by Jake Shears
“Uh—yeah, it’s fun, you guys,” I said. “You should . . . come out and hang?” I turned and ran out, blushing. I have to say, seeing George Michael’s bare ass on that bed was like seeing the Mona Lisa in person. It was perfection.
And then here Chris and I were, back at my tiny, grimy Twelfth Street walk-up, a visible contrast to everything else in our life. Nothing was fitting. The lady below me who made knitted hats would still bang on my floor anytime she thought the music was too loud. My clothes were haphazard. I wasn’t used to having money now to spend on things that seemed as frivolous as everyday clothes. I wore either what was given to me, or old clothes from years before. The whole past winter I hadn’t even had a proper coat. I’d just put on layers upon layers underneath a boxy Levi’s corduroy jacket.
I got up and stepped into the bathroom, reminded of the prank Chris had pulled on me a few days before. I’d come home and opened the bathroom door to a huge silhouette of an alien man sitting on the toilet in the dark. For a split second, my brain had short-circuited: I’d thought I was having a waking nightmare. But it was just a silly scarecrow he’d made. I was so startled, instead of laughing and thinking it was funny, I burst into tears.
I showered and combed my hair in the steamy mirror, looking a little better than I had a few months before on the road. But now I’d let my hair grow longer. It would get greasy and stringy, made me feel unattractive. I grabbed my notebooks and left for the café downstairs so I could write until it was time to meet Scott at the studio.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was grieving my loss of freedom. No longer was anything just for fun. When I wrote a song now, I felt the weight of expectation. It seemed like everyone was drumming their fingers on the table waiting for “hits.” No longer could I go out and party at the gay bars without knowing I was being watched to some degree. And, if hypothetically I was having a bad day and just wanted to go find some random hot guy and get laid, I couldn’t do that, either. I was happy being monogamous with Chris, but it had been a swift change. I was captive to a new set of guidelines, having so much now to lose.
Scott and I had moved to our own proper studio space on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, right across from the Flatiron Building. It was spacious, and we painted it purple and silver, calling it Discoball Jazzfest, after the names of the colors on the cans. Our hours were from Monday through Friday, eleven or so to seven, religiously. We talked, fiddled around, and played, trying to come up with decent tunes. But so much of the time I felt incapable of melodies anymore. My voice, both speaking and singing, had become quieter. It was almost as if I was embarrassed to hear myself sing. Scott and I could get frustrated with each other, when we were out of ideas, when neither of us seemed to have any mojo.
There was no question that he and I were both depressed. But the studio was inescapable. We had nothing else to do. Anytime I wasn’t in there, trying to create something, was a day that I knew I could be writing that one special song. We would try to take days off, but I would end up just pacing around the city on my phone, trying to make sense of it with anyone.
I remember taking a call from Roger Daltrey one afternoon. He wanted Scissors to play his yearly Teenage Cancer Trust fund-raiser. I was walking through Washington Square Park with my phone glued to my ear. I had never met the guy and here I was pouring my heart out. “I think I’m depressed.”
“Over here in the UK,” he said, kindly, “we call that the black dog. Sometimes it comes to hang out for a while.”
I had lunch with Anohni one day, and we had a conversation about antidepressants. “What would you say if we were living in some tribe somewhere, and the village shaman said, ‘Here, I have this root and if you eat it, it will make you feel better’? You would take it, wouldn’t you?” We finished the afternoon by going back to her flat, painted white, with nothing but a white piano in the middle of the room, and talking about writing. She balked at my process, going into the studio to write every day. “Writing songs for me takes a long time. It’s almost like laying an egg.”
Elton would get on the phone and tell me he was concerned about the way I was acting. “You don’t sound like yourself,” he’d say. “I’m worried about you. You’re usually like a shot of B12 wherever you go. This is not you.”
He and David went above and beyond to cheer me up. Once, when my mom was in town, they took us to Dior Homme, had the whole store shut down, and bought me the entire men’s collection. I’ll never forget the look on my mom’s face. If anyone knows how a wild shopping spree can make you feel better for at least a day, it’s Elton.
I might have been depressed, but it was nice to hear a new cheer in Mary’s voice every time I talked to her. She’d been going to surgery seminars and had found a hospital in Seattle that would perform the gastric-bypass operation in a couple months’ time. I’m not sure if it was the new excitement in her life, but she had actually started dating somebody for the first time in the entire time I’d known her. She sounded genuinely happy. The surgery was scheduled for the spring.
One afternoon Elton came over to meet Scott and me at our studio. He brought us shopping bags of Y-3 winter clothing, which I sorely needed, and then sat down at the keyboard and got down to business. “I was thinking something kind of Bo Diddley, like this. . . .” And he played a cool riff. Scott and I gathered around him, the three of us chiming in on chord changes and timing. Within minutes we had a structure with multiple sections. Scott put down a rhythm track and started building on the progression. “Have at it,” Elton said, standing up abruptly. “I’ll see you guys later this week.” He chipped off, and then it was just me and Scott again. My heart sank.
Here we suddenly had a potential song, right in front of us, straight from Elton John’s fingertips, and I was immediately convinced that I didn’t have melodies or lyrics for it. But I began singing around it anyway. “Maybe this is a song about dancing or something?” It was a pretty bland start of an idea.
I kept playing with it, but nothing great was coming. I wanted to give up, go home and go to bed. But then suddenly the words “I don’t feel like dancing” fell out of my mouth. They were true. I didn’t. Didn’t feel like doing anything—writing, singing, exercising, anything. We wrote the whole song that evening, and when we left the studio, I still wasn’t sure if it was any good.
The next day I went to the therapist I had been seeing for a couple months. She was on the Upper East Side, was a big doctor at Columbia University Medical Center. Her office was tranquil, and she had an empathetic nature about her. We both decided that we would try talking my problems out. I really didn’t want to go on antidepressants.
“I feel paralyzed,” I said. “Every second, somehow I’m reminded that I’m going to fail.”
“Well, when you tell me you’re reading sites called Metacritic and Pitchfork five times a day, that doesn’t surprise me.” She had me on a regimen of fish oil and concoctions that would hopefully help me. It all felt like a placebo, though.
On my way out of the office I called Neil. “We wrote a song yesterday. . . . I’m not sure, but it may be good.” You never really know until you do the day-two test. What was sounding amazing could be revisited the next day and sound like hell. But every once in a while, you can return and realize you have something exceptional.
I ASKED CHRIS TO KIND of marry me (again), or at least be my partner for life, while we were getting ready to head to David and Elton’s bachelor party in London the following holiday season. We were in our hotel room primping and making ourselves look handsome, I didn’t have pants on, but I pulled out the rings I’d chosen with my friend Aimee Phillips. They were simple platinum bands. Chris was taken aback, I think. I popped a boner when I pulled them out.
He never wanted to actually get married, but he committed to being my partner. I knew it was a challenge to be with me, not the easiest life. But he was secure, handling all my quirks with a kind of grace. I’m sure it would have given anyone a complex,
constantly being introduced to others not as who you are, but as whose boyfriend you are. Chris was stoic when I left home for extended periods. He gave me hugs and made me food when I was fretting and downcast. Sometimes I couldn’t figure out what he saw in me.
That night, when the bachelor party show was over, in which I sang “I Am What I Am” with the Pet Shop Boys, I got on a stripper pole for old times’ sake and pulled my clothes off. I was pretty drunk. Some psycho Justin Bond brought ended up ripping my underwear off while I was dancing. I remember just looking down at Ozzy Osbourne’s face, gaping up at me, confused. But “Lust for Life” was playing, and even though I was now completely naked in front of a roomful of people, I decided to finish what I’d started. Chris handed me a bowler hat that I had worn for my number. I used it to cover my dick and just kept boogying until the song ended. It’s a wonder I didn’t get thrown out.
The next day I took a train to Paris to visit Kylie, who was living there while recovering from chemo treatments. She’d been diagnosed with cancer the previous summer and had canceled a run of touring. On the phone she was positive, but you could hear the pain in her sweet voice.
I was so excited to see her, but my heart broke when I did. She was really sick. We spent the day going on walks and talking. Her mood was up, and we talked about her recovery. I had no doubt that she was going to beat it, but still I was scared. This was very serious. When we rode in the back of a car with the windows down, the Eiffel Tower sparkling in the distance, I looked at her across from me, so beautiful in her turban. I prayed right there to God in my heart that she would get better. Kylie, and the bright, luminous light she gave to the world, had a lot left to do on this planet.
It was Elton who finally had the talk with me about going on antidepressants. I was despondent, and it felt like there was nothing I could do about it. I think the last couple of years had been so hard on my body: Lack of proper food, not drinking enough water, sleep deprivation, had led to pure exhaustion. I feel like once I put my body through that, it never really came out the other end the same. I have no doubt that those crazy years did some damage. Strangely, it wasn’t a story of a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol; it was just too much work.
“I’m just going to say this, and you need to listen to me. You’ve got to take something. You need to just try it. David and I are very worried about you. If you don’t like them, then just get off of them. But you have to at least try it.”
I got a bottle of Lexapro from my shrink, and Chris and I planned a trip to Disney World for the week I started. It was the only thing I could think of that could get my mind off of things, and why not go to the happiest place on earth when you were feeling like total crap?
We were there for about five days and rode everything. After about forty-eight hours, I started feeling the brain zaps of the pills beginning to enter my system. Every twenty minutes or so, I would feel this unpleasant rush that felt like a laser show was going off in my head. It wasn’t unlike the feeling of coming down off ecstasy. Splash Mountain and Roger Rabbit kept my mind off it, and we just lived like that, in this demented Disney limbo.
From Florida I flew down to Belize to meet Scott at this little resort where we’d set up a makeshift studio space. Though the beach was beautiful, I was completely unable to write anything.
When we were planning the trip, Scott and I got in this huge fight about the fact that he wanted to bring some guy he had just started seeing. He didn’t really know the guy all that well, and I was just pissed off because I didn’t want to be the third wheel on one of Scott’s dates. Of course this devolved into a huge row that culminated in our studio with Neil witnessing it. I remember Neil said afterward, “I’ve barely ever heard two people talk like that to each other. I’ve never even gotten in a fight with my wife or ex-girlfriends that was that intense.”
So we decided that the last half of the trip we’d have two of our best friends, Aimee and Sammy Jo, come down and hang with us. They jokingly called it “the suicide watch.” Scott and I barely got any work done. I was borderline catatonic a lot of the time. I read Murakami books, but mostly I sat on my bed and stared at the wall. This was the worst and the deepest part of the depression I’d ever experienced. Any stimulation was too much, whether it was speech or music, a movie or a suggestion. I just wanted to sit and stare at a blank white wall. That was the only way I could manage the static in my head, the voices that had become so loud and overbearing. At least when I looked at a wall, it gave them space to have their say.
At the end of the trip, we were gathering our bags to bring to the boat to leave the remote spot. It was the day we were going home. That’s when I felt it. Something like a tickle, a tingle in my core. A kind of small relief, a brief sensation of contentment that I hadn’t felt for a long time. Some small internal whisper that said simply: Everything’s going to be okay.
I would continue to wake up in the middle of the night, see the vague outlines of my surroundings, and try to figure out exactly what I had gotten myself into. But it was time to learn how to inhabit the life I had created for myself, and accept the person I had become. I wasn’t and would never be that same kid anymore, wondering how far you could take a daydream.
THE WARHOL SHOW WAS AT some gallery in Midtown, a series of party snapshots he had taken over the years that were being sold individually. All the images, in black-and-white, lined the walls like a timeline of New York royalty. I now had the money to buy such things every once in a while. I walked the length of the gallery, trying different photos on, figuring out what would be fun to look at every day. Instead of choosing a glamorous shot of Liza or Mick, I decided on one of Caroline Skelly, an elderly New York socialite heiress who had gained most of her fame from being robbed multiple times. In the picture she looks very old, almost grotesque, and is wearing what looks like a sombrero and muted sequins.
Scott and our friend Aimee had accompanied me, and the three of us decided to take a cab down to my apartment on Twelfth Street. Scott usually didn’t hang out at my place, so I welcomed the rare occasion to have him over. My CDs were stacked in individual mountains: I’d run out of shelves. Liza with a Z, the soundtrack of Liza Minnelli’s eponymous 1972 television special, had just been reissued, so I threw it on and puttered around, offering them drinks. “Cabaret” came on after a few minutes, and I sang along to some of the words. Scott and Aimee were staring at me, which was strange.
“Jason, there’s something we need to talk to you about,” Scott said. Something was very off.
“Are you kicking me out of the band?” I laughed. “What the hell is going on?”
“Mary is dead. Your mom called an hour ago.”
Liza responded, exactly that moment:
But when I saw her laid out like a queen
She was the happiest corpse I’ve ever seen.
“I just want to say this, and I don’t want it to sound stupid,” Mary had said, a few weeks before on the phone.
“Oh God.” I rolled my eyes. “What?”
“If anything happens—”
“Nothing is going to happen!”
“If anything happens,” she continued, “I want you to know that this surgery is entirely my decision. This is something I’ve always wanted to do.”
“You’re being ridiculous. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“Just in case,” she said.
Liza was now singing that song about everyone getting her name wrong. It sounded truly macabre. I stared at the floor for twenty minutes, with Scott and Aimee just sitting, then excused myself to buy a pack of cigarettes. When I walked out of the deli, Chris was standing on the sidewalk. He had heard the news and had come back from Yale to be with me. We didn’t say anything and he embraced me without speaking.
I put on a nature DVD about fish and sat on the couch, watching the huge schools move in unison. I should have been there when she had the operation. Her boyfriend, Jim, had been with her, and we’d been talking every few hours. I shoul
d have been there. I looked at the black phone on the floor that only she had the number to. It would never ring again.
Jennifer traveled from Arizona to Seattle for the funeral. My mom met Chris and me there as well. I was in charge of putting together elements of the service, enlarging some of my favorite photos of her and making a playlist of her favorite hair metal on a CD. Ratt, Warrant, and Skid Row blasted through the church, at first confounding the mourners as they entered. The music was wholly inappropriate, which I knew would have at least made her laugh. When I spoke, I didn’t have anything written down, and I didn’t have much to say. I think I was still in shock.
My sister Sheryl hosted the wake at her family’s house. It was somber. Mary’s brother was unable to stop sobbing into his hands. Her mom sat in a corner and held conversations quietly. I couldn’t help but feel that every time they looked at me, they saw the reason for Mary’s death. I wasn’t able to cry.
Jim and I had picked up her ashes at the crematorium. The vase sat in my lap as we drove in silence with the windows down. When we stood on the end of a pier and scattered the chalky dust into Puget Sound, the ashes undulated beneath the surface, at first appearing like a cloud. I leaned against the railing and watched as the form shifted shape, turned into a gray, symmetrical creature with wing-like fins, crystalline. I said some kind of goodbye under my breath as it swam away.
I still think about Mary and me when we met, two disoriented souls looking for the understanding of a friend. When we’d first talked on that chat line, how could she or I have known the extent that our fates would intertwine? We had a seemingly random connection, but we were both outsiders, and shamed by others for who we were.
I wish I had something more eloquent to say about it. I wish there was some uplifting truth that I’ve gleaned from her death. If there is, I’m still waiting for it. I can hear her voice speaking somewhere, but not to me. There’s still the reflex to call her when good things happen, or to share some ridiculous story or gossip. She would probably be alive now if we hadn’t met. I know it’s stupid to think that, but I do.