1. The morning after the company Christmas party, I staggered out into the cold. I wasn’t exactly hungover — I had adhered to the two three-drink rule — but I felt beat up and slightly nauseated in a way I associated with drinking too much.
2. I had reached an age, it seemed, when I stayed out past 10:00 pm exactly one night each year, and that night was the Christmas party. As in the previous year, the night unfolded in two stages: the official party (drinks and [self-conscious] dancing with colleagues) and the unofficial one (drinks and [self-conscious] karaoke with colleagues and ~ ten thousand other people, all crammed into a cavernous space found under an otherwise unassuming Irish bar somewhere in the maze of Wall Street). Walking in, I had the sense that everyone present had been trapped here for the entire year, and perhaps longer. It was similar to Подземље by Emir Kusturica, except in this case swapping in New York City capitalism for Soviet-bloc bureaucracy, and with revolutionaries replaced by financiers subsisting on big pitchers of beer, onion rings, and earsplitting karaoke of songs I had never listened to but recognized from my gym.
3. When everyone was getting ready to go from Party A to Party B, the deejay at the first venue slipped into an unexpected zone of music that I associated with 1) my classic-rock dentist, and 2) the kind of ‘midwest metal’ that defined my suburban Pittsburgh youth: I heard one song from each member of ‘the trinity’: Zep, Aerosmith, and Rush.
4. I heard the opening drum beat and synthesizer/laser effect from ‘Tom Sawyer’ and was back in eighth grade, afraid and intrigued. Kids who listened to Rush were ‘freaks’ who lurked in the smoking area and wore jean jackets. I was friendly with a few of them — one played hockey with me (goalie) and another was in my math class — but I never hung out with the freaks. They were too dangerous and I — like many young gays of the time — was very rule-bound in the attempt to compensate for not adhering to the biggest rule of all. But I also remembered going to the arcade where the freaks gathered to play video games and how Rush was pretty much a soundtrack of those nights. There was something transgressive about the arcades; video games were entertaining, mindless and possibly self-destructive in a way that no adult understood, not that any were around. The music was always punishingly loud, which made the dystopian repetition of feeding coins into the slots and playing the same games over and over that much more rebellious and satisfying, even for an interloper like me.
5. Later — in both my life and that of Western society — as indie rock became more popular, Rush was fun to hate; their songs defined the kind of decrepit, bloated arena-rock that inspired punk and hardcore and everything truly excellent that defined underground music through the 1980s and into the Smells Like Teen Spirit era, when a new kind of bloated, arena rock inspired a new kind of underground.
6. I wasn’t expecting to hear Rush on the Night of the Christmas Party, even during the transitional phase between parties. As I waited for a few of my colleagues to find their coats, I played some ‘freakin’ huge’ (air) drum fills. Was I being half-ironic or half-serious? It didn’t matter. I looked around and wondered if anyone else could relate. It didn’t seem like it. I felt very alone, but not in a bad way. As a Gen-Xer, I was used to being overwhelmed by boomers and millennials. But then, walking out, I passed three old-school (Gen X) goth/punkers at the bar dressed in black leather jackets and with Siouxsie Sioux levels of teased hair and black eyeliner. Where they had come from? It didn’t matter: Manhattan was still capable of surprises. One of them liked Rush; she was nodding along to the odd meter of the song in a way that conveyed serious familiarity with it. She caught my eye and we each smiled a little, the way you do when you see someone with whom you share something in common but have no intention of ever talking to.
7. ‘Freak,’ I whispered below the din of the laser synth, not sure whether I was describing her or me.
