Big and Carrie had red balloons and “Moon River” and absofuckinlutely. My husband and I haveThe Wall.
Nick and I met during our freshman year at Syracuse University. I was a nervous girl from Maine with a bad haircut and a boyfriend back home; he was a bandana-wearing, Marlboro Reds-smoking force of nature, swooping anyone who wanted to party under his massive, generous wing. It wasn’t until junior year that we began to date, each of us intrigued by our differences.
Our courtship happened to coincide with Nick’s college legacy: a fully-produced theatrical version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall which ran for two nights at Syracuse’s 1500-seat Goldstein Auditorium. It was a massive show that Nick wrote and directed, complete with a live band, over 20 actors and singers, and scenes linking Roger Water’s abstractions about war and mind-control into something resembling a cohesive story.
I had heard of Pink Floyd by that point, but not specifically of The Wall. My high-school musical tastes started with Whitney Houston and Bette Midler and grew to include Simon & Garfunkel and, of course, the Rent soundtrack. In college, I added Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman and even one Bob Dylan album to my repertoire, but I still knew nothing of classic rock. Watching my new beau put together his show—hushed, bent-necked conversations with light board ops and guitarists; pre-show rallying cries to the cast reminiscent of Henry V at Agincourt; the insistence that everyone involved in the project abstain from weed (at least until the final curtain) because, after all, drugs were just another brick in the wall—these were the early tableaus of our relationship.
The show was a roaring success. Everyone came to see it—all the drama kids, sure, but also the rest of the campus—athletes and business majors, people we’d never had a class with, people who didn’t even go to the school. There was no question that my new boyfriend was a hero, a Gandhi leading the masses, and there I was at his elbow, the First Lady of college life.
Not long after that, infused with a sense of social power I had never before experienced, I wanted to spread my own rebel wings. On my 21st birthday, refusing to be tethered to the Marlboro man who, as it turned out, was oddly responsible and sincere, I made out with a slew of other boys. I felt horrible about it afterwards, and after several days of silence, Nick told me that he was coming over for a “talk.” I knew we were at an impasse—either I’d have to make some sort of commitment or say good-bye for good. I put on disc 2 of The Wall to think things through, and when he walked in, there I was, hunched on the floor listening to “Comfortably Numb” hoping that the symbolism would be enough to win him back. It was.
For Christmas that first year I made Nick a clay coffee mug and etched hundreds of little bricks into the surface with a toothpick, cutting out two or three rectangles along the top edge to show that our wall was indeed coming down.
Twelve years later, this past March, Nick emailed me at work saying that Roger Waters would be doing The Wall at Yankee Stadium, perhaps his last tour ever and should we go? Before I even had time to reply, he wrote again saying that the cheapest tickets were $250 each, an absurd amount, that there was just no way. I countered. There is no way we can NOT go, I said. Screw the money and buy the tickets.
The concert came with its own grown-up hassles, the toll it took on our monthly budget, of course, and Nick running disastrously late due to a broken toilet fiasco on a return flight from LA. He dropped his suitcase on the kitchen floor and we ran to the subway—a mere 36 minutes allotted to get from Boerum Hill to the Bronx. We walked in halfway through the first song.
The music was just as good as always even though the production was somewhat silly, what with Roger railing against big business and corporate greed with the dim edges of the stadium’s Pepsi Co. and Gatorade signs behind his head. The eleven-dollar Miller Lites in Yankee’s souvenir cups helped, and by the second act we were transfixed, our twelve-year relationship hurtling backwards through time, Waters’ voice connecting the dots between where we began and how far we’ve come. We returned home giddy, our grown-up apartment waiting for us, my husband’s suitcase still in the middle of the kitchen floor and the clay mug—now filled with the odd assortment of scissors and pens—still displayed on his desk.
