by Alix Strauss
She’s still in her purple suede shirt and jeans and the room is eerily quiet and she vaguely remembers a nurse coming in to give her a sedative and take her pulse and check her blood pressure and maybe that’s why her mouth is so dry. It could also be the gram of coke, the six drinks, the hit of X.
She does recall packing, Honor going through her bags, Morgan, the hotel manager, stopping by. There was a bottle of vodka, a party, a late-night thing, kissing a sexy drummer—and the rest, like many nights for Lou, is gone. Vanished, like her bottle of vodka, which she’d like right now and thus decides today is not a good day to detox.
She searches through her bag, takes hold of her wallet, and finds her credit cards are gone. Cash, gone. Bank card, gone. Only her driver’s license, which expired five years ago, remains. Her cell phone is missing as well. She grabs her guitar where she’s hidden extra cash inside, slips her hand into the hole, and nothing. That too has disappeared. Her keys, the gram of coke, the tab of X, the three or four joints, all gone. Fuck Honor. She’s tricked her into coming here. Told Lou this is the best place, a relaxing place to help her do this.
She opens the refrigerator, her body already anticipating the lovely, stinging taste of vodka and when she doesn’t hear the familiar clicking of mini bottles as the door swings open already knows they’ve been removed. Inside are plastic bottles of fruit juice, cans of energy drinks, containers of yogurt, bowl of chopped fruit, small boxes of cereal, and a thing of milk. She slams it shut. Reaches for the phone.
“Room service,” she spits into the receiver. Her voice is hoarse and she reaches for a bottle of Evian that sits on top of the bar.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’d like to order and I’ll put the request through for you,” a man with a chirpy yet monotone voice replies.
The water instantly lubricates her throat, but leaves her thirsty, unsatisfied. “I’d like a bottle of champagne and vodka sent to my room,” she says, realizing she doesn’t know her number.
“I’m sorry. I can complete a food request, but that’s all.”
Panic fills her chest like the smoke from a cigarette, which she has yet to light.
“Look, I know you sell bottles, I’ve ordered them before so why don’t you just connect me to room ser vice…”
“I’m sorry. We can’t send that up for you. I can fill a food request.” His voice is robotic and annoying.
“Why not?”
There’s a pause. “My instructions say food only. I’m sorry.”
She slams down the phone. Pounds her fist on the desk. She paces. She wants to leave. If she doesn’t get something alcoholic into her system she’ll lose her fucking mind. Think. Think. Think. And then she remembers, the hotel’s bar, a lovely wet bar downstairs.
She finds a lighter, ignites the cigarette, and inhales. She feels her body start to calm down as she shoots a ream of smoke out of her mouth. She searches for a room key and when she can’t find one figures she’ll just go to the front desk for a replacement. She doesn’t need her purse, her cigarettes, sunglasses, or shoes. She doesn’t even bother to brush her teeth. She just needs to go.
Her hand is on the door, the lit Camel dangling from her mouth, anticipation making her jittery when the knob doesn’t turn.
She twists the knob again. Pulls. Then pulls harder as she realizes the door is locked from the other side. A scream comes out from her lips, an injured animal, almost inhuman. She kicks the door with her foot. Picks up the phone.
“Yes, how can I help you?” It’s the same monotone voice from before.
“My door is locked.”
Buzzing is heard on the other end.
“Did you fucking hear me?”
And then the door is opening and a woman dressed in white appears. An angel? She drops the phone as she lunges for the door except as she does something sharp stings her upper arm making her fall.
“How are we doing so far, Louise?” The voice feels far away even though the woman’s face is right up against Lou’s. And then a cloud passes over her eyes.
“Just take a deep breath with me,” the voice says. Something cold is leaking into her arm. “I’m giving you an anti-nausea and a Demerol drip. I’ll follow with a flush so you stay hydrated.”
Lou thinks the only reason she didn’t do heroin was thanks to her fear of needles.
A hand sweeps over her sweaty forehead. She doesn’t want to be touched by this stranger, but at the same time it feels so nice. A blissful, hazy state creeps over her. She can’t stand but the woman is making her, pulling at her arm. Then she’s walking, falling into the soft couch. She thinks of lighting a large joint right before her eyes close.
Day 2: Staring
She wakes on the couch, dizzy and nauseous. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth. She’s so thirsty. She needs a drink. Please God, let her have just one fucking drink.
She reaches for her fags, lights one, watches the smoke escape, pulls herself up, walks into the bedroom and over toward the window, which houses a long, padded leather seat. She tries to stand on it but has trouble. She pulls up a chair, steps on that first, then onto the seat. The window is huge and accommodates her entire five foot nine frame. She presses her body up against the glass. It vibrates in time with the drilling coming from the construction of the building next to the hotel. She looks down at the people passing by, the people in their offices with their day-to-day lives. She watches the demolition crews pushing barrels of chopped-up roof, granite, and cement. She notices how tall all the buildings are. That even at this height something is more than her. The cars whiz by, the people rush off somewhere, the wind whips the flags that hang above their pricey address. Smoke rises from rooftops, from skyscrapers. It all looks so small and large at the same time. She can no longer keep up with the fast pace of the city or the vastness of sky or the people below. Everything is moving on without her.
She misses Seattle. Misses her three-bedroom home where people dropped by with stuff. You’d put on a record, open a bottle of wine, and the next thing you’d know a phone call was made and a bag of coke-a-cha-cha was on the table. Hey, how’d that get there? What do I have to do tomorrow? Hmmmm, nothing. I’ll just take a hit of this, a line of that…
She wasted so much time tooling around Seattle tweaked and fucked up in a Dukes of Hazzard Malibu Chevelle 350 SS, a MadWheels muscle car. She was eighteen when she joined her first band, Me, Myself & Eye, with two other girls. Friends of friends whom she’d met at bars. She had no concept of what she was doing, but she put the guitar between her legs and guys went nuts. That lasted a year.
She was smarter and had learned a few things when she formed Zsa Zsa, named after Zsa Zsa Gabor. All the songs she and her bandmate wrote were about the three Gabor sisters: Zsa Zsa, Magda, and Eva. She smiles, remembering how they would sing with faux Hungarian accents.
If you had a basement, you could have a band. If you had a van, you could be on tour. If you could be on tour, you could make money. Parlay one single into an entire album and get noticed.
Her breathing is fast, her chest hurts, her eyes sting, and if she could only have a hit of something, a little coke, half a line. Why can’t they just give her that? Maybe she needs to taper off rather than go cold turkey.
Lou rests her head against the pane. She hears the thud she makes when it hits the glass, which feels cold against her forehead, on her hands. She smacks her head again. Harder. Then again. It stops the throbbing in her temples, stops the ringing in her ears, and replaces it with a sharp pain. One more time for luck. Still nothing. The glass isn’t going to break.
She steps down, stumbles back, and falls onto the carpet. The last things she sees are the greasy imprints her hands and forehead have left on the glass. Just another useless mark Lou has made on the world.
Days 3–5: Sleeping, Crying, Jonesing
She itches harshly at the tattoo on her wrist, convinced it’s filled with poisonous ink leaking into her skin. The bug sensation paired with th
e nausea is coming back. She thinks if she were to vomit, which is what she’s been doing for the past forty-eight hours, that’s what she’d cough up: bugs and roaches and ants and God knows what else that’s been living inside her.
Where the hell is the nurse? Why hasn’t she come back? She could be dead at this point. Doesn’t anyone care?
The vision in her left eye is gone as is her hearing. There’s just a buzzing and a rush of blood in her head. Her nose feels raw inside; mucus has been dripping down her throat all day. And she can’t stop sweating and scratching, like her skin is on fire.
She’s lying on the floor in the bedroom dressed in a T-shirt and underwear that’s at least three days old. By her side is her Discman, a trash can filled with puke, an overflowing ashtray, cans and cans of half-drunk Diet Coke and ginger ale. She might have slept in this position but isn’t sure. The carpet is too coarse, her skin too irritated, red, and prickly. She pulls off her clothing and decides to lie on the floor in the bathroom instead. She can’t get up so she crawls there, dragging her body like someone paralyzed from the waist down.
The bathroom is white and clean. Marble is her friend, cold and hard. No bugs in here. She pushes the fluffy bath mat away and lays down naked on the floor. The cold numbs her skin. She looks up at the ceiling.
She thinks about a bottle of vodka, chilled from the freezer. The unscrewing of the top, the almost sweet sound the vodka makes when it’s poured over ice in a frosted glass. She smiles, lulled by the idea of the first sip, the second, the third. How a drink gets better and better as the night disappears and bleeds into darkness. She misses the bitterness on her lips, the stinging on her tongue, the warmth it creates inside her. But mostly she misses the obliteration. The memories it quells, the ones it erases, and the new ones it creates. And the coke. God how she misses the sound cutting coke makes—be it a credit card or MetroCard or business card—mini tap shoes on glass tables, or computer tops, or the backs of guitars.
She loves the way pot fills the cavity of her insides, the peaceful fluffiness valium induces, the caffeine up-all-night jitters speed brings, the out-of-body experience ’shrooms create. She adores them like old lovers who took up space in her bed. They keep her company, she tells her secrets to them, and they make promises, so many promises. And they keep most of them, unlike the people in her life, unlike her parents, or her one-night stands or her friends, or jealous bandmates. They never leave her and are only a phone call away.
The buzzing is replaced by ringing, the sight comes back, and the sweating has stopped. Now her teeth are chattering and her body is shaking and she’s not sure, but she thinks she’s seeing her skull dancing above her. This is the first stage of lunacy. She’s becoming part of the floor.
The last time she was in this position, looking up at the ceiling, was when she’d taken Special K, mistaking it accidentally for coke. But while she was staring at her dancing skull, she got the idea for her ashtray art and her T-shirt designs, her possible new business. See, she thinks, something good can come from almost OD’ing. See, drugs aren’t so bad.
When the shaking is too much, her teeth chattering so loudly in her head that it makes her dizzy, that her jaw is throbbing and her bones are so cold they hurt, she sits on the floor of the swirly marble shower staring at the patches of brown and tan and white as the hot water streams over her. The small space feels confined but safe. She wonders if she can boil the bugs off of her. If only she could wash herself away she’d erase the past two decades. She’d go back to a time when she was happy, though she can’t remember when that was. She only has patches of happiness, like the dark marble of the bathroom. She wants to phone her parents but doesn’t know their numbers. Or talk to her kid brother but wonders if he’d accept her call.
By the midseventies Lou was in her early teens, Sony had introduced the Walkman, Nixon was asked to resign, the Watergate tapes were still a mystery, and Elvis had OD’d. Grease and Saturday Night Fever were musical movie sensations, her parents’ marriage had fallen apart, and she had developed a passion for punk rock, fashion, and anything alcoholic.
As her family dispersed, as her brother became more distant, as her father seemed to be away on business trips for longer stretches of time, as her mother grew increasingly flirtatious, Lou formed her own family, a handful of musical gods—the Kinks, Blondie, Johnny Thunders, Bowie, who years later she opened for onstage.
During this time, a string of men appeared in her mother’s bed. At night she’d stand over these strangers, listening to their hard, deep snores, their erratic breathing. She’d toss aside their dirty underwear, rummage through their trousers or jeans or shorts, take money from their billfolds, pinch a few smokes from their packets of Marlboros, look at the photos in their wallets, drain what was left of their unfinished drinks.
It was in the eighties when she sold her bike for a used guitar, sold herself for whatever she could, and at eighteen, left home to live with friends of friends in Seattle. Diana got married, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Nancy said no, so Lou said yes to everything.
Day 6: Attempting
She stares at her bloated, blotchy face in the bathroom mirror. She’s ugly. Old and weathered. When did she become so hard looking? She hates her brows, her lips are too big, her makeup is smeared. She’s used up, broken down. A racehorse ready for retirement with one last lap to do around the track. Her hair is dry and if she’s going to start over, really start over, why not shave it all off. She’s done it before when, after coming off a crystal meth bender, she was convinced she had body lice. She ran around her apartment with a garbage bag tied around her hairless skull. The Lysol she’d sprayed, like self-tanner, dripped off her body.
The nurse has not returned. Housekeeping hasn’t come. The room is dirty and smells of vomit and sweat. Honor isn’t answering her phone. Even Morgan hasn’t visited. What the fuck, why bother?
Rather than shave her head, sliding a razor over her wrists would be much easier. A clean cut. A simple stroke, like fingers over guitar strings.
If she could, she’d throw something at her reflection, but Honor has systematically removed the soap dishes along with anything breakable or sharp edged from the room. The drinking glasses have been replaced with large plastic cups, the kind you’d have gotten at a frat party. Even the glass tops to the tables have been taken away.
And then she sees it.
The remote control belonging to the flat-screen TV in the bathroom.
Flinging that against the beautiful mirrored wall in the beautifully, perfectly marbled bathroom will surely break the glass, and Lou is desperate to get something out of her system. And then it’s in her hand, and then it’s hurling in the air and into the glass cracking it on impact.
Shattered, Lou thinks she looks decent. Pretty even. The jagged pieces make her appear broken and whole at the same time. Unfortunately, not one shard is removable. It’s as if the entire mirror is held together by superglue. The seven years of bad luck doesn’t faze her. Her life sucks already, what’s another seven.
Hours later—a nap, eight cigarettes, four Tootsie lollipops, three cups of coffee—she sits down and tries to write a song on the Four Seasons’ stationery, like in the old days, but the paper is too pretty. She switches to the cocktail napkins she finds by the ice bucket. They feel good in her hand and remind her of the times when she would write long into the wee hours of the night creating brilliant music high on coke and speed alongside Johnny and Blondie and Iggy and a slew of others. But the lyrics don’t come as easily as they used to. They aren’t as authentic. All music executives are two-beer queers these days anyway.
Her head won’t stop with the words and the music and the songs and the ants and the bugs and the names and the liquor, if she could just have one drink. One drink to calm down. One lousy fucking drink. What’s wrong with that? And if the drug programs didn’t work what the hell makes Honor think this will, and who the fuck is Honor anyway to put her here? She didn’t ask for t
his. She wouldn’t be doing this if she didn’t think she could make a quick buck off Lou. She doesn’t love Lou. She’s in it for the money. Everyone is in it for the money. They don’t know how hard it is to reinvent yourself. How hard it is to write a song. How hard it’s gotten for her to write a song. The instruments feel weird in her hands. Her fingers aren’t calloused the way they used to be. She’s fat and out of shape. The cigarettes make her cough and her teeth are yellow and her hair is dry and falling out and her nails are brittle; the bed’s turning a pretty color of light purple. She wheezes and she knows that it’s becoming increasingly harder and harder to get to that happy, stoned place. It takes too many drinks to keep her drunk. And deep down she knows this is her last stop. Honor is all she has left and if she can’t get through this, she’ll be just another faceless rock star who’s OD’d and how fucking boring is that?
The napkin is still in her hand. She writes “Fuck You!” in big childlike scribble.
Days 7–10: Shaking. Pacing. Choking. Dying. Itching. Scratching. Smoking. Chewing. Bathing. Breathing. Breaking. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting…
Day 11: Fixing
Lou is on the couch, jaw sore from grinding her teeth and chewing gum, strumming her Gibson when Honor arrives decked out in Chanel, dripping of perfume and makeup. Her semicropped, eggplant-colored hair brings a rosy glow to her skin. Her lips are full and colored a pale reddish brown. She wears a beautiful tiny-flower-print dress with a black fur collar. She’s so pretty, Lou thinks. So put together, a look Lou, no matter how hard she’s tried, has never mastered. She watches Honor inspect the room. Picks through the cigarette butts in the ashtray, smells the residue in the plastic cups, sifts through the garbage.