When Di Died.
Picture it. London. August 1997. A beautiful young peasant boy with clear, olive skin…
While perhaps not as domestically earth-shaking an event as, say, when JFK was shot, I have a feeling that most U.S. Americans - shoutout to Miss Teen South Carolina! - remember exactly where we were when we found out that Princess Diana died.
Where was I, you ask? I was in London, coincidentally enough. I had just been released not 24 hours earlier from a three-week stay in the cardiac ward of the University College of London Hospital. This was a year before I started doing drugs, so this particular verge-of-life-and-death drama of mine was in no way related to that. I’ll post the details of this story over the weekend. Here’s a link to download a song called "Goodbye" which I wrote on the last day of my hospital stay.
My father and I stayed at the Bonham Carter House for the night following my release from the hospital, and it was 5:00am when we got into a cab to take us to Heathrow Airport. On the cab’s front passenger seat was the early edition of the daily newspaper, whose cover indicated that Princess Diana (and that ever parenthetical Dodi dude) had been injured in a paparazzi-fueled car accident in France. It seemed as though our cab driver, my dad and I were the only people awake in London at this hour, and therefore the only people who knew of this news. Needless to say, the long ride to Heathrow through the sleepy London ouskirts was more than a smidge surreal.
The cab driver had the news playing on the radio. Before we made it to Heathrow, it was announced that Princess Diana had died. And this will no doubt sound strange, but in that moment and for a while thereafter I felt like my very recent battle with - and subsequent triumph over - a mysterious near-fatal illness in a foreign country was provided with some sort of weirdly symbolic closure by Princess Diana’s death. I mean, the timing of it all was just too perfect.
Often I’ve wondered, if I had died in that hospital, whether Elton John would have rewritten his song about me. Perhaps he’ll rewrite it (again) when I do die someday. For as Sandra Bernhard once said: "Your candle burned out long before the royalties ever did."
As my flight departed the awakening city through that surreal August dawn, a nation began to mourn as it had never mourned before. I guess I just have that effect on people.
Do you remember where you were when you learned that I left England Princess Diana died? Let me know in the comments section below. And stay tuned this weekend for the rest of the story…
August 31st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I was with three friends at a bar called Lestat’s–in Cumberland, Md. (it was 1997, after all, and ‘Interview with a Vampire’ was just coming out; couldn’t have been hotter)…and it was a sea of humanity.
In small towns, gay bars attract people from all ends of the spectrum–men, women, old, young, skanky, hot, scary, scared…
I had just been flirting with the subtlety of a flying mallet with a guy named Nathan who happened to be the bartender. He was dark, cute, thin, tall…that’s all I remember of his physical appearance. But I do remember leaning over the bar and kissing him long and hard. Classy.
I went back to our table and was just regaling the experience to my friends–all of whom had already seen it happen live–when everyone got sort of quiet and gathered quickly around a mounted 19-or-so-inch television that perched above a corner of the bar. That was when we heard there was an accident involving the Princess of Wales.
Even Nathan and his monosyllabic responses to everything I ever said to him (albeit with what some call “a certain gleam” in his eye) couldn’t tear my attention away from it. By the time we all piled into my ‘86 Subaru station wagon to drive back to PA, it was official. She was dead.
The next day I wore all black to the restaurant where I waited tables. I was visibly shaken; the news of her death, coupled with my growing fascination/obsession/ridiculous fantasy about Nathan, made my insides all churny and my brain filled up to a higher level than it normally was.
The next week, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to be with gay people. I wanted Nathan. I loaded up the station wagon with an extra set of clothes (fingers crossed), drove to Cumberland, walked through the back alley maze to Lestat’s…to find it closed. Forever.
August 31st, 2007 at 1:48 pm
To be honest, I don’t remember where I was. I remember seeing and hearing the news reports. But I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing. Now if you ask about when President Kennedy was killed, that I remember but that was 20 years before you were born. LOL