In Which We Can Go To My Sister's If We Say We'll Watch The Baby

Scorned as Timber

by REBECCA ARMENDARIZ

In the months that I turned 22 and 25, Neko Case put out new records. In 2006, when Fox Confessor Brings the Flood released, I commuted 40 minutes to a 9-to-5 corporate job following my college graduation and began descending toward the pitiful end to my first long-term relationship. In 2009, when Middle Cyclone released, my boyfriend died after a 16-month cancer battle.  

The struggles with guilt and boundaries, with perspective, yearning, and self-worth, were the same in these two differently fractured periods, and Neko’s songs spoke to me on a level so unintentionally specific and personal, my experiences molded to fit her words. Her vibrating voice dug to the root of everything I felt.

In June she released a trailer for her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. The trailer features the first minute or so of “Where Did I Leave That Fire." In the video, Neko shoulders thick branches as she walks in a field in knee-high boots that are both sexy and rugged-seeming. The camera pans to show her belt buckles, arranged on the top of her dresser, and one reads “CASE.” She emerges from the bathtub she’d sunk all the way into. She awakens from a twitching sleep and smiles. She rolls over to reveal tattoos on each of her forearms that together read “Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky,” the title of a painting by artist Emily Carr, from 1935. Fireworks burst against an ink sky.

“I wanted so badly not to be me,” she sings. There were times when that sentiment applied to my life like an impervious paste. She’s lost her fire, she says, and at the end of the song someone calls about it: “You can pick it up if you come down with ID,” she sings from the perspective of the man who’s found it. I picture myself after losing my own fire, looking as if someone drew an outline of my body and the shape walked off with my spirit. “You look like you lost your best friend,” a stranger said to me at the CVS up Georgia Avenue a few months after Clark died. I’d stopped there to buy cigarettes a day or so after quitting.

Sometimes emerging again to fill the shell of your own skin after leaving it for a while happens so naturally the switch flicks unnoticed, without fanfare. It happened for me at a Tom Petty concert within the opening notes of “Listen to Her Heart.” It happened to me one morning after a few months of waking up regularly for 7 a.m. yoga classes. It happened to me when I took home the guy from the bar with holes in his t-shirt I’d just met but felt connected to. He turned out to be the guy who wears a NASCAR hat only when he uses tools or drives a rented Zipcar truck, and now I live with him and his Queensryche obsession. 

Her poetic articulation of my feelings mixes the perfect storm’s elements, her voice like thunder, the falling patter of the drums, harmonies swirling like the wind to stir something unanticipated inside me. I wonder what this new album will adhere to, what lines will stick with me and why. Despite loving them outside of the context I originally heard them, I remember certain sparks in songs from Fox Confessor and Middle Cyclone as if nothing has changed.

The first track on Fox Confessor is “Margaret vs. Pauline,” about a girl named Pauline who’s got it easy compared to Margaret, who faces mostly hardship. As 2006 dragged on, my boyfriend and I stopped having sex as he figured things out, a phase that lasted months. He started hanging out with this woman who was clearly in love with him, though they were just friends. He’d go visit her some weekends, and her name was Margaret. “Margaret is the fragments of a name,” Neko sings. “One left a sweater sitting on the train,” she says of Pauline. “And the other lost three fingers at the cannery.” Listening, I tapped into both the person who hated his Margaret and the person who always loses.

When Middle Cyclone first came out, Clark, the boyfriend who died of cancer, couldn’t walk and was shitting in diapers. Neko performed two nights in a row in April at the 9:30 Club in D.C., where I worked part-time.  Clark’s friends came over to babysit and I went alone both nights, uncharacteristic of me considering everything else I’d skipped over the months. I stood on the balcony watching her and sobbing. She ended both sets with the first track on the record, “This Tornado Loves You,” in which she compares herself to a natural disaster murdering everything in its path for the sake of an all-sacrificing love. It was relevant.

On the album she segues from “Tornado” straight into “The Next Time You Say Forever,” following up the title line with “I will punch you in your face.” I felt that anger, too, because in my gut I knew I was about to lose. On “Vengeance Is Sleeping,” she says she dips her cigarette before riding the bus, romanticizing an addiction I needed so badly to pass the length of the day.

A month after Clark died, I went to see her again, this time in Baltimore. Patches of rash appeared around my eyes from crying to “Don’t Forget Me,” the Harry Nilsson song she covers on the record that I guess is about divorce but at the time was only about my loss. “You know I think about you; let me know you think about me too,” it goes. It had rained all day on Clark’s last day. After he died, I went outside to smoke a cigarette on this bench right outside the hospice doors, and suddenly, the sky was pink. Now anytime I see a pink sky, I think of him. I think of him somewhere thinking about me.

That same month I made a mix for the guy I’d started fucking, someone I worked with at the 9:30 and had known for years. I put “I’m An Animal,” a song about sex, on the CD. (I figured out its meaning on my own, but I also heard her say it once in some interview.) “I love you this hour, this hour today, and heaven will smell like the airport,” she sings, and I cry with the harmonies on the word “airport.” I know what she means. I know that smell. And while I’m sure Neko didn’t mean to remind me of an actual person I hope is in heaven if heaven exists, she did. I also loved that guy I was fucking, and I still do, for what we shared in those few weeks. He knows it.  Now we are friends, and I am glad I don’t have to regret giving Neko to him.

Since Middle Cyclone, I’ve started owning my experiences and gleaning keepsakes from them to sustain my evolved self. I like myself a lot more, and I feel strongly about a lot more things. “Hey little girl, would you like to be the king's pet or the king?” she asks on “Wild Creatures,” the first track of The Worse Things Get. “I'd choose odorless and invisible, but otherwise, I would choose the king.” Same, Neko. I want everyone to leave me alone and I don’t want to be held responsible for anyone’s suffering but the worst would be serving some patriarch. 

“Night Still Comes” is about depression, and grief, and how you can’t plan on anything. “I revenged myself all over myself, there’s nothing you can say to me,” she sings, and it’s like she’s talking to herself. The “you” is her, and it’s me. “You never held it at the right angle,” she wails, seemingly blaming herself for her failures. On “Nearly Midnight Honolulu,” her otherworldly voice tells a story to validate a helpless kid’s pain and apologize for his and everyone’s loveless plight. It’s sad and uncomfortable to think about, and it’s so beautiful I can’t skip it. It pops up in my mind during the day, without prompting, while sitting at my desk at work.

Listening to "Man" on the new album I can feel my anger, visceral and heavy, in my body. “You’ll have to deal with me,” she says of herself-as-man. Maybe it’s something to do with my age and that I spend a lot more time reading magazines than I used to. Maybe it’s stoked by the internet, by my constant access to a stream of information that pertains to the issues I care about on twitter. Maybe the same thing’s happened to Neko, who tweets regularly.

“Know what's cool? When you tell a person conversationally that you want to find someone to be with and then they make fun of you for it,” she tweeted on August 2. It’s weird that she’s so accessible, that I have access to the mundane things that fuel her words that I then reapply to myself. But it also shows me how brilliant she is to voice the everyday horrors of modern American life in a way that’s so beautiful and perfect that it encompasses all varieties of loss and sadness and sexiness and anger. Neko’s twitter gives her an outlet for her own politics, her own alliances, her own hormones. It gives her a chance to be a regular person. It shows me that she’s doing OK despite her struggles. It’s better now. I’m definitely better now.

Rebecca Armendariz is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. You can find her website here. She twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about her mother.

"Man" - Neko Case (mp3)

"Local Girl" - Neko Case (mp3)

In Which We Are Jealous Of What They Must Know

Mom

Dressed Up

by REBECCA ARMENDARIZ

My mother loves ghosts and spirits and the television psychics who communicate with them. She’s currently waiting her turn to talk with the dead via the innate gift of Theresa Caputo, "The Long Island Medium," whom she calls by her given name and not her showbiz title. "Who's Theresa Caputo?" I say each time my mother mentions her. "The Long Island Medium!" she yells back, flustered by having to clarify it for me again. The list of people wishing to pay Theresa to talk to their deceased loved ones is two years long, but my mother's already been on it for a year.

Mom says she only saw a ghost herself once, when I was a baby. I’d woken up for a middle-of-the-night feeding, and as she describes it, she got up from bed, walked toward my room, and turned her head right to flip the hallway light on before facing my doorway. In the second after her head pivoted left, she saw an elderly woman in a nightgown standing there, who disappeared within seconds.

“I saw her. I can still see her as if it just happened. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. You can’t make that shit up – that kind of adrenalin at 3 a.m., half asleep,” she recalls.

Mom’s had other paranormal experiences -- she heard someone whispering her name once when she knew the house was empty. Another time, on a drive to Allentown, she felt a hand press down on her shoulder. “It was like my guardian angel was letting me know she was there,” she says.

I have limited faith of my own, and can’t pinpoint exactly how I feel about the afterlife or whether the dead maintain a presence in my space. It’s hard not to trust in some sort of magic, though, when my mother and her concrete beliefs come to visit. She’s jealous of what they must know, she’s told me.

Last weekend, she drove to D.C. to take me to see another TV psychic she admires speak about his life and contact select audience members’ dead family members. Chip Coffey claims he began exhibiting these tendencies as a toddler, when he would name the person about to call on the phone before it even rang.

I just think it would be nice to get dressed up, my mom texted me a few days before the event, so we wore heeled boots and lipstick. When Chip walked onto the hotel ballroom stage, she blushed. “He's SO adorable,” she whispered to me. He’s a short, out gay man with icy hair and a Georgia drawl in a T-shirt and patterned scarf, and she’s right.

"Do not let anyone tell you what you should or should not believe; it's none of their damn business,” Chip said at the beginning of the night. “I just basically say ‘fuck you,’” he said of critics. Before the event, my mom tried to influence my opinion by pointing out Chip’s status as an advocate for both gay rights and animals in shelters, which worked, in part. His middle-finger philosophy solidified his likeability. “Leave me alone, or respect me enough to just live my own life!” I put one foot on board.

Chip showed us black and white photos of his ancestors and pictures of himself as a child and teenager. "I had that hair before he did, bitches," he said of a Bieber-reminiscent high school haircut.

About 150 people, most of them women, beamed at him from their seats. Husbands and children dotted the room. The crowd eagerly interacted with him, verbalizing their approval. Those with VIP laminates happily wore them around their necks – including me (hey, I didn’t pay for it).

During the question and answer session, a man tearfully professed his “man crush” on Chip and asked for and received a hug. His wife looked proud to sit beside him. Another praised him for his work helping children deal with the difficult aspects of their abilities on Psychic Kids, a now-canceled A&E show. Chip said he certainly believes in angels: “It’s kind of like God is Donald Trump with much better hair, and he has his apprentices.”

Chip used his spirit guides to lead him to one of the many hands raised in hopes of receiving a reading. He doled out either life advice based on his future-seeing ability or words from the dead person of their choice. Predictably, most people wanted to catch up with someone from the past and gave him three requested details to go on: the person’s name, the nature of the relationship, and how much time it’s been since the death.

I wasn’t impressed at first. One man’s uncle “talked with his hands,” Chip divined. Grandma was and still is a “spitfire,” though she’s calmed down in the afterlife. A man and his wife would have a second child, a boy, and their two-year-old daughter would soon break her arm.

Another man lost his dad when he was 14 and wanted to know more about him. Chip was unapologetic: “He was a shit.” But he praised the son for being a loving family man who needs to knock himself up a few notches on his own to-do list.

A 13-year-old girl there with both her mother and grandmother wanted to talk to her paternal grandpa, who died when her dad was young and before she was born. Chip mentioned a dog that scoots his butt on the carpet (“That’s Pepper, our dog that died!”) and an argument about pierced ears (Yes, she’d botched the job behind her parents’ back, and now they were healing and closing up. Should she be allowed to get them re-pierced?). “What’s the thing with the shoes?” Chip asked. Why, they’d just been fighting over leaving their shoes in the entryway earlier that day. This proved, Chip said, Grandpa’s lasting involvement in the smallest details of their lives. Everything he said rang familiar to them, and now I was paying attention.

The last person to stand up lost her 13-year-old daughter eight months ago. “She knew she was going to die,” Chip said. Yes, the mother confirmed; it was a suicide. She hung herself and didn’t leave a note. Chip mentioned details, inside jokes, and I could feel the mother’s recognition in my body. My mouth hung open as she laughed and gripped her husband’s arm. 

I know he could be a con artist; he could just be very good at guessing.

My mother dreams of the dead she’s lost. “He said he’s very happy you’re happy,” she told me after one night when a boyfriend of mine, who died of cancer in 2009, came and spoke to her. I usually change the subject.

But when they visit, it makes her feel better. Her ghosts don’t haunt her, they reassure her. There are certainly worse things to believe in.

Rebecca Armendariz is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Washington D.C. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here. She twitters here.