by Shawn Colvin
One of the colors was named Venetian Blue. I thought it had a romantic ring to it, but I couldn’t really get anywhere with it until I saw Brokeback Mountain. Something about the Heath Ledger character stayed with me for a long time. Just walking down the street, sitting at a desk, anything—I’d have that moment where I’d stop and say, “Who is it that I’m thinking about? It’s someone I know.” And it was Ennis Del Mar. I wrote “Venetian Blue” from Ennis’s point of view, about being apart from the one you love and the anticipation of a time when you’ll see that person again, and set it to this very languid piece of music John had written. I was able to use the melting of ice and snow as a metaphor for the melting of your heart that you’ve had to keep hard in order to survive until you’re reunited.
Meanwhile, I had met someone new, and when I meet someone and I begin to fall in love, there’s an essential discomfort for me, because I tend to lose myself. I have impulses and needs that I have to ignore, or quell, because they’re not appropriate, such as wanting to pick out the wedding china after the first introduction.
Several months into our courtship I wrote “I’m Gone” while I was at a hotel in Philadelphia and couldn’t fall asleep. I found myself obsessing over this new man in my life. Surprise! As I lay in bed, my anxieties were swirling around, and I began to worry that I was in over my head. I really liked this guy, and I wanted it to work. And this desperation set in—which I hate. I was pretty pissed off to be going through that; I was sick of it, like I was always going to be on the same treadmill when it came to falling in love. It’s a typical chain reaction for me: fall in love, feel absolute terror, which manifests itself as massive insecurity, which spells doom. I wrote the line “Over and over and over and over.” I wanted to be relaxed and sleepy and simply pleased about the process of getting to know someone, but all I was was tormented about wanting love from a man, from an audience, from the record company, from critics. In moments like that, because your pride and attempts at control and civility break down, you just let yourself go. You don’t care about being seen as desperate for approval. I wrote, “There are things I will do for a hatchet job, too,” and it felt good. I was so angry. How far would I go, how deeply would I betray myself to be loved? At the end of each chorus is the wish to be able to just walk away. I’m gone. I get a lot of satisfaction out of singing that song. It’s a bitter song, and I enjoy the bitterness of it. The music is a pretty simple chord progression that I put down in Garage Band one day.
Would a country artist please cut “Let It Slide”? I wrote the first part of that song ages ago, and then John and I wrote the chorus for it much later on. It’s an example of a good, lighthearted, semi-pop song. Could it have been successful in another time and place? I got to sing it with Teddy Thompson—I love his voice.
I had to convince John about “So Good to See You.” I’d started it several years earlier. To me the interesting part of the song, the reason I continued to be motivated to try to write it, lay in wanting to come up with a piece where the singer has her defenses up. She’s trying to express herself with a lot of fancy rhetoric—ordinarily, intermittently, essentially, pointedly—a literary pompousness that’s basically saying, “When you cut away the bullshit, I’m still in love with you.” Then she just comes right out with it in the chorus.
John had this bizarre chaise lounge in his studio, a lawn chair. I guess he would take a nap in it sometimes, I don’t know. And he had come up with a very lush piece of music that I wanted to put lyrics to. He said, “Well, to loosen you up on this song, just lie here and I’ll hand you a microphone, and let’s see what happens.”
Two things came out. I had seen a PBS special on Martin Luther King Jr. the night before. There were clips of many of his great speeches, and that’s where “That Don’t Worry Me Now” came from. That’s not what he said. He said, “I’m not worried about anything,” and I paraphrased. The other thing that turned up was the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, and this was on my mind because I was obsessed with the HBO production of Angels in America, where the story of Jacob is key. I know how I feel when I sing it. I know it resonates and brings satisfaction to me to say that the angels are boring. I know it’s not true that these things don’t worry me—they do. I just like the beauty of the tune paired up with a sort of agnostic sentiment; there’s an odd kind of hope in that song, something about the simple basic premise of living and dying that we all share.
As we were mixing These Four Walls, we would sometimes go out of the control room and into the studio, and John would play the piano or he’d play the guitar or bass. He’s one of those guys who can’t be without an instrument in his hands. He’d start a song that we both knew—a Beatles song, or a Beach Boys song, and sometimes I would start singing along. We were just goofing off. And one of the songs that he played ended up being “Words,” by the Bee Gees. I’ve always loved that song. I looked up the lyrics on the Internet, and in five minutes I’d figured out how to play it. We pressed the RECORD button, I played the guitar and sang, and John played the bass. And that was that. As someone who writes lyrics and finds a lot of joy and satisfaction in singing not only my own lyrics but lyrics that I think are great by other people, I thought there was something poignant about the line “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away.”
We recorded These Four Walls at New York Noise on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District during the winter of 2005 and 2006. To support the record in that spring, I had an idea for a touring trio that would include Buddy Miller, my old bandmate, and Deborah Dobkin, a great percussionist. Lo and behold, they were both available and interested. When we played Town Hall in New York, both Larry Campbell and John Leventhal sat in. The circle had come around. We were all still playing and doing well. It was such a moment of pride and satisfaction.
I had a new record, a new tour, a new band, and a new guy. And “I’m Gone” was going to prove to be more prophetic than I could have realized.
19
I’m Hypnotized
Over and over and over and over,
I’m beckoning, begging, I keep hanging on.
“All done, heading west.” It was right there on his computer screen, the e-mail from my ex-boyfriend to his new girlfriend. I knew what he was all done with—he had come back to Austin to move out of the apartment he’d rented here to be closer to me. I knew he was back because he’d asked me to have coffee with him. I looked at his e-mail because after having coffee, even after sleeping together, after he told me he loved me, he was still leaving. He wished me good luck—good luck!—and drove away. It was a gorgeous spring day in March. The trees had budded, and the bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes were blooming. He hated Austin.
After my second divorce, I thought if I ever coupled again, I would end up with a balding, boring man with a belly and ugly shoes, someone who did executive marketing, but no, this one had surfer hair and great teeth. He was a big, silly, goofball, knucklehead boy-man, with money. His clothes were scruffily perfect. The sweetness, and how much we laughed, how hard we laughed. Such a funny man, such a charming man, such a luggy, adorable teddy-bear man. The only criterion I had for my next boyfriend was that he be employed, but this—oh, my Lord. And he liked to shop—that alone was reason enough for me to want to marry him.
Once when we were in New York, we went to the G-Star Raw store and he bought some camo pants. After we got back to the hotel, I said, “Come try on your stuff.” He stripped down, put on the pants, jumped on top of the bed, and launched into a Maori war dance, right there on the bed, crouching and slapping his thighs and sticking out his tongue and yelling. Apparently this was either a rugby psych-out or a New Zealand mating ritual, but I found myself staring openmouthed at this spectacle and thinking, Oh, my god, I’m falling in love with this guy. What does this tell you?
And similarly, I had done something when we first met that bewitched him. A group of us went somewhere for ice cream after dinner, and t
he subject of The Andy Griffith Show came up. I’m something of a trivia buff when it comes to Andy Griffith, and it turned out he had been watching it a lot with his kids. I asked if he happened to notice that in some episodes Floyd the barber is standing up but in some he stays seated and never stands up. This, I went on, was because the actor had had a stroke and was unable to stand, so he was filmed always sitting. To further my point, given that I was sitting, I did a little imitation of Floyd. “Ooooh, Andy!” was the extent of it, but that’s all it took—he fell in love with me. So we have the Maori dancer and Floyd the barber, and that was the basis of our attraction.
It was the spring of 2006, and I was doing really well, due in no small part to the fact that I was almost done with These Four Walls. Writing songs is hard work for me, and I am always truly amazed when I finally have a collection of them fit for release. The dust had settled between Mario and me; we were co-parenting amicably, and Callie was thriving. I wasn’t dating much and wasn’t particularly lonely. The antidepressant meds I was on seemed to be holding. In short, I felt solid, productive. I was ready to fall in love again.
We went to dinner. He held my hand. I went home to Austin. He called constantly, sent flowers, jewelry, cards, and all sorts of silly trinkets, like the plastic nun toy that slaps a ruler and shoots sparks from her mouth when you wind her up. FedEx boxes came with Charleston Chews, seashells, lava rocks, dental floss, earrings. There was one bracelet in particular, a sleek silver modern sort of piece that I adored. (His children, upon seeing it, exclaimed, “Mummy has one just like it! In gold!”)
He wasn’t divorced yet, but that didn’t stop him from asking me if I would think about getting married again. In an effort to understand it all much later, I consulted a number of self-help books that helped me realize I’d been a victim of “blowtorching,” a term used for the full-court press of the come-on, the chase times a million, usually going in short order from hot pursuit to cold feet and ending in disaster. I had been divorced from my daughter’s father for six years. I had gone on maybe four dates since then. I raised Callie, and I traveled for work. In other words, I was ripe for the picking; I was fresh meat for a blowtorcher.
I had never heeded anyone’s advice in matters of the heart. (“It takes time to get to know someone!” “He’s only separated, not divorced!”) No, true love made all things possible. This was it. I had our lives planned out within three months of our first date. My daughter and I would spend time with him in the summer while I toured. He would come to Austin. We would travel back and forth. It would be easy. Nothing to it. We both had freedom and enough money. It was exciting, and it was meant to be. This was the next chapter of my life. I wasn’t going to have to raise my child alone, wasn’t going to have to grow old alone.
In reality I hung on for a couple of years, sometimes happily, mostly not, while he backpedaled at breakneck pace and I pretended not to notice. Then he decided to move to Hawaii and didn’t seem the least bit concerned that this was long distance and a half. When I asked how we would see each other, he would kind of shrug and say he would have to come to the mainland to see his kids at some point. Not encouraging. There were tears in hotels, tears backstage, tears in planes, trains, and automobiles.
He officially called it quits, although I was the one who asked if he thought we should break up. Don’t you hate that, when they leave you no choice but to acknowledge the misery? And it somehow looks like your idea? I describe it as having a gun put to your head, only it’s you who has to pull the trigger. I asked why now? He said he couldn’t navigate all this. And then the crusher: “I love you, Shawn, but I don’t love you enough to stay in Austin.” Except I never asked him to be in Austin. He hated Austin.
“Your relationship is a scab!” That’s what Billy said to me. Billy was this last boyfriend’s best friend. He had become my sounding board since the breakup. For one thing, Stokes, my usual expert on a man’s perspective, had gone AWOL. Stokes had fallen in love and, like me, tends to see no gray area between ecstasy and hell when it comes to these matters. I could rarely track him down—he was at the stage where the two of them were oblivious to other life-forms.
So I turned to Billy. Only a numbskull confides in the ex’s best friend while in the throes of rejection, but this was as close to talking to the ex as I could get. Billy was something of a legend when it came to how many women from Match.com a man in his fifties could bed in quick succession.
Billy didn’t seem to mind talking to me. He had a lot to say about relationships in general. But about the ex he would only offer, “Maybe he’ll miss you … and maybe he won’t.” He asked me what was I going to do about finding a new boyfriend. He told me that if he lived in Austin, he would date me. He said he had to be careful or he might develop a crush on me. And still I did not see it coming. I was as libidinous as a cow patty. So one horrible day, as I was blathering on to Billy, he abruptly asked me where I was. I was in my room. Then he whispered, “Are you lying down?” Oh. Oh, swell. My confidant is trying to have phone sex with me as I’m crying real live tears over his best friend. I made light of it, but I felt as though a drooling pervert had just thrust his hand down my pants. The last thing I needed was to be naked and vulnerable with the gigolo of Match.com for Seniors, who gave not a rusty fuck what kind of condition I was in. There are places to go for things like that, and they make Match.com look like a glass of lemonade on the front porch.
DOM was my name for the ex, or one of them anyway. He liked to be teased and made fun of—it was his way of apologizing for or admitting to bad behavior while simultaneously getting off the hook, the old self-deprecation trick. One night—in fact, it may have been the night of the breakup sex after he’d moved out of his apartment in Austin—when he was still pondering and waffling about whether he was an ocean person or a mountain person, being sick to death of the subject, I feigned mock exasperation (no, you read that double negative correctly—the exasperation was real): “Would you stop it already, you dumb old man??”
This delighted him. He laughed and laughed. I abbreviated “dumb old man” to DOM. He liked it. He’d been searching for the proper way to identify himself in regard to me since the breakup. Something personal yet not intimate. He had similar trouble when we first fell in love and he was introducing me as his “friend.” I finally said, “Could you at least introduce me as the friend who sucks your cock?”
I did hear from him again, though, several months after our breakup. By way of snail mail, I got a congratulatory card for my Grammy nomination in 2010. And I got a “happy birthday” text the next month. Signed “DOM.” I threw away the card and deleted the text, and I was okay. I was okay.
When I first met him, he recited a long list of his wife’s accusations against him. She said he was manipulative, cold, chameleon-like, emotionally unavailable, passive-aggressive, and greedy. Oh, my God, she’s a nutcase, I thought. Because this guy is as innocent as a lamb. “He’s an open book,” claimed the man who introduced us. “I’m an open book!” he cried in his own defense more than once.
The Open Book became harder to crack than the da Vinci Code. The Open Book is in another language. The Open Book is dedicated to no one. The Open Book has some pages missing. They will be the ones you need the most. You can study the Open Book as often as you like. There are quizzes. They make no sense. You resort to cheating to get the answers right. You make things up.
You open the book again and again, always hopeful. It’s so glossy and beautiful. It smells like Fresh Sake Hair Cream. But it’s blank, each page empty. This is what’s really inside. Nothing.
20
Out of My Mind
1996
(Photograph courtesy of Tracie Goudi)
All through the night I can pretend
The morning will make me whole again.
And every day I can begin
To wait for the night again.
I guess I knew it was bad before I really said anything to the doctor. It had happene
d before, feeling bad but not wanting to admit it. I wanted it not to be true. When you’re depressed, you don’t feel like bothering about anything anyway—brushing your teeth and bathing are monumental tasks—and you have no perspective with which to gauge the worsening of your condition. You learn to look at the usual benchmarks: how you eat and sleep, if you’re caring about your hygiene, if anything interests you besides sitting in a corner, and how elaborate or specific your suicidal thoughts are. And then there is the loathsome necessity of calling the doctor. Again.
The Prozac I’d been taking for eighteen years was no longer working, and my new doctor put me on Cymbalta. I gave it the requisite three weeks allotted for the drug to take effect, but nothing remarkable happened. So she, the doctor, raised the dosage. I waited again, this time longer, and still I was flat and disconnected and anxious and paralyzed. I went to see her again, ready to admit I wasn’t getting better, as though it were my fault. That’s what depressed people do. They think everything is their fault, especially the depression. Unfortunately, a lot of psychopharmacologists, like many doctors, are egomaniacs with lousy bedside manners, and inevitably I would reach a point of diminishing returns with them, either because they ran out of ideas or said something stupid. This doctor fell into both categories. I went in, lower than whale shit, with the disappointing news. I went in because I had to believe there was something else we could try and I needed her expertise to guide me there. The Cymbalta wasn’t working, I told her. We needed a new strategy.