The Craziest Thing You've Done After a Breakup
LatestThe end of a romantic relationship can cause people to do some pretty nutty things that they probably wouldn’t do without broken heart or wounded ego. Breakup with someone and suddenly you start considering ayahuasca retreats in the rainforest, revenge, or—craziest of all—getting bangs. So what’s the most insane thing you’ve ever done after a breakup?
Let’s try to keep this light here. If you turned to revenge porn or pulled a Bernadine and started your cheating husband’s car on fire, feel free to exorcise your demons, but do not expect a lot of support from the Good Ship Jezebel. Collapsing in a fit of tears in the middle of a Target because you and your ex’s song comes on is funny, criminal action (usually) isn’t.
As for the winners of last week’s Pissing Contest, Your Most Memorable Concert Experience, we have…
Bitchez, do I have a story for you.
Let me set the stage. It was 1998. I was 17 and in the middle of an epic summer. I had been to New Orleans. I had learned the secrets of jazz. I had achieved closure on my middle school crush. It was on.
Fourth of July, I get a call in the morning from a band parent asking if I’d like to sell concessions at a Jimmy Buffett concert to raise money for the band. Y’all, I fucking love Jimmy Buffett. I immediately signed up. I ride to the concert with some friends and am assigned to work at a frozen lemonade stand right inside the entrance to the stadium with a trumpet player that I barely knew.
You guys, he was so hot. Tall, curly hair, whip smart, sarcastic. We got to know each other that evening and had so much fun selling non-alcoholic shit to drunks who thought it was booze. Jimmy was incredible, and when the fireworks started going off, a thunderstorm happened too, and we got the lightning/fireworks experience. It was fantastic.
On the way home, I rode with him in the back seat of my friend’s mom’s Honda Civic. Mom was driving, one friend in shotgun, and me, Trumpet, and our other friend in the back seat, Trumpet in the middle.
We got caught in traffic getting out of the concert, I think it took about an hour. Trumpet and I made out THE ENTIRE FUCKING TIME WE WERE IN THE CAR. With friends and friend’s mom looking on. SUPER INAPPROPRIATE.
And thus began the Great Love Affair of Mocena’s Teenage Years. Two years later, virginity gone, he broke up with me for some girl he later married and made babies with.
BUT WHATEVER. WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE JIMMY.
This past year at Washington’s big outdoor festival, Sasquatch, my friends’ band was playing on one of the smaller stages. My group and I headed out pretty early in the day to catch them (they actually ended up getting a great crowd, but because they had an early set time, I was super afraid that nobody would show up). Their show went great! They rocked it, people noticed, there was so much dancing! To make things even better, one of my favorite singer/songwriters was playing a set after them on the same stage. Perfect! We’d have awesome spots for the show.
As one does at an outdoor concert that charges outrageous prices for drinks, my friends and I had snuck in a few bottles of cheap 2-buck chuck chardonay in our water bottles. Which, we’d quickly realized, weren’t very insulated and weren’t doing a great job at keeping it cold. So we guzzled them. In the afternoon. In 90-something heat. By the time my friends’ band were off the stage, we were pretty happy, feeling it, and pretty much straight up drunk. Oh, well, here comes the singer/songwriter!
At this point, I should mention that the musician is Damien Jurado and I sorta know him, but not really. We were briefly both members of the same Moped Army, only I owned a scooter, not a moped, and was only sorta a member/showed up to events like three times. I’d met him, we’d talked, I didn’t really like him too much as a person, but I HAD met him, like nine years earlier.
His showtime comes and passes. Nothing. There’s just an empty stage with a chair in front of a microphone, but no Damien Jurado. More time goes by. My boyfriend and I are standing at the very middle front of the stage. We’re starting chants, trying to egg him into coming out. Nothing. The guy behind us is like, Where is he? I’m like, I don’t know! Then, because I was drunk, I was like, YOU KNOW?!?!? I KNOW HIM!!! I SHOULD JUST GO BACK THERE AND TELL HIM WE’RE READY! The guy is like, YOU SHOULD FUCKING DO THAT. Somehow, my boyfriend doesn’t here this conversation going on, therefore he doesn’t realize that I then up and leave. I go to the side of the stage where there’s a teenage kid standing to keep people from going backstage. I smile at him, kind of flash my (totally normal person) pass, and breeze past him.
I’m backstage. My friends who had just played should be back there, I think, since they just got off the stage and should be packing up still (they actually weren’t, they had already been ushered away to do some press interviews) so I wander around looking for them and thinking that if I see Damien I’ll be like, DUDE GET OUT THERE, YOU’RE LATE! But I can’t find them or him or anyone. So I go to the side of the stage and I start waving at my boyfriend. He’s not looking, so I step out a little bit further and wave some more. Still, not looking. The guy in the audience who I’d talked to, however, was looking. He’s smiling and whooping it up and encouraging me. So I walk out a little further waving at my boyfriend. He’s still just like looking at his phone. But the rest of the audience isn’t. They all start screaming, thinking that someone is coming out to start the show.
Fuck it! I thought. I’ll start the show. So I continue across the stage, sit down in the chair in front of the mic, and say, “It’s my great honor and privilege to introduce the one and only, one of Seattle’s favorite folk-rock sons, Damien Jurado! (or something as dumb as that, ugh, wine, you are the bane of my existence)” Only the mic was off. I’m then just a drunk person sitting in a chair on a stage in front of a shit ton of people. I kind of turn to the side and I see the sound guy scrambling behind the sound board and then he points at me and nods. So I start to repeat what I’d just said and this time the mic was on. At this point, my boyfriend whips his head up and was like WHAT IN THE GOOD GOD HELL? And then he starts filming it.
When I finish, I think, Oh, shizz, I don’t know what to do now. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Damien with his guitar. He says, “Thanks for that introduction!” Suddenly I realize I should get the hell out of his chair, so I jump up, walk off stage, walk right back past that teenager and back to my boyfriend. Who was equal parts horrified and impressed. Maybe more of the latter, since he’s since proposed and we’re getting married next month?
The show was epic.
And, finally, moriartysringtone, who told such a good story with so few words!
I tried to hit on Jonah Hill when I was blackout drunk in the VIP section of a vampire weekend show and his response was, “You should probably drink some water.”
Where is the news, Jonah.
HAPPY PISSING AND TGIF, MY FRIENDS.
Image via Waiting to Exhale/20th Century Fox.
Contact the author at [email protected].
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