Featured Essay: I Want You To Want Me Too

by Will LaPorte

cw: domestic abuse, child abuse

My father used to own a liquor store. I think he used it less for additional income and self-determination as he claimed, and more to be away from his family for as long as possible, as the stresses and regrets of middle age crept in. The late working days into late working nights metastasized into chaos when he got home, and the store itself created debts that my parents only recently managed to crawl out of.

One day when I was still living with him, he came into my room with a real beat up copy of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You on vinyl. He told me a wide-eyed man came into his shop and traded it away for a nip of whiskey. He didn’t know what he was giving away, my dad said. Or maybe he did and didn’t care. 

I didn’t grow up with the kind of parents that subjected me to R.E.M., Led Zeppelin, or Prince CDs, or really made any effort to put me on, so I was left to my own music discovery devices. I fixated on the bands du jour of the mid aughts like My Chemical Romance and System of a Down, and this would later open out into a semblance of taste beyond the teenage when I had everyone I knew hand me a flash drive full of whatever music they wanted to give me. My first experience with my dad’s late-in-life efforts to grant me taste was after I graduated college in 2015 and moved back home. He trapped me by the computer to show me David Byrne wiggling around to “Life During Wartime.” At this point I’d already acquired the entire Talking Heads discography, one of those friends with a flash drive beat my dad to the punch; but it was nice to see him try.

Enter this tattered copy of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, my dad’s first successful attempt at introducing me to something new after many years of his relative absence, four years of my own, and one year of ramshackle reconnection. Gaye was (and honestly, still is) a massive blind spot for me. Yet, rather than use I Want You as a jumping off point for the rest of his discography, I tunneled into that record in particular, and the spot it held in his oeuvre and life. I’ve never heard a man plead the way he does, make grand stands for love and sex and pleasure and connection. At that point, I didn’t think that kind of vulnerability in a man was allowed. At that point, I had not yet seen my father or grandfather cry. 

My dad handed me the record and hung around in my childhood bedroom past midnight to tell me about the album art, in a way that suggested it was more important and iconic than the album itself. A slightly augmented version of Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack, I saw figures dance about in the haze of a party, limbs unnaturally bent but in bliss. Sitting there as my dad talked at me about the album, I was reminded of our winding nighttime drives down FDR in Manhattan from our home in Washington Heights to Veniero’s Pastry in the East Village. I was barely out of toddlerhood and didn’t much care for rainbow cookies or cannolis, but did love getting to see Keith Haring’s Crack Is Wack mural on the way down. I’d see it so often that the painting would haunt my dreams with Haring’s loving multi-colored humanoid figures, exaggerated, the expression of human beings in community without the rules of flesh to bind them. Looking back, it feels in conversation with The Sugar Shack, paintings where the only vice necessary appear to be art and love, whether or not that remained the truth in the artists’ reality. It’s also the only time I got to spend with my dad as a toddler and when I moved back home, the nighttime moments etched between him at work and me asleep and him at work again. 

In learning about Gaye, I also learned about his troubled childhood and personal life. His grandfather beat the shit out of his father, who beat the shit out of him. The people in Gaye’s life seemed to hold a lot of love for him, as he tried and sometimes failed to hold the cycle of violence at bay, having been hit by, hit, and even attempted to kill his lovers. Some things are not for the internet, but knowing my history with my father, his history without one, and what I’d hear almost every night through my walls, I do wonder if he knew what he was giving me. A silent acknowledgment? A desperate plea for connection despite his flaws, with Marvin’s voice as a proxy? When he handed me this beat up vinyl, still to this day the only record he ever gifted me, was the title on the cover communicating what he couldn’t?

I still have that record, spin it on occasion, I even sampled it when I was first dabbling in making house music, into some tracks I can never release anywhere lest I get drawn and quartered by the Gaye estate. Whenever I hold it, I stare at The Sugar Shack and think of Crack Is Wack,all those joyful dancers. The cardboard of the jacket and the paper of the sleeve barely keep together in my hands. I think of the man who was so quick to give it away for fifty milliliters of booze, where he is now, if he’s still anywhere. I think of Marvin holding generational trauma at bay to profess his passion for a fraught relationship soon to implode. I listen to the prominent crackles and pops over his croon when the title track comes on and remember that somewhere deep down, my dad convinced himself he was working those shifts at his shop for my family, my mom, my siblings, me. He wanted us. Some days, just believing that is enough.

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Will LaPorte (they/them) is a latinx musician, writer, photographer, and structural engineer based in NYC. They create anxious electronic music under the moniker of Ghost Down (ghostdown.bandcamp.com) and run a monthly newsletter, also called Ghost Down, that you can subscribe to here (https://buttondown.com/ghostdown). You can follow them on Bluesky @ghostdown.online and check out their website, which is also ghostdown.online.