Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  He looks at me for an explanation. “She means that we get mad at the radio and that warms us up,” I explain.

  He nods. “I get mad at the radio, too. But I like pop music.”

  “We like pop music. I think we play pop music. And we respect it.” I point at the radio. “But they don’t.”

  “No. I think when they say ‘pop’ they mean something else. Like . . . stupid.”

  “Pop’s short for popular, right? Popular should mean smart. That would imply that we’re all smart for liking it.” I turn sideways in my seat to face him, pulling my coat around me, still gripping the panty hose. “But pop music’s both dumb and pretentious. Don’t know how they pull that off.”

  “By being dramatic,” he says.

  Dave leans up between us. “Melodramatic!”

  “Mmm . . . much worse,” says Gary. “If you guys ever get melodramatic, I’ll take you out back and shoot you.”

  “Deal,” says Dave. His glasses are smeary from raindrops. I consider letting him use my new booty to dry them, as it’s the only dry thing in the car, then decide against it.

  “What happened to pop music?” moans Gary. “The radio used to move me to buy records. It was my life.” This is a loss that seems to cause him pain. “Where did pop music go?”

  “Underground,” I answer. “Or else we just lost it somewhere between the Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex. I think the same thing that happened to food and sex happened to music.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Selling it. It’s public and denatured when it should be personal and intuitive.” I think. “Valuable and free. And healthy. But monetizing it and marketing unnatural facsimiles confuses people. So they’re uneducated in their own responses—” Wait. I check myself. Am I ranting? Am I embarrassing myself? Gary’ll figure out I’m bipolar if I don’t shut up.

  I learned from the soothers that part of learning to deal is knowing how people who aren’t bipolar act. Sometimes all I can remember about this is not like me, and I draw a blank, lose my train of thought. Like now, I just freeze up. Luckily, Dave jumps in. “Bad people dumbing it down, trying to make wads-o’-cash off it,” he says. “Lowest common denominator crap.”

  “The Joy of Music,” Gary hums thoughtfully. “Corporate America wrecked it. Figures. They made that terrible bed and now they gotta lie in it.” He stops at a stoplight. “And it’s filled with money . . .” Listen to Gary, all ranting about bad radio—and he’s not bipolar. I don’t think.

  I’m too tired to be manic, anyway. I bet we’re just talking.

  “You guys have to keep going,” he announces. “You have to make popular music good again.”

  “We do?” I lean my head sideways against the headrest and my eyes close for a second. “But we play unpopular popular music,” I chuckle into the seat.

  “That’s exactly what you play,” says Gary, “because you’re inventing something. You’re gonna be hugely influential. You’ll change the face of pop music.”

  I manage a tired laugh. “What?”

  Gary is serious. “It’s true!”

  “It’s true that pop music needs to change its face,” I murmur, “but the Newspaper said we were chaos people.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, pop songs should be witch doctors.” God, I’m tired.

  Gary leans toward me, confused. “Sorry?”

  Maybe I’m not thinking clearly. “Micro and macro.” I try to make sense. “Intimate yet worldly, and of indeterminate age,” I slur. I slide down further in my seat and my eyes close involuntarily again. I struggle to open them, but they insist on closing.

  Gary watches. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “You sick?” I open my eyes and my mouth to answer, then close them both again before I can think of anything to say.

  ♋ peggy lee

  in between midnight and sleep

  I wake up when the van stops outside our practice space. Gary is looking at me accusingly. “You were sleeping,” he says.

  I’m amazed. “No!” He nods and walks to the back of the van, opens it, then begins piling gear onto the sidewalk. I follow him. “I’ve never done that before.” I still have the package of big butt in my hand. Tea, Dave and Leslie start carrying gear into our space.

  Gary raises his eyebrows like I’ve just confessed a crime. “I’m not here to judge. But there’s something seriously wrong with you.” When the gear is on the sidewalk, he picks up the kick drum, then holds a guitar pick in front of my face. “You can carry this.”

  I put the pick in my pocket and lift an amp, just to prove that I can, but it now weighs about twice what it used to. Putting it back down on the sidewalk, I look in the back to see if someone maybe hid another amp inside it. It’s empty. So I toss the stockings in the back and pick it up, struggling into the dark building with it as my bandmates pass me in the hallway on their way back outside.

  When I get to our practice room, I shove the amp on top of another one, then lean on it for a minute. Somehow the rest of the gear is already in there. My bandmates must be waiting in the van, ready to go home. I’m moving in slow motion.

  Gary watches me heave my rain-soaked coat into the passenger seat. The fur collar smells like wet dog now. “Maybe you’re tired because you played a show,” he suggests.

  Sitting on the edge of my seat and staring through the windshield, I say, “That was, like, our bazillionth show, Gary.”

  “A bazillion’s a lot. You could’ve hit a wall.” He pulls away from the practice space and the tires splash water up in the air and onto the sidewalk. I fall back against the seat and stay there. “A musician is an athlete. And an athlete should be totally spent after a race, used up, or else he won’t ever win. Some other athlete’ll be there using everything he’s got and beat him.”

  “Her.”

  “I don’t like saying ‘beat her.’ ”

  “Oh,” I answer sleepily. I watch Gary drive for a few minutes, feeling drunk. Then, all at once, I feel the weight of his charity. It hits me hard that we have nothing to offer. He keeps helping us, wasting his time and his money. I hate that we’re such a burden. We are not gonna change the face of pop music . . . losing oneself isn’t a marketable skill. In fact, we won’t even last. Nobody buys ugliness; why would they? And there’s no grant for this kind of art because we all know it isn’t art. Painting is art, sculpture is art, antiquated musical styles are art, even avant-garde music is art, but not dumb-ass rock music. As soon as our sucky equipment dies, we’ll die.

  I feel like I should warn Gary that we have no future, that we aren’t a safe investment. Tell him to go care about some other band—place his efforts in a nice successful basket of cool ambition, not the sieve of right now, in this moment that is Throwing Muses. Who is he, anyway? Some misguided angel. I don’t get it.

  I can’t say any of this, though; I’m too tired. “Why are you so nice to us?” I grumble instead, without lifting my head off the seat. Gary doesn’t answer; he just keeps driving.

  When he drops us off at home, he looks at me suspiciously. “Get better,” he says and pulls away, then sticks his arm out at the intersection and waves like he always does.

  ♋ pneuma

  you’re like a warped godmother

  with your baffling love

  Orange popsicle syrup coats my face and hands. Tipping forward, I press my nose and palms into the sand, eyes closed, and listen to the sound of the waves and the screeching children playing near our blanket.

  When I sit up, I imagine I must look very different and amazing. I make my hands into claws and growl terrifyingly at Crane, who lifts her head off the blanket to look at me through big, brown sunglasses.

  She does not tremble with fear. “Do you need a nap?” she asks.

  When I open our front door in the morning to get the paper, there is a bouquet of flowers on the porch, and a six-pack of beer. Our doormat often has something nice on it: a letter, a record, comic books, candles, an Easter basket, hor
oscopes, candy or a painting. I don’t know where you find Easter baskets in autumn or how anyone knows our astrological signs, but we hang all the paintings, and the Easter baskets have replaced the plastic fruit on our squishy mantel.

  This is what an audience does out in the real world. Delivers presents. They’re like sweet, old relatives who forgot when your birthday is, so they bring presents all the time. Sweet, old, invisible relatives.

  I put the newspaper and flowers on our rickety kitchen table and stick the beer in the fridge. I actually fell asleep last night when we got home and stayed asleep, a miraculous miracle, but I’m still tired. Taking a smudgy glass off the drying rack next to the sink startles two roaches, who scurry off the rack and into the drain. While I fill the glass with water so I can take my pills, I realize I don’t want to. I look at the pills in my hand and recoil with nausea. What? I never get sick. Slowly, I walk over to the kitchen table and lower myself into a chair, taking a minute to admire the flowers and wake up.

  The phone rings. I look at it and wait for somebody else to answer it. I’m too tired to move, but I don’t really ever do phones anyway. Not unless I have to, like when I have an interview or someone says “phone for you” and holds it out to my face before I can slink away. Phone for me. There is no phone for me. I’m not good at them because of all the talking out loud you have to do on them. No expressions or body language. It doesn’t seem like communication to me, just a trick to make you stand still.

  My roommates gently bitch at me about this, as if I don’t understand how the machine works: “You can’t just pick up the phone, Kris . . . you have to say hello” and “Geez, they can’t see you nodding!”

  The phone rings and rings. I stare at it until it stops, then I study the wall next to it.

  Our message wall is covered with penciled doodles, cartoons and notes. We do sometimes take normal phone messages for each other, so there are a bunch of 2:15, what’s-her-name called, like/don’t like/hate? can’t remember, or wednesday the twenty-fifth at the paradise? there’s $, etc., but the majority of pencil marks are devoted to quotes from various phone calls.

  In other words, if, when you answer the phone, the person you’re talking to says anything interesting or confusing, you’re encouraged to share it with others by adding it to the wall. Taken as a whole, this wall looks like an art project:then EVERYTHING started falling!

  I told her I had a dog and now she’s coming over

  Mr. Brownie is what I named the plant AFTER it died—before

  that, it was just “the plant”

  tell him I wasn’t, like, MAD, I was just in a loud mood

  I do a lot of interviews standing here, drawing on the wall. Most of the music journalists I talk to are very bright, and I’m grateful for the press they give us. I like the idea of a professional music listener, so I do whatever I can for them. Unfortunately, what they usually want me to do is answer questions, and I’m not good at that. I start doing the math and always come up with: how could anyone ever know anything?

  My bandmates are a tiny bit better at articulating responses, so I write questions on the wall and eventually they grab a pencil and answer. I have to tell journalists I’ll get back to them as soon as the wall responds.

  Q: “What style of music do you play?”

  A: “No.”

  Q: “Why are your lyrics so cryptic?”

  A: “Yes.”

  Q: “Do you mean that you have a fish nailed to a cross in your mind?”

  A: “You don’t?”

  Q: “What’s your favorite color?”

  A: “Clear.”

  Q: “What’s your favorite flavor?”

  A: “Plain.”

  Q: “Is this a dream?”

  A: “Yes.”

  I figure I’ve stared at the message wall long enough to try and take the pills on the table, but as soon as I swallow them, my stomach seizes and I have to run for the bathroom. The pills then throw themselves out of my stomach and into the toilet. Geez, I really am sick.

  Dragging myself back to the kitchen, I can’t think of anything to do but sit back down at the table, so I lower myself carefully into a chair. I’m wondering how soon a bipolar brain that doesn’t take its medication starts making up its own rules when Dave walks out of his bedroom in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans. “Mahnin,” he says.

  “Mahnin.”

  He pads over to the table. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “Laundry. Cleans itself.” That doesn’t sound good. He pulls his T-shirt out to show me. “I left these clothes at the bottom of a pile of dirty laundry and now they’re clean.”

  “Oh. How does laundry do that?”

  “I don’t know! Compression, I’m guessing . . .”

  “Boy,” I say admiringly, “that’s some screwy logic you got there.”

  “No, really, it’s true.” He leans over the table. “Smell my shirt.”

  “I’m good,” I say, turning away. My stomach’s still shaky. “How’re your mice?”

  “Squeaky,” he answers, sitting back down and yawning.

  “Well . . . that’s mice for you.” I drop my forehead onto the cool tabletop. It feels wonderfully soothing, so I leave it there.

  “Kris?”

  “Yep.”

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Well . . . a minute ago I was staring at the wall.”

  “Mmmm. You okay?”

  “Oh, sure.” I pick my head up to look at him, but it weighs way more than it should, so I put it back down. “I feel kinda lousy.”

  “Why don’t you lie down?’

  “ ’Cause there’s no way I could lie down low enough.”

  “You could lie on the floor,” he suggests. I say nothing, just keep my head pressed onto the table. “Gary gave me passes to the aquarium last night. He says we should go.”

  I speak into the table. “What does that mean?”

  “Well,” Dave says, “I think he meant we should go to the aquarium.”

  “To look at fish?”

  “Yes. Aquariums are for looking at fish.”

  I pick my head up again, but not very high; it’s still so heavy. “Why?”

  “Don’t you like fish?”

  “Fish’re okay.”

  He stares at me. “Maybe it would cheer you up.”

  “I’m not sad. I’m sick.”

  “Are you sad about being sick?”

  I think. “Yeah, I guess I am a little sad about that.”

  He stands up. “Get Tea and Leslie up and tell them we’re going to the aquarium. I’m gonna shower.” As he walks away, I lean up to smell one of the flowers from the bouquet left on the porch this morning. The flower is so nauseating that I have to run for the bathroom again, pushing past Dave in the hallway. This time I don’t actually throw up, though, ’cause you can’t vomit the scent of a flower. I just stare into the toilet, breathing hard.

  “Anything I can do?” Dave asks outside the door.

  “Throw away those flowers!” I yell into the toilet.

  ♋ caffeine

  the best of us

  puking

  A few hours later, I’m chewing some of Tea’s peppermint gum ’cause she said it makes nausea go away. My fingertips and forehead are pressed against the glass of a giant fish tank and I’m wondering if the devil is gonna rear up and grab my soul.

  Anyway, looking at fish turns out to be pretty much the best thing ever in the whole history of the world. Gary’s so smart. We’ve all been to this aquarium on school field trips but none of us remembers anything about those field trips except echo-y noise and lunch. We didn’t remember the majesty of the fish.

  Humans aren’t creatures anymore; we’re too out of touch with our own nature. We’re just TV plus hair gel or something, but fish are still actual creatures. They can’t lie, so they seem to have more humanity than us.

  My bandmates and I can’t talk to each other about the fish coolness, though, ’cause everything
we say about them makes us sound like stoned adolescents. We tried when we first got here:

  “Wow. They live inside the water.”

  “Air is their water and water is their air.”

  “And they fly in it.”

  Then we gave up and just watched.

  A Buddhist monk is the guest lecturer in one of Dude’s classes. Dude has brought me along to hear the lecture ’cause he thinks all kids are Buddhist by nature.

  The monk speaks on a patch of grass overlooking the ocean, using the sea to help teach Buddhist principles.

  “You must show compassion for water and the fish who live in it,” he says, and the students nod and smile.

  “You must disengage from worldly attachments,” he says to more nodding and smiling. “You must fly the sky!” The students stop nodding and smiling.

  “You must throw a candy bar into the ocean!”

  The students turn to look at Dude with blank expressions. He leans down and whispers to me out of the corner of his mouth, “Don’t litter.”

  I’m leaning over a table in the dressing room at the Rat, trying not to heave into the beer bin, when a guy from another band grabs my arm and whispers excitedly that a “scout” is in the audience. “I know,” I say. “I brought him.”

  “Oh god, it’s true. Now I’m really nervous,” he mutters, jamming his hands into the pockets of his army jacket.

  There’re record company guys in the audience every night; it never occurred to me that somebody might care. “Naw, don’t be nervous. He’s nice.”