Last night I drove to the loft with a ball of nausea in my stomach. I had spent all day Sunday writing out my personal inventory (oddly enough the fourth step in Alcoholics Anonymous), and it had dredged up crap I thought long forgotten. So, Sunday night I called Max to tell him I was finished - let’s get this over with. Part of the deal was that I had to read it to him when it was finished. I wasn’t sure why. He’d read me his, and it had broken my heart. It was my turn now.

He gently tells me to put it away for two days, spending that time with God, asking him to show me what I’d forgotten. I was sick at heart. Two days? But I did as I was told. I have to rely on other people this time. I’ve done no good fixing myself up to this point.

So yesterday, the end of my “break,” I took the inventory to work. I was filled with images of things I’d forgotten. People who’d hurt me popped into my head and I wrote them as fast as I could. Half of each page was what happened, the other half was how it made me feel.

I ended up with 28 handwritten pages of blood and wounds that had never healed.

So, I’m driving to the loft. I’m not looking forward to it; I can only imagine how Max is feeling. I get to the building and the doors are unlocked. I walked down the long hallway toward the elevators feeling perfectly conflicted: I wanted to get “better” but I did NOT want to read all this to Max or anyone else. Up the elevator I went, and when I got to the loft I opened the door softly, as he’s been recording in there for two weeks.

I keep telling my friends this, and I’m going to drive them nuts soon. It is utterly fucking amazing to watch Max record this CD, on so many levels. When I walked in the door, he was saying “check check yeeeah check yeeeah” into the mic to test the levels. He doesn’t even notice me. I’m SO glad he was only testing levels, because when I sat down and looked at him, I nearly burst out laughing. His outfit was so fucking hilarious it made me split a gut. He’s (finally) gotten a hair cut (he was starting to look like Medusa) so now his nearly-black hair is about 3 inches long on top and all messed up in a sort of semi-spikey tousle. He also had it streaked with blonde in little chunks. (Took me two days to get used to that.) He’s got three silver hoop earrings in one ear, and four in the other (seven - get it?) Generally, he wears huge thick sweaters over two shirts, and either jeans or black leather pants. He goes for dark colours, oh, like black, black and black.

So, I sit down and nearly die laughing. He’s in some kind of retro-golf-pant-type things that are burnt orange and maroon plaid on white. They are skin-tight at the top and flared at the bottom. These pants made him look eight feet tall! And his t-shirt was a maroon-ish thing to match the pants. Oh, dear Lord! I swear, he does this on purpose! To de-conservative-ize me.

You can believe he got shit about that! *snort*

So anyway, the part I can’t get over. I’m sitting in the loft, patiently waiting and watching. M. has his headphones on and he’s listening to a playback of a song I cannot hear. His head is bobbing in time to the beat, and he reaches for the microphone. Quickly he types something into the computer, and then counts the beats off with his foot. Glancing at the lyric sheet in front of him (on yellow legal pads, no less) he starts singing. The only sound in the entire loft is his voice, which is rich and deep. The song says something about smiling and shining light. But he only makes it through one line before he bobbles the lyric a little. “FUCK!” he snaps, getting all musician-testy. I smile to myself and enjoy the moment. Sheepishly he turns to me with a grin and says, “I’m a little temperamental about my vocals.” I just smile and nod.

After around four takes he got it done “good enough” (by his standards). He listened to it through his headphones, and when he was satisfied, he shared it with the rest of the class. I will say this every day from now on: he fucking amazes me. I wasn’t groovin’ too much with the melody as he was recording the lyrics, even though he was. But when he played it all back to me, it was fantastic! He can take the strangest tracks and combine them into a song that RAWKS! I have no idea why his music appeals to me so much, right to my very heart and soul. But I believe in it 100% and plan to do everything in my power to get this CD produced.

The recording process has been the most incredible gift I’ve been given in a long time. I cherish every moment Max puts up with me and lets me sit and watch and listen and soak it all in. Recording is more tedious than I thought, but damn! The way music floats from his head to his hands to the instruments is wildly fascinating. My brain works like a spreadsheet. And that’s just fine - every band needs a manager! But that just makes the creative process all the more foreign. And really, really cool.

Another thing that’s interesting is the “stage presence” that Max - and every other good performer I’ve seen - has in abundance. It’s more than just sex appeal; it’s a playfulness and a complete self-assurance that’s lacking in so many people. Max is standing there in front of a laptop, mixer, Roland Virtual Studio, POD Line 6, WaMi box, three keyboards, two reference monitors, three guitars and a partridge in a pear tree, singing into a microphone as if there was an audience singing along. Not self-conscious, not embarrassed, just completely “at home.” It was incredible.

Hearing the playback, mixing the levels, re-recording sections, it’s all just so fucking cool. I can’t get over it. I could never do it, and I don’t really think I had any respect for musicians before now. But now, after being given the gift of being able to experience this, my appreciation for the musician is just as high as the music.

I will never forget this time in my life, not for as long as I live. It’s an absolute concrete, direct answer to a concrete, direct prayer that I didn’t think had a shot in hell of being answered.

Okay, okay. So, he finishes recording and comes over to sit down. We chat a little about business, and he winds that down. Well, go ahead, he says. Tell me a story.

I pick up my notebook in frustration, knowing I had to do this. I start reading, feeling extremely self-conscious. But soon I was lost in the story of my own life. While reading this untempered list of my very personal pain and hurt, I could feel myself get angry and frustrated and hurt. It was a continuous feeling, like I would have to pound my fist into the wall over and over and over in order to compensate, or overwhelm, it. Max got up and got his lyric notepad and flipped to a clean section. This time, it was Max that disappeared - faded into the background - as I was dragged by all my pain back into high school, where I was betrayed by my first love over and over, and my very best friend. So many things.

I walked through college, reliving my freshman year and the resentment and hurt I felt toward my roommate. Through planning my wedding, getting cold feet and getting talked out of listening to them. Through having Justin and not knowing what the hell to do. The separation, the divorce, the messiness that went with it. My heart getting broken over and over again… To the current situation with Max. All my hurts and wounds and resentments and anger at him, at me, at his girlfriend, at Melissa. My fury and jealousy about Max and Mel being friends. It all just poured out me. I had no idea how long it took to read it all. I forgot Max was in the room. I was swirling in a vortex of bloody, unhealed wounds. Some self-inflicted, some not. But all just as alive as if it were happening to me in this very moment.

When I got done, Max and I talked a little. He said, you feel really crappy now, don’t you? And I did. He pointed out that my whole life I just wanted to be loved. And I did whatever anyone wanted to get it. And when they didn’t meet my expectations, I got hurt. And the anger is my main coping mechanism for hurt. He had drawn out a big cycle on a sheet of paper, and showed it to me. It hurt to see my whole life reduced to a repeating cycle of holding on so very tightly to people, places and things for love, and being disappointed and hurt when they didn’t meet my expectations. I have God-sized expectations, he said. And that’s good. Just let God be the one to love you, because he’ll never disappoint you, and he loves you the most anyway.

The “how I felt” section of my inventory had several repeating themes. “Worthless, stupid, angry at myself, angry at ***, hurt, betrayed.” Over and over. I am still giving them some thought. Max sees it clearly but my clarity is coming with time.

Max handed me another sheet of notebook paper. On it were listed the next steps. Praying for those who hurt me - daily. Praying that God give me the ability to see what I did to them. Forgiving them. Eventually, he said, the bad things will just float away. It’s hard to hate someone you are praying for.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me was this: when we finished talking, and he’d given me the list, he looked at me very seriously and said, “You  are  worth  it. You are worth it. You are.” And I started to believe him, and I had all this scripture going through my head. Promises that God made began singing to me. And I smiled.

We ended the evening piddling around, waiting for his laptop to finish defragging. He jammed out on the keyboards while I made pithy comments in the background (“that sounds like a 70’s porno flick”), pestering him for technical info on all his gear.

At one point I realized, this is his job, and he lets me hang out at it. Cool. So I said to him, “Max, one day when I start knocking on doors selling investments, I’m going to take you along with me.” His response? “Right on!” I said, “You’ll have to be sure to wear a short-sleeved t-shirt and your leather pants, though.” We laughed, hard. The picture is mindlessly hysterical. Me in a conservative, pin-striped business suit, and him in his leather pants, hair spiked, tatoos hanging out of his sleeves. I quipped, “It’ll be ‘Take Your Musician to Work’ Day!” We laughed harder. He smiled and said in a salesman voice, “Well, if you don’t need any stock, how about a CD?”

And we laughed.

In stitches, happy,


mich