Haunted ... When the Minutes Drag
an installment for your comments. more will follow:
I don’t know when it happened, exactly. But when it did, any mist of a soul got sucked right out of me, never to return.
There are many things I know I should be grateful for, I take inventory of that every single day and night, and yet I still can’t find the gratitude I ought to have, enough to match the gifts I’ve been given. I used to feel so utterly guilty for this, and I know – in theory, anyway – how lucky I am to be able to live my life with relative ease, doing something like what I do, which is a dream for so many. I’m livin’ it. I’m a fucking rock star. People think I’m great. What do they know.
You live your whole life thinking about what you want, and how you’re going to get it, and most people don’t even come close. They dream, they plan, sometimes they even get to Hollywood, and then eventually they realize it ain’t all it’s knocked up to be. Most of the time, this happens before any big battles are won, and they go home, back to the mid-west, or wherever they’re from, pick up their life where they left off, marry someone nice and get a job. But when you’re me, there’s not one moment of hesitation, and you jump right in with both feet. I didn’t even have to decide, because it was all decided for me. My best friend, my band mate, he orchestrated this life for me, which was perfect in every way. In a sense, I guess he was setting himself up too. We both just wanted to play, but in the words of my once and former manager, Monte Spiegel, “somebody’s got to be the star.” They picked me. I was easily led. I guess I still am. I’m totally naïve, I believe in everybody’s inherent good intentions. This was maybe my first mistake – but then again, maybe there are no mistakes, because the ever-powerful universe puts you exactly where you’re supposed to be. And like a faithful dog, I go.
And go. And go. On and on … all I ever wanted to do was play music. But as soon as we were actually filling clubs, it started to get out of hand. So many people, so many mouths talking … so many voices. I hated it. The very thing I’d always wanted was the bane of my existence. God forbid I’d tell anybody, I didn’t want to blow my own cover. There was a machine coming to life all around me that was building a pretty dense head of steam. Everybody was so happy. We were making lots of money, selling lots of records. The clubs were full, and my songs were on the radio.
It’s what you really want, right?
I look at my band every day, every night. They are so happy, all smiles. Happy to be working, traveling the world and seeing things we’ve never seen before. New girls, new boys. Magazines, television. I think as time went by I became somewhat of a robot, I had a few standard things I might say, and if it got to be too much, my sweetest friend or my manager would haul me off before I had a fucking meltdown. It happened once in a while, early on, but they got to know the signs: the decent into silence, the hair goes behind the ears, the grinding of teeth. Next thing you’d know, I’d be standing there screaming at the interviewer, calling him out on his ignorance and inanity … it gets really tedious when you get asked the same dumb shit over and over. I am told I should be gracious, but to this day I can’t abide stupidity. I mean, I’ve got a job, and I do it well enough that you want to talk to me, so why can’t you do your fucking job well enough to be interesting? Seriously. Don’t you agree? You would if you had to do this, I guarantee it. And when you do what we do, you have to (do this). The unfortunate thing is that once you hit a certain level, the media idiots think they own you. I could care less, but Spiegel tells me I have to pretend to care. For the fans.
I am not going to hate on my fans, that’s so wrong. They are just responding to the sounds. I don’t blame them, I do the same. Music is manna. The fact that I have been chosen to deliver the communion is not of my orchestration, but I get it, so I suck it up and deliver, no matter how much it feels like punching a clock. But I would never seek to humiliate my people just because I hate myself. That’s not fair at all. I saw a video of that Canadian schmuck radio guy dissing his fans, and I thought, that guy deserves whatever he gets, and he’s going to get it. In fact, I’d like to be the one who gives it to him, the slimy fuck. So full of hubris. Nobody should treat people that way either by word, creed or deed. Maybe one day i will get to tell him that in person.
My biggest problem is, I think I absorb other people’s shit, and when I get into a room with dozens of them, they give off such a chaotic energy, and I am overcome very quickly. It’s different when I’m playing. The music is a barrier, kind of. At any rate, it keeps all that shit at bay. Somehow. If I am not in front of a microphone with an instrument in my hands, it comes at me like a tsunami, engulfs me. It changes me. I don’t like it. It’s the supreme irony, that what sustains me may just kill me in the end. I’m so afraid of what might happen if I get sucked into that vortex. My everlasting fear is that I’ll get sucked down, down, down, and never, ever come back up. Once you’ve touched the darkness, it knows you’re there, and it feeds on your fear. You can’t even look in that direction, because you know you’re going to fall. It’s evil, and its pull is like a giant magnet, sucking all the gravity away from you until you can no longer resist. I try not to look, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes I have no place else to go.
So I sound like a crazy person, right? Clinically, perhaps. But I don’t think I’m so crazy. It’s the rest of the world, the chaos, the darkness that dogs my heels, and has since I can remember. I think there was a time when these things didn’t even occur to me. I think there was a time, long ago, when everything was light and good, and the music was enough. Music, good friends, playing music with your good friends. It’s all I ever needed.
So what happened? I can’t even tell you. One day, we’re on the road somewhere in America, and the next day I wake up with an unexplainable unwillingness to carry on. I’m living the dream. We’ve got a full house tonight. I wake with a lover beside me. Life is good, right? This is where my dilemma begins, because I know intrinsically how ridiculous it is to feel the way I do. So I put on a face. But it ain’t the face that anybody knows, so I get the twenty questions. Being a chick, it’s a little easier I guess, they just put it off to hormones and leave it be. I think that’s what I believed for a while too, until the hormones seemed like they were in effect much longer than biology generally allows for … depression. What happens when you find no joy in the things you are supposed to love. The endless, nagging, sinking feeling you get when you open your eyes in the morning and think about the day ahead, and the fear of facing it. The absolute surety that everybody is hiding something from you, that you’re not getting the full story. Hidden cameras everywhere … but you can’t ever be sure. You don’t want to confide in anybody because it sounds crazy. And also, you think that your closest friends or confidante might just be in on it too. So there’s nobody. Get up and face the day, get through it. It’s easy when you’re a ‘rock star’ (god I hate that term) because whatever I need, whenever I want, I can get it. Want to be alone? No problem. Need drugs? Any kind I want, best of the best. Need a diversion? Name the game. It’s all mine for the asking. I even had my very own Actuator. They called her my ‘assistant’ but I call her The Actuator. She thinks she’s my best friend, but I know she’s got to be getting a piece of me, somehow. So I hide things from her also. It’s completely necessary, because if I were to open up to anyone and tell them what was going on in my head, they’d probably lock me up, or put me on some kind of prison-grade tricyclic that would make me pliant and all warm and fuzzy. Who wants that?
When I sleep and dream, those are the times I am free. For the most part, anyway. Sometimes I dream about the darkness, and feel its gravity-sucking pull. Most of the time I can wake from it before it gets too close. I’ve learned how to recognize it in the dreams: I dream about a place, a house or a building, which has an area in it, usually an attic, that is completely closed off, locked up tight or even nailed shut, to hold whatever is in there. If I go too close to the door, even look at the wrong window, I start to feel its pull. It would be so easy to give in, but what if I did? Where would I be? Would I ever come back? It’s sheer panic, but I am (so far) always able to get away. I can go months without seeing those darkened shuttered windows, but every once in a while they do come back. I think maybe a part of myself is in there, a part I have to lock away so I can stay safe, and so that others will be safe around me. There is no voice, just a compelling feeling, tendrils of darkness that reach out to me from inside, eyeless, soulless, just barely conscious. If I go too close, it will be fully awake, and then I may not ever be able to resist. Along with the dark comes a vacuum of silence. It’s hard to explain such complete silence. Must be what it’s like in space, where you can scream and scream and scream, and yet there is no sound. The silence absorbs the sound of your screams, and nobody will ever hear you. Like a living death, or purgatory or something. Not because I’m Catholic, but for lack of a better explanation.
In fact, being Catholic might actually give me a valid reason for all of this, but I wasn’t brought up in a religious family, aside from the handful of times my older sister dragged me to church sheerly for torture value. I was interested in religion though, I often went to churches with the neighbor’s kids, even went to Hebrew school once or twice. It was all high entertainment to my young self, all the different groups, all saying the same thing, all studying the same book, but all self-righteously rooted in their own salvation to the point where all the others were wrong, and surely damned. The Catholics in particular, I thought, were full of it. All the standing, kneeling, up and down, up and down. I took communion once or twice, anything to break up the boredom. Maybe I am going to hell, I don’t know. My current view is that I’m already there.
I even did some time hanging with a group of Pagans in West Hollywood. They were fun, seemed at least much less the obese and loser-ish gang of witches that they often are. The West Hollywood witches were for the most part quite affluent and full of life, having a great sense of humor about themselves, knowing that it was mostly theatre. Good times.
So I hope I’ve established that I am open-minded, and that we can rule out Satanic possession as a true and acceptable diagnosis for what ails me. Trust me, I considered it a few times when things got really dark. I even visited with a so-called Satanist high-priest, mostly because I was, again, curious, but at that point not ruling out things I did not believe in. Turns out, Satanists are more like Masons than they are evil magicians. Most of them are quite rich and powerful, and were much too interested in having me among their ranks. To them, it’s about status, and what resources they can suck out of you, like a bunch of leeches that have given themselves permission to be cruel and inhuman just to further their own (and the collective) agendas. And then of course there are the orgies and the fetishism. I’ll try anything once or twice, but it really ain’t my thang. In reality, they have little respect for humans, and I can’t abide that. It’s really no different from Scientology, in a lot of ways, just with better parties.
I’m never one to judge people, not ever. But I will lurk about for a while, even if it’s uncomfortable, just so I can get a bead on a situation. Here’s the thing with Satanists: it’s unbelievable how many of them are into beating on each other, or getting beaten on. They actually have clubs for which to indulge this kind of kink, and you really wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it with your own eyes. The lineups for the fucking valet, all Maserati’s and Jags, men and women dressed to the nines, all there for one thing: the debasement of a human. Might be them, might be someone they’re paying for, but one thing for sure is that it’s all pretty debauched. I did enjoy the whipping, though. Not getting it, but doing the actual whipping. I like the sound that it makes. I like to crack a good whip in the air, get some momentum going and then really let it go, like a shotgun blast! Wow, it’s so incredibly addictive. You can’t whip a human that hard though, I don’t think that would be very nice. I prefer the sound of the whip in the air, so I try to get it just as close to the human as possible without actually connecting … but I’m pretty sure it still hurts. Anyway, that’s my Satanist story for today kids.
If I look back at everything that happened, I have to say that I am most sorry about Richard. If he could only see me now, he’d finally know what a fool I took him for. Or maybe I was the fool. After all, I was a pawn in the game, probably even as much as he was. Poor Richard. He comes to me every now and then, he’s haunting me for all I’ve done. Nothing like having your head blown off for presenting a dramatic statement. He was always the one for the big displays, not me. He comes to me looking like the last time I saw him, and he’s got this look on his face like he’s in such agony, the top quarter of his head totally caved in and blackened, strips of meat hanging down around the gaping wound of his exploded skull. Bam! I can still hear the shot. He’s looking right at me. Fuck.
It’s like yesterday. It’s all like yesterday, really. I have absolutely no concept of linear time anymore. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but the way I see it, it takes the pressure off. Plus it makes it all so psychedelic, like I’m in a cloud somewhere and they’re showing me pictures of shit that happened, and I’m looking at them like, yeah, I sort of remember that. The bad stuff doesn’t ever seem so bad, and yet the good stuff doesn’t seem like it was any big woof either. I just know that things were done and said, and I’m here and Richard’s gone.
There used to be things to do here besides write … but now this is all I have. I figure, I might as well start writing down what I do remember, so that people don’t get the wrong idea about who Plez is or was or will be. I’m pretty sure some things have been said.
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