My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Rickie Lee Jones (1954): The Duchess of Coolsville

222 Rickie Lee Jones The Duchess of Coolsville Timothy Liu Before I’d ever read a book of poems, before I’d ever listened to an opera all the way through, I’d already come to understand what a “diva” meant even though I knew no Italian. Born in the United States, I was a child of immigrant parents from mainland China and grew up in the somewhat affluent suburbs of South San Jose. Maybe it was after the fact of my parents’ divorce when my mother ran off with her Gestalt therapist (only to get dumped after she’d spent all of her $60,000 community-property settlement on him and later wound up in an institution), or maybe it was just typical adolescent angst on the one hand and joining the 223 Mormon church against my father’s wishes on the other (while blowing cock at the local mall every chance I could get), but whatever the case, I felt in need of being rescued, as if life had become some sort of psychic emergency that cruising and shoplifting couldn’t answer. So you could say I was predisposed to certain frequencies. For Rilke, it was an archaic torso. For my lonesome, it was the album Pirates by Rickie Lee Jones, a record I’d first encountered by way of a review in the September 3, 1981, issue of Rolling Stone with a photo of Stevie Nicks (+ cockatoo) gracing the cover. Not yet sixteen years old, I’d subscribed to nothing else but. The title of Stephen Holden’s five-star encomium was simply “A real treasure. Rickie Lee Jones: exile on pain street.” He was astonished by “the bravura way it weaves autobiography and personal myth into a flexible musical setting that conjures a lifetime’s worth of character and incident.” Was this not my initiation into the land of divadom? Seven months later, with California driver’s license fresh in hand, I lied to my mother on the night of April 11, 1982. The whole afternoon after having been pelted by rain with no sign of letting up, I was in need. A particular need: her ’79 Dodge Dart, which she rarely drove. Said I was heading out to a church social that evening and would she mind? Her only condition: that I bring the car back by eleven. This was in the days before Google, before Mapquest. I’d never driven outside of Santa Clara County before, hardly even knew where Berkeley exactly was by way of roads and highways (had only taken BART there from the Fremont station once before), but I still have the ticket stub: B C T Allston Way and Grove B G P R L J Sunday, April 11, 1982 8:00 PM $10 Rickie Lee Jones 224 The stage set was a bunch of rooftops with a single grand piano nestled among them. And a big full moon behind it all. You can get some sense of what I heard by listening to her mini-LP Girl at Her Volcano, portions of which were recorded live less than a week later in L.A. (just give “My Funny Valentine” or “Something Cool” a spin, both remastered on her Duchess of Coolsville CD). With a bottle of bourbon propped up next to the damper pedal, she tore the roof off that theater. “She lost her baby that night!” her ex-lover and coconspirator Sal Bernardi would tell me almost a decade later backstage in Atlanta after I had driven all night from Houston just to catch her Flying Cowboys tour there, since that was the closest it would get to where I’d shacked up for grad school. But back to Berkeley. I couldn’t stay for the encore because I had to get the car back. I drove through flashing rain in the dark at 80 m.p.h. all the way home. The divine can make a diva only insomuch as the fanatic can make a fan. You have to change your life as Rilke did and leave Rodin and follow after Lou Andreas Salome on a train to Siberia. I could tell you about all of Rickie Lee Jones’s subsequent tours, her reputation for walking offstage without coming back for an encore, her love-hate relationship with the audience. My partner’s favorite diva would have to be Nina Simone, another feisty lioness...