But She Said ‘No, No, No’

Amy Winehouse is dead today. The news comes from London, where she died, at 27, of causes not-yet-determined but certainly surmised by many.

Here in sweltering Iowa we cower beneath the “heat dome” of July 2011. I’ve just consumed, courtesy of beloved wife Jessica, a major league Julep in Amy’s honor.  It is now being followed by a beer chaser, a Sierra Nevada Hefeweizen called Kellerweis. Just because I too say ‘No, no, no.’ There is a time and a place – perhaps many times and many places – for intoxicants. It’s been known fact since ancient times. Heady brews and concoctions, herbs and ales and fermented plants and so forth, call up strong spirits and visions – creative forces both Mercurial and Vesuvian by definition. Such forces are capable of bringing forth all manner of greatness as surely as they can reduce a mere mortal to so much human rubble.

I am always unutterably saddened to see a creative force battered by excess, dying by their own hand, or some combination of the two, crazy heroes stumbling along their doomed path with as much bravery as they can muster by the sheer force of gifts the Master of the Universe bestowed upon them at birth, yet ultimately unable to rise from the ashes of their own repeated, reckless and Dionysian bonfires until finally they lie extinguished in a smoldering heap. All that creativity gone from this world. All that energy dissipated, bouncing through the cosmos and reinfusing the very fabric of space and time in some way we cannot yet understand but which I am quite certain is real and  significant.

On this Saturday of swelter where the air itself is devoid of air, is liquid and somehow smothering, I see my personal litany of greats gone from this Earth unreel on celluloid strips before me:  Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Alexander McQueen, and now Amy Winehouse. All shot so much life into this world – this crappy, rude, unappreciative world, where they labored and suffered and created what they could when they could manage to rise up and do it – and all died awful deaths, deaths many of us call needless or meaningless and lament as “a shame.” I suppose they each were a shame, and yet each was also an endpoint for a specific person, a person endowed with much, who gave much to everyone they touched and who struggled to honor their talents against long odds. What is the meaning of all that accomplishment, then, on this day?

I can’t say as I know. It’s hard to piece together a wall of logic to reassure anyone against life’s random and massive ironies when, as one small example, Ms. Winehouse’s Tarot card is…wait for it…Temperance. Yes, hers is the lovely and somber card of Temperance. I am amazed and somehow humbled to know this. Jessica has created an altar here in our house, where she commemorates Ms. Winehouse with that card, and a lovely picture of her before she laid herself at the altar of various intoxicants to the point of permanent disability and ultimate demise.

Jessica's Altar for Amy Winehouse

Rehab…I am of mixed feelings there. I love Rickie Lee Jones, and think work made after her own life changes is as lively as her earlier work. She gathered unto herself all her sparks, somehow, while distancing herself from the fire’s deepest heat and saving herself from immolation. I have to respect that. But I respect Amy, too. She died and it was a hard and probably an ugly death, but it was all hers, and she had lived her own life while getting there. I refuse to dishonor that or diminish it by calling it “a shame.” It was something far more vibrant, volcanic and wild than that. It was an implosion, a pyre of perhaps her own design.

I love to see artists of all kinds who can pick up their burdens and wield them, move along, and survive, giving us the gifts only they can muster up out of the mean and rough fabric of life. I love them perhaps best of all. But I will always remember and honor the lives and work of those who do not make it through. They too struggle, they buff and burnish, shine and polish all their rough stones to present to us, and we are better for receiving them. I thank each of them, and wish them all peace, and rest.

Come Back to the Ladies Room, Michele Honey

It surely counts as one of the tortures of the damned to be a liberal, openly lesbian elected official in Iowa listening to the likes of Michele Bachmann pontificating on the matter of marriage with her Giant Gay Husband, Marcus, at her side. It is galling. Of late, the question of Marcus being a Giant Gay Husband has become something of an irritant to the wife’s campaign. Thus we Iowans hear rumors of Marcus stopping just shy of mounting her on the proverbial stump in the hinterlands, where he presses his wide, girlish hips into her backside to show What A Man He Really Is and How Hot He Is for His Wife. Jesus. It makes my teeth hurt.

Meanwhile, my wife Jessica and I deal with the daily barrage of rhetorical arrows as best we can, taking detours onto sweet, breezy summer lanes marked White Côtes du Rhône as we sit together after work, analyzing the latest. There is Michele’s alleged bathroom cornering by two aggressive Minnesota lesbians (tho’ I never like to disappoint voyeurs, you should know that qualifies as a solid oxymoron), the Giant Gay Husband disporting himself shamefully in an attempt to appear less gay, and then the matter of Iowa’s Family Leader Marriage Vow. This is a nasty bit of business, and bears a little examination.

Michele Bachmann was the first presidential candidate to sign what Gawker has called “Iowa’s delightful marriage pledge.” And what a delight it is. My careful synopsis follows. Signatories to The Vow commit to the following solemn oaths:  1. I will never screw anything that isn’t my wife or husband. 2. I will never support porn, even if it helps me in my efforts to screw my wife or husband. 3. Slaves had it bad, but at least their offspring had the benefit of two-parent homes. (Seriously – this stunning misapprehension of history was only removed days ago.) 4. Four is tricky. Four is sort of a come-to-Jesus call for politicians who have already strayed. It’s designed to provide an opportunity for light confession and public contrition over any cash-on-the-barrelhead whoring, porking of rent boys, heavy porn consumption or other forms of extramarital mayhem that may have occurred. This public penance is to be followed by a quick, no-questions-asked embrace back into the fold of sanctified married candidates seeking support in the Iowa caucuses. It’s like that craze of re-virgining yourself. Remember the delusion that one could wish oneself back into mint condition via some quasi-religious frenzy? That one was big awhile back. America is one huge, quivering, crazy nation when it comes to sex. It seems we can never holistically integrate the urges and workings of our sex parts and frenzied libidinal impulses into everyday living. Many apparently never get there, and most of that group of damaged souls self-select into the world of right-wing politics, where outrage over erotic indulgence is prized more highly than cleanliness or a good addiction recovery story. These politicians love the idea of re-grown maidenheads, sham spousal virtues or pretend marriages to Giant Gay Husbands who Probably Secretly Adore Porn.

You may sense a certain level of disgust at this stylized Kabuki of politically-driven marital purity, and if so you are not wrong. I’m fed up. Jessica and I have heard more often than two people who truly and simply adore one another can bear of all the ways in which our marriage is setting up the final, utter disintegration of the United States into a band of borderless tribal areas without minted money in which there are no longer any families at all, a land in which Michele Bachmann is forever locked in sexual torment in a ladies room full of perverse (possibly even French) lesbians. With Marcus peeking through a keyhole while a comely lad whips his giant girly backside with a flourish. It’s the Iowa caucus season, by way of the Marquis de Sade.

The news here seems to have been about The Marriage Vow forever now. I am weary beyond my power to tell. It’s a black eye to the state. Colbert spent five effing minutes on it last night. Gawker is all over it. And despite three candidate rejections of it, the state GOP shows no signs of distancing itself. It’s all Torquemada, all the time here.  Emphatic, blow-hard candidate pledging and a mad right-wing clamor for fealty oaths abjuring hanky-panky – have these married political Republicans been poking everything within reach unbeknownst to all the rest of us? It dawns on one that perhaps a whole world of spousal criminality is flourishing on the conservative political stage, an endless, rampant round of Satyricon sexual frenzy that would embarrass Caligula, barnstorming through the placid, presumably decent state of Iowa.

It’s all so-strange to me, this fighting over marriage and who should have one and how it should be honored. Jessica had three husbands before me, so I’m not a parochial lesbian or anything, and she counts herself as “a minor Gabor… a wee Gabor” due to all her marriages. But life happens, you know?  You meet someone, suddenly you start dropping the silverware and blushing and running into plate glass windows and before you know it love is professed over Neruda and bread and wine in a local eatery. There are flowers. A fully decorated Christmas tree appears in season out of nowhere in your apartment, and the love just gets bigger and bigger and pretty soon it’s moving day and you’re all in the giant house together:  her, you, your darkly suspicious, obese cat, and her dear son, the perpetual child you shall always have with you. Later there will be raccoon kits in the firebox, scaring you nearly to death. Chipmunks and possums cavort on the property. You will sit in hospital waiting rooms through two surgeries, terrified for her. She will endure the anxieties and aggravations of election cycles every four years, with the family in newsprint. She will have to hear about your stalker, who is out on YouTube in big glasses and a hoodie claiming you are don of Iowa’s Lesbian Mafia and behind every murder in the county for the last 30 years. You will worry about the inevitability of occasionally violent patients in her workplace. In short, your married life unfolds right in front of you, in all its clutter and whirl of activity, the relentless drum beat of existence. But every time you look at her, she is pretty pretty pretty. Every time you open a newspaper and find yourself excoriated on its pages, you laugh and laugh together at all of it. Never does it occur to you – not once – that your marriage, which you could not even have for the first 13 years of your life together, is anything less than everyone else’s. Then one day this couple comes riding into Iowa attacking you – frankly and without reservation, as if it were a selling point. He, a giant pantload of a girly man who has made his living in part by promising to cure gays, she a politician buttoned down so tightly she flips out when two dykes in Minnesota try to speak to her about their civil rights in a ladies room.

I don’t know how Jessica and I will get through this caucus season. I’m already angry, and anger is not something I wear well. To make matters worse, @ramonasinger has not managed to get her freaking pinot grigio into this state yet, despite my frenzied tweets. We’re patching in with white Côtes du Rhône, gin and grapefruit juice, and the occasional Julep. We’re resourceful girls. We’ll get by. But a person has every right to be angry about this theatre of the absurd when it impinges on reality every waking day.

I despise Michele and Marcus Bachmann because they dishonor their own marriage by dishonoring mine, and they are both too stupid to recognize even that much. They hardly deserve our passing collective scorn, but as she seeks the presidency every wild distortion born in the stubborn, atavistic sludge of her Cro-Magnon ideology receives an appalling level of consideration. We can only hope every rent boy on earth comes tumbling out of that giant closet, and soon.

If Ever I Would Leave You

Monday afternoon, errands after a brief sleep. I am always most exhausted on Mondays, and most of all summer Mondays. The deepest part of July and August bring me to the edge of despair, and it is only the presence of the hummingbird that has made this season desirable. I am out at the recycling center singing the songs of Camelot. The songs are brocaded, sugar icing over glass. One must hold the voice strictly to account or you slide from the natural rich ornamentation of these gorgeous pastiches, right off the ice into the muck.

If I begin with “If ever I should leave you” and briefly confuse the season that begins the narrative, this is not to say I will fail to recall precisely where Franco Nero began his montage with Vanessa Redgrave and right myself, beginning with summer and ending with the glorious springtime. It is obvious when one watches the film that Nero has either just knocked Redgrave up or is about to- and they had their love child from this time. I wonder what it would be like to be that child and understand that commingling of art and appetite. I think it might be wonderful.

I refuse to lower my voice while I fling plastic bottles into their giant metal bin and to that end I sing with a little bit of defiance: “I loved you once in silence”. I sing it beautifully despite never having known a moment of restraint in love and especially not the absence of words. In love I have always come to the feast prepared to pitch a big tent festooned with garlands and floating lights and floating words and actual food, too, since it has always seemed to me that love requires more than itself to flourish.

I am a romantic who has occasionally tried to sidestep this truth about myself. I apprehend each day a world that seems to me to be strung together loosely of enchantments, like a powerful web that will slowly occlude my ability to perceive it with any measure of accuracy. Among the bored and pragmatic young of the species I am often sad. During the night I worked with several young men who talked Lawrence. One said to the other: “Dude. I’ve been trying to read “The Rainbow” for four months.” The other replied: “I know. They say “Sons and Daughters” is his best novel.” I thought about the firefly I pulled out of a spider’s web by the back door the other night, coming in. I could not bear to see his light trapped in the iron of that web and I pulled it out, brushed off all I could, and placed him in the Buddha garden far from the spider, whom I have to admit I also love.

With the young men who have no interest in me or what I have seen or thought of, I spoke up. “Women in Love” is Lawrence’s best novel,” I told them. “And also that book is “Sons and Lovers,” okay?” They were silent, and not with love of me, either.

I finish up my medley of Camelot standards with the verses of the theme song that finish the film, and when I sing them I weep. I am crying for loss- the loss of innocence, the loss of Richard Harris, JFK, dreams of the nineteen sixties, all of that and more. I weep as I sing. That is why I cannot be a real singer out somewhere in the world, away from the recycling center. I weep when I sing what moves me. And nothing moves me more than the loss of a kingdom when it is joined to the hope of rekindling that kingdom. I’ve watched this movie countless times alone, Harris heralding the young plucky lad he exhorts to carry the story of Camelot forward- “Run, boy!” he shouts, down the corridor of endless summer. Oh, run.