Pissing in a River

by Lorrie Sprecher

  “This part about Gertrude Stein being bored in medical school is so funny,” Melissa said, putting the book on the night table. She was wearing a red-and-black flannel nightshirt. I had on a pair of knickers and my “I Was Arrested By A Lesbian Cop” T-shirt that one of the ACT UP blokes had made up especially for me and my ACT UP friend Margaret because of the way we used to taunt the lines of riot police. “So, you’ve got a new drummer then? You sounded tight. I can’t wait until I get to hear you loud. Nick sounds brilliant on bass and backing vocals. Are you going to start letting me come see you play? I’d really like to, you know. Or would you be too nervous?”

  “I think I’ll be okay now. I feel bolder with a band behind me. You look knackered.”

  “It was a long day.” She took off her round, tortoiseshell reading glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I caressed her soft, tartan sleeve.

  “Oh, I had to examine a rape victim today. Something meant for pleasure just shouldn’t be used as torture.”

  “I just want to kiss you until all your bad feelings go away. You know, like I’m sucking out the poison after you’ve been bitten by a snake.”

  “Oh my God, you’re not going to start rabbiting on about the bloody Garden of Eden again, are you?” Melissa gave me a humorous look.

  “Well . . .” I shrugged, about to say something poignant about the serpent and bring up Lilith, the lesbian in midrashic literature who came before Eve and refused to have sex with Adam. But before I could, she kissed me deeply, pulling me into her lap.

  “Melissa,” I said, when we paused, “your latest paintings are incredible.” She’d finished her series of acrylic paintings about rape. One of her paintings was a study in Gauguin-like pink, and all were unified by the thick, passionate texture of her brushstrokes. “I’ve been thinking about it, and if I ever get the chance to play real gigs where people actually turn up to see us on purpose, I want you to come with me.”

  “Well, of course, I’d love to. If I can.”

  “No, I mean I want you as the other act, like the support band. Not that you’re in a supporting role to me or anyone. But I want people to see your paintings. It’s time,” I insisted, as she started to protest, “for you to show your work. And not just to me. It’s brilliant, man. I mean it. And I’m not just saying that because I want to shag you,” I teased her. “I want you to take a break from your practice and work as an artist for a while. You’re really good, Melissa. Would you do the artwork for my albums? Even if I have to make, release, and distribute them myself?”

  “That’s a promise,” Melissa said. Soon our knickers were on the floor. Then I was kissing her inner thighs while she shivered, and I couldn’t think of anything else except moving more deeply into the center of her.

  TRACK 55 Groovy Times

  Nick, Melissa, and I sat in the pub trying to think up a better name for the band than Star Vomit, which is what I’d called it in California. “It doesn’t suit your music,” Melissa said. She was wearing a dark-green sweatshirt with Patti Smith’s face on it. “Star Vomit makes me think of screamo death metal or something. Your sound is melodic punk with some Britpop and bhangra thrown in. Abrasive but tuneful.”

  “But we’re made out of the matter from the insides of stars that vomited out when the stars exploded,” I explained.

  “I get it,” Melissa said, “but I think that the name Star Vomit is a little too off-putting.”

  “How about the name Sugar Rat?” I suggested. “There’s a rat temple in Rajasthan, India, called Karni Mata where rats are worshipped. They’re the souls of storytellers, and you bring them sweets like sugar balls.”

  “I rather liked that name we used for a giggle a while back,” Nick said. “Hen. It reminds me of the expression ‘rare as hen’s teeth.’ I think it’s quite funny.”

  “It needs more of a political edge to go with your lyrics,” Melissa said.

  I got the pen and paper out of my back pocket. “The Shoulder Rats. To protest against animal testing.” I unfolded the sheet of paper and began to write. “Ganesha Rat.”

  “Extraordinary and the Renditions,” Melissa said. “Sadistic Orange Jumpsuit.”

  “Lesbian Teacher,” Nick said. “Futility Loin.”

  “The Dead Rapists,” I said. “The Lesbian Cobains.”

  “I like the Dead Rapists,” Nick said, glancing at Melissa.

  “Except that you don’t want that word staring at you from all your merchandise and literature,” Melissa said.

  The Mayhems. The Gender Traitors. She Sells Jesus By the Seashore. Out! Guantanamo Bay Tourism Association. Battery-Powered Halo. Oi Vey. America the Bully. Downside of the Soul. The Waterboarders. Sorry I Bombed Your Country. Lesbian Raincoat. The Democracy Pistols. Smarter Than Bombs. The Gash. Snatch. Oil Pipeline Jihad. I’m So Bored with the USA. The Breaststrokers. Democracy Through a Feeding Tube.

  “I like Sorry I Bombed Your Country,” I said, “but I’m afraid it’s too long.”

  “I think anything with the word ‘jihad’ or any reference to terrorism will be more trouble than its worth,” Melissa said, “but I do like Guantanamo Bay Tourism Association. And there’s something nice about Lesbian Raincoat.”

  Nick looked over my shoulder at the list. “I like The Democracy Pistols.”

  Adele had joined us. “I’m not a full-fledged lesbian,” she said, smiling, “being somewhere else on the great sexuality continuum. But I like Lesbian Raincoat. There’s something reassuring about it.”

  “Is a real lesbian raincoat supposed to keep you dry or wet?” I laughed. “Sorry.”

  Nick said, “Maybe it’s supposed to keep the moisture in.”

  “How about The Dental Dams?” Adele suggested.

  “The Dental Dames?” I said.

  “I vote for Lesbian Raincoat,” Melissa said. “I think it suits your sound. The way it wraps around you. The way the rain is all-encompassing. The way it’s democratic and rains on everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, “and the way that ‘Lesbian’ shoves it all down everybody’s throat.” We all laughed.

  “Cheers, then.” Melissa raised her pint glass. “Here’s to Lesbian Raincoat.”

  TRACK 56 You Belong to Me

  Our new trio Lesbian Raincoat developed a respectable local following. Even though we’d begun by mostly performing at lesbian clubs, we were starting to gain a wider audience in the alternative community. We made extra money selling merchandise at our gigs.

  Melissa had designed a logo for us, a blue raincoat, and we used it for the cover of the demo CD we recorded in Adele’s mum’s garage and Melissa’s flat—mostly in the upstairs toilet. Melissa also designed Lesbian Raincoat badges and T-shirts. Whenever she could, she came with us to our gigs and took charge of our merchandise table. We’d started making high-quality prints of some of her paintings and sold those along with the art she had made especially for Lesbian Raincoat’s posters and flyers.

  By now we also had a small but efficient street team of eager young women who believed in our sound, sold our merchandise, put up posters, and helped us run our website. We called them the Fesbian Leminists after a purple T-shirt I’d had in the seventies when the words “lesbian” and “feminist” were considered so outrageous they had to be encoded. We shortened this to the Fesbians. We made them special small, dark-purple Fesbian badges. In return, they came to all our gigs for free and got free merchandise, including limited edition recordings we only made available to them. They were encouraged to post these recordings on the Internet and share them as long as they didn’t sell them. Anyone posting our music for money on eBay was done. The Fesbians hung out at some of our rehearsals, which were still taking place in Adele’s mum’s garage in the afternoons.

  I was listening to a lot of Ruts, trying to achieve that sharp, resonating Paul Fox guitar sound on a numb
er of new songs. Nick studied “Segs” Jennings’ bass playing. Sometimes we did a killer cover version of “Jah War” at our shows, and Nick and I rewrote a version of the anti-heroin song “Dope for Guns” and made it specifically about Iran-Contra. How the US smuggled arms to Iran through Israel, armed the Contras in Nicaragua, then used the supply planes to traffic cocaine into the United States.

  Mostly we played in London, but sometimes on weekends we would hire a van and Melissa would drive us out to gigs in other towns. In the north we played in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh. There was even some talk of us signing with an independent German label called Scratchella. The demo of my song “Working for the Jihad,” which I’d posted on the Internet, had recently been released in Germany on a compilation CD by a small German label, Sterben im November, and had caught the attention of the women behind Scratchella. But Scratchella wanted us to record in Germany, and I couldn’t leave the country yet. We also postponed playing in Dublin and Paris.

  In the midst of all this activity, I got an email from my sister announcing she was getting married. I downloaded the attached photo of an engagement ring with a bloody great, huge, massive diamond.

  “Did she tell you the name of the exploited, probably-dead African who put it on her finger?” Melissa asked dryly when I showed it to her.

  “Ta for saying that. I thought I was going crazy for a minute.”

  “You’re writing your congratulations, of course?”

  “She wants me to come to the wedding.”

  “But you can’t leave the country,” Melissa said edgily, a hint of panic in her voice.

  “Don’t worry, love,” I said. “I won’t go anywhere until it’s safe.”

  TRACK 57 Pilgrimage

  Finally, with Melissa’s sponsorship, help from Harriet, and advice from the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group, I managed to cohabitate with Melissa for the requisite two years and was granted indefinite leave to remain, permission to stay in the UK as her partner. Scratchella was still interested, and we made plans to record our first album in Germany, and then go on a short European tour that the label would promote. Melissa, who hadn’t been on holiday in ages, arranged to take time off from work to join us.

  We had about a month before leaving for Germany. “Now you can go to your sister’s wedding,” Melissa said.

  My stomach lurched and I had a feeling of dread. “Will you go with me?”

  “Can’t,” she said, giving me a wistful, sympathetic smile. “Not if I’m traipsing around Europe with Lesbian Raincoat.”

  I decided a week away from Melissa and Nick was all I could tolerate. I could already feel my OCD revving up as I contemplated spending time without them. At least the wedding coincided opportunely with Patti Smith’s current American tour and I got two tickets to see her in Los Angeles. My sister wasn’t leaving on her honeymoon right away, and I thought she’d go with me. I wished Melissa could come. We hadn’t gone to see Patti in London at the Union Chapel in 2002 or in 2003 at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire because we’d been too consumed by our own lives, as ridiculous as that sounds. But I’d downloaded those shows later on both audio and video. In Shepherd’s Bush, Patti Smith called for the abolishment of George W. Bush’s government and indicted him for crimes against humanity. It was her voice that got me through the Bush regime.

  Carefully I picked out the CDs that would protect me on my trip and keep the plane aloft. These included live early Nirvana with Chad Channing on drums, live pre-1982 Pretenders, late-seventies Heart, and recording sessions from various Oasis albums. I was still trying to sing like Liam. Melissa drove me to Heathrow. I carried the Takamine with me in a neon-pink Dickies backpack guitar case of Jake’s. I tuned down the strings so they wouldn’t snap on the plane with changes in air pressure.

  “How do you feel about seeing your family after all this time?” Melissa asked on the way to Heathrow.

  “I don’t think I can regress too far in a week,” I said.

  “Individuate,” Melissa said, and smiled.

  My OCD kicked in, telling me not to leave. Now that I was finally happy, it would be awful to die too soon. Getting on a plane seemed like I was pushing my luck. But I couldn’t think of a rational reason—besides the obvious one that humans aren’t meant to fly—not to get on the plane. As I said goodbye to Melissa and headed for international departures, I felt my thoughts accelerate, all the old fears rising up.

  As I waited for my plane to board, I listened to Killing Joke’s powerful 2003 CD, with Dave Grohl on drums, which raged against American empire building. I’d wanted an orange jumpsuit and black hood to wear on the plane to protest extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture, and CIA black sites, but contented myself with a bright orange sweatshirt on which I’d stenciled, “America Tortures—Get It Through Your Thick F**king Head and Rise Up.” I didn’t spell out the word “fucking” in case there were kids on the plane. I didn’t want anyone to be able to use obscenity as an excuse to tell me to take it off. With my regular anxiety and less oxygen circulating in the plane’s cabin, I didn’t think I’d do well with my face covered anyway. Airplanes are not good places for panic attacks. I sat and looked at the photos I’d brought along of Melissa and Nick and the three of us together and wanted to run screaming out of the airport.

  My sister picked me up at LAX wearing large, assertive diamond earrings that made her whole head sparkle when she turned to talk to me. I didn’t like being back in post–Patriot Act America and immediately felt oppressed. “Don’t you think you’re being a little oversensitive?” my sister asked.

  “Frankly, no,” I said.

  After over two years, everybody’s American accent seemed ridiculously exaggerated, and my own accent was a source of amusement. I’d left my soul behind in England and missed Melissa and Nick so much it was a physical ache. Away from them, not hearing their voices, my OCD became more pronounced, and I looked forward to a week of ritualistic sentence repetition.

  I was relieved when the ordeal of the wedding was over. Many of the guests were adorned in real furs and diamonds, and I had to keep mentally telling myself to shut up. I get uncomfortable in large herds of straight white people with money, and after two years of really coming into myself, I had even fewer adaptive social skills than usual. When the customs agent asked if I had anything to declare upon entering the United States, I should have said, “Yes, I have a really big mouth.” I desperately wanted to confront the women in fur and only contained myself by imagining Melissa and Chrissie Hynde crashing the wedding with cans of red spray paint. When I say “contained myself,” I mean I wasn’t as bad as I should have been.

  I’d never been a huge fan of weddings—government and religion in the bedroom, the traffic in women—especially if gay people didn’t possess the same civil rights. I felt an appropriate wedding vow for women would be, “I do promise to be chattel.” I remembered how Melissa had automatically equated my sister’s engagement ring with blood diamonds and reminded myself there was a place on earth where I was considered sane.

  Because my sister was still engaged with out-of-town guests for several days after the wedding, my dad, who listened to classical music his entire life and only evinced disinterest and distress when hearing rock and roll, volunteered to go to Los Angeles with me to see the Godmother of Punk so I wouldn’t have to go alone. I was excited we would be sharing such an unexpected, intimate and earth-shattering experience together.

  TRACK 58 Rock the Casbah

  It was 2004 when Patti Smith walked out onto the stage in Los Angeles. It was a real baptism into rock and roll for my father and a feeling of being born again for me. She was wearing a torn pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a peace symbol she’d probably drawn on herself in black marker. There was a Palestinian flag draped over one amp and a peace symbol on the drum kit. She used every opportunity to speak out a
gainst the Bush administration and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She raised her fists and didn’t apologize like the Dixie Chicks and the Democrats. She played a sunburst Stratocaster and an old acoustic guitar. Oliver Ray played a Telecaster, and Lenny Kaye played a green Strat.

  Patti beamed and waved. She said, “Hello, everybody! Glad to be back!” Immediately I knew I was in the presence of someone extraordinary. For me, Patti Smith was peace, love, sanity, and the restoration of American civil liberties. She looked like she had in 1975 but with some gray in her long, black, disheveled hair. She looked so much like herself I felt a big joy well up inside me. I squeezed Melissa’s imaginary hand as I pictured her and Nick standing beside me. I had longed to be in Patti Smith’s presence since the seventies, and being with her now was better than any of my highest expectations. Not to get weird, but she shone with an inner light, like she’d swallowed her own halo. In fact she reminded me of seeing Melissa for the first time, and I vowed to try that swallowed-her-own-halo line out on her when I got home.

  Patti Smith launched into “Trampin” with a smile in her voice, and I was intensely happy. In Patti’s presence I felt safe. The loud music and her voice banished my OCD thoughts. People wanted to get up and dance, but the security guard sent them back to their seats. I desperately wanted to rush to the stage to be close to Patti but was afraid of being thrown out of the venue. The audience called out to Patti, asking her for permission to dance. Patti Smith said, “Don’t look at me. Get off your fucking ass and dance if you want to. I don’t got nothing to say.” People shouted that the security guard wouldn’t let us dance. Patti said, “One guy won’t let you dance? What is he—? The strength of Gandhi? We better do what he says, or it’s gonna get like Altamont here.” That totally cracked me up.

  I turned to my dad and said, “Gotta go!”