Bennie and the Jets. Elton John. 1973. MCA.

I remember the time and place where I was when I finally realized that our world was falling apart faster than we could rebuild it. I was seven years old, seated in the front room of the Rosales house, three doors down east of where my parents lived. Surely there was someone from the Rosales family in that room with me that morning, although I can’t say who; my friend David, or his younger brother Daniel, the talented sketch artist. The room was small and rectangular; the front door and the TV at the north end, and a curtained doorway opening into the rest of the house opposite. The light coming into the room from outdoors was diluted by heavy window coverings hung up on a piece of the western exterior wall across from the couch where I sat. The darkness itself, in the failed completeness of its shade and shadow, seemed to carry some disquieting, essential truth about the Rosales family that it would not fully articulate but only left unexpressed in the humorless commentary made by the family’s cheap furnishings about the limits of domestic happiness in the depreciated homes of the working poor. The television set was tuned to the Today Show, the Barbara Walters version, which was broadcasting an emergency special report about a passenger airliner that crashed shortly after lift off. There were no known survivors, and what the color footage showed viewers was the majesty of the gnarled wreckage, and a coterie of first responders. The strangeness of the Rosales living room—its slow, suffocatingly alien rhythms—heightened the tension of the NBC emergency news report. Watching news programs often bored me; their sharply focused videotaped format meant that I was missing the grainy, colored texture of filmed fiction. That time, however, my attention had been fixed upon the gravity and self-importance of the emergency special report, which was edited and scaled to impel the television audience into cleverly anticipated, market researched emotional responses. I sat there dumbly, struggling to intelligibly decode feelings I could not access. Eventually David’s older brother appeared from his place inside the house to drive us to school in his two-tone black and primered Nova, yet I have no memory of the remainder of that day. I assume it involved the usual boyhood difficulties with textbook arithmetic, and a sudden burst and discharge of physical energy coupled with a baffling yet cordial interplay with classmates at recess, each encounter tinged with an edge of passive-aggressive childhood violence, and AM/FM radio playlists. Is it an exaggeration to suggest that those playlists were the only thing holding the toppling world together, and that, having been trained by expert generations of American radio programmers in the art of the mystery of the segue, private playlists compiled by generations of radio devotees continue to do so? Yes, it is unquestionably an exaggeration, because how do you grow up in the shadow of rock and roll and not understand that our pursuit of human truths take us to the frontiers of exaggeration, out there where it’s possible to “plug into the faithless” and be made ageless by a musical combo that then compels you to “fight our parents out in the street to find who’s right and who’s wrong.” Like debriefings from an alternate reality, rock and roll playlists provided pre-internet stopgaps for the desperately benighted. Because the young Catholic queer from Texas needed the translucent, other-worldly glamor and beauty of Candy Darling in its life, it registered, within the confines of its heart, the uncoded telegraph sent out from queer, hyperborean world capitals by adjacent glam artist Elton John. Someone saved my life tonight. Didn’t you, dear?

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