Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  He suddenly became agitated again. “There is no God!” he yelled.

  Geez. “Oh. I’m sorry. I don’t follow. Who do you want to kill?”

  “Our perception of a God!” Goddamn it, I knew it. “I used to think there was a God, too, like a big father up in the sky. Then I realized it was my own father I saw in the sky. A fragile human being with problems of his own, just like yours.” I took a second to picture Dude in the sky. “Nobody makes the rules and nobody’s gonna take care of you. You have to kill that idea. Your way is your way, your path is yours to follow—you can’t follow anyone else’s.” Kill an idea of God. That is so boring.

  He was trying really hard, though, and I appreciated that; spiritual responsibility is a good cause. It’s just that I was getting showered in spit. I decided to cut it short by taking his pamphlet. The guy looked sincerely grateful, took both my hands in his. “Read this and we can talk again tomorrow.”

  I took it but felt guilty, making a mental note not to walk down Angell Street tomorrow.

  Every morning, I look for an angel in the kitchen.

  I try to surprise it by tiptoeing in and suddenly swinging open cabinet doors. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but know I’ll recognize it when I see it. Silvery glowing steam, maybe, or a tiny Christmas ornament with a halo, hovering near the wheat germ.

  One of the hippies sees her all the time, so she must be there.

  I figure I keep scaring her away or picking the wrong cabinet, though, ’cause the angel never appears.

  Jeff was in his kitchen talking to his jazz roommate when I came back. They were having a polite argument about how much the guy’s jazz band sucks, it having already been established in their last argument that it does suck. We all know this ’cause they practice in the kitchen. “How’s it going?” I interrupted.

  Jeff looked over at me and his roommate took the opportunity to sneak away to his room. “How’s what going?”

  “Your lizards.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Mind if I take a peek?” I asked grimly.

  “It depends. You have issues? You a vegetarian?”

  “No, sir. I’m into animal murder.”

  “Then be my guest.”

  On the way to the bedroom, I tossed the mohawk guy’s pamphlet on the counter, just missing a bird who was pecking at some crumbs. “Watch it,” Jeff said, “or I’ll have a new skeleton to shellac.”

  “You know, that’s not even funny. You’re seeming a little . . . mad scientist today. Maybe ’cause you live in a basement.”

  Jeff flipped through the pamphlet. “Garden-level apartment.”

  I peeked at the lizards, glued to the canvas in their varnish sarcophagi. It was pretty awful; they looked like giant scarab beetles. When I came back to the kitchen, Jeff was grinning, clearly enjoying Cherry-Red’s mimeographed rant. “Who is this person?” he asked.

  “Red mohawk,” I answered. “On the corner of Angell and Thayer. Kinda hyper.”

  Jeff kept reading. “Wow. Was he fun?”

  “At first. He had cool teeth. Then I felt bad for him. He actually raises an interesting point.”

  “That God should die?” he asked, laughing.

  I shrugged. “Well, yeah.”

  “Hmmm. I thought he was already dead.” He frowned, then pushed the pamphlet aside. “I found you a pool.”

  “You did?”

  “The Brown University pool,” he said. “I got you a student ID.”

  “Really? That’s very nice of you. That makes you an enabler, you know.”

  “I know. But I want your name to be Kevin.”

  Had a feeling there’d be a catch. “It’s a boy ID?”

  “Wear a hat.”

  I played guitar like I always do before trying to go to sleep, but I just messed around, playing nothing. Nothing’s good: no heat, no electricity, no noise or voices, just colors. It’s comforting to play a fake song. This one was canary yellow and bright blue.

  The only words floating around were Cherry-Red Mohawk’s, so I wrote a dumb little song about smack freaks, unemployment and holocausts. It was only a minute long ’cause I got bored, but it was funny.

  ♋ hate my way

  i could hate god and blame dad

  After a while, I put the guitar back in its case, grabbed a blanket and lay down on the floor to watch creatures skitter around under Jeff’s bed.

  I spend a sunny morning on a raft with a vague hippie chick named Carol, poking my fingers into the water, trying to catch water bugs, while Carol discusses various life issues like feelings and trees. I’m just getting drowsy when Carol suddenly jumps up and points toward the riverbank, the raft tipping dangerously to one side.

  “Kristin . . .” she says woozily. “Look at all the ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand! There must be six, seven, eight . . . nine . . .” she trails off, still counting, as I scour the riverbank, desperate to see something that isn’t there.

  I stand on tiptoe, squint, shield my eyes from the sun and still I can’t see any ostriches.

  Maybe they’re really small ostriches? Hiding?

  I see the snake before I’m fully awake. By the time I sit up, it’s gone. You gotta be quick with a snake.

  Then I see it again out of the corner of my eye. Shooting my hand out, I reach for it. For a split second, I see something that looks like an X-ray of a snake, but all I feel is the cool wooden floor. I stare at my hand, flooded with adrenaline. There is no snake.

  My mind races. What’s the vocabulary for this? Hallucination, a neuro-chemical imbalance, stress, sleep deprivation, repressed memory, a false impression, a fiction, Jung called waking dreams “visions,” the motherfucker called dreams “wishes,” careful what you wish for, we’re permeable membranes, somebody slipped me something, concussion, brain damage, songs, paint fumes, toxicity, turpentine, shellacked lizards.

  Cherry-Red’s song swells up in static, but that’s a fake song, then fades.

  Burning with shame, my skin flushed and prickly, I lower myself back down on the blanket.

  Jeff’s face appears over the edge of his bed, looks at me a minute too long. “Rough morning?” he asks.

  I look back at him, feeling like I shouldn’t move. “Sorta.”

  “If you got a buck fifty, I’ll take you out to breakfast.”

  “Okay. Not the Town Chef, though,” I answer carefully. I’m scared I’ll throw up if I talk. “It’s too smoky.”

  “Town Chef it is,” he says, stretching.

  “Asshole.”

  So glad I’m not alone right now.

  ♋ america

  follow the road

  swallow a snake

  find shoes in the corner

  run away

  I watch my dog sleeping. The muscles in her face twitch and her feet paddle the air.

  “She’s chasing rabbits,” Dude says.

  I pat her head to try and calm her down. “Zoë’s never chased a rabbit in her life.”

  “Right. So she chases them in her dreams.”

  I’m falling into a hole in my head—been tripping over my brain not working, a mess.

  I wouldn’t go back to the Doghouse, so it came and got me. Crawled through the sewer, lifted up a manhole cover and jumped me. One minute, it was beautiful: fast heaven. Then heaven took a dive and hell was waiting.

  I knew that once you go to hell, you have to go back. I just didn’t realize it was true.

  ♋ doghouse

  i’m in a doghouse

  leave me alone

  The snake is a flashing light. I see an X-ray of its tail as it disappears underneath parked cars, behind trees and around the corners of buildings.

  I’m falling so fast.

  Falling up, on a high that’s spun out of control. A wacky fucking tornado of heat, electricity and energy. Music follows me around, blasting my ears, its colors steaming into my brain one after another, mixing and swirling in a war of churning rainbows.

&nbs
p; That goddamn witch. I was a kid on a bike; music only played when I wanted it to. Then she took her Chevy and jammed this lightning rod into my head and I can’t get it out. Now music plays whenever it wants to.

  The noise is brutal: songs crashing into each other, soaked in static. Separating one from the other is impossible. Chords layered over more chords, congested melodies and lyrics that’ve become a jumble of confused syllables. I can’t think.

  My hands fight back—they can’t play all those parts at once. And I can’t make sense of the words that’re flung into me through the sick orgasm of color. I smash my hands over my ears and the music plays louder.

  ♋ mania

  eyes is spirals

  Cherry-Red Mohawk’s song finished itself and it didn’t turn out funny at all. It’s only funny in a sick way, macabre. The fake part attached itself to a piece of Doghouse evil and took off, came back horrifying. All the songs are horrifying now—fractured, disjointed and harsh. About atomic theory and reincarnation, crashing cars, soap and ice, McDonald’s murders, child abuse, slides and puzzles; it’s sad to me how strange they are. The strangeness has a life of its own: unpredictable and out of control, impossible to measure because it won’t sit still.

  ♋ hate my way

  a boy was tangled in his bike forever

  a girl was missing two fingers

  Music’s making me do things, live stories so I can write them into songs. It pushes my brain and my days around. A parasite that kills its host, it doesn’t give a shit about what happens to a little rat girl as long as it gets some song bodies out of it. It’s a hungry ghost, desperate for physicality.

  I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.

  ♋ close your eyes

  i’m sliding really fast

  my hands are full of snow

  i don’t understand

  i don’t understand puzzles

  And every time a song is done, it whispers, you can go now . . . you aren’t needed anymore.

  Sound body, sound mind.

  Every time I think I’m done, I pick another song out of the chaos in the air. The songs’re keeping me alive so they can be alive.

  Once you pick music out of the ether, once you discern its frequencies, you can’t un-hear it. Maybe it alters your cellular structure, a cancer, I don’t know.

  I do know that the musical lightning rod sticking out of my skull is on fire.

  ♋ mania

  electrify your head

  Tendrils of industrial noise wind their way through the blast of songs: cracking, clanging, droning like broken bells in white noise. It creaks and moans and swishes. I’ve heard this before, but never like the wild phantom it’s become.

  When someone talks to me, it’s through this din, which makes it even weirder to be around people than usual, so I avoid them. This new busted creature I’ve become is genuinely ugly, anyway; no one could ever like it. The creature is a body, certainly, and I live in it, but I don’t think it’s me.

  I call it “me,” call its parts my parts, like I’m steward of a broken ship, but I’m not the one animating it; I’m not in control. It sails along madly, cutting its own path regardless of wind direction.

  ♋ america

  i’m losing my person

  Hot muscles wrapped in buzzing skin tense of their own accord. They move and don’t stop moving or they freeze in solid tension, gripping nothing. They can’t find enough work to do to stay calm. My face is flushed in the mirror at the Y, my eyes bloodshot. I can’t run away’ cause I’m not stuck anywhere but inside this hot-pink skin.

  I was all about running away.

  All I can do is try to beat this red, paper-thin body into submission, wear it out so it can’t fight me.

  ♋ hot pink, distorted

  it’ll take much more than water

  to fix my hot pink, distorted face

  I don’t even look like a nice girl anymore. I look like the songs sound because I am like the songs sound.

  ♋ diving

  dive into ice water

  Cold water is a punishment now. I hate it. My hair is yellow dreads from the continuous dunking in chlorine and salt water—and swimming doesn’t even work anymore. I cut furiously through the water for hours, grimly aware that burning energy will still keep me awake into the night.

  ♋ ellen west

  i’m awake with a vengeance

  I can’t sit still long enough to write in this diary for more than a few minutes.

  I should never have researched music, should never have dissected it to learn its secrets. Bad chemicals, poorly mixed, blowing up in my face—music’s a Pandora’s Box of nightmares, and I’m too shrimpy to close the lid or fight the monsters that crawled out of it.

  ♋ pandora’s box

  inside that pandora’s box

  was a can of worms

  I know most people haven’t noticed songs banging around in the air, but clearly, songs do bang around in the air; I’ve heard them. If I could measure and publish my findings, then other people could participate in this discovery and I wouldn’t seem so antisocial.

  So I sit under Fish Jesus, making endless copies of the Muses’ demos and stuffing them into manila envelopes along with our press kit. My hands are fast, busy, driven.

  I made the other Muses hear what I hear. Now we can make everyone else hear it.

  I mail the demos and press kits to record companies, radio stations and journalists. I know it won’t work, but I do it anyway.

  ♋ styrofoam rattlebox

  if i could grab the man on the street

  with my raspy rataplan

  my only personal property:

  a raspy, whispered plan

  Today, while I worked, a bee flew in Napoleon’s window and circled around me. Then another bee. I closed my eyes and saw them joined by hundreds more, swarming around me in double helix formation. When I opened my eyes, the hundreds of bees were there for a second, then transparent, then they disappeared. My imagination isn’t imaginary anymore.

  They weren’t realistic bees; they looked fake, like little robots. As if someone had created tiny, metal bees and injected them into my retinas. I watched the bees fade and then stared at the empty space in the air where they had been. When I shut my eyes, I could see them again.

  There used to be people here at Napoleon’s. Where did everybody go?

  ♋ call me

  something’s gone

  something’s over

  I walk. Often, all night long. Out of the light, out of the sun. The days are hot and too vivid, but the nights are gentle.

  ♋ walking in the dark

  you own a question

  it’s a body

  The snake is here. Sometimes I see it out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t reach for it. Then an X-ray of the snake fades to static and disappears.

  ♋ winter

  ’cause shadows haunt you

  in your headlights

  I abandoned my beloved Silver Bullet by the side of the road one night because I thought I hit a dog. I mean a wolf. It was not something anyone else would have seen. So I pulled over, cut the engine, left the keys in the car. I don’t drive anymore.

  I’m uncertain as to what world this is, where you might see something . . . pretend? magic? invisible? And so I’m uncertain as to who might live in this world. Not Betty, not Mark, not the Muses. Not me—that person is over. I’m not in here anymore.

  The only thing left in this body is shame. And the only shred of self-preservation I have left is this thought: “Please, no more shame.”

  So I keep my distance from everyone. Stay cold and they won’t feel the heat. I don’t go to school, book shows or schedule rehearsals. I don’t see anyone except the people I walk past on the street.

  I don’t belong on this planet. I’m not good enough.

  ♋ colder

  i’m losing my friends

  and my young dreams

  The snake and the wolf are
merely glimpses, so I can’t stare them down. I see a flash of light and I know what it means.

  It’s like Coyote, the game we used to play when we were kids. Light zaps you.

  ♋ flood