Being downsized stinks, as the millions of Americans who’ve been canned in the past year know. My own employment debacle involved getting laid off, getting another gig, losing that one, then getting and losing another and another as each company I found employment with went out of business in the tanking economy, almost on cue as I arrived. It seemed like a sick joke. But I wasn’t laughing.
I’m a musician and writer and haven’t had a “real job” since 1988, though in lean times I did paint apartments and once sang “Blue Suede Shoes” dressed as the ’68 Elvis at a Korean birthday party. Gigs weren’t too hard to get when I wanted them because I play a few instruments and know the words and music to something like 3,000 songs comprised of blues, jazz, classic rock, rockabilly, standards, Broadway, television commercials, novelty music and my own stuff. Rap’s O.K. with me; ditto hip-hop and salsa. The only music I never really got into was metal. That is, until my personal economy collapsed.
As a lifelong gun-for-hire, I had been used to, and O.K. with, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. I could live creatively on little dough if necessary and managed to get to India, Bali, Maui, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Central Park Summerstage and anywhere else adventure, fun or a story or gig awaited. But I had also gotten used to the steady, healthy paycheck of the daily columnist’s job I’d accepted at a newspaper in 2006.
Though I was still technically a freelancer, without benefits, vacation or a contract, the assignment afforded me perks galore, massively amped my writing chops and paid me quadruple what I’d been used to making in a year. I had, I thought, arrived, six years after deciding to make a living with words and music.
I opened a Roth I.R.A., banked half my paycheck each week, bought my wife an iPod for Valentine’s day, fixed my front teeth, finished the album I’d been recording since 2004 and recorded another disc in 2008 with a producer and eight musicians. If I met a homeless person whose tale of woe moved me, I might give him a ten after talking to them. That’s how good things were.
But in September 2008, a supervisor at the paper sat me down and said, “The company is hemorrhaging money. We can’t afford to pay you anymore.” They couldn’t afford to pay another 50 people in the newsroom, either. Two weeks later, I cleared out my desk and pocketed a letter of reference from the deputy publisher. At least I hadn’t been fired for incompetence, I told myself. And I’d saved more than six months’ salary, as the experts said you should.
But it was still a monumental shock, the end of a very exciting period of life, and it shook me like a death. My father, also a writer, had died suddenly almost exactly two years before. Losing my job felt familiar to that life-shattering event; disbelief, panic, grief, and immediate action required. I told no one except my immediate family what had happened.
Two weeks later, I secured a writing job with another company, for less work and better money. Way to go, I thought — that’s hittin’ ‘em, kid.
That company folded within a month, laying off dozens. As winter rolled on, three magazines I used to write for went out of business, and each first of the month brought a gasp and gulp as I saw the numbers in my bank account plunge.
I fought back, of course. I hadn’t spent five months meditating in an Indian ashram for nothing. I talked, wrote, baked, yelled, bawled, laughed, shared and kept on e-mailing, calling, networking and seeking paying work of any kind.
But I’m not a winter guy. No matter what else is going on in my life, if the sun is out and it’s 70 degrees, the possibilities are endless. During the freezing days and nights of January, February and March of 2009, I began waking up before dawn, nauseated. Soon, fear, doubt, self-pity and resistance to facts boiled down into a ball of almost-constant frustration and anger.
I found a therapist, thankfully covered by my wife’s insurance, and tore a rotator cuff smashing a giant cloth cube with a bat in the doctor’s office. The shoulder healed but I felt no better mentally and emotionally after two months of weekly sessions, so I quit. What I wanted was paying work. Without that, there wasn’t anything to talk about. I started taking it personally. My situation seemed no less than a betrayal from God or Zeus or Yahweh or whoever takes care of what can’t be seen to by human efforts.
One freezing day in March, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s version of Alberto Ginastera’s “Toccata” came on my iPod. I hadn’t listened to this song since I was a teen. For some reason, “Toccata” compelled me as never before, especially the intense, frenetic, pounding ending.
Intense. Frenetic. Pounding.
I sent a drummer friend an e-mail: “What is, in your opinion, the absolute heaviest, banging-est, most insane, loudest, stupidest music of all time?”
“What a great question,” he replied. “My answer for you is the 1986 classic album by Slayer “Reign in Blood.” It’s the greatest album ever made. If you need any more help, let me know. 666.”
I downloaded “Reign in Blood” and waited to listen until I could give the album my complete attention later that day. The first song was “Angel of Death.”
I was carried off into a boiling sonic river of brutal, obscene, blasphemous noise that blasted me like a cannon out of my depressed cave and directly into the fury I was experiencing each waking day. For the next three weeks, all other music disappeared from my world. I listened to “Piece by Piece” as I dropped off to sleep at night, and the first thing I did in the morning, en route to the john, was cue up “Angel of Death.” Any gap of spare time during the day, no matter how small, was filled with “Post Mortem,” “Epidemic,” “Jesus Saves” and especially “Raining Blood.” Every other type of music seemed silly, trivial, light and useless.I didn’t bother listening very closely to the lyrics, either, despite my lifelong Ira Gershwin obsession. In fact, the less I could understand, the better. All I connected with were the screams.
After 30 days of Slayer saturation, I downloaded a blizzard of Death Metal onto a single iPod; 171 songs. Pantera. Anthrax. Venom. Cannibal Corpse. Devil Driver. If I previewed a band at iTunes and there wasn’t a WARNING: EXPLICIT label there or the tempo wasn’t insanely fast, I wasn’t interested.
Something was happening beyond the mind, the emotions and the circumstances. Music, for the first time in my life, was penetrating my body and shaking it. The force of Death Metal moved me out of my mind and into my arms, legs, head and belly. It compelled me to pull over in the car and bang the steering wheel, to run faster and farther in the freezing cold, to lift more weights and smash the heavy bag at the gym with renewed ferocity, and massively upped the intensity in everything I said, did and felt.
It also made me feel powerful enough to fight back against the injustice the world had delivered to me, to meet and embrace that inner demon who had always been told, since I was a little boy, “Smile.” “Be nice.” “Look at the bright side.” “Be reasonable.” “Don’t be angry.” Death Metal didn’t smile, wasn’t nice and there was no bright side to it. By going into my fear and anger via music, I didn’t damage myself or anyone else, and I was able to face each day again. I kept jabbing and punching furiously back at the world, at depression and rage and that low-down, no-good, rotten son of a bitch, Unemployment. Finally, the S.O.B. fell.
Spring came, and I got a licensing deal from a music publishing company for the disc I’d completed in 2007, then another, similar deal for the other CD with another publishing company. Things started loosening up: a job here, a job there. Finally, I was able to make the monthly bills from new checks instead of once again hemorrhaging savings, and I got to go to Paris to write a travel article for a new magazine in July. On my first day there, I rose at dawn, walked to the Eiffel Tower, stood directly under it, cued up “Angel of Death” on my iPod and pictured Nazi tanks rolling through. A nightmare that didn’t last, I thought. Like mine. Two weeks ago, I accepted a year’s contract writing for a media organization.
Zeus hadn’t dropped me, I finally figured out. He’d just handed me off to the devil for a few months.
