Head Case by Cole Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

until everyone agreed.
    We hold community meetings once a week to decide on everything from the alcohol policy to how best to get rid of the rats in the shared kitchen. I write out a contract stating my academic intentions and how I plan to fulfill them—classes I plan to take on writing and theater, independent studies, special projects. My self-constructed degree is in “integrating writing and performance.” I contract to write and perform a solo theater piece as my thesis. Since I’m also in the University of Redlands Creative Writing Department, I’ll have to put together a poetry collection as well. Redlands is the host university. Johnston students are an independent entity, generally feared and loathed by the larger population of the university, but they are permitted to take the more traditional offerings of the larger university as they like.
    My contract goes to a committee of teachers, who meet with me to decide if it will pass. They make me add a science class, but otherwise I’m given the green light. Three years later, we will meet again. I receive written evaluations from each professor, and in turn I write a class evaluation for each of them. There is no structured math requirement.
    Redlands is home to a highly regarded music school, where I take so many music history courses that by the beginning of my junior year one of the professors pulls me aside to tell me that I’m already halfway to fulfilling a music minor. All that I’d have to do to finish it is sign up for music lessons; she suggests singing because it doesn’t require renting an instrument from the school. I’m a terrible singer, but I enjoy singing and I’d like to get better at it, so I sign up. I get along well with my voice teacher, an Austrian opera singer who only wears black. After my first private lesson with him, he says to me, “I sense that we share a certain aesthetic.”
    Despite singing “My Funny Valentine” over and over for several months, in the coed Johnston showers, in class, and in private voice lessons, I don’t improve much. Nevertheless, I rack up enough credits to earn the minor. This is a technicality, since Johnston doesn’t recognize minors, but it still feels like an accomplishment to me. My best friend, Matt, a natural musician, and I contract through Johnston and a Johnston-sympathizing music professor to make an album together. We call it Palm Fronds and Piano Wire. I don’t sing on it; I mainly talk and scream and bang on things.
    It’s difficult to let you between my headphones. Something here must remain mine. I don’t want to believe that what I can hear is the same as what you hear. I don’t want to know about anyone else needing music on such a carnal level. I need to believe that this is uniquely mine.
    In middle school I met a boy my age on the online message board service Prodigy; he sent me his tape of the Sonic Youth album Dirty after he got it on CD. Until then, I’d only heard my parents’ music—the Beatles, folk singers, jazz. At first, I didn’t know what that pealing sound was through my headphones; I just knew that I needed more of it. He told me that it’s called feedback; it’s what happens when you put a guitar close to an amp.
    Music is a basic staple. I need it to get up in the morning, to write, to navigate the world. It’s my main coping strategy because it helps me to move. Time collapses and with it any time-related anxiety, and my body is just a hanger for headphones and not a set of limbs to be negotiated through space. Music pushes me mercifully forward through what I need to accomplish.
    I don’t have an instinct to move my body in space in a beat, to dance, especially while navigating my body around other bodies. I can slow-dance with a partner because it’s not all that different from following someone else across a crowded intersection. However, my connection to