We'll Always Have The Brickyard
The other day someone on a Facebook town page (I follow six because I apparently hate myself) said he saw a pretty girl at the gas station but he didn’t say anything and now he’s filled with regret. He received some not particularly helpful Wayne Gretzky quotes for advice like, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” Were even Facebookers too nice to say, “Bruh, tell me you’re an incel without telling me you’re an incel”? Getting swiped right on Tinder? Are friends afraid to risk destroying their reputation by setting you up?
I think he shouldn’t worry. These days would most girls be receptive unless you’re a Helmsworth brother? America’s great hitchhiking era is long gone. Stranger danger reigns. We can thank made for TV movies, Dateline NBC, and social media for that.
“Where did you guys meet?”
“At the Shell in Colchester. I was getting unleaded.”
“That’s so adorbs! My fiancée and I met at a Mobil.”
Please. All great romances begin at EV charging stations.
But in his defense, Citizen Kane is one of the greatest movies of all time and my favorite part isn’t about fake news merchant Charles Foster Kane or his childhood sled Rosebud. A supporting character says this:
“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.”
So maybe this was commonplace long before All Things Colchester. Especially if someone hasn’t found their soul mate since. If you have, probably keep white dress girl to yourself.
I can’t quite relate to these encounters with strangers. A visual thing? I’m legally blind. Or a shyness thing? But I’ve had similar encounters with prior acquaintances. Most happened a long time ago. I think the Internet has changed this. With strangers, you can go on Missed Connections on Craigslist. (For the record, I have NEVER done this.) Those posts probably have a 0.04% success rate (so you’re tellin’ me there’s a chance) but they must provide soothing balm for a tension filled day or two of browser resetting.
And these days if you run into an acquaintance, you can probably reach out on social media. “It was so nice bumping into you today! That was crazy, riiight? So I noticed you like a full gas tank. My friend had to leave the country and I have an extra ticket for The Gaslight Anthem.”
Ugggh. Maybe the Internet hasn’t made things that much easier.
Aside from cringey slides into someone’s DM’s, the stakes were once higher. If you didn’t get someone’s number or make future plans, you might never see them again. There was the phone book or information, but many people were unlisted or living with roommates whose names you didn’t know. You could get lost so easily--lost without Google Maps or lost from friends and acquaintances in a world where no one left digital footprints.
All of this made me think of one of my missed connections. I moved from Vernon to beautiful downtown Hartford, CT in September of 2000. I started my first real job with the state in June. I was 27. My future was so bright I had to wear $9.95 CVS shades.
On (I think) my very first weekend living there, I decided to soak in Hartford’s rich cultural offerings. I attended the Hartford Symphony’s performance of Schubert and Beethoven at The Bushnell after hitting the Wadsworth Atheneum. Just kidding. I went to The Brickyard. Aka, the Chickyard. Aka, The Dickyard. Okay, so this wasn’t exactly where people went for poetry readings or discussions of Kierkegard’s philosophical system applied to the new millennium. It was a monstrosity. 3 floors! I have never smelled a bathroom so horrific in my entire life than the second floor Men’s Room by 2005. And this held true even AFTER a cleaning. Some smells just sink into the linoleum for eternity and can never be scrubbed away.
The Brickyard once held a Maxim model search. I attended (strictly as a journalist) and reported back to an email list of co-workers. This lost masterpiece was my finest contribution to world literature. My War and Peace. My Hamlet. Let’s just say they didn’t ask aspiring models, “Quck: what’s the square root of 393?” but rather, “What is the craziest place you ever did the wild thing in public?” One of Maxim’s next top models said it was on a picnic table. If we can just pause for a brief PSA: for your next church outing or company picnic, please don’t forget to bring a tablecloth. Or two.
The Brickyard was so appalling I couldn’t stay away if you paid me. Usually until Last Call before nightcap pizza at Aladdin. Or Papa’s Pizza before a 2:13AM shooting on June 6, 2009 ran their business into the ground. A beef had spilled over from The Mansion nightclub on Ann Street (never dared visited by this writer—I don’t think.) Want to bet it was over a spilled drink? 82% of wars are started over spilled drinks. Israel vs. Palestine? Religion? Territory? Nope. Someone spilled three drops of beer on someone’s date in a Tel Aviv bar in 1948 and we’ve had unrest in The Middle East ever since.
On this fateful night, I wandered aimlessly on the third floor—definitely not on the dance club 2nd floor. My views on dancing were more rigid than Lori Singer’s dad in Footloose. (Well, not quite. I sometimes chased my phony moral superiority with the equally bitter taste of vodka and cranberries and half-watched rump shaking in the dark from the bar.) Google found a Hartford Courant description of the 3rd floor. Published right after the grand opening in 1995:
“The gymnasium style wooden floor is surrounded by dramatic windows and topped by a ceiling held up by copper-painted beams. Strategically placed around the room are games and activities—enough to keep even the most rabid sports fans entertained. Twenty-two television sets broadcast continuous sports coverage, and two touch-screen trivia games test your sports IQ. For those preferring a little live competition, there are four pool tables, a coin operated golf game, foosball, a mesh-enclosed basketball court, and darts.”
Holy crap that’s detailed. Who wrote that? David Foster Wallace? Sports IQ games are fun. I probably could have done well, but I’ll bet the low-def touchscreens were microscopic. Lost in the fine print: The Brickyard hated blind people! (I can lobby this hand grenade without fear of a defamation lawsuit because they closed in 2009.)
They also CRANKED music, thus destroying any chance of a laid-back neighborhood sports bar vibe. So when a girl approached me on this Saturday night and gave me a big hug while proceeding to speak, I could barely make out a word. Her lung capacity was simply no match for Papa Roach. Also it had “when the light’s out it’s less dangerous” dim bar lighting, so I was both visually and sonically adrift, rendered deaf, dumb, and blind. Did I have any idea who this was? Absolutely not. But she was hugging me pretty tightly and my confusion only prolonged our embrace, so this wasn’t all bad news. I could finally make out, “You don’t remember me?” in a sad voice. The DJ must have switched to Savage Garden because I finally heard her confirm what I started to suspect: it was my college acquaintance Casey!
I said OF COURSE I remembered her.
We had mutual friends at UConn. She lived in The Jungle (a dorm complex, not a tropical rain forest or Guns n’ Roses fan club) next door in Fairfield, I think. She had many of admirers. One of my floormates thought she looked like Teri Hatcher—then at the peak of her Lois and Clark and Seinfeld “they’re real and they’re spectacular” fame, so there was literally no higher compliment you could pay a girl.
She sat right across from me at my Biology lab table. (Did she pick that spot after surveying the room?) She was from Massachusetts. She saw Oasis at the Orpheum in Boston in October, 1995 (thanks again, Google) just before they got massively popular. (Okay—semi-popular here in America.) When we didn’t dissect frogs we studied the anatomy of the human eye. She stared straight into my dark blue, perpetual motion eyes for an eternity or fifteen seconds. An English major, I thought maybe STEM general requirements didn’t suck after all.
I liked her because, well, she did look a lot like Teri Hatcher. With a better name—at least until Casey Anthony ruined everything, but Teri was always pretty awful. She seemed quiet even though she was a hot girl, which I’m sure she knew. (Although hot girls in modern country songs never know so who can say?) She moved in mysterious ways! I liked to imagine girls being as shy as me. The pretty girl who was a little sad. An idealized fictional character? Maybe.
My drug dealing next door Jungle neighbor (name redacted) claimed he hooked up with her. Someone said they heard him claim this. Or maybe they heard someone say they heard someone else say it…. In the fog of $10 to chip in kegs and strobe lit frat houses with bong smoke filled back rooms lit only by blacklights, you often heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another they’d been messing around. But everyone was guilty until proven innocent—which of course could never be proven.
So my floormate, who barely strayed far from his Usual Suspects VHS or Sega Genesis, said, “That ruined my day.” Join the club, Josh. Name Redacted was a self-diagnosed “disgusting human being” so I clung to the hope he was lying to boost his reputation/weed market share. But stories—or rumors—like this only fed into my “girls only like assholes” worldview. (Never mind I wasn’t always the courtly gentleman with impeccable manners.)
Later, another floormate said, “She’s packed on some pounds.” Had she become morbidly obese? No. But this was like the fox and the grapes parable. Can’t have the grapes despite repeated attempts? Tell yourself they’re probably sour by now anyway.
So yes, I remembered her.
After our Brickyard conversation/shouting match with Linkin Park, we split apart. Regret hit me harder than the rum and cokes. My 20/400 best corrected eyes stood little chance of spotting her again in a mood lit, three floored, 120 decibel blasting bar. I’d never see her again. I might as well go home. But a simple twist of fate threw me yet another batting practice fastball. She stood at the front entrance with her friends smoking a cigarette. She wore a white shirt. Did she camp out in front so that when I left….? Ah forget it. Although the Millenium was still young, Bill Clinton was still President, Friends still had three more seasons left, so I can’t imagine you couldn’t smoke inside The Brickyard! Anyway, I think I recognized her this time and said goodbye. She said, “It was good to see you. REALLY good.”
Okay. This is ridiculous. OBVIOUSLY take a chance here and suggest hanging out? Or ask for her number? Do SOMETHING. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take! It doesn’t have to be a slapshot, a wrister would do. Just let the puck deflect off a skate!
I did nothing except walk home. Back to my lonely studio apartment with its tiny TV and massive stereo and brand-new Dell desktop computer. (“Dude, you’re getting a Dell” wowed me far far more than “Think Different.”) I was more afraid of leading myself on and embarrassing myself. We always fear the wrong things.
This brief, trivial encounter actually slammed the brakes on my life’s forward momentum. I thought about it for weeks. Or months. Or--as evidence by this post--years? Was this girl in the white shirt my girl in the white dress and parsol? I went back to The Brickyard every weekend. You didn’t exactly need to twist my arm to get me to a bar, but I always went there—and not, say, the Pig’s Eye Pub-- hoping to see her again. But I never did.
Pearl Jam, on their rapid descent to commercial irrelevance, released Binaural in May, 2000. Binaural? The CD buying and illegal downloading public had shown a strong preference for albums entitled Antichrist Superstar or Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water. Was Eddie Vedder suddenly an audiologist?
But unlike The Dope Show, Nookie, or Break Stuff, the song Light Years struck a chord in my soul.
And where ever you’ve gone/
And wherever you might go\
It don’t seem fair/
Today just disappeared.
With heavy breath
Awaken regrets
Back pages and days alone
They could have been spent
Together. But we were miles apart.
Every inch between us becomes light years now.
A song about a Brickyard cover charge payer if I’ve ever heard one. I listened repeatedly. I think the song is about someone who dies suddenly so transposing it to a girl you bumped into at a meat market dive bar in downtown Hartford might seem melodramatic to the untrained eye but it wasn’t! Casey and I were light years apart now. It didn’t seem fair.
And there were no available girls at my job to distract me, even if only with false hope. The following Monday, I sat in our sole young, attractive girl’s office: a secretary still hung up the IT guy she dated before he went back to his old girlfriend. (At least I think that’s how it went.) The J. Geils Band warned us: you love her and she loves him and he loves somebody else, you just can’t win! She was having a bad day. I think I told her about my Saturday night in a mournful, tragic voice. I suddenly felt so sad. I blew a chance with Casey that would never come again! And I was years away from considering online dating. Nothing left to do but pine for my long-lost lab table partner. The Brickyard didn’t just break the hearts of Maxim model contestants.
But a few years later we connected online. It wasn’t even the Friendster or Myspace era yet. AOL instant messaging? AIM?? It doesn’t get any more early-aughts than that unless Paul Wolfowitz had entered the chat. She had moved to Chicago. She was getting her doctorate in forensic psychology. I was an even bigger idiot than I thought. With any pretty girl—the girls that all the bad guys want—I would often think, “Well maybe she’s not that smart.” Did I think I was superior because I’d half-understood a few fancy books? Was she dumb for smoking and drinking at The Brickyard? Or wearing Gwen Stefani-esque belly shirts in college? Was I attending art exhibits myself? Now she was in a real city getting an advanced degree while I dragged my feet on my Master’s in a minor league hockey town.
She liked indie bands that hit Chicago but were too hip for Hartford. No room on the schedule for The Shins or Tilly and the Wall when there’s Alice Cooper and the latest Kiss farewell tour to book.
We lost touch—for good this time.
Almost. Last week I might have done some Internet stalking investigating. I don’t think she’s on Facebook—probably wise if you’re interviewing Hannibal Lecter. But she’s a professor at a school for psychology in Chicago. And I found a Youtube video! A psychologist from Dallas interviewed her not two months ago. I never expected to watch a full hour about the life of a forensic psychologist but here we are.
I was interested in hearing her voice. Would I recognize it? Yes, for the most part. Also—this is weird—but she has thick eyebrows. A lot of women have these pencil thin eyebrows. Nature or nurture? I suddenly remembered noticing this back in college! (Was it when she studied my retinas?) Who knew eyebrows were a portal back in time? And this video is actually what triggered my memory of my floormate comparing her to Teri Hatcher because there’s still a resemblance even now.
It was slightly surreal. He kept calling her “doctor.” And she sounded exactly like the psych doctors I work with. Same practiced, formal, professional voice and manner. This was the same person I saw smoking a cigarette outside The Brickyard and at keg parties. But those days are light years away now.
She doesn’t think malingering happens often in criminal trials. She’s seen people fake insanity trying to avoid trial “maybe twice” but even then they’re just exaggerating real symptoms. Maybe this differs from people applying for disability or psychologists can interpret things in wildly different ways. Some of our psych docs seem to think nearly EVERY disability claimant is malingering. Others not so much. It’s all who you get.
She said people found unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity can fare worse than convicted felons because they often get locked in mental facilities much longer than inmates are kept in jail.
They talked about dealing with what she called “the dark side of human nature.” The other psychologist talked about not letting that infiltrate into your private life. How does she manage her self-care? “I don’t know that I do” she joked. But she turns down some cases she knows will be very difficult since she’s “mid-career now.” Ugggh. We’re getting old, aren’t we?
Her main role is to be neutral, not an advocate. She advises the court about their fitness. This is a bit like my job. But she also advocates for new laws and policies which may prevent people from getting into criminal trouble in the first place, so there’s some advocacy. Most have experienced unresolved trauma. Many are from underserved communities. She seems to think most crime is a mental health issue in disguise.
I wished he asked her more personal questions, but that wasn’t what this was about. No, I didn’t want to know if she was single so I could bust a sweet move. I was just curious about this person I almost knew half a lifetime ago.
The video has just 19 views. And since I left and came back a few times, several are mine. So while this story doesn’t have a Hollywood ending, at least I became one of very few viewers of this fairly obscure Youtube content. I guess that’s one type of connection across space and time? Anyone else watching might see an attractive middle aged professional woman and probably never guess she was ever a keg party princess, an entire dorm floor’s dream girl, a young black market entrepreneur’s alleged conquest.
Of course…….if I asked for her number at The Brickyard, maybe she says she has a boyfriend. Or she didn’t think I was the kind of bad boy she was into? (Does a bad boy admirer gravitate to forensic psychology?) Or maybe she decided she liked girls. But that’s why you should always try anyway. If she shoot you down, it will sting for a minute, but you soon forget her. But not taking a chance may lead to 3,000+ word Substack posts a quarter of a century later! Kids, strike out swinging, not looking.
In summary, good thing this non-driver’s license holder only visits gas stations when Powerball or Mega Millions hits a billion dollars.
PS---I’ll leave you with another song lyric. U2’s The Wanderer from their 1992 Zooropa album. Sung by Johnny Cash.
Yeah I went out wandering/
With nothing but the thought of you/
Looking for you.
See? This phenomenon is everywhere! He and Bono might have been looking for God, not a woman, but nobody is perfect.