A Valentine's Day choir of me and my ex-boyfriends singing Tom Waits songs
A short excerpt from my work-in-progress memoir Lights Go Down
It’s Valentine’s Day on the morning that I write this section, I’m smoking up, and I wish I was in a theater watching a choir of my ex-boyfriends. Just a chorus of handsome trans mascs crooning Tom Waits songs like the cruel “Who Are You This Time” from 1986’s Bone Machine which I blasted on tape when I drove my parents’ old red car driving around Princeton. Maybe I’m playing ukulele. Could be that I’m playing uke and singing in the center as the solo. Kind of a Sam Cooke & the Soul Stirrers set-up.
We’re in a small dark theater. The drummer, using brushes like Mimi from Low, has Annie Mok & Her Ex-Boyfriends emblazoned on the front of the kit, a tribute to Neko Case’s band Her Boyfriends. My first Philly boyfriend takes the piano, though in real life he can’t play. I sing “Down There by the Train,” an obliquely gospel-styled song of shame, self-hate, and redemption off of the odds and ends collection Orphans. The tune came as a favorite of mine during my blisteringly self-hating, years-long period, in college especially.
The exes’ voices swell to a breaking point, overwhelming the theater or auditorium or church, as if to aurally catch me falling. The Portland cartoonist solos on “You Can Never Hold Back Spring”; they always had a good attitude and a smile beaming underneath their toned hair. I take up my electric ukulele and my exes all sing “Jersey Girl,” referencing my Princeton Junction past. I hit the distortion pedal and we do a raucous version of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” which the Ramones later covered with a comic book-styled music video. We finish all together with “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” “Only strangers sleep in my bed,” we sing. At the very end I thank the audience, a gathering of friends, and I tell them they’re all my Valentines. I remind them that like Tom sings, you’re innocent when you dream. We go back behind the red curtain, and something funny happens, even funnier than what’s been happening.
My close friends of the tiny audience clap, but the applause swells and cheers for an encore, thunderous cheers that the little gathering couldn’t make. We come out for the encore, and then the small audience claps and again you can hear how few of them there are. Someone plays a banjo—if you get a group of some of these trans mascs together, odds are someone knows how to play the banjo—and we join together for “That Feel,” a wailing, churchy, reverb-soaked appeal to the listener to keep the feeling for life. Choose life.
The lights in the theater go down and a projectionist plays a section from Satyajit Ray’s 1959 The World of Apu or Aparajito, a story about a young writer. “But he never turns away from life,” the handsome and charming Soumitra Chatterjee as Apurba Roy (so close to Ray) says to his college friend Pulu while walking down the train tracks, describing the novel he’s writing. “He wants to live. He says living itself brings fulfillment and joy. He wants to live!” At the end of this fantasy involving a theater full of my friends and a choir of my ex-boyfriends, it seems fitting that I’d die or something dramatic like that. I don’t. I just go back to writing this book.