(Trigger warning: This post discusses suicide and queerness. If you are not in the headspace to read about the connections between emotional health being connected to intimate expression, this is not the piece for you).
“I never had much goingBut at least I had youHow can you walk out knowingI ain’t got nothing left if you do, baby?”
“(You’re My) Soul & Inspiration” – The Righteous Brothers (1966)
The Righteous Brothers laid down “Soul & Inspiration” in late 1965. You wouldn’t know by listening to the beauty and grandeur of the record that it has such a fraught history. Phil Spector, well, being Phil Spector, left such a bad taste in Bill Medley & Bobby Hatfield’s mouth that they negotiated a deal with Verve records to free themselves of Spector a mere 13 months after they recorded their seminal work with Spector, “You Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.’
The big Spector hint has quite a few moments of gothic horror and a healthy bit of petulance. Those factors allow the lyric to ignore what the narrators responsibility is in the dying romance. The blame is all on the girl. “Inspiration” is the acknowledgement of the harms done, yet lands more of a sorrowful prayer. Tellingly, according to the end of the year charts, “Inspiration” ended up being the #3 most popular song of 1966, “Feelin’” was the #5 and Spector’s last cash cow before The Wall of Sound became irrelevant.
Very, very tellingly by the end of 1966, The Righteous Brothers paired up with former Motown A&R director William “Mickey” Stevenson to update their sound to a quasi-Four Tops vibe as Bill Medley tried to give the full Spector-rip off treatment to The Royalettes after their second LP under Teddy Randazzo’s stewardship went nowhere in the middle of 1966. Devastation can have some beautiful, unifying results.
It can prove sharing is caring, even if the attempt lands flat beyond the safe cauldron that produced quite a beautiful moment. There’s something to be definitely said about the majesty of “(He Is) My Man” as it floats like the slow dance of reunion that it describes. Given Medley’s name is the sole writing & producing credit, he really believed in giving Sheila Ross and crew the shiny gem the ladies from ‘Charm City’ deserved.
I’ve nearly wasted 350 words evading what actually has struck me to even put fingers to keyboard. The more I come back to edit, the more I fill in. I’m going to warn you, there’s a reason why I wanted to give this a soft launch. This gets turbulent. I detoured with context you might already know. My thesis of the moment is that the subject of the devastation can clear the way for beauty. You can love beyond confines predetermined by this world if you want to. I’ve lived it time and time again, informed by countless devastating tales I don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to tell. Here we go into trying my best, trying to honor instead of fumbling one of them.
It’s slowly, in triplicity, heading towards August. I should be really creating a spreadsheet of hotels and campgrounds to stop at as I amble what in theory is 3,000 miles eastbound to start fully calculating costs. I got sidetracked again, wondering why I’m ‘like’ this. Why I have to be so fail safe? Granted, making a life change and making an art project out of it is a daunting task. My heart is drawn back into dedication of those that made it hard to go until business was finished.
I’m glad that something deep inside me was drawn to be distracted the last few days. I was told to surrender and let spirit work through me last Friday. Here we go. I relish it to a degree, I love challenges, I love puzzles and problem solving especially if the outcome is joyful, pleasurable or just plain beautiful. There’s a sensation that makes life really worth living if I can pull off all three at once. I hope I can pull off detailing a few tales of my heart and not necessarily my sovereignty with these words. I guess that’s always the case.
The trio that started this path off as last summer wound down was of course, the two weeks of realization. Some devastating truths became apparent while in Baltimore while I got a little more veil parting of the possibilities in Philadelphia. I told Teddy and Theo that I already knew I’d have to face certain relationship issues soon as I got back from Philadelphia. I didn’t know how deep, how long the relationship issues would be, nor that I would have to revisit them extensively.
Some of those were personal, others professional. The more recent ones, annoyingly so are mostly because my unruly body decided to merge one “P” with the other as I age; often enough of the dilemmas lie in the intersection of both. Almost in tandem, Michael Wriston goaded me to start writing about Philadelphia. The last approaching year has been about the past as it vies for a spot in my future. I haven’t really asked or poked at the curiosity of such, but have taken on the assignment. It’s truly birth’d whatever the hell this substack is.
It’s starting to be the parallel, and even a reverse baton passing to a long lingering in progress work of what has brought me to the second half of the 2020’s. I have to stand with where I’ve been over the last year to perhaps before I start sharing where more details come in focus from my past. This tests the waters. It might be high time for you to buckle up. We’re going to start the time traveling. The images might be fewer as I try to paint a world where I’ve lost access to the visual language that reinforces the story.
….within 5 days of returning from Philadelphia, I was thrown back in a metaphorical DeLorean 25 years to again deal with my tangled roots. It brought up a lot of rest stops and detours in the intervening quarter of a century. I’m surprised that I’ve been able to get any modicum of sleep for months. Thankfully the fascism hasn’t taken away my access to cannabis yet.
I was dared to reclaim my role as the guaranteed queen of quips, hot takes and side eyes. There’s someone I always was. I wonder if the call was to see if I still had my old strength. The reality was I had to confess some of my vulnerability. My heart is not as strong as it once was. Or it’s stronger under medication, but I don’t feel as enthused to stress it out with white nonsense these days.
I was resistant to the idea, yet I still relented. Sometimes its desire to be valued in some way. It was decidedly to make up for the numbers of people not invited to reminisce about the hell scape of originating from suburban Bay Area life. The organizers were decidedly of the type that peaked in high school. Some left for college, only to return to Menlo Park, Atherton, Portola Valley and Ladera to benefit from the strings their parents could pull to establish themselves as adult.
I write these words knowing I can laugh at a screenshot of a cousin sending me a Venmo Request for $250. She’s 40, yet can’t manage her money despite living in a McMansion out in the valley and driving some godawful Cadillac crossover. I thought heterosexuality prevented such moments of austerity? I laugh now in the parallel fashion of laughing at my former classmates all playing dress up in the costume jewelry and boat shoes their parents bequeathed to them to give them the uniform of ‘adulthood.’ The zombie apocalypse film I’ve always wanted to write as science fiction is actually real life adolescence that I was the lucky crab that managed to escape the barrel from.
I’ve long, before I was the age of an adult, been expected to solve everyone else’s crisis before I can even tend to clipping my own toenails. I’m mom/dad/grandma/grandpa/auntie/uncle always good for it as if I’m Bank of America. Nevermind the stretches of my life I’ve spent homeless or floating from AirBnb to AirBnb to show up to crummy, underpaid non-profit jobs. Granted, I often do this rigorous life from some sort of faded glamour of an old car, while trying to keep shooting at least a roll of film a month over the last 15 years.
My soul is inspired by those I can’t talk to or reach out and touch anymore. I said this December that I know how much it hurts others when this world forces your hand to consider not being in it anymore. Nobody will truly understand it unless you’ve walked enough circumstances and felt that something that is not right with this existence that you can’t control.
It’s a searing, otherworldly pain that takes a lot to cope with. I can’t really explain it. I’ve definitely screamed when I can find the privacy to do so. If you scream in public, this society hustles you away into one of its institutions. Too often, bodies like mine, perhaps yours, get tortured. Privacy, to a degree is autonomy and protest. Sometimes it is in parallel with legit diagnosable ‘physical’ conditions. I didn’t want anyone to see how painful heart failure is. Nor Gout, nor the the Asthma I’ve lived with for 35 years. Every frame I shoot is trying to find some pain relief, a reason to hold on another day. Often, because of my privacy, it’s all I’ve got. I always assume anyone alive knows what I’m going through, but I’ve been woefully disappointed when it’s just met with confusion or disinterest.
This society is so dishonest.
Trust me, even your eyes tell on you. I also understand the heaviness of the pain that’ll make you consider giving up. It is heavy. You can physically break your back and never recover. Honey I REALLY get it when you can’t identify where the pain is coming from. Where I am wild and feral is to honor those that couldn’t take how banal, how harmful, how sadistic this world order really is. I laugh in faces that side with the cruelty of how we collectively exist to honor them. I keep throwing out invitations for y’all to do the same, but I guess pain really is the kink of the majority.
Nobody dared utter Damien’s name last August 23rd at Burgess Park.
Even me.
I showed up for him tho.
I probably showed up for him specifically. Part of me sharpened my tongue to slice at those that I know were technically ‘closer’ friends to him than I was back then. He was an undeniably sweet soul caught in between worlds, both racially and as I got know, in terms of intimate desires too. That was laced on top of diagnosis after diagnosis that didn’t give him room to breathe beyond acting out the role of a bro in post college corporate America. Catholic faith leaves far too many traits of shame. An upper class suburban existence will make that 100 times worse. I always had my Blackness and my more obvious, less class conscious way of being as a savior.
He funneled into high school as an outsider from St. Raymond’s, a higher class station Catholic School + Parish than Nativity that I attended, or St. Francis where cursory prompts to worship the good lord filtered in beyond required bi-weekly Mass at school. Pretty much most of our K thru 8 peers went to private Catholic high schools, so we were odd ones out at our Public High School. I was ashamed that my parents shelled out $300 in tuition a month, but all the kids from Hillview came equipped with multiple years of foreign language. They had already extensively been to Europe.
I had to give up my beloved saxophone lessons when my lung capacity diminished from my asthma diagnosis in 5th grade. They never returned under the recession of 1992. My parents were annoyed that I was practicing over NBC Must See TV anyways. It was just like the drafting table but no actual stewardship towards any artistic talent I may have had as a kid. Then there were complaints about the thousands of sketches that littered my bedroom.
Any creative desire I had was literally deemed madness. I still sang in the shower anyways. Nobody wanted to discuss the culprit for the asthma diagnosis was probably my dad chain smoking ‘healthier’ Marlboro Lights at a pack a day clip. The punishments for lack of compliance matched slavemaster-style whuppings alongside the psychological warfare that I wasn’t smart enough to keep things neat and tidy. I wouldn’t wish a Virgo dominant marriage for raising any children on anyone.
I never understood what Damien’s smiles and genuine overtures of friendship meant as “The Macarena” climbed the charts. I still have none a real clue if there was some overlap in the forced compliance I experienced. He was prone to slicking his hair back and wearing ‘wife beaters’ to give a middle finger to the respectability of his Lindenwood Address when we first shared that sprawling campus. I’m gonna be honest, he was built as well as someone that was maybe 5’8 and on the high school wrestling team too.
I still didn’t fully understand why he reached out 20 years ago, either. The wardrobe had shifted to corporate polos and khaki slacks in an effort to make it as a office drone in San Francisco. I think I was prone to a cursory nod to leather by wearing some $300 Motorcycle boots to butch up my more dandy ways before my peers went full Bear culture. I accepted his invitation to restart a friendship tho. Before we had the concept of friendships being ‘safe spaces’ in our modern colloquialisms, I guess the openness, frankness in both of those once upon a times 6 to 7 years apart had an impact.
I was wary, given who he used to associate with. His best friend in high school’s parents tried to get our AP English teacher fired for teaching Ellison’s The Invisible Man our senior year. They needn’t worry, since it went over every other student’s head but mine. I’m not even sure that particular family got ‘it’ themselves. The mere thought of educating white kids on any negro experience was enough.
Another one of his comrades of class station had his own recording studio at his house. If I hunt deeply at my childhood home, I’m sure the self released end of our Freshman year CD is somewhere stashed in some closet. I was weirdly the only non-family member either invited or who showed up at the release party. His family rented out the 200 seat ‘second’ stage at The Mountain View Performing Arts Center. I emailed this friend early into our respective college years asking if he were gay based on all that. Of course the response was no.
I think of the hell that would have broken loose had I taken overtures from being that stereotypical queer kid that was either the English or Art Department teachers pet. I was legit courted to come back to teach in the district post college. Had I had the foolish desire to do so, I would have fired on all cylinders immediately. I totally would have gotten my rocks off getting straight to the chase with Giovanni’s Room followed by Mildred Pierce. If I could sum up the psychological horrors of being educated for the first 18 years of my life in Menlo Park, California, perhaps those two classics sum up why I would have done this.
My fingers tremble now from having to look up the obituary.
Damien leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge on February 29, 2008.
Leap Day, Leap Year.
His Chevy S-10 pick up stayed in the lot on the San Francisco side of the bridge. From what I know, the cameras on the bridge confirmed he ‘did’ it. Whatever became of him was never found. He’s not here to speak on what was ailing him, but I have to consider the why he reached out to me. I put the context that I showed up 5 months earlier and there might have been one other brat from the ‘burbs we went to high school with to celebrate him making it a year past a quarter century old.
He was an early Scorpio. Last time we saw each other was over those drinks for that birthday. It was somewhere, a bar I can’t remember that could be gone or still around. All I remember was there was a clang from the Powell Street Cable car in the background. I was surprised by our post high school, post college reacquaintance back then, although nearly 20 years of grief I’ve done a good job of ignoring what it meant until more recently. It seems wild that there are some character similarities in personality running thru who dragged me back in the same social milieu it seemed me and Damien wanted to escape.
I have never been able to walk that damn bridge since.
I struggle driving across it nearly 20 years later. I always feel haunted by the middle of the span, knowing that you might hit one of the towers if one hadn’t jumped from the center. If there was any reminder that San Francisco is a cold place for a warm soul, it ironically is cast that way because of that ‘International Orange’ art deco masterpiece. I get mad at how much this place has robbed in the terms of people that meant well; those that just wanted peace and understanding. I’m trying to detox from having to sit in an office built over at least 5,700 Ramaytush Ohlone sacrificed for the ill-gotten riches of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
I weep hard each time I think of him because all I remember is that gentle smile. I’m not gonna grab what I can find on Google Image search so you can see it. There’s a dishonor in me not having a cherished picture of us together in any form. All I have of him is memory and words. I hate to think what he was trying to hide with the innocence of it. I owe that smile that level of respect. It’s not the first time I’ve been left in the mystery of why, somehow looking around at the same time, understanding too deeply why it happened.
There’s always going to be the ache of wondering if I had done enough. What in terms of time or resources would have been perhaps more relief? If I pause and make time for you, you should say Damien’s name in respect. It’s the first time death really came into my life where I wrestled with ego inflation that in some way, I could have helped prevent it. We can stand to give each other a little bit of time, sometimes more than we feel comfortable asking for.
Lord knows there’s been many moments in my life that I should have asked for the same type of attention. I wouldn’t be in pain as often as I am.
It’s too painful to go search when we last chatted via Google Chat, although I know it was shortly after his 26th birthday. That inbox tells way too many secrets about how many men have flirted with an alternate reality only to, well, try on some damn boat shoes. It’s been a decades long pattern, and I don’t have a single example where any of those men aren’t locked into some type of misery that is either prison or literal death.
I rarely take car photography of Volkswagen Beetles.
I do not get why a climax of a family friendly Disney movie from 1968 hinges on the attempted suicide of a car, but this is where it landed. I’m surprised my parents really let me watch that movie over and over again for years. Then again, I’ve already referenced their general nonchalance above, so in a way it makes sense. I was always too poetic in a way, so maybe they hoped I got the same idea so I would be one less thing on the ledger when they argued about the bills.
Herbie, the sentient 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, faced the ultimate betrayal for being loyal, loving and always in someone’s corner. Herbie stuck by Jim Douglas (played by the rapscalliony handsome Dean Jones, perhaps dictating a sub type of my desires from an early age), a down and out stock car racer. Bought on loan from a bougie European car dealership set on Van Ness Avenue, Herbie had been a problematic companion for a dutiful maid he clearly didn’t like before, therefore was exchanged for a perhaps less problematic economy import. Perhaps a Renault or a Fiat.
There’s decidedly queer subtext in the fact that Herbie so boldly attaches to the underdog outsider Jim. As the forced heterosexual romantic foil Carol Bennett notes, Jim had just ruined a ‘lovely Buick Special’ (one assumes a 1961-63 version with that sweet, light aluminum V8 sold to BMC in 1964) in his ‘SCCA’ grade racing. The movie starts with him barely making rent doing demolition derbies. He could barely afford the car payments on Herbie, so he takes the cheerful yet underpowered little Beetle racing. Like Corvairs, Volkswagens did have handling advantages over more powerful cars. Brute force is not as good as finesse quite often.
It all crashes down when Herbie is tossed aside when Jim has earned enough money to purchase a Lamborghini 400 GT to conform with the expectations of the racing circuit. Everyone, even Jim, can’t admit it’s the bond between him and Herbie, neither them as separate entities, that has bought Jim his sudden earthly wealth. I’ve always given props to Herbie’s rage, smashing the inert, lifeless Lambo to bits before hysterically tearing through the streets of the most lovely fantasia painted scenes of San Francisco that work very well as a proxy of the psychological horror the city can be on a foggy night.
It all leads to Herbie blowing through the toll plaza, somehow climbing the fence on the Pacific side of the strait, and failing because of his short wheelbase stature, trying to power themselves off the side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Somehow, miraculously, Jim has ran all over San Francisco, seemingly from North Beach all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge in apology. Jim knew he was dead wrong, Herbie was his ride-or-die, separation from that lovely life full of victories might as well be death. It was bad enough he had to share Jim with Carroll, but hey, it’s the 1960’s.
Nobody was ready for a handsome white man to fall in love with a Volkswagen. They’d be more accepting now, if Herbie were named Sheila, I guess. Who knew Walt Disney’s last approved film project was a bisexual, cross appliance polyamorous three way. Or Quad if you wanna throw Tennessee in it.
I never could read whether Tennessee was rooting for Carroll or Herbie to ‘win’ Jim as the intimate prize, but Tennessee Steinmetz clearly knew a good prostate spamming when he felt one. I’m gonna say he was coaching Herbie to get that ass because Herbie could be more subtle with the suggestion of butt play than he could. He’d clearly been trying for years. I guess his deconstructed Edsel never quite gave the same thrill.
When Jim slips off Herbie’s slippery hood, holding on for dear life on Herb’s bruised, loose chrome bumper, the trusty, loving Volkswagen understands that people don’t understand the devotion they’re betraying. They might do it time and time again. Given the sequels where Jim Douglas/Dean Jones reappears through the early 80’s, up to the point where Jim gets married (I guess again after divorcing Carroll?) and hauls around the family he creates in a Chevy Caprice wagon, somehow Herbie is still there, still lovingly supporting Jim’s ambitions.
I never really got how often I’d be “Herbie” when I was 4 years old, popping popcorn for myself. I think I’m finally understanding my hope that if I stuck by someone that the bond would weather all of life together. I’ve been, so unfortunately wrong time and time again. I’ve never thought of jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I’ll get to the darker tendencies of letting my more chronic conditions get out of hand enough that I’d hope my body would release my soul from whatever curse the darker side of loneliness cuts through you some day.
Nowhere near enough, perhaps only one person ever has made the attempt to try to fix the pain. As I said to Mike close to a year ago, that person lives in West Philly, and has pushed me to consider northwest Philly, despite his own pain and issues with the place that raised him. I don’t think people understand how I could see myself as a sentient Volkswagen.
Some see me as a Teddy Bear, ironically.
The bridge that brought me back to the hell scape of ghouls I went to high school with has called me that. I held up my side of the bargain. I dragged various people relentlessly and consistently for 2 hours while remaining cordial to those that feigned interested in who I was an adult. In the last year, I’ve keep quiet about how often he leaves the so called ‘teddy bear’ that I am on the shelf as an abandoned toy. I’m built a little different, sad that I lost my E.T. that reminded me to phone home when I let my first Corvair, Frankie, go. I’m decidedly sentimental. I’m also getting too tired to be left in a dust bin to be picked up when only one set of needs are going unmet as well.
He really needs to, among others, thank Damien that I bothered to still try.
He should watch The Love Bug and then perhaps read this, for at some point, I am gonna release the past hoping the future feels less heavy as my body becomes less capable of carrying the load:
I have to consider the time limits of what we can share. What can we share if I move in so many directions? In some ways, we’ve never parted. In some ways we stand in the middle of our lives with so many fractures of navigating this world presented to us. The world that sent us down different paths.
None of the nation’s highways or rail lines go in straight lines North, South, East or West. There are so many variations on the landscape that sometimes you just gotta drive down the road. Therein lies the beauty of the crossroads, my old friend. There’s certain places we know how to get to just by recall and reaching out for by feeling. There’s choices I still gotta make. There’s a life I haven’t quite built to my standards or desires.
I said something was going to challenge my self determination. I wasn’t surprised it was you. I’m surprised how great and how horrible that feels. There’s a pregnant yearning you’re showing now in every half full sentence, every softening of your eyes, every denial that it’s not with you. I cry a lot about this stillbirth. I can only hope that I encourage you to choose yourself, and all that you embody, for yourself, and not anyone else, before it’s too late. There’s a life you want too. I’m so surprised how much it looks like one you’d want with me.
Sometimes you state the very obvious but ignore the truth. I don’t know whether to write this to the audience that’s been observing us for 30 years or directly to you. I worry about the consequences of either direction, for each one might provide unneeded stress to our fragile hearts. You don’t know how heartbreaking it is to realize your heart has always been as broken as mine. I struggle with you placing the burden of having the open heart on me when you were the first that opened your arms to hold me close to your heart.
I wish you could see yourself through my eyes. Do you hear how tender your voice is? Do you understand that I love it when you hand me something, or open the door for me to put on the boxing gloves with fools?
You see, I’ve always held a special place for the themes of 1966, even if I have a preference for the year of 1965. I consider 1965 as perfect as it got in modern times, yet, as the song says, it was ‘The Eve of Destruction.’ 1966 tried so valiantly to build upon the strengths of 1965, only to run out of steam by the time it became 1967, the riots, 1968, more riots, more death, more Vietnam, 1969 brought us Nixon and neoliberalism and the re-establishment of these rank traps we find ourselves in in 2026.
Baby, I can’t make it without you
And I’m, I’m telling you, honey
You’re my reason for laughing, for crying
For living and for dyingBaby, I can’t make it without you
Please, I’m begging you, baby
If you go, it will kill me, I swear it…
