A Case of You
A Case of You
Prepare to Bleed
I can’t remember ever hearing the song “Chelsea Hotel #2” by Leonard Cohen without knowing it was about Janis Joplin. I wonder how I’d feel about it if I could, just once, remove that knowledge. Cohen expressed regret later—not about the song itself, but about the indiscretion of naming Janis as its inspiration. But I suspect it wouldn’t matter who inspired it, Janis or just some unfamous gal: I would still despise this song.
I used to love it as much as everyone else. That painful blend of bravado and vulnerability that is always ascribed to Janis, brought to life in such vivid detail. I picture her adjusting her dress at the waist, for some reason, as Cohen observes her from his bed. Shaking her hair over her shoulder, maybe. Such life.
But on a recent listen, the last verse, in which Cohen dismisses Janis as one of countless fallen robins in his life, hit me like a gut punch. Seems a bit unnecessary, I thought. Even cruel. I reminded myself about dramatic irony, but I didn’t believe it—he seemed to mean what he said. Then I skipped back to the beginning of the track and heard the whole thing anew. Oh my god, I thought. This is what men want. For a woman to give them head without caring that they’re not handsome, that she’s late for her own show, that they won’t think of her often after this, even after her own spectacular death. “Chelsea Hotel #2” is what men want.
The only real compliment Cohen gives Janis in the song is that she doesn’t bother him with emotionality. She doesn’t whine about needing him, or not needing him, a presumably female tendency he refers to as “jivin’ around.” That this is about a once-in-a-generation genius who could sing two damn notes at the same time does make it sting a bit extra, but no woman deserves this as her biggest compliment. Because we’ve all done some “jivin’ around”: that endless game of trying to be heard without accidentally saying too much—of daring to express an emotion that might be subject to change, to a man who just wants you to service his parts.
The second verse makes me retch. He and his friends are spending their New York nights chasing money and flesh, a shuddery foreshadow of cokey ’80s stockbroker energy. Then he shrugs it all off with a truly confounding line: “That was called love for the workers in song / Probably still is for those of them left.” First there’s the problem of a poet-musician labeling himself and his friends “workers” as their limousine drivers hold up traffic on 23rd Street, sweating through their polyester uniforms. And the phrase “for those of them left” is just bizarre given that this song was written in the ’70s, a golden era for the industry of the singer-songwriter. Did Leonard Cohen anticipate our current age of nobody profiting from music but Ticketmaster and T-shirt manufacturers? I doubt it. More likely he saw himself as a precious dying breed: the true artist always on the verge of extinction. Retch.
Janis did not write a song about Cohen, that we know of. But she did give this revealing and depressingly relatable confession, published much later in Richard Avedon and Doon Arbus’s book, The Sixties: “Sometimes, you know, you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something to…to tell you…. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening. You know, innate communication. He’s just not saying anything. He’s moody or something. So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping, you know. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realize that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me. I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened. Twice. Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen.”
So that’s how Cohen’s room at the Chelsea Hotel felt for Janis. She wasn’t saying she needed him—maybe she didn’t know how; maybe nobody had ever taught her the fine, exhausting art of jivin’ around—but she did. She needed something from him, some kind of connection. And he was just lying there.
Janis may not have written about Cohen, but Joni did: in “A Case of You” she depicts him as a poison for which she has developed such tolerance that she can easily consume lethal amounts. Cohen’s own mother warns Joni about him, in the final verse: “She said, ‘Go to him, stay with him if you can / But be prepared to bleed.’?” (“All the mothers warn me against their sons,” Joni told her biographer.)
Decades later, in a magazine I bought from a garage sale as a teenager, Tori Amos said she would’ve given her arm to have written “A Case of You.” I’m always struck by this notion. Any writer who’s ever been warned off a man wishes they’d written “A Case of You.” But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much. Look what I turned that experience into, you could think, if you’d written “A Case of You.” Your pain would have made the world more beautiful, would have made generations of women cry the most cleansing tears, the kind that open floodgates of endorphins when they’re done. You would be forever connected to these women: your people. And your wound would be healed.
Of course, songs have been written about Joni too. The most famous is Graham Nash’s “Our House,” which illustrates that Cohen’s “workers in song” were not all holed up in grimy hotel rooms; some of them were picking flowers and playing with cats. Joni stars as a radiant goddess of hearth and home, making everything seem easy. But even through Nash’s rosy lens, I sense a wifely exhaustion in Joni—especially when he beckons her to sit with him, inviting her to rest for “just five minutes.” Five minutes? She gets just five minutes?
Mere weeks after “Our House” was written, Joni would turn down a marriage proposal from Nash, on the grounds that he just wanted her to “cook and clean for him.” She would dump a bowl of cornflakes over his head in the midst of an argument. Nash’s own description of one fight, and this is on the record: “Then I put Joni over my knee, and I spanked her. With all due respect, she took it very well.”
“Our House” has remained frozen in the public imagination as an ode to domestic bliss. But the song’s almost comic na?veté—the “very, very, very fine house,” the bridge of la-la-las, the two jokey drum hits echoing the cats in the yard—whispers the truth in our ears: This is all a fairy tale. The song is a snapshot of one fleeting moment when a man’s life was easy. We all get these moments, if we’re lucky, and we stay with them if we can. But we must prepare to bleed.
It’s like Nash knew when he wrote the song that his greatest fantasy had come to life and it was still just that: a fantasy. Worse, that it was more his fantasy than hers. Because “Our House” isn’t about Joni Mitchell. And “A Case of You” isn’t about Leonard Cohen, and “Chelsea Hotel #2” isn’t really about Janis Joplin either. We are all just writing about ourselves.
—
“It’s interesting,” said one of the journalists, tapping her pencil eraser on my pages. “I’m never bored, per se, when I’m reading Percy’s stuff. But as with her previous pieces, I find myself wondering what the point is. It feels a bit scattered. We don’t even have the focus on one song this time.”
“It was dark as hell was my impression.” This from one of the younger girls, meaning my age, who was writing a memoir about her mom. “I don’t know any of these songs, I’m not into old white-people music, but I did like the use of the three songs—like a literary triptych, or an after-the-fact love triangle.”
The teacher, Tracy, nodded. She wrote long-form magazine articles and had published one epic narrative history of the Underground Railroad that had taken her twenty years to write and research. “I do know these songs, and I’m not sure I’ll ever hear them the same way again,” she said. “Which is definitely saying something.”
Tracy had perfect gray face-framing locs that never moved. “Definitely saying something”—a deadweight compliment, almost backhand. It hung in the air.
“I agree with that sense of, like, what’s the point?” the young girl continued. “What is she writing about, really? Is she writing about the music, or is she writing about herself? Because if she’s writing about herself, we need more of her. And if she’s writing about the music, we need less of her.”
Heads began nodding around the table like dominoes, picking up speed. Only Raj, the food writer, stayed still.
Nomi was looking at me. “I would agree, generally,” she said, and folded her long fingers thoughtfully over her chin. “But I would also acknowledge that maybe you’re carving out some new territory here, and that’s what’s making us uncomfortable.”
The nodding around the table stopped, replaced with the back-and-forth head tilting of fake consideration. Nomi was being a friend. I felt, as always when my stories were being workshopped, like my entire system had arrested—brain, organs, all the gears just paused mid-crank. I wrote everything down verbatim in my notebook, my wrist aching already. I would process it later.
“Raj?” said Tracy. “You look like you have a different perspective.”
“Oh,” he said, and leaned forward, clearing his throat. “Yeah. I guess so. I feel very clear on what she’s writing about, actually, because she announces it in the last line: she’s writing about herself. So I would vote for inserting more of herself, not less of herself. She’s writing about people, really, how people use music to get clarity on themselves. It’s clear to me that Percy’s subject is not music—music is just her channel to get at people. Channel’s not the right word. Her medium. Not medium.” He widened his eyes, annoyed at himself. “Anyway. I thought it was devastating.”
—
“I’m buying your beer,” I told Raj afterward at the Lion’s Head. We were waiting to order at the bar. “Do you have your chili or whatever?”
He patted his pocket.
My gears had started turning again, creakily, eager for lubrication. We all sat at the big long table at the back. The Lion’s Head had attempted holiday decorations, hanging real pine garland that was already brittle, dropping needles on our table. Half the class had come, but nobody mentioned my story; we talked about our plans for winter break. Most people were leaving. Even Nomi had sublet her apartment for a month and was going to stay with her mom in Philly. I couldn’t afford a ticket home, having run out of my cost-of-living loan—a $5K check that came in September and January—so I’d gotten a job waitressing at a touristy restaurant near the Museum of Natural History.
I nodded along to the conversation and thought about Joe, who had called the night before to tell me he wasn’t coming to Brooklyn after all. Some music blog in London had given the album a five-star review, which led to an invitation to open a UK tour. I was excited for him. Neither of us had ever been to Europe.
Raj gave me some dumb “penny for your thoughts” comment, so I told him about Joe. “Sort of my best friend,” I said, in an attempt to avoid the same mistake of calling him my collaborator, though that was truer now, post–“Bay Window.”
“And you were looking forward to seeing him?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s no big deal, he’ll be back through New York. I’m just regretting not going to his show last week.”
“I always find it curious when a man and a woman can be best friends. I was in that situation once, in college, and I was just desperately, pathetically in love with the girl.”
“Oh, that’s me,” I said, laughing as if this was no big confession. “ Was me, I should say. Finally coming out of it now.”
He folded his arms. “If you don’t mind me asking, did anything ever happen between you?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Nothing?”
“We talked about it. Held hands, spooned. But no, nothing happened.” I felt my cheeks warming, catching up to the conversation.
He gave a definitive nod. “Good. You’re fine then.”
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“Because you don’t know what he tastes like. When there’s nothing concrete to miss, that makes it easier to get over, in my experience.”
This had a nice ring to it—the ring of a truism if not quite the truth. I smiled. “What he tastes like. You’re such a foodie.”
He shuddered.
“Sorry,” I said. The term had only recently gained popularity; it was my first time using it. “It does reek of class, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed. And of restaurant-as-sport. Of appropriating food as a hobby when you have found, in your thirties, that you have none.”
I laughed. “Is that so bad?”
“No. It’s just not me.” He tipped his beer can back as far as it could go, even after it became clear it was empty.
I was out of things to say. I turned back toward the other students.
“I’m enjoying the Neko Case CD,” Raj said, and that’s when I knew: he had actually gone out and bought the Neko Case. As soon as I had the thought, I papered over it in my mind. I would deal with it later, along with my workshop feedback. “I feel I should give you a food recommendation in return,” he was saying.
“Sure,” I said. “Hey, what’s up with those Indian restaurants in the East Village that have all the chili pepper lights? Are those good? Because they look fun, in a lame way.”
He grimaced. “It hurts me to hear you say this,” he said. “What time is it? Are you hungry?”
I said I was, and then he was pushing back his chair and leading me up Amsterdam Avenue and down to a subway platform. He had to consult the map; we were going to Queens.
The train was loud and crowded. I watched Raj clutching the subway strap, eyes darting around, as new to the city as I was, and had an impulse to hug him. Instead I said, over the rush-hour din, “Thanks again for today.”
He shrugged. “It was honest feedback.”
I’m not sure why I believed him, given my new suspicion that he was into me. But I did. He seemed oddly incapable of lying.
“The idea of inserting more of myself into my writing does not appeal to me, though,” I said. “Unfortunately.”
“Just throw in a little bit. A line here, a line there. Readers don’t need much.”
“I don’t think I can do a little. I tried to write autobiographically once and it was mortifying, how personal I got.” I winced at the memory of the pieces I’d never submitted to Ring Finger . “I’d end up telling a whole big story.”
Someone with a boom box arrived in our train car. “What?”
“I’d say too much,” I said loudly, into his ear. “It would be a whole book.”
“So write a whole book,” he shouted.
The train lurched. I looked down at my feet, my black boots on the speckled gray floor, trying to restabilize myself. Lines from my buried Archives folder—“?‘Communist Daughter,’ second verse, searing pain”; “Her butt was in the air, her hands in a gopher hole”—appeared in my mind, jackknifing each other. No way, I thought. I would never write that book.
We arrived in Queens at a large, nondescript Pakistani restaurant next to a closed sari shop. The food was good, but curry is always good. He explained in detail what made the naan so chewy as I fought a profound lack of interest. I asked where he was from and he said Los Angeles, which I found surprising.
“Why is everyone so shocked by this?” he said. “Should I be offended? Do I not seem like I could come from a place with celebrities, is that it?” He held up a knife and looked at his reflection. “I have a good face. I have analyzed my face and I’m pretty sure it’s inoffensive, at worst. Is it because I’m not very tall? What about Tom Cruise?”
I laughed. It was true: he did have a good face.
“I’m serious!” he said. “I’m sorry, if you were the first person in New York to gasp upon hearing where I’m from, it would not be an issue. But you are not. You are the third.”
“New Yorkers hate LA,” I said. “Take it as a compliment.”
“Yeah, but I’m not hanging out with real New Yorkers, am I? I’m not hanging out with rappers defending their coast. Half our class is from somewhere in California, including you.”
“I’m from Indiana.”
“Well that’s just random. And don’t change the subject.”
I thought for a minute while he trained that expectant face on me. I knew my answer, I just had to figure out how to say it. He was still holding his knife up like a conductor freezing the music. “Your vibe is not superficial,” I finally said. “Like, at all. I think that’s why.”
He seemed to like this explanation enough to resume using his knife for eating. He chewed for a minute and then he said, “I live in the realm of the senses.”
What an odd thing to say. Later that night, home in bed, I considered what he’d meant. The senses are pure experience, I decided; there is no sense for how things seem, which is what matters to the superficial.
I rolled onto my back and tried to tune in to my senses. The faint circular pressure of a bedspring against my shoulder blade. The smell of prewar plaster and dust, notes of unwashed laundry. The sight of four empty walls leaning toward a ceiling, the clang of an ancient heater, Colgate mingling with the sour remnants of beer and cumin. And then I thought about how my life seemed in that moment—a young writer in her spartan New York phase, studying where Allen Ginsberg had studied—and I felt much better actually. Raj and I were probably not a good match.