(memoir II)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOlkRP6zNlY&ab_channel=imaginary92

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“No, Aaron, it’s about oral sex.”

“Cunnulingus, boy, it’s a metaphor for oral sex.”

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I have a pretty distinct memory about Kate Bush. Aside from her albums regularly circulating my childhood eight-track (my way of saying she was listed among my parent’s records) I have this bizarre, esoteric recollection of having to listen to one of her songs (a long one, it was like 10 minutes) from beginning to end with my Godfather. I was in this apartment building, when I was around 20-21, in the Shijingshan district in Beijing. To make a long story less complicated, I was there on what amounted to a vacation, and my Godfather is Irish-Canadian with dual citizenship and the co-founder of an English company over there. Anyways, he was an old friend of my Dad’s, one of three brothers, and the best way I can describe him is as: mightily eccentric.

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He was a big guy, tall, broad, liked liquor and hallucinogenic drugs, took a strange pleasure in making people deeply uncomfortable, and oddly, I think, was sadly and profoundly alone. He had a family, mind you, was well respected in his community and carried himself the way Russian oligarchs might, or gangsters, but he had these unresolved issues from his childhood that I don't think anyone aside from himself was truly able to understand. He had a masters in philosophy, was incredibly well read (specialized in James Joyce, and I think he did his thesis on Victorian repression and sexualized taboo) and was incredibly hyper-masculine. He could get upset at the drop of a hat, generally over something respect-related, and to be around him was to feel as though you were perpetually walking on eggshells for fear of setting him off.

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Anyways, I was with him for four weeks. He was a very generous man, and frankly I’ve nothing but love for him, but it was an unbelievably strange experience and, in retrospect, if I could go back and pick another four week vacation I’d probably have just taken a cruise to Hawaii, or something.

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Anyways …

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… We were in this hallway in an old, communist style apartment building in Shijingshan (Beijing is comprised of more than a dozen distinct districts that form a loosely patterned square around Tiananmen). The building itself was where the family was staying - apparently they’d just secured a far nicer, far higher end place in another part of the district but were waiting for the construction to stop so that they could move in. That’s where I stayed: in what essentially was an unfurnished, luxury apartment building that was constantly under noisy, presumably 16 hour a day construction. Anyways, his building felt like it would be right at home in some red-army foreign film - in the sense that, if I were to’ve seen an old Russian lady wandering up the stair well, shaking a fist of cabbage at me and swearing in a language I didn’t really understand, it probably wouldn’t have felt entirely out of place.

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At the time, my Godfather (hereafter referred to as D) was a profuse chain-smoker - which I would later get, as I’d essentially began my own habit as a result of that trip, but that’s beside the point. Because the company was quite large, encompassed a number of schools and had a pretty significant number of employees, D pretty often interacted with me while balancing some form of work related stress. At night, what he liked to do was walk to a local grocer (unbelievably cheap), cop some beer, occasionally some black-label johnnie walker, a couple packs of smokes and hang out with me in the stairwell outside of his apartment. I was young, largely inexperienced, but I knew my dad really well and was not unaccustomed to this kind of thing. We’d often talk about art, whatever I’d done or seen, some of my experiences back home, some of his (many of which I cannot, in good conscience, share) or some of his and my dad’s (this one I can, they'd often road trip together between Calgary and Van Isle, so I've been told, D would generally make this drive fear and loathing style, fucked up on LSD and within the span of 24 hours). Anyways, D and I would talk, he’d drink, smoke, and occasionally play me some music.

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He had me working on a painting that he wanted to use as a kind of backdrop for his company website - something with deep Icarian symbolism and a strong preoccupation with wings - prefaced by the phrase: ‘To Fall and Fly Again’. I’m not readily sure what the whole ordeal was about, if I’m being honest, but again it was not the kind of thing that I hadn’t already been made accustomed to back home (pretty part and parcel of my father at the time). So, we’d wind up listening to music on many occasion because, as a lot of artists know, one of music's greatest utilities lays in establishing the appropriate “mood” - as is, so I've learned, getting absolutely debilitated on your various drugs of choice.

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Anyways, to end the story, we listened to a number of Kate Bush’s songs - including but not limited to Running up That Hill and Wild Man - before eventually hearing a piece of music that D pretty enthusiastically described as an elongated allegory for performing oral sex on a snowman. The song is called Misty, 13 minutes, I looked it up.

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Still not sure about that one, as the deeper into his cups D got the more frequent the contradictions in his statements tended to become. Anyways …

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I do like Kate Bush, my Dad always had the hots for her, and the fierce-eighties-female-pop-musicians made pretty common appearances on our record shelves - Cher was another one, Loreena Mckennitt was another, Sinead O’Connor … you get the idea.

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Anyways, point of the story: Stranger Things isn’t all that strange.

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And I guess Kate Bush is pretty cool.

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