Dead Crush #1

Me and Gram Parsons on a motorcycle at dusk. Me and Gram Parsons in the cab of someone else’s semi, barreling toward a creepy dawn. Me and Gram and my loneliness and his loneliness. Gram and my loneliness. I’m somewhere else. See those leaves rustling in a park in a strange night wind? I’m not there either. A bottle many years ago in a park. Part of me might be there. I disappeared.

He died in a desert from morphine and tequila. He cheated and lied. But inside that weakness, the horrifying potential. The weakness in all of them, the potential that leaks out and makes you fall in love with them all over again, even after they lie to you, even after they lie to you for the last time.

The night E. threw a bottle at the go-go dancer I stayed all night in the bar with him as he yelled and got drunker and drunker. I sat at the other end of the bar and watched him. I don’t even know if he knew I was there. Once he picked a fight with someone who made fun of his pink golf pants. It was tempting to make fun of him until he kicked your ass. I watched from a window inside and then went out to help him even though he told me to go away. Once he screamed at my sister, who is the most precious person in the world to me, the one person I’d kill for, (I mean it, I can feel the gun in my hand now as I imagine avenging her imaginary death) on a sidewalk late at night, the night he got arrested at a hot dog stand. I wanted to break up with him then. I was with him for three more years.

What should they do with this love? Gram’s love was so gigantic and desperate. If he had given it to himself, he might still be here. Why do they think that their love can only go to someone else? He was obsessed with loneliness and it powered everything he created. If he couldn’t give his love to someone, would it disappear? And who would he be without love? In “To Love Somebody,” he sings “I’m just a man, can’t you see that’s what I am, and I breathe every breath that I take for you. But what good does breathing do if I can’t have you, if I can’t have you?” In this song and so many others, the definition of man is love for a woman he can’t have or has lost. Man equals unused love. What happens to the man if the love isn’t accepted? He stops breathing? Yes. And what is a woman? Oxygen. And we find this attractive? Uh, yeah. Well, for six months or so. Or the length of time it takes to listen to a Gram Parsons song at least 14 times in a dark room after your husband leaves you.

E. could have beaten me up, could have really hurt me, could have destroyed me. That reality breathed down my neck every time I thought about leaving him. We both knew it was there. It was the little ghost that walked between us. It linked us. “I can’t leave him,” I told my sister. “I’m his only advocate.” I said this the night he told her to shut up and then dropped her off at his friend’s house in a town she didn’t know. I chose him over her, I did it again and again. I chose the slow wearing away of who I am over…I don’t even know what the other option is. I imagine, now that I’ve let another person use me up and leave me, that I’ll find out. I keep choosing this wearing away. Now I’m not choosing it, and I don’t know what else there is.

I guess it’s pretty obvious. I’ve wanted to save someone who thinks I’m their only hope. How can I have been so many people’s only hope? My former sister-in-law used those exact words the other day: “We thought you were his only hope.” I keep thinking I see a glimmer of what they could be through all of the fuckedupness, their desperateness to figure out what to do with love. Sustaining a relationship that’s based on me taking care of them ultimately causes me to detach, like I did with all of them. ALL of them. And then they hurt me, each one more than the last. My reward for being oxygen is always betrayal. I refuse to ever again be responsible for helping someone be who they should be. I want some who’s finished. If only that didn’t sound so unattractive.

He wasn’t really a rock star even though he dressed like one. He wore beautiful clothes; he dressed like an extravagant woman. Near the end, his voice broke and cracked over his sad, sad words. The voice was gone but the hurt was still there, more raw than ever. It was so raw that he couldn’t even sing alone; he needed Emmy Lou to carry his voice with hers. I don’t know if they ever had anything together besides their voices, but he said this about singing with women, “Singing with chicks always seems to work out at least half good, and if you get a really good chick it works better than anything, because you can look at each other with love in your eyes.” But he knew how to empathize. What other man could sing “Do Right Woman” and make you believe him?

I’ve looked at a lot of pictures of Gram Parsons. My favorite thing about him: he’s just a guy. Like many guys before and after him, he ran away. His marriage was nearly over when he ran away for the last time. The things he loved kept him running: motorcycles, trucks, drugs, Jesus, music. They were all a way of transporting him somewhere else. When he died, Gram’s road manager stole the coffin with Gram’s body in it so his stepfather wouldn’t get half of his estate. Even after he died, he was running.

So my confession is that I want to be a savior. Because I know that’s what Gram wanted and that’s what they’ve all wanted so far. Basically, I don’t know how to be desirable if I can’t change your life. I won’t do it again, and I realize that I’m going to have to sacrifice a great deal of my own definition of love, of what it means to be a woman, in order to do this. I may never be in love again without it. So can I ask this: What about my love? Where is our love, women’s love? What am I supposed to do with my love? Why is it always about their stupid love? Also there’s this, if I can actually say it: Love destroyed me.