There are songs that are eternal, stuck on the random playlists that run in constant heavy rotation in our minds, that hit love right in the heart. Bob Dylan has perfect aim, especially in “Tangled Up In Blue.” There is always that person, that you will split up with on that dark sad night and look over your shoulder and say “We’ll meet again someday on the avenue. I seen a lot of women, but she never escaped my mind.”
Kate Bush is another sharp shooter, in her high octave, high octane fright ballad “Wuthering Heights.” These are both songs that never lose their erotic or emotional power because the feelings of this particularly painful and poignant type of love are inescapable. Everyone has them, because they partly exist in fantasy, and are then fictionalized in the heart as well as the soul as that soul’s mate. Like big, slippery, floppy fish, these are the lovers that got away, who we are not meant to have, yet yearn for forever.
These false idols with golden calves are doomed to your desire. You keep the box of the shit they left when they left you, hidden underneath some books in the garage. You still hang onto them, your fingers crossed, no matter how full of love your house is, how well decorated, how beautifully appointed, how friendly and happy, the one you built from the ruins of your broken vows and promises.
It is you, Kathy, who fucked up, with the one you would have loved to spend your life with, but you couldn’t resist being a bitch. Or maybe he was too poor, too dark, like Heathcliff, and became too bitter but rich, and moved to the castle across the way and married your sister and then you fucking got so upset you died. I am the Kathy in this story, time and time again, haunting the freezing moors in a thin, white muslin nightgown, looking to be let into your window from out in the cold. “Heathcliff. Give me my fucking shit!!!” I hate this love, but we are all victims of it.
There is one person out there in the world, one who captured your attention, then your lips and then acquired your soul, but then something stupid happened, and it was all gone. We can never hang onto this kind of love. Who we wind up with, the husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and partners and longtime companions are the real heroes of the story. They save us from our fantasies and ourselves.
Perhaps I am cynical, and I have no right to be, for I know that poetic love survives. That there is a crossroads between the fantasy ideal and the one who does the dishes. I have it too. I live it. My house is bursting with love and sunshine, bright and neat as a pin inside, and my husband and I put our feet under our huge dog Ralph to keep warm. On long trips when we are not able to see each other, I feel physical pain, and am prone to all manner of airborne viruses. I have no doubt in the love my husband and I share, because we are family, and we even know all the words to the song. Yet, every once in a while, in other songs that are the lives of the people whose everyday reality we barely penetrate, I sing the sad aria of the dead girl. I am still the ghostly Kathy, begging to be let in. “I know you still have my clown underwear from Playmates. You asshole! Heathcliff!!!!!”
When asked by adorable George, a journalist in New York, not my Heathcliff, but if I were to have more than one, a harem of unattainables, he would absolutely make the short list – “What do you wish upon those against same sex marriage, such as Bush, Cheney or Ashcroft?”
I answered that I hoped that they would fall in love. The “Tangled Up In Blue/Wuthering Heights” variety, that sad, tragic romance that never ends because it never ran its course, and was cut down in its prime, leaving the audience in a rapturous cliffhanger. The stage manager has wrapped all the actors, and the call sheets were lost and gone with the wind because no one gave a damn. But before the gate is checked, and fate is sealed, that they would fall into this obsessive, bodice ripping fantasia with another man, someone of the same sex. To exist in the hideous libidinous limbo, the tearfully turbulent tango, the prison of unfulfilled wishes and unkissed kisses, with a beloved whom they would normally like to call a “fag.”
Because I just want everyone to love each other.
How you like me now?