You Will Always Be Unhappy

My Fellow Shennyer:

I’ve had this screenshot on my desktop for months:

It’s from, pretty sure, an episode of Columbo, but I didn’t note which one. The actor is, pretty sure, playing a hotel front desk clerk, the kind that Does Not Have The Patience For You Today Sir. He’s unquestionably homosexual, both the actor and (it’s implied) the character he plays. A queen. A stereotype.

I find the image stunning, just beautiful. Clearly, it’s that look in his eyes, cold and exacting but brimming with a hidden intelligence. Plus the distance down his nosebridge whereon the glasses are perched is so happily precise, and the lenses carved in half like lemon slices.

Would this screenshot become a meme? An Insta post once I found the right caption? Like I said, it’s been on my desktop for months. Why did I save it? What did I see in him? Magically—it feels like 100% spiritual magic that happened—sharing the screenshot with my friend Liz Connor, brought out her supersleuthing, and she in her genius got me a name:

Robin Bach. He was Robin Bach, born New Jersey 1947, died Los Angeles 1991. 43 years old. Complications from AIDS.

And of course this screenshot is from a Murder, She Wrote (S04E22), which Robin did 5 of. (Plus 2 Columbos.) His first screen role, in Meyer/Ebert’s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, was as Gay Boy. Robin Bach was, in his own way, brilliant. It’s a brilliance I want more of these days.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. ASMR Naps with ‘Check It Out’
Normal naps have me pop in earbuds, put an episode of The Joy of Painting on my laptop and let Bob Ross’s perfect, soothing voice shiver my nerves to a light slumber. But Ross’s voice has a strong contender with Prasanth, whose YouTube channel, Check It Out, contains several thousand videos: mostly reviews of products, some tours of hotels he’s stayed in, and a few screencasts of his Minecraft. I’ve written about ‘Check It Out’ before, focusing on how it makes me feel more okay about global consumerism. But Parasanth’s voice is saintly. His plosives (the K’s, T’s, P’s, and D’s) sound precisely like a ping pong ball hitting linoleum on the far end of a long, tall room. Just listen:

Need a restorative but not disorienting nap? Put on a playlist (with your ad blockers on) and lie in bed with your eyes closed. Quite nice. Check it out.

2. Karaoke Duets / Trios / Etc.s
Nothing I love more than being the sole guy on stage everyone has to listen to, but when you’re karaokeing with friends, folks sometimes want to band together for a song, and you end up cycling through the standards: Kiki & Elton, Danny & Sandy, Dolly & Kenny, Stevie & Tom, Sonny & Cher. ‘Afternoon Delight’. ‘Love Shack’. I’ve done them all.¹ If you’re looking to mix it up, consider these group projects:

• Starship, ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ (duet; call dibs on Grace Slick)

• Rocky Horror Soundtrack, ‘Dammit, Janet!’ (duet, but get other friends to sneer ‘Janet’ between lines)

• Prince, ‘1999’ (trio; everyone gets their own line of the verse and then comes together for line #4)

• David Bowie, ‘Space Oddity’ (group, with 1 singer as Major Tom and the rest as Ground Control, splitting up the harmonies ideally on a wireless mic so they can stand remotely at the far end of the bar)

• Murray Head, ‘One Night in Bangkok’ (group, with everyone on stage singing the choruses, except the faggiest in the bunch, who does all the chatty ‘I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine’ bits while wandering disapprovingly around the room)

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And You Will Always Be Unhappy

Last week, I was in Los Angeles again. In a previous Shenny, I called it ‘the city I love the most,’ and that remains true. Every time I’m in Los Angeles, I’m happy. Or at least: happier. My getting to be in Los Angeles is evidence that I was once very wrong about myself, at a time I felt I was finally being very right.

It was 2003, and I’d moved from Pittsburgh to Lincoln after a series of failures. I failed to get into any MFA programs the first time I applied, and I failed again the second, not so much deciding on Nebraska’s MA program as having no other options. And in Pittsburgh I’d run out of options. The film career I imagined in college had long faded away, and the Writing For Magazines career I’d tried to make happen was not happening.

Even the power was failing on my long U-Haul out west, which happened on the day of the northeast blackout that affected 50 million people. I just kept driving into the sun, chasing ‘Mustang Sally’ on whatever local oldies station was playing it, imagining that my old, failed life was fading away behind me.

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Flash back seven years, to my first semester of college. Brad, a wrestler on my floor, was a big believer in posting aspirational messages wherever you’ll see them. ‘You look at it every day and it focuses you,’ he’d tell me. ‘You make it become true.’ Was The Secret big in those days? He once loaned me his copy of The Celestine Prophecy, and after I returned it, complaining that it was just self-help packaged as an adventure novel, he shrugged and confessed he’d never read it.

But I bought the whole aspirations thing, or I thought it couldn’t hurt, so I wrote a little sign and taped it above my dorm room’s door, to be read every time I left that room: I will direct a Hollywood feature film before the age of 30.

Did it work? Well, I’m 44 years old.

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By 2004, the stories I was turning in to workshop were averaging 45, 50 pages, and my lit professors seemed befuddled by the papers I was writing. (I once spent days on a paper that ‘argued’ how Melville’s Barnaby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd were not stories, nor novels, but novellas.) To focus on a writing life, I cut off cable and internet and put my TV on the floor in the closet, but then spent weekends bingeing all the Netflix discs that had come in the mail, and rewatching the porn I’d downloaded on campus. Every Monday night, I went to the laundromat, where 4 or 5 other single men sat around the various TVs, all of us tuned to Monday Night RAW. It was the closest thing I had to church.

Around that time, I remembered Brad’s belief in posting aspirations, and while on campus one day I printed one out for myself:

You will never amount to
anything real. Not ever.
And you will always be unhappy.

Friends often went to my place for after-hours drinks, because I wasn’t too far from the bars and nobody in my tiny building cared much about noise. And inevitably they’d notice this sign taped above the door. ‘What the hell, Dave?’ I proudly showed it off, read it aloud. The idea, I tried to argue, was to temper all ambition. Get Real. Steel myself into success and happiness almost as a kind of dare.

Did it help? I couldn’t tell you.

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I was reminded of that door sign last week in Los Angeles, out at drinks where friends from my Pittsburgh years met a friend from my Nebraska years who recalled it. We four were sitting on sofas around a glass coffee table in a low-lit room happily empty on a Monday, and we all had an amiable laugh about it. I characterized the guy I was as confused, with mislaid intentions: in that same apartment, I spent a weekend reorganizing my books by their authors’ birth years, so’s to understand all of literature as a genealogy.

Did it help? Does anything?

This is the part of the Shenny where I find the uplifting way out of this Main Matter, and to make that move, I’d talk, again, about the closet, and how vital it is to help queers recognize it and get the hell out of there. That remains true. But another truth is that I’m pretty sure I kept the sign up, after I came out of mine. I may have even printed it out by then, as a newfound queer.

We’re often so wrong about ourselves. Thinking back on the Hollywood aspiration, I’m struck by how I looked every day at a sign that tried to convince me of something I didn’t want. And while I can laugh at the Baroque masochism of the you will always be unhappy sign, there’s still—all these years later—a part of me that reads it as wisdom.

Drop all delusions about ‘amounting’ to something other than yourself.

Accept that happiness is a passing state, not a status.

I’ve never read the Book of Revelation, but when you grow up ashamed, hiding yourself from everybody, your imagination teems with images of your world crumbling around you the moment you let yourself be seen—enough so, that over time this becomes a kind of fantasy. Burn it all to the motherfucking ground.

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This week’s natatorium is the pool in Trees Hall, which held the campus gym at the University of Pittsburgh. I never swam there, but looking at it now I wish I had (there’s a lot I wish I’d done [and not done] in Pittsburgh). I mean: look at that sunlight streaming in!

1. The finest karaoke performance I ever saw was a trio in Pittsburgh: two yinzer hockey-type white dudes and a short and compact Prince-looking guy. The stage at that small bar was tiny, and when they got up there the KJ played Ike & Tina’s ‘Proud Mary’. During the ‘easy’ part, the hockey dudes stood in the back and did a kind of doowop snap-shuffle, singing Ike’s low parts while the Prince type sang Tina’s big soul voice perfectly. You’ll recall that soon the song switches from the ‘easy’ part to the ‘rough’ part, and this switch is signaled by a big loud mess of horns and drums. The moment this kicked in, Prince jumped off the stage and shimmied his way up and down the very tight aisle between tables. He hopped back and grabbed the mic just in time to wail, ‘LEFT a good job in the cit-tay!’ The hockey dudes shuffled behind to the faster beat and I … was … mesmerized. And then—this is the best part—when the song finished, and they’d blown the whole house down, the three of them left the stage and walked straight out of the bar. Who were they? And who were they to each other?