A month had passed since that inaugural night of unreason, and it seemed as though KJ was becoming an operator of unlikely reunions in my life, with my car as his switchboard. It wasn’t his intention; he was unaware that I had once known the kid he wanted to bring to another fateful concert on that night of April the Twentieth, 2007. And he was unaware that I had once been resentfully familiar with the boy that he reintroduced into my life a few weeks prior —  an individual who would come to be known as Mixtape.

As a sign of the times, Mixtape and I had first met by way of the internet — a specific locus of the internet dedicated to celebrating the greatest videogame of all time, and conning hundreds upon hundreds (truly, thousands) of dollars from stupid kids too young to understand the real-world value of their stockpiled allowances. Mixtape was just that kind of kid in his youthful naivety, as was I, and we eventually discovered that I would be visiting the middle school he just so happened to attend. When that day came, we converged in the very physical realm of a busy cafeteria, and his gaze met mine with undisguised horror. Conversation followed in brief, awkward clips, and after a few moments he vanished back into the undulating mass of lunch trays and paper bags. I left that school a few hours later feeling sick and disoriented, choked on a scalding dumpling for four and a half terrible seconds in an empty restaurant, then logged online to find that Mixtape had spent the past few hours disseminating libel about me across the world wide web. He called me ugly, I called him a jerk, and I wound up attending his school that same fall; meanwhile, he had been sent to a rehab facility somewhere between Texas and Utah, and was never heard from again in the real world. He may have continued to signify on the internet, but he and I no longer frequented the same web locales, and so he was forgotten.

He wound up proving himself not such an asshole anymore, when he limped — on crutches — out of the depths of my memory and into the backseat of my car. He reintroduced himself with profuse apologies and explanations, and later that night the three of us attended a most satisfying three-band bill in the balmy basement of a downtown church, where I inexplicably tanned four and a half skintones darker over the course of the evening. In a touching offer of amends, Mixtape presented me with a bottle of water. He was high — rehab seemed to have failed — and he was friendly: my forgiveness was bought for a dollar, and the several satisfying gulps of spring water it afforded me. Months later, he would be inadvertently responsible for nearly getting me arrested; seasons later, he would be similarly responsible for my consumption of a filthily delicious hamburger that gave me violent food poisoning. He didn’t mean for either of those things to happen, and still probably doesn’t know that they did — I don’t hold it for or against him.

Regardless, on that April the Twentieth, the third man on our journey to see TV on the Radio was not to be Mixtape, but rather a boy with the surname Green. Coincidentally, I had known him the previous year as the most thoroughly shag-haired freshman on the school crew — perhaps the very smallest and worst freshman crew in the team’s extensive history. When KJ revealed his full name to me in the car that day, I remembered him: he was, ironically, the freshman who had once told me the story about how KJ had been expelled from school for reasons pertaining to arson, plastic trash cans that melted like Dali clocks, and the anonymity of the night sky. KJ spent a season in exile at Radnor public school — a place he would later describe to me, after I had met him, in a word, as “unreasonable” — before being readmitted to Haverford on the grounds of an emphatic and mostly insincere apology. Green, on the other hand, shaved his head and fled Haverford upon the eve of KJ’s return, moving to an institution that so concerned itself with the making of Friends (capital F) as to include it in its very name. He seldom resurfaced in conversation, on the crew team or elsewhere.

In short, Green had proven himself to be largely inconsequential during his prior time in my life, beyond that rather literary foreshadowing of my first encounter with KJ. And after this April the Twentieth, he would again prove himself to be a woman of no importance. But on that night, he wound up being significant for two entirely disparate reasons. One would, in rather momentous ways, shape the course of a very eventful month of my summer, and have a Kutcherless butterfly effect that still resounds in my life today. The other was precipitated by the simple fact that he had a mother who was batshit beyond any reasonable expectation. But if you’ve been paying attention, that shouldn’t come as any surprise.

After a brief reminiscence during the drive over, we landed at the venue’s adjoining parking lot, deep in the fiery heart of an unrelenting Chinatown. Green met up with a friend that he had aforementioned, a blazer-wearing boy named Curtis. A profound and unmistakable loneliness glazed over his sad eyes, revealing an obsession with Bright Eyes long before he spoke a single word. In fact, he spoke almost none: he seemed too down to manage much beyond a hello, so Green did all the talking. He mentioned that Curtis had an excellent voice — KJ and I had a band in need of a lead vocalist, he had heard, which we conceded to being true — and that we should try him out sometime. Curtis nodded sadly, and the two went inside to listen to the opening band while KJ and I investigated a Vietnamese restaurant across the street. KJ ordered himself some beef fried rice and spring rolls, and shortly after they arrived he declared it the greatest meal of his life. Pho Cali thusly became a favorite haunt.

We soon made our way back to the venue, where inside there was a band struggling to justify the volume of their amps. A month later Curtis would remember the black, British, boorish-faced frontwoman as having been “so hot,” thereby repulsing me and KJ, but at the time there was no way of telling: he was quietly standing by the side of the stage with Green, freshly purchased TV on the Radio tees pluming out of their backpockets like wilted peacock tails. As I was noting this minor phenomenon, the Britons faded from the stage at long last; after the pretentious and requisite “make ‘em wait another half hour” delay, TV on the Radio emerged at a last even longer. I was only vaguely familiar with their music beyond the one song of theirs I thought was worth keeping after perusing their discography, and their set elapsed with few remarkable moments to recall. The frontman implored the audience to get high (4/20, blah blah blah), many obliged, and the band played roughly an hour’s worth of indistinguishable hipster piffle. The masses called them back for an encore, and the band obliged by kicking the shit out of that one song — “Staring at the Sun” — which was meaningful for me in ways it was for no one else in that room. It was rare that a song so defined a point in my life as that song did for me then and there: for the first time that night, I opened my mouth, opened my ears, and felt it.

Having grown ill with the sickly heat of a thousand sweating souls, the venue regurgitated us onto city streets now lit by the headlights, the streetlamps, and the moon. The leftovers of the concert’s communal perspiration grew cold beneath the summer breeze, leaving our bodies altogether by the time we reached my car once more. Ignited by the turn of a key, we embarked westward to the shady glen that sheltered KJ’s abode.

Green’s momentary significance had already manifested itself in one of its two ways that evening: he had introduced us to Curtis, who would at some point become far more integral to our lives than he was letting on. The other consequence of Green’s presence in the night was making its way through the airwaves at that very moment, arriving with nominal fanfare in the form of a call to his cellphone.

It was his mother, and within moments, he was kowtowing without shame before her every screamed and shouted demand. It was a sudden and irrational assault, like that of the unprovoked cape buffalo, and Green seemed as unprepared as anyone else. Soon he was off the phone, explaining that he had forgotten her instruction to call her immediately once the concert was over (to be fair, TVOTR’s last note had finished ringing out no more than 5 minutes prior), and that there was a consequent hell to pay. However, the danger seemed to have passed, and we continued on to KJ’s house, where Green was planning to spend the night (it being a Friday, and all). But within minutes, his cellphone was revived, alive once more with a mother’s unbridled rage. The car stereo, which had been lowered to an awkward volume (half out of respect for his conversation, half out of desire to eavesdrop), was now turned off. The silence of the passing lane dividers and mile markers was broken only by the static of the mother’s violent accusations, and occasionally, her son’s frail protests.

Finally, he hung up the phone, and leaned forward with conviction. “Get off at the Gladwynne exit.”

I was being hijacked. What was the motivation? KJ’s house was at the Radnor exit just a few miles beyond, and I actually knew how to get there — besides, if the crazed hag wanted to abduct her son, the location mattered not. Now she was involving KJ and me, and as an increasingly less-young adult, I was offended by the implication. I briefly considered vetoing the demand, but when the Gladwynne exit came I relented, opting to avoid confrontation for a small price of my time, gas money and pride. There was no foreseeing what could have come next; there was no way of knowing the mistake I had made.

Once in Gladwynne, the subordinate son guided me with hesitant and shaky directions. Soon we were alone on what appeared to be an abandoned road, with now only the moon to light our ambiguous way. While Green pondered our next move, I took note of our new and ominous surroundings: to our left was a thick and uninviting woods; to our right was a riverside hick community, as evidenced by the various trailer folk burning their trash in the dead of night, staring at us with eyes illumined above their garbage barbecues. My fleeting concern settled into an immediate fear.

Instinct drove me to take a turn beneath a nigh-collapsed bridge, and soon we were delving deep beyond the forest’s treelined veil, along an ascending strip of asphalt. As we reached a bamboo creek by the side of the road, a vehicle barreled past us in the opposite direction with speed previously inconceivable for a mini-van. “That was her,” Green noted calmly.

I stopped my car and waited for a few perplexed moments, until she came surging back up the mountain, now swinging into our lane and stopping a few dozen yards ahead. Green apologized for the bizarre incident, then left the car to walk over to his mother’s. But as he had almost reached the dormant mini-van, it sprung to life once again, roaring further up the road and disappearing ’round the bend, gone from sight and sound. Green watched it fade and let the growing silence surround him, shoulders stooped and mouth agape.

“I don’t know what she’s thinking,” he said as he returned to the backseat, composure now shot. I sat confounded for an instant, then cursed loudly and started speeding as fast as my car could manage in an attempt to catch up with her. I didn’t mind doing this kid the favor of driving him to the concert, but I also had no intentions of getting tangled up in such a strange and dangerous mess.

After keeping the pedal to the floor for what felt like an eternity, the rogue mini-van was back in my sights. This time, however, its pilot refused to even feign a stop, and I was forced to follow further and further along the winding ascent. At last we emerged from the wilderness, and she cut a left off the road and into a residential area. I was surprised to hear Green croak that this was his neighborhood.

We coursed through a network of driveways like blood through a vein, finally reaching the heart of the system where the mini-van lay in parked wait. As I pulled to a standstill, the mother emerged, waltzed over to the livid contents of my vehicle, and tapped on my window. Curious, I rolled it down.

“I’m not crazy. I swear.”

She grinned sadly, and offered no further comment on her conduct that evening. She then forcefully offered to drive KJ home, trying to convince herself that she was now doing me some grand favor to offset the disturbing inconveniences of the previous hour. I declined as politely as I could manage by that point, further angered as there was now no reason she couldn’t have met me at his house, and as I would have appreciated some company of my own on the ride home. But she was determined to wrestle whatever sense of redemption she could get from the situation, and in the end I let her have it, collapsing my will once more. Lost and by my lonesome in the wooded expanse, I coasted gently back down the endless mountain, tired eyes held open for some north star to guide me home, a shining beacon lit by flaming trash.

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