I'm Sick.
Daysleeping gives me flashbacks.
Dear Diary, I’m sick. It’s not Covid, so my life isn’t ruined. It’s just a head cold, a balloon being slowly inflated and deflated somewhere behind my eyes. A little achy. A grotesquely running nose, I wipe it with my finger, why am I such a monster, why don’t I have tissue or something. My brain feels like putty. All day long I drink coffee hoping it will wake it up.
I got Covid last May, the sickness hitting me soft and sudden as I recorded the audio book of Knocking Myself Up. I’d been having a great time - the recording studio, in Highland Park, was sort of beautiful and wooden, with Persian rugs and expensive guitars. The sound dudes were buffing my ego, telling me what a great job I was doing and how I should be a professional audio book recorder (I wish!). Suddenly, my throat. It was weird. It was sore. Was it sore? I kept swallowing. I was talking so much and I never drink water - it’s a real problem, I had kidney stones from it last year, and even with that karmic punishment it is so, so hard to get me to do it. My good intentions have me filling up the tallest glasses in the house with ice water, and then I put it down, I turn away, I get distracted, I leave the room, the whole endeavor forgotten. Once, when doing an intake questionnaire for acupuncture, I was asked if this phrase described me: Thirsty, don’t want to drink. Yes!, I’m sure I yelled. I felt so seen. But, why am I like this? I should return to Chinese Medicine and find out.
Anyway - I thought maybe I’d worn my throat out with all the talking. When the sound dudes told me I’d read my quota and could end early, I said yes. On the Lyft home I daydreamed about laying down in bed. It couldn’t happen fast enough. When I entered my home my husband was on the couch doing schoolwork. I told him I didn’t feel well and was going to lay down. He said he knew immediately that I had Covid. I never, ever want to lay down during the day. Daysleeping gives me flashbacks to being on drugs; it’s hard to indulge without a low-level panic setting in, a fear that my life is out of control.
A home test gave me the palest pink line, one that got deeper and brighter as the days progressed. TJ - that’s my husband - gave me our bedroom, shacking up on the day bed in the office and remaining there as he, too became sick, testing negative for days, even as he coughed and ached and his nose rivered with snot, finally he getting a positive. It was days after his birthday and I supposed we had been too freewheeling in our celebrations - dinner at a soul food restaurant downtown, followed by seeing Jonathan Van Ness’s live comedy show (it was so gratifying to hear them go on about being on crystal meth in a bathhouse, certain they were giving Mitt Romney head. I love JVN’s manic pixie dream genderqueer television persona - I love how cute and Pollyanna-ish they are, but it was nice to know that when the cameras stop rolling their a filthy queer dirtbag just like the rest of us).
A day or so later I surprised TJ by bringing him to the iconic Clifton’s Cafeteria, where he was met and celebrated by a clutch of close friends. It felt relatively ‘safe;’ folks were masked between sips of cocktails and bites of truffle fries. We’d gotten there early and staked out a round of couches at the top of a stairway, amongst the taxidermy and low-key steampunk decor. But within an hour or so, our stately haunted mansion transformed into the club before our very eyes, as young heterosexuals on the make, in their gendered attire of barely anything for the ladies and super-baggy, boxy, body-hiding garb for them men (with the exception of a small group who came to dance straight from attending some sort of Bridgerton experience, in Regency-era gowns scooping into their cleavage and cream-puffing their shoulders, plus tiaras, the works). We pushed through these reckless disco-dancers and their sweaty, - vaccinated? unvaccinated? - bodies on our way out the door. So, who knows what gave us the Covid - a waiter bearing banana cream pie? Jonathan Van Ness? A tipsy Bridgerton groupie? We’ll never know.
Upon getting Covid, the first order of business was not to pass it to my mother, whom I famously live with, and whose COPD could land her on a ventilator if she catches the bug. The second order was not to pass it to my kid, which meant he was to remain at his other home with his other parent for ten long days. This was sort of heartbreaking but honestly I felt too shitty in my body to have much energy for feeling conceptually shitty. I laid in bed, surrounded by books I frequently felt too dumb to read, and mostly just propped my laptop on my belly and watched Call My Agent. What a great show, a show that is not afraid to make that super compelling, excellent-to-watch lez character hook up with a dude, her arrogant and hot boss, no less. The truth is, and I do believe many femmes know it, those macho and arrogant types are frequently good in bed, if what you’re looking for is to get manhandled and tossed around and aren’t especially concerned with an orgasm per se. I am sure there are many queer viewers who hated that the fantastic lez character hooked up with a dude, but as she herself is sort of macho and arrogant and slutty, it seemed she was in fact having a type of homo-sexual experience, only the sameness was in that other sex organ, the mind.
I was just speaking to a friend (cisgender, male) who was puzzling over a hot affair he’s having with a bona fide lesbian. I mean, how lesbian is she is a fair question to ask of a lass engaging with a non-silicone phallus attached to a manly man. But I think a truth is that, while many lezzes’ dream date may be a fellow queer, there is also a lot of fluidity, fluidity that would maybe be more expressed if a). Cis-men weren’t such cliche garbage and b). The time spent in queer community, being blissfully queer, didn’t render you so unreadable to straight people. When I was on my own personal Tinder binge, hooking up with cis-guys because they are so supremely easy to hook up with, I was struck by how like 80% of me was totally invisible to them. And that’s a generous percentage. I did not feel seen at all. And, I probably didn’t see them, either. I remember one dude, very cute, a drummer, put Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on his turntable while we creatively fucked all over his sofa. Afterwards, he spoke with melancholy about how hard his life was - recent breakup, ex-girlfriend took the bed, maybe he wasn’t loving Los Angeles. I could give a shit. Twenty-seven-years-old, handsome, in a band, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied, straight - don’t tell me about your problems, man! You, like, don’t have any. I recalled the complaint of a fellow queer femme whose dating desperation had led her into a relationship with a cis dude, a nice enough guy who still had some scars from being treated unkindly in middle school. The femme was like, Oh yeah? Want to hear about how I couldn’t hold my girlfriend’s hand in public without getting a brick thrown at my head? We queers have been playing the Oppression Olympics for years, straight dudes; don’t come at us with your problems. We will win.
Anyway, back to my Covid so I can get back to my current head-cold. The most major heartbreak of those ten days in quarantine was, I had to miss Cruel World.
When I first heard the lineup for the 2022 Cruel World music festival, I teetered between being excited enough to cry, and an the uncanny suspicion that I was hallucinating. How, in 2022, at the age of 51, was there a music festival one town over from me consisting of all the bands I might’ve put on a single mix tape in 1987? The Violent Femmes??? How I loved Gordan Gano’s nasal whining about his difficulty getting laid! Blondie?? Duh. Devo?! I couldn’t wait to nerd out! BAUHAUS???? Yes, Peter Murphy is a crystal-metholated anti-semite, but - BAUHAUS! Same goes for Morrissey, only more so. A festival of youthful heroes who aged into horrible disappointments! PiL, Johnny Lydon continuing to nurture decades worth of resentments and grievances into song! The Damned - well, now, I don’t think they’ve done a damn thing wrong since I wrapped my spidery black hair in a gauzy black shawl to the tunes of Phantasmagoria (and their rougher, punk songs remain favored classics). I could go on - Gene Loves Jezebel, the Jay Aston version from the UK! (I’d already seen the slightly sad, stateside Michael Aston version some years ago. Will these twins please make up, they’re stronger together!) Christian Death, albeit some strange version that had gone through so many changes of membership I wasn’t sure if I even knew who played in them, but so what? Missing Persons! Berlin! So much 1980s Big Bisexual Bleached-Hair Lady Energy! 45 Grave, a band I only know one song by, the theme to The Return of the Living Dead, but fuck it, I was ready to throw devil horns in their direction and salute their zombie-like longevity. I was ready to splurge on a frilled Batsheva dress to wear to the show! I was ready to die my hair a color it had not been since high school! But, alas. Covid. Cruel World, indeed. I laid in bed and watched videos my friends sent me, Peter Murphy looking like the hottest goth daddy wearing a legit crown, growling like it was 1979. I heard he went into rehab afterwards. I look forward to him making sober reparations to the various groups of humans hurt by his bigoted rantings, setting a beautiful example to Morrissey in the process, allowing the rest of us to enjoy our deep love of these messy human’s music without fearing we’re somehow co-signing their bullshit.
Anyway. Last year, me and my friend Kirk, who did make it to Cruel World, were booking the follow-up festival’s lineup in a text thread. Obviously the headliner would be Siouxsie; we were aghast that she’d been left out of the big goth reunion, though she was likely still traumatized from participating in the first Lolapalooza so many decades ago. In addition to her, we added Love and Rockets - baby Bauhaus, without the problematic front man. We decided Billy Idol would reunite Generation X and they would play. So, imagine the thrilling shock we felt when last Cruel World 2023 unveiled their lineup last week! Siouxsie! Love and Rockets! Billy Idol! (Sadly, sans Generation X) Were we fucking psychic genuises??? Or were these just the obvious goth stars left out of the party last year? (Yes, we know The Cure is MIA - we expect them to headline 2024!)
At twelve noon, with snot dribbling from my nose, I waited in a computer-que and got a ticket for me and one for Peter, a best friend since 1985, when we met sleeping out for Billy Idol tickets in Boston and discovered, to our delight, that we both had tickets to see Ratt at the Centrum the following month. Peter looked like Sid Vicious, with impeccably spiked hair and a padlock around his neck, but also sported disturbingly blue contact lenses and a wardrobe plucked from the back of Ducky in Sixteen Cadles - all old man trench coat, plaid pants, creepers. I think we both appreciated that, while we liked the more obscure and goth-bands of the time, we also would sleep out for tickets to see fame-whore Billy Idol as well as the 80s hairmetal band Ratt. And, in line with this, while I am picking up the tickets for this spring’s goth-a-rama, Peter is sourcing some fucking Madonna tickets for us in the fall. You don’t really change that much as you grow up. It’s more that you access the freedom and, ideally, the funds to pursue your obsessions more successfully.
