Adele means Noble & Kind

The heart hurt, I wouldn’t wash for days almost enjoying how my effluvium filled a room. People were so polite; they said nothing.

The dog needed to be walked, so scruffy, like he knew his master’s mirth, and we got into the convertible and put the top down, though the overcast could go either way. It was still early. Traffic could not be blasted awake by their coffee and their luxury watches ticking away the minutes until they made it. There’s a calm in the still hours of the morn, the queen's necklace, we put the travel-verse in high fidelity and porsched the coast.

Exiles.

I already knew our direction but Caspian was just as happy to be out of his yard, whooping wildly with his ten inch tongue going in all directions. We bit the wind. From the palisades of Pacifica to the lower coast of the divine city, we revved the engine to accept hills, granite breakage, small birds dared to cover our tracks. The city was street cleaning and I didn’t know what would happen when I parked across the street because I yearned to survey her again.

Had Adele continued to eat? I could not eat. The way she wanted us to wash in her jacuzzi, each nigh, feed each other dark chocolates she swore were good for the brain, and then we flopped out of the hot tub with the neighbors pretending to be sleeping. Her joyous laughter.

I remember that we couldn’t make love in the house because she had a cat, and that’s when I began to bring my dog, thinking one could be the companion to the other but it never worked out that way.

Her large pot for plants was broken on the porch. The porch where I would leave small love gifts, sometimes crepe' from Salon Suzette, sometimes mice for her kid, sometimes a single flower with an unpronounceable name.

The sale sign swung from a post, taking its shape from people who were hanged for performance issues The realtor was very selective, the sign said “For discreet buyers”, like anyone who bought Adele’s former house in San Francisco would have a grand party and point and say, “That’s where she wrote all those songs.”

Those mean songs.

How many years must I hear our life unroll from other people’s mouths? All those lives. They’re based on someone, a real someone, and their dog. Those songs.

‘Set Fire to the Rain’ was not the last time my love got tipsy and wanted to send a bottle rocket in a windstorm. Sure, part of Oakland burned though fire is very cleansing, and that part of Oakland might have needed to be rebuilt by someone spectacular. We can not dilute the will of God.

Caspian pulled at my shifting arm and seemed to think that the car only moved if I shifted the gears. He wanted to feel the wind again. The wind never really goes home; it just swirls around, eddies. I couldn’t feel where we should go next because Adele believed I had gotten cancer and died.

Then she found out I had to marry a woman who never got that abortion to get our kid into college. A marriage of convenience because some people aren’t meant to be happy artists. They chase stones that roll and get flung into windows.

The one who sang away.

A police man beeps and he wants to know why I’m parked in front of a dead house. A house which once had so much life, invitations to the neighborhood with people who made art – the neighbors didn’t complain if they were invited for a private audience each season. It was a balance.

I gave my license and understood that my last shower didn’t wash away all the muck. I’m much too ugly now to ever describe the relationship lost. Just a dream that is hard to remember if a person can still rise.

He taps the license over his wrist but doesn’t go back to his car to check for warrants right away. He looks long at my pain, ‘You’re not the only one, you know. We all miss her.’

I turn and it's like two brothers at the Adele Anonymous Convention, post-party. How we must pretend that we didn’t make her laugh, that a celebrity shouldn’t know your name but she did.

“I used to hand feed her ...”

“Melted chocolate,” we both whisper at the same time. No one says jinx because we are both remembering how she would just tongue tip the dark chocolate until she was ready to take it all in. A perfectly clean spoon or finger.

The officer was looking to the horizon, and I looked up to the angle of neck pain. “Why didn’t you…?”

“What? Get married? Settle her down?”

“You can’t do that to an artist, man. I work nights, and that’s when Adele comes alive. She’s like that movie Lady Hawk, and you have to be free and awake at night to keep up. Well...” He shakes off the thought, “I wasn’t free.” Then he points to the badge which makes so many cops kill themselves.

Maybe they all lost Adele.

We were sharing a moment, the officer and I, when suddenly the newspaper truck stopped and threw papers at both of us. Caspian caught one in his mouth, not realizing it was a slight. “Hey! Vominose you two-z. This is holy ground.”

The little man got out of his old Toyota Truck with a baseball bat and the cop was going to reach for his gun when he noticed the man was tattooed with her eyes, one on each forearm. We froze in the brilliance of this sacrifice.

He beat his chest, “Man, I swam to this country for her and now she’s gone.”

We all knew that San Francisco was just her hiding spot between the studio in Los Angeles and the producers in London. She had said that she wanted to experience the Joe Cocker soul of our city, the way that people don’t care how they dress but prefer to be thrown over a bridge when they die. We have an entire city dedicated to burials, ten minutes south in Colma, with a million and a half graves. A city of souls. Adele brings peace.

This middle aged newspaper man got to his knees and wept there in the streets. His glory brought us to tears like the funeral of a great person was being eulogized before us. “Go EeeEeee Zzzzzzzzz (hold me babe)....” The man with the bat had an angelic falsetto. It brought this cop to dry choked tears and Caspian jumped out of the convertible, twisted his paw, and limped over to lick the man on the face.

A cluster of dawn lady speed-walkers came rolling up and yelling, “Don’t you defile this place!” They had tongue lashes like hissing serpents and tried to thow their holy water from the aluminum canisters at all of us. Caspian barked at them and defended the newspaper man in the street. The police officer trotted to his loud speaker to tell the speed-walkers to disperse but they whipped out their camera phones and said they would defund him.

It was a terrible mob scene with all parties feeling a particular interest in the last time Adele lived amongst us.

A helicopter soon arrived with the local news, zooming their large camera over our situation, the neighbors couldn’t back out their cars to work and my phone started ringing incessantly. I hit ignore/block/off but the messages kept popping up over and over.

[I see you on television, Mister]

[You’re at HER house again. I SEE YOU.]

[BRING HOME MY DOG RIGHT NOW!!]

I decided to put the phone in the trunk. There was no place to speed away and just stare at the coast as her amazing voice came through the speakers, the Pacific Ocean crashes to rocks, dolphins would jump in unison. There’s a beauty about leaving San Francisco before 9 am by the coastal route, going south, where no one cares where you been or seen. They only want to clamor north for the next few hours and cheerfully forget the return commute will take 12 hours to disperse, some linger to late night. Many people learn to drink while they wait.

The road going down Xxxx Hill was blocked because one officer cannot arrest 12 emotional people at once who all think they have sovereign authority over the house and shrine of Adele. They all remember her waving to them as if to say, “I give you my all.”

I was in that woman so many times and then she was in me. She was in me. To the quivering bone and I could not shower without the fear of slipping because she liked to drop the soap and I used to like to shower.

I blame the cat, of course I do, and cannot help but understand that everyone had their own break-up with Adele or gave her the cold shoulder because her love was so intense that people need wind down time. They get sunburns from the radiance of her smile, they might fall into her lips like wine.

The Saint Adele Fan Club was plodding up from the lower hill and I was still stuck with everyone claiming their own authority. Everybody wanted to believe that they were worthy to handle the sidewalk before her estate, the way the moon lingered over her backyard, the tides and the seasons of her embrace. Had they fed her sour dough from the wharf? Did she pretend it was her first and best bite though millions of people have fed her the same chowder in a bread bowl that is not even fresh anymore. It’s the same in Monterey and probably Jersey. That which is fresh goes stail and we must perk our lips and continue to smile… like Adele.

Obviously, all of the bay broke her heart. Just listen to those songs. We were mean and cruel when she dwelt amongst us, begging for Bernie Sanders to visit at the Continental Hotel so that Dave Mathews could pick up his guitar tuner by a private plane in Portland. How do you think that made Adele feel, Bernie?

I hate that guy.

I fuck’n remind this crowd by forcibly commandeering the cops bull horn that Bernie Sanders came to our city and wanted Dave Mathews instead of Adele!

::: BERNIE DOESN'T LOVE HER:::

This was not hard for this crowd of hard working and upper-middle class people to understand. Even the newspaper man didn’t want to be taxed until every hobo was happy.

They stopped mobbing to listen. The news helicopter set down a hundred feet over. A reporter got out with noise canceling head phones and threw them off. This reporter ran up to me with the large microphone lancing in front like an olympic torch runner. She panted and clearly wanted to bend over. She touched her ears out of habit and put the mic in my face, “What did you just say?”

“Bernie Burnt her.”

That’s what the old Bernie Sanders for President stickers meant when they said ::: feel the burn:::

We did.

I’m not saying that Bernie Sanders had an emotional affair with the soulful rock singer named Adele before or during his run for President in 2020 but people got really weird during those years of COVID. Maybe he wore a mask.

This reporter I did not know could not encourage me or anyone in the crowd to release our personal biographies. This reporter had obviously never felt her close and could only feed off of the dreams of others. The lost dreams.

We all shared something silently and something very intimate that cannot be transferred by news wires. They only want the highlights but it was a great romance and not a fling. We were all touched by this woman. How can a stranger feel her giggle?

I put the microphone down. I pushed it down and said the real words of Kevin O’Leary.

“You’re dead to me.”

I wonder if he loved Adele too.