Local Man Ruins Everything

Things from Andy McCullough that don't go in the paper.

[mcculloughandy]

Is There Somebody Who Can Critique You

PHILADELPHIA – America may be crumbling, but this sidewalk is holding strong. The procession of youth snakes down Spring Garden Street, banks right on 10th Street and veers into the parking lot behind the venue. Union Transfer was a Spaghetti Warehouse until 2011, when it re-opened as a concert hall dedicated to middlebrow indie music. The setting is not ideal. At 10 p.m. Saturday, when the doors open, the surrounding storefronts offer Chinese takeout and little else. A child-care center promises “OPEN 24-7.” A waggish kid behind me notes the sign. “That is the height of sketchiness,” he says. “Hashtag sketch,” his female companion replies, and they both giggle. We are all here to see The 1975. The average age is under. One boy wears a CHVRCHES t-shirt. Another regales his friends with tales from a Vampire Weekend concert. There is talk of suitemates and co-op programs. I bought my girlfriend tickets as a birthday present. We are both 26, and she remarks she’s never felt closer to 30. After the show, a drizzle will fall on the parents ringing the curb. *** The centerpiece of The 1975 is Matthew Healy, a mite-sized 24-year-old who grew up in Manchester with parents playing D’Angelo and Otis Redding. His voice is the band’s primary attraction, and he is the only person worth studying on stage. The rest of the quartet serves as atmospheric fodder. Adam Hann, the lead guitarist, generates a handful of the band’s finest melodies, and delivers a delightful approximation of the saxophone solo from “Heart Out” on Saturday. He also looks like my cousin Geoffrey. Healy does not look like anyone at your Easter brunch. He bears a vague resemblance to a bootleg version of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or one of those guys with swooping haircuts that Nate Ruess bemoaned in “Dog Problems.” My girlfriend described his cheekbones as “angelic.” He is the bridge between the band’s electro-emo and their burgeoning female fanbase. He struts onto the stage Saturday in a leather jacket, spreads his arms and ditches his sunglasses. Dozens of first-row hands reach out to him. When Pitchfork reviewed the band’s self-titled, debut LP, the writer derided their cynical marketing and songwriting shortcuts. We need more bridges! the critique demands, and this feels reasonable enough. Indeed, the record lasts almost 51 minutes when it should be 35; a trio of interstitial instrumentals is pretentious if not pointless. The conceit seeps through in interviews; Healy has compared the record to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” On stage, their dedication to imagery is impressive. Healy, Hann and bassist Ross MacDonald on Saturday all dress in black, from head to toe, just as “Chocolate,” the centerpiece of an earlier, buzz-building EP, instructs. Healy banters with cheap pops. Having spent Friday in New York, he calls Philadelphia one of his favorite cities in the world. At one point he dips to glug from a bottle of red wine. “There’s a lot of girls here,” he says upon rising, to the predictable peals. “We wrote a song about you.” Then they play a song called “Girls.” And “Girls” is brilliant, comprised of a bright, glittering riff, a propulsive backbeat and Healy’s skittish patter. Like many of their songs, the restrained chorus expands into an anthem when played live. This is the tightrope The 1975 traverses. The band would be insufferable if they weren’t so excellent. *** There is a moment near the end of the show that still puzzles me the next day. Healy isn’t much for mid-song sermon, but he breaks from the script during “Chocolate,” after a bridge that sounds like a Mancunian appropriation of “Soul Makossa.” “Turn off your phones,” he says. “Let’s make this just between us.” This strikes me as odd. The proliferation of smart-phone cameras at shows does feel like a scourge, so Healy’s lo-fi exhortation is welcome. But part of me wonders if there isn’t something more calculating at work here, or if there’s a financial incentive to keeping videos off YouTube. It is an irrational, unfair thought, but it sticks. Inside the building, there is little time to deliberate. The chorus rushes back. The pulsing lights illuminate hundreds of pumped fists and shaking hands. The effect is electric. We are at the 45-minute mark, and the set is all but over. The only on-stage decoration is a rectangle of white light, a motif consistent in their EPs and the LP. The stage goes black as the four 20-somethings exit right. Proper decorum before an encore calls for steady, sustained applause. Instead, the cheering is wan and fades quickly. A chant fills the void. “We want sex! We want sex!” “Sex” is the first single of the debut record, even though it’s been floating around the Internet for years and was the title track on an EP released last November. It is probably the band’s best song, and probably one of the 10 best songs I heard in 2012. Here in 2013, it is still outstanding. Also worth noting: The song is also blessed with a marketable, chant-ready title, distilled into a digestible, 3:27-long package and primed to explode in the very-near future on what passes for pop radio. The chant peters out. What happens next is predictable but riveting. The album centerpiece flashes white light. The crowd shrieks. The band returns. When their guitars crackle to life, for the first time all night, the floor shakes. *** The Format split in 2008, and that was sad. Before he became the Art Garfunkel of indie pop, Sam Means formed a country-rock band called Destry with Michelle DaRosa from Straylight Run. They are called Destry, and they are OK. Ruess teamed with a guy from Steel Train and another guy from a Chicago band I hadn’t heard of. They released an album that sounded like a more theatrical version of The Format’s second album, which wasn’t as good as the first. One night in early 2011, Ruess snagged a meeting in a Lower East Side hotel with a hip-hop producer named Jeff Bhasker. In the story they’ve told, Ruess was a tad drunk when he crooned the chorus for a half-written tune he’d been tinkering with. You know the rest. “We Are Young” became the biggest song in the world, the album it promoted sold more than a million copies and more than two years later the band is just finishing another world tour supporting it. Pop stardom happens at random and it doesn’t. This stuff isn’t easy to predict, but here is something worth wagering on: “We’re coming back here next year,” Healy mumbles mid-set before launching into “Robbers,” the emotional centerpiece of their only album. The tickets on Saturday cost $15. They’ll cost more next time. -30- Andy McCullough writes about baseball for The Star-Ledger.

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Father's Decade

By Andy McCullough My dad never saw me play varsity football. He died before I became a starter as a junior. When I debuted as a sophomore, he was too sick to go. My first play came on a soggy Saturday afternoon, during a dreary loss. A senior got hurt, so the coaches sent me out to cover a punt. I shuffled downfield and fell on top of someone. I told my dad about it as soon as I got home. He was slumped on our family-room couch. He spent most of the last 21 months of his life there, sapped by chemotherapy, zonked on Oxycodone, defying a nine-month life expectancy. I lacked almost all of my father’s physical gifts, the ones cancer stole from him. For me, speed was a relative term. Even in Pop Warner, when my dad was an assistant coach, I didn’t play special teams. I was useless there. You won’t believe where they played me, I told him. He started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. His hand covered his face as he snorted. My mother later told me how my father’s heart ached to know he missed that moment. “Punt coverage?” he said. “Jesus, Andrew, of all the things you suck at. Punt coverage?” *** One morning in late May, I woke up in the bed my father built for me on the second floor of the house he built for his family. My car sat outside in a driveway he left unfinished. The trip took 15 minutes. I steered my Corolla past a park where I watched him play volleyball and past a football stadium where he never saw me play varsity. The day was damp and gray, a thin mist obscuring the verdant outgrowth of Fort Washington State Park. Inside the cemetery, I banked left and parked. My mom had given me the directions. I expected a headstone. Instead only rows and rows of grave markers awaited. Head down, I stalked the rows for several minutes, eyes darting back and forth. The grass clung to my sneakers and soaked my feet. A spate of fear collected in my chest – maybe after 10 years of avoiding this place, never returning after the funeral, I would quit the search and walk away. The anxiety lifted when I saw his name – my name, Robert Andrew McCullough – in bronze. I knelt down to clear a few yellowed clumps of grass from the stone and to apologize. I don’t talk about my dad. I don’t talk about my dad because when I do, too often I begin to cry. If someone asks what my parents do, I tell them my mother is an audiologist and my father was a contractor. Then I hope they change the subject. I’ve spent a decade changing the subject. I wrote this essay in bits and pieces over the last five years. I cried writing in my college apartment at Syracuse, on a flight to Pittsburgh, in an Atlanta hotel room. I wrote and re-wrote, racking my brain for the proper anecdotes, the most effective way to explain my father and our relationship. I considered interviewing a few of his friends, the men he grew up with, who stayed by his side until he died, but the prospect of dissolving into tears front of them dissuaded me. June 25 marks the 10th anniversary of his death. I’ll be 26 in July. I’ve spent more time as a sentient human without a father than I did with a father. This manifests in odd ways: No one ever taught me to shave. No one taught me how to knot a tie. But I know what the word “metastasize” means. Mostly I harbor a jumble of emotions, guilt and rage and discontent the most prominent of the bunch. At times I only feel emptiness, a cavern that opens up without warning. One day in St. Louis a couple years ago, I ordered a slice of pizza. Game 7 of World Series was later that night. The evening before I’d witnessed one of the wildest games in recent memory, and later listened to Joe Buck echo his father on David Freese’s walkoff homer. I thought about my dad, and how I badly I wanted to tell him about it all. You haven’t lived, really, until you’ve wept in public over Sbarro’s. *** In late August 2001, my dad underwent surgery to remove a blockage in his colon. The tumor was massive and malignant. The cancer had already spread to his lungs. His spine was next. I knew none of this. I didn’t know he’d been gulping Tums for months to soothe the unexplainable ache in his digestive tract. I didn’t know he’d found blood in his stool. I didn’t know the fear coursing through him. All I knew was my father needed surgery. The concept terrified me. I was 14, a few days away from starting high school. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’m as strong as an ox.” My dad assured me it was a minor procedure. He was lying. *** A few months after my dad died, John Grogan, the guy who wrote “Marley And Me,” penned a column about my mom for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She wanted to raise awareness about colorectal cancer. She explained how my dad “could talk to anybody about anything.” He was not like that with me. When I was a kid, I dreamed about growing older, when my dad would thaw and I could meet the man everyone else adored. Because to others, he projected warmth. People wanted to be around him. He held court at our house every Friday afternoon, a quasi Happy Hour known as Beer:30, and I carried pitchers of Sierra Nevada from the keg he kept in our basement. After he got sick, an endless stream of friends came to visit our house at night. He sold out his funeral. The church was packed with family and so many others: the insurance men he worked with at State Farm, fellow transplant recipients (he had a kidney transplant in 1979, attended the U.S. Transplant Games every two years and piled up medals in track and field) and dozens of kids he coached over the years, all wearing their black and white football jerseys. I sat in the front row, numb as the procession offered condolences. On the way out the church, clutching the heavy oak of his casket, I tripped on the steps and nearly lost my grip. I could only imagine my father’s scorn at that. My dad had flaws. He drank too much. He could be aloof and dismissive. He withheld affection. But on an intuitive level, my father understood who I am: Smart, but lazy; willing to coast whenever possible; crafty enough to plan an excuse for skirting responsibility. Sometimes I think he saw himself. For my middle school graduation, the school handed out various awards, trinkets for Best English Student, Best Math Student, etc. I didn’t expect to win anything, and I didn’t. Afterward, my father was furious. He could not understand why his son wasn’t up on the auditorium stage holding a plaque. He ran a building and restoration company. The summer I turned 12, he paid me to work on fire-restoration jobs with his crew. I was in charge of minor stuff, pulling nails, sweeping floors, little of consequence. One day I pretended I had a headache to avoid work. When my dad found out, he fired me. After I pulled a similar stunt the next summer, he fired me again. He didn’t ask me back. My dad started coaching my Pop Warner team when I was eight. I played the line. He coached the lines. At times I dreaded riding home with him after practice, sitting in the passenger seat of his truck as he chastised me for every missed block, every lackluster pass rush. He started me on a workout routine during the offseason. I was supposed to do push-ups daily. “Did you do your routine?” he’d ask most nights. I hated my routine. When our defense needed a stop, I’d hear him bark my number from the sideline. “57!” he’d shout. “Upfield!” I would surge ahead, hands flailing, trying to make a play. Sometimes I would. Most of the time, I wouldn’t. *** The chemotherapy didn’t work. There was never much chance. After the first surgery, the doctors gave him nine months to live. My dad wouldn’t bow to that. He doubled it. He tried conventional drugs and experimental trials and all sorts of poisonous shit. First his body bloated, then his frame withered away, his bones aching all the while, painkillers dulling him into naps even as he watched Eagles games. He did this knowing the treatment wouldn’t save him. It would only delay his death and render his life sedentary hell. My dad did those things, I think, because he loved me and he loved my brother and sister, his wife, his mother and father, his family and his friends, and so much else in his life. He loved so much, but he didn’t know how to show it. He cloaked his love in barbs, and he hid his anguish. It’s been 10 years, and I wish so badly I can tell him I think I understand now. I didn’t then, but now I do. I know why he forced me to do push-ups every day. I know why he scolded me for Bs. I know why he lied. *** The last real conversation we had occurred on that couch. I spent too much time during those last 21 months hiding in my room, thumbs affixed to a Playstation 2 controller, afraid to draw the duty of carrying him upstairs. My little brother Tom was strong enough for that. I wasn’t. But one afternoon my dad called me downstairs, and wrapped bony fingers around my wrist as I sat next to him. His limbs swam inside a sweatshirt. He told me how it pained him to know he would never see me graduate college, or get married, or become a man. I tried not to cry, because I realized he was saying goodbye. Then he issued one last challenge. “You have a chance to be so successful,” he said. “Not just to make money. But to really matter in this life, to help people, to make a difference.” He died a few weeks later. When I think about that conversation, my stomach knots. I feel like a failure. I write about baseball for a living – splitting my time between pounding game stories on deadline, asking infielders about their strained calves and broken fingers, texting executives about rehab assignments. My existence often feels parasitic. My father built houses. I’m a middleman between athletes and fans desperate for information for their fantasy team. On that morning in the cemetery, I couldn’t stay long. I had to drive to Baltimore for a series. After 10 years, I can’t untangle how I feel, or how I should feel, or how I one day will feel. Staring at my father’s grave isn’t enough for me to reconcile his death, and it sure as shit won’t bring him back. But it helped to visit. I told him I was sorry for staying away. I told him I would come back soon. My fingers rubbed the bronze of our name. Then I walked back to my car, brushed the grass off my Chucks with a T-shirt and wheeled out of the cemetery. I don’t know if my dad would be proud of me. I’ll never know. But I can hope. -30- Andy McCullough is a staff writer at The Star-Ledger. You can reach him at [email protected].