Love in the Time of COVID
A pandemic power play: OXBOW and Lydia Lunch. First show: all hell breaks loose.
There was this great science fiction story and the premise? People in the future would draw sentences for being antisocial. Given that, the writer laid out, “antisocialism” could be tracked back to the majority of societal ills, it was thusly deemed a punishable offense.
And the punishment? The punishment was “invisibility”. You’d be marked, like Cain was marked, with some sort of sign or symbol that indicated that you were now among the invisible and you were to be shunned. Aggressively so, and to the point that you had become virtually invisible.
Failure to acknowledge the invisibility of the convicted also drew a sentence of invisibility. So enforcement was airtight.
The story’s protagonist, however, is so deeply antisocial that he welcomes this. He does a few predictably dickish things at first. He goes into a women’s locker room, gets off on their uncomfortability with him being there and their fear of acknowledging him being there.
He contemplates going over to a bank and taking the cash but realizes that since he can’t be seen no one could/would be charged for discharging a weapon in his direction so he trods lightly there.
It’s all fun and games until deep into his sentence when it starts to bite. Hard. Then he’s all Barbra Streisand and people needing people is not just a song but something he’s willing to risk a lengthier sentence for. I’d like to say I remember how the story ends but how I seem to remember it ending is him chasing someone to talk to/with.
[W]e start to fight. Light slaps, then a crotch shot with a substantial amount of vigor.
Welcome to now.
I had never been so religious as when I was walking through the halls of a job I didn’t like and prayed to G-d to not only smite my enemies but to do something, anything, so I didn’t have to return to my wretched employ. And then COVID struck.
I envisioned, at first, months of Zoom meetings, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) for lunch. Generally avoiding human contact not related to me during the best of times I was in some version of heaven. Except there would be no Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Not only that, there would be no gym. No restaurants. And then, shocker, since this was not at all what I had prayed for: no shows.
A German journalist had once guessed that my “onstage persona” with OXBOW was a contrivance and the genial guy sitting across from him was the “real person.” I corrected him: the only real one was ON that stage. A stage that was a clearinghouse for all of what courses through the blood and constitutes the soul. THAT all happened on the stage.
But that was gone. And then COVID started to bite. Hard. Twenty-seven people I know, some casual, some not so casual, dead. The jiu jitsu people in my life, all generally healthy, occassionally find themselves believing that COVID is less than real. But the musicians in my life constitute most of the dead.
Beyond that, there was nothing. Music videos for Soothsayer in my living room. Music videos for BUNUEL in my living room. People populating your life via social media…but in abstract.
Then, a call: “you all want to play a show with Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus?”
Audience masked and vaxxed. The great Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Saturday night. Was there much to lose?
Outside of the fact that we had not played for over 16 months, no. And moreover, Lydia Lunch single handedly framed a lot of my thinking around presence, clarity and a deep and driving contempt for the human animal’s multiple failings. There was nothing to lose.
And things had started opening up. By the time the show would hit I would have been training again in BJJ for six months. Seven days a week. Two hours a day (usually at 7 am). So I should be in fine physical shape to make it through a fine physical show.
But weird things started to happen. The backs of my both of my heels feel like they’re being stabbed with knives. Right elbow bursa is inflamed. Left arm is tingling. Is this just the future? Or the recent past? Is it aging and the inevitable consequence of…? Or, overtraining?
Getting into and out of the van going to practice? Murder. Stairs? Murder.
The day of the show I pick out the show shoes carefully. I envision Howard Cosell calling this fight. “And Robinson’s DOWN!”
Weeks ahead of the show I am gripping. My GI is still acting up. I’m paranoid about every cough and sniffle.
Lydia pulls into the venue and she’s a tank and by way of a greeting we start to fight. Light slaps, then a crotch shot with a substantial amount of vigor. That is, her to me. I’m fighting for my life out there now and this goes on until we’re winded. She, from all outward appearances, has NOT stopped playing. Digging deep into a hard global grind. Because this is what must be done.
My wife shows up with my youngest daughter for soundcheck and while chasing and dandling the child I forget about the stairs. Until she heads for the stairs. And making it down stairs, one step at a time with her, the fear creeps back in on velvet feet.
Since in an age when everyone has lost everything isn’t the calculus that someday, maybe one day, and maybe today, doing OXBOW would be an impossibility? I’m in that panic death spiral and quoting Edward G. Robinson in my head. “Holy mother of mercy could this be the end of poor Rico?”
It’s not stage fright, it’s not performance anxiety, it’s real existential dread connected to the very inevitable end of all things for all of us. This is not simply a probability. Or a possibility. This is a reality.
“Five minutes.”
I head for the stairs, veer toward a lesser used back staircase and work my up. One step at a time. To the gallows. It’s a death march. And I’d learn too much, or not enough, about precisely what would come next based on what would come next.
The first line of the very first song: “I want to die. And you’ll want to know why with life’s great parade never-ending and riding high…” Dark, and bitterly antisocial the song is called “1000”. As in how long the Third Reich was supposed to last. But failed.
The song ends. There’s a roar from the audience and then this: nothing hurts. Not the heels, the elbow, the tingling left arm, the ass, nothing. I spy Lydia at one point. Indefatigable and there. As in present in all ways. And visible.
And not only her. Everyone. Or to quote Gary Oldman, “EVERYONE!!!”
None of us, you reading this and me writing it, that I can see, are dead yet. While I’d like this to have a family feelgood happy ending where I comfortably and honestly make the claim that I’m much less antisocial today than I was yesterday we know that that is not true.
But what’s true is this, if you’re alive to read this and have actually read this far, I’m totally glad you did.
Dude, lookin' good and rockin' it out, what could be more life affirming? Okay, remembering last week's post... never mind. ;) :D