Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  “Of course we did,” he said, and we slid closer to each other on the bucket seats and turned on the radio station that kept playing Duke Ellington’s “The Kissing Bug.”

  I wrote down the Gmail address I had set up for him and he used a pay phone to call the kids from Hecaty whose number he took from the lockbox — they had held up a square of cardboard in the Lady Grace for days that said “Please Save Our Shitty Band.”

  I watched him leaning into the call as I wrote “DISPOSABLE CELLPHONES” on the IMPORTANT! list.

  The wind was blowing his hair around his smile as he walked back.

  “They told me they just lost their lead singer. They’re sending me their songs.”

  “You’re changing the name, right?” I said as I steered us towards the Motel 6.

  “Fuck, yes,” he said, and started writing down names.

  “The New KC and the Sunshine Band,” I said.

  “Too Many Humans,” he said, remembering something and reaching for me.

  I gave my hair a bitchy flip and started talking about making money like an accountant in a visor.

  “Bleach,” he said, and I heard a ping.

  HECATY LIVED IN San Francisco, and they had already written over twenty songs that they sent to him right away.

  He fell asleep in the bathtub as the small, stringy housekeeper removed soiled sheets from the double bed, while singing “Vivir Mi Vida.”

  I went to a dirty old Internet shop, printed the lyrics, transferred the music to CD, lifted a blaster from someone’s balcony, and gave it to him.

  The songs were good, but missing something.

  “Missing Something” is actually what they called the files.

  He played with the melodies, and words, and sang the songs back into a tape recorder that the lone busboy — a crank-ravaged dandy — lent us.

  I sent everything back and they wrote in an hour that they were on their way to Eureka.

  He was what they were missing.

  WE WERE HAVING a bad argument at the Motel 6 about the Axe body spray sample I had flapped across his neck.

  Things escalated, and he got up to leave.

  I grabbed my ukulele and sat cross-legged on the bed in my Punk Rock Warlord T-shirt.

  “I love your eyes,” I sang.

  “Your nose and your blowhole; I love your pelvis, booty, your jelly roll.”

  “I’m not a happy person,” he said, pulling on his jeans and sweater.

  I kept scaling it up until I sounded like Mariah.

  “Oh sugar, I love them legs.”

  He was standing in front of the mirror. I saw the curved line by his mouth deepen.

  “All right, I’m sort of happy,” he said crossly, turning, and knocking me out, the way he always does, with his refulgent smile.

  WE DISCOVERED THAT we couldn’t sleep properly without Speck, and called Mike.

  His phone was disconnected. We called the motel and were told that he had checked out, without saying where he was going.

  “We’ll find him,” he said, patting my back as I wept on the floor.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “I see him, is all. I see him charging through the woods towards us.”

  “Is he mad?”

  “Of course not. Everything works out in the end,” he said.

  But very few nights passed after that without one of us waking up, having felt him.

  Then crying ourselves back to sleep.

  I LEARNED TO live with his moods, and he did the same.

  The first time I screamed at him, at the Surf n Crash, for breaking one of our two dishes, he held its jagged edge in his hand and, with difficulty, returned it to the kitchenette counter.

  “Thanks for not killing me!” I called after him as I took off to the club.

  Later that night, he said that when you love someone, you love all of them. And handed me the plate, put back together with Elmer’s glue.

  The plate I would come to keep on a wall as if it were a sacred chau gong.

  HIS BAND ARRIVED, and found a rehearsal space on Fifth Street, downtown. They were him, James Ariel, and Mercury Beretta.

  James was a heavy bear, who beat the drums without mercy and read books about moths and other changeable insects.

  Mercury was the bass player; quiet, and cunning. He loved us both, at first. Eventually he would compare me to a “weaponized Yoko,” and try to bar me from shows.

  But when things were just starting, it was good. I got to know their girlfriends, who visited occasionally, appalled by their cruddy space, and sat in with them now and then with his old Fender Mustang: I inherited it after he got the white Stratocaster he swore he found at a church bazaar.

  James and Mercury slept in the space, bathed in an old Mr. Turtle pool, and worked every night, hammering out twelve songs in two weeks.

  These were the songs they recorded at Love Buzz Studio, a garage behind California’s biggest Liberace fan’s house.

  His name was Lee Tater, and he often came by to encourage them, with glasses of champagne, puff pastries, and the excellent advice that too much of everything is “Wonderful.”

  Money wasn’t tight, but it wasn’t right, as he liked to say because of the Everest College guy.

  Still, we got everything we needed from second-hand stores, like red, four-inch spikes and a plaster dragon and an almost-new spiral-bound notebook.

  He stole me a phone, too, as I distracted the kid at the Circle K by bending over and browsing through bags of phosphorescent cookies.

  I used the burner until I got an iPhone I filled with both of our information, and hundreds of dirty pictures.

  He liked the pictures, but he wouldn’t use it.

  He said he didn’t get technology, which made him, ultimately, unaccountable for his actions.

  As though he was installing malware right from the start.

  One night, he wrote down a number where I could reach him, and when I called, I realized it was a titty bar.

  “My Neck, My Back” pounded over a laconic “Hello.”

  When he got home, I laced into him.

  “What the fuck!” he said. “What did you want?”

  “I couldn’t find the paring knife,” I said. “The good, sharp one.”

  “This is what I hate about all this shit,” he said. “That is not an important question. I could never get used to living on a, whatever, a digital leash.”

  I crossed my arms and scowled, but when he lifted me up and spun me, calling me a baby bitch from the Ween song we loved, I held on tight.

  I LISTENED TO Screaming Females’ “Boyfriend” for three days straight and formed my own band.

  I added their name to an expanding list that included BABYMETAL, White Lung, Tacocat, and the Wild Nothing.

  He and I argued.

  “This will drive us apart,” he said. “You know that.”

  I shook my head.

  We were camping on the velvety grounds of the Carson Mansion, one set of bolt cutters and several well-placed blows later.

  We played “Baby Lemonade” on the blaster: I finished the Kush I was smoking and breathed its remains into his mouth. He watched me walk across the lawn; as I let my minidress fall to the grass.

  And then he sacked me.

  “I DON’T LIKE how girls are starting to look at you,” I said later, as the sun rose.

  We walked to the car without speaking: my bra hanging out of his pocket and me holding a ball of our stuff, wearing his boxers and nothing else.

  “Or how they look at me, like I am America’s Unsolved Mystery.”

  He had started to wear hats with flaps and saucer-sized sunglasses; prairie skirts, pyjama tops, and studded, macramé belts. At their first show, with Dogfight and Hoor at Vogue, I stood in the b
ack, panting.

  I couldn’t breathe: I crouched with my head between my knees, dizzy and sick — he sang something about a girl listening to records and making her cat dance, about seeing her from a long, fuzzy distance.

  His sublime beauty and coarse grace; his vitreous ultramarine eyes, scanning the room, and velvet and tumult coursing from his lips — it felt like he was torturing me.

  These “celestial sensations,” a medic would later explain, as I sat wrapped in a horse blanket on the lip of an ambulance, were a part of Stendhal syndrome.

  “I had to ask,” he said, while briskly checking my vital signs. “It’s like being attacked, or crushed, by beauty,” he said.

  I threw off the blanket and went back inside to find him.

  While I was crouched there, a girl had pinged a paper off his face that I retrieved and unfolded later.

  It said, “I want to fuck you so bad I’m going to explode.”

  WHEN THEIR BAND pictures started circulating, when people saw him perform, no one seemed to make the connection.

  Or they did, immediately, before noticing that his style had changed; that he was harder and more mellow at the same time.

  One fan page kept posting shots of his unnatural pallor.

  He titled their music “sleazy listening.”

  And he looked different, magnified and beyond aloof.

  Shadows shifted beneath his skin, illuminating the broken places then retreating.

  Everyone seemed to know that his trauma was contagious.

  Also, he seemed taller.

  “I feel bigger,” he said as we lounged around the bed. The maid had done her best, sweeping piles of our crap into the corners, and pulling the polyester quilt up over the scorched sheets.

  “You are,” I said, in this porny voice from one of the videos we liked, and in seconds the quilt was up and floating above us like a canopy.

  WE CHECKED INTO Kerry’s Motel, a fleabag filled with dope dealers that someone had reviewed online: “Room was not cleaned well (some leftover peanuts from the last century evenly distributed on all shelves).”

  I met two girls at the Piercing Pagoda in the Bayview Mall: both of them played guitar.

  I was better than either of them by now, so one said she’d play bass.

  We found our drummer at the Boot Barn, and spent the rest of the afternoon doing bumps of crystal and demanding that the Sears sales clerks show us their “finest couture.”

  Jenna, Sable, Sasha, and I were called SLITCH. We dressed like starlets on a chain gang.

  “What’s the name from?” Sable said when we popped mollies later at her trailer.

  “Euripides,” I said, remembering the night his mouth turned my wounds into white doves.

  How they flew away so quickly.

  KERRY’S WAS CLOSE to the Sequoia Park Zoo. At night, we put rhododendrons in Mason jars and listened to elephants trumpet; to lizards skittering across little macadamized dance floors.

  I wrote lyrics in bed, and drew video boards, frowning. He played his guitar, and put it down.

  “You’re not bored of me already?” he teased.

  I was a little distracted.

  Until he slid his finger down the fret of my spine and played quavers until I could not help singing along.

  Later, we took a good look around. Bald spots on the carpet, ant colony. We found the peanuts.

  EIGHT

  BABYSHAMBLES

  We stayed in Eureka for quite a while.

  Our bands rehearsed every night, but it was harder for us. We wrote the music very slowly. Jenna had to tape the letters on her fretboard, and I still had trouble changing chords and singing at the same time.

  But we made assets of our errors, and when a song was sinking, we cranked it up. It got loud, but the police loved getting calls to our space, and would usually stay for a whole set and make us autograph their chests.

  One day, I convinced him to take some time off and we had everyone over to the motel.

  I was dancing with his new drummer, James, and saw that Sable had sidled up to him on the end of the bed and spread her legs.

  James dug his fingers into my back when he felt me tense and said, “Look at his eyes.”

  They were watching me with love, and floating in the blue there was a green signet that seared James’s hands off me.

  I ran to him.

  The party broke up when he played “The Black Parade,” or was it when I started to undress him, and hissed, “Get out!”?

  We had found a dealer we liked, Barry something, and we called him that night.

  He came by in an old silver Eldorado, his hands filled with moonlight.

  WE PACKED UP our stuff, and headed out: we promised our bands that we would stay in constant contact.

  The night before we all left, we had a party with a Russ Meyer theme.

  I dressed as Tura Satana, which was easy: I just needed to rat my hair and wear leather gloves. He, as Meyer, slicked his hair back, drew on a thin moustache, and wore a white shirt unbuttoned to the waist.

  The girls just dressed trampy and the guys wore cowboy hats: they had never seen the movies.

  We drank out of a bucket and sang along to the records that Jenna brought with her portable stereo; performed an improvised play about Leatherface dating Ariana Grande, and the girls danced until they dropped.

  We checked out and dragged our stuff to the car at 5 a.m., and, having trashed the room, lit up our receipt and tossed it inside.

  The sound of the first detonation made us speed up. He drove and I dangled my legs out the window, writing “We owe half a motel” on a receipt pad, and dating it.

  WE HAD ASSIGNATIONS in the little towns we liked, moving southwest, through Oregon and Nevada.

  Blue Diamond looked pretty: we checked into the Filigree.

  We got stoned and ate the peanut butter sandwiches I always kept in my bag, in silky parchment paper, and dressed up that night in red panne velvet suits with white lapel-carnations. He made a reservation in the hotel’s Sparkles Lounge and we shared a single chair at a corner table.

  “And how are my precious jewels this evening?” asked Mr. Olivier, our waiter.

  We asked him to keep the pink champagne flowing, and he vibrated with happiness.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “Somewhere we could settle down, sometime,” I said, knowing that we were being pulled back home.

  “I kind of like it here,” he said.

  “I love your hair,” he said, separating it into mink tails. Then, “I love your lips,” as he opened them with his, and Mr. Olivier gasped when he returned to see him on his knees, holding my sandals, and kissing the arches of my feet.

  “Oh God, I love you,” I said later, as he pushed me over the end of the bed and fucked me like an animal.

  WHEN I FELL asleep, he found a letter I had written to Colette:

  Chère Colette,

  Je sais que mon écriture, attachée ici, n’est pas art. Mais quand je suis avec lui de cette façon, l’art est assis au bar d’un hôtel chic et croise ses jambes. Art taraude une cigarette sur la table noir de laque, et, grimaçant, vaporise de fumée comme un calmar dans mon visage. Entendre —

  Sex with him is a punk song on eight-track; old, explosive rose petals; and a turn on the Coney Island Cyclone, and we are seared by salt water and candy floss.

  Sex with him tells Art to step aside, the brute!

  XO

  I CAUGHT HIM reading it, and turtled.

  “It’s the worst, I know,” I said. “I want to write cool songs about us together, and —

  “You feel like you’re writing ‘She’ll Come Back as Fire,’ or ‘I Love You So Much it Makes Me Sick?’”

  These were two of the many, pretty good, Kurt Cobain fanfics I had pr
inted one night: I fell asleep reading them, and he woke me with a cold kiss, having had “a tiny OD.”

  He had snatched a page and started reading out loud: “Kayla looked up at Kurt and said, ‘Your tender love is all I need.’ Kurt cried and said, ‘You are the only real thing in my life you totally sexy girl!’

  “Look, chills,” he had said, extending his bruised arm.

  This night, we were in the bedroom: I was lying on my stomach writing and redacting, and he was going through my lingerie drawers, humming “Once Upon a Dream.”

  “You don’t get it,” I said. “I’m no different than them.”

  He joined me on the bed, and pulled me close.

  “You are different,” he said. “I wrote a lyric about you last night that rhymed ‘hearts’ and ‘smarts.’ It happens.

  “Look,” he said, reaching under the mattress and extracting a notebook.

  Under the heading “Decoding Evel’s Genome,” he had drawn me sleeping, beside a growing list of names for me, including Dishabelle, Bub, Her Imperial Highness, and Pussy Galorious.

  “I can draw that sleepy picture in three strokes now,” he said.

  Standing there in my silk nightgown and paste tiara.

  “We’re stupid in love, that’s all right, isn’t it?” he said.

  We kissed as blood fell lightly from the tender places in our limbs; torridly, as Nurse Mansfield stepped onto a moving stage in a gelatin scapular and black wings.

  “Come live with me, and be my love” she sang to a piece of construction paper labelled EVELYN with glitter chevrons on either side.

  We stood to leave and she saw us. Waving, she released a plague of locusts that swarmed the room.

  We woke up in a blizzard of mattress ticking and glass.

  “Totally Sexy Girl” was written on my back, which took me days to notice.

  WE GOT A room at the Marco Polo Hotel, his favourite place.

  It was fairly ugly, but I decorated it, and we filled it up pretty quickly with books and clothes and records, with all of our stuff, dumped out of the boxes and piled haphazardly.

  He took off, and went on his tour, and then another.

  He OD’d in Brazil in the middle of a yard, by an altar to Oxalá: James sent me an email that said “WTF,” with pictures attached of him flat on his ass, then floating.