Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  “I’m fine,” he assured me, when I finally reached him.

  “He’s fine,” I announced to everyone in Trouvaille, while tossing a black Balenciaga evening gown onto the counter.

  No one said anything.

  I lit a cigarette and emptied my purse.

  One of the tiny, shiny-haired salesgirls wrapped my dress in white tissue paper, while another crawled around picking up fifties. “He’s going to love me in this,” I said, and walked home, scratching out the contempt on their faces with thick red strokes; with his sterling, living name.

  I HAD MIXED feelings about performing.

  Other than the time onstage, which was mystical, I hated the lugging and rehearsing; the hangovers, bruises, sniping, and the money that, after being divided, only paid for enough junk to the next show.

  He flew home for two nights, and as a treat, I took him for a couples massage at the Elaia Spa.

  He hated it, and got up, dropping hot stones and telling me he’d meet me at the pool.

  “Unless someone tries to give me a face mask. Then I’m gone.”

  Later, in the deep end of the turquoise pool, I pleaded with him that we get our own place, an actual house: somewhere to retreat to, to work, hopefully with him, as much as possible.

  He paddled to the steps, climbed out, and shook his hair.

  “Do whatever you want,” he said, reaching clumsily for a towel.

  I clapped like a seal, before diving to the pool’s grainy bottom and resting there.

  I didn’t know how afraid he was, that he would huddle in a robe that night and sit on the Marco Polo’s plaid club chair, smoking and itemizing events on a message pad:

  In a grey harbour, below the Wishkah, then above the park.

  The hyacinths, like soldiers in white chain mail, through the haze of cold, driving rain.

  The roses of blood in the barrel, the blue barrel of the gun.

  He wrote with his left hand — he and I were both southpaws who adapted as much as we could. But for all the sinister things we wrote about or did, we used our right hands, the left ones.

  I RENTED A warehouse and my band joined me: we kept rehearsing and playing the same three clubs, gathering a following but never quite breaking through.

  Our shows were hit-and-miss.

  I was chipping a lot. The night I forgot the lyrics, and replaced them with unfinished letters to Art Pepper, Tupac, and Amy Winehouse, the girls made me take a break.

  I was shocked that they didn’t appreciate my freestyle: “My writing works on so many levels,” I argued, after a backstage nap.

  And I refused to stop. I threw up, I slammed two gropers in the face, and made up increasingly scandalous lyrics. Eventually, we got good underground press for being “blistering, shameless anti-rock stars.”

  WE STARTED THE heroin sacrament when we were living in Venice Beach.

  We would hang out at this guy Lytton’s place and chase the dragon, too dense to move, and watch people come and go. One night, Page Marlowe showed up, with a twitchy film star.

  He didn’t recognize me but kept checking me out, and handing out flyers for his new band, Lafayette, who were playing at the Troubadour.

  He had failed a couple of grades, I remembered, but looked much older, and harder. Resplendent, too, with his hair streaking like a comet down his back, and slithering through the filthy room in decaying jeans, a flowered chiffon blouse, and skinned Greb Kodiaks.

  Lytton had furious crushes on us. He would shoot up then try to shoot us, but he missed every time, and by so far that we didn’t notice the pings and crashes anymore.

  “Indie Ken,” he called him. I was “Barbie Moll” the night he accidentally shot Clowner, his old, diabetic cat.

  He bundled the cat up and bolted. The next day we went over and he was packing suitcases for himself and the cat, who was still at the vet being sewn back together.

  “He could have died,” Lytton said. He was wearing a suit and his frizzy hair had been buzzed to the scalp.

  “The romance of action has faded,” he said.

  “In its place is the refined and intimate pursuit of peace,” he said, and left, gesturing to his gun, scale, works, and what looked like a ton of dope.

  “We should get rid of this,” he said, and I agreed. We stood there a long time looking at the blood on the walls and ceiling, then grabbed everything.

  That night, he and I shared a pair of his pyjamas and shot up together for the first time.

  As I threw up in slow motion, he took off his fleecy shirt, laid it on the puke, and unbuttoned my top so he could nod with his face on my heart.

  We went back to smoking it after that for the most part, and called it chipping. It was, for me.

  Not him. He was the fucking dragon.

  WHEN WE WOULD get it together and go to meetings, I always talked about how bad heroin made me feel: the aching muscles, heart cramps, and torn-up throat; the half-dead part, where a white horse canters through the room and you barely notice.

  But it felt so good.

  The chemical drip that dropped like a banner saying, “Here comes the rush,” and my heart tapping like birds’ feet on tin.

  Then my body curling like a salted slug as the drug dispatched soldiers to round up any distressing or complicated thoughts and blow them to pieces, while planting the flag of Happyland.

  After one meeting, we made a call, and paced the floor, waiting.

  We were both irritable.

  I tried to read and he asked me why guys his age had beards and moustaches now.

  “They all look like my dad and his friends going to the Elks Club,” he said, and I ignored him.

  Demon, our new dealer — a biker and double amputee — had arrived, with a gram of sticky black rapture.

  BLEACH PLAYED LOCAL clubs for a month: at night, he and I would paste posters that he had made around the city.

  They were collages, mostly, with information scrawled all over them.

  I made one of his face, and screened the show details over it in perfectly regulated, ornate letters. He thought it looked too straight, but the screaming girls who showed up were clutching the copies they had torn from poles and fences.

  “Your face is the sell,” I told him.

  “You’re facing a sellout,” he said, quite cleverly.

  AFTER A SHORT tenure in Seattle, Bleach started to tour all the time.

  At first, he borrowed cells and called and wrote me every day, or more, but he usually forgot to hit Send or even Call.

  He became good friends with Mercury and James; he felt that they worked hard; that they all had a good connection with each other.

  He wanted to be like the artists he liked, like Gucci Mane, Suicide, Robert Johnson, and Lily Pons.

  He told me about sleeping in the van they painted with Beyonce’s and Jay Z’s faces, and washing in creeks and gas station bathrooms.

  That he felt sick from eating beef jerky on white bread and drinking Hawaiian Punch; that he was jonesing until some girl set him up for the rest of the tour.

  That a cop kicked him awake when he passed out beside the van, and he saw a wolf run through a hollow. A holler, he said.

  He told me he once heard a song of his — the B-side —

  seeping from a locked car, and looked inside as he passed by, to see a man punch a woman in the face, then kiss his knuckles.

  About nights of playing in piss bars for angry metal fans.

  The song “Black Branch” begins with a bird resting its head before leaving the summer.

  All I could think about was the girl he called “my heroine,” then I bit my nails into slivers because I didn’t know, I swear that I didn’t know, it was so bad.

  THEY WERE CLIMBING after charting low, still playing frat houses and bars he told me had actual co
olers, like in Roadhouse.

  At Happy Time Tavern in Baton Rouge, he saw a guy strike his pregnant girlfriend, jumped in, and got beaten up pretty badly before the cooler pulled him up and outside.

  He went to get high at his place, and liked this muscular little man so much, he felt sorry when he had to remove his tanned hand from his thigh and say, “Let’s just be friends, Pat.”

  “Comb my hair?” Pat asked, and he did.

  “I gave it a bit of volume, and snipped off his rat-tail,” he told me.

  I heard the rattle in his throat, and after receiving a long, skinny braid in the mail, I mailed him, at his next destination, funds for a checkup, taped inside a Bleach zine.

  The frat kids were worse, he said.

  “I saved her!” he told me one night: he was standing on Interstate 10, buttoning a savaged blow-up doll into a shapeless coat and filling her mouth with black gravel.

  “Of course I can stop crying!” he yelled before hanging up on me.

  I read my handmade tarot cards, and saw him, timidly climbing into a truck filled with dynamite.

  I saw myself, in a torn-up Bitches Be Crazy tank, kicking someone’s teeth out from the stage.

  Watching them speed into the dark like an Alien cortège, each holding on to an irregular silver grief.

  IT WAS AT one of these bad gigs that they gelled.

  They were playing the Olde Icehouse in Thibodaux with Jelly Babies and Defcon Two, who were fired with garbage and spit.

  They got up, kept their heads down, and, he told me later, felt a wave pass through them — “it sanctified us,” he said.

  He blitzed into the riff that opens “Here It Is,” and the room exploded into a mass of hot jumping beans.

  After that night, they would never falter again.

  The week the first single appeared, and its video went into constant rotation — largely because of so many ardent requests — Bleach started breaking records.

  “Here It Is” was ubiquitous, which kick-started their being pursued, relentlessly, by a nearly possessed media, and the legions of staggered fans. Little kids would bring their boom boxes to the street, blare the song, and dance as crowds gathered.

  They were signed by a huge indie label, and scheduled to complete their record at Voodoo Working Studio in New Orleans.

  I went into a supermarket one day and heard their song, then saw his face on every magazine on the rack.

  He, or the band, was rarely the whole cover, but I could feel them growing like the Stay Puft Man.

  Sometimes I would find pictures of me, always with him, always made to look vampiric and cruel.

  “That’s his girlfriend?” I heard a plain, chubby girl ask her friend. “She’s sort of pretty,” she said, unhappily, and her friend said, “She has a fat ass.”

  FAME APPEARED LIKE a flash fire.

  There was something about Bleach, something about their massive, quailing sound and furious misery, that connected them — like a needle to the mainline — to so many people.

  They passed into legend the night they played in front of six thousand maniacs at the Empyrean, in Portland.

  When they left for New Orleans, I was miserable.

  I cried when he left, and followed him into the van.

  I leaned down and kissed him, buried my nails into his back, then pulled, leaving eight lines about who I am and what I am capable of.

  “Don’t forget about me,” I said.

  He slapped my face so hard my head hit the window.

  Four lines, more eloquent: “You belong to me.”

  BEFORE HE LEFT, we decided that our new place would be near home, or something like it.

  If they kept letting their new record company push them like dope, we could live wherever we wanted — James and Mercury missed their adjacent apartments facing the sea, and Attica.

  And while I missed nothing, I wanted to be near the place we first met; to be near the little shrine I set up in the garden behind the hospital.

  Dedicated to Saint Raphael — I carved him from a chunk of soft, yielding wood — the shrine was spiked into a heart-shaped patch of grass, and decked out in ribbons, and braided pieces of our hair. It was probably mulch by now, but it still radiated, calling us back.

  BLEACH FOLDED THEIR demo, Jerry Sizzler, into a full-length project, a record called The Space Between, and as they put it together, my band recorded songs for a record we called Blood Carnation in our manager’s basement studio, where we shot the videos as well.

  The songs were short and sped-up; we recorded them without pausing.

  We used strobe lights that we found at a swap meet and filmed with cellphones.

  In “Velveteen,” we wear heavy black motorcycle boots with chiffon saris and dance with little men in bunny suits.

  Q, our manager, wore burgundy-tinted glasses, and track suits: he heard us rehearsing at the Fifth Street space and threw rocks through the window.

  He signed us that night, and sent us overseas.

  We were instant stars in Germany, and skimming the bottom of the indie charts everywhere else.

  In Berlin, I lost track of the time difference, and dirty-called him constantly.

  He and I were jittery wrecks after a few weeks of this.

  At Asphalt, I dedicated “His Holiness” to “the beautiful Celine Black,” and in the riot that ensued, I heard how far he had come, and how far apart we were.

  That night, he didn’t answer his phone. I wrote texts and longing letters with my fingers in the crazy squeak-panties he found for me in the Latin Quarter.

  They said “Convey and Disfruit Me.”

  LAFAYETTE APPEARED IN London, and Q invited them to join our tour.

  Page banged on our door at the Savignyplatz as I was reaming Q out about inviting “my teenage nightmare.”

  An envelope inched onto the carpet. I cut it open and read that Page remembered me now and was sorry.

  He wrote a lot, in an uneven waveform, about being abused his whole life; about how he was becoming what he hated until an older friend got him high on mushrooms, spoke hypnotically to him about who he was and what he could be, and he swore that this “conjured the ugliness out of me.”

  Page mentioned what Sophie and her friends did, which made him leave town, and said that his song “Falling,” which I heard everywhere there, was about me.

  I crumpled the letter then smoothed it out. I taped it over what happened between us in the woods, in the notebook I was still carrying, the one he always called the Necronomicon.

  Flipping forward, I turned to the page titled “Where Is He?” and looked at the drawing of me, lying on my face, a dead phone in my hand.

  Page knocked at the door and I let him in. He was holding and I was lonely.

  “Friends?” he said.

  It started that way, on a button-tufted leather sofa.

  A boy and a girl warily holding hands.

  HE CALLED EARLY, the morning after he went missing.

  He told me, “I saw a girl whose eyes look like mine,” and that is all he ever said about the night.

  I felt nauseated, and said nothing. I couldn’t lose him.

  I felt worse when I was alone, and spent more time with Page, drug-bubbled and loose.

  Page was mean to every girl but me: one night, a girl came up to him while he was talking to me at Barbie Deinhoff’s and he spat in her face.

  “My mother was a whore,” he said pleasantly, and I remembered that I was afraid of him.

  But he followed me back to the hotel, and apologized again, and we ended up getting drunk and trashing his room.

  Page loved practical jokes, and I was drawn to him because of his twisted humour, and because we both escaped the same horrible place.

  We slept together all day in my room for the week, making
prank calls, answering personal ads online, and watching a German game show that involved gold bratwurst and calculus.

  His kisses were so timid I barely felt them, and I started to think of him as a loyal, if rabid, dog.

  “Piglet,” the girls said. “This don’t look right.”

  They had seen me and Page, half dressed, pouring Calgon into the hotel fountain.

  “Nothing’s happening,” I said, doing a few lines of coke before picking up my guitar.

  Onstage, I felt as though I could kill everyone with my eyes; as if I were summoning an entity that was always onstage with us.

  The other girls felt it too, but it scared them.

  Or I scared them, when I leaned back so far, spreading my legs to admit the sound and the heat, the rough edges of the phantom power.

  He told me about this power that he felt, sometimes, while performing: “It’s when energy flows from no particular source, where things are lit up without reason.”

  THESE TIMES AND separately, he and I hurled ourselves or were thrown to the stage floor; we crowd-surfed and broke our guitars.

  We thought of each other, drenched in blood, our faces still and eyes controlling the room, and cried out.

  “Sexy show,” Page said one night as I walked past his room.

  “Sleep somewhere else,” I said. He grabbed my arm and yanked me into bed.

  I was dirty, and exhausted. Some nights I would let him touch or kiss me, because I was too weak to object; because it felt nice in a vacant way.

  After our last show, we shared a bottle of vodka and an anthill of coke in his room.

  At one point, he chased me up and down the hall. I remember hitting metal carts. Was this why I was stiff, cut up, and mottled-looking the next day?

  He took me to bed, and I said no, and tried to roll off.

  “You’ll have to kill me first,” I said.

  Huge mistake. He heard this as a challenge and climbed on top of me. He shoved my panties aside, and doused me with cherry lube; then plunged into me while holding my wrists above my head.

  I couldn’t help it, I came over and over, which drove him into a frenzy: “I love you,” he said when he finally came too, then let me go.