On Wanting to Shampoo You
I’ve been relistening to and reloving Joni Mitchell’s Blue, fifty years in this world. Ah, the sweet pirouettes of her voice. Her lyrics are still fresh; they still speak to me about the yearnings of youth. Even when the words seem to miss, they hit: “I wanna talk to you / I wanna shampoo you / I wanna renew you again and again.” These lines from the album’s opening song, “All I Want,” seem laughable, at best whimsical, except that (as often happens when stuff gets in your head) they took shape for me three times in the past week ‒ in literature, in real life, in memory.
On a westbound train skimming along the northern border of the United States to Seattle, I was reading James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country. In it, he tried to make sense of the many permutations of heterosexual, homosexual, and interracial love and relationships, such as this: “Yves ... preferred long scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back.”
The title of Joni’s song is rich with ambiguity. Is this the apologetic, self-effacing “all I want …” or the unreserved, exacting, full-throated “ALL I WANT!” or both at once? The young British singer-songwriter Arlo Parks said, “What I love so much about this song is that it is full of contradiction and conflict. There’s a real sense of exploring what it means to be present and alive in the moment…. It feels like she was trying to hold onto something or keep up with something.” At the end of the first stanza, when Joni entices her listener, “Well, come on!” I am ready to do whatever that means.
While visiting my oldest son, Sierra, and his partner in Seattle, we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island one day for the pleasure of crossing Puget Sound. He had pointed out that because of the high cost of housing in Seattle and its avid backpacking and camping ethos, many homeless people live under highway overpasses but in top-quality tents.
At a sink
in the men’s bathroom
in the ferry terminal
on the Seattle waterfront
one guy shampoos
another guy’s hair
As I wash my hands
at an adjacent sink
the shampooer turns to me
and says, “How’s life
in the real world?”
Finally, Joni’s lyrics brought to mind the times I helped bathe my wife, Pat, over the last year of her life. Drawing the bath water, helping to remove her shoes and clothes, supporting her as she stepped into the tub. Then pouring a pitcher of water over her head ‒ the water cascading down and glinting in the morning light ‒ and shampooing her hair, momentarily lost in the minty smell and thick luxurious foam. Then one more submersion, carefully rinsing her hair, using my left hand to protect her eyes from the stinging suds. And after that, lathering a washcloth to massage her back, neck, arms, breasts, belly, genitals, legs, feet. A stark reminder of how her body was withering over time, skin more and more loose, muscles more and more lax from disuse.
Pat rarely felt anything other than physical discomfort, if not pain, in her final year, the fentanyl patches and oxycodone her only relief. I tried to make those baths for her a small moment of repose, but I was sometimes less than patient with her, and her crankiness (as much as she’d earned the right to it). At my best, I gave a good performance of selfless giving. At her best, she silently applauded the effort.
In each of these moments, I was reminded how physically intimate the act of shampooing another can be, what a superb example of caregiving it is. As she described her desire to be alive and free with someone, Joni might’ve simply sung, “I wanna make love to you.” Her line is far better.
19 July 2021