by Lynn Crosbie
In mine, the sun burns the seas and lakes and rivers: fish and whales thrash in the scorched basins among sunken ships and pestilence.
I was most afraid of the nightmares I wrote down, then scribbled over.
In one of the worst, I am walking slowly towards a letter that is stabbed into a mound of potting soil.
I read it, then write the name of my childhood friend at the top.
Except I am calling him to come and save me and my hands jitter the soil to the floor of the dirty little room, where tulips burst forth, tiger-streaked and roaring.
WHEN WE BOUGHT the cottage, it was in bad shape. The owner jacked up the price because “Kurt Cobain used to live here.”
“Played his guitar right under there,” he said, flapping his hand in the direction of about a million trees.
“Sometimes he spooks around here, I heard him,” the guy — an old flat-top in a dashiki and cargo shorts — said. “He was saying Murder, I swear to God.”
“Fucking nuts,” I said, handing over a huge cheque.
“Who, Kurt?” he said, before kissing all the zeros.
I TOLD MISTY we were going to Carnation. The cottage there is actually two buildings. One is an old shack, connected to a mansion in progress — that Evelyn was overseeing, whenever she remembered — by a bridge.
The shack is nothing but windows that I draped with sheets I would sometimes let fall.
“Look at me,” I would say to fawns, bears, and whirling pine needles.
I always stayed in the shack part. Sometimes trucks arrived, and a crew would unload golden armoires and red velvet chaise longues, boxes marked FRAGILE; once, a panelled wet bar and case after case of Martini & Rossi.
“There’s this girl,” I said.
GENERAL LEE DROPPED us off at the airport and kept going.
“Zài jiàn,” he said, and “上帝帮助你.”
We checked in wearing our size XXL Bikini Inspector tees: Misty was dumbfounded by first class. When the hot towels came around, he seized a handful and covered his face as he leaned as far back as he could.
“This is living!” he said to a suit behind him, who smiled, superciliously.
He watched everything available on the tiny TV, drank until he was drunk, and didn’t notice when I grabbed my kit from my bag and went to the bathroom, where I dozed until the pretty stewardess tapped at the door and I pulled her inside and played with her bubble butt as the plane leapfrogged clouds.
“Where were you?” Misty said when I got back. He sounded scared.
“This is the fun part,” I said as the turbulence increased.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote, on the back of one of her messages, “The flesh and the fantasy.”
I sang the rest of the song: it was all coming back to me now.
THE SONGS WROTE themselves.
“The Lady Grace” and its B-side went straight to the top of the charts.
I wrote and wrote: “What more can I give you, it’s all gone blue/The beauty still inside you is dying too.”
Words framed by a steel guitar, brushed drums, and strings, being coaxed by a solicitous bow.
MISTY AND I settled into a corner of the cottage with a kerosene lamp and dinner cooked on sticks.
“I want a whole string section for the songs, the ones about losing her,” I told him as we lay side by side in sleeping bags.
“Then I want to filter them to a sigh.”
“Are you sure that you lost her?” he asked dreamily.
He loved how quiet it was in the country; the stockpiled canned goods and the gold-and-cream-coloured cow that ambled by, now and then, wearing a bell.
“No,” I said, thinking that maybe she hadn’t really changed; that maybe she really did have to leave.
That she wasn’t really with Marlowe.
When I went to New York, I was going to break up with her.
When she said that nothing happened, I knew she was lying. And that’s why I started going after other girls, after any other girl but her.
I tried, I mean. But she always got in the way.
“I’ll never love anyone else,” she had said to me, so quickly.
“I won’t even kiss anyone but you,” she said, when we were alone and making pasta art with construction paper, glue, and sparkles.
“You saved me!” she exclaimed, holding up a picture she painted of me, extending my arms to her as she tumbled down the hill that terrible night.
A blue watercolour balloon expanding from my mouth. Inside, it said, in deeper blue, “You are beautiful.”
I felt embarrassed by how young she seemed at the time, with her flushed cheeks, messy hair, and great big smile.
But the tears in her eyes were genuine pearls, that lay on the breast of her black nightgown like the stately matai; and the swell of her hips was the chorus to a rapturous song I hadn’t written. Not yet.
“Not yet,” she said, when I roughly pushed her to the floor and opened her legs.
“I want to remember everything,” she said, and slowly undressed us both, before rolling into a ball and pulling me inside her.
“Hey,” Misty said. He had found a picture online, of her straddling an amp.
I rolled around the sleeping bag restlessly, remembering how we locked together then and later. That we slept that way.
Misty had retrieved the picture of Evelyn and Page in bed.
“Something happened in Berlin,” I said. “Evelyn was pretty banged up.”
“Yeah, by Page Marlowe,” he said. Then he started apologizing, over and over, tripping on his words.
“It’s okay,” I said, watching the night feed through the windows.
“You’re right.”
MISTY KEPT PLAYING this song called “Friend of a Friend.”
“This is our new jam,” he said.
When I listened to it, I felt cold and enervated.
“Yeah, this is it,” he said.
We slapped palms, and a part of me looked back into the distance, wanting friends, wanting something I had, that I ruined, and couldn’t remember.
Any more than the platinum blond woman I dreamed of, many nights, whose mournful eyes look like UFOs releasing tiny Paraíba tourmalines from their soaked black hatches.
In these dreams, I am a swan, spreading my wings to show her the reach of my love. She always turns away.
I SLEPT IN the woods, on a bed of whitebark pine needles, beneath the dense trees that blocked out the moonlight.
I never looked at another girl; I never would have.
Looking at her was like staring into the sun until everything else becomes wavy and white.
I thought of her with him, and started to dig my own grave. And then I cried along with the nighthawks, the herons, and the mockingbirds. With the coyotes and minks and otters; with the prayers I heard striving towards Heaven, one chain link at a time.
When I woke up, Misty had covered me with a blanket.
He brought me a coffee, saw my tear- and dirt-grimed face, and politely averted his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“I am better than all right,” I said, stretching.
I picked up the shovel and threw it into the woods.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said, dragging the blanket over the cold, packed earth and wet, razed grass.
Because he looked worried, I hugged him, quickly, and he yelped with delight.
YOU WILL NEVER KNOW MY TRUE INTENTIONS.
I wrote this on the Surf n Crash wall, but I don’t remember why.
I know that she used to leave me similar messages in lipstick. Once, she wrote I LOVE YOU MORE, which made me feel as though I had lost a contest.
That same night, she and I fought and broke everything in the place, including th
e windows, defenestrated by the fat-bellied TV, and the shower curtain I wore as a sari when she burned my clothes in the parking lot.
She fell asleep on the bare bed and I lay facing her, thinking, “I hate you,” with such force she shuddered.
“I hate my teenage-slut girlfriend” was first on a list, headed SHAME, that was scrolling through my head in Star Wars type.
The other things are still folded inside, like blood coughed into a napkin.
YEAH, SO I hated my teenage whore-girlfriend, the retarded singer she was fucking, and his shit band.
And I was ashamed about things I remembered in pieces: killing little animals, a lawn filled with mutilated baby frogs, a defective girl’s frightened tears.
With these memories came the sense of human flesh as meat, hot and quivering.
Aspirating blood and fear.
I WAS WRITING junk-slowly in the Little Mermaid notebook Evelyn got for me from the Dollar Tree.
She used it to write her own lyrics when she was starting out: we alternated pen colours to keep our words straight.
She wrote in blue about a bird’s belly filled with cicadas and music. I wrote in black about a monkey drawing the steel bars of its cage like a staff. We both wrote about ourselves, about power and pain; about chunks of nausea and bliss.
In “Where He Was,” she wrote, of me, “Coming down, and watching me drown.”
In “Scream,” I wrote about her mouth as a velvet loveseat, ejecting heart-shaped foam and sharp springs.
I was writing about the music, of all the days spent holed up and dreaming the words and melodies between deep, black sleep and the eternity of figure eights we made, bound happily together.
I looked at the list of things that made me feel so bad, and felt nothing.
At one of her baby pictures, which she had taped to the inside cover.
I crumpled it up and tossed it.
This feeling was better than heroin. It was anger and humiliation, fused and honed into a sharp edge.
Better than the gun.
The story was changing.
I HAD TO see her one more time, but first I wanted to finish the Lady Grace songs and walk around my old life a bit.
Misty handed me a sheet of paper, blank, with one header: FIND THE GIRL.
“Let’s go, I said.
I was ready to call the girl from Linda’s Tavern who used to say, “What would you like?” so provocatively I would feel the blood rush from my head and pool below my belt.
The girl I made promise to meet me at the cottage with a bag of dope and frilly panties with the crotch cut out.
I was in rehab and I jumped the fence for her.
TWELVE
BONA FIDE HUSTLER
Why did I leave?
It’s true that our addictions had changed. Mine was like a sick baby and his was like a hell-bent night-stalker.
I would always cave long before him, and I never did like playing chicken.
We were both insatiable, but I always could stop when I needed to.
But the real reason I could never admit is that when I watched him that night in New York, I also watched everyone else watching him, and wanted it. I wanted to feel what he felt, all the time.
I wanted even more.
And I knew, deep down, that he was falling apart. That there would be violence.
THIS IS WHAT happened.
During Bleach’s first song, I was called to the phone.
“Take a message,” I said, staring at him as he stood stock-still, swiping at his guitar.
Then I looked at the girl. She was lit up, excited. “It’s Page Marlowe,” she said.
I took the call, apprehensively.
“I never told you. I had my picture taken for Melody Maker,” he said. “With your marks all over me.”
I felt anxious, but I didn’t know what he was talking about.
I didn’t say anything.
Page apologized, again.
“Berlin was weird,” he said. “But you need to get back.”
He told me about all the shoots and interviews and sessions I was missing; that I sounded high.
It was true that our little habit had become something full-blown that I wanted to stop. He wanted to nourish it instead: all of his drawings of the Plush Dumpster had become fringed with poppy fields.
“Don’t let him drag you down with him.”
I thought of him falling asleep during a Bleach meeting; of his disdain for all of my interviews — “You sound like a politician”; and his dream of us moving to Peru to become dance instructors for at-risk sex workers.
He only cared about music, and would be happy working as a telephone solicitor if we could still get high, write songs, and have pizza whenever we wanted.
Pulling the phone cord, I inched back to the curtain and saw his eyes rolled back as he shouted: they looked like milk-white stones; his mouth was slack and wet.
Then I saw a big bouquet of roses and a sash, with my name spelled out in black.
“There’s a car outside,” Page said.
I loved my husband. My arms actually ached from squeezing and scratching him all night in a blistering fever.
When he slept, I held him as if he were my son.
I was confused and determined, all at once.
The note I left was addressed to “Sadness.” I walked through the door and into the gold Lincoln, driven by a blond man in a long fur coat and glittering chauffeur’s cap.
DURING BREAKS IN shooting the “Pageant” video — in which I was filmed, dressed as Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, firing at the Miss Teen USA ceremony with a flame-thrower — I missed him and watched an old interview on YouTube.
In it, he talks about shooting his video “Anything,” about how I crashed the filming with a six-foot hero sandwich (“peanut butter and jelly”) and a case of Yoo-hoos.
He laughs and calls me his “delicate herbivore.”
Page had dropped by. He smacked my back and said, “Why is he so gay?”
Knowing I had made a mistake, I stood up when I was called, looped my guitar strap over my shoulder, and played the faint notes that precipitated the crash of the song.
PAGE DIDN’T GIVE up.
He recorded another song about me — “Carnation Queen” — with a two-minute whistling solo.
He sent me diamond earrings in a beveled glass box; he bought me sky-high Versace shoes and a black fur coat that I donated to an animal shelter.
Every morning there was a romantic text, like “I want to sleep with your hair in my mouth forever.”
But everything he did or said felt familiar, somehow. It wasn’t just the plagiarized sentiment. He felt and smelled wrong.
I couldn’t say that I was afraid of him.
I couldn’t.
We were photographed covering our faces and ducking into hotels and clubs.
“My husband needs help,” I said to the shouting reporters. I said this as the tracks on my arm opened and ejaculated spoiled blood.
I could stop any time I wanted.
BLEACH WAS INTERVIEWED about “The Lady Grace.”
James and Mercury deferred to him: they didn’t want to talk about what the song meant.
I downloaded it, and played it over and over again.
He started writing the song when I was in Berlin.
In the first verse, I am turning over earth in a field, and planting dragon’s teeth.
These teeth grow quickly into an entire army that musters behind and around me, an army that he can’t fight.
I THOUGHT OF a quiet night when we were both a bit sick, and Speck crawled between us as we whispered to each other in cracked voices and felt our fever reach the ceiling.
He was on TV, talking about the record, and I still found it hard to
admit to myself how his beauty affected me, how, as he spoke, my hands still moved involuntarily towards the screen, to hold his face.
How I could see, in his tired eyes, the exact second he was sick of answering questions.
“Our new record will be a funk-meets-doo-wop thing, with fuzz-boxes, chainsaws, and onstage pop and lock moves,” he said, and I laughed.
“Are you afraid?” the woman asked, out of nowhere, and he was visibly startled.
“Yes,” he said. “What? No.”
HE TALKED ABOUT Maldoror, a book that he had read and reread, many times.
About having a need for the infinite that he could not fulfill.
In the novel, dogs, consumed with this desire, tear each other apart.
“They think that they are something else, something bigger. And we’re not,” he says.
“Wait, ‘we’?”
“Well, me.
“And her,” he said, getting up and excusing himself.
I FOUND THE lyrics in the notebooks I grabbed from the car we ditched in Eureka, among drawings and lists, songs and the letters he never sends.
Everything was in plastic bags from different Kwik-E-Marts and delis: a collection of narratives. Each bag contained a scribbled-on receipt, torn-out news clippings, and up to four objects, like licorice-pipes, or a kid’s hat; a scarlet leaf in waxed paper, the cashier’s photograph, clipped from her ID.
And books, and little notebooks.
He wrote down everything, good and bad. His kindness stood out, though.
He praised artists who were beyond obscure, including a telephone lineman who had recited him some poems while working near our house, and the local librarian, Mrs. Lipmann, who wore small curly wigs as hats and made concrete poetry out of concrete blocks.
Below a bad review of a friend’s book, he wrote, “The trees surrendered their lives with pride, you complete hack.”
Dagger-shaped tears flowed from a story about a girl’s rape on a dance floor.
Across an ugly picture of me, he wrote “GODDESS.”
“What if,” he wrote, remembering our lavish dinner, “those scorpions are out chariot-racing in the desert?
“And then they go gambling at the Sands. The scorpion-king has this infallible mind for roulette. Black 17! he roars, snapping at his pyramid of chips!”