romance

Today is the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination. And for once, I'm not going to get into it. What else is there to say? I celebrate the life and music of Lennon all year long, so what's the point in remembering yet again the senseless death of a great artist?

I don't need an anniversary to remind me of how awful his passing was for the world. I was only 6 when it was announced that Lennon had been shot by a lone gunman, but I remember how sad it made my parents, especially my mother-- John was her favorite Beatle.

Every girl who had come of age during the early '60s had a favorite Beatle. Most girls liked Paul because he was cute. Ringo also had appeal for lots of girls. George was the one that the shy girls liked because he was so quiet. But John was the funny Beatle, and the natural leader, and the one with the raspy voice and the aquiline nose and those half-lidded eyes.

The saddest part of his death is knowing that he didn't want to die at that point in his life. He'd declared his wish to die in past songs with his confessional lyrics, but when he turned 40 he wanted to live and participate in the world again. And he was robbed of that chance.

Hats off to you, Mr. Lennon.


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I finally got that Raspberries song out of my head. And how did I do that? By making a CD burn of Tracey Ullman's "They Don't Know", that's how!

Sad, isn't it? Replacing one obsession with another... the story of my life.

The Ullman song holds this eternal fascination for me based upon the hilarious video that MTV aired to accompany the single's release back in 1983. In the video (as far as I can recall, because I haven't seen it in 22 years) Ullman is dressed like a renegade from a Supremes tribute girl-group. She is in love with the James Dean-ish "bad boy" and they have a typically pre-Beatles bobby-soxer love affair. The video ends with a pregnant Ullman and her man (both now much older and with rugrats) strolling through the supermarket, buying groceries and living a banal existence in sharp contrast to the excitement and passion of their courtship years.

Then, Ullman drives off in a car with Paul McCartney at the wheel. Evidently, she made an appearance in his movie Give My Regards To Broadstreet and he returned the favor accordingly.

If you aren't aware of the tongue-in-cheek video clip for this song, then listening to it is not the same. The song is not ironic at all. It is meant to be a straightforward homage to bubble-gum pop groups like The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las, and (of course) Diana Ross and The Supremes. The song sounds like a Phil Spector production slickly polished by '80s studio technology.

According to Songfacts.com: "Kirsty MacColl wrote this when she was 17 and sang backup on the track. She was the daughter of Folk singer/songwriter Ewan MacColl, who wrote Roberta Flack's 'The First Time I Ever saw Your Face.' In December 2000, she tragically died after being hit by a speedboat in the Caribbean. After her death, Tracey Ullman took part in a tribute concert for her."

There is a sense of melancholy to the song, despite its uptempo beat and sunny harmonies. All pop music, as Nick Hornby accurately pointed out in his novel High Fidelity, has an inherent sadness to it. Hornby asked aloud if he was miserable because he listened to pop music, or if he was listening to pop music because he was miserable.

For me, the song means something more than what it meant to me as a child. In 1983, I was one of the people that Ullman sang about, the ones who have "never heard of love". There was no way I could possibly understand what she was singing about, because I hadn't even realized what love was yet.


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I was a Senior in high school when I met Eve. She was a Freshman whose brother was in the same grade as me. Eve was dating a friend of mine, but I fell head over heels for her after seeing her act out a scene from My Fair Lady in our Theatre Arts class.

I was also trying to extricate myself from a messy breakup with Vera, a sweet sweet girl whose trust I had betrayed thanks to my inability to extricate myself from the mess of my former relationship with Amy Coates. Amy was done with me romantically but still felt a need to control me through other avenues, and when she had effectively helped me destroy my relationship with Vera she tried to set me up with Beth, her new best friend. That way, Amy could still oversee me while having her way with other guys.

But for me, enough was enough. Joining the Theatre Arts class and meeting Eve was a way of ditching Amy and the circle of people I was hanging with-- hypercritical know-it-alls who were never content with anything. Amy couldn't exercise any control over me so long as I was now labeled a "drama fag".

And for Eve, I was a form of escape as well: her relationship with my friend Craig ended after he got sick of never being able to take her out. Eve was perpetually grounded by her father and stepmother, and they balked at her involvement with the drama class at every turn. Craig was only looking for some quick loving, not a constant headache.

So when Craig and Eve broke up, I moved in. We hit it off. And what's more-- I was unafraid of her parents. I was willing to go out of my way to sneak around and see her. She never asked me or demanded that I do it, but she never tried to stop me either. In fact, she was an accomplice most of the time, leaving her bedroom window slightly open or placing a butter knife outside the sill so that I could pry the screen away in the wee hours of the morning.

Most people thought I'd lost my mind. What was a Senior doing with a Freshman in the first place? Everyone assumed that I was just hitting it and running, but the truth is Eve and I weren't having sex. We were just making out, talking, smoking cigarettes and sleeping in her bed until her father woke up at 5 am, but we weren't having sex.

We were in love. It was like Romeo and Juliet. And there was nothing that could keep me away from her. I had no car-- no problem, I could ride the bus or my dear friend Sharky would give me a ride to her place; I had no money-- but we didn't need money to sneak out and sit by the steps of the elementary school across the street from her house, shooting the shit; I was going to graduate and leave school-- no matter, I came back to visit her several times a week for up to a year after I had left.

I had this feeling of "Us against Them" when it came to Eve. I felt like she and I were at odds with the world, and only the two of us could understand each other. Everyone seemed to be against our union, all except for our drama friends-- they were more like co-conspirators, helping us carry out our secret liasons.

I took her to the prom. She looked spectacular; I was dressed up in a tuxedo. We left the prom and ended up at her birth mother's home. Eve's real mother was one of the few adults who recognized what we had: she could see it in my eyes, that I loved her daughter very much and wanted only the best for her. Eve's mother helped us out a few times when it came to our clandestine meetings.

But it couldn't hold up over time, and after two years of ducking and dodging, Eve and I broke up. And for a while, I felt like They-- the Them in "Us against Them" --had won the battle. They had the last laugh, as Eve and I went our separate ways and I tried, in vain, to fill the void with other girls.

They didn't know about us. They've never heard of love.


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I think a song like "They Don't Know" resonates because, much like Fox Mulder in The X-Files, I want to believe. In this case, I want to believe in love. I do believe in love. Call me a dreamer or a fool, but I have never been ashamed of the things I have done for love. I have risked my life and personal well-being for love. I have devoted my life to expressing love at every possible opportunity. When I look back on the things I did just so I could spend a few hours alone with Eve, I don't feel stupid. I feel like I followed my heart, and it makes me proud to know that.

But after the break-up, I did feel a little stupid, like I'd wasted my time on a girl who didn't know what she had. It didn't help that, shortly after we bit the dust, she finally made the choice to leave her parents' house to go live with her mother. To me, it was a kick in the teeth.

But her newfound freedom didn't last long. She and her new beau were brutally assaulted in Chatsworth Park, and her life changed for the worse. When I heard the news, I cried for days and blamed myself for what happened, reasoning that she wouldn't have been hurt if I had been there, as if somehow I could've made a difference...

I was now trying to extricate myself from a new mess, but this one was tainted by the pain and horror of her fate. I dated and made the rounds, meeting beautiful and interesting girls in an attempt to forget about Eve and all the trouble she seemed to attract. But I was severely traumatized by it all, and I foolishly pushed certain girls away because of the pain in my lovesick heart.

Many a girl would complain to me about my inability to move on with my life, and they were so right. I shouldn't have let it affect me the way it did, but I couldn't help myself. I was weak. I was angry at the world.

For a spell, it really did seem like They won.


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And now, over a decade later, Eve and I are sort-of together. After all this time, there is still something there, something exciting and worth all of the trouble I went through for her.

Last night we talked about deeply personal things, positive things. She told me how seeing Sharky at my show recently helped her in her dealings with movie producers and directors.

I mentioned to her that I needed a physical hobby to occupy my time. I am coming to terms with my aggressiveness, my competitive drive buried beneath the layers of mellow Zen that I exude daily. I realized that the reason why my sex drive is not waning with age is because I have too much energy building up inside of me, and that I need to sublimate and re-direct my energy so that I am not in a constant state of mind-blinding horniness.

When I was younger, I used to play basketball every day. I used to play football and baseball too. I even lettered in Cross-Country Running during my Junior year of high school-- I was a fucking Letterman, for Pete's sake! Technically, I was a jock-- can you believe it?

Eve and I talked about yoga as we ate Ghirardelli chocolates and watched Shrek on DVD in her living room. We talked the way we used to talk on those moonlit Valley nights in 1992, when we were at a loss as to explain the chemistry we shared.

As I drove home later on, I played the Ullman song on the stereo (looped endlessly, of course) and it was like the story of Us. It was the whole scenario played out in three verses and a catchy chorus. The last verse really hit home for me:

(Warning: cheesy song lyrics being quoted-- RUN!)


There's no need for living in the past
Now I've found good loving
Gonna to make it last
I tell the others don't bother me
'Cause when they look at you
They don't see what I see

So I don't listen to their wasted lines
Got my eyes wide open and I see the signs
'Cause they don't know about us
And they've never heard of love


And I realized that, in a weird way, she and I have won. We didn't win in the traditional sense-- there was no prize to be had, no pot o'gold waiting for us at the end of some rainbow. Rather, we have survived years and years of experiences lived apart from each other, and now that there is nothing in the way of us living our lives the way we want to live them, we have somehow come out on top, in spite of all of the people who didn't understand what we had.

We have come out on top because, even though she and I had our differences along the way, we still get from the other what we used to receive back in those dark days of undercover bliss: that understanding of each other.

But now, it is coupled with the things I wanted to have with her so badly, the things I risked my neck to someday have-- romantic dinners, nights spent alone doing nothing but watching TV and talking, evenings out with friends without having to worry about people looking over our shoulders...

I know she loves me, and she'd better know by now that I love her. But where do we go now?

Is this love, or is it closure?


*/*


All I know is, I'll always love her, even if we find somewhere down the line that we cannot be together. And as long as she and I remain as close as we are, then nothing that I did for her was in vain.

None of it. It was all worth it. One day, I will tell my children and my grandchildren about the love I had for Eve, how it caused me to do irrational things, how everyone told me I was an idiot for loving her... and I'll also tell them about how I didn't care, because she was (and still is) the most beautiful girl I've ever known.

One day...

I don't mean to imply that I earned this, or that I "paid my dues". If life has taught me anything, it's that we are not entitled to anything unless we ourselves go out and seek it. And even then, after we've sacrificed and given of ourselves more than adequately, there still is no guarantee that anyone will ever receive what they feel they deserve.

What we have now is remarkable but also poignant and bittersweet. Oh, if only we could have taken some sort of shortcut to happiness, skipping all of the drama and pain. Maybe we'd be happier, stabler people overall. And yet, it wouldn't be much of a story if we hadn't done it the hard way, I suppose.

But then again, there's nothing wrong with the stories about the couples who weren't star-crossed, the seemingly passionless pairings that came about with relative ease, without resistance, as if willed by destiny to exist. No, there's nothing wrong with those people at all, because even though their path was not riddled with obstacles, they still probably faced the world in a similar way-- they most likely took a long look at the way the rest of the planet carried on and then turned to each other, sighed, and said: "They don't know about us. They've never heard of love."

I am glad that I believe in love. I am glad that it seems to be paying off, after years spent investing my faith in it. And I am mostly glad to have loved anyone at any time at all.

Have a nice weekend, folks.