#AB30: A Note From The Underground—By PJ

#AB30: A Note From The Underground

PJ DeGenaro

Haven’t seen you in quite a while. But I couldn’t mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Achtung Baby without thinking about you. 

When we were at school together in the 80s, you had an old Buick Regal you’d inherited from your grandma. Between classes, we’d sit in the parking lot in our winter coats and boots, the heater running, enveloped in the stink of hairspray and exhaust. Your keys dangled from the ignition. The keychain ornament was a big shiny heart that caught the light, with your name etched across it in loopy script. 

Living in suburban America—as we did then and still do—we learned at an early age that many of our significant memories would involve cars. And you always did like to drive, didn’t you? 

I remember listening to the strings fading out at the end of “The Unforgettable Fire,” while rain beaded the windshield.

You said, “Why didn’t you tell me U2 were the gods of music?”

I said, “I tried to for an entire year. Meanwhile you convinced me to see The Alarm three times. I hope you understand the irony of this situation.” (I probably didn’t say it quite like that.)

We bonded over music. We were in a golden age. We had U2, The Cure, New Order, The Smiths, Siouxsie, Depeche Mode. And yes, The Alarm. Little “modern rock” clubs popped up here and there, displacing the roller discos and old-man bars. We drew black lines around our eyes, empurpled our lips, and went dancing.

But the years passed, and things got more complex. As they do. A lot of shuffling around. Jobs, moving out of parents’ homes, awful boyfriends that we held onto longer than was strictly necessary. A little bit of competition. And sometimes, a faint whiff of apprehension. 

I had been warned: You had a history of choosing one friend to lure into a private world, shutting everyone else out. Then, with malice aforethought, you would knife that friend in the back. 

I defended you, of course. I mean, girls were always “getting in fights,” giving each other the cold shoulder, and then making up. Sure, there were men who kept their girlfriends isolated from other people, but you weren’t a man. You were my best friend. Everyone was jealous. You were beautiful—men didn’t see anyone else when you walked in the room. I could deal with that—of course I could. Besides, you were hilarious. Nobody ever made me laugh the way you did. We would just look at each other and start laughing. We could laugh for hours at absolutely nothing. We could laugh until we fell over, breathless and pummeled in the guts. 

Meanwhile, the 80s were fading out—long black coats and hairspray giving way to natural fibers and the United Colors of Benetton. Neither of us had liked Rattle and Hum very much. Born in the mid-60’s, we’d been raised on blues-based “classic” rock. Now we were done with that, and we didn’t want to hear U2 play it. We’d fallen in love with U2 because, despite all the influences they claimed, they sounded only like themselves. 

I missed the sweeping wintry seascapes and teenage bedroom tantrums of their earlier records. I didn’t write them off; I just didn’t feel their presence the way I once had. I let my fan club membership lapse. You never even had one. There was no internet back then, and we had no idea what U2 were up to at all.

Achtung Baby, then, landed on us like a meteor—a fully-grown male meteor, hot from outer space, wrapped in patent leather, smelling of musk and tasting of devil’s food cake.

This is just the album I’m talking about, not the subsequent tour. Listening to the album was its own experience. Listening to the album with you is what I remember best.

By this point, we each had tolerable jobs and shitty basement apartments. Your apartment was less shitty, so we hung out there a lot. We had dumped the awful boyfriends, and we agreed that our deepest bond was with each other. And since we couldn’t have Bono, and because no man in our orbit could even be considered a reasonable facsimile of Bono, that had to be okay.

***

On Long Island, you can pick any major east/west route and drive for hours, in and out of towns with no obvious lines of demarcation. I see us hurtling through the night as if through a tunnel, past rows of darkened buildings, patches of trees, a lighted window in a house here and there. Then we’d burst out of the darkness into a neon Gehenna of diners and furniture outlets, The Gap and the A&P.

You now drove a sporty, pre-owned Honda Prelude. Five-speed. You had perfect eyesight. You had a good stereo with a cassette player. 

What we carried with us into that tunnel, at the tail-end of 1991, was Achtung Baby. We listened to it obsessively, flipping the cassette over and over.

There was no internet, but there were magazines. We knew a bit more now. We knew U2 had begun making this record in Berlin—in turmoil, in a darkness more profound than our own. Edge had been listening to Nine Inch Nails. Perfect, because so had I.

And they looked…well. Even at my most disenchanted with U2, I thought Bono was a moveable feast. The hair, the fuckin’ shoulders, and the way his body tapered down to his little pointy boots, like a little goat-footed faun. Now? He was a sleazy banquet, all hard and shiny. It almost hurt to look at him. Edge always made me think of that one refined, willowy girl in school—the one with the perfect features, who could wear anything and get away with it. He was still exactly that, even in his rings and bedazzled pants. They were beautiful, all four of them. And suddenly, after all these years, kind of intimidating.

I remember sitting on the rug in your apartment, watching MTV, picking at a box of Dunkin Munchkins. (You and I hardly drank or smoked. We ate.) We suffered through Guns N’ Roses, MC Hammer, and episodes of Beavis and Butthead, waiting for a glimpse of the “Mysterious Ways” video.

You said, “Wait till you see Bono lying on his back, humping the air… Look! Now! Now!”

“Oh shit, I almost missed it!”

“They should have made that scene a little bit longer.”

“They should have made that scene the whole fuckin’ video.” 

But of course, this is about the music. That groove, that bassline, that bump-and-grind. Maybe if we’d listened a little more closely to Rattle and Hum we’d have heard it coming. I’m thinking of “God Part 2.” But no, we were taken completely by surprise, and we loved it. 

***

Still, I couldn’t understand what album the critics were listening to when they said U2 had “lightened up.” With the exception of one or two songs, this was surely the heaviest they had ever been. Heavy as heartache. Heavy as sex with someone you can’t stay away from, who will pretend they barely know you the next day. Heavy as shuttling back and forth in a tunnel, in your little car, the night pressing down on you, knowing that you’re not really getting anywhere. Heavy as night, as betrayal, as the end of the world.

After a few dozen listens, when the shock wore off, we were able to talk rationally about Achtung Baby. 

We noted that the song “One,” disguised as a ballad, actually builds and builds—but quietly—like an argument between two people who don’t want to wake the kids up. That “So Cruel” is nothing less than a piece of bitter erotica in which someone is trying really hard to get the person they’re so angry at to just come, already. That the solo from “The Fly” sounds like a conflagration, creeping up the walls and sending showers of sparks in every direction. That “Zoo Station” prepares you for a party that never, ever happens.

“But the last three songs,” you said, every time. “The last three songs.” Murmured like an incantation, like you were willing them to arrive.

I wanna get it wrong. Can’t always be strong. And love, it won’t be long.

I remember you pulling into an empty parking lot so we could get through “Ultraviolet,” “Acrobat” and “Love Is Blindness” in absolute, reverent silence. This might be fiction—a memory I’ve dredged up to lend more weight to that brief, strange time. If it’s true, anyone who saw us there might have assumed we were lovers, though we sat well apart from each other with the gears between us.

When the others were finally proven right—when you’d found the chink in my armor and used it to devastating effect, leaving me well and truly on my own—I kept listening to Achtung Baby anyway. None of this was U2’s fault, after all. In fact, I thought I understood the album now better than I ever had. I would never again sing a friend is someone who lets you help without clenching my teeth, without conjuring the smell and feel of the cheap orange carpet on my apartment floor. 

Women can disappear, falling easily into marriages and name changes. I’ll admit to trying to google you when that became a possibility. I understand that you once asked someone we both knew if I’d be open to becoming Facebook friends. I said no, unequivocally. Then I wondered if I was being petty. 

I googled you again recently and learned that you were still looking out mainly for yourself, always working some kind of angle, with what seemed like mounting desperation. You still seemed to believe that being the prettiest girl in the room would get you whatever you wanted. You’d had kids somewhere along the line. The idea of being your daughter made me shudder.

And yet, when I saw U2 on the Innocence+Experience tour—my first time seeing them in years, my first time ever in general admission, right under that amazing screen—when they played “Until The End of the World,” and the final cataclysm rushed down over my head, bringing waves of regret, waves of joy, the boots, the cars, and all of Cedarwood Road with it, all I could think was, “My God, wait till I tell you about this!”