Everything Has Changed—Except, Maybe, This One Friendship
I met Stephin Merritt on my mother’s birthday in 2001—I was home from college for the summer and after a three-hour, wine-soaked dinner with my parents, we took a taxi downtown to the Bottom Line for the second of two Magnetic Fields shows that night. They were my favorite band, and because my father’s friend Neil Gaiman was their opening act, I had convinced my parents that it would be a great continuation of the birthday celebration. At first, my father complained that the band was boring, but after about twenty minutes, I could tell he was hooked—Stephin’s wordplay, his slant rhymes, his wit and tenderness. Who could resist?
After the show, Neil invited us backstage to say hello. I was so drunk that I could barely stand, and in addition, horrified at the idea of meeting the members of my favorite band, particularly Stephin, who was famous for being curmudgeonly. My father, also drunk and now very jazzed to talk to Stephin, whose music he had just heard for the first time, barreled us all into a very small green room, where Stephin was seated on a loveseat, surrounded by the members of his band. Sam Davol, the band’s cellist, offered me some pieces of the clementine he was peeling. I wanted to disappear, and that was before my father started asking Stephin about his musical influences, which made me want to die instead. We finally left, and the next day, I had a very large headache, and thought that that was probably the end of it, but the following year, after I graduated from college, I found myself sitting at a coffeeshop on University Place in Greenwich Village, interviewing to be Stephin’s personal assistant.
Life Before seems miraculous now, so full of other people, and kind hands passing you something to eat, and trusting the air around you not to kill you.
As with most things in Stephin’s life, the interview had been arranged by Claudia Gonson, his manager and high school best friend. Claudia hovered over us as we got settled and ate a yogurt. Stephin drank tea, and I think I was probably too nervous to have anything. Claudia talked quickly, and Stephin talked slowly. At some point, Claudia left, and Stephin began to read me his to-do list. I had the job.
Here is a brief list of things I did for Stephin in the four years I worked as his assistant: I photographed hundreds of his instruments for the insurance company, everything from cigar box ukuleles to tiny frog-shaped ocarinas and a percussion instrument he had made out of plastic cups; I donated all of his clothing to Housing Works and then replaced it all with only brown items and white t-shirts; I opened his mail and paid his bills; I appeared in a documentary about his life and told a joke about Brad Pitt; I responded to his emails; I made him an alphabetical database of all his lyrics; I labeled his songwriting notebooks by year; I played with Irving, his chihuahua, and bought replacement versions of said chihuahua’s beloved squeaky chicken toy, which he occasionally eviscerated. I showed up at noon, often waking Stephin up, and mostly we sat in his living room and drank green tea.
It’s a funny relationship, being a personal assistant. I often saw Stephin in his underwear, and he wasn’t always alone when I woke him up in the afternoon. He paid me to be there, to help him, but I would have done it for free. We became great friends immediately, which was also how quickly it took me to understand that the music critics and journalists who had created the image of Stephin as a grump had misunderstood him completely. Stephin was the most loyal and kind person I’d ever met—he just happened to do things in his own, utterly idiosyncratic ways, which included actually pausing to think before he spoke, a tic that made people feel as if they’d said something wrong. I felt (and still feel) protective of him, and a few months after I started, helping and protecting meant going on tour with the band, and selling their merchandise in the lobby at their shows.
Life Before was so full of strangers, and hugs, and being inside other people’s spaces.
I was terrible at it, selling the merch. The job involved too much math for my English major brain, and lots of planning, and staying up late, and once I had to sleep in a dank Canadian basement with a dying cat. When we got home, I made a suggestion—would the band mind if the next time, my boyfriend Mike came along? He had been a roadie for his high school and college friend’s punk bands, driving buses and hauling gear and selling their wares in tiny, dingy clubs.
For the next ten years, he did—we divided the work equally, depending on your definition of the word “equal.” Mike was responsible for coordinating the design of the merchandise with Stephin, who has always had a crystal-clear vision of what he wants. Mike would then get the merchandise made, and order quantities to be delivered to various cities along the tour route. He would count everything in and out at every show (I would help with this part, right up until the time of night when he would shoo me away in favor of finishing the job properly himself.) Sometimes he would even drive the van.
My job was customer service—because we did it for so long, and the band’s fans are a very loyal bunch, we met the same folks over and over again, and so I got to know the fans in Chicago, the fans in San Francisco, the fans in New York, and I would hug them across the merch booth, and take their photo for the tour blog we kept. If Instagram had existed, it would have made it all easier, but it didn’t. I was both a barrier and a bridge between the fans and the band—I accepted their homemade gifts, their freshly baked pies, their handwritten notes, and put them in Stephin’s hands, or on the table in the dressing room. Stephin told me once, when we were hanging out with the director of a museum he had done a concert with, that I was social lubricant for heterosexuals. It was true that straight men sometimes turned quite shy around Stephin, and if I was there—young, chatty, and blond—I could act like a flight attendant, and carry on perfectly friendly conversations with anyone too afraid to talk to Stephin, as I had once been. I was happy to do anything that made Stephin’s life easier.
Life Before was airplanes and cities and restaurants and bars. Sometimes truly disgusting bathrooms, which I used anyway.
During that decade, I decided to go to grad school for my MFA, and Mike moved with me to Madison, Wisconsin. Stephin, so distraught that I was leaving him, moved to Los Angeles. (This part is fact-checkable only in my head, as Stephin would no doubt claim to have moved across the country for his own reasons.) He got new assistants, and I left them clear instructions. My instructions to Stephin, given wordlessly, was that he wasn’t allowed to love them more than he loved me. And my sadness at leaving Stephin was lessened by the fact that whenever they had a new record, Mike and I would dust off our boots and drop whatever we were doing and swoop back into our old jobs.
Mike and I got married in 2008, in my parents’ dining room. Stephin sang me down the “aisle,” which was really just the side of the room, in the narrow space left over from as many chairs as we could cram in. When I asked him if he would sing, he said yes, as long as it wasn’t “The Book of Love” or “It’s Only Time,” the two songs (I knew this from answering his email for all those years) that people most requested be sung at their weddings. I asked Stephin to sing “Walking My Gargoyle,” a love song he’d written about Irving, his chihuahua, and he did.
The last time we went on tour with the band was in 2012. My first novel had just been published, and the band agreed to let me be the opening act for a short leg—Philly, Detroit, and DC. I would read a bit from my novel, and then the band would come out and play Que Sera Sera with me, which Stephin had tried to teach me on the ukulele, and then they would play, and I would go back to the merch booth. It was exhausting, and romantic, as full a circle as one could hope to draw. The day we got home, I peed on a stick and discovered that I was pregnant with our first child. In the years since, Stephin and his mother are always at our house on Thanksgiving, and my children call him Uncle Stephin, a title I’m quite sure no one has ever used before. He is still mine, and I am still his.
Life Before meant going places for work, not like a fusty business trip at a conference hotel, though sometimes that too—mostly, going places for work meant being in a dozen bookstores or nightclubs, a different city every night, slinging our wares, trying to win over new fans, and to please a crowd.
Stephin has a new album out this spring, on May 15, ten days after my fifth book will be published. The band’s tour has been cancelled, and my book tour has been cancelled. Yesterday, Stephin sent me a selfie he’d taken out on a walk, looking very dapper in a jacket, a tie, and a face mask. The only times I’ve left my house in the last three weeks have been to take my children on bike rides around the block. I’ve been so busy feeling sad and scared and distracted by the world that I haven’t quite processed what it means that my book will be published in a moment when there are no bookstores to walk into, and that when Stephin’s album will come out when there are no clubs to fill with people.
All Adults Here
$24.00, BOOKSHOP
This is a new feeling, and one that is sure to multiply exponentially—the realization that things aren’t going to be the same for a long time, if ever, and there is a neverending list of things that are going to be forever changed. I used to miss the big parts, but now I miss the small parts, too—the clubs and concert halls, sure, but also hotel lobbies and airplane lounges and the gay bars, the gas station pit stops, the ability to be around people you love and are annoyed by and even strangers, sometimes hundreds of them at once. This is also part of what it means to be a New Yorker—to live in a crowd. Stephin sent me his photo from Manhattan, across one bridge, probably two miles from my living room in Brooklyn. I can’t imagine the next time I’ll be there, on the island where I grew up. It might as well be the moon.
It’s not always clear how to maintain friendships as an adult—add in a home quarantine, and people are busy worrying about their kids or their pantries or their loved ones or, I don’t know, the fate of humanity, and it seems even harder. There are some friends who I’ve set check-in dates with, because we’re both wrangling children 24/7 and life seems more impossible than ever. But Stephin texts me nearly every day, and when I sent an email asking people to recite poems for my bookstore, Books Are Magic, he texted me back a video about two minutes later. You just never know who’s going to stick in your life, because you never know who is going to love you back as much as you love them.
I’m a novelist, which means that my work is best enjoyed by someone sitting alone, in silence. My book tour will be replaced by an online facsimile, and that will be just fine. But I am mourning the loss of all those nights on the road, where I would lean against the wall in the very back of a concert hall, mouthing all the words, watching people in the audience do the same. I think when all this is done—or rather, when I’m adjusted to whatever After looks like—I’m going to buy tickets to everything. I’m going to cry my eyes out.
The last time I saw The Magnetic Fields play was at Symphony Space, just before Thanksgiving. It was the first time that I’d just sat in the audience, in a seat, for the entire show. Sam’s family was right in front of us, and Claudia’s daughter and parents were right next to us. The rows around us were filled with familiar faces—the band’s dearest friends and most devoted fans—and it felt like the best family reunion I could imagine. I waved at Stephin’s mother and told her we’d see her soon, for Thanksgiving. And then the band began to play. I knew every note, every word, and when Stephin climbed a ladder during “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”, I watched the bottom of the ladder, which was too close to the edge of the stage, and thought to myself, yes, I could leap across these three rows of people to catch him if he fell. But we were already falling, all of us, and we didn’t know it. We were falling from one reality to another, from before to during, and someday we will fall into after.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
