I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  I know this story doesn’t match up with the one your father told you. You’re probably pretty angry about being lied to, and if that’s the case, be angry with me, not your dad. I made him swear to me that he’d keep my secret. He begged me to stay and he asked, “What am I supposed to tell Emily?”

  I told him to make you hate me so much that you didn’t want anything to do with me. To tell you that I’d run off with another man. But he said he couldn’t do that, he loved me too much. I told him that if he loved me, he’d swear to keep my secret, so you’d never have to be haunted by it. I told him to tell you I left to follow rock ’n’ roll. To let you think I was a free spirit so you’d have a free spirit.

  And at first, I did follow the music. I thought maybe I just needed some time by myself to grapple with things. Then I’d be able to be the girl your father fell in love with before the murder, the girl who sat beside him on a makeshift stage in an old warehouse learning to play guitar. That version of me would have been a good mother. But I can’t be that person again, there is too much bad in me. I hope you can understand, and I hope you won’t ever try to find me. All I can do is damage you.

  Louisa stopped writing and eased her cramped body out of bed to check on Nadia. The little girl was lying on her side, facing the door, as if she was waiting for her mother to come in, needing her. She breathed lightly but did not wake when the dim light from the hall hit her face. Louisa wished she could take Colette’s place that night and lie down beside Nadia, have the girl comfort her. More than anything, she wished she could transport herself to Wisconsin and lie down beside her own daughter. Emily wouldn’t be a little girl anymore, though; she would probably be almost Louisa’s size, almost her shape. But her expression would be as peaceful as Nadia’s when she slept, as innocent.

  Louisa closed the door and walked back to her room with that sense of innocence in mind. She skimmed her letter. Was she really going to bring this nightmare on her daughter? The nightmare she’d feared she was passing on throughout her whole pregnancy? Was she going to let Emily know—at this vulnerable age, when she was probably confused enough about her own identity—that her mother was a murderer? No, she couldn’t.

  She added three more lines to the letter. Like with all the other letters, I won’t be sending this one. I never wanted you to know, and I’m not going to tell you now. After all, you’ve been better off all these years not knowing. Then she closed the notebook and put it away in the back of her closet, realizing that she’d never write in it again.

  “I need to know the truth, Molly, about my mother and why she left.”

  I spoke into the grimy receiver of a Milwaukee pay phone. I’d waited three days to make the call, figuring that was how long it would take for Regan to be well enough for Molly to bring her back to Carlisle. I’d actually hoped Regan would answer because she wouldn’t have been as hysterical as her mother. Molly started screaming as soon as I said hello. Apparently everyone was worried about me, my father had barely slept since the morning I’d left, and Regan would be able to get healthy a lot faster if I was by her side. When she finished ranting, I told her I’d consider coming home if she gave me the information my dad had refused me.

  Molly sighed. “Emily, you’ve been through a lot. Regan scared us all to death and your dad told me about what happened with Johnny—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. Tell me about Louisa.”

  Molly ignored my stern words. “If you just came home, so we could help you deal with that stuff, then we could talk about everything else.”

  I slammed the palm of my hand into the side of the metal enclosure surrounding the phone. My extra coins clattered on the surface where they sat. “Everything else? Louisa is not everything else. She’s the reason behind everything I do. I’ve never been able to admit that until now, but you had to see it. I spent my entire life trying to understand her through the music she supposedly left to follow. I started my own band so that maybe …” I stopped myself, still not willing to admit that I’d been hoping my songs would bring her home. That sounded so naive. Then again, I thought angrily, Dad and Molly encouraged that childish fantasy, didn’t they?

  I scraped a quarter up and down the telephone cord like I used to scrape my pick against my guitar strings at the end of an intense song. I missed my guitar. Reminding myself why I didn’t have it, I said, “I screwed up my band. I learned that music doesn’t heal, it doesn’t save. It ruins lives. If my mother really thought it was going to fix something for her … well, no wonder she never came home.”

  “Emily,” Molly pleaded, “your life isn’t ruined. Your band isn’t ruined. Regan and Tom are in Chicago waiting for you to come back, so you can work through all of this together.”

  The quarter slipped through my fingers and hit the cement. “What? Why didn’t she come home with you? I couldn’t go back to Chicago even if I wanted to.”

  “Don’t let a bad relationship ruin—”

  “Don’t let it ruin my life like it did Louisa’s?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant—”

  “Regan told me what she overheard you say about my mother. Did Eric Lisbon rape Louisa? And what does it have to do with her leaving me?”

  Molly paused for so long that I wondered if she’d hung up on me, but then I heard her inhale and exhale cigarette smoke. Finally she said, “Regan never should have told you that.”

  “Why, because it isn’t true?” God, how I wanted to believe it wasn’t.

  “Because as close as Regan and I are to you, Louisa’s story and her reason for leaving are between you, your father, and Louisa.”

  Blind rage filled me. I slammed the receiver against the side of the phone three times and it took every ounce of willpower not to hang up. Pressing the phone to my ear again, I growled, “Listen, I know my father told you to say that. He probably thinks it will bring me home to talk to him. But I’m not coming back to listen to his fairy tales anymore. After what happened with Johnny, I can’t hear his crap about how much he and my mom loved each other. Obviously something was wrong or she wouldn’t have left. And I’m going to find out what that was. If you won’t tell me and Dad won’t tell me, I’m going straight to the source. The last time you heard from Louisa, she was in Boston, correct?”

  “Emily, that was eight years ago.”

  “Was that the last time you heard from her?” I insisted.

  When Molly emitted a painful “Yes,” I hung up on her. I had my starting point.

  I returned to where I’d been staying to collect my things. Milwaukee wouldn’t have been my first choice because it was still in Wisconsin, but I’d left my dad’s house sleep-starved and low on gas. It was about as far away as I could get. Besides, I had acquaintances there who let me crash with them without asking too many questions. And they had connections. When I mentioned that I was going to be driving a long way and wished I had some pills like the ones that my waitress friend in Chicago provided me after particularly rough nights, a green-haired girl named Dawn told me she could do better.

  I gave her forty bucks and she brought me two plastic baggies of pills. “The white ones will get you up and the blue ones will bring you down when you’re ready.” Then she revealed a tinfoil packet. “And this will make you feel invincible.”

  “What’s that?”

  Dawn beckoned me over to the coffee table and spilled white powder out onto its mirrored surface. She expertly chopped two lines and handed me a rolled dollar bill.

  I hesitated. Cocaine, the biggest rock-star cliché. Then I remembered that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be a rock star. Music wouldn’t mean a thing to me again until I found my mother, the person who’d made me believe in it in the first place. And I was going to have to drive through Chicago on my way to Boston. I needed to feel invincible.

  Louisa’s picture became my compass. I taped it to the dashboard as I drove across the country. When I got to Boston, I taped it to the wall above my bed, the place where I
’d always hung rock posters in the past.

  Of course, I couldn’t cut music out of my life completely. Even though I doubted the myth about Louisa following punk rock, it was still all I had to go on. I went to concert after concert, trying to integrate into the scene with the hope that an older bouncer or club regular might remember her. It hurt like hell to watch other people onstage doing the thing I used to love so much. I had to numb myself to it. I used alcohol for that purpose when I could, but found it harder to scam drinks underage in Boston than it had been in the Midwest. Instead, I took speed to keep me upbeat enough to talk to everyone, figure out if they might know Louisa. Soon, drugs filled the void that music had left. Chopping coke finely with a razor blade made my fingers feel like they were gripping a pick and hitting the strings hard and fast. Codeine and Valium put me in a sleep so deep I didn’t dream about my guitar or shows I’d played or songs begging to be written.

  I used my old lyrics notebook to record clues about my mother. I spent nine months in Boston and only met a few people who thought maybe they’d seen her around. If it wasn’t for my drug use, I may have never gotten a real lead.

  A dealer came to my house one night and brought along his girlfriend, a chick with bluish black hair who looked about ten years older than she was. She paced around while her boyfriend and I negotiated. Then she stopped in front of my bed, squinting at Louisa’s picture with heavily lined brown eyes. She tapped it, announcing, “Hey, I knew her. Jimmy, come over here, see if you remember her name.”

  “Chill, Mary.” Jimmy tried to continue his conversation with me, but I was already approaching Mary, urging him to follow.

  “Do you guys remember her? What was her name?” I asked, wanting them to recall on their own, not just go along with what I said.

  Jimmy glanced at the photo and shrugged. “I meet too many people. Who is she to you anyway?”

  Disappointment made my words hollow. “My mother.”

  Mary’s squint moved from the picture to my face. She stared into my eyes so deeply that I got a chill. Then she snapped her fingers. “You’ve got her eyes. Louisa. I’d never forget those eyes.”

  Shocked, I leaned against the wall for support. “How’d you know her?”

  “We danced together. Her, me, and her best friend, Colette.”

  Molly. I wanted to say that Louisa’s best friend was Molly. Instead I asked, “What do you mean you danced? Like at concerts or something?”

  Mary laughed a phlegmy laugh that sounded more like a cough. She placed her palm delicately on the top of a nearby chair and spun around it, landing in a seated position with her chin resting on the back. “No, like dancing, honey. We worked at a strip club together for a year until your mom got in a fight with the manager and she and Colette drove off to Oakland. Louisa never mentioned a kid, though. Colette had one. Nadia or Natasha or something. Little girl, way younger than you.”

  As soon as Mary and Jimmy left, I took two Valium so I could sleep without dwelling on the sickening image of Louisa twirling around a pole and thrusting her tits in guys’ faces like some chick in a bad hair-metal video. But I left for Oakland the next morning.

  Even though Louisa’s life was a pathetic shell of what I’d always imagined, she did seem to be following the music. She’d been in Boston right before the Pixies made their mark and hit the Bay Area when punk bands like Green Day and Rancid were starting out. And the Gilman, the place where those bands played, was still around. Within three months, I met a woman who’d been hanging around the punk scene since the late eighties. She vaguely remembered Louisa and Colette. She said all the two of them ever talked about was New Orleans. When they disappeared in 1989, that’s where she assumed they’d gone. Given the time period, I would have expected my mother to go farther north and catch the beginnings of grunge in Seattle, but New Orleans was thick with musical history, so I could see the draw.

  I arrived in New Orleans on a sweaty night in early July. I checked into the first hotel I found, right off I-10, a real dive in an area that was not meant for tourists, as I concluded by the sagging buildings with boarded-up windows and the gunshots I heard coming from somewhere nearby. The only things it had going for it were that it cost thirty dollars a night and that it was located above a twenty-four-hour bar.

  I spent as little time in my room as possible. Its appearance was nauseating. The cigarette-burned carpet was the color of an old mustard stain. The furniture consisted of a bed with shit-brown blankets, a chair whose wooden arms had been used as an ashtray on several occasions, a scarred and drink-ringed dresser, and a matching (in the scars and drink rings, not the color of the wood) nightstand. No telephone or television, although I didn’t want either. What I didn’t like was that I had a sink and a mirror, but the toilet and shower were in the tiny bathroom that joined my room with my neighbor’s—a greasy-haired man who winked at me every time we passed in the hall. Only two flimsy bolts separated me from him, one flimsy bolt if I was in the bathroom. Since my explosive breakup with Johnny, I’d taken to carrying a butterfly knife; I took it with me to the bathroom and kept it on the nightstand while I slept. It was convenient to have it there anyway, for cutting cocaine.

  I’d been in New Orleans for a week when I celebrated my twentieth birthday. If you could call it a celebration. I’d been zigzagging across the country after Louisa for over a year. It was the second birthday without my dad and Regan, and I had to fight the urge to call them. I fought that urge every day, but the battles felt the worst on holidays.

  Once upon a time when I ached like I did that day, I would have just played my favorite song. Now my music collection sat in the corner untouched as I scraped at the thin, white film that coated the scarred surface of my nightstand. There wasn’t enough for one lousy line and I hadn’t made any reliable connections in New Orleans yet. I took a big swig from the wine bottle I also kept on the nightstand and decided that since I’d been there a week, I might as well unpack. Maybe I’d get lucky and find more coke in the process.

  I pulled a pair of jeans out of my bag and opened a dresser drawer to toss them inside. Something on the bottom of the drawer caught my attention. Painted in red nail polish in the back corner were the initials L.C.B., and a date, 4/81. My heart clenched and I dropped the jeans. I ignored the fact that there were probably a million people with the initials L.C.B.; I was convinced that those letters stood for Louisa Carson-Black. My mother had been in this room.

  I yanked the drawer out of the dresser and slammed it on the nasty carpet. I traced the letters L.C.B., the date. I was sure it was her; the letters and numbers matched her handwriting on the back of photographs. I wanted to cut out that block of wood. Drive it all the way back to Carlisle. Show it to Molly and my father. Tell them, “Look, I found her. I finally found her!”

  I was in no state to drive, though. I knew that. So I just sat with the drawer and drank my wine. Eventually, I retrieved my notebook to record my discovery. “St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans. Louisa’s initials, April 1981.”

  Wait, 1981, I realized. I’d left Oakland looking for the place Louisa’d gone in the nineties. Louisa and Colette must have talked about New Orleans because they’d been there before, not because it was their destination. I’d driven halfway across the country only to end up farther from Louisa’s trail than I’d ever been. I should have followed my instincts and gone to Seattle.

  I ran my fingers over Louisa’s inscription, hoping she’d left her mark in every place she went and that I could find those marks. Then I decided that I should try to get some sleep, so I could head west again as soon as possible. Before climbing into bed, I wrote “E.D.B. 7/96” next to “L.C.B. 4/81” and returned the drawer to the dresser. I washed down two sleeping pills with a mouthful of wine and turned out the light.

  Taking sleeping pills after mixing coke and alcohol was dumb, and washing them down with wine, even dumber. I fell into a horrifying stupor.

  The first light of dawn seeped in through the curtains. No
t only was it too bright to sleep, I convinced myself that I could see the veins in my eyelids, and they were moving like tiny red worms. I pulled the putrid brown blanket over my face to block it out. I relaxed briefly, but then I couldn’t breathe. It felt like someone had shoved cotton up my nose and down my throat into my lungs, blocking all airways. Panicked, I ripped the covers off my face.

  Things were fine for a moment. The room was dark. But I felt something weighing heavily on my chest, still preventing me from breathing properly. That’s when I really started hallucinating.

  I looked down and saw forty or fifty little people swarming me. They were about three inches tall, all wearing space suits. Little men and little women, distinguishable because the men wore full space suits, and the women wore black dresses with space helmets over their heads. They piled miniature chairs and tables on top of my chest.

  “Stop it!” I yelled, trying to shake them and their stack of furniture off me. “I can’t breathe! You’re going to suffocate me. I don’t want to die in some sleazy hotel room.” One mini astronaut stopped his work and walked toward my face. He studied me quizzically and I knew he was asking why I deserved to live.

  “I was something once,” I told him. “I could have been this big rock star. Then I could have died in a sleazy hotel and it would have been glamorous.” I sensed the little spaceman glowering at me. “Okay, you’re right. It wouldn’t have been glamorous, I was joking. I’ve got this bitchy, sarcastic sense of humor,” I explained, even though part of me knew that I shouldn’t be talking to him. He wasn’t real. “All I’m saying is it wouldn’t have been this pathetic. I really screwed up, and I’m going to die now, right? This is my life flashing before my eyes, and I’m supposed to regret wasting all the talents everyone told me I had, right? Well, I do.”