30. Fear of Yellow Story by Deb Curley

FEAR OF YELLOW

I guess it all started with the game of Chief Big Weenie on Adrian's porch. The boys had been practicing all day, one band after another, and we all joked about how it would be fun to have a band with just me and Mary and Laurie.

"I'll play drums!" Laurie cried, and we saluted the Chief's big weenie and drank our beers.

"I already know some chords on the guitar…" Mary looked at me pleadingly.

"Great! It's settled then. I'll play the bass!" I spun the Chief and his big weenie wobbled ecstatically. It was a sign, we were sure, of big things to come.

The boys, of course, laughed at the notion of three girls with virtually no musical experience forming a band. They humored us good-naturedly at first, letting us borrow instruments and amps, and even helped us write our theme song.

Fear of Yellow, we were called. Sharon thought of that name. It wasn't exactly that she was afraid of the color yellow, it just happened one day that a scary girl in an even scarier yellow sweater called her a bitch for no apparent reason, as some girls are wont to do; because they are feeling fat that day, or because their periods are late, or just because they see other girls with cute guys.

Looking back, I suppose it isn't really surprising that Fear of Yellow became so controversial. It was all a big joke for a while, and then something happened that no one counted on; we became good. Some people just couldn't deal with that. We couldn't even really deal with it, and we began having troubles within the band; that was the hardest part. You see, funny things happen when a band becomes "famous".

It was interesting to watch how people changed in the face of success. Laurie and I laughed about it to try to hide how pleased we actually were. Mary couldn't ever handle it, but she doesn't think about things the way most people do, anyway. I think she's a genius. Most people think she's crazy, maybe it's the same thing. She always seemed to have altogether too much energy for her tiny body, and thoughts, always thoughts, too many thoughts for her brain to sort out at once. Or maybe she was always scared that someday someone would listen to her and take her very seriously. I always did.

"Hey Mary Gavazzi Please Very Much Thank You," I said in greeting, "How the hell are ya today?" (Bad question to ask Mary unless you have at least an hour to listen to her response.)

"Oh, Deb Curleyfries, have you seen Micky today? I think he's mad at me 'cause I sorta told him last night that he was an asshole in a final sort of way and now I think maybe he didn't understand that I still want to be friends, it's just that some things must be, but still this is a lonely life and it's tough when you take away your meaning in life, even once. But we had so much fun last night and then I had to go and freak out on him again because I only want him to do what's best for him, and for him to be happy, but I think that I'm not best for him because I'm always getting on his case to make him get a job and go to classes, and you know that line from Rikki's song, 'I could look at you forever but I'd rather be laughing' and I think I maybe don't laugh sometimes enough, or Micky either. We do love strongly but not for happy-go-luckiness right now, and maybe never, but I want to find him and no one has seen him. Oh, there's Mark, maybe he knows, I'll talk to you later, okay?"

How I understood her, I'll never know, but somehow I always did. She'd tell me I was the only one who ever understood her, and I'd say that maybe we were both crazy.

Maybe we were all a little crazy that year. Sharon slit her wrists one night in the amphitheater, and Kyle slammed his car into a tree trunk just because he thought he could live through anything. They're both alive today, but not the same. They'll never be the same. It was the year of Fear of Yellow. People all over campus chanted our names at concerts, and people I'd never seen before would smile and wave in greeting.

I think it was Dave who first cracked under the pressure of our success. Or maybe I just cared what he thought more than I cared what anyone else thought. He was my best friend for a long time, and sometimes I think I was the only one who ever understood him, too. Most people complained about his "attitude problem". He wasn't really a bad person, though he did have a problem. He had certain ideas about how things should be done, and any deviation from that was incomprehensible to him. Once I asked him about his soul.

"I don't think I have a soul, really," he spoke matter-of-factly, "I think it's just layers of previous experiences, one on top of the other. I usually can't think of new ways to do things because all I have are old experiences to base my thinking on. I know what works because it's worked in the past. That's all I can know. What's it supposed to feel like? What's a soul feel like?"

I didn't know what to say, where to begin. In the end I really couldn't argue with him, because who knows? Maybe in some warped sense he's right. Maybe it is simply previous experiences that we base our judgments and ideals on. He couldn't deal with Fear of Yellow, he simply didn't know how. He wanted to like us, he tried to like us, but he just couldn't let himself. After all, we were just girls, and experience had taught him that we were inferior. At the time it infuriated me; later I only felt sorry that he couldn't live differently.

Of all of us, I think that Laurie remained the most stable that year, and somehow she managed to keep her sense of humor relatively intact. She was my stability, my sanity, my best friend and housemate for almost four years, and yet that too went sour in the end; our friendship became stale and irritating, like an old favorite record that I'd played far too much. I wonder if that always happens with someone that you know so well. Sometimes I desperately wished that I was more like her, other times it infuriated me that she wasn't more like me. Mary used to tell me that hate and love are closer to each other in the heart than mere indifference, and this seems true; it was far easier for me to hate Laurie than to stop caring.

Still we did have many great days. Living with Laurie was like living by myself, only there was someone to talk to. We were so different; she was a strong believer in the importance of "self-time". I wouldn't exactly call her lazy, she just looked at time as something to enjoy rather than something to fill up. And people were so important to her. She loved to laugh and play and enjoy someone else's company. She played drums like she lived, too. Her drumming was never quite steady, but full of life and energy and laughter. She would practice, and tried to play more technically, but always the beats that sounded best were the happy, carefree ones when she was just having fun.

Mary, too, played the guitar like she lived. She would play frantic, jumbled chords, never quite clear and pure unless you listened quite carefully. She could never look at the audience while she played, always at her guitar or at me. During the applause, however, she would raise her eyes a bit disbelievingly and smile like she was going to burst from sheer happiness.

My bass playing was, of course, solid and steady; fun but never quite letting go completely, and always just a little bit more complex and technical than the guitar and drums, as if I was quietly trying to appease those musicians in the audience who considered us ridiculous. That was me, all right, forever trying to keep the peace.

It was so hard sometimes. I felt like all of my friends were so different that somehow I had to single-handedly hold them together, like some great link that would hold the chain of my world together; if I let go, I thought it would all come crashing in on me, jumbled ruins of a world that was once strong and proud. But of course most of that feeling was in my head. I just couldn't stand to see people that I loved fighting and hurting each other. And my curse was, of course, that I could always see both sides. My mom calls it a gift; I'm not so sure. Most times it hurt me more than it helped anybody. A couple of times it helped, though. I remember Lynn called me in tears one night because of the way Dave had treated her at a show. Dave just doesn't realize sometimes that he hurts people…

The Sundowner Lounge was packed, hundreds of sweaty bodies pressed up against each other, straining to get just one inch closer to the stage, and Lynn was at the soundboard, furiously mixing, trying to get the band sounding great while also trying to teach ten younger students the arts of live sound engineering. Dave stormed in, pushing aside people and glaring angrily at Lynn.

"What is going on here?" His face was bright red. "This lounge is a mess! You can't have good sound when it doesn't look good! Clean those cables up, you over there! And somebody put the mic stands that you're not using back in the box! Tape those cables down on stage, someone could trip and break his neck! Let's move on this please! Lynn, you should know better. Come on, you've been doing this for years. Where's Deb anyway? Did she leave you in charge? Well, get this mess cleaned up, and we'll talk in the morning. I'm gonna go find Deb. She should have been here."

Of course, he was really right. Things should be nice and neat at a gig, or it looks bad for the sound company. And people can get hurt if cables aren't taped down properly. And I probably should have been there, except for the fact that I was taking a night off. A well-deserved night off, I might add. You see, Dave and I were co-presidents of a campus organization called Sound Services, and we ran the sound for all the campus and local events. This included set-up and tear-d own for each gig as well as running the board and at the same time teaching the new members how to run everything. Not an easy task. And Dave was a good president, I guess, because a president is usually simply a figurehead. You see, he got all the credit, and I did all of the work.

I suppose I was a sucker. I just wanted everything to go right, and if I didn't run a gig, nobody would. Dave was always too busy to do the actual work. (It was about a ten hour job, after classes all day.) But he was good at getting business. By the end of the year, I was running five or six shows a week, taking twenty-one credit hours, and going crazy. But I had to make everything right. Even if it meant I paid dearly for it. And I did pay, for a very long time.

So I was taking a night off, God forbid. And poor Lynn had to take the brunt of Dave's anger, although it wasn't really anger, just an obsession with having everything just the way he wanted it. But you see, I understood that, Lynn didn't. She only felt humiliated and hurt. What could I say to her when she called me two hours later, crying? I'd never heard Lynn cry before, it scared me. It scared me that one of my friends could do that to another. I loved them both, couldn't they see that? Couldn't that one simple fact make everything okay? Couldn't I wave my magic wand, my so-called "gift" and make Lynn stop hurting, make Dave stop being so blind?

No, of course not. It took me four years to learn that it just didn't work that way. But I finally did learn, four years later and three thousand miles away from the Sundowner Lounge.

In the end, it was really the music that kept us together and pulled us apart. We wrote songs about the things we thought, unafraid to express outrage or disagreement about life and the people we loved. And though music was our love and our lives, we weren't afraid to make fun of it. This was always misunderstood by those to whom music was a sacred thing; they did not understand that when you love something truly you must accept equally all that is good and bad about it. We were not afraid that we would lose our love of music by laughing at it and ourselves sometimes. Music is a serious art, yes, but sometimes you forget to play music when you are working too hard at it. I think about that a lot because that's what hurt me the most; my friends who could not accept our music as "real" music. Music, I tried to explain, is what happens when your soul if free enough to speak through your instrument, and that does not necessarily require years of experience or great technical prowess.

It is hard sometimes for those who are closest to a situation to see it clearly, and I think none of us wanted to see the rift that was growing between us because of the music that Fear of Yellow made. I tried not to admit it, but that rift hurt so much, and I think that's what truly pushed me away in the end. I was also so scared of not changing. Or at least that's what I told myself and everyone else. I think that's partly true, but I think the real things that I was afraid of were the changes that were happening that I couldn't control. I wanted to get out before I hated all of my friends. Or even worse, before they all hated me. That was truly my deepest fear.

So I left. I moved three thousand miles away while I could still call them my friends. Oh, how strong I seemed to them! Venturing out into the world by myself, leaving behind all my safety and security. They said goodbye and told me how much they loved me, never suspecting that the reason I was running away was so that I could preserve that love.

Now we all look back and say how good Fear of Yellow was. How creative, how true and pure! Why it had to end before they all could see that, I don't know. Maybe it's simply not a threat anymore, not that it ever was anyway. But I do still love them all, and we're forever planning a Fear of Yellow reunion. With any luck, it will always remain just a plan.

THE END