Boys, girls, America and Tom Waits

The brilliant piece by Sarah Hepola sent my mind on two different trips. One was something I think about all the time. The other one took me by surprise.

Trip #2. The Big Bang.

I will give you the conclusion right away. Ready? Here we go: Through music they listened to, the boys I dated made me into a boy!!! And this is why I have been so tormented and so fidgety in my seat for so many years.

OMG OMG OMG.

See, the authentic me has never been very interested in identifying myself through other people’s music. May be it was because I was constantly doing something interesting in my head. Or may be, it was something deeper. In any case I have never sought out other people’s new music (unless it’s a cool African dance I just saw on YouTube). New bands were always coming into my existence from boys who shared the sacred with me, froth on their lips, brains popping.

…and when a boy made me listen to Tom Waits for the first time, I thought the record was awful. Yes, yes, I fell in love later, didn’t we all. I even covered “Blue Valentine” and it made me shiver. Really feel. But my dear God, when I started identifying myself as a Waits lover, I was slowing turning into a boy.

As a small child and then a preteen girl, I liked simple things. Like cheesy love songs. Straightforward romance, happy or unhappy, but no confusion. As a grown woman, I suddenly find myself attracted to and writing simple love songs again. The confused boy is leaving my body and I toast his departure.

Trip # 1. Discovering America, in both senses.

My first boyfriend was an asshole and I had huge cheeks. He thought of himself as a sweet combination of Henry Miller and Jim Morrison. He lied, cheated and wrote beautiful prose full of sexual references and unforgivable spelling mistakes.

We were teenagers in Russia. The magical culture of the magical West was oozing into our minds, shooting sacred words like “King Crimson”, “Robert Plant” and “Castaneda”. Twisted stories of twisted lives, beautiful in their godliness. No, these musicians, writers and literary characters weren’t people. They were gods, Boddhisattvas, probably six-handed and absolutely perfect, their shit and all.

So I moved to the States.

I sucked the godliness with my own mouth. I toured in a shitty little car across the beautiful mystical America, I talked to bums, I lost friends to drugs, and I rubbed with the people who rubbed with the legend.

I have met, made friends with and recorded with my favorite founding member of King Crimson, by virtue of my own art.

I wrote sad songs and sang in a very low voice. Like Waits.

Oh hell, I’ve even had an Italian husband who was beating me, and spent a month in jail on real accusations of unreal espionage. Disgusting smelly sandwiches, FBI and all. All the fucking glory.

And it was nothing like the romantic stories of mess that I created in my head as a teenager. If anything, it was painfully ordinary, with the exception of my friendship with Ian McDonald.

Those stories were no more than mental Instagram.

Did I really need to take all these years to figure it out? Dear God.

But if you are a 13-year-old girl who loves Tom Waits, you are probably going to do the same things I did. And then one day, wake up and suddenly laugh at the silly drunken boys. And then…