TRACK 8: SUNDAY MORNING (NO DOUBT, 1997)

from Hot Mic: What I Sang at Karaoke and the Men who Drove Me to Do It

Charles Jensen

An Aries baby, and I always loved the feeling of rebirth each new year brought. But my thirtieth birthday felt more like an expiration date. The milestone inspired a great deal of reflection on my twenties, a decade of upheaval, difficult relationships, family conflict, and money problems. But the decade shaped so much about the rest of my life. I started and completed my MFA and began publishing poetry chapbooks while tapping out my little poetry blog on the regular, and I found myself part of a rich online poetry community that nurtured me in the years after I completed my graduate degree. 

I flew to Austin in mid-March for a regular visit with my boyfriend Hunter. But it wasn’t really a regular visit. It was the anniversary of when we met on the dance floor at Oilcan Harry’s, a moment that sparked a complete overhaul of my life in the months that followed. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. It wasn’t a “dating” anniversary, as we’d only been seeing each other “for real” for about six months by then. But Hunter put together an amazing itinerary. The first night he took me to a play and a great dinner. The second night he took me to a fancy restaurant. When we walked in, the owner shook my head and said, “It’s nice to meet you, Charlie. I hear you’re getting good response to your book.” My chapbook Living Things, which won the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, had been released some weeks earlier. Those poems explored the aftermath of Torry’s suicide, a heavy and confusing spiderweb of grief that took months to escape. When the server brought our menus, they had “Congratulations, Charlie” printed across the top of them. At the end of the meal, they sent me home with one as a keepsake, signed by the chef and the owner.

The last day of my visit, Hunter and I went to brunch with the Ugly Stepsisters (as a friend of mine who knew a lot about their hijinks called Hunter’s besties D and J). The two of them argued frequently, and this morning was no different. When it was clear they thought Hunter and I were spending the day with them, I pulled him aside and asked if we could spend this last day on our own. And that was how we spent most of the night cuddling on his couch watching Lost. 

It was the perfect visit—beyond perfect, really. I felt loved and supported and celebrated in ways no one had done for me in the past. 

In two weeks, I’d turn thirty, and the love I thought could last a lifetime would snuff out as fast as a candle in a hurricane.

The sustained chord that opens No Doubt’s “Sunday Morning” is a holdover from “Sixteen,” the previous track on Tragic Kingdom. It serves as a palette cleanser that washes away the memory of that angrier track. A snare line fades in, like horses galloping toward us from a great distance.  A nervous bass line frets as it rises and falls until it crests with a syncopated flourish. The lead guitar gives two notes before the thumping rhythm of an organ carries us deep into the song. The instrumentation speaks directly to No Doubt’s ska influences. Stefani wails over an instrumentation that evokes a tipsy version of Blondie’s “The Tide Is High.” These first lines tell us a lot about where she’s coming from. Whatever happened in the relationship has forced her to change, become a different version of herself, one—we assume—who sees herself and this relationship differently. 

The drums pull up and the guitars signal a shift in the song. Now all the instruments hit on the same beat, each beat of the measure in an unrelenting assault. Whatever has shifted in the relationship has been an equal and opposite reaction. The speaker’s love regards her differently. Less lovingly, we intuit, and the moment has caused her to revise everything she thought she knew about him. She doesn’t know him, and maybe never did.

I suffered a rare bout of insomnia once I got back to Phoenix, followed by a day-long headache that morphed into a migraine before it released me. I called Hunter on Thursday to let him know I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t keep our phone date that evening—the only interaction we had that whole week, following a string of unanswered text messages and voicemails I’d left for him. I drafted a semi-confrontational email to invite a dialogue about what was going on between us, but I hesitated before sending it. Finally, on Friday I shot him a simple text message: “We need to talk.” The only four words I could say to prompt a reply from him—“I agree.”

He called Saturday afternoon for what I thought would be the clearing of the air. “Hey,” he said, his voice brusque with urgency, but with a lightness that belied the seriousness of the call. “Would you be willing to be a reference for me on a car loan?”

I sat up on the couch in disbelief. “What?”

“I’m at the Jaguar dealer and I think I’m going to get one.”

Hunter already drove a Mercedes. A Jaguar? I was stunned. “Um, sure.”

“Great. I’ll call you later,” he said, and hung up.

Reader, he didn’t.

I trudged through my week. My coworker quit suddenly to take another position on campus, which meant I was covering a good portion of her duties while I waited for the incoming director to be named so that I could get a new hire approved. The busiest parts of the academic year were behind me, but between the increase in workload, homework for a part-time graduate program in nonprofit management, and the side teaching gig I was still doing, I had a lot going on. On Wednesday I went to a poetry reading my friend and former classmate Sarah Vap gave in town. I walked my dog Arden around the complex when I got home. My neighbor Jack from the building across from me was drinking on his patio with his married neighbors Melissa and Tim. He called me over.

He shook his glass as I approached the edge of his patio. “Cocktail?”

Jack was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties—clearly the autumn of his life. It was hard to tell with precision between the mixture of skin damage from tanning and the obvious Botox or fillers keeping his skin taut across his cheekbones and forehead. He had a lean build, and his eyes sparkled deviously when he talked. Since I moved in, we’d had a few conversations. I felt they were flirtatious, so I tried to strike a balance between being a cordial neighbor and not sticking around long enough for the overt flirtation to begin. When Jack was drinking, this window of time shrunk. Melissa and Tim conspicuously excused themselves to go freshen their beverages, leaving Jack and me to talk alone.

“How’s the baby girl?” he asked, looking down at Arden. She plopped her butt onto the walk and panted in response. Jack had his own dog, a Bichon Frisé named Olivia whose whole body wriggled when she walked. Arden wasn’t good with other dogs, so we kept them separated when I visited. I wasn’t feeling particularly social—I was tired from my responsibilities and the stress of Hunter’s distance made me want to withdraw into my apartment and lick my wounds.

“I think she resents how much I’m gone.” Arden was a great companion in the months after my break-up with Gregg the year before—she gave my life structure and purpose on the days when I otherwise might not have gotten out of bed. 

Jack pursed his lips. “Oh, she loves you.” He squared his shoulders to me. “Now, how about that drink?”

I laughed. Jack had a vibrancy about him fueled by a mixture of his queeniness and the kind of laissez-faire attitude earned through a life of living on the margins. He’d grown up during the years when being gay was most difficult—when police might arrest you if you were in the wrong bar, after the rise of HIV/AIDS and the dying off of the people his own age. He’d clocked me as queer the first time he saw me, and his powers of perception never wavered. I knew I radiated a soft misery. I could feel it evaporate out of me with each breath I took, despite every effort I made to seem like my normal carefree self. I waved away his offer of a beverage. I had to wake up early to hit the gym and didn’t want to risk starting the day with a hangover. 

I made small talk for a few minutes while Arden waited patiently next to me. When I sensed an appropriate amount of social effort had been made, I tried to excuse myself to feed Arden and wallow in my empty life. Jack narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Just busy.” That was my constant refrain to people—extolling how busy I was with external things like work, but the truth was I was busy being miserable.

“You’re lying to me, but I’m going to let it slide.” Jack’s eyes twinkled. He reached his hand over the patio wall and touched my forearm gently. “You are by far the most attractive friend I’ve ever had,” he said. 

I blushed at the sudden compliment and stammered out some syllables in response. I wanted to tell Jack it didn’t matter how attractive I was, not in the long run, when I felt like I was falling apart inside, feeling something I loved so dearly drift away while I watched it grow smaller and smaller in the distance. I wanted to tell him that in a few hours, my clock would chime nine times and I’d wait like an idiot for the phone to ring for my regular phone date with Hunter, even as I was convinced in my bones he wasn’t going to call. 

Jack insisted. “You are,” he said again. I appreciated what he was trying to do, but I wasn’t able to accept it. And even if I did, I then had to reconcile the fact that I may only have been attractive on the outside, but that whatever I had inside me wasn’t enough to keep the man I loved engaged.

I made excuses about dinner time and told Jack thank you, that I hoped he had a good night. Arden trotted beside me, clearly thrilled she’d be able to bury her snout in a dish full of kibble mere moments from now. As my shoes scuffed the pavement, I heard Jack quietly—but pointedly—mutter, “Fucker,” but whether this was in reference to me or in spite of me, I couldn’t be sure.

The speaker of “Sunday Morning” has one main thesis: you’ve changed. She suggests her paramour’s transition is physical, but as listeners, we know it’s emotional. The way a person’s thoughts and mood are visible in their facial expression, their posture, their walk, their energy level. Negative feelings really gum up the work of our bodies. Not only has the beloved changed in appearance, she supposes, he may be the opposite of who he used to be. Our mirror images are not perfect reflections of ourselves—they’re backwards. The world inside the mirror is also backwards. She may be alluding to Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice arrives in the land of un-birthdays and meaningless rules by way of a mirror.

The bridge shifts to gratitude both sincere and ironic. The beloved’s actions have revealed his true nature, forcing him to stand in the light and be fully seen. She never thought his true self would be revealed to anyone other than her, but it has happened. The shift in his perception, along with being cut off from her love, has left him withered. 

After his most recent missed call, Hunter and I started an email exchange that would elapse over the next several days. The first letter said he loved me very much and didn’t want to hurt me. I responded by saying I understood, and that I was open to amending things between us to accommodate what he was feeling—giving him more time, more space, breaking up, or a secret fourth thing I hadn’t thought of. The next day he took down all of the photos on his MySpace profile, though it still said he was “in a relationship.” At this point, MySpace was my best barometer of both what he was feeling and whether or not we were still in a committed dating situation. 

And then, the next day, another email: I love you and want to be the one for you but I think I am in a point in my life that I can’t be the right one for you at this time. The irony of everything struck me in that moment. I made the choice that connected Hunter and me way back that first night in the bar, but it was Hunter who reached out to me all those months later, Hunter who told me in that phone call he loved me and wanted to be with me. It was Hunter who initiated and pushed all of this forward, and now it was Hunter who was self-selecting out of the situation he’d built. 

I knew it was over. But I held onto hope with a vise grip. I thought if I just said the right thing, made the right space for him, stepped back, or maybe stepped toward him—I was convinced there was a choreography I just hadn’t discovered that could keep us together. After a few days of silence, another email: I am going to need time, Charlie. To understand why I am unable to be everything for and to you. You have brought so much to my life that I don’t think I can ever give back to you what you have given to me. You are a real person and you are real with how you feel and I love that about you. Yes I do love you - very very much. I hope that you don’t feel that I have ever led you on or made you feel that you were used. I can only offer my sincere apology and ask for forgiveness from you. I think that the sexual attraction between us is more one sided. I am attracted to you but I feel that for some reason that it isn’t enough for me. And you can’t compensate for both of us. You are very hot and you are amazing, but deep down in me I guess that we are not meant to be a "sexual couple". And like you said - maybe it also has something to do with my plate being full, miss you and know in my heart that I will never stop loving you. You are a part of me and my thoughts and I never want to ever not be at a minimum friends.

I pushed my chair back from the computer, swatting at the breath he’d just yanked from my lungs.

James and Aaron took me out for drinks. Over the course of the night, I explained what had been going on with Hunter and how devastated I was about it all. They exchanged an awkward look. “I don’t know if we should tell you this,” James said.

I leaned forward. “You can’t say something like that and then withhold it. You know my mind’s going to go wild trying to imagine what it was.” In fact, my mind had already broken free of its reins. and galloped away at full speed. Hunter cheated on me and they caught him. They overheard him having a conversation with someone else. They saw him flirting with someone else when he was here. They were all variations of betrayal, because that was all I could reasonably except from Hunter at this point.

“He reached out to us about your birthday,” Aaron said. Hunter had sent them a message through MySpace to ask for their help coordinating a surprise. Hunter would fly out to Phoenix on my birthday and surprise me at my office dressed like a UPS guy making a delivery. Hunter asked if James and Aaron could pick him up at the airport and drive him to where I was. 

My jaw fell open. I didn’t think the knife could go any deeper. But even though Hunter had told me things were basically over, here he was, finding an entirely new way of wrecking me without even lifting a finger.

I drafted a response to Hunter’s email after I’d had time to process. It was unfiltered, assertive, and unrepentant. I revised it over a few days, returning to what he’d written me, each time finding new angles of treachery and duplicity in his messages. I read Hunter’s email to my mom. “I understand why you’re confused,” she agreed. My dad and brother both called later to say how sorry they were about what was going on, that everyone in the family loved Hunter and were sad to see him go. A few days after that, James picked me up and took me to dinner. I kept going over and over everything Hunter told me, how he’d acted with me, how confusing it all was. And how I must have done something wrong because everything had been going so well right up until it wasn’t. James put a hand on mine across the table. “Charlie, this isn’t your fault.”

The words rattled me and shook me awake. In all the spiraling, it was the one thing I hadn’t considered. I didn’t immediately believe it, but James pointed out a few compelling points of reality. I sat back in our booth, feeling myself sink into the vinyl. “I just don’t know how to get over it all.”

“You won’t get over it,” James said. I nodded, feeling sure I’d carry this grief around until I died. “But you’ll get through it,” he finished. Somehow—for whatever reason—I knew James was right.

Hunter called me a couple times the next week, calls that elapsed over two or three hours. Long, deep conversations about our feelings, about how hard he’d try to make it work with me because our love was worth fighting for. One night he missed a phone date he’d arranged, so I called him on it by text, as he encouraged me to do. The next day he revealed the Ugly Stepsisters got into a fight when they were all out together, and that J showed up at Hunter’s at 4 in the morning, soaking wet, pounding at his door. D, too drunk to drive, had J take the wheel but when J couldn’t find the windshield wipers on D’s car, D snapped and demanded to drive. When they got out to switch seats, D punched J in the face, then drove off and left him standing there by the side of the road. When Hunter met up with them for brunch later that morning, they acted like nothing had happened. 

My thirtieth birthday came and went. My family threw a party for me, but I felt like I was only half there. That weekend I planned a great time out with my friends. Dinner at my favorite Phoenix restaurant, followed by karaoke at Burger Betty’s and after hours dancing at Charlie’s. I needed it more than ever by then, after all the confusion of the last month, being the business end of Hunter’s yo-yo. 

But Hunter had one more card to play, and he waited until that night, two days after my birthday, to play it. He told me again he felt like he couldn’t give me what I needed. But this time, instead of trying to convince him otherwise, or accommodate him in some other way that sacrificed what I wanted and needed, I said, “You’re right.” I told him I’d need time away from him to heal, if we were ever going to be “friends”—whatever that meant to two people who lived a thousand miles apart. 

I felt whatever I’d been holding on to these past weeks—the emotional steering wheel I’d white-knuckled since Hunter’s breakdown began—I let it go. There was relief, and there was grief. I could feel the loss inside my body as though a vital organ had been removed.

The night of my birthday party, I drank everything. I wailed through song after song at karaoke, dedicating “Sunday Morning” and “Tainted Love” to “my ex-boyfriend who dumped me two days before my birthday.” I was grieving out loud, in public, through the sensory swamp of inebriation—and while I knew in the moment I was being that guy, I also couldn’t stop myself. Everyone else was there to celebrate my birthday. I threw myself a final hurrah the night before the end of the world. All I wanted was to forget. At Charlie’s, I danced while my friends peeled off from the party one by one, until only Cindi and I remained. I spotted a cute guy on the dance floor, his face swiped by the roving lights in bursts and flashes. This was so similar to the moment I met Hunter a year before—drunk, on a dance floor, thirsting. I danced over to him and introduced himself. He and I were both so drunk we leaned against each other for support while we danced. And when I asked him to come home from me, he politely declined, but gave me his number for a proper date. I passed out in my own bed that night, alone, my phone flipped open to our text messages.

That man—Brody—would go on to be my most enduring partnership, and we’d spend the next seven years weathering the most challenging events of our lives together. And even when that ended, we remained best friends. 

About three months into dating Brody, Hunter called out of the blue. “I want to be with you,” he said. “I love you. I miss you.”

I thought about the time I’d spent with Hunter since that fateful night at Oil Can Harry’s. The journey I’d gone on to rebuild my life into one I enjoyed, in which I loved and was loved. I thought about the hearts I’d broken along the way—Gregg, my own. If this happened even just weeks earlier, I might have bent to Hunter’s will. But I couldn’t now. I was sure Hunter would keep me on this carousel of want for as long as he could. I didn’t think it was malicious. I think Hunter wanted to love me. I think he wanted to let himself be loved. He just—for whatever reason—never learned how. I told Hunter I couldn’t do it all again. That I hoped he would find what he was looking for.

The last chorus of “Sunday Morning” includes an additional line that recontextualizes and clarifies the entire situation of the song. After noting how he came in with the breeze and seems to have changed, she notes her former beloved continues to pursue her only because she’s moved on. Now it seems he realizes his mistake—getting out of the relationship had the unintended effect of both cutting off his emotional resources and revealing to others just exactly who he really is. That he thinks the relationship could be prepared after all he’s done is the real gag of it all. She sees him for the first time without all his artifice, manipulation, sweet talking. She sees now his bad behavior. And she’s not available to sustain him anymore. She must repair her own wounds and sustain herself. He’s on his own.

There are three credited songwriters on this track—Gwen Stefani, No Doubt’s primary lyricist; Eric Stefani, her brother and the band’s former primary composer; and Tony Kanal, the band’s bassist and co-writer. Kanal’s credited on several Tragic Kingdom tracks, including the most damning of himself. And that might be Stefani’s sweetest revenge.