first round
(8) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll”
rolled
(9) Mark Ronson feat Amy Winehouse, “Valerie”
179-92
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/4/24.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” and the Monsters of Influence By Erin Keane
First, the invocation: Nick Zinner’s synth-ceremonial curtain-raising, an indicator that something electric and epic is about to begin. Karen O, conjured, draped in fabric, raises high her mic like the Statue of Liberty in neon kicks, and layers on her incantation: lose yourself, stop thinking so damn hard, follow your instincts, and sure, swallow some of these, maybe. You summon me like that, I tuck my flip phone I’m too broke to upgrade into the tragic pockets of my skinny jeans, point a drink to the sky, and heed the call. It’s the end of a decade that began with terror, hung together with paranoia, and was only just beginning to reveal how much we were being watched. Facebook had overtaken MySpace and Twitter was still a bunch of nerds shooting the shit, but we were excited about the president still, and it felt good to be in Chicago’s Grant Park, where he had given his election night victory speech last November, and where Yeah Yeah Yeahs were filling in as Lollapalooza headliners after the Beastie Boys bowed out because of Adam Yauch’s diagnosis. We’re two songs in when the dance anthem begins. When Brian Chase’s beat comes in, on the floor is where we already are.
A Yeah Yeah Yeahs jam, especially one like “Heads Will Roll,” is no passive experience but tell that to the bemused audience in Richard Ayoade’s floor show-turned-massacre video. (Indie rock videos were important again for a while there, thanks to music blogs.) The video opens on Zinner’s hands on a light-up synthesizer playing the overture—what Andy Thompson of the delightfully lo-fi site Planet Mellotron dismisses as “really obviously sampled strings,” sourced from the Mellotron M4000D (“described by the manufacturer as 'a Mellotron'. No. No, it isn't.”—Ibid.), and specifically, from the Sound Card 02’s Roxy SFX 2 series, which you can hear in its unadulterated state on YouTube, where in comments, Zinner’s exact sequence can be found. Then the camera pans up and across to Karen, a Queen of Hearts fancy-dress fetish dream, all cellophane and red satin and chrome studs and scarlet lips and those iconic bangs framing her kohl-rimmed eyes. Chase in shades, impenetrable, and the camera spins and we see the audience from the band’s point of view. Couples at little cloth-covered, civilized tables. Watching. Not waiting, exactly. They don’t know something’s coming.
Fifteen years should be far enough in the rearview to say something definitive about the sound of a dance hit, and yet. Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out their third full-length album, It’s Blitz!, in 2009, locking down Karen O’s pedestal in the rock-god pantheon with the one-two punch of its opening tracks. From the first lines of “Zero,” it’s clear It’s Blitz! is an elevation from their previous records, though the precise effect is hard to put into words, a common limitation of writing truthfully about music that we can swaddle in instrumentation details and production reports and clumsy metaphors but never quite overcome. You can call it a ripening of the sound, I guess, but also, it’s not simply that artists—the trio, producer Dave Sitek—plus time equals change, though there had been plenty of that on display: Karen’s fall off the stage and recovery, her move to Los Angeles, that SPIN cover story for Show Your Bones, etc. Take a fist, explode your fingers into a sunburst, trace an arc in the air, like you’ve just pulled off a magic trick. It’s like that. They kind of had to. If a blistering debut like Fever to Tell is a birth announcement via dynamite and the introspection of Show Your Bones a declaration of survival, with a third album a band enters kill or be killed territory. They’re either on their way out or they’re here to fucking stay. (Back then, anyway. Now who knows what you get before the algorithms bury you alive.) It’s Blitz!, and “Heads Will Roll” specifically, displays earned confidence: What doesn’t kill you gets cut up into confetti and blown back at the world.
“Every now and then I’ll hear, ‘Thank you so much, you really got me through high school.’ Or ‘Thank you, you really got me through freshman year of college.’ Or ‘Thank you so much, you really …’ I have heard that from fans who don’t really know what to say to me and I don’t know what to say back, except for, ‘Oh really? Thank you! I’m happy I got you through that,’” Karen says in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, the indispensable account of the New York City Aughts rock revival. “But really in my head I’m like, ‘I manifested that shit for you! I wanted to get in there like a motherfucker and that’s what I did.’
“Heads Will Roll” certainly manifested some shit for me. Alice taking over Wonderland and turning it into a revenge blood bath was something I didn’t even know I needed until I heard it. One Christmas, some twenty-five years before this song came out, my uncle gave me the Junior Illustrated Library hardcover copy of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, with John Tenniel’s almost-grotesque illustrations in full color on the cover. There’s Alice, looking hassled and indignant, as the Queen of Hearts points at her, commanding. There’s no dialogue bubble emerging from the sovereign’s mouth, but there’s also no mistaking the sentence: Off with her head! The mock turtle and the dodo and the griffon lurk in the background making comments, while the Mad Hatter gawks, useless. I’ve met those dudes a million times over since I first read the book. (Speaking of dudes, another standout moment on Planet Mellotron: Thompson deeming the cello on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” “[f]ar more memorable than it deserves to be” and I’m sorry for the intrusion but I’ve become obsessed with this website, I love contrarian purists, and would absolutely binge a one-and-done season of a TV show about this guy but only if Richard Ayoade directed it. Anyway!) Pretty much everything I needed to know about being born into a finite human-girl life and growing up in a hostile world I absorbed from this book, buried deep in anarchic nonsense so I’d have a shot at paying attention.
The story begins with a jump down a rabbit hole and ends with a death sentence and in between, Alice encounters tests everywhere she goes. She stumbles through a series of nightmare scenarios, quizzed by disturbed creatures who don’t care if she fails, set up for breaches of etiquette she’s never taught, scorned for being a stupid girl, her disgusting, out-of-control body berated at every turn. Eating mystery cakes. Drinking off-label potions. Swimming in a pool of her own tears. Even though she’s never alone, throughout her adventures Alice is still lonely. But when she’s put on trial, she outsmarts the system, escapes her own elimination, and lives to wake another day.
“Was I the same when I got up this morning?” Alice wonders to herself at one point. “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?”
2009 wasn’t the exact year I started taking that question seriously—that was more of a drawn-out process, a test of how long one could be considered “emerging”—but we can ballpark it. I had had my extensive warm-up, my twenties, all those nights in dive bars and at the shows, every band a bar band back then, some you’d recognize by name now and others you wouldn’t unless you had been there. And my god, the iPod changed everything—a whole CD collection the size of a pack of the cigarettes you could no longer smoke inside, a choose-your-own-adventure with every spin of the clickwheel: the White Stripes, the Walkmen, Interpol, all the bands who sounded old and new at once. If I am telling time by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and why wouldn’t I, when Fever to Tell came out I was in the throes of a prolonged and poorly-hidden adolescence that had bled into my mid-twenties, getting an MFA in poetry, living in a starter home and marriage, both of which I would leave by the time their EP Is Is hit iTunes.
These days the last thing anyone wants to hear are the leftover neuroses of those tagged “academically gifted” as a child, and believe me, I get it. But I regret to admit there was a time—around my second semester of graduate school—when I said out loud that if I hadn’t published my first full-length book by the time I turned thirty I would consider myself a failure. (By failure I meant regular.) This notion—that I had until thirty to break through—would have been laughable in more youth-oriented disciplines like garage rock, but it’s what the literary world told us in the pre-Instagram era: That a writer of thirty-nine, even, could still receive a meaningful title of “Younger Poet,” which was clearly the next best thing to simply being young. What better way to stay younger forever than on a campus? According to our professors, all we would need was that first book, a handful of letters, and a little teaching experience to land a tenure-track teaching job and be set, more or less, for life. Being a (lower-case for us losers) younger poet was fun, and I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to outgrow it. Sure, there was the enduring of things like the calculation of how badly it would, hypothetically, screw my chances to get published in a print journal I wanted on my CV (online journals were considered borderline then, imagine!) if I called out the editor staring down my shirt in the conference hotel lobby bar. But there was also driving my VW with the top down singing “Y Control” and “Maps” through the suicide curves and cackling hills of the rural corners of the region, on my way to present at a conference, visit a friend’s classroom, give a reading in a little series at a cool coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, hoping the machines wouldn’t drown me out. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always in rotation for my in-car vocal warmup.
How did all that work out for me? I didn’t have a book out by the time I was thirty, but a week after my birthday, I did land a contract, hallelujah, with an indie label, I mean press. I celebrated by barhopping with dudes who were not my husband, who stayed home because midterm election results or something. He was already an adult; I was getting kicked out of a seedy karaoke bar after one of the guys kicked over a chair singing “Night Moves” and we were deemed too rowdy for a Tuesday night. Je ne regrette rien! By the following spring I was living alone in my own apartment, revising my acknowledgments page, building out my record collection, iPod tucked away in favor of vinyl, and a promise to myself that I would never again be with another guy who wouldn’t dance with me.
Then came the book. I applied to every full-time, permanent or visiting, creative writing job, my new and promising boyfriend—who, yes, would and did dance—said he was open to moving with me wherever the AWP Job List would take us. I remember marveling at how far north the rest of the state of New York actually goes. I was a finalist for one job but didn’t land it. By spring most of those searches had been canceled, victims of the Great Recession, sections re-assigned to adjuncts, where they’ve probably stayed. That boyfriend and I adopted a magnificent shelter cat, and then all three of us signed a lease together timed to the academic calendar and I vowed not to acquire any furniture that wouldn’t be easy to move or leave behind.
Do we ever know when we’re out of the exposition and into the real action until it’s over? If I think about it too much it starts to feel like the whole first decade of this century was an exercise in learning how to survive in the beginning of an end. The next year, there were way fewer jobs and they needed more CV burnishing. I kept at it, got a contract for my second book, the deeper one that would mean my work had legs, not just dirty jokes and a couple of good moves. The summer before it came out, we bounced through that Yeah Yeah Yeahs Lolla set at Grant Park’s bucolic North stage, with its trees and skyline lights as a backdrop. It’s hard to really dance during a festival headliner set—you end up kind of jumping up and down in place for an hour, crushed in with the crowd that’s been drinking giant beers or those weird boxes of wine all day. But we did our best. Everything about the last show of the day feels epic after all the side stage antics and heat-addled mishaps, and this set was no exception. Karen was a controlled explosion; the crowd sang our hearts out on “Maps” as she blipped on the words. I spent the weekend feeling by turns younger and old as hell next to the girls in sundresses young enough to be my students. I was tired of living temporarily. I put away the dream of tenure, and the following month took my first full-time job in journalism, scoring a newspaper staff writer job in the last days of the actual paper claiming to be as important as the website. The buyouts, of course, had already started.
Are any of us aware of the weight of our decisions when we make them, or only in hindsight, when the critics start dissecting our moves? Maybe this was my real talent after all, coming in at the beginning of the end of something, and figuring out how to hide out there in plain sight.
*
Ayaode’s “Heads Will Roll” video really picks up when the main character arrives, a ponytailed werewolf in a skinny tie—tailor, introductions—eyeing the crowd, his prey, with contempt. The audience won’t dance, but he will, and they will watch with fascination.
But first, a word about dancing werewolves: Yes, there’s Michael Jackson’s varsity-jacketed “Thriller” routine and Michael J. Fox boogeying in a white suit and full “Teen Wolf” fur. But also, if you haven’t seen this clip, you really should: there’s Tom Cruise as upstart pool shark Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 adaptation of The Color of Money, his sequel to The Hustler. Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) is on his way to collect his protégé, a baby-monster he can’t control, who’s showboating as he runs a table. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is playing over the bar’s sound system, and Vince—wearing a VINCE T-shirt, for chrissakes—is feeling himself and the song. He's sending the balls in one by one, and between, he’s dancing. And there’s this shot, set to Zevon warning us to stay away, where Vince does this little spin then leans down to sink a ball one-handed, and he pauses to grin—presumably he’s aiming this contemptuous pity at his mark, but cut to him looking right at the camera as he bares his teeth and it lands like it’s meant for the viewer. (Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, is a genius too.) The next time the camera is back on Vince we stay with him for a continuous dizzying shot, and with every ball he drops, his arrogance swells, his improvised choreography grows more intricate. He’s wielding his cue like a combat staff, like a sword. He bites off the irresistible line, “his hair was perfect,” as he rakes his fingers through his mane with a leer. I mean, is there anything more terrifying than Tom Cruise’s own teeth?
Back to our wolf: While the band plays cool on stage, our guy’s solo floor show is all balletic menace. The floor lights up in homage but he’s all loose flips and careless elbows, more “Napoleon Dynamite does New Order” than “Billie Jean” en pointe, than “Thriller” precision. A pause, a howl on his lips. Then comes the carnage.
Michael Jackson himself died on June 25, 2009, just about a month after the video for this song, which would hit Number 1 on the Billboard Dance charts on August 1, premiered. How do you outlive a pastiche like that? The night of Jackson’s death, word spread by mouth and text and, probably, Facebook: We’d meet at this intersection and see how big of a party we could throw before we got shut down. This intersection was exactly the kind of spot you’d expect to encounter a flash mob (I’m sorry! It was 2009!) shutting down traffic to “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.” And all the terrible things we had heard about Michael Jackson were put inside a box and placed on a high shelf for a half-hour of sweaty chaos in the street. We danced, soaked with sweat in the humid river town summer night, like we did when we were kids and “Thriller” first entranced us, like we did in the ‘90s when his elaborate, technically dazzling videos ruled MTV. Almost a decade later, years after I married the boyfriend who went out dancing with me that night, and after I managed to make a career in journalism that feels to this day like it’s borrowed and I’ll have to return it on short notice, we stood outside the Adlon in Berlin where Jackson once dangled his infant son off a balcony with a blanket over his head, and said, Well, that happened here. I have a similar thought when I’m sitting at a red light at that intersection: Once upon a time, when we didn’t pour all our anger or mourning out on the internet, we danced in this spot—not for him, but for our younger selves.
And speaking of monstrous influences, when you’re a girl falling in love with Alice in Wonderland, nobody tells you about the metanarrative surrounding those books. You find that out decades later, and you wonder why so many things you thought were beautiful when you were younger had to have something rotten at their core. What was Charles Dodgson’s damage, exactly? Scholars and historians differ on the specifics, but here’s Virginia Woolf’s observation:
For some reason, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. … And therefore as he grew older, this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins.
Woolf did have a flair for the devastating detail. The image of “little girls whose frocks he pinned up” lingers terribly, to say nothing of the myriad psychosexual interpretations of his life and rumored predatory designs on a real girl, Alice Lidell; the contemporaneous gossip, the postmortem literary analysis, and the growing acceptance that there was something deeply fucked up and malevolent about this guy whose aesthetics also, oh yeah, course through my veins. Knowing this, what am I supposed to do with Alice’s persistent body horrors? With the sinister depictions of eating and appetite, of the fantasy that should a girl move enough among monsters she could become one herself?
“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” as Alice told the dudes. “I was a different person then.”
These texts shape us before we can know the people who made them or hope to understand their actions. What “Heads Will Roll” does for me—song and video together—is subvert those formational texts, bending their influences into something new and yes, useful. The video’s wolfman is a monster, but he’s defanged on the dancefloor at least, revealed to be just a chaotic terror. And that’s Alice’s voice that Karen is channeling, not any made-up queen’s—she’s giving the orders now, and she’s not going to settle for being made to feel abandoned in Wonderland for one second longer.
Third books function like third albums in a career; mine was a leveling-up, too. It came out almost a decade ago and went out of print nearly as fast, a casualty of the precarious economies of indie houses. (I have never been the major label type.) In that book I wrote a series of “exam” poems, and at readings I would set them up by saying that while I was writing that book, it felt like life was a series of tests I was failing, one by one. Another way of saying I couldn’t answer the riddles because they didn’t make any sense then.
But what if dance til you’re dead isn’t a curse but a blessing, an invitation, one rule worth following. I wrote a better book, and I found a way to teach on my own terms. I’m not younger anymore, and I’m a more resilient writer for it. What I really am is a slow learner. You could call that being a late bloomer, but blooming is just a response to conditions. When you apply the metaphor to a person, it becomes Wonderland-level nonsense.
Back in the wolfman’s dance, by the time the dance floor turns orange, the audience sees all too late what it sees. They can’t outrun him. But when he slashes them with his claws, confetti spills out instead of blood. His monster eyes match Karen’s dress. He takes her down, too: decapitated and bisected across the torso, Black Dahlia-style, she’s still singing. Inside, she’s all red glitter. I think of this image when I contemplate the “dissection” model of writing about art, of slicing something open to see what it’s made of: Was I expecting a raven or a writing desk? And what, together, do I think they would they tell me?
Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems, and two are even still in print. She’s the editor of The Louisville Anthology and author of Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (both from Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022. She teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon. She can’t believe she found that photo of herself at the Michael Jackson dance party.
The Dose Makes the Poison: ej haley on mark ronson and amy winehouse’s “valerie”
For the record, state the make, model and color of your vehicle.
At two PM on a Tuesday in September, I sit in a parking lot beside a pond and tell a woman on my phone that I’m running out of runway. I am not in my bedroom, and the licensing board of Arizona requires that she ask me these questions in case something alarming happens on the call.
What is the address where you are attending this session (if you do not have an address, an intersection is sufficient)?
In southeast Alaska, there are few deciduous trees—the better to allow the winter dark to creep in among the green. The better to cloak that sudden seasonal shifting where the few leaves don’t change, don’t fall, only rot.
During the past seven days, how many times have you experienced suicidal thoughts?
At a certain point of saturation, individual raindrops will coalesce to form a sheet. There’s a rightness to a body of water when viewed in this way, the ditch grass and milfoil holy in their wobbly swimming, the mallards’ oil-bright heads blueing the brack.
Have you made a plan?
The danger, then, is intervention: a single swipe of the blades will occlude the vision as the rain continues its nesting.
Are you in danger?
There’s so much to be missed in this negotiation between motion and stillness, so many ways to practice your unblinking until a gale of water becomes a sheet—
Yes.
—the light’s refraction so soft from the bottom of a pool.
*
In the summer of 2015, I am alone in a hostel in Brooklyn, learning how far $1500 does not go. I mean to learn about poetry, to slide uncomfortably into a life I thought I wanted when I was young and didn’t know any better. I eat cups of shrimp noodles anointed by an orange bodega cat named Hey You, ride the L to the city, and marvel at the pleasant way I disappear.
And each evening, as I return to my creaking bed and canned tuna, I pause as I pass the fortune cookie factory near my hostel. In the bloom of orange light, I breathe lungfuls of warm sugar and imagine dissolving it between my tongue and soft palette, the paste an emulsion to slide good fortune down my waiting throat.
What I do not do is call the man who waits for me in the apartment we share back in Michigan. As I breathe the noise of this place, I do not ruminate on the ways I don’t have the courage to leave him, not on the ways he would be perfect if only everything about him was different, or the quotidian resentments stacked like so many undone dishes. I don’t think of him once, that absence its own kind of sweetness.
*
I met the woman who would be my wife one day by pretending to be someone else.
It’s much more romantic than it sounds.
Prior to the internet’s shift from forums to social media platforms, I learned the craft of collaborative writing through text-based roleplay on a series of online journal sites. Each site was a case study in divergent evolution: cloned from the same base code, each gave way to its own sub-subculture of the terminally online. On livejournal, celebrity roleplayers barked at one another over the accuracy of their respective portrayals while an avatar of Liza Minelli, username lizawithaz, sailed unbothered above them like a descant. On dreamwidth, community moderators crafted tabletop simulacra on ghost trains or frozen wastelands, while panfandom characters from Hatsuni Miku to Nick Miller to Eric Cartman raced to solve mysteries or stay alive. When greatestjournal collapsed in 2005, a great migration of slice-of-life roleplayers tested the alternative communities, found their inhabitants too hostile, and settled on insanejournal, where they still remain today.
Text-based roleplay in these atmospheres is a hobby with a vast gender disparity. Due to a degree of anonymity, it’s difficult to state the statistics with any certainty. However, based on fifteen years of anecdotal experience across a variety of slice-of-life communities, I would estimate the ratio of female writers to male at 40:1. This, combined with a considerable romantic wish-fulfillment element of the hobby, meant that the gender disparity of the players carried over into the community of characters. The dearth of viable male partners created an economy within these communities—I saw a need; I filled a need, and in return I received an embarrassment of riches: not money, but something I needed far more: attention and praise.
I was fourteen when I spun my first roleplay character from whole cloth under the auspices of taking part in a slice-of-life roleplaying game in the Harry Potter fandom. On the first page of the 2001 publication of Quidditch Through the Ages—an in-universe tie-in created by its author as part of a charitable endeavor for Comic Relief—a library log lists Bundy, K as the borrower between Fawcette, S, and Warrington, C. It was through this gossamer thread of canon compliance that I created a boy named Kevin. Like me, Kevin had difficult feelings about his father; like me, Kevin feared the dark things he might become.
*
The conversation between my therapist and I begins with an ultimatum: there is lightning inside me that points me toward the rocks at Echo Cove or False Outer Point, beautiful places at the end of the road where loved ones find quiet vehicles parked near the yawning mouth of the ocean. The shades of desperation that pull them through roads lined with shale and spruce toward gravel mausolea are as different as the suffering that begat them. But in the end, one thing is always the same. They arrive, in dark of winter afternoon or endless summer evening, and must perform that awful calculus of whether they hope to find the car occupied or empty.
Something drastic must change, or our next conversation will be at the leisure of the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric ward. Her face is implacable as ever she asks me whether there might not be a third option.
We meet the following week, and I give her my flight information and ask her what it means to set an intention. I’ve been accepted as a patient at a Ketamine clinic in Arizona, and I will spend two months in the desert alternating between infusions and regular intensive in-person therapy.
When the alternatives are suicide and hospitalization, logistics become as concrete as money becomes conceptual. For the first time in years, there is a goal: stay alive until Scottsdale. My best friend visits from Florida. I recall very little of our time together—remember very little of that period at all—but I know that on a hike, I tell her that I’ve been thinking of dying. Later, when the wet terrain becomes too unstable for us to crest the dam, her voice cracks when she tells me she knows how important this hike is to me.
I love her so much in this moment. I regret that this pain won’t stop spilling.
*
At the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, I am confronted by the unwieldy truth of my body. The city did not so much teach me to be invisible as it allowed the truth of my incorporeality to unmask itself. True, I exchange a gentle jostle of shoulder in doorways or on trains, but always I am met with eyes unfixed on the middle distance.
It starts with a mirror. Rather, it starts with nine mirrors, the tenth a door that closes behind me so that I can be confronted by myself on all sides. It’s startling to stand at the center of that octagon, the truth of my neck, my belly, my tits accusatory in the cool LED lights. When I look down at the mirrored floor, my sundress is the bell of a jelly, and I am a diving voyeur. While I stand there, it never occurs to me to remove my bicycle shorts beneath, never crosses my mind to widen my stance and observe the truth of my cunt. It doesn’t occur to me that it is the only part of my body I know by touch and not by sight, or that this is a trait it shares with a large tattoo of sheet music that marks me from cervical spine to bra band: I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
None of this occurs to me because nothing occurs to me except that I am not a ghost. This alone is enough to unseat me, and I leave the room feeling as though my skin is two sizes too small. It persists from exhibit to exhibit, ancient intestinal prophylactic to nickelodeon peepshow, my body a real and present thing, through the room of inflatable breasts that feel more crash pad than bounce house, bodies upon bodies upon bodies spilling sweaty into the street.
Woman, the word inflamed and unwelcome on the tip of my tongue, an infected tastebud.
*
I’ve emptied the storage unit, my mother texts me from thousands of miles away. But not the notebooks, she adds, never the notebooks.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that the contents of The Vault, a thrifted white storage cabinet stuffed to bursting with spiral-bound notebooks I accumulated over the course of middle and high school, is filled with pages of handwritten erotica numbering into the thousands. Some of it, I’ve written alone. Some with friends, some with strangers, most with the woman who will be my wife one day—though neither of us knows this yet. Over the course of our twenty-year creative partnership, the woman who will be my wife and I will write 131 individual romantic relationships, some two dozen of which form the foundation of the city my imagination builds to house them all. They shrug away identities and ideals, growing alongside us like shadows no matter how their faces may change. Always, they find one another. Always they love one another.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before the city is truly a city, there are the notebooks passed silently between us while we sit on a basement sofa. In them, I am almost always a man with big hands and good intentions. I’m too young yet to know the logistics of making a woman come, but still I am a man who knows that sex isn’t good unless she does. I am never selfish, naked in my wanting, willing to pine for page after page until the dam breaks at last. I always say I love you first and notice the color of my lover’s eyes. I am generous with telling her she is beautiful. It seems like the right thing to do. And when we are troubled, the cruelty is never pointless, but a crafted gambit to sweeten the moment we come together again.
Later, when we’re on opposite ends of the country and have traded notebooks for locked comments in online journals and shows of narrative strength against our less lyric peers, I write the woman who will be my wife one day a story set to a song. My future wife has started a master’s program; she’s outgrowing this hobby that has bound us together since I was a child, and I fear the way she’s on pace to strip away the trauma of our time in Colorado and step into the adulthood our survival had stolen. I couldn’t keep up. Not that I didn’t try: in 2010, I began dating a man I would eventually not know how to leave—I had not yet learned the difference between loving someone and liking them, the difference between codependence and need.
This time, the lovers are addicts in recovery, struggling with asynchronous pressures of fame. The song I have chosen, first written by English indie rock band The Zutons in 2006 and covered by Amy Winehouse for the Mark Ronson album Version, was written by The Zutons’ lead singer David McCabe during a twenty-minute cab ride to visit his mother. In one version of the story, the eponymous Valerie has been arrested for driving under the influence; in another, she’s been arrested for driving with a suspended license.
But whatever the reason, the message is the same: My body’s been a mess. I miss you. Come over.
In the story, the lovers have contributed to one another’s relapses. They are in the before- before-discovery, before-treatment, before-progress. The guilt is destroying him; love will destroy him first.
I relay a message in a language I don’t yet know I speak, hurled into the expectant ether.
*
A Partial List of Ways in Which to Submit to the Process of Treatment
Prior to arrival in Scottsdale, dismiss the following fears
This will not work
This will not work because of me
This will not work because of me, and I will be financially ruined by the attempt
Memorize a two-sentence explanation of Ketamine’s off-label use in the treatment of depression by working on the NDMA receptor, blocking the activity of the glutamate neurotransmitter, which increases the brain-derived neurotrophic factor and allows for increased neuroplasticity.
The second sentence must, by necessity, contain an acknowledgement of Ketamine’s abuse as a party drug, accompanied by a detailed explanation of the clinic’s stringent safety protocols, trained medical staff, and quality control processes
Failing this, resort to ancient axioms. Dosis sola facit venenum: the dose makes the poison
Refrain from illicit substances, alcohol, and marijuana throughout the course of treatment. When others ask you if you mind whether they partake of these substances, tell them you do not. It does not matter if this is true.
If you are of child-bearing age, a pregnancy test will be given
For the 48 hours prior to infusion, all attempts should be made to maintain a stress-free environment. Avoid social media, stressful work environments, or unhealthy relationships
If this is not possible, you’ve made a mistake in coming here
On the day of your infusion, do not eat solid foods six hours prior to treatment. Cease all intake of food and water two hours prior to infusion. Treatment may cause nausea and vomiting, and it’s critical that you arrive with an empty stomach
Have a driver available to take you home (no rideshares). This is mandatory. Following your infusion, you must not drive for the rest of the day, so ask a friend or family member to drive you. If you do not have a friend or family member willing to do this, please contact the clinic for information on how to request medical transport.
For the first five treatments, humble yourself before your retired parents, and practice the ways you will speak for thirty minutes each way. Offer to buy them lunch; do not question whether this is for them or for you. Practice; your tongue will be looser than you expect.
For the final treatment, the medical transport driver will be quieter, the drive to and from the hotel shorter. It is still polite to make conversation, if you are able. There are no set rules on gratuity for transit to and from the saving of your life, so it is best to be generous
*
By my third week in Brooklyn, this loneliness has become a life raft, a heavy woolen coat. Having run through most of my money and the usual milieu of tourist attractions, I spend my days absorbed in the novelty of making my own choices, no concessions to make or whims of others to consider. Even the indolence takes on weight because it is mine and mine alone.
The wet July heat has come and I’ve not yet shaken the remembering of my body in the Museum of Sex’s hexagonal mirror. My tits are swampy, the seat of my well-tread bicycle shorts always damp or off-damp. I have prepared for this: during our Colorado survival in my teen years, my future wife and I escaped the heat of the home where I’d been abandoned to haunt shopping centers and discount movie theaters, big box stores and fast food joints, cultivating our interests around which places had the best air conditioning and the crispiest Diet Coke.
My ticket to Asif Kapadia’s documentary, Amy, at the Times Square AMC is more money than my diminishing funds will allow. When I trade the remaining week’s worth of bratty Brooklyn coffee for bodega coffee crystals, I feel I’ve come out ahead in the deal. I’ve loved Amy Winehouse since Frank, mourned her death four years before in 2011, but I’m unprepared for the wet sadness in her 25-foot face, for the way I am cradled in the whiskey and cigarettes of her contralto in digital surround sound.
There’s a moment, early in the film, when Winehouse’s friend and former manager Zach Shymansky discusses the first attempt at an intervention, stymied by Mitch Winehouse, the father she worshiped who abandoned her mother when Amy was nine. On the screen, Shymansky, childhood friends Juliette Ashby and Lauren Gilbert, and the Winehouses gather soundlessly around the table of a hotel courtyard. In voiceover, Shymansky reflects on the door that was closed when Mitch Winehouse said that his daughter didn’t need to go to rehab, a chance lost that they would never get again. Maybe things would have been different if they’d fucked off Back to Black, he says, but he sounds uncertain.
The world takes on a certain clarity when viewed from the bottom of a pool. The road takes on a certain clarity when viewed from the other side of a tragedy. There are always more moments we wonder if we could have been saved.
This meeting inspires a song that changes everything, that swallows a brilliant, tender woman piece by trembling piece.
I ain’t got the time, and if my daddy thinks I’m fine / They tried to make me go to rehab and I won’t go go go.
*
It’s not uncommon for Ketamine patients to experience extreme emotions in the waning period of their first infusion. When the nurse comes to check on me, she touches my arm and asks me if I’d like her to get my stepmom from the lobby.
My first question is whether my dad is mad at me. She doesn’t hesitate to say no. This blithe concealment is not new—in hindsight it should have been my first clue as to just how wrong things were going to go. But I have always been too eager to trust that people I love have no reason to lie. This belief is a medicine I keep taking with no evidence of its ability to heal me. A poison whose median toxicity I lack the tools to divine.
*
I return to Michigan. If I’m changed by my time in the city, it’s in a way that defies a neat narrative structure. I only know that some formless shifting took place in me inside the museum, in front of the fortune cookie factory, in the novelty of solitude, and it does not leave me when I return to our narrow apartment.
I leave my boyfriend of six years, but not before I propose to him.
As I do it, here is what I know: I have taken every step forward in our relationship to this point; I have grown to hate the things he loves; he loves me more than anything in the world; when I asked about what he wanted for himself, his answer was “to be with you;” I do not want to marry this man as he is (aimless, clingy, a drunk); I might want to marry who this man can become (a fiction, a fantasy, spun sugar on the roof of my mouth).
As I do it, here is what I don’t know: it’s not normal for sex not to stop when you ask it to; it’s not normal to be the keystone of another person’s identity; momentum is not the same as progress; most women don’t have to be drunk to tolerate being touched by men; being needed is not the same as being loved.
And with this litany of things I both know and do not know, I ask him to be my husband in August, and I end our relationship in December.
In the coming years, I will assign so much blame to both of us for the pain we caused one another in trying to love and be loved. I have no doubt that the ways that I hurt him—intentionally and unintentionally—echoed long past the moment he packed the car and drove back to Alaska. We live in the same town now, our relationship nearly a decade in the grave with no intentional contact between us.
Still, if I could see him, I would apologize for not recognizing when the medicine had turned to poison, for not realizing that amputation was a form of kindness when the alternative was spiritual sepsis.
I spend the two years following this breakup not learning those things I do not know. The characters I’ve created have grown too great in number, so I construct a city in my brain where each lives in their own private corner dwelling, suspended in time until I need them. I take long vacations from my body to stroll its wide boulevards, rotate each creation and admire every freckle and flaw. I remember the face of every person I’ve ever written, remember every love story and the particular power of its transformation.
Outside the city, my body absorbs such terrible violence.
Again.
Inside, the light is golden.
Again.
Inside, even rough hands are gentle.
And again.
Inside, everyone’s eyes are kind.
*
A monumental shift takes place after my third treatment, and though I am cautious in my optimism, I sit on the flagstone with my dog and try to tell my mother what I know.
My entire life, I have been managing my expectations. The belief that there can be no more to healing than an absence of pain is neither a problem of defeatism nor a lack of imagination, but rather a lack of context. A fish can’t be blamed for seeing the color blue and not assuming the sky.
Then, one day, it’s gone. Not just the pain, but the accompanying ceiling for my own recovery. The ketamine is not fixing me, but giving me the tools to fix myself. Over the phone, I tell my mother that for the first time, I understand hope without qualification, and together we cry and cry.
Each night, I text my best friend and the woman who will be my wife, and I tell them about the strides I’m making in treatment. When I tell them about a successful session of equestrian therapy, I joke that the horses only like me because they sense that I know where to score. We joke about the strange things I see during infusions. We joke about the paths my new lease on life may take.
“What if horse tranquilizers are what you needed to enter your villain era?”
“damn turns out all i needed to write a novel was a head full of horse tranquilizers”
“Sorry, I didn’t wanna ruin your favorite book series while you were out getting horse pilled.”
I mention equestrian therapy to my dad. His laugh is different than theirs, incredulous in a way that signals I should not elaborate. Mentally, I shift my intention and hope I can find a way for he and I to be friends.
*
On July 23, 2021, I confess my feelings to the woman who will be my wife one day. That we were talking about new alternate universe storylines for our current slate of characters is not unusual. That it was prompted by the graphic lesbian sex scene in Ammonite is new. Logically, I can only assume that I have Kate Winslet to thank for having the courage to tell this woman I not only loved her, but wanted her; not only wanted her, but desired her with a ferocity that tanged in my guts and bones and cunt like music. I have had twenty years to love her every other way: as a friend, a surrogate sister, a protector and companion. To love her the way I do now is not a fraying of those other threads. Instead, they are the tether that binds us as we cross into an unfamiliar plane, brave despite the ways that love has been unkind.
But I have learned from the mistakes I made in Michigan. I know now that loving someone will not fix them, and I do not expect this of her. She loves me while I work to heal myself, in pain and out of it, her support never flagging when the goalposts of my success grow more and more humble the sicker I get.
And even with the strength of this love, there is the city. In the years since Michigan, its network of streets has grown more ornate, its scenery grander, its fortifications secure. Sometimes, I retreat inside it without knowing and lose hours, then days. When I emerge, I feel pride in the way that I can weave complex relationships of cause and effect between characters and their respective stories, that nothing ever happens without a reason.
I am so loved, but my future wife is so far away, and the city is right here, its lovers so vast and so present.
Things come to a head on a trip to Seattle in the spring of 2023. I am so happy to be with her, but sex between us has become complex for reasons that we’re both struggling to unpack. For my part, I don’t know how to express that I feel jealousy over the way these characters we’ve created can love one another in the open. That feeling gets more complex when the lovers are both women, and I agonize over whether I feel this way because of my increasing alienation from the concept of womanhood, or because I want her to want to touch me the way that her character wants to touch mine, to romance and tell me I’m beautiful with the same untroubled abandon.
When I tell her this, she is so gentle when she reminds me that this isn’t the first time we’ve talked about my difficulty separating fantasy from reality. The pain of this reminder stays with me far longer than our continued navigation of intimacy. This medicine, a poison; this city, a tomb.
*
Everything falls apart in Arizona the night before I leave to visit my future wife. I’ve undergone five of six treatments, and the plan is to go see her, then return for four more weeks of treatment and therapy to shore up my defenses before returning home to face the winter and my own new desire to survive.
The fight between my parents and I takes place in several uninteresting parts, but its main thesis is this: I do not fit in the life they have created for themselves in retirement; my presence has become burdensome; I have communicated incorrectly and failed to read the room. When I ask why this wasn’t brought to my attention sooner, my dad reminds me that the stakes of the situation of my coming here were high. Not for the first time, I leave the conversation feeling as though I’ve taken someone hostage with my emotions, that I lack some fundamental essence that makes me worthy of being understood. Then, we go to a party at my aunt’s house, and I serve fussy pink cocktails while everyone gets drunk around me, and life chatters unfailingly on.
It’s then that I finally learn that loving someone is not the same as liking them, and that my parents do not like me and never have. More accurately, I have been learning this in fits and starts for my entire life, and only now do I accept that it’s true. I am always learning what love is by being shown what it’s not: no sooner do my parents obliterate the agreed-upon plan than my friends start suggesting ways to crowdfund the remainder of my treatment, my future wife making plans for special places we can see that will belong to the two of us alone. I am becoming the person she fell in love with again, and we spend the week in Portland reacquainting ourselves with the particular effervescence of anticipation, of joy.
I return to Arizona just long enough to finish my initial treatment series. I let myself feel righteous anger at the way the change in the situation has deprived me of both the doctor-recommended booster treatment and four weeks of in-person therapy, but I try not to linger.
There are different ways to ease into estrangement, strategies to make gentler the process of turning the wine back into water. I went to the desert and learned that I could feel joy at the prospect of being alive. It’s fierce but it’s fragile, this hope, a wild and fluttering thing.
My dad and I have lunch at an Outback Steakhouse the day before I return home. I think some part of him regrets what’s happened between us, but I don’t ask. My stepmother and I haven’t spoken since that night, and I don’t ask about that either.
Instead, when we hug goodbye, I climb into the highlighter-yellow Jeep (you’ll like this car, the rental clerk said, it seems like it matches your personality) and drive the blacktop with the windows down. I feel my body, uncomfortable in the desert heat. I hear my voice as I sing, the first pleasure I deny myself when each new depressive episode begins. Sometime near sundown, when scrub has given way to saguaro and every building looks like an Amazon warehouse, I bounce in my seat to the drumbeat from “You Can’t Hurry Love,” Amy’s contralto buoyant under vast swathes of sky. She entreats Valerie to come on over, and for the moment, she is alive, and so am I.
And so am I.
EJ Haley (they/them) is a novelist who lives and writes in Alaska. They published poetry, essays, and served a number of journals in an editorial capacity under another name. She was a gift for her time, but she deserves a chance to rest. This is EJ’s first publication.