I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  Louisa squeezed her eyes shut as she slipped beneath the covers beside Michael. His arms found their way around her immediately, his lips brushing her neck, but the dream was beginning. She could feel the blood heavy in her breasts.

  As she pushed the memory back, Louisa stepped off the streetcar in front of the dilapidated building she’d been living in for months. The yellowing sign, barely visible in the ghoulish shadows of the streetlights, proclaimed it the St. Charles Hotel, but it was really a bar, open twenty-four hours a day, with three floors of rooms above it that were rented for twenty dollars a night or seventy-five dollars a week. Louisa’s room was on the third floor. Her view consisted of the on-ramp to I-10 and one of the many blocks of St. Charles Street that tourists avoided as they passed through the run-down section between the French Quarter and the Garden District. Louisa was lulled to sleep each night by the muffled music that never ceased in the bar below. She kept a knife on the scarred nightstand beside her because she shared a bathroom with her constantly revolving next-door neighbor. This was how she’d lived since she left, and she knew it was exactly what she deserved.

  The summer after my freshman year—when faded yellow ribbons still hung all over Carlisle even though Operation Desert Storm had ended in the spring—I followed Marissa’s advice in my own twisted way. I started a band, but didn’t let it stop me from pursuing guys at River’s Edge. Regan cajoled her parents into buying her a drum set, and I got an electric guitar for my fifteenth birthday. I’d had an acoustic since I was five and learned to play it before I could write my name, but the night that my dad gave me the electric was special. It reminded me that once upon a time things had been simple. I’d been Daddy’s little girl, and all that mattered to me was making him smile, which he did most when I sang or mastered a new song on guitar.

  As soon as I’d rolled into double digits, people started comparing me to Louisa. I heard it so much that by the time I hit twelve I didn’t think of myself as Emily or Regan’s best friend or Michael’s only child. I thought of myself as Louisa’s girl, and I strove to live up to her outrageous reputation.

  People said that at thirteen, Louisa chopped off all her hair in history class just because she was bored, and the ragged pixie cut that she wouldn’t let her mother fix only made the boys pine for her more. She was the girl older guys always went for. I heard that she never dated anyone in her own grade, but apparently she hated the men who called to her from pickup trucks as much as I did. One spring morning her sophomore year, she and Molly showed up without any books because on their way to the bus stop, they’d hurled one at every driver who commented on their legs. Louisa’s expressions of loyalty also had a veneer of danger. On prom night, she danced with Molly on the roof of the high school gym since Molly wasn’t allowed inside, being pregnant and all. Even Luke Parker and Eric Lisbon, who was Louisa’s boyfriend at the time, hadn’t dared to go up there. Of course, Louisa was the kind of girl who always got away before the cops came. The day she bid farewell to Carlisle by shattering glass with high-heeled shoes flung from the back of a Harley, they showed up after she was long gone and gaped slack-jawed at the damage she left in her wake.

  I was so obsessed with the image of a woman I had never known that my dad often faded into the background. Louisa was fantasy. He was routine. He drove me to school every morning and tucked me in every night. I’d observed the lines that curled around the sides of my dad’s mouth when he laughed, watched the molasses waves that dipped down to meet his chin when he shook his head, known the pattern of the black stubble that peppered his jaw, and felt his fingers ruffle my hair for so long that he became a part of my shadow. It was Louisa’s face I yearned to see when I got up in the morning and her features that I searched for in mine when I looked in the mirror. But, of course, I would never admit how much I cared. That would make me seem like a little lost, motherless lamb, and I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone thinking of me that way. So I acted like her instead. Everyone seemed to expect it of me and playing her role made me feel like I knew her.

  But I was most myself with my father. Every night he and I retreated to the living room after dinner. He stretched his long, tired limbs out on the couch and alternated between sips of coffee and drags from a cigarette. I “played DJ,” as he called it, putting on a song, excitedly talking over it about the musicians’ techniques, and then putting on a new one before my first selection had even ended. He smiled throughout the whole procedure, truly affected by my great discoveries, and never hesitating to point out when he thought I was full of crap. We communicated almost entirely through this game of song and response. Every couple of weeks, our conversations would turn into all-night discussions that ranged from the influence of jazz on punk to the burgeoning riot grrrl movement to why Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing made him an interesting presidential candidate.

  On the night of my fifteenth birthday, however, we weren’t speaking. I put on one record and left it alone. I planted myself in the rocking chair across from my father’s couch. He sat with his head bent over his mug as if he needed to watch each granule of sugar dissolve. He had not acknowledged my birthday that morning or after I returned from Regan’s. Thinking that he’d truly forgotten about it, I gave him the silent treatment throughout dinner, and he simply hadn’t spoken. As angry punk rock blared, I glared at him, fuming.

  His lips slowly snaked upward and finally, he couldn’t take it. He tried to force his mouth into a frown, causing his face to light up with the exaggerated expression of a jack-o’-lantern. “What’s wrong, Emily?” he asked with that absurd smirk.

  My face flushed as I became aware of his ruse, but I acted as if I hadn’t figured it out. “I realize, Michael, that you aren’t a woman. You didn’t carry me around inside you for nine months and go through agonizing labor …”

  “Don’t call me by my first name. My name to you is Dad.”

  I narrowed my eyes, and he narrowed his back at me. My lip curled up at the left, and his curled at the right. My chin dropped to laugh, and his followed the same arc. I shook my head, realizing for the first time that, except for my green eyes, I was the spitting image of my father. “Well, don’t pretend to forget my birthday!” I shouted, half amused and half exasperated.

  “Did you actually think I forgot?” he teased, sliding a small box out of the breast pocket where he usually kept his cigarettes.

  “No!” I denied, snatching the package from him. I unwrapped it quickly, completely mystified by what it could be. It looked like a jewelry box. When I was ten, he’d given me what I thought was Louisa’s only piece of jewelry—an antique silver locket. I wore it every day, even polished it when it started to tarnish. But I didn’t take such special care of it because it had been Louisa’s. Inside the shiny oval was a picture of my dad at eighteen. I treasured the necklace because it reminded me of him more than it did her. Now, I was almost afraid to open my gift, thinking it was something else of Louisa’s, that he, too, had begun to associate me with her. But I removed the lid to find a red guitar pick and a note in my father’s scratchy handwriting that read, “Look in the basement.”

  I raced downstairs to find the floor plastered with paper arrows pointing toward the closet that had once held Louisa’s records. Dad stood behind me while I opened the door. After carefully setting the hard, black case on the floor, I unlatched it and raised the top slowly. A guitar. The blue body sparkled brighter than any lake I’d ever seen. The white pick guard glistened like a pearl. My eyes followed the frets up to the headstock. “Holy shit, it’s a Fender Mustang,” I spoke in quiet awe.

  “My 1969 Fender Mustang,” my father added. “That I’m giving to you.”

  I whirled around. Since his head was right behind my shoulder, our faces were just inches apart. “How do you keep this stuff hidden from me?”

  There was a faraway look in his eyes. “I was playing that the night your mother first saw me at River’s Edge.” He met my gaze seriously. “Don’t end up like her, Emily
. Don’t search for the music in other people. Play it yourself.”

  I immediately glanced down, afraid that in my eyes he could see every boy I’d met at River’s Edge.

  He let any traces of sorrow drain from his voice. “C’mon, baby, plug that sucker in and play me a song.” He ruffled my hair, forcing me to look up at his gleeful face. I realized that he was innocently unaware of the things I’d done, which was unfortunate because that was part of the reason I continued to do them.

  The next morning, Regan and I cleared a space in her basement to rehearse. I brought over my guitar and my stereo. We learned to play from it, strumming, singing, and thrashing along to everything from my dad’s Beatles records to the Patti Smith album Louisa left behind to the seven-inches I got monthly from the Sub Pop singles club. Regan broke sticks and I snapped strings, my hands a mess of bloody blisters. We spent our afternoons making music, but we still spent our nights at River’s Edge or with the boys we met there.

  In my head I had made a transition. I was no longer Emily Black, toy of the rock gods; I was Emily Black, future rock goddess picking out her own groupies. If the boys could have their playthings, why couldn’t I have mine? I was demanding equal rights. However, since no one but my dad, Regan, and her family had ever seen me play music, by all outward appearances I was just a slut. I asked for nothing more of the guys I slept with than the use of a condom. I spent no more than two weeks with them and had a couple of occasions that were identical to my night with Sam, in which I exchanged only a few sentences with my chosen partner. I was not fully aware of how it looked to others. Heads never turned when I left the Edge and the heads that did turn when I stumbled out of a field or the alley behind JT’s Tavern with my lipstick smeared on my chin belonged to people older than my father. They buzzed about Louisa, which I thought they would have anyway, so I just concerned myself with the way it made me feel.

  Of course, I knew what love was. I saw the passion Molly and Luke still shared after nineteen years of marriage and the devotion my father still had for Louisa almost fifteen years after she left us. But I knew that the only thing I loved that much was music, so I had no desire to search for a person to fill that role. Sex to me was like drinking or dancing at a crowded show. I wanted to reach new levels of excitement. I wanted to feel something, even if it was sickness or bruises. I wanted to be entertained. My quest was to find a guy who could do that job well. But it was nowhere near as important as learning to play my own music. I shopped for records in a much more dedicated fashion than I shopped for boys.

  I shopped for boys like I shopped for shoes. I tried on guys with soft voices and with screams that mangled my ears. I tried out one of the black-haired, the red-haired, and the brown-haired variety before I settled on blonds as my type, but I never distinguished between natural and bleached hair. I had two guys that touched me tenderly and one that covered every inch of me with bite marks and scratched me as hard as I scratched him. Neither type aroused me any differently; I actually preferred the other three boys who performed at a level in between. I never allowed any of them to be as lazy as Sam was, but despite their attention, I never felt more excited by any of them than I had by him. Lying beneath, beside, or on top of them, I didn’t perceive what I was doing to be wrong, and I certainly didn’t consider myself inferior to them. After all, I thought, I’m giving them nothing more than skin and they will never forget me.

  April 1981

  Louisa made friends in every city she touched down in, but she never had trouble saying good-bye. In fact, she hardly ever said it. Her exits usually weren’t planned; the urge to flee would come over her in the middle of the night, just as it did in New Orleans. But although her stay in New Orleans was one of her shortest anywhere, it was also the only place where she’d become regrettably close to someone.

  Colette had introduced herself the very first night Louisa came to town. Louisa arrived in New Orleans after midnight, checked into the St. Charles Hotel, the first place she saw upon exiting I-10, and took the streetcar into the French Quarter to find a nice place to drink. Despite the fact that she’d driven from New York City with just a three-hour nap at a truck stop in Tennessee, Louisa knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She wandered down Bourbon Street, but the bright lights and loud celebratory atmosphere conflicted with her mood, so she turned off on Ursulines. Between Royal and Chartres, she found the perfect place. Large stone steps led down into the bar. Inside the old building that had likely once been a mansion, the walls were made of gray stone and the floors and bar of deep brown oak. At the back of the bar, French doors were propped open and a brick walkway led to a patio that seemed to be getting the only breeze in New Orleans, but Louisa decided not to go outside, instead ordering a rum and Coke and carrying it to a table in a dark corner.

  She noticed Colette immediately. It was hard not to; she had the body of Farrah Fawcett, but her clothes were pure punk rock. Everyone—especially the men—paused to stare at her. Tall and slender with short, jet-black hair sprayed to stick up in fierce chunks and spikes, Colette wore a black miniskirt, torn tights, and a vivid red shirt that advertised an obscure movie from the sixties with a photo of the unknown starlet’s face, eyes wide like a frightened animal and lips slightly parted.

  Colette sat at a table next to the jukebox with four friends who were as skinny, pale, and crazy-haired as she, but totally nondescript by comparison. Louisa hung around for an hour just enjoying the atmosphere and Colette’s laugh, which reminded her of Molly’s—constant, loud, from the gut, and completely unrestrained. Colette put a Runaways song on and sang along in her whiskey-and-cigarette-tinged voice as Louisa finished her second drink and headed for the door. Before she could exit, she found a red-fingernailed hand wrapped around her arm.

  “Where are you from and why are you leaving?” Colette demanded, her bright blue eyes glittering.

  Colette’s interest was piqued as soon as Louisa said that she’d just arrived from New York. “No shit! I’m gonna move there in a month or two. Whenever I save up the money. I want to be a singer. In a band. Did you see a lot of bands there? Did you hang out at CBGBs? Did you meet Blondie?” Colette spoke in a quick, clipped manner that covered up what Louisa soon found out was a North Carolina accent.

  Colette’s life story bubbled from her lips as Louisa took a seat beside her. “I ran away from my hometown more than a year ago, when I turned seventeen. I hated that small-town bullshit. But it sounds like you’ve lived in a lot of big cities, so I guess you wouldn’t know what that’s like.” Colette paused to gulp her Jack and Coke, leaving another red lipstick print on her glass.

  “No, not at all,” Louisa murmured.

  As the cocaine Colette had snorted earlier wore off, she calmed down, and she reminded Louisa of Molly even more: an intelligent, sarcastic girl with big dreams. That’s probably why Louisa made the mistake of opening up to her.

  Colette got Louisa the job at the strip club where Colette had worked since arriving from North Carolina. They often went drinking together after work. Louisa usually spent her nights off alone, Colette out with other friends, but one night Colette showed up at her hotel.

  “This is the ugliest room I’ve ever seen,” Colette announced as she plopped down on the bed next to Louisa and examined exactly how badly the brown blankets clashed with her purple tights.

  “How’d you get my room number?” Louisa asked, slamming shut the notebook she’d been writing in and pacing toward the window.

  “Asked the bartender. You really should get an apartment in the Quarter,” Colette continued, peering down at the pockmarked, threadbare carpet.

  “I thought I was going to New York with you in a few weeks.”

  Colette, distracted by the notebook, ignored Louisa’s statement and asked instead, “You writing juicy secrets in there?”

  Louisa stared hard at the on-ramp to I-10. “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “Sure, you do. Like your husband.” Louisa’s right hand clamped i
nstinctively around her left, covering her wedding ring. Since she had her back to Colette, she didn’t see the younger woman pick up the letter on the nightstand and the photograph that was tucked neatly beneath it. “And whoever this little girl is.”

  Louisa flew across the room in a whirlwind and ripped the picture out of Colette’s purple-painted fingertips. She cupped the wallet-size photo in her hand and glanced down at the four-year-old girl with long, ebony hair held back by green barrettes that matched her forest-colored velvet dress and her flashing jade eyes. Louisa took a few steps to her left and placed the photo on the rickety dresser.

  “Who is she?” Colette asked quietly, her eyes as wide as the starlet’s had been on the T-shirt she wore the first night Louisa met her.

  “Emily. My daughter,” Louisa whispered in a voice that seemed disconnected from her body. She avoided Colette’s gaze by inspecting a scratch in the wood a few inches away from the photograph.

  “Did he … did your husband take her away from you?” Colette ventured, her voice wavering. Louisa knew Colette’s father had kept her mother out of her life since she’d cheated on him when Colette was six.

  “No, Michael would never do that!” Louisa exclaimed. She felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her, saying their names aloud.

  “No, of course not,” Colette muttered, more to herself than to Louisa. “He wouldn’t send you pictures if he had.”

  “He doesn’t send the pictures. He doesn’t know where I am.”

  “Who sends them, then?”

  Louisa ignored Colette’s question and continued her own train of thought in a daze. “I left them. I left Michael and Emily.” Her throat throbbed as she spoke their names again.

  “Why?” Colette’s voice rang out like a child’s, sounding almost like it could have come from the girl in the picture.

  Louisa turned slowly to face her and looked her in the eye. “Because I had to. Because I wasn’t good enough for them.” She set her jaw firmly, signaling that she had nothing else to say on the matter.