The Tunnel Song Guy
January 11, 2016
Dear Friend,
I know it's weird to hear from me like this, every few years. Things've been pretty good for me, But sometimes, something happens and I need to tell you about it. I hope you don't mind.
So, I got a call this morning from Sam. The Tunnel Song Guy has died.
That's going to make absolutely no sense to you, I guess. To you, to everybody, he's - he WAS - "David Bowie." It's not like I didn't know that. It's not like I don't use his name myself. But in my head, in my heart, before he's David Bowie, he is always, always, The Tunnel Song Guy.
The first night I got to know Sam and Patrick, the night we drove through that tunnel, and everything in my life changed forever, we heard one of his songs on the radio. It was "Heroes." And none of us knew what it was.
I know that seems ridiculous to you. It does to me, too, now! "Heroes," for God's sake! Hey, it was 1993, and we just didn't know. To us, he was the guy who did "Let's Dance" and "China Girl" and "Modern Love," and those were just pretty cool songs that were ten years old.
Anyway, it was like I told you 23 years ago now. There was Patrick, so smart and funny and friendly, there was Sam, so warm and open, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and they were both so welcoming, so generous, just letting me into their warmth, and we were in Patrick's pickup, driving, and Sam wanted to go through the tunnel so she could stand in the bed with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes like she was flying, and just as we got to the entrance, on came this song, this amazing song we'd never heard before, and it lifted us up and carried us, like instead of a tunnel we were actually going through the sky. We had no idea what it was or who it was, but it was that night, it was all of us together. It was The Tunnel Song, and it was just everything to us.
Over the months that followed, we kept looking. I guess we were pretty inept about it. How do you look for Bowie's "Heroes" and not find it, huh? It wasn't all we did, though, you know that. We had a pretty full year. I guess you remember that. It wasn't until that summer, when Sam left for college, that she found it, and when she came back to see me after I got out of the hospital, she had it on a tape, and we went back through the Tunnel, and it was just... It was amazing.
And, yeah, we knew then that it was "Heroes" and he was David Bowie, but what he meant to us personally, what the song meant to us personally... Yeah. It was "The Tunnel Song" and he was "The Tunnel Song Guy."
And now he's dead. Sam called me this morning.
I guess that's a surprise to you. When I wrote to you 4 years ago, we were together, and we were together when I wrote you 3 years before that. But we've never been able to really make it work. You know about my Aunt Helen. I've been dealing with all that, and I'm better than I ever thought it would be, but I have a very hard time handling relationship stuff. Sam has her own issues about these things, and our two sets of problems keep bumping up against each other.
I love her, and I'm sure she knows that. She says she loves me, and I believe her. We can't be, we don't want to be, with anybody else. But we can't make it work being together.
So I woke up this morning to that weird noise a phone makes when it's on vibrate, and there was Sam, in tears. "Charlie," she said. "I can't believe it. The Tunnel Song Guy is dead! David Bowie died yesterday!"
My stomach dropped out. I guess it's sort of funny. Here's a man I've never met, a man I hardly ever even think of by his right name, and I'm more upset that I he died than some people I've actually known in my life.
I know I'm not alone in that. I know it doesn't make me weird or anything. I can't turn on a radio or look at the Internet without hearing his voice, his songs, even the Tunnel Song, reading tributes and farewells and remembrances of him.
But I get inside myself a lot, maybe too much, so I decided to check in with you, and tell you about it. I don't know, I guess it just seems like letting you know these things makes me feel like someone, somewhere, understands me a little better. I hope you don't mind that. I'm sure you don't.
Anyway, thanks for reading this. I appreciate that, and I appreciate you. I'm not in trouble or anything. I'm fine, really. I just feel a little better when I share things like this with you.
Your friend,
Charlie.
January 13th, 2016
Dear Friend,
Well, a lot can change fast, I guess, so here I am again.
There was a knock on my door yesterday afternoon, awhile after I got home from work, and I opened it up, and there were Sam and Patrick.
Oh, I don't think I told you, Patrick came back from Seattle about three and a half years ago. He was with someone there, and he died. No, not AIDS! I know the noble beloved gay partner is supposed to die of AIDS, but Eliot was never one to stand on ceremony, so he came down with some blood thing I never really understood, and within a week, he was gone. Patrick tries to put a good face on it: "Hey, at least it was quick, right? I mean, he didn't suffer, hell, he was unconscious after the second day!" But it really hurt him to be around Seattle, around all the places he'd been with Eliot, so he came back to Pittsburgh. Right now, he's co-running a small alternative-press music website with Mary Elizabeth. They're staying above water, so that's okay I guess.
Anyway, I opened my door and there they were, Patrick and Sam, who drove back from Philadelphia - that's where she's been living - and they both had tears all down their faces. Patrick said that seeing how Bowie got to have eighteen months to prepare for his death, and he used it all creating this amazing art - have you heard that last album? Watched the videos? "Lazarus," my God! - and how Eliot would have loved to have had that opportunity, instead of leaving unfinished scraps and so on. Anyway, that was how it got to Patrick, and Sam said that she felt like he'd held up his end of the bargain with The Tunnel Song, and she hadn't, because I'm here in Pittsburgh, and she's in Philadelphia, and what the fuck?
Well, that made me cry. I mean, you know, I was close anyway, what with him dying the day before. But I felt like I'd let Sam down, like she needed me to keep up her end of the bargain, and it's not like she didn't fall down on it, but so did I, and she was the one taking the blame. I know, it doesn't make any sense. Patrick laughed at both of us with tears running down his face, which is something only Patrick can really pull off, I think.
Sam made milk shakes - you know, it's our "thing" - and we sat around blubbering and chuckling, and of course, Patrick had the CD with him, and he said, "There's really only one thing to do."
So we piled into his pickup, which is even bigger and beefier and more macho than the one he had 22 years ago, because he still loves going into car dealerships and swishing around while going for the butchest vehicle in the lot, and headed for the Tunnel.
It was about midnight at this point, and I've got to tell you, it was really cold. I mean. REALLY cold. It was maybe 5 or 6 degrees! But there we were, me and Sam in our winter jackets. She has this great old Navy Surplus parka that was apparently made for arctic use by submariners, like in that old movie "Ice Station Zebra," where they just surface under the ice-cap, and there's the bridge of the sub, sticking up out of the ice. It's dark blue - Navy Blue, of course - and has white fur around the edges of the hood, and when it's thrown back, like it was that night, while her face turned bright red and her ears alarmingly pale, and her eyes are warm and brown and excited and sparkling, she looks like a jewel in a museum or something, like everything around her only exists to better display her warmth and feeling. I just have some dumb khaki parka without a fur lining, that I picked up because it was the cheapest one at Target. (Yeah, I know, Target. Hey, at least I don't shop at Wal-Mart. Unless, you know, I'm really desperate.)
But there we were anyway, my face actually hurting with the cold, but I didn't care, because we were there again, in the bed of a pickup, flying through the tunnel, Bowie's voice, still as rich and deep and powerful as it ever was singing out the open back window as Patrick drove. I couldn't see his face, but I imagined a kind of savage smile, even as the tears ran. I didn't have to see him. I know Patrick.
The wind was like a personal assault, like bee-stings all over every exposed inch. I didn't care. Neither of us did. We stood there, side-by-side, holding hands, together. You know, we'd never done that before? She'd gone in back, or I had, and we'd leaned into the wind of the truck's motion, and spread our arms and flown like birds, watching the discolored pale tiles racing by us as we sped towards the tunnel entrance, but we'd never taken that flight together.
But that's how we were now, our hands tightly clasped together, the vicious wind savaging our bare faces, throwing our hair back, and she looked like some kind of goddess, and I marveled that I was privileged to stand at her side, to hold her hand, and then she smiled over at me, her own eyes still teary, wet tracks frozen onto her face, but still smiled, like having me there beside her made everything right with the world.
And The Tunnel Song boomed off the tiles and back at us, telling us that even against unstoppable foes, against insurmountable odds, fighting is still possible, and even a moment's victory is sweet enough. And we knew he was gone, dead, devoured by cancer, and still he was here with us, telling us we could fly.
The truck came to the end of the Tunnel, as it always has, as it always will, and the city unfolded in front of us, spreading lights like jewels across the horizon, and we knew again, were reminded again, of what that Tunnel and that city and that song had told us, all those years ago.
We were infinite.
It took about three hours of hot cocoa back at my place for us to recover. Patrick had left an hour or so before the end of that, saying to Sam with studied casualness, "You can crash here, right?"
And she'd looked at me for a long time with solemn eyes, and I'd looked back the same way.
The last time hadn't been good. It had ended with me curled up in a ball on the ground, and Sam, after a hushed phone conversation with my sister, pulling on her clothes and leaving me there. That was exactly the right thing to do. I was in no shape to be with her at that moment. But it ate her up. She told Candace that later. It ate her up because she was abandoning me, even though that wasn't it at all. Yeah, I'm okay, and I've got great help, but sometimes I'm still a very messed-up guy.
But I thought of The Bridge Song, I thought of what we heard, what we saw, what we were reminded of. I thought of how Berlin, which The Bridge Song had actually been about, had recovered from its wounds and come back together.
And I nodded back at her.
Don't worry. I'm not going to write about last night after that. We put the Bowie CD on repeat, and we were fine. That's already more than I want to say, and more than you want to read. I mean, awkward, right?
But we were fine, and I'm feeling great this morning, and I think maybe things are different now. I think maybe thinking about a city that healed, and the heroes who healed it, and the man whose words were inspired by them, and who spent a year and a half counting down his last days, and using them to share the beauty and mystery he was discovering with the rest of us... I feel like, if that's possible, there can't be anything that's too much for me, especially there can't be anything that's too much for both of us to handle together.
I have to go, now. I hear the shower running, so Sam's up. I'm sure she'll smile seeing me pounding away at this old Underwood Champion Portable she gave me 22 years ago. (Yeah, I use a computer for the "pay copy.") I just wanted to thank you again, and since I just told you about feeling sad, I wanted to tell you about how now I'm feeling happy. Now I'm feeling hopeful. Because now, once again, I feel infinite. And, better still, I feel we're infinite. Like our future and our opportunities and our choices...are infinite.
Your friend,
Charlie.