Queer God Worship: Letter to Will Oldham
“the weight of everything, Mount Eerie, all the songs you’d sung”
An Open Letter to Will Oldham
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My friend Daniel bought me, my girlfriend, and himself tickets to your September 6th performance, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy at the Aladdin Theater in Portland, OR. Daniel is a fan of yours, and I enjoy what of yours I've heard, though I will confess to not “owning” any of your music.
This is what I remember.
You were staring at me for most, if not all, of the set. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt like that. Maybe it’s because I’m bald and have a beard. I’m sure I’m not the only one there who felt like you were staring at them, and thought maybe it was because they were bald and had a beard. Many people in Portland seem to be balding these days, and we do enjoy our beards, both ironic and not.
You sang an Everly Brothers song that I used to get a private thrill listening to when I was fifteen, on my dad’s Pioneer console that he bought at the factory when we were stationed in Japan. I loved that stereo, tube amp and all. I loved that song, because it was about something I wasn’t supposed to know anything about yet. And, unlike my Daddy’s Steppenwolf records, it did it without doing it, which I loved. I loved that you played it in your own way. I loved that it reminded me of being a kid the way that a smell can remind you of a place.
You talked about bananas and the Baha’i faith in between songs. My uncle Dick, the PT Boat medic who came back from Vietnam with a morphine addiction, was an insufferable prick that claimed to be of the Baha’i faith after he cleaned up and started working as a addiction counselor for the Navy in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. He got me a job roofing houses when I went to visit him the summer after my senior year of high school. You haven’t lived until you’ve roofed houses in Florida in July. The guy he hooked me up with for the roofing gig was one of his sponsorees in the program and went on a bender three days before I was booked to fly back to Oregon and drank up my last check. My uncle explained the Baha’i faith to me back then, but it’s been too many years for me to remember much about what I never really cared about in the first place. Baha’i people don’t seem to require my understanding in order to get along, almost invisibly, in my life. Like, as you said, the space between bananas in a bunch.
You talked about seeing the musical Death Trap in New York and how it made you feel when the men kissed. That it was “gross.” Then you noodled around on your guitar for a minute. Then you explained that you used to fool around with your friends when you were young and got over it and couldn’t believe that there were people who never got over it. I’m paraphrasing. Forgive me. I drink.
You played "I See a Darkness" and "Nomadic Revery" and I remembered that one was yours and didn’t remember the other one was. At one point, I couldn’t sit there any more and listen. "Nomadic Revery" did something to me. I had to go outside. Well, I went to the bar and paid too much for a shot of Dirty Bird and then went outside and smoked and tried to distract my heart by reading the road signs out loud. It wasn’t just "Nomadic Revery." It was more like the weight of everything, Mount Eerie, all the songs you’d sung. The way I always feel empty in a crowd of people.
I saw the film version of Death Trap on Showtime with my dad a few years before he died. I remember the scene you talked about. Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine leaning over their double desk and kissing for the first time. It was an electric moment. I may not be remembering it right; but sometimes I prefer my memory to the truth. My father and I turned to each other. Me, I guess, wide-eyed, never having seen grown men kiss like that before, and knowing that it was novel. And novel, I knew then, and know better now, is the best friend of thrilling. That thrill made me want to kiss a man. I was 13. I hadn’t thought of men as a possibility in that way, before that very moment. I hadn’t fooled around with my friends when I was little. My father, seeing that I was amazed and perplexed by what was happening on the nineteen-inch screen in our living room, explained to me that there were some men who did that sort of thing. Then he told me about what he and my uncle Jimmy used to do to new guys when they were stationed together in Okinawa.
We lived in Okinawa in the early nineteen seventies. Both my uncle Jimmy and my dad were communications techs for the Navy. In those days something my dad referred to as the “black rose,” which also goes by the names “Vietnam rose,” and “black syphilis” was “killing men” in hospital wards all over the island. They would go insane, screaming that they wanted to die, writhing in agony to the end. Turns out that accounts of “black syphilis” were deliberately embellished and spread by officers to discourage soldiers about to transfer to the Vietnam War from sleeping with Vietnamese prostitutes.
I have two friends that are close enough to me that we may as well be brothers. One of them fucked a neighbor kid in the butt when he was nine or ten. The other grew up a snake-handling Pentecostal, and cut off his thumb with a radial arm saw working stoned in the sexual reassignment capital of the world. One can sit in a gay bar even if there is gay porn on the TV screens. The other one can’t. I’ve kissed both of them. And we’ve compared dick size, hard. And played the Ghost Busters piss game, three men on a john.
My dad and my uncle Jimmy used to sit in a cinder block hut, typing out messages being beamed around the world by these gigantic steel antennas shaped like dinosaur cages. Shifts went round the clock, and because they were family, they were never allowed to work on the same shift. They were both bearded, six foot, two hundred pound bears of men, with thick, black curly hair. Whenever there was a new man coming on the team and my dad and uncle were shift-changing in front of the new guy, they would, without a word between them, walk over to each other and exchange a passionate, deep kiss, pulling away to stare into each others' eyes. Then, silently, whoever was staying on would sit down and put on their headphones, while the other would walk out to the parking lot. They had the entire navy communications unit in on the gag, and would drag it out until the guy finally cracked and said something. If they never asked, they never told.
At the end of the show you said something about wanting to play more and more encores because it was scary, the show ending for you. I understood. Afterward we went to the local and got drunk. It helped me not to think so much about everything and how it never fits together.
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