The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

Author:David Giffels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

But not me, baby, I’m too precious . . . Fuck off!

And then began punching again.

After a while, it did start to hurt. When the song ended, in the tape hiss before the next track, “The Phone Call,” began, I ventured: “Why are we doing this?”

Jim turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at me, wild euphoria mixing with vague disappointment and judgment. “Because this is what we do.”

So, for the time being at least, I had no real context for this song, whose lyrics were explicitly about the place where we’d grown up, with lines about “moving to the Cleveland heat” and direct references to streets we knew—East Fifty-Fifth and Euclid Avenue and the Shoreway, so when Chrissie Hynde sang “duet duet duet do it on the pavement,” I knew exactly which pavement she meant, which, for me anyway, made for a peculiar, tangibly harsh specificity in an otherwise uncertain sexual fantasy. I had seen those streets and their scattered gravel and ground glass. Doing it on that pavement would be very uncomfortable.

But I wondered most about another line.

I had the album at home on vinyl, and at first, joined by Ralph in clandestine congress, with the volume set low enough that we didn’t think our parents could hear, we repeatedly moved the needle back over the previous few grooves, to hear her say it again: “not me baby, I’m too precious . . . fuck off!” The imprecision of the needle drop, however, meant that most of the time I also heard the previous phrase: “Howard the Duck and Mr. Stress both stayed, trapped in a world that they never made.” I knew Howard the Duck was some sort of druggy comic-book character from Cleveland; copies of those comics were passed around high school along with Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, and they’d begun to replace Sgt. Rock and Batman. Howard the Duck comics were like rumors of cocaine, part of some subculture that I knew existed but only in theory. And I knew from Scene, the local music paper, which I picked up every Thursday at the record store up at the strip plaza, that Mr. Stress was the name of a popular Cleveland blues band.

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