Аманда Палмер - The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

How long have you and Todd been together? I asked. We were sharing a late breakfast in Sydney, where we both happened to be touring at the time. I was grilling him about his long-term relationship, hoping I could find my own clarity.

About five years, give or take .

And how much older is he?

Ten years, about .

What’s the difference in your incomes? I said. If you don’t mind me asking .

It’s not massive… but it varies. We’ve agreed to split certain things and float each other when we need help. I spent almost half a year out of work last year when Todd took that huge gig in Vegas and I followed him there. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve found a balance .

It doesn’t worry you , I said, that he might, I don’t know, always be ahead of you? Not older… or richer, per se… but just, like, ahead of you in terms of aging, and life experience? It’s morbid, but don’t you think about the fact that he might DIE on you? And then do you feel like an asshole for thinking it?

Well… you know that Todd is HIV positive, right?

But I hadn’t known. I looked at my tofu scramble, feeling like an idiot.

Jesus. Luke. Nobody ever told me .

No, no, I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I figured someone would have told you. And I’m still negative, in case you were wondering .

I asked nervously, gently, because I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to pry about this stuff:

When did you guys find out?

Oh , he said offhandedly. Todd was HIV positive when I met him .

What?

Todd was HIV positive when I met him , he repeated.

And it wasn’t… a deal-breaker? I felt ashamed even as I said it.

Amanda… it wasn’t a question of deal-breaking. I was in love with him .

And then Anthony got sick.

Really sick. And nobody could figure out what was wrong. He was losing his balance, he was having trouble hearing, he was losing his vision in one eye. The doctors didn’t know what to tell him. His calves hurt. His arms hurt. Anthony looked about twenty years younger than his age, and had always been the picture of health; walking everywhere, kayaking, doing yoga. I called him from the road every day, and every day there was a new mystery ailment, a new pain alien that had landed somewhere in his body to launch a fresh attack.

I felt bad bringing him my own stupid problems, but I knew he loved helping, so I continued to lay my life at his feet. My business was an unwieldy mess as usual, and as my fanbase had grown I’d tried out several hotshot managers who worked in big offices running the careers of the famous, but finally gave up on that idea: I pared things back down to me and a dedicated staff of three people who understood me. My income was neither huge nor predictable, but I was getting along fine and able to pay everyone, mostly because I performed relentlessly: it had become a running joke among my Cloud Club housemates that for six years I’d been announcing my impending break from touring, during which I would finally clean up my apartment. I was off the label but unsure of my next step; I had accumulated a pile of great songs but wasn’t certain how I was going to release them. Neil was waiting for his youngest daughter to graduate from high school in Wisconsin (where he had raised his kids with his first wife), so that we could move nearer to each other… probably in New York. Every time I came home to Boston for a break it seemed I was battling the flu, a post-tour depression, or a bout of existentially harrowing PMS.

But while my problems felt mundane compared to the frightening and undiagnosed pain my friend was in, he listened patiently, laughed with me, and advised wisely, as usual. For a few months, Anthony went to every doctor, every specialist. The eye doctors treated his eyes, the hearing doctors puzzled over his ears. Nobody could figure it out. We were all getting more scared. One day, his eyes and head started to pound so badly that Laura rushed him to the hospital. I raced back from a show in New York.

They took a biopsy from his temple and they told him that he had giant cell arteritis, a whole-body inflammation of the arteries that strikes people at random.

He was pumped with a giant bag of steroids, taking in enough prednisone in one day to supply a bodybuilder for an entire year.

Watching Anthony in the hospital that night was hard. He likes being in control of any given situation and gets anxious when things don’t go according to plan. I’d always viewed him as a worldly, jet-setting adult when I was younger, but as I circled the globe and kept boomeranging back to him, it was becoming more clear to me: he’d built himself a little office in a little town surrounded by things he had known all his life, things he could trust. He was strong on the outside—he had his black belt in karate—but he was fragile and sensitive to sudden change on the inside. Anthony had been abused physically and emotionally as a kid, and he’d told me the stories, a few here, a few there, and had even started writing some down. They were frightening. But whether he was writing or chatting, I was always impressed and struck by his sense of humor about the abuse and its aftershocks.

It hurt to see him there, hooked up to strange machines, vulnerable in a blue hospital gown as the doctors and nurses came and went, poked and prodded. Laura spent the night, curled up next to him in the adjustable bed. Friends took turns bringing food.

It wasn’t fatal, thank god. His vision and hearing were damaged, but he’d live. I exhaled. I didn’t think I could handle it if something truly bad happened to him.

I used to play a game with myself in high school and college, my own self-taught version of method acting, and it came in handy for a few theater productions.

If I ever needed to cry on command, I had a trick.

I would just think about Anthony dying.

It never failed. I’d burst into tears no matter what.

I don’t really have stalkers.

In order to have a stalker, you need to be a decent stalk-ee, and I’m terrible. I don’t think you can stalk somebody who’s available after every show, and who announces which café she’s writing in and tweets pictures of her coffee, telling you to drop by and say yo. It’s not really interesting to go through someone’s trash when they’ve already twittered pictures of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want stalkers.

I’ve had fans follow me, and occasionally bug me. If I feel stalked, I deal with it in the most direct way I can: I go to them . I tell them what I’m up to at the moment, ask what they’re up to, humanize myself, and then ask them respectfully… could they please stop sneaking covert photos from across the café, and just come over and say hi, give me a hug, and then leave me to work?

Anthony called me this morning , Neil said.

I hadn’t talked to Anthony in a few days—I was on the road. In my absence, and because of the sickness scare, he and Neil were becoming closer—texting, connecting.

I knew that Anthony was doling out relationship advice when Neil needed it—the same way he’d been doling it out to me for years. We were both relying on him for under-the-table, nonstop marriage counseling. We started referring to him as “The Godfather.”

He’d even given Neil a phone therapy session on How To Deal With Amanda And PMS, and talked Neil off the ledge a couple of times when our relationship would hit an impasse and we’d march off to our separate corners, unable to cope with each other. My PMS can be brutal: I transform from a pretty reasonable person into a black hole of doubt, despair, and existentially flailing Muppet arms. To be safe, I bought Neil a book about the chemical workings of hormones and the feminine brain, which he studied like a set of stereo instructions, hoping that he might be able to understand the finer settings of this Monthly Irrational Icequeen. Miraculously, it worked. He downloaded an app to his phone that indicated when my period was due to arrive, and around that time he stopped taking things so personally.