I graduated from college in May of 2000 and after crashing on couches in New York and Philadelphia for a summer, I moved to Williamsburg with my friend Nate that September. Even in 2000, the New York Times had already done a bunch of stories about how Williamsburg was hip and cool, which instantly made living there embarrassingly unoriginal and uncool. Still, we were doing our best to be interesting adults.
I went to this show with Cat. She was six years older than me, and I had a schoolboy crush on her. She was smart and funny and beautiful. She wore intellectual chunky glasses and had short hair. Like me, she was also Korean and from the Midwest, which I felt bonded us in an innate way.
I knew her because she was in a friend group of my friend’s older sister. I was introduced to the friend group when that friend, Debbie, came to visit New York. After that visit, they started inviting me out with them. I felt adopted by these older people. The core of the group were graphic designers, so hanging with them made me feel artsy and sophisticated. They knew which bars they could sneak me into, and of course, those became the bars where I would take my friends when we went downtown, and I could be like, “No, it’s cool. I know a place on Avenue A. It’s just a bartender. They never card anyone.”
I went to a lot of indie rock shows with the older friend group. We’d go any time Versus played at the Knitting Factory. We all saw Seam headline a show with Jimmy Eat World and No Knife at Tramps. They were there for Seam. I was there for Jimmy Eat World. While Jimmy Eat World played, we stood in the back, on the outskirts of a mob of high school emo kids. Nobody in the friend group knew Jimmy Eat World. It was 1999, right after Clarity was released, but before Bleed American and the hit single “The Middle.” They laughed and shoved me to join the high school kids as I rocked back and forth yell-singing “Paint a cross on your left hand!” during “Claire.” All the high school kids left before Seam hit the stage. I felt bad for Seam, playing to two-thirds the audience of their openers.
Cat had spent some time in the indie scene in Chicago and knew the guys in Seam. She looked stunning that night. I had never seen her wearing makeup or with her hair so styled or wearing contact lenses instead of her chunky glasses. After the show, I waited with the other friends as she talked to Sooyoung at the side of the stage, and I thought to myself that this is what Cat looked like when she was trying to look hot.
This Malkmus show was two years after the Seam show. I had never previously made a move on Cat, and I didn’t have much game. I had two ways of flirting with girls: (1) making fun of them, and (2) talking about bands and writers with them. Still, I had never gone out with Cat, just the two of us, and I wondered if this could possibly be a date. I decided that I would know by how she was dressed when we met up.
She came straight from a long day of work at the hospital. She was a psychiatrist in the middle of her residency. Writing all of this down now, I don’t know exactly why I, a 22-year-old living in a 7’ x 8’ windowless room with a futon taking up nearly all of the floorspace and a curtain hung from a chin-up bar serving as my door, thought that a 28-year-old doctor with her shit together would be interested in dating me, but there I was with the audacity of hope. I put on a favorite button-up thrift-store shirt that I thought was especially stylish and made sure to shave before heading out to meet her.
When we met on the sidewalk, I noticed that Cat was less dressed up than I had ever seen her. She had no makeup on and looked very tired. She gave me a normal friendly hug, and I wondered if she could smell the aftershave and expectation on me.
Tickets had sold out weeks in advance, and she asked me how I had managed to get them. This felt like the most obvious indicator of how far apart our lives were in that moment. Music was my life. I checked the listings in the Village Voice every week to see who was playing, when, and where. It was my Wednesday ritual. It’s not like this was a secret show. It was the first show Stephen Malkmus was playing in New York after Pavement broke up and the release of his first solo record. It had been advertised well in advance of tickets going on sale.
I wondered if I’d ever be old enough or saddled with so much responsibility that I wouldn’t know when my favorite bands were playing in my own town? Where I wouldn’t recognize the name of every band playing at my favorite venue? In a matter of seconds I had gone from feeling sorry for myself that this wasn’t a date to feeling sorry for Cat.
Excerpted from Stubs 2001-2010
John Jaewon Kim 