6 EVIE
E VIE
The heat rose from the patio beneath a cloudless morning sky while I sat sipping a cup of tea on a trellised stone patio—my tiny apartment’s prize selling point.
It had been another long, sleepless night but a pleasant morning in my little apartment.
I enjoyed the perfect Friday weather, closing my eyes to savor the late-morning sun on my face well before the years when sunscreen would become a daily thing.
My mother had loved warm weather, and I could still see her in my mind’s eye, with baby-oiled skin on a plastic lounge chair in the backyard, sipping iced tea and smiling as Rod Stewart played on a nearby radio. I inherited my love of summer from her, I guessed.
I hadn’t ever planned to live on Long Island.
More like Manhattan. The East Village. Los Angeles or London, maybe, if I was thinking big.
These were the kinds of places a kid dreamed of when they grew up in a small town.
I’d had NYU and their offer of a rare full scholarship to thank for bringing me out of small-town life and into the city originally.
A search for affordable housing a few years later and an ad in the paper eventually led me down the Long Island Expressway in a beat-up white Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible.
After that, I’d stayed for the reasons so many do—the combination of suburbs, farm stands, and the sea in a place still near enough to the best city in the world to make it worth the trouble and expense.
And also, I liked it because no one knew me and I could reinvent myself.
A new state, a new life, filled with the youthful optimism and feeling of endless possibilities laid out before me, free of my past. I had nothing tying me down—not even a goldfish or a potted plant—so I could go wherever my job or life took me.
Sometimes it bothered me when I thought about it, usually in the long hours after midnight when darkness descended and my heart pounded in my chest—that I could be one of those people who died in their apartment and no one found them for days.
Dreary, I know. But thoughts like that were chased away by the morning light and, with it, the last remnants of fear scurrying away to the dark corners where they belonged.
Years later, I would learn about anxiety and panic attacks and post-trauma and all the myriad tools to cope with them.
But this was a different time—the late ’90s—and the mental health awareness movement was still a few years away.
So my coping mechanisms were few. One of which was the appearance of light and the sun. The world was less scary after dawn.
Mild caffeine from my tea had hit my bloodstream, clearing the cobwebs. And it was going to be a pleasant, sunny day. I could just feel it—the magic sparkle that tickled my skin when something good was hovering in the universe, waiting to descend.
Late nights and I were old friends, and I’d been born a naturally nocturnal animal, which was handy in a career like mine where late hours turned into early morning. My mom used to call me her baby owl, so I supposed it went back that far.
After she was gone, I needed to be on guard throughout the night, when chaos could threaten at any moment with my father bursting through the front door of our trailer in any state of mind.
Or worse, not coming in at all, so I’d have to stand sentinel all on my own, curled into the corner of my pink bed, clutching a unicorn for safety.
He wasn’t a bad man, my father; he just wasn’t a good man. Rough, unreliable, with a propensity for alcohol, selfishness, and a general distaste for anything related to parenting. But not a bad man. Which I suppose is me being generous. But forgiveness happens in time.
I don’t remember when it was that I began writing and telling stories, but the first record I have of it appeared in a small off-white diary with a Precious Moments character on the front and a tiny lock that didn’t need a key.
I still had it, tucked away in the small box of keepsakes I’d allowed myself to bring with me when I left home.
I’d write about my day, write about my mom, write about who liked who in third grade or what I wished for at Christmas.
I’d write about my father showing up with a three-dollar gas-station knockoff Barbie the day after my birthday, smelling of cigarette smoke, and my mother asking him to leave. I’d write about the world around me.
The last entry in that first diary, written in blue pen with stubby letters, was simply the date, November 25, 1980, and the words: “My mom died today.” After that, the writing ended for a while.
But in my teens, I picked up the pen again, started filling up notebooks, and it turned into a way of self-soothing.
It took on a kind of therapy, along with the one blessed thing I could thank my father for—his collection of albums and an obsession with rock ’n’ roll.
Music, words, and films. Put those three loves together, and that was pretty much me.
I haven’t talked about my parents in many years, and to do so feels strange. Like opening one of those old diaries and reading aloud. I probably should have been more open about it, but it was a time of my life with so many shadows that it was better to leave them alone.
Anyway, after years of pushing my way into the largely masculine music industry of the early ’90s, paying my dues at countless clubs on countless late nights, I found myself as one of those rare music writers who had made it far enough to count it as a real career (sort of) alongside my real passion, which was music filmmaking.
MTV was still everything in the ’90s, and even more so, band documentaries were all the rage.
My goal was to direct my own film one day—a behind-the-scenes documentary about a band or an artist. The calamitous spectacle of the Stones’ Gimme Shelter.
Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
The grittiness of The Decline of Western Civilization .
Even U2: Rattle and Hum , before I developed a more discerning eye.
These were my bibles. I know that today I just work on small local stories, and I don’t talk much about my old career, but back then, it was music only.
And I was pretty good at it, I’ll admit.
Which is all just to explain how I found myself in the spring of 1998 getting ready to head out for an interview with a British alternative rock band for a story I’d pitched to Spin magazine, which was a huge deal at the time.
The band I’d be covering on this particular evening was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, Mayluna.
They were the opening act, and I’d gotten the assignment only because a more senior writer had declined to stoop to the level of it, opting instead to cover the main act.
To give her some credit, Mayluna was the more interesting story, and I’m sure she knew it.
I was pretty sure she declined simply because she was afraid to fail, and I’m glad for small miracles.
They had already gained a reputation for being press-shy and difficult to pin down.
When I’d pitched it, I’d gotten the feeling that the editor had chuckled at the idea of sending me, knowing the enigmatic nature of the group.
I imagined him saying, Eh, why not. Let’s see what happens.
But I did have a knack for those sorts of stories.
Profile pieces were my skill. I had developed an uncanny ability to slide into the shadows and into the trusted inner sanctum of bands on tour, grabbing snippets of conversations and quotes in vans, buses, dressing rooms, backstage at music festivals, recording studios, and smoky hotel rooms where the magic often started and ended simultaneously.
Standing in the corner, observing, taking notes, recording when I could.
Barely noticed. I didn’t even use my real name, opting for a pen name instead.
From the time I was little, I’d been the most invisible, forgettable girl on the planet.
Easily left. Easily forgotten. Another thing I’d learned from my father, besides good taste in music, I suppose.
But I’d taken those traits and learned to make them work for me.
Made a whole damn career out of it. Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn to spin it into a superpower.