by Lynn Crosbie
TEN
DAYS THAT WE DIE
He came home, and promised to stay awhile.
Then handed me a flat black box with white ribbons.
The dress he gave me was a vintage, sleeveless Chanel evening dress made of lace tiers.
I modelled it for him in bare feet with my hair in a chignon, and his eyes burned a hole through to the white G-string he cut off me as the dress pooled to the floor.
We got stoned and fucked all night. When someone banged on the door at 8 a.m., I wandered over in a sheet, mascara ringing my puffy eyes.
It was the reporter lady. I had completely forgotten.
“Hey,” I said wanly, as she took in the room that was filled with books, papers, candy, and lingerie; frowning at the reek of garbage, sex, and smoke.
He pulled his jeans on and demanded to know why she was there.
“Is this a fucking set-up? Do you want her to look bad?”
“Well, it’s obviously an error, please watch your tone,” the snippy, well-heeled reporter said, and he lunged at the photographer, who had been shooting the whole time.
“Please stop!” I said, trying to pull on my dress, and furtively cleaning my face with dish soap.
“They’re using you,” he said, and the reporter said, “Why don’t we let Evelyn decide?” I was wearing a soap beard and moustache.
But I looked like a goddamned princess in that dress.
“Won’t you come in?” I said.
“HOW OLD ARE you?” Lois asked.
Lois was a veteran journalist and mother, who said she just adored our little kitchen with its wood-slab table and furry red chairs.
“Nineteen,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“Tell me about your band,” she said, and I talked all through the morning.
I told her about the Gunpowder Plot and how our band was like that, how we wanted to overthrow the sexy baby-voice girls who were so popular right then.
“And they would be King James?” she said, and I heard the bear-trap snap on my ankle.
She thought I was a complete idiot.
She was going to publish something really bad.
I heard a snap and Clicker, the photographer, retracted his lens but not fast enough.
My fresh tracks opened like stigmata over my verdigris-coloured KC tattoo.
She talked about this and more in “Celine Black’s Jailbait Talks Smack,” the most scandalous article that Vogue had ever published.
Or so I was told, in one of the nicer of the thousands of calls and texts and emails I received in the next two weeks. I tried not to answer them, though, because he was so enraged, he ordered a truckload of plates and bowls and glasses just to break them, after depleting his arsenal.
The photographer was amazing, though: in the picture they published, I looked like a saint.
Saint Trash.
WE FLEW OUT east to start touring.
In New Jersey, a little fat woman yelled at us as we walked along the shore after our show.
“Ya think ya special?”
“Jesus Christ,” Jenna said. “That was Snooki.”
THE PHOTOS HIT TMZ the next day, then detonated.
Page and I in that Berlin hotel bed, passed out, half dressed. Kissing, in the money-shot.
CARNATION KIDS IN LOVE? the headline said, and under the shots of me were others.
There was “Page Marlowe’s Baby Mama” Sophie Birkin, weeping, and another one, that hit hard.
A picture of him, surrounded by cameras and microphones, looking bewildered.
He was holding a peanut-shaped pinata and the “What?” on his lips looked like a kiss.
WE RESUMED THE tour that night.
At our first stop, the Majestic in Detroit, I told the crowd that pictures lie and to stay the fuck out of my private life.
We sawed into “Berlin”: “I want what he took,” I sang.
“My innocence.”
I turned the whispery ending into a fireball and for one second everyone was as still as stone.
I TRIED CALLING him around the clock.
Sent a million texts and emails, called everyone he knew.
I got the freeze.
I told the reporters backstage that the pictures were not what they seemed to be; that I loved him, and only him.
“So much,” I said, “that —”
Jenna dove for the switchblade and missed. One, two crooked lines and I was pouring his name down my dress.
I LET THEM stitch me up, and prayed he would call.
He didn’t.
I saw an interview on MTV where he mumbled about his influences (The Yours, Chet Baker, Uncle Tupelo, Public Enemy) and at the end took off his sunglasses and looked right at me.
We saw it in the record store, where we were promoting Blood Carnation, and I made Q turn it up.
“What have you done?” he said.
The girl interviewing him said, “Me?” and he moved his finger across his throat: stop shooting.
HE WAS IN Melbourne.
Bleach was playing at the reconstructed Palace Theatre when he got hit in the face by a beer bottle, just as someone yelled, “Your girlfriend’s a fucking sluzza.”
He put his guitar down carefully, and left the tour.
The other band members were frantic, and blamed me for this, and for his dark, inscrutable moods.
He left and checked into a room in Helena, emerging only, I would learn, to stand by mailboxes, holding letters covered with drawings of cellular mutations.
This is the letter that I did receive:
I can’t believe that you did this to us. I am remembering how you once opened up for me, all trembling skin and calf eyes, and called me the whole world.
There was no return address.
I felt nauseated. I remembered a lyric of his: “You take the car. I’ll take drugs.”
I did keep the car. And he kept the gun.
HE QUIT THE band then changed his mind; he cut his own wrists, harder and better; he gave interviews from hospital beds, braceleted with bandages, and would only talk about James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle.
And when he did, he would become lachrymose, citing the “dark-blue rain-drenched flower.”
Rumours spread about his mental health, about dope, and me: the devious tarantula.
“Don’t blame her,” he told a reporter who followed him to Marysville.
He kicked a few tumbleweeds and said, “We’ll be back together soon enough. It’s compulsive.”
He meant that in a good way, but the NME’s story “A Ghost in a Ghost Town’s Grave Compulsions” made it seem otherwise.
The last line was, “He is the best musician in the world. And if love doesn’t kill him, he’ll stay that way.”
SPIDER, ASSASSIN, IT didn’t matter: SLITCH prevailed.
We rehearsed every night, but Jenna and I did all the work. I wrote lyrics and fine-tuned my guitar sound, which was occasionally whispery, but largely so fast and hard I needed to tape my arm each night.
My lyrics were straight out of my notebooks. Every song was about him, even the one about Page, a bluebeat song I improvised onstage each time.
It always played off the words wild, sorry, and repent.
WE FOLLOWED BLEACH’S orbit, toured the same towns, but in smaller halls, and we never got bad and nationwide like them. We were rarely invited out of the country except to Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo, cities where we just needed to stand onstage to get reviews like “Korera no utsukushī Amerika hito no on’nanoko wa, jendā no wariate no bōryoku no keibetsu no komento ni tatsu.”
We were tough, but not tough enough to sleep three hours a night, maximum; clean our clothes in laundromats or coffee-shop bathrooms, and piss in jumbo maxi-pads.
We
tried to stay in America, where a lot more was expected: we were pursued for interviews because of our looks, and reviled for the same reason.
We became notoriously difficult interviews: I was always late and Jenna was sullen in the extreme.
I was elected to do the talking, but when I tried to show my books of guitar tablature or talk about the politics that inspired us, we were treated to big yawns and commercial breaks.
“Just talk about clothes,” Sasha said. “You’re the frontwoman, Princess Jasmine.”
The band was becoming a fucking bitchwreck.
I MET MY mother one more time, at the Red Door on Evanston. We ordered drinks, and she noticed a green thing in hers.
“Is it a cricket?” she said, and I rolled my eyes.
She held my hand. “I haven’t seen you since —
“I thought you died,” she said.
“Didn’t I?” I said, and watched her navy-blue mascara run.
People stopped and stared at me, then hurried away when I looked back, venomously. “Where is he?” my mother asked.
I picked through a bag of vintage dresses and started pulling them apart with a crochet hook.
“I think he’s in Kashmir?” I said. “Or Baltimore.”
She looked confused. I excused myself, tied off in the stall, and drifted backwards.
I felt a pain in my wrists, then chest.
When my blood clouded the tube, the pain sat up and stretched.
I saw him as a kid, walking slowly with an injured bird in his hands, gingerly stroking its crooked wing.
“I love him,” I yelled at my mother when I came back out. I yelled it at the bartender, and four guys with quiffs, wearing jean shorts and suspenders.
At mothers on the street pushing their baby strollers like weapons, as I railed outside.
At the sky, into my sweater, and over my heart.
And later, at my band, who were arranging baby turtles in a terrarium. They turned away, their hands filled with little palm trees, stones, and heads of lettuce.
I knew something about love for one huge moment; I saw red church doors burst open, declaiming, It’s all good!
But when the blur came, I forgot everything: I saw my thoughts cross my head and explode, as someone racked and racked a shotgun below.
THE SHOW AT Seattle’s El Corazon would become legendary.
If only for the photograph of me, my leg on the amp and riven skirt riding my thigh as I whipped my hair into a fireball.
I was singing “Let Go,” a song about the idea that we are destined to live the same lives over and over again, unless we let go of everything.
And even though I knew I had to let him go, I wouldn’t.
I HEARD THAT he was in New York for SNL, and called around, trying to reach him, to explain something I didn’t understand myself.
I missed him so much I could practically see my beating heart in his hand.
I thought of how he touched me sometimes, like he was building a ship in a bottle; how he put Kermit bandages on my smallest injuries.
I called around and found him at the Chelsea Hotel, staying in Tennessee Williams’s old room, having discovered, under a plank in the closet, a slip of fine yellow paper that says, “Blanche is mad about the boys.”
“I’m coming for you,” I said, and he sang me the dirtiest song, made up on the spot, that made me stridulate.
He rhymed “go see” with guess what.
SLITCH SET LIST: His Holiness, Plush Dumpster, Pearl Divers, She Takes You, Pageant, The Good China, How Much, Nice to You, Plunge, Press, The Excitable Gift, My Ugly Child, Let Go, Velveteen Sun.
I WAS PACING backstage in a red slip and heels.
I wanted to blow up the world and repave it with sugar-coated glass.
The audience was still clapping when Sophie walked in, and actually tried to hug me.
I asked her for a light, blinking as if I couldn’t remember who she was. She still looked beautiful, but I was a demon by then — I took all the energy from the room and exhaled it in plumes.
Someone handed me a bottle of champagne, and said it was from Page. Sophie overheard this and said, “You’re still the same ugly bitch you always were.”
She was so angry, her words came out in squeaks.
I exhaled a wobbly circle, then flicked my cigarette in her face. She started to run and I chased her into the alley. I was kicking her rib cage when the bouncers pulled me off, laughing.
She lay there, saying, “Ow,” and I stared at the tiny ribbon of blood escaping from between her lips.
I snatched it up and wound it through my hair, went inside, and someone grabbed me and I curled into a ball and got fired back into the screaming crowd, who seized my rings and bracelets; felt and entered my body with their hands, and bit me until I was black and blue.
“I’m going to New York,” I announced to the girls, who were backstage drinking Thunderbird.
I was drenched in blood and beaming: they whistled and clapped.
AS THEIR RECORD stayed planted at number one, Bleach took a short break.
He used the time to write something new. A song called “The Lady Grace,” about me.
He called Mercury and sang it to him; then the three of them met in his hotel room and fine-tuned it.
They recorded it at a small local studio called Hazmat, using primitive equipment.
In the song, I am a beautiful girl enchanted by a beast; on the B-side, “What Has She Done,” I wear a hood and Alex DeLarge T-shirt, and break into his room with a bayonet.
He worried about the songs’ reception: good and bad reviews were insufferable to him.
The songs’ quiet beauty and lovesickness were devastating.
Their new sound — a silvery, dissonant kind of hillbilly music — attracted a new audience, and a fair amount of cynicism about their credibility.
Bleach’s fame enlarged so much that even Mercury was nervous, and started carrying a taser.
But he and James were cautiously hopeful about the show, and a big festival gig that he hadn’t said yes or no to, so far.
They took a break one day and drank mushroom tea. He told them how slowly things once moved.
Mercury was about to say, “How the fuck would you know?” when he saw something in his face that made him shut his mouth.
They took a cab to Academy Records.
He went inside and stood in front of the James Brown records, and touched each one.
When he did, I felt the touch correspond to each vertebra, and jumped.
I EMAILED HIM at the hotel’s address, “Wait for me.”
I arrived with a set of Louis Vuitton luggage and Luscious, the very large, cultivated personal assistant Q hired to keep an eye on me.
We were dressed in striped jerseys, black peg-legs, and silver wigs: the old man at the desk didn’t blink.
“Welcome to the Chelsea Hotel,” he said.
I waited.
“What, you need help?” he said, before snapping his fingers and summoning Sammy, a Spanish kid in a denim bodysuit.
I found him in the register as “Jah Wobble,” and asked for their best suite.
“For you,” he said, “we’ll even change the sheets.”
He was at Rockefeller Center. I had his stuff brought to the room. Their best suite, it turned out, was an L-shaped room with a mini-fridge, balcony, and painting of Janis Joplin slapping Leonard Cohen across the face.
Luscious took off: I told him to meet us in a few days.
I ordered ginger ale and cigarettes from the deli, and took out my kit. The blood poured in like rain and I shook it off and sank into the softest bed of pine needles, remembering that I was a married lady.
THIS HAD HAPPENED in Las Vegas, out in the desert with a reverend named Bobby Socks, four touris
ts in identical Habana shirts and slacks, and a bouquet of white peonies.
We drove in the middle of the night after he slipped a ring on my finger, a moonstone set in black branches, and asked me, on his knee with me crying and saying, “Yes, yes,” and then all night wound around each other, slippery and shining.
We signed forms to get a hyphen, to be Evelyn and Celine Gray-Black. They were expensive forgeries: he had no ID other than a laminated picture of Kurt Cobain’s driver’s licence that I made him carry for emergencies.
We wrote vows that we swore we would not make fun of. He said, “I love you more than drugs,” and I said, “I died dreaming of you,” and the Reverend Socks united us as our feet sank in the hot sand and our tears turned into visions of ice-cold lakes and torrid rivers.
On our honeymoon in New Mexico, we stood above the Rio Grande gorge, and he carved our names on the bridge as my scarf unwound and fainted beneath us, landing like a vein in the stones.
We saw a crashed car as small as a Hot Wheels, and he loosened my hair and I squirmed as he whispered about the things he planned to do to me that night at the Sagebrush Inn.
I WOKE UP in the dark hotel room, and shook off my dreams.
I was wearing a little cast; the lampshades were scorched, the curtains turned up in blackened flounces.
Cold lips were kissing my feet, ankles, then knees.
I tried to sit up, but he pinned me down and I thanked God when his mouth slipped then found me, then, felt my body arch up.
“Nothing happened,” I started to say, and he stopped me.
“I believe you,” he said. And kissed me so hard that our teeth crashed.
I was so grateful, I bit my shoulder as he tore into me. But it still hurt enough that I asked if we could wait for a bit.
“Let it bleed,” he said.
“THE SONGS ARE beautiful,” I told him, and he allowed himself one flash of pleasure before waving me off.
“I fucked them up,” he said.
“Then they’re beautiful fuck-ups,” I said, and tried to play them, but he ripped the jump drive out of my computer.
“Who are they about?” I said.
“The worst woman in the world,” he said, and I melted. He said it as he held my face in his hands, and showed me the pine trees in his aquamarine eyes.