The Killing Moon

Under blue moon I saw you
So soon you’ll take me
Up in your arms
Too late to beg you or cancel it
Though I know it must be the killing time
Unwillingly mine

Mid-80s, a rush of blur, summer, heat, desire. Someone else inhabited this body, yet a part of me now, resided there then. A foretelling in my bones. I remember returning to L.A. in Mike Dunnigan’s van with Dave Hurricane. The Skoundrelz had played the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. The license plate read, “R U EXP.”

It had been a tough trip. The way up, I fought through a wicked Niacin flush in an overheated pea green Chevy Nova. It was Tony who fed it to me. He swore it covered a multitude of sins and I needed something like that.

We stayed in the Mission District with some punker chicks who were generous with their drugs. During the gig, Dave vomited on stage. It was a dreary night and the floors of the Mabuhay were as depressing as the era.

I wasn’t one of those pink and black, side ponytail 80s girls who liked to have a good time on her parent’s dime; I was on auto self-destruct. I had a burning to do damage. Of course it was something else entirely that I sought. Something tender and forgiving half-buried in the junk metal wasteland that was my life.

It was never really discussed that Mike was a Christian and he’d probably eschew that label anyway. It was known that he was sober and he kept an immaculate home, but these things were written off as eccentricities. He was wise to guard his faith.

I knew nothing of faith but sensed a gentle presence just beyond my reach. Since I was a small child I’d been drawn to churches. At night the streetlight reflected the shape of a cross on my textured bathroom window. I knew better than to ask my mother about it.

The drive back to L.A. with Mike had a comfortable cool about it. Into the mystic. We took the coastal route. The bucolic landscape refreshed the senses. Too many hours spent in darkened rooms made a girl’s skin the color of cement. Her voice like asphalt.

Mike was really into Echo and the Bunnymen. Dave seemed to like them too. Their language was foreign to my ears, but over the course of many years, I acquired a taste for it. That night Mike let me sleep on his sofa. I was homeless. Mike’s home was sacred space and few people were allowed in. I understood nothing about Mike but I knew I was safe there.

Last week I put on “Songs to Learn and Sing,” by the Bunnymen for old time’s sake and I claimed a song from it as my conversion song. I don’t know if people actually have conversion songs, but “The Killing Moon,” speaks to me so clearly of that freefall into the arms of Jesus. Even way back then, in the van, he was holding a net for me and in some small way, I knew it.