Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  “Who gave the drummer a pen?” I ask, carefully putting my Tiger Balmed contacts in their case, then leaning over his shoulder to look. My carefully written set lists are blackened with lines and arrows; songs are crossed out, moved around, exchanged for other songs. “You fusted it all up,” I tell him. “Nobody can read it now; everything’s crossed out.”

  “Ev-ree-theeng,” coaches Tea kindly. “Not ev-ruh-thang.”

  “Ev-ree-theeng,” I repeat. “Eh-vree-theeng’s fusted.”

  Dave looks up at me and smiles. “Hi, Kris. Your set sucked, so I made up a new one.”

  “Oh,” I squint at it. “Okay. I can’t see very well right now. Is it good?”

  “No, this one sucks, too,” says Dave, “but less than yours.” He stares at me. “Are you crying?”

  Leslie stands and stretches. “We should probably play it whether it sucks or not. We’re supposed to be on now.”

  “There’s gum on those set lists,” I offer helpfully.

  “There’s gum on ev-ree-theeng,” says Tea.

  Our band was started on these two bullshit principles—well, they’re more like bullshit wishes, but here they are:

  1. That people should be able to touch one another and feel each other’s pain. Physically, like you could place your hand on someone’s cheek and feel their toothache; and emotionally, if you move someone, touch them deeply, you have to take responsibility for that depth of feeling and care about them.

  So it isn’t just pain that we should feel in each other—happiness should seep out of pores, and clouds of jealousy and all the different kinds of love and disappointment should float around us. We could walk in and out of people’s clouds to know what they’re feeling. That’d be the kindest way to live on planet earth.

  2. That maybe our essential selves are drunk—not wasted, just kinda buzzed, enough to let go. If we were always a little tipsy, we’d be light, nonjudgmental, truthful. Our hang-ups’d be shaken off, there’d be no second-skin barriers to honesty. Oh, and also no hangovers.

  We figure that if these two things were true, then it’d be okay for a band to sound like we do: sorta painful and a little out of control. We’d play what the audience felt and feel it at the same time and they’d feel it reflected back to them in sound and we’d all care about each other’s stories and clouds of feeling and . . . good luck with that, I think miserably through my stage fright, trudging past the knitters, hippies, junkies, drunks, painters and psychos.

  I follow Leslie through the crowd, keeping a close eye on the fountain of dreadlocks making its way through the fuzzy room. Clearly, it isn’t okay for a band to sound like we do. If it was, nobody’d think we came from outer space, which is what everybody seems to think. Whatever. Don’t have time to care about that right now.

  We don’t just have equipment to set up, we have a whole stage set: TVs tuned to static, a busted old Moog synthesizer (also tuned to static—it basically just sits onstage, drooling, like a demented robot friend), an ironing board we use as a percussion stand, lamps (because we prefer mood lighting to rock-show lighting), various car parts and kitchen utensils (for hitting), a movie screen we project slides onto and a pair of mannequin legs in a gold lamé miniskirt with a TV for a torso. All this may sound arty, but really, it’s just overenthusiastic.

  All four of us believe our stage set is beautiful, but it probably isn’t, which is why we call it “the crap.” Once in place, the crap becomes a dimly lit obstacle course. Tonight, it is a smeary dimly lit obstacle course with a halo around it.

  A blond cloud next to me comes into focus as Tea untangles her guitar cord from the mannequin legs. I stare too long, trying to figure out which blur is Tea and which is the legs. She stops. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I squint at her. “Is that you?” I ask, pointing. “Or is that?”

  “Holy shit,” she says, walking away.

  The lights go down, but it doesn’t matter ’cause I’m working in a fog anyway. I find center stage and drop the mic stand about a foot ’cause the singer in the first band was tall. Feeling my pedals to make sure they’re in the right order, I carefully place the greasy beer bottle down on top of my set list, then run through my settings as fast as I can with the guitar volume low. When I hear Dave’s sticks count us in, I turn the volume back up and hit the two pedals I need for the first song, ready to focus. Well, ready to lose focus. Trying not to see won’t be too hard tonight, I think to myself as the song starts. Now: no more thinking.

  Wait. Is that smoke? A smoke machine? We’re already halfway through the intro and there’s already choking smoke everywhere, billowing onto the stage; it looks like we’re on fire. I didn’t know this club had a smoke machine. They must’ve just gotten it ’cause whoever’s working it is really enthusiastic. We repeat the intro.

  Then the clouds start flashing; it looks like lightning. Aw, crap. Strobe lights. Strobes’re supposed to make you look cool, but they make you play retarded. ‘Cause the last time you saw your hand, it was on a different fret, and brains aren’t smart enough to fill in the missing milliseconds. Mine isn’t, anyway. Maybe I didn’t play enough video games as a child, so my reaction time is slow.

  We play the intro a third time. Aaaah! This sucks. We’re all playing our parts, but just barely. It looks like a war zone and it feels like total chaos.

  Tea walks over to me through the smoke and flashing lights, rolling her eyes in frustration, then presses her face up against her guitar neck and laughs, shaking her head. As she walks away, Leslie comes from the other side and peers at me through a flashing cloud, mock coughing. We wrote our parts with the intent to make every measure fascinating, which is great when you’re sitting in a circle facing each other in your practice space, less so when the complexity of the material is lost on a visually overwhelmed audience, and just annoying when we can’t even see our instruments. I have to sing in a second—we can’t play the intro again—and the microphone’s lost in smoke. So’s the guy working the smoke machine, wherever he is. I’d like to find him and hurt him. I can’t even stare into space; space is gone.

  This is so dumb. Closing my eyes, I try to lose myself in the pounding noise. I let my hands feel their way along the neck of the guitar and let my lips find the microphone by themselves. When they do, I bump into the mic with my whole face, which makes a loud thunk. The band sounds like a confused thunderstorm, though, and a sweaty, shirtless guy in the front row keeps jumping up through the smoke, yelling “You’re so RA-A-A-A-W!” over and over again, so I figure I’m the only one who hears the face-thunk.

  Then, suddenly, after the first verse, my guitar sound gets very loud and bright. I whip around and see the shape of a body on the floor near my amp. What the hell? Somebody’s messing with my amp? I shoot a get-the-fuckout-of-here look in the shape’s direction, but it just slithers under the smoke like it’s escaping the fire and reaches for my pedals, so I step on its hand. It turns over and lies back on the floor, smiling up at me—a leering drunk. Nobody I know. The second verse is gone; no idea what I’m supposed to be singing. I can’t think up here. I mean, I can’t stop thinking. I wonder what Tea’s playing. I can’t tell. I can’t even hear Dave. Wish that dick soundman had actually put kick and snare in my monitors instead of just saying he did it. The drunk guy just lies at my feet.

  Leslie looks at the figure on the floor, disgusted, and moves toward it ominously, the silver buckles on her motorcycle boots glinting in the lights. I recognize in her movement the intent to kick the jerk and shake my head at her, alarmed.

  She shrugs and walks away, keeps her bass line going the whole time. Distracted, I’ve stopped singing; I’m letting chords ring out and losing track (god, poor Betty wanted me to flirt up here) but Leslie never misses a beat. Never. Dave never misses a beat, either; he smashes delicately, the deep sound of his kit punctuated by the metallic knocking of cowbells, mixing bowls, hubcaps and busted tambourines. It’s beautiful. But Dave never messes up because he can’t be di
stracted. He’s just as nearsighted as I am and lost in his own world back there behind the drum kit. If he looks up, it’s like a mole digging his way up from underground, squinting in the sunlight.

  Dave and I both love the gentleness of blurry vision. “We’re lucky to have the option of a visual softening agent,” he said once. “I can talk to someone for an hour thinking they’re someone else. It’s so Shakespearean.”

  Right now, he’s liquifying the song, somehow murdering perfectly, with finesse. Thank god, ’cause I’m not. I’m sucking perfectly. I’ve sung one verse and one chorus, but the rest of the song has been a pretty goddamn free-form instrumental. I cue the band to end it. Ugh . . . make it stop. As the last chord fades, the drunk stands up triumphantly, with my beer in his hand—hope he gets Tiger Balm lips—sways dangerously for a few seconds, then stage-dives into the crowd. They separate and he plummets to the floor. Instantly, the first couple of rows close in again around his still form; they aren’t missing a beat, either. I love it when a crowd effortlessly swallows a whole human.

  Making my way through the smoke to fix the settings on my amp, I bump into Tea. She grabs my arm. “Sorry!” she says. “What’d he do?”

  “He fusted my amp.”

  “Fusted it permanently?”

  I mess with knobs until it sounds good. “Nah.”

  “What’d he do that for?”

  I shake my head, shrugging, and then go back to the front of the stage, bend over my set list and try to follow Dave’s magic marker arrows up and down the paper. They go in all directions, blending with scribbled song titles. There’s also a dark green smear across the middle of the paper that looks like . . . guacamole? We had guacamole? I thought they only gave us horse and orange soda.

  I’m still trying to figure out what song is next when I realize that the beer the drunk took has been replaced with a new one. I look up to thank the person who gave it to me, but all I see is jostling crowd bodies talking, laughing and hooting. Then the smoke clears and a gentle blue light washes the stage. As a cue, Leslie leans over me and smiles, then starts the next song.

  “Stand Up.” Good. That’s as easy as Throwing Muses gets: no time changes, fairly predictable chord progression and almost normal chords; it just has to be really tight. And Leslie’s always tight. As long as I can remember the words. Don’t think.

  “See no evil, think no evil, speak only evil” is how the band describes my MO and it’s a pretty accurate description. I don’t know what I’m doing up here, but evil knows. Evil tells stories from my life that I can’t follow, makes Throwing Muses sound like the Doghouse. And like finding home in a foreign country, I’m here, but I take nothing for granted.

  And I take no responsibility for these wicked déjà vu syringes.

  ♋ ellen west

  my mouth is full of demons i swear to god

  The creepy, goofy mess that is our sound is finally playing itself—song tattoos glow all over me, I’m looking and seeing nothing, and I’m nowhere. Nowhere at all.

  Every few minutes, I am again. Just to check in, keep the counts going and untangle the fingers as they slam away at the guitar, lost in their own world. I listen to Tea’s guitar, make sure we’re meshing, try to sing in tune with her, then yell in tune by myself. Squeezing the sweaty guitar pick tighter, I’m aware of a sensation, familiar but too strange to be okay. Something crawling into my chest and swelling up inside my throat.

  I can start a song just sorta, you know, singing along, and then, before I know it, inflatable words fill my rib cage, move into my mouth. I gag on them and they fly out, say whatever they want, yell and scream themselves.

  And blecch, that voice—it’s wretched. My speaking voice is low, husky and quiet. The song’s voice is loud, strangled and wailing: thin and screechy. A squashed bug might sing like this.

  Going away is my only real talent. Betty’s right: I’m a reluctant performer . . . not a performer at all. I need to go away so the song can play itself. When it ends, I take a deep breath and turn to look at Leslie. She’s still smiling.

  We pull up at a cliff by the ocean. The grass is so green and the water so blue, I can’t move; I just sit in the backseat and stare out the window.

  Dude and our dog Zoë hop out of the car, and together they run toward the ocean. Eventually, I get out and follow, but I’m too little to catch up with a full-grown man and a dog, so I stop and watch them run through the grass. For some reason, when they get to the edge of the cliff, they both unhesitatingly jump off.

  I scream. Racing to the edge, I look down, ready to see my suicidal dad and dog dashed to pieces on the rocks.

  They’re both looking up at me, perched on a ledge roughly four feet below.

  “What’re you screaming about?” asks Dude.

  So many people tonight. Three or four hundred, someone says, a real Friday night crowd. Of course, we still make only fifty bucks, and they don’t want to give me that. In the back office at settlement, one of the club guys puts a gun on the desk between us and asks if I really expect him to give me fifty dollars. His cronies are silent, counting piles of money with dismal expressions.

  I don’t think a question like that deserves a response, especially with that ridiculous prop between us. Even this idiot isn’t dumb enough to shoot a teenage girl over fifty bucks. I realize now that these guys thought they were paying us in orange soda and horse-goat for the privilege of playing their club. So, while the audience files out of the club and the other Muses pack up gear and crap, I stand in the office and wait for this asshole to count out our goddamn gas money. Which he eventually does. Jerk.

  Snatching the money off the desk, I shove it into my pocket without counting it. If you think, then you care. He doesn’t think, so he doesn’t care. Shitty attitude in a shitty back room. Why does music gotta be here?

  ♋ flipside

  there’s always drooling zombies

  or at least one dick

  The first time we played this club, they paid the audience to come in. We have pictures of the sign: “Throwing Muses—We Pay You $1.” We took the pictures because it was both sad and funny. Sad because nobody was gonna show up, funny because we didn’t care. They really should have offered people more than a dollar.

  Ever since the Doghouse happened, though, we’ve been on fire and so have our crowds. I don’t like what that apartment did to me, but I love what it did to our sound and so do a lot of other people. We were sorta counting on nobody ever listening, but outer-space music or no, they seem to relate. That fucking guy with the gun must think I’m an idiot. It isn’t complicated math: a few hundred people at ten dollars a head, everybody drinking five-dollar beers, and they don’t wanna give us fifty bucks for gas?

  I’m pretty pissed off, walking to the alley for load-out, thinking that tonight I’ll be in the backseat of the Bullet or on Napoleon’s floor, while that loser goes home to his house, that I’ve got nothing to give my bandmates except a ride home (orange soda and horse, those assholes . . . and possibly guacamole, but I never actually saw that) when I see an enormous and hairy man crossing the room, grinning like a crazy person.

  Instantly, I forget to be mad. He is . . . a Mexican biker? I’ve still got Tiger Balm vision and can’t quite pinpoint the look, but he’s walking toward me, both fists in the air, growing taller and wider with every step. “That song!” he shouts.

  Oh, good, he’s happy. “Which one?” I yell back.

  “It has two chords and a million words!” Now he’s in my face. Yep, Mexican biker, wicked-cool accent, genuinely huge, smells like smoke and cologne. He towers over me, his smile as big as my whole head.

  I look up at him. “Oh god, ‘The Letter’? That’s a terrible song.”

  “No, it’s beautiful,” he says. “And you play it crazy—like The Exorcist! I thought your head was gonna start spinning around.”

  I wince. “That’s a bad thing.”

  He shakes his head as we step outside together. “No, it was muscul
ar, man!” he laughs. “And you look like such a nice girl.”

  “I’m nice!”

  He laughs louder. “No-o-o-o, you’re not! You play that song for me next time, okay? Promise? I’ll come to every show if you promise to play that song.” He holds out his hand for me to shake. “Deal?”

  “Geez, can’t you just play it yourself? I’ll teach you the chords; there’re only two of ’em.” But I shake his hand anyway.

  He laughs again and walks away, yelling “Promise!” one more time. I laugh, too, and grab the other side of an amp Dave is loading into the back of the Bullet.

  “Promise what?” he asks, grimacing over the top of the amp. Together, we shove it in, crushing the kick drumhead and narrowly missing an unprotected guitar neck. The mannequin legs jut out of the trunk at odd angles, their high-heeled feet pigeon-toed.

  “He likes ‘The Letter,’” I answer.

  “Really?” Dave asks, confused, studying a thigh injury he sustained during the set.

  “Yeah.” I stare after the biker guy. “That’s what he said, anyway.”

  Dave talks into his leg. “Maybe he feels sorry for us.”

  I take the money the club guy shoved across the desk out of my pocket and count it. Forty bucks. Our tickets to get in cost thirty. “That could be.”