I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  A sly smile crept across Regan’s face, making her look much more like Rizzo and the Regan I was used to. “You know his mom is at Harvest Fest, selling candy apples for the church choir or whatever. And besides, his room is way at the back of the house, right above the back porch, so all we have to do is climb this tree and get on top of the porch roof …”

  My mouth distorted in horror. “Have you been stalking him?”

  She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Let’s call it preplanning.” I grimaced, but she yanked on my hand. “C’mon, Em. It would be a very Pink Lady thing to do. And it’s for the band.”

  I sighed and allowed her to pull me up. “I guess if it’s for the band. I don’t know if it’s a good idea for us to be in a band with someone you want to hook up with, though.”

  But Regan waved off my concern. We collected our pillowcases and shoes and started toward the road, leaving a litter of empty airline liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and tattered yellow prom-dress scraps on the playground behind us.

  When we reached Tom’s house, we went around to the back. Like most yards in Carlisle, it wasn’t fenced in. Regan had apparently spent some time in that yard because her description of it was dead-on. A tree provided easy access to the roof of the enclosed back porch below Tom’s bedroom window. Sober, it would have been a simple feat. Drunk, it was slightly more complicated and definitely noisier than anticipated.

  We stuffed our shoes into our pillowcases, where they clanked against the few remaining liquor bottles, and then we twisted the tops of the pillowcases around our wrists. There was a low branch on the tree that seemed to be thick enough to support us. We couldn’t see much beyond that; the dim light above the back door barely sliced through the darkness.

  Regan mounted the branch first. She gripped with both hands, jumped, kicked her legs up, wrapped them around it, hung upside down briefly, and then swung herself up to a sitting position. It was gracefully executed. Then she scrambled onto the next branch to give me space. I just stared up at her shadowy outline.

  “C’mon, Emily,” she hissed.

  I pointed at the torn remains of my yellow skirt. “I’m not wearing pants.”

  “Oh, no one’s looking. When did you get so modest?”

  I shrugged. The skirt was just an excuse, really. It was the upside-down thing I feared, certain all the alcohol in me would rush to my head and then back out of my mouth.

  “Emily, come on!” Regan repeated, forgetting completely about whispering.

  “Shh!” I swung up onto the branch the same way she did. When I got on top of it, I lay there for a moment, squeezing my eyes closed to stop the ground from spinning.

  “I see London, I see France …” Regan taunted.

  “Shut up!”

  “Shh!”

  I stood awkwardly and climbed successfully all the way to the second-to-last branch, but practically fell grabbing for that last one. My shin scraped against jagged bark, reopening and deepening the wounds I’d sustained earlier. “Dammit!” I cursed, feeling blood trickle down my leg.

  Regan was already shimmying across the branch that spanned out over the porch roof. “Shut up, Emily!” she reprimanded, not monitoring the volume of her own voice.

  I peered through the darkness to the shadowy ground a story below. “If I die, you better marry this guy,” I grumbled.

  She didn’t hear me over the crackling of the twigs she crushed as she slid off the tree onto the roof. Neither of us landed very quietly. The drunken thunder of Regan’s feet on the roof was as loud as I always imagined that fat-ass Santa really would be.

  When I got onto the last branch, I wrapped my arms and legs around it and slithered along backward, moving like a caterpillar with my pillowcase dangling down like an oversize cocoon. Positioned above the porch, I released the branch and landed right on my butt.

  I rose, rubbing my sore tailbone and staring down at the blood glistening on my legs. “Regan, this better be worth it.” I rummaged through my pillowcase for one of the little Jack Daniel’s bottles.

  Regan explored the roof in the faint light coming from Tom’s window. Apparently, he hung out there often. A couple beer bottles were stashed in the gutter, and next to the window, Regan discovered an ashtray, or at least what Tom used as an ashtray. It looked like a malformed ceramic bowl, probably one that he’d made for his mom in art class in third grade, judging by the craftsmanship and the pink glaze. As I limped over to her, Regan reached into it and removed a small pipe coated in resin. “Ooooh, naughty boy!” she chirped with delight.

  “Just the way you like ’em.” I laughed, my annoyance disappearing as alcohol numbed my aching limbs.

  She set the ashtray and pipe down and headed for the window that led into Tom’s room. Due to his lack of response to the clatter on the roof, I assumed Tom wasn’t inside, but figured we could wait and surprise him. Regan pushed the partially open window the rest of the way up, placed her palms on the sill, and put her legs through, like an excited kid propelling herself down a waterslide.

  It turned out that Tom was indeed inside, innocently sprawled out on his bed, reading a magazine with headphones on. And he responded the way any fourteen-year-old guy would if he saw long, definitively female legs coming through his window. “Holy shhh—” I heard him begin to declare, but Regan was quick.

  I scrambled through the window headfirst to see what was going on, landing not so slickly again, this time on my elbows. My pillowcase shot across the hardwood floor in front of me. I looked up to see Regan straddling Tom on his bed, her hand clamped over his mouth. She’d wrapped herself around his lanky body like a spider preparing her flailing prey. Grinning maniacally, Regan yanked the headphones off of Tom’s ears with her free hand. “Shh!” she growled insistently, and removed her other hand from his mouth.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Tom moved with such force that he sent Regan tumbling toward the edge of the twin bed. He shot backward, drawing his long legs to his chest, wedging himself into the corner of the wall his bed sat against, and jerking the headphones out of his stereo in the process. The room suddenly filled with blaring distorted guitar and the voice of a punk chick midscream.

  I scuttled across the floor and hit the stop button. “What the hell are you trying to do? Get us caught?” I whispered scornfully.

  “Yeah, what the hell?” Regan added, sitting up and scooting to the foot of his bed, visibly pissed that he’d knocked her off of him.

  His bewildered brown eyes wide, Tom slowly looked back and forth from me to Regan. Regan smoothed her blouse and removed her dark brown, curly wig, which had been knocked to one side in the tussle. She tugged at her short, red-streaked hair so it was appropriately disheveled, glowering at Tom the whole time. I calmly pulled a little bottle of Bacardi out of my pillowcase and stared right back at Tom when his gaze fell on me. Then I stood and perused his room. It was pretty clean for a guy. The fault, I assumed, of his Nazi mother. The hardwood floor was neatly swept, though now my blood stained it. A couple of band posters hung on the wall and three crates of records and tapes sat next to the stereo. I busied myself flipping through them until Tom broke out of his shocked silence.

  “Uhhh.” He rubbed at his temples and then slid his hands back into his tangled, bleached hair. “Am I awake?” he asked softly, probably not meaning to say it aloud. Regan smirked again and reached across the bed, pinching his leg through his flannel pajama pants. “Oww! What the hell?” He grabbed her hand.

  She wrenched it away from him, still smiling. “You’re awake.”

  Their eyes locked. “What are you doing in my room?” Tom repeated.

  Without taking her eyes off of his, Regan bent down and retrieved her pillowcase. She brought out the bottle of schnapps and shook it. “We’re here to get you drunk and molest you,” she informed him, straight-faced.

  Tom went white. “My dad’s, like, down the hall,” he said, and gulped.

  I snickered, shaking my head, and Tom ripped his
eyes away from Regan’s, his face going from pale to bright pink in a matter of seconds. I strode across the room to where a few guitar cases and a practice amp were, the only stuff, it seemed, that Tom touched in his own room. I pointed at a bass that was out of its case. “You play that?”

  “Yeah. Why?” he managed to ask.

  “Are you good?” I demanded, assessing him critically.

  “What does this have to do with—”

  “The orgy?” Regan giggled, taking a swig out of the schnapps bottle and offering it to him.

  “Oh my god.” Tom put his scorching face in his hands. “Why are you in my room?”

  “Oh, you know you’re going to call all your little friends as soon as we leave,” Regan taunted.

  Tom snatched the schnapps bottle. “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Neither do we, so this is perfect.”

  “What’s perfect?” Tom coughed, obviously overwhelmed by the peppermint in the massive swig he’d taken. He handed the bottle back to Regan, grimacing in distaste.

  “You joining our band. Here”—she offered him my pillowcase—“pick your poison.”

  He selected a mini tequila bottle. “You want me to join She Laughs?”

  “How’d you hear about our band?” I asked at the same time that Regan inquired, equally as incredulously, “Tequila’s your favorite, too?”

  He slipped back into stunned, shy-boy mode again, eyes darting back and forth between the two of us. Regan, by the pacified little smile on her face, found it to be cute, but I was irritated. I repeated my question. “How did you hear about our band?”

  “Oh, uhh, I guess I overheard you. It’s all you guys ever talk about.” He blushed again and decided to drain the little Cuervo bottle to compensate.

  Regan was pleased by this development. “You listen in to our conversations?”

  Tom took this to be criticism. He threw his hands up in the air, twitching wildly. “You guys stalked me and climbed in my bedroom window!”

  “Shhhh!” I hushed him. “And I didn’t stalk you. Regan did.”

  She glared at me over her shoulder. “Emily!”

  “What?” I shrugged, unlatching one of Tom’s guitar cases.

  Tom’s face changed from exasperation to awe when Regan looked back at him. It was endearing, really. The poor kid had been tormented to such degrees by our charming hick peers that the concept of any girl being attracted to him blew his mind. I’d seen plenty of guys who acted as though they didn’t know they were hot, but Tom clearly had no clue. I waited for him to stutter about the whole situation some more or for Regan to make one of her usual witty remarks, but they just awkwardly stared at each other.

  I took the guitar out of the case and strummed a few chords, but neither of them seemed to hear. “If you guys want to have sex now, let me know and I’ll leave.”

  Tom leapt off the bed like I’d branded his ass with my words. He stood next to the open window as if he was preparing to evacuate his own room. “This is not normal. I mean, I can’t imagine that this is how people usually get asked to join a band.”

  “Well, are you going to join or what?” Regan asked.

  “You climbed in my window in your Halloween costumes!” Tom exclaimed.

  “Trick or treat. Join our band. What do you want us to say?” I put the guitar down. “At least you know you’ll have fun.”

  “Uhhh, yeah, I mean …”

  “Tom, who are you talking to?” A woman’s voice came from the hallway, footsteps closing in.

  Regan and I scrambled to our feet and rushed over to the window. I dove right through without any hesitation and headed straight for the tree. I should have stuck around to see the look on Mrs. Fawcett’s face when she walked in and found Regan up on her tiptoes like a dancer, her alcohol-soaked tongue jammed down Tom’s throat.

  “Regan Parker!” Mrs. Fawcett bellowed, her voice shattering the silence of that pristine Carlisle night. The reputation she’d so carefully built for her family slid out of her hands and crash-landed in the sea of airline liquor bottles, wigs, and high-heeled shoes spilling out of the black pillowcase at her son’s feet.

  Regan pulled her mouth away from Tom’s, running the edges of her top teeth lightly over his bottom lip to make him shiver. “See you at band practice tomorrow,” she said as he opened his eyes dreamily.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, watching her disappear out the window.

  As Regan and I shimmied down the tree, we heard Tom’s mother scream, “Regan Parker in my house! How could you?”

  And then the backyard reverberated with Tom’s laughter.

  SONGS MY MOTHER NEVER TAUGHT ME

  When I was a baby, my father sang me to sleep with old blues songs. I took my first steps to the Beatles and learned to dance to the Clash. But the first time I realized I could claim the energy that blasted from the stereo as mine, possess it, be it was when Regan and I blackmailed Marissa into taking us to our first show at River’s Edge.

  That summer Marissa was sixteen and constantly in trouble. Regan and I were twelve and bratty as could be. Most of our schemes involved tormenting Marissa. We “borrowed” her clothes and ruined them. We played with her cosmetics and left them unusable. And our favorite activity? Listening in on her phone calls.

  One afternoon we overheard her promise to meet a boy at eight. She was supposed to be grounded for smoking pot in her room. (Regan and I had ratted her out for “burning some weird smelling incense.”) Just before Marissa’s appointed meeting time, Regan and I stationed ourselves in the shadows next to the toolshed. We watched as Marissa eased open her bedroom window and made the leap to the shed’s roof with her guitar case strapped to her back. When she got to the bottom of the tree next to the shed, we pounced.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Regan asked smugly as we blocked her way, arms crossed over our practically nonexistent chests.

  Marissa groaned, “Not tonight, Regan,” and tried to push past us.

  Regan grabbed Marissa’s wrist. “Hot date? Mom didn’t unground you, though, did she? Emily, why don’t you go ask her? Marissa and I will stay here.”

  “Yeah, right. Like you can hold on to me.” Marissa easily jerked away, her armload of silver bangles jingling.

  “No, but I can scream—”

  Regan should have known better than to give Marissa warning. Marissa slapped her hand over Regan’s mouth before she could utter a sound and pinned Regan against her the way gunmen hold their hostages when using them as shields from the police.

  Regan’s angry hazel eyes darted from me to the house, urging me to yell for Molly. But Marissa’s blue eyes seared into me from over Regan’s head. “Emily, please don’t. Scott Anderson asked me to play bass for his band, July Lies. My first show with them is tonight at River’s Edge. They’re really good. Scott’s dad was in your dad’s band, you know. This is my big chance.”

  I studied Marissa in the faint golden glow cast from her bedroom window. She wore artfully ripped jeans and a Smiths T-shirt she’d rescued from the thrift store and carefully constructed into a tank top that fit her perfectly. She’d curled her tawny hair into big waves that framed her precisely made-up face. Regan squirmed in her grip, shaking her head no, but my gaze wandered to the bass strapped to Marissa’s back. She’d been practicing for four years. And she’d brought my dad into it. He’d told me so many stories about what it had been like to play at River’s Edge, Louisa smiling up at him from the front of the stage.

  “Okay,” I said softly, “we’ll let you go.”

  Regan thrashed around and tried to yell “Emily!” through Marissa’s palm.

  I met her eyes, quieting her when I added, “But … the next time Molly leaves you in charge of us, you’re taking us with you to River’s Edge.”

  Marissa agreed immediately and Regan begrudgingly approved the deal.

  Two weeks later, I walked into that warehouse for the first time and stared around in awe like I’d entered the Sistine Chapel
. It was as smoky and dingy and loud as I’d always imagined. The perfect rock ’n’ roll setting filled with so many scruffy, tattooed, colorful rock ’n’ roll people. The opening act was an all-girl band. They kicked off their set with a blistering cover of “Chemical Warfare” by the Dead Kennedys. Regan and I dove into the pit with no fear even though we were the smallest kids in the place. It quickly became clear that the girls onstage weren’t the best musicians. They played some mean covers, but their original songs consisted of indecipherable yelling over feedback-laden, poorly arranged power chords. But it didn’t matter. I stared up at the girl who fronted the band, rocking out in knee-high black leather boots and a badass leopard-print skirt, and I knew that that was what I wanted to do.

  I’d been fantasizing about what my first gig with my own band would be like ever since. After losing my virginity to a pathetic excuse of an aspiring rock god and then being called a groupie by an even bigger one, my fantasies became increasingly elaborate. I daydreamed that even though it was our very first concert, we headlined and at least a hundred kids were there. I imagined that most of the people up front would be girls like me and Regan who slammed in the pit as hard as boys and chose only the best bands to mosh to. Mixed in with those girls—hopefully being brutally shoved around by them—would be the pseudo rock-god boys that I’d slept with. They would gaze up at me with a mixture of regret and envy in their glistening eyes, begging my acknowledgment between songs, but I would stare right over their heads like I had no idea who they were.

  As un-punk as it was to do so, I even planned out what I was going to wear: a short, sea-green, velvet dress that I’d found at a thrift store in Madison. I thought it complemented my father’s Lake Placid–blue ’69 Mustang and that it just looked hot. I wanted to be a million times sexier and more mysterious than the false deities whose arrogance I’d fallen for at River’s Edge.

  Our first show took place in April of my sophomore year. It could have been sooner, but we’d seen bands play River’s Edge after rehearsing together once or twice. We had no interest in getting booed like they had, so we decided to wait until Tom had been in the band for six months.