Celebrity Skin

LA is weird as fuck, but maybe it doesn’t have to be deadly.

When I wake up/ in my makeup /have you ever felt so used up as this?/

Its all so sugarless /hooker waitress/ model actress/ oh just go nameless

A gen Z porn star is playing Courtney Love at the inflatable hot tub party. Celebrity Skin.

I used to love this song and loved it long before I was myself a hooker or a waitress or a model or an actor. I loved this song, and every other song and movie and book and paparazzi photo where a glamorous lady careened off the edge of a cliff. Sylvia Plath’s villanelles coil round my brain while I sort my laundry. I close my eyes at night and Brittany Spears pas de bourrees against the lids, wielding knives, a Benihana floor show staged by Pasolini.

The dark side of fame! Would that I, too, could be selected by the fates for glittering doom.  I started off young, fixated on Madonna and her defiant, Salome gaze. Then I discovered Edie Sedgwick and my intentions clarified.  Plan A had been fame, but Edie showed me a pathway more thrilling than fame: tragedy. I didn’t have to hit it big to be magnificent: I could self destruct instead, fabulously, a wheel on fire, my trajectory a gorgeous tumbling descent through influential haircuts, cruel famous lovers, nights that were mornings that lasted for days. Every self inflicted setback a point in my Martyr’s crown.

So many gay boys try so hard to be iconic. Ive met so many and scorned them all from my chaise on the sidelines, cozy and protected under layers of shadow and cigarette smoke. They needn’t work so hard to be remembered. A cautionary tale can live forever too. Look at Medusa.

So, unafraid of these pitfalls, seeking them out  even, I moved to Los Angeles at 32 and cycled through the  full lyrical resume of Celebrity Skin in about 5 years, only to come through the other side unlike Courtney Love: Sober, sane, and wearing the same face I came to town with.