I recently crashed at my old college friend’s place during a brief San Diego visit. This book was hanging around a table or shelf, and I picked it up for the look of it, but immediately felt something familiar in the author’s name. “Adam Gnade? Wasn’t that the radio station guy…that guy who gave us access to the TV studio?” [edit: No, it was not. That was a different dirty-blondish Adam with musical enthusiasms and hungover eyes.] Flashbacks of two freshman nerds broadcasting Pulp and Blues Explosion videos, interviews with random friends, and Titanic, after midnight to maybe a handful of dorm-dwellers. My friend suggested that my correct pronunciation of the name most likely affirmed the sameness of author and college radio guy [edit: It did not]. The author photo was confirmation proved memory’s false and elastic nature. None of this is important. I managed to read the first chapter before hunger and nostalgia attacked and we went wandering down El Cajon boulevard, which in my 20+ year absence had grown slick and neon and unfamiliar, hotels and high rise apartments and restaurants pustulating the landscape, but none of this is important because we had really delicious spicy tofu larb or something like larb, and pineapple sour beers at a Thai street food place, and the next day I walked from North Park to Hillcrest to eat at Bread and Cie, where I betrayed my own nostalgia and impulse to just order a slice of fig and anise and a slice of olive bread with butter and a pot of Earl Grey, instead ordering a bougie smoked salmon sandwich and a stupid puffy cappuccino. It was fine and none of this matters, but I felt so fat with disappointment I had to walk past the old Che kid apartment above The Loft (which seemingly never tired of playing Cher’s “Life After Love,” and perhaps never has), where somebody’s friend would leave a black garbage bag full of Bread and Cie bread on the concrete patio after all his night shifts. Even though the patio now has a fancy wrought iron fence around it, I could see weird posters and candles shoved into wine bottles on the window sills, superficial signs of interesting inhabitants, and I smiled up into the tiny windows of the $150 a month closet I’d lived in, where the cats would ninja-kick through the weak wooden slats of my sliding door and once or twice relieved themselves on my bed which was not a bed, which was two stacked egg crate foam pads. Why didn’t I buy a mattress? I spent way too much of my early twenties without an actual mattress, and I can’t remember why I was that cheap. None of this is important. Especially in regards to this book, which I bought and quickly devoured, finishing it on Christmas Day in the worst place to finish a good book with this much food-nostalgia—the Hertz rental car office at Newark Airport, where I was stuck for 2 hours with only a day-old peanut butter and honey sandwich in my purse (#momlife) to sustain me. You pretty much need to be reading this book in your favorite taqueria/diner/dive with your mouth full if you don’t want to hate yourself and your situation.
I guess what I’m really getting at, what "After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different,” is really getting at, is that all of this is important and all of this matters. These moments you live and forget about until someone like Adam Gnade revives them through familiar or relatable experiences...childhood bliss and trauma...friends of the charming dirtbag variety...rumination on films, books, albums, family, dirtbag friends, meals (especially meals) and so on. The novel (I had to check the back cover several times to confirm it was a novel, so much of it feels like memoir, like personal essay, but maybe that’s me projecting “radio guy” assumptions onto the narrator) will fuel your appetite and your nostalgia such that you’ll go meandering down your own food holes, your own sordid and beautiful youthful experiences, and that’s a hell of a thing. There’s an amazing line about nostalgia that I sadly cannot quote because I gave the book to my sister-in-law, but you should go dig it up yourself.
“Thoroughly enjoying this.” Quote and book photo by aforementioned sister-in-law. College photo Halloween 1997 by somebody’s roommate, Argo Hall, UCSD, cellblock K-8.
