Just a few days past the solstice and already I imagined the morning light had changed. But it was that queer wildfire effect from somewhere making the sunlight pink-gold, all the treetops like a Maxfield Parrish painting psychedelic.

I first heard the band Can that summer after college we lived at the beach. It was my strange roommate Dave Dever who could always be counted on for strange tastes. The whites in his eyes showed and his head rolled back when I said I’d never heard Can. The CD was a compilation called Cannibalism with muted illustrations interlaced in a vague, trippy way. It just looked dark and sounded dark but was like something you couldn’t turn away from, Medusa like.

Someone had a Sony boombox that played discs and tapes. It had candle wax and spill stains, sticky buttons. There were four of us living in a one-bedroom shack, young men on our own for the first time post college.

After graduation I drove down to Maryland to find an apartment for us. Before the internet or smart phones, I would have picked up a free newspaper at a gas station and searched the classifieds for a summer rental. Then used a pay phone to make an appointment to see the place. A pay phone, with coins.

The landlord Glen was ex-military and doing the math, must have served in Vietnam. He lived in a similar shack two doors down. The rental was one story above street level overlooking a Texaco station on Division street, the boundary between the oceanfront and bayside. Not much to look at, but what did you expect for a crummy summer rental to kids who were just going to ruin it anyway.

Glen leaned against the crumbling railing leering down at the Texaco and young people below. He was always smoking and shirtless, dog tags dangling, the first case of man boobs I’d ever seen. And Glen was in recovery, was very proud of how much he could drink with no one noticing. How he’d operated certain kinds of equipment or weaponry like that too. As he said it I wondered if he was drunk. His face was boyish and round, a wide smile and puffy cheeks ruddy and wrinkled like a rotting apple or wax witch, the cartoon kind people sometimes hang in their kitchens.

Glen would have had crude tattoos too. He would look at me and start to say something but then turn away and laugh, as if he knew I wouldn’t get it. There was something about me that made him laugh, perhaps the fact I was green and hadn’t seen shit.

Glen might have heard the band Can emanating from our rental certain nights along with marijuana and boy laughter, rarely girls. All of us worked odd jobs but never before noon. So we were up most of the night all nights with that boombox going. The neighbors were like us and most times drinking our beer or vice versa. They would have been exposed to the Can too and asked, what is this? Dave would have told them.

I didn’t know it then but the Can music was a blend of free jazz/rock and improvisation that had been maniacally edited and spliced together. Most band members were German but the singer on that disc was Japanese, and the words were garbled and mixed different languages, some made up and unintelligible. All this at high volumes with young men getting wasted made for a special vibe. The Sony boombox was not good fidelity wise but perfect for the Can. Because the little frontman Damo sounded like he was trapped in it, screaming to be let out.

The boombox had a repeat function and we used it every night, nodding off to those distressing sounds, awakening to them too, then Dave the next day remarking what song he’d awakened to, how weird that was, and repeating this daily pattern for weeks, possibly the whole summer. How hot and sandy the shack got, but how quickly we could air it out by propping open the front door and opening the back windows, the cross breeze between the ocean and the bay.

One night Dave and I drove a couple hours looking for a place we could camp but got there and couldn’t get in because there was a locked gate and so we had to turn around and drive back. Dave’s face reflecting in the glow of the ice blue digital dashboard with the Can playing, urging me to turn the headlights off so we could just enjoy the moonlight, use our night vision, admire the look of the distant waves and how they sparkled, basting ourselves in the Can.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, music

Tags: can, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir