The Light, by Love & Rockets

Everything went black. At the hospital, when I woke up, I saw my mother crying over me. When she left, two fat nurses got me naked, violently looking for "tattoos, like those of my friends". The three of us had been run over by a water-pipe truck. The irony: it had been a truck from the University's Fire Dept. They took me to the bathroom, where they "bathed" me with isodine, which was also applied to my long hair. On purpose, one of the nurses made knots with my hair, saying "this is so you will have it cut when you leave here, you delinquent faggot! This what you deserve for being drunk".

The truth is none of us had been drinking; I was 16 and we were coming back from work. We sold skateboards and Doc Martens shoes. The car stopped in the freeway, out of gas, and the three of us tried to push it to the nearest exit. It was raining and it was my father's birthday. After a minute or so of pushing, I heard a loud noise and felt a very sharp pain on my lower back. Noise and darkness. I swear: when I was hit I saw faces of people I loved along a dark tunnel, and a very bright light at the end. I thought I had died.

Next thing, I am on the floor, with my leg broken and lots of blood around me. The ambulance arrived and the first thing they did was remove my brand-new cherry red boots, which I had just bought with my salary (I would never see those again). They carried me like a wounded whale. The pain was so intense I passed out.

I spent six months in bed, at home. My hair was a total mess from spending so much time with my head rested against a pillow and the nurses' kind treatment. My mother and my girl friends from school helped me untie the knots. I couldn't do anything by myself, so I could not change tapes as much as I would have liked. One tape remained near me a long time: Love & Rockets, Earth, Sun, Moon. It was the second track, The Light, that meant the most to me.

This was the soundtrack of my late teenage years and the soundscape of my physical pain. It was an epic narrative in itself, a song full of pride, hope, sadness and optimism. It was, for me, a prayer: it had force in it, a sort of self-respect I had never witnessed. There was no self-deprication here, nor the usual miserabilism I was so indulgently fond of. The whole album was very strange to me; it wasn't what I expected and therefore it fascinated me. Instruments and voice merged in The Light in an eery, uncanny mixture that resembled, musically, what I felt when I had been hit by that truck.

The Light described, both lyrically and musically, aesthetically and emotionally, the experience of being completely by myself, watching time flow and run like water through my hands. I would lie there, unable to rest or concentrate with a book, listening to this prayer, an elegy for the ambitions of youth and the possibilities of happiness. A song of urgency, of love; an epiphany, like the ones one has in the verge of death.

And do you remember/the blackest moment...?


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