Where Did You Sleep Last Night

by Lynn Crosbie

  I told them one true thing. “I lost him,” I said, and Cory, who I only knew from his name tag, joined me as I wailed and tore my T-shirt apart with long, grieving strokes.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” I said later, by the lemon squares.

  “Oh God, don’t be. I’m only sticking around to listen to you.”

  Then he handed me a vintage autograph pad, which I signed with a kiss.

  He was a good guy. He was my Brenda.

  I WOULD GET clean to get him back, I decided.

  I did it like it was nothing: I lay on my bed, perfectly still, letting the Death Star explode inside me.

  After a week, I was eating the clear soup and stale crackers that Cory brought me, and listening to his rap about letting go and letting God.

  I only heard a bit of what he said, but his kindness was why I started playing music and writing again.

  I wrote a song I could imagine Stevie Nicks singing with the Savages, and it starts, “I’ve cut the wings of birds to make our bed; made hangings with their little heads.”

  I COULDN’T REACH him. When I called, Mercury answered and I hung up.

  He always took my calls to James’s phone. One time, he said, “Don’t be like this, suge,” as I was clicking off.

  I wanted to tell him something, but I forgot what. I screamed into a pillow instead.

  “YOU’RE SCARED OF him?” Cory said when I told him about it.

  “I think he wants to kill me,” I said, and Cory smiled indulgently.

  “Why would a wealthy actuary want to kill his stepbrother’s sick girlfriend?”

  My lies had multiplied: I had no answer. For myself, either.

  I heard someone say, “Spread your legs,” and shook.

  “November’s comin’,” Cory said. “Looks like a real cold one.”

  This was intolerable.

  But I felt sad because I was about to lose another friend.

  “You make me sick,” I said, and sighed as his face fell off the cliff, arms winding, legs churning.

  “This is why I can’t have nice things,” I said after he left in a huff, and laughed.

  I CALLED AND wrote and texted from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep.

  I added him to my letter list again.

  After I wrote the letter I had been avoiding:

  Dear Mom,

  I got the news today.

  I wasn’t shocked, obviously. More taken aback that he had the guts to kill you both.

  I thought he’d run off.

  I hear there is nothing left of your little shack.

  Your neighbour, Tanya, wrote me that you bragged about me all the time; that you knew my song “Press” was about tucking me in at night when you were working at the bar.

  As to your last boyfriend, and the mess he made.

  I pretend that you never felt a thing.

  That you were looking at that one shot, of the time you took the bus to hear me play, and Jenna took our picture, making tough faces and shaking our fists.

  “I’ll take care of your mother,” your boyfriend told me when I met him.

  Mom, he said it and held me, rubbing his hard dick against me.

  I am going to pretend it is night in the purple house and you don’t know I am watching you from the top of the stairs as you hug yourself and smile, thinking of something so good it makes you double over.

  You are the frightened heart of every frail creature that can’t endure, and I love you.

  XO

  My hands were trembling so much that the words were barely legible: the XO bled into my name, signed with clotted red ink. I kissed the page, and left a ragged lipstick kiss, folded it, and kissed it at the fold, and again, and again, until it was fat and tiny.

  I mated it with my father’s pretty stamp, and mailed it to the Plush Dumpster.

  And I decided I would write him tomorrow, about what had happened, and how much I missed him.

  HE CALLED ME that night.

  I was relieved, but I heard questions and reservations in his voice.

  I stopped telling him how much I loved him and asked about the program, his music.

  He was vague about rehab, and excited about the music.

  “I gave up the solo idea,” he said. “Mercury and James and I are writing such good songs, we almost have a record already.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called . . . wait, I forget the working title.”

  “You sound uncomfortable, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. I’m great. In fact, we’re going on a little tour. In Australia, then Fiji, then Poland.”

  “Oh. Can I come?”

  I heard Mercury’s voice: “No!”

  “Uh, no, it’s sort of stupid, no one’s bringing anyone. It’s a lot of money, though.” He started to sing “Thriller” as “Scrilla”: I heard a lot of voices joining in, laughing.

  “Oh. I just miss you and —”

  “What? Are you still there? Hello?”

  He kept doing this until I ended the call.

  I was piercingly sober.

  Tears worked their way like needles through my eyes, leaving long, burning tracks.

  “My mom DIED,” I texted him, and stared at his answer — “Yeah, I heard, that sucks” — on and off all night, picking through the gaps, where I was certain he had dropped a tiny bit of love and compassion. Anything.

  I DID WHAT I always did, but clean.

  I called Cory and apologized, and as he talked about his higher power, I wrote to God as if he were dead too.

  “God, I love you,” I wrote, and I kept writing.

  “I feel like I’m living through Fifty Shades of Celine Gray,” I told Cory, who said, “Oh, that’s really funny, that hot musician guy.”

  CORY AND I talked awhile. I told him how mean he was about my mother. About my cat. To me, sometimes.

  “Why do you love him?” he said.

  I thought of the flowers that would inevitably arrive with a note about my mom; about the black cat firecrackers he planned to set off for Flip, the squeaky mouse he had dressed in a mourning veil.

  The songs he made up for me, the burnt sandwiches he made when I was sick; the smile that he showed only to me, where one dimple appeared like a perfect, sculptural flaw.

  “He gets it right. It just takes a while,” I said.

  “Hang on to him,” Cory said. He was moving to a cornfield in Illinois to work as a paralegal: I heard the sound of ripping tape.

  “Everyone always leaves,” I said, biting my nails.

  “You push everyone away,” he said.

  “Write me,” I said, and he promised as the florist arrived with a long white box of forget-me-nots, the colour of his eyes.

  THE EMAIL WAS sent from yournightmares@hotmail.com.

  The subject line: So funny.

  Attached: A picture of him and Brenda in bed, of him tweaking her weird, plantain-shaped tits.

  I opened my mouth and the scream pivoted, leaped, and made a perfect landing.

  I knew who was doing this.

  He was a dead man.

  “IS THIS JOE?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know if you remember, but I kissed your dice when —”

  “I remember you, angel-face. What do you need?” I talked. He listened.

  The Devil stopped stabbing someone’s ass with a pitchfork and pricked up his ears.

  “Nice,” he said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  MY EMPIRE OF DIRT / CELINE

  When I was with Mercury and James, it was another world entirely.

  James and I talked about music in a quiet, clinical way; Mercury had big ideas, about time and space and the songwriting talent of Burt Bacharach.
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  I was still using, I had the “Avalon Travel-Pak” with me, but I was at a place where it took so much, so long, just to feel straight, never mind stoned.

  James, who had gotten rid of Brenda at my request, had given up on me. I put Evelyn out of my mind, as much as I could. I thought of her as the Sargasso Sea, pulling me under and away, an image that affrighted and enticed me.

  She kept sending letters:

  “I was watching you play once, and I left my body. I saw you the way a fan does, like the ones screaming around me — one girl was calling your name so tragically — and I saw your fingers clutch and slide; saw you lean back then heave forward, heard the big blasts and little whimpers of your music, and I wished that I knew you.

  I shook my head and remembered that I did and wanted to grab everyone and tell them.

  ‘I know him. He kissed me.’

  I felt her pull, that lissome seaweed.

  And so tired, when I saw the lonely question she had pricked on the envelope in Braille: “Do you love me?”

  I would write her again that night, using markers and construction paper.

  I had sent her so many letters, in bird and heart and UFO shapes: she never mentioned them.

  Or the flowers, or the selection of cheeses.

  I was afraid I didn’t really send them. The headaches were bad again; my memory was in pieces.

  Mercury called for me, we were in the middle of a cover of “Miss Otis Regrets.”

  There it is, the rope ladder: “Direct me to the pilot of this craft,” I say, and each of the bullet-shaped passengers nods.

  MERCURY MADE A tent in the studio one night and said we should all camp there.

  James said, “Not a chance, cowboys,” and headed back to his hotel.

  I was scared of my hotel: the night before, I had called Evelyn and talked for an hour before I realized I was in the shower, whispering filth into a bar of soap.

  Cockroaches have invaded, big, brawny ones who muster before forming phrases like DISMISSED! or SECTION 8 on the walls.

  Their leader orders them to crawl on my flesh all night until reveille: I am a mass of scratches, bites, and sores.

  Mercury and I talked and wrote new songs, and somehow he made perfect sense when he told me why Evelyn and I didn’t work.

  “She won’t let you be yourself,” he said, handing me my stash.

  “Plus she’s a slut. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”

  “Then don’t say it.”

  I felt that I was shouting at him, that I had stood up and was wearing the tent as a Royal Ascot hat.

  But I was still lying on the blanket that, mercifully, elevates and flies me out of there as the wolf sits at the fully dressed dinner table and orders the skin of my face, “seasoned, and golden brown.”

  I pass the top of the Statue of Liberty, and paint our names above her eyes.

  Fall into my scary room, which is now immaculate, which now contains, on the bed, in a wedding dress and wreath of lilies, my girl, holding a huge can of Raid, with two violet-painted toes peeking out.

  SHE WATCHES ME as I ineptly stuff my works under my shirt; as I run a bath, and sit on the tub.

  As the water pours down the drain, as I find a decent vein and tap it, she sits silently with her back to the door.

  When I come out, she leads me to bed, lays a blanket over me, then smooths it like a shroud.

  I am streaming part of game six of the 1986 World Series, holding my breath as the grounder passes through Buckner’s croquet-wicket legs and Vin Scully flips out.

  “Behind the bag!” I say, and she smiles indulgently.

  “How did we get back to this hotel?”

  “I’ll explain later,” she tells me in charades.

  Then she ties off, produces a loaded needle, and shoots it into her healing-over arm.

  I try to stop her, but the Somali pirates have cautioned me once already about my insubordination, and the water is wavy with shark fins.

  “If you won’t stop, I’ll join you,” she says.

  “I want to feel everything with you, to do everything.”

  Evelyn tells me that she came to find me just as the giant squid drew a filleting knife.

  “How are we still alive?” I ask.

  “Are we?” she says in that silky voice that makes me get up, break the light bulb, and fill my hands with bamboo-soft handfuls of her skin, her hair, her ass: the legendary inverted heart that so many have written about, that only I get to touch.

  “Do you remember that thing in Vice?” I say.

  “The five-star review of me in a tight pencil skirt?”

  “That one,” I say, and between the weird slides and spiky rushes, I rest my head on the small of her back, just to admire her better.

  She says she likes the way my hair feels on her skin, and we fall deeply asleep.

  “Wait,” I said the next day.

  “An enormous, homicidal squid?”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ABOUT A GIRL

  I told Joey about how Mercury treated me; that I was afraid of him.

  “Please don’t torture him,” I said.

  “Torture him? You got the wrong number,” he said, and hung up.

  He called me from a burner later on.

  “You never talked on a fucking phone before?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, twisting my legs into a lanyard.

  “It’s all right. Now, let’s see how he treats you after he meets my friends.”

  LATE THAT NIGHT, Joey’s friends found Mercury, at the White Horse, drunk and talking about me.

  “What’s she like?” someone said, and he told her that I was like a cow in a pig mask.

  He was still laughing on his way to the bathroom, when he got grabbed and pulled behind the bar.

  Two men in white cashmere sweaters and pearl-grey slacks took turns with a tire iron.

  “Be nice to Evelyn,” one of them said before Mercury passed out.

  “I feel fantastic,” was the first thing Mercury said when he woke up from his coma.

  “And you know what’s weird? I couldn’t stop thinking about my best friend’s wife’s music when I was sleeping. She kept me alive, I think.”

  HIS GIRLFRIEND, BETH, who had raved about Kardashian Sun Kissed spray to me, had become deeply tanned, with frosted Texas-hair.

  She scowled and told the reporters he talked to that “he’s not himself,” in a loud whisper.

  He and I saw one interview on TV where she said that, and he said, “I know what I’m saying, you stupid bitch,” and for a second the screen filled with the station logo.

  WHAT HAPPENED WAS that he wrote a song for me to sing with Bleach, called “Nice to You.” It is a slow, melting ballad with a chorus of orotund witchcraft.

  James told me that he helped write it: I knew they were nervous around me, and I’m sorry to say that their fear tasted like truffles deep-fried in Almas caviar.

  He found someone to sub for Mercury and practised with me: they had written in a little guitar solo as well, which I plucked then savaged.

  We played it side by side on MTV Live and Loud.

  When the girls screamed, I felt it too, and when Mercury’s anxious eyes — he appeared via Skype, playing a djembe drum in his hospital bed — asked if we were cool, I nodded, as tears fell from my eyes.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he said as we bowed; after I got called back and a wide-eyed girl handed me white roses.

  “Let’s go to the hotel and make out,” I said, but he wouldn’t.

  We hit club after club, and he faded back as I shone out.

  The DJ at the Impasse dedicated a mix of “Be My Baby” and “Velveteen Sun,” and as I sissy-bounced across the dance floor, the beautiful gay men waved palm fronds as they carried me, on a
makeshift litter, around the room.

  I had snipped my hair in front into a widow’s peak and wore diamond-tipped false lashes and gore-red lips: all this and a golden snake clasping a bottle-green gown.

  Perfectly white, bare feet.

  In the washroom later, one of my escorts was powdering his nose as I patched my pancake.

  “Honey, you were so out. And look at you now.”

  I grabbed him. “Tell me why?”

  “You mondo-diva types, you know, all beauty and tragedy and mess. You have to fall hard before everyone, especially the ones who kicked you when you were on the ground —”

  A massive girl in a poodle skirt and sweater set joined us at the sink.

  “— before everyone feels sentimental about you, and wants you back.It usually starts as a joke, and then it gets serious.”

  Poodle Skirt said, “It’s like when the kid you torment at school gets sick, or transfers, and everyone practically makes a shrine, they are so sad.”

  “Yes,” he said, cutting his eyes at her.

  “I’m just glad you’re back,” he said, before rolling out a length of red carpet so I could leave the bathroom like “the fucking queen you are.”

  Later, I watched him dance on the tables and tear pictures from the wall.

  “He told me that the night was so perfect that he wants to kick through it,” the fat girl said.

  “Why are you still here?” I said, snapping my fingers.

  Five men appeared and rolled her out the door like Violet Beauregarde.

  “Are you too famous for me now?” he said, teasing me.

  “Baby, are you?”

  Every hot girl in the club was lying on the floor with arrows drawn on their midriffs, pointing down.

  “To us,” he said, and we clinked our tumblers of Canada Dry.

  “To Mike and Mindy?”

  “Fuck, yes,” he said, and happiness, that chronic truant, appeared and said, “I’m here to learn.”

  “I NEVER TOUCHED Brenda.”

  “I never got a letter, or anything at all, from you.”

  “Not even cheese?”

  “I got flowers,” I said, thinking of the spray of blue blossoms and baby’s breath. “And the black mouse.”