"It used to be a tenet that 'I am a journalist and I'm trying to get at the truth.' Now what you should say is 'I am a journalist and people lie to me.' I think that's what happens. When you're approached by a journalist the first thing that you realize is that you are not —if you are intelligent —that you are not in the domain of truth. Not anymore. And therefore the most important thing is to lie. To actively lie. To actively construct and deconstruct before there is any chance you can be analyzed or got at or picked to pieces. The conclusion that's drawn, not only by the journalist but also by the public, has got to be the wrong conclusion... so that the right conclusion remains something that you have control over. It's become a kind of absolute. I've spoken to lots of other people that are in the music business and they've all said the same thing. Do you lie to interviewers? You fucking bet.The whole thing is a lie from start to finish." — Pete Townshend, interviewed by Celia Farber for SPIN, 1993

In 1993, the year Pete Townshend released Psychoderelict, an album about a mature, sentimental rock star who falls in love with a cold and calculating newspaper journalist, I interviewed him for SPIN magazine. The first interview grew into several more, some of them over the phone. It took me so long to transcribe the many hours of interview tapes — and even longer to construct a feature article, due to an overwhelming agony of internalized pressure — that the final article did not appear in SPIN until 1996.

There was nobody alive I wanted to talk to more urgently than I wanted to talk to Mr. Townshend, at that time. I'd gotten so carried off with his music and lyrics from such a young age that I felt nothing but grief at the prospect of meeting him. Why grief? Because, like Sally Simpson, I presumed I would be shown that I was very small and could never be seen or heard by him. I carried a terrible burden of idolatry. I hadn't yet found myself, defined myself. I was 27. All I had experienced in my work was assault and battery. I was totally lost.

And yet I felt that my core ideas and ideals of seeking a truth (internal and external), and of transcending false authority and finding the authority of self, had come from him. I needed to explain this to him, to seek some kind of clemency, or validation.

As I struggled through countless drafts of the tortured article, my editor said typical editor things like: "I don't think we need all this stuff about how you felt about the interview."

So I cut it all out.

The real story never got told. That's how the old media was designed — to keep within very narrow comfort zones. How To Write A Feature Article. Rule number one: Hide. Don't reveal anything about yourself.

But all these years later, these fossils are on the ocean floor, and I am finding great freedom in retrieving them. This is a living experiment in creative freedom. Imagine telling the real story, or shards of it, even. Imagine that frowning editor's face gone — no longer casting shadows on the process of expression. That is my dream for The Truth Barrier —to free us from the censors who shame our truest responses to the world.

It took almost a quarter of a century to get here. I don't mind failing, but I mind the insidious reflex to stay safe, to never appear human. If something is pressing on your memory, it probably a story worth telling. As it was.

So here's the story, more or less:

It was 1993. Like I said, I was petrified of meeting Mr. Townshend. The interview had been arranged by SPIN's publisher Bob Guccione Jr. I had even gone so far as to try to get out of it altogether. Then I threw myself into preparation for the interview that lasted for weeks. I could prepare intellectually but not emotionally.

When I went, shakily, to his hotel on the appointed day, I felt I was walking into certain spiritual death, by erasure. Like meeting a father who you believed you could never matter to, but whose photo you'd looked at every day of your life. The role I had to play at SPIN was that of a journalist for a rock magazine. Such a person has no vulnerabilities. The posture is one of power: You can't be found guilty of love in that business.

En route to the interview, I stopped at a health food store. I touched the heavy glass door to enter it and there was a loud bang and the door shattered. After a moment, the glass fell out. A crowd gathered. The store's proprietor came running out and a man in the crowd said: "She didn't do anything. I saw it. She only touched the door."

I apologized to the baffled store owner and said I had to leave, because I had an urgent appointment. That's not the first time energy's gone wild on me.

When Mr. Townshend entered the hotel room, I was unable to look up from his boots. We shook hands and he said, "I am so sorry."

I looked up at him and said: "Why are you sorry?"

"Because I'm late," he said.

He couldn't have known I prefer people who are late.  Day dreamers.

I had brought my father's Marantz tape recorder — the best machine ever built for audio recording. As we began the conversation, the tape promptly stopped. Pete snapped his fingers into the microphone a few times, and that fixed it. For hours we talked. The main thing I was obsessed about was Tommy. Who was he? What did he know? Why did his knowledge cause him to go blind, deaf and dumb? How did his journey cause him to regain his senses?

It was like being placed on a magic carpet. I can hardly believe it even now, that such a dream came true — me and Pete and a Marantz and a stack of tapes and plenty of time.

I'd entered the room in the emotional state of a political prisoner, barely having a voice. Things had gone so terribly wrong and there was so much abuse and trauma around me. At the end of the first interview session I showed him a stack of AIDS columns and mumbled something about having gotten lost on my quest for truth and reconciliation. I stopped short of saying: "And it's all your fault."

What was Tommy's question?

What was my question?

What could Pete say to somebody who had been ruined and beaten by a question? Does that mean it was the wrong question, or the right question, or maybe neither?

All of this was going on, swirling, in the muted, elegant hotel suite. Pete listened. "Would you like to go across the street and have a beer?" he said. "I'm not sure we have finished our conversation."

We retreated to a midtown bar and I felt it was now imperative that I reveal my true identity as a fan. That I take off the journalist's mask and explain just how deeply I felt his work, what kind of love I felt. This was not easy, because this feeling is shared by millions, and I don't like having the same feelings as millions of others. We sat at the bar and somehow I said what I needed to say. I remember vividly the gentle quality of his attentiveness, and that he said nothing. He just made one small gesture. He touched my forefinger just above the knuckle — a gentle rub — as if to say, "It's okay." And then suddenly it was all okay.

Emboldened, I took charge of the situation and found something to scold him about. I told him to stop pretending not to be beautiful —that I would now speak for all women, all rock devotees, and/or Who fans, and set him straight about something, namely that he was and is the very zenith of rock and roll male beauty, and that at no point in time was Roger Daltrey ever more of a looker than he was. Sorry.

He blushed slightly, which was nice. I like getting to the bottom of things, when possible.

We stayed in touch over the next five years, and spoke on the phone, riffing on the big themes of truth, sanity, spiritual journeys, media, rock and roll, family, writing, poetry, and what good writing is. Yes, I told him about the AIDS problem — the spiritual and moral dilemma of trying to crack apart the myth and get at the realities below, and how the myth had deformed people's lives and souls and bodies. He gave me a gift in the form of a phrase that lifted me from the urine-soaked stench of the media floors and allowed me to begin a healing process. He called my quest about AIDS "...your poetic space." Called me up one day and said, "I wanted to tell you that I met somebody who shares your poetic space about AIDS."

Fathom the distance between "AIDS denialist" and "your poetic space."

When I told him I was pregnant with my son, he congratulated me and said that when I gave birth, the room would "fill up with angels." He counseled me about marriage, family, commitment, staying on track with it all. I was due to get married, and not ready for it.

We fell out of touch after about five years.

When I started The Truth Barrier, I emailed him, and he wrote back excitedly that I was finally going to do my own thing and that there was "a lot of intrigue" to the site — that it was high time I started teaching people about "the Swedish poets."

I sent him my first story published here, called "A Hero Named Harry," and he wrote:

This is really moving. Should be an incredible beginning. The photo is so fabulous. I have one of my parents when they were young, and they too look like film-stars somehow, two beautiful post-war saps with no concept of the way a child might fall in love with his (or her) own two parents, like a lover, and feel spurned like a lover when they went off to work, or to their affairs, or their drunken jags.

The other day I happened upon the folder with the transcript from our first interview in 1993. I quoted so meagerly from it the first time, always lamenting that his majestic word compositions were never displayed on their own.

I will be running several quotes from the interview here, now and then, in hopes you enjoy them as I do, meditations on life, crystals of strong voice in a de-voiced society.  More to come.