I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  I knelt on that cold cement floor, dust clouds poofing up around me as I flipped faster and faster through the albums. “There has to be something good in here. Don’t tell me it’s all folk crap,” I complained, craving noisy guitars the way other nine-year-olds hungered for candy.

  “That’s rock, too, Emily,” my father chided from behind me, looking slightly disappointed that I wasn’t finding nearly as much satisfaction in his old record collection as he did. His dark eyes drank in every album cover, mouth twitching with a memory, a line that wanted to be hummed, or words in the record’s defense that would have been wasted on me.

  “No, it’s not noisy enough,” I replied. I wanted something that you could feel in your throat when you played it loud, something that churned through your stomach and shook you to the tips of your toes. Something that scraped out your insides and made you want to dance without them. Just as I searched for the steepest hill to ride my bike down, I hunted for music that would provide the greatest thrill.

  My dad’s wavy hair fell across his brow as he laughed softly. Everything about my father was soft except for his hardworking hands. Just twenty-one when I was born, he still looked young, more like an older brother than a dad. However, since he stood over six feet tall, so much bigger than I was, I always viewed him as my protector. As tough as I acted, on many occasions I buried my tear-drenched face in one of his flannel shirts to be soothed by the sound of his voice or the thump of his big heart. Most important, he was also my playmate. He went along with my nightly exploration of the records, sharing in both the delight and the seriousness of my mission.

  “It’s gotta be noisy, huh?” He smiled impishly. His brown eyes sparkled like they were lit by stage lights. “Your mother would be proud of you,” he said. The glimmer in his eyes changed just slightly; a sense of longing always emerged when she came up in conversation.

  “Are any of Louisa’s records around here?” I asked. I rarely referred to my mother by anything other than her first name. She was even more distant than the rock gods in Rolling Stone. I had nothing of hers but photographs. I possessed the energy and voices of my icons through their music, but I remembered neither about Louisa.

  “Somewhere. I don’t know if you’re old enough yet,” my father teased, scooting away from the crate to stretch out on the floor.

  “Louisa left some records with you!” I exclaimed, my hair slicing through the air between us as I twisted around to look at him. I’d been asking that question since I was five years old, but he never answered. I knew I had to have those records. They would be my mother. They would let me know her voice, her thoughts, the stories she would have told me before bed. They would help me re-create the moment I knew I would never remember: the night she decided she could no longer ignore punk rock’s summons and kissed me good-bye. “I’m old enough! I can’t believe you’ve just let ’em rot down here, Dad! Damn!”

  “Emily, don’t swear,” he scolded affectionately, leaning back with his hands behind him.

  “I’m sorry. I just want them so bad …” I took a breath, imagining how I would finally create my own altar, how I would stack Louisa’s records right next to the little stereo that sat across from my bed. “I just know they’re so cool!” I exhaled, curling my dusty fingers in my long, tangled hair and then leaping onto my father. He sat up quickly to catch me.

  “You are certainly Louisa’s daughter.” Dad grinned. “Nine years old and you want to make the windows rattle and the floorboards creak with blasting speakers.” He slid me off his lap, stood up, and led me past his tool bench, the furnace, and boxes full of Christmas decorations to a little closet that I’d never looked in, certain it only contained bugs and mice. It was surprisingly clean, and up on the top shelf perched a red milk crate with about twenty records in it. My holy grail.

  Play it harder. Play it faster. Louder. Harder. Faster. So loudhardfast that I forget your name. After all, did I even know it in the first place? Those were the first lyrics I composed myself. I wrote them the summer I turned fourteen. As a little girl I felt the music in my gut and in the tips of my fingers, making me want to sing at the top of my lungs and learn to play guitar as well as my father. When puberty hit, I started to feel music between my thighs. My legs stretched long and slim, and my hip bones jutted out. I dressed in vintage blue jeans so worn they clung to me without being tight in that trashy way the girls with big, ratted bangs at my high school preferred. My hair, still as dark as my name, hung straight and thick, dusting the middle of my back when I pushed it behind me. The only makeup I wore then was black eyeliner and red lipstick.

  Every weekend I walked around town with Molly’s daughter, Regan. Since I was a baby, I’d spent my days in Molly’s home while my father worked. Molly treated me like the sister of her two girls, Regan, who was only four months older than me, and Marissa, who was four years older. My dad told me that Louisa would have loved it that I was best friends with her best friend’s kid. Regan even looked like Molly, a tiny but feisty girl who stood a few inches shorter than me, the red highlights in her chocolate hair glistening in the sun as we prowled the streets of Carlisle.

  Main Street had changed since Louisa made her dramatic exit sixteen years earlier. Two blocks beyond Carlisle Groceries and Meats a strip mall had sprung up where Main Street became County Highway PW, the speed limit jumping from twenty-five miles per hour to forty-five right in front of the entrance to the brand-new Wal-Mart. Regan and I spent our Saturday afternoons in that vast, brightly lit emporium of crap, shoplifting everything from sodas to candles to black bras.

  On those treks down Main Street the summer before freshman year, I heard whispers of my mother’s name. People talked because of how much I’d grown to look like her on the outside, but I knew that I was most like Louisa on the inside. I understood why she’d hated Carlisle. Like all small Midwestern towns, it evolved slowly. It lagged at least a decade behind when it came to any cultural advancement. As the rest of the country moved into the nineties, Carlisle hung on to 1979. The women still had badly feathered hair. The men who whistled at Regan and me from their battered pickup trucks still had Styx and REO Speedwagon blaring through the speakers. Louisa, who’d entered her teenage years in 1969, lived in a town still stuck in the fifties. Like her, I saw two ways to escape Carlisle: sex and rock ’n’ roll. For the first time, I thought I heard my mother’s voice inside of me. Play it harder. Play it faster. Louder. Harder. Faster. So loudhardfast that I forget your name.

  The first guy I slept with was a musician. Sam thought he was destined to be the biggest rock god the world had ever known. I thought so, too, but hell, I was only fourteen. Back then, we spent our days at Wal-Mart and our nights at River’s Edge, an abandoned warehouse three miles from the outskirts of town and just as far from the nearest farmhouse. Kids came from all over two or three counties to listen to the raucous, angry music that bands pounded out at the Edge, the closest thing rural southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois had to underground rock, and the only place where Regan and I could find cute punk boys.

  The afternoon before I met Sam, as Regan and I slid black lace panties on in the fitting room at Wal-Mart, she shouted over the partition, “Tonight’s the night, Emily. We’re going to find you some sexy punk to fuck out at River’s Edge.” We’d made a pact at the beginning of the summer that we wouldn’t enter high school as virgins. Since Regan had hooked up with a guy at River’s Edge the previous weekend, it was my turn to seal the deal.

  I zipped up my jeans and shouted back to her, “I don’t care what he looks like as long as he’s in a band.” I was, of course, being somewhat sarcastic. He had to be in a good band.

  “That’s my girl.” Regan laughed as we stepped out of our stalls at the same time. The clerk standing outside the fitting room, a plump woman with an overprocessed perm, gaped at us, horrified.

  “You’re Molly Dahle’s daughter,” she hissed at Regan, flecks of spit curdling her coral lipstick. “You better watch it or you�
�re gonna end up just like your mama,” she continued, wearing the look of a satisfied hog, “knocked up at sixteen.”

  Regan glared at the woman, her hazel eyes turning the color of embers. She dropped the clothing that we’d been pretending to try on and corrected, “Parker. It’s been Molly Parker for eighteen years now. Let me guess, you were prom queen? Class of ‘74? And you laughed your ass off when my mother dropped out to have my sister. But here you are now, fat and old, and my mother is still as thin and pretty as she was back then. Not to mention she’s happily married, whereas you … I bet you haven’t gotten laid since prom night, you dried-up—”

  “Shut up!” the woman bellowed, cheeks flaring and watery blue eyes bulging. Wal-Mart shoppers from intimate apparel to housewares gawked.

  Regan gazed innocently at her audience. When she wasn’t glaring or cursing, Regan’s size made people think she wasn’t a day over twelve. She backed away from the clerk, acting shocked. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said sweetly, but loud enough for the silent store to hear. “I thought the customer was always right.”

  Regan and I sashayed through the racks of clothing toward the aisle. I glanced back and saw the store manager storming toward the clerk. I had no doubt she would try to tell him whose children we were, but the beauty of the new Wal-Mart was that it was run by folks from outside of Carlisle and even attracted many of its customers from surrounding towns. At Carlisle Groceries and Meats, Regan and I had been watched since the age of five for signs that we were like our awful mamas. At twelve, when we got caught smoking cigarettes behind the store, it was attributed to the evil we’d sucked down in our mothers’ milk. But the managers of Wal-Mart viewed us as their corporate offices instructed. We were customers and the employees were not to let petty, small-town gossip interfere with proper customer service. As the manager lectured the clerk about this, Regan and I exited without suspicion, new underwear beneath our jeans and purses stuffed with stolen makeup and lighters.

  Still snickering, Regan and I trekked through town, passing houses with big wraparound porches, painted bright shades of white, yellow, blue, and red. Downtown Carlisle was the nicer part of town. Farther south, the sun-faded and boxy houses looked as if a major snowstorm would reduce them to a pile of waterlogged boards. Our families lived in the area in between. At the intersection of Main and Laurel, we parted ways. “Marissa and I will meet you at the Edge at eight tonight,” Regan reminded me.

  Of course, they were late.

  My dad dropped me off on his way to play music with the guys from his high school band. It wasn’t a serious project, but Dad joked that it kept him in touch with his roots and helped him escape my noise.

  I waited for Regan and Marissa on the outskirts of what was used as a parking lot at River’s Edge. Cars lined up next to the warehouse, their tires treading worn gravel, broken glass, and thick ruts of dirt. Where I sat, grass struggled to grow in gnarly tufts, nourished by spilt beer and cigarette butts. Just a few feet away from me, it was lush, green, and tall, which made the area surrounding the warehouse look like the patchy head of a balding man.

  No one knew where the name River’s Edge came from. There was no sign that a river had run anywhere nearby in the last century, the nearest being the Pecatonica, five miles away. Maybe it was the name of the company that once owned the building. Even my dad, who met my mother there eighteen years earlier, had no idea. But I enjoyed the rural tradition of legend, and River’s Edge was steeped in it.

  In the late seventies, when someone—maybe the cops, maybe the electric company—noticed that the warehouse was being used, they shut it down for a couple months. Then someone—or maybe a few people—bought the property. No one knew who’d done it because nothing at the Edge changed when it secretly reopened. Making it into a legitimate club would have meant security, controlling underage drinking, and taking a cut from the money the bands made. The mysterious owner just left an old paint can with a sign that said “Donations” on the wooden table by the door where bands put their flyers and sold their silk-screened Tshirts and low-quality demo tapes. We all kicked in cash whenever we could so the electric bill could be paid and the roof kept leak-free.

  River’s Edge ran like a co-op. Volunteers did sound and lighting. Bands scheduled themselves on a calendar backstage. There were three slots a night and rookie acts who didn’t know anyone else to sign up with chose a random date and opened by default. Bands from farther away called their friends to be added to the calendar. It created an intricate underground rock network so appreciated by everyone that fighting was rare, despite the edgy, volatile nature of the music.

  During my dad’s time, the sound at River’s Edge transitioned from folk to garage punk, and it managed to survive the plastic metal of the eighties. Punk rock still thrived when I started seeing shows there, music that shared some similarities with what was brewing in the Pacific Northwest at the time, but we played it faster, like our lives depended on it. I have no idea why my father allowed me to hang out there. He probably assumed I went to appreciate music the way he’d raised me to, not realizing that rock possessed me the way it had my mother. If he’d had any idea that I was getting drunk and checking out boys, he would have tightened the reins. But my dad was very trusting and I was very good at concealing things from him.

  I took a swig of cheap, watery beer and squinted through the fiery red light of the setting sun, searching for Marissa’s black Pontiac. Pollen tickled my nose and late-August humidity thickened the hazy air. I finished most of my drink before Marissa and Regan showed up. Regan stumbled out of the passenger’s door with a half-empty bottle of wine in her hand. Marissa stepped out gracefully, a lit cigarette dangling from her bloodred lips. Regan and Marissa both wore the same shade of lipstick, but other than that they looked nothing alike. Marissa resembled their father, tall with sandy hair and aquamarine eyes, while everything about Regan was dark; she inherited the Native American features of Molly’s father. Marissa stood fluid and curvy, possessing the elegant confidence that Regan and I hoped we’d find in our own bodies in the next four years. At the same time, Marissa was still bad-ass enough to be our idol. The black halter dress she wore revealed the phoenix tattooed on her left shoulder and her creamy arms, toned from years of playing bass guitar.

  We were a mismatched trio. Although I acted like the third sister, I obviously wasn’t. Paler than both of them, my skin exuded the spooky glow of a full moon. They were both lean and muscular, and I was bony. Truly, we were not a trio at all. Regan and I were the inseparable pair, and Marissa the kind older sister who provided rides, tried to impart wisdom, and sighed when we ran recklessly ahead, ignoring her.

  “Good evening, Emily.” Marissa reached through the window into the backseat of the car for a beer. “Help yourself to the good alcohol,” she added, noticing the Old Milwaukee I held.

  I set down my can and stood up as Regan loudly slurred, “Tonight we’re getting Emily laid!” She chucked a box of condoms at me, which were most likely the rightful property of Wal-Mart.

  I rolled my eyes and threw the box back at her.

  “That’s all she’s been talking about since we got in the car. Having some regrets about sleeping with that drummer last weekend, Regan? Need someone to share in your misery?” Marissa teased, her cheeks rising with her smile.

  Regan stuck her tongue out at her sister and bent down to retrieve the condoms. “No, I just want her to get it over with. The first time’s no good anyway. It’s like opening a wound.”

  Marissa chuckled, rounding the car to meet us. “How would you know, Regan? You’ve never had a second time. Maybe it’s always like that.”

  Regan raised her bottle of wine, uncoiled one of the fingers wrapped around the neck, and jabbed it in her sister’s face. “How do you know, Marissa?” she mimicked. “Maybe I screwed that drummer twice.”

  Marissa shook her head wisely, her long hair shimmering. “If you had any more sexual experience, you would know that no teenage drumm
er could do it twice in an hour. Besides,” she added with a giggle, “I know you overheard me saying that ‘opening a wound’ thing a couple years ago.”

  Regan blushed indignantly. “Shut up!”

  “Oh, Regan,” Marissa sighed, “you’ll learn. You’re both too smart to end up little groupies.” She patted us on the tops of our heads in a motherly fashion and started toward the large, gray building. I watched her black high heels clicking steadily through the dirt and imagined that they were just like the pair Louisa had furiously thrown as she exited Carlisle. I wanted more than anything to combine the cool dignity of Marissa with the uninhibited rage of my mother. And I was convinced that Regan was right, that I would just have to get rid of my virginity to do it.

  The opening chords of a fast punk song reverberated inside the warehouse. Feedback sizzled like lightning flashing across the darkening sky, beckoning us. I grabbed a fresh beer from the car and linked my arm with Regan’s as we strode toward the entrance. She took a big gulp of wine and pondered her sister’s words. “We’re not groupies, are we, Em?” she asked, sounding somber.

  ”Nah, we’re just bored.”

  Regan’s enthusiasm was quickly renewed. “So, you’ll let me pick out a guy for you tonight?”

  “What the hell,” I agreed, swallowing half the beer to catch up with her drunkenness. “You’ll probably pick a better one than I would.”

  “Great!” Regan squealed. She ripped into the condom box and handed me a strip of them. “You’ll need these, then. Better safe than sorry!” I pocketed them as she pulled me through the wide doors of the warehouse. “When I find him, I’ll give you a sign.”