Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [207]
I do not mention this information to boast, though I am proud of much of the music journalism I have done, and grateful to the various editors who gave me the opportunity to grow as a writer. I mention my work because, although I had a true and constant passion for rock & roll and other forms of popular music and culture, my work was not really where I lived the most important part of my life, nor for that matter did it always give me a sense that my life had amounted to much. When the day’s writing was done, I still had to go home and face the real life I was living. My marriage had been in trouble more or less from the start. I think we both had brought too many family demons to live together in one house, and to be honest, I wasn’t understanding or supportive enough of the fears and damage that had driven my wife into her troubled space. The union was probably fated the moment I realized that I hadn’t so much loved my wife as I’d tried to save her, maybe as a way of atoning of how I had not tried to save my brother. That didn’t make for a well-balanced marriage, and when, at the end of one of our particularly painful arguments, Erin said to me, “You don’t need me the way I need you,” I saw that she was right, and I understood how unfair I had been. We separated a little over two years after we were married, and were divorced in 1985. We remained good if troubled friends afterward, and once or twice over the years we tried to find ways back to each other, but I’m afraid too much damage had been done by that time. She remains somebody I love, and somebody I still hope the best for.
After that, it was pretty much one feverish relationship after another. I was getting older, and I desperately wanted to find somebody I could build a family and home with. And then, for far too long, I simply stopped wanting any home or family, because it hurt too much, felt too much like irredeemable failure, to want those things and yet feel I would never have them or might damage them once I did. Then, perhaps not surprisingly, I fell into a bout of clinical depression. I would be sitting doing my work, or listening to music, or reading a book, when sudden fear would grip me. I would go and lie on my bed and curl up for hours at a time, waiting for the darkness to pass, waiting for a chance to breathe normally. I found myself doing the same thing I had done as a child during those hours of my odd spells of illness: I’d grip my hands tight, concentrating on my palms. It felt as if at the center of them there was some relief or answer to be found, if I could just press them hard enough.
I knew enough about depression to know that it could get worse, or possibly turn fatal. I went into therapy with a good doctor, and in time the fear and other symptoms began to lift. Life began to regain some of its fundamental pleasures and purposes. The entire bout probably only lasted a few months but it felt like an eternity. Depression is a hard experience to communicate, and perhaps a hard one to understand, but once you’ve had it you don’t forget it. It makes you look on the rest of the world with a bit more compassion, and it also causes you to watch the corners of your life more closely, so you can spot the darkness rapidly if it begins to creep back in.
DURING THIS TIME, I SIGNED A CONTRACT to write a book about a musical group. I shouldn’t have done this—I didn’t have enough real feeling for the subject at the time—but I thought I wanted to change some things in my life, and I thought I knew enough about writing and music that I could summon the passion. After nearly a year, I hadn’t written anything, and I knew I wasn’t going to. Instead, I came up with an idea to do a different book about another music group, the Grateful Dead. It was a good