Currently, I’m sliding out from tutor responsibilities for the semester and I’ve been counting the days in a few ways, one being: I’m ready to devote more time to my own writing, which I’m hoping the summertime will let me do, but another reason is the more acute frustration of just feeling like the time has come for this particular moment to end. I’ve noticed how squirmy and adolescently “I-don’t-want-to” I’ve been. As if that frontal cortex thing that holds attention and patience has reverted to pre-closing stage (which is about 25 years old and explains a hell of a lot of bad decisions in my past).

Patience and the slippery slide away from it makes for wacky decision making. My proverbial butt has slalomed down that mountain multiple times as I’ve decided to move on, not look back, get to the new place that’s just around the corner. But fuck the corner, I’ll just sledgehammer through the wall justified by an immediate sense of I’m miserable, time to leave even if there’s nothing v$able lined up in my future. The initial sip of freedom is sweet, but if that take-flight cocktail is equal parts escapism and speculation with a dash of fantasy, then the hangover’s pretty hardcore. I’ve shaken not stirred my share of those life-libations throughout my time and have been lucky in that a get-scrappy reflex usually kicks in around as destitution seems about to knock through the door. But the experience has often left me financially freaked out and sometimes worse (see past post: kach$ng). But still I agitate for the exit. Difference now is that I may ask why? And how? And what’s next?

The why of when I left SPIN is only becoming slightly clearer now that I’ve decided to take a bit of a closer look. I remember being soooo ready. My emotions pacing around my insides in readiness to step out the door for good although I couldn’t point to one particular event to make me completely switch off. As with most things, it’s a build. The memory of the how I left is strong: Going into the office with my friend Jon late at night. He was helping me move my boxs. It was pitch-black getting off the elevator onto SPIN’s floor. No one was there. Maybe one desklamp on in the art department (mood-setting in memories is so important). I do have an intense flashback of how weird it was to be in this place where so much had happened, so many formatives and follies. There hadn’t been a going-away party although there were probably rounds of drinks at the bar, but even that, I don’t really recall. My sense was that I really just wanted to peel off, crumple up that part of my life, pitch it in the can, and move on. But why the urgency?

Overall, working at SPIN had been everything I’d wanted my rock’n’roll journalism career to be. My office had moved from the supply closet (literally) to an inner room to (finally) a corner space with windows where I’d written and edited and interviewed all sorts of funtime, complicated Charleys and Charlenes. I’d gotten inside the heads of musicians and found interesting, strange, sometimes terrifyingly too-real stories. I’d gone shopping with Kim Gordon, clubbing with Courtney Love, fishing with Primus, pubbing with Pearl Jam. Then there was Nirvana. Kurt was still alive, which meant the band that had unequivocally changed my life were still creating. New bands were popping up with this&that. But yet … maybe I’d stared at the sun too long making it hard to see around the black spot seared into my life’s retina. Honestly it wasn’t as dramatic as that though. Just a nagging gah this isn’t fun anymore sensation. I’d recently gotten a view of how someone else saw me when one of the interns dropped off a stack of records and CDs in my office and stood in the doorway for a beat, then said “You’re lucky” and left. I was. I’d been an intern at Rolling Stone and recognized the look, the yearning, and it was not lost on me that I was standing in a privileged place. But it was complicated because that’s what life is.

In 1997, after I’d been gone for a few years having knocked around as a freelancer, then become a VP of video promotion at Elektra Records, I got a call from a lawyer representing Staci Bonner, a researcher who’d been on staff during my time at SPIN and who was bringing a case against the magazine’s then-owner, Bob Guccione, Jr.,(he was in the process of selling his stake in the mag around the time of the trial). Staci’s claims were this: “that she was the victim of quid pro quo sexual harassment, intentional gender discrimination and hostile work environment sexual harassment” here’s the summary. At the time, I had no interest in being involved in her suit mainly because I had always felt SPIN was exactly what I’d expected it to be: a place of rock’n’roll roughhousing where if I was lucky my gender would be able to soften some jagged male edges. But in reality it became a place where I toughened my outer hide and gave up on the squishy bits. I was not really successful at this, obviously, which led to my exhaustion given the reflexive roll inward to protect those soft spots. But honestly, this became a wholly unconscious movement, and I can guarantee this was/is the way for any woman in any male-mostly industry, which is mostly all of them, at least back in my workaday world. Maybe it’s getting better. But that’s where I was at the time the call came to take the stand for Staci/the plaintiff. I went in for an interview with her lawyer and remember thinking (and maybe saying) over and over, “It’s a rock’n’roll magazine, of course he/they said/did/acted like that.” Truthfully at the time I felt confused that calling it wrong was even a thing. It just was.

I did end up taking the stand for Staci. I did try very hard to come around to the complete and utter wrongness of how the men of SPIN conducted their business toward women. I wrote an article about it back then (Jane magazine piece) and my editor sent the draft back to me a few times with notes like “more blood on the page, please” and “I want to feel your tears.” Rereading the article now, I’m not sure I ever delivered what he wanted mostly because I wasn’t clear on where my tears were located. After being so long in the music business by my own choice, I’d seen how the yes/and worked: Yes, rampant and utter sexist bullshit (in my case from mainly white men) was daily and I was often utterly thrilled to be in the mix of said men and would actively stop up my ears from their words and actions. On more occasions than I like to admit, I’d join in the smiles all around as inappropriate comments dropped like little plastic parachute soldiers from the sky. Oooh, incoming, duck. What, that little thing? Harmless. My guilt then and now stems primarily from not doing anything when I’d see another woman caught in the parachute drop. (Why is it so much easier to see someone else’s discomfort than to pay attention to my own?) The last line of my Jane piece, as I read it now, rings hollow—”It’s ironic that the place where I found myself as a writer is where I lost it as a woman.”—because it’s only one shade of true. I didn’t lose my voice as a woman. I did sit on it like teenager hiding a joint (unlit). I didn’t want to see what that voice could do because that would take a type of inner and outer work I didn’t want to do. I enjoyed the club. But when it was time for me to go, when my arm got tired of holding up the armor, I ran out fast&hard without wanting to look back. Maybe instead “It’s ironic that the place where I found myself as a writer is where I hid it as a woman.”

Nuance. An elegant little word with a definition that makes so much more sense to me now as I get older and appreciate the multitudes inside a moment. My impatience then to leave the icky bits behind, the confusion of who I was supposed to be and the sense that because I did not have righteous indignation around how I was treated meant I did not sufficiently get it, moved me toward amnesia. Certainly now as I revisit these stories I can embrace both my joy around the adventures and my reckoning with my timidity and desire to please.

I avoided reading anything about the trial at the time given my confusion around what it was I actually felt so I missed this piece in Salon by Celia Farber, one of the staff writers at SPIN during my time there and someone who personally and professionally was taken apart during the trial for having been in a relationship with Bob. (In essence, any woman who testified, no matter the side, whether involved with Bob romantically or not—and I hadn’t been—had her career dissected in ways that left us all shredded. It would take a lot to build back confidence in my writing work after that). But now, reading this bit in her article, I feel a ping as she described the vibe at the magazine: “A lot of people Bob hired were simply very angry, very dark and above all very, very passive-aggressive people …. They sneered and gossiped and tripped each other up. And sometimes it seemed that the only ones who provided relief from this sour, competitive way of life were the ones who, occasionally at least, expressed something resembling lust. At least lust isn’t passive-aggressive.” Now, mind you, this is her recollection, but as I read that a bell did ring and a thought did come. Of course I was tired by the end and wanted out hard enough that I left my notice on Bob’s desk and took all my stuff in the middle of the night. Anger. I hadn’t been that when I’d stepped through the doors on my first day. I’d been excited. I hadn’t quite put my finger on how the people who were would spin me upside down in those gaslighting ways that some people are so good at. I fancied myself dark in a there-is-no-god kind of way and I did try on a few styles of sneer and gossip. I cliqued. Then I stumbled, couldn’t keep up. Ultimately I wanted lust in a very different way and had begun to mistake it for lewd. Then I just needed some time away. To (not) think. Now, I don’t regret the leaving at all, but the exploration into how that time shaped me has taken ages. But of course, that’s how life works, or rather, how my life works.