We met just before the end of my junior year at a party around a fire barrel in an open field next to a pond. I wanted to be anywhere but at home, and so I spent my time in muscle cars or at parties, which is where I met Misty. And when he wasn’t anymore, I couldn’t stand the place. It was not a cheerful household, but my grandfather was always there. He had an oxygen bottle on one side of his recliner and a urine bottle on the other. The few steps from the bed to his recliner would leave him gasping as though he had just finished some unseen track and field event.

In his final years my grandfather was so crippled by emphysema that we kept a hospital bed in the living room. A year later, my father was killed in an accident, and my mom decided that we would stay with my grandparents indefinitely. My mother moved us in with my grandparents when she and my father separated. I’d been living with him since I was a year old. Just a few months before I met Misty my grandfather died. It may at first seem counterintuitive, but my increasing desire to be embraced by the local mainstream while swearing off my natural predisposition toward weirdness was triggered in large part by a particularly painful development in my life. By then The Cure weren’t exactly non-mainstream-they’d already hit number thirty-five on the Billboard chart with Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me-but my friends and I weren’t speeding around in muscle cars on forgotten backroads blaring “Just Like Heaven,” no matter how high it had peaked. That is to say that I had been steadily embracing hair metal and Camaros (even though I couldn’t afford my own) while gradually forsaking bands like The Cure. This all happened at a time in my teenage experience when I was at my most mainstream, at least in terms of the mainstream that existed in rural North Carolina in 1989. Which leads us to the embarrassingly personal, painfully impenetrable confines of my high school bedroom and an intimate relationship with The Cure’s Disintegration. She dumped me abruptly and without warning and immediately started dating a country heartthrob named Mike. Perhaps the improbable symbolism of her name somehow diminishes my earlier assertion that I did not live in a John Hughes movie, but it’s the truth. In the fall of ’89 I’d just entered my senior year of high school, and I’d recently been dumped by a girl named Misty Hayes.

I listened to the Pixies, but I also went cruising down the closest town’s main drag in my friend’s Camaro, fist pumping through the open window to a soundtrack of Motley Crüe. I was into skateboards, sure, but I also went bass fishing in country ponds. But before I fall into that cozy “I was so different” narrative, painting myself as the stereotypical teen-movie outsider, I want to first confess that my teenage experience was a study in ordinary contrasts. When you picture this in context, it might strike an odd portrait: I grew up in rural North Carolina, five miles outside of a mid-sized town you’ve never heard of. Bangs self-consciously plastered to one side of my forehead in my best attempt at Tony Hawk hair. Picture me, if you will, in the fall of 1989: skinny, befreckled, wearing an army jacket and a pair of Chuck Taylors.

The cure disintegration