The first time I heard the Cocteau Twins’ rapturous, exultant "Heaven or Las Vegas," cruel
circumstances had compelled me (yet again!) to take a word processing job.
Thank God for my Walkman, I would think as the hours crawled past, never to be
retrieved. On the afternoon in question, I was tuned to a local radio station.
I was hooked from the first four bars. When it got to the chorus, that
glorious, exultant chorus, I very nearly swooned. At song’s end, I just sat there, happily dazed, until a
fellow temp asked if I were all right. I couldn’t have been more all right.
With
some time on my hands the other day, I headed over to my beloved West Hollywood
Public Library to see what I could find out about how this
glorious work came to be. I was surprised to see in the David Geffen Reading
Room none other than its namesake, looking unusually good for his age because
gay men exercise more diligently than their breeder brothers, and scrupulously
moisturize. David — it’s hard, after what we’ve been through together, for me
to think of him as Mr. Geffen — wasn’t looking only muscular and moist,
though, but also a little predatory. One of the librarians confirmed that David
has come to regard the room that bears his name as a prime pickup spot. It is not my place to demur. You will notice that no reading rooms are named after me.
I
have been to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and have with my own eyes witnessed
the endless pairs of almost indistinguishably butch lesbians swaggering down its
main street in such a way as to demand either, “Wanna make something of it?” or
“What are you looking at?| I can’t
understand why one would seek a lover who is a mirror image of himself, but
there is much in life I don’t understand, and it isn’t as though Mick Jagger
and Eddie Van Halen didn’t marry themselves, is it? But our greater concern in
this paragraph is the woefully undersupervised children of the beggars who
stand outside the WeHo library begging patrons for spare change.
The
other afternoon, a stylishly dressed, meticulously coiffed woman who’d no doubt
driven over in
a Lexus casually handed her half-finished cigarette to a little
ragamuffin with dreadlocks and a distended belly before entering the library,
in which smoking is of course forbidden. One thing led to another, and in a
moment or two, one of the ragamuffin’s little comrades had managed somehow to
set himself afire. One of the beggar mothers instinctively flung herself on
him. While it’s true that she managed to put out the fire, she also suffocated
him, a result about which I can’t imagine anyone being entirely pleased. If
there’s any consolation, it might be that the child won’t grow up a member of
America’s inescapable (except by boxing, basketball, or drug-dealing, and the
latter can get you locked up) underclass.
I
think this whole thing speaks to the unreliability of dreams. I woke up this
morning fairly busting to get over here to my typewriter after dreaming with
rare vividness of David Geffen, children on fire, and income inequality. The
result, plainly, has been an essay that only my most ardent fan could enjoy. At
this rate, I will have no readers left, and will die alone, and will have none but
myself to blame.
I
was serious, though, about “Heaven or Las Vegas.” And you know something else that's quire wonderful about it? It serves as an eloquent refutation of the importance of technique. I suspect that a person of normal manual dexterity and average musicality could be taught to play the guitar part in a couple of hours. You might say the same of Mazzy Star's inexpressibly gorgeous "Fade Into You." You don't need to be Yngwie Malmsteen or Al di Meola to make magical music.
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