March Newsletter

1999, a night honoring Patti Smith at Carnegie Hall, and friends who tell the truth.

All that March has been: Patti Smith at Carnegie Hall, New York, Dinner before Ben's show at Largo with my best friends, a bird feeding on lavender nectar in my garden, sprinkled wisteria in Griffith Park, and Catherine and I backstage at Carnegie Hall.

My memory of the past is blurred and increasingly inaccurate, but what has always been painstakingly vivid in my recollections is how I felt. I remember quite distinctively how I felt in the years between 1999 and 2001; I remember being seventeen, turning eighteen in the year 2000, when everything was supposed to change (or end), and in a way it did, and didn’t. I felt restless and self-conscious, at war, lacking, infatuated with everything that wasn’t.

R.E.M was my favorite band, and I had a crush on Michael Stipe.

I remember the tears, the confusion, the dream, the depression, and the pain.

I was involved with a man much older than I was, a somewhat attractive heroin addict who didn’t believe I threw up after I ate — because I wasn’t skinny — a man to whom I lost my virginity, and my bearings.

R.E.M was my soundtrack in those years, coming of age, and then later, when I did become skinny, a drug addict myself, with cuts on my arms to show people that my suffering was legit, not imagined, not a call for attention — or a tool to stand out in the small town crowd. I was blind to the fact that everybody hurt, one way or another, at some point, and my suffering was the only reality I was capable of perceiving, my True North.

I was young.

And little did I know that one day I’d find my bearings, and that I’d meet Michael Stipe, backstage at Carnegie Hall, as we poured hot water over a tea bag, in a paper cup; little did I know