Chris Isaak

“Come here, I want to talk to you.”

G led me away from the dinner table and into the bedroom. We had just returned from visiting my folks in Seattle and were settling back into our real lives. In retrospect, I can see how this was a terrible moment for her, heavy with knowledge, leading me into the void. There’s always something a little nerve-wracking about being told that somebody wants to talk to you. If they just want to talk to you, then they’ll start talking. But to make a point and a date of it portends something more serious.

We lay down on the bed, me on the right, as always, and I looked up at the giant blue ocean collage her class had made which hung on the ceiling, and wondered why the air felt so thick. She took a deep breath and told me that when we were in Seattle, she had lied about using birth control and that there was now a chance that she was pregnant. The sky opened up and swallowed me whole. Or so I wished.

G was the first person who was patient enough to heal my damaged sexuality, and it had been a long and tenuous process. I finally felt that I could trust her enough to let go off most of the accumulated baggage I carried around. She gently encouraged me while I unpacked my secrets and brought them into the light – camping with Mrs. C, confusion about my father, the lake by the dance building – and assured me that I was alright, that it would all be okay. She promised me, one spring night seven years earlier, while walking through the dark streets of Baltimore, that she would never hurt me. The look in her eyes when she made this promise was overwhelming, and any last shred of resistance I had to falling in love with her disintegrated.

It was a relief to me, but must have been a heavy burden for her, knowing how fragile I was and how careful she had to be. Things had been going badly for her at work and our discussions about having a baby had stalled and she desperately wanted some kind of change, something positive to look forward to. She knew that playing with birth control would devastate me – would break her promise – but for a moment, she didn’t care. Her needs outweighed mine, as they must occasionally do, and she acted on them. She immediately knew it was the wrong thing to do, and so she screwed up her courage, took responsibility for her actions, and told me what she had done.

I am very bad with confrontation. I was so hurt and felt so betrayed that I just clammed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say because the only thing going on in my brain was “AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH” and I couldn’t bring myself to say that, so I just lay there on the bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing everything would go away.

It was a bad time.

And one of the worst things about it was that the only person who really understood how badly I had been hurt was the one who had done the hurting. I just couldn’t explain to anybody why this was such a big deal. It was like trying to tell somebody about a particularly terrifying nightmare. More often than not, the details of a nightmare are not particularly scary, and no matter how hard you try to explain the underlying emotion, it just comes out sounding weak and unconvincing. That was me trying to explain and get sympathy for G’s betrayal. It just didn’t translate and I was stuck, alone with my festering soul.

A couple of days later, G went out of town for a conference, and I just holed up in the apartment, licking my wounds and playing the new Chris Isaak CD, Forever Blue. Written as a response to breaking up with his girlfriend, Forever Blue covers all the break-up bases, from rage to self-pity to denial to, finally, acceptance. I couldn’t have asked for a better balm. I knew we weren’t going to split up over this, but I enjoyed pretending we might and wallowing in all the selfish emotions that I felt, feeling injured and misunderstood. At first, I just focused myself on the opening track, Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, but as my self-pity softened, I allowed that there was more going on than just she was evil and I was innocent, and, reluctantly, I began trying to dig a little deeper.

With a willingness to dig a little deeper came a willingness to try therapy, and I started driving out once a week to the quiet woods of Topenga Canyon, and, with help, started carefully unraveling some of the knots that I always avoided. Ultimately, it was a good thing and I came to a better understanding of myself and my motivations, but it was rough going for a while there and I was beginning to wonder if I’d be forever blue too.

There are those that say a break in a relationship is like breaking a bone and there are those that say it’s like tearing skin. A broken bone, though it eventually heals, is never as strong as it was before the break – it never fully recovers. Torn skin, however, forms a scab, which turns into a scar, and that scar tissue is stronger in that spot than it was before the break. I prefer to think of that moment, lying in bed, looking up at the sea, as a tear in my heart.

Once my immediate wounds healed and I was able to let go of that first track, I came to love the second one best – Somebody’s Lying. Whether or not I could relate to the content of the song, I found it to be a perfectly constructed pop song. It has that ineffable inevitability that great pop songs have, and once it starts, it doesn’t seem like it could come out any other way.

Chris Isaak is a model-handsome California singer-songwriter whose career was given a huge boost by the inclusion of his wonderful songs Wicked Game and Blue Spanish Sky on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Lynch has an unerring ability to pick musical collaborators who can strike deep into the teenage collective unconscious, and many of Isaak’s songs sound like they could be from any period from the 1950s on. Those two songs, found on his Heart Shaped World album, are stunning and heartbreaking and beautiful, and either one could’ve filled in nicely on this collection. But Somebody’s Lying is one of my favorite songs to sing along with and because it represents that moment when things were toughest and (more importantly) because we got through those times, I had to choose this track, to commemorate the scars on my heart that made it so much stronger.