Pills, Ancestors, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Nurse Going to My Head

David Johansen shows up in my dreams with a message

David Johansen showed up in my head at 7 a.m., singing Bo Diddley.

“Hold out your arm, boy, stick out your tongue. I got some pills, I’m gonna give you some...”

And just like that, I was 13 again, sitting next to my father’s hospital bed. Machines humming, the air heavy with antiseptic and something I would later recognize as fear. Pills flowing through IVs, keeping him alive. The unspoken terror that I’d grow up to be the man in the bed, tangled in tubes, waiting to die.

But in that half-dream state between waking and sleep, something softened. Johansen wasn’t just singing in my head—he was there, in that hazy, glam-fabulous way, grinning under the stage lights. Sequins and sweat, a bottle in one hand, a microphone in the other. A presence, not a ghost, exactly, but not not a ghost either. A rock ‘n’ roll ancestor.

I’ve been taking pills to sleep. I don’t like it, the needing, the dependence, the fact that some nights I still stare at the ceiling for hours even after I’ve swallowed them. The ways the edges of my body and mind blur out, the feeling of a slow dissolve. But Johansen was still grinning, like he knew some joke I didn’t. Like he had a message, but not one you could put into words.

So I let my vision go a little fuzzy, softened the way I was holding the moment, and asked, What do you want me to know?

And the answer wasn’t words. It was a knowing. A feeling. The kind of thing you get in dreams, or when you hear a song you haven’t thought about in years and suddenly every memory it holds comes flooding back all at once. A slow, familiar smile, a reassurance: We’re going to take care of you, even if you end up in a hospital bed. Even if you have to take the pills. Even if you hate them. There’s a long tradition of people struggling with their sickness and their medicine. It doesn’t mean the rock ‘n’ roll stops.

And I think about lineage. About Bo Diddley writing the song, and the New York Dolls taking it and spinning it into something new, something urgent, something that pulsed in the veins of the early punk movement. I think about how music, like dreams, is a way of passing down messages we don’t always have the language for. About how certain songs show up at just the right moment, carrying something we didn’t even know we needed.

David Johansen never meant to visit me at dawn, but there he was. Maybe I called him up. Maybe he just had something to say. Either way, I’m listening, until it’s my time.

RIP David Johansen