The Growlers

 

Around the time Lehman falls, the Director of the University Writing Program at UCR calls a meeting to let ten lecturers on one-year contracts know there won’t be ten of us next year.  After the news we’re being kicked back down the ladder, I pick up some classes in Sun City, where the pay is half plus four-dollars—only, instead of getting laid off, for the next 52 weeks, I work 3 jobs 80 hours a week. 

Because time is all that matters to me when Christmas break rolls around, I don’t schedule a flight to Washington or make holiday plans.  When Lola flies to her dad’s in Seattle and the roommate drives to his mom’s, I don’t tell anyone I’m home alone for three weeks—until tonight, a Wednesday two days before New Year’s Eve, when Isaac calls to tell me he has to reserve a room for two nights to get tickets for the Raveonettes New Year’s Eve show at the Standard. 

“That’s rude,” I say. 

“Who cares?” 

“I care.  It’s greedy.” 

But Isaac wants to go ahead with it, and I want to see the Growlers at the Echo on Friday anyway. 

On Tuesday, still sequestered in an empty Riverside rental the night before I answer my phone, I’m sprawled out on bad carpet before my Mac, searching LA venues for live music when I come across this Spanish-sounding cowboy surf rock playing in San Diego at 10.  It’s 8:45.  I think about driving there, but it would mean not drinking for another hour and half or two by the time I get a room, find the venue, and manage to get a ticket to the show.  This does not seem worth it.  This seems desperate.  I open a beer instead and lay on the couch, snapping Hipstamatic photos of my Converse. 

In Bellingham, it was easy to get some.  You stepped out of the apartment, walked down two stairwells, and made a left to enter the Up & Up or 3-B or you kept walking and made your way to the Ranch Room inside the Horseshoe, ordered a gin and tonic, and sat back to listen to Tom Waits on the jukebox and wait for the one that wanted you to come.  That, or you turned over in bed and woke Arlan. 

I listen to the Growlers for awhile, thinking about the lead singer’s smirky expression.  The songs sound alike, but the sound has power somehow, smug power.  Nielson reminds me of Johnny Depp, but without the script, or with a script he was writing himself with no help from Hollywood producers or the stacks of cash banks reserve for them.  I’m undecided about Nielson as I listen, trying to discern whether he uses his smugness for good or evil. 

In 2001, when I meet Isaac, who’s just come from Kenya and Uganda following his parents who sought political asylum from Idi Amin, he’s still a skinny African beating rednecks at pool in the bar below his apartment, living on red vines and a beer someone, usually a bartender, finagles him.

The day we’re supposed to meet for lunch the first time, years before either of us has cell phones, I’m two hours late.  He’s still there.  I sit down and apologize, touched by the softness of his voice, the way he raises his hand to his head to twist a piece of hair as he listens to me talk about Thomas Sankara, the West African president who quoted Marx and recommended women not marry so long as marriage continued to exploit them—all this in the 1980s, when Reagan ate coconut cake at the White House, his war on drugs somehow missing the coke stash of his Vice President’s son. 

A decade later, Isaac was a software engineer for Geodelic, the start-up trying to beat Groupon to the punch.  He was the lucky one:  his mom, dad, sisters—they were all thinking about going back. 

When his dad one day stopped paying the rent on an Inglewood house where his mom and three of his sisters lived, Isaac started paying it.  Then a sister lost her job and couldn’t make her car payment, so he took that over, too, which is how we drive to the Echo on Thursday in a BMW.  

 The night air stings.  “It’s freezing fucking cold outside,” I say.  As I say it, I see a body in an alley doorway and gasp. 

Then I see it’s not a body, but a person lying on the concrete floor, legs drawn up like a fetus. 

“It’s freezing, Isaac.  Should we offer to let him sleep in your car?” 

“I don’t know.  What do you think?” 

I try to play the scene out in my head.  We offer the guy the backseat, then what?  Ask him to get out when we’re ready to go?  I think of my alcoholic friend, Tim.  How angry is this guy?  Our laptops are in the car. 

“Let’s see if there’s a second-hand store.  We can get him a jacket or something.” 

When we turn the corner, I see one. 

We rifle through coat racks, trying to find the warmest one.  I choose an army-colored parka lined with down and pick up a sock hat from a rack near the register, where a handmade sign taped to the counter reads like a challenge: No Discounts.  No Exceptions.  Still, when I tell the cashier the jacket is for a homeless guy in the alley, he gives me 10 percent off.

We walk back to the alleyway and find him still lying there, eyes shut.  If he’s drunk or high and I startle him, I might get punched.  So I work my way up to it.  “Hi,” I say.  “We got you a jacket.  Do you want it?” 

He doesn’t answer or open his eyes, like he’s too cold to sit up and put the jacket on. 

“I’m going to lay the jacket over you,” I tell him.  “Then I’m going to take off your baseball cap, put on a warmer hat, and then put your cap back on, okay?”  I kneel next to him and drape the jacket over his body.  Then I take the cap off his head and pull the hat over it. 

Up close, his face is devastating, his features drawn into the expression of suffering, like soundless weeping.  I feel like I’ve kneeled over a body wasted by gunfire, struck by an image of the two of us alone in a Middle Eastern desert, his face cradled in my hands, like I’ve come across a soldier in the end times—only he’s not a soldier.  He’s innocent.  I must look strong kneeling beside him, like he’s going to be okay now, but all I have is my anger.  The contrast is sharp—my anger, his innocence.  A minute later, Isaac will call it humility. 

I let my hands linger before I pull them away.  I put the baseball cap over the hat and adjust the coat.  Then I stand up and we walk away. 

I am walking away from the first time I’ve loved since I can remember, like the first pure emotion I’ve had in months or years, every minute more conscious of the hole where love should be, of the shallow emotional landscape of whole countries. 

“Do you know what you just did?” 

“Don’t,” I say. “I should have touched him longer.  I didn’t want to—impose.  He was so innocent.  I looked in his face and I saw his innocence.” 

“He was humble.” 

I look at Isaac and nod, it suddenly occurring to me his own humility is more disciplined than accidental, that humility is something one works towards, that I almost went along without even trying to be the one good thing. 

We eat at the pizza place next door to the Echo.  I pull a straw wrapper into pieces, wad the pieces up, and roll the paper in the condensation from my glass. 

When I thought the man in the doorway was a body, my reaction is the one Freud describes as the uncanny—that thing we recognize and then fight to the death to feign we don’t recognize, like an arm thrown up to keep something close at bay.  Then, when I realize it’s not a body, but a man out in the cold, I’m disgusted all over again. 

 “Why are people not rioting?”

“I don’t know.”  He takes a bite of his salad, his skin smooth and dark cherry.  “Where do you think he was from?” 

“I don’t know. Where do you think?”

“I think Cambodia.  Because otherwise what makes it worth it, you know?  Anywhere else, you could just go back.” 

In line to buy tickets an hour before the doors open, we hear a guy announce the show is at capacity, but Isaac manages to get two anyway. 

We go to the wine bar across the street and sit at stools facing the bar mirror.  He asks me about the conference papers I’m supposed to deliver at the MLA in eleven days, one for a panel called “The Lives of Part-Time Faculty.” 

“Fine,” I shrug.  “I’m just saying what happened.” 

“You’re too good for that job.” 

“Dogs are too good for that job.” 

He thinks I should write.  I don’t say I have no faith in that either.  I nod.  It’s New Year’s.  “I want to go talk to these guys after the show tonight, okay?”

“What guys?” 

“The band.”  

“Yeah?” 

“Yes.” 

“Ok.” 

Throughout dinner and drinks, I keep thinking about him—why we don’t put him in the car and drive him to my house, why we leave him there to freeze.  It seems like a risk we don’t think about, as if we are aware only that our legs are pegs on a track under someone else’s control. 

A week earlier, as I’m driving Lola to the airport during the rains, when the brakes and steering go out on the freeway and we hit the meridian wall, careening across five lanes of traffic to the shoulder, I notice it then, too. 

I’d asked Jen to take over a winter intersession class for me so I could manage my schedule at the other two schools, but now that I needed the car I’d loaned her back, she didn’t want the class.  Two days before Christmas, we drafted another letter to the department chair at Moreno Valley College and waited to be pinballed around. 

At 9:30, we make our way back to the Echo, order drinks, and stand before the stage.  Before I finish my beer and go outside to smoke, I take some pictures of the band, and Nielsen’s face shows up pink, like a Warhol print, in all of them. 

When I try to get back in, the bouncer points at a sign that reads No Ins and Outs, like “Ins and Outs” is a thing, like Idiocracy, like You know, ins and outs, Scro.  My girlfriend was a tard, now she’s a pilot. 

“What’s this for then?” I ask, pointing at the wristband.

“Alcohol.” 

“We just spent fifty bucks on fifteen-dollar tickets.” 

“Too bad.” 

“I drove up from Riverside to see this show.” 

“Not my problem you can’t read,” he says. 

The third time he says it, I can’t help myself.  “I teach College English, which means I teach people how to read, so when you suggest I can’t read, I don’t feel like I’m illiterate, I feel like you’re a tool.” 

“You need to leave.” 

“Then you need to give us our money back.” 

“That’s not gonna happen.” 

“Then I’m not leaving.” 

It goes back and forth like that until a woman stumbles outside clutching her stomach, and I try to push past him before he puts himself in front of me, Isaac appearing at the door.  He tries to smooth things over, but neither of us will budge.

For a minute, the bouncer puts his hands up like he’s going to lay them on me. 

I look at him, curious but daring him, too. 

“You just see a big fat black guy.” 

“You’re just telling everyone what you’re insecure about.” 

He links a rope through some poles to forge a divider between us.  When I don’t move, he takes a phone out of his pocket and dials the cops.

I think he’s bluffing until I hear him say, “It’s a woman” and back off to sit on the curb and wait. 

“What are you doing?” Isaac says, “Let’s go.” 

“I want to tell the cops they took our money.” 

“Kathryn.  They don’t care.  Let’s just go.” 

“It’s wrong, Isaac.” 

“I know. 

Then I am sobbing on a Los Angeles street curb, waiting to tell some cops why a business that takes your money should provide a service, and why it’s their job to see to that, how important it is understand what crime is, real crime not prime time TV, how the transfer of money is a record of criminality, how intangible injustice because it is a relationship, not a thing, how you can’t get a handle on it like you think you can, the way you think you can make a fist around time but you can’t, time is thin air—but they don’t come. 

Isaac sits next to me on the curb.  I let him pull me up and walk me to the car, his arm around my waist.  When I look for the man in the doorway, he’s gone.  I’m overcome with guilt and the fear we let him die.  Did an ambulance come for his dead body?  Did he walk away?  Did a better person lead him into her home? 

On the drive back, suddenly ashamed of the space I take up in Isaac’s car, of making someone listen to that, I rub my eyes dry, my face grainy with salt.  Tomorrow, it will be a record of tonight. 

“Isaac, he said I thought he was fat and black.” 

“I know.  It’s okay.” 

In a minute we’ll walk through glass doors into the lobby, take the elevator up to our room, press our faces into bleached sheets and wake up to drink coffee at a nearby Starbucks on the last day of the year. 

Why does love weaken our resolve?  Is resolve a dam?  Are tears, like a gag reflex, the sign we have registered another’s love?  A sign of its effect on us?  Is everyone who cries just somebody loved?

Thao and Mirah

A couple days after I let the French-Algerian bass-player break up with me, Jesse asks if I want to see Thao at the Hotel Café on Monday, which I do. 

            I haven’t seen him since the night I stayed at his place before my interview with the President of Santa Monica College, but he was sometimes sending me those love texts you suspect are sent in mass. 

            Lola is in Seattle with her dad for four weeks.  I’m single and unemployed, still struck with the post-Wall Street catastrofuck realization there are no rules. 

            I drive there Monday afternoon and wait at my car for Jesse to respond to the picture I send him of the parking sign. 

            “Can I park here?”  It’s just faster if Jesse does the math. 

            “No.” 

            When he asks me about the Frenchman, we’re eating pizza-flavored pizza. 

            “He was mad at me, and I didn’t like the way he fought.” 

            “Mad about what?” 

            “I don’t know.  That I didn’t get back from Vegas with Isaac in time to go on our camping trip or something.” 

            “How can you not know?”  

            “Because he acted like it was about me doing things I didn’t want to do instead of making art.” 

            I could have said I can’t fuck to Rihanna, or I can’t miss the morning sun, or I can’t drink coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, but you can—can’t you?—if the one you do that with knows what he’s mad about. 

At the Hotel Café, we get a beer and listen to a woman with a good voice sing self-help lyrics and talk too much between songs before we go to the other room and sit at a booth lining the wall around a piano. 

            “Should we make out?” I say. 

            Jesse laughs. 

            “Is that a no?” 

            Then we kiss a little and go back in. 

During the opening act, Jesse had put his arm around me; it was the minute more romantic than utilitarian, the evening’s as yet unknown highlight.

           

I’m so happy to see Thao come out, I’m gushing.  A giant man in front of me starts to steer me in front of him so I can see better, but I don’t want to come between him and his date, so I tell him I’m okay. 

            It’s not really a Thao show.  It’s Thao and Mirah, whose perfect voice is solid, who can belt, but I want to hear Thao, not her backup vocals.  I like Mirah and I don’t mind the songs, but her voice undoes what Thao’s does. 

            In the movie in my head, sometime before or after the slow-motion desert-punching scene where men have to fight for money rather than just lay claim to it, Thao is on stage singing, her voice a model of all that we still could be. 

            I spend the rest of the show watching her easiness with the audience, their adoration for her, the cool way her shoulders kind of slouch, thinking about how I’ll be when I’m on stage in three weeks.  Only I’m not thinking how I’ll be onstage, but how I’ll get out of it, what the circumstances of my refusal will be. 

            I spend the next three weeks in the garage—excited, then nervous, then sad, like I’ve already seen it play out.  If I can’t pull this off, it will be my own fault—not the fault of the President of Santa Monica College, or the job market, or Wall Street, or the polite and cowering middle class. 

Vincent Gallo

The pictures confirm what I’ve always suspected:  a person’s love for you can make you beautiful by sheer will.

            Jen and I are at the Piano Bar with Jesse, who, as a gift to me, agrees to take us to a Vincent Gallo show at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa. 

            It’s the day after my 35^th birthday.  Jesse takes pictures of Jen and I on the patio and I get nervous when I see them, like maybe I shouldn’t have let someone that into me go. 

            “I wish I looked like that,” I say. 

            “You do look like that.”

            As a sign of his power to make me look like the person I want to be, the image holds me hostage for weeks. 

            One year and one day earlier, Jesse and I had our first date at a Thao and the Get Down Stay Down show in Pomona.  My friend was the tour manager, so we went backstage and drank PBR on tap. 

            “How cool is it that everyone’s here to see you?” I said to Thao. 

            She laughed. 

            Onstage, she said, “You guys are great.  This is like the best first date ever.” 

            Jesse squeezed my hand—over, I guess, the comment I’d made at the bar before the show when I accidentally said, “At least I like you now.” 

            “That’s rude!” he said. 

            “That’s not rude,” I answered.  “It’s totally fucked up!” 

            Last night, a year later, Jen and Joy and I decided to just go back to our room at the Standard Hotel after I asked a waiter where a smart, hot chick could find tail and he said he didn’t know, he was new there.

We eat an Umami burger, and Jesse and I wait outside, smoking, while Jen buys a shirt at Free People.  It’s cold.  I pull my hands into my sleeves and blow warm air into my fists.  Jesse tries to give me his jacket, but I won’t let him so he wraps his scarf around me instead. 

            Hours earlier, we watched Under Great White Northern Lights, and on the drive to Costa Mesa, I think about Meg’s face during the piano scene, her broken face, the way Jack looked at her when he saw it, the way he put his arm around her shoulder pulling her in. 

             

            We get in line at the door.  I am wearing lipstick, which feels funny.  Women ranging from their twenties to forties wear boots and move their hair from one side of the neck to the other, the way you move straightened hair. 

Whenever Jesse looks at me, I have the same feeling I used to get when I’d carry my guitar off the ferry the weekends I left college to go home. 

            It makes me shy. 

“So you like girls?”  I say. 

            “A girl.” 

            “Yeah?  Like which one?”

            “Just some girl.” 

            Jen talks about the crush she had on Vincent Gallo in college. 

            “Isn’t he a Republican?”  

            “I heard that, too.” 

            “Like the really bad kind.  I one day googled Vincent Gallo and Charles Manson by chance, and it was like Manson was reborn in Vincent Gallo.”

            “That’s terrible.” 

            Facing Jen is the decision to take a part-time job in San Francisco in January or to stay in Riverside, where her partner makes a six-figure public defender salary and where people like Jen die a little on the inside.  Tonight, though, it’s so much like Jen is deciding about Vincent Gallo that I feel like I’m interrupting. 

            Eventually, she leaves the two of us to sit at the bar and watch the show from a screen. 

            An hour after show time, we are still standing before an empty stage.  It’s Sunday night; everyone has Monday to deal with. 

When the band finally comes out, hands shoot up to capture it.  The drummer, this badass twenty-something rocking an Afro, looks from Vincent to the crowd, shaking her head.  When the song’s over, she says, “It’s inappropriate for you guys to be taking pictures.” 

            “Ha!” I say.  “Maybe he wants money for that, too?” 

            Jesse laughs. 

            It would’ve gone better if instead of pretending the mob showed up outside Vincent Gallo’s bedroom window, they’d just owned it—like Hey Peeps, angry Artist doesn’t want his picture taken, ok?  We know, we know…sorry!

            I want words, but the music is instrumental for the most part.  Because the lyrics don’t really come and because Vincent Gallo stands with his back to the audience, like he’s giving us the silent treatment, I feel like something is coming.  Like he will yell at us or smash something and the evening will go down on his permanent record as the night he lost it.  

            I mean, for all anyone at the show that night knows, no sound whatsoever comes from him. 

When I post a Facebook link to an interview in which Vincent Gallo offers to sell his sperm for 250 K, Jen’s disgusted, sorry she saw him.  

            Her reaction surprises me.  He’s an asshole and all his choices are all wrong, but I don’t regret the music—just the pointlessness of his anger.  Still, it amuses me more than it makes me indignant; at least Vincent Gallo’s anger makes mine seem more legit.

I hope when I’m 50, basic human psychology doesn’t escape me—like how we’re not cool as a matter of fact.  We’re only cool if someone (a lover behind a lens, say) is willing to see it that way, and even then, their vision of us might any minute be influenced by an angle that does not defy the laws of physics, like gravity or the speed of light or a sudden lack of will.  

Unexpectedly, days or weeks later, I’m playing music in the garage with friends when I transpose the image onto somebody’s riff: 

            Your lips pout/ Are you ever coming out? 

            No one here is good enough/ To see you in hell

            You’re Vincent Gallo Man/ In Vincent Gallo Land

            Vincent Gallo Man in Vincent Gallo Land

I guess it’s not easy to watch someone’s back.  I guess you keep thinking she’ll turn around and face you.

the dream is the thing, not the thing.

 

A Review of the Kills, at Wiltern

When Okcupid user John asks me if I’d like to see the Kills with him—as per instructed in the online profile under “You should message me if…‘you want to see the Kills with me’”—I say, “I would like.” 

            It’s our third date, if you count the hour we met at Footsies in Highland Park the week before when I took a break from knocking down a plaster wall to walk down the street and have a beer. 

            “I’m with a friend.  Is that okay?” 

            “NOT COOL,” he texts.  “Did I say that aloud?  I mean no problem at all.” 

            So, he’s funny, which I love. 

            The friend, of course, is a guy I’d met on okcupid back in February.  We were chipping through the plaster to get to the brick wall behind it—to employ a girl who’d recently left her parents’ house when they suggested she see an exorcist priest to cure her gayness. 

            So there was an edge to the evening. 

            Still, we had those Kills tickets on Saturday, 8 days after we met at the bar the night I suggested John go ahead and kiss my neck. 

            Relationships doomed from the start probably have too many words between them, lubricated by a glass of IPA too many or an impatience endemic to mid-thirty singles.  In person, John had a Jimmy Kimmel thing I liked, but his appeal had more to do with the first email he sent me: 

Your profile is like the great wall protecting the villagers on Skull Island. It's strong and it's fortified and it's totally up to the task of keeping out giant gorillas -- except for the King-Kong-sized gate the tribesfolk are forever opening and then rushing to shut and bolt at the sound of heavy footsteps. The gate provokes the ape and reveals the psyche of the people who built it. The villagers are trying to keep Kong out, but they also want him inside. That's the game they play. Sound familiar?

I liked it.  It struck me as a little mean, too, but I can handle a little mean.  Who wants no trace whatsoever of mean?  

It’s my third Kills show in six months—the first at San Diego’s House of Blues, the second in Pomona, this one at the Wiltern in L.A. 

            We meet at his place at 6, drink a beer, and listen to an NPR podcast following the suicide of Taylor Armstrong’s husband in which a guy filling in for Larry Mantle asks John whether reality shows need to adopt some kind of guidelines to “save people from themselves.” 

            “Do you have to be a tool to have your own radio show?” I ask. 

            “It doesn’t hurt.” 

            “That sentence is the single-most evil sentiment I can think of.  Because it’s about what to do with the other—this whole we/them thing.” 

            “I like what you’re saying.” 

            Because we stop for Mexican and I order a gin and tonic, I am somewhere between buzzed and already drunk by the time we circle Wiltern looking for parking and stand in line to order fourteen-dollar beers. 

            We watch a three-piece opening band called Mini Mansions, whose singer is the drummer and who pulls off a cool mix of vocal harmonies and punk rock beats, like Beatles meets Velvet Underground. 

I don’t remember the next band.  I’ve finished the IPA.  John and I are standing in back near the doors.  I’m thinking how there’s a space in front of us that would fit a queen-sized bed. 

“Why can’t we have public roller-beds at bars?” I ask. 

“You want to sit down?” 

“Yeah.” 

We find a table downstairs.  For reasons of IPA or whatever, I show John text conversations between me and three male friends of mine.  I don’t remember it being my idea, but maybe it was.  I remember John saying it’d be fun. 

That might have been the minute he lost interest.  That, or my evening’s thesis, which was something to the effect of:  It’s okay to just like me.

“Oh, you’re insecure?” 

“It’s not insecure to say it should be fun.  I mean, the guy that doesn’t adore you is just the guy you settle for, isn’t it?” 

At the time, he nodded.  Soon, though, it will feel like the seventh or eighth time he’s suggested I’m insecure, which is not a word I identify with—uninsecure, maybe.  Honest and alive, maybe. 

But I say I’m not unwilling to be insecure.  It’s just—is this a question of that?  That’s what I say the next time it comes up. 

Later, John tells me about a woman who sent an email accusing him of being insecure and egotistical, of having Mommy issues and fear of commitment. 

I don’t understand the readiness to pathologize.  The trick is humility; humility is our only real defense.  We talk about how rough it is to get dumped, how easy to act out, about the tendency to love the one who leaves you.

“That’s why I don’t break up with people,” I say.  “You might never get rid of them if you do.” 

When the Kills come on, I’m walking back inside from having a cigarette.  I find John and stand in front of him. 

Mosshart is at her best tonight.  When I look around at the kind of crowd she draws, I’m only struck with how normal everyone seems, the edgiest of them a young dark-featured woman out smoking with the wrong guy—at least that’s the impression I form from the guy who’s watching the two of them, watching her, debating how to work his way in. 

There are a couple strikes against us already if you don’t count my kid or the men in my life.  I smell like his mom, for instance, like coffee and cigarettes.  He hates it.  Ok, but that’s my fault:  my profile says I “sometimes” smoke because of that one time I kind of quit. 

Watching Mosshart makes me want to be on stage again. 

John and I make out—discreetly, I think, but I’m not sure.  At one point, I turn around, put my hands around his neck, and kiss his chest.  Then I realize and turn back around. 

When Mosshart sings Kissy Kissy, later kissing Hince’s forehead as he solos, I wonder if he’s cool with it, if Kate Moss is here. 

The stage is where Mosshart gets to be herself. 

I think I love her because there is little chance of thinking she is someone else, of finding herself in a Toyota Prius with a man who wants a different woman.  She is going to smell like cigarettes and she is going to cough and Hince is going to think the cough sexy and it’s going to make its way onto an album. 

Even more than her uncompromised beauty, what strikes me are Mosshart’s lyrics.  I’m happy to turn just one of them over and over again like a prism—like “If I’m so evil, why are you satisfied?” or “Idiot-style in the shower, flicking your ashes down the drain.”  Or “I hate the way you love” or “Can’t quite see the end.” 

I want to know how you get those lyrics out into a world waiting for a newer, cleaner model of what it’s already got. 

Because Alison Mosshart, to me, is what it means to be dirty.  To be on the outside of clean. 

Instead, I learn maybe to go ahead and trust my instinct, maybe I’ve evolved, maybe my first impression is not that off—like how after breakfast the first time, as we stood in the parking lot before I drove off, I said, “All my stuff is wasted on you.” 

The morning after we see the Kills, he agrees. 

“I don’t think it’s going to work.  Do you?” 

“Oh, you’re going to break up with me right now?”

“Well, do you?” 

“No, but not because I don’t like something about you.  I think you’re too busy.  I like an intense kind of thing.” 

“I’m not that guy,” he says. 

I look down the road.  I’m sitting on the trunk of my car, smoking. 

“Plus,” he says.  “I can’t be with a smoker.” 

“Are you mad at me?” I ask. 

“What?  See, I only hear like every fourth sentence. 

I nod.  What I had said right before he said, “I don’t think it’s going to work,” is “Look how sexy you are.”  Which at least makes for good dialogue. 

It’s always like that when it’s over.  You cease to hear the other. 

After I go upstairs to get my things and stand at the door, a minute from driving away, I say, “It’s sad, don’t you think?” 

“Not really.  Honesty is never sad.” 

“Really?  I think honesty is the only sad thing.” 

There’s an uninhibitedness between us that kills something between us.  So I learn inhibition is the stuff love is made of.  At first, it surprises me I could have neglected that.  But then it makes sense.  Restraint, reticence, repression—yeah, it’s all coming back. 

And this:  Next time I am in a position to, I will work harder to keep the dream alive longer because the dream is the thing, not the thing. 

At 5:30 that morning, the Kills send a facebook post about an upcoming show in Lima, Peru, and I wonder which one of them was up that early or still up.  Is every day of her life a work of art?  Will she find someone who doesn’t fail to appreciate that? 

At breakfast, John had asked me how long it takes for me to write songs, if it’s easy.  I shrugged. 

“There’s a way of talking that’s unlike writing,” I said, aware I wasn’t making sense at breakfast.  “I don’t know.  Sometimes I don’t remember how people talk, and I can only think in terms of how to get from point A to point B.”  Meaning, sometimes I’m too clear-headed to write well.  Meaning clarity does not make a good song.  But as I’m thinking it, I remember Mosshart’s ballad “The Last Goodbye,” and that doesn’t feel right either. 

                        It’s the last goodbye, I swear/ I can’t rely on a dime-a-day love/ That don’t

go anywhere/ I’ll learn to cry for someone else/ I can’t get by on an odds-

and-ends love/ that don’t ever match up. 

Few one-liners are cause for alarm.  Panic is something that builds from a series of incessant words that build into epic paragraphs and whole stories.  Pathology doesn’t exist in the open air.  It’s not lying on the road.  Layers and layers of words produce it.  If you don’t want it, reduce the number of words.

The trick is to keep the story simple, get it down to one line, in case you end up going over and over it--like this:  Not everyone is going to be into your thing. 

And then you can tell yourself, some are. 

Karen Elson The Ghost that Walks

In the months before Karen Elson releases her debut album, she’s writing songs—secretly, literally in the closet. When she plays them for White, he calls her “a natural” and cuts the album at his production studio Third Man Records.

Like Nico from the Velvet Underground, Karen Elson is a world famous model before singing and it shows in visually pleasing stage performances of Elson in a Greek-style dress, flanked by band members who also appear to be models. So far, the resemblance ends there: Elson’s voice is soft and feminine; Nico’s a kind of masculine falsetto. Still, Elson covers the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says” in her cabaret group The Citizens Band.

I don’t particularly connect with the genre—a dark-ballad cabaret—though I might have a decade ago if the lyrics were edgier than they are sad. Still, the music is good if you can get past the sadness.

In the album’s title song “The Ghost that Walks,” Elson sings about the childhood name she was given for being the tall and skinny pale redheaded girl. In “Stolen Roses,” she sings about stealing away to escape bad memories.

Elson has vocal range, but her voice sounds new and raw, too.

In the song “Cruel Summer,” for instance, she strikes out alone in a lo-fi video that, like the music video for White’s “We’re Gonna Be Friends,” looks like it might have been made with a Mac. She sits on a vintage porch swathed in the warm peach hues of her hair and the cabin’s curtains, guitar in her lap, as she sings the lyrics: It’s been a cruel summer

The sun has been hit by the storms /My darling was bewitched by another /Her black magic tricks stole his heart /I saw her scheming as she twirled her hair /So long and black like the storm /She caught my darling’s eye and/ As quickly as the lightening / I muttered a lonesome goodbye/ It’s been a cruel summer /The kind that makes grown men turn pale/ My darling was bewitched by another /I could not compete with black hair

It’s a bold move—not just because Elson plays solo, exposed, but because the message feels so personal: In 2009, just two months after White formed the Dead Weather, her husband was touring Europe with the raven-haired punk rock priestess Alison Mosshart, of the adored British Indie-rock duo, The Kills.

Even more devastating than the image of Elson penning the song while White is away with Mosshart is the song’s resonance with a cover White does of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” in the latest White Stripes album. In both songs, another woman catches the attention of the singer’s love; here, it is the redhead who wins hearts.

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene /I’m begging of you please don't take my man /Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene /Please don't take him just because you can/ Your beauty is beyond compare /With flaming locks of auburn hair /With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green /Your smile is like a breath of spring /Your voice is soft like summer rain /And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

Elson says "Cruel Summer" is about both the scary electrical storms in Tennessee and competition between pretty girls, but it feels more like Jolene coming clean about the woman worrying her.

Fear of another woman—of her beauty, of the possibility a storm can overshadow the sun or that we are maybe not the sun after all—reminds me of a lesson my dad tried to impart over a pool table one night. “Everywhere you go,” he told me, “there’s always going to be a better player.” Most of us aren’t expressly taught how to deal with a world populated by worthy others, and so we suffer and are driven to express that suffering in our art.

In the same google search I find Karen Elson’s “Cruel Summer,” a video interview of White and Mosshart appears in the sidebar. Mosshart looks at White the way she looks at her rock-duo Kills partner Jamie Hince—with deference and admiration. White looks at her, too, but he looks away more often, as though one of them has more to hide.

By then, Hince was dating supermodel Kate Moss, now his wife, but how did he feel once Jack White came along and borrowed Mosshart, first for the Ranconteurs “Steady As She Goes,” then for good? Gossip magazines speculated there was something between Dean Fertita and Mosshart, but anyone paying attention would have seen more sparks between Mosshart and White.

Elson tells Vogue contributor Jonathan Van Meter that "The early songs I wrote were very self-indulgent," she says. "Real woe-is-me. But living in Nashville, the songwriters I like here, they all manage to find a narrative; they use metaphors and stories to explain what they're feeling." She rolls her eyes. "I don't need to show everybody my diary."

Still, with The Ghost That Walks, I feel like I’m overhearing a love letter to Jack White—a please-come-home letter destined to fail because its appeal is rooted in feeling sympathy for a girl in pain rather than the promise of good times.

It’s the message that prevents me from loving the album.

In music, we get the chance to envision our lives the way they are supposed to be—which doesn’t mean songs need to be struggle free. In a song that asks me to re-live losing, I need the artist to offer some redemptive spin, assuring me our innate badass-ness allows us to take a beating every now and then.

To reach for The Ghost that Walks, I’d have to be all right with feeling sad and abandoned, yet pretty, which would mean missing out on being Jack White’s schoolboy crush in “We’re Gonna Be Friends” or Mosshart’s adversarial lover in “I Hate the Way You Love.”

That’s the other thing about music. In childhood, there are crushes and there are bullies, yet later on in life, we can recall the past from a number of vantage points. It’s the reason we turn to music in the first place: to rewrite history, to imagine winning.

It’s gutsy to pour your heart out while your husband traipses around the globe setting another woman’s lyrics to music, taking another woman’s songs on the road—gutsy, but sad.

After the end of the White Stripes and after the end of White’s marriage to Karen Elson, I want to imagine The Ghost That Walks as Elson’s last goodbye to White and to the intolerable sadness of that minute just before walking.

Hole Nobody’s Daughter

We don’t all learn not to hate ourselves, but some do.

Music tracks lives, and at its best, alters them until the worst experiences are re-livable moments, little histories devoid of the gut-wrenching hard facts.

If you’re lucky, songs remind you of your own survival, not the moment a struggle followed you from one town to another, locking itself into the wrong place and time—a sudden feeling your shirt is cut wrong in a city that lets you be.

Like the time you hitchhiked to a college town and sat, sunlit, on the curb outside Tony’s coffee shop, smelling like smoke, trying to pull your fingers through hair whipped by the drive.

“I need a haircut.”

“You’re fine.”

That was Gabe.

Maybe you grew up in a small town on the Olympic Peninsula thinking all cities were nestled between mountains and ocean, all things the color of wheat, like a square of Country Pride cut out of its crust, all people in homes waiting to come outside and yell at you—until Gabe wants to hitchhike to Bellingham and you end up at John and Nellie’s place on High Street, some kind of garage with bunk beds where they eat bagels she brings home from her job at the Bagelry and drink Odwalla John brings home from the juice factory when it was still Dharma Juice.

Nellie was napping, her lips a shade of pink you can still see. It was warm out. You wore a light blue tee shirt and jeans. The Horseshoe had a dollar minimum and a sixty-minute limit.

Any day now you were going to leave home for college and probably fail at life.

Strangers helped you get through adolescence in a small retirement town poised to ruin you: the guy who picked you and Gabe up in Coopeville and drove you through Deception Pass, for one; the Violent Femmes; Gabe, who said you smelled like Pantene and Camel Filters, who wasn’t a stranger, but with whom you shared a lot of silence. T

his was just after Kurt Cobain was found dead and Live Through This came out, and Courtney Love set your life to music for a while, teaching you things like how far one could go being bad, before it had occurred to you to embrace something like that.

When you are eighteen, and Kurt Cobain is dead, and you happen to live in Olympia, songs like “When I Was a Teenage Whore,” are like daily horoscopes asking you to stop and see your life through a new lens—not written for one of twelve kinds of people by an anonymous struggling journalist, but by a screaming psychopathic grunge queen accused of being a murderous whore. In other words, exactly the kind of woman who saves young girls on the verge the guilt of sloughing off all the dead skin of growing up girl in a small town.

If you did survive that and it even seems like that life happened to someone else, Courtney Love’s new Hole album Nobody’s Daughter should reach you.

Those who did not survive—maybe because things were fine already or because stranger love was too few and far between—are going to be harder to please. They’re going to keep reaching.

That’s what I want to say to the album’s discontented reviewers.

What are you reaching for, man? Put the pen down and make your own album. You do better.

Zeke

The LA Weekly says “ZEKE sound like the DWARVES if they snorted a tub of meth every day,” Village Voice describes the Seattle band as “chainsaw punk rock,” and some enthusiastic writer from Guitar World believes "[he] can say without hyperbole that this big-guitar engine-block rock is a million times better than whatever it is you're currently listening to”—which if you do the math, means you are listening to an actual chainsaw hacking the heads off babies.

I heard a lot of noise. My seven-year-old daughter was sitting cross-legged next to me as I played “Lords of the Highway,” her knee and head moving in time to the beat—reflexively, though; she hadn’t meant to.

“You like this music,” I said when I noticed it.

“No, I don’t!” she countered.

She liked it; she just knew not to get caught liking it. Zeke is the kind of primal that seven-year-olds are supposed to be moving away from, like polite pet owners turning away from cats in heat.

The hardest, “Kill Myself 2 day,” whose chorus seems to be “Die!” screams at you—vocally, the delivery is metal, but the guitars, bass lines, and drums are richly rock, slasher rock, evocative of eighties metal howls and screeching bass solos. I can see the album being the inspiration behind a Dead Weather song like “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” in which Jack White and Alison Mosshart shoot at each other as they swagger through a suburban desert in leather jackets. “God of GSXR,” a 36-second headbanger perfect for hardcore kissing against a gas station wall, would make a good trailer to an epic all-American film about not giving a fuck.

I’d fuck to it.

Thing is you’d have to fuck to “Lord of the Highway” because the songs are on the short side, even for quickies. You could fuck to “Lord of the Highway,” say, the two-minute forty-two seconds song that’s twice as long as the next longest whose video depicts a Dukes of Hazard style car chase—exactly the kind of car Zeke would sound hot in the backseat of. Still, I’d want to be done, outside smoking already, by the time a song like “Mainline” played:

Running up the mainline/the fucking mainline Running up the mainline/all right Running up the mainline/the fucking mainline Running up the mainline/all right/[yelling]

It’s catchy, but catchy’s not what you want post-back-seat-of-the-car sex. Somehow that one’s just too cheap.

The sound is awesome. Now if only the band had more to say.