IN LOVE WITH ELVIS COSTELLO

My housemate, Peter, brought out this video tape for me to watch, of the earliest footage of an Elvis Costello show. He was singing "Alison," and it made me cry.

It was like a scent that suddenly transports you to a time and a place in the past.

It was me, at twelve years old, bent over my cassette recorder, trying to catch a song off of the one, mostly-static, radio station that we could receive in my hometown--the only exposure I had to 'popular' music, and one that never exposed me to things like Elvis Costello or the Sex Pistols or any of the things I'm only discovering now.

Somehow it took me back to the summer when I was thirteen.

Earlier in the winter, I had met this girl who had clearly needed "saving"--she was loud and crass and had seizures at school, and her parents just shook their heads callously and said "not again," when the ambulance came to pick her up. She swore, she took drugs, and was everything that your parents warn you about. And my little missionary heart thought I could save her.

She told me she was a lesbian, but it was all right, because, you know, she would never be attracted to me. I just wasn't her type. Somewhere along the line she must have changed her mind, because one night she called me over and said she had these candles that she wanted me to smell, and that's the last thing I remember until I woke up in bed with her on top of me.

And she said, "So, how does it feel to be a lesbian," and I got physically ill.

And she kept asking me to do things with her--to sleep with her--things that I thought were wrong and didn't want to do, and she told me that if I didn't or if I left or if I told anyone, she would commit suicide. Or she'd run away and live on the streets and die of a drug overdose. So I kept doing these things, and eventually I believed that I wanted them, too, or at least I wanted to be loved and wanted that much.

At some point in there, I thought my parents had found out what was happening, and my then twelve-year-old brain had the grand idea of swallowing a bottle of aspirin and then slashing my wrists. The aspirin went down fine, but the wrist-slashing wasn't quite as easy as I'd thought it would be, probably because I did it slowly, less than a millimeter at a time, and never quite got far enough. I don't think I really wanted to do it, but it just seemed like the appropriate course of action at the time.

I woke up the next morning with a screaming headache and a couple of pathetic scratches on my wrist.

I don't even remember what the deal was with my parents, because they hadn't found anything, but they did eventually find a note that I had signed with the blood from my wrists, or rather the school counsellor found it and gave it to them, and they told me that signing something in blood was evil and satanic, and I convinced them it was a joke, and they said it wasn't a very funny one, and repeated the part about it being satanic.

Then, in April, a month after I turned thirteen, I went on a school trip. I had these persistent dreams every night about one or both of my parents dying.

When we got back home, my father picked us up at the school and told us that we had to get home because my mother was sick, and I thought, "She's going to die. This is one of those moments people talk about--they say 'such and such happened and right then I knew she was going to die,' and that's what's happening to me right now, and later I will look back at this and tell people that my father spoke those words and I knew she was going to die."

We got home, and I went upstairs, and my sister Leslie went into the garage with my father and my mother, and then she came running inside to tell us that mom had collapsed in the garage. She called the ambulance. I sat alone at the kitchen counter, and in the self-centered way that only kids can, knew that this was happening because it was the only thing that could turn me from my current lesbian lifestyle. I had even smoked a cigarette once.

So I prayed, "God, I've never believed in making deals with you, so I'm not going to say that if you save my mother I'll turn my life around. I need to either turn my life around or not, regardless of what happens. I don't have the will to change. I don't even have the will to want to change. But whatever happens, please give me that will. Whatever happens, I will change." And I promised then that never again would I fall so far from God that it would take the death of the person I loved most in the world to bring me back.

And I left the house, in my stockinged feet, and I ran the half-mile to the neighbors, in the melting snow, to ask them to pray, because I had already learned that if something really bad is happening, the best thing you can do is to act and to do something about it even if that act is small, and running in the snow in my stockinged feet was somehow part and parcel of the way you feel when you're thirteen years old.

And Mom died that afternoon. I went to school the next day, and I called this young woman (she was 16, or maybe she'd turned 17 by then, I don't know) who I believed loved me so much that she would kill herself without me, out of class. And I told her that my mother had died the night before. And she made a pass at me, and I grew up. Right then, in that second, I became an adult. I realized that she had never loved me. That it was about sex. That I told her my mother had died, and she wanted to take sex from me.

I became really physically ill, and that illness returned every time I saw her after that.

I remember sitting up with my siblings at night, and making them promise that no matter what happened, they would never, ever fall away from God, because when we died, I didn't want them to be gone. I don't remember who started us making these promises to each other, I just remember us all making them and begging for them from each other, desperately.

And then the school year ended, and I spent the summer seeing nobody but my family.

And I just felt a certain way that whole summer--I was terribly sad, and yet the sadness wasn't the hopeless kind of desperation I feel now sometimes. It was kind of beautiful. I would look up at the skies, and I would wonder when the clouds would part and I would leave this earth and I would go home.

That kind of sadness and beauty were the things that came back to me listening to Elvis Costello, and I cried, and I wish that I had known his music then.