Somebody to Love?

by Grace Slick

  Today, I'm in love with what I can create outside myself—something that doesn't involve my appearance— like painting, drawing, sketching, sewing, interior design, writing, playing piano for my own amusement, good conversation, philosophy, spirituality, just lying around, thinking. And since professional recording is presently a thing of my past, instead of music, I now use color in the form of pastels to show how I think and feel.

  Because I only do a drawing once, each piece is an expression of how I am at that point in time. Kinko's can take care of repetition if it's needed or warranted. Anyway, I consider performing rock and roll to be a young person's game. Old farts leaping around, trying to hang on to their flapping skin, is not an uplifting experience for me, either to watch or perform. There are certain kinds of performances that simply don't lend themselves to wrinkles. Like hard rock.

  With classical music, it doesn't matter how old you are. The formal, sit-down attire combined with the music itself makes it appropriate for an aging ensemble. But hard rock? Picture spandex on Ted Koppel, or Newt Gingrich behind a drum set. Hideous, right?

  That doesn't mean I think everybody over the age of thirty ought to give up; it's just my take on the situation. If you don't mind geriatric rock, that's fabulous. It'll buy Grace Slick a home in Saint-Tropez if you continue to show up at concerts in throngs of thousands and give up your forty dollars a head to listen to a fifty-eight-year-old woman say, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”

  That was okay in 1969. But would you buy that now? Maybe I could be the first rocker to have a bedpan roadie, an oxygen unit onstage between songs, a change of Depends, and a Count the Liver Spots contest, or …

  Give rock and roll back to the kids, and make sound-track instrumentals like a good old rascal.

  That's my opinion of geriatric guys making music. So what about listening to it? At first, in 1990, when I stopped the business end of rock and roll, it was hard to turn on the radio without being heavily judgmental: “If only the bass were louder, the harmony is off, put echo on that screechy voice, turn down the top end,” and on and on.

  I couldn't seem to just listen. But after a while, I was able to enjoy music without getting my “professional opinion” all over it. Today, I like listening to the radio because they play things I'd never hear unless someone else was making up the playlist. If I solely listened to my own tapes, it would be Gipsy Kings over and over. Radio gets me out of my own rut. But if I had Bill Gates's cash, I'd hire a guy to wander around beside me, playing flamenco music on a daily basis. It wouldn't just be a rut, it would be Iberian overkill—España locura me (“Spain crazy I am”).

  I won't say a final no to ever making music again. I have trouble saying no to anything, but if I decided to perform again, it wouldn't be in the same context as I've done for the last thirty years. Maybe a hellish little set at the Shady Pines nursing home would be in order. Me and Martha Stewart on cocaine doing a Sid Vicious lullaby. Vocals without music, spoons beating on bedpans.

  It could happen.

  Let me clarify my point. If you're a woman who's over fifty and have had no plastic surgery, put a mirror flat on the floor beneath you, take off all your clothes, and try getting down on all fours. One quick glance at the mirror will show you how the woman-on-top position looks to your partner. Gravity has pulled your sagging skin into the terrible folds of a Shar-Pei dog, your features are distorted by the inevitable droop, and your ego accurately tells you, “That's not who I am!” In the spiritual sense, all that floppy meat is not you, but in a physical sense, we do have eyes, and that reflection in the mirror is hard to dismiss with a load of cosmic platitudes.

  “Return to Sender” (Grace Slick)

  Black comedy: the wiser you get on the inside, the uglier you get on the outside. People who're trying to be polite, or simply displaying a lot of denial about aging, will say, “Yes, but she has that glow that makes her lovely.” True, a happy gramma looks slightly better than a morose old woman, but ugly is ugly.

  Not good or bad, just flat-out ugly.

  Some of the world's great gurus have beautiful things to say about living, but they generally look like shit. You may have seen them, the toothless degenerating fat old monks with acceptance written all over them. Do we love them? Sure. Are their bodies attractive? No.

  And another thing—why is it that Cher and I are the only nonpracticing comediennes who've admitted to thoroughly disliking the physical aspect of aging? It's not going to make me do any cliff-diving, but I'd prefer to look as good as I feel. I'm not going to don the flowered chiffon dresses that are considered appropriate for a woman my age, but I'm not piercing my body parts to be au courant, either.

  The trouble is that the Ruth Gordon–type character is much beloved if she's seventy-five or eighty, but fifty to sixty is a midrange, with no discernible margin for eccentricity (without looking like a nut case). Think of any fifty-five-year-old woman you know. Is she exhibiting outlandish attire or behavior? This age group that I'm now a part of is a peculiarly conservative group, unwilling or unable to jump out of its own self-inflicted rigidity. We run companies, dress acceptably, and pander to our children's concepts of who they want us to be. We're chattel who've crawled back into the brittle dialectic handed down by our parents.

  Myself, until I figure out a personal, creative alternative to body piercing, I'll continue to persist in the anonymity and comfort of sweatpants, and I'll be just another slob at the supermarket, picking up a six-pack of V8. The Joan Collins getups take too much time, and unless there's a point or a reward, I'm not interested in spending hours every day at a makeup table or in my closet, choosing the right outfits. It isn't worth it; the best response Joan can hope for is, “My, she looks good for her age.” That's not enough of a reaction to get me rooting around at Neiman Marcus. However, if men suddenly got seriously enamored of old broads, that might be enough of an incentive for me to play with my credit cards. Since that probably won't happen, who cares? Dressing for other women (my Chanel is better than your Donna Karan) is what's left for the old-timers. Men could care less what a sixty-year-old woman is wearing.

  All that said, it may be that there's a method to the madness—a point to aging and the deterioration that comes with it. The Buddhists have proposed a loose block of time frames and the appropriate conduct to be carried out in each stage of life:

  The first—from birth to the age of twenty— is the learning time, when we're taught by elders about the social and intellectual ways of our own particular culture.

  The second—between the ages of twenty and forty— is the time of action. We have our babies and make our way in the world, caring for the very young and very old, making “right livelihood.”

  The third—between the ages of forty and sixty— is a shift into study and inquiry. We amass information and prepare for the next phase.

  The fourth—from the age of sixty on—is a gentle time of going inside, learning to laugh at the poignant struggle of everything in form, and listening for the call to transition.

  Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher whom I greatly admire, took care of his father in the final stages of his life. Relatives would come to visit in the hospital, put on a happy face for the old man, then go out in the hall and say, “He's not like he used to be. He's so quiet—he just sits there looking out the window.” They were used to the gruff, driven, aggressive tycoon he used to be. But Ram Dass said, “I've never felt so close to my father. I take care of his needs and we just sit there quietly, appreciating the scenery and enjoying each other in a way we were never able to do when our goals were so polarized.” His father was turning inward, becoming reflective, and waiting, with no particular attitude, to die.

  The opportunity to “go out” by closing down peacefully is almost as good as just going to sleep one night and not waking up. (Although “waking up” on a spiritual level is exactly what we might be doing at that point, according to some theologians.) I'm not interested in leaving the Earth just yet, but the
re are compelling reasons for working with the loss of the senses rather than against it.

  For starters, when your hearing and sight fail, that's the perfect time for meditation. There are no distractions and mobility is limited—it's a good time to sit in meditation practice, slowly getting used to being spirit without form. Sounds like a hard thing to do if you're busy hanging on to who you used to be. But we do have choices. We can go nuts over not being able to go bowling any more, swallow some Drano and get it over with, or relax into the silence and touch places we missed when we were so busy yelling “Strike!” the other realms of being simply escaped our attention. I like to think I'll take the latter path. The high road, so to speak.

  Then again, when the time comes, I might freak out and demand to be hooked up to every prosthetic device known to man: industrial-strength hearing aids, synthetic corneas, a plastic gall bladder, morphine and vitamin IV drips, a Mae West jacket, a Maserati wheelchair, a colon bypass uplink—the whole robot kit strapped onto my rotting frame.

  It's not a pretty picture, but the entertainment value has enormous possibilities.

  53

  Dropping the Body

  Weight loss? Yup, the bodiless person can pretty much certify his diet has been one hundred percent successful. Westerners generally call it “passing on” or “passing over” or “deceased” or “he's history” or “he's dust.” There are endless euphemisms for that four-letter word, DEAD.

  Maybe all the linguistic contortions aimed at denying the reality of death are rooted in disbelief that some people who have particularly powerful and charismatic personalities can actually cease to exist.

  Bill Graham, who “owned” a hundred yards of whatever space he was in, was one of those people. He was an animated fifty-foot action figure, a mammoth supertoy who was able to consolidate, cajole, entertain, listen, roar, and make mistakes with a larger-than-life burst of energy. At his funeral in 1993, at Temple Emmanuel in San Francisco, a sad but familial spirit permeated the huge temple. The place was filled with people who, along with their grief, were also feeling grateful to have known such a wonderful character who could expand himself for charity, for friends, and for raging anger—all in equal proportions. Ordinarily, I don't like funerals, but the atmosphere at his was unusually harmonious. It featured none of the embarrassingly morbid formalities that turn most funerals into acts of showy bathos.

  When someone dies, many of us feel bad that the person's opportunity to enjoy more of life's pleasures has been cut off. But many of us are also sharply reminded of our own mortality, and that is the biggest fear—and the biggest mystery of all. All the religions have a story link about the “hereafter.” Atheists consider you stupid if you think of death as anything other than the end, and most people don't know exactly what to think except that they don't like it. We're programmed to seek survival, and the medical profession considers death a failure.

  The French have a phrase, petit mort, which means “little death.” It's most often used in conjunction with post-orgasmic malaise. The ennui or resolution of passion after sex is kind of relaxing and pleasant to me, so I'm not sure why they call it petit mort. But I do like the phrase as a way to describe other events or emotions that don't involve actually stepping up to the spirit world. When people lie to you, it's a little death—the death of trust. When you fail to reach a goal, you feel petit mort. When a lover cheats, when a business folds, when a home is destroyed, when a friendship is ruined by anger or resentment—these are all little deaths, little pieces of your being slowly falling away into a grave of sadness. The loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both.

  I'm not thrilled by the idea of dying, but since I've had several strong experiences of déjà vu, I'm inclined to embrace the “theory” of reincarnation. I have such an affinity for all things Spanish, I feel I must have spent many lives in that country, as well as in California when it was under Spanish rule. Flamenco guitars, the Gipsy Kings—they move me in a way no other music has. I find it's not even a choice. It's not that I think things Spanish are better or worse than things derived from other cultures. It's just part of me somehow, and it's so powerful I can't ignore it.

  One example of this mysterious Spanish connection at work occurred when I was watching a movie scene where they cut to a shot of the ocean. When they pulled back into an old church, I started crying because I knew, even before the narrator said where it was, that it was San Juan Capis-trano. And I'd never been there. My tears were not about sadness; I believe they were in response to an over-whelming recognition of some previous experience I had while living on the once-Spanish coast of Southern California.

  I'm not inclined to join cults or weird groups (other than rock-and-roll groups), so it's not in my nature to buy into goofy, Hale-Bopp comet stuff. But I do pay attention to things that have repeatedly reinforced their presence in my life. I don't care if other people believe what I'm experiencing. I'm not proselytizing for anything; it's simply a fact that supernatural phenomena—or at least, the hint of such phenomena—have played a strong part in my own life.

  Agnosticism is probably the safest position from the point of spiritual debate. The universe is a metasystem, and we are a subsystem that can never completely know the full operation of the more complex metasystem. So when people tell me they know “how it is,” I tend to view it as hubris. I have strong ideas about certain phenomena, but can they be proved? Of course not. How can I possibly know what incredible form of energy organized this cosmos, or exactly why the universe evolves as it does? But I can be pretty sure of one thing:

  “It's all going the way it's supposed to be going

  Otherwise, it would be going some other way.”

  —SANDY HARPER, 1978

  Sandy is a normal guy I once met, who made that statement just before giving me several tapes by Ram Dass. Both men are gentle, searching individuals who seem to be as comfortable as the animals with “the way it is.”

  When I look carefully, the physical pain of dying is what I fear more than the actual death itself. And then, pride enters into it, too. I don't want the mailman to show up one day and discover a bloated, gassy mess with a rictus grimace. The poised sleeping beauty pose would be nifty, but since it's too late for that, a more artistic alternative has occurred to me. The following is in no way a death wish. I like life just fine, but when the time comes, my favorite way of dying would be by …

  EXPLOSION—all over white walls!

  I would initially swallow a tiny pill—unfortunately they haven't invented it yet, but imagine it's on a timer. Maybe the duration would be fifteen seconds, just so there's not too much time to think about it. When the thing explodes, I'll be pulverized into so many millions of tiny pieces, nobody will be able to identify me. I'll simply be all over the place, splattered on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the furniture. And the fragments will be so minuscule, the effect won't be the slightest bit disgusting. You won't be able to identify my brains from my liver from my heart from my fingernails. There'll just be reddish, bluish, yellowish colors all over the place. Body colors. Then you can cover the whole thing with Verathane to preserve it as a one-room art piece. The ultimate art piece. Too bad Andy Warhol is gone; I know he could have gotten into it.

  My last idiotic contribution to humankind.

  My only stumbling block is the pill. Somebody needs to invent it. If a medical scientist reads this and is interested in getting involved, you know who to contact. Good old Rick.

  Until then, concentration on living in balance seems to be the ticket, so I intend to continue my artistic pursuits by drawing and writing because it makes me feel at peace and alive. During this year, 1997, as Andrea and I are writing this book, so many people who've contributed to the happiness of the world have died in just the two months of August and September. It's a grouping of losses that seems to ask all of us to rethink our own priorities, to appreciate rather than
deprecate, to enjoy, to laugh, to help, and to try to get to our own truth. A spiritual teacher, Stephen Levine, reminds us: “Live like it's your last year of life.”

  54

  A Few Closing Words

  I see this life as a portrait that is mine to manifest in my own way, a universe of pictures we trade with each other as kids trade baseball cards. And on the other hand, if information comes through that renders that concept ineffective, I'm going to have to swallow either my pride or a bowl of battery acid and get over myself.

  Do I contradict myself? Of course. When the evidence comes in that I've constructed yet another house of cards that's about to fall (unless I start over and construct a different foundation), what am I going to do—stand under all that crumbling plastic-covered paper and try to hold it up?

  So what are you doing with your empty canvas? Here's what I've done with mine, and I'll continue to change it as the opportunity arises.

  Looking backward or forward is easier than looking in the mirror right now to determine who I am. The image is crowded with past perceptions and tantalized by future possibilities. All I can say for sure is that at the moment, I'm living in a house in Malibu, painting life and wondering about death, being enchanted by the beauty of this land by the ocean, watching time carve lines in my face and hands, running up long-distance phone bills to my friends spread across the country, turning up the heat in the pool for my thin-skinned friends here in L.A., getting to know and love my cowriter, wishing my mom and dad could come and stay in my peaceful house, hoping my daughter enjoys the “trip,” and waiting for the next curveball to come sliding out of the Master Pitcher's mysterious south paw.

  Will I get back into the music business? Not unless Mark Isham calls up and says he has a title track that requires a singer with the vocal range of a four-ton frog.