The story of how a 50-year-old Axl Rose brought back my mojo one steamy night in the Meadowlands
We have a lot in common, Axl and I.
We both were once wild and sexy and full of potential...
and now we are both chubby and wistful, but powerful,
reaching out to reclaim what we abandoned.
Ok, so maybe we are nothing alike--
he was an internationally known rock musician,
for years,
while I was simply a writer on the cusp of success,
for a moment.
But I think we both handled it poorly
and I think we've both aged,
and bulked up a bit in our midsections,
our faces puffy and blurring out the beauty that may have once existed.
And I know that I felt alive in a way I haven't for so long,
alive like the fireworks exploding over the stage
as he wailed into the microphone,
alive with the muscle memory of
how
fucking
badass
I once was.
I stood there, hedged in by rows of flimsy folding chairs,
trying not to dwell on the fact that we paid as much as a pair of plane tickets
to be 20 yards from the stage
or the fact that despite the solidity of the Dansko construction,
they were still heels, so I felt an intense desire to chop off my own feet.
But when “Mr. Brownstone” charged through the amplifiers
filling the stadium and my every pore,
nothing mattered but how loudly I could scream.
I let him welcome me to the jungle as visions of power and beauty filled the stage of my mind:
I felt the old me surge to life,
emerging from a dusty corner on atrophied and forgotten muscles.
I felt like somehow he had opened a door for me
a door leading me down a path I've been too afraid to search for,
the path toward the life I forgot to create.
And when the lights came up on Axl sitting at the piano,
playing us in on the opening of Layla,
I thought I'd slipped through the fabric of space-time
and had landed in an alternate reality,
one in which I'd continued writing, and was vibrant and confident, fierce.
I blinked as he transitioned to “Patience,”
still sitting at the piano, his face a blend of serenity and satisfaction.
He looked so comfortable with his fingers on the keys, like he belonged there,
like maybe he was still a little boy taking piano lessons with a prim old lady down the street; that maybe his life had been full of joy and peace instead of drugs and disappointment.
Through it all, I kept marveling that he was there.
That his voice was the voice I'd rocked out with for decades...
He was still the same, even though his sexy elvish face was hard to detect;
he still had the gift that drew him into the vortex of fame.
And maybe,
even I could find my way back to the fire in me,faded sexiness be damned.
