Crisis of Character

Catherine Spino reviews Geoff Rickly’s SOMEONE WHO ISN'T ME.

I. My name is Catherine Spino and I am scared shitless to write this. 

I love you, keep going.

I bought an iPad specifically so I could read Geoff’s novel. I even bought one of those Apple Pencils. It makes my notes not look like my notes, but rather scribbles from another world. A digital looking glass. I reach my hand into the screen, mark up the book like a shitty graffiti artist. I erase it and mark it again. I am in Geoff’s book now. 

Someone Who Isn’t Me (Rose Books, 2023)

Is main character energy seeing yourself everywhere? Am I doing it now because for years, I could see myself as anyone but me?

In Someone Who Isn’t Me, eponymous Geoff is the frontman for a famous post-hardcore band. He tells us about music, how he searched for it everywhere—how he “learned the guitar and fell down the stairs holding it…[how he] sat through funerals just to hear the organ play.” I think about when I was an actor, how I’d watch movies and plays and feel like I was witnessing something cosmic. Geoff wanted to believe in the existence of sound “so desperately that it felt like being stabbed.” I think about all the scripts I’ve memorized, the hours I spent in my family’s basement reciting the same words to abandoned Christmas decorations until they created an odd music within my body, until I felt a voice inside me become the voice of someone else, echoing over a house full of clapping hands. 

“That flash contained all my possible selves, all my possible endings, beyond which life is as fundamentally unknowable as death. I decide I’ll live forever in that glow, in that moment where nothing can hurt me. I am the sun. I am a star.”

Describe the stage. Being on stage was like planting your feet at the edge of a cliff and teetering off of it. I felt alive. I could be anyone on that stage and be loved. I could be anyone and not be me. But once the show ended and my makeup was wiped clean, I was left with this naked face in the mirror. My own face. The face of someone I hated, someone I didn’t believe in, the magic shucked out of me like a pearl from a broken shell. So, I tried to find ways to become someone else worthy of applause without the help of lights and costumes.

“If there’s nothing else, there’s applause…It’s like—like waves of love coming over the footlights and wrapping you up. Imagine, to know every night that different hundreds of people love you. They smile, their eyes shine, you’ve pleased them. They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth anything.”¹

Catherine the Life of the Party. Catherine the Problem Solver. Catherine the #1 Fan. Catherine the “Down for Whatever” Martini Slinger. Catherine the Great Fuck. Roles I knew like the back of my hand, roles that came with a price tag, only to be paid with marrow from the soul. The applause was never ending—all I had to do was keep saying yes. I felt stunning until I didn’t, but there was always another shot to take. I sank into waves of numbness and liquor. What a revolutionary I thought I was: I found a way to drown on land. 

Describe the descent. The tides turned. My body thrashed in the water, desperate to save itself. I became physically ill, gut swollen, eyes empty, facial muscles tense from overblown smiling. My yeses felt like bullets aimed at my own head. I heard my own crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox. I felt it fester in my muscles, my nervous system glitched. Breathing became conscious work. I thought it might be easier to submit to this tangled version of myself because I knew it best, even though it was killing me. When I yelled in my dreams, no one could hear me. I woke up with a soreness in my throat.

I must be dying, I thought. This must be death. I welcomed it.

II. My name is Catherine Spino and I wanted to die instead of feeling the pain. 

Geoff boards a flight from New York to Mexico that’s supposed to save his life. He’s headed to a clinic that boasts a risky potential treatment for heroin addiction: ibogaine, a psychedelic drug with dissociative properties and a 50/50 chance of success. If the ibogaine succeeds, the addiction lifts. If it fails, Geoff dies. It makes sense to take the risk. He has no more life to lose, but all the life to gain.  

When I started to get sober, my therapist told me that healing can be paradoxical. When we start to become better, the obsessive thoughts become louder. The mind doesn’t want to give up the pain it knows for something unknown in fear that the unknown could be more painful. So it replays the same script over and over. It’s the devil you know versus the devil you don’t. As the summer shifted into early fall, the voices quieted down only to come back louder. Shame gnawed at my insides, seeped into my blood. I wanted the voices to stop but the only duct tape I knew would quiet them was booze and weed. But my desire for sobriety was stronger, so I buckled in and braced myself. Geoff hears cicadas as the ibogaine kicks in.

He works his way through a wax maze with street signs named after cities: Barcelona, Sydney, New York. In one, he finds a friend coating stained glass scenes with thick black paint: a scene from a life changing show in Philly, another from Geoff’s band’s set at This Is Hardcore, “concealing something[s] from himself.” I think about the things I’ve hidden from myself, how my memories warp like a record left in the sun. I’m afraid memories of love will grow thorns and memories of sadness could destroy me, leading me down roads of blistering pain. Do you forget your strength? I take a deep breath and begin to peel the paint.

The only way out is through and sometimes, the only way through is back. I sold all my belongings, got on my horse and trekked back to the scene of the crime.

The road is longer than it is hard…No best foot forward to sway the odds, just a voice inside you and a stone to throw.²

Geoff goes back to a studio in Jersey City, where a Pitch Doctor is sent to help perfect the highest note in the verse “I don’t want to feel like this forever,” the lines getting Geoff all choked up as he sings them. He stands in the bathroom of the studio, soap scum words speaking to him on the bathroom mirror: REMEMBER. “It drips down the cold surface…and collects on the countertop, forming the words GO DEEPER.” 

I looked for messages everywhere, in how the bird shit was spread on car windows, which trees turned yellow then orange then red first. I once found a spider hanging above the shower. She fell—did she jump?—and flailed in the water, refusing to die. I covered her with a cup and took her out to our porch. I wondered if she wanted to die like I did. I wouldn’t let her.

I love you, keep going.

Geoff goes through every place he’s been to on tour with his band. He lists them all out, almost like bruises. Gettysburg. Roscoe. Ipswitch. Minnetonka. St. Cloud. Floodwood. Esko. Superior. Cable. Rib Lake. Tomahawk. Antigo. White Plane. Calumet. Oshkosh. Sun Prairie. New London. Red Granite. Grand Marsh. Spring Green. Dodgeville. Highland. Soldiers Grove. Malta. Sycamore. Lee. Paw Paw.

Make a list of all the places you’ve been, all the stages you’ve been on. Discuss how that isn’t you, how time blurs, how you can’t remember it all exactly. How long you’ve tried to call it all back only to come up with shards—the way your hair curled just so, applying red lipstick (what was the brand?) in graffitied bathroom mirrors that smelled like desperation, the way men’s faces looked rocking above yours like they’ve seen some eighth wonder of the world, or a freak show, but none of that will matter in the morning. How you can’t even remember their names.

Geoff opens a door and the words blur on the page because I go somewhere else, his words become my world, a transportation device. His childhood home becomes my childhood home. And there I am, holding up balloons to my papa who is no longer there, cheeks red with a rash that clears as I grow up. She asks me what a little boy asks Geoff: “What’s your name?” She looks up at me because I am an adult and I cry because I am not an adult, how can I be? I forgot to feed the child that’s in me. 

“Did you forget?”
“I forgot, completely and totally.”
“That’s so silly.”

And yet, she still takes my hand.

‘Cause the person on the other side has always just been you.³

“I’ve only ever imagined my self as the broken thing that I’m trying to get away from. But what if there’s another me: a somehow heroic alternative Geoff, buried under the drugs?...If I can find that Geoff, maybe it’s not too late to fix things.”

There is a Japanese art form called Kintsugi, which directly translates as “golden journey.” It’s the art of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer so the break isn’t disguised but turned into something beautiful. The metallic lines become a part of the object’s history. I imagine picking up the pieces of all the selves I’ve shattered, the ones I tried to sweep away, the ones that now come to me looking to be heard. I imagine all of the gold seams in my body, connecting myself to these voices, my heart so full it could burst. I imagine myself as a silver disco ball full of everything I’ve ever known. Put me up to the light, watch my stories dance on the wall. They whisper, I love you, keep going. And so I keep going. 

III. My name is Catherine Spino and I think love could kill me.

Geoff boards a plane back to New York, ready to make amends. Ready to change, ready to start again. His friends throw him a surprise party and he falls apart in his friend’s hands in the bathroom, held in something like safety. I think about when I got sober, how I tried to keep up this facade that everything was okay. That when I removed the alcohol, there wasn’t a hole left in me.

Where do all the unwept tears go? Maybe they collect like water in a dam near your heart. A dam filled with years of shame in my chest flooded and ran wild. Maybe love hurts because I was pushing it away, maybe because I buckle and harden when it floats to me on a breeze. Love presses into my chest so hard that I confuse it for a knife. I shut down, steel up, but maybe it’s a thread. A thread weaving through holes, holes I’ve filled with other objects and people and things that made them rot. Maybe love is a thread. Sometimes my chest hurts so much when I cry but maybe that hurt is expansion, so I lay on the floor and feel the tears run down my face as I expand. My heart grows bigger. 

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs.”⁴

I stop having sex with random men. I start drinking Topo Chico until I learn it could kill me too and then I start drinking another seltzer but miss Topo Chico. I remember I loved to sing so I sing in the car and driving becomes easier. I keep a gratitude journal by my bed and find myself closing every entry with “I love you, keep going.” 

I stop reading Geoff’s book for one week. I celebrate one year of sobriety on vacation with my family. I cry as “Yellow” by Coldplay plays at the restaurant my parents take me to celebrate. I get lost in an antique store. I debate not writing whatever the hell this is. I question if my sobriety is for me or if it belongs on a page which feels like a stage. Is my pain a performance? Is it even real? I think of Geoff’s therapist, quoting the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” This book has brought a mirror to what is within me, all of it. This is what is within me. Seeing it, feeling it, is what will save me.

Geoff doesn’t get a perfect ending. I want one, though I know it doesn’t exist. Life isn’t a play but I still yearn for a script, direction. It’s hard for me to read a book and not search for a blueprint on where to go next. I remind myself I’m in the driver’s seat. You can’t escape the noise, but the blaring music can go quiet. Our hands control the volume now, inching the dial down when the decibels begin to flare. 

I couldn’t close the book because I read it on an iPad, but when I locked my screen, I was met with a reflection in the looking glass. Someone I never thought I’d become. 

I love you, keep going.

---

Catherine Spino is a writer from the East Coast. Her work spans from music/art journalism to fragmented prose essays and poems. Her writing is featured or forthcoming in Hobart, Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Read COPY, and more. She doomscrolls on Instagram under @spaghetti____western (that's 4 underscores) and tweets from the road under @1virginmartini.

Geoff Rickly is the lead singer and songwriter of Thursday. His debut novel, Someone Who Isn’t Me, was published by Rose Books.

1. Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, All About Eve (1950)

2. Ethel Cain, “God’s Country”

3. Weyes Blood, “God Turn Me Into a Flower”

4. Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life