Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  I squinted up at him and my snake bag slipped off my shoulder. “Nope!”

  “Whatsa matter, reta’d?” he leered. “Lost yer key?”

  “Dick,” I muttered, picking up my bag. But he was right, I had lost my key. Maybe he’s right about the retard thing, too. I looked up. “Hey, Dick! I have an idea: first you shut up and then you let me in.”

  “I’ll let you in if you . . . come . . . upstairs!” Ew. “Wanna get it on?”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  He laughed and a thin line of saliva lowered itself from his lips to the ground in front of me. He did this on purpose. I watched, entranced. His face and the brown grass below shared the same slime for a second, then he let it go.

  I was impressed. He was a champion spitter, really world-class. How do you control something that viscous? He must get a lot of spitting practice with all us peasants around. “Wow,” I said. “Did you just try to spit on me?” He grinned. “Didn’t you just say you wanted to sleep with me? Dick?” There’s gotta be something wrong with a person who spits on the people he wants to go to bed with and vice versa.

  He laughed again. What a happy little rich boy. “My name’s not Dick, reta’d!”

  I walked up the front steps and looked under the mat for an extra key. “My name’s not reta’d, Dick!” How did this guy get into Harvard? Spitting scholarship? I checked both mailboxes. No key.

  He was still hanging out the window, staring at me, so I walked down the steps and into the bushes to bang on the front window of our apartment. An alien waved from inside, then came out to the sidewalk to flip off the Harvard thug and let me in. “Some people are just too fucking weird to talk to,” he said.

  Whenever we’re mad at the Harvard guys, we open our apartment door wide and slam it into their expensive bikes. Then we yell, “Sorry!” up the stairs. The alien did this as we went inside. Their bikes were pretty nice when we moved in. They look like crap now.

  Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, is staying with us while on a lecture tour. Sitting by the fire while my parents make dinner, he and I discuss cats and dogs.

  “I was a dog person first,” he says. “When I was little, like you, I loved dogs and hated cats. But now I’m a cat person. I love cats and hate dogs.”

  It has never occurred to me that you might like one animal more than another. I tell him I like both dogs and cats.

  “But which one do you like best?” he asks. “Which one would you invite to a party?”

  I have no patience for ambitious musicians; ambition is a really embarrassing tap dance to watch. Uptight and self-conscious, posing for pictures with anyone who might be able to help thrust them into a spotlight: look at me! And no reason to do this, nothing of substance to show us when we turn around and look. They aren’t even real musicians; they’re just show-offs, “performers,” who can’t get people to watch them do anything else, so they dress up and play fashion sound. “The blind ambitious,” Dave calls ’em. They’re Boston’s mosquitoes.

  But the musicians who make noises for noise’s sake fascinate us. Their vocabulary is slamming joy and desperation, lethargy and force. These musicians are funny people who’re serious about something and sad people who’re happy about something: they’re kind. They seem to wanna be just buzzed enough to feel what others feel, too.

  We didn’t even know what we were looking for when we found this scene, but here it is, filling in a bunch of blanks; a subculture within a subculture.

  Late afternoons, I grab my guitar and snake bag and walk to sound check. The city smells like smoke then, and sounds like roaring. The crush on the sidewalk, tired people going home as my workday is beginning, is unself-conscious at this hour: hungry, honest, work clothes wrinkled and askew. Lost in this shuffle is a good place to be.

  In the clubs, we get lost in a shuffle of humanity, too, and it’s lovely. A show is an opportunity for people to get base together, take a ride together, a group high. The bands are in the audience until it’s their turn to play, when the band onstage becomes a part of the audience in order to watch the next set. It’s such a celebration. No one seems to headline; bands just pile up, watching each other and cheering when somebody throws another log on the fire of real music. As if together we can make enough healthy noise to drown out the blind ambitious.

  ♋ caffeine

  the radio keeps playing

  the radio keeps saying

  “nothing lost and nothing gained”

  Every generation thinks its music is low and dirty, but you can always get lower and dirtier. People looking to expand their horizons are hungry for a body depth or a mind mess. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

  There are an unbelievable number of clubs in this city, but rat people like me (there are others, as it turns out), come to the Rat for low dirt. Short for “Rathskeller,” it’s a sweaty pit that is actually underground, and it’s the epicenter of this subculture’s subculture. It smells like beer and dark.

  ♋ devil’s roof

  i love the smell of beer

  the smell of dark

  Tonight, we’re playing the Rat with three other bands who all sound like themselves. Music that doesn’t imitate other music—imagine that. And the audience likes it. They wait in line on the sidewalk at all hours and spend cash money just to be allowed to crawl down into the airless Rat and sweat over expensive cheap beer. And listen to bands who sound like themselves. I find this very moving.

  Plus they . . . well, I’m not sure what they do; it’s like they’re playing along. They get it. When music walks into the room, we all know it. It isn’t delivered to an audience by musicians, it happens between people.

  ♋ pale

  and when the music starts

  it goes straight to your head

  Gary peeks in the dressing room after sound check, beaming and holding a cardboard box full of our new demos and starts handing them out to the other bands. I grab one out of the box and look at it. It doesn’t look graphic designy to me. “This isn’t art,” I say to him. “It’s a picture of us.”

  Gary peers at it over my shoulder. “It’s art,” he says. “See how it has colors on it?”

  “Colors?”

  “Nice colors. Don’t you think it looks a little Warhol?”

  “Well . . . there’re colors on it.”

  “Yep. But you hate pretense. So it’s an unpretentious picture of you. ’Cause you guys are adorable.”

  I look at him. “I’m not adorable.”

  “No, you’re awful. I meant them,” he says, pointing to my bandmates. “They’re adorable.”

  Tea, Leslie and Dave study the cassette in silence. Suddenly, Dave grabs a fistful of beers out of the bin and gives one to each of us. We all stare at Gary, waiting for a speech. The other musicians in the dressing room notice and grow quiet. Gary looks around the room and holds his beer in the air. “To not sucking!” he says to polite applause and a quiet hoot or two. I clink my beer against his and then go out into the room to watch another band sound check.

  According to Massachusetts law, because we’re too young to drink, we aren’t allowed anywhere in the building during business hours except the dressing room (where all the free beer is) or on the stage (where the rest of the free beer is). So if I wanna see a band play, I have to either watch them sound check in the afternoon or hide behind the drum riser during their set, where no one but the drummer can see me. Hiding behind the drummer is wonderful—my ears ring all night, like the hangover that’s part of the high.

  A full-body onslaught, better than a hurricane, music is the only nature I’ve got here in Boston, and it’s wild.

  ♋ flying

  if I’d known leaving every home would get me here

  I would have gone sooner

  I settle the record gently on the turntable like Dude taught me, pull the lever to start the turntable spinning and delicately place the needle on the smooth part of the disc where there is no music. I know that a record is l
ike a brain: smooth means no information, lines and ridges indicate stories.

  I sit on the floor, only barely prepared for the rapture to come. In seconds, the room is full of bursting color.

  But today there is no sound check to watch; a film crew is setting up their equipment on the stage instead, placing tripods between amps and holding cameras up in the air and on their shoulders, trying to set up the best shots ahead of time. Damn it, I forgot. While the bands play, they’ll race around, crawling between our effects pedals and standing over us, shooting from above. They do this a lot and it’s sort of terrible. Not that they’re in the way. Our crap didn’t make the move to Boston, as we’d gradually lost our enthusiasm for setting up lamps and carpets and legs and then tripping on them. So we’re just a band on a stage now, not a band on an obstacle course; the film crews have plenty of room to run around. The problem is that they show us what they shot.

  Yesterday, the filmmaker that’s shooting tonight invited us to his apartment to watch footage of ourselves. We didn’t wanna go but couldn’t think of a nice way to get out of it. “Keeps you honest,” Dave said, staring sadly at the video monitor, when the guy left to make coffee.

  I squinted at the screen in misery. “Well, no it doesn’t. It keeps you self-conscious. I was honest before.”

  “Yeah. Being in the moment doesn’t look good.” He pointed at himself. “Watch the face I make whenever I do this fill.” He grimaced angrily both on film and in the room. “I wish I didn’t do that.”

  Hmmm. I glanced at Dave. He looked sick.

  “Well, geez, look at me,” I said, pointing at the screen. “I really don’t blink.” We watch. “Golly, that’s creepy.” I knew I stared into space when I played; Betty never stopped giving me shit about that. She should have been giving me shit about the thing I do with my head. It swivels from side to side in a figure-eight pattern while I play. What the fuck?

  “I think of it as an infinity symbol,” said Dave kindly.

  For most of the set, I stand rigidly still, except for the head thing and my twisting left shin. That part of me was broken in half when the witch hit me with her Chevy and it seems to have some leftover resentment, ’cause it just goes apeshit when we play. My foot bends over itself, maniacally keeping time, squirming and straining to release the song. Then the head swivel and shin twisting spread into the rest of me: my shoulders roll; an arm’ll fly out suddenly, then go back to playing guitar like nothing happened; my trunk stretches, twists, then straightens. I sort of . . . writhe. It looks like a seizure, or at least an elaborate tic.

  I figure it’s what I gotta do to get the déjà vu syringe to work. When memories in the songs are stuck in my muscles, I need to release them. That’s what it feels like and that’s what it looks like. But I already knew how it felt. I didn’t know how it looked.

  I turned to Dave. “I didn’t need to know this.”

  “Tea and Leslie look good,” he replied airily.

  I nodded. “They do. Maybe we should hide behind them when we play.”

  “I do hide behind them. It’s not working.”

  When the excited filmmaker returned, Dave and I took our coffees and smiled politely. “Wow,” said Dave convincingly. “Just beautiful.”

  “I know.” The filmmaker smiled proudly. “Didn’t it come out great?”

  It’d be better if we weren’t in it. “Yeah, that was fun,” I answered. “Good work.”

  “You guys make it so easy,” he said. “I can’t wait to shoot you again. I think I’ll use a wide-angle lens to shoot you tomorrow night.”

  “Mm-hm.” I jammed my face into my cup, trying to imagine my reflection in the coffee through a wide-angle lens. Shoot me.

  As we trailed sadly out of the filmmaker’s house, he waved happily. “See you tomorrow!” he called after us as Dave and I exchanged grim looks.

  In the dressing room, Leslie fishes around inside her backpack for set-list paper and a marker. “Got a handful of narcs coming tonight,” she says offhandedly. Some record company employees are actually forced to listen to demo tapes, as it turns out—poor sons of bitches—and apparently, we have a “buzz,” so they send representatives to shows to check us out, see if the buzz is anything to get excited about.

  I wish a buzz was really a buzz: a humming whine that everybody could hear, whispering the names of bands. The record companies are just hoping that local hype will grow into a scene that could then be marketed nationally, with big-ass hype. In other words, they ask “What’s cool?” and try to be the first to come up with the answer. Then they sell that to people who are also wondering what’s cool and would like to be told by someone else. So record companies perform the questionable service of telling people what to think while reaching into their pockets for cash. “Yeah. We’re going to dinner with one,” I tell her.

  “Oh, good,” she says. “I’m hungry.”

  Food is really the only reason to go out to dinner with one of these guys. The reps we’ve met are all good people, but none of them are looking for good bands. They want cool bands. We aren’t cool and never will be. Cool bands are different from us—they have an eye to the outside, an impression of the impression they make. It’s the opposite of being lost in your own world the way we are. We only appear to be hyped because music writers like us and they like music. Fashion is where you find cool, though, and fashion is not music.

  “How could you possibly sell what we do?” we ask the reps and are met with blank stares.

  “Don’t you think your band is good?” they ask.

  “Sure we’re good, but that doesn’t mean we sound good.”

  “But you know you’re special.”

  We laugh. “Yeah . . . short bus special.”

  We don’t tell these people that they’re in the fashion industry, not the music industry, ’cause that would be rude, but it seems obvious to us that music is timeless, fashion ephemeral. Our orientations are necessarily opposed. It’d be like trying to sell paintings as wallpaper; people would hate that, it’d hurt their feelings.

  Really, record companies are in the marketing industry. Fashion probably wasn’t evil before marketing people got involved and tried to invent it themselves and then sell it to America’s youth by convincing them that the rest of America’s youth were already partaking. Fashion probably began as a groundswell of beauty: the tribe enjoying the way buildings look and music sounds, right now, in this moment. That’s valuable, because it allows for substance to shift styles. But marketing’ll do anything to avoid substance and engage only in style. No longer beauty that falls from trees like apples, fashion becomes shiny, scary chemical candy, unnatural and unhealthy.

  There’s no way we could play that game even if we wanted to. We’d suck at it; we have no ambition in that world. Our ambition is limited to the next song, the next show. If someone wants to listen, we’re touched; if no one wants to listen, we figure they’re missing out.

  Which means we’re too up our own asses to be marketed nationally, big-ass hype or no. I can think of so many bands that’d jump at the chance to play along with the entertainment industry, to use cool to sell records. So we hang out with the reps, eat dinner with them and then gently suggest that their company sign one of those bands instead of us.

  Tonight we’re having dinner with one of the old guys, the coke guys, the VIPs with orange tans and tinted glasses. VIPs are not the reps in the rock club trenches—they’re far removed from everything musical. Oozing out of the moneyed world of limos and palm trees (really!), they personify the tragedy of errors that is the music business. VIPs are always expensively dressed (Gary once tallied one of their outfits at a few thousand dollars; the clothes I was wearing that day cost thirty-five cents), they are never women and they all have a creepy, fake peacefulness that comes from both feeling safe because you’re rich and wanting people to think you’re self-actualized.

  All VIPs have a stylish, articulate assistant to speak for them and help them do things like move
. Because they seem partially dead. As if they’re just dying one piece at a time, their money holding up what’s left of their corpse with various . . . treatments. They’re fascinating in a yucky way, but you can’t spend too much time with them. It’s like going to Vegas—not funny enough.

  The VIP and his assistant take us to a coolly beautiful restaurant where a coolly beautiful hostess seats us at a round table with a white linen tablecloth. I watch fish swim in an enormous fish tank set into the wall while the VIP orders three bottles of wine and name-drops old musicians we either haven’t heard of or don’t care about. When he forgets our names, the assistant steps in and addresses us personally. “David, I’m guessing you must be a Who fan, am I right?”

  Dave smiles. “Can I have another Coke?” he asks.

  When the VIP leaves to go to the men’s room, his assistant smiles at us. “He’s legendary,” he says. “A brilliant man.” We all watch the lumpy figure shuffling across the restaurant. “He can make or break you,” the assistant hums admiringly.

  When the legendary, brilliant man shuffles back to the table and sucks down another glass of wine, we order all the food we can and then watch his face melt. VIPs’ faces melt when they drink. I don’t know if it’s face-lifts or tanning booth abuse or maybe hair transplants slipping down their scalps, but it’s freakin’ weird.

  While his face is melting, the VIP tells us he can give us money to make a record—answering our prayers, fulfilling our dreams—and we sigh and eat more. Hearing this is sad and boring, because we would love to make a record and we don’t have the money to do so. But three things have kept us from doing a deal with a record company:1. Once you sign, they can drop you whenever they want, but you can’t leave.