Composed (19 page)

My friends, particularly my girlfriends, were phenomenal. Every day for the first few weeks, someone would come by to sit and watch a Bette Davis movie with me, or drop off a casserole for John and the kids, or just sit quietly next to me on the bed when I was too miserable to talk or listen. Chantal Bacon, my next-door neighbor and one of my dearest friends, visited many times just to make tea for me, as she knew exactly how I liked it. She would brew a pot, arrange it on a tray, smile, and almost imperceptibly leave. My friends Gael Towey and Stephen Doyle made applesauce for me a few times, and it became the only thing I wanted to eat. Stephen ferried it over to me on his bicycle. Chelsea went back and forth to Nashville, where she was living, to help with Jake and the house, and calm Carrie’s nerves about me.

John read aloud to me Chekhov’s “The Bet,” and in my morphine haze the images and language became almost surreal, and wonderful. That was perhaps the best moment in my early recovery.

Because of the slow pace of recovery, I was frustrated and even despairing at times. I went deep into my pain, ascribing all kinds of portentous meaning to it. The changes in barometric pressure that accompanied an approaching storm laid me out on the sofa, immobile, with a crushing headache. They had broken my top vertebra during surgery, intentionally, so they could free up the trapped cerebellum, and my neck felt like a concrete brick. It hurt constantly. My left ear developed overly acute hearing, and I found that I couldn’t bear not only noise but any music with lyrics—the words seemed too complicated, and irritating. I listened to classical music in those first few months, and nothing else. Mostly I wanted silence. I was enormously sensitive to sensory overload, and I stayed inside my house most of the time to avoid sounds of traffic and sirens, loud voices, and dogs barking. Sometimes I reversed words when I was talking, or replaced common words with others that weren’t even close in meaning. My friends laughed when that happened and told me it was adorable, that I shouldn’t worry about it.

In my self-pity I went so far as to convince myself that both my parents had somehow known I was going to have brain surgery and had decided to die before it happened so they wouldn’t have to go through the agony of seeing their child undergo such a terrific ordeal. This little exercise in morbid narcissism allowed me to become furious with them, and feel justified. Then, at some point, that all dissipated and I was glad—more than glad, I was deeply relieved—that they weren’t around to witness it, as I knew how much it would have taken out of both of them. My brother came up to New York from his home in Tennessee, and my sister from her home in Port-land, Oregon, to offer comfort in lieu of our parents. I was grateful for that.

Today my face is no longer as round as a hubcap from steroids, and the initial egregious pain from the surgery has mercifully faded, but a kind of posttraumatic memory pain endures. On some days it is almost cripplingly awful and others barely noticeable, and I have grown used to my missing vertebra and the little ski jacket in my skull. I am still sensitive to too much sensory information and have given up taking the subway because the sound frequency of the trains is unbearable. A loud party can make me shaky and dizzy. But my most recent MRIs look fantastic. Dr. McKhann was so thrilled with the results, he said, that if he showed my MRI at a conference, he would be told that he performed unnecessary surgery, that there was no evidence of a Chiari. I don’t see Dr. Heyer anymore, but he has been replaced by two other fantastic men—my pain specialist, Dr. Michael Weinberger, and my physical therapist, Evan Johnson—and a wonderful acupuncturist, Shellie Goldstein. They are diligent, meticulous, and constantly encouraging. I use pain medication only on rare occasions, and my doctors all assure me that there is “no limit to how much I can still improve.” I take this as gospel, on all levels, metaphoric and physical.

I’m glad I had brain surgery. My cerebellum was in a rogue location: It had done the geographical equivalent of starting in Vancouver and wandering down to Houston. The map had to be rearranged. But I don’t recommend it as an elective adventure. I don’t recommend it without the presence of my husband, who will call several of the top neurosurgeons in the country and compile all their opinions in a spiral notebook and then drive you to the hospital and make sure you see his face as soon as you are remotely conscious and help you learn to walk up one stair, and try to make the tea taste right, and take over the spelling words when you pass out, and read short stories to you, and show up again and again and again. And I don’t recommend it unless the idea of brain surgery keeps resurfacing in the background noise of the foreshadowed knowledge of your own life. It’s too big, and it takes a long time to explain it to yourself, not to mention to others. It scares the shit out of everyone. It requires a steely, aggressive sense of humor. There are too many after-shocks in the way of nightmares and pain. But if it
is
a foregone conclusion in your life, I highly recommend Jimmy Breslin’s book, a good night’s sleep, the score from
The Wizard of Oz
, a relaxation tape, Chekhov and morphine, and a decent cup of tea.

R
ecently someone sent me an issue of
Guitar Player
magazine to show me an old photograph taken in London in 1985 on the set of a television show. It featured a group of musicians sitting in a circle with their instruments. There was Carl Perkins, and there were George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds and Ringo Starr. Right at the center was a young woman with spiked hair and knee-high leather boots, holding a tambourine: me. I was thirty years old. I was the token woman on this show, a fact the producers hadn’t bothered to disguise when they invited me to participate. I didn’t care. I stepped off the plane and went straight to rehearsal and walked into that crowded studio and into another life, as far as I was concerned. I don’t think I ever told my parents I was going to do this show, and I don’t think I told them after the fact, either. I don’t know if they ever saw it. I went to George Harrison’s house for dinner that night with all the guys and listened to them play old rockabilly and blues songs for hours. I was completely exhausted from the flight and a full day of work and from pretending that I had total confidence in my right to be there. But pretending I had the confidence made it easier for me to generate a little of the genuine article, and a moment I later had with George helped in that respect tremendously.

The following night, as I left the television stage after my song, I saw George standing in the wings, waiting to go on. He was clapping for me, but I shook my head and said despondently, “It wasn’t as good as rehearsal.” “It’s
never
as good as rehearsal,” he replied, and I saw then that he was nervous.
George Harrison was nervous about appearing on a television show and performing a song.
I thought about that so many years later, when I attended the memorial for him in Strawberry Fields in Central Park the first weekend of December 2001, a few days after he died of lung cancer. He didn’t take his Beatles baggage to the guest spot on the Carl Perkins television show, but was just in the moment, wanting to be good, like the rest of us.

I have a friend who vacations for a month on Fisher Island every summer, another who goes to Maine for August, several who enjoy many leisurely weeks on the Vineyard upstate, and quite a few who are unreachable from June to Labor Day. I relish their summer vacation stories; I even obsess over them. I need all the details. (What was the house like? No, what was it like
exactly
? How far from the beach in feet and inches? What did you grill? How did you find a babysitter up there? What did you do?
Eat? Play?
)

I am not one of those people. Because every June, as soon as my son goes to summer camp, I leave Manhattan and go to work on the road. I tour with a full band and crew, or as part of an acoustic trio, but often it is just John and me out there doing our folk-rock George and Gracie show. Once, when we had a day off in Anchorage and drove up on the mountain that overlooks the Cook Inlet to watch the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever seen, I got lulled into thinking that we were on a kind of vacation. And I allowed myself to get a little happy. Then, two days later, comes a 4 a.m. call for a 6:30 plane, which flies three and a half hours to get to an airport bus to take us to a rental car for a four-and-a-half-hour drive into some godforsaken wilderness where some genius has had the foresight to book a folk festival, which I play that very night and which pays a significant chunk of my New York state taxes for the coming year (which means it is an appearance I cannot afford to turn down), reminding me that I am most definitely not on vacation, that I am, in fact, in a kind of bizarre rolling parallel universe that only those who have done summer tours can truly appreciate.

The road can be numbing, though I prefer driving to flying, as I seem to have a thing about flight attendants, having developed over the years a hypersensitivity to attitude at high altitudes. I have been in planes that have been struck by lightning, surrounded by tornadoes, diverted to new and even more miserably inconvenient destinations; planes whose landing gear failed to descend, engines conked out, wings clipped the ground and spewed rivets across the runway, takeoffs and landings have been aborted in snow and ice storms and violent winds and rain; planes that dropped so fast and so far that people literally hit the ceiling; and once, on a nearly empty late-night flight into Nashville, the pilot sent an attendant back just after landing to ask me if I knew where Gate 4 was, since he thought I had probably landed at this particular airport more than he had. And I had.

But a wonderful audience on an inspired night in a beautiful setting is like nothing else on earth. There is almost always that moment onstage when I feel guilty for complaining, because the audience is just so great and so responsive, and I realize that they really did come to see me, and I feel as if I might actually have a larger purpose in the world. I do it, ultimately, because I love it.

Once, in Montana, I drove by a hot springs resort set at the base of a magnificent mountain, in the midst of a spectacular valley. The landscape was beyond imagination: dramatic peaks and wide meadows and a river that shone from bank to bank and twisted through the valley from end to end. A convention of scientists had gathered at the resort, and a big white tent had been set up on the lawn, full of people milling about and having drinks. Outside the tent, some fifty yards away, sat a man in white shirtsleeves and khakis perched on a boulder at the foot of a little hillock, reading some papers in his left hand and nervously drumming his fingers on his leg with his right hand as he mouthed words silently to himself. I assumed he was the next speaker at the convention and was rehearsing his speech. I looked at the view behind and around him—the mountains, the valley, the Yellowstone River—and suddenly thought to myself,
It’s me. That’s me.
Obsessing over the details, how I will sound and appear, working it out, preparing, while all around me was a vast expanse of beauty and natural magnificence, unnoticed. It took me a long time to begin to let go, to quiet the critical voices, to stop editing. Performing is energy exchange. Sometimes it’s hard work, priming the pump, finding where the audience’s connectors are, and sometimes I just have to get out of my own way so they can take me on a ride. The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most—it’s a monk’s sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

I have built my career with my eyes half closed and both parents held at arm’s length, for opposite reasons: My father was too close to what I wanted to do; my mother too distant.

My mother led with her feelings. She made business decisions based on how she felt about someone, she hired lawyers because they seemed nice, she personalized what was not personal and was held captive by her own projections, based on feelings that were many times unfounded in reality. She also revealed her secrets and deepest pain to those who were not trustworthy, because she was easily taken in by gratuitous flattery and the whiff of obsequiousness. She could never properly discern character behind polished falsity. Conversely, she withheld her own truth from those who might have helped her if there was an appearance of detachment, or calculated logic and reason, in the person in question. Sometimes that person in question was me. She was half Sicilian, and she was incredibly sensitive and emotionally volatile. She felt deeply and didn’t let go easily. She found her own internal emotional landscape bewildering and overwhelming much of the time. It was so much for her to navigate. To me, it seemed like too much work, a ruinous distraction from the creative life, and an exhausting and unpredictable way to live. I saw I had a choice. My heart ached for her, a prisoner of so many feelings, so unbounded by reason, but I lived in reaction to her much of the time.

My father, in many ways, also led with his feelings, but he was of a more stoic, enigmatic nature, and much of the time we didn’t know what he was feeling until long after the fact, if ever. More to the point, he was a transcendent artist, which gave form and context and rhythm to those feelings, and the world was all the better for it. Living inside himself wasn’t easy—in fact, it was almost impossible for him to stay inside the terms of physical life and the limits of the body and mind, and he tested those limits many times, in many ways. But he did have a forum for his emotional life, the vastness of it, the grandeur and the pain. My mother did not have such a vast forum, although the forum she did have—her garden and her many domestic arts—was ultimately her salvation and a source of great beauty. Both were suited to the types of lives they created for themselves. That sounds obvious, but I think it was providential. I know plenty of people who are
not
suited to the lives they create for themselves.

To engage either of them in the seeding of my future, and the understanding of myself as an artist, would have been inconceivable tasks for me, as it would have meant analyzing them, refuting them, rebelling against them, explaining myself, seeking solace, or submitting. So I did the only thing left to me: I withdrew.

My father accepted this quietly. I imagine he understood, even though I know there were times that it hurt him that I didn’t ask for his advice or allow him into the inner workings of my plans. My mother accepted my ambition reluctantly and with a lot of anxiety, and with some judgments about the way I dressed or conducted myself, which were fair enough. I wore white pumps with a black suit on a big, splashy television show, when I should have been wearing an evening gown. I colored my hair purple. I abandoned Catholicism, making moot her most careful maternal training. I had no problem telling people to go fuck themselves when I felt it was warranted, even though I was not abrasive by nature and in fact was brought up to be a people-pleaser, a loathsome inclination. I didn’t suffer fools gladly, even when I was one myself. I also recklessly walked along a well-worn familial path at the edge of an abyss, by using drugs in my twenties. Fortunately, I didn’t have whatever it is in the brain chemistry that creates addiction and I stopped abruptly and forever when it became clear that it was a course of greatly diminishing returns. Such breaches of conduct and form were almost more than my mother could bear. Looking back, I now see that some are almost more than I can bear, too.

But out of various forms of personal catastrophe comes art, if you’re lucky. And I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry, and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer, in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world, where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then, despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.

We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture becomes, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person’s depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice; the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer’s unflinching eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline to which I cling in a confusing, unfair, sometimes dehumanizing world. In my childhood, the nuns and priests insisted, sometimes in a shrill and punitive tone, that religion was where God resided and where I might find transcendence. I was afraid they were correct for so many years, and that I was the one at fault for not being able to navigate the circuitry of dogma and ritual. For me, it turned out to be a decoy, a mirage framed in sound and fury. Art and music have proven to be more expansive, more forgiving, and more immediately alive. For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

The first good song I ever wrote took me the better part of a day, with no interruptions. I lay on the floor of Renate Damm’s apartment in Munich in 1978 and didn’t lift my head, except to quickly eat something or go to the bathroom, until it was finished. It was called “This Has Happened Before.” It’s a young woman’s song, tentative and too self-referential, too navel-gazing, but not to an extreme that would make you squirm. It’s well constructed, painstaking even, and I can hear the hard work in it. I was very proud when I finished that song, and it was the first time I felt like a real songwriter. I was twenty years old.

In the summer of 1994, I was in Paris, alone, finishing my book of short stories. On a beautiful late afternoon, I was walking toward the Seine from the Panthéon when, wafting out of the open door of a record shop, I heard a song by Guy Clark, who was a distant hero when I first began to write, then a genial mentor and friend, along with Rodney, when I lived in Nashville. I stopped in the street to listen to the song, and then went inside the store. There were racks and racks of vinyl records, all, it seemed, by American folk and roots musicians. I was ecstatic. I started flipping through the racks and came upon several of my own records.