Self-Discography #6: "Heaven or Las Vegas" by Cocteau Twins

The problem was that, as a teenager, I believed I was devoid of emotion. In my journals from the last couple of years of high school, I would wonder what was wrong with me, why I couldn't open up; why I could not express myself authentically; why I couldn't let rip an ear-splitting scream of frustration.

What people saw without my realizing it was my face contorting into various expressions, and they heard my words conveying with an amazing clarity exactly what I thought and felt. And yet...I still believed there had to be a better way. Leave it to a perfectionist to try and figure out a more "efficient" way of expressing what he feels.

Which is why I could have cared less when I first heard the Cocteau Twins. It sounded so mushy...spangly...muted...airy...twee. The vocals trilled all over the place and the guitars seemed as if they were all mashed together with no room to make out the chords properly. It was just one more thing the goth kids were playing so they could sway and quasi-dance to it and then talk about how alternative they were, so far outside the mainstream.

Besides, I was already leaning more folk at this point--my ears seemingly wanting the more literal heartbreak conveyed by Natalie Merchant and Tracy Chapman. I didn't have the patience to navigate through this aural Jell-O.

One night, however, as I sat huddled in my basement, again trying to articulate with ballpoint pen why it was I felt so inarticulate, Dave Kendall was on MTV's "120 Minutes" blathering on and on in his annoying way about the Cocteau Twins, and just as I was about to turn it off, the soaring intro of "Iceblink Luck" ushered in this wave of musical warmth. I was (and remain) a sucker for a slightly left-of-center pop song,
and this was simply one of the most beautiful--the guitars crisp, the bass perfectly nimble, anchoring it all for Elizabeth Fraser's no longer pixie-ish voice. It swooped low and settled in a beautiful mid-range.

To the goth devotees of the Twins, I would later learn, this song was betrayal. To me, it was like receiving the most beautiful invitation to a party. I put down my pen and closed the journal. I had almost no idea what she was saying. The only words that came through? "...that will burn this whole madhouse down."

***

I was sitting on the hood of my stepfather's truck in western Nebraska. The air was thick with heat and humidity, but a gusty, westerly wind was kicking up as a phalanx of thunderstorms marched down off the slopes of the Rockies, advancing across the rolling prairie.

I'd been driving for two days already, leaving Portland on a broiling August afternoon to head toward Vermont, where I would attend a college I'd never seen. I was driving the 3,000 miles alone. My mother was panicked; my stepfather, predictably, said little. He just looked at my mother and stated, "He'll be fine."

I'd desperately wanted to leave Portland. I wanted to leave two years of confusion, frustration, and exhaustion that mixed my coming-out, trying to finish school, and deal with my family. Even over the summer--when I thought I'd left most of this behind--I'd been obsessed with a boy who worked at a cafe near the movie theater where I worked. And in predictable Portland gay boy fashion, he'd expressed interest, played hard to get, apologized, and then did it all over again. I'd tormented myself enough in my journal, word after word running in circles that annoyed even me, detailing, outlining, explaining every little aspect of it all. You know, in case I wasn't actually expressing myself clearly.

And when I'd finally hit the interstate, I realized those words were gone. I rolled down the truck windows into 100 degree heat and let "Heaven or Las Vegas" play as loudly as I could. There were words here, but they weren't really words that conveyed accusations or questions; they were not hard facts. They were emotions, suggestions, hints at a new feeling that could replace the spirals of letters that had seemingly gotten me nowhere over the last four years. From the all-enveloping warmth of "Cherry-Coloured Funk"--which I insisted on listening to as the sun set behind me--to the mournful "Road, River, and Rail," I found myself coming back to the cassette every other hour. And when, at night, I tried to write about all that I was seeing from the driver's seat, the words seemed to shrink in number, their meaning becoming slight.

By the time I made it to western Nebraska two days later and saw, for the first time, the desolate beauty of a sea of tall grasses spreading across the visible landscape, my shoulders had begun to drop from my ears. I felt happily empty, in fact. I had no tears of self-pity. I had no words of recrimination. I had no words at all.

I'd pulled over, taking an obviously little-used exit off the interstate and followed the state highway south for a ways before pulling over on the side of the road.

Leaving the stereo on, I'd walked down the highway shoulder, Elizabeth Fraser's voice mixing with the rising wind. Off in the distance, tendrils of rain reached the ground. Lightning flickered in the dark anvil-shaped cloud. I came back to the truck and leaned back against the windshield, my leg splayed down the hood. I strained to hear any words in the music of the album's last and most musically obtuse song, "Frou Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires," which began with distorted guitar in the background of a baroque piano line and erupted into a regal shower of non-words that seemed to express that everything was, as my stepfather would say, fine.

To my surprise, a cloud had grown out of the bottom of the thunderstorm out there on the prairie. A thin tornado. I wondered if I should leave, but it seemed far enough away. The sound of the wind in the grass seemed to carry away the last strains of the song coming from the stereo behind me. For the first time in what felt like years, I was--happily, contentedly--alone.