Let’s Go Thundering:
Remembering a “Very Rock’n’Roll” Woman
by Gary Lippman
People often ask me about the anchor-shaped lead amulet I wear on a thin chain around my neck. Some curious souls, perhaps missing the runes engraved on the amulet’s surface, ask me, “Why are you wearing an anchor?” Eager to correct them, I say, “It’s not an anchor, it’s a mjölnir—the hammer of Thor, thunder god of Norse mythology.” And, if I’m in the mood, I’ll go on to explain, “I wear it not because of Thor, but in tribute to a certain thunder goddess.”
This “thunder goddess” turned out to be all-too-mortal, though her mortality is besides the point. Her name was Madeleine Jansen.
⦿
When she telephoned me from Stockholm in 2006 to say, “Guess what? I’ve got a brain tumor,” Madeleine sounded as buoyant as she ever had during our fourteen years of friendship. She even joked, “Cancer can’t be as bad as my last ex-boyfriend Tommy, right?” And this ebullience rarely left her as the malignant tumor spread, resisting treatment, and her doctors pronounced it inoperable. Imagine the gloriously daffy old heroine of the film Harold and Maude as a husky-voiced Swedish beauty in her thirties—this was “Mad Madeleine,” as she called herself, even after the medication ballooned her body and made her long gleaming blond hair fall out.
“You don’t recognize your pal anymore, do you?” she’d say whenever I arrived in Stockholm from my New York home for a visit.
“Sure I do,” I lied, trying to conceal my shock at how much worse she looked. Having watched my mother waste away from a similar affliction decades earlier, I found it upsetting to spend time in the company of another woman dying too soon. But because I cared so much about Madeleine, I steeled myself and spent that time with her, anyway.
“You don’t look so bad,” I said.
“Liar! I look terrible and you know it. That’s not very rock’n’roll of you, to be so polite.”
“Not very rock’n’roll of you”: a typical Madeleine putdown. She was only being playful, and yet she knew whereof she spoke. While she didn’t sing or play an instrument, Madeleine was right up there with Iggy, Janis, Elvis, Lemmy, and the Two Naughty Keiths (Moon and Richards) when it came to embodying rock’n’roll’s anarchic joyous spirit. More than anyone I’ve known of or known, she quite simply rocked.
“Mad Madeleine” had been born on an auspicious day, the day that humans landed on the moon for the first time and Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap.” Not that flying to the moon, or flying anywhere, was to Madeleine’s taste: fearful of airplanes ever since a flight she took to Majorca suffered major engine trouble, she declined all my invitations to come to the U.S. Flying appeared to be the only thing she was afraid of, though, and she told me that sometimes in her dreams, she would soar like a hawk above her hometown in rural Sweden, able to smell the oil from a local refinery.
I went to Stockholm three times during Madeleine’s last year, bringing gifts like a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps (which she’d asked for) and a new silver mjölnir-on-a-string to match my own. Yelping with delight on seeing the miniature hammer, she declared, “So now we’re really thunder gods together.” The night I gifted her that mjölnir, we were seated on the balcony outside her hospital dining room, watching the sun set over the milk-white Globen Arena. As Madeleine chain-smoked Marlboros, we made small talk with her stone-faced elderly neighbors from the cancer ward. “All of them are terminal,” she whispered to me. She didn’t have to add, “Like I am,” because by then we both knew this was so.
One of her fellow patients was a right-wing fanatic who claimed to be chummy with the man who’d assasinated Sweden’s Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, back in ’86. While this fanatic struck us as heinous, neither Madeleine nor I wanted to argue politics with him. Terminal was terminal. So the sun sank lower and lower and finally vanished, and long before then some nurses had wheeled all the patients back inside inside except for Madeleine. We couldn’t see one another in the darkness, only shadowy outlines, yet on my friend smoked, and on we talked, until she ran out of cigarettes.
Speaking of shadows: as we all know, few relationships are without them, and I still feel sorry about some of my behavior with Madeleine. I regret, for example, that I didn’t phone her or visit her more often once she got ill. I regret that when I did visit her, I got bored sometimes and didn’t work hard enough to hide this boredom from her. I regret that I haven’t kept in touch with her friends and family since her death. Most of all, I regret that, on one of the last times I saw her, I turned down a surprising request she made.
“Make love to me,” Madeleine whispered from her bed in her dimly lit hospital room. It was late at night, I was jet-lagged, and as I gazed at my friend, who was surrounded by machines and stuck full of needles, I wasn’t sure at first that I’d heard her correctly. Recognizing this, she laughed her throaty laugh, then said, “That’s right—make love to me. I know we’re just friends, but I haven’t had sex in a long time, and I probably won’t have it again—who would want to fuck me in this state? Would you, please? We don’t have to do it for very long, don’t worry, I won’t wear you out, and I won’t charge you a single kroner for the privilege! I just want to… feel something. Something good.”
“Madeleine,” I said, my whole body tensing, “I’m sorry…I—I totally understand what you mean, what you want, and I wish I could do it, but I can’t. I just, like, can’t. I’m, uh, too tired…”
“Liar!” Another laugh. “You don’t want to fuck a big round almost-bald woman who’s got cancer.”
“Hey,” I said, stalling with a stab at humor, “you just described my exact type.” As if she hadn’t nailed the truth precisely.
“Are you afraid you can’t get it up?”
“No,” I said, although this was, yes, another impediment in my mind. And now I fell silent, uncertain what else to say. I longed to please her, and knew how profound her request was. And yet I said to myself, Whatever the reasons, I just don’t want to. Shouldn’t I honor what I want to do and don’t want to do? And isn’t this a different way of showing respect to her, by declining to “fake it?”
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “At least I tried.”
“Will you forgive me, Mad Madeleine?”
“Sure I will. I do. Don’t worry about it. It was just an idea.”
Knowing she most likely didn’t mean this, I nevertheless felt relieved, and quickly said, “Scootch over.”
“What does ‘scootch’ mean?”
“It means, ‘Move.’ Like, right now.” And even though there wasn’t much “scootching” room, I managed to fit my sweatered and blue-jeaned body next to hers on the hospital bed, trying not to disturb those tubes and needles that kept her comfortable and alive. “This is a poor substitute for sex,” I told her, “but I’m still gonna hug the hell out of you.”
As she made room for me, she shook her head. “Do you Americans always confuse hugging for fucking?”
By now my arms were already, gently, wrapped around her, and I started singing the Cure song “Friday I’m In Love,” which she immediately greeted by making a fart sound with her mouth.
“That song is stupid, completely stupid. Sing something else.”
So I shifted to a Swedish number she’d taught me, another throwaway pop tune whose English chorus went “Everybody wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die,” and after a moment she laughed her raspy laugh and joined in.
All these years later, I still feel haunted by the memory of that night. On one hand, I chastise myself for turning down this dying woman’s poignant request, for disappointing this friend I felt devoted to. What good was the mjölnir I gave her, or the bottle of Schnapps, compared to one last making of love? Why didn’t I just put aside my aversion and try to please her in this most important way?
On the other hand, I can imagine Madeleine’s ghost saying, “Hey, dude, chill out, it’s not very rock’n’roll of you to keep attacking yourself for this choice you made. You disappointed me, sure, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. You did the best you could, that was where you were then, so let go of it. Let go of everything except the good stuff.”
This idea of “letting go,” I’ve come to realize, is what she so often tried to teach me. So mostly now I try to focus on that “good stuff,” my happy memories of her, and the times before she fell ill when we would run around the center of Stockholm, and laugh at tourists (conveniently ignoring my own tourist status), and listen to loud music together, and tell each other stories from our lives.
The truth is, we even had fun after Madeleine got her cancer diagnosis. I’m thinking of one occasion when she was already hospitalized, an afternoon when she insisted that I help her to climb out of bed, get her settled in her wheelchair, and then sneak her out of the hospital for a few hours. She said she wanted to eat “real food”—who could argue with that? And so, against my better judgment (wasn’t she in too bad a shape for a hospital breakout?), I gave in to her demand. Which meant that, come nightfall, all the nurses were probably flipping out about Madeleine’s disappearance while I pushed her wheelchair along quiet residential streets, and we sang Thin Lizzy songs together, and we debated whether the moon landing was faked (she said yes, I said no) until we found a tiny pizzeria, and in that place our singing and debating, to the annoyance of other customers, went on and on. (We’d brought along that bottle of Schnapps.)
Even for a wild one like “Mad Madeleine,” there tend to be limits to joie-de-vivre-in-the-face-of-doom, and I did watch her good cheer sometimes falter toward the end. Zero whining—she made fun of my lifelong tendency to kvetch(the perfect Yiddish word for “complain”), because kvetching was the opposite of “letting go”—but she wept sometimes when her physical pain grew too great. Also, a recurring source of worry for Madeleine was Tommy, that most recent ex-boyfriend of hers. He was an alcoholic brute who’d gone to prison for regularly and viciously beating her up. I’d arranged for my friend Paula, a psychologist based in New York, to phone Madeleine each week and discuss this crisis with her, which seemed to help. But Madeleine still felt trapped because she had a child with Tommy, a toddler now staying with her old friends. Needless to say, she feared what would become of the boy once she was gone. And it turned out that she was right to feel this fear, because after her death, Tommy catastrophically got full custody of their child.
Madeleine also fretted about the future of her other offspring, a handsome young man named Jonathan. He came to the hospital one afternoon to show off a new tattoo on his arm. It was his mother’s name in a heart. As soon as he showed it to her, Madeleine burst into tears, tears of joy. And while watching this dying woman with her young adult son, I couldn’t help but recall wistfully how my mother felt such panic about what would become of her own son once she was gone.
⦿
“Keep on thundering!” was our motto, the refrain Madeleine and I would use to sign off at the end of each phone talk or visit. We invented the motto on the night we first met, in June of 1992. The story of how we met is one of my most cherished memories, but it’s a complex one, so you’ll need to follow me each step of the way here, kind reader. I promise that everything will make sense in the end.
Our story began not in Sweden and not in June but six months earlier, in Miami Beach. I was visiting friends there, and one night at a well-known locals’ bar called Mac’s Club Deuce, I got to chatting with an affable burly Swede named Lars, who gave me his contact info in Sweden after the bartender yelled “Last call.”
“If you ever visit my town,” Lars said with a slur, “phone me and I’ll introduce you to more pretty young Swedish blond women than you can handle.”
Which sounded divine. Like many Americans my age or older, I’d long thought of Sweden as an erotic promised land. Helping to kickstart puberty for me was my first glimpse of the sexually graphic poster for the popular Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow). Clearly, I thought as I stood gazing at that poster in my favorite New Jersey head-shop, Sweden is a place I’ll need to visit when I break free of this repressive suburb, and my repressive school, and my repressive single mother.
Sex was not Sweden’s sole appeal, either: Viking myths, the comic-book version of Thor, the crime novels of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (The Laughing Detective, especially), Abba’s whimsical pop music, August Strindberg’s savage plays, and Ingmar Bergman’s many diverse films, all played their parts in my cultural education—particularly Bergman’sThe Seventh Seal. What adolescent could resist the dark charm of the medieval Sweden Bergman evoked? And who could resist the film’s weary knight-protagonist playing a game of chess against the Grim Reaper himself, who was pictured as a supremely scary black-robed and chalk-faced motherfucker?
By early 1992, when I was twenty-eight, Sweden had long been at the top of my “Must To Visit” list. But Lars convinced me that the time to visit was now. So, eager to take up the man on his offer—with that prospect of “more blondes than I could handle” easily outweighing my fear of Bergman’s unbeatable chess-playing Grim Reaper—I booked a flight to Stockholm and landed there in late June.
Unfortunately, my great expectations got swiftly dashed. Although the sunshine was near-constant—this was summer in Scandinavia, after all—and the cityscapes were gorgeous, and all the museums were interesting, I couldn’t contact Lars because, damn it, somehow I’d lost his phone number during the past month. Since I didn’t know Lars’s surname, I couldn’t track him down, either, and the city was too vast for me to hope to bump into him by chance.
There were more bummers. None of the beauties who swirled everywhere, brunettes as well as blondes, seemed to want anything to do with me. They were polite, yet the cheesy American come-ons I used with them utterly failed to win them over. Plus, my competition was formidable, since most of the local men were so tall and so handsome that I noticed, for the first time in my life, how not-tall and not-handsome I was.
You idiot, I grumbled to myself. If only you hadn’t lost Lars’s number, you’d be in paradise! And such silent grumbling never stopped—that week in Stockholm was where I reached my all-time “personal best” for humorlesskvetching. It came from nothing more than spoiled-child self-indulgence, of course. Then again, what young person isn’t prone to unrealistic expectations, sexual frustration, and their usual wingman, self-pity?
Soon, despite the high price of liquor in Sweden, I started drinking vodka. A lot of vodka. Which only served to worsen my mental state. By day three of my vacation, I was already in a psychological downward spiral.
The bar I frequented the most was a popular Kungsgarden hotspot called the Victoria. Each night as I emptied shot-glass after shot-glass there, I still nursed some hope for an erotic, or romantic, or at least social connection (in that order of preference). The vodka stoked this hope yet also cushioned me from its failure, and the later each night got, the more I temporarily confused my being drunk with my feeling happy. Then, after the Victoria closed, I would always reel back to my hotel in Gamla Stan while loudly singing to myself The Cure’s song “Friday I’m In Love”, which caused more than one Stockholmer to shake their heads derisively at me. No doubt they pegged me for the ridiculous American I was.
That summer, the summer of ’92, you heard “Friday I’m In Love” nearly everywhere. I loved the song’s lilting melody, its glistening guitar part, and its oddball lyrics, which managed to merge exuberance and melancholy, especially in the bridge, where Robert Smith sings “Always take a big bite / it’s such a gorgeous sight / to see you eat in the middle of the night.” “Friday I’m In Love,” you might say, was the unofficial theme song for my unhappy time in Sweden, and whenever I heard it while there, my loneliness and interpersonal failures felt a bit easier to endure. It’s also the song I’ve come to most associate with Madeleine. “Always take a big bite”—this, of course, is what she did, how she lived her life.
But back to how I met her:
Despite the solace that The Cure’s song gave me, my depression and my hangovers didn’t let up. By my vacation’s last full day, a sun-dappled Saturday, I felt so terrible that I couldn’t even seize on a splendid opportunity that presented itself. At the beer-garden where I had lunch, a lovely young blonde with green eyes and a mischievous smile asked to borrow my copy of the International Herald Tribune. She had a tow-headed male toddler with her, obviously her child.
Due to my foul mood and vicious headache, I simply grunted in response and handed her the newspaper. When she returned it to me ten minutes later, I grunted again while taking the paper back. My surliness didn’t seem to bother her, though. In fact, to judge by her smile’s consistently high wattage, I even amused her. Another ridiculous American, she must have figured. And grouchy, to boot.
As soon as this woman and her child got up and left the beer-garden, I began to silently attack myself: Loser! The first friendly attractive young woman you meet all week and you blow her off? You don’t deserve to be happy! Losing Lars’s number was an accident, it was excusable, but this? With this, there’s no excuse!
Evening came on. I considered crawling into bed in my hotel room and sleeping through until noon, when it would be time to head to the airport. But the sky, remaining cerulean at ten p.m., appeared to mock this idea. Summertime revelers flooded through the city center. While walking aimlessly in a park with my head bowed, I hardly noticed my green surroundings. Nothing could stop me from wallowing in my self-made emotional murk.
Then something did.
A lemon-colored leaf twirled down from a tree and landed on my shoulder. Taking the leaf between my fingers, I stopped walking, studied it for a moment, and then muttered to myself, Enough. Enough vapid whining! This bummer trip I’d gone on wasn’t Stockholm’s fault, it was my own. Why, surrounded as I was by such manifold beauty, did I keep ruining my time by dwelling on greedy, vulgar, impossible desires?
From now on, I vowed, I’ll just take whatever comes, good or bad, without complaint.
From now on, I vowed, I’ll simply let go—and let life handle me however it wants.
And no sooner did I make this decision than I noticed a group of young people, all of them dressed in frilly historical costumes. Two of them were play-fighting with swords while the others, gathered beneath an oak tree, laughed and drank a type of mead they’d brewed themselves.
“Hey,” I said, approaching them with my brash new “letting go” spirit. “Mind if I grab a sword and join in?”
Three hours later, I was laughing heartily along with everyone there. They were students in a local university’s “Renaissance Club,” and just as generous with their friendship as they were with their toy weapons and moonshine mead. Most of the women were comely, yet I felt no need to flirt with them; most of the men towered over me, yet I didn’t feel physically humbled. Because I had let go, I was fine just as I was.
Then came the proverbial icing on the cake. When it was time for us to part—the students had to catch their last train home—I thanked them for salvaging my night, for salvaging my whole week, and the ginger-bearded young man whom I’d spoken with the most gave me a gift which he took from around his neck. It was the Thor’s hammer, the mjölnir, the anchor-like amulet I still wear. While he explained to me the mjölnir’s mythological meaning, I thanked him repeatedly for it. And I remember that while I watched my new friends walk away (as it happened, I would never see or speak to them again), I touched the runes on the surface of my new possession and announced to myself that this mjölnirwould represent for me tonight’s lesson in “letting go.”
By now, it was one a.m., yet the sky was still fairly bright. On the way back to my hotel, I cut through the Kungsgarden and decided to stop for a nightcap at my regular hangout, the Victoria. The problem was that the place was mobbed with Saturday night celebrants, and outside its front doors, eight or nine locals stood in line, waiting for a gargantuan bullet-headed bouncer to grant them entry. Stepping up to stand behind the last of the would-be customers, I decided that I’d give it a few minutes, and if I didn’t manage to get myself inside by then, I would just say “Oh, well” and head hotel-ward. I’d already had an unexpectedly wonderful night, so I could take or leave a nightcap.
For a few minutes, while I stood in line and surveyed the scene around the Kungsgarden, nothing happened.
Then something did.
“Are you American?”
On hearing this question put forth in heavily accented English from a few feet above my head, I turned to find the Victoria’s bouncer looming beside me.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, squinting up at him. “Is that, uh, okay?”
He nodded his head, as grim as could be. “Come along.” At which point he led me past the other people waiting in line, opened the door to the nightspot, and motioned with his bullet-shaped head for me to go in. As the loud talk and even louder music from the bar washed over me, I squinted again at the bouncer. What was going on here? Why did he favor an American for faster entry over the locals who were ahead of me? How did he know I was American, anyway? All I managed to ask, though, was “Why me?” And all the bouncer said, still unsmiling, was, “You have a friend here.”
Entering the Victoria, I surveyed the throngs of people, my eyes leaping from one to another. Most of them were drunk, and none of them looked familiar, although the place had its usual high proportion of female beauty and male height. Just which “friend” did I have here?
It wasn’t long before I found out. As I approached the bar, someone standing behind me placed his big calloused hands over my eyes and whispered “Guess who?”
Lars had recognized me from six months earlier in Miami Beach. While I gaped at him, stunned at the coincidence of this meeting, he said, “That was a fun night when I met you at the Club Deuce. Why didn’t you ring me up when you came to Stockholm? Didn’t I give you my phone number?”
“You did, man, but I lost it…Believe me, I wanted to call!”
He didn’t seem to believe this. But he slapped my shoulder, all the same, and said, “I was looking out the window and saw you waiting to get in here, so I told Ulrich to give you the VIP treatment.”
“Ulrich’s the bouncer? You know him?”
“Oh, sure,” said Lars. “He’s my cousin. Now come on with me, all my friends are in the backroom.”
Following him through the crowd, I glanced down at my mjölnir, thinking, It’s magic, Viking magic! Then Lars introduced me to his group and one of the women, young and blond and green-eyed, directed at me a mischievous smile I’d seen before.
“Hey,” she said in a throaty voice that was also familiar, “I borrowed your newspaper during lunch today! At the beer-garden, remember?”
I nodded, grinning back at her. The happy coincidences were coming too fast to process. “You had a little boy with you…”
“My son Jonathan,” said the woman. “He’s five years old, and acts more adult than me.” She gave a husky laugh. “You know, when I saw you today, you looked so depressed.”
“I was. Hungover, too.”
“Are you feeling better now? You must be—I see you’re wearing a cool Thor’s hammer around your neck.”
“Since you know what this mjölnir is,” I said, getting in a good flirtatious groove for my first time all week, “you must be a thunder goddess.”
“That’s right,” she said, “I am.” Another laugh. “So let’s go make thunder!”
I leaned forward to mock-formally kiss her hand. She told me her name. I told her mine. And when the Victoria closed for the night, she and I said goodbye to Lars and left together and strolled through the city and played like children in a public fountain. At dawn, we became lovers in my hotel room. Over the years what we had would change to friendship, and our friendship stayed strong until, at the age of thirty-eight, she lost her game of chess with Bergman’s chalk-faced, black-robed Grim Reaper.
⦿
No one walks on the moon anymore.
Neil Armstrong outlived her by half a century.
Yet I think of Madeleine whenever someone asks about my mjölnir. Or whenever I hear “Friday I’m In Love.” And in my mind sometimes I soar like a hawk across the ocean, back through time, and then I enter (no bouncer needed) the Victoria of an early-nineties summer night. We’re still young here, and she’s still healthy, and now she’s lifted her hand for me, extending it with a cute flourish, and she will go on doing this until it’s my own turn to “play chess.” I’ll kvetch, I’m sure, when the Reaper whispers “Checkmate”—pitying myself the way I did during that first week I spent in Stockholm. I still struggle, despite my mjölnir, to “let go.” Yet letting go, she tried to teach me, that’s where the thunder and the moon and rock’n’roll are coming from. And right this moment in the Victoria, right this matchless moment, this one, I’m leaning forward to kiss her hand, and as I do—
“Call me Mad Madeleine,” she says.
(Dedicated to Verka, Ingunn, Billy, Gabou, Jonathan, Findhus, Lola, and Paula.)
Gary Lippman received a law degree from Northwestern University and has worked with New York's Innocence Project. Lippman's play Paradox Lust ran off-Broadway in 2001 and his journalism has been published in the New York Times, The Paris Review, VICE, Fodors, and other fine spots. His novel Set the Controls for the Heart of Sharon Tate was published by Rare Bird Books in 2019, and his story collection is slated to appear next year. You can read his work at garylippmanofficial.com.
