“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte,
and when he is made, ye make him twofold more
the child of hell than yourselves.”
Matthew 23:15

Falling in love with Judee Sill the other day was like receiving an unexpected gift.  With her tucked away safely in the grave for almost 50 years, there was no need to indulge in any ridiculous fantasies, such as living happily ever after with her in an ecstatic, existential nightmare.  We were never going to hold up a liquor store with our unresolved emotional dysfunction, or attempt to fill the abandoned parking lot of our souls with hijacked tractor trailers full of drugs.  At least, not at the same time.  

The doctors gasped when they stuck the knife into our chests and opened up the empty ball of fire, pulsing like an angry love song, no one's ever heard.  They summoned the guy with the special camera, the one that takes pictures of emotional electrons, and told him to document the deadly findings.

This is what they saw.  How extremely bleak and humorous.

"Available," indeed.  Such a dry sense of humor, Judee.  Like a graveyard in the desert.

My abandoned, empty soulmate.

The video for my song "A Beautiful Place" is an unwitting glimpse into the empty cavern of familial and spiritual wrongness that drove me to write the song in the first place.  Directed by my brother, the video is an exercise in how to achieve maximum disparity of vision between the director and the subjects of the film.  Like watching Darby Crash doing somersaults through the set of Barry Lyndon, I was surprised to see wide, distant shots of a punk-rock food fight.  Wait, you mean, the camera was actually a hundred miles away?  There was nothing any of us were ever going to do about the lighting, but, shouldn't the camera at least have been at risk of being covered in frosting? 

It was a one-off kind of shoot.  There was no way to go back and re-do it.  All the birthday cake had already been licked off the hood.  There was no way to clean the teeth of the station wagon, or re-compose the cake that had been cast upon it. 

There was nothing we could do.

The wrongness wasn't finished with us, though.  During the bridge, my brother asked me to sing the lines using the "Kubrick face."  I instantly knew what he meant, and because wrongness was a part of who we were, I didn't really think about it.  I just did it.

It's ridiculous.  During the bridge, especially.  The lyrics couldn't be less suitable for the "Kubrick face," and even if they were, is it a creative vision you're projecting, or do you just want to use the term "Kubrick face," because everybody knows what it is, and that's the level we're at?

The latter, obviously, and I can't say that I was beyond it myself.  Because the cover art for the album "A Beautiful Place" is on does in fact resemble the "Kubrick face," which is perhaps why it occurred to my brother to bring it up.  I have no idea.  I hate the cover art, but sometimes a coked-up demon is easier to face than a bleak, abandoned parking lot.

Knowhati'm sayin', Judee Sill?

My brother is one of the smartest people I've ever known, and is in fact a great writer and cook.  Movie director?  Maybe, maybe not, though admittedly the footage of me playing aimlessly with a wrench during the 2nd verse of the video is pretty good.  But he's never going to heal, because he's going to keep his Kubrick face close to the vest, so it can continue to irradiate his heart.  I have no idea where he is; he once woke me up to kick me out of his house at 7am, after I'd been there for one night.  My bank once asked me where my brother lived, to validate my identity on the phone, and the guy was embarrassed because he could tell I had no idea.  My bank knows more about my brother than I do.  He has hated me for years, and because he's never going to face his demons, they're going to continue to warp him, until every trace of humanity is gone, and all that's left is loathing.

Well, he can have it.  Gollum was all about his Kubrick face.  If that's what you're into,

Why don't you hang around with him.

This disenfranchising nonsense has been at the forefront of my heart and mind for decades.  It's why I did so many drugs back in the day.  It's why I married a stripper in Las Vegas.  It's why I came to Mexico.  It's why I wrote "A Beautiful Place."

It's why I fell in love with Judee Sill.  Her story resonated with me at the level of the most subatomic, emotional electrons.  I was never into crime, but we made a lot of the same mistakes.  We were broken and pissed-off for similar reasons.  Once, my emotionally- and verbally-manipulative and abusive stepmother had a fake temper tantrum in the customs line in Cozumel, Mexico.  She pretended to freak out, and insisted we all go back to the U.S. immediately.  My dad didn't do anything.  It was me, him, my brother, and she who shall remain unnamed because it's disrespectful to speak of the walking dead while they are still alive.  May God have mercy on my half-sister, who never had a chance.  So I stood there in the customs line at the age of 16 or 17, and looked at Mexico through the large windows on the other side of the glass.  It wasn't really a choice.  The other people on the trip were obviously not real, so I told them to go back to the U.S. if that's what they wanted to do.  But I was going to Mexico.

They could see that I meant it.  They weren't going to stop me.  I didn't care what they did, and there was nothing Kubrickian or Gollum-like about it.  I'd never had a girlfriend, and wasn't into partying at the time.  But I was going to walk into the puzzle of jungle trees, waiting to be solved, just beyond the airport window.  This fake, dramatic witch is not an obstacle.  She's not even here.  So, I went to Mexico.  The other people on the itinerary followed me.  I saved the trip.  Before I was even old enough to vote.

And nobody has ever acknowledged it.

Ever.

I used to say that "A Beautiful Place" was my favorite gospel song.  It's my favorite gospel song because it reaches toward the heavens from the pits of hell itself.  It hates the demon on its own cover, even if it can't find any other honest mask to wear, and it refuses to be warped by some stupid prize it found at the bottom of the river.  The song may rot in an empty parking lot full of burned-out cars and used syringes, surrounded by mean-spirited people who carry the torch of loathing like an ignorant tradition, but it doesn't care what you say.  Never has.  It's not dragging you through customs twice.  If you want to stay in the airport (hell, perhaps), that's your prerogative.  But the song is never going back to them chains.  Whether it ever "had it all," or not, its prison days are definitely over.

Finally, it is free.

A Beautiful Place

Kashed in all my karma
for a beating and a couple-a joints
let's do something stupid
see which way the finger points

Cuz every day
the future gets farther away
'til you get to the end,
and you realize you never had
any future at all

     I don't wanna die
     in a beautiful place
     surrounded by people who love me
     and make me feel free
     leave me to rot
     in an old vacant lot
     burned-out cars,
     dirty needles,
     and bottles,
     and you,
     and me

I had it all
and it all had me
but my prison days are over
I'm finally free

Eating raw birds for breakfast
the milkman is on fire
I'm tired of you
almost as much as you're tired of me

Everyone hates you
your friends have all gone away
I don't care what you say,
I ain't never goin' back
to them chains

     I don't wanna die
     in a beautiful place
     surrounded by people who love me
     and make me feel free
     leave me to rot
     in an old vacant lot
     burned-out cars,
     dirty needles,
     and bottles,
     and you,
     and me

©2004 Nathan Payne