Threat Quality Press

After I gave the eulogy, Spider’s mother slapped me. A moment later, his sister hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would crack.

I always knew that, at some point, I’d start a band. This isn’t because I love music, because I don’t. I don’t even really like music. I’m obsessed with it. Music is like a cancer in brain, tangled in the neural ganglions that make up consciousness, so essential to my sense of self that I don’t think I’d exist without it.

Since I was a kid, it’s been a monkey on my back, driving everything I did. Sometimes, I can’t stand it. I can’t listen to anything without parsing out rhythm and harmony. I failed history in the sixth grade because I never paid attention to what Mrs. O’Neil was saying, I just listened to the modulation of her voice. I have to sleep with ear plugs in, because a truck backfiring on the road or the dusty creak of the house settling or a dog barking in the distance sets my brain off on a manic spree of musical analysis; copying the sound over and over, breaking it down, building it up, torturing it this way and that way, until a random scrap of noise at night has become almost a full four measures of song.

My dad gave me a ukulele when I was five, because he thought it was funny. I didn’t. I never went anywhere without it. After a few months, I found I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t think without playing on it. I graduated to the guitar when I was seven, then the violin. Now, I can play anything with strings. I learned the piano, the clarinet, the drums in high school.

Music was my life—and I don’t mean that in the idiotic, “oh, I love listening to the Shins while I lie on the floor of my room in the dark” way. I mean, I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t have a girlfriend, I didn’t do my homework. Shit, I joined the band and didn’t even show up to practice, because they spent so much time fucking around, or trying to explain syncopation to the guy on the tympanis. Too much time when I wasn’t playing.

I knew I’d start a band, because I was sure, deep down, that I’d be able to find another person like. Or two or three. And if I could find those two or three people, we could all just sit together and let our obsessions play out, and everything we did would be better than any music anyone has ever made. We wouldn’t be friends—I don’t think there’s even room in my head for friends—we wouldn’t even have to talk to each other. We could just sit near each other, and the music would happen.

When I met No-Love in the tenth grade, and I thought he was retarded. Nothing he has ever said or done since then has disabused me of this notion. But god-damn could he play the drums. He was like the Rain Man of the drums. You could give him a pencil, a soggy banana, two shoes and a math book, and he’d have a drum kit that was more expressive than anything Bonham ever played on.

He wasn’t like me. He didn’t have the monkey on his back; he was just an idiot who was a natural at the drums. I could deal with that, though, and we spent two years in high school working on music. The drummer-savant worked the rhythms, which left me free to play with everything else. Obviously, we weren’t a band. Neither of us could sing, I can’t write for shit, and, after a few attempts at street busking or playing at parties, we discovered that we were really boring to watch.

Two guys with lobotomized vacant stares, focused with autistic severity on our instruments—I don’t blame anyone for think that was boring. It was boring; I only did it because I’m utterly incapable of doing anything else.

So, when No-Love called me, and told me he’d found a singer, I was skeptical. People who were good at what they do aren’t interesting to watch, I thought, so No-Love has either found me someone incompetent, or just as tedious. He was at a bar, calling me from his cell. He was yelling into the phone, and I could see him with his right hand mashed over his ear, trying to drown out the noise of people shouting and puking and karaoke, or whatever the fuck else happens at bars. No-Love was probably wearing a dirty t-shirt wit the Muppets on it.

“You have to see this guy!” He screamed at me. He told me where the bar was, and I didn’t want to go, because it was twenty minutes away. I dragged myself away from the mountain dulcimer I was playing with, and went anyway.

I was glad I did. The bar was some filthy, redneck honky-tonk thing. I had no idea what No-Love was doing there, and I didn’t care. He routinely did things in which I had no interest. He was sitting at a table, fat and wearing a dirty t-shirt (with the A-Team on it, not the Muppets), drumming with his fat fingers on the table surface and an empty pint glass.

Spider Vetter was singing karaoke, all right; performing a rendition of “Baba O’Reilly.” I’m not sure how to describe what he was doing. He wasn’t screaming, exactly—his voice was actually a full octave lower than Daltrey’s, and he was apparently transposing the melody down accordingly.

But singing doesn’t quite cover what he was up to, either. The music tore through him, a kind of hurricane of sound that boiled across the room and shuddered against me. He had the microphone in his hand, and stalked up and down like a tiger, leaped around and up and down like a maniac. The song was a bolt of lightning, and his body and voice were barely able to contain it. He looked as though at any second he might explode with ecstasy, leaving bits of organs and echoes of his voice splattered on the walls.

Spider finished the song, and No-Love arranged to introduce us. Spider saw me, gave a kind of a half-sheepish grin, and then threw up on my shoes. He retched in a sloppy 2/6 time at first, but it gradually stabilized into a largo 3/4.

We had Spider—Spider Vetter, who was considering changing his name because he hated that people kept asking him if he was related to Eddie Vedder, and once punched out a 36-year old mother of two for demanding why he wouldn’t want people to think that—for one year.

Every gig was roughly the same. Spider spent the time before it:

a) drunk
b) high on something
c) in jail
d) in a fight
e) some combination of the above

We would do our set, in which Spider was usually just sober and conscious enough to extract a fucking miracle of a performance, playing his own charisma like an instrument, enthralling an audience that was eager to worship him like a God. He wrote his own lyrics, and I never understood them; they were surreal panoplies of sound, words stacked on words stacked on words, with strange dipthongs and consonance. Easy to make music to.

After our sets, Spider would spend the rest of the night:

a) drunk
b) high on something
c) in jail
d) in a fight
e) some combination of the above

Then, he would disappear in his haze of adrenaline and poisons, until we dug him up out of a dumpster/crackhouse/holding cell for the next show.

There was no question that Spider was a savant; that his talent flourished even as he neglected it utterly is proof of that. Spider didn’t practice, he didn’t study, he just spent his life thirsty for experience, and doing anything to his body that he could possibly think of. That he could sing like a fucking rockstar was a complete accident of nature, and incidental to his true purpose in life, which was to punch people and put things in his nose.

Spider died when he was 21, of some combination of head trauma, massive stroke, heart attack, and choking on his vomit. He probably also had “cirrhosis of all his fucking organs” and a necrotic spleen. We found him dead in a bathroom stall at a club in the ass-end of Cleveland (though, really, I don’t know if there’s a part of Cleveland that doesn’t qualify as its ass-end). There was a passed out topless trailer-park pixie lying on his legs and his mouth was flecked with blood and spit. They’d been doing lines of something yellow and glittery, I don’t know what.

Spider’s parents asked me to speak at his funeral, and I was appalled to discover how ordinary they were. His mother was a corporate librarian; his father was an accountant. He had an older sister studying to be a lawyer, who wanted to focus on not-for-profits. They lived in a little cape cod in the suburbs surrounded by trees and cool shade.

I agreed to speak at Spider’s funeral, and this is what I said:

“A lot of you are sad because Spider died, but this is wrong. You’re sad because you think his death was an interruption of a life that would have otherwise gone the way it should have, and ended with him married with a few kids and a puppy and a job that he wore a tie for. His death was not an interruption, because there is no way that life should go. His death was the culmination of his life, the perfect expression of his being. In this world, there has never been a person for whom dying in a bathroom stall with a hooker and a toilet full of drugs is a more appropriate way to go.”