Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I didn’t mind if he saw my writing. In fact, I tried reading him an essay about the Seventh Quark, which put him to sleep like a hammer to the head.

  It was the diaries. I could never open up completely about my complicated affections, all of the dissembling and the scream, which remained lodged in my throat.

  He had started to get severe migraines, which made him mean and confused.

  When the migraines passed, he ate the pills like Skittles, and we started ordering them in big tubs.

  I hovered over him with ice packs and cold water. Misty taped black paper to the windows and walked slowly in fuzzy slippers: light, noise, even smells, were torture when he was like this.

  “Kill me,” he would say, bashing his head against the wall.

  I held his head, and felt the veins by his temples throb.

  “Tell me one last time,” he said, and I described that night with Page, leaving things out, like the truth.

  “It was disgusting!” I said, and I was taken aback by my own anger. “But you know, you —”

  “It was like cracking the top of a soft-boiled egg,” he said, and passed out, leaving me with the warm, runny image; his absolute and irrevocable error.

  HE WAS PLAYING his guitar in the kitchen when I came downstairs.

  It was the middle of the night: a small, dewy blonde was sitting with him, wrapping gummy black chunks in tinfoil.

  I stared at them.

  They were too stoned to care. He sang: “All the ugly things we do, I’ll fly away from you.”

  I shoved everything off the table, with a powerful swipe of pink terry.

  His eyes flashed, and in a heartbeat he was up and I was down.

  I was on the floor.

  The girl said, “What’s her problem?” and he lay beside me.

  “We look dead,” he said.

  IT WAS MISTY who sorted everything out.

  Who got the girl out and took me to the hospital.

  I knew that it was too late.

  He was perfect, though.

  Damian Black was incinerated on August 9, 2014, in a doll-sized suit and crimson tie.

  His cheeks were fat and rouged; his dwarf hands clutched a miniature sock monkey.

  I got the ashes back in a matchbook and let the wind carry them from the window of the hospital where I had asked them to carve out my womb.

  “YOU KILLED HIM,” I said, looking right through him.

  He started to reach for me, and then he was gone.

  “You can do better,” he wrote.

  By the time I got his text, I was in Los Angeles, doing the pinkest, cleanest blow with Jenna as we coloured and powdered each other and she sang,

  We got a thing going on.

  TWENTY-SIX

  IN THE SOMEDAY WHAT’S THAT SOUND?

  Back in Los Angeles, the pared-down Joy played every night.

  Q started plotting a short tour, and tweaked our look.

  When Jenna and I were photographed, we clasped our hands in prayer, looking to the sky.

  I wore long-sleeved, high-necked black dresses that showed miles of leg.

  A fine gold cross on a chain.

  “This is for Damian,” I said at every show.

  When they called his name, I would say, “Who?” and make a show of scratching tears away in two fast streaks.

  When Bleach played the O2 in London, he stopped their first song to say, “I’m sorry —” but was drowned, then knocked, out when someone threw a bottle.

  I WAS LYING on a table, being interviewed.

  I had done the day circuit: two days earlier, I was lying in Julie Chen’s arms as she burped my back and shushed me in front of a room of warm, empathic women.

  I was asked what really happened, and I demurred. And, “Do you still love him?”

  “My lawyer would prefer that I do not speak about him,” I always said.

  During one interview, with Torrent magazine, I smoked skag on the end of a cigarette with a sexy boy who dropped grapes into my mouth and boldly kissed me.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I wondered where the big media was, though. Q called this a do-over, but it felt more like a crash: the small clubs, the edgy little magazines and college radio DJs.

  Bleach was taking heat, but they were still filling stadiums.

  I started to tell the Torrent boy about women and punk and he shut me up with his mouth, wrote his number on my hand, and left.

  I kept going over it in my head.

  Why did he think he could touch me?

  And yes, yes, I love him more than anything.

  I DID ONE more interview before the requests stopped.

  With the very imposing Lesley Stahl.

  “But Evelyn,” she said, interrupting my sad, familiar story.

  “Why are you, well, both of you, always returning to heroin? Surely you know how destructive you’ve been?”

  I knew this was the part where I was supposed to lower my head and cry, but I wanted this elegant lady to understand.

  “Imagine a production line filled with boxes,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “And they are labelled things like LOVE and HATE and LOGIC and MEMORY and KNOWLEDGE.

  “And the line breaks and the boxes fall and the cleanup crew is about to strike, so they barely care: they just start shoving items in the boxes, randomly.”

  Like the humming of one million bumblebees getting belly rubs by army ants in pith helmets, a field of poppies, Sadako Sasaki and a thousand paper cranes at her feet, the steps of the tango, the kidnapped Diophantine quint, Crime and Punishment’s non-secular forensics and the purple and black cover of the 1977 Penguin edition, how this particular book smells — like fusty vanilla — and speaks: “suffering and pain are always necessary for men of great sensibility and deep feeling.”

  And —

  Stahl had lost control of the interview. Resigned, she leaned back, and snapped her fingers for her compact and brush, as I perorated:

  “Nothing is one thing or another, and everything is alive.

  “And that’s why,” I told her, “I like heroin.”

  But she was long gone, as was the crew.

  I found them all later at a pub down the street, doing shots of Jäger and throwing darts at my face.

  “Oh, it’s just good fun,” one of the camera men said, and with a heavy heart I joined in.

  Nailed myself right in the eye and let the gaffer do a body shot off me.

  Why does everything sound better when he says it?

  BETWEEN MY GOUCHING in a dry, sleepy voice and the praise I lavished on Class A narcotics — just a few moments after saying I wanted to try again to have children — the show was a disaster.

  For me.

  Whatever sympathy I had garnered for my loss blew up in my face, and the tabloids were joined by glossy magazines, to say nothing of an online hurricane, in despising me.

  Me, who “probably killed her own baby, and is destroying Celine.”

  One old punk star took out a full-page ad in the New York Times: it was an extremely unflattering picture of me, taken as I stumbled out of a club, with makeup down to there and my shirt gone missing.

  Underneath, it quoted me saying “And that is why I love heroin,” and said, in enormo-font, “Celine, let’s not lose you (again?). All is forgiven. RUN.”

  I called the only lawyer I could think of, William Mattar, who claimed that the ad was not libellous, “but I’m not an expert. Were you hurt in a car, by any chance?”

  “Not yet,” I said, and transferred him a large retainer.

  “I really like your ad,” I said, a little star-struck, and he said, “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  IT WAS HE who defended me.

  He re
sponded through the media and said that we were in grief and not ourselves.

  And that I was still his wife.

  I knew that his management was behind it, but I had the notice blown up into a wall-sized poster. Where it says “my wife” is raised and rosy, from all the kisses I left there.

  “Thank you,” I texted him. It took me three hours to strike the perfect note, to find the words.

  “I do love you,” he wrote back, straight away. “And you call me baby-killer for this.”

  I tried reaching him, but he was obviously high and watching Rambo: First Blood, one frame at a time.

  When he finally answered, he said, “I can’t find your fuckin’ legs!” with a sob in his throat, and I hung up and thought about getting a rescue-burro, the kind they paint with zebra stripes in Tijuana, and calling it Todd.

  I WAS FREEBASING in the bathroom a week later when someone knocked at the door.

  The crowd had been even smaller. Jenna didn’t bother showing up: I played a half-hour cover of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” in a blind rage.

  It was Q.

  He told me that we needed to take a break, and rethink what we were doing.

  I left the bathroom, and slumped beside him.

  “But we’re so big,” I said.

  “Ellen-big,” I said.

  “You were,” he said. “But the bitches who watch don’t buy your music. They don’t even care about it.

  “You’re a past-the-crossword-puzzle People story. And after that interview —”

  “Q, that’s cold,” I said.

  The silence between us was strained: an article had appeared that morning in Jezebel, by a young journalist I had met at a party and shared vintage tips with.

  “We Get It, It’s Empowering,” the story began, twisting like a drill into an assassination of “teenager has-beens” and “useless nostalgia.”

  And, of course, “morbid addicts.”

  The story was viral: I was fucked.

  “Oh, and he’s gone missing again,” Q said.

  “Well, send out a search team,” I said.

  “Save the tortured junkie!”

  He looked at me curiously, and walked away.

  I meant me, I meant me.

  AT OUR NEXT show, I spoke to the small audience one night for an hour, about women and sex, violence and beauty.

  I didn’t notice that almost everyone had left; I didn’t see Q frantically signalling me, or Jenna’s look of disgust.

  “Fuck you,” someone said.

  “Fuck me?” I said, dialing up my amp and tearing into “The Ace of Spades.”

  People started trickling back.

  I forgot most of the words, but I was possessed: That’s the way I like it baby I don’t wanna live forever.

  “This one’s for my husband,” I said, and the room filled again, pounding like a single hate-filled heart.

  I TOOK THE occasional tepid bath, sat in the dark water and counted our fights.

  It took more than my fingers and toes.

  When I thought of him pinning me to the bed in anger, I flipped the jets on.

  I was done in the speed of light. It was like science with us. I was energy and he mattered.

  I wrote that down and sent it to Hallmark, with a little drawing of myself having a good time in the tub.

  The day I sent the submission, I got so stoned, I don’t remember how the Dolce & Gabbana models got into my room — a chorus line of gleaming men singing “Fancy” — but I do remember greeting them in tiger-striped heels and a matching merry widow, while drinking from a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and demanding they dress me.

  And love me, of course.

  I woke up on the bathroom floor with one of the models. Our eyes opened at the exact same second and his “Ti amo” sounded like a dove’s cry.

  We dressed in leopard and plaid suits and he ground coffee and spoon-fed me yogurt with opium.

  “If it weren’t for him,” I said, and he pecked at and caressed me until his boyfriend showed up and dragged him away.

  I flew home that day: the fall had begun.

  IT’S NOT LIKE he was suffering.

  I assumed he was still in Carnation with ten hookers, or celebrating with his bands and many fans who had begged him to leave me.

  Early that summer, I had been thrilled to see my flowers push up and out, filling our yard with big, vivid blooms that I snipped and kept in milk bottles by our bed.

  With some help from a gardener, the tomatoes and lettuce and squash and cucumbers grew as well: I had spent many days grooming them, and spraying their sleek bodies with the trunk of a pink elephant watering jug he had given me after a great day of thrift-shop scrounging.

  Even though I kept to myself, more often than not building birdhouses and scarecrows and little hammocks for the fat zucchinis, there was speculation that I killed Page Marlowe; that the Bleach song “Black Branch” was about heroin, and that I seduced him with my own addiction.

  Misty changed his number, and when I sent a friend of a friend to check out the cottage, he said it was boarded up.

  The “friend” was a big muscular cop.

  I wouldn’t let him kiss or touch me, but he dry-humped me for so long that I accidentally hit the radio and the dispatcher heard me panting, “More, you dirty pig, more.”

  I NOW KNEW why he spent so much time with other women.

  It made it easier to forget him. It felt so good.

  But none of them were allowed to do much more than hold my hand and compliment me.

  I saw an older man, who bought me jewellery; a designer with short, silky hair and a riding crop; a kid even younger than me, whose parents liked my music.

  And Jenna, who I almost fell for, who made me want to drop the others, one by one.

  She wanted us to live in Central America and grow vegetables and have children: all of this talk turned me off.

  I hog-tied and bit her; struck and pinched her.

  She sang In quelle trine morbide beneath my skirt, and I got the cop to cuff and remove her one night.

  She said she loved me.

  JAMES CALLED ME, out of the blue.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I started to say, and he told me he was calling to talk to me.

  “It must be killing him that he lost you,” he said.

  “He always has women,” I said.

  “What does it matter, if you’re the one he loves?

  “Anyways, he always pretends they’re you,” he said, and wished me luck.

  I did the same.

  What was I doing?

  IN OCTOBER, I thought about Lou Reed, dead almost one year.

  His last Twitter post was “The Door.”

  I played his music all night.

  He seemed to be asking me directly to remember him, the one who loved me.

  Even though he knew me.

  I jimmied open his lockbox. There was a phone number inside a seashell painted with my name.

  “Come shining through,” I said when he answered.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  WHEN YOU’RE ALL ALONE AND LONELY

  He asked me to meet him at the cottage.

  When I got there, Misty rushed out. He followed, walking slowly, holding a shovel.

  “I need to show you something,” he said.

  “I don’t want any part of whatever that is,” I said.

  He crossed his arms and didn’t budge.

  I tackled him.

  As we rolled around the grass, I saw Misty hustle out some tiny bit of exotica who was saying, “But he’s my new boyfriend!”

  WE TALKED FOR twelve hours straight.

  Misty went to Disneyland, and we faced each other at the kitchen table.

  We wrote “THE CONTAGION�
� on a piece of paper, cut ourselves, and used the blood to draw a line through the phrase.

  Then we signed it, “Never again, Sincerely, GRACK” — a portmanteau of our surnames that one of the zine kids had given us.

  We examined sections of our old notebooks, and added new maps of the happiness and calamity that had befallen us since we took each other’s hand and walked into the world.

  I made him tell me about every woman, every score, and every lie.

  He did the same, and although neither of us betrayed a single emotion, we were silently relieved at each other’s odd chastity.

  We wrote a song called “Same-Old, Jesus” and took a break to perform it, as Mike and Mindy, our country cover band, at a Carnation bar-restaurant called Slice.

  In it, Jesus is very tired and old, and is shopping off the TV. He buys hedge clippers, a massage wand, and “the same old crap,” he tells the girl who answers the phone.

  “You know. Toasters that double as heating pads. Heating pads that blast toast all over the bed.”

  People talked through our set, but when we played this song, our last, they all got up and danced.

  “Lord, ain’t you got that right,” a woman said to him later, and squeezed his ass.

  We laughed all the way home. It was something.

  IN THE MORNING, he came into the room, shook me awake, and told me to call my mother.

  A strange man answered the phone, and bellowed her name.

  I apologized to her for my long absence, and asked her to come and see us sometime.

  He saw my face as I hung up and asked what was wrong.

  “Oh, she’s just drunk,” I said.

  “I can’t wait to meet my grandson, Elephant!” she had said.

  WE TALKED ABOUT Damian, and cried so much we were just running through rooms, flailing our arms.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” he said when we had thrown ourselves onto a chair.

  “Or him,” he said, which set us off again.

  All night long, we passed an invisible bundle back and forth: we held it tight and whispered promises and apologies and words of terminal love, then passed it back.

  When we fell asleep, icy little fingers touched our faces, waking us, and he said, We have come so far.