But occasionally – and this seems to happen to me with at least some regularity; not annually, but maybe every three years – seismic shifts happen to change your life all at once. It’s rare when that happens, and I think it’s rarer still when you’re aware of it happening.
I lost my depression at a rock show, everyone. We’ll get there.
But first, a detour. One of the things I’d spent a good portion of 2013 paying for was a trip to Disney World at another deluxe resort - my first monorail resort, at the Contemporary. Jeff, Paul, and I shared a room - not inside the A-frame, because sometimes dreams are too rich - but still a 15 minute walk from the Magic Kingdom. It was a trip almost entirely without incident (read: Kev's anxiety attacks were not on display, not even once, and no one could tell I was still rampantly depressed, which was great) and we hung out with local friends and Robert was there for most of it. In the middle of my trip, I got to meet someone I’d been friends with for over a decade and had never met face-to-face, a fellow named Drew Slone I met online when everyone was on LiveJournal and Facebook was a silly maybe no one really thought about. I hugged him very long and very fiercely, and met his family, and sometimes people don’t disappoint you.
Also, Robert got me a private meeting with Baloo, so everything was coming up Kevbot. Thank you, past job that paid way too much. You’re still paying dividends.
The trip went off without any major hitches, except for the fact that Marty and Joe and I decided to stay up all night on the last night, and then go to Waffle House at 4:00 AM before they dropped me off at the airport. What a fun idea, for people in their twenties, which we aren’t now and will never be again. I clambered aboard my flight and immediately started making everyone around me keenly aware of my bizarre sitting-up snoring, which sounds like a twentieth-century blender in a dystopian future anthropologist’s office struggling to behave according to its machinery and never making it.
I started March off with dental surgery, which I’d had to postpone first because of my sinus infection and then because of my eye infection. That sentence makes me feel like the damn Little Match Girl, but this was my reality. March roared in like a syphilitic lion. I was ordered not to go to the gym for four days, or do any strenuous work, which was great, because the absolute best thing for a depressive state is lying around the house unable to use your normal ways of combatting it. The only course of action I had was my writing, which was back in force again after a four-year hiatus.
The year before, I’d finished my first novel in four years, a somewhat nice, somewhat nasty little book about identity and recovered memory called My Agent of Chaos. It was a shaky first draft, but it was complete and not half-bad. I decided I wanted to write an all-new novel again, which is scary in the way writing your second novel is scary. You can do it once, and that’s always an achievement, and doing it a third time is sort of expected; twice is the hardest, because you don’t know if you used up all the weird magic that makes a book in that one drive toward the end. I decided the only way to make sure I finished the new book was to do it as a Kickstarter.
For those unfamiliar: Kickstarter is a funding source for art. People donate toward your cause and you create something unique and then give it to them. I’d used it twice before to rewrite old books to make them publisher-ready. Because I wasn’t working with traditional publisher models, I used the Kickstarter money as a contracted writer would use an advance; I put it toward the five or so months it took to devote the time and energy to completing my book, treating writing as a legitimate second job for which I had gotten paid. This year it was especially important; after losing two of my three jobs and being sunk in this damn depression for so long, I needed the boost.
The book I decided to write was a risky proposition. In the 2000s, I’d busily crafted a mystery series about a tubby private eye named Wayne Corbin. I did a fairly neat four-book arc, knowing what was going to happen in book four before I even started book one. Ever since, I’d been trying to figure out what happens next. Several attempts had turned out badly. But I knew I wanted to write it and I knew I needed a push to do it. I offered to write poems for people who donated and off I went.
The thing was a success, which surprised the hell out of me. I was in that time of my depression when I just expected things to go badly; in fact, a part of me now believes that I did Kickstarter specifically because I expected it to fail and I wanted another reason to feel bad. It didn’t fail, though. The money I needed for about four months of writing came in, and one day late in the month, I sat down and wrote the first line of a book I called Panic Town: “The guy was tall.” From small things, big things one day come. I went the John Irving route and knew my last sentence before I wrote the first sentence. All I had to do was get there.
And still that goddamn depression lingered. How can I have this success with my writing, and in my comedy – Johnny D’s Comedy Presents was still getting new audiences every week, and I was meeting so many great, funny new people – and still be unable to shake this sense of doom slithering inside me?
Then came the good news: Drive-By Truckers were playing in Boston mid-March, preceded by a band called Blitzen Trapper. I knew a couple songs by Blitzen Trapper – “Furr” and “Black River Killer” – but not enough to make me really excited. Opening acts don’t normally grab me and shake me and demand I buy their stuff, I Am Dynamite and St. Paul and the Broken Bones notwithstanding. I was intrigued but not clamoring. And here’s the other good news that was also bad news: I also had, absurdly, bought tickets for Patton Oswalt that night. They were on at the same time across the city from one another. Goddammit. Goddammit.
This was my decision: I was going to be flying to Washington DC the next day to see the same lineup with my friend Ian. I was only ever going to see Patton once on his tour. So I chose to give my DBT/Blitzen Trapper ticket to someone who’d gotten shut out and see Patton Oswalt instead. Ever since that night, I’ve wavered about whether that was the best or worst decision of my year. Patton was great and I laughed a lot, and I’m sure the DBT show in Boston was amazing … but none of that’s why. Here’s what happened.
I flew down to DC – my first time there – and met Ian at the airport. We grabbed some dinner and hung out and then headed right to the 9:30 Club. We’d seen DBT once before, and Ian was totally fine with going right up to the rail and standing all night and hanging with my DBT friends. Tonight, he was also fine with getting to the club an hour before the doors opened to make sure we had those spots at the rail. I do concerts a very particular way, which is why I normally go alone. When you meet someone who can approach a rock show the way you do, go to rock shows with that person. Ian and I have almost always had an easy camaraderie and that benefitted us here.
“Have you ever heard of Blitzen Trapper?” I asked him in line.
“Didn’t you put one of their songs on a mix for me once?”
I thought hard. I was really into “Furr” for awhile, but I’m really into any songs about werewolves. “Maybe?”
We entered. Met up with my friends. Some of them remembered Ian from Boston the year before. One of the coolest things about this show is that it was the first one I was going to see structured around the new album, English Oceans, which had come out recently and which we both loved absolutely. In this way, Ian and I were both on the cusp of a brand-new thing. I go to way more shows than him, but we were going to see this new species of show together for the first time. In that way, I was sort of happy I didn’t have the one up on him from Boston the night before.
The opening band took the stage. A few of them were mega sexy and so they earned points right there. Right away launched into a song called “Fletcher.” It bounced along for the first verse, the words washing over me … and then the chorus hit. Three of the singers joined in on mics, singing all together, and the easy rhythm and the direct delivery sunk into me. The drums crashed. The piano banged. The guitars and bass swelled and fell, floating along like an insistent promise. It took me three minutes but I was already in love. Between the first and second songs, I stole a glance at Ian and saw he, too, was transfixed.
“Did you know they were this good?”
“I had no idea they were this good.”
More songs hit us, all of them degrees of terrific. Then they steered the night into a song called, “Love the Way You Walk Away.” Music is different at a concert. The melody hits you first, the instruments; usually it takes a few listens for you to really hear the words. But I caught a bit of that first verse: “When you find what you’re looking for, you want it less.” Tears pricked my eyes. Something inside me crumbled. Then that three-part harmony in the chorus again and something inside me broke. I clung to the rail like it was a life raft. Ian was on one side of me and my Drive-By Truckers friends were all around me, and that was necessary, because I was all at once in emotional meltdown. All the real pain I’d been living inside for the past three months just fell away. I felt it go.
Look, it’s maybe trite to say I was reborn at a rock show. But there’s something to that. The rest of the show was great – they played the two songs I knew and a host of other songs, and that was before DBT came in and rocked my face off. But the next day, Ian and I raced around to record stores and bought as many Blitzen Trapper albums as we could find (there weren’t a lot) and the next night, we were in line two hours early, to guarantee that we were front and center to experience that again. The difference now was that the nagging voice in the back of my mind, the one that wanted me to think about the worst outcomes and the failure of my life at 38 and the fact that no matter how many novels I wrote, I was well past the time I could be a bestselling writer? That voice wasn’t there.
It wasn’t everything. It was just most everything. My depression would come back during the year – a few times – and I’d still have some anxiety attacks and at least one major panic attack, but things were on the road to being okay for the first time since my Whole Night Out.
I got on the plane from DC to Boston five hours after the rock show ended that second night, exhausted but with the album American Goldwing in my ears. April was going to be better. It had to be. I had a place to start from now.
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