The Laws of Gravity

by Lisa Ann Gallagher

  From the 6th of June (my move-in date) to August 20th (my approximate hire date at the store) was a grand total of around eleven weeks of unemployment. Ultimately, what’s eleven weeks in the span of time? Twenty-one percent of a year. I think I paid for August rent a day or two late, but I did always come up with the rent and grocery money needed during those eleven weeks. Late August not only marked my official entry into the world of adult work responsibilities, that moment also marked an early end to that complicated and life-changing summer. A summer that I still dream about, am still haunted by and that marked me deeply as a human being. I fully acknowledge my imperfections. I was terribly clueless about the responsibilities of living on my own. But I had no choice in leaving home. I wish I had been better, smarter, savvier but I cannot fix ancient history. If I could go back in time, I would return the dead to life, not correct the flaws that burdened me at the tender age of eighteen.

  The discovery of the game marked a change in me. I was wounded. I became cripplingly self-conscious. I handle shame very inadequately and my anger flares when I feel I am being deliberately shamed.

  I didn’t know exactly who participated in creating the game. The handwriting was Tony’s. The game was found under Nancy’s bed. The sentiments, I felt certain, were Jennifer’s perhaps most of all. But I was horrified to wonder who else, beside my three roommates, might have taken part. Was Kevin part of the game? What about Dave – who had been so seemingly kind and supportive? I shuddered to imagine that Patrick might have been present, throwing out suggestions to the others of what he thought were my most feckless traits. I never knew. Maybe it was just my roommates. But I understood that I was stuck in a house where I felt supremely unwanted. I now had a job, but still no car and no idea what to do to improve the overall situation.

  I couldn’t say anything to anyone. A confidante had betrayed my trust and I was mortified. I hid in my room, muffling my tears into my pillow. I would only venture forth to the outer rooms when absolutely necessary. At night, in the safety of my bed, I started a bizarre ritual of pulling safety pins through the outermost levels of my skin. The inside of my mouth was eaten raw. My fingernails were again bitten to the quick. And I started keeping a diary under my mattress.

  I was a rather innocent and unworldly eighteen-year old girl. To have the evidence that people saw right through me and (I suspected) hated me – well, that knowledge destroyed a part of me. I didn’t think I could convince them to like me again, but I thought I could fake it long enough to figure out what to do, where to go. I struggled to participate just as much as I felt necessary. I remember partying downtown Detroit late August with Eric and Jeff before Eric shipped out for basic training. He had the notion to dress like a homeless person and live on the streets for one night and convinced Jeff to join him. I went to some shows including the Flaming Lips at the Blind Pig, with my roommates. Instead of playing their own songs that evening they played The Who’s Tommy completely, front to back. During “Listening to You” Karen, tastelessly and intoxicated, shouted “Suck Me! Blow Me!” over the “See Me … Feel Me …” lyrics. I smiled and sang and acted like all was okay.

  Tony left for Ann Arbor and the start of his Junior year at college, taking his splendiferous record collection with him. Precious, still in high school, broke up with him. That September I spent my time with Terese, Dave and very few others. Nancy and Jen spent their evenings and weekends at school, jobs and parents’ homes. I walked to work each day, nearly a mile. Every step away from No Bev each afternoon lifted my head and self-esteem, higher and higher. Each step home I would feel my spine scrunch smaller and my chin drop lower as I got closer to the house.

  The Colors would stop by the store to visit while I was working. They would load up on Combos, Mountain Dew and beef jerky on their way to practice. Sometimes they stole items while I was working, with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge in my direction. Rob Tyner from the MC5 used to come in, wearing his fringe leather and black Jewfro. I had met him two years earlier when I auditioned for the Vertical Pillows (an all-female group he had been managing). He suggested I start a new band but my confidence was shattered. I just wanted to go to work, go home, turn up the stereo as loud as possible and tune the world out. I put the handful of articles written for the third edition of Explosion! in my bottom dresser drawer and never picked them up again.

  I worked at the convenience store about four weeks before being laid off. Newest hired, first to let go. Or, perhaps my the pocket-pinching had been observed on surveillance video. I wasn’t given a reason. Terese had recently begun a telemarketing job at a financial publishing house and she had been talking about getting me hired there. The day I lost my job I called Terese and she set up an interview for me that week. I was hired and started work the following Monday.

  I was now gainfully employed and would remain at Longman Financial for more than three and a half years. I was officially an adult. My childhood had ended and the tumultuous summer of 1986 was behind me. But ghosts of that era still remain. In the process now of writing about that summer I thought I’d be caught up in a nonsensical and futile game of “What If?.” What if I could go back then, knowing what I know now…? What if I had more seriously pursued the job hunt before August? What if Scott had lived, or I had known him more? Or, maybe I’d imagine being some thoroughly badass chick that didn’t give a shit, kicked open the door of No Bev on Day Fucking One and brought my roommates to their knees. Instead, I am rejoicing at the girl I once was for the first time in a quarter century. I may have been impressionable and naïve, even outlandish. But I am finding myself, instead, really loving and admiring the person I was at the start of that summer. The person I was before I learned to be ashamed of her. The Lisa that I didn’t respect and couldn’t protect.

  Autumn Song…

  There was a part of me that wanted to forget the rude awakening I underwent and make peace with my roommates. I also felt I didn’t have a choice. No Bev was my home and I needed to cohabitate, peacefully, with Nancy and Jen. I became quite adept at smiling through my humiliation. I’d go in my bedroom during the worst moments and stare at the black mark in the center of the carpet until I could control my tears.

  In September The Colors officially invited Dave to join the band, as bassist. He accepted and with his membership I too began hanging out with The Colors. I started going to practice and to shows. Spending time with The Colors brought me closer into contact with Patrick. I tried, once, to talk to him about my feelings. He was polite and friendly, but indifferent. Falling in love with other girls. But his interest in me would wax and wane during the next few years.

  It was fascinating to watch a collaborative creative process at work. Dan had recuperated from his injuries and was at the helm of the new Colors. A dominant personality with a brilliant writing aptitude, Dan would begin most new Colors’ songs with a guitar lick. Dave had been the chief driving force of Just Born and occasionally seemed cowed by Dan’s ability to take charge. Not that Dave, Patrick and Charlie were uninvolved with the musical process. They each made strong contributions. But songs would always begin with Dan and he would write the lyrics. Colors’ practice would begin at around 9pm, three or four weekday evenings each week. In order to gain access to the storage space there was a special code to the gate. The guys were sensitive about sharing the code. So many people came to practice and having the code in the wrong hands could make the management aware of the improper usage going on. If anyone tagged along separately we would have to slide in behind another vehicle, right at their back bumper before the arm came down.

  Their storage space was a metal square box near the end of a row, farthest from the office. Scott had worked as assistant manager for a while at Your Attic before he died. The space had a rolling galvanized door and a drum stage built right behind the door. Left of the stage there was just a narrow opening in which to enter the space. On the stage Patrick’s drum kit was positioned and a shelf above him stored miscellaneous musical equipment, ol
d amp heads, boxes of t-shirts (printed just prior to Scott’s passing, the band etched in black on a white background but since Scott alone had light hair and wore light clothes to the photo shoot his image subsequently faded, eerily, out of the shirts) and other junk. Empty bottles of Maker’s Mark and stacks of spent Coors cans lined the walls, beside the amps. Milk cartons full of wires and plugs and wah-wah pedals were stacked about.

  I would invariably sit on the drum stage, front left of Patrick. Charlie stood in the far left corner. Dan to the right and Dave to the far left wall. Jen and Nancy or anyone else there would sit wherever – on boxes, milk cartons, everywhere but the floor. Squares of old carpet had been spread down, both for floor covering and sound muffling, but the floors were disgusting. Covered in cigarette butts, burns, ashes, spilled beer, unrecognizable blobs of gray and brown and yellow. Vomit and urine, maybe.

  We girls didn’t piss inside. We would grab hands and run around the corner of the facing row of storage spaces. There, with the semis whizzing north above the hillside above us, we would hunker down and pee. Nancy, for some strange reason, had to take off nearly every article of clothing to make a tinkle. She couldn’t just pull her panties down, squat and go. Michigan winters can be frigid but we braved the cold for our boys.

  After practice the band would go to Onassis Coney for chili dogs and Mountain Dew. We’d sit in a large booth and the guys would rehash band stuff, memories, plans for gigs. I learned a lot by watching them banter about the dynamics of their band. Sometimes females that Patrick liked would be there with us, which was extremely uncomfortable. Neither Dan nor Charlie brought their girlfriends to practice or shows.

  My feelings for Patrick continued to grow that autumn and winter as I watched him hop from girl to girl to girl. The sister of Kurt’s girlfriend Corey. A girl at U of M. A Greek chick with a crazy Eighties afro. There seemed no rhyme or reason to his interests, no “type” I could discern. Laura and I had talked weeks before, during a trip with Patrick to Ann Arbor to see Soul Asylum. She had shared that Patrick had expressed interest in her after Scott’s death but she turned him down. Laura had sense not to immediately hook up with another guy, but she faded from our lives that Autumn.

  The Colors’ roadie, Curtis, was a curly-headed moppet from Dearborn. Curtis loaded equipment, set the stage for shows, drove the new van and everything you could imagine. Goofy and amiable, Curtis was really the fifth member of The Colors. He took his fair share of crap from them, as well. I once saw Charlie hurl a plastic mug of beer right at Curtis’s head, showering the boy with suds and silencing him.

  The Colors continued to perform some of the tightest sets in Motown that season. I don’t think Dave always felt like he fit, but it sounded like he did. They still performed songs written while Scott was alive but quickly began the process of writing more songs. I loved the song “What Are You Trying to Do to Me?” which had an epic, escalating feel and they performed a few covers including The Supreme’s “Where Did Our Love Go?”

  Meanwhile, Quinn had joined The Mangos, replacing Eric who was at an Army base in El Paso. Eric would call every few weeks, keeping us apprised of his life and him of ours. Quinn was a good singer but not a strong frontman. His one performance with the band at the Mystery Lounge was timid and lackluster. The Mangos were defunct, by mid-fall. Maxwell and Tracy from Angry Red started a side project, Bigger Than Mass.

  Angry Red Planet – what a helluva band. They were perhaps the strongest rock band in Detroit during the Eighties, with a loyal cult following that exists to this day. I still love listening to their tunes. The song “Sun Goes Down” on their EP Gawkers Paradise remains a favorite of mine. “Curling” (about the sport) had that catchy “Gotta gotta go!” chorus. Sometime late that fall my roommates and I attended an Angry Red show where the band treated the audience to a game of musical chairs. As the band performed the song “Ghost of the Crab Nebula” we raced around the chairs, as one by one they were pulled away from beneath us. Last two standing: Patrick and I. “Jump off that booty crack! Mama says jump …!”

  That fall I met a gal named Beth at a Gories gig. Beth was a senior at Ferndale High. Beth was bubbly and sarcastic, her brown hair dyed black in a short bob. With her ebony hair and dark button eyes, she looked like Susie Derkins, from “Calvin & Hobbes.” She was fun to hang out with. She reminded me of myself -- in that she was very young, very excited about Gravity and quickly absorbed the interests and mannerisms of the veterans. Beth hung out often at No Bev and at shows, and she and I became quite close.

  In late September, the No Bev household threw a beach party. I invited my little sis Laura to spend the weekend with me. My family and I were speaking but we hadn’t spent much time together. The two of us spent Saturday afternoon injecting vodka into navel oranges with syringes. A plastic blow-up pool sat in the corner, filled with ice and the oranges and beer were set into it. Everyone wore Hawaiian shirts and leis. Jen’s sister Wendy wore a grass skirt. My sister was enthralled with my lifestyle and amazed with all the cute boys. I tried to set her up with Chris, bassist for Alien Nation. He was in high school and very sweet, but Laura (not yet fourteen) was too young for him. We were missing some of the core Gravity guys at the party, but the party was still fun. I took a bunch of black-and-white photos. There’s a great picture of Beth, her mouth open in laughter, with Nancy’s arm around her neck. Both girls are holding cups of beer.

  Although I was gainfully and respectfully employed, my roommates were still aloof and often rude to me. I had a lot to prove to them, and yet we did have some fun moments together. During a weekend excursion to the mall where Jennifer worked, the three of us and Suzie invented the “Love Muffins.” Now, I don’t care what anyone else claims – we invented the phrase “Love Muffin!” This was October 1986 -- if anybody finds documentation of this phrase being used prior to that, fine -- otherwise we get credit. The Love Muffins were our tribute band. We wanted to host a party at Halloween that year and dress up and perform one song from each of our Gravity Groups. We bought special fancy underwear to wear under our costumes and each of us selected band members to portray. For instance: for The Colors, Jen would be Charlie, Nancy would be Dan, Suzie would be Dave and I -- of course -- would be Patrick. We even tried to steal clothing from our respective “characters” to accurately portray each one. Patrick had left a tuxedo jacket in the closet at No Bev in late summer. The jacket was gorgeous -- vintage, black with an evergreen paisley silk collar. I began wearing the tuxedo jacket on top of t-shirts late that fall.

  The idea and the party both fell through, however. No Halloween party and no Love Muffins -- but I still insist that we invented the term.

  The only band still together that fall was Alien Nation, but with Tony in Ann Arbor they weren’t playing gigs. Before long they announced their split and the start of a new group. Tony and Kevin from Alien Nation, Ian and Flip from The Mangos. The new band was named The Generals, in homage to a song by The Damned.

  Ian and Terese were hot and heavy that fall. They shared a weird scatological humor. Ian’s best friend was Phil, who would forever be known to us as “The Dullard.” He was a very pleasant person and a frequent guest at shows and parties, but his personality was rather bland. He took a lot of shit from the other Mangos.

  Ian, Terese, Phil and I all partied at weekend hotel party that October. There were two rooms -- one for Ian and Terese and one, presumably, for Phil and I. I suspected they were trying to hook me up with Phil and I didn’t know the guy very well, nor did I wish to sleep with him. So I bunked in Ian and Terese’s room and was kept awake for about six hours listening to the squelchy sounds of them fucking. I have a great photo left from that weekend, of Ian spanking Terese on the ass with Gideon’s Bible.

  When I think of this time, there are some scattered pleasant memories. Parties and great shows with companions, including both Nance and Jen. I was working, paying rent and living responsibly. But ultimately, that fall was such an awkward phase. My confidence w
as shot. My roommates were often snippy at me. I didn’t truly feel at home at No Bev and yet hadn’t given any real consideration to living elsewhere. Not only was my social life completely tied to this group (my friendship with Lynda had waned since the summer and Andy was away at college) but I truly wanted still to belong. I wanted to be part of Gravity and to fully accepted and embraced. I wasn’t mature or confident enough to walk out.

  After about three months on the job at Longman Publishing, I got promoted and transferred to the Customer Service department. I was now working full-time and earning around $10,000 annually -- good money those days for my age. I was frugal. I paid rent on time, the utilities and phone bill (my cut after the deposits were cashed in). I bought a few clothes and records but otherwise lived simply. I still didn’t have a vehicle so my manager would pick me up each morning on her way to work. But after I woke late twice in a week, she stopped offering a ride. So I would walk to and from work each day. That was a four mile walk, each direction. On the coldest of winter days my face would be red and nearly blistered and often I’d have to duck into Denny’s on Greenfield to use the toilet. But I was also in awesome shape. I would dread going back to No Bev. There was a second-run theatre on Greenfield a block south of 11 Mile Road and I would often duck in there for a $1 movie, to sit in the dark with my own thoughts and away from the critical eye of others.

  As October rolled into November, life was quieter at the house. Fewer parties and drop-bys but still lots of shows. We used to go see The Colors and their first gigs with Dave. Saw the Mystery Girls often that fall (who subsequently changed their name to the Junk Monkeys -- between the Trash Brats and the Junk Monkeys, apparently garbage was all the rage). There was this guy at Junk Monkey shows -- Sandy called him “Jigaboo.” Tall and blond with Buddy Holly glasses, he was on the dancefloor for every second of every song played. He had a jerky, eye-cringing way of moving and was constantly trying to get women to dance with him. He looked like he was being electrocuted. A few dumpy hangers-on accepted his invitations but most declined, myself and my roommates included. Nancy once, on spying Jigaboo stagger toward her, crossed her index fingers in the sign of the cross. Go away, demon.