NEWS OF THE WORLD

I mentioned to my friend Tom a past affinity for Spread Your Wings by Queen, and he was kind enough to send along a link to the video.

It took a minute for me to reconstruct what the song had meant to me.

Hearing it again, it sounded harsher and more abrasive than I remembered. I think in my memory it was meeker.

But really it was me who was meek...

I stood in Michael’s basement, an expansive room crowded by a pool table, a ping pong table, and scores of orange Hot Wheels’ tracks. I stood, an 11-year old among a party of 12-year olds, and cried. Michael had slapped me across the face for sport.

He was a year older, and I called him my friend. And he was once, but as time wore on, the relationship became defined by his abuse and my passivity.

I left this party in tears, and ran out into the teeth of a winter storm...

By the time we reached high school, I enacted some empty revenge by terrorizing Michael when he strayed into a bathroom to which me and some of my buddies had staked a claim. But this did not wash away the aluminum aftertaste of my former timidity.

And so in Spread Your Wings, part of the soundtrack to those days, I do not hear perseverance and victory, but rather the echoes of humiliation and defeat...