It’s raining and fog lays a smoky screen over the distant hill dotted with houses that twinkle like fireflies at sunset. I stare out, feeling some guilt about watching Rick James videos on YouTube. I told Cheri and she went: “You know all he sang about was ‘bitches and hoes,’ right? Disgusting. And all he did was free base coke and have orgies! What’s your problem, have you sunk so low?”
All that stuff aside, which is not the entirety of his story, I like how he had this fantastic urgency to be himself come hell or high water, and he got plenty of both during his life. It shines out in his music and fashion choices. (Me? I don’t even have the guts to tell you, Cheri, that I don’t like them fried sardines you’re so proud of making. They are oily and not tasty!) Also, he had a thoughtful side as evidenced by some of his ballads you rarely hear on the radio (“My Mama”). In his autobiography he said he mostly wrote “Super Freak” for white people to dance to. He didn’t consider it one of his great tunes. I only liked that song as showcased in the Little Miss Sunshine scene.
Cheri then says, “You actually read the Rick James autobiography? Are you mad?” More words tumble out crushing glowing ruminations on the spirit of his music into ashes of clinical chatter pontificating on his addiction and abusiveness habits, not to mention his legendary shit-talking. But I like his shit-talking, it’s funny as hell. He was jealous of Prince, clearly, because he called him a short little egotistical nobody. Now that’s jealousy. He might just’ve been proud to be jealous! Isn’t that cool?
Cheri: “Cool, you say? You can have him, Sweetie. You’re from the Midwest. Don’t pretend to be all rough and tough. You’re just a marshmallow gal posing as some city chick. Your heart is fearful and guilty. This is part of what I love about you, your pastoral corn fields energy. Your spirit animal’s a deer, sneaking apples from the fields, looking this way and that to make sure ya won’t get caught, even though you’re legitimately famished. You’re trying to be something you’re not. Just be yourself for God sakes!”
“Well, Cheri, that’s why I channel Rick James, I have some inner flamboyance and he’s an inspiration.”
(His autobiography is called The Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Super Freak.)
“I could give a good god damn. You’re setting our progress back decades listening to that misogynistic stuff.”
That was the last time I discussed my guilty pleasure with Cheri. Why is it we boil an artist’s talent down to whether or not and what specifically their gross imperfections are, whether drugs, booze, sexism, self-torture, abuse. Does it serve to glamorize their lives or is it so we ordinary, derivative folks feel superior?
The fog out there drifts up the hill in a sheen, dissolving into the blue-black sky, exposing those softly twinkling houses now like brashly lit searchlights. I am lonely. Rick fills the dish washing, laundry folding, floor sweeping drearies with a hilarious, touching, flawed as hell lifeblood. However, Cheri makes me feel like it’s already necessary to apologize to people whom he abused and flung insults at during his lifetime. Sorry in advance for bopping around this cavernous house blasting him. It’s near impossible being a dainty soul when real-deal funk takes a hold.
I play “You and I” over and over, wanting to get at its heart. It is a complex funky love song, an ode to friendship too, a testament that those two beloved reasons for being are intertwined, as James explains in his autobiography. The version featuring Parliament is over eight minutes long. I study the serious foxy musicians pulling it off effortlessly. There’s another song I been listening hard to, “Groove Line” by Heatwave. The end sounds like a train pulling away from the station carrying a loved one, filled with sad longing, an effect I believe the French horn creates. Whoever wrote the music must’ve been some place far from home at the time.
Cheri is pretty sure my loneliness stems from not being capable of watching a screen for too long. It gives me a headache due to I think the odd disconnection it creates. This is a total disability these days as supposedly all the heartbeats of life exist within a screen’s vast innards. The exception is the music videos, which you become immersed in because they’re from before your time or during your time but were unavailable in your region.
“Now don’t get all up on your high horse,” Cheri chimes up when I talk this way, “Screens is life now.” She can immediately spot when I’m being a snotty bore.
So, she says you can get a therapist online. You don’t even got to leave the house, with all your social angsts going on. She pokes how I wouldn’t have to deal with those cold sweats when talking to people, especially professional persons who are organized and put together. Meanwhile what did Rick James wear but funkadelic haberdashery? He was put together on his terms. It’s pretty certain he wouldn’t make you sweat if you came up to him in person. Online therapy, wow, it’s beyond nonsensical debating why you’d get online therapy for having screen issues.
Stumped by her reasoning, which is the goofy kind of logic that goes a long way these days, I yelled to Cheri: “Give it to me baby! I can’t sit in this ole hot tub all by myself!”
Amore Cheri, she didn’t get the reference (“Give it To Me Baby”, 1981) and frantically made a call to 1-888-Get-Help or some shit.
literally stories 
Susan
The older I get the better I understand the value in giving people I do not or never could have known a break. Now, Rick brought a lot of trouble on himself, but I know that cocaine can make you crazy. That is never an excuse, but the guy did his time and although (perhaps) the fate of his soul is up to a greater power, I figure he is at quits with the earth he left behind.
“Cheri” here, presents a troublesome sort who claims to be progressive, yet only to a point. For a person to be progressive they must have a sense of charity for all, and not just the people they vote for. Even the most wildly left person you can imagine is guilty of intolerant far right thinking when they aim a gun at someone they hate due to politics. The gulag was invented by leftist folks, so we all bear watching–not from outside, but from within. The truly cool people are seldom very popular or known.
Anyway, there’s still room, I hope, for super freakiness in our lives.
Great to see you back with such a delightfully off-center and thoughtful work.
Leila
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I think Leila nailed it in her comment about this “off-center and thoughtful” work. Can we separate the human from the work? Should we? Excellent Sunday Whatever.
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Dear Susan
Thank you for this brilliant piece of writing, and thanks to Literally for publishing this!
Dorothy Parker, Shirley Jackson, Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski would’ve loved this story. (I think they’re smiling down right now.)
This reads like autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiography, a crucial mode in modern and contemporary writing where the individual subject is being swamped, and even washed away forever, by mass culture.
This story is not just about one artist, it’s about the way/s we all live our lives now. It seems there really are two ways of being these days: you can join THEM and become a cartoon parody of yourself; or you can (in whatever ways you can) turn away from “THEM” and somehow maintain the authenticity of the most important person there is for you: yourself. Your Self, your individual, unencumbered, free Self, which still exists if you look for it.
In other words, rebellion, the most effective forms of which these days are not marching in the streets, but refusing to buy into the Big Lie in all its myriad, serpentine forms.
The VOICE of this narrator is amazing! It sounds like a person talking, but is also lean and non-wordy, incredibly intelligent and amazingly real. And the voice is created by a SENSIBILITY that is subtle and unique.
The NARRATIVE in this piece is also great. It’s amazingly natural and it flows like real life, instead of being held up (lamely) by the artificial supports of a mechanical plot device.
And any time the antagonist in a piece of writing is given such great speeches and lines as Cheri is in this piece, one knows that one is reading a truly well-developed, well-done piece of writing. A grand example would be Paradise Lost by Milton, where Satan is the one (other than the author himself) who’s given all the best speeches.
This piece of writing will be around for a good long while. It will not merely disappear; it’s so good that it will continue to resurface one way or another. Writing this good tends not to disappear, even though it might be largely ignored, and certainly misunderstood by many, for a good long while, too.
Great work at all levels! Unbelievably well-written, unbelievably humble and yet unbelievably important, too…Thank you.
Sincerely,
Dale Barrigar
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Hi Susan,
As someone who has over a dozen Gary Glitter songs on my playlist, I can understand this.
Oh by the way, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ was brilliantly weird.
I had a skeleton that danced and sung ‘Super Freak’ but the fiends attacked him and broke him.
I think this paragraph sums this up –
That was the last time I discussed my guilty pleasure with Cheri. Why is it we boil an artist’s
talent down to whether or not and what specifically their gross imperfections are, whether drugs,
booze, sexism, self-torture, abuse. Does it serve to glamorize their lives or is it so we ordinary,
derivative folks feel superior?
What does bug me is how certain artists are abhorred when Jackson is still idolised by many!!
I thought this was brilliant!!!
Hugh
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Susan
PS
After a couple more readings of this piece, I like it even more than I did before!
Dale
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Thank you for your thoughtful comments and for giving this story a place on the LS site. It felt right sending you this odd duck because whether you accepted it or not, I knew you’d give it a read and provide honest feedback, & am grateful for your openness. Rick James wasn’t an angel by any stretch, but in the end listening to his funky tunes proved to be a pretty effective mental health tool for the isolative MC. The restorative power of art can make the meek feel strong, sometimes even flamboyant. His spirit is still around, providing musical rehab lol! Thank you again!
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Pat Boone lives forever, and Elvis dies at 43 on a toilet. Make of that what you will, but I did know about OJ Simpson, Hank Williams and a lot of others.
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