Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  He collected, too, busted-out stars, like my mother’s suicides in a way, stars with horror-movie faces that he viewed as high art.

  He told me stories about Chet Baker, Syd Barrett, and John Berryman. “And that’s just a sample of the Bs,” he said.

  He said that the heroin-mangled Baker was telling someone the squalid story of his addiction and ruin.

  And the guy started crying.

  “Don’t be upset,” Baker said. “It’s just my life, man.”

  “Boom goes the dynamite,” I said, and he sighed.

  I collected lame expressions, but that is neither here nor there.

  He was still morose as he drew a rifle saying “BOOM” from an eight-shaped aperture.

  HE WROTE ALL the time, mostly diagrams, about how X and Y would arrive at ZZ.

  He didn’t know that I’d loved him as long as I could remember; that I had such a painful crush that I used to go to bed early just to imagine being with him.

  These were not raunchy fantasies: in them, he and I would drive in his old Pacer and buy things like maps and glass medicine bottles, wedding suits and lace kerchiefs; paintings of flowers and deserts he would caption, later, with a ballpoint pen.

  Like, “GIVE HER POISON FLOWERS ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY” or “I’M NEELY SAHARA!”

  We would go home and make things in bed, and write, and he would sing: he wrote songs for me and played a painted ukulele.

  We just held hands in these dreams, or slept with our faces touching.

  At school, I was quietly known as the Hefty Bag.

  I would eat in the library, where Mrs. Killzone ignored me as I watched the part in Nirvana Unplugged when, at the end of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” he closes his eyes, pauses, then opens them, and it is so intimate and frightening, I would never fail to be shocked to tears.

  “Will you leave me?” I asked, as he added a red D- to a picture of Coldplay.

  “Yes. But then I will come back,” he said, and frowned.

  “Sometimes, I’ll fly off too,” I said.

  “I will see you from outer space, worrying. Chewing the ends of your hair and looking at the clock.”

  He smiled.

  “My girl,” he said.

  “TELL ME ABOUT your life,” he said, sounding like wasps busy in their nest. Whenever the girl in the bed cried, a red-gloved hand dialed the dose up on the drip and he and I high-fived each other.

  He cut his hand and mine, pressed them together, and we drifted for hours in a field of long, sweet grass.

  “There is school,” I said, as we lazily passed a cigarette back and forth.

  “There was this one boy,” I said. “He was in a band.”

  I USED TO go see Page play at the Black Snake, a shack in the backwoods.

  Kid Blast played lots of ballads with driving guitar and vaporous keyboard solos.

  I would ride there on my bike, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, baggy jeans, and knock-off Docs.

  When they played, all the girls would stand in the back, drinking from flasks and grooming, and dancing with, each other.

  And when Page slithered to the edge of the stage, they would rush him then jump when the music sluiced forward.

  One night, Page was packing up his equipment and laughing with his bass player as I watched.

  He asked me for a cigarette, and I blushed and said I didn’t smoke. “But I’m going to start,” I stammered, and he smiled.

  “Later,” he said, walking past me and switching his hair out of his luminous Ponyboy eyes.

  Nothing had ever sounded as good as that word. I thought of the way people talk about “near-death” and new voices, obscenely beautiful, calling them forth.

  I LET HIM look at my notebook, and change it.

  Beside my long list of practical plans about cold calls and contacts, he added “In her honey dripping beehive” and “Agonizer times ten.”

  He drew a pulsing arrow pointing to the top of the list where he had struck out “All alone is all we all are.”

  “That’s not the lyric,” he said.

  “That’s how you sang it,” I said.

  Near the end, I almost said. Instead, I said: “I always get the words wrong.”

  “‘The rebel angel buttons up a pilly cardigan,’” he said, flipping through my notebook. “What is that from?”

  “I think it’s Slipknot,” I prevaricated, and wrote “YARN” and “NEEDLES” beside the bigger words, “LEARN TO KNIT!”

  You could just reach up and there was wool and there were drawers filled with everything you have ever wanted to find.

  He looked more and more at the building every day. Every day, I wanted nothing more than to keep him warm and safe.

  I FELT THE same way about Page once, or I thought I did.

  One night, after seeing Kid Blast, I came home and told my true love that I was infatuated with someone else.

  His sad eyes swam, slowly, back and forth.

  The next day, I got Page’s number from the dopey school secretary, Miss Bubbles, and texted him. I told him that I was a waitress in town with “strong, deep desires.”

  I added a picture of myself in a lacy bra that I ran through twenty filters, included my cell number, and sent it.

  He texted me that night: “I want to see you.”

  We agreed to meet by the river, a ways south, that pours into the Snoqualmie, near the three black pines.

  I was so impressed by my cunning, I forgot to worry if he would like me.

  When I saw myself in the mirror, when I saw my hair slink past my shoulder, I smiled and saw a lyrical curve reflected back.

  “Why are you dressed up?” my mother asked me. She was home from work and angrily unpacking Publix bags.

  I was wearing a long, sleeveless Dave Grohl T-shirt, tree-covered tights, and a red cable-knit sweater.

  “I’m meeting a friend,” I told her.

  She looked relieved.

  She even drew wings at the edge of my eyes with blue liner, and dabbed at me with a powdered brush.

  I SLIPPED A flask of vodka into my backpack, and a decal I found at the Re-In-Carnation thrift store of a skull surrounded by roses and ballistic thorns.

  And I hitched a ride with an escaped mental patient, who was still in his hospital gown.

  “Tell the flavour of onion that the flavour of dill is about to throw down!” he said, and I promised him that I would.

  “Take care of yourself, honey bunny,” he said when he dropped me off, and I watched him drive off, smiling a little — no one had ever called me that before.

  I made my way to the mouth of the Tolt River. After clearing the little forest, I walked slowly down the sloping bank.

  I saw Page by the poplar and three listing pine trees; I saw the moon baking in the blue-black sky.

  I couldn’t help it. I started to run.

  He looked up as I fell and pinwheeled to his side, tearing up grass and wildflowers and little trees.

  “Oh no,” he said, holding me to a stop.

  “I’M ALL RIGHT,” I said brightly, my eyes shining and sweeping his face.

  “No,” he said. “You look like a giant tomato.”

  I felt a familiar nausea.

  I handed him the vodka and he shrugged, drained it.

  “You’re the chick who comes to all our shows,” he said, and began to walk away.

  I fell to my knees, unzipped his fly, and took him in my mouth.

  “Oh Christ, yes,” he said, and pulled my hair back and forth until he released a spume of salty, bitter cum.

  “Show me your tits,” he said, and lay down.

  THIS MEMORY MAKES me weak.

  “That’s how everything started, at school,” I said.

  I saw Page leave the Lady Grace with a
trash bag and guitar case. Skull decal sewn to the sleeve of his leather jacket.

  I saw him stick out his thumb, and shook, remembering his hands in my hair.

  “Don’t,” he said, turning my head from the room with a window that the river ran through.

  “Look,” he said.

  The river had changed course and was flowing through us, and we were floating in its pearl-water and breathing through silver gills when he seized my heart and rested his mouth by my collarbone where the pulse beat hard.

  “DID YOU EVER have your heart broken?” I asked as the blood gathered up the morphine and ran.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  He rolled towards me.

  “There’s always someone better,” he said. “Once you start looking.”

  DREAMS SOMETIMES SLID into nightmares.

  I saw myself sliding my top over my head, and unfastening my bra. Then dancing for Page, who grabbed me and said, “You really are wild,” before slamming my head down again.

  “IT’S NOT COOL, what you did,” Page said after he was done. “You know I’m with Sophie.”

  “Please don’t tell her,” I said.

  He got up and walked away, and I got a ride home from an old lady who said “I’m saving you from another goddamned weirdo.”

  I went inside and ran upstairs. I stood on my pillows and placed my head against the KC poster and sighed, as I felt his skin start to ignite and his hands, having left the guitar, move slowly, curiously, to my face.

  That night, I dreamed that he asked me to go to LA with him to record. I know that he really wants to score, so I tell him I have school: he turns into a small white dog and attacks my leg.

  “BUT WHY DID you go after him? If he had a girlfriend?” he said.

  “What would it have mattered, if she was the one he loved?”

  He looked at me curiously, opened then shut his mouth.

  Elton was making a little cake: we could see his polka-dot apron through the yolk-yellow curtains over his sink.

  I cried: everyone was mad at me.

  My tears were Plexiglas: he removed them from my eyes then put them in a lockbox I never look through.

  “I know you were lonely,” he said, holding my face in his hands, and I agreed, so he would be nice to me again.

  His grip was tight.

  “You won’t cheat on me,” he said, like an imprecation.

  When we kissed, our minds wandered then returned, like dogs in a yard.

  Howling to each other about what they have found; howling to get back inside.

  AT SCHOOL, THE dull misery that led me to tear circles of hair from my head became taut and barbed.

  Sophie saw a bite mark on Page’s neck, and he told her that I had practically date-raped him. She lost her mind.

  She and her friends followed me down the halls, hissing and throwing rocks, and finally followed me home and sat outside my window, drinking and calling for me.

  “Are those your friends?” my drunk mother said.

  “Yes,” I said, and walked towards them.

  They dragged me into an empty lot, sat on me, and wrote “SLITCH” into my chest with a penknife. They were wasted and couldn’t decide on the best insult.

  My mother found me barely conscious, covered in blood, and drunk-drove me towards my old pediatrician’s office before slapping her head and saying, “Wait, I think he’s dead.”

  I managed to say, “Emergency,” and she aimed the car at the Snoqualmie Valley Hospital on Ethan Wade.

  “This must be your fault, at least some of it,” she said, nervously lighting a cigarette.

  I was admitted right away: three medics wheeled me into the back and started firing questions at my mother about my age, my blood type, when I had last eaten.

  She couldn’t remember much.

  When the stately doctor, with a stunning head of silver hair, appeared, she attached herself to him and said, “I just don’t understand this. Everyone loved me in high school.”

  Then the pills rolled out of my jacket and everyone was all over me, like this ghost of gnats I once saw who had just discovered a single, white camellia.

  “Pump her stomach,” the doctor shouted.

  And, to my mom, “Leave, or I’ll restrain you. For fun.”

  “OVERKILL,” SADNESS SAID, humming “Tiny Pyramids.”

  “You think —”

  “Don’t even,” he said, covering my mouth.

  “I’m just thorough,” we both said, and were jinxed until my mother brought me some flowers, and stared out the window.

  “I miss you, Evelyn,” she finally said.

  WE SPENT A lot of time looking into the windows of the Lady Grace.

  We saw children left to cry in their piss and shit for hours; animals cowering; women being flattened with punches, men being screamed at until they wept.

  There were single people, dancing badly and making great long slides across their floors; pampered turtles on plush pillows; two men who loved each other so much they just held hands all day, blushing.

  One day, we looked into a window of a loft space and saw a band rehearsing. The name HECATY was written in spidery lines on their drum kit.

  “I think they mean Hecate with an ‘e’,” I said. They didn’t have a front man, and were making up lyrics as they went along, like, “Witches, witches live in trees, scaring birds and scaring bees.”

  Slam, crash. They turned things over.

  “How is Hecaty ever going to happen?” the guitarist, a skinny kid in an Urkel T-shirt, said.

  The drummer said, “Why the fuck not?” and stomped his kick drum.

  “We need a great guitarist and songwriter,” Urkel said, then looked out the window right at us.

  We ducked. He laughed and wrote lyrics and music on a piece of paper that he made into an airplane and flew to the group.

  I watched the plane’s difficult journey, then the boy, the O of his mouth as he seized then opened it.

  I COULD SEE the skinny kid storming off at some future point, yelling, “Fine! Replace me with Kurt Cobain 2.0!”

  Tears in his eyes.

  I changed his name right away.

  To Celine Black: he will tell interviewers that he was named after the French writer unless I’m in the room and high.

  “The distinguished intellectual Celine Dion,” I will say at those times, and laugh.

  I secretly love her.

  À votre belle âme, chérie.

  I WAS JEALOUS of his talent.

  But I was starting to get my own stuff happening.

  I told him about a song I wrote when I was a kid called “Boss Twerp.”

  As I recited the stupid words, he picked out a melody that made my song sound brilliant, which humbled me.

  I called him Boss Twerp all day.

  At night I couldn’t, because his golden skin was so alluring I had to go panning.

  WE ONLY KISSED. He was adamant about this.

  This was my main reason for getting back: I wanted to get older.

  One night in the back seat of a burned-out Volvo on a patch of immense daisies, he pressed his mouth to the word carved into my skin, leaving a trail of sugar.

  The scar was reduced to a glimmering assertion: we are here.

  He persisted, then groaned and pushed me away.

  “Let’s do this,” he said, pulling me, roughly, to my feet.

  WE NEVER ONCE asked ourselves why we left Opiate Heaven.

  Probably because we kept making new versions of it as we went along.

  And because we knew, somehow, that fate was moving us forward with a whip in its hand.

  Which meant that he would die and I would not: the story was as plain as sundown.
/>
  AND WE NEVER wondered if any of our time together was real, or just a shared delusion that the drugs gave us.

  I didn’t because I knew it was real.

  One night, Potemkin was cleaning our eyes and swabbing them with salve and he and I were crossing an apple orchard near the Chevron station to get chocolate and cigarettes when we were attacked by butterflies.

  They filled the sky like I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds but brighter orange and thumping. And moiled around our eyes.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, and covered me with his body, squeezing his eyes shut until the bright cyclone fragmented and they all fluttered away.

  “I read about this somewhere,” he said. “Tears are like Pappy Van Winkle to them.”

  I would often think of the gorgeous monsters, feasting on my tears.

  I was crying. As we walked under the blossoming trees, he told me that he loved me.

  Everything felt clear and true: where we were; what we would be.

  “Butterflies in her eyes and looks to kill”: he would sing that to me on karaoke night at Zizzy in Las Vegas.

  He brought the room to their feet and I danced between them, waving an orange scarf I wound around an old prospector as he moved a gigantic girl slowly around the dance floor.

  WE WERE VERY sad to leave.

  We never argued, or had to share. We only wanted each other.

  He said the only reason he wanted to be around other people was to show me off.

  And I wanted to be powerful: to leave our impression.

  Still, those days and nights of serving up moonshine and starfruit.

  I was racked with desire, to be beautiful, to rise up and shine.

  To feel him come inside me as I constricted like a snake, but I was too shy to talk that way then.

  I felt him wanting me back: “It will be the same, but better,” I told him, and I was only lying a bit because I had the yips at this point: he just had to brush by me and I vibrated, on high, all day.

  WE STOOD ON the edge of the abyss, held hands, and jumped.

  We were still stoned enough to think we were falling into the ocean; we saw the edge of Venice Beach, in California, where the surf laps the shore like a great grey cat.

  Old men were serried on the dock, lowering fish hooks into the sludge; one said, “Just like that, they jumped.”