A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney

Author:Rob Delaney [Delaney, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2022-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

IT SHOULD SURPRISE no one that after Henry was diagnosed and began his new life in the hospital, I began to listen to a lot of Elliott Smith. I’d always loved Elliott Smith, but now that I had a child in mortal danger, whose life would at the very least be dramatically transformed forever, Elliott Smith felt like the right soundtrack. For anyone who doesn’t know, Elliott Smith was a genius whose music was already considered depressed—and, to some, depressing—even while he was alive. But then in 2003, he died after stabbing himself twice in the heart with a kitchen knife, really cementing his legacy as the immortal Prince of Sadness or whatever. It’s “funny” that a couple of years before that, Wes Anderson actually filmed Luke Wilson’s character slitting his own wrists in The Royal Tenenbaums while Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” played in the background.

Even more remarkable than all that was the fact that in 2002, while Smith was still alive and working on his final album, I was in a sober-living halfway house with an extraordinarily prescient Elliott Smith superfan. His name was Greg, and like some in the house, he had just gotten out of prison. I hadn’t been in prison myself; just the rehab that would mark the beginning of the now twenty years I’ve somehow been sober. Greg was a big, muscly Italian kid who could’ve benched me and Elliott Smith at the same time, but he loved to sit with a guitar and sing Smith’s songs beautifully. Greg had a new, bumpy, ugly red scar in the shape of a big “T” on the left side of his neck. Why? A few months earlier, he’d tried to kill himself by—you guessed it—plunging a kitchen knife into his own neck. I don’t know what became of Greg after the few months we lived together in the halfway house. All these years later, I just remember that I liked to hear him sing and play the guitar—and that he owes me thirty dollars, which in today’s money is closer to forty-seven dollars. Greg, if you’re reading this, keep the money. Just don’t spend it on knives, you nut!

If that’s not enough, another housemate from sober living was a very handsome and skinny junkie who used to play music with Elliott Smith. He said that part of his motivation for going to rehab was spending time with Smith, whom he viewed, even while alive, as a cautionary tale.

So, that’s the type of music I wanted to listen to every day when Henry was in the hospital. Now, granted, I’m a sober alcoholic who’s taken two antidepressant drugs every morning for most of the last twenty years, but for me, Smith’s music isn’t depressing at all. Even after years of managing depression with reasonable success, I don’t pretend to fully understand why I feel that way about his music, nor do I opine on it that much. I can say that I love and take comfort from things that others might casually dismiss as depressing.

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