Blogfriday on Sunday: How reading Clapton made me think of my own life

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Blogfriday
I have romanticized very few celebrities in my life. That’s not to say I haven’t been caught up in celebritymania, or taken men in my life and made them into celebrities in my own mind. But true celebrities: Alan Bates, Eric Clapton and James Spader.

I just finished my first reading of Clapton I didn’t know that he had been in Murray the K, the NY DJ–Christmas show and disliked him. I would have romanticized, Murray the K, had I not been eight when I first began to listen to him. He was about as romantic as my father to me, and I was never into father figures.

But Eric he was god. I knew about his addiction and alcoholism but never actually thought about how it affected him the man. I heard about his promiscuousity but that made him more attractive. It doesn’t in the book. It could be me. I have grown up.

I won’t begin to go into his story. He’s Clapton, and I still find him fascinating. Maybe even more as he was so brutally honest about himself. I respect that. It does take the romance out.

The book makes it seem that his greatest achievement is his sobriety, then late in life marriage and daughters. But Clapton’s greatest achievements will always be his music to me.

I want to disentangle myself from the book and just get back into the music as he became too real. I don’t remember when he became my first real musical idol; I think he was in Blind Faith. It was forever ago.

There were times that I felt the book read like an outline.

Yet I feel as if I need detox.

I’m not innocent. I have known too many junkies. I was barely seventeen the first time I didn’t try heroin. It was hard for me to understand why people would literally want to be down. I liked amphetamines but they seemed deadly even to the teenage me and I suppose a certain wariness and fear of all drugs but pot saved me.

That is possibly my greatest achievement. When I moved in with friends who had turned into lesbian junkies but I didn’t know that, I was blind to my roommates predilections as so much was going on in my own life. I have no lesbian tendencies and thought that they should have informed me. I would have forced Ro to buy her own bed and not share mine much sooner than I did. Ro wanted me, Jayce wanted Ro, Carrie wanted Jayce. It was confusing. It was stupid. I was newly separated not looking to change sexual attraction genders. I suppose I seemed vulnerable.

Ro, the girl considered more beautiful and desirable than even Shelby came from a family that had literally forced her out of living with a man as he was Jewish. It messed her up and made her vulnerable. But I wasn’t to be her salvation. If I run from men I truly love, I’m not going to stay around for women. It took so long for me to understand what was happening.

My best friend Shelby lived a few blocks away and I spent my free time with her. We would come to my house and wonder why everybody seemed asleep with the record player playing the same side of a Cat Steven album over and over again. To this day I have a love/hate relationship with his music and not because of his religion.

There ware overt signs that Shelby and I missed over and over again both about my roommates sexuality and their addiction. Our school junkie, Matt, a Nam Vet was always over. But we were used to people taking care of Matt.

I lived in a Sound town on the Island, went to NYU, worked for my parents and did volunteer work. My husband, Noah, was always around though we had broken up. I didn’t object as I was always on the go and needed rides. Perhaps we were in love. Perhaps we were in as much love as either of us were capable then. We met my first day college and our history was filled with weeks together and weeks broken up.

It’s hard for me to write about Noah with any objectivity as we’re still friends and I do consider that to be an achievement. It’s hard for me to talk about our relationship as I don’t want him to seem horrible. Other times it’s me who would come across a bitch. It’s easier for me to talk about the things I did. But I have an aversion to talking about ages eighteen to 22. They always felt like incredible years when anything and everything was possible. There was an aura of sadness and death hanging in the air. My first college friend JohnnyB had died, not directly from drugs but its after affects. Other people at college did die directly from drugs.

Then I moved in with the lesbian/junkies. It took me awhile to realize that they would clean up the junk and needles before I came home.

They became sloppy. Ro declared her lust for me and that was the last straw. I stayed for a few months and moved in with Shelby. Soon after I went to visit my sister in Cambridge and didn’t come home for over two years.

That was the true achievement of my early life. I became friends with the girls who lived next door to Elka and her best friend from home, and moved in with them. Elka went back to Syracuse for school and I transferred to Boston University where for the first time I truly became a student.

My new friends drank and did pot, nothing more. Despite their constant partying they were intellectual. Jazmin worked for the summer at a luxe store in Boston. I had been waitressing for a week and made the worst waitress who got the best tips. It was the lobster shift. Truck drivers and rock stars frequented the diner. I would make seventy five cents to $50 on one cup of coffee. I guess I was cute and I know I was a ditz.

Jaz got me a job at the store she worked in. It was much more suitable for me and I continued working when I went back to school. Through a friend of Jaz I met the bass player for the group that frequented the diner and we had a mid 70’s type relationship. We played drinking games, hung out at my house as I had seven roommates and every day was a party. Hung out at his apartment as it was quiet.

He had no furniture in the kitchen or living room. The bathroom had a giant poster of the New York Dolls. In one of life ironies a girl who would become one of my closest friends was living with a Doll. My bass player wasn’t flamboyant. He could have been a writer or lawyer.

The bedroom was furnished with a waterbed, large TV for the time, and dresser with a professional tape machine. He would play songs from an album that they were going to record and I hated it. It seemed sexist and stupid to me. Only later would I be able to understand the brilliance and early heavy metal in the music.

We would drink and smoke pot all night when not having sex. He had access to great coke and introduced me to using coke to stay awake and sharp as I had early morning classes, night classes and work. We would see each other when he wasn’t touring. Then they began to record songs from the tape. Our relationship, or whatever it was, ended a natural death. I was back in touch with Noah who I had refused to speak to for over a year.

Again if I wanted to I couldn’t begin to explain our relationship. We were still legally married though I filed for divorce during one of our talking to each other all the time stages. Noah had given up all drugs years before and had never drank. In college, our first though he had been kicked out before my freshman year, he would attempt to save me from drugs I wasn’t doing. Well not when he was around.

By the time I lived in Cambridge we had done the chase me dance for so many years, I don’t think either of us could take it seriously. I couldn’t or wouldn’t to be totally honest.

It scared me to love somebody as I had once loved Noah. I didn’t want to give so much of myself to anybody, including him, again. Yet when I was ready for my next serious relationship, I became entrapped in lust and obsession. Not mine. I only obsessed over Noah and never in a way that made me want to be with him. I don’t know if I can ever explain that.

This story is going in ways I hadn’t planned to ever blog. Reading Clapton brought it all back.

That life I left behind that consisted of sex, drugs and rock & roll. I was going to say that it lasted seven years but really it lasted fourteen or more.

I couldn’t relate to the heroin or constant drinking but I related in other ways. Yes I did drink too much. It was the 70’s. Drinking to excess and drugging was considered normal. I stopped the coke quickly as I never liked it as a high but a way to function and I knew that was wrong.

When I moved back to the city ludes were the thing. I thought they made people stupid as I thought heroin did. We heard rumors about Ro. That she was a common street ho working for a two bit pimp. Somebody said she worked at McDonalds.

Shelby and I called her father one Stoli filled afternoon. He hung up on us. I know she died in 2000 as I looked that up.

There were years that I have romanticized that time in my life but it’s seemed too sordid in recent years. I know too many people in their teens and 20’s. While I know they are too grounded to become whatever I was, i do get scared.

Reading Clapton brought this all up and made think of achievements. Large and small.