My Legitimate Favorites, Vol. 2, "Going to California" by Led Zeppelin

Monday, September 8, 2008

Around the end of the summer I first fell in love with Sufjan Stevens, my friend Matt and I went to a beer bar in Amherst called the Moan and Dove, a place that plays Bob Dylan on it's jukebox and serves various snooty beers from all over the world, typically populated by pretentious, bearded male grad students. At the time I was big into what I was calling "Social Engineering," which basically just meant I would create elaborate and false back-stories about myself and get to know strangers as that person, seeing how they reacted to whatever facade I'd adopted at any given time. I can't remember if we were pretending to be brother and sister or married at the time, but regardless Matt and I were deeply entrenched in one of my experiments when we started talking to these two guys sitting at the bar. One of them was a forgettable, plastered bro-dude who was hitting on anything that moved and was too drunk to really articulate. The other, his friend, was a ginormously tall and eerily soft spoken boy whose name I can't remember. He turned out to be one of several random, amazingly magical people I've brushed shoulders with in my life and, even though I can't remember his name, I've never forgotten him.

Bear with me; this story and how it eventually tied back in to my life is a long and sappy one, but it's worth telling. And I don't tell it enough.

Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe he was just an incredibly open person, maybe he was making up stories just the way I was- but either way he opened up to me almost immediately. He told me a story about a time in his life, not too far in his past, where he'd been addicted to heroin for years and gotten his then-girlfriend pregnant. The two of them had nothing in common but drugs, he told me, and when he decided to get clean he had to make the difficult decision to leave both her and the child behind in order to do it. He lifted up his t-shirt and showed me a tattoo across his torso, his son's name in old English lettering. When it seemed like I was about to feel sorry for him, he waved his hand in the air and said that he'd started wandering, sleeping on couches, panhandling and hitchhiking. He was lonely, still going through withdrawals, and was overpowered by guilt about leaving his son behind when he thought he might give up and relapse. That was when he heard "Going to California" by Led Zeppelin on the radio in a mall and had a revelation at the words "find a queen without a king / they say she plays guitar and cries and sings." He told me he knew then that if he just kept moving eventually he would meet that girl in the song, and she would be the key to everything.

Now, I very, very rarely meet people who hear and regard music in the same way that I do- as having some mystical, universal property that can change anything at any given moment. Needless to say, I was intrigued. When I asked what happened, a light seemed to come across his face. "I found her here," he said. When he randomly and bizarrely ended up in Western Mass, he saw a girl playing her guitar on the street in Northampton, singing and crying. He brought her a cup of coffee from one of the nearby coffee shops and they started talking. After two months they moved in together, and he claimed to not have touched any drugs since. Once he was officially sober for a year, he told me, they planned to go back to get his son so they could raise him together.

So I did what anyone would do, I asked what she was like. But instead of telling me, he grabbed his drunk friends' cell phone and called her, right there in the middle of the bar. "Hi, baby, it's me," he said, "I was just thinking about you."

Yes, that really happened. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I was there, and it happened.

Years and thousands of miles later, I was on a plane flying back to Massachusetts from Oregon. I was in an especially frantic rush to leave for reasons I won't mention, and so ended up on a last minute flight (that my grandmother paid for) where I flew for 5 straight hours in the middle seat, between two strangers, without enough elbow room to write, read a book, or do anything other than sit there bone straight listening to music. I was completely bankrupt, financially and emotionally, and hadn't realized until I was on the plane that I didn't even have batteries for my walkman. The only options left for me were the various in-flight radio stations, most of which, oddly, were talk radio and christian music. I compromised on a classic rock station and settled in.

I feel weird saying that it was one of the worst days of my life; I know it sounds lamely melodramatic, but it really was. I was a basketcase, and totally lost. I was about to turn 25 and had absolutely nothing to show for it but a trail of fuck ups, stupid decisions and failures. I was ashamed, and it killed me to go home knowing what was in store for me there. Aside from hearing "I told you so" from everyone I'd left behind, I was moving back in with my parents because all of my money was gone. I knew that if I was lucky enough to find a job at all, I'd need to have my folks drive me to and from, since I'd sold my car before I moved. I felt unlovable and totally unremarkable, in ways I never had before. It wasn't at all where I imagined I'd be at 25, which is an understatement, and any changes I could possibly make seemed so far away from me then that something in me just broke. It's heavy to say so now, but I was seriously considering suicide at the time. I was suddenly so afraid of everything. I went so deeply inside my own head that, if I were going to be honest, I'd have to admit I haven't totally come out yet. Maybe I never will. Maybe that was the point.

You know where this is going, I'm sure. Somewhere over those mountains in Wyoming that go on for hours and hours, "Going To California" came on the station I was listening to. I really, really listened to it for the first time and this feeling of deja vu washed over me.

"I spent my days with a woman unkind,
who smoked my stuff and drank all my wine.
I made up my mind to make a new start,
going to California with an aching in my heart.

Someone told me there's a girl out there
with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.
So I took my chances on a big jet plane,
never let them tell you that they're all the same.

The sea was red and the sky was grey,
I wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.
The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake
as the children of the sun began to awake.

It seems like the wrath of the Gods
got a punch on the nose and it's starting to flow;
I think I might be sinking.
Throw me a line, if I reach it in time
I'll meet you up there where the path
runs straight and high

to find a queen without a king,
they say she plays guitar and cries and sings.
I ride a white mare to the footsteps of dawn
Tryin' to find a woman who's never, never, never been born.
Standing on a hill on my mountain of dreams,
telling myself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems."

I thought about that boy in the bar, and how he'd chosen to take the words to the song as some kind of prophecy during the darkest time in his life. I can't compare what happened to me with heroin addiction, obviously, but I still suddenly so related to the song that I decided to do exactly what he had done. I told myself I needed to keep moving until I found that person who was the last piece of my puzzle, until something made sense again. Laugh, whatever. It was the only thing that got me off that plane that day.

I did what I had to do, and it was just as difficult as I feared it would be. I was a ghost in my parent's house; just going back and forth to a crappy $10 an hour temp job, smoking a lot of pot, and never leaving my room. Once Renee finally convinced me to re-present myself to the outside world, she and her friend David came and picked me up from my parents house. The three of us just drove all day. With one incredibly ill-advised exception (which I also won't mention), it was literally the first time I'd left my room to do anything but work since my plane had landed. These are all pictures from that beautiful day.





I didn't know it, but that day I met the key to my new everything, the future father of my son, who plays guitar and cries and sings. Four months later we moved in together, and today I'm on the other side of all that darkness, living in love with my awesome little family. I hope that mysterious boy from the bar is too, somewhere.

Thank you, whoever you were.