Well, it is raining again. I have found myself obsessed with songs about the rain, about love and loss, about crying in the rain.

It’s raining so hard
Looks like it’s gonna rain all night
And this is the time
I’d love to be holding you tight
But I guess I’ll have to accept
The fact that you’re not here
I wish the rain would hurry up
And end, my dear

The new year has really started out pretty damned lousy. There have been few memorable moments, really it has been a rainy, depressing, sick, drunken January.

Things must change. While I feel I am generally not one to be controlled by loss and anger and depression and all around bullshit, I sort of feel like it’s following me. I have lived a life of self induced struggle and moved past that stupidity, but this, this is all different. Things have not been going my way. I write and I wonder, who the fuck wants to read this self pity shit, who gives a shit what’s in this mind, because the funk I am in is not sexy, not cock fueled and certainly not full of new love. Which is why I guess I need to see it, I need to read the words, and understand why loss and pain never leave. How I hold myself back.

In just this week, my best friends boyfriend/husband got stabbed in a robbery. He is doing fine, strong and healthy, but it is still truly not right. Then over the weekend, I got a bloody DUI. Not good, not good at all. I blew it. Funny thing, I was just thinking to myself that–in 12 years of living here I have never visited the infamous 850 Bryant, that is until Friday night. What a fucking nightmare. It has me feeling like such an asshole. All of it has me down, low, like I can’t pull myself out. Low; like self destruction, addiction, fucked up love, low. I don’t know how to write about it, or feel about what I feel and I hate that. And it makes me feel small and petty. But at least I’m not dead or wounded– nor did I physically hurt anyone, except for that ego of mine– and maybe the feelings of those I love most, of course.

The past never leaves us, the loss, the grief manifests and when it resurfaces it is like experiencing the loss all over again. Some loss you still have to face everyday, some loss your still married to. Some loss, washes up on the shore or comes down with the rain. Everything lingers, every song has a past and each listen can so easily bring that pain right back.

Just like that cold August day on the beach, where sat from dawn to dark–mourning the loss of my marriage. Who was there? Jeff Buckley the Grace album–All that was so Real, that haunting rendition of Cohen’s Hallelujah. Also there, the most tragic of Elvis Costello–belting songs of pain and brokeness–A Good Year for the Roses, was played on loop.  I was broke. We were broke. We broke each other.

I spent the days and weeks that followed, sitting in that 1964 Dodge Dart Convertible wreck of car we loved so much, crying my heart out, watching the ocean roll in its ugly gray waves. Replaying the soundtrack of our life, with the largest heartache I had known at that time (amazing how much more heartache the human heart can handle).

Often I think of my marriage, in terms of quantified problems that never would have never added up right, no matter how much we may have loved each other. And then there are the times I think of my lost love as, just that– a loss. Another fuck up. I lost my cock and my best friend.

Like all great love stories of highly charged, chaotic artistic romantic lost love, it includes large amounts of debauchery followed by loathing and hate. It involved mountains of cocaine, large amounts of booze and gangster drug dealers. We had found ourselves in a friendship with the coke man, which is altogether a bad and glorious relationship. Cocaine makes you hate yourself, yet you cannot say no to it, especially when it’s free.  Our nights with the drug dealing gangster became increasingly more frequent. Sleep was elusive, awake was torture.

This night, my birthday, which will never to be the same, the celebration consisted of an eight ball, good scotch and a party at our little love shack. The night wore on  and on. The coke never stopped dropping down on the table. I didn’t want it, but was unable to refuse it. We were super high. I think we must have played that  stupid Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP, about a hundred fucking times that night. I certainly cannot hear any song off that album ever again.

Midnight.
One AM.
Two AM.

He disappears. I am alone with a house full of Excelsior gangsters, none of which are who I actually invited to my birthday, but none the less–here we are, wondering what happened to the husband. My mind knew, I knew, nothing good was flowing through his blood, and as so often, nothing good flowed straight to his cock. I knew, I knew.

I thought I knew. But when, he came back to the apartment, with a 6′ gay black man. All of sudden– I didn’t know shit.

Was he an offering?

I never saw the  gangsters run so fast in all my life. The only one that stuck around was the cocaine man, because misery certainly likes to have two, three, four….there is more than enough pain for everybody.

The husband disappears again. Back and forth– in and out, super flying high. Anger flooding in with each open and closing of the door. They come back, the dawn is creeping, Foxy Brown is bumpin’ she’s a bad girl. The coke still droppin’ and my husband is out chasing cock. My heart is gone, not even broken or sunk –it’s just up and gone. I know, I know and I know. But, I need to know for sure. I leave the gangster there and take the walk to my art studio I had at the time, I know he is there. Descending the hallway, passing the heavy wood doors, it smells like basement, chemicals and garbage. My door is close, but I don’t even have to get to my door, I see them, their silhouettes, my husband on his knees with big black cock in his mouth, sucking like a high strung bitch.

I never made my presence known. I kicked the cocaine gangster out, I locked the door to the bedroom, packed my shit and headed for the ocean, where I spent the next week crying in the rain, listing tracks of tragedy.

Our marriage was over long before this, but this act pushed it through.

I often wonder if we only had the knowledge or bravery to talk to each other, maybe we could have worked through the sexual issues, but it was to late, it was dead already. Our love was dead, I wanted to be dead, I wanted that cock sucker to be dead.

And the rain is still coming down. And I am still obsessed with songs of rain, but now I am putting  on a little mix that stirs the potency of love. Because with love comes laughter, and laughter is always, eventually, accompanied by his partner tears.

Love Goes Up, Love Goes Down compiled by a good friend, who I miss and love,  in my time of need.
Wilson Pickett 634-5789
The Chiffons He’s So Fine
Martha Reeves and The Vandellas Heat Wave
Betty Wright Tonight is the Night
Marvin Gaye Sexual Healing A cappella style sooo good.
Ivory Joe Hunter Since I Met You Baby
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles You Really Got a Hold on Me
James Brown Please, Please, Please
Maurice Williams Stay
Jan Bradley Mama Didn’t Lie
Barbara Lynn You’ll Lose a Good Thing
The Drifters There Goes My Baby
Jackie Wilson Lonely Teardrops
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles The Tracks of My Tears

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