iTrip
Four notes. Piano, sixth-grade-recital simple, and I’ve got it before the singing starts: “How to Save a Life,” The Fray. Three for three since the state line.
Nobody is administering this game. There are no judges and there is no prize, and the only contestant is me, driving, hands at ten and two like a man with something to protect. But three for three is three for three.
The music is coming out of my own speakers, in my own car, tuned to 87.9, which is a frequency where nothing broadcasts. The signal travels about four feet. It leaves Kyle’s iPod, passes through the iTrip clipped to the top of it like a small white tollbooth, and arrives at my antenna carrying the full authority of an actual radio station. The iPod itself rides in Kyle’s left hand, on the far side of the console, which is to say in another jurisdiction entirely.
I want to be clear that this was ratified. At the Shell outside Terre Haute I bought gas and a ninety-nine-cent hot dog, tuned the stereo to 87.9, and said, you’re on music. Kyle said, sweet. That was the entire negotiation. No term limits, no recall procedure, nothing about appeals. I drafted it myself and I drafted it badly.
Marker 147 goes by. Our exit is 9. That’s 138 miles, and the cruise is set at 74, because 74 is the fastest speed at which a trooper decides you’re not worth the paperwork. 138 over 74 is 1.86 hours. Call it 112 minutes.
Here’s where the numbers get useful. The average song runs about three minutes fifty, which is 3.83 if you’re doing the division, and I am doing the division. 112 over 3.83 is 29.2. Twenty-nine songs, rounding in nobody’s favor. Twenty-nine more of these, minus the one currently saving a life.
The hot dog is not sitting right, which is its own lesson. We covered sunk costs in September. The hot dog cost ninety-nine cents and I finished it anyway, because I’d paid for it. Professor Hale would have things to say about that. About the hot dog, I mean.
The next song declares itself in two notes, which should not be possible, except that the two notes are the beginning of “All Star” by Smash Mouth.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. But a man makes choices, and then a man’s iPod displays those choices at 87.9 FM. Either this playlist was assembled by hand, meaning Kyle sat at a computer one night, considered everything music has accomplished since Gregorian chant, and clicked on Smash Mouth. Or it’s on shuffle, meaning the iPod merely contains “All Star,” resident, maintained, carried across state lines on purpose. I haven’t decided which is worse. I have time. I have twenty-seven songs.
I glance over. Kyle is watching the soybeans go by and mouthing the words. All of the words. He does a small thing with his shoulders at the chorus. This is a man at peace, my best friend at this school, enjoying a song I would not admit to owning under oath, and the sight of it puts a specific pressure behind my sternum that I’ve decided is the hot dog.
The songs go by in threes. Something acoustic resolves into Jack Johnson, five notes, too easy. Then the Fall Out Boy one where the singer pronounces the chorus like he’s protecting it from transcription. The title is longer than the chorus. I have both. Kyle drums two fingers on his knee through all of it. He is having, as far as I can tell, one of the better afternoons of his life.
Then a power ballad starts and I get it in under a second, and this time the getting costs me. “Lips of an Angel.” Hinder. Under a second. And it doesn’t stop there, because while the first verse is still limping toward its chorus I discover that part of me is already waiting for the bridge. I know where the bridge is. I know what the bridge does. You cannot unknow a bridge. Eight for eight, and the game has begun to review its only contestant. When did I ratify this? Nobody sat me down and made me learn the architecture of a Hinder song, and yet here it is in my head, load-bearing, where presumably it displaced something. A language, maybe. CPR.
Marker 118. That’s 109 to go, which at 74 is 88 minutes, which is 23 songs. So I run the other number, the one I’ve been saving. At 78, it’s 84 minutes. The difference is four and a half minutes. Four over the trooper threshold, sustained across the width of a state, and the purchasing power of all that risk is about one song. I ease it up to 78 anyway. It is the worst trade I have ever made, and I make it with both hands on the wheel.
And I know the average is flattering me. The 3.83 assumes radio songs, radio lengths. Somewhere on that iPod, statistically, there is a live Dave Matthews recording. There is always a live Dave Matthews recording. If a nineteen-minute “Two Step” from some amphitheater gets loose in here, the model doesn’t degrade, it dies, and we enter a regime where the remaining distance to campus is measured in one song.
We haven’t spoken since the Shell, which is standard. This is a friendship that can drive four hours on two sentences and arrive fine. Talking was never the problem.
Outside Effingham the giant cross goes by, all hundred and ninety-eight feet of it, and right on cue some low-watt station leans over the fence from 88.1. Four feet of authority is fine until you drive past a man with a tower. A preacher surfaces through the static, tremendously certain about the last days, rides along for a mile or two, and falls back into the corn. The playlist resumes as if nothing has been foretold.
I’m sixteen for sixteen when a guitar arrives that was recorded through a sock. No reverb, no money. A girl’s voice counts the song in, actually counts it, which no producer would keep, which means there was no producer.
I’ve got nothing. Ten seconds, fifteen. Nothing. I feel the game lean forward. Finally. A contest.
The verse doesn’t help. The voice is young and working hard, pushing at notes shelved slightly out of her reach. It’s nobody. It’s nobody, and I’m about to log my first loss with something close to gratitude when the chorus arrives and rhymes higher with flyer, and the bottom drops out of the afternoon, because I do know this song. Everybody knows this song. It was everywhere for about eleven days last spring.
Not from music, though. From the news. This is the girl who was seeing the lieutenant governor two states over, back when that was the only thing anybody talked about, and when the story broke, the internet went through her life with a flashlight and found a MySpace page with four songs on it. She was MySpace famous by Wednesday. By Friday she reportedly had a manager. She never had a label or a deal or a shot, and then she had a scandal, which turned out to be the same thing as a deal. Her name was two first names in some order I can’t reproduce. The song outlived the name inside of a month. There’s probably a lesson in there about markets. I leave it where it is.
This is “Fly With Me.” I rule it a forfeit. I didn’t name that tune. I named that deposition.
And here is the problem, the real problem, the problem underneath the problem: it’s catchy. It was always catchy. That was the joke last spring, and somewhere around the fourth listen it quietly stopped being one, for everybody, nationally, though nobody said so out loud. My thumb has started keeping time on the wheel. I make it stop. It resumes on its own recognizance.
Kyle gives it two clicks of volume.
I look over, and this is where I lose the thread of my own investigation, because Kyle is mouthing the words with feeling. With feeling. And there is no test, none, that separates a man enjoying this song ironically from a man enjoying it sincerely. The readout is identical. The only instrument that could settle the question is a question, out loud, in this car, and I am not running that experiment. If it’s a bit, we’re fine. If it’s sincere, I am sharing a two-bedroom with it starting in the fall. Some things you don’t test for.
There was a guy in the lit survey last year who had himself tied to the mast so he could hear the singing without doing anything about it. Great story. Ahead of its time. Although he at least used rope. He at least told his crew. Mine improves on the classics: no rope, nobody told, just a man doing seventy-eight with the windows up.
The song after that is Snow Patrol, four notes, doesn’t matter. The one after that I get in two. Marker 61 comes up on the right. Fifty-two miles. At 78 that’s forty minutes, which is ten and a half songs. I do the division, and then, for the first time since Terre Haute, I don’t do anything with it. The number just sits there on the dashboard, being a number.
Something new starts. Piano again, simple, familiar the way a yearbook is familiar. The title is rising toward me like the answer in one of those Magic 8 Balls. I could have it in two more notes. I let it go.
“Hey, dude,” I say. “Can I take over the music?”
“Of course,” Kyle says, and hands the iPod across the console without breaking eye contact with the soybeans.
Marker 59 goes by at seventy-eight miles an hour.