The Day Before You Came

Of all people, it was Max Ten who found the humor in Morrissey; he'd play Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones, that raspy, sandpaper croon, and say, "Beautiful." As the rest of us immersed ourselves in a mire of 80s dirges, it's ironic that it was Tennial, the intellectual in our group, who burst into the apartment with Altered Images' "Happy Birthday," all giddy - "This girl is so cute!" Another day he comes up and says "You've got to hear this." It was Blancmange's cover of the Abba offering, "The Day Before You Came." We listened to it five times in a row. "That is so f-ing deep." "Deep?" I asked. "I know it's over." "Death is everywhere." "Remember the time when the trees fell down?" That was deep, but "I must have opened my front door at eight o'clock or so,/ And stopped along the way to buy some Chinese food to go./ I'm sure I had my dinner watching something on TV,/ There's not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn't see."

Max Ten saw past our agoraphobic wallowing, recognized the melancholy poseur in each of us, and just started to laugh ("Stop, me, oh oh oh, stop me; stop me if you think you've heard this one before.") "So fucking funny," he'd say. On the sk8tr girl incident: "Jesus, Jay, deal." 

"I know it's over."

"Don't quote Morrissey to me."

"I'm not."

"La la la. 'Last night I dreamed that somebody loved me.'"

"So?"

"She wasn't that hot."

"Yeah, she was."

"Yeah. Sorry," he said, and then facetiously, "There, there."