Turn Around Bright Eyes (27 page)

These are questions I’ve pondered all my life, which is probably one of the key reasons I turned out a Bowie freak. He was certainly the rock star who had the most fun pretending to be a girl. He brought out into the spotlight the gender-bending that was always part of rock & roll, going back way before Elvis showed up to his first audition in a pink suit or Jackie Wilson mastered the art of fainting onstage. If you watch the Marlon Brando biker movie
The Wild One
, the movie that laid down the code of hypermasculinity for fifties kids like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, you see all the biker rebels rioting and brawling and looting. But it isn’t long before they’ve broken into Mildred’s Beauty Salon and started dressing up as girls. One of the bikers wears a mop on his head and says, “That Mildred gives the best perms!” It’s amazing—rock & roll masculinity had existed for barely
forty-five minutes
before it was already turning into a drag show.

And it’s stayed there ever since. In fact, if you’re looking for a one-line description of a rock star, it could be “a boy who wears what women tell him to wear.” This is rarely why a young boy dreams of being a rock star, but that’s what the job is. A rock star sings like a girl, wiggles like a girl, emotes like a girl, wears whatever he found on his girlfriend’s floor. (As Slash put it in his memoir, “We borrowed shit from chicks.”) Boys are usually more comfortable when we’re hiding behind machines, but a rock star lets his girlness hang out. Bowie didn’t invent this. He just did it a little sluttier.

When listening to “Ziggy Stardust,” it’s strange to recall how glamour-starved his audience was. We like to imagine a seventies Bowie show as a glammed-out freakfest—it’s certainly how Bowie wanted his fans to picture themselves. But when you see the amazing 1975 bootleg documentary
Cracked Actor
, it seems that most U.S. Bowie freaks were in fact bearded, long-haired kids in overalls, not looking so different from any other rock crowd. At one point, one zonked hippie kid in flannel and corduroys raves to the camera about Bowie’s messianic power: “He’s from his own universe! The Bowie universe!” The camera guy asks if the kid is also from the Bowie universe. He replies, “No, I’m from Phoenix.”

The glitter was all in their heads, because the Bowie school of glamour was a way of
perceiving
the world, not really dependent on dressing up at all. Bowie’s glamour hit American kids the way potable water hit medieval peasants; they had no idea how thirsty they were. But he was even more thirsty for them. Bowie was desperate for these kids to like him. Even in 1973, a British reporter for
Melody Maker
was taken aback by how friendly and sincere he got when accosted by female fans. “They’re the salt of the earth,” Bowie says. “Those girls. They don’t sit each night and compare notes of groups, criticizing lyrics, asking if it’s valid. They just play the record—yeah, and maybe they dance. I love them. I love them dearly.”

That comes across in songs like “Ziggy.” Bowie aspired to make those girls dance. He kept singing about girls in space, and how the only way he had to communicate with them was making them dance. (He puts it honestly in “DJ,” one of my favorite Bowie songs: “I got a girl out there, I suppose. I think she’s dancing—what do I know?” It takes a rare rock star to admit he’s wondering if the girls are dancing, and an even rarer one to admit he’s too zonked out to know.) With Ziggy, he gave himself over totally to the dancing girls, and let himself go.

That’s the mood I’m going for when I sing “Ziggy Stardust,” even though it’s usually just in a rent-by-the-hour room. The big ending—“Ziggy played guitaaaar!”—turns us all into David Bowie. It’s not my voice, but it’s a voice I can steal, a voice big enough to crawl into and disappear inside for a while.

3:55 a.m.:

Ally had her bachelorette party at Sing Sing. It was a month after the wedding, which was a shrewd move, and I was invited, which wasn’t. Her girls got a big private room and gathered there at seven. My marching orders were to call at eleven and see if the party was still raging, but the bachelorettes weren’t even close to the final countdown. They were mostly rocking the nineties jams—Nirvana, Hole, Snoop, Pixies, Liz Phair, Whitney, the Beasties. There were so many songs loaded up in the queue, by the time your pick rolled around you’d completely forgotten requesting it.

These bachelorette bacchantes showed no signs of slowing down until I stepped up to sing Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” That’s when everybody said “look at the time” and started rummaging through the coat pile. I didn’t even get up to the line about “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” before the front desk abruptly switched the sound off. It was 4 a.m.

Some nights you plan ahead for an exit where everybody goes around and sings one last song, but that’s a relative rarity. Other nights you all just abruptly run out of lung steam. This was one instance where the place was closing down and the staff wanted to go home. Sometimes they’re friendly when they throw you out, knocking on the door to give you a few minutes warning, and sometimes they just cut off the equipment mid-verse. Only once a few years ago did they send the security guy in, and that was probably understandable considering we were on our third “Paradise City” in a row.

But the end comes too soon, and everybody wishes they had time or energy for a few more. You want to get one last song in, but there’s always more you have lined up in your head, songs that you’ll just have to save for next time. You have to trust there’ll be a next time. You know there’ll always be more songs to sing.

In September 2006 I asked Ally to marry me. I’d been biding my time while she finished up her dissertation and got her degree; she was back down in Charlottesville the summer before, deep in the lab. Back at home, I was plotting my own kind of endgame, because I wanted to spend my life with her but wanted to do this right. I didn’t know how she felt about marriage. Maybe she was against it as an institution. We’d never discussed it. We’d often shared fond fantasies of what we’d do when we were old together, but for all I knew, she wanted to leave this to chance. While she was in Charlottesville wrapping up her graduate work, I was planning a strong and convincing pitch. As my friend Carrie urged me, “You have to give her a
story
.” This was no time to be half-assed. Pretending you arrived at things by coincidence and good intentions, bumbling into them without a plan: This is the way of tender-hearted, apple-cheeked youth. Pretending to do things by accident is what you do in your twenties. That pretense consumes a lot of your energy then. And it makes sense in your twenties, because it gives you a degree of plausible deniability in case you fuck it up or get fucked over. It gives you the Pee Wee Herman “I meant to do that” escape clause. But in your thirties, when you’re confident about what you want, it’s harder to talk yourself out of making the bold move that will help you get it. I had no desire to talk myself out of this at all. So I needed a plan.

Ally got her degree in August; we celebrated by going out in Charlottesville to Baja Bean’s karaoke night, where she did Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” A few weeks later we took our celebratory trip to Palm Springs, California. I had a ring in my bag, which I sweated over every step of the airport security process, every hour of the journey. On Saturday we drove up to Joshua Tree National Monument and stopped for lunch at a Del Taco in Desert Hot Springs. There was a sticker on Ally’s french fries indicating she was a winner for a free burrito. The sticker proclaimed,
TASTY NEWS! YOU’RE AN INSTANT WINNER
!

We drove around in the desert, with the top down, basking in the afternoon sun, the welcoming waves of the yucca trees and chollas and ocotillos. We blasted the Sirius radio, switching back and forth between the Elvis station (it was “Soundtrack Saturday,” this one dedicated to the music from Elvis’s 1963 film
Fun in Acapulco
) and 1st Wave, the vintage new-wave station. Ally was relaxed; I wasn’t. I was at the wheel, looking around for the right place to execute my plan. I had a ring in my pocket. I was wearing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirt, with little
Y
’s all over it, which must have been an unconscious attempt to send a subliminal “yes” message.

We stopped and hiked a few trails, but none of them was secluded enough or serene enough. We climbed a hill, yet this wasn’t a job to do on the side of a hill. There were a few hours to go before sundown, and it was still blazing hot, but I was sweating in agony. We rolled onto a dirt road through the Queen Valley and Morrissey came on the radio singing “Suedehead” and I knew this was the place. I pulled over and we walked to look at a particularly inviting Joshua tree, the gnarls of its branches reaching up into an infinitely blue sky at all kinds of skewed angles. We could see miles in all directions, all the way out to the snowcapped San Bernardino mountains, knowing we were the only human beings anywhere near here. The air was so silent we heard a desert raven flapping its wings as it slowly crossed the sky over our heads. The ring was still in my pocket and the soil was barely steady under my feet. The idea that I could still chicken out and put this off for another time throbbed in my brain. But there were so many yuccas and Joshua trees reaching up and spreading their arms to form a Y, we were wrapped in a million yesses. Five minutes later, the ring was no longer in my pocket, and all the trees seemed to be waving their arms in the joy of it all.

After an hour or so, we saw a dust cloud in the distance growing bigger. It was a park ranger who had spotted our stopped car. He just wanted to know if our car broke down or if we needed help; we didn’t. We did the wedding fast, just three months later, on December 30 (birthday of Michael Nesmith
and
Davy Jones). We had fun reviewing the candidates for our first wedding dance—“Heroes”? Too long. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”? Too somber. We went with the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey.” And a month later was the bachelorette party, with Ally belting Nirvana’s “About a Girl” to the break of dawn.

It feels strange to remember how I used to think it was too late for me. I thought I’d had my shot. Maybe I would be able to re-create some of the things in my life that had been lost, but the surprise, the urgency of being that happy would be gone for good. Now I have the experience of being a husband, at a different time, as an adult. And yet everything seems new. The experiences of marriage are still surprising for me, and while this means I am often confused about what the hell I’m doing, it means I’m continually awed by how different it is.

Trying to live in the past didn’t work for me, and it’s only now that I fully realize I’m incredibly lucky it didn’t. Because it would have been all too sad to miss out on right now. That would have turned the past into a fraud. It would have meant all my happy memories were a lie. It would have meant all that time and all that love was a waste, leading up to a wasted future. It would have been the ultimate betrayal of everything I thought my whole life was about and everyone I cared about. All the people who loved me, in all the times and places of my life—all the people who made a lover out of me—they would have all been wrong about me. And it could have happened easily, just like that. It’s scary to think of how I could have gotten stuck pining for the past. I was lucky to get a second chance. I thought I was too late, but it turns out I was just in time.

I have gone from feeling right at home in my twenties to feeling like I’m nowhere at all, and then back to feeling at home, but a totally different home. So I love with a different heart. I’m a different person in a different place. Like a record, baby, right round round round. A second chance is more than anyone deserves, but a second chance is what I have. Many people get to this place, via death or divorce, and none of us exactly
planned
to get here, but here we are.

Ally and I have made our home together. We love it here in Greenpoint, the place where Polish dudes in convertibles pull over to try to pick up Ally in the mother tongue. I don’t speak Polish, but I’m pretty sure they’re saying, “Is this skinny Irish dude bothering you?”

We love everything about this place. The neighborhood even has a record store where the clerks still have that hilariously unreconstructed old-school “your taste sucks” attitude. I love that. I never thought I’d miss that aspect of record stores, but now it makes me all gooey and sentimental, even when it’s directed at me. These days, encountering record clerks like this in real life is like meeting a butler who says “Very good, sir,” or a criminal henchman named Rocko. Let me share some verbatim dialogue from my local record store. Me: “Where do you keep the James Brown albums?” The clerk: “Yeah, we’re not that kind of record store.” Verbatim! Once upon a time this would have infuriated me. Now it makes me feel excited, like I’m a little kid visiting the Indie World exhibit at Epcot.

By now Ally’s been here almost as long as I have. We’ve been here long enough to see the deli around the corner go from Lucky Seven to Beer Mania to Kestane Kebab. We run into friendly people everywhere, including people who drifted up from Virginia; my first set of neighbors in Brooklyn heard my voice through the walls and recognized it as one they’d heard on the radio in Charlottesville. In retrospect I know that my previous failed attempt at making a home for myself was my fault, not that neighborhood’s. I guess that place was a crate I packed myself into so I could mail myself to a saner, safer moment in the future. And I guess this is it. Ally and I have made a crate full of memories here. We have heard a lot of music here, seen a lot of bands. We make new memories in new songs. We hear the old songs and we tell each other stories about places we’ve been and strange things we’ve seen. All those people, all those lives, where are they now? They’re in us and here we are.

IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS
bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can’t rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.