This week, Dan and John talk about
- Recording via Cleanfeed instead of Skype (Podcasting)
- Namedropping celebrities, being friends with celebrities vs ”regular” friends (Friends)
- John’s friend Peter (Friends)
- Follow-up: When did John go to bed? John Roderick Wiki (Sleep)
- John calling the ambulance on someone who was OD:ing, giving them Narcan (Stories)
- People OD:ing in restaurant bathrooms on Capitol Hill, everything sucks now, high real estate prices (Stories)
- John working at a pizza parlor, taking a girl to his cousin’s wedding but then talking to the wrong guy about it (Stories)
The show title refers to someone who almost OD:ed waking up after a shot of Narcan and saying to the medic that it is cool, but it was not at all cool.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
Recording via Cleanfeed instead of Skype (RW247)
Dan usually calls John on Skype, but now they are recording a different way and Dan doesn’t get the normal ringing sound and all the stuff that he is used to. John is very excited by their new way of recording because he loves new technology. They probably shouldn't mention the tool because they want them to buy an ad on the show, but it is Cleanfeed and they probably don't have any money. John is excited because he wants their feed to be clean. Adam Curry introduced Dan to Cleanfeed, it is what they have been using for a while, and it is really nice that Dan sends John a link, he gets the link, John clicks it, and then they are just recording. You don't need software, you don't need anything, you don't need Skype, and then Dan gets John’s locally recorded audio file without him having to later upload it. It is much better!
Namedropping celebrities, being friends with celebrities vs ”regular” friends (RW247)
John didn’t know Dan was friends with Adam Curry, the guy who invented podcasting. Dan would consider him a friend more than an acquaintance, he could text him and he would text him right back, which is a friendship in 2022 during COVID! Half of John’s friendships used to be that! He is Dan’s neighbor in Austin. He hosted Headbanger's Ball for a while, he is not kidding around, he was in that David Bowie video, he is a big deal and he is a great guy.
Over the years John has done quite a bit of name dropping and it is not gross when he does it because he doesn't do it wantingly, but because of some quirk of modern celebrity he has been lucky enough to wander the world and meet all these interesting people and have extended relationships with them where you would think that people of a certain level of celebrity only hang out with themselves, other celebs at their level, and higher, there always seems to be a ceiling, but there is no ceiling and you just end up where you end up. If John was at Studio 54 and Robert De Niro sat next to him they would have plenty to talk about. It has less to do with who you are and more to do with: ”Did you finagle an invitation to the thing where you end up sitting next to somebody?”, but Dan never name-drops and the fact that he and Adam Curry bang around is wonderful!
Most of John’s celebrity friends are gone from his life now, so it is just back to his normal friends and it has been really nice connecting with his actual normal, regular friends. Over the last 15 years he spent a lot more emotionally and physical energy with people that he knew from entertainment, that involved him flying around, and also relationships where you do a lot of texting and retweeting. These relationships were not based around the fact that they met in some cafe and used to sit around that cafe and talk about comic books.
Now that John was forced this last year, especially during the pandemic, to say: ”If I were going to include somebody in my bubble, who would they be? If I were going to reach out to somebody I hadn't talked to in a long time, who would they be?” John needs human beings in his life, he can't just now be without humans, and he reached out to some friends he had known for 30 years and they were all so welcoming as though no time had passed and he was able to reconnect with people and start going for long walks with friends. As the COVID went in and out there were all those times where it seemed like: ”Maybe this is it! It is over!” and they would meet for food and a week later they would realize: ”Oh no! We can't do that anymore!”
It has been really good for John to be reminded that he has a full complement of people in his life, old friends, good friends, and it has been part of his reestablishment of himself as an actual human and not just someone who is trying to get in on somebody else's invitation to a party where Ted Danson is. He wasn't like a whore, but he was always just doing what he was doing and of course if he could get into a party where Ted Danson is he is good to do it. It is not like he was standing outside, trying to get past the velvet rope, but it did feel like a career, and it felt like a life, a thing that you do, and it was in a weird way.
But it is fun to sit around with people you have known forever that have been there all along. It is not like he never saw these people, but now he feels much more that this is his actual world. It sounds like Adam Curry is in Dan’s actual world and they do have reason to talk about podcasting and things like that, and Dan imagines it would be the same as if John were to talk with a fellow musician/performer type person. Dan could imagine John and Lenny Kravitz hanging out, they both write songs, they both sing, they both play guitar, and they both are a front man. Dan sees no other difference between them.
John was a big fan of his first couple of records, but somewhere along the way it is more styled than substance, there were a few wardrobe malfunctions. They would have to have something else to talk about besides their showbiz careers. He owns the Abbey Road recording desk and it would be hard for John to walk around his house and not want to touch everything. If Dan is at Adam Curry's house he is not like: "Whoa, is that the original microphone?” He is probably not sitting on top of a pile of guitars, each one worth more than John’s house.
You could tell them apart just because he would have really big sunglasses and John would would have a beard and he probably wouldn't, and he could do the splits. There are a lot of differences! Dan was watching the video for Jump where David Lee Roth does the splits and also the giant kicking leap where his leg is pointed right at the moon. John thinks he can barely walk now. It is what killed Prince. He got on those painkillers after all those years, and he weighs a Buck O’ Five, he was tiny! All those high-heeled boots and all that jumping around? His knees and his hips were all shot and he kept doing it, he couldn't stop doing it, it is the Prince show, and he got on painkillers because it just hurt so badly. And there is no way to get on painkillers and stay on them and not be a junkie in the end.
Before he actually overdosed he had at least once used Narcan, which jump-starts your heart. John has seen it in action. It is heavy duty, but they don’t slam a huge needle into the guy's heart, John can’t remember, it was a long time ago.
John’s friend Peter (RW247)
A friend of John’s that he recently reconnected with and spent some in-person time with is We Can All Agree On Cheese Scott, they have known each other since 1991, they have always had a relationship where they mercilessly teased each other, although Scott is much more deadpan than John. One time in probably 1996 they were both getting dropped off in the back parking lot of the old New City Theater, which then became the (Richard) Hugo House. John’s band’s practice space was in one of two garages behind the New City Theater (see RL132, RW207), which was John Kazanjian's Theater.
It used to be a giant funeral home and he bought it right across the street from Cal Anderson Park at a time when you could buy an old funeral home in the center of Capitol Hill for $40.000. Before it was a funeral home maybe it had been a mansion, or maybe it was one of those funeral homes that was built to look like a mansion. It had a huge theater that had been the place where they would do funerals, it had all these rooms, and down in the basement there was a whole embalming place, an elevator that could hold a coffin.
Behind the New City Theater were two stand-alone garages, both big enough for hearses, that had just been used for storage. In the mid-1990s Peter Carrs, the first bass player in The Long Winters who had been working at the New City Theater as a member of the company, asked if he could turn one of those garages into a practice space and because John Kazanjian was a supporter of the arts in every way and it was a time when on Capitol Hill you could get a studio apartment for $300 and there was no premium on space, there were still abandoned warehouses everywhere, real estate was not a factor, he said: ”Yeah, sure! If you want to fix it up, you can! I will charge you a little bit of rent!”
John helped Peter a lot with that project. They cut a door in the side, took the garage door off its hinges and put it back as a wall, put electricity in it, they kind of insulated it, and turned it into a practice space. Then Peter started living there because Peter was Mud Duck and Dirty Bird. ”Why would I get an apartment? I can live in this uninsulated garage in the back of the theater in the old funeral home and I can go in and use the bathroom in the theater!”
Because John had help him he was using it as his band practice space, too, but then Peter started living there, sleeping on the futon, and he got all testy because John would come in with his band because they finally had their own practice space and as long as Peter's band wasn't practicing it felt like John’s band should be able to practice, but all of a sudden Peter was sleeping there: ”Fuck, Peter!” - ”What do you mean? This is my place. I fixed it up!” - ”We are paying rent on it, too!” and then John started paying all the rent on it, but Peter was still testy, and he is a testy little brat.
Eventually John didn’t want to share this with Peter or have anything to do with him. He kept making the mistake over the course of the next 15 years that he kept having things to do with Peter, including hiring him to work on his mom's house, he asked him to be in The Long Winters, and the final straw was that John asked him to help him work on his new house just two years ago (see RW177, RW191) and he screwed John over every time!
Being frustrated by Peter, John went to John Kazanjin and asked about the other garage on the opposite side of the parking lot, 200ft (60 m) from the other garage, and he got permission to also turn it into a practice space. They ruined it as a garage forever, took the garage door off and put a cinder block wall with a window and a door, built an inner wall to insulate it from sound, and turned it into their band practice space.
When John left on his walking across Europe he handed it off to the next band and it was a band practice space all the way until the Richard Hugo house tore everything down and built a whole new arts complex there a few years ago. Now real estate on Capitol Hill is more expensive than Manhattan, it is so crazy to think that only 20 years ago John was still paying $350 a month for that place. Now $350 a month won't get you a bottle of water up there!
Follow-up: When did John go to bed? John Roderick Wiki (RW247)
(this is in reply to episode 246 when John woke up by construction workers at 4am and Dan claimed he remembered John going to bed at 2am while John claimed he would always go to bed at 4am)
The Wikipedia guy (Jochen) should tell them what episode (it is RW191). Dan wants to give him an assignment every episode. John doesn’t think he likes that because he is a) German, and b) living in Scandinavia, which only emphasizes his Germaneness and he doesn’t want any instructions. Dan thinks John could be wrong because he wrote Dan on Twitter. How do you pronounce his first name? J-O-C-H-E-N is how it is spelled. It is pronounced Yo-Ken, and he is getting a lot of shout outs in all of these shows lately. Here is what he says:
Hi Dan,
I just wanted to do my duty and answer your question on this week’s Road Work about whether or not John had said he went to bed at 2am or at 4am. My notes for episode 236 back in October 2021 read as following:
”John is trying to think of how he is going to ever go into retirement. He hasn’t any way to do it. He turned 53 a couple of weeks ago and if that is halfway through his life he will live to be 106 and he has some doubts about that. He is not going to get to 106 if he is sleeping 4 hours a night. He slept 8 hours last night because of three things: He was so exhausted from sleeping only 4.5 hours of sleep the prior three nights that he was able to go to sleep at 2am instead of 4am, and then he slept in three chunks from 2-8am, he woke up, looked at the clock and said: ”I don’t have to get up yet!”, he rolled back over and slept till 10am, rolled back over, reset the alarm for 10:50am, and their show starts at 11am.”
My interpretation is that HE DID go to bed at 2am like you remembered, but it was an exception from his usual 4am, so both of you are right? — Jochen
Dan’s interpretation is that Jochen does want to get questions, and that experts like him would appreciate the recognition of their expertise. Apparently it is trivial for him to call up data and Dan would think he would want to exercise that ability.
John’s experience is that Jochen has embarked upon the project of listening to these shows for very personal reasons and although he makes his knowledge available to everyone generously because it is a practical application of his project, the actual project itself and his pursuit of it is something that he is doing for his own reasons, not exclusively for public benefit, but for reasons of his own. Although he accepts his responsibility, a lot of people now contact him and expect him to have ready answers, and he is happy to do it, but at the same time he is pursuing his own course in life. John definitely has talked to him and said: ”Hey, will you tell me this? Will you tell me that?”
Captain Mariam has also an incredible recall and John has asked her many times: ”What was…? Did I ever…? Is there something?” and they usually are able to tell him, but at the same time he would give them a task or submit a request.
John calling the ambulance on someone who was OD:ing, giving them Narcan (RW247)
Some late night Scott and John were dropped off in the back parking lot. John’s practice space was right there, Scott's car was parked there, they had been at some event, and they were standing there in the parking lot, saying their goodbyes, and they heard from the stairwell behind the New City Theater down next to the casket elevator a sound of somebody making a moaning noise, which could only be one of a couple of things. If it was two people weird-humping down in that awful water-filled stairwell, they definitely wanted to see it (whole story see RW162)
This was John’s turf! Basically all through the 1990s Capitol Hill was his turf and when things would go some way he didn't approve of he was always up there being the Sheriff. There was an aid car ambulance that used to pull up in front of the News Stand where he worked and they would leave it running while they went in to get a coffee because ambulances and cops just leave their cars running, but the third time they pulled up out there and John got out, stopped them on the sidewalk, and said: ”Don't leave your ambulance running out in front of my store! It fills the store up with gas fumes!” And medics aren't used to being told anything, these guys are top of the food chain, they smirked, they stood there and looked at each other, and then one of them went back and turned the ambulance off. They were parked in the bus zone!
John was like that already about everything. If somebody was out there with a barking dog he would go out: ”Hey, don't let your dog bark on the corner of Broadway and John. It is not acceptable!” These days you could take a shit on the sidewalk out there and people would applaud! It would be symbolic of capitalist oppression or something. But at the time there were still standards, even in the Grunge years.
John and Scott tiptoed over to this very dark, very gross, concrete outdoor steps down to the embalming room, they peered over the edge, and there was a guy lying on the concrete steps and another guy pumping his heart, and the moaning was his breath as the other guy was trying to put air in his lungs. Of course you get involved and they went: ”Hey buddy!” and the guy looked up all scared: ”What is going on? Do you need a hand?” - ”Oh, no, it is cool!” and when he stopped giving the guy the compression he was kind of breathing, but barely, and you hear that phrase ”barely breathing”, but when you see someone who is barely breathing, it really is a thing. He is still alive and he is still trying, but he is not making it.
”Looks like your buddy is in trouble!” - ”Oh well, it is cool! Don't worry!” - ”Seriously, though? Your friend there seems like he is dying!” They went down the stairs because the other guy was a junkie who was scared and high and not exactly a threat. It was a weird, bad scene, but it is not scary, except in the sense that this guy is dying. The guy was like: ”Yeah, well, he might be in trouble!” - ”We got to call the ambulance!” - ”Oh, I don't know! Don't overreact!” - ”Seriously, he needs an ambulance!” and there was a phone booth right there on the corner and John went up and put a quarter in the phone and called 911, telling them that a guy was OD:ing in the stairwell behind the New City Theater.
Scott took over, taking care of the guy, pumping, he might have even given him mouth to mouth, and they hear the siren driving around, they can't find the place, they hear them over there, then over there, until finally they show up. As they hear the siren the other junkie dude said: ”Looks like you guys got this under control. Hope you don't mind if I split because I really don't want to interact with any cops, if that is cool!” - ”Yeah man, we get it! Via con dios!” and so he splits and John and Scott were in charge of this guy, and he would take a little raspy breath and then no breath for what seemed like a long time.
This ambulance pulls in, the guys get out, they come down the stairs, and one of the guys is pretty big, the guy that was dying was also kind of big, they all hefted him up, carrying him up to the parking lot, and the two aid car guys are like: ”Oh, this guy is really dying! We can't deal with this! We are just aid car guys!” When 911 hears ”Junkie on Capitol Hill” during this era, they are pulling dead junkies out of bathrooms all over the Hill all the time, they just sent an aid car. The aid car guys said this was way above their pay grade and they needed to call a medic, which made John mad because it he had said he was a junkie and he was dying and he was still alive. Why wouldn't you send the medic? They sent this exploratory aid car, either to give somebody a bandaid or transport the body!
The medics got there in three minutes, they are professional firefighters, they get out, joking with each other, totally cavalier, they look at the guy: ”Oh yeah, this guy is really fucked up!” They pick him up, throw him in the back of their ambulance, rip his shirt, just talking to each other, this does not bother them at all, and they whacked this guy with a shot, and there were two beats… 1001, 1002, and just like in the movie be sits up, breathing, eyes open, and the first thing he says is: ”It's cool, it's cool, it's cool!” and the medic is laughing: ”It is not cool, my friend!” They strapped him and intubated him and they said there is no guarantee that he was going to be okay. The shot woke him up, but that is not to say that he won't still die.
They shut the doors and off they went, then the other aid car was gone, everybody was gone, and all of a sudden, Scott and John were standing in this dark parking lot all by themselves, ”Well, anyway, see you later!”
Dan wonders if you can get Narcan, just to have it around in case, like people who are allergic have an EpiPen they just keep in their backpack or in their car. John guesses it is a prescription drug that you could conceivably get, although that would be a hilarious conversation with your doctor. It says that there is a nasal spray. You just get a prescription for it, you are carrying nasal spray around with you, like an inhaler, and when you OD you just spray it in your nose. It is so much easier to be a junkie now than it used to be! Dan continues to read from the Internet about Narcan, saying it reverses an opioid overdose by blocking the effects of opiates on the brain and by restoring breathing, but a person cannot get high from using it.
People OD:ing in restaurant bathrooms on Capitol Hill, everything sucks now, high real estate prices (RW247)
On Capitol Hill a lot of people used to OD in public bathrooms or in stairwells behind businesses (see RW162). John has two firsthand experiences of people dying in bathrooms of cafes where he was a regular, and that is why bathrooms started to have locks. In 1991 you could walk in anywhere and say: ”Can I use the bathroom?” or you just walk in and use the bathroom. The whole business of ”A key to the bathroom that is tied to a big brick that you have to ask behind the counter” came about as a result of people using bathrooms to shoot up and then you were in there for an hour and people were out there pounding on the door, and you finally have to kick the door down and you find somebody in there who OD:ed.
John remembers the first day he walked into the Espresso Roma and went back to the bathroom and the girl behind the counter told him that there was a key now. Those were early days when the stakes were really low about how things sucked now. These days everybody says it all the time: ”Everything sucks now!” and John doesn’t remember saying that except maybe the first time when he had to get a key for the bathroom: ”That is the end of the good old days!”, but little did he know!
It would have been very hard to predict in 1994, looking around Seattle's Capitol Hill, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and everywhere, that real estate that was not Beachfront Santa Barbara, but just regular dumpy little bungalows and warehouses, would be ridiculously expensive to the point that nobody could afford it. There are two bedroom, 1400 square foot bungalows (130 sqm) on Capitol Hill, there is nothing special about them, they are 10ft from their neighbors on either side, and they are $1 million! These were bungalows that were just shit box Punk Rock squats and every third one of them had some band practicing in the basement, people were splitting the rent up in ways where you could have a room for $150.
It is true everywhere! John remembers the first time he saw a house in Los Angeles that was $250,000. This wasn’t some mansion up in Laurel Canyon, this was just some box on the flats. Of course you look back at Bitcoin and go: ”I could have bought five houses for $40.000 each!”, but you can't do that or you spend your whole life regretting everything you have ever done. You can't live like that!
If you meet someone who claims they don't really have any regrets, either they haven't done a goddamn thing in their life, or they are completely unaware of all the mistakes that they have made, or they don't feel regret because they are a sociopath or something. Everyone has regrets! You can't sit there and: ”Well, if I had done this!” We would all be millionaires if we had done something different. John’s dad could have killed Hitler! He could have, 18 years old, flown to Germany, went to a parade, somehow managed to make his way to the front.
John working at a pizza parlor, taking a girl to his cousin’s wedding but then talking to the wrong guy about it (RW247)
Last night John was laying in bed and he started to have bad thoughts creep in.
In 1993 John was working at a pizza parlor where everybody was the same age as he was, 21 to 24, they were all Punk Rock scroungers and drug addicts in the way that was very normal (see RL264). Everybody was a floater: You would work the pizza serving station and then you would work the cash register and one day a week everybody had to do the dishes. The pizza tossers were a grade above. Every shift there would be two pizza tossers and they got paid more and they had seniority and they didn't have to do the dishes once a week. One of the pizza tossers was a girl who was a drummer in a Punk band and she had short black hair and was small and had grown up as white trash in a small Washington rural town.
John had been working there a while, he had been oblivious to his coworkers, he used to sit at the cash register and pour wine into a Coca Cola glass and sit and drink it while he worked. it was a ”whatever” job. The girl that was a pizza tosser and drummer in a Punk Rock band was also a lesbian and was in a long term committed relationship with a drummer of a famous band. There was one summer, they were working together at the pizza kiosk that we set up temporarily at a festival at the Seattle Center called Bite of Seattle. It was a hot day and they were just slinging pizza, it was a huge money maker because there were crowds of people, and had always noticed her, but this day he really saw her.
They were working and cracking jokes and working next to each other and they saw each other and at the end of the day she said: ”We should hang out!” - ”What about tomorrow?” and she laughed and: ”Okay, cool!” John didn’t have a car and the next day she picked him up and they went on a tour of all the dive bars of Seattle. Everyone that had a piano bar where some 70 year old gay guy would play any song you would name and all the patrons of the bar were 70 year old women who were singing show tunes and every once in a while some hipster would get up and say: ”Play Down by the River!” and he would know it and they would sing it. It was dive bar culture!
They we went to all of them! They went to the Twin T-Ps, which was a bar that looked like two tipis, except made out of concrete, all of these things are torn down now. At the end of the night they ended up in Volunteer Park in the dark, sitting on the grass next to each other by the kiddie pool, and they started kissing and making out in the park. This was the gay hook up park where all the bushes were full of people and you would walk around the park in the night and people would step out of the bushes with their faces in shadow and there was all this action going on in the park. It was legendary!
A Punk Rock guy came walking across the park and he said the girl's name: ”… is that you?” - ”Oh, hey man!” He knows her story, he knows she lives with and is in a long-term relationship with this woman and he is like: ”Okay, cool! See you around!” - ”Okay, bye!” They were sitting there, pretty awkward, and she said: ”We should go!” and she dropped John off and John said: ”Can we go out tomorrow?” - ”Yes!” The next day was John’s rich cousin's wedding from his rich side of the family. It was at a place called The Ruins, an abandoned warehouse that had been turned into a very fancy event space in a completely unlikely location. John told her: ”Dress nice!” and she picked him up in a knee length vintage thrift store dress and a little choker necklace with a turtle on it. She asked: ”Where are we going?” - ”To my cousin's wedding!”
They went to the wedding and she couldn't believe it. It was gaudy, there was a life-size elephant, not a live one, but the room was decorated as though it was the Maharaj's Palace. The next room was supposed to be Sherlock Holmes’ library, it was one of these places. There was a grand piano, candelabra, and she was just laughing because she had never been to a thing like this and no-one would know it was there unless you went there. John was at that stage of his life where he was totally mocking his rich relatives, like now, except then he was doing it in a very young Punk way, like: ”Look at these scumbags! These are my people!” and they were having a great time. Everybody liked her, they have no idea that they were laughing at them, or if they did they thought it was funny.
They went behind a curtain at some point and started making out again, and it was really intense. John was completely in love with her, he just went across a line to ”utterly in love with her”. He was young, dumb, and inexperienced, that once he was in love he lost all sense. Because of the intensity of these two days he could only conclude that she was in love with him and that they were together now, and not only were they together, but that this was the passionate relationship of their young lives. They were making out behind this curtain right by the bar, nobody could see them, but the bartender peaked back there, and is like: ”Oh my!” because they were serious.
This was the uncle who owns the winery (C. Calvert Knudsen), and there was so much wine, all his label, and John went to the bartender at one point and said: ”Just give me one of those bottles!” and they were drinking it and he asked for another one, and in the course of sitting behind this curtain and making out with this girl, they were both drinking a lot of wine and they both started to get woozy. At some point she went to the bathroom and she didn’t come back. After a while John went over next to the women's room and he heard crying.
John has no idea whether it was her or somebody else and she was still in there because she was comforting somebody. John didn't ask her. When she finally came out the mood had changed, they left the party, got in her car, they were super drunk, she drove back to John’s house and then she spent the night with him, but they were too drunk to do anything. In the morning John woke up to the sound of the front door closing and her having gotten up and left and he felt a cold disturbance in the force because that was not the move he was expecting her to make, he thought they were going to wake up in the morning and get pancakes and start talking about the rest of their lives.
Later that day John was in the U-district for some reason and he bumped into Holden Payne, the lead singer in a Punk Rock band and a guy he knew from Alaska. He was in the social circle of the Punk Rock bands that this girl was part of and he was like: ”Hey John Roderick, what is going on, man?” - ”Hey Holden! Just kicking it!” They stopped to talk: ”Yeah man, what is the story?” - ”I have just been hanging out with this girl, actually!” John was thinking this was all going to come out eventually, or maybe he was bragging, and Holden goes: ”What?” - ”Oh, shit! Yeah, well, whatever!” and he bounced off of the topic.
The next day John was at work and she came in and said: ”Can I talk to you for a second?” and they went to sit at a table in the pizza restaurant, which is already very unusual: ”Did you say something to Holden Payne?” - ”Oh, man, yeah, by accident!” - ”He is the worst gossip and he told his girlfriend and his girlfriend told this that and the other and it got back to my girlfriend who just got back from tour last night, which is why I left in the morning because she was getting back from tour and now it is a massive scandal!” - ”Oh, no!” and at that point their relationship was over.
John was gone, he was cooked, he was in love with her and couldn't believe that their relationship was over. It was impossible! He had not had a relationship yet. He had a High School girlfriend, he had some girls in college that were his girlfriend / trouble friend, including one girl who went to Whitworth College whose actual nickname was Trouble. She said her grandmother had started calling her Trouble when she was three years old and that is what everybody called her. John was dating a girl named Trouble, that was very appropriate to this time and place.
This girl from the pizza parlor was going to be his first ever real Downtown girlfriend and she was a drummer, and she was so beautiful, and she didn't care about anything, and neither did he, and she was funny, and then it was over. John couldn't tell whether it was over because he had talked to Holden Payne, or whether it was over because it was always just a weekend for her, and she was going back to her girlfriend or what. He was just too unsophisticated, he did not play it cool, he drank too much, he didn't do any of the things correctly.
But they worked together and he couldn't get her out of his head and he couldn't believe that she didn't want to find a path for them and he was drunk and he got drunk over this 1000 times and eventually she asked the manager to switch her shifts around so she wasn't working when he was working, it was awful and it never left him. After he got sober, for a decade!
She ended up marrying a guy and they had a successful record label, she was in a band that if not popular was very influential. She is still around although John has only run into her once or twice in the 25 years since then, but he never forgot it and he never forgave himself and it just broke his heart because he had this tantalizing moment where he thought everything was going to change for him, he was going to stop being a lonely-heart loser, he was going to have the things that you have: a girlfriend that you are really into, and she is doing cool things and then you can do cool things and you guys are a thing. Holden Payne had a freaking girlfriend!