The Breeders: “Saints”

You probably had a game like The Hat Game when you were in eighth grade. The one rule of The Hat Game was: My girlfriend stole my hat a lot, and most of the time it would wind up in her bra, and then I would have to go get it. The hat in question was a winter hat (what Canadians might call a toque, I gather) with some trains on it, and being 1996, I considered it the height of alternafashion. (Especially after I saw a picture of Thurston Moore wearing something sort of similar.) As a result I got way defensive of the train hat and way, way butthurt whenever people yanked it off my head. On top of this, the girl who invented The Hat Game was liable to scratching and biting — not the male-gazey porny kind you can sell stereos with, but in that very specific “awkward-about-ones-own-body” way that resembles nothing so much as a cornered opossum. The “down the bra” gambit, rather than being a coy highway to third base, was, in actuality, a clever ruse designed to get me within a clawable range. The Hat Game was not very fun, I guess is what I’m saying.

A summer later, she and I broke it off — I maintained custody of the train hat — and I started dating a girl who liked soccer and Everclear and wasn’t so much into needless physical violence. One of the first weeks into this new relationship, we were lying in a hammock at a party, and this song came on, and I had a little bubble of accidental wisdom: “Wow, it is so much more fun to date somebody who isn’t constantly trying to draw blood from my face.”