|
archived
at originally
appeared in Monozine
issue sicksicksix |
|
Ian
MacKaye : We set out on an Asian Pacific tour in October of 1996. We started with a gig in Hawaii, and we went to Japan, where we played 8 or 9 shows. Hong Kong, onto Malaysia, then Singapore, then we flew down to Australia, starting in the West Coast of Australia- Perth, and made our way, across. Halfway through the Australian tour we had a few days off in Sydney. I had been feeling fine I had no problems whatsoever- hadn't even had a cold or sniffle, nothing. The night before this break, we played in a town called Wollengong. Everything was fine. I felt maybe a little weird during or after the gig. I remember feeling kind of irritated or anxious or something. We did the gig, and headed back into Sydney. We were staying in an area called Bondi; we were staying in an apartment actually. A friend of ours had to leave town for like a month. He said "well you guys can all stay in this apartment", which was great. We had 3 or 4 days off, we figured this was going to work out fine. So, we went back to this apartment, made dinner, watched a movie... I felt totally fine, then we laid down to sleep, it was probably 2 or 3 in the morning. I remembered just thinking "... hmmmm. I'm going to be sick tomorrow." I could tell. that something was wrong, and it was the first kind of inkling that anything was wrong. But it's very typical of me to get a cold on a day off, because I run a very high adrenaline. My adrenaline really keeps things going, so as soon as I have a day off, my bodies like "okay now, fuck you... you're sick. I've kept you going all this time." When I woke up in the morning I was definitely feeling kind of delirious and definitely feeling like I was getting sick. I had to go take about a half a mile walk down to this office to pick up these forms for this New Zealand immigration stuff. We had to do it while we were there; there was no doubt about. I figured I'll get down there now, and get these forms sorted out-THEN I can be sick. I remember walking down, it was in the morning...pretty early; I probably slept only about 4 or 5 hours. It was a really beautiful day. I came around a corner, where there was a bus at a stop across the street. I kind of came around the back of the bus to go to the sidewalk. As I came around, there was this elderly woman, laying flat out, face down on the sidewalk, just lying there, like a mannequin. I was like "what happened?" It was at that moment, all these people came running out of the bus, to help her. I had come around the back of the bus a millisecond after she had just fallen. I just saw her on the ground before anyone could react. She was just so helpless, I was like- "this is a VERY bad omen." I spent
the morning in this office trying to get these forms. It was really
warm out, but I was freezing. I had to sit in the sun and put on a
hat. By the time I had gotten back to where we were staying, it was
over... I had given them the forms, I said "fill these out and take
them down to the office, I'm sick" and I just got into bed. And from
that moment, that started a 20 day illness, basically. When everybody else was out at a movie, I was just lying there roasting away. I realized what was going on was, I was having somebody else's dreams'. These were not my dreams : I was quite sure about it. I remember they came back. Guy came in and said "how's it going?" and I said "I figured it out I don't know how this happened, but I'm having somebody else's dreams. These dreams are not my dreams. I can't stop having these dreams, and I think the only way I'll be able to deal with this is to just kill myself. And he said "Okay... let me go talk to the fellows about this." So I was really convinced this was it- I really had to kill myself. I couldn't think of any other way to stop having these dreams. I was really, really out of my mind at this point. So, the third day, I went to go see a doctor. I had no congestion, and wasn't vomiting, (I did vomit a little bit after a couple of days because I had been baking so much, that I couldn't hold food very well) I wasn't having diarrhea, but I had an incredibly sharp pain in my chest. That was starting to concern me. I went to go see a doctor and said that I needed some antibiotics. He disagreed with me, and said he didn't think I had any infection, because I didn't have any kind of phlegm. There was nothing yellow coming out of me, and particularly because I could breath through my nose and waist congested. So they put me on intravenous vitamin C, which was intense! They gave me two huge rounds of it. I came out of there bounding... I felt great. I coolant believe the effect on me, it made me feel like Superman. I came back, like "I don't have an infection, they gave me vitamin C, I'm feeling really good. I feel strong." About two hours after that, I just crashed. I hit so hard, that was just so terrible. I got through it that night. The next day, I was like "That's it, we've got to go see another doctor." So the next day, I went and saw another, and I just begged him for some antibiotics. I figured I had just some kind of virus, and needed to knock it. He gave me some mild antibiotics, which I couldn't keep down. I kept throwing them up. So, that night I laid in bed, and Brendan was sitting with me. My chest was hurting so much, that I couldn't laugh and I couldn't cough. It was like a sharp, stabbing pain. I realized, "I know... I've broken a rib, and scratched or punctured a lung or something " That's the only thing I can think of. I'm trying to remember if there was a time I fell against something, or landed weird. Did I hit myself with the guitar? Maybe I cracked a rib.. .but something was up. So we ended up taking ace bandages and just wrapping my chest, like a mummy...really tight. That actually worked. It constricted it, so my ribs didn't hurt so much. It was clear to me that if I wasn't feeling any better in the morning, I needed to go to the hospital. I was just never getting better, just this endless cycle of sweating- Everything was getting drenched and ruined. I couldn't think straight, I couldn't read, I couldn't look at television, I was gone. That next morning, I woke up, and just felt so bad, I called up this Australian friend of ours, and said "Look, take me to the hospital." So we went down to King's Cross Hospital (It's actually St. Vincent's Hospital.) It's in a neighborhood called Kings Cross. It's a public hospital, and it's basically a hospital where all the junkies go... stuff like that. We went there, and said that I was having chest pains... which I was, and it immediately put me at the front of the line. They admitted me to see if I was having a heart attack. They discovered in the x-rays that I had pneumonia. I guess I didn't understand what that was. I hadn't been sick and all of a sudden, was totally catastrophically ill. My experience
in the emergency room was funny, because the whole time I was there
(and I was there for hours and hours) there were all these junkies;
OD'ed guys, coming in.. .made to drink charcoal, to absorb the toxins.
It was just so crazy in there. People were screaming and whaling,
and all I could think about was "how am I going to get out of here
in time to get back on the road?" We were supposed to play the next
night. They admitted me, and said that my chest was just full of fluid.
I got my own room, and they put me on antibiotics, some really powerful
ones, that seemed to knock out the fever. At that point, my chest
just locked up, and I could not breathe. I was oxygen forever...I
had a mask on, and this nebulizer thing. I spent every day there just
gasping for air. They figured that maybe my lung had collapsed, which
explained why my chest hurt so much, and my shortness of breath. I
had always thought that a collapsed lung was your lung just pushed
in, but in fact, according to the doctors, there's a chest cavity-
your lung lives in this. That cavity actually created like a negative
gravity. It pulls the lung open, so you have full range of breath.
Well, if something was to corrupt that cavity, whether you're stabbed,
or something happens to change that pressure, the lung doesn't really
collapse so much as it loses it's full expanse. It doesn't fold up
like a balloon, it just isn't being pulled open anymore. The doctor's
theory was that I had an infection on the lining of the lung. To protect
it, your body sends out fluid, to protect the lung, so they don't
tear, or rub against one another too much. My body totally overreacted,
and sent out everything and just filled my entire chest cavity with
fluid. They don't know why my body did this. My lung collapsed, because
there was all this fluid around it. So they said that they wanted
to see if the fluid would recede and reabsorb into the body. Well
after 2 or 3 days, it didn't and they said "Well, I think we're going
to have to give you a tube." So they cut me open and stuck a tube
in my side, and started draining out the fluid. Every day I was sitting
there, and had a physical therapist, trying to get me to bring up
some phlegm... something, so they could test it for some kind of bacteria
or infection. I couldn't come up with anything...I didn't have anything.
So they're draining the fluid, and when they first do it, it's kind
of interesting. There's a local anesthesia, and they put it in my
chest, adjust numbed it. They cut me open and put a tube right in.
I was looking at it, lying there, talking to the guy while he did
it. Half a liter of fluid just came right out. I was like "Whoa, that's
incredible" but the doctor wasn't very happy. I asked what's wrong
and he said that it should be three liters. I said "THREE LITERS?"
He said "That's how much fluid we think is in there. This is only
half a liter, which means you still have two and a half liters of
fluid still in there." I'm like, well...this is fucked. They say they'll
just leave the tube in for a couple of days. It was clear that the rest of our tour was going to be cancelled. It was the first time, in our ten years of touring, that we'd ever have to cancel a serious amount of dates. Only three shows were cancelled, EVER. Two because our van blew up and we just couldn't get to the gig. One because Guy was in a hospital in Austin, Texas and we couldn't make the drive to Phoenix the next day. These were the only times out of hundreds and hundreds of gigs. We've only had to cancel three. This is the first time we were ever faced with 2 weeks of gigs. The two weeks we lost were really, the money making gigs. The whole first part of the tour, was exotic (going through Malaysia and stuff) which cost us a fortune, and we didn't make any money on any of that. We didn't even make any money to pay towards the tickets, so the last two weeks were sort of the bread and butter dates, and those were the ones that got cancelled. We ended up losing like 30 or 40 grand on this tour. So these dates are gone, and at this point I don't care. I don't even care about the band. I am completely interested in survival at this point. I wasn't panicking, but I was a little discouraged by all the developments. It was the first time in my life that I wasn't able to do anything about it. There's nothing I could respond with, my body had no recourse. I don't go to doctors... I don't take medicines. My whole concept has always been eat well, sleep and take care of yourself. I don't take an aspirin to break a fever, I don't even take vitamins. I take NO medicine. It's sort of a rule of thumb, I'm just not interested in it. I feel that our bodies are created to work. Obviously there's people with mitigating circumstances, but generally speaking, I think our bodies have been created to work on their own. Now faced with this operation, I was tortured by it. I was also getting more and more depressed, because I was getting worse. Nothing was getting better. Once I went into the hospital, I submitted to their program. I decided trying to wait it out, sweat it out and rest it out. After seeing all these doctors, that decision had to be coupled with concept of complete submission. For me I kind of feel that going into a hospital is like flying on a plane. It's unpleasant, it's loud, you cant get any rest, the food sucks, but you start in one place and end up in another. They're just these very odd vehicles. It's like a program, you just have to go in and just be there. In fact, when I went into the hospital, I made a conscious decision, that I would ONLY eat hospital food. Even though everyone was there saying "We'll bring you really good food", I just said no, because this is an unpleasant experience and I do not want to associate this with anything I like. I think hospital food is designed to be bland, because (at least with the illness that I had), I couldn't deal with complicated food. It had to be something simple. So every day, I had this ridiculous vegan vegetable burger thing. Every day I had exactly the same meal. EVERYDAY! But I was trying to make myself think of it as sustenance. I'm trying to make myself as blank a page as possible.. .and trying to isolate this experience to what it was. My depression became more and more profound. I started to have these ideas. I think that people think of hospital stays as moments that kind of dot your life, like you live, and there are these moments where you might find yourself in the hospital. But I started to think of it quite conversely, that you're born in the hospital, usually you die in a hospital, and there are periods of time where you're in a hospital throughout your life. That is reality, and the moments out of the hospital, are the abhorations. The Hospital is like your vessel.... I was losing my mind basically... .I would stand in the window and watch these people walking around outside- it was a beautiful summer day in Australia- and I was just cursing them, like "FUCK YOU!" I would think "You fools, you think you're well, but were all sick." I was losing my mind completely. Finally, after really struggling with this whole idea about having this operation, I decided to go ahead and do it. It was hard, because I was 10,000 miles away from my family. I think my biggest fear, was not that I was going to die, but I was going to die so far away from everybody. I kept thinking it was going to be a big mess for everybody. I don't like operations. I don't like being put to sleep. I think it seems really "slippery." After talking to these doctors, I found out that they are like kings. I've never really dealt with doctors before, but these guys were like lords of the manner. They were so arrogant, like "Well, we'll just pull this out.. .it's no big deal." They're really hardcore about what they wanted to do. I was like "Fine, I'll do what you say." It was a thoracotomy operation. I was told it would leave a 4 inch scar on my side. But in fact, what this operation entails, is probably a 14 or 15 inch incision along my left shoulder blade. It sort of lopes right around my shoulder blade and comes along to my side. They come through there, they spread my ribs. They cut all the muscle in the back, and spread them, which then tears all the muscle in the front. With their hands they reach into my chest cavity, and literally, manually, pull out the gunk that is in there... the rest of the fluid. It is a hardcore operation. I've learned since, from friends of mine who work in hospitals, while it's a rather routine operation, it's considered one of the most painful, because it just decimates your chest. It just ruins you. When I woke up, they told me that they could give me morphine. I said I didn't think I needed it, or wanted it... .They said "we think you should have it." And I said that we'll see how I feel. When I was conscious enough they told me they had hooked me up to a self- administered morphine "thing." It was a little button that you click and it gives you measured amounts of morphine. I think the Australian ones give you a little bit more than the American ones do. Every 5 minutes, you're allowed to have a little hit. I told the guy I really didn't think I'd need it, but he said "I'm going to go ahead and set it up. You can click it up to once every five minutes and get a hit of morphine." I said 'll try it...maybe I'll take it every hour or something. He said "you decide" "Well, if I decide I probably wont use it at all." He said "that's fine, I'm just going to give you this thing" It's a little bracelet, a little thing that hangs off your wrist, and you have a little button right there to click. The moment he walked out of the room, I was just pushing that button, 'cuz I was hurtin'! In a way I cant describe. If you're in pain, your body's not healing. It's just your body dealing with the pain. The idea of the morphine is to mask the pain, so your body is set to the idea that it's supposed to be healing from the operation. Which is pretty sound, I think. A lot of people say "did you get high like a kite?" Well, the thing about morphine is, if you're in good health and you take morphine, than you'll get a high. But if you're injured or sick, it doesn't even bring you back to zero. It just brings you close to zero, maybe. It just rounds things out, so you don't have to completely focus on the fact that you've been hacked open. I'm now on 3 antibiotics, 2 pain relievers... I'm riddled. Even after the operation, I'm in much worse shape. I feel much worse than I did before. I can't walk, I'm strung up to this fucking tube, which is still draining. Now I'm draining out all this pussy stuff from the operation and I have this morphine thing connected to me. I can't even get out of bed... I can't even roll over. I'm now put into this chest ward. The chest ward, is basically where all these guys are coming in for quadruple bypasses. They're all waiting for fake hearts and transplants. It is a depressing part of the hospital. As a matter of fact, I was in that ward for I think 6 days, and in those 6 days, I had 4 room- mates; come and go. I had 3 guys come in for quadruple bypasses, and one kid who had an artificial heart that he was rejecting. I'm just there with stupid pneumonia! I was in the hospital for 16 days. Other people would come in and say "I'm getting a quadruple bypass " and then they'd get it and leave the next day, and I'm there for so long, I was a household name to everybody. The doctors became very concerned, because I wasn't shitting. They said it's a natural reaction to the morphine, because morphine kind of fucks up your machination, I guess. Everything sort of shuts down. I remember I was talking to Joe and a nurse came in and said "we're going to give you some laxatives." So I ate it, and nothing happened, and they gave me another one. I'm now on 2 laxatives, and nothing was happening. Finally she came in and said "maybe we should try a suppository". I said "whatever you guys want to do .. .I don't care" She said "have you ever used one?" and I said "No" She says "Do you want to put this in, or do you want me to do it?", and I'm talking to Joe, I just roll over and say "you just go ahead and put it in." I mean, I didn't give a fuck anymore. Nothing mattered to me. At this point now, I was on 3 antibiotics, 2 pain relievers, and 3 laxatives, and my body was continuing to shut down... I was getting more and more depressed. The food was starting to make me physically ill I had been eating the same food over and over and over, and I don't seem to be getting any better, even though , now I've gone through this horrible operation. Finally, I just woke up feeling sick. At this point, I was able to walk. I got up with my morphine thing that rolled along, and my little cam bottle of fluid and made my way across to the bathroom and just threw up. I got up and looked in the mirror, and noticed that my tongue was entirely green! I just sat there looking at my tongue, it was green.. .literally.. .green. The whole top of my tongue was like, mossy. So I went out to the nurse, and said "something is wrong with my tongue." She said "what is it?" and I stuck my tongue out, and she said "gross!"... which is not what nurses are supposed to say. She said "have you ever tried brushing it?" I said "brush my tongue" She said yeah, and I said "no." "Well some people do that- I do" I go "why do you brush your tongue" She says, "I don't know... good breath" I thought that seems really odd. I said I'd give it a try,'so I went back to the bathroom with my toothbrush, and I tried to brush my tongue, but in the state I was in, my tongue was one giant gag point. The moment I tried to brush it, I fell on the floor and started vomiting. I was just convulsing in vomit. It was so disgusting... .I tried to walk out, and the food cart went by, and I had to go vomit again. I was just throwing up over and over again. There was nothing to even throw up at this point. I made it back to my bed, just weeping. Everything was wrong at this point. My tongue was green, I couldn't shit, I was throwing up, I felt terrible... I was in pain. The doctor came in, and I said "doctor, your medicine is killing me. I think we need to stop the medicines." We talked about it for a while. He goes, "I think you're right" and he just crossed off all the medicines- just crossed them off the chart. I was so happy. I just felt like I needed to get back on program. I needed to get back to me. I just felt like I was strung up like a puppet. The next day, he came in and I said " I have to get out of here" I literally could not eat the veggie patty again. I COULD NOT eat that thing, I needed real food, and I needed air. I would walk up and down this hallway and I 'd go by room after room of people laying with their chests, like, wide open.. .all stitched up from their bypasses, or even worse. There's a number of rooms you walk by where you just hear the machines, like the artificial hearts clicking and whirring away. This INSANE clicking sound.. .OR, there was this one kid who was there. He'd been there for like 8 months, he was hooked up to an artificial heart. There was a little family room you could meet in, that had a television and a VCR. To accommodate him, they had these extra long tubes, from his chest to this artificial heart back in his room.. .probably 50 yards long, it went down the hallway... .So when I walked around, I had to be careful not to step on this poor kids tubes. That's the really horrific constitutional that I would take every day, just for an hour or two, just walking back and forth, just being reminded of just how frail and fragile bodies are. It was hard.. .there was this poor boy, who was just 25 years old. He'd gotten a transplanted heart, and his body was rejecting it, I didn't know, and maybe you know, your body will always reject ALL donor organs. It never will accept it. The thing is, the degree in which it will reject it. I used to think that they would try different hearts and different organs, until they found one that didn't get rejected. The way it works, is that they give you medicine, that basically shuts your defenses down, enough so that it can't attack this invader, or organ. It's a way to suppress your defenses, so as not to oust the intruder, but at the same time, leaving it strong enough to fight other illnesses, and that's it. That's the trick of these transplants that people are given. You have to take this stuff everyday, for the rest of your life. That's it.. .This guy was 25 years old, and he was like "well, what else am I gonna do" yeah.. .you're right, what else are you gonna do. Finally, I was unable to eat at his point, and the doctor came in and I said "listen, you've got to let me out of here." He said "You know, I think you've reached a saturation point." They let me out the next morning. I remember they told me that I probably wouldn't want to eat, or be able to eat, but I just hit a macrobiotic market on the way home, and just got so much food, to start rebuilding my own body again. I was there for another week, trying to get up enough strength to fly back home. I got home right at the end of December.. .We were practicing again within three or four weeks of that. It was hardcore, and my chest wall is still fucked up from it. They say that it could take a year, or two years, or three years even, before the numbness in my chest goes away. My dad told me that he had an operation on his chest that took 20 years for it to go away. Given that, I didn't feel that there was much option... so I'll be numb in my chest for 3 years.... It was so intense, the whole thing, and I think it was also because I'm never sick. I think that people around me were freaked out about it. I don't have any bad feelings about it at all.... So, 3 weeks later, you're practicing again? Yeah How long before you got back on the road? Our first show was about 6 months after that. And were you nervous about it? No Really? Not at all Was it an American Tour? The very first trip, we did about two weeks in New England, but in June, we actually flew back to Australia and finished the tour. Australia didn't give you any hesitation? No, I think I'm quite comfortable about how the body works. I'm very accepting of things. The doctors told me that it was a fluke. They don't know why I got so sick. They say that my body overreacted. It was a combination of things. They couldn't believe that I didn't smoke or drink. They were shocked, because I was in a rock band, and they figured "well, obviously you've been sick for weeks" I said "No, I've been fine." They said "do you take drugs, drink, do you smoke? Were you in any jungles in Malaysia?" I said no. There was nothing. According to one doctor, I may be a little TOO healthy. My defenses were just over reactive. It's like lighting a match in your apartment, and every sprinkler in the entire building goes off. Something happened, and my body went completely ape shit trying to protect itself. That's the best guess. I saw doctors here and they didn't see anything. I was a little nervous whether I'd be able to sing or not, but that's strictly an issue of function. My lungs had been through this trauma, and I didn't know if I'd have the air. I suppose it's possible that my lungs are a little bit defeated.. .maybe I don't have the breath that I used to have. It's hard to kind of measure, because I'm also 36, so one would assume that as you get older, that you just don't have quite as much resilience. In fact, the last few tours I've been on, I've actually been in a lot better shape than I had been in years. Also, I had thought before I got sick, that I would take yoga. The doctors in Australia (which I actually couldn't believe) said to me "You should take yoga when you get home." The thing about American medical practitioners, is I don't think they've even heard of yoga. I just feel that they aren't completely sold on that kind of medicine. The idea of doing something like yoga, as opposed to doing aerobics, or whatever. The Australian doctors said that it was perfect for what I need...gentle stretches to open your chest up again. It was funny, because 2 weeks before I went into the hospital, I'd been saying to the band, that I'm getting older, and my body is not as resilient. I think I need to start doing this, to help get looser. So when the doctor said that I was like "It was already planned." I had been doing yoga ever since, and I certainly think it's helped a lot. Did anything help you through the agony- a view, conversation or someone's company? Yeah, I should also mention, that right when I got sick. Guy's grandfather had died. He was here. Guy's grandfather had decided that he wanted to be buried in Haifa, Israel. So Guy, suddenly had to get on a plane in Sydney, on one days notice, and get to Israel. He ended up having to fly some insane route through Thailand, Egypt, into Israel. Because he had come through all these places, he was kind of unkempt. The customs agents tore him apart. He was carrying a guitar with him, too.. .they made him take the guitar apart, to figure out if there was any kind of weapons there. Guy left town almost immediately after I went into the hospital. Brendan came to visit me every day he was there. He left probably the day after the operation, so he was there probably two thirds of my stay in the hospital. He'd come everyday and he'd bring this computer. I could just read the Email, I wasn't really answering it, but I would read it, and tell him what to write. We played a lot of Rummy 500, and the place where we were staying at.. .we ended up having to spend 2 or 3 weeks there. It really could not have happened in a better place than Sydney. Had we been in a hotel the entire time, we'd have been so broke, it would've been insane. It was like a home base. We had the most friends there, our tour manager was based there, it was all there. The hospital that I ended up going to, was considered to have some of the best doctors in the Southern Hemisphere, which I didn't know at the time. It really is one of the best hospitals. The place where we were staying was this guy's apartment. He had a stack of MOJO magazines. It's a British rock history magazine. It's very well done. It has incredibly in depth articles about really obscure 70's rock acts. He would just bring me about 4 or 5 of those every day, and I just poured over those things. I learned more about 10CC and Foghat than anybody should ever have to. It was so well written and I enjoyed it so much. When I got sick I was right in the middle of re-reading "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," but I just couldn't finish it. It was too depressing- it's not a good book to read if you're dying.... The other thing- Joe lent me his Walkman, and I found myself listening to Nina Simone a lot, which was really good. I find her music so inspirational. I got out of the hospital, was now back staying with a friend in Bondi, and recovering, still having the sweats, and getting stronger and stronger. I was really wondering: "Oh yeah. I'm in a band, what is music?" It all seems so absurd. I couldn't really understand what it was. I rented this movie called Message to Love- The story of Isle of Wight. Isle of Wight was a festival in England in 1969 or 70, just after Woodstock. It was one of Hendrix's last performances. It was a total disaster... .The movie just ended up showing what a mess it was, what a horrible disaster of a concert it was. None the less, in watching that, I was enthralled by watching these performances. I just realized "you know, I'm a musician" and that was one of the first times in my life that I actually said "that's what I do, that's who I am". It was weird, I've never had to think about it, but coming out of this illness made me kind of figure out what I did. I was like "oh yeah, I play music. That's completely valid." It was a nice realization- and good old Nina Simone. There's a song, it's one of the heaviest songs I've ever listened to, called "Compensation." What really got me through, was thinking about people WAY worse off than I was. Also, that I live life in a very tangible manor. I walk when I hit the floor. I deal with things as they happen. I've never planned, I'm not an ambitious person I don't think, except for what I'm working on at the moment. I don't have long range goals, I can't really deal with things, unless I'm actually doing them. For me, when I was in the hospital... that's what I was doing. That is where my life had taken me at that point. A week before that, I was standing on a stage... my job was to be in the hospital.. .try to stay alive. The way I live is so day by day... It was quite an experience, and in a way, I was kind of relishing it. You don't get that kind of opportunity very often, to be in a hospital in Australia. Australian's haven't been quite as perverted by malpractice suits yet. They have really good national healthcare there, even though it didn't do me any good The hospitals are like public schools.. .kind of dirty. There was no bullshit. Here's your bed, rile floor, very 1950's straight forward. No Faux Colonial decorations, no pictures of flowers on the wall. Your in a hospital now. the nurses are like young people. They are just nurses. They had this little cart, it was called the pharmacy cart. They would just come in. check your charts and just give you your medicines out of there. The protocol is really different than American hospitals, I think. People didn't bullshit you there. "Yeah, your sick" There wasn't any kind of sweet talk. That appealed to me a LOT. That's the kind of language I can appreciate, where as if you ask for a band aid here and they're like "well... I don't know." Just give me a fucking band aid' Everyone is so worried about breaking protocol and being sued in this country, and for good reason... It's just changed the way medicine has worked here, I think.. .not that I have that much experience with being in hospitals here. Visiting people in hospitals, I'm often surprised by how different it was than my experience. I far prefer the Australian way. National healthcare is an absolute- should exist here anyway. When I was first in the hospital there, my roommate was this cocaine junkie guy, he was asthmatic, but he had pneumonia, too. This guy was outrageous.. .he was a total felon, in and out of jails. He was in the hospital.. .a guest of the state. He would go out every day, to go smoke cigarettes. He told me "Yeah, I just went out and did some coke" I'm like "you know, you're in a hospital. Don't do cocaine when you're in a hospital" He was like, "I know, I was just bored" He asked me one day "do you want me to go out and get a couple of chicks?" I said "What?" He said "yeah, I could go get a chick and we could get blow jobs" I said "No.. .I'm not even thinking about my dick. Are you kidding? I'm trying to breathe over here!" He's like "yeah, you're right, mate." He was a completely weird guy. He the kind of the guy that made me feel nervous to leave my money around. He was a junkie... but actually, we ended up being kind of good friends. Then he got kicked out, and he got so mad. They were like "You're well" and he didn't want to go out. He knew that if he went out, he'd be back on the streets, so he kept saying "I'm not well" They said "well, you're out of here either way." He left cursing... .they all knew him, he'd been in and out for years. He was so pissed- he got free food, and a place to sleep. Now he's back on the streets and has to figure it out. You can't buy these experiences, so that's why I kind of relished them. I was originally planning on asking you if there were any kinds of visions that you had experienced, then you mentioned your haunting dreams... Plus the sense that your life is nothing but a long hospital stay, with intermittent moments of freedom. Is there anything that immediately remind you of being sick? No... I have no recollection of the actual feeling of it. I can remember the whole situation-I have a good memory about it, but I don't have any negative connotation about it. I don't think of it as "oh it was so horrible." I don't get chills.. .it doesn't bother me. I don't care. I was sick. Anytime I've ever hurt myself, I don't think "oh, I don't want to hurt myself again", it's like "Oh yeah, I got hurt." I dont ever have a sense of recoil, or repulsion. It's like, that's what happened, and I'm sure something like that will happen again. Nothing ever reminds of it.. .The smell of hospital food, when I first got back, a friend of mine went into the hospital. She had broken her water like 2 months early. She went into the hospital, and I walked down the hall to see her, and I walked by a big cart full of meals, and that smell took me RIGHT back. Your smell is your strongest sense, I felt that my plan had worked perfectly. That's exactly why I only wanted to eat only hospital food, because I only wanted to give one kind of food that sort of property. That was totally my plan. If you wrote a song to sum up your incident, what would you title it? "Now
I'm doing this." Did you feel refreshed when you got back to it? Did it feel good to return to something you hadn't dealt with? I think it was a beginning of a whole new era for the band. By the time I got home, Brendan had arrived home. He was out West with his girlfriend. When they returned he had announced that they were going to get married and have a child. Suddenly everything just changed. The band has completely changed. Did that seem like it was a visible shift in direction? I think it was a realistic shift. We'll never be the same, because now we have a baby in the band. That's great. I'm all for life. We've been operating as a band, for a decade, doing what we do. We do it very well. But there's a point where we're like "C'mon, throw us a couple of curve balls, give us something to work with here." We have to exist in real time, and part of real time is the evolution of life. Look, here we are, the same 4 people, we keep playing together. Everything around us changes- life, we get older, things evolve, our music evolves, it's about real time and the idea of having kids, and peoples lives changing... .It's supposed to happen, we're not supposed to be the same, four, full-time Fugazi members. I WANT there to be that kind of effect, I want life to insinuate itself into our band. I'm psyched about that.. .Now we only tour for 2 weeks instead of 2 months... and that's fine. In the year since then, Joe moved out of his house, and got married. Guy moved out of his place, and everyone's life really changed radically in '97 after this illness. It just presented a stopping point for the band. We've gone for 10 years. I got sick, and BAM, we were not going to play for 6 months, and that was it. That made everyone reassess what they were doing with their lives. I'm comfortable being a band that doesn't play out as much, and also a band that accepts, not only the limitation of our health, but also the limitations of family. I'm into that, and I think it's good to work under that context. |
|
©2000
Co-Production
and 
|