Jackie’s the most famous widow ever, young or old. She’s our Elvis, our Muhammed Ali. I was obsessive about her before, but now I was over the edge. I kept playing the first Pogues album, Red Roses for Me, just because of the album title—Jackie once said that those were the last words to cross her mind in Dallas before the shots, looking out at people in the crowd holding roses and thinking, “How funny, red roses for me.”
People remember her—well, let’s stop right there. Most of us weren’t born then. We don’t “remember” her, and we aren’t even picking up secondhand memories from older folks who were there. We invent our own memories of her based on tokens like the Air Force One photo with the bloody dress, the funeral salute, and so on, including the documentary record I found. For lots of people, Jackie is a symbol of poise in the middle of grief, and since she was thirty-four at the time, she’s also a symbol of youth. It’s weird how you sometimes hear divorced people complain that they’d rather be widowed. It’s not fun to hear people say this, if you’re a widow, but I don’t want to be judgmental about that—love dies in many different ways, and it’s natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it’s not a competition; there’s plenty of pain to go around. These people just don’t know—and why should they?—that widowhood is not dignified, but degrading enough to strip away every bit of dignity you ever kidded yourself you had, and that in her time Jacqueline Kennedy made a fool of herself in public over and over. People project all sorts of strength and dignity onto her, but she was a mess, which is part of why I worship her.
Jackie wouldn’t move out of the White House for two weeks after the assassination. It’s an incident that’s totally forgotten now, but it was a national scandal at the time. The Johnsons were trying to assume control of the White House, taking on their roles as President and First Lady, but they had to deal with the widow refusing to move out of her old room. They couldn’t very well kick her out, even when Harry Truman was on the phone to LBJ, telling him he needed to get rid of her and claim his own goddamn White House. Lady Bird was a champ about it, saying, “I wish to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort; I can at least serve her convenience.” But Jackie wouldn’t go. Two weeks! Not very “together” of her, now was it? Perhaps she knew she was being rude; she wasn’t born in a barn. But she did it anyway. She overstepped the boundaries of manners, dignity, taste, and basic human kindness, because what else could she do? Where was she going to go? How would she get there? Where would she take her kids? How would she find a new place to live? How could she pay for it? She had so many decisions to make and no time to make them. This one she blew. History has forgotten, but it’s one of my most cherished Jackie moments.
Jackie blew lots of other decisions, too, depending on which shady bios you believe. Did she sleep with her Secret Service agent? Did she sleep with Bobby, Sinatra, Brando, or the architect designing the JFK library? If she didn’t, why the hell not? Wouldn’t you? Did Ethel invite Angie Dickinson to sit in the front row at RFK’s funeral just to get back at Jackie for holding hands with Bobby at JFK’s funeral, since JFK slept with Angie on the night of his inauguration? Apparently, during the first few months, Jackie drank herself to sleep. Which means . . . what? She got to sleep? Fair play to her. I tried drinking myself to sleep, too, but it didn’t work. All it did was make me drunk, listening to the clink, clink of my ice cubes as they melted. Being drunk was a drag, but I liked the clink, clink and hoped enough bourbon would get the job done, so I drank a lot. Bourbon made me miss Renée bad, though, so I switched to Bushmills, but I still missed drinking with Renée and I still stayed awake.
The Jackie documentary record begins with the narrator announcing, “On Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:25 P.M., Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy began an ordeal unparalleled in human history!” It’s a low-budget quickie for sure, with the same actor doing the same accents for the Indian and African ambassadors. A French voice proclaims her “charmante!,” with accordion in the background. Somebody recites a poem (“The awful scream of the assassin’s gun / Widowed her for life”) in which “prayer” rhymes with “Bouvier.” The LP covers the eighty-hour rush from Friday afternoon, when the assassination happened, to Monday afternoon, when the funeral was over and the story ends. In this version of the story, the funeral is the happy ending: “Never before has such a grueling ordeal been faced with such grace and poise as Jackie Kennedy displayed throughout the tragic circumstances so abruptly and atrociously thrust upon her.”
I came to cherish this as a rock-and-roll record, as Jackie Kennedy’s debut album, the greatest hit of a spectacularly fucked up sixties pop star. I realize she did not “release” this album. She did not authorize it, produce it, endorse it, or anything like that. Yet I hear it as a Jackie record, perfect 1960s diva pop that’s up there with Dusty Springfield or Ann-Margret. It’s a bootleg authored by her against her will, stolen from her like her husband, beyond her control, in the grand girl-group tradition of starlets who get trapped and manipulated by the Svengali producer, sort of like Ronnie and Phil Spector.
I put my Jackie record up on the kitchen stove so I could look at it all day. I left it in its protective plastic sleeve so food wouldn’t get splattered on it. Since I never cooked anything but pasta on the stove, with tomato sauce out of jars, there were little red splotches all over the plastic sleeve. I liked the red splotches, yet felt guilty about not washing them away. When I had friends coming over I’d slip off the sleeve, and then Jackie was pure and pristine, on her white couch with the white curtains. When my friends left, I’d slip the cover back on, and she’d be spattered with blood all over again, corrupted by death, corrupted by being alive when her husband is dead, corrupted by knowing more than she’s supposed to know about death.
I also have my grandmother’s old copy of a quickie tribute mag, Jacqueline Kennedy: Woman of Valor. It reports, “Mrs. Kennedy’s appetite, never robust, has returned.” There was a lot of widow gossip in that mag that made me wonder, especially concerning the whereabouts of her ring. She put it on her dead husband’s hand in the hospital? Then how did she get it back? Did she get photographed without her ring on? What did his family think about that? After she put it back on, when did she stop wearing it? I studied this and the other magazines in my Jackie shrine:
Screen Stories, April 1965: “Jackie Pleads, If You Love Me, Please Leave Me Alone!” The article notes, “Many people have wondered why she was not at his grave at Christmastime.”
TV and Screenworld, March 1970: “Exclusive: Liz and Jackie’s Spending War!” The story has this scoop: “The two richest and most glamorous women in the world are having the most expensive cat fight ever known in history.” Liz bought the $1.05 million Krupp diamond, which Jackie wanted for her fortieth birthday; Jackie had to settle for $40,000 “Apollo 11” gold earrings from Aristotle Onassis, in the shape of the moon and the spaceship. According to the story, “Jackie, ever ready with the bon mot, chortled to actress Katina Paxinou, ‘Ari was actually apologetic about them. But he promised me that if I’m good next year he’ll give me the moon itself!’”
I immersed myself in Jackie trash like I was studying with a kung fu master. Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and death and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.
On the eleventh of every month, my friend Elizabeth would say, “Well, we made it through another month. So do we get her back now?” We always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead. We expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the
Final Goodbye. We figured that we’d said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We’d passed the test and would get back what we’d lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from coming back. The idea that there wouldn’t be a final goodbye—that was a hard goodbye to say in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. No private eye has to tell you it’s a long goodbye.
You tell yourself, I’ll get to the end of this. But there’s no finish line, just more doors to pass through, more goodbyes to say. You know that Smiths song “Girlfriend in a Coma”? At the end of the song, Morrissey whispers his last goodbye. I love that part; that line cracks me up now. Yeah, right, you think it’s your last goodbye. He has no idea how many more he’s got left. Good luck, kid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson knew the score: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” That’s from “Experience,” his late essay about human loss and his son’s death. There’s a lot of cold-blooded shit in that essay, and the winter after Renée died I read it over and over. I always had to stop to butt my head against that sentence: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” I was hoping that was a lie. But it wasn’t. Whatever I learn from this grief, none of it will take me any closer to what I want, which is Renée, who is gone forever. None of my tears will bring her closer to me. I can fit other things into the space she used to occupy, but whether I choose to do that, her absence from that space is permanent. No matter how good I get at being Renée’s widower, I won’t get promoted to being her husband again. The loss doesn’t go away—it just gets bigger the longer you look at it.
It’s the same with people who say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.
That’s part of why I worship Jackie. She just kept the story going. After she died, she went straight to the top of the charts, as the world’s second-most-famous dead person. Jackie had no manager, but she went right on being the national widow, the way Elvis continued as the King after he died, with a legendary heart full of affection for America and all the grieving nobodies in it. She owns the name Jackie in a way her husband could never own his. When you say Jack, most people probably think of Nicholson, the closest thing to a default Jack in American pop culture, but Jackie Kennedy owns Jackie, despite the gentlemen named Robinson, Chan, Stewart, or Earle Haley. When Tammy Wynette died, The Nashville Network did a tribute special in which the singer Marty Stuart mused, “I bet she’s hanging out right now with Jackie O.” I thought this was a shockingly beautiful thing to say. Tammy and Jackie didn’t exactly come from the same neighborhood. In life, Jackie wasn’t what you’d call down home; Loretta Lynn sang about her as a celebrity snob in the 1970 hit “One’s on the Way.” I’m sure Tammy felt the same. But in death, Jackie can be anything we want her to be, even a country star. She has red blood on her pink dress, but she’s wild and blue.
glossin’ and flossin’
DECEMBER 1998
When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?
I wanted to start. That was something. But what do you do with a desire like that? I didn’t know, so I did nothing with it. I had been a widower for over a year and the second year was rougher than the first. I had done nothing with 1998, and had no ambitions for 1999 except getting it over with as fast as possible. Given another year that Renée didn’t get, I planned to waste it. I made no plans to make things better. All I did was sit in my empty yard. Planet earth was blue, nothing left to do. Planet earth was pink, nothing left to drink.
I looked for spiritual solace in Chained Heat 2, arguably the finest straight-to-video women’s-prison flick of the early nineties (nosing out Caged Heat 2: Stripped of Freedom). Brigitte Nielsen plays Magda Kasar, the sadistic warden. You see, after the fall of Communism, they have empty prisons in Eastern Europe, so the sadistic wardens need to rustle up fresh prisoners. This is where innocent American girls come in. Innocent American girls who foolishly fall asleep on trains, allowing Brigitte Nielsen’s agents to plant drugs on them, setting up phony busts so Brigitte Nielsen can brush the hair out of their eyes with her riding crop (all sadistic wardens carry those, to handle insolent prisoners with hair in their eyes) and murmur, “Mmmm—your skin is so pink.” This is all in the first five minutes. They played it a lot on the USA Network around three A.M., when everybody who had a reason to fall asleep, or a way of getting there, was gone for the night and it was just us inmates, watching in our cells.
I would watch Chained Heat 2, or some other movie, and lie on the couch hoping I would fall asleep. If I tried lying in bed, I would hyperventilate and my heart would start beating too fast, until I would have to breathe into a paper bag. The worse the movie was, the more it cheered me up. I was grateful to stumble across Witchblade, featuring Julie Strain as a creature of the dark who feeds on the blood of gangsters. Or was it Witchboard 2: The Devil’s Doorway? I know—it was Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart. There’s a scene where one of the gangsters asks, “What time is it?” The other one says, “What, do I look like Big Ben? Am I Swiss? Am I ticking?” I was grateful to resume hyperventilating, just to drown out the dialogue. If I was lucky, I got to sleep before dawn; if not, I knew there were at least three other Witchcraft movies out there somewhere.
On one such night, I decided I was having a pulmonary embolism. There was no other explanation for the way I felt. I waited until six, when I thought the emergency room would open for business. I drank some bourbon, figuring that would either slow down the heart attack or make me too clumsy to die right. I raided the boxes in the bathroom closet, looking for some kind of medication that might come in handy, and found some Stelazine from 1986. I watched MTV all night and held on to my paper bag. Eventually I said Fuck it and started walking to the hospital, since it was too cold for the car to start. If they weren’t open, I’d just get in line and wait. I walked along the train tracks, paper bag in hand, clutching a throw pillow to my chest with the other arm, with the dawn over my head, and sat in the emergency room. Dr. Lutz was incredibly kind to me. She was so kind, I wanted to cry with humiliation that I was taking up her time when all I would do was let her down, the way I let down every other person trying to be kind to me. All she was going to get out of this was a reminder that some people aren’t worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness. But I was standing right there, with electric wires hooked up to my chest, and it was too late to protect her from me.
My EKG proved I wasn’t having a pulmonary embolism. It was so good, in fact, that the doctors were handing it around and complimenting it as if I had just done my first finger-painting. Dr. Lutz asked, “Has there been any major stress in your life lately?” I went, “Ummm . . . ” She sent me home with a handful of Xanax, a bottle of Mylanta, and my word that I would do a little better to make some changes. That was a start. I walked down to the train tracks and headed home. That was a start, too.
Christmas was coming. Everybody in my family was dreading it, so we decided to flee to Florida. We could swim in the pool and drink margaritas at the Astro-Lanes Bowling Lounge in Nokomis and cheer one another up until it was safe to return to the world. This was a really excellent plan. (Christmas is like the “Hey Jude” of holidays—every five years, at one-third the length, it would be a perfectly nice idea.)
As I flew down to Tampa, I watched the old couple in the next row doing a crossword together. I watched them the whole way, even though I hate crosswords, because I hate planes more. He was a lot slower than she was. Her vision was better, so she read the clues out loud and tapped his serving tray impatiently while he made his guesse
s. He spoke very slowly and loudly. The idea that Renée and I were never going to be these people made me furious, until I could feel my heart pound with rage against my chest. I felt better once I got to the Tampa airport. The walls were a bright 1970s orange, like a Houston Astros uniform from the days when J. R. Richards was their pitcher, and everything looked shiny and cheery. I felt even better when I caught up with my sisters and parents in the airport. I realized I was starved for some color and noise, and I knew that’s what I would get.
My sister Tracey was pregnant with the first grandchild in the family. It was very exciting. We assumed she was doing this to provide us with entertainment. Just for fun, Ann explained to her what an episiotomy is. As a biology teacher, Ann is a pro at explaining these things—pro enough to drain all the color from Tracey’s face. Tracey was standing there in the pool, shaking her head, while Ann and Caroline swam around her, nodding. Tracey turned to me and said, “Rob? It’s not true, is it?” But I was staying the hell out of that one. Tracey was reading a book called What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I told her they should do a special edition for her called What to Demand When You’re Demanding. The girls took turns playing rounds of “how to exhaust when you’re exhausting” and “who to madden when you’re maddening.” It was a good time. It didn’t make us all better or anything, but it was a start.
Love Is a Mix Tape Page 14
