Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  WE SHARED A shot, and looked at Sammy, who we had sent away earlier.

  At him nodding in a club chair, a still-warm bag of sandwiches in his lap.

  Q texted me sometime in the middle of our nervous reunion.

  Blood Carnation had broken the top ten and he needed me back.

  “Like yesterday,” he wrote.

  I stroked my sweetheart’s dandelion head and blew. Its seeds scattered through the room and inside me in bursts of light.

  “I’ll be there,” I wrote, and I told the moon and the moonstone that I had everything now.

  BLEACH PLAYED AN unpublicized show at the Roseland Ballroom.

  We showed up late, carrying a pail: he had thrown up twice on the way, and I stole it from a 99 Cents Only store.

  He wore a leopard-skin coat, hunter’s hat, and pink sunglasses that matched his flowered shirt; I wore a boy’s suit, with spike heels.

  James said hello; Mercury didn’t.

  The show was astonishing: he sang from a hole in his heart and at the end fell backwards into the crowd, who reverently passed him back, then forward.

  I watched from backstage. I looked at all the soaked faces, the waving arms, then he looked back at me, and nodded, lightly.

  I was electrocuted. I hung on to the curtain until he came back; I peeled off his shirt, towelled him off, sat on his lap, and snapped, “He’s mine!” at the advancing groupies.

  “You’re so big,” I whispered, pulling my own top over my head to press my heart against his.

  THE NEXT DAY, we skipped the SNL rehearsal to cop some more dope, and went to the Museum of Natural History to stare at the gigantic blue whale.

  When one kid, a little girl, asked for his autograph, his name crawled with self-loathing.

  We walked around slowly, smashed into each other, waded through stores and streets, and sometimes people called out to us or asked us questions.

  “Give me money,” an old lady demanded, on Twenty-third Street.

  We filled her hands, which I noticed were immaculate, her fingers decked out in pewter lions and fish.

  “I love your rings,” I said, and she snapped, “You’re ruining everything!”

  Back at the Chelsea, we walked upwards, winding past painting after painting, and we stopped as our heads spun with colour and light and kissed and kissed, we were still kissing when it was night and his band started banging on the door saying, “We go on in five minutes!”

  HE WAS NERVOUS, and agitated.

  “I don’t think I like this anymore,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I told him he would be fine. That I would be there, “clapping and blowing kisses like everyone else.”

  They performed “The Song You Made Us Play” and “Vagismus.”

  He wore a red knit hat, jeans, and a striped T-shirt; his long hair tied back with an elastic band.

  They played so well, there was a sense of profound absolution. They were asked to do an encore, which “never happens,” the show flak said.

  He pulled out a chair and played, with his acoustic, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” and everyone was shocked into a silence that spoke of things jammed in the throat.

  At the part where he held the note in the word shiver; the part where he howled and closed his eyes, I closed my own eyes and stopped breathing.

  ELEVEN

  YOU KNOW YOU’RE RIGHT / CELINE

  I opened my eyes and she was gone.

  There was an envelope on her chair, a note that said, “NOT HERE. NOT CLAPPING. SORRY.”

  Our hotel key was wrapped in the paper.

  “That was our last show,” I told the audience, and ducked when Mercury threw an amp, before running after James.

  I went backstage and a leggy girl sat on my lap and told me my eyes looked like Smurfs, totally like Smurfs, and I let her.

  Because everyone was watching; because Ev was already on TV, surrendering a six-pack of malt liquor at the airport.

  And because I had been swallowing my rage since I first saw those pictures of her and Page Marlowe.

  While fucking everyone in sight.

  I got pushed into a car aimed at the after-party. I cracked the door at a stoplight, and rolled onto the street. No one noticed. I passed newsstands and saw my face on magazines, looking sick and pathetic.

  “You!” a little gangbanger said as I passed by.

  I unearthed pay phones and called her as I walked, smashing the phone down each time she answered.

  I left the receivers dangling. All these pitch-black hangings and a loathing so profound it made me feel alive.

  I located her bass player, through the engineer, who was a friend, then hung up on him as he said, “Women be shopping.”

  I heard her crash into the cymbals as she rushed to the phone.

  “Sable, get your fat ass to New York.”

  She did, and I made her do all the work. I just lay there, in fact, as she popped up and down.

  I wasn’t there.

  I was listening to the Jupiter Symphony with Evelyn; I was extracting the notes from the curve of her pink sateen hip and promising, again, that I would never love anyone else.

  SHE JUST SEEMED so lost and lonely, and vaguely attractive.

  I liked the way she looked at me; I liked listening to her talk.

  And talk. About Captains America, Beefheart, and Ahab; La Traviata and Travis Bickle; moon rocks, moonstones, the Apollo moonwalk, and moonwalking at the Apollo; my ass in her hands the deluxe by-product of an irritated oyster who, having reached Ithaca at last, says, simply, “Meh.”

  Burnt toast offerings, the sacred heart, the BVM, long-term investments in short-term acts of terrorism, terror as a form of cultural grooming, hairspray weaponry, the muscles of love, each brush stroke of The Starry Night corresponding with the post-period tail of Pi, anemones, enemies, mania —

  The staff cleaned around me.

  The tourniquet, a neon rubber tube, stayed on my arm like I was at a rave, and I heard the maid named Queen say, “He has dolls,” as she dusted an army of tin soldiers I had baked, painted, and dressed to kill.

  I WENT OUT to get cigarettes, a chocolate Yoo-hoo, and some pound cake from the deli, and emailed Misty from a strange girl’s phone, writing laboriously.

  “I never took typing class,” I told the girl, and she said, “Me neither,” but it came out like a squeal and she shrank inside her cat-ear hooded sweatshirt.

  I told him I was at the Chelsea, that I had a job for him, and to write back ASAP.

  He did, and the diffident girl showed me his letter.

  “I’m there,” he wrote.

  “Thanks,” I said to the girl, who was failing miserably at looking cool.

  “Nice pussy,” I said, kissing her cheek.

  She attached herself to me like a limpet.

  I saw Misty turn the corner and gently pried her off.

  “I’ll never forget you,” she said, running away quickly.

  Her cellphone was jammed in her mouth, I noticed. I shook my head, and moved towards Misty.

  He was carrying everything he owned in a paper bag.

  “What’s the job?” he said.

  WE WENT TO a bar, and I asked Misty to be my personal assistant.

  I was too enervated to make it sound fancy. “You’d just do things for me, all the time. And charge me, I don’t know, a thousand dollars? Every week?”

  He swallowed hard.

  “I’d do it for free,” he said.

  “Don’t,” I said. “It’s real work. We have to find someone. And I need you to help, to run interference, stay on top of my calls and all that shit, and keep people away, when I don’t want to be found.”

  Misty burrowed through his belongings, pulling out a jade sculpture of a pony.

>   “Keep this,” he said, handing me the pony, which I managed to send to Evelyn with a note: “Hang on to this. If at all possible.”

  He got me soup and dope and magazines.

  Sat beside me on the edge of the bed and read me what they said about her and me.

  She was inside all of the tabloids, and a couple of trashy magazines. Shopping on Rodeo Drive, in a tiny chair by a catwalk, onstage, in bed.

  “Is there more?” I said.

  He opened up windows on the laptop I had him buy, and patiently moved the cursor.

  TMZ had acquired a new picture of her and Page Marlowe, taken before she came to New York. He is holding her from behind, and her eyes are closed.

  I was all over the place too. On the cover of one of the indie music magazines, it said THE SECOND GOING OF CELINE BLACK.

  I looked like a huge pussy.

  “I like that picture of you,” Misty said, and I told him to fuck off.

  He cringed and I apologized.

  A lot of our friendship was like that.

  MISTY SOMETIMES WROTE on a legal pad titled “My Movie Reviews” as I blinked in and out of sentience.

  “Read me some?”

  He turned to The Great Gatsby. “This movie about how a man’s sublime face, its form and function, resists interpretation by the introduction of a severely brain-damaged cast, whose lumbering and moaning —”

  I didn’t hear the rest; I had nodded off.

  I wish that I had kept listening, as though that unfinished sentence were a blinking green light inviting access and forbidding it at the same time.

  SHE CALLED, LEAVING messages with the concierge, day and night.

  I folded the white slips into Ninja stars, and threw them at Misty.

  I wrote all day in the hotel room, scored at night, and sat on fire escapes, listening.

  “Oh, the stars, how they do sing,” a spindly old man said one night, craning his head.

  I drew chord progressions and made epidemiological maps of current diseases and plagues, using a compass and Speed Racer stickers.

  I found one of her letters to dead people, addressed to “Mr. Sinatra,” smiled involuntarily, and added it to my notebook.

  I played her music and quietly came undone.

  Misty listened to my lyrics and letters and ideas and became distraught when my voice was slurred because his mother, who left him at a bus station when he was eleven, was a strait-razor-carrying drunk.

  I wrote about pain the most. How I felt, and what people I would like to injure.

  Several were music journalists who wrote about us with chilling sarcasm.

  “You have shredded me apart,” I wrote to them. “You have never risked anything.”

  “I think you’re brave,” Misty said, crossing his arms over the lattice of scars on his torso.

  I was limp with sadness all of a sudden.

  “I can’t go through it again,” I said, crawling into the bed from its foot.

  “What’s it like?” Misty asked, sitting on the floor with his back to me.

  “You piss yourself out of fear, not like they say, like it’s a natural thing.”

  “Gross.”

  “And in the BANG, you hear everything, like the bang is a box and inside it is —”

  “Um, wind chimes?”

  “Okay, and catgut. An animal crying; blocks assembling the word LOVE; grace notes, stepped-on notes, notes held and ripped apart; stings, smacks, pangs, skin defibrillating skin, the word No, then please, then No.”

  “No,” Misty said quietly, and slept with his mouth open, twitching.

  Another white message glided under the door. “Your wife is sorry she missed you, and she loves you. P.S. I heard some man laughing in the background. This is Sammy.”

  I tried to slap Misty’s head, because it was time to check out, I thought, but my hand landed and stayed there and we both lay, suspended, until the room was black with the sound of good shoes and sibilant skirts.

  “THERE IS NO room 100,” the concierge told a middle-aged man with a dyed black comb-over.

  “You think getting stabbed in the stomach with a buck knife is sexy?” he inquired mildly of the man’s heavy blond wife.

  Misty checked us out and arranged for a driver.

  As he talked on his phone, I crouched by the check-in desk and jabbed at the faintest of my track marks.

  “The show is coming up,” he said, “in New Jersey, and we need to get you clean.”

  It occurred to me that my management and band were paying Misty as well, to keep me alive and present when they needed me to be.

  “What show? What are they paying you?” I asked him.

  Then my outrage wandered away: never do junk if you need to finish thoughts, sentences, or simple tasks.

  He heaved me onto his shoulders after packing a few trash bags. I had made one of Evelyn’s notes into a little hat, and was wearing it with cowboy pyjamas, black slides, and the Freddy Krueger sweater she knit me during a long stay at the Crown City Inn in Coronado.

  OUR DRIVER, AN exquisite Chinese man named General Lee, made only the faintest moue of distaste when I threw up in one of the bags.

  “My notebooks are in there,” I said, thinking of all the taxis and hotels and, once, a flooded bathtub where I have left my writing.

  I remember too how Evelyn lost the Necronomicon at a saloon in Dallas one night when we were doing shots with some cowboys.

  We raced back at 5 a.m. and broke a window while I kept the car running; found it in a puddle of incontinence so disgusting she could barely bring herself to touch it.

  Misty was all business. He had managed to procure a blazer, which he wore with his crease-pressed jeans and a knock-off Nirvana T-shirt.

  “When you did the first Unplugged —” he said, finger-combing his thin, mouse-coloured hair.

  “You don’t get to remember anything,” I said, interrupting him. “I know what you know, what she knows. That’s it.”

  Misty frowned. “How do you know you ever were him?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” I said, turning over to sleep.

  He could not have known about the things that rushed through me, how they sank, then pulled.

  Impossibly bright, glimmering intimations of happiness, possibly joy.

  All I remembered was latching on, at last, and then the sound and the darkness.

  I started talking in my sleep and Misty woke me up.

  “I was just remembering something,” he said.

  “I went fishing when I was a kid and brought home a decent-sized bass.

  “My mom served it whole, and uncooked, in a pool of blood.

  “‘You better eat every little bone and both eyes,’ she said.

  “‘I dressed the goddamn thing for hours!’”

  He told me that it was hooked into a coral gown and crowned with radish roses; that its scales glittered among the plated hibiscus flowers.

  “She ended up beating me,” he said, “But it wasn’t my fault.” That night was the first time he tried to kill himself, he said, and every night since he had cut himself, in a massive variety of depths and lengths.

  One of his heavy, scar-gloved hands rested on my head; he extended the other through the window, pawing at the cool air, and said, “It’s not your fault either.”

  I told him that I knew.

  It was hers.

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” I asked.

  “To this rehab place near Atlantic City,” Misty said. “Then back to the studio for the show. Oh, and then we can find that person you’re looking for.”

  The band, Misty told me, had been asked to do an Unplugged show, and more. James and Mercury had been trying to reach me, with no luck.

  Mercury, who knew me well, took out an ad in the NYC Crai
gslist, which I found during my daily, obsessive scan of each section, including discussion groups about Linux, crafts, and kink.

  “You: Our amazing lead singer and guitarist. Us: Fucked. CALL!” it said in Missed Connections.

  I did call, from the road, and he was so happy to hear from me, I ended up agreeing to do the show.

  “I think we just need to sit and talk,” he said, and I agreed, as my attention drifted to the path of a supple coyote, picking its way through the scorched grass.

  Misty hung up the phone I dropped and told me more about the rehab centre.

  “They have a guest cabin, where I’m staying,” he said, “and mystery and archery nights.”

  Misty was excited because it was his first road trip.

  “Road trip!” he said constantly, even getting General Lee involved.

  He made us stop in little towns on the way.

  In Toms River, I posed for pictures looking miserable and eating a sprinkle-covered donut, slapping the haunches of a mermaid statue; kissing a fan so big she is being wheelbarrowed to the gas station; wearing foam sunglasses and drinking a can of Rolling Rock, shotgun-style.

  I photographed Misty and General Lee showing off their biceps by Cattus Island, fist-bumping under a neon girlie-show sign, and laughing as a lady in a housecoat chases them for stealing her flowered panties off the line.

  “Take our picture?” he asked a teenaged boy, who took a beautiful shot even though he was shaking.

  Then we had to find a place to develop and frame it for the dashboard, and because it was a Target and sold bags of cotton candy, the car was filled with yellow, pink, and blue clouds.

  As we drove, Misty started emptying what he called our “Beach Fun” bags. He was holding up three plastic shovels when I told the General to forget the plan.

  “I’m not going to a fucking rehab, I’m happy this way. And they can shoot the show in Seattle, because I’m going home.”

  Not to our house, though. To the cottage.

  I CONVINCED HER to get the cottage one night at the Mount Angel Inn, after we got high and confessed doomsday scenarios to each other.

  Hers involved muscular Aliens, forcefully occupying guest rooms and demanding obscene meals and services, like “Bring me a barrel of ham hocks, toplessly, and prepare to be whipped without mercy!”