I was embarassed because I'd been caught listening to Billy Joel. This is not something I am prone to do, but we all indulge secret passions sometimes and I am no exception. Even worse was that I'd tried to cover it up.

By the time my relatively new friend Carla and I were buckling our seatbelts after the rock show, I had completely forgotten I'd been listening to Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Vol. 1 on the way to the club. Carla and I were sweaty; our ears were ringing, and we basked in the post-show, pre-bar glow. The dark windshield glimmered furtively in the light rain. Carla was in the passenger seat saying something I couldn't hear through my teal foam earplugs, which I proceeded to plop greasily into an empty coffee cup. I rememeber she wore a navy blue denim jacket with a lot of brightly-colored buttons, a lot of mascara and silver glitter. I turned the key in the ignition and the car woke up sputtering, gouting light everywhere.

I like to relish the moment, right after starting the car, when the CD player resumes its work, especially when I can't immediately place the music. Sometimes I wait for an appropriately anonymous section of whatever I'm listening to before I turn off my car so I might get to experience the mysterious instant of not recognizing the familiar when I return, setting up a little wonder pit-stop for myself in the future. It doesn't always work.

Then I try to prevent myself from identifying the music that's playing, delaying the jolt of recognition for as long as possible by shutting down mental file-searching and concentrating on the sound of the music. It feels great to hear something so good and unencumbered, if only for a moment. But when I started the car on my pseudo-date with Carla, something about the texture of the music, which I couldn't identify at first, bothered me. Something about its jittery piano and deep-throated vocals gave me pause. With dawning horror, I realized - Oh my god it's the freaking Billy Joel CD - and I stabbed the off button. The silence of the ocean floor flooded the car.

Carla and I had known each other for about a month - we met through a series of events that has nothing to do with this story. We definitely had a spark, but we were also co-workers and were involved in vague relationships and would probably wind up being too good of friends for anything to come of it.

My real mistake wasn't listening to Billy Joel; it was trying to hide it. It's one thing to get caught doing something embarrassing, but it's much worse to actually appear embarrassed by it, which implies that you meant it. Had I just smiled rakishly, started belting out the lyrics ironically, or made a wisecrack instead of quickly turning off the CD player as if she wouldn't notice... I can't help but wonder what might be today.

We both stared straight ahead. I affected a studious aspect; her gaze was more searching. The silence was enormous. No cars passed through the gravel lot to make a munching sound. We were almost the last to leave the club, because we always stay until the bands are heading to the afterbars.

"What was that?" Carla asked, not unreasonably or without sympathy. Still, her voice sounded like a parody of casual curiousity. Her reflection looked slightly baffled in the windshield, brushed in broad dim strokes on the dark.

"Huh? Nothing," I said, in way I hoped would register as absently, feigning surprise at her question as if she'd jarred me from a pleasant reverie. I might have even yawned and stetched my arms. I suddenly developed an intense fascination with the web of cracks I had put right above the inspection sticker on my windshield. I'd been moving large furniture. Running my finger along the bright water trapped in the black glass, I furrowed my brow as if to say, These fissures are no longer acceptable; how might I bring my ingenuity to bear on a solution?

"That was Billy Joel," Carla said defiantly.

"No, it wasn't." My god, what did I mean?

"Yes it was!" Carla said in a scandalized tone. "That was 'Only the Good Die Young.'" She was smiling, but in an astonished, kind of affonted way.

Fucking "Only the Good Die Young." It was. It really was. It wasn't exactly "We Didn't Start the Fire" bad, but still, it was bad. My jaw lolled like something with a busted hinge. I felt like maybe my eyes did something that might be construed as goggling.

She said my name plaintively, taken aback by the sudden disappearance of my usual bravado. I had to think in terms of damage control. I needed a ripping bon mot, something witty and cutting and dismissive.

"No it wasn't."

Oh dear. Like Peter in the Garden, I had opted for a third denial. I could see where it was heading. Like Peter, I was going to get called out.

Carla must have enjoyed the pliant, come-hither resistance of the stereo's knob as she purposefully depressed it with a stiffened finger. The song began right at the titular chorus. "Only the good die young," Joel proclaimed, with what seemed to me a smug satisfaction. He would not be denied. I peered intently through the windshield as if trying to discern portents in the confusion of orange street lights refracting through the irregular rain. The part of the song right after the chorus that sounds like a used car commercial accused me from the air. Carla's gaze burned into the side of my head like a brand. Defeated, I turned down the volume a little, but let the song continue to play. Carla smirked at the floorboard as we drove off into the weeping night. At last call, she left the bar with some guy wearing earlobe expanders and a neckerchief. I went home alone. Although we remained friends, the tenor of our relationship was markedly different from then on, we never spoke of that night again.

[A friend of mine told me recently that she sometimes just had to listen to the Arcade Fire even though she "felt guilty about it," and it reminded me of Joanna's recent Shins-anxiety post. Around the same time I discovered a cache of old writing, stuff from my late teens to early twenties, that I'd thought long destroyed. This little Billy Joel thing was among that writing, and it seemed of a piece with this concept of taste-based guilt that keeps popping up for me recently. I barely recall writing this and certainly don't remember living it (my late teens and early twenties being a particularly blurry period in my life), so I'm not sure how much of it is autobiographical and how much is character sketch. I still don't wear earplugs, for instance, and I never knew anyone named Carla. But I did find a burned copy of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits in an old Case Logic CD binder, and I was terribly indie at that time in my life, so...who knows? It was probably a spot of both.]

Labels: brian, indie, rock