Month: July 2011

The posts were pissing me off.

“She was a nut. Too bad she didn’t try harder to live.”

“Coming soon, the Michael Jackson/Amy Winehouse reunion album.”

“Boxed Winehouse.”

I realize that making fun of messy celebrities on Facebook is the new American pastime, and I run the risk of appearing way too earnest here (I pretty much always run that risk here) but there was no part of me that found anything about her death funny.

I’ve been sober nearly eleven years, with the help of other drunks and drug addicts. Stay sober long enough, and well-meaning friends who don’t have the addictive personality, or the disease, or whatever it may be that kept you from applying moderation to your life, will praise you for your strength and willpower. (We call these well-meaning friends “normies.”)

But here’s the thing that every sober drunk and drug addict knows. Strength and willpower had little to do with it. None of us can say with any certainty why we were able to “get it,” and hold on to it, when so many couldn’t. The statistics were against us, rehab or no rehab.

Listen to enough of our stories, and you’ll hear a common thread. There was nothing special about the last time we got drunk or high. It was rarely the worst day or night of our lives. Rarely did it involve the worst consequences we’d faced. Sometimes no matter how much we drank we couldn’t get drunk that night.

Maybe the right friend said the right thing at the right second, or the perfect stranger opened a new door. Maybe that afternoon we just got tired of the emptiness where our souls used to be. Every story involves luck, or coincidence, or, if you prefer, a bit of grace. It took more than five or six tries until it happened to me.

I was late to the Winehouse bandwagon. I often stubbornly resist the zeitgeist, and her “Rehab” song turned me off. But during one visit to Hawaii, the Manly Fireplug added Back to Black to our iPod. We listened to it nonstop that week. There was something about our hotel, a rather seedy, down-at-the-heels tropical outpost called the Queen Kapiolani, that fit Amy’s lyrics.

Back in San Francisco I developed a back-up singer hand gesture routine to my favorite song, “Tears Dry On Their Own,” which I’d perform in the car while the Fireplug was driving. That song contained my favorite of her lyrics:

I cannot play myself again

Should just be my own best friend

Not fuck myself

In the head

With stupid men

Here’s the thing about Amy. She knew who she was. A drunk, an addict, a cheater. She slept around behind her boyfriends’ backs. She had bad taste in men. She didn’t whitewash her sins or blame it all on the other guy, which so many pop songs seem to do.

She made me feel less alone with my own sordid past. With the part of me that is still, to this day, less than virtuous.

I don’t know Amy’s story. I know she did, despite her song, attend rehab, more than once. I don’t know what it was like for her to wake up in the morning, to want to write her next record but find it impossible. I only know the smallest slices of her life, fed to me through headlines and grainy photos.

I don’t know how badly she wanted to get sober. All I know is that her time ran out before grace found her.

Those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while know that I now spend a good chunk of my time with a guy I call the Manly Fireplug.  I don’t call him that to protect his identity – he’s just fine with notoriety, thank you very much – the nickname just cracks me up.

His name is Joe Gallagher, he owns Joe’s Barbershop here in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and we’ve known each other a few years now. Back when he first picked up a pair of clippers, he rented a chair in my barber’s shop. I used to sit in Pasha’s chair and just stare at Joe. A few months after Joe rented the chair, Pasha up and died of a heart attack in his mid-40′s, and so I naturally used the occasion to switch barbers. (I never said I wasn’t capable of cold calculation.)

Joe had a partner at the time, so I contented myself with feeling his hands touch my head every couple of weeks. He wasn’t stingy with advice. After hearing the 22nd installment of my doomed long-distance love affair with another blogger, he spun me around in the chair, looked me in the eye, and barked, “You just need to get fucked. Really hard.”

He had a point.

I went off to grad school in NYC and Joe opened his own shop. When I moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2006, Joe was single. We started working out together and one thing led to another. He swears I spent a lot of time bending over in front of him at the gym, putting weights away. I never said I was a fool, either.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Joe proposes to me as I lay sedated in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung. I think the experience clarified for us that we wanted to spend whatever time we had left in this world together. The sedation just made it easier to say yes. Not long afterwards, California passed Prop 8, taking a legal wedding off the table.

Like most couples we hit a rough patch, but came back together with renewed purpose and respect. “People don’t change,” the cynics say, but I have first-hand experience to the contrary. With every passing day he became more solidly the partner I’d always wanted. I had to work to do the same for him.

We’d talk about heading off to one of the other states that had legalized same-sex marriage. Joe turned 50 . “I’m not getting any younger,” he warned me. But I kept dragging my feet, wanting to wait until it was legal in California again, wanting to celebrate such a day in the place we call home, with our friends.  But there were no guarantees that Prop 8 would be overturned, and eventually I realized that we could both get what we wanted. We could get married somewhere else for real, and still come back to celebrate with friends.

Which is a very long way of saying that I’m getting married. In like five weeks.

I now understand why people take a year to plan these things. “What are your colors?” a florist asked Joe a couple of weeks ago.

“Um, colors?” he said.

Yeah, we’re not that kind of gay.

The Bay Area Reporter ran an article on some of us heading to NYC to get hitched. You can read it here. My only caveat is that I now better understand why some people feel slightly misrepresented when interviewed by the media. The whole Cher thing was sort of a joke. Also, the idea of a “traditional” wedding matters less to me than the idea of sharing the day with friends. But if that makes it traditional, then I guess I want a traditional wedding.

Two days later CBS radio interviewed us as well. It’s a nice, short piece, and you can hear it here.

Then ReyRey of ReyRey’s Photography offered to shoot some engagement pics, including the one above.

Joe and I had talked about keeping the whole thing low-key. It’s not like we can afford to throw a party for 500 people. But there is no low-key with Joe Gallagher. Frankly by now even I’m starting to find myself overexposed. But it seemed wrong not to mention it here, where I’ve chronicled ten years of my life, and where some of you have been kind enough to follow along.

Goddamn, I’m going to have a husband.