1985: The Replacements, “Here Comes A Regular”

By Anthony Thomas Lombardi

There’s a point in “Here Comes a Regular” by the Replacements where Paul Westerberg asks pleadingly, am I the only one who feels ashamed? before adding, in a barely audible moan, or the pain? This has always been the most disarming moment of the song for me. While the Replacements were widely renowned for their off-handedness, this strikes the listener as an admission that Paul may not even be ready to spill. How do we disassociate shame from pain? Our sense of self from what we feel? Is it possible?

It’s been just over five years since I had my last drink or drug. During that time, I haven’t returned to “Regular” much. While in the throes of addiction — caught up in one bender or another, for some reason or another, because of some heartache or another — I would often sulk to its windswept desolation, licking my self-inflicted wounds, grasping for some way to turn the blame on someone—anyone—else for the state that I was in. I found a lot with which to commiserate with Paul about, or so I thought. Since then, the song — once highlighted on every sadsack mixtape I’d ever made — has been relegated to a heap of regret for me, a part of my past I’ve learned to be cognitively dissonant from. I wasn’t paying attention to the cognitive dissonance Paul was exhibiting in the song. Maybe I should have been.

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In the HBO show, The Wire, there’s a scene where D’Angelo Barksdale, serving a 20-year prison sentence, sits with a book club discussing the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, The Great Gatsby, read and discussed ad nauseam by high school students across the nation. D’Angelo suffers an almost painful lack of dissonance with his past:

…[T]he past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it; all this shit matters. … Like at the end of the book, you know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right, you can say you somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don’t matter that some fool say he different ‘cause the things that make you different is what you really do, what you really go through. Like, you know, all them books in his library — he frontin’ with all them books — but if you pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages have ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read near one of them. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ‘cause he wasn’t ready to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him.

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I made my living bartending for almost a decade — close to half of those years in recovery — and during that time, as you’d imagine, I made a lot of friends, a family you can say, while creating an enemy in myself. I remember I used to watch Cheers when I was a kid, and balk at the idea of anyone spending that much time at a bar. This shit is so unrealistic. Who the fuck spends their whole lives on a barstool? Years later, I found that not only was this not an embellishment, but that my skepticism was misdirected: the lack of loneliness being the real red herring. I’m not holding a sitcom to standards of realism, but finding my people in books, movies, music, and TV, as so many of us from unstable environments do, I found myself ill-prepared. Everybody wants to be special here / they call your name out loud and clear, Paul keens. What happens when the name your friends call out is constantly changing, ill-fitting, a sweatshirt covering a bruise?

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I grew up in housing projects, five of us in a two bedroom section 8 apartment — luxurious by the standards of the neighborhood — different family members cycling in and out, yoked by their own addictions. I couldn’t walk home without quite literally tripping over addicts and their perceived benefactors. It’s odd to me now that I could scoff at the lack of realism in a vice swallowing up so much time and so many resources. If I took one look out my window — or into the next room — I would see folx chained to their vices for more than the 14 hours that a bar permits. But I created a gulf between myself and my world; my reality and the world I created to survive that reality.

Westerberg waltzes around this kind of gulf in “Regular.” Throughout the song, he seems to be both chasing after and conceding to this ever elusive chimera of reconcilability. What I missed in the song while I was drinking — and what I’ve prevented myself from coming to terms with in it over the past half a decade — is that amendments with ourselves, with our pasts, aren’t impossible because our grief won’t allow us to commune with who we were, but that they become unreachable when we won’t allow ourselves to be cognizant of the lessons finally ready to be gleaned in who we’ve become.

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There’s a psychological theory called self-integration, whereby one detaches themselves from the world they know — their family, the environments that shaped them — to discover their true sense of self. This requires a certain dissociation. Prior to this phenomenon, people manufacture an identity, consciously or subconsciously, influenced by who they’re surrounded by, willfully or unwillfully.  Now that I’m no longer ceding an identity — based on what people feel about me, how they project themselves onto me — I’ve strengthened a core and developed a sense of self divorced from what — or who — was trying to kill me.

I’ve often felt, in a lapse of harsh but maybe necessary judgment, that my old drinking buddies — the folx who made the bar their home, as I once did — construct their entire identities around drinking. In retrospect, this is more an indictment of myself. It further reveals to me that these identities weren’t as hollow as I’d assumed, but rather were created to unfurl a distance between us. It was no matter that our barstools were often inches apart — what was between us stretched beyond ourselves, beyond the burnished, pockmarked wood in front of us. I can see now that this is a different kind of lonely, one that I didn’t discern in “Regular,” and so I shelved it. Pulling it down now, I can’t help but hear that bruised heart beating, loud enough to echo for miles and miles.

When Paul confesses, Sometimes I just ain’t in the mood to take my place in back with the loudmouths, it never occurred to me that, although this was something that bedeviled me often, it could be speaking to some deeper, more insidious grief within me.

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During the last few years of bartending, regulars of mine would ask me to do shots of water, soda, or ginger beer — to join them in a ritual without taking a drink. What they didn’t realize was that the memories conjured by this ritual could never truly be benign. The chasm between what that ritual means to them and what it represents to me was a microcosm of the growing rift between the person I was and the person I was slowly becoming — or beginning to welcome back.

In one particularly unguarded moment in “Regular,” Westerberg quietly seethes, All I know is I’m sick of everything that my money could buy, hitting the word sick like a barfly crashing an empty pint onto the stick. He follows this with, a fool will waste his life, God rest his guts, slightly softening the landing of guts, offering a tenderness to what we lose in our addictions, in ourselves, but long to return to. Blink and you’ll miss it.

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I used to romanticize the song’s loneliness. Drawn to lines like Even if you’re in the arms of someone’s baby, now / I’ll take a great big whiskey to ya anyway, I’d drink, enveloped in the creakiness of the tune, like a long cold wind blowing a bar door shut. It’s a loneliness I don’t recognize anymore. Which isn’t to say loneliness isn’t as pervasive as it ever was, but that it’s transformed — as does in the song.

First the glass, then the leaves that last, then comes the snow / Ain't much to rake anyway in the fall, Paul bleats at the song's conclusion. Consoled by the wounded synth-cello swelling behind him, there’s a strong case to be made for this denouement as “Regular”’s most strikingly desolate moment. But the piano interlude that ratifies his words — words that, we suspect, cannot hope to provide any real sense of closure — becomes in spite of, or maybe because of, Paul’s restraint, the song’s most affecting mea culpa. Sometimes, allowing our grief the space needed to tire itself out becomes a way in which to survive it.

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The loneliness I feel now isn’t as malignant as it once was, which isn’t to say there isn’t a dull, permeating ache to it. There is. But there are two kinds of pain in life: the pain of discipline and the pain of remorse. I’ve simply chosen the former. As many conflicting emotions as it summons, “Here Comes a Regular” has found its way back into my life during our current state of near terminal loneliness. Now, instead of disconnecting myself from what the song used to mean to me, I’ve been learning to accept the person it comforted, to allow that grief to give way to a new meaning. Listening to it now feels ceremonial, like I’m resurrecting a ritual, not unlike the shot of soda. The difference is, I’ve learned to brace myself for and maybe redefine that kind of reminiscence. I may even learn to love the mangled boy I tried so hard to drown. Even a mercy kill, after all, requires atonement.

Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Pushcart-nominated poet, organizer, and educator. He has previously served as Assistant Director for Polyphony Lit's Summer Scholars Program, and currently runs Word is Bond, a monthly reading series that benefits bail funds across the country, in conjunction with the Adroit Journal, where he also serves as a poetry reader and contributor. His work has appeared or will soon in Guernica, wildness, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, THRUSH, Passages North, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.