I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “Yeah? You know if you want to talk …” Colette shifted uncomfortably in her seat and trailed off like she expected to be shot down. She’d asked Louisa about her past on a few occasions, but Louisa always clammed up like she had in New Orleans.

  This time Louisa would’ve told the story even if she hadn’t been asked. She couldn’t help it. Everything was rushing back.

  “Eric.” The name scratched its way out of Louisa’s throat like a rusty nail dragged across a chalkboard. “Eric Lisbon was my high school boyfriend and he lived in that house.” Louisa gestured down the driveway at the bloodred building.

  “I met him the summer after my freshman year. My best friend, Molly, her boyfriend, Luke, and I saw his band play at this old warehouse, River’s Edge. Eric was the guitarist. He impressed me so much that I sent my friends home and waited for him in the parking lot afterward. I sat on the hood of his van, smoking a cigarette, trying to seem cool. And it worked.”

  Louisa glanced over at Colette, who didn’t seem to know if she should smile. She nodded, straight-faced, urging Louisa to continue.

  “He put his amp down, ran his fingers through his inky black hair, and hopped up beside me. He said, ‘Louisa Carson, to what do I owe the honor?’

  “I was so flattered. He was two years older than me. He never acknowledged me at school before. Or maybe he had, I just never noticed him until I saw him onstage. I said, ‘You know who I am?’

  “He stared right at me with these dazzling hazel eyes and said, ‘Of course I do. I remember when you first moved to Carlisle, started stirring up trouble with Molly, and making things more interesting. Not to mention brightening up the place with your beautiful smile.’

  “I didn’t want to blush, so I complimented him back, told him he’d put on the best show I’d ever seen. He teased me and asked how many shows I’d been to, like I was so young it had to be my first. So I took a drag off my cigarette to look older and said, ‘Plenty.’

  “Then he pinched my cigarette between two fingers, took it from my mouth like a lollipop, and tossed it to the ground, saying, ‘You’re too pretty to smoke. It’ll give you wrinkles.’ I didn’t know whether to chew him out or kiss him. I gave him this playful little butterfly kiss and he laughed, grabbed me by the arm before I could slide away, and laid a full one on me.” Louisa paused and reached for her pack of smokes. She pushed the car lighter in and offered Colette a cigarette.

  Colette accepted and asked, “Your first kiss?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately.” Louisa remained silent until she was able to light up. She knew she needed to smoke to keep talking. Finally the lighter popped and Louisa went on. “Eric and I were inseparable for the rest of the summer, until I went to England.

  “My cousin Amelia was nineteen and she’d just moved to London to go to school. My dad agreed to let me visit her because he thought if I saw the rewards of studying abroad, I’d focus on my schoolwork more. But Amelia had found the beginnings of punk rock to be a hell of a lot more interesting than her studies. Instead of taking me on a tour of the campus, she bleached my hair and took me to Kings Road. She bought me a stack of records and a whole new wardrobe with her tuition money. The only school-related thing that Amelia introduced me to was David, a classmate of hers with a brilliant aquamarine Mohawk and even brighter blue eyes.” Louisa sighed.

  “That British accent made me forget about my boyfriend back home. But when I returned to Wisconsin three weeks later, I went right back to Eric because I never thought I’d see David again and I was in love with Eric, right?”

  “Yeah?” Colette’s eyes lingered doubtfully on the house looming in front of them.

  “You can tell it’s gonna end badly, can’t you?” Louisa asked, but Colette didn’t answer, so she continued. “Eric had a temper. He didn’t like the bleached hair. He called all of my new clothes ‘slutty.’ We fought for most of my sophomore year and then I met Michael around my sixteenth birthday.” She cracked a smile for the first time since she’d started talking.

  Colette turned to her, recognizing the name. “Your husband. You left Eric for him?”

  Louisa studied the cherry of her cigarette, her tone softening. “Not exactly. Michael and I were friends. He used to give me guitar lessons before the bands went on at River’s Edge. But yeah, I had a crush on him. I just couldn’t figure out how to break up with Eric. He scared me. So what did I do?” Bitterness crept into her voice again. “I let him catch me with Michael. It was innocent, of course. Michael’s not the type to steal someone’s girlfriend. But Eric seeing me with Michael’s guitar around my neck was as good as him catching us in bed. Eric was that jealous.”

  “You did it on purpose?”

  “Kind of. I met Michael at River’s Edge on a night that Eric’s band was playing, so I knew Eric would arrive early.”

  “What’d he do?” Colette couldn’t keep her anxious eyes off Louisa, but Louisa still focused on the end of her cigarette, reminded of how Eric’s gaze burned into her that night.

  “Nothing at first. He ignored me, played his gig. Molly was five months pregnant at the time. She didn’t feel well, asked if I would be okay getting a ride home with Eric. I thought I would. He’d called me every name in the book before, but he’d never hit me or anything. I figured he’d yell, maybe we’d finally end it, and he’d drive me home. So after the show was over, I waited by his van. The whole parking lot cleared out by the time he got there. He’d been inside getting wasted and even angrier at me.” Louisa’s breath hitched and she took a long drag to cover the sound. “When he found me he beat the shit out of me. Then he left me in the parking lot. Like roadkill.”

  “Jesus Christ …”

  Louisa held up her hand to silence Colette without looking at her. She lit a fresh cigarette from the one she’d almost finished. “Michael found me there. I guess he liked to stay late at River’s Edge and practice guitar. When he walked out to his motorcycle, he heard me crying. He wanted to go to the police, but I begged him to take me home. He dropped me off and I went in the front and out the back. Straight over to Eric’s because I was completely humiliated that Michael had seen me like that. I didn’t want him or anyone else thinking I was this helpless, battered girlfriend. And I planned to end it that night if it killed me. Which I wish it had.”

  Exhaling heavily, Louisa rolled her window down halfway. She needed the slap of cold air to keep her from crying. Her eyes landed on the sagging front porch. It had been sturdier back then, but the chipping coat of white paint matched her memory. “It was stupid to go over there. I knew his parents were out of town. I knew he was drunk and he’d just beat me up. But you never think someone is capable of crossing that line …”

  She saw herself: bruised, hem of her dress torn, but defiant, banging on the door. Eric answered, coming from the bathroom, still zipping his fly. The evil, crooked grin. “Here to make up, baby? I guess I should be unzipping …” Wrenching her inside with one big hand around both of her skinny wrists.

  Louisa ripped her focus from the blackness outside the window, desperately seeking Colette’s familiar face. She needed to see that someone else was beside her, that she wasn’t trapped alone in the car with her nightmares. “He dragged me down to his basement, to this little bathroom the size of a closet …”

  Louisa could smell that cramped room. Piss, mildew, the whiskey on Eric’s breath. He brutally shoved her to the floor, her knees bashing against the concrete. She tried to scramble to her feet, but he pushed her down again. Her head banged into the underside of the rusty sink and she rolled onto her back, clenching the top of her head in pain.

  Eric laughed and jumped on her before she could curl into a ball to protect herself. He sat on her legs and pinned her arms over her head with one hand, reaching up her skirt and tearing at her underwear with the other. After tugging his pants down, he slapped his calloused hand over her mouth and commanded, “Stop screaming! No one’s going to hear you.” Louisa hadn’t even realized she was making a
sound.

  She struggled against him, but it didn’t matter. He slammed her around the grimy bathroom like a rag doll, jamming himself into her for what felt like an eternity. When he finally finished, he drunkenly passed out on top of her. Louisa thought she’d suffocate beneath his weight, but she managed to slide out from under him.

  Eric’s father’s gun collection was displayed in the corner of the basement across from the bathroom. Louisa limped over to it, picked up a handgun and pressed it to her temple. Count to three, then fire. It will all be over, she told herself. But she counted all the way to one hundred and couldn’t do it. Noticing a phone on the wall, Louisa lowered the gun. She cradled the receiver between her cheek and her shoulder, and dialed with her free hand.

  “I need you,” Louisa whispered hoarsely when Molly answered. “I’m at Eric’s.”

  “What happened?” Molly asked, panicked.

  Before Louisa could respond, Eric stumbled out of the bathroom, pulling up his jeans. “Louuuzah,” he slurred. “Where’d you go? I wasn’t through with you.” He immediately spotted the phone, jerked it away from Louisa, and put it to his ear, demanding, “Who is this?”

  Louisa could hear Molly shrieking, “What did you do to her?”

  Eric let her shout for a moment, a slow smile spreading across his face. Then, glaring into Louisa’s eyes, he taunted, “I fucked her. So hard that she won’t ever think about fooling around with Michael Black again.”

  Molly screamed indiscernible threats until Eric cut her off with a snarl. “I’ll do what I want to her. She’s mine.”

  Then his hand dropped to the waistband of his jeans. Louisa felt the cold weight of the gun in her palm. She couldn’t let him hurt her again.

  Eric had been so focused on the phone that he hadn’t even seen the gun, not until it was pointed in his face. Before he could reach for it, before he could even say her name, Louisa fired.

  She didn’t remember hearing the shot; she didn’t remember watching him collapse. She just remembered—very vividly—how he looked dead. His forehead caved in like a rotten melon, hazel eye missing from the right side where the bullet entered, the skin around the wound pulpy like papier-mâché that would never dry. Shattered pieces of skull, red gore, and tufts of his greasy black hair were all that remained of the back of his head.

  Louisa had gaped at him until Molly arrived and found her sitting on the cold basement floor, half-naked, covered in blood, some Eric’s, some her own. The gun lay between Louisa and Eric’s body.

  “He did this to himself, Louisa,” Molly rationalized, kneeling in front of her. “He killed himself when he raped you.” Molly wiped the gun clean and pressed it into Eric’s hand. She carried Louisa out to the car.

  While Molly gathered the scattered remnants of Louisa’s torn clothing and erased every trace of her from that basement, Louisa stared through the windshield, unable to pull her eyes away from the ugly, bloodred house.

  Listening to Louisa’s tale, neither could Colette.

  “Eric’s death was written off as a suicide,” Louisa finished. “No one ever suspected it. Guys his age in our area, sometimes they got drunk, looked out at those dead fields, and saw no future. But he didn’t kill himself. I did. I shot him point-blank.”

  “And it’s haunted you ever since,” Colette completed.

  “Yes.” Louisa nodded. A fat tear rolled down her cheek and her voice shook. “I could’ve had a future. I tried to have one with Michael. But when I had that baby … I couldn’t be around her. I’d done something too awful.”

  “Honey,” Colette said, shaking her head, “I done way worse things than you.”

  Louisa’s eyes probed Colette’s. “You killed someone?”

  “No, but neither did you, really. You acted out of—”

  Louisa put up a hand to dismiss what Colette was about to say. “Don’t give me that self-defense crap. Michael had me convinced of that for a little while, but …” She paused and then stated firmly, “I ended a life, Colette.”

  “What kind of a life?” Colette sneered. “I am not saying that you should just brush off shooting somebody—hell, I can’t even brush off the time I accidentally ran over a rabbit—but I’m saying that, because of the circumstances, it’s not the worst thing you’ve done and it’s no worse than shit I’ve done either.”

  “What’s the worst thing I’ve done, then?” Louisa anxiously scrubbed the wetness from her face.

  “Leaving your little girl.”

  “No.” She shook her head so violently that strands of her hair whipped against the window. “That’s the best thing I’ve done. She’s got a better life without me. I did a horrible thing, Colette. I wasn’t worthy of Michael and I didn’t deserve to raise that little girl.” To put a stop to that discussion, Louisa addressed Colette’s other comment, thinking that if Colette had committed a comparable act, it might ease her own conscience slightly. “What’s the worst thing you’ve done, then?”

  Colette turned in her seat to gaze at Nadia. “Dragging this little one toward all my dreams that just wind up being nightmares.” Then she looked up at Louisa again. “Go home, Lou,” she urged, tears collecting at the corners of her heavily kohl-lined eyes.

  Louisa faced forward, grasping the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles went white. “I can’t. I’m not ever going to be able to. When I left, I thought I was going to find myself out on the road somewhere, in a song at a show in some other city. I thought the music would heal me because that was the only time I felt okay. Listening to the radio, or watching someone play, especially Michael.”

  Colette placed her fingers on Louisa’s shoulder. “I know what you mean. A good song can make you forget everything. You feel like it was written just for you, that the singer knew your pain. But Michael actually did. His were the songs you needed.”

  “I know.” Regret filled Louisa’s voice. “But I figured it out too late.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “No.” Louisa slammed her body back against the seat to knock Colette’s hand away. “Don’t you understand? Michael’s a good man. He’s got a decent job. He’s raising our daughter to be a strong, beautiful, good person.” She swallowed a whimper and turned pain into self-loathing.

  “And never mind the evil thing I did. Let’s set that aside for a minute. What about how I’ve spent the past ten years? Drinking? Doing drugs? Stripping? I didn’t let rock ’n’ roll save me. I became the ultimate rock cliché! I let go of Emily back in 1979 when I became a stripper. I only followed the music the way I intended for three years. I went to Detroit for a year. Then I went to New York, where I met a girl who said she wanted to start a club in L. A. And I thought about that old warehouse, River’s Edge. The place where I discovered music, where I met Michael, and I thought, ‘That’s it. If I can create a place like that, I’ll create enough good energy to get rid of all the bad inside of me. Then I’ll be able to go home.’ Nope.” Louisa laughed cynically.

  “That girl bailed on me as soon as we got to California. It took me two months to find a job and when I did it was at the slowest bar in Hollywood. When I finally had enough money to make rent on time for the first time, I came home to find my apartment had been robbed. I didn’t have a bank account. I kept my money under my mattress and of course it was gone. So I cried to my coworker and she ripped an ad out of the paper for me. Amateur night at a strip club. ‘You’re pretty enough,’ she said. ‘You’ll make it all back in one night,’” Louisa mimicked, raking her fingers through her hair in disgust.

  “And I did it. I fought tears onstage, thinking how ashamed my daughter would be if she knew that this was the kind of woman her mother was: a murderer who abandoned her child and went on to earn money by taking her clothes off.”

  “You were just trying to get by,” Colette soothed. “She’d understand that, or she will someday. And Michael, he really loved you, so he would understand, too.”

  Louisa tossed her cigarette out the window and viciously shoved
the car lighter in again. “Yeah, Michael’s really loyal. He knew the truth about Eric and he stuck by me. He begged me not to leave. And how’d I repay that? By cheating on him. I remember the date I did it, Colette! October fifth, 1980. I’d been back in New York for a year. I’d saved all that L. A. stripper money to get back there and was determined to make an honest living. So I bartended in the East Village and one night this guy comes in. I set a drink down in front of him and he goes, ‘Amelia?’ and I go cold because I think he said, ‘Emily.’ ”

  “Your cousin Amelia …” Colette handed Louisa the cigarette pack she fumbled for.

  “Yeah. My favorite cousin. I named my daughter for her because she died in a car wreck in London a few months before Emily was born. So I’m staring at the guy and he’s staring at me like he’s seen a ghost. Then I recognize the blue eyes, even though his hair doesn’t match anymore.”

  “David. The guy from London.”

  “Yeah, David.” The cigarette lighter popped and Louisa resisted the urge to press it to her lips instead of the cigarette between them. “David and I did shots till closing and then instead of going home, I ended up at his hotel room. He pretended I was Amelia. Apparently, he’d been in love with her, but never got to tell her until she was bleeding to death in his arms on the side of the road. And I pretended… . Well, I was drunk and had been alone for nearly four years and it just happened.”

  Louisa remembered the way her clothes slid to the floor like petals wilting off a flower. How she couldn’t decide if it was easier to close her eyes or open them. Open, she could see quite clearly that David wasn’t Michael; closed, Michael was all she could see. She settled on closed when she looked up and saw that she’d left her wedding ring on. It glittered in the light cast from a billboard glowing through the window. But even with her eyes shut, she could still feel the ring, the metal cold and numb as her body.

  “He fell asleep as soon as it was over. Of course, guilt was eating me up so I couldn’t do the same. I considered myself married.” Louisa’s fingertips glanced over the gold ring on her left hand. “I still do. So, I slunk out of that hotel, went home, packed my things, and was out of New York before sunrise. I headed for New Orleans, where, as you know, I went back to stripping, started doing coke, and sleeping with random strange men on the really lonely nights.”