by Liz Phair
Copyright © 2019 by Liz Phair
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780525511984
Ebook ISBN 9780525511991
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Cover photograph: Guzman
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I was never really insane, except on occasions where my heart was touched.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One: She Lies
Chapter Two: Below
Chapter Three: Red Bird Hollow
Chapter Four: Magdalena
Chapter Five: Three Bad Omens
Chapter Six: Labor of Love
Chapter Seven: New York City Blackout
Chapter Eight: Break-in at Blue House
Chapter Nine: Hold This for Me
Chapter Ten: The Devil’s Mistress
Chapter Eleven: New York City Blizzard
Chapter Twelve: Shanghai Street Fight
Chapter Thirteen: Surf Therapy
Chapter Fourteen: Hashtag
Chapter Fifteen: Sotto Voce
Chapter Sixteen: Customer Experience
Chapter Seventeen: Goodbyes
Author’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
prologue
I’ve been writing songs for thirty years. From the beginning, my songs have been stories. Every time I recorded an album, I was writing my memoirs. When I listen to the music I created in my twenties and thirties, I instantly travel back in time to inhabit those moments again: how I felt, what I thought, what hurt me, what I longed for. I wrote straight from the heart so the truth would ring like a bell, and resonate in the listener’s heart as well.
Every time I pick up a guitar and start to strum, I hear a melody forming in my head. It dances along with the chords I’m playing, bouncing up and down as it tests the boundaries of the key. I feel like I’m playing with a wish that wants to get out, or anger that needs to be released. Sometimes I don’t even know how I’m feeling, until I start singing and it all comes tumbling out. It’s almost like dream interpretation, except I’m awake. I don’t know how I’d navigate the world if I couldn’t write about it.
My manager called me the day Prince died. I was on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins, opening for them as a solo act in opera houses across the country. My manager and I had other business to discuss, but naturally our conversation turned to Prince, and to all the other artists we’d lost in 2016. It seemed like a year in which a disproportionate number of fixed stars in the musical firmament were extinguished. At one point, we joked that this was the Rapture, and God was starting an all-star band. But beneath our levity, a sense of urgency thrummed.
He spoke with uncharacteristic candor. “Liz, you need to think about this next record. Nobody knows how much time they have. You might be gone, and you gotta ask yourself: Are you making the album you’d want to leave behind if it were your last?”
I thought about my son, and what I’d like him to know if I wasn’t there to guide him. I would bequeath him the courage to face his fears, the vision to see opportunities for connection and love in even the darkest times. I’d pass on my faith that there’s a brilliant story in each and every moment of our lives if we pay attention. I’d draw out the poison of thinking that faults and failures make someone unworthy, and instead I’d reveal how bad decisions are just equal and opposite manifestations of great gifts and abilities. I’d leave him with the power to hope.
Horror Stories is my effort to slow everything down and take a look at how we really become who we are. It’s more than just my personal story. It’s about the small indignities we all suffer daily, the silent insults to our system, the callous gestures that we make toward one another. Horror isn’t necessarily the big, ghoulish creature waiting to pounce on you in the dark. Horror can be found in brief interactions that are as cumulatively powerful as the splashy heart-stoppers, because that’s where we live most of our lives.
In the stories that make up this book, I am trusting you with my deepest self. We spend so much time hiding what we’re ashamed of, denying what we’re wounded by, and portraying ourselves as competent, successful individuals that we don’t always realize where and when we’ve gone missing.
How foolish we feel in those rare instances when the fog dissipates, the path is clear, and we see our hapless footprints wandering around all over the place. Those are the resolute moments, the sober morning-after reflections when we plant our feet facing in the direction we wish to go and vow never to deviate from honesty, empathy, and inspiration.
It’s hard to tell the truth about ourselves. It opens us up to being judged and rejected. We’re afraid we will be defined by our worst decisions instead of our best. Our impulse is always to hide the evidence, blame someone else, put the things we feel guilty about or that were traumatizing behind us and act like everything is fine. But that robs us of the opportunity to really know and care about one another. It closes a door that could lead to someone else’s heart. Our flaws and our failures make us relatable, not unlovable.
I learned this when I released my debut album, Exile in Guyville, back in 1993. I wrote those songs during one of the hardest periods of my life. I had no money, and I was lonely, confused about the future and angry about the past. The lyrics reflected my reality in an unflinching, unapologetic, and sometimes explicit way that people deeply connected with. Fans came up to me at my concerts expressing gratitude and admiration for my bravery in telling the truth, because it made them feel a little less isolated and overwhelmed by their own difficulties. They heard themselves in the music, not me.
My motivation for writing this book is to articulate those experiences that people may not always want to recognize, but describe them in a way that makes them worth the effort. By taking situations that are disempowering and then finding a way through the maze, I find that examining the weaker moments in our lives makes us stronger. In that, I don’t think I am alone.
Come walk down some dark and mysterious paths with me. Once your eyes adjust, you’ll see that monsters are only mirrors. There is music in the creaking trees. Deep beneath our workaday world, we are all dreaming.
We left her there. That’s the part that haunts me. We saw her need, and we ignored it. The bathroom was crowded. It was hot. I was waiting for my turn at the mirror to put on lipstick. I don’t know why I only see the scene from two angles: looking down out of the corner of my eye while I do my makeup, and waiting with my back against the wall for my friends to finish washing their hands.
I don’t know if she was a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead. I know that she was at the party. I think she was wearing an olive-green jacket, but actually, I might have made up that detail. I seem to be assembling her outfit partially from fact and partially from fiction, as if I’m trying to dress her the way I used to dress my old Barbie dolls, make her look presentable, give her that dignity. My conscience is a fantastic prosecutor. After so many years, only the damning evidence remains. I was there.
I saw it. I did nothing.
Fear is an exhausting emotion, and I was scared so often that first semester in college. It was overwhelming trying to find my classrooms in a maze of unfamiliar buildings. I was afraid to ask the other students what the professor meant when she said our reading was reserved in the library. I was too scared to use my zip card in the cafeteria line, in case there was a trick to it. Trying to look like I knew what I was doing was my constant priority.
Looking back, I feel compassion for my younger self. I was just trying to get by. I was only eighteen, and my brain was still forming. I have to have something to say to the jury in my defense. The truth is, I was happy that night. I had met some girls I liked, finally. They all knew one another from a private school in Manhattan. They smoked clove cigarettes and smelled like patchouli. They had boyfriends and were trying to set me up with a guy from their group. One by one, they each took me aside and whispered something nice he’d said about me. They raised their eyebrows when they spoke about him, like I was lucky.
He wasn’t my type. He was okay. I went to a movie with him a week later, and we sat silently in the theater waiting for the lights to dim, having nothing to say to each other—just breathing slowly, acutely aware of the proximity of our limbs. He was nervous, I remember, because he blurted out, “If you’d ever hit somebody over the head with a baseball bat, you’d never forget it.” I agreed.
I’ve linked these memories together because, after I turned down the chance to be his girlfriend, my new friends looked for someone else to fill the vacancy and round out the octet. I didn’t see them much after that, which was probably for the best. Though we never discussed the girl in the restroom, I blamed them for not taking responsibility just as much as I blamed myself. How could we, how could any of us who were there, have turned a blind eye to what was happening? We can be monsters, we human beings, in the most offhand and cavalier ways.
It reminds me of those sociological experiments that expose how fundamental cruelty is to the establishment of society. A family, a clan, a nation, can’t be described without drawing a line around those who are included and leaving others outside the boundary. When researchers ask a group of students to single out and ostracize a member of their pack, someone always brings up William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, that story of shipwrecked children who devolve into a primitive tribe. But the shunning instinct doesn’t require isolation on a desert island or captivity in a science lab to find expression. It’s much, much closer at hand. Scratch the right tender spot and people turn savage.
It’s instinct, and that’s that. Not everyone regrets the unkind things they do. Guilt is the poisonous flower that springs up after a selfish act. In order to grow, there has to be soil present to begin with. The most impressive blooms get pressed into your book of recollections, and every time you go back and reread a chapter, their dry, skeletal remains drop out and fall into your lap. Decomposition marks the pages, and when you’ve interred too many bad memories, the book itself begins to smell.
We dig our disgrace by inches. Some of the meanest things I’ve done have been fleeting, momentary offenses. I only recognize their malignity once they’ve lingered overlong in my imagination. The painter Ed Paschke used to say, “They’re the bugs that get stuck in your grille.” I’d call them aftershocks of missiles lobbed from a safe distance. I’ve been carrying around for decades the tiny, toxic shards of souls I’ve casually shattered.
Late at night on a train, for instance, a man smiles at me, and I sneer—like he’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I’m scared. I’m nineteen, and I don’t want to get raped. But as his face falls, I know instantly that he meant instead to reassure me that everything was okay. He was there. I was safe. If you think that’s the bad part, it isn’t. Everybody makes mistakes. My culpability begins the moment I turn my face away and stare out the window, pretending that I am better than he is. I let him think that he is repellent, allow him to sit there in shame and dwell on how poorly he was perceived. When he gets off the train, he looks as downcast as any man who hates himself will be. Wondering what kind of day he’d had, what situation he was going home to, what cares and worries weighed on him, this is my burden to bear for as long as I have a memory.
“If I Had Only” is the hit song I’ll never release. When quantum physicists talk about entanglement, I know exactly what they mean. When Einstein calls a phenomenon “spooky action at a distance,” I want to leap up out of my seat and shout, “Amen, brother! Preach!” It’s a lonely universe, and the void takes up so much of it. Why are we surprised to find dark matter residing within ourselves? Emptiness is filled to the brim with anti-starlight. Spread out a towel, lie down, and bleach beneath the not-done, the not-said, the not-redeemed.
A famous comedian left his dog on the back porch of his Mulholland Drive aerie. He lived in New York and rarely made it back to Los Angeles. His assistant would drive up twice a day to feed the crippled old Newfoundland and walk him for ten minutes along a dusty arroyo where no grass grew, on a bare gravel path along the scrubby side of a mountain. I visited the dog three times. I didn’t know the owner, so I just stood there beneath the tiny deck where this big creature lay all day, panting from the heat. I said nice things to him, like Romeo wooing Juliet. He had the sweetest, gentlest disposition despite being, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.
I had the chance to adopt the dog, but he was too big and too old for my narrow house, and he’d have had trouble climbing up and down all the stairs. I asked around at the stables where I rode horses. Nobody was interested. Many months later, after I’d given up hope, I got a call from someone who knew of a farm for Newfies that might be able to help. I didn’t respond. I never called back. I was on tour, I was busy, it fell through the cracks. And now I carry this dog around with me forever. He comes back and visits me like a ghost, that sweet face of his, to remind me that I am forging chains like Ebenezer’s, and they grow heavier as I go.
So who was the girl in the bathroom? I’ll never know. What were her dreams? Why was she there? What made her get so drunk? She was dressed the same way we all were, in a frilly miniskirt and ankle boots. She looked like she’d be a nice person to meet on another day, under different circumstances.
I could tell by her shape and the quality of her skin that she was pretty. But she had to be lonely, because where were her friends? Where were the people who were supposed to keep track of her? Where was the roommate or the boyfriend who was supposed to make sure she could stand up and get home again? She must have come alone to that party. It must have taken courage, a lot of liquid courage, to stand around not knowing anybody. Her unconscious body on the floor was proof of just how nervous she’d been.
Her legs were sticking out of the stall. We stepped around and over them. It reminded me of that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch of the East lies prone after Dorothy’s house lands on her. People coming into the bathroom tittered and pointed at first, then gasped. Then they shut up.
The line right inside the door was still lively, still revved up from the party atmosphere outside, but as you moved deeper into the inner sanctum of the lavatory, it got silent. People went about their business with a grim, thin-lipped efficiency. Eyes darting, cheeks pale. Faucets turning on and off. Nobody saying anything. Nobody doing anything about it.
She was lying facedown, passed out, her head resting on the floor next to the toilet, a big smear of excrement extending out from between her sprawled legs. I’d never seen someone who’d shit themselves before, let alone publicly. The humiliation of it was extreme.
As I waited with my back against the wall, I had a clear view of her soiled underpants. I don’t remember what I was thinking. I was just uncomfortable. We all were. Whether I was aware of how dangerously close to death a person would have to be for their body to forcibly expel alcohol from their anus, I couldn’t say. It also didn’t occur to me that she could ha
ve been drowning in her own vomit. When one end excretes, generally, so does the other. It’s the body’s late-stage response to poisoning. No one thought to check if she was breathing, at least not while I was there. No one wanted to go near her.
It wasn’t just the mess that repelled us. What was it about her behavior that we were rejecting? If she’d crashed her car while speeding, would we walk past the smoking wreck, averting our eyes? Would we shrug and say, That’s what you get for engaging in reckless behavior? I’m certain we wouldn’t. We would rush to the vehicle and do our best to save her. In fact, I can’t think of another instance in which we would judge instead of helping. What we were judging was how easily that could have been us.
Let me paint another picture for you. Let me describe a better world to live in: Four girls enter a bathroom and find one of their classmates collapsed and in distress. Quick! Get help!, they shout. They try to revive her, they check to make sure her air passages are clear. One of them takes off her sweatshirt and covers the girl to preserve her modesty. Don’t let anyone else in! Has someone called nine-one-one? Hurry, we need help! Oh my God, I hope she’s going to be okay. Please, God, please let her be all right! But that’s not what happened. And that’s what I have to live with.
There’s something relentless about hindsight. It chips away at the unimportant details, leaving just the guilt, just the unfinished business. I cannot exorcise her from my conscience or purge her from my past. She will always be lying in that bathroom in my soul, waiting for me.
It’s one of the first authentic days of summer, when the glittering sunshine erases all winter doubt; the kind of day that is exhilarating. The sky is such a deep shade of blue that it takes my breath away. We are standing on top of a massive sand dune, 130 feet above the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. I shield my eyes, trying to see the tip of the Sears Tower poking up out of the water as I look back across the vast expanse toward Chicago. If it were nighttime, I would see the red lights on its broadcast towers blinking incongruously above the horizon, as though the rest of the building and skyline were submerged. I squint, but it’s no use. The curvature of the earth has swallowed up my life.