Good morning. Hello. Greetings from Chatham County, NC. I have returned. Made it home, thank you for your concern. Did I sleep through my first flight? Yes, yes I did. But I made it home in time for Jane’s bedtime.
The weekend was as emotionally intense as expected when you go see the world premiere of a documentary film, the subject of which is a friend who is dead, and made by a friend who’s dead. It was overwhelming, cathartic, absolutely sad, happy, and dredged up a lot of unexpected feelings in me. I was prepared to be sad about Billy. I was prepared to be sad about Mike. I was not prepared to be sad about… my youth? About the Boston music scene? About aging, about alcohol, about holding on to your youth and aging gracefully.
I was not prepared to be reminded about how cliquey and exclusionary the Boston music scene felt in the 1990’s. About how the music press called me a trust fund baby because we had the audacity to make music that was, gasp, shoegaze or space rock or… not Bostonian. How we kind of got a pass because of our record label and the beloved Boston bands on it, but boy howdy that scene did not really like Freezepop or Lifestyle or Rockets. It’s interesting, it’s really something that has gone away from the Boston music scene these last decades. It’s so much better now. I had maybe retconned things in my head about “the good old days.” But.. yeah. That all came back and did not feel super healthy.
And… just… the death? So much death. Like yes, okay, Billy has passed and Mike has passed but I was ready for that. But the fourth or so shot in the film is Mark Sandman. Then Bill Whalen and Bullet Lavolta. Then Mike appears on screen, for the first time, just head poking behind the drums in some Damn Personals footage from the Middle East (of course).
Then you hear Mike’s voice, from behind the camera, doing one of the eighty-three interviews he did for the film, and you just want to break down. Good job, you made it almost five minutes.
By the time you get to Kurt Cobain, and Billy’s mother’s suicide, well, you’re not even counting the number of bodies in the film anymore.
We wanted it to feel like a wake, and maybe by the end of the night we got there, but I did not come out of it feeling better. It hurt.
The film itself is a massive accomplishment. Scott Evans, who finished the film as a tribute to Mike, did a masterful job. The assembly and editing must have been a hellacious ordeal, and in the end it all works.
It went a long way to filling in a lot of the holes in Billy’s life. Billy was a man with whom I was friends, and with whom I drank, on and off for nearly 20 years. But there were multiple year-long absences. In the early years, he would explicitly remember me, he liked our band. In the later years, as we saw less of each other and his mental illness and addictions progressed, it was more of a nod of vague recognition when I did see him. The film made me understand the absences, the rapid aging. In all the years I knew him, I never knew he was rich isn’t that weird? No idea. And I never knew about his mom.
Because that’s how friendships based on rock and roll and alcohol work. Are you actually friends if all you know about each other is that you both love this band and you both love booze?
Arriving with Jess, Mike’s ex, and walking down the line with her, passing hundreds of people, was a different sensation. I felt almost like a pallbearer (I am sorry Jess it is not your fault I love you and it was amazing spending every minute with you). Seeing old friends that you hadn’t seen in years was another overwhelming aspect. The dichotomy between the Billy friends, more than a decade moved on from his passing and in far more of a mood for a wake than Mike’s friends, for whom his passing is still so recent and raw.
But mostly, I felt this weird sensation somewhat akin to what it is probably like to be a C-list sitcom celebrity. After the film, I went to the rest room. I probably passed thirty men. Every single one of them, we vaguely recognize each other, we know that guy from somewhere. But we’re not sure where or how or why. Everyone. Hundreds of vaguely recognizable faces, and you’re vaguely recognizable to hundreds of people.
Every single one of them if I saw them in, like, the RDU airport, I would stop and chat and try and figure out who they were and we would eventually realize, like, our bands played together in 1998 or something. But with hundreds of them, a nonstop parade of them, it was just overwhelming. It sounds kind of fun and positive, but the feeling it mostly gave me was anxiety. I do not know why, I can’t explain it. I found it profoundly unsettling.
But the friend faces, that was just amazing. Too many to list. Just phenomenal. And the ones who were there that I didn’t get to see. I didn’t get to see Suzybuzz or Jess Elias. I learned old friends were there only from their Facebook posts later.
I knew it was going to be hard, and of course I am so glad I went. It would have been harder to not go. And going to Man Ray afterward with Sean and Jussi and Abby and Danny and Colin and Richard and Erin was absolutely the right thing to do. And staying up to see Lindsay afterward at Sean’s was the right thing to do.
All the stages years of grief crammed into ten hours.
This morning Jane resisted school again, off to the problem solvers spaces, the social worker came out (one counsellor is on maternity leave the other is part time). She wasn’t as bad about it all as last time, and she was kind to the counselor. But Emma isn’t feeling well. I am vaguely nauseus from the Zepbound and it was all just kind of hellacious. She was worried she “didn’t know what was going to happen at PE.” I talked to the PE teachers, who were outside. They said her last PE session was fine and they specifically remembered her leaving the class happy. So who knows. Last week it was art.
Had this record shipped from Italy. I think I own three copies now. Let me know if you need one.
Talk to you tomorrow, wherein I turn 52 and the age at which Billy passed.