DD has a lot of issues. I should know. I just want to say for the record I was her first real love. I was the first real marriage-like partnership she had, and there’s still no one who has been with her longer than me. I guess the work I had to do when it came to DD, the lesson that was there for me in my journey, was that we are responsible for our own journeys, but not for everyone else’s.
I gave a lot of love to DD. I put a lot of work into us. DD, frankly, did not. But I don’t think the work I did was a waste, because, ultimately, I know we are going to be together again. There have just been too many signs of that, over the years. I don’t feel comfortable talking about them. They were extremely intimate signs. But I feel like when she’s learned what she needs to learn, that’s when we’ll be able to pick up again where we left off, but further down a path of wisdom.
What does she need to learn? She needs to learn patience. To not just run around looking for something that’s not to be found, like how she’s obviously run away from her problems again recently. Obviously she needs to learn to just be still, and mindful, and feel where she is at the moment. And she needs to work on being less selfish, and she needs to confront some of her — excuse me — shit. Life shit that she’s afraid of confronting. She’s still totally in denial about a lot of the things that happened in her childhood. Look, I’m telling you that I have done a lot of work with people who suffered abuse, and I always offered to work with her, and she was very resistant to just letting me get right in there and help her.
Our connection happened before I ever heard her play. It was not about “oh, I’m going to be with this rock-star violinist” or anything, for me. Our connection was deeper. In a way, her music was like a disability for her. Because it was a distraction from the real work she needed to be doing. She could go off into her music, and I would be like, “Hello? You really need to put down that thing and look at me, and deal with some of the shit that’s holding you back here,” and she would just clam up, or take off on the road, for weeks and weeks, leaving me to just — what? Sit around on this island and wait for her? And then she would finally come home and be fucking sick, from all the toxins she would put in her body while she was out there drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes with Rosalyn Knight and eating literal shit at Burger King with Brody. Then she would want to be babied, and she’d want to be mothered, and then she’d sleep for like, three days, I’m telling you, like, really, three days of being just a rumpled roll of bedclothes where you were thinking, I need to poke this person and just say are you even alive?
And then there was all the cheating. Why not call it what it is? What she is. She is a cheater. That’s just who she is. That’s another way her music really held her back, in a lot of ways. Because every time she came off the stage, like everywhere, there was always some wide-eyed little (I’m sorry, but it’s true) slut running up to her and practically begging for her to fuck her. Everywhere. Even times when I would be there, and she would dedicate a song to me from the stage, they would still come. I don’t have a lot of great things to say about Rosalyn Knight, but she got it right when she called DD the “gateway lesbian.” I couldn’t tell you the number of times girls ran up to her and told her, “Oh my God! I only just realized I might be bisexual just now! When I heard you play the violin!” No, honestly. I’m telling you. They would say that when I was right beside her. With my arm around her.
So, you see it would be so very easy for me to say, hey, I don’t bloody care where she is. I hope she rots in hell. She is a liar. You reap what you sow. But in fact, because of that, frankly, instead I actually feel extremely sorry for her. I believe in love above all things, and I know that our destinies are intertwined in a very, very deep way. We are soulmates. And at some point in time, when she’s ready, when her journey has taken her where she needs to go, I still believe that we will one day be together. That is all I have to say.
Mykola Loychuck
Green Room Area, Rudolstadt-Festival, Rudolstadt, Germany, 2015
What do I remember about DD? Uhhh, so much … [long pause]. It’s very difficult to start because … I don’t know how to organize it in my head … and I have several theories about DD, and I’m worried. I’m concerned that some of them may contradict each other.
Well … [long pause]. One is that sometimes, I genuinely believed that God had sent her to this planet to teach me patience. She had this way of showing up for the plane, or the train, or the show itself at the very last second, after I’d checked in with her exactly a hundred thousand times to make sure she got there an hour ahead of time, just to allow for a margin of error. But she didn’t believe in reserving anything for a margin of error. I think my heart is at least … eleven years older from the wear and tear of wondering if she was actually going to show up at all. Although, looking back, she always did. So, does that mean that she was always, in her way, trying to get me to stop worrying? Or did she enjoy watching me sweat?
What else?
I read a science fiction book once. I don’t remember what it was called … Wait. It’s possible that this is a dream that I had and not a book that I read.
In the book, or in the dream, there were people whose minds had fused with cats. There was a woman, a regular human woman. She was leaving the outer-space town or something, going away. She asked her lover, who was a person who had fused with a cat in his mind, she asked him if he would miss her after she left, and the cat person said something like, “Meow … how can I think about you if you’re not there? Meow.”
All right, well, perhaps that’s an overstatement of sorts, but she … she’s very in the moment. This is what makes her such an excellent side player. Not even a side player — side player isn’t a fair term for her.
She forces you, the singing songwriter, to come into the moment with her, to reside in the song and not think about anything else. God what a sweet mercy and a triumph that can be when I can do it. When I can connect to my own humanity through a song, and then I shock myself that I’m actually connecting with other human beings. It’s the greatest thing.
Of course all the self-help new-age books all demand that you live in the moment. But what if you actually do live in the moment, which I have done sometimes with DD over the years? You wind up not remembering things that you told people you were going to do, including some promises you made, and you wind up not remembering things you promised you weren’t going to do, and you forget about planning any plan for the future, because you’re so living in the moment.
Although everyone says we are supposed to do that, it is actually something that annoys people a lot, to say the least, when you do it. I have experienced this from several different angles … [long pause]. Yes, I have.
She claimed to be a direct descendant of Chief Sitting Bull. He’s the one who beat Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn. Oh, you knew that. Of course. I didn’t mean to insult you …
She told me she almost earned a degree in classical music from the conservatory, but they told her she would have to wear a dress to the final recital, so she just didn’t go.
She claimed to be born with a crescent wrench in her back pocket. She said it many times. She loved anything with wheels and she claimed to be able to drive and fix anything with wheels, from a backhoe to a grader to a locomotive. Could be. I once watched her hot-wire a cherry-picker truck in Whitehorse at four in the morning and drive it down the street to a mini-mall where we got in it and she got us up to the roof and we drank vodka out of Big Gulp cups and looked at the Northern Lights.
I was fretting aloud about how we were going to get arrested and I was trying to figure out a plausible story to tell to the cops to explain about why we were on the roof of the 7-Eleven with a weird stolen truck, and DD said, “Just shut up and look at the lights, boss.” I said
