“You like Loreena Campbell?” I exclaimed. She was a blues songstress from Chicago who my parents had gone to see religiously.
Johnny sat up, his demo loosely in hand, stunned as I was. “I love her! You’ve heard of her? How? I didn’t think her music made it out of Chicago.”
“My dad. He listens to her, a lot of older blues, just about everything really.”
Johnny nodded emphatically, pointing at me with that look you get when you finally identify something you couldn’t put a finger on. “That’s why I like your voice so much. You’re like the punk-rock Loreena Campbell.” I couldn’t help beaming at that. “I saw her very last show at a bar in 1981,” he continued.
“Yeah, right,” I snorted. “How old are you?”
He laughed, pushing tendrils of red-streaked hair out of his face. “Twenty-two. It was my first concert and I almost didn’t get in. I was nine years old, standing with my mom, singing Loreena’s songs to the bouncer, trying to win him over when Loreena herself walked by. She made them let me in ’cause she liked the way I sang.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Johnny’s eyes grew wide as the full moon glowing through the window behind him. “I’m serious. It was the best day of my life. I decided right there that I was going to start a band.”
I shook my head, amazed. “I never thought I’d meet a punk guy who was into Loreena Campbell.”
Then I realized I’d never had a conversation like this with any guy besides Tom and my dad. It put Johnny on a new level and I was uneasy about that. I decided to move the conversation into an arena where he would surely disappoint. “Why don’t you put on your tape?” I suggested.
As I anticipated, it was mediocre, like all those opening bands whose generic sound drones on and on while you pray Please, god, let this be the last song before the main act because you’re so bored. This should have triggered an immediate opening and slamming of the car door, perhaps with some laughter to drive in the last nail, but no, I couldn’t stop thinking about how he liked Loreena Campbell and Loreena Campbell had liked him. His voice was really good, and the guitar work definitely had potential. He just needed to lose the overly fuzzed out, angsty thing.
As I thought about this, I noticed him leaning toward me, shirt riding up again, and when he kissed me, I kissed him back.
The way he kissed me made me forget all the reasons behind my self-imposed vow of celibacy. Nothing besides singing had ever made my mouth feel so good. I barely remembered to come up for air every once in a while. If he learned to play music as well as he kissed, he’d be the world’s biggest rock god. He tangled his fingers in my hair, tracing his nails down my scalp, making me shiver. The way he touched me made me forget every guy I’d ever been with, so during the second mediocre song on his tape, I took off my top. He smiled, and lifted his shirt over his head. While he did this, I quickly popped out his tape and put in Loreena Campbell. I don’t know if this pissed him off because when I turned back, all I saw was abs. He maneuvered through the gap between the front seats into the back, and I followed, straddling his lap.
Under the blazing heat of the morning sun, the smells of stale cigarette smoke, stale fries, and not-so-stale sex collided, jarring me into consciousness. Waking up half naked in the backseat of Johnny’s car scared the crap out of me. The last time I’d slept with someone, it ended with me feeling completely helpless. I couldn’t believe I’d exposed myself to that possibility again.
I struggled to sit up, but Johnny’s embrace kept me pinned to the seat. I was pleased to note the awkward angle of his head: right cheek mashed against the window, neck cranked back like I’d instinctively shoved his head off of my shoulder in my sleep. But at the same time, I fought the urge to kiss his smooth, white throat. And I knew if I glanced down toward his bare chest, I’d be toast.
No. No more mistakes. Back to celibacy.
I poked him awake. “I gotta go.” I wondered why I hadn’t said that the night before. I’d never actually stayed with a guy I’d slept with for more than ten minutes after completing the act. Sometimes, I’d agree to meet them later, but I’d never fallen asleep beside them.
“You said that last night.” Johnny yawned. He tightened his grip on me, trying to set his head on my shoulder.
“I did?” I squirmed to loosen his grasp.
“You did. I convinced you that you were too tired to drive.”
“Oh.”
“Was I so bad that you blocked it out?” he teased.
“I’m always confused in the morning until I get coffee.” This was true, but I avoided his question. He wasn’t bad. He was good. I hadn’t known “good” existed until him. But he didn’t need to know that. He still struck me as slightly more than self-confident.
“Let’s go get some coffee, then,” he suggested, kissing my cheek. He was aiming for my lips, but I moved out of his path, reaching into the front for my T-shirt.
“No. I should get over to Regan’s. Practice.” I tugged my shirt over my head, fingering the chain around my neck as I pulled it on top of the T-shirt.
Johnny lifted the locket from where it fell against my chest. “So, what’s so special about the necklace?” He ran his forefinger over the silver oval, pressing the tiny button that opened it. “Who’s inside?” He lowered his eyes to study the faded black-and-white photo of the stubbly face I had memorized. “Boyfriend?” he asked, without any inflection to indicate if he cared how I answered.
The lie was posed on my tongue, but strangely I felt the need to tell him the truth. “It’s my father.” I brushed his fingers away and snapped the locket shut. “It was my mother’s. One of the only things of hers I have, besides her old records.”
“She was a musician, too?”
“No. Well, I don’t know, maybe she is. She loved music. We don’t know where she is now, though.” I trained my eyes on the vacant parking lot as I spoke. Why was I compelled to tell him these things? I didn’t talk to the guys I slept with, not like this anyway.
“No wonder you wanted it back.”
“Yeah.” I stared him down. “I shouldn’t do impulsive shit like that. I could lose things that I care about.” Impulsive shit like sleeping with you and losing my focus on my career.
“Nah, you’re too tough. No one could take anything from you.”
He seemed to grasp my meaning, which freaked me out. I leaned into the front seat for the rest of my things.
Trying to lighten the mood, he gibed, “So you’re Daddy’s little girl.”
My head snapped around, all the muscles in my back tensing. “Shut up!”
His smirk disappeared. “Jesus, Emily, calm down. It was a joke.”
He kept me on edge because, deep down, I actually liked him. I didn’t just find him attractive, our personalities clicked and clashed in all the right ways. “Sorry. And, yeah, I guess I am.”
“That’s fine.” That cocky lip curled up again, but he used the intensity of his gaze to make it appear almost sensitive. “I guess you could say I’m a mama’s boy. My dad bailed on us when I was five, so I’m really loyal to her. When someone walks out on the family, you either fall apart or get tight. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
I glared at him. “No, I don’t know what you mean. My mom wasn’t like your dad. She didn’t just bail,” I mimicked snottily, and reached for the door, but he took hold of my arm.
“Well, she left, right?” he contended.
“Yeah.” I jerked away. “But not ’cause she cheated or whatever typical bullshit your dad probably pulled on your mom.”
His eyes blazed, but he inhaled slowly to cool them, speaking to me gently again. “Hey, leaving is leaving, the effect is the same. But we’re stronger for it.”
I didn’t want to get into I-survived-the-single-parent-home therapeutic crap. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about this with you. We’re not friends. I don’t even know your last name.”
“Thompson. John Christopher Thompson. Pretty boring, huh? S
ee why I was so jealous of you for having a rock ’n’ roll name like Emily Black?” He tried to charm a smile from me.
I shrugged. “You already go by Johnny. Just come up with an adjective that describes you and make it your last name.” A devious look crept across my face. “Too bad Johnny Rotten’s already taken.”
“Oh, is that what you think of me?” He pretended to pout. Then he pointed to his hair. “Can’t I be Johnny Red? We’d make such a cute punk couple …”
“Couple?” I choked, scooting closer to the door. “Yeah, right. I don’t date. I’m focused on my music. Nothing else. You just distracted me last night.”
“Johnny Attraction?” He gestured at his bare chest.
I refused to look anywhere but his face. “Don’t flatter yourself, Johnny Bastard.”
He shook his head, keeping his silver eyes on mine. “I don’t like that one.”
“Johnny Threat.”
“Where’d you get that?” he smirked.
I flashed an impenetrable smile. “I’m not telling. Besides, you have to act like it’s your real name for it to work.”
I wasn’t about to let him know that the name came to mind because he was a threat to my long-standing resistance to romance. That his couple comment had actually made me feel warm and mushy inside, just for a moment.
He held his hands up, surrendering. “Okay, fair enough. But you’ll at least let me buy you a cup of coffee for coming up with such a great name, right?”
As he groped around on the floor for his shirt, my fingers found the door handle. “No. I have to go practice.”
“Hey, I thought you said I could come with you. So we could all talk about the show in Chicago? Maybe a few shows?”
“Yeah,” I said, slipping out of the car and his reach. “Right. Sure, just follow me.” And with that innocuous phrase, I let him into my life.
2 .
Rock and roll is what I’m born to be.
—Patti Smith
“Ask the Angels”
Radio Ethiopia
SLEEPWALK DANCING
November 1986
Sirens screeched down the street outside of Louisa’s Minneapolis apartment. She paused at the window, watching two police cars followed by a fire truck, their red lights slicing through the evening shadows. The glow briefly illuminated a yellow cab. It sat in front of Louisa’s building, blinkers on as it unloaded passengers. Louisa resumed packing. On her walk home from a show at the 7th Street Entry the night before, her cheeks getting chapped by the wind, she’d decided it was time to leave. She couldn’t take another Midwestern winter.
She scooped up four glasses from the coffee table and brought them into the kitchen. Two were relatively clean. Louisa rinsed these and set them aside. The other two were sticky with the remnants of whiskey sours, her current drink of choice. One of them had cigarette butts floating in sludgy brown liquid; the other had a flyer stuck to the bottom. She tossed both glasses directly into the garbage. She’d accumulated too much stuff over the past two years in Minnesota anyway.
Louisa hadn’t figured out where she was going next until she glanced at the drink-ringed flyer she’d peeled off the glass. It was from a show she’d seen in September, a noisy rock band from Boston she’d loved. Boston winters were bad, but not as bad as Minneapolis, she decided, and if the scene was hot, who cared about the weather. She folded up the flyer to shove it in the pocket of her jeans, but dropped it when the doorbell buzzed loud as a fire alarm.
Louisa opened the door to Colette, who had a three-year-old girl with honey-colored hair clinging sleepily to her leg. “I’m sorry to do this to you again, Lou,” Colette said with a trembling lip, “but Nadia and I have nowhere else to go.” Before tears could overflow from Colette’s big blue eyes, Louisa ushered them in and used her teakettle for the last time to make Colette a mug of steaming black tea.
Louisa was not nearly as shocked by Colette’s appearance on her doorstep as she had been in 1983, the first time it happened. Back then, Louisa lived in San Pedro, California. She hadn’t seen or heard from Colette since she’d left her in New Orleans two years before. But apparently Colette had come to regard Louisa as an older-sister figure during that brief time in the Big Easy. When Colette got into trouble, Louisa was the first person she thought to track down through her transient friends. At the time, Louisa was about to leave San Pedro for D. C., where a new form of hardcore punk was emerging, but she couldn’t bring herself to close the door on Colette, lost and lonely at twenty-one, with a brand-new baby whose father’s identity was as hotly contested as the origin of the heavens. Louisa let her in, thankful that Michael didn’t have Colette’s kind of connections. Then again, he understood why she needed to be alone.
Louisa set Colette on her feet in California and then continued to wander, summoned by music, a new band with a different sound that could be “It,” anything that could prove the healing power of rock ’n’ roll had not failed her. But inevitably, Colette and baby Nadia would appear at her door and ride along for a while.
“I got mixed up with the wrong guy again,” Colette sighed, gratefully swallowing the tea and sandwich Louisa made for her. Nadia had eaten half her sandwich and promptly curled up against her mother for a nap. “He was dealing drugs out of my apartment. I came home last week and found the door kicked in. I knew the Santa Cruz police would be looking for me. Not to mention social services.” She gave Nadia a squeeze. “I had to get as far away as possible.”
“Boston far enough?” Louisa gestured across the room to the open suitcase on her bed. “I wanted to go tonight.”
“Boston sounds great.”
A couple hours later, they left Louisa’s apartment, Louisa carrying the last bag and Colette with Nadia on her hip. Colette shut the front door and paused to grab Louisa’s mail. “Want this?” She offered the envelopes to Louisa. Louisa fanned them out as she took them in her free hand. She let the bills flutter to the ground, but shoved the envelope with the familiar girlish handwriting and a Wisconsin postmark in her pocket. Molly still wrote to her even though it had been ten long years since Louisa had abandoned her husband, child, and best friend. Ten years almost to the day, Louisa realized.
Fueled by sleeplessness, Louisa drove while Nadia slept in the backseat, strapped in and sitting completely upright with her head tilted toward her left shoulder. Her unruly curls, which she wouldn’t let Colette cut, brushed the scuffed leather seat. Colette slept as well, her pale cheek pressed against the cold window on the passenger’s side like it was a pillow. Three hours into the drive, as they neared Baraboo, Wisconsin, Louisa’s intuition guided her off of I-90/94 onto US-12. Just a shortcut, she told herself as she crossed the Wisconsin River.
Louisa no longer headed east toward Boston, but slightly west toward a place she’d spent years avoiding. South of Mineral Point, Louisa followed the backcountry roads to the abandoned warehouse, River’s Edge, where the best music she’d ever heard had been played by friends, acquaintances, and most beautifully by the man who later became her husband. She parked in the gravel lot, but did not get out. She saw tire ruts in the frozen mud and rusted beer cans in the weeds. The kids still come here, she thought, cracking the window as she lit a cigarette, and when she glanced down at the ground just below, she saw a thin wire glinting in the moonlight. A broken guitar string. And the kids still play. But when her mind turned over the next thought, Maybe Emily will come here someday, her throat seized up and she put the car into drive again.
She continued her ghostly tour, driving southeast on County Highway PW, whose curves she knew as well as the curves of her own hips. She slid silently into the sleeping town. Where the highway became Main Street, she slowed below the required twenty-five miles an hour to gaze into the darkened windows of JT’s Tavern and Carlisle Groceries and Meats, both of which looked the same as they had over twelve years ago when she’d fled with Michael on her eighteenth birthday.
Reaching the southernmost outskirts of Carlisle, Loui
sa turned onto an out-of-place, winding street that rose and fell with tiny hills like shallow breaths. The houses were ill-spaced, sitting like faded wooden blocks tossed to the ground haphazardly by a cranky child. Fields stretched out behind them, already harvested clean in preparation for winter. Louisa stopped in front of a house painted a violent shade of red that looked like dried blood in the darkness. She sat waiting for the ghosts to emerge: herself and Eric Lisbon. Perhaps she would even see the moment when Eric dragged her inside and all the music she’d loved and collected from River’s Edge drained from her open mouth instead of a scream. She’d have to spend years searching for it again.
Colette stirred beside her. “Where are we, Lou?” she asked, blinking sleepily. Taking in her surroundings with a squint, she added, “Why are we in some little podunk town?” She honed in on the house down the driveway from them. “That place gives me the creeps.”
Louisa whispered, “Me too.”
Colette stretched, touching the roof of the car. The sleeves of her leather jacket dipped to reveal a group of silver bangles that clinked together, breaking the silence like a crash of cymbals. “I can drive, y’know. I got some stuff that would wake me up.”
“No, I needed to stop here to remember why I can’t go home.” Louisa clutched the steering wheel. If only she could drive the car at a hundred miles per hour right through Eric’s house and demolish her memories, but they were indestructible. She sank against her seat, defeated.
Colette gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”
Louisa trained her eyes on the shadowy fields beyond the red house. She forced her voice to sound strong. “This is my podunk town, Colette. This is Carlisle. And the stuff that happened in that house? That’s what I’ve been running from.”
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone Page 10