by Zoe Whittall
I took a last gulp of my coffee. The chores awaited. It was my turn to feed the sheep. I didn’t change into my barn clothes, just stuck my bare feet into my black rubber boots and walked across the yard in my nightdress. The lamb looked healthy, bonding with its mother. I leaned against the fence, watching it suckle, oblivious to the feeding-time frenzy in the larger pen beside them.
Afterwards, I made another pot of coffee, returning to the edge of the porch, staring out at the horizon. Eventually others joined me; Tegan and Chris smoked a morning joint. I could hear Jeff noodling on the acoustic guitar in the living room. Every muscle in my body was tense, ready to pounce. Bryce was always the last to wake up unless it was his turn for morning chores.
I walked to the edge of the garden, where the chives and carrots would soon grow. I stood at the washing line. When Bryce came up soundlessly behind me, he hooked one arm around my neck in an embrace so quickly that I reflexively elbowed him in the gut. Hard. He doubled over. Normally I would have apologized immediately for such a crazy reaction but instead I yelled, “Don’t fucking sneak up on me!” so loud that everyone around looked up. Bryce stared at me, bewildered but grinning. He was wearing dirty white cut-off shorts, and nothing else, and his bemused smile, his arms raised in mock surrender, only made me angrier.
I ran toward the pickup truck. I was in a nightgown, but I got in the cab of the truck, newly stencilled with the word Sunflower! on the driver’s-side panelling. We always left the keys on the seat. I peeled out on the gravel, speeding off down the dirt driveway, and the road, over the horizon.
It was the first time I had to get away.
And the only time I came back.
Chapter 7
missy
tucson is so hot the air is trying to murder you. At this point, I have wicked PMS and I wish everyone harm. Everyone. Do you know the sound Alan makes when he’s breathing in an otherwise quiet van? Cory went home after Dallas, and I was happy to see her go, not hovering, watching everything we do with a critical eye. The thing about cocaine is that it is a highly personal drug, makes you self-important, the sound of your own voice is a fucking dream, and man, aren’t I pretty right now? I’m so pretty right now! That kind of shit. But if you do it too much and then stop, you become as annoying as everything around you. Is that what my voice sounds like? Your own weird fingers, the bruises on your legs. Every little thing about yourself is just fucking monstrous.
Coke feels good, until it doesn’t. If I don’t overdo it, though, a coke hangover is existential, quiet. The world becomes crystallized, cold to the touch. It’s not unpleasant, unless you overdo it. The definition of overdoing it changes, subtly, over time.
I don’t realize I’ve been overdoing until we get to Tucson where I listen to Bailey, the semi-cross-eyed drug dealer, monologue about David Lynch for like, an hour while trying to buy drugs. I slip the baggie into the inside compartment of my makeup bag. And then I realize, holy fucking shit, I bought drugs on my own? This was usually Billy’s job, and I was the tagalong. It’s uncomfortable, this shift. People who actually buy the drugs aren’t casual users.
I had to organize everyone who wanted some, and do it surreptitiously so Tom or Gord didn’t hear. The other thing about coke is that nobody does it and doesn’t like it, but some people can feel ambivalent about it until it is in front of them, and for others it becomes a Thing. Like potheads and people who like to smoke casually when offered. I am always in the latter camp.
Now what am I?
Before sound check in the evening, I find Billy chatting up the hot bartender, kneeling on a stool, hunched in a C over the bar, as she leans back against the ice machine, arms crossed and skeptical. She toys with one long strand of red hair, nodding at his monologue, then raises her eyebrows at me in a way that says, Want a drink?
“I just need this dork,” I say, and drag Billy away, toward the women’s bathroom. I sit on the long row of sinks, picking at flecks of minty nail polish, while he taps out some coke onto a paperback copy of Blue Highways. I don’t like to prepare the bumps or lines. I want to avoid getting too comfortable with it. I want it to remain unnatural in my hands.
“Is it good?” The last bag Billy managed to score had tasted especially Drano-ish, and burned going down. I’d felt briefly high and then virulently uncomfortable in my skin for the rest of the night.
“Oh yeah, this isn’t bad.” He leans in to chop it.
Billy snorts a caterpillar rail. I chop up the line he preps for me into one half its size. I don’t want to die in a dumb way before I have a chance to write at least one more really good song, just to prove it wasn’t dumb luck.
I watched people in the music scene do coke for years before I tried it. I didn’t understand what I felt at first; the effects were intangible. “I don’t understand it,” I told Tom the first time. We were at an industry party and I was depressed because it was November, and I was still in school but had dropped a bunch of classes in order to play some short tours, and we’d just heard that we’d been turned down by the label we’d most wanted. I felt like I’d fucked up school for nothing. Everyone was fighting, and Tom was like a broken record, on a riff about how he had a baby now and didn’t want to be in a band that went nowhere. Everyone was a messy combination of drunk and high, and I was tired of feeling bored and sober, so I did a tiny bump off the edge of a house key in the bathroom.
Tom cautioned me against it. “It’s stupid, don’t even try it once,” he said. But he didn’t take the bag from me when I grabbed it, and he schooled me in the details. He even did a small bump.
“I don’t feel anything,” I said later, on the dance floor.
“Missy, it’s almost five in the morning, and we’re dancing.”
I looked around and realized it was true.
“Oh, right.”
“And are you tired?”
“No, I feel like it’s five in the afternoon after a really productive day.”
“Well, it’s five in the morning in shitty November and stuff actually sucks, so we should go home.”
But Tom hasn’t done drugs since his second kid was born. He doesn’t want his children to know he died in a stupid, preventable way. He says it took a toll on him, too. He did so much MDMA in the rave years he has a hard time making enough serotonin. He takes a cocktail of antidepressants to deal with it. Somehow, this information didn’t scare me. If you do something enough it seems normal and safe.
No one knows exactly how much drugs Billy does, but it doesn’t seem to affect him. Ever. He’s always on time, he never misses a rehearsal. Sometimes I watch him when he’s high, and think about all the things I heard about drugs when I was growing up, how they would ruin your entire life: there was no other story about cocaine or other party drugs. What no one tells you in school is that actually so many people are high all the time, or indulge every once in a while, and that most people function just fine. Plus, with Billy, even though he’s got a heavier habit, the band is his whole reason for living, so there’s not much room for an addiction in the traditional sense of the word.
Twenty-one is a very present-tense age. Addiction is a past-tense problem.
Billy rocks on his feet, side to side, picking at a zit on his chin. I lean over and snort the smaller line, then apply lip gloss in the mirror, a colour that makes them look bruised. Billy knocks back a second line, then leans against the wall and starts to sweat, inhaling again, rubbing his chest with his hands. Jared walks in and taps his violin bow at my back, trying to unhook my bra strap through my thinning T-shirt. “Sound check, my little babies! Sound. Check. Time. In five.”
I follow him into the house, where Tom sits on the edge of the bar talking with his kids on the house phone. The sound guy runs cables across the floor and mutters to himself. Tom holds the phone out. “Guys, it’s Missy! Say hi to Missy!” I hear his two kids mumbling hello on the other end of the line. I hand the phone back to Tom and then do a series of handstands and cartwheels across the empt
y dance floor. I stand up and give a deep bow. The sound guy claps. I hear Tom say, “I love you,” and then he laughs loudly and hangs up.
“My four-year-old said I love you too, Daddy, but I love Mommy more,” he says, laughing, but his eyes flash with fatigue and hurt.
I skip over and hug Tom. “He’s four. He doesn’t know how to lie yet,” I say, rubbing Tom’s head and squeezing him to my chest. Because I’m newly high, I turn the hug into a swaying slow dance that he pulls away from. I do a backflip away from him, then another deep bow. He claps.
So Tom and I did kiss once. It was like a moment I plucked from linear memory, extracted and dried out, to live somewhere else. We don’t speak of it. It sorted out any attraction we may have had, and put it to rest.
I’ve kissed a lot of friends, and it doesn’t mean anything. I figure that if you don’t get that kind of behaviour out of your system in your early twenties, you end up having affairs when you’re old and boring. And I’m not in any hurry to be either.
The show is terrible. It is hard to tell if the audience notices, or sees the looks Tom is giving us. Alan seems tired, and Billy stops three songs in to tell “stories” and the diehard kids in the front row are loving it at first, like they’re getting the real deal instead of just a habitual replaying of the album. But by the third time he does this, they start to look confused. A group of guys are laughing, and I’m wondering if they’re laughing at us. Is the alt weekly reporter going to trash the show? This is, of course, the point where none of us are really high anymore, and so Tom and I slump into a sort of morose finishing of the set by rote memory. Jared is oblivious, hyping up the audience and dancing, and Billy is just . . . done. He’s done before we even get to the encore.
The crowd claps and cheers for us to come back out as we drink water backstage and catch our breath. Tom grabs Billy by the shirt and says, “What the fuck is wrong with you tonight?”
Billy raises his hands in the air, in shock. “What? We were killing it out there!”
“Can you hear? Are you even present?” Tom yells. “We sound like we’ve never heard music before. Alan, tune your fucking bass, dude!”
“Relax, man,” Alan says. “It’s fine. Just an off night.”
When he first joined the band, I thought that I would bond with Alan more than anyone. In most bands he’s been in, he’s usually the only gay guy and the only person of colour. The band scene is mostly straight white dudes. But Alan mostly keeps to himself. And for some reason, he doesn’t love me. He is always putting his hands on my shoulders and looking me in the eye and saying Shhhh and Calm down, Missy, for fuck’s sake. Which makes me like him more. But he’s just chill. And so talented. He’s been in a million bands, and I feel like if we didn’t want him anymore, he’d just sidle up to another band and play bass for them. But for Tom, Billy, and me, this band is our identity.
Tom storms back onstage and starts playing the intro beat to our encore song, as Alan gets his bass back from the sound guy, and joins him. Cheers ensue.
Billy does a quick bump. “I don’t know what his fucking problem is,” he says. He reaches over and runs his hand along my jaw. I think he might kiss me, and brace myself, but instead he laughs and puts a key under my nose.
The encore is fantastic. Billy looks like he’s fucking the entire audience at once. The alt weekly guy is pumping his fist, his face blooming with satisfaction. After the show, I bring him a beer from the backstage green room. He’s taking notes in a small notebook leaned up against the stage as the crew is cleaning up. I reach over and give him the set list and the beer, touching his hand a little.
“You better be telling your readers how pretty I am,” I say, giving him a little wink. I can see his expression shift with the knowledge that he could probably get laid later. He tries to play it cool, but I can see that perfect combination of nervousness and need.
I love that shift. I reach for his hand and bring him backstage, though unfortunately Tom is raging by the time we reach the green room.
“We have to get it the fuck together!”
No one appears to know what he’s talking about. I plunge my hand into the bowl of gummy candies, throw some to the alt weekly guy, who is furiously scribbling and watching us.
Billy tries to keep the peace. “Dude, you’re overreacting. So the night wasn’t predictable. It got a little unruly, but that’s okay! That’s rock ’n’ roll.”
At this, Tom kicks the craft table. A bowl of fruit and a tray of soda and beer tumble to the ground.
I don’t know why, but I start to laugh hysterically.
“You’re such a fucking baby!” Billy says, laughing.
Alan grabs a broom from nearby and pushes the broken glass aside.
Tom, breathing hard, face flushed, storms off.
Later that night, I am left with Billy, the bartender, the alt weekly guy, and the rest of the drugs. We end up at an after-hours bar, a blur of karaoke and beer that tastes rusty and watered down. After that, we go back to the bartender’s house, a modest bungalow with a red-dirt yard covered in stones, desert flowers, and cacti, with an in-ground pool in the backyard. My memories are point form: I throw the reporter’s notebook in the pool; I feel like a wild horse, every step is a gallop; we all peel off our clothes and swim around. I remember I am fearless. I remember feeling like a kid, and like I’m embracing the best moments of life.
Before alt weekly guy sort of half fucks me in a coked-out haze on a chaise longue, I hold his cock in my hand. “Keep these details for your diary, okay?” I make my tone both menacing and then sweet, which I can feel is the perfect combination. This is the moment I enjoy most, when I know that someone will do anything I want them to.
He agrees with a whimper.
The actual sex is unremarkable, physically. There is always a point where my mind wanders and I think, why do people do this? I look at whoever I’m with, and I can see in their faces why they do it. It looks like bliss, like they’re winning at everything, like they can’t believe they are where they are. Even if they’re not having the best sex of their lives—how could they, with a half-passed-out girl as dawn nears—they still look complete, content. In those moments, it’s as though they’re speaking a language I don’t speak and I can’t think too much about it or I’ll get sad.
Later, after the alt weekly guy has scurried home, the sun pinks the edge of the horizon, and I lie awake listening to the insistent pounding of my heart, running in weird little skitter beats. A crow circles my chair. We lock eyes. “I love you,” I mutter at the crow. He cocks his head. He eats a cigarette butt. I give him a sparkling bobby pin I’d been using to pin back my too-long bangs. I fall into a minor reverie as the sun comes up.
The sun warms my body like I’m a squirming seedling, bringing me back to life. There’s something vaguely holy about a coke hangover. My skin tingles alive, my brain is slower, but then so are my worries.
I stand at the kitchen sink, staring out the window. I don’t remember what city I am in. Wherever we are, outside everything is dried by the sun, a splotchy palette of reds and oranges and browns. I drink several cups of water out of a mug with a Cathy comics decal on the side. I make a pot of coffee and when I open the fridge for some milk I see the calendar and realize that today is my birthday.
I am twenty-two.
The bathroom door is locked, so I pee outside in a bush, my weak stream pooling in tiny decorative stones.
I touch a cactus. I don’t recommend doing that. But it wakes me up.
I peer into the bathroom window, and I can see Billy fucking the bartender from behind, up against the sink. Her ass is just perfect—Billy’s hands sink into it as he pounds her. She’s quiet but yelping in moments. I turn away and hear him come as I tend to the cactus wound in my finger.
The bartender drives us back to the hotel in time to meet the rest of the band. We have to leave early to be on schedule. I watch blood rise in my fingertip, pressing it into my leg. The cactus meant business.
When we’re back in the van, I clock that Tom’s bad mood has faded, so I cuddle up to him. I feel a slight resistance in his arm, and then he pulls me in closer. He takes a rainbow cupcake out of his knapsack.
“Happy birthday. I can smell that you’ve already had a birthday party without me?”
The cupcake has a little toothpick with a paper flag in it that says MISSY, and a little cello doodle. I’m so touched that tears come to my eyes, which embarrasses us both. I want to seal it in a bag and never eat it.
“You’re the best,” I say. “Really. Like, thank you.”
The band sings me “Happy Birthday” in five-part harmony, and then we fall back into our own thoughts, watching the scenery blow by us. I see the northbound signs for Phoenix.
“Oh, we were in Tucson—right!” I accidentally say out loud.
“Have you been sucking on the tailpipe? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tom asks.
“She’s been sucking on something!” Billy mutters from behind us.
Alan turns around from the driver’s seat. “Sluts make the most of life.”
Alan barely ever weighs in. Validated, I give him a high-five.
I squeeze my legs together, feel that familiar ache signalling the recent presence of someone else.
Tom doesn’t speak to me again until we hit the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Chapter 8
carola
i caught a Greyhound bus back from Concord. I was attempting to make it home in time for the meeting of the women who had been involved with the guru. Some of them had felt that it needed to happen at night, during the full moon, in a clearing halfway up the hill behind the centre. But I was dreading it. I just no longer felt like engaging, or even being around anybody. The feeling that I required a ring of space around me, and for no one to talk to me for days, was new and uncomfortable. This was a recent development. For so many years, my life had been about community, making groups of people work together toward a better good, and lately all I wanted was to go places and have no one know where I was, to speak to no one for hours and hours.