Because I do stupid things on social media, I wrote that I was going to try and write for fifteen minutes every day and post the results; provided I get prompts from my 150 or so Twitter followers-50 or so of whom probably have me on mute.
Because I like stalling, I could tell you about my day–like the fact that it’s wicked hot in my apartment despite the fact that I don’t hear the radiator AND I have a window cracked, or the fact that I finished Lenny Kravitz’s memoir in two nights (it’s an easy but engrossing read) AND re-listened to his Questlove Supreme podcast while I was working. OR the fact that I illegally downloaded like 25 or so albums that I already own on LP but can’t digitize without paying for them AGAIN. Even the stuff I didn’t already own-like Helen Reddy’s “Delta Dawn”-she’s not gonna lose out on money because I didn’t legally buy the track. She’s DEAD.
Anyhow, I did get a prompt (ONE prompt) from my friend Jake, who asked me to write about a song that haunts me. Another quick sidebar-I am a bit obsessive, so I don’t think there’s been a moment in the last six or seven hours during which I haven’t thought about what to write. I’d like to figure out a way to rid myself of this behavior; I think that’s one reason that even things that are fun to me always feel like work.
My brain walked through half a dozen different songs before I did the right thing and settled on the song I thought of first-“Drowning In Your Eyes” by Ephraim Lewis. It was a blip on the top 40 in 1992. This is the shit I was listening to when the people I hung out with were listening to En Vogue and Boyz II Men. Well, I was listening to them too, but “Drowning” was a bit too genre-unspecific for my R&B, reggae and hip-hop rooted friends. Ephraim was Black, and “Drowning” is certainly soulful, but the music rests somewhere in a lounge-y, atmospheric space. To put it another way-while Ephraim was certainly talented, I’m pretty sure it would’ve taken a lot longer for his label to sign him had Seal not emerged a couple of years before.
So, I was 16, had negligible income and the internet was the better part of a decade away from being in every home. I had to tape that mamma jamma off the radio-and considering “Drowning” barely scraped the top 40, my chances of hearing it regularly were not plentiful. But there was something hypnotic about it that stuck in my head. Ephraim sounded completely lost in a reverie; something I didn’t quite understand until the summer of ’95, when I developed a massive crush on this guy named Evan. We were co-workers at Tower Records–I worked the floor, he hung out in the back office as the head of our stockroom. He wore leather vests, tight jeans and a skull and crossbones earring. He looked like a remnant of ’70s metal, someone that walked off the back cover of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell. In another light, everyone would’ve recognized him as GAY AS HELL (sing it in Lizzo’s voice) but his sexuality was a closely guarded secret in the store. I’m not exactly sure how I got the tea, but as someone who’d never actually dated anyone before and didn’t know a whole lot of available men, I pursued him in an incredibly awkward, juvenile fashion. I wrote notes, I made eyes, I invited him to lunch. Uncomfortable with a co-worker knowing his secret (especially a chubby, moody teenager), he spent quite a bit of time dodging me.
And-oh, I forgot to mention-Evan had (and still has, as he is still alive as of three or so weeks ago) BEAUTIFUL blue eyes. Those eyes were so beautiful, in fact, that I still associate Ephraim’s dreamy beat ballad with them, twenty eight years after first hearing the song and twenty six years after meeting Evan (and easily twenty since the two of us last crossed paths in the non-virtual world).
A haunting coda to this sort of goofy song- while Ephraim’s first album, Skin, is a bop (think Seal x Sade with a little bit of Massive Attack thrown in and an adult contemporary sheen), he didn’t live long enough to complete a second. Plagued with mental illness, in the process of discovering his own queer sexuality (and allegedly planning to come out before the release of his sophomore effort), and rumored to be on mind-altering substances, Lewis jumped to his death  (or fell to his death after being tased three times by the LAPD) from a balcony.
“Drowning In Your Eyes” is haunting in a nakedly romantic, infatuated sense.
Ephraim’s death is just plain haunting.