things aren't the way they were before

Chester Bennington died just over nine years ago — the anniversary just passed on July 20. I don’t know why, but I think about his particular death a lot.

I say “I don’t know why,” but of course I know why. It really shocked me, it was really sad, and I’d grown up with Hybrid Theory and Meteora on repeat. Hybrid Theory in particular is one of those albums I STILL listen to over and over — you know that, I’ve written about it before!

A few things I always think of when I think of Linkin Park:

• “Folks, we have a very special guest for you tonight. I’d like to introduce . . . MR. HAHN!!!” I get that intro from “Cure for the Itch” in my head all the time.

• I once asked Linkin Park superfan Julie Tieu about her favorite underrated track off Hybrid Theory and she said “A Place for My Head” and that’s such an elite choice I remember it the way you might remember an iconic walkoff home run.

• That time Chester started singing “Rolling in the Deep” at a 2011 festival but he was in the wrong key, and Mike Shinoda stopped him after that first iconic line to get him on track.

I think about that last moment a lot, actually. I don’t know about your algorithm, but mine serves up a bunch of music content to me — they know what I like. And I get all these videos that are like “just LISTEN to what she sounds like without autotune!” or “when a singer has the experience to KNOW how to recover after a mistake!” and they’re often cool moments, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I roll my eyes at the over-the-topness of it all — ultimately these are just videos of singers doing their jobs? Like, sure, she sounds great without autotune, but a lot of professional singers sound great without autotune, because they . . . have good voices? They hit me in the same way those “oh my god, you won’t BELIEVE this actress is 35!” type of posts hit me, where it’s like, actually I totally believe it, she looks great, she takes care of her skin, she has the best money can buy, this picture’s been retouched, and also what the fuck do you think 35 even looks like?

So Chester starts the song, and then Mike has to get his attention like, no, wait, hang up — you’re about to go down a bad path. They talk, Mike plays a note on the piano, Chester gets set back up and starts again. It’s not that it’s some big deal — they’re professionals, this is how music works. But I like the friendship in that interaction, the collaboration, the vulnerability of being wrong for a moment in front of a huge crowd of people before your friend sets you right. If I watch the video in the right mood, it can make me cry.

“In the End” is a true same songs over and over for me, because when I’m in that place, I will literally just loop it. I recently reread a romance novel I wrote a long time ago — before Love in the Time, something that never went anywhere — and I realized I wrote that directly into the book:

“Well, you’re being awfully squirrelly about your listening choices. My imagination is bound to fill in the blanks with some wild stuff.”

“I was listening to Linkin Park, okay?”

“Okay.” He paused. “Wait, is that the real answer? Why is that embarrassing?”

“Because really I just listened to ‘In the End’ over and over again.”

“For an hour?”

“For the whole hour,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I randomly got in my feels about Chester’s death, and all I wanted to do was play that song on loop. I do this sometimes. Like once it was nothing but Lizzo’s ‘Truth Hurts’ for like two days. Tegan and Sara get in heavy rotation — recently, it was ‘Burn Your Life Down.’ During the Kavanaugh hearings I played nothing but ‘Killing in the Name of,’ in my car, walking through the grocery store, just those angry lines repeating and repeating . . .

Those are all true examples, obviously.

I’ve also talked about how “In the End” is my dream karaoke song, not that I’ve ever had the chance to perform it. I only want to do the Mike Shinoda parts — I want someone else to handle Chester’s. What I can promise you is that I understand how you have to hit the iconic right out the window line; I can build up to what it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time . . . and I know to keep going with I tried so hard even after you’re taking it away with the chorus; I know about the stutter on propert-ty; I don’t know what I’ll be doing when you’re going off in the bridge but I’ll point at you so people know you’re the one killing it. I just need you to hold those notes. That’s not my wheelhouse.

Part of me rereading this old manuscript was that I realized . . . wait, I wrote this directly in there. Like I said, I was deeply in my Chester feels at the time. I put all of that into the book, which was a lot about making art and feeling disconnected and trying to find a way back to what used to make you happy. (So . . . the same themes I still circle lol.)

This is deeply vulnerable because this manuscript is at least seven (?) years old, has never been edited, and is not at all the way I would write it now, but I decided to just share the scene. The set-up is that Juliet is a screenwriter who’s gone to visit Chase, a former teen heartthrob who disappeared from the industry and has emerged as the author of a dystopian literary novel that’s getting some buzz. Juliet has history with Chase, and has been tapped to write the screenplay adaptation of his book, which is why she came to see him to try to convince him to star in the adaptation.

. . . only she hasn’t told him that yet, because she knows it’s a sensitive subject. He left Hollywood for a reason, and has expressed no interest in going back. In this scene, Juliet’s very recent ex-boyfriend (as in, she just dumped him over the phone) and screenwriting partner, Paul, has arrived in town to try to convince Juliet to get back with him and Chase to sign on for this movie. Paul is a total dick, obviously.

So with that context, here’s my “In the End” karaoke tribute scene:

By the time Chase walked into the pub, the set-up was so clear that I felt naive for not having seen it from the start. Part of Paul’s wanting to continue to “pretend to be together,” even for this one day, including wanting to stake his claim on me in front of Chase, a rival he swore he wasn’t jealous of but then did stuff like this. Slinging his arm around my shoulders as Chase made his way to the little booth we’d found in the corner.

It must’ve gotten colder outside while we’d been in there, because Chase had his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and the tip of his nose was a little red. I felt the sudden strangest urge to burrow into him, to lend him some of my warmth. I tilted a gulp of my previously untouched beer into my mouth, just to give myself something to do, and almost choked on it.

“You okay?” Paul said, applying pressure to my shoulder that felt more like a warning than a comfort.

I nodded, still unable to speak. I took another sip of my beer, trying to ease the ache in my throat.

“What’ll you have?” Paul said, holding up his hand to flag down the waitress, who was already headed over. “Service is faster here than at that cafe, I’ll say that.”

Chase’s jaw clenched. Considering that Johnnie was his neighbor and friend, I doubted he appreciated the comment. “Water’s fine,” he said.

“You don’t come to a brewery to order water,” Paul said, smiling up at the waitress. “What would you recommend for our friend here? Maybe something a little lighter than this one you gave me.”

The waitress gave Chase a wink. “Your water’s coming right up,” she said in a way that suggested she knew him and his usual order. “Unless you want the house root beer?”

“Sounds good, Tami,” he said. Then, after she left, he gave Paul a tight smile. “I don’t drink.”

“That’s right,” Paul said in a tone that made it clear he’d known this, had just been finding yet another way to needle Chase. “I’m sorry to put you in that position, man. Addiction’s a hell of a thing to struggle with. Good on you for working through it.”

There was nothing specifically wrong with the words, but Paul’s tone sounded so condescending. “Chase has been sober for over ten years,” I said, wanting to say something supportive.

“Nine years,” Chase corrected. My gaze flew to his face. The expression there told me that I hadn’t gotten the math wrong, that there was a story to this modified anniversary. I felt terrible for even bringing it up.

“Ah,” Paul said, glancing between us. “Don’t feel bad, mate. Relapse is part of the process, or so I’ve heard.”

The flat contempt in Chase’s eyes would’ve floored me if it had been leveled at me, but Paul seemed unfazed, taking a long pull of his beer. I was torn between wanting to drain my own and order another, anything to dull the awkwardness of this night, and wanting to tell the waitress to take it away.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” Paul said.

“Not with you,” Chase said to Paul, before his gaze slid back to me. There was something about the way he said it, the way his face shifted. It felt like a promise, like he was saying he’d talk about anything with me. My breath caught in my throat.

Luckily, we were rescued from the sheer agony of the moment by a loud hiss of feedback from a mic, and then our waitress’ voice came over the sound system. She was standing on a stage at the front of the pub, holding a clipboard in her hand.

“Okay, everybody! It’s Tuesday night, and you know what that means -- time for karaoke!” She started naming the first three names from the clipboard, letting them know to get ready, and Paul leaned back in the booth and groaned.

“Of course,” he said. “We had to come on karaoke night.”

“I love karaoke night,” I said defensively, as though I were the person who’d come up with the whole concept. “It’s fun.”

“If you can’t sing, you shouldn’t be up there,” Paul said. “And if I want to hear people who can sing, I’d buy tickets to A Very Special Evening with John Mayer.”

Paul had a weird thing with that guy. Once, he put “Your Body is a Wonderland” on repeat while he gave me what he called a sensual massage. My skin still crawled thinking about it. He was the kind of guy who thought songs like “She Will Be Loved” and “Crash Into Me” were a woman’s fantasy.

Seriously, how had I ignored so many red flags? I took another swig of my beer.

The first person took the stage and started singing a timid, warbly version of a Mariah Carey song. I would never admit it now, but I didn’t totally understand why people picked songs that were so difficult to sing when they clearly weren’t up for it.

“Go-to karaoke song?” I asked Chase, having to lean across the table to make sure he heard me.

“Hmm,” he said, curling his hands around his glass. “I can tell you that I’ve learned the hard way that ‘Losing My Religion’ is not the track you want to be stuck up there for five minutes with. Fun to sing along to in the car, but then you get up on stage and realize how many parts repeat, and have to stand there through the mandolin instrumental like an asshole.”

I snort-laughed through another sip of beer. The waitress brought me another one without having to be asked, and I made an apologetic face at Chase before taking a swig of that one. I didn’t drink much and was kind of a lightweight, but still I knew I was in no danger of getting drunk from a couple beers. It was just enough to help me feel a little looser, a little less self-conscious.

“Can you sing, Chase?” Paul said. “I didn’t know that was one of your talents.”

Chase grinned at me. “Oh, not at all.”

I knew he was thinking of the time we’d belted out “Under Pressure” in the car when we were teenagers, the way he’d taken the David Bowie parts and attacked them with gusto even though he was right. He really couldn’t carry a tune.

Under the table, Paul’s hand was on my thigh again, but I was wedged between him and the wall and couldn’t really move away. It wasn’t a big deal, I decided. We weren’t technically still together, but we had been for a while. I could handle a little contact.

The Mariah Carey woman had left the stage, and a dude took her place, singing along to Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” I nodded my head along to the music, shouting out the “Oh yeah! All right!” part along with him. Paul cringed overdramatically, but I noticed he didn’t move any further away.

“This ain’t this guy’s first rodeo!” I shouted across the table at Chase. “Tom Petty is always a crowdpleaser.”

I was definitely not drunk, or even close to it. But I also knew that I’d come unhinged somehow, that I was dangerously adjacent to saying something I shouldn’t, making a fool out of myself. Maybe I really was going through something, I thought. I definitely felt like my life had been on a certain track, and ever since I’d cried over Chase’s book in the plane, it had gone off. Maybe not enough to fully derail, but enough to make everything unsteady.

“You want an embarrassing karaoke story?” I said. “Try singing ‘...Baby One More Time,’ dressed in the full outfit, pigtails and all, and starting to cry in the middle of it because the loneliness really is killing you. Right? Britney had some real lyrics. Listen to ‘Everytime’ if you don’t believe me. And she’s still under a conservatorship for her quote unquote mental health issues, which is really just her dad keeping control of her money if you ask me.”

The last bit came out louder than I intended as the “American Girl” guy wrapped up his song, and I flushed, partly because I was feeling overly warm stuffed into this small booth, and partly because I was embarrassed that, no matter what I said, I managed to put my foot in it somehow. Why would I tell such a sad sack story about myself? And why would I bring up show business parents controlling their famous kids’ money, when I knew that was something Chase had dealt with in his own career?

“You know she didn’t write any of those songs,” Paul said. “There was probably a team of fifteen people behind each one.”

“Actually, she did write ‘Everytime!’” I said. “I saw an interview where she said she wrote that one from scratch on the piano.”

Between my inexplicable sudden need to defend Britney Spears and my deep knowledge of Justin Bieber’s catalogue, perhaps I made it sound like all I listened to was early 2000s pop. But Chase just smiled at me, his eyes crinkling.

“‘Mr. Brightside,’” he said. “I know it’s an obvious choice, but people always sing along to it, so you don’t feel so alone up there. If I had to pick a go-to, that would be it.”

I grinned at him. “That’s a great one. I used to choose ‘Umbrella,’ for the same reason. But Tom Holland kinda set the bar pretty high on that one.”

“If you’re not going to breakdance in the rain, gtfo,” Chase agreed.

God, I wanted to kiss him so bad. It hit me suddenly, a punch to the solar plexus. I’d been telling myself that the break-up with Paul had nothing to do with Chase, that it had been coming for a while. And that was true. Chase may have been the catalyst, but I doubted Paul and I would’ve lasted much longer even without him.

But he definitely was the catalyst. I was lying to Paul -- and to myself -- if I pretended otherwise.

Paul squeezed my leg. “Perhaps we should talk about the movie,” he said. “We could find somewhere quieter . . .”

The next girl chose ‘Hard Times’ by Paramore, and I immediately started dancing in my spot, using the movement to squirm away from Paul a bit. “I love this song!” I shouted.

“You love all the songs,” Paul muttered, like it was an insult. “If you’re coming on board as Wes, Chase, we need to know so the studio can start casting Laila. They’ll probably want you in LA for some screen tests . . .”

I saw Chase’s brow furrow. Shit.

“I’m not playing Wes,” he said. “I don’t act anymore.”

Paul turned to me, an expression of fake concern on his face. He didn’t even bother trying to make it look authentic. “Babe? I thought you’d talked to him.” Then he turned back to Chase. “The studio will only move forward with you as the lead. That’s why they sent Juli -- sorry, Juliet. They knew you guys had a past and thought she could convince you to sign on.”

Shit. I closed my eyes, as if I could re-set the expression on Chase’s face burned into my eyelids. But when I opened them again, there he was. Looking at me with a quietness to his face that broke my heart. It wasn’t betrayal, or even disappointment. I felt like I could’ve handled those, explained my way out of them. It looked more like . . .

Pain.

“I didn’t --” I started, then realized that any protest would only make things worse. I swallowed, wished I’d been drinking something stronger than beer. “The studio did send me,” I said. “It’s your book, after all, and you’d make a great Wes. But I also --”

“I don’t act anymore,” Chase said again, his voice low and final.

“I know,” I said. “And that’s why I didn’t ask you right away . . . I mean, I thought maybe you’d come around eventually.” That was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it immediately. I tried to recover, but only ended up digging myself in further. “They only want to make the film with you. And you were so good, Chase! You’d be perfect in that role.”

His mouth twisted bitterly. “They only want to make it with me, huh? Ask yourself why that is. It’s not because I was ‘so good’ as an actor.”

Paul gave me a look like, see? That’s what I said. I ignored him. “That’s the studio. You know their priority is always whatever makes the most money. But fuck the studio, think about your book. Think about you. Can’t you see it? This could be a real opportunity . . .”

“For who?”

“For us,” I said. But it was too intimate, the way his eyes bore into mine, the way those two words hung over the table. So I made a circle gesture with my hand, including Paul in my statement. “For all of us.”

Chase reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, laying a five dollar bill on the table, and it still took me a minute to realize that this meant it was over. He was leaving. I wanted to say something to fix things, to go back to when we were laughing about karaoke songs, but I knew I’d already done enough damage. I’d had a whole plan for how I’d eventually bring up the idea of him acting in the film adaptation of Smoke Signals. It had involved, well, not lying exactly, but at least easing into the fact that it was the very reason I’d been sent to Oregon in the first place. Now that was all ruined.

“I’ll leave a key under the plant on the front porch,” Chase said. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, Juliet. We can talk more about the movie if you want. But not about me playing Wes. That’s not going to happen. Okay?”

I barely had time to react, because he was already giving Paul a brief nod. “Have a good flight back to LA,” he said.

He stopped briefly by the bar to say something to the guy working there, and then he was out the front door without looking back. I saw him through the windows of the pub, his hands shoved in his bomber jacket again, shoulders forward, heading down the sidewalk. And then he was gone.

“Actors,” Paul said from beside me. “They’re so temperamental.”

I turned to him. “What the fuck? Why did you just spring that on him like that?”

He shrugged. “No point in wasting time,” he said. “You should have been straightforward right from the start.”

I felt a pang of guilt at that. I had felt dishonest, not telling Chase about my ulterior motive for visiting him. But I also felt justified in the truth that it had been good to just catch up, that I was glad to see him even if he wasn’t going to agree to be in the movie.

“Come back to LA with me,” Paul said. “Chase can ship your stuff back to you. It’s obvious at this point he’s not going to help with this project. He’s only going to drag it down. So let’s get out of here, go home and bang out a killer script together, and then present it to the studio. We don’t need him.”

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I stopped the waitress as she walked by, ordering a drink with the highest ABV on the menu. When it came, I made myself drink half of it like it was medicine, wincing at the “floral” and “pungent” flavor that had been lauded on the menu but tasted like old muddy garden waste to me.

Paul excused himself to go to the restroom, and I took out my phone, checking to see if there were any texts from Chase. Of course not -- just that last word, with the single period after it, as if he’d already known how the night would end. But there was one from Radha, and I texted her back under the table, as though I were hiding it even though no one was there.

How’s it going? she’d written an hour ago, as if she could sense that it was the moment when nothing could possibly be going worse. I texted back a long, stream-of-conscious rant about how Paul had showed up and how we’d broken up but he wasn’t taking it well (or rather, he wasn’t taking it at all), and how Chase had walked out. I don’t even know if half of it made sense, but Radha got back to me immediately.

Wow.

That was it, one word, until a second later there was another incoming text.

Is it too soon to say good riddance re Paul?

I laughed a little at that, but it came out more as a choked sob. I’m fucking this up so hard.

The response came fast. Impossible. Take care of your heart, wash your face, and get some sleep. You’ll be fine.

That was good advice, and I should’ve taken it. Instead, Paul came back from the bathroom and I shoved my phone to the side, turning it over so the screen faced the table in case any more Paul-bashing texts came in from Radha. I finished my drink and had another, and the whole time I thought about going home -- going back to Chase’s house -- but I didn’t know how I’d face him.

The karaoke was petering out and half the bar had gone home when I signed up to do a song. “Come on,” I pleaded with Paul, so out of my mind that I somehow thought it was a good idea to get him involved despite his contempt for karaoke and our recent contempt for each other. “This is a duet! It needs two people.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself, Juli,” he said. “Let’s just get a hotel, and look up flights in the morning.”

But they called my name, and I headed up to the stage, tripped a little on the top step. That wasn’t because I was drunk, I told myself. I’d had like four beers! I just hadn’t stood for a while and was feeling a little shaky. When was the last time I’d eaten? Lunch at the diner?

The opening piano of “In the End” by Linkin Park started up, and I quickly realized I was in over my head, trying to do Chester’s singing parts and Mike Shinoda’s rapping parts. The few people left in the pub just stared at me from the bar as I interrupted myself, trying to keep up with the words going across the screen behind me. And then it kicked into the chorus, and I closed my eyes and just belted it out, trying to pretend I was still in my rental car that morning, that I could re-set to the way I’d felt then. When I’d felt achy and tired and sad but still hopeful, like maybe I was on a new path with this movie and with Chase and with my life.

Then I opened my eyes and Chase was bounding up the stage with another microphone, awkwardly sliding one sleeve of his jacket off while trying to jump in with the second rap verse, then shifting the mic to his other hand to let the jacket fall to the floor. He even stuttered a little on the word that had a digital stutter effect on the song, and I think I was smiling at him but he looked very serious, like he’d been called to perform on a national stage, and I couldn’t tell anyway because suddenly my vision was blurry and I realized I was crying.

He had to help me out with the final chorus, but somehow we got through it. When all that was left was the piano outro, I dropped my microphone and, before I could think twice about it, stood on my tiptoes and gave him a big hug. “Chester’s dead,” I whispered. “He died.”

“I know,” Chase said, holding me tight.

“I’m sorry,” I said into his ear. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” he said.

Whew. I was right about that Britney Spears conservatorship shit. Just saying.

I linked to it before, but if you’re in the mood to put on a full festival performance in the background, just as a way to remember Chester, here’s that 2011 one I referenced. “Rolling in the Deep” starts around 1:08:45.

And if you want to know my favorite lyric from “In the End,” it’s (of course) I designed this rhyme to explain in due time . . . I use that one in my daily life more often than you might think. I love the idea of designing a rhyme. Much less doing it to explain something, much less doing it to explain something in due time. Perfection.

Currently reading . . . I just finished What We Can Know by Ian McEwan on audio. It’s a rare book that I finished, and then started right back up again. I didn’t listen to the whole thing a second time, but I did want to go back to the beginning, because there’s so much context you get throughout the novel that you know the beginning will hit different once you have it. The gist of the book is that it’s a hundred years in the future, climate change has wrecked the planet, the world looks very different than it used to, and a scholar Thomas Metcalfe is obsessed with studying the “Second Immortal Dinner” from back in 2014, when this poet read aloud a corona dedicated to his wife that’s never been published or found in the years since. It’s an inventive take on a sci-fi/dystopian/climate change novel, because it makes you think about our present day differently (like how would someone from this future look back on us?) and in general asks questions about history and how things are remembered. I’m proud of myself because when my husband read this and was talking about it months ago, I was like “oh that’s some Ian McEwan shit” before he’d even named the author. I fucking knew it!!!! I’d recognize his Atonement ass anywhere!!!

watching . . . My family is still watching Malcolm in the Middle and there was a joke in the last episode that just about had me on the FLOOR. Reese is talking about this job he got slicing meat. He’s excited because his coworkers have already given him a cool nickname. “The old Ten Fingers wasn’t using it anymore!” he says, and I fucking DIED. I don’t know why that was so funny to me, but it was. That show.

listening to . . . Well now I’m listening to Linkin Park again. Obviously. But I’m also listening to the audiobook for JAWS because it’s this month’s book club pick over on the paid tier of my newsletter. It’s so different than I expected from the movie, but I’m really enjoying it!

visit my website, which is out of date but has a FAQ about Juliet, Naked

follow me on Instagram, where I’m trying to be more present but so far failing

buy In Every Possible Way, about a woman who hits her head, wakes up in Ireland, and gets shown around Ireland by a hot, gruff mechanic