You Thrill Me So
And when you kiss me with your ruby red lips
It thrills me so, I turn a backover flip.
— Jackie Wilson, “That’s Why (I Love You So)”
A speaker at the memorial for my friend Miles is saying
that when his wife died eleven years earlier, Miles never
got over it, which reminds me of a letter in the advice
column of today’s paper where the writer says she
met this guy, and they started dating, and it’s been six months,
and things are starting to get serious, but she hasn’t told
him that she’s being treated for Stage 1 cervical cancer
and wonders what she should do. I get it. On the one hand,
the writer wants to be responsible, wants to take into
account not only her own future but that of the person
she’ll probably fall in love with even though she isn’t
in love yet and neither is he. On the other hand, this is not
really big news, seeing as how the possibly doomed person
is just telling the hypothetically healthy one
what they both know already, which is that we’re all going
to get it in the neck sooner or later. In the meantime,
there’s love. All you need is love, say the Beatles, though
the Germans go them one better with Liebestod or “love-death,”
which refers to a theme in art and music generally as well as
the aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in which Isolde learns
of Tristan’s death but isn’t buying it and instead imagines him
coming back to life as a beautiful melody plays and the intensity
of her hallucinations increase until she falls dead herself,
so that even if the two sweethearts don’t end up having
a fabulous life together, at least they end up in the same ballpark,
so to speak. And then there’s that French phrase
la petite mort or “the little death,” a euphemism for
the momentary release from the self that follows orgasm
and does indeed amount to a sort of rehearsal for the moment
when we kick the bucket, buy the farm, give up the ghost,
meet our maker, take the dirt nap. But while I’m sure
all of that’s fine for Hans and Yves and Helga
and Gabrielle and them, here in this country we don’t die
of love. No, sir, we turn backover flips instead, or at least
Jackie Wilson does. Jackie said that when he kisses
his baby’s ruby-red lips, he turns a backover flip,
but he was just the first: Edwin Starr did it, so did Jimmy Ruffin,
and countless others turned a backover flip when they kissed
that Special Someone, which is just another way of saying
the singer loves his beloved to pieces, loves her to death.
Suffering is the one promise life always keeps.
According to Shakespeare, each of us owes God
a death, and he that dies this year is quit for the next,
be he one who succumbs to a massive heart attack,
as did Jackie Wilson on September 29, 1975 while
performing his hit “Lonely Teardrops” at the Latin
Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or dies slowly,
like Cicero Perry, a Texas Ranger who suffered twenty
bullet, knife, and arrow wounds in an 1844 battle
with Comanche warriors and was left for dead but rose
and staggered some one hundred and twenty miles,
bleeding, unarmed, and without food or water through
from Uvalde to San Antonio and refused to die till 1898
but not before marrying Margaret Ann Rousseau
on June 24, 1845 and having seven children with her.
That’s a lot of children. I wonder if nearly dying
made Cicero Perry feel sexy? Jackie Wilson actually did
backover flips on stage along with knee drops, splits,
spins, and one-footed across-the-floor slides,
but then he took it too far: Jackie wanted to sweat profusely
during his performances because, as he said to Elvis,
“Chicks love it,” so he would take a handful of salt tablets
and drink a lot of water before going onstage,
and if you didn’t know that high salt consumption
is a risk factor for heart disease, you do now.
I’m thinking that grief isn’t all bad. I’m thinking
that the woman with cervical cancer ought to
let herself fall in love with that guy, if that’s what
it comes to. How does she know he isn’t going
to get knocked off his bike on the way home
after their next date? The older you are, the more
you understand these things or at least think you do.
The Beatles were in their twenties when they recorded
“All You Need is Love,” but Wagner was twice
their age when he put the final touches on Tristan
and Isolde, and in those days the average German male
died at forty. I’m thinking grief gives you another chance
at love, lets you find a place to put that love
so that it’s yours always, unchanging till the moment
you yourself change. Miles told me once that he met his wife
at a dance, that on her headstone it says “It All Started
With a Cha-Cha,” and now the speaker at the memorial
service is saying again that Miles never got over
his wife’s death. I say he didn’t want to get over it.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Art
Our adorable friend Amelia broke up with her bad-tempered husband
whom we’ll call Joe Petroselli because she’d had it up to here
with his attempts to control every aspect of her life from what music
he listened to to whether or not she took her salad dressing
on the side or just right on the salad, not to mention his rages
when she refused to listen to Nine Inch Nails or wouldn’t try
ranch instead of green goddess, so now when either Martha or I
is the least bit grumpy or irritable, the other person says, “What’re you,
Joe Petroselli?” I didn’t really know him that well, but who knows
anybody, themselves included. Story goes that Elizabeth I was
so delighted with the character of Falstaff in the Henry IV plays
that she requested, which, coming from a queen, means commanded
Shakespeare to write another play showing Falstaff in love.
Supposedly Shakespeare obliged by writing The Merry Wives
of Windsor, a story considered apocryphal by many scholars
since it was first recorded a century after the play’s debut,
though the story persists because Merry Wives is comical
and tonally and stylistically different from the politically
and historically resonant Henry plays, meaning either that
when the queen has an itch for a certain kind of play
you better scratch it if you know what’s good for you, buster,
or that there are two Shakespeares just as there were two
Paul Verlaines, the one a conservative, pious, married,
heterosexual pillar of his 1ate 19th century Parisian community
and the other a radical, impious, bohemian gay adventurer
living amidst the dregs of society. Verlaine flipped back
and forth between these wildly divergent personalities as if
they were two different people. Flip, pow, splat! Fortunately,
both Paul Verlaines could write great poetry. Another thing
about whatever kind of writer you are is that all writers
change things around so they don’t get sued and/or beaten
to a bloody pulp, so maybe I should say again here that
the name of the guy our adorable friend Amelia split from
isn’t really Joe Petroselli at all, it’s actually one that sounds
more like Jake Malinowski but it’s not that, either.