This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictiously.
Copyright 2025 by Carley Moore
ISBN: MALKAPIPPIMARINA
You may have heard that I’m publishing an older novel of mine on Substack that never found a home. It’s called Live at Roseland, and here is Part 2! I’m my own editor for this book, though I worked with an agent on it many years ago. It went all over town and got very close at a few places, but alas, no dice.
If you read even a little of it, please hit the heart way down below, re-stack, and share widely. I know some of you have been waiting patiently for Part 2, so here we go!
Enjoy the typos!
xoxo
Carley
Part 2 – The Road
11
Willow
I couldn’t tell you what happened to my body because I left it behind that day in the river. I had a dream that I was a tugboat scooting along the weedy banks of a post-industrial rust-belt town. I was looking to trespass; I was hoping to find an outlet for my inlet ways. Or maybe I dreamed I was chair pieces—top rail, mid rail, manchette, arms, seat, spindles, and stretcher—making my way thought the factory for assembly. I spent time on the lathe, spinning and getting sanded, and afterwards I enjoyed the calloused, impersonal hands of the workers. They put me together, and made me into an object of sense and function. Perhaps it was a daydream, or maybe more like the waking trance I’d come to favor before I died, but eventually I became the water that killed me. I was brackish and full of silt, blue green algae and probiotic. All of my movements were about the down and out. I felt split and divided and always in the crosshairs, but somehow at long last I managed to achieve the impossible. I separated my body from my self. I became substance—no, substantial—without all of the bother of matter. No more blood. No more guts.
Maybe it didn’t matter how it happened. Already, that day was becoming less and less clear to me. “I forget,” my mother used to say when she didn’t want to talk about something. Me: “Mom, did I always want my hair short?” Mom: “I forget.” Me: “Didn’t I tell you when I was five that I was in love with Strawberry Shortcake?” Mom: “I forget.” Well, I got it. I wanted to forget too. I could still hear some of my favorite singers—the lyrical-heath coo of Kate Bush, Poly Styrene’s plastic rebel yell, and Nico’s broken junkie talk—but even they were fading.
I moved into a new shape. I got a different job. It involved watching and seeing. Vision. If it weren’t so culturally imperialistic I’d call myself a shaman. I’d taken my anthropology class Pass/Fail to fill my social sciences requirement, and I didn’t actually read the chapter on South American shamans, but I did look at the lone photograph. A female graduate student took it, as part of her field notes, and it was this regular looking guy in the rain forest of Paraguay. He was shirtless and shoeless and he was wore a pair of beat-up old khakis. He’d made himself a headdress of feathers and leaves, and a necklace out of shells and a rosary. He had plants spread out in a semi-circle around him, his eyes closed, and his arms spread out in a T. When I saw that photo, I thought, that’s the look for me. But I never told anyone because I didn’t want to come off as some idiot white person, some small-town barely-out lesbian who was looking to steal a little culture for herself.
What shape do hauntings take? When I died I became the cells of that landscape. I became all water, past and future. But first, I embedded myself into the architecture of that river, and into the people who inhabited it in that moment. Annie called to me from the bridge and I knew she was daydreaming about fire, the flames we once made together. She wondered if I heard her, and I wondered that too. I hadn’t been listening to her for a while. I tried to hide it, but coming out had changed me. I was tired of loving her so much and sick of talking about hetero shit, and yet we clung to our patterns, our shared dreams. Being with Annie started to feel like hanging out in a pretty cage.
The kid who found my body—his stick fingers smelled like hotdogs. He stood on the shore and poked at my feet with a stick. “Wake up!” he said. “Please!” Words, I could tell, he’s used before. I became the bridge that day too—Bethlehem steel on top of a granite face, cantilever and counter-balance. A man died when they made that bridge. There was a blast and he drowned, but that was an accident and no one remembered it. “I forget,” they said. But I absorbed the shock of the explosives, the soot, and the water filling up our lungs. We stopped breathing. We choked.
Annie and I had always been determined to escape. She went to work and she found the one John Singer Sargent monograph and she sat down on the industrial green carpet and flipped to the page of the painting he’d, Jeb, that dirty old man, told her about, “Nonchaloir.” (Repose). She’d taken French for the first two years of high school, but the word still felt unnaturally foreign, ancient even, as she whispered it to the seam of the book. Once the painting had started to have an effect on her, she whispered it several more times into the empty stacks, as if she were casting a spell or trying to get rid of a ghost. Maybe I was that spell. Maybe I was that ghost.
The woman in the painting, Sargent’s niece, was beautiful, but Jeb was right. It was the dress that fascinated Annie, not so much the way it was painted—yes, that was impressive, something Annie knew she could not yet do—but its folding and its volume. Its pearly white creases and ridges reminded her of meringue and an old satin purse she’d bought from the Salvation Army and never had a reason to carry. The dress nearly engulfed the woman and it covered the length of the small sofa she lay on. It, and the gilded simplicity of the room in the painting—the gold-flaked table, the well-upholstered couch, and the large picture frame above her head— seemed to encourage repose, rest, and calm. Staring at the painting threw into relief, the chaos of her mother’s house, the tiny prison of order she’d created in her bedroom, and my suicide. She used her paintings to shore up the walls and to keep all of her mother’s piles of newspapers and clothes and dishes at bay, but lately she saw her bedroom as a padded cell, and her paintings’ obsessions and preoccupations were bearing down on her.
She couldn’t believe how much space Sargent had given that woman, and she wished, as she inhaled the scent of that particular book, that she could be both the woman in the painting and the painter. She looked up from her book and down the long corridor of books to the window at the end of it. The afternoon sun was bright and there were dust particles floating in the air. She felt, for a second, as small as a particle in space, and then her stomach started growling and she remembered she hadn’t had time to eat between Jeb’s house and the library.
But if the painting was a spark, then I was the fan that flamed it, turned into a fire. I drove her—us—out of town. I scared the shit out of her, so that she’d run and never look back. She was weak then, and I knew better than anyone that she needed a push.
And so she closed the book, tucked it under her arm, left her cart of books in the middle of the aisle, and walked out the front door of the library. She didn’t allow herself to think that she had a plan because she didn’t. Instead, she walked to Lamott’s one Mexican restaurant, The Taco Shack, where we used to eat at least twice a week, and ordered a cheese enchilada, guacamole, chips, and a Pepsi. While she ate she conjured up an image of herself in the National Gallery holding her stolen book up next to the actual painting. She was wearing her favorite black jeans—the ones held together by nearly 50 safety pins—and her yellow B-52s t-shirt. Jeb was there too, somewhere in the background, looking more at her than the painting. And she saw that he could love her, and that he might even a little bit already, and that if she were ever going to survive my suicide, she needed this, needed him.
I liked that painting too, but I had my own associations. The woman, like most women lately, reminded me of Jen, who I fell hopelessly and pathetically in love with after one vegetarian meal at the Moosewood restaurant and one night together in her communal loft space. Jen and the girl in the painting looked nothing alike and I’m pretty sure Jen would have called it a “piece of bourgeoisie propaganda,” but there was something about their necks, the angle or repose that reminded me of Jen. She was way more experienced than I was, and even though she and her partner had an open relationship, she told me she wasn’t looking for a long-term thing.
I was doubly vulnerable. It was my first truly vegan meal, and the only time I’d spent the entire night with a woman. She was so sweet and open to me and she showed me how to touch her so that she could come. And she must have licked every inch of me—I was on fire, I think, or maybe just ready to ignite. Combustible. Flint and steel. It felt to me, like I finally met her, the one. And later when I was back in Lamott, I couldn’t help myself, I started to write her these crazy letters and leave long rambling messages on her answering machine, about how much I loved her, and that I would do anything to be with her, and that I might die without her, until eventually she called me back one afternoon and told me to stop, and that I was scaring her and that she couldn’t be with me because she really loved her girlfriend.
And then my heart caught fire, and I kept trying to swallow it whole. But I couldn’t put the fire out, so I decided to pour water on it.
12
Annie
They’d drunkenly fallen into a great pose. Jeb was on his back wedged into the corner of a massive wine-stained beige sectional. Aside from a card table turned on its side and with one of its legs broken off, it was the one piece of furniture in the cinderblock limbo that made up our backstage area in D.C. His mouth and eyes were shut tight as if he were warding off either a really bad dream or some serious vomit. One of his arms was splayed out to the side, palm up, all Jesus receiving his flock; the other arm was lost somewhere underneath Bobby’s gut. Bobby was pressed up against him; head nestled into the crook of Jeb’s left armpit, one of his legs wrapped around both of Jeb’s. They looked like lovers or giant fighting angels who’d temporarily taken respite on a cloud. I wished with all of my artist’s heart that they could be naked—what a drawing that would be!! But you take what you get.
I wheeled one of the giant black speaker cubes closer to Jeb and Bobby, hoisted myself up onto it, pulled my sketchbook and charcoal out of my backpack, and started to draw. I began with big lines, the shapes of their torsos and legs, Jeb’s arm. I fussed for a while with his hand—all of those joints and tendons were tricky—and Jeb’s fingers were strong, muscled in a way only a guitarist’s would be. I wanted to get at the sinews, the space between his fingers, but the effect was more webbed than I wanted. I blew off the extra charcoal, and started in on their faces. I could come back to the hands. I drew Bobby’s nose, it was thin even along the base of it, big nostrils though and then I moved into the cross-hatching of his beard and his full, slightly chapped lips. I lingered over Jeb’s face—his high forehead set with two faint worry lines, the purple shadows underneath his eyes, his long brown lashes, and his nose, large and red around the nostrils. “A nose to be reckoned with,” I heard my Figure Drawing professor’s voice in my head as I moved my piece of charcoal away from his nose and into the tangle of hair that made up his sideburns. She loved faces, and had a hundred little sayings about drawing them. “Don’t get lost in a neck!” had been Willow’s favorite. She could kill a drawing with one comment. “Dead in the eyes, both of them,” she said to me one rainy afternoon last fall as the class struggled to draw two elderly ladies, sisters who sometimes came from the old folks’ home and sat for us. And then she moved on to the next critique.
The thought of Willow, anything that made me crack up or pissed off, made my heart palpitate and my eyes watery. I couldn’t fathom it. I was never going to hear her voice again—that particular throaty timbre of amusement and disdain that was her specialty. One dumb tear escaped from the corner of my eye, wandered down my cheek, and plopped onto the drawing, blotting out the good work I’d managed with Jeb’s hand. I smudged the tear away with my thumb, sniffed hard, and wiped the remaining tears off of my lashes. Willow, your memories of her and whatever you saw on the street that night outside of the funeral home and by her house, are back in Lamott, I told myself.
I put the charcoal down on the speaker, licked my index finger, and started to rub at the drawing. I needed more light around their bodies and some space on the fabric of the couch. I blew the extra charcoal off the sketch and held it out in front of me. “Not bad,” I thought. Something was beginning to emerge, two male bodies in repose, but was it them? Not quite. I hadn’t quite managed Jeb’s face. Still, I was glad for this time with his body. This morning when I stumbled down the stairs of the bus—the last person to get off—I’d wondered what I was doing, where I was, and who I knew. “No one, you don’t know anyone,” I thought with a jolt of panic, but I remembered I had my sketchbook, and I followed the sounds of the roadies’ voices into this cinder block room. It was comforting to stare for so long, to take Jeb in, and move him back out through my fingers and onto the page.
Bobby coughed and shifted his leg. Jeb’s chest continued to rise and fall with his breath, steady and even, unchecked by the bong hit and Marlboro Red smoke I’d watched him blow out the window of the tour bus all of last night as we rattled along through Pennsylvania and Bobby whipped up frozen margaritas in the bus blender. I uncrossed my legs and let them dangle off of the speaker. I massaged my forehead. Work, steady concentration on something else, can cure a hangover, but my stomach still felt queasy and empty, the space between my eyeballs hollowed out. I was tempted to hop down and wedge myself between Bobby and Jeb on the couch—shouldn’t I be the one nestled in Jeb’s arms? Instead, I rummaged around in my backpack for my can of fixative, and sprayed a noxious cloud of chemicals onto the drawing to make the charcoal stick. I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was almost 2:30—I was starving and eager to get to the National Museum.
I hadn’t yet learned about tour time. I didn’t yet know that it was pointless to wake up before two, and that unless Martin, the tour manager, had scheduled a day off or arranged in advance for a car to take us somewhere, it was highly unlikely—because of press and sound check—that anyone was going to get away from the venue until the show was over.
“Homos,” a voice said from behind me.
“Fucking homos,” another one said.
I turned around. It was Ian and Terry, wrinkled and pale from drinking the same margaritas I had. Terry winked at me and Ian smiled. I wanted to play it cool, but I felt like I had a tiny flashing neon sign above my head that zapped on and off. “Escapee,” it said, or “Never been nowhere,” or worst of all, “Groupie.” My parents, when they were together, fought too much to manage vacations. We went to the Jersey shore a couple of summers with my mom’s scary Vietnam vet boss and his family and I’d been to Willow’s grandma’s condo in Fort Lauderdale. In the last two years, I’d managed to be part of several concert trips with Julian and Willow and Chris, but the furthest away and biggest placed we’d managed was Toronto and that was a day trip because nobody had any money for a hotel.
Cities were a big deal to me. I’d assumed that our tour bus would park right in the center of D.C., and like many a small-town outcast I was convinced that my people—the other punks and painters—would be waiting for me in one café or gallery or bar. I just had to find it. I didn’t yet understand that every city had its own geography and principles for dispersal and drift, and I didn’t yet know that most of the arenas and open-air parks where The Band of None played were a good fifteen minutes outside of the actual city whose name they claimed. So as I pulled my shit together on the bus and prepared to step into the center of what I imagined to be downtown D.C., the recurring daydream I managed to call up whenever I got out of Lamott was in full swing. This daydream was more like a music video, and its soundtrack, to my dismay, was one of my least favorite Ramones song, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.” In it, I saw either Patti Smith or Kim Gordon or Blondie walking towards me against a backdrop of low-slung graffiti-covered brick buildings. The sun was bright, so much so that I had to shield my eyes. Thankfully, (embarrassingly?) I was wearing my Horses t-shirt. Today it was Blondie who walked past me, nodded approvingly in my direction, and continued on, clearly on her way to something so cool that it would take me at least a week to know what it was and to be invited myself. But it wasn’t where she was going that mattered, it was the nod, the look that said, Welcome to the city, you belong here, you really, really do. Lately, when I conjured up this particular fantasy, the nod was somehow cosmically linked to Julian, who felt at this same moment of my acceptance, the irrevocable sadness of having lost me. My Blondie/Julian revenge fantasy had skidded to a halt when I stepped off the bus stairs, into a parking lot, and a landscape that looked suspiciously suburban.
“Nice,” Terry said, looking over my shoulder at my drawing.
“Thanks,” I said. “It was just too good of a pose to pass up.”
“We can never let the press get a hold of it though,” Ian said. “Big scandal. I see the headline in Spin, “Jeb Pascoe and Bobby Vince, Secret Tour Love Affair.”
“Some of our fans would be so happy,” Terry said.
“Probably give the album sales a little bump,” Ian said.
“How far are we from D.C?” I asked, changing the subject. I felt uncomfortable with my drawing at the center of the conversation.
“Wakey, wakey!” Martin, the only person I’d met since I got on the bus who wore a suit, ran in from the hallway that led to the stage. “Annie, luv, be a good girl and help me wake your old man here. Let’s play it like Sleeping Beauty, only you’ll be the prince and he’ll be the beauty.” Martin had wild Andy Warhol-like gray hair and he was carrying a bunch of coffee stained papers under his arm. “Where is the fucking food?” he changed quickly from cooing at me to bellowing at the crew, who theoretically existed over his shoulder by the stage, and when he saw the pathetic tripod of a card table, he added, “Where is the fucking table? Merilee is gonna have my head if her hummus is not out.” The way Martin exited and entered a room reminded me of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. He was all bluster and rush, without the pocket watch.
I hopped off of the speaker and walked over to the couch. I leaned over to whisper in Jeb’s ear, “Jeb babe.” I shook his shoulder. Nothing. “Jeb,” I said more firmly. Still nothing. I moved his hair off of his forehead and placed my palm on it. “Jeb,” I said again. Bobby groaned, farted once, and kicked hard at the air like a dreaming dog. Jeb remained still, practically frozen.
“The only person who could wake Keith Richards from his nods was his son Marlon. He used to sleep with a gun and anyone else who tried to wake him got a pistol in his face,” Ian said. He raised his eyebrows at me and winked, like it was just a funny little anecdote about heroin addicts. Ian was the one member of the band who always looked out of place to me. His long blonde hair and penchant for Corona t-shirts made him look like a replacement member for the Beach Boys. Ian’s and Terry’s eyes were on me, and I felt a little stupid. Jeb and Bobby couldn’t wake up because they’d shot up, not because they were drunk. Since I’d boarded the bus, I’d already caught Jeb with a needle in his bunk. “This is mostly a vitamen cocktail,” he lied. It worried me, but he was so chill about it, I decided I had to be too. I’d already run away. I didn’t have any money of my own. I was on tour with my favorite band of all time!
I was resistant to Ian’s comparison of Jeb and Bobby to Keith Richards in both stature and level of addictiom. It’s probably not like an everyday thing, I pushed aside what Ian was telling me and re-focused on the task at hand.
They didn’t know how much experience I had waking the dead, I thought. For most of high school I’d been my mother’s alarm clock. If it weren’t for me, she would have lost her job years ago. I remembered, for a second, of the note I’d left on top of her mascara-stained pillow yesterday afternoon. Mom, remember The Band of None? Well, they invited me to the next couple of shows. On the bus! Should be fun! I’ll call when I get a chance. Love, A. I wondered who would wake her up now that I was gone.
“Did you do the radio?” Martin said to Ian and Terry, as he looked frantically around the room. Several of his papers fell to the floor, but he didn’t bother to pick them up.
Terry saluted. “We had a good ole’ chat with Chuckie and Ip Switch at WKSG.”
“This room is not Merilee ready,” Martin said.
“What about me?” Ian said. “The crew hasn’t even brought me my wardrobe.” I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or pretending.
“Don’t you wear all black?” Martin said and turned back towards me. “Keep at it Annie, there’s a girl. I could tell you were more than just a pretty face.”
I continued to whisper into Jeb’s ear and to hold the palm of my hand to his forehead. I kept it light and sweet, as I always did for my mom. Honey. It’s time to wake up. Come on now. You can do it. It’s not too bad out here. The sun is out, but it’s not that bright. I’ve got coffee. “Does anyone have ice?” I asked.
Bobby extricated his body from the side of Jeb’s and looked around, eyes half shut, mole-like, angry. “Fuckers!” he shouted at all of us. I couldn’t help it, the speed of his movements and his expression reminded me of a cartoon, and I laughed. He slid back down into Jeb. “Sorry, new girl, what’s your name?” he mumbled.
“Annie,” I said. I wasn’t surprised he couldn’t remember. Jeb’s introductions as I boarded the bus had been of the “Everyone this is Annie, Annie this is everyone,” variety.
“There’s a boy!” Martin shouted. A couple more of his papers fell down by his feet. He kicked past them and shuffled over to Bobby, extending his hand. Bobby took it, extricated his legs from Jeb’s, and stood shakily up. “No hotel today captain, but there’s a nice little locker room down the hall. The crew’s put some towels in there for the gentlemen, and by the time you get out of the shower, I bet Brian will have dinner just about ready,” Martin said.
“Sorry about press,” Bobby said sheepishily to Martin.
“Might have to fine you,” Martin said. “But we’ll talk about it later.”
We all watched Bobby wander off down the hallway towards the locker room. He tried two locked doors and sighed loudly in exasperation.
“Red door!” Ian shouted. I noticed he was carrying a can of beer around in one of those rubber beer cozies.
Bobby flung his big frame against it and disappeared.
I sat next to Jeb on the couch. The room was beginning to fill up. The crew filed in—six guys with either very long hair or partially shaved heads—started to wheel the remaining black cubes out of the room and replace them with another couch, a long folding table, and several large wardrobes cases on wheels. The crew dressed pretty much the same, brown Carhart pants and hardcore black band t-shirts like Black Flag, Danzig, and Sam Hain. Some wore bandanas over there heads, and all of them had their wallets on long silver chains. I started to pull at Jeb’s arm hairs and to pinch the skin on the inside of his forearm. My panic surged back into my chest. I felt awkward and out of place, unsure of what I was supposed to be doing next to this passed out guy, who asleep seemed like a total stranger to me. Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake.
“You could just try to fuck him awake.”
I looked up at the woman walking towards me. She was wearing a black Band of None sweatshirt (not one that I’d ever seen at any of their concerts, and I did take pride in knowing my concert tees), cut off jean shorts with ripped black tights underneath, and scuffed up combat boots. Her hair was tied up in an amazing gravity defying pile of brown/blonde dreadlocks.
“You’d have to get him hard first, but it might work, you know, morning wood,” she continued. “I’m Tabitha,” she said and stuck out her hand for me to shake. I took it. It was warm and soft, and I noticed the tail end of a scaly snake inking it’s way out from under her sweatshirt sleeve. “I run the merch table with my husband Toby. We ride on the other bus,” she said and stuck out her thumb, as if she were hitching a ride somewhere. “The shitty one.”
“I’m Annie,” I said, standing up.
“Did you draw that?” she asked, looking at my sketchbook, which I’d put in the groove Bobby’s body left when he got up.
“Yeah, I was bored,” I said.
“It’s good, you should keep that up,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said, “I will, I mean I’ll try.”
“Uh oh,” Tabitha said, grabbing my hand and pulling us away from the couch, “I’ve seen this before, and you should probably move away because it’s ugly and Jeb is going to be super pissed.”
I turned back around just in time to see Martin, Ian, and Terry pour a bucket of ice water onto Jeb. Jeb sputtered and sat up, wiping the water off of his face and back into his hair. He squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them wide to take in the room. Everyone stopped what they were doing to see his reaction. He stood up and looked over at me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, stunned on his behalf.
He shook the water off of his arms. Ian and Terry looked down at the concrete floor. The crew kept their heads down too; suddenly absorbed in the faux-wood grain or fabric of whatever piece of furniture they had in front of them.
“Sorry, man,” Terry said, and it seemed genuine.
“They asked about you at the radio station,” Ian said. “It was you and Merilee they were hoping to talk to,” he added, but he looked like it made him happy to see Jeb suffer. I decided he had a mean streak.
Jeb took a step forward. His left knee buckled, but he managed to stay upright and to get his face about an inch away from Martin’s. “This is the last fucking time Martin!” Jeb yelled.
“Sound check in 30,” Martin said. He didn’t raise his voice; he was all matter-of-fact and pleasant about it.
The veins around Jeb’s neck flared and pulsed for a couple of seconds before he turned on his heels and walked down the hall and into the locker room. A couple of seconds later, Bobby emerged from the same door, a white towel cinched low around his waist and his skin red from the shower.
“Actually, that was pretty chill,” Tabitha whispered into my ear. “Once, Ian had to break up a fight between Bobby and Martin. They were down on the ground, like, wrestling.”
“Should I go after him?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t. He probably just needs to cool off,” Tabitha said. “Not that I know anything about male rage. I’m married to guy who is physically incapable of getting mad.”
“You’re married?” I asked, just then taking in what she’d told me.
“Weird, right? You’ll meet him. We actually met at a Band of None show when I was sixteen.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-two. I probably shouldn’t be married, but Toby let’s me do what I want and I get to travel, so it’s good,” Tabitha said.
“I just don’t know anyone your age who is married. I mean, girls I went to high school with who are moms now because they wanted to have sex and didn’t really care about birth control, but not anyone like us,” I said.
Tabitha narrowed her eyes at me. I’d put my foot in my mouth, I knew it.
“I’m sorry, that was rude.”
She shrugged. “Let’s go harass Velvet.”
I picked up my sketchbook, shoved it back into my backpack, and followed Tabitha out into the auditorium. We wandered way up into the back of the orchestra and plopped down into two of the plastic blue seats. I couldn’t believe how many seats there were, and that by tonight they’d be full of sweaty, screaming fans. Velvet, as far as I could see, consisted of two extremely tall twin brothers, one who was the lead singer and one who was the guitarist, a tiny troll-like manbehind an enormous drum kit, and a keyboard guru who wore a gigantic velvet top hat and red suspenders. I’d seen Velvet host a recent episode of 120 Minutes, but I wasn’t impressed. Tabitha and I listened as they plowed through their opening number three times in a row.
“Girls, how do we sound?” the lead singer called up to us.
“Like Smiths copycats,” Tabitha cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted back.
“Who is your friend Tabby?” the guitarist asked.
“Annie, she’s with Jeb.”
The guitarist attempted a fake curtsy and I waved back.
“Annie, where are you from?” the lead singer purred into the mic.
“Nowhere,” I answered. “And you?”
“We live in London,” he said.
“Is it true that Camden Town is the largest open-air market in the world?” I shouted back.
“Dunno,” the singer said.
“Do punks really hang out there, in the thousands?” I continued our ridiculous shouting conversation.
“Wanker punks,” the guitarist interrupted.
“Can’t you get like any cassette or record ever made there?” I pushed.
“That sounds about right.”
Velvet’s lead singer turned his back to us, and the band started in on another song, one that wasn’t as bad as the first one.
Tabitha rested her pile of hair on the back of the seat, and I spaced out. I couldn’t really believe that I was out of Lamott, sitting next to Tabitha in a random auditorium in D.C, about a hundred feet away from a band that I’d only ever seen on T.V. I thought all of my friends who’d tried to leave town, and I wondered how long it would take before word got out that I’d run away with The Band of None. I hoped it would get around at Cheap Hits, and that Julian already knew. I still wanted him to be jealous—both of my leaving and of Jeb, even after all that happened in the last week.
I remembered all of the half-baked plans hatched in the window of Cheap Hits, and how none of us ever had the money or the connections to make anything stick. Willow was supposed to stay in Ithaca when she went to visit Jen. I tried to prepare myself for the possibility that she wasn’t coming back. She had exchanged letters with a guy there about maybe moving into one of the empty rooms in his apartment, but when she got there he’d already rented it out. Our friend Chris managed to save up bus fare to New York City last winter. He arrived with $200 in his pocket on a snowy February night. He was too freaked out to take the subway, so he hailed a cab to Rivington and Eldridge, streets that appeared in some book he was reading, and tried to buy some weed. A dealer led him to abandoned building, took his money, told him to sit tight, and never came back. Chris spent one cold and scary night in Tompkins Square Park, sleeping on a bench, and then called his uncle collect and begged for a bus ticket back to Lamott. Julian had been talking about moving to New York since I’d met him. I wasn’t so sure it would happen. And why didn’t I send in those applications? I had ten different excuses, but none of them made any sense.
There was something about Lamott, a kind of defeatist attitude that was stitched into our bones. All of my mother’s relatives never wanted to go anywhere, and hated cities. It was in the weather too—etched into the gray sky, a veil or a scrim we all walked around in or behind that made us groggy and stupid. And I remembered that when Willow and Chris came back with their plans dashed and no money, I’d felt bad for them, but I was also relieved. I missed them, and there was a twisted, little broken part of my heart that didn’t want them to succeed without me. Maybe I needed a role model for leaving or someone else to do the driving, to act casual and natural about it, like it wasn’t a big deal.
Velvet’s song clattered off into a couple of stray chords and the twin brothers started to shout over our heads at the sound crew about trebles and keeping the highs down. I looked over at Tabitha, who had taken a small tube of Elmer’s glue out of the pocket of her sweatshirt, and was intently drizzling it onto the palm of her left hand. She grinned at me. “Stupid right? But it dries and I peel it off and it keeps me from picking at my cuticles ‘til they bleed.”
Willow used to do that, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. Was I really going tell everyone I met on the road about my dead best friend? “It works. My friend did it to quit smoking. It’s a good distraction.”
“You want some?” Tabitha waved the little tube at me.
“I’m good.” I stood and let the hard plastic seat bottom flip up behind me. “I think I’m going to go look for Jeb.”
“Don’t look too hard. You never know what you’ll find.” Tabitha rubbed the glue into her hand so that it would dry faster and smirked at me.
I laughed like I got it and squeezed past her knees, which she barely moved. “Later,” she said and I waved up at the band, who were completely engrossed in sound check and didn’t even look down off the stage.
I found Jeb half-asleep on a wooden bench in the locker room. He had a black bandana tied around the upper part of his arm, and the happily lit look of someone who’d taken something, but had no intention of saying what it was or sharing it.
I stood above him and watched his eyes come into focus. His pupils were small black dots in a sea of blue. I didn’t know what to say. I’d just met Jeb, and even though it already felt like we were in the midst of something pretty intense, I felt like it was none of my business. I was afraid too, of how he’d respond if I asked him, “Are you a junkie?”
Before I could figure it out, he waved me over. “Annie! I can’t believe you’re here!”
“Pretty crazy,” I said because I couldn’t really believe it either.
“Can I lick your pussy?”
“I, uh, yeah?” I stammered. I wasn’t used to such direct conversation about sex. I wasn’t really used to any conversation about sex. Julian and I didn’t talk like this, and his time near my vagina was mostly limited to fingers and his dick. The licking was purely foreplay. “Should I, just like, how?”
“Just hike up your skirt, take your underwear off, and sit on my face.”
I did what he said. The directness was hot. I maneuvered myself so that I was straddling the bench just above his face.
Jeb breathed into my pubic hair, and held onto my ass with both of his hands, pulling me down onto his mouth. His tongue felt amazing, first slowly like he was kissing my mouth and then faster over my clit. He knew what he was doing. I stared at the white cinder block wall in front of me. The mottled wall blurred and the tops of my thighs shook. I felt myself opening up on top of him and then I saw the wash of reds and pinks that sometimes flooded my vision when I had an orgasm.
“Woah, that was amazing. Thank you.” I scooted back down onto his chest, smiled, and reached back around to undo his belt buckle. He was already hard. I pulled up and down on his dick. Jeb fished around in his pocket for a condom and I stood up so that he could put it on.
“You just like keep condoms in your pocket?” I asked as I watched him slide his jeans off of his butt and tear the condom wrapper with his teeth.
“This is how it is on tour. You never know when you’ll get a moment alone, so you gotta be prepared.”
Jeb put his legs down on either side of the bench and I climbed on top of him, but the positioning was precarious. My feet couldn’t both touch the floor, so I ended up perched on top of him, balancing. I moved up and down a couple of times and Jeb moaned and shut his eyes. I imagined I was flying. Jeb pulled me down so that my chest was pressed against his. I could feel his heart beating through his shirt.
“I’m so glad you got on the bus.”
“Me too,” I whispered into his ear while I kept my hips rocking back and forth.
Jeb sat up, thrusted harder into me several times, and then moaned into my neck. I stopped moving and hugged him tight. We stayed there like that for a few minutes until Jeb gave me one last big hug. I scooted off, of him put my underwear back on, and fixed my skirt. He peeled off the condom and threw it across the room, into the waste basket. “Score!”
“You are so beautiful,” he said and I blushed. I’d never been with someone so vocally approving of my body. Near the end of my relationship with Julian, I felt like we were in a silent competition to see who could compliment the other one less.
He draped a heavy arm around my shoulder and breathed into my hair.
I felt my heart sink down into my stomach and settle into the melancholy that sometimes snuck up on me after sex. I didn’t know it then, but years later I’d finally admit to myself that as much as I wanted to fuck someone instantly, I often felt better if I waited. New settings and landscapes—male or otherwise—overwhelmed me, made me feel out of sorts, and confused about who I was, and what was expected of me. Maybe I’d run away from Lamott too quickly? Had I just replaced Julian with Jeb? Slid one man in the slot that another one had filled? Put one panel over another? Was I just running away from my pain and problems? I missed Willow so much my heart hurt.
And then I thought about sillier things. Who would take care of her grave the way she would have wanted? Who would decorate it with the darkest flowers and keep some well-meaning relative from putting a stuffed animal teddy-bear clutching a heart onto it? I remembered Willow or whatever that was standing like some kind of fishwife across the street from the funeral home, pleading for me to look at her. Maybe I was meant to stay close by, maybe getting on the tour bus was the precise way not to see her.
“Where did you go? I lost you.” Jeb pulled his jeans back up around his waist, and fastened his belt buckle.
I wondered if I could tell Jeb about what I’d seen that night he’d picked me up outside of the funeral home. What the fuck had I seen? I didn’t want him think he’d brought a total nutcase onto the tour bus.
“Maybe I abandoned Willow.” I managed to swallow the hard lump that was forming in my throat and get those words out.
Jeb squeezed me tighter. “She’s the one who left you, baby,” he said into the top of my head.
“You think so?” I hadn’t yet considered this bit of logic. I was already so guilty, and haunted. My heart un-clenched itself ever so slightly. Comfort. The relief of having someone to confide in, someone who might understand and who could get me out of my own head.
It was an old pattern of mine—making Willow’s shit into my own, turning her pain into my story. So at that moment, sitting in some random locker room outside of a city I’d never been to and would never actually see, having just fucked a guy I’d pretty much just met and run away with in last 48 hours, calling Willow’s suicide a betrayal felt like an okay thing to think.
“I wouldn’t say so otherwise.” Jeb kissed my cheek and looked over at the institutional clock hanging on the far wall of the locker room. It was 4:30.
“Sound check!” Martin’s voice interrupted us through the closed door.
13
Annie
“Martin won’t let me leave. I’m sorry we’re not going to get into the city.” Jeb stood in front of his open wardrobe case in his underwear, trying to decide between two black shirts that looked exactly the same to me. He was more alert and his face less puffy than when I’d found him in the locker room. Maybe sex was an antidote to junk.
“Two days ago I didn’t even know about that painting. It’s okay, I don’t care if I see it.” I was disappointed, but I didn’t want to let on. It seemed uncool or bad manners, but I remembered this was kind of like the party Jeb said he was having when we met in the ravine. Never happened.
“We were lucky to have had that hour together in the locker room,” he said and I was happy for it too. I felt closer to him, like I belonged, and wasn’t just some random groupie from Lamott.
The vibe backstage had shifted from pre-show lethargy to opening act excitement. Velvet was making their way through the last couple of songs in their set, and the crowd cheered and whistled. Brian, the band’s chef, was cleaning up from the dinner he’d just prepared for us, a delicious Italian rice I’d never eaten before and some grilled vegetables which made me think it might be okay to be vegan. The crew had managed to transform the drab room into a lounge. They’d plugged in lamps, covered the couches in Batik prints and set up the food area, which now had every kind of chocolate you could imagine on it and an espresso machine. Everyone was awake. Pre-show jittery good rather than hungover and angry.
“Bet you didn’t think that going on tour was going to be about hanging out with a bunch of thirty-five-year-old guys backstage,” Bobby called over to me from the hinged semi-privacy of his wardrobe case. He looked like he was hiding out behind a giant Styrofoam Big Mac container, but I could still see his hairy ass as he bent down to grab at the pair of boxers he’d just dropped on the floor.
“Jesus, Babbo, spare us your anus,” Ian called out from across the room. He had a Jimmy Buffet album cover taped to the outside of his wardrobe case. Havana Daydreamin’—he was officially the cheesiest member of The Band of None.
“You want Daddy to do a little dance for you?” Bobby pulled his boxers over his butt and the rest of the band groaned.
“Cover your eyes Annie!” Jeb said in mock alarm.
“I’ve seen way hairier men in figure drawing class,” I said, perched on the arm of the sofa, taking it all in.
“Your new girlfriend is an artist Jeb, she appreciates me,” Bobby winked at me.
“Some have been turned to stone at the sight of Bobby’s ass.” Jeb was dressed now, and he walked over and gave me another big squeeze. I liked all of his hugging, I wasn’t used to such open affection. Maybe I was starved for it.
Clad in just a Hanes t-shirt, boxers, and socks, Bobby skidded out into the middle of the room, thrusting and gyrating his hips to a beat none of us could hear. He danced over to Ian for a couple of pelvic thrusts and then turned towards Jeb and me.
He managed a couple more gyrations and then his dick slid out of the front opening of his boxers. Jeb cackled and hooted.
“Oops! I’m coming out!” Bobby said, but he didn’t tuck himself back in. Instead he turned around and mooned Jeb and me. Maybe he was the hairiest man I’d ever seen.
Merilee walked into the backstage area, just as Bobby was mooning us.
“My lady,” Bobby pulled up his boxers, curtsied at Merilee, and skidded back over to his wardrobe case.
“You could wax. Some guys even shave.” Merliee said, seeminly nonplused.
She looked more fragile face-to-face than she did on the stage. Her black hair was pulled back into a low short ponytail. She wore a long black skirt and a white and black striped shirt—the kind I’d seen Picasso wearing in a photo in the textbook to my Introduction to Art History class. Her skin was pale, her feet were bare, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She was my same height, sleight at 5’2 and thin. We hadn’t officially met. She had her own private room behind the hall of bunks on the bus and had been in there the whole drive from Lamott to D.C. She spotted me and narrowed her eyes.
“Merilee, this is Annie. She’s going to hang with us for a couple of cities,” Jeb said, still hugging me. I kinda wanted him to let me go.
Merilee smiled big. Her teeth were super white and evenly spaced, her lips red and full. Her mouth up close—and this was the closest I’d ever been to Merilee Adams—was sexy. I was reminded of that stupid Pearl Drops Tooth Polish T.V. commercial where the woman runs her tongue over her teeth and lips and half says/half moans, “Mmmmm, it’s a great feeling.” There was a suggestion of something erotic around the whole lower half of Merilee’s face—music, sex, talk
“Are you a fan of mine or Jeb’s?” She extended her hand for me to shake.
“Mer,” Jeb said and sighed.
“What?” Merilee looked at Jeb and shrugged. “I want to know if she’s my groupie or yours.”
“I love the whole band,” I answered truthfully, shaking her hand.
“But who do you love the most?” Merilee pushed, letting my hand drop, almost as soon as she touched it.
“Don’t you have a friend coming later, Mer?” Jeb asked as her wrapped his arms around my chest from behind and pulled me closer.
“Maybe, but what if I like your friend more?”
“I’m a huge fan of your lyrics,” It was true and I had to give her something. She was the lead singer, the star. Besides, I liked the geography of our three bodies at that moment. Merilee and me facing each other and Jeb behind me, marking me as his territory. It reminded me of a scene from Dirty Dancing, a movie that I never confessed to loving to anyone but Willow, who once loved it too. The scene when Penny and Johnny sandwich Baby in between them to teach her how to do the routines for the big number. Penny is Baby’s shadow, and she places her hands on Baby’s hips to teach her how to move, while Baby faces Johnny. I’d always found the scene hot. It suggested the possibility of a threesome, but only if Baby could learn how to dance.
I felt starstruck this close to Merilee. She was one of my top five idols. She’d written the songs I knew by heart. I’d studied her weird movements on stage and I read anything I could get my hands on about her life and her work. If Jeb didn’t have his arms around me, would I try to touch her?
Merilee laughed. “I am so kidding! You don’t have to choose, at least not yet anyway!”
Nothing came out of my mouth except a stupid half grunt.
Jeb finally let go of me and Merilee turned back around to make her way down the hallway and into her locker room. “I’m wearing red tonight!” she called back to the band, “So don’t wear any weird shit that might clash with me.”
I hadn’t planned to, but I spent most of the show behind the merchandise table with Tabitha and her husband Toby. After I finished smoking what was in Terry’s bong 9he told me I could) and wandered out into the auditorium with my backstage pass tucked inside of my dress, Tabitha spotted me and waved me over.
“Anyone who brings their own marker to use for signing is a lunatic.” They were in the middle of one of their endless fan rants. Tabitha had her feet propped up on the t-shirt table and was leaning dangerously back on a folding chair.
“I’m scared of the weeping ones. The girls who can’t stop crying,” Toby said. He looked like a graduate student—round wire-rimmed glasses, a close-cropped beard, and one of those green Communist caps like Fidel Castro wore. “They usually come in a hoard and they take forever to decide what to buy.”
“But they spend a ton,” Tabitha said.
Terry’s pot was strong and my chest felt like it had a small umbrella in it, opening and closing with each breath. The merchandise table and stand were far from the stage, but we had a pretty good view. We were well into the first set. The band had just finished one of my favorite songs from their second album; one they hardly ever played anymore, “Train Town.” It was about Lamott and growing up having to go to church, and the fact that there used to be a train in and out of town and now there wasn’t. A song about being trapped, which had always resonated with me.
When the band finished the song, Merilee started to talk to the audience.
Merilee: “That’s Jeb’s favorite song.”
Jeb: “Well Merilee, I am kind of partial to it.”
Merilee: “Why is that Jeb?”
Jeb: “Cuz I wrote it.”
(The crowd cheered).
Merilee: “Jeb, what do you know about D.C?”
Jeb: “Well, let me think (strums a couple of guitar chords for effect). Oh yeah,
Jim Morrison was born here.
(More cheering and hooting from the audience).
Merilee: Didn’t you have his book of poetry, Wilderness?
(More cheering and whistling).
Jeb: Still do.
Merilee: So it’s a classic?
Jeb: Of a kind.
Merilee: What kind is that Jeb?
Jeb: (Strums a couple more chords). Well, ah, let me see. I’d say it’s the wisdom of a bloated old musician who fancies himself a god. You know I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.
Merilee: I do, Jeb, I do.
There was something intoxicating about watching Jeb onstage, and knowing that he’d chosen me to go on the road with me, and magically plucked me out of Lamott. I was part of something creative, some kind of traveling art machine. I watched Merilee scoot closer to Jeb and his guitar. They had chemistry on stage, there was no denying it. I felt a little jealous, so I turned back to Tabitha and Toby. Julian was the one who was supposed to make me feel that way, not Jeb.
A girl approached the table. She looked about fifteen. She wore braces and kept her head down, her chin tucked into the collar her oversized black button-down shirt.
“Do you have any vintage shirts, like the ones from The Rosary album?” she eeked out from her neck.
“I wish we still sold those. They were beautiful. I had the one with the drawing of the rosary wrapped around the branches of a tree.” Tabitha leaned over the table to talk to the girl.
She lifted her chin a half of an inch out of her neck. “Yeah, that’s the one I want.”
“I think we have a patch of it.” Toby rummaged around under the tables and came back up with one.
“I already have that, but thanks anyway.” The girl absorbed herself back into the crowd.
“I bet The Band of None is her whole life.” I knew what it was like to have your favorite band come and play for you. “This is probably the highlight of her summer.”
Toby and Tabitha looked back and forth at each other. Toby raised his eyebrows. “If you are currently on tour with this band, it’s safe to say that this is both your life and the highlight of it so far.”
“I’m just with Jeb,” I objected.
“Sure you are,” Toby said.
“You just keep telling yourself that,” Tabitha added. I felt her eyes on me. “You have great cheek bones.”
“Thanks.”
“And a long swan neck,” Toby stood up from the patch bin underneath the table and moved a step closer. He smelled like cigarettes and sweat. “I have a good feeling about you Annie.” He moved my hair off of my neck and put his hand there.
“Don’t scare her.” Tabitha let her chair fall. She spread her legs and rested her elbows onto her knees. A hole high up on her inner thigh revealed a pale fist-size patch of skin. “Do you ever read Gertrude Stein or Anais Nin?”
“Little Birds was good. Stein’s too weird for me though. The prose is like one big loop. I don’t get it. It makes me feel stupid and bored. I can’t take all of the repeated words.” We’d read Nin and Stein in my Twentieth Century American’s Women’s Literature course last year. Stein made my head swim, but Willow loved her and used to read parts of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas out loud to me in the Cheap Hits window.
“What about Henry Miller? Quiet Days in Clichy?” Toby squared his cap on his head, but he kept his hand on my neck, moving his fingers up and down the nape of it. I couldn’t decide if he was handsome or not, but his fingers were strong and the impromptu massage felt good.
“The one with the prostitute? My friend Willow and I used to masturbate to that book.” I angled my head back so that my hair fell onto his forearm.
“Together?” Toby rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots and continued to rub my neck, moving his thumb up and down behind each of my ears.
“No, we just traded it back and forth. We did that will a lot of books. Stupid stuff mostly, like Flowers in the Attic and Interview with a Vampire and some totally embarrassing romance novels my mom had around.” I wondered if I’d tell them about Willow, who she was to me and how she died. I moved my lips in the shape of a W, but no sound came out. What would I say? Willow, my best friend. Willow, who killed herself without any warning. Willow, who I didn’t save. Willow, who I failed.
“Anything with threesomes in it?” Toby asked.
Tabitha shot Toby a dirty look, and then she took my hand and rubbed her thumb along my index finger. “I thought Flowers in the Attic was so hot! The brother and the sister, trapped together. It was gross and somehow so right.”
“Annie, have you ever had a threesome?” Tabitha let my hand go and Toby stopped massaging my neck. I took a step back. My lungs still felt tight and hot. They were smiling expectantly at me. I felt like a cupcake, pure confection, something they wanted to eat up. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do with Tabitha, and that embarrassed me, made me feel suddenly queasy. I thought of Willow again—her desires—and in my stoned mind, I imagined making a present to Willow out of Tabitha, a kind of sacrifice to the dead, a sex offering. Could fucking Tabitha somehow bring me closer to Willow and help me understand what it was like for Willow to be gay?
“Oh, you mean, me? Do I do that? I haven’t ever.”. Like most girls I knew, I moved from guy to guy, without really stopping in between, and I’d never been with a girl. My high school boyfriend, Thomas, a jazz trumpet player, treated me like a piece of china—all display, all breakable. I willed him to stop being so gentle, but I never told him what I wanted, and he couldn’t figure it out. I just got colder and more distant until I cheated on him with Jeremy, a Goth disaster from the next town over, who was drunk enough to give me what I wanted but was too ashamed to ask for—anonymous, rough sex. And then I met Julian.
I spaced out with Toby and Tabitha, remembering that moment. I was paying Willow for a Siouxie and the Banshees cassette at Cheap Hits. It was my eighteenth birthday, and I was using the money my grandma gave me every year in a Precious Moments Hallmark card.
“You shouldn’t waste you time with that,” Julian called over from the record bin closest to the counter. He was flipping through the Bs. Willow raised her eyebrows at me and took my ten-dollar bill. Julian didn’t really talk to us, but we all knew he’d broken up with his girlfriend, Jenny, a couple of weeks ago. They were a legendary Lamott couple. If Jenny was Queen of the Deadheads, then Julian was King of the punks. Supposedly, they practiced tantric sex and taught each other how to have multiple orgasms. Once in high school, before Julian had dropped out, I’d seen them making out. Julian had her pressed up against the pale green wall of lockers, his knee wedged between her legs. His long black hair fell onto her face, and all I could see were their tongues, moving in and out of each other’s mouths. Jenny must have sensed my stare because she opened her eyes for a couple of seconds, before plunging back into Julian’s face.
“Lydia Lunch is better.” Julian walked across to the Ls and started to flip through the bin. “Or Bongwater.”
Willow rolled her eyes at me and put the ten in the cash register. Guys were always telling us what to listen to—it was annoying.
“I want the Siouxsie.” I put the change in the pocket of my skirt and started to unwrap the cassette.
Willow opened up the tape deck on the store’s stereo to put it in.
“Seriously, play this instead.” Julian had zigzagged back over to the Bs, pulled out a Bongwater album, and brought it to the counter. The cover was a sepia photograph of a weird looking puppet doll, which was wearing a matching striped shirt and cap.
“I can’t play it unless someone buys it.” Willow rested her elbows on the glass counter, and let her un-stiffened Mohawk hair fall onto her forearms. “Keith gets mad if I just take the plastic off of stuff without asking.”
“Are you always this bossy about music?” I asked.
“Only with people who look like the need help.” Julian grinned and flipped his hair back.
“It’s Annie’s birthday, so she can play whatever she wants.” Willow turned her back to us and pressed play. The tape caught and clicked into place.
“What are you, 15?” Julian asked.
“I just graduated.”
“From junior high?”
I pressed the toe of my Converse against the base of the glass counter, and thought for a second about my next move. I remembered how happy Jenny looked that day, back against a locker, pressed open and pinned down like a butterfly in a display case. The tape scratched in the tape player, and the first song started. It sounded like a funhouse song, weird accordion, and Siouxsie’s up and down vocals, “Creeping up the back stairs.”
“We’re having a party for me tonight at Willow’s house. Her parents are out of town. You should come,” I said and I willed myself to meet his eyes. They were blue and striking next to his pale skin and black hair. “And bring me a present.”
“Now who’s being bossy?” Julian placed the toe of his combat boot on top of the rubber tip of my other Converse. He held it there for just long enough to make me want to move my foot, and when I wriggled my toes to move it, he pressed down a little bit harder, pinning me. And then he turned and walked out of the store.
That night he showed up in front of Willow’s screen door with his friends Butch and Corndog. My present was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and Julian feeling me up in Willow’s parents’ closet. I wasn’t wrong about his hands and his tongue, the weight of his body against mine. We fell back into the mash of hangers and shirts in the closet, and he stuck his tongue into my mouth and slipped both of his hands under the wire of my bra and pressed me deeper into the closet.
After that night, Julian started to show up wherever I was. At Cheap Hits, at Willow’s house, or outside of my bedroom window. And he always brought me a small present—a tiny tube of yellow oil paint, a giant bag of peanut M&M’s, and once a bracelet made out of a spoon that he insisted meant I belonged to him. The beginning, those first couple of months, were like that—the presents, the wooing, and the make out sessions that lasted for hours. I wasn’t a virgin, but I wanted to go slow. Julian said he could wait forever. That’s how sweet he used to be.
“Just think on it.” Toby gave my neck one last squeeze, pulling me out of my Julian revery.
“Yeah, like, we’re here, always,” Tabitha said gesturing Vanna White style to the t-shirts, sweatshirts, cassettes and CDs on the table.
“And we have this open, non-hierarchical, feminist relationship which is about giving each other pleasure, no matter what,” Toby said.
“That’s cool.” I’d never met any one like them before. I knew plenty of cheaters and liars, couples’ who were pretty much married, and lots of single people who were either looking to fall in love forever or fuck for the night. But we were all sneaky and shady about it. No one in Lamott was very good at saying out loud what he or she wanted or needed. We preferred to get wasted and fall face-first and fucked-up into it, and if it wasn’t right in the morning to pretend it never happened.
“I’m pretty much bisexual.” Tabitha stood up to re-arrange a disheveled pile of t-shirts near the front of the table.
I flashed back to Julian’s new girlfriend naked on the mattress at that party and the little triangle of bush underneath the bow of her white cotton underpants. I remembered that I would have done just about anything with her so that I could touch Julian again. I wondered if it was like that for Toby—if he was doing this for Tabitha or for himself. And I thought of Willow and how pissed off she used to get about other peoples’ bisexuality. Half in the closet, she used to say. Or It’s too easy. I missed her anger and her certainty. She would know what to think and do at this moment.
“I’m kind of with Jeb, but I’ll keep an open mind.”
“That’s all we ask,” Toby said and Tabitha nodded and started to ready themselves for the crush of customers before the encore.
I waded back out into crowd. I’d always loved the press and pull of live shows, being close to people I didn’t know, and never would, but feeling a deep connectiong with the music. I remembered the last show I went to with Willow, a triple-bill—New Order, PIL, and The Sugarcubes—that she, Chris, and I—managed to get tickets to in Toronto. Chris passed out in the crowd because he hadn’t eaten all day and was dehydrated, but we were packed in so tight that we didn’t even know. It was Willow who noticed and poured two sugar packets into his mouth to revive him. On the long car ride home, the four of us decided that Johnny Rotten was a total dick live and that we’d travel anywhere to see Bjork again. We couldn’t believe her voice—it’s crazy ups and downs, the way she made caterwauling melodic. And we felt only reverence for New Order, who managed to get all of their synthesizers and drum beats right so that the whole audience was pogoing for a full two hours.
Bobby began the funky base riff that led into the band’s biggest hit to date, “Steeplechase.” My heartbeat got caught up in the thwank, thwank, thwank of Bobby’s steady pull on the strings. I found an opening and wriggled into a dancing mass of sweaty fans, who were jumping up and down and screaming in anticipation.
“This if for the liars and the ones who love ‘em!” Merilee purred into the mic.
I looked up at the big screen above the stage. It was all Merilee. She ran back and forth across the stage, mic in hand, as Bobby’s baseline sped up, and then she froze right next to Jeb and started to sing, “You said you’d chase me!” The fans around me surged forward, and I felt my feet lift off the ground. My heart dropped and shifted as the strangers surrounding kept my suspended. I felt its beat, beat, beat, beat between my legs and in the tips of my toes and fingers. My nose pressed into the hair of the girl in front of me, and someone gently wrapped an arm around my waist. They have you, I thought, you have no choice. Just let go.
And I did. I stayed hovering above the sticky arena floor like the groupie angel I fantasized I was becoming. I closed my eyes and leaned back into the bodies behind me until the crowd shifted and my feet settled back onto the floor. Whoever had their arm around my waist let go, but I felt an imprint of hand on my back, a shadow touch that lingered like an aura. Merilee danced near the drum set while Jeb settled into the fast, flowery solo that tore up the middle of the song. Someone elbowed me in the back, but I took it for a concert-crowd-stumble and ignored the sharp pain between my shoulder blades. I stared up at Jeb. The crew had a red light trained on him and the effect was devilish. He was dressed entirely in black, his head bowed down in concentration, and his fingers slid quickly over the neck and belly of the guitar. He looked seriously skillful and tall—like the rock giant I knew he was. I could see his long sideburns, and the strong square T of his shoulders. I wondered how many girls in the audience wanted to fuck him, and I felt a surge of territorial pride.
I got elbowed again harder, and I turned around. “What the fuck?” I shouted at the two pale girls behind me, but the music was loud and my indignation came out as whisper, as nothing. They gave me a baffled look and shrugged. I scanned the dark crowd behind them. This wasn’t a hardcore show—nobody should be throwing elbows. I sniffed at the air and my nose tingled like I was about to sneeze. I sniffed again to stifle it and I smelled her, Willow, or the two scents that most embodied her—Carmex lip balm and the Aussie grape-flavored hair gel she used. I shoved past the two girls and moved deeper into the tightly packed crowd. I squinted and I saw it before I saw her—the eight bleached-blonde tall spikes of the glowing Mohawk that had become her death corona.
The crowd pushed up against me annoyed that I was moving away from the stage. “I need to get to that girl!” I shouted into the ear of a nerdy guy with a mop of dyed black hair who couldn’t have cared less. This time I was determined to catch her.
Willow’s hair moved erratically in and out of my sight. Jeb finished his solo and the crowd cheered wildly and pushed forward again to scream for Merilee who started to spin out from behind the drum kit and into the center of the stage. I couldn’t move. I breathed in and closed my eyes. Salve and grapes. Medicine and fruit. Somehow, she was still here. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t left her behind. I jumped up and down a couple of times to get a better view, but the crowd shifted again and I lost my footing. I landed, twisted my ankle, and fell down hard on my butt. I stared up at the tangle of legs in front of me. My nostrils flared with the smell of artificial grape hair spray.
I remembered the first time we put Willow’s Mohawk up. We used an entire can of it and still, it wasn’t enough. We tried Elmer’s glue and finally egg whites, which worked though we nearly passed out from inhaling so much hair spray in the small space of her bathroom. Some time between the glue application and the mixing of the egg whites, Willow started playing the Sex Pistols “I Wanna Be Me” at full volume over and over again on the giant cassette player she kept on the bathroom floor. When we finally got all the spikes to stand up, I was in awe. Willow treated it like it was no big deal, just another hair style, but all I could see was this badass punk girl, who was going to piss off most of Lamott just by walking down the street.
Someone stepped on my hand, and I pulled it back towards my body protectively. I stared hard at the dirty, dusty floor. I felt dizzy as if I were back in that same hair spray-clouded bathroom. I curled my chest and head around my knees and willed myself to pull it together and stand up, but I couldn’t move. I squeezed my eyes shut—Merilee’s voice faded out and Sid Viscious’ snarling howl blared in my ears like a phantom radio. I felt myself shrinking into a ball on the floor of the concert arena. Maybe I was about to faint, maybe it was a memory, or maybe it was another one of my visitations, but I finally saw her in the crowd. Legs parted or people wandered away—I don’t know, the space around me opened up, and there she was, dancing like a lunatic in the dim stage glow.
Kick and shove. Punch and lunge. Howl. Spin. Jump up and down. Pogo. Put all of your twisted insides on your shredded outsides. Draw and paint like you’re gonna die. Dance like your possessed. Create anarchy in a small space. Hate the DJ for never playing your request. Love him when he does. Break shit. Bump into people. Crash into them. Fall against them. Let them catch you. Fall down. Get up. Smash capitalism. Smash the state. Fuck it. Fuck gender conformity. Fuck her. Fuck him. Fuck them. Arms. Legs. Feet. Hands. Everywhere. Movement. Fire. Freedom. Body as manifesto. Body as politic.
I stared like I was at the movies. Willow film. The archival footage. What was I looking at? Did anyone else see her? Did she see me? I wished I were at the library shelving books so that I could wander off into the mental health section and find a book on grief. Do sad people hallucinate? Do they see ghosts? Years later, I’d read Freud’s “On Mourning and Melancholia” and I’d remember these first hauntings. I’d think of myself as a girl Hamlet—someone who was stuck and needed a visitation so that she could figure out what to do next. Hamlet was the only Shakespeare play I’d liked in high school—I understood him, his dithering and confusion, his rage at his mother. I wished he would have treated Ophelia better, but then Willow reminded me with a bored senior I-can’t-believe-we-have-to-eat-in-this-cafeteria-sigh, “It’s just a fucking story,” and I snapped out of it. But I wasn’t thinking of Hamlet then on the concrete arena floor in a strange city. I was thinking I was crazy.
My circle of vision narrowed and the corners of my eyes blackened. Willow dimmed and then faded out. My head felt heavy and so I put it on the floor. Fucking stop it, I said to myself, as I eyed the buttery sole of some guy’s Oxblood Dr. Martin boot.
I woke up on the bus. Tabitha stood above me, looking annoyed. I stared at the hole in her tights instead of looking at her face. I still felt certifiable, but I wasn’t going to let on. I sat up and took a look at my clothes, which were covered in dust and shoe smudges.
“You do that a lot?” Tabitha handed me a plastic cup full of water.
“What?” I drank it down.
“Pass out like that?”
“That’s pretty much the first time it happened.”
Tabitha eyed me skeptically. “Well, you better hope the bouncer doesn’t tell Merilee.”
I nodded.
“He spotted you wandering around in the crowd and waded into rescue you. He said you were about to get trampled.”
“I fell.” I knew I sounded like the battered women character on the soap opera I sometimes consented to watch with my mother on the weekends. She taped them during the week and viewed them back-to-back in a Chardonay-laced haze. I bumped into a dresser. I fell down the stairs.
“Well just stay here and rest, and don’t look so sad, you’re on tour with a semi-famous indie band! Oh, and word on the street is that Twig Austin is showing up tonight.”
I sat up. “The Twig Austin?” I’d seen all of Twig Austin’s movies, and during one particularly boring middle-school summer, I’d masturbated every day to a giant poster of his face that I’d hung up on the door of my closet. I loved his full lips and the faintest shadow of stubble underneath his chin. But it was his Adam’s apple that really got me—the part of his body my thirteen year old self found the most erotic. A while back, when I had a subscription to Interview magazine, I read he was “the new James Dean,” and while my tastes had changed since his face made me come on sweaty July afternoons after watching The Brady Bunch and Three’s Company reruns, I was still super excited.
“The one and only. He and Merilee are dating. It’s not like a People story yet, but you heard it here first. Maybe he can make Merilee fun again.” Tabitha walked off the bus and into the dark parking lot. “I gotta go sell shit,” she called back to me.