Cheap Vodkas of the Heartland

After my chart-busting glam rock combo Christopher Milk broke up, I thought briefly of enrolling in law school, and even more briefly of cooking school, but in the end just spent most of my time standing in the bedroom window of my apartment on Sunset Blvd. smoking Sherman cigaretellos and thinking I ought to write a song called “How Did I Wind Up Here?” After better than four months of this, I allowed our agent to talk me into going back on the road, this time as a solo performer, singing CMilk’s most beloved hits to the accompaniment of my own acoustic guitar.

It was a living, but a lonely, unfulfilling one. I might have had a girl in every port, but appeared only sporadically on the coasts. I developed a fierce loathing for the inoffensive art one finds in budget motel rooms, and for the endless driving I had to do. My agent suggested that I become an alcoholic to get through it, and I became expert on cheap vodkas of the American heartland, my favorite being Volga Boatmen, distilled from asphalt and available in the Tri-State area (Kansas, Montana, and Wisconsin). For good measure, I also became addicted to Benzedrine. You may recall some of the more ghoulish rock magazines began predicting the date on which I would drop dead.

But then, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, at a special concert for the 100th anniversary of the birth there of Eddie Cochran, I met Mariline, a good woman who loved me for who I was, for a change, instead of for my glamorous past associations with David Bowie and Bev Bevan. As part of her campaign to save me from myself, she appointed me de facto stepdaddy of her autistic teenage son Bob, whom I called Bobby because it was more in character. When I had to get back on the road after three wonderful days with them, it like to broke my poor heart, and I hit the bottle harder than ever. I’d phone Mariline every night before I staggered on stage, and she would cry because of my obvious inebriation. It made me feel a heel, which of course only made me thirstier.

I finally collapsed in the middle of a show in Eau Claire. When I woke up, I was in a hospital room, also, presumably, in Eau Claire, and a doctor with male pattern baldness was telling me that if I didn’t change my ways, I might be dead by 75. I felt pretty sorry for myself, and hoped Jesus or somebody might appear to me in a vision, as you often hear about, but it was Mariline who eventually appeared, tearfully, at my bedside. She begged me to imagine how my death would hurt her, Bob, and my tens of thousands of loyal fans, some of the loyalest in the world.

I got clean and sober — for her, and for them. Some folks might have told you it was the AA meetings that done it, but the truth is that it was because I started showering a lot more conscientiously, and avoided both bars and liquor stores, which are called package stores in some parts of the country. Mariline and I even discussed marriage.

Bob, who previously had spent most of his time laboriously writing poetry — remarkably good poetry, mind you, of the sort you’d expect from someone with neurological problems — on an Etch-a-Sketch, came on the road with me while Mariline got her masters in Library Science. I was unable to divine how there was anything especially scientific about library work, but she'd never teased me when I’d drunkenly sing the same song three times in a set, or have my proverbial flag at half mast when I took the stage, so I didn’t tease her none, nor her nun sister.

Bob developed an amphetamine problem of his own — it’s nearly inevitable for anyone doing the sort of touring we were doing together — but it seemed to cure his autism. The doctors told Mariline that her choice was between the boy’s being a productive, not-very-weird member of society — albeit one who gnashed his teeth a lot, and picked at scabs he alone could detect — or reverting to the private, unknowable hell of autism. She told me through tears it was the hardest decision of her life, and I done wrote me a song about it.