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.