Derrick Brown loves you

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Derrick Brown hoped he was just a little jetlagged. “I feel really weird,” he told his friend and fellow poet Amber Tamblyn just 24 hours after a fundraiser for the American Heart Association on August 4, where Derrick, Amber, Mindy Nettifee, Buddy Wakefield, and others performed for a crowd of 500. It was billed as “Drums Inside Your Chest.”

The irony was lost on Derrick, though. Breathing heavily, he told Tamblyn that if anything happened, his mother’s phone number was in his cell-phone under “Ma.” Then, his face froze. His jaw locked and his body tingled. Within minutes, he was numb.

“I could not see, but I could hear,” Derrick says. “My breathing was about done. I wasn’t in pain or sad, but I was crying out of one of my eyes.”
Amber drove him to his parents’ house, Brown’s mom piled in the car, and they sped to the hospital.

Meanwhile, a crowd waited for Derrick to emerge at his not-so-secret Broadlind Café reading with Aimee Bender. Brown, who recently opened for the Cold War Kids in Europe, was lead singer of the now-defunct Long Beach bands John Wilkes Kissing Booth and Glockundspiel and currently fronts All Black Cinema. He was set to leave on tour with the White Stripes in a few days.

It was anaphylactic shock, Derrick says. A shot of “something” brought him back. The tests detected an unrelated heart murmur and a cyst in his nose that might affect his voice, but after 12 tests, there is no explanation as to what caused the drum inside his chest to nearly explode. He doesn’t expect more test results until mid-September.

“First of all, it’s good to be alive,” Derrick told friends in an e-mail a week after the episode. “Second of all, don’t get too close or I might tell you I love you or something gooshy.” After many weeks spent on tour in support of his newest chapbook, I Love You Is Back, he acknowledges that has rarely said the words enough. “I sure as hell feel different about that now.”

Brown’s appearance at “Save Our Schools,” the September 8 fundraiser he was scheduled to headline along with Jay Buchanan and other Long Beach bands, is canceled, but the show is still on. He expects to fulfill his October schedule with Solomon Sparrow’s Electric Whale, a spoken-word extravaganza tour that includes a stop in Long Beach October 16, plus a solo stint with Cold War Kids and the White Stripes afterwards.

Like a lot of artists and musicians, Derrick has no medical insurance. To find out more about Derrick Brown, or to purchase any of his books to help pay the bills, visit brownpoetry.com.

Tags: derrick brown, Long Beach, poetry