No Connection at Home. A Complete Unknown.
When I left my studio, tucked away in the suburban home I shared for thirteen years with my second wife, it was in haste.
She’d drawn up the contract, the one decreeing I vacate it completely by the 11:59 June 30 — fittingly, the end of the fiscal year — and I had found lodging for my considerable cache of drawings, paintings, photos and cassette tapes. It was just a matter of getting them there.
Five hours before deadline, Amy came home from a trip and found I was still loading things up. She had what I can describe only as a meltdown. Though I found it a bit unsettling, I calmed her and showed her the time on my phone. It was 7:00.
It was hot, and I’d been moving stuff all day, so I went swimming over at a neighbor’s house. “I can’t stay long,” I told Melanie. “Gotta have everything out by midnight.”
“Oh, you’re kidding!” she exclaimed. She knew Amy, but not like I had come to.
“Why would he kid about something like that?” asked Ray, her husband. It was the kind of lightness I had come looking for.
Because I left in haste, I did forget a few objects. A framed photo of us in front of a waterfall. Some cards and love notes I’d written to her over the years, which she’d unceremoniously thrown into a kitchen trash bag. (Is there even a ceremony for such an act? Maybe she’d lit some incense.)
Also forgotten in the hubbub was a framed pastel of David Bowie, the rock singer, songwriter and provocateur.
In my new place, occasionally I’d wonder what ever happened to that thing.
Today, just this morning, I found it at a thrift store. For a mere $4.99 it can be yours.
Though it hadn’t occurred to me Amy wasn’t much of a Bowie fan, maybe it should have. Our relationship was marked by a disconnect when it came to music. Yes, we went to shows together, listened to cds in the car, reminisced about the idols of our youths. Most people would characterize her as a lover of music.
I am here to counter that she is not.
Firstly, she doesn’t pay for it; she pays for some service like Apple Music, which would rather see a musician starve to death than pay royalties. Second, she rarely goes back and listens to stuff she used to claim to cherish, opting instead for the latest Billy Eilish or whatever her daughter is listening to.
I happen to know her daughter does not care what the fuck her mom listens to. I do. Well, I did.
Now? Meh.
If she’d been a teenager in the late sixties, she would have preferred the Monkees to the Beatles. In the seventies, disco over funk. In the eighties, well, her devotion to Duran Duran is well documented.
People like what’s popular, and Amy is no exception. Though it shouldn’t surprise you that being married to someone like that, when you’re an artist who isn’t quite popular, is hurtful, it probably does. It’s as if with her music choices she’s saying, there’s a concrete reason you don’t have a recording contract.
When all this began to really dawn on me, I took to my secluded basement studio to rehearse for shows, and played the upstairs piano only when she was gone. I didn’t want to expose what I did to someone who, at best, didn’t give a shit, and, at worst, would shit right on my music if she could.
Atop that piano was a wooden box with a door and shelves where I kept cds I knew Amy in a million years would never listen to. You know, “guy stuff” like Richard and Linda Thompson, Bruce Cockburn, The Roches and Neko Case. I didn’t want her even to see them.
You may find my attitudes toward music somewhat wrought and lofty. So be it. I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us.
