It’s sometime around 1979. A group of English department graduate assistants, instructors, and a full-time faculty member or two are at a party at an old two-story student house with peeling paint and the smell of old wood, slumping a couple of blocks from campus. Everyone is pleasantly drunk.
A number of them is standing with their arms around each other and singing; the song starts out slowly, quietly:
Headin' out to San Francisco
For the Labor Day weekend show
I got my Hush Puppies on
I guess I never was meant for glitter rock 'n' roll
And honey, I didn't know that I'd be missin' you so
What a tantalizing image for a flock of nerdy English majors scuffling around a mediocre English department, struggling with money, coursework, and teaching in a mediocre way a lot of mediocre students who don’t want to be there. Their lives are, frankly, a little bit embarrassing, and their futures contain a lot of doubt.
What can you do with a master’s in English from Auburn? Go get a Ph.D. somewhere? If you’re an instructor, you’re going to be let go in a year or two, and what do you do then? Find another instructor’s position, which is impossible in those years, or put off destiny by going to get a Ph.D. yourself somewhere? Your spouse is already uncomfortable with your prospects. Even if you’re a full-time, tenured professor, you have to ask yourself, fuck, is this it? I’m going to die here, in this place?
The Hush Puppies are a nice clue: the singer here is as big a loser as we all are. We wouldn’t be caught dead wearing Hush Puppies! So we’re not so bad, are we?
The next stanza mirrors the anxiety tinged with hopefulness:
Yes, it's been quite a summer
Rent-a-cars and westbound trains
And now you're off on vacation
Something you tried to explain
And, darlin', since I love you so
That's the reason I just let you go
Everybody belting out that song knows the truth: did he have any choice? What, he was going to forbid her to go? Our choir has the same approach to life by necessity: yes, I’ll teach that course; the lease isn’t very kind but I need a place to live; please, can’t I have another class to teach? And their love lives: how can you really love one who is working this hard, making no money, living in garrots? If your erstwhile partner wants a choice, what are you going to do?
I can't help it honey
You're that much part of me now
Remember that night in Montana
When we said there'd be no room for doubt
No room for doubt! What a fantasy for our choir! Their lives are all about doubt, defined by it. Am I making enough progress on my master’s thesis? Will my instructor’s contract be extended? Even the tenured professor: have I done enough to be awarded a full professorship? All of them, even the professor: will the money hold out enough to pay the bills? Will there be a course available for me to teach this summer? Will the rent go up?
And, if you apply it to someone’s love life, which Jimmy Buffett meant: Does she really like me? What did she mean when she looked away from me last week? I’m finishing my master’s next year, so what future could we two possibly have? I knew a couple who were instructors with an open marriage, though I suspect it was only the wife who was active. There’s real doubt all right.
No room for doubt? As if. This is a downtrodden group who would love to have no room for doubt just for an evening, which is what they’re doing here, with their arms around each other, singing. No doubt that we’re having a good time tonight, anyway. And that chorus, which repeats itself, insinuates its hope every couple of minutes:
Come Monday, it'll be alright
Come Monday, I'll be holdin' you tight
I spent four lonely days in a brown L.A. haze
And I just want you back by my side.
Oh geez, the hope in that chorus! Though tinged with smog: there’s always something to interfere. Yet there’s the expectation of holding someone tight by your side.
Then the last substantive stanza:
I hope you're enjoying the scenery
I know that it's pretty up there
We can go hiking on Tuesday
With you I'd walk anywhere
California has worn me quite thin
I just can't wait to see you again
Even though it’s been over 40 years since I linked arms with those people, I still read those lines with a hint of something hopeless. She’s gone away on vacation (which she TRIED to explain), and he’s left to offer meek and insincere hopes that she’s enjoying herself up there. Whom are we kidding? He hopes she’s miserable and god forbid she should meet some horny Montana cowboy.
I hate the verb in the third line: “can” go hiking. Why not “will”? Because it’s just so far from certain; she’s off on goddamn vacation, after all. I bet that group with their arms around each other shared my neuroses.
And then the end:
Come Monday, it'll be all right
Come Monday, I'll be holdin' you tight
I spent four lonely days in a brown L.A haze
And I just want you back by my side
I spent four lonely days in a brown LA haze
And I just want you back by my side
He keeps mentioning that brown LA haze. I don’t imagine Jimmy Buffett meant it—I mean, it’s just a theme in the song—but I think of an obstacle, something to endure. I happen to hate LA, so it’s personal. I think the geography is all fucked up, so I have no idea where I am there. Maybe Buffett actually meant LA as a larger metaphor, one for loss, confusion, and estrangement.
My brother lived there for 50 years, taking degrees from UCLA in astrophysics and working for various LA-located companies like Hughes Aircraft. It was murky work; he couldn’t tell me what he did. He said he went to parties and wasn’t allowed to say what building he worked in because the Sovs had ships offshore listening. Once I called him and asked, “How are he ICBM’s?” and he simply hung up on me.
Brown LA haze indeed. My brother sure lived in one.
I believe I read that Jimmy Buffett wrote this song about the woman he later married. He died a billionaire, and, going by the pictures that one sees of him, he escaped that brown LA haze unscathed. Really, considering the joy that his songs brought, he deserved the happiness that I hope he had.
I hadn’t thought about Jimmy Buffett for decades before his death was reported. I don’t’ know if his songs get played much, but it’s also true that I don’t listen to music on the radio anymore—really, not since the late 80’s, when our car radio went out. There was a period when we lived near Philly and listened to indie folk/rock on WHYY, but that ended when we moved to Seattle in 1999.
His death made me reconsider him. His material and vibe were unique then and later. The closest you could place him was with the beach music of the 60’s, but that’s not even ludicrously close. His ironic, clever, wistful, sometimes boastful yacht-oriented music was all alone. (Someone else wrote “yacht-oriented.” I can’t think of a better adjective. This was not “beach music”.)
That he rose up from sandy beaches in the 1970’s centered him in the happiest years of my life: in my 20’s, teaching freshman composition and English lit surveys, playing basketball, softball, drinking beer, pursuing girls, and really enjoying teaching—it’s one of my few skills. Plus the nearly unlimited time to write, which I squandered on basketball, softball, drinking beers, etc. I guess it really could be my fault.
For another post, I looked back through my gradebooks (which I’ve kept, wistfully), and I was surprised by what a hard grader I was: no more than one or two A’s in each composition class, sometimes none, and only two-four A’s in my lit surveys. Yet I always received glowing evaluations from the kids. That’s not nothing. (One girl commented that I should blow-dry my hair every morning, though I did. There’s the 70’s for you!)
So they must have liked me, and I enjoyed the work. Each day that began a new quarter, I left my office excited to go to the classroom.
In the end, I think “Come Monday” meant so much to me because it appeared during a singular period of my life that I really enjoyed and in which I felt comfortable. I wasn’t conscious of the implications of the song that I’ve set forth here. I didn’t pay that much attention to anything in my 20’s.
But in thinking about it tonight, I was wondering why it means so much to me after the fact. I think the music spoke, if unconsciously and unintentionally, to the emotions that my friends and I were feeling. Despite any optimism and bravado, we were doomed: no one wanted anyone with an English M.A. from Auburn.
If we’d thought about matters completely enough, we’d have realized how badly we were fucked. So we all went to law school and though I haven’t made a survey, I’d guess that we did OK (one townie-hippie became a dean at Indiana Law and is now a provost.) Or some of us went into writing-adjacent careers, like technical writing. But that we would find ourselves wasn’t at all obvious in 1979. We distracted ourselves with drink, sex, and music like Jimmy Buffett's persona.
He was a shrewd businessman and died a billionaire. So I wonder if he would have laughed at us, how simple, naïve, and stupid we were. What an irony that would have been! We identified so completely with that boat pirate persona, which was of course fictional. We understood neither him nor ourselves. I trust we’ve all grown up a little. That doesn’t mean that I can’t be sad that he’s gone.
RIP, happy old pirate.