Wrong b/w In Sympathy

I finally figured out what my problem is: to write, I need to read. I had that long dry spell from posting, because I hadn't been reading. Well, I read a little. I finally finished that book I bought in Paris last January, at Shakespeare and Company. I bought Paul Auster's New York Trilogy only because it was affordable and had great graphics, because the store is pricey- great, but pricey, and I have to read before bed. I really liked the book, and took my sweet time reading it.
Then life gets in the way, and takes up a lot of my psychic energy, and head space, and there's only so much to go around.
So now, because I want to get back writing, I'm reading two books: Kafka's The Castle, and Touching From a Distance by Deborah Curtis, both of which amaze and transport me instantly into their worlds, so I pass that along to you...


Michael, or Lady My Kill, as we used to call him, used to show up at the most annoying times. Either early in the hung over mornings, chain smoking and eating up our kitchen, or just as we were about to go out, killing the voyeuristic mood we liked to lapse into. By 'we' I mean Scot and I.
My Kill's was the threat that we used on each other to motivate out the door: If we don't leave now, Lady My Kill will show up, and you know what that means!
That meant loud, grating acid trips. If he was on acid, which was usally all the time, he wanted your attention, and to scream in your face. Scot and I are pretty mellow guys, and have very high pain thresholds, unless we were drunk, so his presence was a little much sometimes. A lot much, often, actually. At first we tried to scare him away, by lying to him and saying we were going to church before we went out, or the police station (he was on acid after all) and when that didn't work, we'd lay around in our underwear, trying to act weird.
Alas, nothing scared him, and even though we told him his behavior was difficult, and to call before he came over, which he did for a while, we eventually accepted his presence, for I think we were the only stable people in his life.
He did have a pretty funny Boy George story:
Hey hey Brian Brian Brian!!! Did it tell you I saw George on a bridge one night in Paris, and I screamed at the top on my lungs HEY BOY GEORGE, YOU'RE A FUCKING BITCH!!!
Which he then did, in my apartment, for effect, I suppose.
What did he do? I asked.
Nothing. He said.
I looked at him and thought It must suck to be famous.
Lady My Kill got his act together a few years later, and started taking the right kind of drugs, you know, the prescribed kind, and went to hair school. (There are a lot of kids out there who went to hair school when they made the decision to do something constructive with their lives, and I can't help but feel a little responsible for that. Did I look like I was having my cake and eating it too? You be the judge...)

As I told you earlier, I met Renee just as Scot was getting ready to move away from Chicago. He said he was leaving because he didn't make enough at Medusa's to live off of, and didn't get enough support from his friends, but I think it must have been more than that. Chris, his on again, off again, was back in the picture.
Chris and I hit it off well, and we subconsciously, and consciously, fed each other's self-destructive habits. Watching two people you love live so destructively crushes your soul after awhile, especially when they claim to' just be having fun'.
Scot never did the things Chris and I did, but I do remember us having many pep talks with him, after that confession, about giving a good job interview, and believing in himself, because he was (and is) so incredibly talented artistically.
I know! But I can't talk to people! Why can't I talk to people! He would answer in frustration.
Because you're an artist, Scot. You don't tell, you show. Show people how great you are. I said.
Looking back, it took special people to see his abilities, and many did (I think his Medusa's job was a two day gig that lasted a year: they quickly saw his talent.) His biggest mentor was Nunzio, but when he died and Orbit closed, it hit Scot hard, and it took him awhile to recover.
Chris and I let him go with our blessings; we let him go where he needed to go. I wish we could have given him more, but we barely gave anything to ourselves as it was.
Chris moved into our dining room, and then into Scot's room after he left. It was a cold and deary day as we packed up his moving truck. Chris and I hoped he'd change his mind, but as he drove away, our apartment, and our lives never felt so empty.



Scot, in our Sheridan Road apartment, Chicago, 1990


Wrong

In Sympathy

Fire Walk With Me

OK, yes, you guessed it, I'm obsessed with David Lynch.
And here's a playlist I made for you. It's guaranteed to put blood in your stool, you'll dance so much you will...
Fritz Conrad Sumer '09 Mix (sic)

Anywho, I was looking through my concert ticket book, looking for more events from 1990 to tell you about, when I came across my stubs for Bowie and Soul Asylum, both of which I went to with Chad. I thought nothing happened to me in 1990, but I was wrong: everything happened to me. I wrote about Chad last year, when I sent an essay to a Morrissey fan site, and then posted here, hoping to win free tickets for the 'best Morrissey memory' or some crap, which no one 'won', for I doubt it was an actual contest. Cause I would have won! God, I'm bitchy tonight. Oh well.
That was a great story, (Found Found Found, June '08) and Chad and I had a great time, and you should go back and read it!
Well, in 1990, we went to Bowie's Sound and Vision tour at The World. We were in the last row, yet the show held us mesmerised from start to finish. For us to finally see our long held idol, well, words can't describe it. For me I think it was seeing Boys Keep Swinging, on Saturday Night Live, and it was love at first sight. I recently found a clip of him on Johnny Carson, from 1980, performing Scary Monsters, and an amazing restyling of Life On Mars, when Johnny held up a copy of that album I gasped a little, cause it was like watching him wave a dildo around, that album is so gay to me. My gay. It was the soundtrack to my secret gay 1981 love life. And there's Johnny, waving it all over TV, for America to see. (And I still have my dog-eared copy Roy Carr's book, if you want to see it...)
Watching Bowie interact with himself via video image sizes here-to-for unseen, was like watching him breathe life into his past and present personas. Weird validation. Well, it was more than that, he had very elaborate interactions with his pretend self. I guess most artists do, and feel eclipsed by their 'image'. It was almost like his own version of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. This clip gives you a pretty good idea.
Soul Asylum was at Metro that year, and I went with Chad because he asked me, but I didn't really dig them til their Somebody to Shove days. For whatever reason, I decided to dress really gay, just to see what would happen. Nothing did. I did that for Gallon Drunk at the legendary Lounge AX, much to their dismay, cause it was like me and 8 other people there. They were fan-freakin-tastic. Nothing to note at Soul Asylum except the show seemed sparsely attended, as well. I think I 'gayed it up' at Gallon to upset my date Mark, who was easily disturbed back in those days. I couldn't help myself!
Now I have to tell you about Mark...
um, later.

Writing this story reminds me how much I have digressed from my original plan of telling you more about Renee, and another story about a movie I saw with another guy I dated then, Skip.
He invited me to see a movie, which I now have to spend a million years searching for, because I forgot to save the link for it a couple years ago. Hold on sec... OK I found it, and it only took me a Frankenstein!
Alright, the movie was Poison, and we saw it at the Music Box, but we weren't alone; we were with a friend of his. I didn't like the movie at the time, for I thought is was just as it's title implied; a conceptual poisoning of homosexuals in a heterosexually dominated media. These were the days of the corporate American sponsors of Thirtysomething threatening to pull their ads is they dare show two men kissing during prime time, after all. That may have been the director of Poison's intent, for he was 'out', and maybe he needed to clear the cinematic slate, as it were, and declare these stories 'poison', and go from there. I dunno. But my diatribe on this topic made Skip more and more upset, if the look on his face was any indication, for he begged me with his eyes to shut up and take the movie for the pieced of fluff he thought it was. I was trying to upset him because I could tell he was sleeping with this guy, and I wanted Skip all to myself, and he was dropping me off, getting rid of me, after the movie to be with this guy, and I was mad. Mad right there on Sheridan Road, in front of my apartment building, by Broadway, in 1990. (Imagine a picture of me pointing to the spot his car sat, my eyes moist, with a quaver in my voice...)