Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  Her service in her hometown, a tearjerker of mammoth proportions, finds the church packed to the bell tower. Amy and Shannon, looking shell-shocked and frail, red-eyed kids, solemn parents; players from the Lady Comets (Sahara’s favorite local women’s basketball team) sniffling into Kleenex; local members of the government with platitudes in their pockets but heartfelt looks in their eyes; and some of my band and me sitting quietly in a row. There are photos of Sahara in the full power of her youth, smiling her familiar, thousand-volt smile; wreaths and vases of flowers; a video screen showing a slide show of even more photos. I can hear one of my songs, “Celebrate Youth,” playing softly over the house speakers, and at the center of it all, a small, bright-pink box of about the size that might hold a pair of kids’ shoes. It is her ashes. The ashes of a thirteen-year-old girl named Sahara. It is unfathomable.

  I flash back to the moment, years and years ago, when I am standing in our living room in Australia and seeing my own father’s ashes being handed across the threshold. There is a terrible finality in the act of cremation, which I have felt is both healing yet at the same time incredibly disruptive. It is, in a way, an acceptance that they are gone, returned to the cosmos, the earth, the sky. But it is also a huge mind-fuck to see a loved one suddenly reduced to a tiny, ordinary box. It’s impossible-seeming, and yet what are we in the end but this? My reminiscing also takes me back to the minute I first saw Sahara bopping in and out of a backstage queue as if she had too much to accomplish and not much time to do it. I understand that now.

  People speak at her service. A young girl stands and delivers a beautiful and sweet poem she wrote for her lost friend. I struggle tearfully through “Free,” a song I’d written about dealing with the loss of a child, for the parents of a young boy from our neighborhood who’d drowned several years earlier. Despite my bright and shiny pop-star image, I’ve written a lot of songs about death.

  Some of us take the long, silent drive back to Sahara’s home after the service. We sit in her bedroom and tell stories, while Amy clutches the Harry Potter backpack that was her baby’s traveling bag of choice when they would go on the road to Disneyland, to Palm Springs, or to see me. The stories and the shared grief help momentarily, but everyone knows it will be a long, hard journey to the far shore of any healing.

  A few days after she’d left this earth, I had gone to my computer and put down some thoughts. A few sentences on losing her. Writing has always been my way of seeing the forest through the trees. It’s my soul’s compass, my way of dealing with things that are tangled up inside my brain. And I need to do something for her. Something good and pure that speaks of who she was and what she meant to me, like I did for my old dad years ago. I want to build a memorial to Sahara, but I am no stonemason or sculptor or builder of any sort. I am only a writer.

  A few weeks after the service I have a melody to a verse and chorus of a new song I am thinking of calling “Saint Sahara.” I have no words for it yet because I generally write lyrics last, but I’m lost as to how I should phrase my feelings for her and her death. I don’t want it to be maudlin or soppy—she wouldn’t want that. And Amy herself had recently said to me, “If you write a song for her, please don’t make it a dirge.” I know what she means. On the computer I see a document titled “Miss S.” That was my nickname for her. I open it up and the words I wrote almost a month ago are there before me and they fit the melody I have written so perfectly that I am actually stunned. I’ve never had this happen before, ever. I lay the newfound lyrics into the first verse and sing it out to her in my music room:

  Come on, close the book and turn out the light

  Put your plans aside tonight

  Yeah I know it’s not wrong, but it sure isn’t right

  An angel bids a last good night to us

  Come on Sahara, give us a smile

  You’ve walked this far with us, let’s walk one more mile

  Hey Saint Sahara, beautiful child.

  You left us all wanting, you left us beguiled.

  And life goes on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

  RETURN TO OZ

  2007

  I take a trip back to Oz for my first shows there since I left in 1972. I play a bunch of dates in Australia’s six main cities—Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth. Not a lot has changed, as far as your options to play a gig go, in the almost forty years since I left Australia’s brutal shores. We play the local arenas and I try to find something I recognize in the land where I once lived, dreamed dreams, fell in love, learned to play the guitar, and received a neighborhood whipping. I expect a few past issues may arise now that I’m back performing in Australia instead of just visiting my old mum’s house, but I’m not prepared for the onslaught of emotions that surface in me once the shows start in the “Great Southern Land.”

  Working here makes all the difference to my mental state, and it is my first truthful and solid re-bonding with the place where I was raised. I’m no longer just a casual visitor, the boy in the bubble, removed and distant, stopping by for a quick reminisce before I head back to my home in the U.S. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I felt back in the days when I lived here and options were few. But now it rises up in me, and I begin to understand just how much pain and longing I really associate with this country. Feelings that had waned with time or that I’d suppressed are suddenly front and center. They’ve been waiting for me to return and make a real connection with Australia, my home. As I travel around the country, I am thrust back, against my will, into memories and forgotten issues that have been buried alive for more than thirty years in the rich, black, clotted earth that is my distant past here.

  The first big town we hit is Brisbane. It’s the same city I journeyed to in 1969, straight out of Vietnam, in my lurching, uneven pursuit of a musical career. Two women I recognize are in the meet-and-greet line after the arena show. One is a middle-aged woman who was once a seventeen-year-old goddess I loved for a while, or believed I did, back when I was nineteen and playing in the inauspiciously named Wickedy Wak. Her name comes back to me—Gaye—and as our eyes meet there is a flicker of doubt and embarrassment, as we each must wonder what we look like to the other after all this time. A moment of disorientation while we take that mental trip back thirty-five years to when we last saw each other.

  I am almost sixty and so is she, and what we meant to each other for a brief time in 1969, when we were both teenagers looking for something to hold on to, is all there is between us. I also recognize the woman with her, Anne, and remember her as a young blond surfer chick back in the day when the Beatles were still a recording band. I feel like I owe these two. All those years ago they were the first to claim fandom and friendship with a young unsettled Ricky and let him know he was okay. I associate them strongly with my first success as a fledgling musician and the beginning realization that I might actually be able to pull this dream off. Seeing them fills me with gratitude, pride, and yearning. But they are gone—whisked out along with the rest of the meet-and-greet line—before I can think this through, much less express it.

  Next stop is Sydney. It is the hedonistic capital of Oz. Beautiful and perverted.

  My early journeys through Australia, back when I was living and gigging here, were the beginnings of a lot of the sexual shit that I have had to deal with later in life, when it shouldn’t have been all about fucking. We all got into as much sex as we could back then. It didn’t matter how young they were, or even how old they were, or if they had husbands or boyfriends, were virgins or hookers. A lot of it seems like normal young-guy stuff and to a degree it was, but I was never able to shed the obsession as I grew older and should have been letting much of it go. The habit of a sexual path is as powerful as any habit. And I picked up a hell of a habit. It’s been hard to break. It’s never good to have as much as you want of anything.

  Walking around Sydney one afternoon makes me feel the same claustrophobic feelings I used to ex
perience in this place. This was the biggest Australia had to offer? It wasn’t big enough. But what was I really searching for? Certainly not physical size. LA always feels too big. I e-mail B every day. The only good thing about being away from her is that we both focus on what is important—us. And all the garbage that has accumulated throughout our relationship just falls away.

  We travel to Hobart. The big town of Tasmania … where Errol Flynn was born. And that’s pretty much it for Tassie. There is absolutely nothing else Tasmania is famous for except its early and punishingly hard penal settlement in the 1880s. (A prisoner escaping with another fellow lifer got a bit peckish after a while and killed, cooked, and ate his companion. “He tasted like chicken,” he is quoted as saying on his reapprehension.) Obviously I have always avoided this place. I stay in my hotel room until the show to make sure I don’t get killed and eaten.

  The next city we go to is Melbourne, where most of my demons were born and raised. I’m pretty certain Mr. D is from around these parts. There is suddenly so much unresolved stuff here for me to deal with, I can’t even begin to assess it. I guess I’ve avoided it on my previous visits by going straight to my old mum’s house and consciously or unconsciously keeping myself sequestered there until it was time to go back to the U.S. All of my dark teenage stuff is here. Now that I’m out and about and interacting with this place, it’s impossible to avoid it. The memories are lurking in the dim alleyways of the local pubs, in the angry finger flipped out of a moving car window, in the gray cinder-block schools that still look like the prisons they were to me as I served my time there, and in the sharp twang and drawl of the down-home Aussie accent that I associate with such buzz-kill phrases as “Are you a fuckin’ queer, mate?”

  On a day off in Melbourne, I take a side trip out to 13 Subiaco Court, my old home. The street seems much smaller than I remember, but the house still looks the same. Sharp-edged cream brick, lawn struggling for life, and bushes screaming for water. I see my front bedroom window facing the street. I was a tortured little motherfucker inside this house, and the present occupants are completely unaware of all the history that is here for me. They can’t suspect I’m standing outside, full to the brim with emotions, looking at this small suburban battleground that was the center of my teenage universe.

  It’s in this house that I tried to hang myself by the neck until I was dead, that I beat my face in anguish and torment until it bled, that I gave up on school and wondered if I had ruined my life, that I obsessed over the girls I couldn’t approach and masturbated several times each day out of sexual frustration, teenage angst, and something a little deeper and darker that wouldn’t surface as a serious problem until I was in a committed relationship years later; where I built guillotines, gallows, and fire pits and tortured schoolteachers and shopkeepers in my dark imagination; where I learned to play the guitar; where I met Pete Watson, the man who delivered me from an academic hell, named me “Rick Springfield,” and set me on the musician’s path. It’s the house out of which I sneaked late at night to sit in the car while my friends robbed convenience stores. The house where I forged my strongest memories as a young teen. It all happened while I was within those so-familiar walls. So much life lived in this place: it’s difficult for me to absorb it all as I look upon it so many years later. How can a simple, nondescript, cookie-cutter suburban house have so much hoodoo, so much energy, the residue of so much pain and so much innocence lost? So much life.

  A few stops down the line from here is the Richmond train station, where I was beaten by a gang of drunken older boys while I was trying to get home one night carrying a bad case of blue balls after rubbing up against a teen temptress at a local dance. “Are you a fuckin’ Sheila, mate?” came the rhetorical question from the group of toughs as I stood begging for the late-night train to arrive and usher me into the safety of its brightly lit womb (“Sheila” being the derogative term for a girl back then). Of course my hair was longer than theirs and my slight frame made me an easy target. I was smacked across the face and beaten for my insolence in not answering. I arrived home aching and angry, and I stole into bed so no one would see me or the damage done. I fell asleep thinking that in the final analysis, I was indeed “Howard the Coward.” I couldn’t fight back to save myself.

  This wells up in me now, this shame and remembrance of my helplessness, my loneliness. And it’s lumped in with all the other moments I felt weak and unprotected in my teens. It seemed these bastards were everywhere: challenging me, telling me I couldn’t go to this party, that dance, get on this train, have my hair that long, be younger than them, walk down a deserted street with a girl, live where they lived. Those fuckers will pay. The phrase jumps into my head like it’s been waiting for me to get here and face this. That’s what I want. I want to hit back. It amazes the part of my mind sitting back and taking notes (something writers always do) that this reptilian-brained auto-response would ring such a big bell in me. Hit the bastards back, hard.

  The next night, after the show in Melbourne, the band and crew go to a local dance club, and of course I drink too much. People are getting loud and some are saying stupid shit, and I’m in the bathroom when a guy walks in and says something I don’t like. I don’t even remember what it was, but it’s enough. Hit the bastards back. It surfaces in me like a breaching shark. I boil suddenly with long-suppressed, long-simmering anger. With all the teenage angst I can muster, I slug him in the face and he goes down hard, bleeding from his nose, like I did so many, many years ago. Fuck you, asshole! Of course I instantly feel remorse once the adrenaline is absorbed back into my system, and I want to make him feel okay. I let him know it was nothing personal. I am fighting back for the young man from ages ago, with the androgynous look, who wasn’t strong enough to fend for himself in the land of the Tough Guy. Of course I don’t say this to him. But even I am surprised by how volatile being here has made me. The strangers I am bound into close contact with on this Australian tour—the crew, the other artists, the audiences, the promoters, and assorted tour personnel I work with—remind me of the people (both positive and negative) who helped raise and shape me as a kid, a teenager, a young adult.

  B has always accompanied me on previous trips to Oz, and I think it’s partly because she isn’t with me this time to remind me of who I am now that I’m feeling this bond with my origins, and all the stuff it stirs up, much more strongly. I hadn’t realized how this view of Australia as a bully state during my later teenage years had affected me. Maybe some of this is a skewed distant memory from a tortured and powerless teen, but it didn’t come from nowhere. Being home in Australia as a full-fledged adult male is like waking up one day with Spider-Man powers. And all those young guys who used to threaten and intimidate me at local dances, lonely train stations, and brightly lit pubs look like youngsters themselves now. Part of me wants to hug them and tell them it’s okay, don’t be so afraid of this world, we’re all struggling, too. And the other part wants to fuck them up so bad their mums wouldn’t recognize ’em. The need to be more than the limited view that I felt some of these people projected onto me, combined with the inherent feeling that I would never achieve my full potential in this place, is, I think, what drove me from this beautiful land and a life that could have been.

  I was raised as a musician in a time in Australia when any artist that came from overseas, be it the U.S. or England, instantly received more attention, more money, more kudos, and more respect than the Aussie acts, even if the visiting stars sucked ass, and it made me feel even more inadequate than I already did. It proved to me that if I really wanted to make a mark, stand for something, join the world stage, I had to leave this land. I wasn’t the only one who felt this. Other bands and singers would leave Oz to seek greater fortune elsewhere.

  I could write a whole book about my connection with Australia—my homeland. It truly is my small town that I love/hate. It has breathed life into me, raised me, scarred me, taught me, taunted me, given me hope, given me dreams, caused
me harm, taught me to survive, taught me to feel shame, built my faith, and shown me that my faith is worthless. I am forever tied to this harsh, inhospitable, dry, barren, unique, spiritual world, and I can only hope that one day my ashes will be spread upon its unforgiving and beautiful red desert. So much is inside me, wrapped up in these emotions, that I think I drink to numb it all. I’ll deal with it later.

  The Darkness is on tour as well. Like me, he was born here. He chimes in now and then with words of wisdom and is clearly enjoying his homeland resurgence. The morning after I drunkenly punch the guy in the bathroom of the club, Mr. D stares back at me from the beloved hotel bathroom mirror and tells me that he’s proud of my unfettered feelings, and by the way, one of the girl singers on the tour would really like to get me high and fuck me. But his main reason for popping in is to have me understand that I am now and forever an outcast, an expatriate, an unfavored son, the visitor I thought I always wanted to be. But there is a neediness in me that so wants to belong to this land, these towns, these people, that I switch back and forth between the high I get from playing shows here to the fear that I have left behind a huge part of who I am in this country when I moved to America. It’s something that I will probably never shed, this feeling of what could have been, a life not lived and a future never realized. I’m sure it’s why I’ve stayed away so long from this place and resisted a real reconnection: I can focus on everything I have, and not everything I missed out on.