by Steve Almond
* * *
Jo felt my basement apartment was, as she put it, “the kind of place where a serial killer lives.” She needed sun, she explained. And a porch.
Our new place was on the fourth floor of a brick building in Sunset Heights, El Paso’s historical district. The neighborhood sat on a small rise overlooking the Rio. Locals once had watched Pancho Villa’s forces battle federales on the plains below. The view now was of the colonias, the sprawling cardboard cities that enveloped Juárez proper.
Our apartment was bright and dusty. Every day a new piece of furniture appeared, or a houseplant. Jo made forays into Juárez, carrying back masks, wall hangings, a black leather whip I hoped to employ in some splendidly incompetent sex game but which was instead suspended tastefully over the divan. The kitchen began to fill with utensils—not just forks and spoons, but garlic presses and salad spinners. With a great, perhaps even vicious, efficiency, Jo erased the vestiges of my bachelordom. Closets became places where clothing was hung.
I arrived home one day to find the bed decked out in new colors. Jo wandered in from the other room. “What do you think?”
“Nice,” I said. “Very colorful.”
“I knew you’d like it.” She hugged me. “It’s Guatemalan.”
I paused. “What happened to my old comforter?”
“Salvation Army.”
“You gave it away?”
Jo slipped her hand into one of my back pockets and gave me a playful squeeze. “Don’t you like this one? We can give it a test-drive if you’re not sure.”
“Yeah. No. It’s nice. I just don’t understand why you needed to throw the old one out.”
“I didn’t throw it out, David. I gave it to charity. It had a stain.” Jo began unbuttoning my shirt.
“What stain?”
“A huge disgusting stain. Right in the middle.”
I felt a fizz in my chest. “Whatever happened to washing?” I murmured.
“If you loved the thing so much,” Jo said, “you should have washed it yourself.”
Mostly, though, we had this beautiful new life. We went to a lot of parties. We took road trips along the rambling old highways of New Mexico and stopped in obscure towns for pie. We slept in on Sundays.
Sometimes, late afternoon, we would lie in the hammock strung across our balcony and watch thunderheads lip over the Franklins, releasing spindles of lightning. Everything changed when the rains came: the desert turned a rich brown and threw up the mulchy scent of creosote. Boys fluttered like salmon in the flooded gutters below. The slag heaps behind the smelter gave off the dull wet sheen of solder. Over in the colonias, mamas filed out of shanties to wash their children and fill metal drums with drinking water and thank the Lord.
Afterwards we listened to the world trickle and waited for the honeyed colors of dusk. With the sky suddenly cleared of smog, we could see all the way to the sierras south of Juárez, which looked like giant bones against the thirsty soil.
I took Jo to see Mötley Crüe. Probably it would have been better to start her off on Poison, one of the ballad bands. She kept looking at the front man, Vince Neil. He wore a suit of studded black leather, elevator shoes, a choker. “He’s kidding,” Jo shouted. “It’s a joke, right?”
Neil leapt onto a speaker. “How many of you guys are gonna get some fucking poooontang tonight?”
The crowd went apeshit. The bass started in, along with the drums; the plastic seats began to quiver. Then a noise like wheels hitting a runway, which meant the guitars, churning down to their appointed chords. Jo looked as if she’d been struck in the back of the head with an eel. I’d given her a pair of earplugs, but the affect of 105 decibels is as much seismic as auditory. Strobe lights popped. Neil howled. His voice was a rapture of violent want, released to the crowd and returned in ululating waves. All around us, skinny boys emptied their bodies of sound. Everything about them banged. Bang bang bang. Their hair whipped the air, their slender arms knifed in around us.
I found Jo on the steps outside the arena, head between her knees. “If they could just turn it down a little,” she said.
“Go ahead and take the car,” I said. “I’ll catch a ride from the night editor.”
I figured Jo would be asleep when I got home. But she was sitting up in bed, a towel wrapped around her head.
“Feeling better?” I said.
“Yeah. How was the rest of the show?”
“No big deal. Nikki Sixx flashed the crowd his weenie, so that was pretty cool.”
Jo took a sip of tea and fixed me with one of her concerned looks. “You don’t really like that stuff,” she said.
I had hoped this might be one of those times where we let our differences be. “You sort of have to get into the spirit of the thing,” I said.
“What spirit would that be? The spirit of misogynist inner-ear damage?” She shook her head. “You don’t like it. You’re just being ironic.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go brush my ironic teeth.”
“And that singer guy,” Jo said. “What a getup. He looked like a piece of bad furniture. What’s he supposed to be, some kind of stud? Some kind of big ladies’ man?”
“It’s a show,” I said. “Showmanship.”
“What gets me is that kids are paying money to listen to that crap. It’s so indulgent. In a place like this, with so much real suffering.”
“You shouldn’t take it so seriously.”
Jo waited a beat. “You do,” she said. “You spend half your life interviewing these guys and critiquing their shows.”
“Reviewing,” I said. “It’s my job to review them. I’m the reviewer.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s your job. But isn’t it a little sad?”
“I think you’re missing it,” I said.
“What am I missing? Is there something really deep going on, David? Please, educate me.” Jo pulled the towel off her head and let her hair fall. She was acutely aware of her own props.
“The music helps certain kids sort of get in touch with their feelings.”
“Their feelings? What, exactly, does poooontang have to do with their feelings?”
“The music itself. The physical part.” I had, at that time, grown my hair into a rather unfortunate mullet: short in front, long in back. And sometimes, in the dim light of one or another arena, the notebook would fall to my side and the music would surge through me and I would bang softly. “What is it that you want from these kids, exactly? Can’t you just let them have their thing?”
Jo looked at me with her big green eyes. “They should grow up. They should learn to have some respect for themselves and quit trafficking in such lousy fantasies.”
“Easier said than done,” I said.
I took Claudia to see Ted Nugent. She didn’t like metal much, either. But she was quieter about her contempt and didn’t say a word, even as we arrived back at her place, undressed, and reached through the dark. We knew what we were doing. It was disgusting and terrific. Afterwards, I washed up and slipped my clothes on and felt an odd sense of buoyancy, of floating awkwardly into the authentic and forbidden.
On our six-month anniversary as cohabitants, Jo fixed portobellos in a cream sauce with sautéed shallots. I wanted to check out this new local band, Menudo Anti-Christ. Instead, we were going to see Ray Barratto. That was what Jo liked: Latin jazz. Any kind of jazz. I couldn’t understand the stuff. I would sit there and listen and listen and wait for the songs to begin.
We were with a bunch of our friends, Jo’s friends is what they were, people brimming with statistics and good intentions, people engaged in projects, people who used words such as empowerment and nodded meaningfully when they talked to you.
Guys kept putting tequilas in front of Jo. They wanted to see her poise on display. She got up to dance and now the whole club watched, the young cats sipping gin and the lonely Corona dykes and Barratto himself, the droopy old conguero, long past such uncomplicated pleasures, tittering at the
motion of her hips, bidding her this way and that with his thick fingers and his drum.
She wobbled in her red suede boots and laughed and insisted she was fine. Then she and a friend went to the bathroom and only the friend returned. Gallantry now demanded that I enter the ladies’ room. That was fine with me. I liked the idea! I imagined a bright alcove full of dishy women putting on lipstick and talking cock. But the place was empty and smelled sort of disappointing. A gurgle came from the far stall. Jo looked as if she’d been dropped from a helicopter. The tile pressed against her cheek. Her legs were bent in a few directions. She smiled the glassy smile of the non-ambulatory. On the drive home she threw up twice more, dainty little strings of puke.
How stunning she looked laid out on our bed—like a beautiful corpse! I pressed a washrag to her forehead.
“I’m dying, David. I’m going to die.”
“You’re not dying, sweetie.”
“I’m gonna fall asleep and throw up and drown on my throw-up. Like that guy from the Doors.”
“That was Hendrix,” I said delicately.
“I’m going to die, David. Tell me you love me.” Jo closed her eyes. The lids were round and soft purple. They made her look terribly vulnerable. “Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I love you, David. Don’t lie to me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I love you.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“How much lot?”
“Infinity lot,” I said. “Infinity to the infinity power lot.”
Jo smiled. Her teeth were totally unstoppable. It seemed inconceivable to me, at that moment, that I would fail her. I could see what she had in mind: the settling down, the having of children, the long, good promise. Motherhood would make her glow like a planet.
“Gimme kiss,” she said.
The tequila was coming off her in yellow fumes I found not undesirable. I began, then, to undress her. She squirmed. Moonlight hung in the window and advanced along her body. The skin over her heart flickered.
“Where are you going?” Jo said.
“Nowhere.”
“Don’t go.”
“I’m just going to take my clothes off.”
“Don’t. I’ll fall asleep. I’ll drown.”
“I’m right here.”
“You can’t ever leave me. Kiss. Mmmmm. Kiss again.”
Claudia couldn’t cook. Her specialty was flautas, which tasted of burned lard. She said the recipe was from her mother. There was always never much to talk about. Her sister was getting engaged. Ozzy Osbourne was coming to town. We drank wine from green jugs.
Without glasses, Claudia’s face looked naked. She blinked a great deal. Her skin smelled faintly of chlorine at all times. Our coupling remained hurried and incompetent. Claudia preferred the lights low. We never, ever spoke. But always, there came a moment when her body unclenched; her eyes lost focus and the torrent began. This was just how she was built, though I was convinced it meant something.
The idea I had was to do it in the bathroom. I liked the way her thighs bulged against the white of the sink. I liked the light, which was a little too bright, which fringed our skin in yellow, lent us a crispness I associated with interrogation.
I knew there was a complicated person living inside Claudia’s body. A reason she wasn’t living at home, a reason she was involved with me. She had her own hopes stashed somewhere. But I wasn’t interested in those. I wanted only an accomplice.
I reached down and Claudia threw her legs a little wider. Her mouth went sloppy. Her eyes half closed. Water began gushing down the soft skin of her thighs. I pressed forward, and the water, wanting out, pressed back. The sensation was warm and almost painful. Then I felt myself begin, and pushed in all the way. Claudia shrieked. Her head thumped the mirror. There was a sharp crack, a rapid downward motion, and water. Geysers of water, gurgling up, sweeping down. We lay tangled on the floor. I could see blood threading the puddle near my head. Claudia, I was certain, had exploded. Then I saw the sink, toppled nearby. The leads to the water pipes had snapped clean off.
Jo met me at the door. This was maybe one in the morning. I was pretty well sobered up by then.
“What the hell happened to you?” she said.
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that you left the paper four hours ago, and your hair is wet.”
“Claudia’s fucking toilet overflowed,” I said. “I had to take a shower.”
Jo stood directly in front of me. She didn’t say anything. I could see the blood in her cheeks spiraling.
“It was disgusting.” I said. “Believe me. You should be glad I took a shower.”
“I want to know what the hell’s going on with that woman, David.”
“Claudia? What’s going on with Claudia? I would guess she’s mopping right about now.”
“If you’re fucking lying to me, David. If you’re fucking that woman—”
“Hold on,” I said. “Just slow down—”
“Look at me, David.”
“I am looking at you. I’m looking right at you.” I could feel an awful, thrilling current inside me. “Now you listen to me,” I said. “If I were fooling around, if I were flouncing off to fuck this woman, don’t you think, did it ever occur to you, that I might be a little more subtle about it? That I wouldn’t try to do it right under your nose?”
Jo took a half step back. “Why can’t I meet her, then?”
“You can,” I said. “You can meet her any time you want. I’ve told you. Do you want to call her right now, and have her come over and you can ask her if I fuck her and then come back here and sleep with you? Is that what you want?” I was breathing through my nose now. My chest was puffed up like a gamecock. “Because you obviously don’t believe me. You don’t believe I could just be friends with this woman.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.”
“You might as well have.” Behind her rose El Paso’s new civic center, which was supposed to be a sombrero but looked more like a flat tire. Farther out, the barrel fires of the colonias danced like matchsticks. “Look,” I said. “Claudia was part of my life before you came here. Maybe that’s why I hold her apart a little. The truth is she’s a pretty unhappy person. Troubled. And a part of me feels like she needs my company. She’s not like you, honey. She doesn’t have the world at her feet.”
“Who says I have the world at my feet?” Jo said quietly.
I grazed my fingers along her cheek. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’ve got to trust me, baby.”
Was it wrong for me to want to protect Jo from such terrible hurt? From a part of myself she was better not knowing? Was it wrong to preserve her belief in me? After all, I wanted to believe just as much as she did—in my own decency, in our bright future together. I wanted to make her happy. This other business, as I saw it, was just something I needed to work out of my system. It would never have occurred to me back then that behind all my fancy footwork was a darker sin: I didn’t love Jo as she loved me. I knew only that I felt guilty all the time, unworthy and resentful and complicated. And so, every few weeks, I went out and drowned myself in loud song and copulation and this made me feel simple. And when I returned home, I told Jo heroic lies that defended us both from the ruinous truth.
I didn’t love her as she loved me. What other sin is there, finally?
Jo was on the phone in the other room. “Oh my God!” she cried out. “That’s so amazing!” A couple of minutes later, she came in the bedroom, puffy and exorbitant.
“That was Kirsten.”
“Who?”
“Kirsten. My best friend from high school. She’s getting married. She wants me to be a bridesmaid.”
I nodded at the closet, where her other gowns hung. “Peach chiffon or teal?”
“Very funny,” she said.
“When’s the big day?”
“November twentieth.”
“Not
this November twentieth?” I screwed on a tight little smile.
“Don’t you dare,” Jo said. “Don’t you dare pull this shit. I am not going to this wedding alone because you have to review some idiotic band.”
“Guns N’ Roses,” I said, “is not just some band.”
You have to understand: I had interviewed Kip Winger three times. I knew the names of his pets. I had memorized, without any intention of doing so, the words to “Headed for a Heartbreak.” Possibly better than anyone else on earth I recognized the depths to which heavy metal had sunk. The intensity and musicianship of its earliest practitioners had given way to pretty-boy schlock. This is what made the Gunners so compelling. They represented a return to the core values of the genre, the angry hedonism, the dramatic release. I doubt Axl Rose would have described himself as an Aristotelian, but that is what he was. His voice ramped forever up, toward catharsis.
I had explained all this to Jo, several times. But she just looked at me like my head was on fire. “What we’re talking about, David, the issue, is whether you’re coming with me to this wedding.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“This is Kirsten,” she said dramatically. “This is one of my best friends.”
The trick with Jo was to let her self-regard run down a little. Then to pause, always to pause, which conveyed thought. And then to assume a softer tone. “I know it’s important,” I said. “I hear you. But this is important to me, honey. It’s my job. And I know you think it’s just bullshit, but it’s also something I value. Can you understand that?”
We were, all things considered, in a phase of expectant compromise. The paper had nominated me for a three-month stint at USA Today, in D.C., where I hoped to earn my wings in the world of depthy glitz. Jo was talking with Nader’s people about a job. Marriage wasn’t on the table just yet. But—as I now gently reminded her—the end of my metal days was in sight. Couldn’t she give me this one last hurrah?