That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio. But some nights we were all right, driving on a dark desert highway, cool wind in our hair, except it was Florida in August and you could swim through the humidity, and the smell of boiling oranges oozed from the Tropicana plant.
That was when we rigged an 8-track under the Dart’s dash, and blasted our own music—screaming along with Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” as we thundered down I-75 from Gainesville to Tampa, to the theater where Patti had fallen off the stage the year before and broken her back, but this night she refused to stop singing and howling and flinging her marionette body around, even as the lights came up and the loudspeaker complained that we should all exit the building immediately.
That was when we drove back through shadowed cow fields, headlights dangerously dimming because an alternator belt had broken. We fired accusations: “What’s wrong with your stupid car?” “Why don’t you help me figure out what to do, instead of giving me shit?” We found an all-night truck stop that could help us out. The radio behind the greasy checkout counter moaned, don’t it make my brown eyes blue?
That was when we returned to the hovel in the student ghetto, to the bed with tangled sheets that never got washed. We put on “Aqualung,” drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run sounding wrong and dirty and hot. Then, one of us said it. It just slipped out. And the next album dropped with a flat clunk down the record changer, and the needle hissed as it hit the first grooves.
That was when 10cc sang, I’m not in love.
Kit Carlson
Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Short Fictions. She has recently published in EcoTheo Review, River Teeth, Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Wrong Turn Lit, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.
