"By the Way" • Red Hot Chili Peppers (by Chris Scott)

When I get home from work, Red Hot Chili Peppers is blasting in our apartment. Specifically the song “By the Way.” Luke hears me shut the door over the music and rushes over to the CD player to turn it down.

“Sorry about that,” Luke says.

“All good. Man, I haven’t heard this song in years,” I say, bringing my backpack into my bedroom. I hear Luke chuckle in kind of an odd way and say, “Yeah.”

I dick around in my room for a bit before reemerging into our messy living room in our cramped apartment, and “By the Way” is still playing. It isn’t until it starts all over again that I realize Luke has it on repeat.

“You like this song?” I ask. The reason I say this: “By the Way” isn’t a cool song, and Red Hot Chili Peppers isn’t a cool band. And Luke only listens to exceedingly cool and obscure music, his tastes far more esoteric than mine. Usually when I get home CAN or NEU! or something like that is playing, but more often some band I’ve never heard of. This was probably the case when we were in college, too, but I didn’t know Luke terribly well then, our social circles only occasionally overlapping. The way we ended up living together is the way most things happen for guys in their early 20’s: by accident. Each of us being the only other person we knew moving to Chicago after graduation and needing a place to live very quickly and as cheap as possible.

I move over to the stereo to change the song, and Luke gestures at me and says “Hey, actually…”

“Yeah?”

“I know it’s weird, sorry. I kind of just want to listen to this song, if that’s okay.”

“Oh,” I back off. “Yeah, totally. My bad.”

We eat our dinners and drink beer and listen to “By the Way” another twenty times or so before I can’t really take anymore and retreat to my bedroom where my Discman and headphones are waiting for me.

The next day I get home from work and “By the Way” is still playing, and I realize this might be a situation. Something I know about Luke that I don’t think I’m supposed to know: He took a semester off in college and spent it at some kind of facility or institution or rehab or something. I find Luke at the fridge hunting for something.

“Hey dude,” I ask, tentatively. Men our age don’t really know how to talk to each other. “You doing okay?”

Luke gives up the search and gently closes the fridge behind him. He sighs and looks at the ceiling instead of my face. “Sorry, yeah. I can’t really explain it. Just something my body needs right now. This song.”

“That’s totally cool. It’s just not the kind of music you usually listen to,” I say. “Do you at least want to listen to some of their other stuff?”

“Do you want to listen to their other stuff?”

I think about this, realizing I’ve always kind of hated Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Not really, no.”

“I’d use headphones but headphones feel, like, claustrophobic or something…” he trails off.

I want to put my hand on his shoulder but I don’t. “It’s alright, man. I just wanted to check. I’m all in. ‘By the Way’ forever. Hell yeah.” Luke smiles at this, and it feels meaningful.

We listen to “By the Way” nonstop for a couple of weeks, and then one day out of the blue it passes. When I come home from work, Luke is listening to some experimental jazz thing. I have no idea what it is. But it’s not “By the Way.”

Luke still pops up on Facebook sometimes. He’s married, has a couple kids, lives in Colorado. His photos are always sunny and beautiful. He seems good. He seems happy.

My plane takes off, rushing me home for a family emergency. I didn’t have time to sync any music to my phone, but I do find one song that’s downloaded and it is, insanely, “By the Way.” I have no idea why. But I can’t handle a three hour flight in silence right now, so I put it on. And then again. And again. And again. Covering my face and breaking down in heaving sobs while it plays over and over, an echo delivering me somewhere.

Chris Scott's work has appeared in The New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs, Okay Donkey, HAD, hex, Milk Candy Review, scaffold, and elsewhere. I am a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. I can be found at https://www.chrisscottwrites.com/, @iamchrisscott.bsky.social on Bluesky, @iamchrisscott on Instagram.