2. They tell you how your record will sound.
3. They don’t have to release your record, but no one else can either (not even you), because your record is essentially their record. They paid for it, they own it. You aren’t even allowed to re-record your songs and release the new versions—your songs are gone.
I’d sent out all those demos and press kits before I knew this. See, we’re nobodies and nobodies have no rights. And in order to be somebodies, we’d have to sign a nobody deal, sacrificing our firstborn song babies in the process. It just isn’t worth it. We know they could never sell what we do; they’d just make us suck, then drop us. Living in a van’s the dream and living in a van’ll stay the dream. We’ll just have to keep playing until we can afford a van.
So we voice our concerns halfheartedly and I’m sure the VIP and his helpmate have more to say when we do, but we can’t listen ’cause we’re too busy eating all we can and watching his waxy skin drip like the candles on the table.
♋ mercury
this meeting with old ladies
on tremendous amounts of coke
Our press is increasing exponentially: the more people write about us, the more people write about us. We do a fistful of interviews every time we play. The four of us sit in a row on a Universal Couch and talk for hours during the other bands’ sets. I can’t sneak off to hide behind the drum riser and listen because I stand center stage when we play. This, to journalists, seems to imply a willingness to mouth off. Apparently, to them, “lead singer” means “person who won’t shut up.”
It’s so lousy to know that we’re missing all that music. We feel left out, listening to fuzzy thumping through the wall as writer after writer points out that we’re teenagers and three of us are female. We never have answers to these nonquestions. “Teenager” just means stupid. And is there a difference between male and female people? Is there? Seriously. I have yet to identify a single character trait I would attribute solely to one gender or the other.
Tonight one of the sexist journalists is a woman who’s angry that Dave is a man. “Why didn’t you hire a woman to play drums?” she asks me accusingly.
I’m at a loss. “Because Dave’s not a woman,” I answer. “I didn’t ‘hire’ him anyway; he doesn’t get paid.”
“I’m a volunteer!” Dave chirps happily.
She gives him a blank look and then turns back to me. “Surely you would agree that you play female music.”
“Sometimes we play female music,” I say. “But not any more often than men do.”
At first, it’s easy to be patient with these writers because it’s clear that they don’t mean to be so wrapped up in stereotypes, but . . . by the time the fifth person comes in and asks us something to the effect of why did you decide to be girls? I sorta lose my cool and end up mouthing off in spite of myself. “We aren’t girls on purpose; we’re girls by accident! We’re musicians on purpose. I mean, do you treat men and women differently?”
This poor guy happens to be really nice; he just didn’t know not to ask that particular question. He shakes his head uncertainly. “Well, it’d suck if you did,” I continue. “I don’t see how gender could inform anyone’s character; it’s useless when it comes to predicting behavior. Except for idiots’ behavior—’cause thinking you have to act male or female instead of human makes no sense.”
He looks so tense that I begin to speak more gently, but I don’t stop, which is what he would like me to do. “What could gender possibly have to do with how your hands work?” I ask him. He shrugs. “Women’s hands work on typewriters but not guitars? Or are we only allowed to play acoustics ’cause electricity’s too bitchin’ for girls?” He nods along, then shakes his head, trying to agree with me. “For god’s sake, didn’t we all grow up with Free to Be You and Me?”
“Yes!” he says heartily. “I did!”
Even I wish I would shut up, but I don’t fucking stop. Music pounds through the wall and I blame this guy for making me miss it. “We all know there’re bigger differences within the races than between them, right? So substitute ‘gender’ for race, duh-uh. I thought we already did that!”
He opens his mouth, but I interrupt him before he can say anything. “Not to mention the infinite shades of gray inherent in the whole concept of gender. Gender is a spectrum, with no clear division between the poles. Hetero and homo are just scratching the surface of sexuality . . .”
This is when the exhausted journalist moves warily on to another band member, writing in his notebook next to my name, “outspoken feminist.”
I’m building a snowman in my front yard when a plow comes laboring down the street, spraying snow into the ditch. When he sees me, the driver slows down, then stops next to my house, cutting the engine. He stares at my snowman.
I stare at him.
“Is that a boy or a girl?” he asks.
“It’s a snowman,” I answer.
“Looks like a snow lady.”
I look at my snowman. “No it doesn’t.”
“Oh,” he says. “My mistake.” He starts the engine and continues down the road, waving goodbye over his head.
“Self-expression,” says a woman with glasses, her army T-shirt bunched and sweaty. She holds her tape recorder out to us. We look at it.
“What about it?” asks Dave politely.
“Let’s just talk a little bit about self-expression,” the woman says. Leslie looks at her. “What, just ‘talk about it’?”
“How important is it?” she asks, squinting thoughtfully.
“Self-expression?” says Dave. Tea and I just sit there.
The woman begins to rethink her impression of us as articulate. She turns to me and puts her tape recorder under my chin. “Tell me your thoughts,” she says slowly. “Regarding songwriting and expressing yourself.”
I’m confused. “My self ? Why would I wanna express that?”
Leslie peeks out the dressing room door. “The next guy’s a grown-up!” she says incredulously.
“What?” asks Tea. “Why?”
“I can’t imagine,” answers Leslie. “Maybe he’s a newspaper.”
I look at her. “Maybe he’s a newspaper?”
“Shhh . . .” Leslie opens the door with her biggest California smile and offers the guy a drink. The Newspaper is indeed a grown-up. He has a trim beard and a tweed jacket. He looks more like a professor than a newspaper to me. Or like someone auditioning for the role of “professor.” I guess he could be a newspaper.
The man declines Leslie’s offer of a drink and gets down to business. Placing his tape recorder on his lap, he begins to talk about art and commerce. It’s his feeling that a musical genre begins with a select few, in a period of intense energy and chaos. In time, the movement both picks up steam as it’s popularized and loses focus as the energy dissipates.
“I’ll buy that,” I say. “That’s why ‘legendary’ means ‘overrated’ in Top Forty and ‘where are they now’ in underground music.”
“Right,” he says. “When a band comes along who can adopt the essential elements of a genre yet lose the idiosyncratic chaos associated with the groundswell period, essentially imitating the style and smoothing out its rough edges, it’s funded by the recording industry with the aim of popularizing this sound, which will eventually be considered mainstream,” he says.
“Sure,” says Leslie.
“I don’t think you guys are that band,” the Newspaper says carefully.
“No,” answers Tea.
“No, I wouldn’t think so,” agrees Dave.
“We’re the chaos people, aren’t we?” I ask.
The Newspaper nods.
“You guys play a lot of notes really fast!” says a young guy in a T-shirt with the words Candy Time written on it. He’s enthusiastic to the point of hyper.
Leslie laughs. “A lot of notes really fast?” she repeats.
Candy Time looks at us and laughs uncomfortably, thinks Leslie might be making fun of him. We just
smile. “Yeah! You’re untrained,” he says, “but you can still play fast. It’s cool.”
Leslie stops laughing. “Untrained?”
“Yeah . . . you just play whatever comes into your head, right?”
“I guess that’s what we do,” answers Tea. “Isn’t that what everybody does?”
“No, that’s the thing,” he explains. “Professional musicians take lessons to learn how to play by the rules, but you guys just play whatever you feel like playing!”
I can feel Leslie bristle next to me on the couch. “Are you implying that we sound the way we do because we don’t know the rules? That we don’t know how to sound like other bands?” Candy Time realizes his mistake, but too late. “What gave you the idea that we were ‘untrained,’ anyway?” she asks him, but she doesn’t give him time to answer. “You know how hard it is to play this way? Try it sometime! There aren’t any lessons to teach you how to do this!”
The more Leslie talks, the angrier she gets. “And do you know how easy it is to sound like everyone else?” Candy Time blanches. Interesting how often a journalist is afraid of one of us. They just have to hit a nerve in order to get an ax ground on ’em.
I’m enjoying this, but Candy Time looks ill. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” he says.
Leslie shakes her head. “I know you didn’t. Just don’t think that anymore; it bugs me.”
“Yeah, it bugs her,” I add.
“It doesn’t matter how many notes you play or how fast you play them,” Tea explains. “You have to play the right notes.”
“And no one can help us figure out what those are,” says Leslie. “It’s hard to learn something that no one can teach you.” He nods and looks down at his notebook, hoping to come up with a better question.
“What’s Candy Time mean?” asks Dave in an attempt at friendliness.
The guy looks up, bewildered. “What?”
A goth-y chick with straight black hair in cutoffs and ripped tights balances a beer on her knee, holding a notepad and pencil. “Why,” she asks us suspiciously, “are you guys the only band my mother likes?”
There is a gentle, tattooed boy next to me on the couch, hunched over his tape recorder, his eyeliner smeared with sweat. He requested an interview with “the lead singer,” so the other band members gleefully took off, leaving us alone.
When the door shuts behind them, the boy stares at his knees. “Whadda you do,” he asks slowly, “when you wake up on the wrong side of the lithium?”
Aw, geez. I wince and he smiles, but his eyes look sad. “Sorry. Bad first question?”
“Yeah. I was thinking maybe favorite color? Dream date?” I lean toward him conspiratorially. “My favorite actor is Daffy Duck.”
“What’s your favorite color?” he asks.
“Green.”
“Whadda you do when you wake up on the wrong side of the lithium?”
I’m trying to read him. Is he asking for help? Or is he gonna make me sound crazy in his article? “It doesn’t matter,” I answer. He looks at me intently. “The music we play isn’t craziness. It doesn’t need lithium.”
“What about you, though?” he asks.
“Well, that doesn’t matter, either.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause I’m just one guy in a sea of people,” I say. “Plus, if something gets you where you’re going, it’d be wrong to question it.”
He thinks about this. “What if you can’t come back?”
“You mean if you just went nuts?” He nods. “That’s the risk you take, I guess. I mean, if that could happen, you’re probably already nuts.”
Chuckling, he looks down at his knees again. “But . . . what if it makes you dead?”
“Well, dead’s better than crazy.”
“Which brings me back to my first question.”
I look at him. “My favorite color is green.”
“Do you need to be healthy in order to survive?”
“I don’t know. There’re probably a lot of okay ways to survive. You may need a passion, though. Or else you don’t have any reason to stay here.”
“Define passion.” He turns his tape recorder toward me.
Some people from one of the other bands burst into the room, then notice the boy’s tape recorder and shush each other, smiling at us. They grab beers out of a bin full of ice, then sit on a bench across the room, talking in low voices. One of them is a lady who looks as monochromatic as Mark. I miss Mark. She mouths “Sorry!” at us and I smile at her. Staring at her beige hair, skin, clothing and eyes, I remember what Mark said about poetry.
“I think you need something in your life that is both beautiful and necessary. A person or a mission or a place. Beautiful might not be pretty, and necessary might not be understood, but, still . . . I think caring, not death, is a passport to heaven.”
We sit in silence while the band next to us continues to talk quietly.
The boy leans back against the Universal Couch. “Do you have to go to hell to get to heaven?”
This has never occurred to me before.
♋ heaven
this is heaven
and all my friends are there
After the show, we do a photo shoot outside the club. It’s raining, and we try to protect each other’s heads—especially Leslie’s, ’cause her dreads almost drowned her in that pool drain in Santa Cruz. We all have our arms around each other, soaking wet with sweat and rain.
It’s raining hard now. Autumn rain is different in Boston. Less . . . leafy. At home on the island, rain always smelled like leaves; here, it doesn’t smell like anything but water and tires. At least in front of rock clubs.
I’m waiting for Gary to pick me up and take me home. We loaded the gear into his van and now he’s settling the show in the back office for me ’cause he said I looked tired. I laughed when he said this. “Tired! I don’t get tired!” but now I’m noticing that I actually do feel tired. Not sleepy—more like I just ran a marathon. Like no amount of rest could make a dent in this . . . weakness. God, now that I have a minute to think about it, I’m exhausted. Is it my drug cocktail?
I’m never sure what those crazy chemicals are doing. Keeping my swollen and shrinking soul inside my outline, I guess, but I’m seriously dulled. I feel like I’m living in a fake, soft world, my real dimension just beyond this one. I can remember it: it buzzed and my muscles sang with its energy. It was electric and frantic and hard and real. I was never tired there.
Boy, am I grateful for the coat Dave made me buy. Tonight, I’m hiding in it. It isn’t a raincoat, though, so it doesn’t repel water; it soaks it up instead, getting heavier and heavier. Wish I could lay it on the sidewalk and lie down on it. Wow. That doesn’t sound like me.
Suddenly, I hear a voice over my left shoulder, speaking quietly into my ear. “On another night, there’ll be another tree and it’ll be raining again.” I look up and see a dark-haired guy next to me, dripping in the rain. Where’d he come from? “I’ll be there and you’ll be there,” he continues, “and then we’ll both know.”
“Know what?” I ask him, looking around. I don’t see a tree. But he doesn’t answer—just walks away in the rain.
I’m watching him walk away when Gary pulls his van up and pushes open the passenger side door. “Who was that?” he asks.
“Don’t know.” I ride shotgun even though it’s too dark and stormy to see any buildings tonight.
While I’m arranging my wet coat around me, Leslie tosses a flat, shiny package onto my lap. “I got you a present.”
I squint at the package in the dark. “What is it?”
“Well,” she says, “you know how you always wanted a giant ass?”
“Yes!” Aaaaah! “You got me a giant ass?”
“I got you a bigger ass. Ass enhancement.” Tea and Dave giggle.
I hold up the slender package. “There’s ass enhancement in here, Les?”
“Yeah!” Her accent makes everything she says h
ilarious. Leslie can make the word yeah funny. And three syllables long. “It’s black-girl stockings, booty included!”
I’m starting to be able to make out the figure of the beautiful booty-full lady on the package. I hold it up to show Gary. “Wow . . . I’m so sad I didn’t know about booty-included stockings until now!”
“It’s never too late to grow a booty, honey.”
“Or fake one! Thank you, Les.”
“That was awfully thoughtful,” says Tea.
“It sure was. I’m gonna ride my bike all over the fucking place. I’m gonna sit on that bus like nobody’s business.” Rain splashes on the windshield, the wipers sending it pouring into my open window.
“Kris?” says Dave from behind me. “Can you close your window?”
“Sorry!” I roll it up and turn around to see how wet he is.
He’s soaked. Blinking, he takes off his glasses and holds them out. They’re spattered with raindrops. “It’s okay. Can I use your new ass to clean my glasses?” he reaches for the package, but I pull it away, shaking my head at him grimly. Rolling his eyes, he cleans the glasses on his damp shirt.
“I can’t wait to try ’em on,” I say to Leslie.
“You’re gonna look great, Kris,” laughs Tea.
“Hope they fit,” Leslie says. “Those’re some big-ass stockings . . .”
Leaning back in my seat and hugging the package, I watch the rain outside. Gary switches on the radio. “Oh, good,” calls Tea from the backseat. “I’m cold.”
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 20