On a Woman Named Suzette at a Juliette Lewis Concert

"She weighed maybe 95 pounds and her cigarette-stained teeth stuck out at a 45-degree angle. I was in love."

Art: Austin Blake Mays

August 7, 2016

Allston, Massachusetts

I was 22 years old

I’ve known for months that Juliette Lewis would be playing literally down the street at Brighton Music Hall but had held off buying tickets in the same spirit that resulted in me ultimately visiting New York and D.C. a week apart from each other last month. I was scheduled to work an overnight at the hotel tonight but doors opened at 8 and my shift wasn’t until 10:30 so I figured what else would I be doing? Sometime this afternoon, I bought my ticket. I reached out to Cody, new blond manager boy, asking if I could get to my shift a little late. He told me I could show up by 10:55 the latest. I didn’t end up leaving the venue until 10:50.

Got to Brighton around 8:30. I’d never been before and it was both smaller than I would have thought and less packed than I would have anticipated. Situated myself to the right with only a couple people separating me from the stage. It wasn’t long before this older woman, at least 60 years old, with reddish-brown hair down to her coccyx, stood beside me and proceeded to shoot looks at me. I truly thought she was Juliette’s mom, at first. If she was sizing me up or something, I don’t know, but she eventually started talking to me about her sister who was working security at a VIP booth at Fenway for the Pearl Jam concert.

“My sistah and my nephew, can you believe that shit?” she said. “Up to heeyuh my sistah is awhn me. My shouldah! She’s that shawht and workin’ security.”

Mind you, this woman was all of 5’2” herself. She weighed maybe 95 pounds and each of her cigarette-stained teeth were sticking out from her gums at a 45-degree angle. I was, obviously, in love. She was so fun. Clearly addled from decades of concert-going and all that that entails. I was grateful to not just be staring silently at my phone as we all waited for the opening act to come on at 9:00—some band straight out of Reese Witherspoon’s Fear called “The New Regime.”

She and I got to talking about music and she brought up Patti Smith. Both of us having a moment about the role she’s played in our lives. It was a real Jenna Elfman as a guardian angel in Can’t Hardly Wait kind of moment, speaking with her. Also made me realize that, despite how massively I still want fame and recognition and to be “Brian Burns” to people I don’t even know, that I would always always always want just enough anonymity for moments like this. I feel like I’m just the right mix of friendly looking, objectively handsome, and game for the more eccentric kind of people to gravitate toward me. Not to mention the fact that, so often, I’m alone. It happens kind of often to me. A real magnet. I just love it.

And I was already conscious of all this before she—who eventually introduced herself as “Suzette...or Suzy”—told me about her days volunteering at some radio station that used to be headquartered in The Pru. We’re talking sometime in the late ‘70s. There was this one night when Queen was in town, getting interviewed by this radio station before performing at some hallowed, now-shuttered record store called Strawberries. She found out they were staying at The Lenox Hotel and went there that night to stake things out, camping out in the lobby and somehow getting her hands on the roster listing the pseudonyms and room numbers for each member of the band. She goes up upstairs to the room where she thought John Deacon would be and knocks on the door only to be greeted by Freddie Mercury in his underwear.

Some other time, she went back with Ted Nugent to his hotel room. They watched some old movie together while her car was parked illegally in the lot.

“And I was ALONE all these times,” says Suzette. “People hahhdly believe me when I tell ‘em!”

Whether or not she was remembering the whole truth, I didn’t even care. Such a life, she’s lived. And getting into all these antics all alone. She was stranded in Providence one night after staying late at a Patti Smith show and had to get her uncle, who worked overnight shifts at some Polaroid factory, come pick her up. She so inspired me. All these things and people and concerts she’s seen. Suzette eventually told me how she didn’t even know Juliette Lewis’s music (I didn’t either, honestly) and yet there she was, 60 years old and basically front row on a Sunday night. She felt like magic to me. The exact companion I needed that night—already late for my graveyard hotel shift cause I was at a last-minute concert and standing next to a woman who once lived in an eight-bedroom house in Somerville with the members of a band called The Nervous Eaters.

High already off Suzette, Juliette took the stage around 10. She was total electricity. A stick of dynamite, fittingly costumed in a very Evel Knievel star-spangled leather leotard. War paint under her eyes and bandana on her head. So svelte, so strong. I didn’t know a single song she sang but it was revelatory nevertheless. Her drummer was hot and the audience looked like the entire neighborhood of Jamaica Plain had undergone a mass exodus to Brighton Music Hall. I was really into the show and, more importantly, out of my body. Always the goal of live music, with any luck. I told myself I’d leave at the end of the next song for maybe three songs in a row. I touched Suzette on the shoulder and mouthed that I had to go and, the way she barely reacted, you’d think I’d just told that to a perfect stranger.

Requested an Uber as I hauled ass down Cambridge Street to grab my bag and dinner from the apartment. He was already waiting outside once I got home but he was cool with stalling while I ran up real quick. I was, clearly, jazzed so I was both eager to chat with the driver and felt at ease doing it once I got in the car. He was a black guy, maybe 30 years old, and I was really making him laugh. We’re going back and forth as we get closer and closer to the hotel and then he stops me for a second.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he says, “how old are you?”

Presuming he’s baffled that someone so young is about to commandeer a hotel overnight entirely by himself (though I had a gay guy recently tell me, “Oh, honey, you are not 22” the other week so there you go), I tell him, “I’m 22.”

“Okay, you’re gonna make a lot of money one day but you’ll need to do one thing,” he says. “You need to go into radio.”

August 11, 2021

Gilford, New Hampshire

I am 27 years old

In one of my gayer commencements, I’d like to talk about Greta Garbo. Heavy-lidded and melancholic icon of classic Hollywood films who stopped acting at 35, lived until she was 84, and spent much of those interim decades walking up and down Park Avenue. Famously wanting “to be alone.” Or at least famously misquoted as such. At some point, Garbo cleared this all up, insisting, “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be let alone.’ There is all the difference.” I couldn’t agree more. Pardon the self-mythologizing but I’m willing to argue I’m something of a latter day Greta Garbo. Constantly walking, barely working, and almost always alone in the city of New York. Two persons who could easily find and keep company, if such a desire presented itself, if only the possibility and the ease of being “let” alone didn’t prove quite so very pleasurable. Though maybe just a little melancholic. But baby, that’s cinema.

I am often alone. Having a boyfriend has been good for this, though I don’t mean that in an anxiously-attached kind of way. Or at least not explicitly. Accommodating my solitary tendencies around a partner who I, at first, just spent a lot of time with and, eventually, came to live with has been a healthy, even necessary exercise in companionship. As someone who used to proudly declare “I never hang out with friends during daytime hours.” I still never hang out with friends during daytime hours but it’s best to take these steps one at a time. Because if I’m eating a meal or grabbing a coffee or going to a Juliette Lewis concert on a Sunday night, it’s coming from a place I swear feels more sincere than anxious when I say: I want to do it alone.

But these five years later, I still stand by that equation solving for my aloneness not always lasting for very long. That evidently there’s something about my face or posture or taste in cultural events that can result in someone like Suzette seeking me out in the crowd to strike up a conversation. Though maybe I’m giving myself too much credit. That Suzette’s non-reaction to my departure from Brighton Music Hall should be sufficient evidence that I was merely her most recent addition to a long list of polite men and women who’ve listened to her stories. The newest person she could share these heavensent run-ins with, asserting the legitimacy of it all, and less so for us than for her. Telling me about celebrities in bed and in their underwear so she could feel just a little less lonely in these memories. It’s a fear I understand. Suzette needed to know she wasn’t just a ghost.

If wanting to be alone is a detriment that needs fixing or just some inherent trait I should learn to honor, I haven’t decided yet. Because if I wasn’t so comfortable being by myself, I might never have been published in a certain column in a particular newspaper—to be grotesque for just a moment. I was alone at that fateful Fran Lebowitz event but so was an old man who’d offer me a ride home on his motorcycle and if I’d been any other type of person, I might never have had that story to tell. But for every Ted on his Harley and Suzette in general admission, there’s a walk to the park or a day on the beach where it’s only Brian. Stretches of time and space where my solitude meets no match, not even briefly. And I can understand how baffling this might be to the people who fill their days, effortlessly and enjoyably, with friendly faces. That I won’t be getting any sympathy for wanting to be by myself only to wind up all alone. But, I promise, there is all the difference.