It was Saturday, November 20, 2010. I’d been laid up on the couch in my East Village apartment for days, lifeless and achy, suffering in one of those between-mania lulls. It was triggered just the week before by the last minute rewrites and fear that accompanied the first public reading from my memoir. I was half-watching SNL that night when, around midnight, Anne Hathaway sparkled her “Florence + the Machine!” intro. Effortlessly wailing away in a super-mini, Florence’s pitch and indecipherable lyrics snared the attention of both me and my Pugliese ESL husband. I was deliberating whether her voice pained or pleasured, while waiting for the illusion panel in the front of her dress to reveal a nipple as a result of a quick Dog Days twist. My husband thoughtfully discerned, “Her hair color is a fist to the eye.” I Wiki’d Florence during commercial break and downloaded Lungs after her second SNL performance. Florence sat, unheard, in iTunes, along with Bryan Ferry’s Olympia, my other recent purchase, until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when I moved them to my Nano for the trip home to Philly for the holiday. Running late, Giovanni and I were relegated to the stained, ripped-up, cushionless, bathroom-adjacent back seats of the bus, where we absorbed the shock of every bump, exacerbating my still crippled-up condition. Since focus and clarity were nodding out somewhere between my energy and ability to write, I listened to music instead of marking up manuscripts for my non-fiction workshop. On my iPod, I click-wheeled to the “recently added” playlist. My husband, hot and flustered from running (against his Euro grain) through Port Authority, wouldn’t let me lie all over him, as I usually did. So, upright and alone, I closed my eyes and listened to Lungs. Track by track, the layers of harps, taps and howls seeped in and stirred. I recognized these emotions…I allowed their resurrection to entrance and transport. My sister Marie, a true 70s groupie who’d passed away in March, and my Siouxsie-freak friend Steven, also gone, appeared. I turned toward the window in tears, sad they weren’t around to experience this beauty. With dried eyes, I pressed pause and squeezed my sleeping husband’s arm. “Giovanni,” I whispered, “look at me. I’m falling in love.” His initial Southern Italian reaction was a defensive furrowing of the brows, until I handed him my iPod to read the title. “Ah, you like-a?” “No,” I answered, “I love.” For the remainder of the ride, I looped “Hurricane Drunk,” my instant favorite, enough times to almost believe I owned the words. As we pulled into the Greyhound station, I fought not to stomp in time to the front of the bus. Instead, I settled for a bouncy, aisle-long hipswitch and a pain-free departure.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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