Live Free And/Or Die

 

We went to New Hampshire for a couple of days. I’ve never been to New Hampshire before and going there explained a lot about why that is. I usually get to go to places because someone wants me to play there but I can’t imagine there’s much of an audience for someone like me in New Hampshire, and so far no one’s invited me and given me the opportunity to find out. I imagine folk singers would do well here, and lounge music might be as far as it goes in a jazz direction. I don’t think I heard music being played in any form in the whole time we were there.

We drove past a sign - Welcome to New Hampshire - with the New Hampshire strap line, slogan or motto Live Free Or Die underneath, and as if to underline the point an un-helmeted motorcyclist hurtled by, long hair blowing in the wind.

No one wore a mask. It seems they don’t consider it necessary because the incidence of Covid-19 has been very low in New Hampshire. i wonder if this is because New Hampshire is a very un-garrulous sort of place - people don’t bray at each other in New Hampshire so they aren’t spraying each other with spit-born droplets of deadly virus. I don’t think they even go out. There was nothing much to do in our little corner of New Hampshire except walk by the ocean and try to figure out a way to get to the beach by clambering across a thousand mossy rocks.

I quickly gave up on the quest for a decent cup of coffee on the first morning. We went to the nearest big town, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I didn’t hold out much hope and the coffee place I had pegged as the good one was closed for the day due to, according to the sign on the door, exceptional circumstances. We went to a cafe that was pretending to be German where I settled for a cup of sour black liquid and a catalogue danish pastry from the freezer to table range. The breakfast of depressives.

It was strange spending a night away from home after all this time. Neither of us could sleep, even though New Hampshire was considerably cooler than the unbearably overheated upstate New York. It was nice to be in a room without a window-mounted air conditioner thrumming through the night. Instead there was an energy efficient heating and cooling unit high up on the wall, but although it was practically silent it had a huge illuminated temperature display that lit up the room with an eerie green glow and informed us that the temperature was still seventy-two degrees. After half an hour of trying to switch off the display we unplugged the unit and opened a window instead. Similarly the wall mounted TV had a red light that might have warned passing ships of the dangers of bedroom furniture. And in the kitchenette area a microwave with a digital clock display flashed on and off until I thought i might have an epileptic fit and got up to unplug the thing. It was a busy night.

It’s all good practice for going on tour. In the past few years I’ve wondered if each tour I was about to embark on might be my last. And suddenly there was no touring. I did one final show, in an ex-freight depot in Cambridge, New York. Two days later I felt - if not unwell - decidedly not myself. I called the covid helpline where they told me I didn’t have Covid because my symptoms didn’t fall into line with the official Covid symptoms as they were then. They told me I’d probably got a cold but I didn’t believe them so I quarantined anyway.

I felt better, and then I felt bad again, and this time I was able to go for a test. Two days later I was an official Covid victim. I felt exactly the same as I had the first time around, only this time the official symptoms had been brought into line with how I was feeling. I quarantined again. I felt better again, and then i felt worse - worse in fact than I’ve ever felt in my life - and one day after a few days of feeling utterly weird, and not being able to walk round the block without collapsing, my arms. legs and head were suddenly detached from whatever was left of me and making their own peculiar and fuzzy nonsense. I was riding along with Amy in her car at the time. She took me to the emergency room where they confirmed what Amy thought and I refused to believe - I was having a heart attack.

So now the lung damage that caused the deoxygenated blood to clog up and damage my heart (40% blocked on one side, 100% on the other) is all repaired - I’ve made a full recovery. My cholesterol level is exactly where it should be, my blood pressure and heart rate are perfect and I’m fit and healthy and ready to tour my ass off. I still feel breathless, I still get unreasonably tired, I have a loose and intermittent cough, and need eight hours sleep where five used to be plenty, and all this has been attributed to Long Haul Covid which I’m not going to argue with as it seems there’s no other explanation, especially as I’m now off most of the post heart attack medication.

Yes, I’m ready to tour my ass off - but that’s just bravado. The truth is I’ve never felt less ready or able, and the Delta Variant threat is adding an extra twist of hilarity. I’ve been trying to get in training for it. but as the weather has either been either excruciatingly hot or impossibly wet, walking or cycling hasn’t been an option so I’ve been going to the gym and clocking up miles on the treadmills. The gym really isn’t too bad - there never seem to be many people there. Older woman saunter on treadmills as they catch up with gossip, men of my age (and probably younger) put in time on the cross trainers wearing expressions of fearful determination because they’ve either been told they’ll have a heart attack if they don’t do something about it or they’ve already had one. And then there are the body builders and the body-beautiful people doing clever and esoteric stuff with the aid of benches and dumb bells. I wear headphones and zone out. I switch the TVs off, not just the one pertaining to my treadmill but the ones either side because I don’t want a home improvement show or Fox News flickering away in my peripheral vision. Sometimes, depending on what I’m listening to, I feel like I might be dancing on the treadmill but not when it’s Soft Machine Third.

For the rest of it I’ve been trying to figure out how my songs go. It’s amazing what an eighteen month lay off will do. Amy told me muscle memory would kick in but it hardly ever does. I get the first line and hit a void. I don’t think this is an effect of Long Covid, I think it’s just a standard feature of being me. I’ve had to re-learn everything. A strange process, elating and depressing by turns. One day I’ll be thinking that some of this stuff is pretty good, and other days I’ll be thoroughly dismayed and downhearted at how lame it all is. The other day it occurred to me that these songs are my life’s work, and then I started to think about all the great things other people have done during the pandemic. To be honest I’ve found some of them quite annoying in their relentless pursuit of creativity - writing a song or a sonnet every day, posting a track a week on Bandcamp - you know the kind of thing - it’s very laudable but it’s all in the shop window. There’s sometimes a depth to a certain amount of privacy. 

On a bad day it seems to me that all I’ve achieved during the pandemic is to forget my life’s work. That and figure out how, with a couple of deft snips, a Sweetwater sticker can be turned into one that says twat.

I easily forget that I've recorded countless tracks - songs, instrumentals, weird electronic doodles and so on - some of which might even see the light of day on a new album; and that I’ve recorded an album with our friend the poet, Karen Schoemer; and even recorded enough basic tracks with Amy to make up half an album. Apart from that I’ve been slacking off, daydreaming and forgetting stuff. I spent an inordinate amount of time packing up posters and sending them out to promoters though that of appears to have been a waste of time because half of them are undelivered, lost in the wreckage of the post-Trump US Mail Service.

I've also been called out for daring to suggest in one way or another that a certain aniti-vaxxing rock icon of the sixties and seventies would be a worthy recipient of the truncated Sweetwater sticker. I was told that I shouldn’t be in a creative industry.

I think it’s time I got on with some work.

Things Like This Happen To Other People (part two)

I’ve always thought chasing behind an ambulance as a way of getting through traffic was in poor taste - socially acceptable in fact. But lying there with my feet facing the rear doors, watching the world fold away and disappear behind me at a steady sixty five or seventy miles an hour I could see that I was wrong. I saw cars pulled over to the side wearing expressions of deference mixed with concern (in so much that is as a motor vehicle can wear an expression - you must bear in mind at this point I was coming out of a near death experience). But other cars, belligerent looking blighters, shot into the spaces that opened up and glued themselves to the back of the ambulance 

I was in safe hands with the improbably named paramedics, Shane and Duane. Duane sat on the bench besides me. A brief chat about fishing fizzled out, mostly because I don’t know anything about fishing and I was feeling a little…distracted, so Duane was left to field both sides of the conversation. I may have dozed off.

We arrived at the hospital, Albany Med, and the action started up all over again. Shane and Duane got me out of the ambulance, wheeled me across a concourse and through a set of doors where another team of excited medical professionals were ready to take over. We crashed through a reception area in a blur with someone shouting out my personal details, symptoms and latest vitals. It was like a TV show.

They told me they were going to prepare me for the radiology suite. They had to put me on a different trolley / bed / gurney or whatever those things are called. I didn’t have to do anything. They got round me and grabbed hold of the undersheet, counted to three and lifted me clean onto the other bed. I felt like the star of some twisted showgirl routine.

We were on the move again, speeding along corridors and up in an elevator. I got to see a lot of ceilings and light fittings. and then we were in the radiology suite - I wouldn’t neccessarilly have known this if someone hadn’t told me. A doctor explained that they were going to inject me with a dye so that they could see a map of my arteries on a big screen. I told them that if it was all the same to him I wouldn’t look. He said they were going to sedate me.

Someone said they’d go in either through the groin or somewhere else. I didn’t like where this was going, my vote was for the somewhere else. I may have voiced the opinion. A nurse reached in with a Phillips Phillishave and mowed off a patch of pubic hair, just in case. ‘Oh fuck!’ I said, ‘that’s going to itch when it grows back.’ 

People were working all round me. Electrodes were being stuck all over me - I wish I’d been able to take a selfie. A doctor leaned in and asked in a clear voice: 

‘How are you feeling now?’ 

‘I feel like a racing car in a pit stop.’

They sedated me - they must have done because I was in a grey nether world. I could feel the blood pressure thing around my arm. It tightened periodically to check my blood pressure. It was my friend in this strange grey place somewhere between worlds, a reassuring grip on my arm - it’s ok buddy, everything is going to be ok… 

I was in a room and something was beeping, one beep, then a space, then two beeps together… The blood pressure thing was still there - tightening, just to the point of too tight, holding it then slackening off. I discovered I had something electrical taped around my left index finger. It glowed red which I thought might be handy if I needed to find my finger in the dark.

The ceiling was those polystyrene looking tiles supported on an aluminium lattice. There was a sprinkler directly above my head. I hoped the building wouldn’t catch fire. I didn’t want to get wet. I started to make an inventry of the ceiling tiles, how many were unviolated by light fixtures, vents, sprinklers etc. It was an impossible task, I kept losing track and having to start again. 

A masked face was looking at me from behind a clear plastic visor. 

‘The doctor will be in to see you in a minute. You’ve had three stents put in your heart.’

I felt vaguely as though I could just get up, walk out, go home. But I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I couldn’t be bothered anyway. And I was tethered to too much stuff, and now I’d got them to turn down the beeping I was quite content to stay where I was, a prisoner of the electrodes.

The doctor came in. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you before somewhere,’ I said. He laughed - ‘I hope you’re feeling a bit less like a racing car at a pit stop!’

He explained the stents and how it all was. I’d had quite a heart attack, I’d probably been having it for a few days. I’ve never felt so utterly British - I’m feeling a bit under the weather -  still, must press on…

I asked how they got the stents in there and he told me they went in through my right arm just below the elbow. That explained the big bulge of sticking plaster with the large bruise spreading out from it. I’m imagining it was much the same as a chimney sweep sticking a brush up a chimney and screwing poles on until the brush pops out of the top of the chimney, but in miniature. And hopefully a lot cleaner. Something like that - unlike the president I don’t have a feel for this stuff.

They were going to keep me in for a couple of days. I felt a lot better than I had - exhausted, and a bit giddy at having survived the ordeal, and a bit freaked-out at being hooked up to all this stuff. Euphoria gave way the next day to a kind of melancholia. I didn’t lie there feeling sorry for myself but I felt beaten for a while. The heart attack was brought about by the Covid-19 virus. My lung power was substantially decreased which meant blood wasn’t being oxygenated, so it started to clot. Lack of oxygen and subsequent thickening of the blood puts a huge strain on the heart. It’s a vicious circle. Before this I was fit and healthy. I spoke to a friend in England who remembered walking around Cromer with me just last February. He said he could barely keep up with me. I started to feel angry How could this have been allowed to get so out of control? 

I’d been subtly warned about the food by some of the staff. I was given menus to fill in. I could tell how it was going to be as soon as I looked at them. Ordering was a matter of damage limitation. Pasta with marinara sauce - I thought that couldn’t be so bad but I was wrong. I was wrong too about meusli, fresh fruit, yoghurt, orange juice… It was all trash, full of additives, high fructose corn syrup,white sugar and all the other stuff any qualified medical professional would surely tell someone in my position to steer clear of. Meusli translated to a packet of Cocoa Pops, fresh fruit came in a festering sealed container steeped in its own sweated juice, yoghurt was a chemical substitute with pink colouring and flavourings - first ingredient on the list: high fructose corn syrup. The soggy overcooked pasta came with a tub of violent red sludge that contrasted perfectly with the green of the mushy pile of overcooked French beans. 

On the one hand you have the science, the technology, the skill and professional dedication that can turn a dying man into a functioning human being, and then you have the business. And where they intersect you see the cynical cost-cutting measures. Someone is running all this with an eye to the profits.

But I don’t want to dwell on negatives right now. The staff at the Albany Med cardiac unit have my undying gratitude, I thought they did a fantastic job and they did it all with kindness and care. My Covid re-test result came back negative so I was moved out of isolation and onto the main cardiac ward. I said goodbye to the bed that had been home for twenty-four hours and I was happy about that. At some point somebody had written the word pain on the framework with an indelible pen and it was evident that no no amount of scrubbing had been able to erase it. I hope that person’s pain proved less enduring. 

They took me off the big heart monitor and put me on a battery powered remote thing that slipped into a special pocket on the pretty patterened gown they gave me. I got a pair of pants too, big pyjama trousers in a contrasting pattern - you could have got four of me in them and it took some ingenuity to tie them up so they didn’t fall down. A nurse got me a pair of padded socks to wear so I could walk around the ward. They were bright yellow, I cut quite a dash. She told me not to go through any doors into the rest of the hospital.

Her colleague expressed doubt: ‘Wait, are you sure he’s not going to wander off?’

I laughed. ‘Yeah right - look at the fucking state of me! I’d go out clubbing but I don’t think I’m going to get lucky in this outfit, do you?’ 

He looked embarrassed - I think he thought I’d been referred from a psychiatric ward - it’s the English accent, it confuses them.

Different people kept wheeling in equipment and conducting tests. I could hardly keep up with it. A guy even woke me up at five o’clock in the morning - he stuck a load of electrode things over my chest and took readings. He was very apologetic but I really didn’t mind because I was on hospital time and anything was a welcome break from the tedium. The only contact I had with the outside world was a few phone calls and a care package from Amy. There were no visitors allowed because of the lockdown. It was quite lonely at times.

The final test was an ultrasound. The ultrasoundist (I’m sure she had an official job description but I can’t remember what it was so ultrasoundist will have to do) was a woman in her late forties perhaps. I asked her if she did anything else. 

‘Nope, just this, I take ultrasounds of peoples hearts. Been doing it twenty three years. I love my job and I’m really good at it.’

Somehow we got on to the subject of retirement. She gave a dry laugh: ‘Huh - I can’t afford to retire, I’m in the medical profession. I’ll be doing this until I keel over.’

I retrieved my clothes and got dressed. The nurses teased me that they were going to send me off with with the gown and pants outfit. One of them gave me a comb so I could look presentable for Amy who was coming to pick me up. I was trolleyed to the front door in a wheelchair even though I was more than capable of walking. Amy said she was expecting a crumpled and broken man but when I got out of the weelchair and walked through the door apparently I looked as though I’d spent the weekend at a health spa.

Not exactly, I felt exhausted - I still do, but a whole lot better than I had a few days before. If I’m honest I sometimes feel vaguely traumatised at the thought of it all, especially that I was offered the services of a chaplain which makes me wonder how close I may have been to popping my clogs. People say it must have been a terrifying experience but I never once felt frightened while it was all going on. I think that’s down to the people who cared for me in the hospital. I can’t thank them enough.

Now I’m out and about again I’m sick and tired of seeing big macho men and fools strutting around without face masks, and of being sneered at by bare-faced people. Maybe they think they’re tougher than Covid-19, or that they’re nature’s chosen, the naturally immune, but some of them are going to find out that they aren’t. They’ll be deeply sorry if they get it like I have. I want to tell them, to warn them, but I learned a long time ago that you can’t tell people what they don’t want to know. If stupid people want to die an unpleasant death I suppose that’s up to them. The sad thing is that in the dying they’ll put other people at risk.

For myself I’m happy to fantasize about full facial nudity…

Things Like This Happen To Other People (part one)

Things took rather a sinister turn last week - I had a heart attack and spent the weekend before my birthday in intensive care. 

I felt good when I got out of quarantine. A few days later I suddenly didn’t - we went for a walk and I got very out of breath - I had to sit down. It kept happening and it kept coming and going. Other virus sufferers told me they had exactly the same experience - the recovery is long and drawn out. I kept reading about the comet tail - recovery from the virus can be slow and fraught with setbacks. 

Apart from being short of breath, on occasions I started to feel quite nauseous. And then the chest pains started. High up, either side of my shoulders. Then they'd subside and I’d feel tired. I’d curse the virus and try to get on with things.

Obviously it was going to get better. Except that it didn’t. I had a day when I felt pretty crappy just about all day. The following day I got up and felt vaguely well. I sat and drank peppermint tea and enjoyed Amy’s latest homemade granola experiment. I felt tired - maybe I just needed to lay down for a while... I went up the stairs and felt the pain, an acute discomfort, grip me. I lay down and after a while it was a little better so I got up, got ready and went out with Amy in her car to run a few errands.

We were up north of Hudson where some friends have a farm. It was good to be out in the country, in the sunlight enjoying a socially distanced conversation.

I felt unwell. I had to excuse myself and get back in the car.

We set off to go home and I started to feel really unwell. Amy suggested we stop off at the hospital but that seemed to me like a drastic step, an admission that something was seriously not right. And that’s the last thing I wanted to admit to.

Amy said ‘I hope you’re not having a heart attack,’ and I laughed it off and said ‘No, that would be completely different to this.’ It couldn’t be - everybody knows a heart attack is when there’s something like a fist gripping a large stone in the middle of your chest and you get tingles and sometimes a shooting pain down your left arm. I didn’t have any of that so it couldn’t be a heart attack. And anyway, me and a heart attack? It’s not possible, it’s a bad fit. Heart attacks happen to other people and possibly to me in some dim and distant future when I’m very old.

I was quietly freaking out and trying to keep a lid on it because I didn’t want Amy to be upset. My head had turned into a hot, fuzzy mush, my rib cage was squeezing itself inwards, I had a fairly excrutiating pain each side of my chest and my arms had turned into nonsense. It became imperative that we get to the hospital. I’ve never seen Amy drive so fast.

We skidded into the ER parking lot where there was a barrier and one car ahead of us. Amy jumped out leaving the door open and the engine running. Everything was blurring by this point. I saw an exchange taken place but didn’t know what Amy was saying. I found out later it was ‘My husband’s having a heart attack.’

There was a team running across the concourse and I was in a chair being wheeled through. I think I told them I’d had the virus.

‘He’s Covid-positive!!

‘Room seven?’

Yeah, room seven.’

We crashed through to the back of the hospital and into a room containing a whole team of medical workers. They dumped me onto a bed, clustered around, fired questions at me - allergies, medications, date of birth… A nurse who said his name was Scott told me I was going to be ok and he was going to give me an injection. They gave me pills to swallow, tore off my shirt and stuck a whole bunch of electrodes on me. They put a tube in my arm, gave me the injection and siphoned half a gallon of blood out of me. 

Scott asked if I wanted a chaplain.

‘That’s the last bloody thing I want!’

A woman in a lab coat bustled in with some apparatus and announced that she was going to test me for Covid-19. The apparatus looked like something you might use to artificially inseminate a goat - two small wiry looking probes - I tried not to look too closely. She plunged them deep into my nose and I could feel them in my throat. It was unpleasant but it was over very quickly.

They gave me oxygen tubes and I began to feel a lot less alarmingly like I was about to die. I had four over-riding concerns: 

I wanted to someone to go and tell Amy how I was - they gave me my phone and I called her. I had no recollection of this until later. It went something like: everything’s ok here - apparently I’m having a heart attack. 

I wanted to pee really badly - why didn’t I have the sense to go before all this happened? 

I mustn’t die because tomorrow was the second anniversary of the death of my daughter Luci’s mother, and I really didn’t want to bring this on her. The timing was not good and at the very least I could hear her saying: why are you making this all about you? And quite right too.

I was three days from my sixty sixth birthday and I didn’t want to spend it in isolation in a hospital.

Bit by bit I was divested of all my clothes apart from my socks - I went through the ensuing twenty four hours wearing my socks - how quintessentially English - he died with his socks on… They put me in a flowery robe that didn’t button up at the back and it occurred to me that they weren’t planning on letting me walk around anywhere for a while, not in that garment, and anyway I was hooked up to too much machinery. 

I was going to be transferred to Albany by ambulance. I was introduced to the paramedics who were going to take me there, two large and baggy looking men in black satin bomber jackets. They were called Duane and Shane. They seemed quite proud of the comedy aspect of their pairing.

They swaddled me in blankets, strapped me down to the trolley, loaded me into the ambulance and off we went with the siren wailing, Shane at the wheel, Duane busied himself with a few things then sat with me in the back. 

‘So, what do you get up to in your spare time? Are you into huntin’ and fishin’?’

It was going to be a long ride to Albany. 

******

There's obviously more to come but it's a long and twisted tale. Look back in a day or two for the next installment.