How Cigarettes Killed My Youth, and The Killers Made Sure It Was Dead

We have been talking about how old we are getting since we were 16. Every birthday since has been troubling, urgent, a mad attempt to do something fun and smart and cool enough to last us the rest of our lives and at least define the fleeting age and the night it ended. For the last few years, every one of my friends has ended every one of their birthday parties crying. And we laugh in the tear stained face of the birthday girl, because we have been turning 30, 40, 50, since we were teenagers.

At this point, the urgency is out of control. My youth is gone. It ended about a year and a half ago, and I am trying to wrap up the mourning and I was trying to act appropriately on the night of my 23rd birthday. We stayed in. We had a party with food but somehow ended up at the blessed place of my youth — the Dance Cave, full of 19-year-olds, full of less than a year of my life that was vulnerable and youthfully confidant, depressed and tired, heartbroken.

The Dance Cave lets students in for free and consequently it sears itself into the young minds and memories of everyone who goes to school in Toronto. It is a strange institution. Ask anyone who used to go there and they will tell you with near disdain that it is a joke and you have to go with a huge crowd of people and you have to get wasted.

But it never felt like a joke for us. The place was perfect when I was 20. It was sparse most of the night, with people who wanted only to dance. It was smoky amid rumors that Toronto was about to pass a law prohibiting indoor cigarettes. I had just been ruined by love, the kind agitated by a naivety so sweet you want to smack it in the face. The newness of University and the city had become old and frustrating, and there was no way I was in a position to throw myself into my studies. I moved into a new apartment with high white walls in little Portugal, where my friend Dar and I would stay up all night objectifying our hearts and eating bocconcini, skipping our Shakespeare class the next day because we were tired and depressed. We would go out dancing on Friday and Saturday nights, often just the two of us with little money for alcohol, and it meant more than a weekly divergence or an appearance or a typical use of a 20-year-old’s time. Everything in our lives would culminate in one unmerciful moment when the DJ, weekly and without fail, would end the night with “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to a drunken, thinned-out crowd on an empty floor under the dark ceiling and stupid disco ball. Ian Curtis’s perpetually breaking voice mirrored our painfully typical lovesick angst.

Decades after its death, Joy Division would so define my young adulthood. Of course, so would the Cure and the Smiths, the Stone Roses and New Order. I wasn’t sure if they had remained a fixture on the dance floor for two decades or had made a comeback, just in time for my friends and I to turn 19 and move downtown. And I knew that my obsessive love for all of these bands was somehow tied to my early childhood. I pictured myself in 1984, diapered and clean, quiet on my mother’s immaculate floor and my brother flipping through channels, the two of us unwittingly catching a glimpse of Robert Smith for a few dark and wonderful seconds. I pictured every two-year-old in 1984 experiencing an international variation of this glimpse and then, 17 years later, wondering why the Cure had such a confusing and irresistible affect on their psyche. And the Smiths and Joy Division and New Order — every strange, sometimes sort of peripheral band from the 1980s that made a strange, sort of peripheral comeback when my generation was suddenly allowed to legally drink and dance in public.

The music was so serious, so important to us. Most of it was ecstatic, tinged with difficulty like we were. We prided ourselves because we knew that the Cure was immeasurably more thrilled than their fans, because the lyric “it’s such a gorgeous sight to see you eat in the middle of the night” is the lyric of an eternally thrilled soul, and we would scream that line at one another in front of everyone. To this day I cannot reconcile the joy of “Just Like Heaven” with the dark, hysterical voice that sings it. I cannot explain how it felt, dancing to New Order after last call, everyone else heading out the door, the two, three, four of us left with the reality of a band built on the death of a friend, that was there when it all happened, that was making us so terribly happy.

Classes were comparably tedious. To get through the week I made a mix tape of everything we loved to dance to and listened to it on the way home from my night classes all winter. The most loved songs would conjure images of 20 years later, honestly bring tears to my eyes and leave me with the conviction that when life was different, I would not have the strength to listen to “I Am the Resurrection” or “Panic.” I told Dar that I imagined one of us getting married, and the DJ at the wedding playing “Disco 2000”, the bride practically collapsing under the weight of unbearable memory. In this sense, the music was tied to my future as well. And we knew it. All along we knew that something important was happening, something very definite and memorable, and this allowed us to gracefully escape the arduous, typical trudge of apathetic young adulthood, despite our boredom, our exhaustion. And all along we knew that youth for us would not last even the normal amount of time, and within the year everything was waning.

The place changed so gradually we barely noticed, and I’m glad. It softened the blow. The first indication that something was up was the Killers’ rise to fame. We thought they were silly. We didn’t understand them or their fans. The definite end was the moment the Dance Cave DJ preceded “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with “Mr. Brightside.” We were 22 by then and both songs were troubling, undancable. But the kids went wild for each. I suspected their infant 1984 glimpse probably happened circa 1991 and aged right at that moment, shrouded in the literal last cloud of indoor smoke Toronto will ever experience — the smoking ban coincided with my sudden maturity. Masses of cigarettes crowded the sidewalk outside the Dance Cave, accompanying the line up we now had to stand in to enter. Two years earlier Dar and I used to wander in after midnight with no problem.

By my 23rd birthday “Mr. Brightside” had reached monumental importance, representing the temporal limbo its appearance had thrust us all into. The Killers took the place of Joy Division at the end of the urgent night, the end of my 23rd year. We all hugged and screamed the words the same way we always had, and sort of laughed at how serious the music was for us. But there was no dark, hysterical voice, and there were no cigarettes, cool and rebellious. The air was smokefree, healthy and responsible, and the kids didn’t leave after last call but stayed crowded on the dance floor until they were forced out.

The Dance Cave is one manic year of our lives, a collective memory stagnant on city streets and in city clubs, layered with each quick generation. We love the place, but think of it for only a second when our younger co-workers speak of it, infatuated and hung over. The sight of it is so loaded now, loaded with memories and pain and music and a youthful energy and intensity that surely would have ruined me if maintained. I am only almost 24, but the place makes me feel old, madly sober and out of touch. And I walk past it, through the cloud of outdoor, sidewalk smoke and the cigarettes smell like my youth and the blessed Killers sound like my youth and I am crushed by 20, all of my friends in 1984, Joy Division, and an imminent “Disco 2000” on my wedding day.