It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m lackin’ the talent,

I can’t stand the sadness,

I don’t have big enough balls!

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m just goin’ back to

Great Falls.

They would give the Gipper eight years. There were only two verses to Don’s plague song, which we’d heard Don sing in the little Barlows’ apartment. “Goin’ Back to Great Falls,” the Damaged Man would call his last song. When we first heard it on the radio, the censors had bleeped out the balls and the fuck-all. “Less bad ain’t better,” as Don used to say. There was no bleeping out Ronald Reagan, who would be reelected in a landslide—naturally, the right-wing radio stations wouldn’t play “Goin’ Back to Great Falls,” not at all.

Don would be killed in Montana. He’d been playing with a band in Bozeman, but the band was based in Missoula; the details weren’t clear, not at all. They were a couple of college towns; Don had been playing with college kids. That was all Nora knew about the band. Someone shot Damaged Don in a parking lot, after he’d been singing “Goin’ Back to Great Falls.” This was after Reagan’s reelection, when the gay boys Don had been singing about were still getting killed.

After Don was killed, there were sympathetic DJs who played “Goin’ Back to Great Falls” as a protest song. There was a resurgence of the Damaged Man on the airwaves—of “It Never Gets Better with Gwen” and “No Lucky Star,” and the rest.

For as long as Ronald Reagan was in office, Nora closed out every performance of Two Dykes, One Who Talks with a Damaged Don song. “I can’t sing, but neither could Don,” Nora always said, bringing tears to the eyes of the veteran patrons of the Gallows Lounge—even before she started singing. Em would just hug her, crying, while Nora sang.

In the Reagan years, when Em and I wrote each other about our writing, we always asked how the plague song was going.

39. WENGEN

While Ronald Reagan was preaching the doctrine of American exceptionalism, the snowshoer and I went to Switzerland. My mother and Molly met us in Wengen. The little Barlows were still skiing, albeit more cautiously—they were in their seventies, almost in their eighties. Wengen was their idea; they were always looking for new places to ski, in Austria or Switzerland, and they invited us to join them. My mom and Molly loved skiing in Europe; Elliot and I felt the same way about winter hiking and snowshoeing. Wengen, in the Bernese Alps, was new to all of us—not even the little Barlows had been there before.