Heroes Act/Hope You Don't Get Famous

My son took his first dance steps the other day. A dip and clap, a bent-kneed baby shuffle, copying his dad. I don’t remember the song, but you can guess what we like: his middle name is Coltrane, a girl's would have been Holiday.

It’s not all gloom and jazz, but there might be a day he asks why so much of what I love reads like a list of the sad and the dead: Amy, Billie, Etta,; Carson, Sylvia, Emily; Donny, Marvin, John. We could have a conversation about death and genius and illness. Or, we could talk about luck and fate; the danger in realizing your dreams, the consequence of deferring them. 

Amy Winehouse drank herself to death at 27. Our birthdays are two days apart; I dressed as her for Halloween the October I was 26. I'd thought the resemblance was passing, in retrospect, the photos are arresting. After she died, I made one of the Sharpied-on tattoos permanent. 

In an old interview, Amy shrugs at fame, “I don’t think I could handle it,” she says, this early prophetess of her own doom. I would climb through the screen if I could. If success surprises you the wrong way, it can derail you just as fast as failure. I think it can tear you apart, if you’re the wrong version of yourself when it finds you.

My second year of law school I earned a slate of spectacular fall grades and exploded in a bloom of self-destruction through the spring semester. I sold my car, dropped out of my internship, came home, and by the middle of the summer everything went from dark blue to black. I can explain this now as a pattern I hadn’t learned to break. 

I’d ruined things the same way at the end of high school, again at the end of college. Whenever the future got too bright, I turned it down. Not off entirely, just… dimmer. I’d set myself up well enough to finish respectably, but that ‘thing’ I’d wanted, the reason I’d worked so hard in the first place? Off the table. 

Sylvia Plath was 30 when she turned on the stove. I was 16 when I read The Bell Jar, and not alone in feeling like she was the first person who understood me all the way down. It was confusing, to learn about her, to spend late nights at the Smith College library wondering if we’d shared a desk, to read every page and still have the story end with a witch and her oven, Hansel and Gretel asleep in the next room.   

Sylvia got everything she wanted; she said as much to her mother a month before she killed herself. It also happened to be everything I wanted, and the quiet horror of that symmetry kept me off balance for years.

Emily Dickinson and I grew up down the street from each other, a century apart. She lived and died in Amherst, and I understand the impulse: I’ve returned whenever I didn’t know what else to do with myself. But Emily hid and kept hiding. She listened when they told her no, so often she repeated it back: once, again, then forever. 

Where largesse is concerned, luck is just a connecting train. This applies to all things: art, work, love, even the lottery. You have to get yourself to the platform. Once aboard, there’s no way to tell where you’re headed, and no one to tell you that getting there is only the first part. Staying sometimes requires that you become someone else, and the two of you cannot exist in the same space at the same time. 

I said I left Boston because my friends were all moving or getting married, but the changes I couldn’t handle were the ones I needed to make. Just as I heard my train coming, I packed up and moved to DC.

Donny Hathaway was 33 when his body fell 15 stories from the window of his room at Essex House, so young and so spectacular people still shirk the word ‘suicide’. After half a decade in the wilderness, he’d relaunched his career, a rocket to the Grammys. It didn’t make sense. 

The New York Times article reporting the incident includes a single quote from his wife: “He was troubled.” Troubled by the fame his success brought, troubled by the speed at which it came, and what it asked of him, the anxiety of being pinned to a version of yourself you don’t want to be forever. 

Rolling my suitcase past that hotel three decades later, his songs in my ear, red wine breaking down the lip of the paper coffee cup clutched in my hand, I understood. You can get used to the wilderness. 

At 32 my whole being was in a state of suspended animation, the natural consequence of leaving unanswered every question where I should have replied ‘yes’. Instead, I spent years padding my personality with enough quirks and vices to wave away any failure, insulation against infinite squandered potentials. Why? Well, you know how she is.

Commit to your art or commit to your life. I studied my options and decided that picking either eventually meant you lost both. So, I took myself off the hook. I learned how to float: a life-raft of red wine in the hotel room, always a cup in my hand.

It sounds like this is about choices, but when I think about Billie Holiday and Etta James, I don’t see a lot of them. I wonder about the difference between a tortured soul and a person who was, quite literally, tortured. Is your gift more of a burden when it traps you in an unsurvivable life, or when it comes with the catch of an unsurvivable brain? 

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe all flora will wilt when placed alone, that high, under such bright light. 

And Emily’s alternative? I tried it. But hiding out in Amherst gets more Twilight Zone each time, the spaces emptier, the people more anonymous. Wandering deserted supermarket aisles, I felt myself vanishing in return. The woods got darker beyond the shadows, sidewalks crumbled at their breaks, the same whisper under every sound: there's nothing here for you anymore. 

This helped me understand: you can miss a thing without wanting it back. 

I play a game where I scramble their fates, connect the right dots: send Donny and Amy to Emily’s, shut the door and keep the world out forever. Give Etta and Billie childhoods, a shot to be people beyond the force of their talent. Rent Emily Sylvia's last flat and nudge her out into the world. Let Sylvia bloom. But that’s a game. We don’t get what we need. We get what we get, and we try our best from there. 

At 34, I got myself to a different platform, and I got on a train. It was a series of connections from there, but I realized I’d had it wrong before: Choose your life, and things will follow from there. I’ve had more good luck than a single person is entitled to, and I’m grateful for every drop. 

I saw Etta in 2006, the first Jazzfest after Katrina. We found the stage right as the sky melted into a dirty blue twilight that seemed to confirm our unbelievable good fortune: to be back, to be alive.

Etta was smaller than I’d expected, dancing in front of the band in kitten heels and a grey silk jacket. I was deep in my own murk at the time, but her light cut through. It was celestial. Soulful, ghostly, dappled, all the forms light can take. Without realizing, I took a few steps: a dip, a sway, a shrug. A bent-leg baby shuffle. Copying her. 

So here’s what I’ll tell my son about the sad art I love: beautiful things can grow in dark places. Life is complicated. So is youth, and love, and brain chemistry. It may help you make sense of your own life. And its light always shines through.