1990: Heaven or Las Vegas, The Cocteau Twins

By Steph Straub

te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,

secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

— Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

April 27, 2022 — Cherry-coloured Funk

My parents and I have an inside joke when there’s a phone call after 9p.m. We quote Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck and ask, Who’s dead? I don’t do it when I get the 11p.m. call saying Grandma died.

Joan Straub smoked Bel-Airs and switched to Salems, until emphysema forced her to quit, which she did cold turkey without a whimper. On weekdays, she drank a six-pack of Budweiser. On weekends, she drank Manhattans with her dad. This was before my time, when she was mother to my father. She worked as a teller for a series of banks that consolidated into something unholy by the time she retired. Due to some old-school sexism, she’d end up training her future bosses. 

She was the type of person who would take the phrase tough broad as a compliment. If I ask my dad any more concrete questions adjacent to childhood (aside from brands and drinks), he’ll answer but put it off, as if it’s a matter better left in the past. 

She was a hard worker.

She loved in her own way.

She was a riot.

She wasn’t much of a loving type of mom.

We kinda fended for ourselves. 

He doesn’t hold animosity, but it feels like something better left alone.

On Sundays, I was either at church with my mom, or I was with my dad and grandparents in the Bronx while they booked bets and watched games. My grandma typically picked us up. We joked that she made an exchange – she’d get me on Sunday in exchange for a dozen fresh Bronx bagels handed to my mom.

My grandma wasn't the oatmeal cookie type, but my fondest memory was when she spared me football and men yelling about lost bets and teams not covering the spreads and went to her room to watch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York while she chain-smoked Salems (yes, I had asthma). What we have in common: I have her sad, hazel eyes, and we both enjoy Manhattans. Her memory is a blessing — chasing me around yelling Stephen Michael! as I roamed the house with bologna slices wreaking havoc.

She documented my first few years alive, some shaky heavy over-the-shoulder camcorder where everything looked as saturated as the Bronx in the 90s. Once I got the fundamentals out of the way (walking, talking, etc.), the camera stopped coming out.

My grandparents moved to Vegas around 2000, when I was seven. 

It feels apropos (or extremely on-the-nose) to play Heaven or Las Vegas, The Cocteau Twins’ sixth album, as the soundtrack to this dreaded trip. 

The Cocteau Twins’ music is definitely up my alley. An angelic lead singer in Liz Frazier dialogues with herself and otherworldly guitars through a universe of filters, bass lines, and drumbeats that way more rappers should sample. For those that like filling in lyrical blanks or just making shit up as you go, this is the band for you.

More likely than not, I happened upon The Cocteau Twins during some late-night college bull session at a dealer’s house in Minnesota, when weed felt verboten. I reeled from the memory of being stopped and frisked by New York’s Finest, so it had that forbidden je ne sais quoi. I felt the band’s warm embrace on winter nights, the safety of being weird, accepted, and not in trouble. If you endure enough writer’s workshops and make out with enough theater nerds, you’ll ultimately encounter the sad yet horny genre of the Cocteau Twins.

Music like this deserves the fog of a thousand blunts. It played in my periphery throughout my twenties on a bunch of playlists: late-night playlists, relationship collaborative playlists, breakup playlists, shower playlists, and a painfully inoffensive list for when I test the sound in the church sanctuary but avoid anything with tangible lyrics, lest it be perceived as secular, heaven forbid. I never play Christian music on my own time, because it’s poorly produced, and I hear enough of it at work. I believe Christian music is about 20 years behind in terms of production methods, yet borrows from the worst from that time. As of 2023, they’ve finally incorporated the Millennial Whoop. 

The opening track, “Cherry-Colored Funk,” sends me. That’s the version of Vegas I’d live in — a warm embrace to all the senses and an omnipresence like the Holy Ghost. Instead, Las Vegas is an all-out assault on the senses, a demonic possession. It never rains in Vegas, but the floor always looks wet.

Las Vegas is the Bud Light of cities, the Mecca for red-faced white men with backward caps and cargo pants. One can see lights washing over washed-up folks smacking a button for a dopamine rush in an over-air-conditioned room without daylight or clocks because time as a concept does not exist in Las Vegas. In the background along with award sounds and whirls plays top-20 hits on a rock station owned by iHeartMedia where, according to them, music peaked with Appetite for Destruction. It all begs the question, what are we willing to surrender to?

I can never dissociate Vegas from my extended family there, so the city never stood a chance.

The perfect album cover of overexposed Christmas lights leads into the perfect opening track. Like a lens with a slow shutter speed, the subject takes a life of its own and makes a new meaning. Like the best relationships, Heaven or Las Vegas functions on a visceral level — Do you fuck with me or not? Find the words later if you're interested. You’ll know if you’ll enjoy this album by the opening track alone.

Liz Frazier sings on “Funk” like she’s airing out grievances, the mundane that holds her back from the sublime. Again, the beauty of incomprehensible lyrics is creating a musical Rorschach Test, both pleasure and pain depending on which refrain you hear.

May 22, 2022 — Pitch the Baby

I grab three White Claws at an overpriced burrito stand at JFK. The self-checkout kiosk doesn’t recognize the bar code for the Claws, so I swipe three more and stuff them in my carry-on, sandwiched between socks and milk thistle supplements to undo the impending damage I intend to incur on my liver. I split the Claws with my parents as we finally embark on our delayed redeye to Vegas to collect my grandmother’s ashes to scatter them over my great-grandparents’ grave. 

I have a working theory that technology only works forty-five percent of the time, and people only understand about thirty percent of what’s being said. I work part-time in the evangelical church I was raised in, working the live stream, switching between camera shots, and helping with the lights, sound, and lyrics. God’s very much like capitalism: I don’t believe in it much, but it’s everywhere I go. 

When you’re in an evangelical church, you get cozy with glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. If the worship, lights, air conditioning, music, and reverb hit that day, folks break down. Through the weeping, moaning, and gnashing of teeth, anguish needs no translation. And when you’re a shitty twelve-year-old rolling your eyes at the suffering of humanity, you invent your dialogue. Speaking in tongues functions like background music, lest it creep me out. It’s both real and unreal. Someone commits the act, and I don’t discern if a divine being courses through them. I’m surprised Christian music never had a broader Dream Pop or Shoegaze moment — They might’ve kept me on board.

Another existential question here is, what the fuck is Heaven or Las Vegas? My answer is, it’s a perfect title. It seems like a haughty reference to some ee cummings poem quoted in a mumblecore film, but it’s just one of those phrases I wish I coined. To me, Heaven and Las Vegas are fictional locations, places with rabid fan bases you should never trust. It’s about the joy and horrors of creating or devoting oneself to something beyond you, like a child, a pure love, or letting something, like hatred or a substance, destroy you.

To my mom overhearing “Pitch the Baby” droning from my headphones in the coach seat next to me, it’s that Enya shit. To me, it’s a mom’s plea cooed through the only articulate phrase in the chorus, I only want to love you, driven by a bass line that has no business being that groovy.

It feels almost hack/trite to point out the biographical context of Heaven or Las Vegas, but here we go (I know). Liz Fraser had her first child with her bandmate Robin Guthrie, who struggled with a cocaine addiction. Bassist Simon Raymonde’s father unexpectedly died during recording. Simon arrived the next day and allegedly worked on the opening of “Frou-frou Foxes.” It borders on bad faith to indicate that their turmoil informed the work, but it’s obligatory to hold two thoughts at once: their work transcends their circumstances, despite their circumstances.

The film nerd in me conjures the opening credits to a mind film. Something like Grandma’s Dead, written and directed by me. Some nice neon and out-of-focus shots and Saul Bass credits cascading across the screen as we witness the live stream time-lapse collapse of an empire like a controlled casino demolition.

November 5, 2021 — Fifty-fifty Clown

Do you wanna see the chalk?

My uncle drives my father and me along Flamingo Road, a couple of days after a fatal car crash by former Raiders’ draft pick Henry Ruggs. Ruggs drove under the influence at 156 mph in a residential area before crashing and killing another driver. Police left crisscrossed chalk lines in green and red outlining the paths of the two cars, leading to a wall and a makeshift memorial.

My dad and I flew over because we had that nagging suspicion that Joan would die relatively soon. She survived heart attacks, emphysema, Parkinson’s, etc. When we found out she had COVID, I joked that COVID got Joan. She recovered within a week. The cocktails of meds, illness, and time finally got her on the way out.

Fred, my step-grandfather, stepped out of the house before we got there. My dad and I haven't talked to Fred in years. He’s the type of man who leaves trays at In-N-Out Burger tables because people get paid to clean them. Loose gold chains and even looser elastic shorts were made for Fred. Like tongues and Liz Frazier’s lyrics, contempt can be conveyed without words.

The noise. It’s the biannual remarks about who won’t be left with what in his will, the series of petty remarks, talking behind people’s backs, a stereotypical father-stepson relationship spearheaded by a baby boomer’s sense of entitlement about doing the bare minimum as a stepdad. Not explicitly said but implicitly understood — My step-grandfather also can't stand the fact my dad married a Puerto Rican woman and gave him his only grandson — me, a mixed over-educated long-haired lefty shoe gaze listener from the Lower East Side. His memory will not be a blessing.

Joan sits on a couch, bundled in a blanket watching Blue Bloods. Fred bought an oxygen tank too cumbersome for her to travel anywhere beyond the living room, so they set up a long tube reminiscent of corded home phones in the nineties. She chimes in every few minutes with something like, I love Tom Selleck or This is such a great show. During a commercial break, she turns to me and says, Cut your hair. You look like your father. Even on the way out, she had some jokes. After a few minutes of lucid conversation, she brings up how her old job wants her to come back to work. 

Janet from accounting is begging me to come back. 

Janet’s been dead for 20 years, my dad tells me when we leave.

May 23, 2022 — Iceblink Luck

I meet my parents and my uncle in the lobby around 11a.m. My uncle asks, What do you want a shot of?

Espresso, I said.

You sure you don’t want vodka or something? The café cashier is kinda a bitch when it comes to free vouchers.

My uncle collects paper vouchers from the cashout vendors because the machines won’t give out change due to a coin shortage, so he gathers them all up for a neat profit. It resembles Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy checking the coin returns from every stray phone booth he encounters.

We’re figuring out logistics — how do we gather my grandma’s ashes? Although my dad paid for the cremation, his name magically disappeared from the authorized list to collect them. And my beloved step-grandfather was unwilling to lift a finger. He’s busy working. None of us drive, so we’re beholden to my uncle driving sober because I’ve only been drinking beer all day.

To kill some time, we head to the world’s largest dispensary and peruse all the weedstuffs that they make too strong. I ask the cashier for the most mid of mids that they have, and I get a pre-roll I space out between three days, so I don’t succumb to psychosis and fight God. The first night leaves me in such a state I wander out from Bally’s to the Taco Bell Cantina on the Strip, my first real sense of liberty after containment in New York with masks throughout. 

This is the unbridled joy I experience while listening to “Iceblink Luck.” Describing the Cocteau Twins' songs feels like explaining a hallucination. Shimmering guitars and discerning only glimmers of phrases like, that will burn this whole madhouse down with absolute glee. Ideal music to float down the Strip with.

Friday, May 27, 2022 — Frou-frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires

The crematory’s backed up. 

We’re not authorized to collect the ashes.

Let’s set up a time to discuss this over a steak dinner at Morton’s. 

All noise. It appears we’re flying back home empty-handed. Sometimes there’s so much fuckery it cancels out in your favor. The airline cancels our return flight, so, behold, one of the few perks of having relatives in Vegas is a comp for another hotel somewhere outside the strip — the South Point. I play craps for a total of five minutes before it feels wrong, and I lose my pocket change. It’s another form of depression, where you see locals who don’t want to deal with the tourists yet still would like to disassociate while smacking a spin button on a slot machine.

We enter a massive suite — a mitzvah from my uncle, but it was a smoking room. My parents don’t smoke. South Point did think everything through, though, because the placard warns: 

NO SMOKING MARIJUANA

A $200 Cleaning Fee

Will Be Assessed For

Smoking Marijuana In

A Smoking Room

My mom sniffs in the room and whiffs the ghosts of a million cigarettes. She gets right to spraying the air and furniture to eliminate the musk. A security guard points me to the road outside the parking lot to legally smoke legal weed.

My parents and I weather it well at our wit's end. What’s also inarticulate is the boundless love of my parents. I quantify this through certain gestures: a few bucks to tide me over before the rent check destroys my bank balance, my mom texting me bible verses every morning. All these meaningful gestures do little to demystify the presence of love so strong you start to believe that God is love, love is an act, and all you can do is speak in tongues. 

Fred allegedly intends to straighten this all out and confront us at this steakhouse dinner, but work got in the way. We go with my uncle and Frankie, an old family friend straight out of a Scorsese picture, now another mediator between us and Fred, to pick up my grandma’s ashes and scatter them over my great-grandparents’ graves.

It’s bad timing. Maybe come back six months from now and we’ll sort it out.

My mom’s patience finally wanes after three men talk around a subject for an hour. She possessed a monk’s stoicism soaking all the fake conversation at Morton’s Steakhouse, a place that aspires to be in a Sopranos scene so badly and is the fine dining pinnacle of anyone who wishes they were Henry Hill in the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas.

This is where I associate that beat drop in Frou-frou Foxes. I hear a mother’s love, a pang in the chest years and years after defending everyone she holds dear, often thankless in that endeavor, the Jeremiah 29 keychain she gave me after graduating from college, manifesting plans to prosper, not to harm. 

Like Liz Frasier’s towering vocals, while incomprehensible, verbalize. I remember only stray bullets in that barrage of what my mom said to them. 

Do you know  how hard it has been? How much money we spent, how much work we’re missing?

You people do not have to make this so difficult.

We are absolutely sick and tired of your bullshit.

You people even make dying difficult.

All of this fucking contempt you hold for us and this bonchinche. 

The table went silent as I sipped my Manhattan. The very next day, Frankie arranged to have my dad pick up a portion of his mother’s ashes.

April 22, 2023 — Wolf in the Breast

My great-grandparents’ graves live right off the Mount Pleasant stop on the Metro-North. So many Irish names, you think you’ve arrived at a Famine memorial. If you choose to get off at that stop, you go to the last car, the last door and a conductor will kindly unlock that single door to let you off at a cement plank of a station, a brutalist Ghibli film.

“Wolf in the Breast” resembles that peace of walking in a cemetery on a sunny day and paying your respects. Here we have a treat: one of the two songs on the album with printed lyrics. She repeats My baby’s cries along with the refrain I feel perpetual, like a human engine plugging along, making new memories and legacies, and finding joy in the journey and peace in the present. 

My dad dusts off our stones atop the tombstones that endured a year without us and sets a new pair.

The Metro-North limited all transit to one track, due to construction. We wait on track two as our train arrives at track one. After a pregnant pause, the conductor walks out to his platform and yells, Are you going South? I dart the distance to the train crossing. My dad hears nothing but picks up his bags and runs along at my cue.

I feel perpetual. I feel perpetual.

Steph Straub is a writer, filmmaker, and performer hailing from New York. His creative journey spans writing screenplays, off-Broadway plays, and poetry, as well as stand-up comedy. His passion for storytelling also drives his involvement in the world of short films.

stephstraub.com

Twitter/Instagram @caramelpadre