Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  There was a loud murmur, which was equal parts condemnation and approbation.

  “You make me hurl,” I said.

  “And you’re perfect, right?”

  “No,” I said, and then, in a rush, “I was hanging out with a guy for a while and one night he fucked me when I was too tired to say no. We were high, and it felt so good. But I got hurt, and I was sorry.

  “Is that rape?”

  “Yes,” everyone said, nodding their heads.

  “It’s not that simple!” I said, and stood up.

  He was standing in the hall, pinning up invitations to the “Squeaky-Clean Jamboree.”

  “I’m gone,” I told him, and flew down the hall.

  He lumbered steadily behind me.

  “Stop. What’s happening?”

  I turned, pinched the fabric of his nubby beige robe, and flicked his belly, hard.

  “Forget it, you’d never understand.”

  I packed the last of my stuff. He kept trying to get me to talk. At one point he just sat on my trunk, so I went out for a cigarette and a fat bump and the shit hit the fan, what else is new.

  HE FOUND MY notebook.

  When I returned, he was sitting on the edge of my bed.

  He was rail-thin, dressed in shredded jeans and a kid’s-size white T-shirt.

  His white hair fell in glaciers to his shoulders; his eyes were icy blue jewels.

  “You loved him?” he said curtly.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what I feel, or felt. I just —”

  “You enjoyed it?” The words were like a lethal dwarf avalanche.

  “No! Well, my body did, but —”

  “Let’s go,” he said flatly, as Misty — who had been staying at one of the guest cottages — appeared, gathered up his stuff, and led him away from me.

  “I’ll see you at home,” he said.

  “Oh, you total fuck-up,” Roman said from the doorway.

  He and Misty jumped the fence.

  I followed him, a short time later, stood on the highway and stuck out my thumb.

  I had one dead phone and the clothes on my back.

  SEATTLE = LOVE YOU LONG TIME, my sign said.

  I was all grown up.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SOME VELVET MORNING WHEN I’M STRAIGHT

  The eighteen-wheeler’s bumper sticker said GIT R DONE across a Confederate flag.

  I got in and started talking over the sound of the hogs in the trailer, talking to Earl, who was hauling them to a slaughterhouse near the airport, close enough for me to get some money and fly home.

  I was telling him about a dance they had one night at the rehab, where they hung little white lights in the trees and he spun me around —

  “About that loving me,” the trucker said: stroking his fat, stumpy dick.

  It was my own fault, but as I bent down, I saw a crowbar, grabbed it, and came up swinging.

  I left him on the side of the road, and drove straight to

  the Best Friends Animal Society in Angel Canyon.

  When we got there, they lumbered off the truck, stunned.

  I tore the diamonds out of my ears and gave them to the director, then called 911 and reported the driver’s location.

  I charged my phone in the office and sat there quietly, watching the pigs rumble through ravines, in the warm shadows of shingled escarpments.

  The new list was called YOU WILL NOT! and the first entry was DEGRADE YOURSELF.

  The list would be long; my life would be hard.

  But there was still some faint hope for the velvet morning.

  I SPENT THE night there, and was woken up at dawn by the one-eyed rooster.

  Q called: “What are you doing in Utah?”

  He had FedExed over my purse and suitcase, and was screaming at me as I walked around, petting rescued lizards and rats, a motherless baby bear.

  “I put a flag on the play,” I said.

  “I read about the truck driver,” he said, lowering his voice. “They’re talking permanent brain damage, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Like anyone would notice,” I said.

  I told him about rehab, about him singing “I’ll Make Love to You” in front of everyone while beaming at me; about the hapless staff.

  About meetings where people confessed to disgusting venality — “Q, this one guy was found in bed with his dead, naked son and calls this day his ‘wake-up call.’”

  “I’ve been in AA ten years,” he said. “Saved my life.”

  I didn’t know anything about him, I realized.

  “Do you have any hobbies?” I said, and he brushed me off.

  “I fired Sasha. She’s already shopping a book. All About Evel.”

  “I’ll make that stop,” I said, thinking of the man in Vegas with the black eye patch who had asked me to kiss his dice at the craps table

  “Every single pumpkin,” he’d said, pushing forward a mass of orange chips and shouting, “Little Joe from Kokomo,” as he rolled a hard four then lifted me off my feet as his entourage cheered.

  His card said “‘Crazy’ Joe G.” He wrote his number on the back, and whispered to me, “If you ever need anything —”

  “Where are you going now?” Q said.

  “Not sure,” I said, reaching carefully for a three-legged puppy, and holding him in the crook of my arm as I looked at a map.

  “He’s a superstar, by the way. The record, all that Page Marlowe stuff, magazine covers, the girls.”

  “What about us?”

  I was too scared to say What girls?

  “Well, your Bazaar cover got pulled, and we lost the Monster tour. Your song is getting great reviews, but no one’s playing it.”

  Jenna and I had recorded a punk country song called “Sugar” in Nashville, about the first time I laid eyes on him.

  “Well, then I guess I’m coming home,” I said.

  I thanked everybody and they all promised to keep looking for Speck.

  I got in the car that Q called, curled up, and stared at the magazine in the pouch.

  Guitar World. I saw the tension in his hands and the danger, always danger.

  I was singing to myself as hundreds of zils crashed and whizzed off into the atmosphere.

  WE HAD AN apartment right by Hollywood and Vine.

  His management had gotten it for him a while ago, for all of the parties we never attended.

  The VMA Awards were in a week, and I wanted to go. I wanted to make things right and go with him.

  What I didn’t know, as I climbed the stairs, was that he had already told a reporter that we were “on pause.”

  “She still loves someone else,” he said, and the immaculate, hardened woman with the microphone just melted.

  Misty opened the door to our apartment, and wouldn’t let me in.

  “He’s out with a friend. Who is a Ten,” he said.

  “That’s great, Misty,” I said, “because I too am about to go on a date — with the legendary performing artist Method Man.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I left some stuff here,” I said, and tossed the drawers.

  “Tell him to call me,” I said, and Misty shook his head.

  “I’d love him if he weighed, like, a thousand pounds,” he said.

  “Then maybe you should marry him,” I said, and headed back to the taxi that I had taken from Utah.

  I paid the driver with three credit cards when we got to Motel Hell, a cheap place I found online that used its worst reviews as pull quotes, like FILTHY DUMP and RANCID STENCH EVERYWHERE.

  The cards were declined.

  I called Q and he said, like Rerun, “You in trouble!”

  HE WAS MAD at me, so mad that he didn’t call for days. He did send mo
ney, and a new credit card in an envelope that said, “My accountant wants to hire a hit man: don’t fuck up again.”

  He finally called and told me we should be away from each other for a bit.

  “Again?” I said.

  “Just until I don’t feel like punching you,” he said.

  I WANTED HIM back, but I understood. He thought that I still loved Page, which I did, in a way.

  He also didn’t understand my static, stuffed-down anger that often produced screaming nightmares.

  Right before and throughout rehab, I would see the familiar face in sleep, covered with water, and start running as it began, slowly, to reveal itself.

  All he could do was hold me — a sweating, frantic monster — until the face separated, as it does at the point of a needle, into harmless, drifting lily pads.

  Then I would sigh, he told me, and, finding myself in his arms, say, “You, it’s you,” and kiss him until I was passionately awake and alone, and had crash-landed on the floor.

  This still happened. Every single night.

  BACK IN SEATTLE, I got stoned one day and walked along Aurora Avenue, thinking about my sweet life.

  One day, I stopped at a Starbucks, ordered a hot cup of caramel sludge, added sugar, and wrote letters to Corey Haim and River Phoenix.

  I mailed them, c/o JC: Superstar, then leaned against a pawnshop and remembered him sleeping beside me as I made our initials with rails on an enamel mirror, and leisurely ordered from eBay — long black Schiaparelli evening gloves, tipped with gold claws; pink parasol; a man’s photograph of his small, frizzy dog, signed “Hard times, strangers!”

  I dragged my mouth along his spine until he stirred, and — someone was calling my name.

  I looked up and he was remote-locking a Mercedes and coming towards me.

  He talked briefly with his driver, a mountain in a peaked cap, and raised his hand.

  I had no idea he was back in town. I may have blushed.

  He was in jeans and an old suede coat, his hair stuffed under an old shinny cap; and he looked so good that women and men were falling over like tenpins.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “What’s with the car?”

  “The Falcon? It’s not worth it to get it fixed.”

  “I’ll fix it,” I said, plaintively.

  HE HAD BECOME paranormally beautiful, as if modified by the fingertips of extraterrestrials.

  I looked at the outline of his cock, which hung loose and heavy against his leg; at his pearlescent hair that lifted and waved in the still air.

  Each of his bones was visible, each a runway model in Milan, showing sheer, stiff textiles to raw shouts of astonishment; his lips swelled like radishes in water, his eyes blazed from their haunts like irradiated holy virgins.

  His crow-feather lashes; his nose, a sacred temple, everything.

  And then he smiled, blinding me like I was Dracula.

  A guy came outside from the pawnshop, waving a receipt.

  “Not for everyone, but a good piece,” he said, giving me a sly once-over.

  No.

  I had drawn that ring for so long, a narrow gold band engraved with our names joined with hearts and stars.

  On the outside it says tl4e.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, softening. “But to be honest, it’s a little infantile. I used to keep it in my pocket, it’s too, I don’t —”

  “Yeah, no, I know what you mean,” I said.

  We stood there for a while, looking at each other. When he touched my hand, it turned blue.

  I HAD GONE broke pretty quickly. I went back to the motel, then to the pawnshop again with most of my jewellery: not the moonstone, though, not ever.

  I went to Bang Bang, a dark, sticky strip club, and found Imiri drinking Fanta and checking out the talent.

  He was the only dealer I liked: he kissed me on both cheeks and told me he had missed me.

  He was wearing a zigzag of blue lipstick, pink curlers, and a flowered robe over his badly scarred and sinewy body.

  I told him I was crashing pretty hard and he set me up with a gram of “my damn kung foo” and gave me a lift home in a crazy, low-slung, bumping car booming Big Daddy Kane.

  “Later, boo,” he said, and I startled him by grabbing his hand and crying. He said, “There, there,” and “Girl, it’s going to be all right, I promise,” until I could tear myself away from him.

  I CHECKED INTO my room: the motel had been called the Seashell a long time ago, but people kept ripping down the SEAS and the defiant manager decided to leave it.

  He even ordered black towels and soap, and trained the housekeepers to mess with the lights and leave the occasional scary object.

  Mine was a rubber rat in the shower.

  I hung up the creased poster of him I had kept with me since the night I tried to kill myself, and was quieted, as I always was, by his own wrenching silence.

  “They keep fighting then getting back together,” I wrote on the wall in the ant-chalk the manager had given me with my key, then erased us.

  “What has happened?” I wrote with the chalk: soon, hundreds of ants obliged me by dying, repulsively, in the shape of the question.

  I called to ask him, but I kept getting his voice mail, a burst of “Pop Tatari.”

  I spent the night reading about myself online.

  “Ugh, I wish she would DIE,” Deb666 wrote in response to a story about how I spiked his rehab and broke his heart.

  “Me too,” I wrote, and hit Like all over the place.

  I WROTE EVERY day, and got stoned: Roman was out of rehab too, and dealing from his place in the Valley.

  I was done with SLITCH: I got Q to fire everyone but Jenna.

  “Now what?” she said, tilting her pretty face up for a kiss, and in that second I thought, “Joy.”

  She and I kept rehearsing. She invested her money well, so we played in her loft.

  My mother used to wear the perfume: it smelled heavy, and sweet.

  “Your father gave me this,” she told me once, during a happy bender.

  “Cost so much,” she said, still impressed.

  I was with him at the pharmacy when he slipped it into his coat pocket, then took me to the track where I won a hundred dollars on Joyful Jerry.

  We went berserk.

  JENNA AND I auditioned an Appalachian banjo player and a heavy metal drummer/violinist and Q hired them.

  We assembled the Heartless songs, songs that act as a tormented correspondence with his.

  There are ballads about the road trips and our first real kiss; the baby we lost, our little dog — I wrote about nights so hotly, my zombie cunt rose, gathering strength.

  The songs were snapped up and passionately reviewed, but I remained the Cootie Girl — a bad, ugly joke.

  He, on the other hand, was untouchable: brilliant, cool, and squeaky clean.

  His management, Monotone, saw that he did the right press: he talked to tiny alternative zine editors and huge talk show hosts; he appeared in art and music magazines, talking earnestly about Florentine painting and song composition; he did a cameo in a Gus Van Sant film, playing an angelic-looking psychopath.

  “This is how you do it!” Q sang to me in the style of Montell.

  I told him that it was his job to get us the same kind of press, and he booked Jenna and me on a daytime soap as “streetwise waitresses” and had Family Circle call for my favourite recipe “involving rock ’n’ roll ingredients,” the woman said.

  “What, like drugs?” I said, and Q advised me to “lay low for a while.”

  “The last time I googled you, the first hit was an Enrique Metinides photo of a woman hanging from a black tree,” he said.

  I asked Q for my mail and got a huge envelope
. I looked until I found three nice letters, all from guys.

  I sent each of them a potted plant and thank-you card, and a prayer. I recited their names — Haroun, Justin, and Choi Jeong-Hwa — like a prayer.

  The summer was finished.

  A boy spent the night lighting bottle rockets outside my window, shouting, “All hail the Fall!”

  I TOOK AN accelerated correspondence course in auto mechanics, learned how to start the Falcon, and did, after jumping the cottage fence and flooring it as he and still another dish came to the door, holding wineglasses and staring.

  I went back to the Blade, and befriended Mal, an old mechanic at a shithole parts shop who helped me replace its rotted-out guts, blast its rust off, tune it, oil it, and customize it with high-finish pearl paint, in a lambent white colour called Blizzard Beach.

  He even reupholstered its interior to its original powder blue, and stuck a Sweet Wahine on the dash.

  His fee barely covered the cost of the parts. I looked at the Tom Selleck posters all over the walls and felt a pang.

  I knew what it was like.

  “I’ll bring him here,” I said, and he laughed me off.

  I drove the car back to the cottage, got into his Mercedes to hot-wire it, took out my drill with the titanium oxide bit, and laughed.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  I drove the car to our house, and the next day he texted me a picture of himself, driving the Falcon in cat’s-eye sunglasses.

  I kissed the text, then sank. Who took the picture?

  ROMAN AND I spent most nights watching TV and nodding.

  He would call his wife occasionally, and tell her his boss was making him do overtime. I felt sorry for her: he was homely, and a liar. But I liked the company.

  During Law & Order: SVU, as Fin and his gay son battled each other with chain sticks, we talked about him, and why he was so loved; why everyone hated me.

  “He has that quality,” Roman said. Unperturbed by my discomfort, he went on: “And you don’t.”

  I looked at our CDs on his shelf, side by side. No matter what, their communion is holy, and inviolate.

  The cases send out feelers, finding nutrients there.

  “DID YOU GUYS even have sex?” Roman said.

  “Yes, of course.”