Until All These Shivers Subside:
R.E.M. and the Terrible, Awful, No-Good Fall of ’92
I will try not to breathe
This decision is mine
I have lived a full life
And these are the eyes that I want you to remember
It was the fall of ’92. I was in DC, two years out of college, working a dead-end theater job when the call came in.
“David’s dead, Bud,” my father said, employing his preferred honorific. “Last night. How soon can you get here?”
“Here” was the North Shore of Massachusetts, where they’d found David, my first cousin, in a car by a mall. None of us knew what happened or why but when we got home we learned. Depression. Episodes. Suicidal ideation. Psychosis. Possibly brought on by years of hard hits in football.
My uncle and aunt were reduced to husks. Cousins flew in from near and far. We rallied around each other at the shiva. Bagels, cream cheese, lox, corned beef, brisket. Laughs, tears. A lot of music. A lot of TV.
Two weeks later I was back in DC and it happened again. The phone rang and it wasn’t a cousin this time but a friend’s dad, Steve, someone I’d come to know well. He’d been sailing off the Jersey coast when the boat was caught in a storm and he lashed himself to the mast but it didn’t work. He was thrown overboard and drowned. It was something out of a movie but it wasn’t a movie.
I’d spent time at their home in Potomac with the parents, their kids, one of whom I’d gone to college with. This was the surrogate family that took me in, fed me and watered me when I was just finding my way in the real world. Now he was gone. Another funeral, another shiva. More bagels and lox. More cream cheese and bulkie rolls.
I need something to fly over my grave again
I need something to breathe
It wasn’t a great time, that fall. Death wasn’t meant to be experienced in twos.
My dead-end job became deader. Which was strange because at that point the theater was everything to me; the idea of being near a stage, no matter what I was doing, struck me as novel. I’d had artistic pretensions — still did. I wanted to write, to direct, but paying rent took precedence. It made you take jobs you didn’t want to take. Not much room left for art after that.
I was living in Foggy Bottom and the elections were happening: Clinton v. Bush, and if there was excitement around it, I didn’t feel it. I’d only recently started voting, my first election the DC mayoral race, Dixon v. Barry, but this was a presidential election and but for the fact that I knew who I’d vote for, it all just bounced off me like so many Super Balls.
I will try not to burden you
I can hold these inside
I will hold my breath
Until all these shivers subside
Just look in my eyes
I proceeded to drink, heavily, at a spot near L Street, a hotel, perhaps. I learned how easy it was to spiral. Every day I‘d wake up, trudge to work on 14th Street, then walk home and try to avoid the bar. Some days I was successful, others I wasn’t. I’d make phone calls to my parents, yammering on about whatever came to mind and they knew I was bombed but they tolerated it because it was the fall of ’92 and they felt it, too.
There was music at that time, two albums in particular: Suzanne Vega’s 99.9 F, which came out in September, and R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People, which appeared a month later. Both, miraculously, broke through. Whatever wasn’t working, wasn’t functional or sane, fell away when I heard them. R.E.M. had always done it for me, since discovering “So. Central Rain” on a high school trip in ’84. I’d lie in bed listening to “Green Grow The Rushes” and try to experience all the feelings that came with it. Fell in and out of love for the first time as I heard “Perfect Circle.” “Harborcoat” and “Cant Get There From Here” filled my ears with something other than my family’s predilection for Yacht Rock.
Then college and Lifes Rich Pageant, then Document, then Green. Berry Buck Mills Stipe on my dorm room wall. Bonding with other kids cool enough to know, to get it. Concerts, two during that time — freshman year, Halloween ’86, UVM, Feelies opening; and senior year, Montreal Forum with the Indigo Girls. R.E.M. was the soundtrack of the times, inextricably linked with whatever I happened to be feeling or going through.
But nothing hit harder than Automatic.
This being ‘92, I ripped the albums on a Maxell cassette for my late cousin’s sister, with whom I was close. She thanked me a couple weeks later over the phone, mainly for “Try Not To Breathe,” which she found especially moving. “David always said that,” she told me. “I want you to remember. That was something he said.” The song brought him back for a moment. I was glad.
I will try not to worry you
I have seen things that you will never see
Leave it to memory me
I shudder to breathe
I made it through the fall. Saw my uncle and aunt at family gatherings on the North Shore and there was always sadness but somehow they softened, became easier to talk to. My friend’s family in DC took me in and I spent time at their home, a refuge from the dead-end job and the booze. I directed my first professional show. The Post reviewed it and said nice things about me. More gigs happened, some with money attached. I joined a band and “Driver 8” was one of our covers. I still had to support myself but the slope became more slippery, the glide path to something like a life. Goals, aspirations, and accomplishments zoomed into focus.
Within a year I was in New York, on a new journey. With that came Monster, then New Adventures in Hi-Fi, then Up and Reveal. Another soundtrack, another phase — and finally, inevitably, the terrible, awful, no-good fall of ‘92 faded. The gloom, once overwhelming, receded.
I would listen to Automatic For The People many times in the ‘90s. No matter where I was, when I heard “Try Not To Breathe,” I was back in that place. Now shielded from the pain, a different person, I still wanted to remember.
ERIC WINICK has long worked at the intersection of the Arts and Commerce as a consultant and marketing director for NYC nonprofits. Separately, he is a creator of plays, nonfiction, and audio documentaries. He resides in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.
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