Rock Monster

by Kristin Casey

  I struggled to sit up as Joe offered me the first swig from an unfamiliar bottle. I’d never had brandy before but forced down two sips, figuring I couldn’t feel much worse than I did.

  I was wrong.

  By the time we got to the hotel, my salivary glands were on overdrive in a pre-vomit automatic reflex. I held the impulse at bay with single-minded focus and gentle, repetitive swallows, like a mantra distracting me from intense physical distress. Joe helped me to the lobby lounge, where I sat like a lump, meditating—breathe, soft swallow, breathe, soft swallow. Securing a room took a remarkably long time while I rapidly deteriorated. When he finally collected me, I could barely walk and had to be half carried and propped up at the elevator. Still, we were almost home free, mere seconds from the salvation of blackout drapes, bed, and minibar. I envisioned saltines to settle my stomach, washed down with sips of chilled wine…but alas, it was not to be.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Walsh,” said the front desk clerk, rushing over to block the elevator. “There’s been a terrible mistake and we’re unable to accommodate your stay.”

  This can’t be happening, I thought, looking for a trash bin or planter in which to vomit. I figured sixty seconds if we were lucky.

  Turned out, the flustered young man’s boss had just alerted him that Joe was banned from the hotel due to an incident on a previous stay. A throwing-star competition gone awry, Joe later explained, when he and some radio contest winners had removed a large painting from the wall that, when finally rehung, did little to cover their amateur ninja damage.

  My knees buckled, just in time for Joe to work it in our favor.

  “My girlfriend is sick,” he pleaded. “She needs bed rest. No parties—you have my word.”

  His word wasn’t enough. Management took pity on us but posted a security guard in the hall outside our room, just in case.

  I was so relieved that I overcame the urge to vomit. Joe fed me melon and wine until I felt well enough to cross from the sofa to bed. My boyfriend had different ideas, and the next thing I knew I was bound naked to a balcony with melon juice dripping from my butt crack, where Joe had tucked a slice of honeydew. I’d never been less into his kinky scenes, but the river view was nice and I liked making him happy.

  I had a low threshold for boredom and didn’t want to lose the life I’d found. Reining in Joe never occurred to me. Instead, I vowed to keep up with him.

  •••

  I had no intention of returning to my hard-partying meth days, but I loved being high—inside the sweet spot of a buzz, weightless and floating, yet not so far out there that I couldn’t access my bearings. Nailing the recipe was key. It was easy to slip up and overindulge, emerging days later mentally fried and remorseful. Joe didn’t always get it right either and he had a term for that. He called it monstering.

  “We’re monstering,” he’d tell Rick, to explain why we couldn’t come over. Or, “That was quite a monster last week, huh, babe?” and, “I can’t believe you did four hog rails in a row, you monster.” It was our little joke, conveyed with both affection and concern—plus, if we were honest, admiration. The idea was that an occasional, accidental monster was unavoidable, but at least we were aware of it. Like, don’t make it a habit…just make the most of it when it happens.

  Our monsters were balanced with periods of normalcy: dining out, shopping at the mall, and watching TV, sober and clearheaded. Such was the case when Joe received Austin’s key to the city, a campy-cool honor bestowed on him by the mayor in a private ceremony in his office with a photographer. Afterward, we went to Chinatown, a popular family restaurant in North Austin. I’d been feeling down that day, so Joe clowned around at the table to cheer me up and entertain my friend Daryl, whom we’d invited to dinner. The restaurant was slow, with two other occupied tables, and Joe was soon throwing himself into Dick Van Dyke–worthy stunts, twice sliding off his chair, and fumbling with a spoon until it went flying. I was giggling in no time, but the restaurant manager wasn’t. Without a word to us, he called the cops.

  The police weren’t laughing, either, but they were smug—apparently seeing Joe as a real threat to society with his unkempt hair and leopard-print jacket. (Who knew what he was capable of? Did you see what he did to that fortune cookie? Broke it right in half!) They handcuffed him before I knew what was happening.

  “He’s only had one glass of wine!” I wailed, unaware that a public intoxication charge did not require a Breathalyzer. The irony was staggering. This was literally as sober as Joe got. That it had all been an act to make me smile made his arrest feel all the more tragic. “Don’t worry, honey!” I yelled, as he was deposited into one of three squad cars responding to a single flying spoon. “I’m right behind you.” And I was—unfortunately in another squad car when they ran my license and found a three-year-old traffic ticket I swore I’d paid. I tossed my car keys to Daryl, who promised to meet us at the station. I was more worried about Joe but tried to stay calm. Maybe he doesn’t have any coke on him, I thought. Please, God, don’t let him have any coke on him.

  He had coke on him.

  I had the cash to cover my fine so I was released, but no one would tell me what was going on with Joe, which seemed like a bad sign. I had no idea how true that was. As he relayed it later, he was literally backed into a corner and ordered to undress so they could search him and his clothes. With mere seconds to hide the drugs, it was a good thing Joe worked well under pressure (being the same guy, after all, who’d subverted Texas’s etched-in-stone liquor laws). With a looming PI charge to lend him credibility, he gave the performance of a lifetime, launching into a paranoid rant about injustice and civil rights, while simultaneously yanking off his jacket and flinging it wildly across the room. High-top sneakers whizzed past his captors’ heads as they moved in to restrain him. He was tossed into a private cell, clothes and shoes bundled and stored until the cops could figure out what to do with him.

  Meanwhile, I called a stripper friend whose husband was a police officer. Tim was off-duty, but I reached him at home and he promised to do what he could. Joe was free within the hour, without a body search, thanks to one call from Tim and $250 bail from Daryl. He appeared none the worse for wear, aside from mild disappointment that his key to the city did not unlock its jail.

  On the way out, he signed autographs for the station cops, then ushered me into the elevator with Daryl and our friend Quinten (who’d come with Daryl to the station). When the doors closed, Joe reached into the pocket of his leopard-print motorcycle jacket and pulled out two full vials of coke. “What do you say we have a little party on the Austin PD?” And that’s exactly what we did.

  Down Under

  In January, Joe went to Australia. He’d be gone months, probably through spring, and said he would send for me “at some point.” We’d been long-distance dating for months, and now an entire ocean separated us. The distance was hard, the uncertainty crushing.

  Moodiness set in, insecurity, self-pity, and the razor-sharp belief that we were over before we’d begun. At least once a day I’d berate myself for my childish feelings, then buck up for a few hours before sinking into despair again. This was my first relationship in four years, my second ever, and I didn’t know the rules. Going on instinct and the awareness that nothing repelled like neediness, I took Joe’s calls with cheerful confidence and zero complaints. I wasn’t an idiot. Ending a relationship from overseas was as easy as hanging up a phone.

  One night he called at 3:00 a.m., after I’d already passed out from a long night at work. When we finally spoke, he brought it up, putting me on the defensive.

  “Is it really so hard to believe I was at home, alone in bed? You’re the one traipsing around the world doing God knows what. I didn’t fly off without you, you know. You left the country without me.”

  Joe laughed. He did that sometimes when I got fired up, in a way that suggested he was impressed. I never knew how t
o respond.

  “You got me there, kiddo,” he said.

  Whatever he thought, I wasn’t cheating on him. If only because the guilt of betraying the man I loved would wreck me faster than celibacy threatened to. But my sex drive was no small thing, and I secretly thought I deserved more credit. Instead of a trophy for my Herculean self-restraint, Joe dropped a bomb on me.

  “It’s probably unfair to put expectations on you, being so far away and all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a right to get your needs met. I wouldn’t like it, but it’s up to you.”

  I pondered his statement. Was this a trick? A loophole to absolve himself of a recent indiscretion? Or leftover remnant of his generation’s free-love, hippie-shit ethic? Unsure whether to be impressed or appalled, I stammered something indignant and changed the subject.

  Casual non-monogamy was practically all I’d had, making it neither liberating nor revolutionary to me. But who was I to impose my will on an autonomous adult man? As for Joe’s vision of the ideal relationship, I got a lot of mixed signals. Reading between lines was tough in person and impossible long-distance.

  Meanwhile, being in love took the fun out of stripping. Work began to feel like a real job, and I reacted to every slow shift or rude customer, barging into Chris’s office to wail, “I can’t work like this!”

  He ignored my pleas until one night I caught him buried in paperwork. “Fine,” he sighed, waving me off like a gnat. “Get out. Go home.”

  I left, but instead of the one mile to my apartment, I drove six across town to Daryl’s. In the process, I forged a new freeway ramp down a grassy slope, having missed the preexisting, conveniently marked and paved one. I was pulled over two blocks shy of my destination.

  The arresting officers were patient and polite as I was handcuffed, processed, and deposited into a clean, private cell, where I curled in a ball and cried for four hours until Christine bailed me out. I called Joe and told him what had happened, and he replied by inviting me to Sydney. In the interim, I went to court and requested that the judge suspend my license. Probation, the alternative, entailed a process of permissions for every out-of-state trip for two years—a formality, my lawyer said—No one’s trying to stop you from following your boyfriend around the world. Calm down.

  Fuck that shit. Having to ask at all was repellent. I’d kowtowed to Chris, who had power to fire me; outside the club, I answered to no one.

  Lockup had rattled me. The loss of my basic freedoms, however brief, felt dehumanizing. I didn’t trust authority figures to look out for me, having been failed or betrayed by too many—cops, parents, teachers, coaches, priests, nuns, and two previous business partners (i.e., drug dealers). When I paid my fine ($600, in tens and twenties) my community service requirement was waived, finalizing one of the breeziest DWIs ever handed down in Texas. I was as grateful as I was ashamed.

  My rebellious streak had a way of getting me in over my head, and scrambling out from under it was a way of life I wanted to shed. For years, I’d bounced from adventure to adventure, too busy ducking and weaving to wonder what any of it meant. Three years earlier, that recklessness led directly to a violent attack. After getting mugged, I moved across town and threw myself into work at Sugar’s, an exclusive, insulated world in which I didn’t have to process emotions or events. Traumas were left outside the door of that throbbing, glittery womb in which I gestated a new identity. I did not reconcile the past; I ditched it like an annoying little sister. I did not examine my flaws; I burned those traitors at the stake. Rising from the ashes was a new, improved me, but the DWI suggested that she, too, was an illusion, just another failed experiment.

  Too many versions of me were scattered around Austin, shady shadow selves hiding in alleys and behind trees. It was getting harder to escape myself locally. Why not start fresh in another country, carve a new identity from the rib of the man next to me?

  •••

  My first two weeks in Australia were a boozy blur of crowded shows in heaps of pubs. Joe was touring the Sydney area with the Party Boys, a popular local band. The gigs were packed and lively, if in smaller venues than he was used to. Our accommodations were similarly downsized—a one-room guesthouse in Neutral Bay at the home of some friends of Joe’s. The main house was tidy and spacious. Our detached bungalow was thrown together like a dorm room, with stackable wire basket drawers and a three-piece foam contraption mattress.

  Oddly, we slept fine on it. Odder still, we slept every night. I hadn’t had cocaine since Joe left the States, because if it wasn’t around I didn’t dwell on it. When it was, I very much did. Such was the case in Sydney, when after a few days of blissful ignorance, I discovered someone in Joe’s circle had blow on weekends and was known to be generous with it. To our laid-back Aussie friends, cocaine was an afterthought. I tried to emulate their foreign ways, pretending I could take it or leave it. I didn’t have much choice, considering Joe’s coke budget was as scaled down as everything else.

  He’d give me one bump the night of each gig, but that was it. Then, while Joe showered and dressed, I’d loiter in the main house, watching sports with the generous friend, always trying to look surprised by the offer and offhand about accepting it. I’d make moderation look easy if it killed me, dammit…except there was no moderating my drinking. Many a morning found me in the main house, waiting on the world’s slowest coffeepot, pretending not to have the world’s worst hangover.

  The close quarters did have an upshot. Lack of privacy curtains or soundproofing meant Joe’s kink scenes were out, and straight-up fucking was finally on the table (so to speak). I went for every opportunity, landed half, and called it a win. I had to assume Joe was satisfied too, when he caught my eye from the stage, singing about a couple who “were good in bed.” I figured our sexual frequency would pick up at tour’s end, and then life would be perfect…as soon as I scaled back my drinking.

  I didn’t scale back. My drinking got worse.

  I was generally a happy drunk, but also one easily triggered. Cocaine dulled my insecurities, making me less reactive and testy. It also had a sobering effect, keeping me from being sloppy and embarrassing. Our diminished intake in Australia opened the door to stupid arguments. Most blew over quickly, but one issue became sticky: I wanted more sex than Joe did, and I was becoming vocal about not getting it.

  When my cajoling became badgering, he sat me down to talk. “It’s not that I don’t desire you. I do. But your needs might be bigger than I’m wired for, so you have my blessing to have sex with someone else.”

  “Oh, God, not this again—”

  “Just listen. You’re young—I get it. But I’m working here, and spread a little thin.”

  “Don’t… Don’t you love me?”

  “You’re my woman—of course I do. I’m only cool with this if it’s not behind my back. I’d need to be in the room.”

  His unconventional ideas were less shocking the second time around, and I was less inclined to shoot them down out of hand. Since puberty, I’d lugged around this insatiable sexual longing, like a heavy, wooden cross twice my size and impossible to carry. I finally had a boyfriend at my disposal 24/7 and still couldn’t get enough. If he felt pressured or inadequate, wasn’t this a favor to us both? Where I came from, threesomes were ubiquitous. How different was this, really? A twosome with a witness.

  “Who?” I asked, expecting him to shrug or laugh it off as a joke. Instead, he suggested Trevor and I perked up.

  One of Joe’s Aussie friends, Trevor was handsome and polished, yet playful. He had clear blue eyes and tight dark curls interwoven with hints of silver. When Joe made the offer, Trevor came right over. Had Joe not been sitting there, flipping through magazines and cracking occasional jokes, I might’ve had more fun with it. Instead, I called the game early, too self-conscious to go all the way. I loved Joe for trying to meet my needs, even if he d
idn’t understand them.

  •••

  I thought it might be selfish of me to expect love and passion from one man. After all, I wasn’t everything Joe needed, either…and I obsessed about my shortcomings.

  Kevin Borich, the Party Boys’ guitarist, and his fiancée Melissa were an ideal couple. He was handsome, roguish, and funny. She was a beautiful young model, angelic in every way. As many pubs as our guys played in, I never saw her drunk. I was too shy to just come out and ask for her secret to a blissful relationship; then one day it came to me: Who wouldn’t love Melissa? Duh. And I was back at square one.

  The Brothers were equally fascinating. Hamish, Angus, and Fergus Richardson sang backup for the Party Boys and possessed a more compelling presence than even the “perfect couple” did. In their early- to mid-twenties, the Brothers were boyishly handsome, naturally fit, and well mannered, yet waggish and exuberant. Their close bonds and joyous demeanor drew me in like a powerful drug. Twice on tour, Hamish pulled me onstage to dance with him during the show. Each time I’d felt both thrilled by the inclusion and abashed by my undeservedness.

  On a strip club stage I had leverage. Everywhere else, I was lost, and not just dancing with Hamish. No one in Joe’s world needed anything from me, which should’ve been freeing yet sucked me into space. I was liberated to the point of weightlessness. I missed work and being put on a pedestal. Joe’s attentions could turn on a dime and our bickering escalated. We had a screaming match or two but reconciled because we hated fighting. We didn’t resolve things; we didn’t know how.