I was thirty-eight, hanging on by my fingernails, going to school full-time, raising three kids by myself, teaching three courses and volunteering in a little nursing home. I believed I wasn't using. I didn't know that working seven days a week without a break was nuts. I would have said it wasn't compulsion. It was survival. I didn't know that waking up fantasizing about a brilliant stoner, thinking about him every second of my jammed-up day, using fantasies about him to lull myself to sleep in the early hours of the morning were the signs of romantic compulsion. I wasn't drinking, hadn't yet discovered gambling and never liked drugs. Hey, I was clean.
My friends tried to talk to me about my love jones. I told them it was the only magic in my life. "He's the mystery tramp," I said, and quoted Bob Dylan: ...but now you realize he's not selling any alibis, as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes and say do you want to make a deal? "I can't con him. He's bone-deep honest. No deals are going down."
B. had grinned, "I never thought you'd be the kind of shallow person who'd get deep insights from pop music!"
I felt as though she'd punched me in the heart. I shrugged. Later, much later, maybe 2 a.m., I lay in my solitary bed and let songs run through my mind, the songs that were keeping me fully alive. Sally Go 'Round the Roses kicked in.
Sally go round the roses (sally go round the roses)
Sally go round the roses (sally go round the pretty roses)
Hope this place can't hurt you (hope this place can't hurt you)
Roses they can't hurt you (roses they can't hurt you)
Sally don't you go, don't you go downtown
Sally don't you go-o, don't you go downtown...
I knew Sally. I knew "Hope this place can't hurt you..." I knew that someday it would---and the roses wouldn't save me. "Doesn't matter," I whispered to the lonely dark, "it's worth it." I look back now and see that I had forgotten about the rest of Dylan's song:
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?
That is the nature of the deal. I made the deal not with my beloved stoner. He was, after all, the Mystery Tramp. There would be no alibis. I made the deal with everything I had learned about "love"; from every fairytale; every movie; every ad for lipstick and mouthwash; from the words and images that nattered at all of us all the time, "You give all you've got to love, and you'll be loved."
The songs faded away. I felt myself slip into the hypnagogic swirl that precedes sleep. I fought its irresistible pull. And then, there was that which I feared most: the sensation of absolute aloneness, the sound of absolute quiet. I jolted awake and began again the internal mantra of my lover's name.
It would be a decade before I'd hear the song that might have given me the deep insight I needed. By then, I'd almost stopped listening to music. By then, I had cut too many deals.
Mr. Brownstone:
I used ta do a little but a little wouldn't do
So the little got more and more
I just keep tryin' ta get a little better
Said the little better than before
I used ta do a little but a little wouldn't do
So the little got more and more
I just keep tryin' ta get a little better
Said the little better than before
