No. 935 – Crawl Away

Performer: Tool

Songwriters: Maynard James Keenan, Adam Jones, Paul D’Amour, Danny Carey

Original Release: Undertow

Year: 1993

Definitive Version: None

It took a while, but because of the constant bombardment of Sober just before Beavis & Butthead, I finally decided to check out Tool just before I moved to Columbus. So I was listening to Undertow quite a bit when I moved into my new apartment.

It was my first real apartment that was all my own. I’ll talk more about the place specifically in the weeks and months ahead, but it was a two-bedroom townhouse that was part of a six-unit building in German Village, which is Columbus’ oldest neighborhood, located just south of downtown. As I think I’ve recounted, it was less than a 5-minute drive to work from there.

But when I got the apartment, it wasn’t quite ready. The owners wanted to repaint it and resurface the wood floor, so I lived at my Dad’s house for a week—with most of my stuff piled into the garage.

And the apartment was going to need a lot of work from me. I had my great-grandfather’s bed, a weensy TV, my stereo setup and a few other things—books mostly—and that was it. I was promised a few hand-me-down tables, but I’d have to round up everything else on my own.

I moved in on a Sunday and I distinctly remember how alive I felt that first night. I also recall how alive I felt the next morning when I looked outside and saw that someone had tossed a Mountain Dew bottle through the rear window of the Happy Honda. There was a big hole and glass pieces were scattered all over the back seat. Nothing was taken, so it was just some random buttwipe. My guess, looking back, was that my Michigan license plate fewer than 5 miles south of Saint Woody’s Place might have had a little something to do with it. As I would later say to much consternation of the Ohio State fans in my life, Columbus could be nothing more than just a glorified Norman or Tuscaloosa—a one-track college-football town.

Funny thing is, the vandalism worked out for me. I drove my car downtown to a glass shop—I had Monday off—and called Dad to see if he wanted to get together for lunch … and so I could get a ride back home. (What? Make the 1-mile hike home?) Dad was out, so Debbie came to get me, and the same offer applied. We went to Schmidt's, a legendary German place in—go figure—German Village, and it was there that we, unknowingly at the time, began to set the wheels in motion for our relationship. We set up two friends dates to see the Reds and go to Cedar Point.

Little did I know what a bottle through my car’s rear window would lead to.