A Long, Long Time Ago

On high school cross-country, adolescent laughter, "American Pie," listening to Dr. Dre in the locker room, and finding joy when you need it most

During the miserable early weeks of 9th grade, I got recruited to run cross country. This happened in P.E., after I ran a mile at a decent (but not amazing) pace and my P.E. teacher—Coach Crowley, a no-nonsense young Irishman who was also the varsity cross-country coach and who remains one of the most rock-solid human beings you could ever meet—pulled me aside after the run and told me that I was a strong runner and should join the team.

I’ve always been highly susceptible to compliments, but especially at this insecure moment in my life, when I had very few friends, when those friends I did have were off playing football, when basketball season was still a few long months away, and when I was struggling with all the rules and requirements of this new Jesuit school life. Plus, Crowley had used the word “strong,” an adjective that no one had ever previously associated with me in any context.¹ I had no plans to run cross country, no interest in running cross country, but I found myself nodding and showing up to practice the next afternoon.

By the end of that first practice, a short run by distance-running standards, two and a half miles through the streets around the school, I was huffing and puffing and pretending not to be exhausted, but I had five new friends. Or at least five new people I could talk to. A cross-country practice, it turned out, was basically a long, free-flowing group conversation conducted under oxygen-deprived circumstances. And the skinny, affable guys who made up the freshman team—Bravo, Kipp, Alvaro, Colemon, Willett²—made that conversation easy. Of all these dudes, I’d only known Bravo, who’d gone to the same elementary and middle school as me, though we’d never been close. Everybody else was more or less a stranger, but they treated me like I’d been running with them for weeks.

And soon enough I had. Each afternoon, unless it was a dreaded interval day on the track, we ran the exhaust-filled streets of Chinatown and beyond. Harwin, Westpark, Town Park, Richmond, Ranchester, Briar Forest. And Gessner, always Gessner. Unaccompanied jogging minors, talking and joking around, giving each other crap, only interrupted by the occasional stranger—usually a man, but not always—rolling down their window to yell “Run, Forrest, Run!” in a mock-southern accent. (People thought this was funny in the mid-90s.) Even with the heckling from passing cars, it was always easy being around these new teammates of mine. High school was suddenly more tolerable, and I didn’t even realize why. 

So the season started and I ran in the meets, where I did fine but didn’t distinguish myself, except for the one in the Woodlands where someone stepped on my heel during the opening sprint and I lost my shoe and ran the rest of that rocky and stumpy course with only a single shoe, which to this day remains my most heroic moment as a runner and also as a human being. Beyond that, I don’t remember anything from any of the actual races, other than always being extremely nervous before the starting gun and always being extremely tired when it was all over.

But I remember being with my teammates, every weekday afternoon and every Saturday morning. I remember us struggling up the hills near Memorial Park. I remember us running Brays Bayou, pretty far from school, and stopping at the Lee LeClear Tennis Center on South Gessner for water. I remember us admiring the freshman girls from the St. Agnes team whenever we crossed paths at meets, though most of us—myself very much included—never actually talked to any of them. I remember us doing fartleks, a word I’d never heard before, which doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

But most of all, I remember this one van ride where we laughed so much and listened to Don McLean’s “American Pie.” And that’s what I want to tell you about.

***

Towards the end of the season, we had a meet in Dallas, the first overnight sports-related trip I’d ever taken. Imagine it: a bunch of teenage boys packed into a van, high on candy and camaraderie, giddy to be going somewhere.³ At some point, maybe a hundred miles in, we started laughing. Like, really laughing. Somebody made a joke and then somebody else made a follow-up joke and then pretty much every kid in that van was laughing and couldn’t stop. 

The early 20th century English essayist Max Beerbohm⁴ once wrote an essay on the subject of laughter where he makes this observation: “There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best.” You know what Max is talking about: the kind of laughter that overtakes you, where you lose control of yourself and don’t even remember why you’re laughing anymore. Suddenly everything is funny. You don’t get too many of those moments in your life, especially as you get older, but what a strange, wonderful gift when it does happen. And the peak age for that kind of laughter might be 9th grade. 

It must be said, however, that witnessing someone else in this laughter-prone state, when you’re not in this state yourself, is usually pretty annoying. And so we must have been an irritating presence when we stopped at a barbecue place off I-45 somewhere near Centerville for dinner that evening, a pack of private-school laughing hyenas making our boisterous entrance as the other patrons looked up from their brisket and ribs. I’m certain my adult self would find my teenage self highly obnoxious if I could witness it now.

I only remember one joke. There were Disney-style cartoon cowboys and farm animals painted along the wall near the buffet, and I remember one of us—okay, it was me—saying that they didn’t have TV around here, so the local kids just came to this restaurant to stare at this wall. That’s what they called watching cartoons.

In my laughter-drunk state, this seemed like maybe the funniest joke I’d ever made in my life. My teammates seemed to think so, too. I have mixed feelings now. There’s definitely an element of city-boys-making-fun-of-the-locals going on. That doesn’t sit well with my grown-up self. But it’s not a cruel joke, just a silly one. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. I can’t imagine anyone at that restaurant actually being offended or hurt by it, if they even heard it. More likely, it would’ve just been another part of our generally annoying hyperactive adolescent presence.

And even if there’s something in the joke that I can’t be proud of, I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t change anything about that moment even if I could. How thrilling it felt to be at a restaurant on the road, with our coach sitting at another table, without my parents, without anyone’s parents, telling jokes and laughing hysterically with a bunch of guys my age! We laughed so hard my stomach hurt. We laughed so hard I struggled to breathe, and my soul seemed to briefly float above my body. That dinner was easily the most fun I’d had since I’d started high school. My lonely freshman self from the start of the semester wouldn’t have believed it.

***

Back in the van, we drove on in the dark. Maybe the food tired us out or maybe our sugar high had finally worn off, but we all stopped laughing so much, stopped even talking so much, quietly drove, looking out the windows. Some people slept.

Sitting in the row behind me, Bravo had a Discman. I was still in a stage where I didn’t care all that much about music, so I hadn’t brought anything. But, for whatever reason, I started listening with him.

As far as I remember, he brought only a single CD: Classics by Don McLean. Not a typical album for a high school freshman to be listening to in October 1995, but Bravo was always a little out of time. He was the fastest guy on our team by far, but he also somehow seemed to come from a different generation than the rest of us.⁵ He was the oldest kid in a small house full of half-siblings, which might’ve demanded a kind of maturity—and led to a kind of ambition—that most of us didn’t have yet.

But he loved to joke around, too. He’d been part of our whole group laughing it up the whole trip. He was enjoying this trip like we all were. And now he decided to keep the enjoyment going in a more serious way, by listening to Don McLean.

I remember looking at the CD cover, which features a bronze bust of Don McLean’s head. The unintentional humor of the title—Classics—wasn’t apparent to me back then: I didn’t yet realize that our guy Don is very much known for writing one classic, not a bunch of them. To be fair, though, the album does include two versions of “American Pie,” McLean’s undisputed classic.⁶ The original version opens the album and the “new version”—a vastly inferior re-recording—closes it.

Bravo and I were smart enough to stick with the original, track one. I must’ve heard it before, but it felt like the first time. I knew nothing about the tragic tale of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper—though I would’ve known their songs from the oldies station—but maybe Bravo filled me in as we listened. In my memory, we listened to the song together, but sharing Discman headphones isn’t physically possible, especially when you’re sitting in separate rows of a van. So we must’ve taken turns listening, though that’s not how it feels in my memory.

But here’s what I know happened: The two of us listened to “American Pie” over and over as the van drove towards Dallas. We listened to “American Pie” more times in a row than I’d ever listened to any song in my entire life up to that point, and possibly more times in a row than I’ve ever listened to any song since.

And we’re talking about a famously lengthy song: eight minutes and thirty-five seconds. Now, for you, sophisticated reader, listening to “American Pie” on repeat for more than an hour on a trip to Dallas might sound like an adequate form of torture. But for us it was the purest joy. I’m not joking. Earlier, we were high on candy and then we were high on laughter and now we were high on the greatest hit of Don McLean. Each time we finished listening to “American Pie,” we immediately hungered to listen to “American Pie” again.

What was it that delighted us so much about that song on that drive? It’s hard to pin it all down. But I have a general theory: It’s a sweet, sad, joyful song, melancholy and happy to be alive at the same time, and that’s how I felt in those early months of high school. McLean’s voice sounds sweet and sad right from those introductory lines (“A long, long time ago, I can still remember…”). It wasn’t hard to place myself in that song. A lonely teenage broncin’ buck. An outcast at the school dance. Singing dirges in the dark. There’s a nostalgic longing to the song that must’ve touched both of us, even if we couldn’t have explained it to each other or ourselves. McLean’s singing in 1971, wishing he was back in 1959. Maybe Bravo and I both wished we were back in another time, too.

***

Let me flash forward real quick. I remember walking into the cross-country locker room after an early morning practice—this was sophomore year—and the upperclassmen were playing “B*tches Ain’t Sh*t,” from The Chronic, at maximum volume. I knew about Snoop and Dr. Dre, of course, and I liked their songs on the radio, but I’d never heard this one before. I was sixteen by then, not so innocent, and the lyrics still made me flinch inside, though I tried not to show it. I’ve never forgotten the extremely bad vibes of that moment: a group of private-school guys at an all-boys school blasting one of the most misogynistic songs in popular music history. It was like walking right into the darkest recesses of the adolescent male psyche.

My point is this: I’m glad I had the goofy, sweet freshman teammates I did—even if I didn’t fully recognize the value of these traits at the time. I’m glad that the vibes in that van weren’t like the vibes in that locker room. And I’m glad that Bravo introduced me to Don McLean.

“American Pie” is a song about the loss of a certain kind of innocence—a cultural or generational loss of innocence—but it’s also just a very innocent song. Maybe it’s self-consciously innocent, but it’s still innocent. Kind of corny, maybe. A little heavy-handed with its symbolism, sure.⁷ And it would definitely sound lame next to the music that most young men found cool in the mid-90s. But it’s a pretty kind, tender song—and that matters in the long run. It also has an absolutely perfect, eternally singalongable chorus.⁸ All things considered, it’s not a bad song to get obsessed with when you’re just starting high school. A guy could do a lot worse.

There are so many moments from my adolescence when I look back on myself and just cringe. I cringe at my stupidity and my lack of empathy, my self-pity and my insecurity. I cringe at my shame and my shamelessness. But there are also moments when I look back on that adolescent kid and feel grateful for some of the half-conscious choices he made. That’s how I feel about joining the cross-country team. And that’s how I feel about all the old music I gravitated towards in high school, which all might’ve started that night in the van on the way to Dallas.

My obsession with Don McLean’s classic didn’t last much longer than that van ride. Soon enough, I’d discover other classics. Soon basketball would start, and I’d make more new friends. And in the decades after graduation, I’d lose touch with every single one of my cross-country buddies. But I’ve never forgotten how hard I laughed with all the guys on that trip, or how many times Bravo and I listened to that song. Sometimes you get lucky and find joy just when you need it most.

To answer the question the song asks: No, I don’t believe music can save your mortal soul. But I do believe some songs are better for your soul than others. And some people, too.

1. Now that I’ve written this, I’m starting to doubt whether he even used that exact word.

2. I may be forgetting some teammates. I’m also leaving out all the sophomore runners who’d later become my friends, too. And I’m leaving out the seniors, who I studied attentively whenever they were in our presence: Colemon’s older brother, the funniest person I’d ever been around. Cruz, the guy who locked me in a storage closet. Muriby, the best runner on the team, who had kind of a Pete Sampras vibe. And Dougherty, who was kind enough to ask me if I needed a date to homecoming, whereupon I lied and said that I was going with my cousin’s friend. 

3. We were driven by the freshman coach, an older Jesuit priest who did not have Coach Crowley’s rock-solid vibe. As far as I can remember, we ignored him the entire trip.

4. Best sentence from his Wikipedia: “He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist.” I’d love to be described that way.

5. I remember Bravo being into other stuff that no other teenage boys seemed to be into in those post-grunge days. He was a big fan of Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and he’s the first person who ever told me to check out Abbey Road. And later, at the beginning of college, he told me about Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. This was all before he left school to go work for the Press Secretary of a president I didn’t vote for. I visited him in DC, and we watched a Lakers game on a little TV down the hall from the Oval Office.

6. Maybe, if we’re being generous, we could also say his song “Vincent” is a second classic. It’s not a classic in my mind, but Tupac thought it was a classic. It’s pretty well known that it was his favorite song and that he was obsessed with it for many years. (His girlfriend even played it for him in the hospital when he was dying.) I’m willing to defer to Tupac’s opinion over my own here. The Classics CD, however, features a “re-recorded” version, which is, of course, inherently less classic.

7. I love that someone asked Bob Dylan about being referred to as “the jester” in that song. And I love Dylan’s extremely petty answer: “Yeah, Don McLean, ‘American Pie,’ what a song that is. A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’—some jester.”

8. I’ve been singing it as I write these paragraphs. Who doesn’t feel a little better inside when they sing that chorus? Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…