Junk Love & Baby Oil
“…and to show I’m not mad: I only slipped on the cake of soap of the air, and drowned in the bathtub of the world. You were too good to cry much over me. And now I let you go…” John Ashbery
Except I did cry, very very much, over him. Painful, sleepless, breathless, hot tears. I cried like someone who had given more than they’d usually be prepared to give only to have it thrown like pie all over their sad clown face, someone who’d chosen a high road at the fork, with trepidation, and on tippy toes, just to feel it fall beneath their feet after the first step.
The quote is from a poem called ‘Thoughts of a Young Girl’. He sent it to me the day after we met. I wondered if he bestowed this collection of words upon every young girl he fell for, like an abstract legal disclaimer, so he could say under his breath “but I told you! Did you read the poem?”. I can hear him saying that to me, though he didn’t and probably saw no such meaning in it. He said nothing at all actually. Radio silence. Enough silence to project a universe of meaning on a void of reason. No lines to read between even, just a blank page I wanted to crumple in one hand like an investment banker who just realised he’s lost everything he ever earned and so much more. I was in deficit. He was in debt. Only to each other and ourselves. Only in love.
A few weeks earlier, a group of us sat around a pool in the summer sun. Someone with long hair talks of radical ‘woke’ college students in Olympia paying emotional reparations to exes; Millennials paying for each other’s therapy to deal with the traumatic aftermath and vanquish them of the baggage they’d carry into the next liaison. I say I love the idea- cough it up assholes, that’s evolved! It seems I’m the only one who doesn’t find it laughably absurd.
The day before I left, the day before he left, we commit to the Keto diet after watching that Netflix documentary that makes it seem like the ultimate cure all; the remedy to all the pains of being. The same allure as the Egyptian Magic moisturiser and clay face masks he ritualised in sobriety. It’s a deluded unspoken belief of ours that this Keto diet will fix him and save us from us, from him.You cling to hope in strange corners when you’re desperate for a life raft. We decide to commit to it for the next two weeks while I’m away. He says he’ll give me $2k “CASH”, “straight from the ATM”, if -I pass the Keytone pee test by the time I’m back in LA. Do you know how impossible it is to be Keto in Europe? ON TOUR? In Winter? and I’m fucking doing it. I’m eating sun-dried tomatoes and cashews from corner stores, thinking somehow it will heal him from afar. Then he dumps me after Day 1, out of thin air. AWOL. Adding insult to injury, salt on a wound, lemon juice in a paper cut. Bizarrely, this Keto detail kills me the most, it makes me feel especially pathetic and incensed about the whole thing. I could’ve been downing cinnamon buns. I could’ve left him when I found out he was using and run for the hills. I could’ve not gone on tour and stayed with him until he was better. I couldn’t’ve done anything different actually and I curl up in my keyboard case and sleep through our first day of rehearsals in Berlin.
I first really saw him (for what he was to become to me) side of stage at a Pond show, Paint Me Silver swirling in the air. He’s noticeably, effortlessly cool. Wayfarers on, fucked up jeans falling off, 36” leg, and a disintegrating t-shirt. Everything is stained and worn out (unpretentiously -it’s too sincere to be contrived). Messy hair, hunched over shoulders, lanky, tall, insatiably handsome. Jawline -yeah, jawline. Cheekbones too. Big Hands; man-sized hands. Shoe laces undone. VERY well endowed (everyone knows this apparently, which partly mortifies, partly boosts him). Something kind of Jewish and New York about his whole thing. Quiet and assured, secretive for sure. I watch him from the other side of the stage (the band are but a moving blur between us; I can only see a vignette of him in sharp focus at this moment). I watch him laugh, so cheeky, like he felt guilty to let it out. He whispers in someone’s ear, hand over mouth, before giggling some more… and I guess I die a little. That laugh could shatter my heart into a thousand pieces. I wanted him SO BAD RIGHT NOW and I visualise our entire relationship almost exactly as it happened right there and then.
I clock him at the After Party sitting at one of those large round tables you only see in Chinese restaurants, weddings and corporate events. He was alone, of course, fiddling with something, tapping his leg, looking unbearably cool in a pained-to-be-cool way. I pull up a chair next to him to strike up conversation. Who am I kidding here? I pull up a chair next to him to flirt and win his absolute adoration and affection. Mid way through my first sentence, unceremoniously, he offers me some Valium and upon my baffled, polite decline, proceeds to dose himself generously. I took offence at the suggestion, thinking he thought I was nervous and needed it or maybe he wanted to shut me up. A negative spiral of assumptions. In fact he was nervous and what I know now (that I didn’t know then) is that people who love drugs think its the nicest thing to do- an olive-branch to eternal friendship. He was a bit of a Dick and a no-hoper I concluded, clearly not fussed over me (how dare he not be fussed over me!). I lost interest in a fluster with a shrug of the shoulders, stood up, walked into the night and not minutes after, end up in a slow-jam make-out on the dance floor with the exquisiteness that is Moses Sumney. Never kiss and tell I told myself for these memoirs, but I don’t think he’ll begrudge me for it. Mac said he was jealous. Of me, not Moses. There’s not a soul in this dimension or the next that wouldn’t want to kiss that man. His lips are like satin pillows on a baby-pink cloud in the heaven of all heavens. He is not of this earth. Larger-than-life; mystical. A Prince; a God. He knows this of course. It’s all mapped out in his asymmetrical black threads.
Wiped and sluggardised, I dutifully saunter off to the elevators to go to bed. My single ‘Tra$h Can Luv’ has just been released and I have a couple of phone interviews in the morning. Anderson Paak and his posse are loudly exiting the building, ghetto blaster on his shoulder -where it has been glued (along with a grin that tells me trouble) for the entire tour. The elevator doors open and there he is again, this time looking like a frightened rabbit in headlights, eyes wide, face pale as a ghost. I ask if he is ok, because he doesn’t look it. He acquiesces, so I offer to sit with him for a while in his hotel room and chat until he falls asleep. I’m always fearful of people like this dying alone in hotel rooms. You never want to feel what if or if only with this particular breed of fragile and fearless. So we lay next to each other on top of the bed as perfect strangers, fully clothed. Our hands are neatly placed on our own stomachs, staring at the ceiling… and we talk. For hours. I don’t even remember about what. Gossip. Existentialism. His history of drug problems, of course. He expects it to shock me, but my childhood was full of junkie casualties and it’s passé and uninteresting to me. In the recently post #MeToo era, I’m amused (and pleased) that he asks permission to spoon me, which I say yes to, then to put his hand on my ass, which I also say yes to, then (in the morning) if I wanted to have sex with him (in those exact words) to which I laughed and said definitely not. I was too busy, and besides, it was a weird thing to ask in such a matter of fact way. Tactless and unenticing really. I pretend to not be flattered.
“Who would think… that two people could really meet in a spinning elevator, at night when the wind that’s called the Freemantle Doctor’s blowing over the sand and the lawn, where earlier we shook hands, and might never have spoken again” extract of poem by him.
Back in the van, Alex informs me that my funny valentine asked for my number and (ever the protective boss) would I mind if he gave it to him? I’m embarrassed, also a bit chuffed and say “oh ok, whatever”, playing it cool. The boys in the band unanimously approve of the match, saying they rate him -which means highly. Apparently there’s an alter-ego he pulls out on tour called Bubbles where he is completely naked covered in shaving cream head to toe, speaking in a high pitched voice, and that intrigues me honestly. The next day, I’m in Auckland and he’s in Hawaii. With his mother. He sends me a picture of a fluorescent green Croc (I promised myself I would NEVER entertain a man who owned Crocs or toe shoes -even ironically, which in this case, I assume it was) followed by another picture of himself topless on a beach. This is something pasty guys in bands are not usually inclined to do. My eyes popped out of my head with hilarity to see a monstrous portrait of my favourite poet’s head in a flat cap tattooed on his chest -Pablo Neruda. I laugh to myself at how ridiculous it is, while also thinking to myself -It’s a sign! We’re meant to be! Because the only tattoo I have is a scrappy handwritten LVXI that I like to say is in reference to Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet XI (but is actually the initials of a junior doctor I dated -in 2011).
He divulges to me that he’s seen a stripper with elephantiasis popping ping pong balls and live goldfish from her pussy and gets M to record a sweet little video from a Vietnamese restaurant saying what a pleasure it was to meet me (my hands were covered in honey from the cheese platter station when we met for the first time and we shook honey covered hands). He sends a picture of a Michel Houellebecq book (a writer my stepmother swears is an overrated misogynist pig, but my godfather sings all praises of).
I get back to LA a few days later, always the wanderer, catching Ubers across town with sprawling suitcases and stuffed Ralph’s bags spilling over with spandex and thigh highs, staying in generous friend’s glamorous homes from West Hollywood to Montecito Heights. He offers for me to stay with him off Sunset and I think “fuck it, why not” and end up with my oversized suitcase at what looks like a crack den just behind Guisado’s. He explains it’s a temporary rental from a concert promoter with bad taste in art. Terrible, in fact, tech-bro psych-trance graphics I’d call it. It’s to neither of our taste, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s wearing a beanie tucked behind his ears, chain smoking and I think he seems quite hopeless; an oddball and completely unlovable in the most completely loveable way. So I fall completely in love with him, naturally. Perhaps because of it, or in spite of it, perhaps he planned it that way and it always works that way. He falls in love with me because everyone does eventually, and he’s positively gaga about having an empathetic non-committal nurse with good boobs. That’s my take. Next thing I know, we’re stoned in a cab on the way home from my show, giggling (god damn that laugh), singing (badly -he’s famously a-tonal) and kissing (and slow spitting in each other’s mouths). Barf. He says “I think we’d be good together you know, like a good couple” and I said “I just want to love you, let’s do it, make it official”. We’re giddy. It feels stupid and exciting and very, very real. We’re both good at that though- making it feel real; love bombing ourselves and others, believing our own hype, believing it will be different this time, breaking hearts. We play the same game and we’ve met our match now, making it all the more scary.
“When I’m lying in bed with you and we’re kissing and I’m looking into your eyes, it’s like the ultimate and most satisfying privilege that it almost makes me feel guilty. Like, how did this happen to me?” text from him.
We are both full-time road dogs, he goes South, I go West. He has a day off in the diary a couple weeks later and flies from Mexico to meet me in New York, writes me his first poem in forever and it’s all very romantic. I buy us a cute little Manhattan hotel room for the night with the per diems I’ve collected starving myself during the days. We walk past VR clubs, order boba tea and find ourselves stumbling on top of The Empire State Building by nightfall. Looking out over that iconic scene, he starts singing a Killers song (who I’ve been touring with) in his trademark a-tonal and totally sincere voice to crack me up and MY GOD I LOVE HIM. By the time we get home his eyes are wide like a rabbit again. They say pupils dilate when you’re in love and you like what you see, but in retrospect it was the valium and who knows what else. He’s sitting naked (Gaelic cross tattooed down the middle of his back) on a chrome wheeled black leather office chair, tucked into the desk, improvising esoteric soundscapes on a mini synth -“uh oh its getting a little serious now”. He calls reception (“mmhmm” “ok”) while I watch him from the bed with hearts pouring out of my eyes over absolutely every little movement he makes as he walks across the room smiling at me “there better be milk in that fucking minibar or I’m going to fucking flip”. I’m smitten. For no particular reason I can put my finger on other than I must’ve wanted to be.
“It rolled in from the distance like a storm, a storm that turns the sky green and defines your longing in acutely articulated minutes, or fine details sharpened into a nail of fragrant wood. They burn it in the avenues, which themselves become redolent and full of smoke” extract from poem by him.
It’s February 26 2018, I’m wearing his Calvin Klein shirt that I haven’t taken off for a week as if it will give me magic powers and protection. I’m in Chicago, I’m in Washington. I’m in Vancouver having a panic attack when his mother with long blond hair and a heart of gold, brings me a box of chocolates back stage. I’m reading Testosterone Rex ‘Myths of Sex, Science and Society’ by Cordelia Fine and there’s a photo of a bottle of Baby-Oil in my phone, so I guess we’re already into that. I’m In Seattle (literally sleepless in Seattle, thinking about the Tom Hanks film that screened every Friday night on free-to-air TV as a kid). I’m making a nude video in the tub to Future’s ‘Mask Off’ (his favourite song at the time). Percoset, Molly, Percoset… Ugh. Eye roll. The video is not hot. I put an X-Files X-Ray filter on it and a Star Wars credit roll. I’m tired af and my body is a mess. Did I tell you his dad worked on X-Files? I had Fox Mulder’s ‘I Want To Believe’ poster on my bedroom wall as a teen. See! Meant to be! And besides, he loved to well-up singing Emotions by Destiny’s Child together. As far as I’m concerned any man as pure and precious as that deserved all of me, forever. I’m in Oregon.
“We could talk about all of the recent movies we’ve seen and then move into a state of silence, allowing the thrum of whathaveyou to occupy us. The candle melting down a neck of opaque glass. That’s your heart! And the wax is the time spent between the moments you failed to notice. Maybe. Or maybe the neck is your neck and the wax is my saliva which dissolved in the breath of your affection and coiled into smoke” extract from poem by him.
We find a handful of free days we can squeeze in together in absolute desperation. I get the Yellow Fever vaccination in London and fly to Berlin to play my first solo show in what looks like a concrete prison cell to a small group of fans I didn’t even know I had. I finish up at 2am and go back to some very sweet fan’s flat for an hour before dragging myself to Schönefeld to hop on a 3-flight connection to São Paulo via Casablanca. He’s been taking Viagra for fun because he can and I really will never know what else. He’s reading Kathy Acker and I buy him Lost Connections: uncovering the real causes of depression -and the unexpected solutions by Johann Hari. We need it. We don’t leave the hotel room for 3 days. Baby Oil, Maple Syrup, John Cale’s Fear, Rickie Lee Jones’ In The Ghetto, Gummy Bears and lounge room Salsa lessons. We could’ve been anywhere. I didn’t even see Brazil. We were a flurry of absolute love.
“Trails of troubles, frozen battles, paths of victories we shall walk” Bob Dylan plays over a video I make of him smiling, then pouting, in the shower, with a hand over one eye, steam rolling down the glass door. My life moved so fast at this time that my memories have become nothing more than expanded versions of the snapshots I have left in my iPhone.
At Lollapalooza, in front of thousands of people, he welcomes me up on stage as his girlfriend. I’m awkward and say something dumb on the mic. He sings his cover of Under The Bridge just minutes before the Chilli Peps IRL play it on the stage across the field in a moment that isn’t lost on any of us. He’s my dancing monkey. He’s M’s dancing monkey. He’s everyone’s oh-so lovable dancing monkey. In the hotel lobby at dawn I meet a morbidly obese man in a suit eating a cheeseburger who manages Morrissey and Perry Farrell. His hired young ‘lady of the night’ grabbed me by the arm, saying my name, claiming to be a big fan! She’s cool as fuck and I spend the next day by the pool with her and her sexy little cohort. They tell me of goths in the Amazon, how prostitution is legal in Brazil (and paid for by the festival, to provide pleasure for the bands) and how they just love bands and want to play music. I tell them to start a band together like The GTOs (google it) and to take advantage of their connections. I tell them to use blackmail. I’m joking on the outside. I’m dead serious on the inside. I miss The Killers at the same hotel by a matter of hours.
“Then again I like alternative things, like not having children or owning a car, and men who wear lots of rings, the scent of vicious tar” extract of poem by him.
Next thing I know, I’m in Bologna. Something is wrong and even 30 year old parmesan wheels can’t put me into a food coma of pleasure that will ease my dis-ease. He’s not tethered to me. There’s a lost connection and I know it. My intuition screams at my gut and my heart.
“Sugar is sweet and melts like honey, and when it’s hot the honey gets runny… watch the honey run away, say my name another way, but when it resolidifies- maybe on your lips? Your thighs? I’ll be there once again, make it warm and run like rain, and when you find yourself in pain, remember that I feel the same. Maybe not identical, like a pair of tentacles, but nonetheless I am aware, that because I do you too must care. Nothing to be done for it, the distance, the clock that oh so slowly ticks. The old warm ugly sweater doesn’t fit. This funny way we’re forced to sit! and dream again of when it’s warm again, when our bodies melt like sugar in rain” poem by him.
It’s his birthday and he’s bleached his hair. Something is up I tell you. A gothic pair of friend’s from Canada have arrived and take him to Joshua Tree, fielding messages from loved ones to share with him. I scribble on my hotel notepad:
“The most precious gift that ever presented itself to me. The perfect offering; cracks included, not to be sold separately. Blinded and basking in the light. Sincerely, your Honeydew Melon”
Referencing Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. Against the advice of his therapist (who says it’s impulsive) he jumps on a first class ticket to Australia to meet me and it’s the beginning of the end. I’m on another stadium tour with the Killers (who he’s repulsed by at this point). He’s told his friends he’s marrying me, which makes them scoff. I’m into it though. I want his babies. He meets my family. I take a bite of one of my grandma’s home-made weed cookies and end up on the kitchen floor thinking I’m having a brain aneurism like the woman in the TED talk, begging to go to hospital. My hand looks like an octopus. My dad is doing nothing, watching tv on the couch. My boyfriend tells me we need to find Valium to make it better and even in my haze I can tell he is trying to trick me into revealing the location of drugs that don’t exist in our house. Apparently (the lies are a deep web I’ll never untangle) there’s a bottle of Oxycontin in the fridge (left over from a surgery of my little sister’s), that he got stuck into. He flies back to LA, followed by me, a day later.
Things are weird. Demonic. Distant. Cold. Trashy. He always takes photos Downtown when he’s like this. He thinks he’s functional, but he’s just an asshole. A beautiful asshole. One night he starts vomiting and sitting in the shower. Yeah, sitting (something I do to this day when I’m suffering). Shivering. He thinks it’s food poisoning from El Compadres (where we drank flaming mojitos and argued last night). I stumble down in my satin slip to CVS on Sunset at 2am to buy Pepto Bismal and a hot water bottle. I’m reading him Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War On Drugs by Johann Hari -“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety -It’s connection”. Even while he’s writhing in bed sick I’m desperately forcing paragraphs about the Rat Park experiment in Vancouver, saying we should move to Portugal where it’s legal and users are taken care of. I’m telling him that it’s about the connection to the culture and ritual of the drug taking, not the addictiveness of drugs themselves after all. This is a revelation to me, it’s a non event for him. I’m killing him with hope and drowning him in affection. I think he’s sober somehow.
We go to look at a new rental property in China Town that we might move into with his goth friends (who are both in recovery and have an extremely volatile relationship). I try to be non-judgemental and positive but I think they’re all bad news for each other and a disaster waiting to happen. They have hope for themselves though and they’re trying so hard and my heart aches for them and their combination of purity and deception. This isn’t my world and I want my baby back. His friend says “you know he’s using right?” and I didn’t. I’d been with him every minute of every day. How was that even possible? I feel a heat rise up in me and I want to cry and scream and smash things, but I also want to act with compassion and acceptance; react with all the new knowledge I’ve gained from the books and talks and be the person who makes a difference and breaks the cycle with ultimate mind-fucking loving compassion. I ask him if his “food poisoning” was withdrawals and he doesn’t deny it. Tells me he snuck out while I was asleep to score from a guy off Craigslist at Dunkin Donuts in Highland Park and smoked it in the bathroom. I didn’t see the tin foil. We go to Narcotics Anonymous that night. I join him as a support person and volunteer to read. I accompany him and his friends to meetings every day, I wait for them at the front of Cafe Tropical and call my friends wondering how I ended up in this place. I even go to the House of Intuition fucking crystal shop and buy “Intention” candles that we light together and pray for his recovery. This is WAY outside my comfort zone and suddenly we don’t feel very cool at all. I fly to Berlin with hope. He’s sober.
At the end of the fucked up two week European tour, where I’m so sick I think I might get stomach-cancer from the heartbreak, he answers my call for some reason, somewhere in Denmark. I know that 10 days sober is when his sex drive would come back and I know him so well I’ve already assumed he’s shacked up with someone, which he confirms. A cokey teenager. Great. I believe he loves me, but he’s doing his thing he does, and took my word for it when I said I didn’t need this shit. The inevitable cycle of lust, love, fear, drugs, cheating, implosion and going home to get clean. I tell him I love him unconditionally and accept what’s happening. I’ve watched a buddhist talk that convinces me if I truly love him I don’t need to possess him, I can love that he exists without needing to exist in the same physical space.
On a 12hr budget plane back to the US with no TVs on the back of the seats, I write and record a song called ‘Dumb Bitch’ when I’m feeling less Zen. When I land, I post it online thinking I’ll delete it an hour later. Russell Crowe retweets it. FFS. My rabbit in headlights drops my suitcases to me at Nick Littlemore’s house, where I’m crashing like a dumpster fire. Nick plops a midi keyboard in front of me and tells me to write, a song a day. He orders me delivery pancakes for dinner as a reward. So I write. The only silver lining to hardships is that I can make something from it, from the void. I live with the ongoing fear that one day I will get a phone call that he is gone, not because he wanted to go but because his chemistry skills couldn’t match the concoction and the balance is off. Junkies don’t want to die, they want to live and it’s the only way they know how. They’re too precious for this slumland; every injustice we walk past and accept gives them perpetual unbearable pain. They’re intelligent and sensitive, they’re awake and they want to be asleep. I promise myself I will check in with him intermittently for the rest of our lives even if it annoys the hell out of him. I tell him I love him as often as I think it. No one gets it, least of all him, and no one ever will.
“A little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown, I had it made up not make a frown, but a little bitty tear let me down” Burl Ives.