Two days pass; then all at once a new feeling comes. A blinding white fear of being alone. It’s less like the boredom, the fatalism of adult single life, and more like I am a baby lying beside a stream in a dark forest. Unprotected. I am afraid. The words flash across my mind: You. Will. Always. Be. Alone. Something bad is coming and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Why did I push her away? She was so soft and warm and kind and good and funny and I am now here standing alone at the precipice of this vast darkness.
I drive down to the city to her new apartment in Los Feliz on the Eastside of Los Angeles and call her from the alley beneath her bedroom. She answers and I tell her to go to her window. I wave. She comes down to let me in. I tell her I’m sorry. I tell her I’m crazy. I tell her I was an idiot and I didn’t mean it. I just get confused sometimes. We reconcile, but I can feel her resistance, less like I’m a repentant drunk and more like she knows she can’t say no—she’s been hurting too, after all—but she dreads whatever is coming next. Or possibly I imagine that. Maybe she’s simply glad to see me. I don’t really know. I never know which of these feelings to believe, because they all coexist inside me: the simple one attracting me to her for all the reasons that are abundantly clear, the dark one telling me I am suffocated and trapped, the panic like that of a child terrified of being left alone.
* * *
WHEN I GET bored of trying to write the novel, which has mostly gone untouched while I write songs, when I long for new experiences, I find myself pitching an editor at a music magazine to assign me features about musicians. I just want to be close, to be out at night with the sweat of the crowd and the boom of the speakers. After twenty blind pitches, I’m finally given a few freelance assignments to write about live music. The editor likes my pieces, and when a vacancy comes up, he offers me a job as the new managing editor. The magazine is called Filter. I’ve been going to shows for so long it seems like a natural step. Watching the crowd in the back, jumping through the pit in the front, trying to understand why everyone is here. The recurring thought I have is that every show is a celebration of something. An idea. Sometimes that idea is as simple as sadness, or anger, or, for particularly bad shows, love. So the game I like to play is piecing together what idea we are celebrating tonight. The more specific the idea, the better the show.
Tonight we celebrate the shared sense that our ironic detachment from the world is both our greatest amusement and the feature most destructive to our lives. The thing we are celebrating is the fact that we know it and have the gall not to care.
Tonight we celebrate the wonder we had at sadness as children. Like finding a dead bird in the grass after a heavy rain and trying to imagine what came before and what comes after.
Tonight we celebrate mirrors, the harsh well-lit ones, the bent and twisty ones, the fabulous vanity we feel as the light reflects off our clothing and cheekbones while we strut between them.
Tonight we celebrate fucking. The mystery, the possibility our bodies offer us for transformation, the sense that our bodies know our selves better than we do.
It’s a great job. I get to hear records before they come out. I get to fly to faraway music festivals in places like France and Iceland. I get to sit across from Tom Waits in a roadhouse in Marin County where I tell him about songwriting and my book and the trailer on the edge of the world and he tells me, in that broken chain-saw voice of his, “That’s how you do it, man. After a while, it’s like Emerson said, the universe conspires.” I get to sit in the basement of a tiny bar in Alphabet City with Lou Reed, to be the erstwhile mop-topped journalist whom he tells, “Rock and roll can go, ‘Ba, ba, baaah,’ my friend. It cannot go, ‘La, la, laaaah.’”
I love the seedy clubs, the pretentious, lively conversations with rock stars and writers casually sipping red wine in the back room with their legs crossed. The magazine staff is so small the editor in chief and I end up writing most of every issue, filing seven or eight feature stories per issue under different pen names, which we decide should sound like French Canadian hockey players, for some reason. We stay up all night on deadline at our office on Miracle Mile, copyediting, playing Galaga, and drinking beer. When morning comes, we crawl over to the print shop with our hard drive, making the 7:00 A.M. print deadline by maybe eight minutes.
With the money from the new job, I move out of the ranch and back to the city. I get a place on the Eastside in Los Feliz, one neighborhood away from the rock clubs in Silver Lake. It’s a tiny upstairs studio apartment with espresso wood floors, a shade tree and a brick facade outside the unscreened window like something from the Latin Quarter in Paris. There’s a kitchenette and a closet where I tape entire books to the wall with duct tape, Notes from the Underground and The Trial, right over my writing desk. I like the idea of Dostoevsky and Kafka looking down at me, fellow travelers in the 3:00 A.M. task of confession and poetry.
When I’m not writing stories on rock and roll, I’m still writing songs, fiddling with guitar effects, scribbling pages of lyrics in notebooks. Amber and I have settled into a perpetual state of not-quite-togetherness but not-quite-not-togetherness, which means we spend most of our time either breaking up or getting back together. I know she finds it exhausting. I know it’s unfair to her. It’s just like the feeling I got in college that my knowledge could not save me, that despite my earnest desire to be a better man, a better boyfriend, a better friend, I am caught between two emotional poles: one constantly running away, the other constantly running back.
Sometimes I think I’m like what I once imagined Dad to be, before I really knew him, when he was just an idea in my head. I pictured him as swashbuckling and charming, one foot in front of the law, living life by his wits, longed for and sought after as he moved from place to fascinating place. Other times, I wonder if I’m like Paul: a basically good man with a crippling disorder, trapped by impulses he can neither understand nor control. The worst of it is when I wonder if I’m like Doug. I read somewhere that victims of abuse identify not only with the victims but with the abusers as well, taking note of the power the abuse gives them. I wonder if I am this, that I’ve learned that the threat of leaving has given me a power, over Amber, over the women I met whenever we broke up, to be both present and absent, forever a captain setting sail on the horizon, always one foot on his vessel, so present and earnest about his desire to stay, so enraptured with the promise of the sea.
Something about rock and roll makes all of this bearable, like I am among fellow travelers in drink and an idea of love that is shared like a dark joke. So it feels like a secret life, to be interviewing rock stars by day and trying to write songs about my confusion by night. The interviews are a farce, this role play of musician and erstwhile journalist is only an act I put on for appearances because all I really want to know, as I swim in this black river beneath my life, is this: How? How do you do this thing I want so desperately to do? How do you write a song?
CHAPTER 38
WE CAN BE HEROES
The long blond bangs fall over his mismatching blue and black eyes exactly the way they did in the posters. The posture is the same, a kind of excitable swishiness with feminine limbs and long fingers, his sharp chin and perfect Nordic nose. I’m a little surprised by the outcropping of gray stubble on his face, the odd effect of age and agelessness it creates, like talking to an oracle in some hidden cavern in the sky. But then it would be different than it was when I was thirteen. I’m a grown man now. I can’t just blurt out all the ways I wanted to be him, how much he represented an unattainable ideal for Jake and me. He’s an idea, not a person. So I can’t just hug him and hold on tight, tell him I’m trying to understand something and I need his help. It’s like speaking to the Wind. What do you ask the Wind?