LIQUID THERAPY

LIQUID THERAPY

Born to Booze

Ted Leo can’t drown his demons—they know how to swim

Kirk Podell

In all these adventures, I’ve never tackled the inevitable: hangovers.

Yes, Born to Booze might be a fun thing for you, the reader, to enjoy, but at what cost to me, your humble servant of fun? I awoke the Sunday of meeting our friend and yours, Ted Leo, with a crippling anxious feeling from activities the night before. I was also depleted and full of regret from a week in L.A. a few days before, catching up with old friends, going to every bar where everyone working knows your name like Cheers but add the dumpster lady from Mulholland Drive and you get my drift.

The end of the week and this interview had snuck up on me. My anxiety had gradually spiked more than ever after a few days of drinking in a row (I guess this is growing up). “I’m gonna stutter over questions,” I said to myself in the shower, getting ready to head to North Brooklyn to meet Ted. “You fuckin’ idiot. Why did you punish the bartender about Tunisian rap last night?” “Did you really offer that girl the Poison Idea shirt off your back?” Basically, I replayed every scenario over and over in my head from the past seven nights of debauchery and was getting ready to go out AGAIN to meet Mr. Leo. Tonight’s show was sold-out, as he was celebrating the 20th anniversary of his band the Pharmacists’ record Shake the Sheets.

The Pharmacists are just one of many of Ted’s bands started in D.C. in 1999 after the breakup of his band Chisel (no relation to the Oi! boys I babysat in the previous issue); he also did time in Citizens Arrest and toured with Aimee Mann in their band the Both. His roster and output are massive. I would describe it as “NPR tote bag punk,” something your mom would text you, “Hey I heard this band on All Things Considered, do you know Ted Leo?”

I’ve been in rooms with amazingly famous people. I had fucking Christmas dinner at David Arquette’s house, where Jennifer Aniston bumped into me getting champagne in the kitchen and went, “Oh hi, I’m Jennifer nice to meet you" LIKE I DIDN'T KNOW. What I’m trying to say (and brag about) is my threshold is high for situations where most would get nervous or starstruck, but for some reason this was different. I had texted Ted around 2 p.m. just to confirm a time to talk, and by five I was still left on read. “He hates me, he hates this idea,” I quipped aloud. I was fully prepared to get ghosted by Ted Leo.

We had a 6:15 meet time, so I was already on the way by then and had made up the whole scenario in my head: “I’ll go down there, he won’t text back. I’ll go to the venue, they’ll have never heard of me. I’ll get kicked out and told to never write again,” like a sad puppy. It was now 5:45, and I tucked into a bar close to the venue where my buddy was working to kill time, and yes, to get a tall cold drink to shake off the cobwebs.

Joey Snax met me and helped reassure me a bit: “You are too hard on yourself. Also, if we get ghosted by Leo, it would be kinda funny, you have to admit.” Snax is like Dude from The Big Lebowski mixed with a Xanax—I need him around for sanity. After a few drinks and some chitchat I had loosened up a bit, and at 6:12 my phone buzzed: “Hey man, go to the side door by the vans, you’re on the list." My heart jumped out of my chest! “Be right there!” I texted back immediately, and slammed whatever concoction was in front of me. I was almost skipping over with glee: I wasn’t a failure, I am just a nervous mess!

We made our way inside and upstairs, where we found Ted and the band. “Take a load off, I’m gonna make some tea,” he told me. My body had finally relaxed. The dude—hell, the entire band—is the ultimate chiller. The greenroom was so calm I was almost waiting for that generic Asian spa music to play over the speakers. I plopped down on the couch and realized I had maybe slept a total of eight hours in, like, two days. I sank farther into the big leather couch, where Ted and I started just shooting the shit like the patient intake at a new psychoanalyst’s office. He decided to give me a strange sleepy tale: “I was on tour with Aimee Mann years ago in Columbus, Ohio, and we decided to go out for a drink at my buddy’s bar Double Happiness. It was strange, even though school was in session, no holidays at all, the entire place had emptied out. It was a ghost town.”

I started to relax even more; the dude’s voice is very soothing.

“So we get to the bar, and it’s empty except for one dude, just sitting there. Finally the bartender comes out and we get our drinks and Aimee and I start catching up, talking about our families, etc.” I am now fully horizontal on said couch, Ted unloading about family, touring, me tackling my anxiety. We are getting more work done than any therapist has done in years for maybe both of us.

“My grandpa said maybe two words to me my whole life,” he said somberly. “On his deathbed he told me he was special black ops in World War II, like sneaking into enemy territory before even groundinvasion kinda stuff. I guess he waited till the end to tell any of us. We never got any corroboration so I couldn’t tell if he was losing it at the end or finally unloading his truth to us."

I did not see this interview going this way.

“So me and Aimee are talking about this, and the one guy in the bar in the empty ghost town of Columbus that night goes, ‘You talking about South Pacific black ops?’ Everything he said, down to firsthand accounts that my grandpa told us, lined up."

I can tell Ted telling me this was also a breakthrough for him. We should really be charging each other by the hour by now. “So this guy is telling us stories, things my grandpa said down to the detail, and then, in the middle of it, he face-plants totally forward and slams his head on the bar. We don’t know what to do, it’s already weird enough that he knew all of that; was this him unloading until death too? Did the CIA end his life for divulging info? I thought he died right there, then he shoots back up and goes, ‘Hey, sorry, man, I'm narcoleptic. Well, anyway...’ and proceeds to keep telling me stories my grandpa told me.”

Strangers can have this effect on anyone, I guess. Thirty minutes before all of this, Ted was a stranger to me, but in that little greenroom, the two of us unpacked enough to call each other pals. We can connect our anxieties to our truths and back again, making us all feel like we can relax a bit more in the world, knowing all things will come to be real in the end.

Maybe the Pharmacists aren’t just a clever name, because they sure prescribed just what I needed.