Singles Going Steady: Metallica's "Enter Sandman"

The day the music died, for me, anyway, wasn't when Madonna released her craptacular cover of Don McLean's classic, "American Pie." It was about a year earlier in my dingy, too-big-for-one-person apartment on Oakland Avenue in Columbus. The Oakland apartment was my first foray into living alone, having broken the lease at my previous apartment because of my then-roommate Crasian's raging alcoholism, lying, threatening suicide, and inability to pay the rent, among other things. Crasian was like a sickness, the kind that gets you lots of presents and time away from work and sympathy. But it's still a sickness and not something that you should be nurturing.

Crasian was having a hard time with life in general, but the big problem had to do with her woefully misguided crush on her boss, Flash. Flash was this ridiculously cute, tiny blonde with twinkly blue eyes and amazing style and a long list of boys wanting to take her out. Crasian, on the other hand, was puffy, with dull, mousy brown hair; pale, vein-y skin; and a sense of style that can only be called Lumberjack Librarian. Crasian wasn't gay, exactly. I think she thought she might be, but in retrospect, I suspect that she was just lonely and Flash's affectionate behavior filled up that hole in Crasian's life and she clamped on to it with bulldog jaws. We all told Crasian that it wouldn't end well. Even after Flash and Crasian slept together, it was clear that Crasian was nothing more to Flash than an experiment, a story that she could bust out among friends to prove how wild she had been in college.

But this affair was consuming Crasian's life. She didn't talk about anything else. Crasian would say things like, "Doesn't Flash see how great we could be together? I know she feels it too—I mean, why else would she be making out with me in the stockroom if she didn't feel it, you know?" Then she'd drink a fifth of Jim Beam or whatever else was handy until she passed out, coming to only if the phone rang to whimper, "Is it Flash?" If Flash snubbed her at work, she'd totally fall apart. When she was home, she was drinking, sobbing, usually both. She dropped out of school and quit her job. Then she started ignoring her bills, and when the collectors started calling, she ignored them, too.

Needless to say, as her roommate, this situation was getting old at warp speed. There was no reasoning with her, yet she was incredibly needy. I was totally drained from talking about it with her, so I avoided her as much as I could. The payback was a bitch; she'd bang on my door in the middle of the night, drunk, yelling at me that I was a terrible, selfish person. So I started giving the creditors her mother's phone number, memorized Crasian's social security number and changed over all the utilities in her name, and told our landlord that I wanted out. The piece de resistance was when I came home one night after work and Crasian was sitting on our stairs in her pajamas, empty bottle of whiskey in her paw, and maniacal smile on her face. "What's up?" I said, though I didn't really care. "I'm trying to figure out where to kill myself so you can find me when you come home," she said. Ding Ding Ding! The Crazy Alarm sounded loud and clear. Crasian ended up moving home shortly after that.

The whole experience rattled me. See, Crasian was a very good liar and an extremely affable person. That combination served her well; people trusted her, believed her, liked her. Hell, so did I. I believed that before all this happened, before we moved in together, we were genuinely friends. It wasn't until months later that I started to realize the extent of the damage Crasian had caused. While I was keeping my distance from her, she was telling our mutual friends that I said awful, hurtful things about them, that I was a bad friend—while at the same time telling me that they'd said hurtful things about me. She told Ross I was cheating on him, and told me she thought I should leave him. For whatever reason, she was determined to make my life as miserable as possible. And it worked: Ross and I broke up, those friends stopped talking to me. It took a tremendous amount of work and tears to put everything back together again—and things still weren't quite the same.

My mom came to visit and help me get things set up in my new apartment, cooked for me, babied me. Friends came by to drink and smoke on my front porch. The first month in my place I had company almost every night. I was surrounded by people who loved me and cared about me and yet I had never felt more alone in my entire life—not just lonely, but alone. And I was the most tired I'd ever felt. I didn't want to do anything but sleep and watch TV. I wasn't interested in food. I constantly felt on the brink of tears. There was a tight feeling in my throat at all times. Something was definitely wrong. It manifested itself in many ways but one was especially strange: Suddenly, everything was quiet. One morning I woke up and the entire apartment was silent. You know how when there's some white noise coming from somewhere and it stops and you can't right away figure out what's different? That's what this was. Like something had clicked off inside me. I always had a song of some kind in my head, was always humming or singing something, but it was gone. And I didn't have any interest in listening to music. At all. I'd stare at my shelves of CDs and didn't want to hear any of them. That's when I knew I was in trouble.

It never occurred to me that this was depression rearing its selfish, ugly head. I'd always been on the melancholy side of things and no one would describe me as a particularly ebullient person, but this was something else completely. My brain went a little haywire. I was suddenly afraid to be in my apartment, especially at night. I'd convinced myself that I was going to get robbed or attacked. I stayed out on my porch until it got too cold or too mosquito-ed, then reluctantly went inside. I moved my bed out to the living room and slept there, with the TV on and the phone in my hand. I was afraid to be alone. I started spending an inordinate amount of time with D-Money, doing things that I didn't particularly like to do—biking, hiking, golfing—just so I could be with her. I became fearful of knives—especially when I was using one around someone. I was certain "something" was going to happen to cause me to stumble or slip and drive the knife into the person's chest. Every headache was a tumor; every muscle spasm was a stroke. I looked in the mirror and felt like I was staring at a stranger—my own voice sounded unfamiliar. I felt like I was carrying a yoke with buckets on each side filled with concrete and dipped in lead.

One afternoon I was pacing and smoking out on my porch when my landlord, Boris, came by. Boris lived across the street and was a confirmed bachelor, in his late 60s, with thick glasses, and bushy white hair. He often smelled of alcohol and spent most of his days chatting online with Russian mail-order brides. He'd told me that he'd been a translator in World War II and often started conversations with me in Italian, or Russian, or Polish, or French. I liked Boris, felt a little sorry for him, so I didn't mind when he visited. We'd have a drink and he'd tell me about the women he was wooing. This time, however, I'd called him: In the side yard, a large raccoon had fallen off the roof and was wheezing loudly, half-dead, baking in the afternoon sun. It was foaming at the mouth and I was certain that it had rabies. I was also certain that it was going to somehow get up and bite me, so I was freaking out. I'd called animal control, but they said that unless the raccoon was mobile, there was nothing they could do. Boris took a look and said, "Well, he's almost gone. Can't be too much longer now. We should leave him there."
"Boris," I lit yet another cigarette. "You can't be serious! He's dangerous! He could attack me—someone! You have to do something!" I had started to yell a little bit.
Boris, rightly so, looked at me like I was nuts, "My dear, he's barely breathing. I don't think he's going to be attacking anyone in this lifetime." He walked back over to look. The wheezing was getting louder. "Why don't we have a drink and think about what to do, hmm?"

We stood in the side yard drinking Johnnie Walker black label and stared at the raccoon. The hippie guy from down the street stopped over to see what we were looking at. "Oh man," he fussed with his hemp necklace then shoved his hands in his pockets. "I guess it's too late to call the shelter. What a drag." Boris rolled his eyes. Hippie Guy hand-rolled and lit a cigarette and stood there with us. A few minutes later, the two meatheads next door came over. "What's going on?" The larger meathead shoved himself in between Boris and me. "Dude!" Larger Meathead motioned to Smaller Meathead, "Check this shit out. It's fucking foul, dude."
Smaller Meathead stepped on my foot trying to get a better look. "Fucking nasty!" he laughed. "What are you going to do with it?" he asked me.
"Um, nothing," I lit a cigarette. "Nothing."
"You just gonna let it rot there?"
"Yeah, pretty much," I said. "Got a better idea?"
The two meatheads looked at each other. "Shovel?" said Smaller Meathead.
"Yeah," said Larger Meathead. "Be back in a few." The Meatheads walked home.
I was surprised at their compassion. "Wow," I said. "They're going to bury it. I guess I had the wrong idea about those guys."
Boris looked skeptical, but Hippie Guy nodded. "That's cool," he said. "That's good Karma in action, man."

While we were waiting for the Meatheads, I got Boris and me another drink, got one for Hippie Guy, too. We didn't talk, just continued to watch this poor, broken animal huff and sputter and jerk, then let out a slow, labored wheeze. I thought I should cry, but nothing was happening. I didn't feel anything, except a little drunk. The Meatheads came back with a large shovel and a baseball bat. "What's the bat for?"
Larger Meathead stared fixedly at the raccoon, "We're gonna play ball, dude." He and Smaller Meathead looked at me and laughed.
Boris's eyebrows shot up and he stepped in front of me. "Wait, Iseult, I think you better go inside."
Hippie Guy looked kind of pale, "Yeah, you should wait there."
I shrugged my shoulders; I didn't know what the big deal was. I'd seen animals get buried before. I thought it was kind of corny and sexist, but also sort of nice that they wanted to shield me from the unpleasantness of the burial. "I'll see you later," I said to Boris. I barely cleared the first step when I heard a sound that I'd never heard before, or since: It was like the crunching of a bag of chips, followed by a whistle, followed by a squirting noise, then a thud.

I finally understood what the bat was for.

Later, I sat out on my porch steps, afraid to look in the side yard. D-Money came over and I told her about the raccoon and the Meathead Twins. She immediately went to look. "Don't worry. There's nothing there but a mound of dirt."

In bed that night, I stared at the ceiling unable to turn off my brain. I wasn't sleeping well in those days anyway, but with the windows open, I could hear that the Meatheads were having a party and it was extremely loud. In between sounds of cans opening and girls giggling, I could hear a little bit of music. Usually the Meatheads played rap, but that night it was rock. Hard, brittle, metal. "Dude! Turn it the fuck up!" I heard someone yell. I braced myself for the blast. It was Metallica's "Enter Sandman." Lying in the dark with only my insomnia to keep me company, I had to laugh a little at the irony: "Off to Never Never Land…" The next thing I remember hearing was a lawn mower and some birds. It was morning.

Metallica, "Enter Sandman," from the album Metallica (AKA "The Black Album")
Released August 1991