Maybe she isn’t making a scene so much as doing one—it’s hard to tell with her. I don’t think she’s lying when she’s acting; she just sort of becomes what she thinks she should be—in this case, heartbroken, mortified. She must have an internal director that hands her a motivation and she just runs with it. I’m sure it feels like feeling to her; it just looks a little bigger than you see in most people.
“Look, I’m not trying to bum you out.” I have my spin ready. I try to appear grave as I tell her, “The band is doing so well, we feel like we’re wasting time here, you know? I have to . . . plan for my future or I won’t have one.” She’ll never buy it.
Betty breathes deeply and dabs at her cheeks with a cocktail napkin. “Oh, I know.” She sighs and smiles a sweet little smile. “And you thought you were gonna live in a van!” she says mischievously. I say nothing.
Suddenly, she lunges for me. I clutch my snake bag to my chest as she grabs me in a murderous bear hug—god, she’s strong—and doesn’t let go for a long time. In fact, she moves me around the room by the neck, introducing me to confused party guests. “Krissy’s my little girl and she’s moving to New York! She sings!” Betty kisses my cheek and starts crying again.
“Boston,” I say in a strangled whisper.
“Careful what you say around her,” she warbles. “She’ll write a song about you!”
“No, I won’t.” She drags me to the next group of people.
“I knew this would happen! I’m so proud!” she dances with me, then wells up again. God, she’s just a big, sweet psycho. “Broadway, Krissy! I’ll visit you. I’ll take the train in the snow and we’ll go out to dinner. I can watch your rehearsals, make sure you remember to string ’em along!”
I hope she doesn’t take any train to New York without calling me first, but I’m not sure she’ll remember any of this on the fifth of July. I’ll send her a postcard from Boston. She’ll figure it out.
The fireworks are wicked, lighting up clouds and making the night look even blacker than it really is. Betty’s white living room frames the explosions cinematically, color splashing on the walls and furniture, then fading. I decide to sneak out during the finale to avoid any more weepy hoopla. The lights are out and the party guests are all staring at the sky; it seems like a good time to leave.
On the front porch, though, I look over my shoulder and see Betty following me to the door. “Krissy?”
I smile. “Hello, psycho.”
“Hush,” she says over the crackling, popping fireworks. “I wanna talk to you.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t seem drunk anymore, just soft. Maybe it wasn’t alcohol in her bloodstream, but good old-fashioned sparkling. Betty does like her parties.
The finale ends and the guests cheer. Suddenly, all softness leaves Betty’s face. “Don’t disappear,” she says as people yell and clap.
“I have to go. I promised the band.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She looks mad—the porch light illuminates half of her angry face. “Don’t use a strange city as an excuse to disappear inside yourself. Don’t spiral down into that hole again: that hole is a grave. You know what I’m talking about.” I do know what she’s talking about, but I’m surprised she knows what she’s talking about. “Don’t leave people alone. It’s unkind. Don’t do that to me again.”
What? “Unkind?” I say defensively. “I had no choice. I didn’t do it to you, I did it for you. To keep it away from you.” She still says nothing. “You weren’t alone, anyway.”
“How do you know?” she growls. My god, she’s pissed. “What about us? We were supposed to stick together.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m in shock. I don’t need this. How can you yell at somebody for getting sick? “We weren’t us anymore because I wasn’t me anymore.” We look at each other in silence. Clearly, she’s the dominant dog. She’s actually being loving right now, it’s just . . . scary love.
“You’ll end up dead.” She looks like she’s gonna start crying again, but she’s also really angry.
“You always say I’m gonna end up dead.” I try to smile. The lights inside the house come back on; people begin talking and moving around. I wonder if Betty’ll thaw a little, but she stays rigidly still, glaring at me.
“This time I mean it,” she seethes. “Do you know how worried I was?”
“No.”
“Listen. Once I saw Picasso unveil a painting of the darkest, ugliest death mask a woman is capable of wearing. I thought only Hollywood could create an image that skeletal, that awful. I know that’s what Picasso thought, too, because that’s where he found the ugliness that modeled for his painting—like a soul torn from its body. He horrified Hollywood that night by showing them their own ugliness, the darkness they had created in the name of false beauty and greed.”
Huh? Picasso? I stand there, staring at her. She told me to listen, so I’m listening. I just have no idea what I’m listening to.
She keeps going. “I was a soul torn from its body, you know! When I left Hollywood, I never thought I’d have to see something so frightening ever again. But there are all kinds of hells! I saw the same death mask on your face. A young girl, of all people, going to hell. And then . . . you disappeared. You didn’t even give me a chance.” Her voice shakes in fury. “Never do that to me again.” She slams the door.
I stand on the porch, stunned. Jesus, weepy hoopla doesn’t seem so bad now. “Death mask,” slam! What am I supposed to do with that?
Listen, I guess. I put my snake bag over my head and around my shoulder, then turn and walk down her front steps in the dark. It occurs to me that Betty might be a wise and secure old person after all.
♋ clara bow
with sunburned lips
i can bitch
about another stupid summer
Another game of Coyote is winding down. No winner has been declared. My friend and I are the only animals left standing, our brothers having fallen in the gaze of headlights long ago. He looks tired.
The little kids lie on the ground, staring at the stars, quietly saying inane things to each other.
“There’s only one Martian in the whole universe, but he doesn’t live on Mars,” whispers his little brother. “He lives on a bench near the movie theater.”
“I know,” whispers mine. “I’ve seen him.”
My friend and I lie down on the grass and call it a tie.
FALL 1985
Rats run past my feet while I sing. The little ones are frantic—they scurry by, neatly avoiding my shoes. The bigger ones lumber through the room, taxed, going methodically about their business.
We’re recording demos in a studio in Roxbury where the “vocal booth” is an enormous loft next to the control room. The loft is dark everywhere except for my spotlit microphone. After we record each song instrumentally, I come in here alone to stand in the spotlight and put down the vocals. Because we work at night, the rats are awake and surprised to be intruded upon, though not so surprised that they stop doing whatever it is rats do at night.
So we hang. They keep busy, I scream and yell, they run across my feet. The rats are here for a few good reasons: to eat and breed and not die of exposure. That’s a valid existence for an animal.
Apparently my wolf had no reason to exist. When I found myself picking a pretty song about a she-wolf out of the air on a warm afternoon, I knew she was walking away.
♋ and a she-wolf after the war
this is the future
after the war
and i don’t need any more
Then a gentle little song about the bees sent them buzzing in wider and wider circles, their buzzing leaving with them.
♋ buzz
don’t worry
the bees
they buzz around me
So I guess my animals are me seeing sound. But the snake has not yet set itself to music. I actually have a song with the word “snake” in it, but I’m still waiting for the wolf and the bees to ca
ll the snake back to wherever they all came from. Maybe its work isn’t done here yet.
Of course, it isn’t a snake, just a remnant of a particularly virulent chemical bloom. I’m no longer sure what “real” means, but the snake flickers in and out of existence, soaked in static, like a busted TV. It’s here even though it has no good reason to be; it doesn’t eat, breed or die when exposed. It makes me like the rats.
♋ mania
rat, rat, rat, rat, rat, rat
The band struggles to stay awake all night, lying in a pile together on the Universal Couch or the red shag carpet, reading comics, eating organic Froot Loops and drinking burned coffee. When we’re playing, they’re okay; it’s the downtime that hurts ’em. And there’s a ton of it.
Comic books help keep them awake. Underground comics’re our new passion, our greatest discovery here in Boston: a whole nuther world, fighting the good fight. I’m jealous of the form; it has everything—light, shadow, line, landscapes, bodies and speech. And lordy, how we feel for the artists in this genre. Whereas our Corporate Satan is Top Forty music, theirs is what? Marmaduke? How do they get up in the morning?
Most of the time my poor bandmates just cuddle the comic books, though, having dropped off somewhere in the middle. I watch them sleeping and realize that we are no longer the clean, healthy beach kids we were a few months ago. Boston seemed so ugly and dirty at first, but we’ve settled into grime as a way of life. In fact, we’re comforted by it. I think we’ve become genuinely dirty—the kind of dirty that doesn’t wash off in the shower. Crumbling walls and stained carpet match our own shittiness, mean we belong in a place. I hope it’s because we’re pure of heart.
When it’s time to play, I speak their names quietly and touch their shoulders gently, so as not to startle them. I feel sorry for my tired friends—they’re asleep only because they don’t happen to be bipolar—but they’re touchingly game. They shake off sleep like dogs shaking off bathwater. “I’ll make breakfast,” says Dave groggily.
“Is it misty in here?” asks Tea.
Leslie stretches and puts an arm around me. “And how are the rats this evening?”
No amount of tranquilizing can make me sleep, so I like having an excuse not to do it. This studio has no windows, which makes it feel like Las Vegas or a biorhythm experiment, sending me into a kind of suspended animation in which I feel no physical sensation at all, just a pleasant hum. And the sound! Explosions and flowers. Like coughing up your liver and seeing that yeah, it’s slimy, but it’s also sort of beautiful. We’ve become floating emotional responses, ragged and charmed.
Our producer is a vigorous, eloquent guitar player named Gary. He’s artful, sweet as mutherfuckin’ pie and only a few years older than us, though we’re pretty sure he’s a grown-up. He’s more together than we are and already has his own road mythology.
We knew we loved Gary when our band opened for his and we heard him use the word “silly” when talking to the soundman. We all snapped our heads around to look at each other, open-mouthed. In our opinion, only individuals capable of tremendous import use the word “silly.” Plus, Gary wanted to produce a demo for us and that seemed ultracharming, if a little masochistic. Luckily, we like both of these characteristics.
He thinks we need something to sell at shows, to beg record stores to carry, to get reviewed in the local music press, etc., and, in his opinion, our demos to date are nothing to write home about. “Not representative,” he said kindly.
So not only is Gary making us sound good for the first time, he’s also gonna use the artfulness that drips from his pores to package our cassette in such a way as to make it something more impressive than your average demo tape. I told him I always just wrote Throwing Muses in magic marker on demos and he made a face. “I’m gonna go graphic designy on your asses,” he said.
So Gary picks us up in his van and takes us to the studio every night, bewitching us with road stories the whole time. He’s trying to get a message across, it seems—a message about how awful touring is. How awful and how rawk. We focus on just the rawk, which gives us something to look forward to. He hasn’t really sold us on the awful, anyway.
“No, you don’t get it!” Gary cries, finding it difficult to keep his eyes on the road in his enthusiasm for the story he’s telling. “The promoter and the bartender and the bouncer and the soundman were all hitting on us! Like our whole band was s’posed to sleep with them before we got paid!” He thinks. “Which pretty much makes me a hooker,” he says primly.
We’re impressed. “Wow! Your band slept with the club?”
“Oh god, no. They just wanted us to.”
“Oh,” says Tea, disappointed.
I’m disappointed, too. “So you aren’t really a hooker.”
“You were just invited to be one,” adds Dave.
“I could be a failed hooker!” Gary says defensively.
Leslie giggles. “I think you at least have to have sex.”
Gary thinks. “Okay. So I’m not a hooker at all. I would like to retract my last statement concerning me selling my body.”
We drive in silence. I look over at him. “At least you aren’t a failed hooker. . . .”
When recording songs instrumentally, the band plays in a circle, making almost constant eye contact. That makes it easier to guess exactly when and where the next beat and note are going to land. I never really noticed this before, but each song sounds like two or three unrelated songs put together. Plus, our chords are unusual and the time changes unpredictable—it’s like racing down stairs juggling. Live, it flies, but recording’s nerve-wracking. Exhilarating but nerve-wracking.
My eyes dart from Tea’s pick to Leslie’s fingers to Dave’s foot on the kick pedal. We’re fucking up this . . . well, sort of a bridge. It always starts too fast, then gets too slow before going into the next section. We’re after abrupt changes, not wishy-washy noodling, and our timing here is mushy.
It could be my fault. My bandmates’re often following me and my hands still shake so bad. We’ve really had it out, my hands and me. I seem able to override the shaking when I’m in release mode, but it’s hard to sustain that for an extended period of time, and it’s always a struggle. My fingers eventually realize they can’t keep up and sort of collapse into stored-up tremors. Goddamn lithium.
From the control room, Gary speaks into the talkback mic, interrupting our fucking up through the headphones. “Is it possible that the shift into the change is tripping you up?” We all start talking at once, but no one has a microphone, so all he hears is babbling. “What?” he asks.
Dave leans into his snare mic. “Yes.”
“Okay. Let’s try the second half of the third verse into the shift into the change.” We all talk at once again. “What?”
Dave leans over. “Okay.”
“Or is that silly?” Gary knows not to overdo it. He won’t allow frustration to enter the picture and we have to play it right, so Gary has to remind us to “identify our curve.” Which means, essentially: when you start to suck, stop.
Once, we started sucking enough to have to take an actual sit-on-the-couch-and-do-the-math break. It was my fault: the timing in that song was so complicated, we hadn’t ever understood it and now that oversight was being captured on tape. “There is a logic to it . . .” I ventured.
Leslie looked at me. “Do you know what that word means?” she asked.
“Well, there’s a flow to it,” I said.
Gary watched us sing our parts at each other on the couch until we had figured out how they were supposed to mesh; then he placed a book of photographs on my lap. I stared at it. “What’s this?”
“It’s a book.”
“Oh.” The photographs inside were disgusting and breathtaking. Roadkill, body parts, lab specimens, all lit like movie stars: warm and glowing, with crazy colors you don’t see outside of death and injury. I stared at a picture of a severed hand for a long time. It was hard to turn the page—horror is hard to look at but
harder to turn away from. And it was just so damn beautiful.
I found that the longer I stared at each picture, the more enchanted I was. My eye would eventually remove all emotional coloring, leaving only admiration for texture and form, for DNA and the fragility of those made of it. A severed hand is graceful, exquisite; a liver really is pretty. “This is cool,” I said to Gary.
He nodded. “It’s you guys.”
“Thank you.” I looked at him, then turned another page. A dead rat floated in a jar. It looked like it was sleeping—not distorted or injured, just . . . unusually still. And lovely. Each one of its hairs had to form itself out of cells, minerals and will. Life seems so unlikely when you look at it up close.
“Thank you,” I said again to Gary, this time not for the compliment but for helping me see why a person might want to make the noise we make.
A music paper here in Boston described one of our shows as sounding like “four people playing four different songs at the same time.” The writer meant this as a compliment and it’s probably what we sound like to people, but it isn’t really fair. Playing different songs’d be easy; it’s playing the same song differently that’s hard.
Recording this demo with Gary has helped us become just self-conscious enough to not sound like total freaks. We noticed, for instance, that some of our songs are deeply, inherently anxious. In order to play them right, we gotta play on top of the beat, ahead of the drums. In others, if we don’t sit solidly behind the kick, we sound like a giant spaz; to cement Dave’s rolling, we have to hit our notes a breath after every kick beat, even if the passage is racing by at a hundred miles an hour.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 17