Devils & Blue Dresses: My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend

adult intentions replay themselves until I am sickened by my own presence. I had first been here when I was a young man. I thought I had, in the wreckage of my selfish pursuits, left it behind. But its spirit still exists. It stares into my twitching eyes and I am helpless to stop it. My selective memory has failed. I am vulnerable. The images play out, and I walk to the door. I look back, the way you might look at a scar on your body, with regret and sick infatuation at the loss of purity.
    Beyond the filthy needles of inhumanity and its running dogs is the world I, at all costs, aspire to. After all, it must be better than yesterday. It is the only promise I made to myself: that world overdosing on the magnificent passion of sad and common characters, with broken and stolen dreams sent aloft on the smoke and haze of their exhausted, consumed brilliance. Such a dark vapor that, when lovingly inhaled, carries the communication of the arts through rebellious evolution and satisfaction of the retired senses, exhuming cerebral burial grounds.
    There is the beauty of the ugly who think they’re beautiful, and the holiness of undaunted, crippled believers with newborn, bird-like mouths open and crying for regurgitated life. A transsexual masseuse asks where it hurts the most. Eyes reflect the truth of their hearts. The world of consecrated refuge versus the unbearable reality of a society addicted to addiction.
    There is betrayal on every front at the hands of invisible friends. It’s still playtime, time so unwittingly given up in our youth to enter the cage of adult promise. It is, finally, a place where life becomes art and the only real harm that can come to you comes by your own hand. But now I’m left to wonder at the odds of keeping that while haunted by the cry of innocent, trusting children. I slap my face hoping to wake before I sink any further, and like a parent after an abortion, I turn to face the fire.
    For my very life and damaged sensibilities comes the age-old question: what is love? Not closing the door completely, lest someone insanely love in a non-punitive way, I give the age-old answer. I don’t know. Is it humanism in broad terms? I don’t think so. I would give the same care to a hurting animal as I would to a human. Probably more. For my understanding, love must be about what did and did not occur in my family and career at the very precise and critical moment when my commercial Pop artist’s flame was white hot. After that it would run a parallel descent alongside anything else of lesser value until the bottom, some short twenty-five years later, shook me hard enough to make me breathe again.
    In a different climate or a different age, where my artistic credibility and history might have grown legendary with less opposition, such a confession of ignorance andsupplication to the truth would sadly be enough. Here and now, however, at the callous feet of my critics and time, it is not. It is no good as an answer, and it’s even worse as an excuse. “Wasn’t it enough to simply care?” infuriates them. Furthermore, nothing I could say would please them. It becomes impossible to safely reach for the truth when surrounded and attacked by a pack of vengeful hyenas. These critics who would judge me are irrationally incensed. They are weary at my insistence of raising my head. They choke and become ill on air that I breathe and I wonder if their anger and frustration is with their inability to finish me off. After all, they thought I was washed-up. For them, my life as an artist was never considered an ongoing work upon which they should honestly weigh the merits of my talent and it’s painstaking accomplishments. It was much more personal than that. What angers my enemies and critics is my presumption of heightened stature and my tarnished claim to artistry itself.
    It seems to me that I have paid too many times for the privileges of birthright through imperfection and native intelligence. I am a common man indifferently caressed by uncommon graces. There was never a question of my capability to love, only my desire. Never a question of my justifiable need for revenge, only my courage. Never a question of my talent, only my commitment. Never a question of my fame, only my humanity. Where and how those truths can be presented lays a pall upon my spirit. This contest of my making, between children and self-indulging social art, even though settled by many accounts, continues to engage me.
    To