Month: July 2023

The Soul Crushing Death of Sinéad O’Connor, Who I Should Have Helped

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

July 26, 2023

Sinéad and I had been out dancing at a Dublin disco called The Pink Elephant. It was our first date. I remember how she laughed when we saw the heavy metal band Def Leppard in a corner booth. Word was they were living in Ireland as tax dodge. Dublin was not very metal in 1985 and they were delighted that someone recognized them. “Def Leppard?” I burst out with my big American voice. “You guys are my little brother’s favorite band!” They all looked immediately deflated. Sinéad let out a big laugh. “Jesus, you’re vicious,” she said.

With the news of the passing of Sinéad O’Connor, so many memories of our time together have come flooding back. Her pain is well known to the world, but her impish humor less so. I’m both unsurprised by the news and crushed beyond repair. So much that I can barely write this. Hers was a life of pain that seeped into her music and now that pain and music are silent.

I spent a large part of the summer of 1983 living in a squat in Brixton, England, on the south side of London. Thanks to an Atlanta connection, I was rooming with an Irish violinist named Steve Wickham, who had most famously played on U2’s War album. When he headed back to Dublin to play a U2 show in Phoenix Park (with The Eurythmics, Big Country, and Steel Pulse) I tagged along and fell in love with the emerald isle. The summer of 1984 was dedicated to becoming a Dubliner (with short trips to London and Paris). This included supporting his band, In Tua Nua, who was recording a song by a very young Sinéad O’Connor. I was their roadie when they opened for Bob Dylan at Slane Castle and was there when they signed their deal with Island Records in London. I was firmly in Sinéad’s world but it wasn’t until the following summer that we would meet.

Back in Dublin for the summer of 1985, my calendar was structured around some big concerts. First was U2 at Croke Park (29 June) with In Tua Nua and R.E.M. (and Squeeze) opening, and then the show of all shows, Live Aid at Wembley Stadium (13 July). I was camped out, as had become custom, with Steve Wickham and his American wife, Babs, now living in the Ranelagh neighborhood of Dublin. That’s where I met Sinéad. She would come over to work on songs with Steve in his kitchen, her singing to his fiddle. In fact there’s a recording in my cassette stash of her singing to the sound of me washing dishes in the background.

She was small but gruff, her voice often at some frequency unreachable by my American ears. But when she sang, everything stopped. People have written lengthy tomes about that voice, so I’ll just say that once she started singing, everything else in the world, even dish washing, seemed pointless. Her big penetrating eyes were easy to fall into as well. At the time she was working doing singing telegrams and would occasionally show up at Steve’s in a French maid costume. The juxtaposition was jarring, stockings and combat boots.

Steve and Bab’s roommate, Clodagh, whispered that Sinéad fancied a pint with me. For the first time, I had an actual girlfriend back home, a fellow Emory student named Starla. But I was so enchanted with Sinéad’s talent, I just wanted to know more about her. So Sinéad and I went to the movies. Eager to share “my culture” with her, I took her to see The Breakfast Club at the local cinema. She didn’t get it. Afterwards, we walked down to An Lar (the City Center) to see what would happen. Besides dancing to Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood at the Pink Elephant (and our encounter with Def Leppard), we immediately got into some very deep conversations. I had just graduate from Emory and was on my way to grad school, so I was anxious to get her take on the role of the Catholic Church in Irish culture. I had gotten some amusing anecdotes from Bono, so I was curious what the singing maid had to say.

At this point there had been murmurings about the abuse of children by Catholic priests but I got a first hand testimony of the reality of that sick norm for Irish families from Sinéad herself, just 20 years old at that moment. I won’t go into detail, but it was clear that she had a legitimate anger rooted in very real trauma. And her emphatic point was that her experience was widespread in her homeland. She told me about the Magdalene Laundries and the role the Pope, John Paul II, played in protecting pedophile priests. It was heavy, so the Guinness and dancing helped to keep our heads above water.

We stumbled out to Grafton Street and headed up Rathmines Road to my kip at Steve’s. She then, in her long low rumble Irish voice, asked if she could kiss me. I remember not being sure I heard her correctly and asked her to repeat herself. That was our first kiss and I’ve revisited it a thousand times. If I had followed her lead, how different both our lives might have been. Maybe she would be here now. I felt even in those first moments, she was asking to be rescued from her pain. I wish I was the person I am now when I was 21. I would have said let’s go far away from this place.

We had more of those conversations on Grafton Street and at Steve’s. She was at Steve’s one day when my mother called asking where I was and Sinéad did me a favor by lying that I was just “out.” I was up in Belfast, Northern Ireland and had been detained during a riot and missed my train back to Dublin. She showed kindness to my worrying mother when her mother had shown her only anger. Shortly after that, Sinéad moved to London, to advance her singing career. I followed a few weeks later for an In Tua Nua show and to stay for the epic Live Aid concert. The day after Live Aid, Sinéad and I met up for a day of shopping on Carnaby Street. She was full of confidence about the direction her career was going. The world was paying attention to the music coming from Dublin and she was on the cusp of finding an audience.

In the fall I headed home to start my work as a graduate student in Atlanta, and build a relationship with Starla. Sinéad stayed in touch and there are a box of letters somewhere full of chatter about Latin American politics and her work with The Edge on the soundtrack of Captive, a British film about a terrorist gang. 

I returned to Dublin the summer of 1986, after Steve had left In Tua Nua to join the Waterboys, who had begun work on their sprawling Fisherman’s Blues album. I had spent the first part of the summer in Copenhagen, staying with Starla’s uncle, but doubled back to London to see Sinéad. She had just shaved off her short cropped haircut and was completely bald. It was striking. I was starting to pay attention to the rise of the racist skinheads in the United States and was considering making that subject of my Master’s Thesis. “Are you going to study me?” she asked. Her intensity on social issues was undermined by her darting eyes which rarely made contact, which I now recognize as a marker of lifelong trauma.

Since it was our thing, we went to the movies. This time it was Return to Oz at theatre in Leicester Square. That filmed she loved, because Dorothy escapes a sanatorium to the magical realm of OZ. I think she felt London was her Oz. Later we went to a Russian restaurant with her roommates Spike and Clodagh. (I had to send my undercooked Chicken Kiev back – the things one remembers.) And then we headed up to their apartment, with Bob Marley pictures tacked on every wall. They smoked massive amounts of hash, while I listened to the Black Uhuru and Aswad records and watched Sinéad’s transformation in this London Bohemia. Things were coming her way.

We reconnected again in London in 1987. I was again in Dublin, after some time wandering the south of France and Italy. Sinéad let me use her London apartment as a crash pad. She had finally landed a major label record deal with Ensign and was starting the work on her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. We stayed up all night talking and listening to Joni Mitchell albums. There was a joy in her voice that was new. She was about to finally be heard and heard on her terms. This wasn’t the shy girl dressed as a French maid singing, “Happy Birthday.” This was a fully developed artist who was about to share the thing that made her her with the world. And that included her righteous anger. I remember falling asleep in her bed while she danced to the music on her stereo. I woke up the following morning and she was already up, dancing to the music. She grabbed my camera and snapped a picture of me wondering who this new Sinéad was. What I didn’t know was she was pregnant with her first child.

That album, and the follow up, I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got, of course set the world on fire. The next time I saw her was in May 1990 when she had a concert in Atlanta at the Fox Theater. We hung out in her downtown hotel room, ordered room service, and she showed my pictures of her son, Jake. My skinhead study was fully underway, so we talked more about fascism than music, but I shared with her some of the music of the Atlanta band that I had managed, Drivin n’ Cryin, who were signed to Island Records, U2’s label. She seemed good. Stable and confident, but lonely. Neither of us had been good at sustaining long term relationships. But her voice had opened up a door of adoration and she accepted it cautiously, like the love of an abusive mother who could turn on you in a flash.

And that’s what happened in 1992 when she tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. I knew exactly what it was about. I immediately remembered our conversations in Dublin about John Paul II’s role in protecting child abusing priests. But the larger public flipped out, seeing it as some type anti-Catholic action. It got ugly fast. Two weeks later I saw the audience at Madison Square Garden boo her off the stage at the Bob Dylan tribute concert, (I was watching it on Pay-Per-View.) and my heart broke watching this crowd, who was there to honor that greatest protest singer, scream their hatred at this young female protest singer. Maybe it was because she was bald.

By that time, Sinéad and I were on opposite paths and never met again. I bought her records and followed her ups and downs. A few years ago, when she was being very public with her mental health challenges, I reached out to her on Twitter and we reconnected. I told her that I had work through my own issues with suicide and wrote a book about how to climb out of that black hole. But she seemed to be slipping farther into that abyss and the death of her son last year was more than she could bear.

Now that she’s gone all of us that knew her are left with the sinking feeling that we could have done more. Yes, her brilliant music will live on, but so will the ache of guilt. As we focused on our own journeys, we assumed those around us would be fine when, in fact, they desperately needed us. I am far removed from the 20-year lass I met in a Dublin kitchen, but I can’t shake the feeling I could have been a better friend. I’m sorry, Sinéad. I will do better next time.

From Big Brother to Cancer Care Giver

~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

July 23, 2023

What’s the John Lennon line about how life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans? I had this vision of flying into Georgia (on my father’s dime), rescuing my brother from his shithole hobo camp, and delivering him to a Portland cancer treatment facility, then watching his recovery from a safe distance. It didn’t quite turn out like that. 

When I got to my dad’s after landing in Atlanta, my brother, Ronnie, was on the phone, telling me I had wasted my time and that he wasn’t going to leave his camp in Cartersville, Georgia. I could tell he was afraid of the incredible change he was facing. Instead of suffering from his rectal cancer in a hell he knew, he was looking at relocating in a place far away from the Georgia piedmont. And he had never even been on a plane. I told him I wasn’t going to force him to do anything, I was just headed to come hang out with him for a bit. He’d been held up in a Quality Inn for a few nights because his pain was so great. He was convinced he was on death’s doorstep and just wanted to be left alone. This would have to be his choice.

Finally seeing him after two years was a bit rough. I thought about the last days of Howard Hughes but without the billions. His hotel door was propped up open so the Georgia heat and flies could come in as he lay in the bed. I went into operational mode. Food, coffee, and whatever else he needed. Gradually he realized he would be better off in Portland. He wasn’t ready to die just yet. I got a room next to him and we made plans to strike his camp later in the day.

He had been living on a hill behind the Cartersville IHOP for seven years. How he survived, I’ll never fully understand. Another blistering summer in rapidly evaporating Georgia would have killed him. His camp was a tent, full of spiders, and a year of garbage hidden under tarps, and a dozen gallon jugs of urine that served as his bedpans when he was immobilized by pain. It wasn’t pleasant but that thought that there was something better waiting motivated us to clear the camp and head to Atlanta to catch a flight to the land of Obamacare. 

The journey home was a challenge. Whatever you do, don’t fly Frontier Airlines. It’s the nightmare airlines. Just getting a wheelchair to get Ronnie to the gate at Atlanta Jackson Hartsfield Airport was an ordeal. Then, because of cancelled flights, I had to race him to another gate on another concourse and hope that delayed flight would get us to our connecting flight in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas to Portland flight was cancelled and they told us they could get us on another flight home three days later. I told them he was a cancer patient who had an important oncology appointment the following day and Frontier Airlines ticketing agent just shrugged her shoulders. So we headed to another terminal (Ron still in a wheelchair) and bought a ticket for that night on Spirit Airlines. (I never thought I’d say this, but Frontier makes Spirit look like Delta.) We finally made it to Portland, but Ronnie’s backpack didn’t arrive until six days later, with all his electronic items stolen from the bag. Frontier sucks.

After a day of adjusting to West Coast time, my job driving my brother around began. First to an oncologist in Tualatin, south of Portland, where we found out his cancer was Stage 4. Then to a residential facility I was hoping to move him into, where they told us it would be a few weeks. This was happening the week I was driving Cozy to and from art camp, way out in the traffic hell of Beaverton. Endless calls to Medicaid to get his long term care interview moved up from late August, making CT scan appointments, preparing meals, and administering pain meds every two hours.

Suddenly, I’d become an in home care nurse.

It just seemed really clear that this was the obvious role to step into. What else should I do? My brother is battling anal cancer. He was doing it alone in the Georgia woods, and now he’s doing it on my couch in a state that has legal weed. 

The legal weed bit has blown his mind. It’s been hugely helpful with his pain and appetite (although it wasn’t helpful with the Taylor Swift video I tried to make after we got high and watched Yellow Submarine.) In the conservative state of Georgia, possession of less than an ounce of pot is an automatic year in prison, on the taxpayers’ dime. In the liberal state of Oregon, an ounce of weed just means you’re running low on weed.

Once the pot and narcotic pain meds started to work, Ronnie started to feel human again. He’s got an amazing oncologist at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Center and wonderful palliative care coming. We’re still trying to find housing for him. Going through chemo on my couch is not an option. Keeping him in colostomy bags and diapers with an 8-year-old running around is a less than an ideal setting for him and my family, but he’s, literally, out of the woods. Sitting on our porch in the cool Portland night air (the opposite of Georgia), has allowed us to connect in a way we never did when we were kids. It started to feel like this experience was healing me as much as it was intended to heal him. 

It’s certainly a left turn from my normal summer, teaching on line and working on my side projects, but the support of Cozy, Andi, and Jaime makes it work. Watching Cozy and her uncle bond has been a thrill (Cozy is ferocious on the board games), and Andi has helped me remember how important this effort is. The moments I can escape with Jaime for a bit have kept my battery charged and her concern for my brother just fills my heart. And I’ve been able to show Ronnie some of the joys of my little town, like green tea at the Chinese Garden and way too much sugar at Voodoo Donuts.

Fifty years ago, everything was a constant fight between us. I never would have thought of trying to comfort him. Now my hand is on his back as the doctor tells him that his cancer has spread from his rectum to his lymph nodes and lungs. I don’t put him down for his assertion that he can “shred” his tumor with turmeric and sound waves. I just encourage him to listen to his doctors, who are among the best in America. This isn’t Georgia. Under Oregon’s expanded Medicaid, even the poorest among us have access to be best care.

Part of employing empathy is seeing this through my brother’s eyes. He has to be scarred shitless about this diagnosis, that is close to a death sentence, with a treatment option that will be a true test of his mettle. He’s lived as a hermit in the Georgia woods for ten years and now he’s in the hipster metropolis of Portland (Just the number of people walking around has shocked him. Nobody walks down the street in Cartersville, Georgia.), and, on top of all that, he has to trust a brother that has showed him more hostility than love in his life. I can’t imagine what’s going on in his brain. Thank God (Oregon voters) for legal weed.

Ronnie has been incredibly appreciative and acknowledges turning my living room into a cancer ward has been an imposition. But I thank him. This opportunity to help him has been good my for soul. If I can expunge a lifetime at anger towards him, I can deal with my anger issues for good. The other day he reminded of me when I knocked him out for calling me a “baby killer” in front of my girlfriend who had just had an abortion. He’s not the same person, and now I have a chance to be different.

Healing can take many forms. For my brother, it’s going to be regular radiation and chemo treatments, a bunch of pot, and hopefully a bed of his own. For me, just being here for him is the healing I needed.

Ron’s GoFundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-house-my-brother-for-cancer-treatment?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Little Brother

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

July 7, 2023

My little brother, Ronnie, and I took sibling rivalry to a new level. In fact, I’m quite sure we sent each other to the Emergency Room when we were kids. Our constant fighting must’ve driven our parents crazy. I know it did for me. It was the cause of some desperation, at age 16, when I first thought about throwing myself into a lake and drowning. (To be clear, the lake was a Stone Mountain, Georgia pond that was maybe three feet deep.) As an adult, I stopped talking to him for 17 years after he threatened to kill our mother. He did some time for that one.

Things have changed with my brother.

We started to reconnect in 2012, when I was back in Georgia. We visited some of our old stomping grounds in Stone Mountain and I learned how to talk to him in a non-antagonistic way. Ronnie has had a challenging life and I think our sibling dynamic played a roll. I wasn’t exactly the best big brother. I think Ronnie was the first target of my rolling anger that was the result of my abuse. I relished in the fight as that was my standard mode. When I could have been protective and nurturing, I was combative and cruel. So the reconnect was a chance for repair, especially when my bother fell into homelessness.

For the last few years, my brother has lived in the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Cozy and I had lunch with him and my father in 2021 at the IHOP near his camp and he was skin and bones. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had cancer. We didn’t talk for 17 years, but we talk pretty much every day now, unless he can’t make it down to Kroger to charge his phone.

Trying to find Ronnie adequate cancer care in a backwards red state like Georgia has been next to impossible. Dissertations have been written on how the Republican Party has conned poor and working people to vote against their interests to pad the pockets of elites, but suffice it to say, being sick and poor in Georgia is a death sentence.

So I’m bringing my brother to Oregon.

The assumption in Georgia is that every poor person who claims to be sick is only after OxyContin, so the insane amount of bureaucratic bullshit that is required to even see a doctor guarantees poor and homeless people are cut out of the health care system. Ronnie’s cancer doctor was 46 miles away at Emory University and he was routinely too sick to even organize a ride to the city. Tired of missed appointments, they dropped him from their patient roll, a cost cutting measure that shortened my brother’s life expectancy. Social scientists know we can predict your life span by the zip code you live in and the death gap for Cartersville, Georgia is as wide as the Tallulah Gorge.

Oregon, on the other hand, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, making sure low income people have first rate health and dental coverage. It took a matter of minutes to get Ronnie signed up to the Oregon Health Plan and get him space in a residential facility and an oncologist to start his cancer treatment. My mother was dumbfounded by how easy it was to get my brother the services he desperately needed. “Well, I live in a blue state, Mom,” I told her. Now I just have to get him here.

Early tomorrow morning, I’m catching a flight to Atlanta (paid for my father) to collect my little brother. The nature of his cancer is among the ugliest, anal cancer. He hasn’t been able to access the health supplies he needs so he’s often sleeping in his own waste. I’ve been Amazoning him colostomy bags, but he needs so much more, including diapers and clean clothes.  Getting him in shape to fly back across the country is going to take some work. He’s in great pain, without access to any sensible pain medicine, often sure he’s not going to live through the night. I assure him Oregon also has legal weed to help him through those nights. I would bring a bag of THC gummies with me from the corner pot shop, but in Georgia that would get you a one way trip to prison. (The penalty for possessing less than one ounce of marijuana is up to one year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.) Did I mention that Georgia sucks?

These may be his last days or the wonderful care given to low income people in Oregon may extend his life considerably. Anything is better than being poor and sick in the South. I’m banking on him being alive when I get to Cartersville and being in good enough shape to get on the plane. I’m looking forward to our cross country trip and getting to know the guy I didn’t have time for when I was a kid.