the first round
(4) christopher cross, “sailing”
jibed
(13) huey lewis and the news, “hip to be square”
182-135
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, tweet at us, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 4.

Georgia Pearle & Joshua Dewain Foster on “sailing” 

It was around this season last year that we first toured the property where we now live. Love built this place, the original owner had told us with her hands full of sterling rings, none of them a wedding band. A swoon to her voice as she said, This place was built to house love. Sing that to the same cadence as Fantasy, it gets the best of me. The Loft: six acres of parking lot and gardens edged in evergreens and lilacs, and two log cabin buildings—one that started as a restaurant, and a second that sprouted as a space to hold wedding receptions and parties anywhere other than a local Church hall. It was the first of its kind in Eastern Idaho.
In sailing terms, the sail loft is the room where sails get drafted, cut, and made into something that can catch the next wind. So it makes sense, this place being called The Loft. My job here, to help people cut the ceremonial sails that will carry them into new versions of their lives, forging new families. Or that’s how I see it on a good day. On a bad day, I think Foster and I are camping in the basement of other people’s hope, and those sails look like fantasies someone else crafted and stuck me to tend, a purgatory for our many prior matrimonial failures. We live with four divorces between us, at least seven diplomas on our shared walls, six of them verifiable, two dogs, a spoiled tuxedo cat, two garbage cats that came with the place, and my two teenagers at the dinner table each night.
The first month we were at The Loft, Foster found a baby bib in the garden and bestowed it to me. I threw it out. It keeps reappearing: last night, on my pillow. Before that, on the bathroom counter, in the bottom bathroom drawer. This morning I saw it draped on our headboard, which he claims was my doing. I don’t remember that.
Sailing Cutie, the bib proclaims in an insufferable white cursive. The bib is the soft but somehow bitter pink of the Walmart baby section, a cheap pink, like a Pepto bottle left too long to the elements. Machine embroidered on the bib, a sail boat with a dark pink bow stitched to the mast, dark pink stitching around one white sail, cerulean stitching around the other blue sail. The same blue for the anchor, and navy for the hull, and I think to myself, of course the supposedly masculine colors get to be the parts of the boat that are functional. Water-tight hull, anchor and sail, all blues. Meanwhile the pinks are merely decorative. Then I think, the bitterness of the pink is probably my own damn bitterness at being pink in spite of all my reaching toward anything else, queerness and solo-ness especially, at having gone through the whole supposedly fulfilling stretch of young motherhood mostly broke and alone, my children now in their teens and readying their wings, condescending to me over the homemade chicken soup I’ve made them when I have a literal PhD in the topic they’re teaching me about. But, my word, my children were beautiful. Bright blonde, sharp and so quippy that I kept regular notes on the gorgeous things they’d say.  They’re still beautiful, in the way that teenagers are beautiful, constantly morphing and bursting, passing through the uncomfortable but necessary transom from postlarva youngling to grown human being. And of course I’m also proud of them, and comfortable in my assurance that they’ll go on being brilliant and beautiful and do something necessary for the world, that is if they can manage to keep their teeth and fingernails clean without my nagging. It’s just that the marathon of keeping them alive and focused in a direction for nearly a whole generation now has got me about worn out.
The bib has a brown stain along one full side of its pink, faded because I keep washing it. I keep throwing it in with the dish towels, in our laundry room full of wedding linens for the event center we both run, where we also live (in the basement). In my head, the stain has been there all along, mud from languishing in the rain after being dropped from the hand of some distracted auntie at one of the twenty-three weddings we hosted last summer. That’s probably not right, though. Foster is too attentive to misplaced objects and to the lawn care to have left it there in the mud for that long. I’m sure he picked it clean off the grass and brought it in to our shared bathroom counter, where it stayed, mocking me. The bib’s presence was there both times I drew my own blood for the at-home fertility test. Just to see where we are, what the options are or aren’t, because I am aging and Foster hasn’t yet had children, not that he knows he wants them. And oh holy hell, could I do it again? The first test failed. I over-bled on the blotter paper. I was sure I wasn’t giving enough with those little plastic lancets they’d sent, and so in my typical manner of overdoing everything, I took a straight razor to my fingertips. The company sent another kit. That time everything came out normal, fine enough for someone whose womb is geriatric.
Each time I throw the bib in the Speed Queen and waste another cycle on it, I ask myself why. I’ve thrown it away at least thrice. Every time, Foster pulls it out and finds another place where it can haunt me. I never would have put a bib like this on my child. A bib is just another thing to wash. Between diaper blowouts, spitups, and teething drool, infants have to be changed so often that it never seemed practical to me to Velcro yet another piece of fabric across their chests. Plenty of days, I gave up on fabric entirely and toted my babies around the house in only their diapers. As far as I’m concerned, this particular bib is no more or less useful than any bib. It’s a gesture, a symbol, with little real application. All summer, I told myself the same thing about all the weddings we hosted. The tradition, the fanfare, the same array of awful and awfully sentimental songs on repeat. Cut as many sails as you like. They’re nothing without the right wind.
But then, I ask myself, if it’s only some symbol, why did I find time to sob in our basement stairwell after every ceremony? Honestly. I’m poet enough that there’ve been plenty of times I’ve loved the symbol and the image more than the real, daily thing they were supposed to mean. I’m not supposed to love diamonds, those useless upcharged things with their industry’s ethical atrocities, but I loved my wedding jewelry all the way to the moment I pawned it off to pay the electric bill, both times, as marriage seemed important enough for me to try at least twice. And as I watched those princess cuts on my finger twist in the light, set in platinum, I loved, too, what they symbolized—the visage I carried, both times, of the fresh-faced young man who loved me enough to put two full months of work into something that served nothing more important than this reminder of his devotion. The fresh-faced young man who had fathered my child, and spent days lingering with me in the sand, beachside back in our coastal home county. It’s not far to never-neverland, sings Christopher Cross. Fantasy, it gets the best of me.
Those diamond rings had meant hope, and in my twenties I sold my hope for pennies on the dollar. How else was a girl supposed to keep her lights on after love had died? I pawned those rings and went back to my books with my children on my back.
After we’d taken our first tour of The Loft and its accompanying basement dwelling, Foster and I scheduled a trip to my home county in Alabama to talk to my lawyer, and the one of my two ex-husbands who’s still showing up for the kids. It was March 2019. We’d be graduating in May, two newly minted Doctors of the Literary, having pushed through the last few years together. What a way to spend our final Spring Break, dragging this love to tour all my failed sails.
The first day of our trip also happened to be my sister’s baby shower. Of course I only had an inappropriately black dress to wear, which looked strange against the pastel petit fours piped with icing pacifiers. I bought her a multipack of matching socks, hats, and yes, bibs, in an array of white and gray, and imagined them scattered and lost to the furniture in the blur of her firstborn’s first months. It was a warmer thought than it sounds. Some part of me truly misses those years I spent smelling like curdled milk, afraid to wear black because it would show so many smears, afraid to wear cotton because of how it’d reveal those letdown leaks. And maybe this is the point of sentimentality, at least when it comes to babies. Spend the time describing your days with an infant to anyone, and it’s mostly bodily fluids, laundry, blistered nipples, and the ever-banal-but-too-real-not-to-mention exhaustion. But there’s that other intangible: the moment when the child sighs, sleeping on your chest, and you see that you’ve broken off a piece of yourself and grown it into the future, a future you can only hope will expand into worlds you won’t live to see. And smacked on the back of that comes the hubris they’ll have when they do grow into people who know they’re rising to replace you, too foolish yet to realize how much they, too, will fail to perfect the world behind you, just as you know your own parents failed.
At the end of the baby shower, as I was sweeping the room for the last of the paper plates with their remnants of chips-and-dip and pastel buttermints, I got a text message from Foster: I’m bleeding. Anldso drunk. Nothing else in the message save a location pin. I showed it to my sister-in-law, she showed me her phone with its own garbled text flares from my step-twin, and we agreed it was time to go pick the boys up.
By the time we got to the ass-end of the suburban golf course where Foster and my brother were throwing discs over exposed sewer pipes and into the dense swamp woods, they had entirely forgotten they’d texted us. Pearle! It’s a miracle! How’d you find us?! Foster grinned and pointed to his calves, filthy and wet and vined with blood. I knew these woods well enough to know he’d got caught in a mess of brambles. I turned to my brother, HolyHell. How many hours I leave him with you, and this happens?
And of course my step-twin, lover of costume and revelry, participant in no less than one and no more than three Mardi Gras organizations, had already concocted another scheme. He had somehow collected a batch of sailor hats, and he wanted all of us together, in sailor hats, at the neighborhood yacht club for karaoke night, where we would sing together in those sailor hats.
It’s at least part my step-twin’s fault that I’m such a curmudgeon. He’s the sort of jokester who’ll get you nearly beat up any time you go anyplace together. Once, when we were twelve, I left for the bathroom at a homecoming game in Brewton, Alabama and came back to him telling a throng of cornfed Southern Baptist boys that I was known for my witchcraft skills. As soon as I’d heard the plan, I resolved I wouldn’t be singing. I probably wouldn’t be wearing those dumb hats, either.
I listen to a song like Sailing, and how can I not be irritated at the gauzy ease that seems to mark so much music from my parents’ generation? And this brother of mine, he loves it unquestioningly. I envy that about him, his ability to jump on whatever ship his joy has built and go with it. Meanwhile I can’t seem to trust most ships not to thrust me overboard or make me sick. When I was small, my father had his captain’s license, and would sometimes run charter boats for deep sea fishing trips. Once, before my step-twin’s father married my mother, I was out on one of those charter boats with my parents and their gaggle of friends, all in flipflops, tiny shorts or string bikinis on their slender-as-a-line-of-cocaine frames. I imagine it was about four years post-Sailing. There was the salt air, and the dolphins chattering boatside, their skin flecked with light as they sprang. I was young enough to imagine mermaids down there in the deep. And then I got sick enough to sully the hair of at least two or three mermaids, and someone carried me down to the cabin to moan to myself, alone, for the rest of the trip.
Christopher Cross makes an unsettling promise: that there’s a way to be taken away without danger. That peace really exists somewhere, that compromise won’t come on the back of the someone who’s already the most disadvantaged. You say boat shoes, I think sweat and blisters. What a damn inheritance.

*

This trip to Mobile Bay was the fourth time I’d visited Pearle country, and it’d never been this frazzled. I, for one, was scared shitless, understanding the synchronicity and alignment of all this. In January, Pearle and I had entered our last semester at the University of Houston, both with quality manuscripts and peak hope in a bleak job market situation. My agent, or, ex-agent, was shopping my novel then. I didn’t feel great about it, blamed Trump. GD Donald. That same month, Pearle and I video-conferenced in on a line with all thirty-two of my parents’ progeny. My parents had news to share. They opened the LDS official email once we were all ready: they had been called to serve, as Mission President and Companion to Mission President in some remote Pacific Islands—the Marshalls, Kiribati, Nauru—for three years. Little coral mushrooms growing out of the deep dark blue. My mother slid her glasses down her nose and chuckled and couldn’t get a word out, so surprised and shocked. She was really clucking. And my father, he sat back, stared off into the abyss. The story I’d always heard was that they had signed up for a six month mission to Southern Canada, where they could take their dog and pickup and food storage. I watched him running his commitments and career as a farmer and rancher through the ticker of his mind. He stared off, yawned big, opened his eyes. They had a June departure.
After the news, I didn’t sleep well for a few nights. Things had not been great between me and my parents. They were sick of me abandoning them and the family farm and our morals and standards in the sweaty pursuit of high art. I was critical of the Church, this governing organization and spiritual politick to which we all adhered, to varying degrees. I had lodged my complaints and withdrawn, stood my ground, ran my mouth, and because of this, hardly anyone could stand me anymore. The last time I’d seen my parents face-to-face had not been pretty. There was a yelling match with my mother in the parking lot of an orange gas station; I leveled truth upon my father in his big cowboy F-350 while we were eating tortas from the taco truck. I was so mad I only ate half.
And yet, I still felt inclined to call my father. He’d looked sucker-punched by the call. I knew how much responsibility there was to care for back in Idaho, because when I hadn’t been in sweaty pursuit of high art, I had worked every job on the family farm, from pulling weeds at the granaries to counting potatoes with the bankers. I deeply respected my parents, had worked in the dirt with my father since I could see over a dashboard, graduated into the office to be trained by my mother in the books and legalities. I had built their spreadsheets and and organized and backed-up their data and synced their phones and connected them. They loved me through my first divorce, completely shocked and scared, but my second wife and I left after a barley crop disaster, thinking I could never manage risk and crop failure like farmers had to, and that really fractured things. By my mid-thirties, I wanted that dependable, full-benefits, shared-moldy-office-institutional future. So I told my parents, before I left for the PHD, trailering my then-wife’s musical instruments and my books with my farm pickup, I told them I wouldn’t be coming back. The farm life was not for me. I was an artist, for shit’s sake. They were the leaders, caretakers, toilers. We’d tried it enough times to know better.
I left, knowing there was more sweet-bitter to come. My life changed a few more times in adult and complicated ways—that all-American story of eros and aftermath—and now here I was, fiercely with Pearle and her kids and our cats and her dog, our books in the same hallway. A new kind of family, at least for me, and one I wanted to continue post-doc, so I was staying up at night thinking about the obligation I had to my parents and this labor of love, and my history of missions, and theirs too, and how easy it is to lose everything, and the delay and heartache of rebuild and the hard-knock ticks of the mortal clock, and the truth of crashing dreams, of best ideas—creative and personal—capsizing, and my plodding and sunburned and volcanic genealogy, and all that my people had bled into their eons and stars and hills and hay and dust, and the lack of prof jobs or book deals, and thinking became dreaming, and maybe that became prayer, asking for direction on how this little crew of Pearle’s could ever fit into it, if they wanted to.
Then I talked to Pearle about everything that was weighing on me, and she heard me out, and she said, That sounds like something you and your father need to talk about.
So I called him. He almost always answers me, in part because I know when to call him, when he’s happy and clear-headed and undivided, which is usually sitting in his pickup in Idaho Falls eating fast-food and on bluetooth. In Houston, I sat out in my own car, in front the flat I shared with Pearle and the kids, with sunglasses and a beanie on.
This call was short. I told my father the truth: we were different because we had to be, and there was no use in allowing this wedge to settle and split us. I was sorry, and as he knew, loyal as a cowdog, and dependable, and indebted. And if there was a need for me in Idaho, and a way to include Pearle and the kids, then maybe there was a reason I’d finished the degree a year early—just in time to move back home.     
My father was chewing something beefy, and focused on that, quiet in thought. He said he’d let me know if anything came to mind. We hung up. I told Pearle that was that, and we kept our gigs and dissertation schedules.
But then something strange and big happened—my mother had this old family cheese-and-kitsch store, a log cabin building they’d bought from the original owner a few years back, and now the neighbor wanted to sell the adjoining reception hall.  My father called me, giddy but cool. He’d always wanted the whole corner property to eventually build something he’d never tell me. Top secret. The purchase would include the log cabin events center and its business operations, an industrial kitchen, nigh on three decades of rustic-romantic wedding decor, and the living quarters beneath the building, a three-bedroom, two-bath basement house with a west-facing set of concrete bunker stairs.  
Pearle and the kids and I, we all hashed it out. In February, we flew to Idaho for a few days to talk more with my parents and meet with the former owner and maybe pop into School District 251, my alma mater, and also attend the funeral of the untimely death of one our our best family friends, a young man who was a hunting guide and fishing guru, son of my father’s best friend and hunting partner. Death abounded here; it felt heavy to be home, but necessary. And, in that way, the ideas and energy all started to pile up. Pearle and I stayed up talking to my parents. The former owner invited us to tour the premises and living quarters, and had a tray of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies waiting. The basement house felt Nineties Nostalgic. I’d always been made to sleep in the cellar, and to have a whole downstairs, well, to me it felt like a comfortable beaver dam. What a dream. The kids were stoked to have separate bedrooms with functioning doors, and that the showerhead had neon settings. Pearle and I eyed up a two-person jetted tub in the master bathroom.
We started to imagine ourselves in new ways, Pearle and me. Could we? Should we? Even though it was a big boat, it was a small cabin, and lonely living. And but what about the kids?! Idk, idk. We didn’t say yes; we said we’d need to really look into some things. We all returned to Houston. By March, my father was joyfully negotiating with the neighbor, and Pearle and I were sweating pre-anxiously, and playing coy, not committing. Rejections came in on my novel, doors continued to close. The agent removed herself from the book, took a job internally. I thanked her, was sad, told her I was sorry that I could never make her any money.
Suffice it to say, when Pearle and I arrived in Mobile, we were feeling an urgent anxiety about locking something down. We got into Mobile and dropped the kids off with one of her ex-husbands, the one who’s still around, and went and crashed at her step-brother’s mom’s house. It all felt very family, and no one really knew what we were in town for. Babyshower gossip talk. I was very much looking forward to it all. I was going disc golfing with Pearle’s step-brother Daniel. A very family move. Knowing Daniel had a finely weird sense of humor and plenty of pop culture wisdom and great taste and stock of beer. He admitted to not being the most active Disc Golfer, but had gone enough to know his subdivision had a course in the heart of it. I had two bags of discs, and enough stress to chuck and drink all day if we had to to feel better about life.
The next morning, before the babyshower started, Daniel picked me up, and we wound around this massive wooded hilly runneled maze of houses and cul de sacs. LAKE FOREST, it was badly and generally named, and may have well been its own township, or kingdom. Daniel told me facts and fodder that sounded regionally accurate and fascinating. Daniel and his wife and their three cats and dog all just bought a house in Lake Forest, just around the wormy road from where he’d lived with Pearle as a kid, the one in which they stuffed a toilet in the basement full of potatoes, just to see how many he could fit in, no shit, and cost the family a lot of money with that prank, not to mention the loss of spuds. One of his high school friends owns that house now, has a homemade arcade in it.
It took a while to drive across, Lake Forest. Daniel was tan and swarthy and smiley, and had on sunglasses. Very boaty looking. I was wearing shorts in public, a rare look, for the sport of it, and running shoes and a bandana. The windows were down, and the spring air was hot, and the trees misty and the spanish moss greener than usual and wet, and the sun was out, and we could have been going to the pier where apparently the subdivision had a yacht club, which I couldn’t really visualize how close we were to Mobile Bay, just another hill over, down the road. And, that like any bay, there would be piers and accesses and businesses. It smelled coastal, and felt that way, when we parked and got out of the car in the lot smack dab in the middle of the course, and up and down which snaked Daphne Alabama City Parks Septic Crew, pumping sewage above-ground through huge flexible piping. The exposed sewer and weekend-parked dozers and tractors and flatbed trucks left by the department made for interesting obstacles.
I gave Daniel a bag of discs; he gave me a can of really good beer whose name I could care less about; and we started at box one, heading west, up and downhill, toward the water, drinking and throwing.
There’s always some comradery and chatter in the first nine holes. Daniel, who I could see now, had more a dock vibe in his new digs. He tried to explain H.O.A.s. We mostly talked and didn’t keep real score and felt good about throwing all these bogies. Daniel put on some music from his phone, a Google XL, just like I had, and streamed some of his new favorite music since moving to Lake Forest: Yacht Rock.
So far, I liked everything fine about the day but the soundtrack was really bumming me out. This softy salty meander. Is it all powdered drug metaphor? I could never tell. I tuned it out, drank, threw. Went through a few before the music got better. The beer kicked in and so did the habitat. My throws wobbled, then veered, then shanked. I didn’t care. I was vibing level Florabamaburger-in-Paradise, this music made perfect sense.
At some point, Daniel told me more about the yacht club, which sounded to me like a country club for ball golf, just add sails in a harbor. That was where Stacey and Daniel had been hanging out on various weekends, particularly, karaoke night.
And I must have been really drunk, because I said I’d sing some karaoke with Daniel, anytime, no problem, you bet, that’s what friends were for.
The tenth got gray and fuzzy. We’d walked up and down and back a hill, to the car, replenished the beer cooler, and tee-ed off down into a swamp full of sewage tractors, and I was probably sobbing on about how much I loved Pearle and her poems and politics and murmured all about it through my drive and launched my driver through a bramble wall into someone’s Lake Forest backyard. It took me a minute to pick my way through and dart in and grab the neon plastic, and by the time I came out and caught up with Daniel, my shirt was torn and I was bleeding down both shins. Felt great though, wasn’t thinking about anything but my salvage shot. A trio of bros with super cool backpacks came up on us playing really fast and so we found a bench and opened another one and let them play through. Daniel turned up the music. I was out of the window, too drunk, and again, yacht rock sucked, that was undeniable.
We were beyond the point of productive conversation. Daniel scrolled his phone, searching Miami Vice tunes, and I was squinting at those pros who jumped us. Each one threw three-hundred feet, and around trees and trucks and shit too. I was amazed at how good people could be at things, and ashamed I wasn’t better in every way. I wasn’t feeling great about anything. Why wasn’t I more careful? Classier? In less credit card debt? Even if this all worked out in Mobile, how would the kids really do in Idaho? How would Pearle? How would I? I grieved ex-family members from my past lives, the book, my own literary dreams.  I was depressed and alone and bleeding in a foreign and hostile region.
I was about to puke, when Daniel was like, Will you look up there? His phone sang: The canvas can do miracles, believe me. 
Down the hill strolled Stacey and Pearle in fanciful Sunday gowns. I learned this, when they got up close. I was stupefied, grateful, amazed.
How had Pearle come to find me, lost as I was, bloody in the water, torn up, paddleless, out of my latitude and longitude? Castaway miracles, only. And moreso, I was so glad she was here finally, but did she have a solution to my deep and abiding consumption of MERIT 57? And also could she pick me up and carry me to the car?

*

Before dawn on the day of our appointment with the lawyer, I couldn’t quit thinking of the wide Western sky. The summer before, Foster and I had driven all the way from Texas to Idaho to stay in an empty cinder-block ranch-style surrounded by fields and potato cellars, and on the way through Wyoming he started waxing on about the desert. I’d never seen so much open ground, marveled at the juniper and sagebrush. Imagine all this, thousands of years ago, all an ocean floor. I blinked into the dark and tried not to feel seasick. At one point in my life I’d overidentified with jellyfish, wanting what I thought must be an existence of clear calm in the dark. But all this talk I’d heard from Foster of water rights in the West had me nervous. What happens to a liquid creature in the desert dust? In a place where water’s scarce enough to draw and fight contracts over it? What if I dried up? And the kids? It’s not like either of us was particularly adept at making love stay. We had a pile of try between us and an even bigger pile of debt, much of it accrued in past lives, past attempts at making family. Finally, I reached across the bed in the dark and convinced Foster to get up with me and go to Waffle House. We sat in what had once been the smoking section, back when I was sixteen and dropped out of school and drawing a paycheck there, and talked through the conversation we’d be having with my lawyer later that day: how at risk would my custody of my youngest child be, given that we were living in sin and planning to move cross-country? And should I have my first husband’s paternity rights revoked, given that we hadn’t seen him or any sign of his care in how many years? What sort of contracts would I need?
After our plates were cleared, we set to walking the gator trail to burn off the nerves together. Except for when we fail, we do this most mornings. Walking. In Houston, we’d walk four or five miles around Buffalo Bayou, or the track at the downtown Y when it rained. In Idaho, we hiked. Lately, we go upstairs and pace circles around the dance floor before dawn, our rowdy collie puppy swiping our calves.
So we didn’t think much of setting out down the boardwalk trail along the interstate that runs across Mobile Bay, at least not until we’d got going. The early morning mist was out over the water, and maybe there was an alligator or two in the reeds, but mostly there was that unsettling echo of cars across the overpass overhead, thathunk thathunk. And I’d been saying it all week, but there’s no place I hate more on this earth than Daphne, Alabama. The place is mostly an interstate fast food strip and a sewer treatment plant that overspills into the bay and gums up the air. Daphne, where I’d been pulled over and searched by the cops what felt like at least once a month when I was a teenager, targeted for my manic panicked home haircuts, the piercings, my penchant for combat boots with ripped up dresses or old man slacks cut below the knee. They never did find a thing when they tossed my car. I’ve always been pretty square.
Another reason I hate Daphne: I could probably play Are You My Baby’s Father? on any given day in that miserable city. They’re both still there, in apartments a few miles apart. When I still lived local, years ago, sometimes they’d pick the kids up in the same damn truck, grinning together like some snaggle-toothed faux-wrestling tag team. For a while, I’d called them My Two Dads.
As we rounded the sidewalk coming off the boardwalk, I said to Foster, I’m sure this sounds ridiculous, but I can feel my firstborn’s father.  Stumbling down the sidewalk in frayed wide-legged denim, grizzled, tie-dyed, something about the man’s energy made Foster put a hand on my lower back and shuffle closer. I walked faster, craned and squinted, trying to get a good look at the man’s eyebrows. Was it? Could it be? Nope. Not him. 
And then the next one was him. Barely nine a.m. on a weekday, and my first ex-husband was walking from the Circle K in a pair of kitchen shoes and chef’s pants, black striped and ballooned, and a stained white undershirt. Seventeen years since the wedding photos. He’d lost a fair chunk of his teeth and not bothered to replace them. He had a rollie cigarette in his left hand, and a glass bottle in a brown paper bag in his right. Hey how y’all doin this morning, he said with a chin flick, no recognition until I tossed an, Alright, how ’bout you, over my shoulder. I wasn’t about to stop and try to reminisce, about what, all the birthdays and bank holidays he’d missed? Or the night he broke out my backdoor window to “use the phone,” or the time he’d cleared out my bank account to pay a dealer debt and left me and the baby with no power in December? That was H’s dad, I muttered to Foster, who did the double-take, incredulous, and then pivoted on his heel to walk backwards in this sort of ridiculous, sort of beautiful, puffed-up-and-protective stance.
Later, after sitting with Foster in my lawyer’s office, we’ll have dinner in a Thai restaurant with the other of My Two Dads. The plan was to let him know what was coming in the mail: the relocation letter, which my lawyer had perused already, which would inform him that we intended to abscond to the Idaho wilds with the kids after we’d finished in Houston, and include all the state mandated details of prospective visitation schedules, et cetera. And as we’re sitting there—Foster by my side and another version of my family, kids included, across the table—all of us pulling spring rolls from the same plate, for a moment things feel normal. Thanks to Foster’s easy charm, my ex seems to have forgotten to think all Mormons are kin to Warren Jeffs, and I somehow forget my litany of complaints against him, which are justified and many, and it all feels, for a moment, like family. I feel generous enough to pick up the check.

*

On the last big day of the trip, Pearle and I had a scheduled call with the neighbor, and then a follow-up call on that call with my father, whom we had recently learned sold his valley house and offered the neighbor all the cash proceeds for the reception center who would be very interested on the guarantee that Pearle and I were on board to manage. The neighbor wanted to say yes, but needed to be reassured we were for real.
On the first call, we assured her we were ready to leave our classrooms for the cult of small-business management as soon as we could. We all had a good scary relaxing laugh in my car on the bluetooth, then closed the deal. The neighbor was going to hang up and call my dad.
And then later, the call came from my father: “So are you two managers even ready for this? Do you have a pen and paper? Let’s make a list …”
Awkward, neither of us really spoke up. Pearle took notes, I asked clarifying questions. The new reality: there was a spot somewhere for us. Apple trees and space for kids and dogs. And work, work, endless work, tending to the investments and best bad ideas of others, taking the rickety helm while they set off on more hero narratives.
After a minute, my father’s voice fell drastically, Had something changed on our end? Were we totally both-feet-in, locked down, sure? And we were, made sure he knew it fully. In that case, he’d deliver a check of earnest money before the banks closed, and we’d work out the rest as it came at us, now that we were in business together, back in cahoots with the family. The laughs and praise of my father: rare, genuine. I was really coming home, this time with Pearle, and her crew. He could barely believe it, and really, neither could I, but we both were pretty damn happy about it. Pearle was just as stunned, smiling to herself in the co-pilot seat. She had confided to me how much she loved the mountains, the cows, the sagebrush, and who knew what kind of poems she could make in potato dirt.
It started raining again, getting cold and cloudy, dark. We belted up, hummed through the slow wet city of Mobile and onto the causeway, the sun setting in an orange line to our backs. We had a half-hour to kill before meeting for dinner, and suddenly I was feeling frigid and tired, and Bama was cold for the first time that week, but I also felt stoked that I had money coming in the future that was not student-loan, so I drove to the Daphne Dollar General, parked and left Pearle in the car, ran in and found a red flannel shirt made from the same fleece material as a lumberjack Snuggie. Never a piece of apparel that looked less Southern. Three dollars. Hell, I had that, cash. I bit off the tags and handed those to the cashier, told him to keep my pennies too. I put it on, buttoned it up, warmed me like a Large but thinned me because it was a Medium. That’s what happens, when things go your way. You start to feel like you had something to do with it, get a little high-headed, puffed up.
I strutted out to the car and Pearle took one look and started laughing. In that kind of mood, Pearle shaking her head at my faux bravado, we drove the speed limit down the main drag and then on a dark slender road to the parking lot of the Lake Forest Yacht Club, where most of Pearle’s Bama Family, minus her ex-men and children, for the last night, were waiting for us to eat dinner, and take in the local talent. In the white wooded archway of the entry, which looked suspiciously closed, stood Daniel and Stacey, and Pearle’s pregnant sister Katie with her husband Chris, and Pearle’s step-mom and long-term man, who was also the father to her daughter’s husband. This was the kind of family that made sense to me, a tangled and complicated but funny one, and once Pearle and I got up close, Daniel handed us two captain’s hats. Everyone else already had theres. I put mine on, lofty, spacious, tall, the brim, tiny, but visible. Pearle held onto hers, rolled her eyes, said Absolutely not.
Daniel led us up to steps to a dark outer ballroom and then through some closed doors that opened onto seventy, eighty seated and standing Hemingway-white People of the Gulf, mesh-back fishing shirts and cargo shorts and Roll Tide baseball caps, watching us saunter in with our captain’s hats, having never seen any of us before, all singing along to Steely Dan? Both sides were startled, and we all diverted our eyes, and our party hustled to a big undressed round-top table on the far side, facing the karaoke DJ.
Daniel stood up and took some menus from a rack on the wall, which was great, because we were all starved, and a customer, a woman a lot like us, just there for dinner and drinks and some entertainment, came over to our table and gathered up the menus and told us what there was: fried fish and shrimp, fries, po-boys, cheap beer. I think she was mad because her whole table looked viciously hangry and waiting on a food order. I didn’t like the treatment. All these good southern mannered folks had taken off their captains hats now that we were inside and seated, but I kept mine on, seeing that it bothered the other table. They forgot us when a silver-haired shorty took on Simon and Garfunkel, both parts.
In casual conversation, something came up that I’d heard before: both Daniel and Stacey and Katie and Chris had tied the knot that this very yacht club. But when I heard it this time, I heard it differently, since Pearle and I were partner in the love business, co-managers of beauty, innocence, freedom. We talked about their wedding and wedding decorations for a half-hour.
Pearle and I hadn’t smoked in months, but I went out and bummed one to celebrate, out on the wood deck, and got in some deep breaths. Daniel came from the bar with the last six good IPAs and we each took two. I heard more about their weddings, the in-fights, the highs and lows, the dancing at the end, always dancing, and remembered the pictures Pearle showed me on her Instagram more then once, in new context, and ain’t that all worth it, the sweetest part of love? The couples pics?
We look out to the black water of the gulf when the talking is done. And just like any cigarette, it’s the first one that gets me, and then the second one makes me reconsider my choices, but no it’s too late. I was a family man now, soon to be back in Mormon Country, I couldn’t be smoking coffin nails.
All the more reason to get them in now, I reasoned, and to celebrate.
We all finished one beer and went inside. Some new favorite was singing another bad song from an era that wasn’t mine. Who cared? I stood there and watched and saw that literally everyone else in the building did. A big boy sidled up to me then—he’d been sitting with the menu-woman, I recognized, looking up into his soft nostrils.
Hey, he said. What’s up with you and your friends?
I looked him up and up and down.
They’re my family, I said. We’re not from around here.
He looked over to his mother, and back to me, sort of.
He asked me: What’s up with the hat?
The nerve. Didn’t he know who I was? A soon-to-be Doctor of the High Arts, a cowboy captain, a man on a mission from God once again?
I said to him, flat out, staring up: It holds down my hair.
That clearly shut him up because he shut up. So I went and sat down, and told Pearle to put on her hat, which she did, for a couples pic with me, and then told everyone at the table what happened. They laughed. We watched three pretty okay performances. Then those that smoked went out for a smoke, and Pearle came this time and also joined. We always had a habit of being bad for each other. Wedding memories ensued, and so did my deepest fears and regrets. Oh, I’d made some mistakes. What number was this? On the docks, in a cold light yellow rain, we finished our last beer, all of us, and our last smoke, and entered again the gallery to cross the room and go out to the cars. I was ready to get on the road.
So we entered again the gallery, and immediately Daniel had his claws on me, walking me up the aisle to the DJ station, where the man in the sparkling jacket held up two wireless mics for us. Terror set in. We walked past the angry mother and son. I realized, that of course, Daniel had never forgotten what I had so drunkenly promised. I don’t know when he signed us up for a slot, but he had, during the beer runs.
Now, I am not a singer, and the stage has never called me, and I was dressed in confusing and anachronistic fashion and very much not enough drunk. My heart beat pounding beneath my ears, and I felt the beady eyes of the many mother-son couples in the room. Daniel, who had his back to me, was giggling. That ass; what a guy. Pearle had her phone out, recording. I’d been duped. I felt very queasy, and knee-weak.
Not the first time, not the last time, I thought. This was a hang-on and ride-it-out situation. So I took the mic and turned my back to the crowd and and tried to calm myself and leaned over to Daniel and asked him what the fuck where we singing.
Sailing, Daniel said, by Christopher Cross.
The title came onto the lyric screen.
I stared at it, hard. I had no idea.
Then the music started. The wavy instrumentals. And I thought, briefly, incorrectly: Oh, I know this. I’ve heard this. Right???
Some synthesized rhythms marked the true beginning, and baseline anxiety, of the song: reality escape by schooner. The further we got from the shore of the stringed instruments, and into the deep of beach-coke-80s America, I had serious doubts about turning around to face the crowd, and wanted to stop-drop-and-roll behind the DJ station, leave Daniel alone in his own mess.
But I didn’t. I grimaced, rotated, showed myself, put one hand in my pocket, struck the mildest pose. The words were appearing, ready to be sung. I shook my head no to Daniel, let him go first. As he mildly waded in, I tried to grasp any familiarity with this song, which everyone in the room immediately grooved to, as if Soft Nostrils had appeared behind us in a flowing buttoned fish shirt and neon sunglasses and a saxophone. Which, these first lines, they still give me shivers, make my blood run cold, for their softness, their nonsensical praise:

Well, it's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me
And if the wind is right you can sail away and find tranquility
Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see.
Believe me.

That made zero sense, and I had no idea what logically came next. So I would anticipate, and try, and fail. That happened for four minutes. Honestly, I don’t know how I made it through the entire set, other than the strange recess intervals found throughout in which I could close my eyes and pull my hat brim down and shuffle in place. Even when I did attempt to sing, mic down and six inches from my mouth, my eyes affixed to a swordfish on the back wall, my captain’s hat itching and weighing heavy, a-rhythmically moving my hips to a foreign flamingo sound, I put my arm around Daniel, that rat fink, and sang incorrectly:

Sailing—it takes me away!

That was my best line, and it got a few mother-son claps. Totally undeserved.
I knew then that “Sailing” by Christopher Cross was a bad song that made gullible people do irrational things. How many ship-heists because of this? And how many subsequent ship-wrecks?
Me, I held on for dear life, with Daniel, in our karoke life-raft until it was finally over. When I gave my mic back to the DJ, I looked him right in the chestnut moustache and said: Thank you, and I apologize for doing that. Never had this shirt, or singing in public, been a dumber, cozier idea. I walked straight out of the building then, planning to never return. Pearle was desperate to find something to eat and then go to Daniels and finally get to play VR-Ocean Floor. I agreed too, if there was something to drink that was fun.
We met Daniel and Stacey at the nearest Publix, and grouped up to get a cart. We had plans to buy fruits and crackers and good beer. Outside that stuffy yacht club, the night suddenly felt full of hope and options and fuel. We all put on our captain’s hats, my idea. I guess I’d never taken mine off, refused. On the entrance security camera we saw ourselves. I took a picture of the picture with my phone, which was really just a picture of me, of us, back then, but also still.
We took a little cart and wheeled into the mostly-empty store. There was an employee replenishing the citrus display. An old white man, not rattled by our rude hats. He stopped culling the grapefruits and straightened and watched us walk by. And he crossed his arms and sort of congratulated me and said: Hey, hey, hey look who’s ship came in.
I buttoned my fake flannel collar button, smoothed down my shirt, adjusted my hat, replied: We’re just fixing to set sail.  

*

Both my step-siblings got married at that yacht club, thanks to my step-mom’s deep HOA discount, inclusive packaging, and the allure of the bayfront view. At the first wedding, I wore this strapless mid-thigh satin purple thing that I was convinced made me look like a suffocated tulip, my sister and my new sister-in-law’s sisters all in a bouquet to match. I’d burnt my forehead the week before trying to figure out how to operate a curling iron, and left the rehearsal dinner early to sob on my steering wheel the whole way home. I had just kicked out my second husband a second and final time, on the same day my temporary employment contract had ended, and me and the kids were headed back to the food stamp office. But the photos! Those lilac dresses against the fuchsias and corals in that sunset over the bay, my siblings radiant together, my children young and bright in the golden hour. The canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see.
I hate that yacht club nearly as much as I hate Daphne, but I love my step-twin’s unflappable effervescence, his enviable humor in the face of a disapproving crowd. The night we showed up with Foster, I was having none of the sailor hats, the warm lager, or the deep fried plates of deep fried. But when Foster got onstage in that dollar store plaid, mic in hand and arm around my step-twin, all nerves and try in the face of sockless, khaki’d hostility? It occurred to me how many other hostile bodies he’d braved alongside me, usually with far more humor and grace than I mustered myself. If I distrust Christopher Cross’s diaphanous, synthetic promises of being taken away, of dreams, innocence, of being free, someone pulsing “believe me” in my ear, what I know I can trust is the earnest and daily attempt to show up and look something like family. Foster asked me to put on the damn sailor’s cap, and I put on the cap to try this togetherness again. I’d rather be landlocked in our valley bowl of long-dried ocean, the aquifer far beneath me, trimming the lilacs and deadheading the petunias. We know by now how to stand against the wind. Whoever needed a mast, anyway.

Joshua Dewain Foster once again lives, works, and writes in Rigby, Idaho, his hometown. Since 2005, he's migrated from potato country to various creative enclaves for community and education, including the University of Houston, Stanford University, the University of Arizona, and BYU-Idaho, and has published in DIAGRAM, Tin House, Fugue, Sunstone, and others, as well as been awarded by the Idaho Commision of the Arts, with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and two Donald Barthelme Prizes. The last time he entered into a March Xness competition was 2017's March Fadness tourney, in which he wrote about "Here Comes the Hotstepper" and driving rideshare during the Houston Super Bowl. You can read it and other short stories and essays at his website: joshuadewainfoster.com

Born and raised in the Gulf South, Georgia Pearle is an alumna of Smith College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. Her poems have been published with Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and others. She recently finished a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston.

mirth of the cool: Jason Christian on “hip to be square”

I’ve always said the first tape I bought with my own money was AC/DC’s Back in Black. The truth is Back in Black was my second or third or fourth cassette—I don’t exactly remember—the first was Sports by Huey Lewis and the News. I must have invented the lie in junior high, when such things are eagerly discussed, and when adolescent pressures betray our worst insecurities. Years before, when Huey Lewis entered my life, at age eight or nine, I was still innocent, a pop-loving kid, unaware what constituted “cool.”
I don’t know how I came to hear, and later buy, that particular tape, Sports, perhaps because my stepmom liked to crank pop radio as she “laid out” by the pool. I lived with my mom and stepdad most of the time in a woodsy, economically depressed housing edition forty-five minutes east of Oklahoma City, where, in the suburbs, my dad and stepmom lived. Our house in the country had been burgled so many times that at some point we didn’t even have a radio anymore, and so every other weekend and summers at my dad’s was a different reality altogether: a manicured lawn, cable TV, background music, that backyard pool, and a billiard table on which my dad taught me to play.
Maybe this is what happened. I watched Back to the Future and enjoyed it so much I wanted a tape by the guy who wrote its signature track, “Power of Love,” but when I got to the record store I was faced with options: buy the movie soundtrack that contained that Huey Lewis song, or pick another of his albums that didn’t include the song but presumably had many others that were just as good. The most recent album, Fore!, was surely fine, but its cover was kind of boring: three dudes standing against a wall. The much more interesting cover was on the previous album, Sports: Huey Lewis in a loosened tie, leather jacket flipped over his shoulder, a billiard table behind him, racked and ready, and a bunch of other guys standing around what looked to be a British pub. As I said, I was learning billiards from my dad, and this guy sort of looked like a taller, beardless and yet relaxed and probably less-of-a-workaholic version of my dad. I chose Sports that day and indulged in its anthems, “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” “Heart and Soul”—so many hearts!—and most perplexing for a boy already tempted to sin, who snuck glimpses of his dad’s Playboys and R-rated movies, the lively little number “I Want a New Drug.”
I hadn’t yet gone through the D.A.R.E. Program, but I’d heard Nancy Reagan’s plea to Just Say No. Drugs were unequivocally bad, and here was my new musical hero flippantly singing about wanting drugs that wouldn’t make his head hurt or his throat dry, make him nervous or sleep all day. I thought drugs made you violent or angry, or zombified. (Watching the video now, I can see that the song is a critique of alcohol binging. The video features antiquated vistas of San Francisco and more than one skimpily dressed woman, objectified. I doubt I ever saw that video back then, and if I had it might have complicated my views on the singer.) I had no idea what Huey Lewis was talking about when he sang about drugs. Irony was a lesson I wouldn’t learn for almost a decade, and anyway I didn’t pay much attention to lyrics at that age—I was a rhythm loving guy, a guitar or sax solo guy—and so when I finally gave Fore! a listen soon after—whose title comes from the golfing convention of warning unsuspecting players of an incoming ball, a gesture I found comical because I’d only seen it in the movie Caddyshack, when a golfer played by Rodney Dangerfield accidentally hits a ball at another golfer and shouts the urgent warning, but the golfer fails to respond and gets pegged in the crotch, prompting Dangerfield’s character to exclaim, “I shoulda yelled two!”—I took the songs on Huey Lewis and the News’s fourth album at face value.
This was clearly appropriate music for an eight or nine-year-old. What could be more wholesome than golf? That the album’s only Billboard top five hit, “Hip to be Square,” was an homage to the status quo was self-evident, not only from the lyrics but who was involved (two of the San Francisco 49ers’ star players, Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott, sang backup vocals), and, most important to me then, how the band looked: frankly, square. If I understood the word “square” in the correct context I only did so after asking my mom or dad. Or I picked it up from some movie about the fifties, which were popular at the time. Peggie Sue Got Married, for example, and my absolute favorite, Stand By Me. Both of those movies and Fore! came out the same year, 1986, the year I was in second grade, the year Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration was released and The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead, two albums I now prefer more than anything Lewis ever did, though it is to Lewis I want to give my attention precisely because of how much I—we—have gotten him wrong.
Americans have a long tradition of missing the point of ironical, thinly veiled political tunes. Consider Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” a song that critiques how our government treats its veterans, which has been used, without permission, as a campaign song for hawkish politicians. Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” was never a “pro-marriage” song, and yet couples cut a rug to it un-ironically at weddings across America, all the time. “Hip to Be Square” is this kind of song according to the author himself. In a response to a query about regrets that was published on the band’s website in a column called “Question of the Week,” Lewis writes: “I wish I’d left Hip to be Square in the third person (‘He used to be’…).  It wasn’t intended to be an anthem for square people, and not everyone recognized the irony, shall we say.” Not everyone, especially this square Oklahoma boy.
We tend to conflate first person narrators as stand-ins for their authors, especially in music. But if the narrator isn’t him, and the song is ironic fiction, what specifically makes it so? “I used to be a renegade,” the song begins, “I used to fool around. But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down.” Is this part ironic, or is the irony found in the celebration of squaredom in the chorus, in the title itself? Does the fact that not changing the song to third person leading to confusion only indicate that, indeed, the singer’s appearance and reputation are wholesome? Otherwise, why would the public have missed the point? Imagine if Johnny Rotten would have sung the song. Everybody would have understood the joke.
In a recent interview in the lit journal Whitefish Review, based in Montana where Lewis has a home, he talks fondly of his wandering youth, hitchhiking around America, bumming around Europe and North Africa with a harmonica, busking in the streets. “After being in Morocco for like two months,” he says, “in Casablanca. I couldn’t get out, too stoned. Couldn’t leave.” That Huey Lewis is only hard to imagine if I forget my own wandering, bohemian twenties, and how different that life was from my tame life now. In youth, we forget our parents were once young, and we forget—or deny—a celebrity’s image is largely contrived. Nobody exits the womb fully formed. Therefore, in light of this tidbit on Lewis’s early wild ways, does one imagine the irony in the song in question having more to do with him lamenting that he’d settled down? In other words, was he critiquing his apparent conformity? Perhaps he clung to the past.
I had no idea what a renegade was, not then, but I must have sensed like so many others that Lewis was far from it. I’d swallowed the myth. Sometime later, when I got into hard rock, and that rock morphed into metal, I distanced myself from the wholesome pop idols of my youth. I bought that AC/DC tape and then G ‘n’ R’s Appetite for Destruction and then an arsenal of tapes by Led Zeppelin, Metallica, and other uber-masculine bands, which I must have hoped would render any vestige of my youth invisible. In short, I wanted to be a man, and specifically one with a rebel edge. But before all of this self-conscious effort to construct an identity, what I found in Huey Lewis was simple joy. There was a guitar, a keyboard, and saxophone, and Lewis spiced it up with harmonica. The music was easy to bob your head to and dance to if you felt so inclined. I was a brooding type, even as a kid, but I still remember losing myself in wonderfully contagious pop music, not because of what it did for my self-image but because it was just so easy to like. “Hip to Be Square” was one of those songs. So were “Power of Love” and “The Heart of Rock & Roll.” But in adolescence, the part of myself that I wanted to erase was too closely linked to music like Lewis’s: upbeat, happy, fun music. 
I was the smallest boy in my small country school, and throughout most of my childhood I was of two minds. On one hand, I liked to romp around in the woods. I fished and hunted with my dad. On the other hand, I was a momma’s boy, somewhat effeminate, feathered my hair, and enjoyed designer clothes when we could afford them.
My given surname was Gay. I was bullied all the time, and it was awful. Once, when I was in seventh grade, an older football player grabbed me in the locker room, gave me a wedgie, and hung me on a hook by my underwear. I think he must have gotten the idea from a movie, and in that context I suppose it could have been funny. But it was real, and it hurt in every sense of that word. The damage to my psyche still lingers today.
I changed my last name to my stepdad’s last name, which seemed a partial solution. Later, after my mom divorced and remarried, I change my last name again, this time to Christian, an odd name for a kid questioning authority, including that of the church. I enjoyed this irony immensely: a newly minted atheist named Christian. This was around the time I was cultivating an unsmiling, haughty disposition: my metal turned grunge turned punk phase. To this day I listen to metal and grunge and punk, but most days I prefer jazz or blues or old rock ’n’ roll and even some pop, though pop of the Lewis variety has never managed to re-win me over. It feels like a Disneyfied imitation of those old blues and rock ‘n’ roll tunes that strike me as better, more authentic sources of heart and soul.
It’s not exactly Lewis’s fault that his music evokes a certain corny innocence to much of the population, and it’s not his fault that “Hip to Be Square” had an unexpected second life when Brett Easton Ellis decided to write an entire chapter for his controversial (and boring) 1991 novel American Psycho. The section on Huey Lewis takes up only seven and a half pages of a 399-page book full of gratuitous violence and repetitive palaver. But because it was included in the 2000 film adaptation and combined with one of its more memorable scenes, when Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) invites his friend Paul (Jared Leto) to his house and hacks him to death with an axe, it finally found its way into the cynical, ironical side of our culture.
But we aren’t in on the joke Lewis intended. Lewis’s music is the joke, part of it anyway. Because of its use in the film, “Hip to Be Square” now occupies the middle of a Venn diagram, slasher films on one side, Huey Lewis on the other. I might have been pleased with this development, but I am not. Now that I’m forty-two, I somehow feel the need to defend Lewis’s honor. Slasher films and social satires are fine, but Ellis’s recent smug cynicism about the Left renders, for me, his earlier criticism of Wall Street moot. Or perhaps I’m unimpressed because of how the critique is portrayed. The winking and nudging, the “get it, get it?” irony, now seems tired and heavy-handed. It’s like we used to say way back when: “I’m really impressed with what you’ve done here—NOT!”
When the narrator of American Psycho calls “Hip to Be Square” a “masterpiece” and a “rollicking ode to conformity” we cannot know where the irony lies for Ellis either. Does he, Ellis, understand that Lewis is being ironic and therefore he, Ellis, wants his obtuse killer to not sense this fact and instead demonstrate his ignorance by praising the song? Or does Ellis miss the point as well? Does it even matter if it comes from a throwaway section of a mediocre book? (I should mention that I tried to read the novel but never managed to finish it, and so I cannot definitively declare the measure of its success. Instead, I will simply say it wasn’t for me.) Regardless, Ellis’s use of the song signals to the prickly, misunderstood place in pop culture where Huey Lewis’s work resides. Was it “retro” pop when it was new, and therefore a novelty act? Or was it an innovation of pop, albeit one undoubtedly indebted to its bluesy roots?
On December 28, 2015—my thirty-eighth birthday, coincidentally—someone named Joe Glim wrote a “Question of the Week” asking how the band felt about the juxtaposition of Bateman’s crime with his “extolling the facets of ‘Hip to Be Square.’” In response, Lewis wrote this sideways response:

Fine. It’s really a long story about the film company who released a phony press release which said that I’d seen the movie, and it was so violent that we pulled our tune from the soundtrack...not true...there never was to be a soundtrack originally, and they were trying to gin up interest for the film on the eve of the release...that, but creatively, I’ve never had a problem with it.

He doesn’t give much space to answering the question, and instead tries to dispel a rumor. “Not true,” Lewis writes, and he seems defensive despite claiming that he “never had a problem with it.” But why shouldn’t he be a little cagey about the treatment of his work? “Hip to Be Square” is forever stained with Paul’s blood. At some point, to counteract the confusion, Lewis began singing the song live as “(Too) Hip to Be Square,” changing its meaning entirely. The song was recorded that way on a live album, released in 2005.
Ellis has expressed regrets for how he treated the band and the song. “They weren't a favorite band,” he told Billboard magazine. “I was much more a Bruce Springsteen person than a Huey Lewis person—but I didn't think they deserved it. I liked them more than the implied criticism of them that's in the text.”
Regrets aside, the song can never be the same innocent song it once professed—ironically or not—to be. Ellis, in other words, marred it forever. Lewis, though, had the last laugh when in 2014 he spoofed the film on the comedy video website Funny Or Die, re-enacting the scene as himself in Bateman’s role and Weird Al Yankovic as the doomed friend. But instead of critiquing “Hip to Be Square,” Lewis dissects the allure of American Psycho, “a movie so entertaining,” he says, “most people probably don’t listen to the message. But they should, because it’s not just a great character study, but a sardonic metaphor for 1980s greed and materialism.” After delivering the deathblow, Lewis snarls and adds, “Try parodying my songs now, you stupid bastard.” In this way he gets a friendly jab at both Ellis and Weird Al, who in 1985 parodied “I Want a New Drug” with “I Want a New Duck.” More importantly, Lewis gets to shape his own reputation. He’s no longer the G-rated pop singer of the 1980’s. He’s got astute social criticism and profanity at the ready. He’s a fun guy up for a gag. The clip, though cheesy in a dad-humor way, is priceless.
Long before this clip, though, Lewis displayed other sides of his...um...talents in Short Cuts, Robert Altman’s 1993 film adaptation of nine stories and a poem by Raymond Carver. The filmic tapestry follows the lives of various odd characters, including a sexist pig named Vern played by Huey Lewis, who first sexually harasses a waitress (Lily Tomlin), and later, while on a hunting expedition, pees into a river as the camera homes in on his cock. Seeing Huey’s willy was the last thing I ever expected to see, and the scene surprised me further when his character spots a floating corpse.
There is a long tradition of child—or child-friendly—celebs taking aesthetically and morally risky roles. Macaulay Culkin, at one time the face of Hollywood innocence, portrayed a drug-addled teen in Party Monster. A decade later, Selena Gomez shocked audiences for her role as a violent criminal in Spring Breakers. I kind of like when this happens, because it illustrates how foolish we are for falling for the innocent-celeb shtick in the first place. We should have anticipated that Miley Cyrus would shed her identity as Hannah Montana and grow up to make a video of herself sitting nude atop a swinging wrecking ball. She is more than this one daring act, but that she was capable of such a thing was, for many, beyond the pale. This is how things tend to go. Children grow into complicated, and sometimes morally dubious, adults. Not always, but often enough.
I suspect the saintly imperative of celebrity behavior is, in part, rooted in racism, like so much else in our country. In the 1950s, the lily-white cast of Leave It To Beaver was emblematic of moral superiority above all because of their social standing as middle class WASPS. A family of another formation, other sexual orientations, from other origins, religions, or hues of skin, would have invited all sorts of suspicions by a large chunk of the American population at the time. And this moral legacy continues to thrive. The Federal Communications Commission boldly states on its website that it “prohibits obscene, indecent and profane content from being broadcast on the radio or TV.” It’s the first sentence of its “Consumer Guide.” How this is decided, and by whom, isn’t as much of a controversy as it should be as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. We Americans like to maintain our fantasies, whether historical, cultural, or political. From George Washington to, well, Huey Lewis, we like to think (or hope) that our heroes embody only shades of “good.”
This isn’t an argument to promote “badness,” but rather to expand our definition of “good,” and as far as music and films and books are concerned, to allow for messy, and moral ambiguous art. And anyway, the internet has rendered these attempts at censorship almost quaint. Then again, I am probably naive in this belief. The Christian Right surely still demands we maintain the ban on “seven dirty words.” America is still digging trenches in the culture wars. It’s consensus on morality, on reality, that we lack.
If I’m honest, before I set out to write this essay, I’d almost forgotten about Huey Lewis. I’ve lived several lives since he left my life. But I did some research. He’s alive, but suffering. In 2018, he was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder with no cure that causes vertigo, ear-ringing, and often total hearing loss. Lewis had already been progressively losing his hearing. He felt that he’d never sing again. He was devastated, canceled the next tour.
“This has absolutely ruined everything,” Lewis told Whitefish Review. “I try not to let it get me down. In the first two months of this, I was suicidal.” After a fifty-year career, he’d lost his reasons to live.
He is now basically deaf. He uses hearing aids and other treatments, but nothing will bring back his ability to hear as before. Still, he’s found a way to make music, for now. He released yet another love-themed single, “Her Love is Killing Me,” and the new record, Weather, drops on Valentine’s Day.
I can only make sense of what I hear and see and the few words by the man that I’ve read. I keep thinking about an overlooked but catchy bluesy number on Sports called “Bad is Bad.” Its video features the band strolling nonchalantly down inner city alleys and street, mingling with archetypal urban “riff raff,” drug dealers and prostitutes and homeless and pimps, as the whole band lip-synchs through doo-wop harmonies. The lyrics are simple but unclear, but the gist is thus. The narrator/singer goes “uptown” to see his cousin play guitar, and the cousin sounds like a “chainsaw buzzin’.” His cousin’s parents are there, and the narrator/singer says to the father, “Hey uncle, man your son is bad,” followed by the one-line chorus: “But sometimes, sometimes bad is bad.”
Even now I’m uncertain how to understand these words. “Bad” means “good” in American slang, and so when the narrator/singer continues as though to clarify his position—“I said cool is a rule, but sometimes bad is bad”—I’m left thinking he really believes his cousin is bad, as in immoral, no irony at all. But because there is no evidence in the text to indicate why he is this kind of “bad,” I can only assume that his badness has to do with his guitar sounding like a “chainsaw.” In other words, his cousin is a hack. And because he’s on stage, he’s also a fraud. The judgment “bad” then is more aesthetic than moral. It’s an evaluation of how he presents himself and how well he plays.
The lyrics take a break to allow more “oohs” and “ahs” and “doo doo doos,” and then verse two arrives, a line out of nowhere about an all-you-can-eat joint that charges $1.99. The refrain returns: “I said cool is a rule, but sometimes bad is bad.” There is almost nothing to this song lyrically, which I find telling. Like a good pop song, the lyrics were likely never meant to mean much anyway, just neat sounding words that rhythmically worked, semantic filler. The video is all surface, too: dark shades, trench coats, leather jackets, a West Side Story-like performance, posturing cool.
The song, like so many of Lewis’s songs, is atmospheric, more about the harmonies and beats, punctuated here and there with the word “bad.” I find myself wishing I could add a sneaky addendum to the third and final refrain, if only to put a finer point on Lewis’s modus operandi: Sometimes ambiguity is good.

Jason Christian was born and raised in Oklahoma. His writing has appeared in Country Roads Magazine, The New Republic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from Louisiana State University and lives in New Orleans.