Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know, a few times a day?”

  “How did you manage to fuck so much?”

  Roman was lamenting his inability to desire or do anything: “I can’t even get into Pootie anymore,” he said, breaking the DVD in two.

  “I’m not answering that,” I said.

  I thought of him back in Venice, reading about Delmore Schwartz in bed, with his new monocle.

  He had kissed the book and then me.

  Later, as we unstuck ourselves, he said, “We are not natural but supernatural beings.”

  I DREAMED HE was forcing me to sign divorce papers.

  “You’ll have to cut off my hand and jam a pen into it,” I say to his lawyer.

  “Into my cold, dead hand!”

  I was stoned all the time then, including the times I spoke at local high schools about sobriety.

  “This is your brain on drugs,” I told the last group I addressed.

  I held up a smiley-face balloon, danced, and played “Jump Around,” and they all jumped up and got down.

  On my way home, I walked slowly across an air grate and my French twist, ballerina skirt, and ten crinolines lifted and I am writing him a poem.

  NOTEBOOK PAGE, NO date (drawing of a sun barfing rain):

  Roman’s gots ta go. Call Q about Magnum, P.I., get tangelos, smack, veg-pizza, heart-covered panties & a yellow slicker. Ask Q for an assistant, add picture of Speck with stick in the water to site, take a shower, finish love song about Bigfoot, don’t cry don’t cry!

  BLEACH RECORDED THEIR Unplugged session in one take.

  I watched a bootleg at Apollo, a bar in Van Nuys.

  They ended with a new song called “Layer Cake.”

  Each layer is supposed to be an untruth, uttered by me, up to and including “I love you.”

  This is the part he wails.

  They left for the Mondo Monster tour the next morning: they were the headliners, doing twenty-five shows in thirty days.

  “I feel good,” he said when a VJ asked if he was up for it.

  Thirty days on a bus: he couldn’t be serious.

  I noticed a girl standing behind him, looking demure and emanating money and good breeding.

  “Oh heart, you poor fat slob,” I said, holding it, and stumbling towards a drugstore for a pail of antacid.

  I got an EPT on a whim. Rouge, eyelash curlers, and Celine Dion’s signature perfume.

  When I got home, I made up my face and pissed on the stick.

  When the answer was revealed, I stared at it off and on all night, as though other answers, murky and certain, were on their way.

  I DIDN’T HAVE the heart to go through it again, the healthy food and vitamins, the doctors, the ban on everything good.

  I hated baths and showers, even. It’s an opiate thing, you wouldn’t understand!

  When had my life become an esoteric melodrama?

  I called a women’s clinic and told the soft-spoken woman who answered, “I want the works.

  “An abortion, oh, throw in a breast exam, a —”

  “You are not ordering a pizza,” she said, suddenly tart, and I asked who had poisoned her goddamned coffee.

  I wrote “Q: Set up D&C” on a sticky paper and added it to the collection framing my mirror, making its face look like a flower.

  I THREW ROMAN out.

  We fought about the mess he made, his being a mooch and a fabulist; even his brown Wallabee shoes.

  He called me a narcissist and I laughed. “Because I like myself better than a leech?”

  “That’s not fair,” Roman said indignantly.

  This is what bad marriages are like, I realized.

  I thought of him not talking to me for two days because a song was stuck in his head, then breaking the silence to show me the trampoline he bought me that says I’M SORRY BABY where you bounce.

  Of both of us yelling and throwing out the dishes we couldn’t bear to wash, and making up in bed; of me calling him “an insensitive ape,” and waking up to bananas everywhere, in vases and tubs and jars.

  My true marriage: I took out his poster, which was folded into a square, and pressed it to my cheek.

  Roman saw me, frowned, and walked out the door in those big, ugly shoes.

  “MISTY, JUST LET me talk to him.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “From the Hells Angel I keep on retainer, cop.”

  “You hurt him and then you said —”

  “I know the story, Misty. Everyone knows the fucking story.”

  “Stay away from us,” he said, and hung up as I was saying, “Us? Who is us?” In front of a mirror, like a caged bird.

  He brought Ronnie Spector to the VMAs and won everything.

  We didn’t win the one award we were nominated for — the “Daisy” video — though it was hard to tell from my seat in the back with ten giants in front of me, doing a fruity line dance.

  HE RESUMED HIS tour the next day. Every show sold out, and was ecstatically reviewed; in all of the pictures, he looked more refined, and still more violently attractive.

  He was always smiling, and holding court backstage — stories drifted back to me, of his casual grace and quiet geniality.

  Meanwhile, I was always at a small, dark bar, watching TV and drinking Stingrays.

  I would wear a Tiny Tempah sweatshirt, no pants, and dirty white Vans, with my filthy hair in pigtails.

  Men still tried to pick me up; I let them buy me drinks and nothing else.

  All that I was certain of was that he and I were still together, no matter what.

  “Come on, let’s go somewhere,” a not-bad-looking biker said, and I shook my head.

  “My husband would kill you,” I said.

  My phone rumbled and it was Q.

  I brought a confused Tom Selleck to Mal’s, who had a heart attack. Selleck went with him in the ambulance as I waved my hanky from the curb.

  Back at the bar, I saw myself in the clouded mirror and pulled my shirt over my head.

  He would never love me again: I was disgusting.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME, WHEN / CELINE

  Evelyn used to play Lana Del Ray and ask me if I would still love her when she wasn’t young or beautiful anymore.

  She was all I could think about.

  Marisa, a musician I saw now and then, couldn’t stand her.

  One day I was scraping around a pile of heroin I was about to liquefy and she said, “You would never have got into this shit if it wasn’t for her,” then keyed a little bit for herself.

  As I tied off, we saw Evelyn on TV being hounded about me until she cried, and Marisa said, “She’s so pathetic. God.”

  “Talk about her again,” I said, holding her face with one hand, “and I’ll kill you.”

  As I squeezed honey from a plastic beehive into two cups, I heard her frightened heartbeat.

  It sounded good, something like the shimmering tambourine in “Atmosphere.”

  I DREW OVER my rehab-issue notebook cover. The dead deer is wearing a halo of shotgun shells, and saying, “RAPIST,” to the hunter.

  The hunter is wearing a mauve-tinged, white wig. His eyes are circled with blue shadow. He is saying, “BORN THIS WAY.”

  I wrote her name in it, above lists of memories only she and I would understand, like “The robin’s nest,” “Hap-Penis Cream/The Sex Party,” and “the small yellow towel.”

  I was clean for two weeks, which was a personal best. But I got back on board: after the warm flood, there was nothing, no feeling at all — how anyone lived clean was a mystery to me.

  One afternoon, Alexandra, a painter I had met, and I were having lunch outside and she and her friends were oblivious to a half-dead guy f
ive feet away being stepped over.

  I noticed, but I can’t say that I cared.

  I thought of Evelyn, who would have held his head and yelled until someone got an ambulance.

  A busboy eventually came out and yipped, and he must have called 911, because an ambulance showed up and scraped him off the sidewalk.

  The busboy wore his hair in a bun, and wrung his hands like a squirrel.

  “I love you,” I thought involuntarily, and he looked right at me as Alexandra and her friends quarrelled over the cheque.

  I STARTED USING again because of her.

  Because she ruined the only good thing I have ever done.

  Now it’s just a crime.

  “But what happened?” she kept asking me, until I lied and said he attacked me.

  I told her I ran into him at the Chateau Marmont, and he followed me out after an argument about who was cooler, Billy the Kid or Dracula.

  “And you had a huge knife on you?”

  “Do you think that Billy the Kid walked around unarmed?”

  It would be a very long time before I told Evelyn what had really happened.

  And even then, she was unconscious.

  This is the true account of what happened this summer in Los Angeles:

  I rented a car after flying there with fake ID, wearing a Dolly Parton wig, bandana, and a Donna Karan dress. No one knew I was gone.

  “If anyone asks or calls,” I told Misty, “tell them I am working, and take a message.”

  I drugged Misty as well, and made sure he was tucked in his bed holding Pilloo, his secret name for the small down-filled pillow he always took from my bed.

  “Your hair smells nice,” he said. I snapped at him, then felt bad.

  “I’m sorry, Misty. It’s like shaking the dots off a ladybug,” I said, and kissed him.

  NO ONE KNEW where I was. I changed, and sat in the rented yellow Cortina watching his place for hours, until I was sure he was alone. I could see him striding around his living room in black studded briefs and, later, making a glazed pineapple cake that he left to cool on the back windowsill.

  I felt so calm, I was sleepy.

  Yawning, I knocked on the door.

  And heard huge, furious barks.

  “It’s not really a good time,” he said, pushing his dogs back with his feet.

  I held up a Glad bag of blow.

  “Oh well,” he said, leading me into the sunken living room and tightening the sash on his cream-coloured kimono.

  “I’m allergic,” I said, and he led the lean, snarling dogs to their run in the backyard.

  The room was huge and dominated by a boxcar-sized sectional sofa and huge oil paintings of each member of Lafayette.

  They all had glossy teardrops in their big sad eyes.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “I did these,” he said. “All of them, man!”

  “No way,” I said, sitting down.

  “Way,” he said, sitting down close to me and vacuuming thick lines.

  We talked about Lafayette’s upcoming shows and new record, Sorrow.

  “It’s about —” He stopped himself, and blushed.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “We’re cool.”

  He deflated with relief and said, “It’s impossible not to want her.

  “She’s so shy and hot and bothered.” He extended a hand for a slap, then withdrew it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I miss her.”

  I remembered the Berlin photos and him crashing the party at Mercury’s.

  The burns and lesions all over her; the infected bite mark the doctor blamed me for: I was wide awake.

  His gardener must have left the machete by the door.

  I got up and headed right for it.

  “Bathroom,” I said, as my hand closed around the tang.

  “She was asking for it,” I said.

  “Asking? More like begging,” he said. “It was fucking crazy: she wanted me to hurt her.”

  I raised the blade.

  I detached his head with one stroke.

  After I bagged and dragged him to the garage, I cleaned a few surfaces, grabbed his laptop and phone, and left just as some call girl showed up and asked me, “Tres de nosotros esta noche?”

  “Just me,” I said, and she clapped her hands.

  “Oh Papi, eres tan bueno!”

  She was plump and pretty, with a black beauty mark on her succulent lower lip, but I had a body in my trunk and a wife I still loved, in spite of myself.

  En otra occasion, Angel.

  I OPENED HIS computer and sent an email to Evelyn, signing his name. I started to look at her emails, then stopped, and threw his stuff in a bag I would burn with him.

  He had told me that his mother was a pro, whose boyfriends sometimes messed with him.

  He taught me to play “Sorrow,” and sang its wistful lyrics about losing the only girl he ever cared about.

  He smiled and said, “I like you,” just before I spotted the glint of the blade.

  The dreams began immediately.

  A family of women living in a soiled room, mourning their dead father’s cruelty and selling books from the lawn, beside a door to the sea, or a shore jammed with people waiting for a distant boat.

  I buy a copy of Moonwalk.

  I hear his head fall and bounce.

  “You seem so nice,” he says.

  I WAS SEEN with women all the time, but I never touched them.

  I liked their company sometimes, and slept in their beds when I couldn’t wake up, but that’s it.

  One famous groupie was pissed at me: the morning after passing out on her sofa, I saw her writing “CELINE BLACK’S PENCIL-DICK” on her laptop and turned her around.

  I directed her hand to my hard cock and said, “Post that. I dare you.”

  The murder had infected me somehow: she moaned and tapped the Delete key.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She squeezed and said, “So sorry, I can’t stand it.”

  For a while I was grateful that Evelyn had once told a reporter that I was the “greatest fuck in the world,” while showing off a bracelet of finger-bruises.

  But I was only great with her.

  I was sick from wanting her, of pretending some groupie or model was her, if I was high enough, if it was dark enough, if she would just shut her mouth.

  But they never did and I ended up staying faithful, something I kept to myself.

  MERCURY FIXED ME up with a debutante named Stella, who invited me over for breakfast.

  She was crazy about me, she told him. Smart, elegant, and beautiful.

  I said no, but he had already set everything up.

  I was up all night anyways, so I drove to her place in the morning and she answered the door wearing nothing but a frilly apron and high heels.

  “I’m starving,” I said, and sat at the table drinking coffee and demolishing at the flapjacks.

  She slid into a dress, and sat across from me as I read the paper. I read it out loud, to avoid her hurt, sullen face.

  “‘Dear Carolyn Hax. Don’t get me wrong, I am an eggplant-shaped, short, and simple man. But does that mean my wife doesn’t have to try? She never shaves her legs or closes the bathroom door even if she’s —’”

  Stella snatched a golden brown piece of toast, with its crusts neatly severed, and threw it at the paper.

  “What?” I said. “It’s funny.”

  I grabbed my phone and wrote a text as I walked to the bathroom.

  “Meet u @ the house,” it said. I closed the door because Stella had started to cry.

  “Could you keep it down?” I said.

  I had a big day planned.

  AROUND MIDNIGHT, I drove the Falcon toward a vacant lot on Pi
ke Street to meet Khartoum, my new dealer.

  My text hadn’t said when I was showing up at the house, or our house. I expected her to be there and ready for me.

  Mercury called as I had just started out.

  “What’s with the phone?” he said. “Your name even comes up.”

  “Oh, some girl,” I said vaguely.

  The truth was that I wanted her to be able to call me anytime, and when she did, I wanted to see her name and that cute picture of her, making a snow angel by three bare black pines.

  I GUESS I had always known that she was confused about Page: that she loved me, and was very sad.

  But I never tried to find out why.

  Mercury was still talking as I pulled up to the curb, rapping my fingers against the dashboard, anxious to get to Evelyn.

  “Why don’t you and James come here, and we’ll work on the set?” I said.

  “Party favours?” he said.

  “There’s a bar, but I’m clean,” I said.

  If he knew I was lying, he didn’t let on.

  “Is she going to be there?” he said, ready to lace into Evelyn, and I said, “I hope so,” and hung up as I spotted Khartoum.

  Hope was actually pushing its green head through the dirt, dislodging some of the filth that had corroded my heart.

  I SHOWED UP at the house hours later, stoned out of my mind.

  She had fallen asleep wearing one of my shirts, her hair loose and waving.

  I wanted to touch her so badly that my hands were shaking.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and looked down.

  “Don’t be,” she said, and frowned.

  “I’m pregnant. Again,” she said. “But don’t worry, I’m having an —”

  “We are having a baby,” I said.

  I knew it wasn’t his. I remembered shooting a supernova inside her and making a golden nebula.

  WE LAY IN bed and talked.

  We resolved to remember each other’s birthdays (“I’m a Leo, just think of pussy”) and to cross off days on a big calendar after filling each square with salubrious activities like Bikram-shopping and raw-food-soft-sculpturing.

  I told her about the other women.

  The ones I was currently not fucking, and the ones I did, when I thought she was with Page.

  She didn’t say anything, just hung on to me like I was a branch in a current.