The Long Blondes, "Once and Never Again"

Kate and I turn 50 this month. In fact, Kate turned 50 yesterday. That’s half a century, and in recognition of that we’ve got some big stuff planned. Weird that because humans have five fingers on each hand, my wife and I get to splurge and go see U2 play at The Sphere. But that’s numbers for you. If we had Simpson hands and everything was base-8 instead, I’d have been making these plans eighteen years ago. Not sure what the tough tickets were in 2005: Pope John Paul II’s funeral? Seems like we caught a break with our ten digits, so Achtung Baby it is—and Viva Las Vegas (Apple Music, Spotify)!

For one of us, the Vegas trip will be a big improvement on our 40-year celebration. Ten years ago Kate and I had it in our heads to throw a party—a clambake, we were thinking, or a pig roast. But those ideas foundered on the shoals of Everything Else We Had To Do, so by the time our birthdays landed, the only plan we had in place was for Kate to go to Hawaii with her friend Emily.

Yeah, you read that right. But if anyone deserves eight days’ R&R on a tropical archipelago with her best friend, it’s my wife. You’ll have noted that I used the present tense there, which was intentional, because that statement is as true today as it was ten years ago. I’d go so far as to say that it’s always true. So you wouldn’t have heard a word of complaint from me when Kate was packing her bags for Waikiki back in October 2013.

But you will now.

Let’s start with the fact that Kate’s week-and-a-day away aligned with a cascade of family scheduling commitments that we haven’t experienced before or since. This was the one week of the year when the soccer and swim team seasons overlapped. So, double practices, for starters. Add a midweek Halloween party for Cub Scouts that called for the production of a costume and a jack o’lantern, and the school week became a harrowing itinerary of precision-timed runs back and forth from work, day care, parks, pools, CVS, and select takeout joints—I don’t think my car had all four tires on the ground at any single moment while Kate was gone. When I pulled up at the church reception hall with Florian filthy, dressed in tatters, and covered in blood, the other Cub Scout parents might fairly have asked whether he’d come dressed as a zombie or as just a kid left alone with his father for the week.

On top of all this, it was “P.A.C.K. Week” at Butler Elementary. P.A.C.K. Week called for parents to send their kids to school with a fruit or vegetable of a particular color each day (Monday = Purple, Tuesday = White, and so on). Described in the school nurse’s email as “a fun and educational program that encourages children to eat a variety of different colored fruits and vegetables,” the way it actually played out was you’d forget all about it until your children reminded you at 8:15 AM Monday morning, and suddenly you were scrambling to summon an eggplant from thin air while your kids hyperventilated on the kitchen floor. Every Butler parent we’ve ever consulted abhorred P.A.C.K. Week. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Kate might have turned 40 and left the Continental U.S. specifically to avoid it.

We can talk about whether it was just interesting, or ironic, or an artifact of karmic justice that the convergence of events on that week’s schedule was tantamount to a total solar eclipse with Halley’s Comet passing in front of it. But I get it: no one’s going to pour one out for a father having to parent alone for a week, no matter how many stalks of celery he had to Sharpie red, yellow, and purple before school.

So let’s kick this up a notch. What if I told you Kate brought me back the chickenpox from Hawaii?

On the 27th of October, Kate arrived at Boston Logan in the wee hours of the morning with an accountable red mark on her forehead. It had appeared at some early point during her travels home. At a dentist’s appointment two days later, her hygienist identified the mark as shingles—well, a shingle. A Single Shingle. Naturally Kate went right to Google to read up about shingles, and it turns out that having even just one shingle on your face can be pretty serious. If shingles get into your eyes, you can go blind. If they get into your ears, you can go deaf.

Suddenly I was imagining having to do all the P.A.C.K. Weeks myself going forward. More than this, I was actually really worried about her health. Fortunately, she arranged for prompt and effective treatment of the Single Shingle, and nothing ever came of it.

All well and good for her, then. But two weeks later—by now we’re into November, closing on Thanksgiving—my head was itching. I noticed this just after I had a haircut, when the barber ran his comb methodically over my scalp, activating a dozen or more mosquito bite-sized lesions. My doctor’s first read on this was dermatitis. Bacterial, he said, which was … gross, but fine. I considered whether I should call the barber and warn him about what I might have left on his comb and scissors. But then I figured any such pathogens would have met their end in the jar of Barbicide on his counter, and I let that sit.

Within a day the lesions were swarming down from the crown of my head to my shoulders and chest, with the grace and speed of Alexander of Macedon conquering great swaths of the Middle East and Asia. Bright and early I went to the urgent care clinic at MIT Medical for a second opinion. (At that time I was working at MIT and needed only to flash my work ID to be seen right away.) The nurse practitioner looked me over and asked if I’d had any recent exposure to the varicella virus. And as a matter of fact I had: my wife had recently contracted a Single Shingle. That settled the diagnosis. It was chickenpox.

From MIT Medical I crossed campus and briefly occupied my office in Building 10, to gather up my work computer to take home. By this time I had already emailed my boss about the situation. When he rounded the corner and saw me rooting around at my desk, he ordered me out of the suite. Directly, and with emphasis. Colleagues overhearing this told me later they thought they’d walked in on me getting fired.

An hour later I was meeting once again with my primary care physician, which was demoralizing. I’d had the chickenpox before, I told him. My mother had the receipts. You’re not supposed to get it TWICE. What gives? He answered—and as far as I could tell he was reading this off of Google—that yes, repeat infections were exceedingly rare but not impossible, and more common these days than a generation ago. It used to be adults had all kinds of opportunities to top off their immunity: principally when their kids were infected, but also because there was always just enough varicella around town to keep their antibodies on edge. Now that their children are inoculated against the virus, adults miss out on this regular mid-life exposure, with the result that their chickenpox immunity can grow weak and complacent.

On that score, I imagine that what transpired in my bloodstream ten years ago probably went a lot like this:

My doctor asked if he could bring the rest of his practice in to discuss my case. “We see this so rarely—it would be really instructive for the other internists to examine you.”

I shrugged. This wasn’t the first time a clinician used me for an object lesson. The very same dental hygienist who identified Kate’s Single Shingle had tried to warn her off diet soda a few years earlier: “I had a patient come in last month. He drinks 64 ounces of Diet Coke per day—we had to fill six cavities in one sitting.”

“I know that story already,” Kate had answered. “He’s my husband.”

A conga line of physicians filed into the exam room—I’d say at max capacity the pox-per-doctor ratio was something like 5 to 1. Ask 100 lawyers about their level of comfort alone in a room with so many MDs, and you’ll get the same answer from all of them: oh, HELL NO. With a numbers advantage like that, you basically expect them to go full Dionysiac frenzy and tear you limb from limb. It won’t matter that you never did any med-mal work yourself. It’s what you stand for that needs destroying. And we’ve all read Lord of the Flies.

In any case, I got out of the doctor’s office unscathed—strike that: actually I was scathed as hell, but not by any of the clinicians, who at worst poured out glasses of bubbly after I left, laughing and shouting A pox on all attorneys! I don’t remember much about how I got home from downtown, except that at some point I had my window down in the passing lane on Storrow Drive and was yelling ALL YOU ASSHOLES GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY! I’VE GOT THE GODDAM CHICKENPOX! at the column of cars in front of me. Now unless you’ve got yourself involved in that leprosy outbreak in Florida, adult-onset chickenpox is probably the closest you can get to falling right out of society. So in that moment I felt oddly free to stream curses out my window at unassuming motorists. The rules just didn’t apply to me anymore.

By this time you’ve all lived through your own COVID-19 quarantines, so I won’t dwell on how I whiled away my two weeks in isolation. I will say that the ten straight days of fever weren’t fun, and the amount and intensity of itching is impossible to put into words. It took Shaolin discipline not to tear my scalp to ribbons at any given moment. Medication arrested the forward advance of the pox at just below my ribcage, but a handful of intrepid commandos did push down as far as my calves. I drank liters of Benadryl, shellacked myself in calamine lotion—puffs of pink dust crackled off my body as I walked down the stairs—and I took three oatmeal baths per day. The oatmeal treatments sound much cooler than they were. I had envisioned sitting in a vat of cooked sludge. Turns out the consistency has to be more like biscuit gravy or Cream of Wheat, or else you clog your drains.

Oh, and one last note: the pox get into your ears and nose and mouth and throat.

A month later I was no longer infectious, almost fully recovered, and therefore back at work. The holiday season landed, and Kate and I went arm in arm to each other’s workplace parties. My MIT colleagues couldn’t wait to get hold of her: So you went TO HAWAII without Brad, and then you came home and gave him THE CHICKENPOX?!? Two nights later I took my turn at her lab party: What were you thinking using KATE’S HAIRBRUSH after she had SHINGLES?!? She and I were clearly telling very different versions of this story. This is an allegory for American politics, and it tells you all you need to know to understand the state of the republic.

The music I identify most with turning 40 and sweating out the chickenpox is Someone To Drive You Home by the Long Blondes. This band came and went before I had heard of them, and that breaks my heart. Setlist.fm says they came through Boston twice, in 2007 and 2008. Back in 2013 I read about the Someone record in a best albums list I had found on the Internet—ten years later, I couldn’t tell you where. I was able to find just now an emailed receipt from iTunes showing that I bought a download of the LP on Thursday, October 24, 2013: i.e., right around the time the varicella virus was bubbling up under Kate’s forehead on a beach in Kauai.

On November 5, with the virus gaining its foothold in my blood now, I wrote the following to my friends Mark and Bob:

I’d post more I’m Listening To … Albums on Facebook, but I’m not playing anything other than the Long Blondes.

Look for an iTunes gift from me. I haven’t been this into a buy since the Civil War album by Titus Andronicus. [See “Four Score and Seven.”]

On November 18—from a tub of watered-down oatmeal, no doubt—I sent the promised gifts through iTunes, with this cover note attached:

Do a poxed old friend a favor and take this around the block a few times. It’s Blondie meets Pulp, and I’m obsessed with it. There’s even a cheeky unattributed Moz quote lurking in here. Perfect!

Everything about the Long Blondes scratches me where I itch (so to speak). Blondie meets Pulp, while reductive, is a fair description of what they were after. On the Blondie side, uber-stylish Kate Jackson and Dorian Cox stood in for Debbie Harry and Chris Stein on vocals and guitars. Upbeat, new wave numbers with a hint of disco backbeat hi-hat up and down the record: you can’t not hear Blondie in this. As for Pulp, the Long Blondes were a Sheffield band, and Pulp’s Steve Mackey himself produced the Someone record. Kate’s wry, world-weary lines about singlehood owe a great deal—but not everything—to Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker.

Every track on Someone To Drive You Home is a standout. “Lust in the Movies” (Apple Music, Spotify) is a heat-seeking missile opening Side A. “Giddy Stratospheres” (Apple Music, Spotify) glams up Gang of Four sounds and slings them skyward. “You Could Have Both” (Apple Music, Spotify)—Out on the doorstep, lip burst and bleeding. Well, that was a crash course for me—achieves a Picaresque desperation that Jarvis himself must have envied. And “Swallow Tattoo” (Apple Music, Spotify) is Lush’s “Ladykillers” (Apple Music, Spotify), but with softer corners and a warmer heart.

I could go on, but it’s enough to say instead that Someone is one of a scant ten or twelve Top Five Albums for me, and it climbs higher up my list every time I play it. I have this record on vinyl now; my Kate bought me a copy of their beautiful reissue two Christmases ago. Speaking of the holidays, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention their typically gorgeous “Christmas Is Cancelled” single (Apple Music, Spotify), which holds a place of high esteem in my Christmas playlist.

The song I chose for today is “Once and Never Again” (Apple Music, Spotify), in which Long Blondes Kate counsels a younger woman—a sister? a cousin?—through hard times. 19! You’re only 19, for God’s sake. You don’t need a boyfriend! I know how it feels to be your age and feel the world is caving in. “I Will Survive” and songs like it have always felt like protesting too much. By contrast, this song’s you’ll survive message rings truer for me, and Kate’s get-a-grip sentiment carries just enough melancholy to remind you there are two characters in this song. And the music downright stomps, with its tambourine, floor tom, and shuffling guitar. Come out with me and find out what you really want, Kate urges. But this is all we ever wanted, right here at home with the turntable on.

In June 2008, Dorian Cox had a stroke, and this was enough to put the band into retirement. Once and never again isn’t always a consolation, as it turns out.

But it’s great for chickenpox, if you can swing it …