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
Here is the final installment, the ending, of my novel, Live at Roseland. Thanks to everyone who has been reading, re-stacking, commenting, and sending along sweet messages. This has all been an experiment for me—publishing a whole older novel of mine on Substack, one that never found a home—and at some point soon, I’ll write a post on what the process has been like for me as a writer.
I’m making a PDF of the whole book of Live at Roseland for a contest I’m entering, so if anyone would like a PDF because it’s easier to read on an e-reader, just let me know and I’ll email it to you.
If you read even a little of the book, please hit the heart way down below, re-stack, and share widely. I know some of you have been waiting patiently for the ending, so here we go!
Enjoy the typos!
xoxo
Carley
Part 4 - The City
21
Annie
The space was more cave than club. We walked down a set of stairs from the street, got a nod from the bouncer, followed a winding paint-splattered hallway, and emerged into a gray cavern with a stage wedged into one of its rounded corners. I ran my fingers along the back of my head. That afternoon, in a fit of clipper excitement, I let Jeb shave the lower half of it. The skin behind my ears felt particularly soft and new.
“Do you want something to drink?” Jeb leaned over me and whispered into my neck. We’d used the clippers on him too, but a much bigger blade, and I’d even trimmed his sideburns. He looked well-groomed compared to the last couple of days on the bus.
“Shot? Beer? Both?” I unzipped the sweatshirt I’d nicked from his closet and tied it around my waist. It was too big and the club already felt sweltering. I looked around as Jeb receded into another realm of the cave to get our drinks. I’d been to hardcore shows before, usually with Julian and sometimes Willow. I was used to being one of ten women at any given show. I’d worn my combat boots and I was prepared to throw an elbow or two if I had to, but mostly I was resigned to standing off in the corner and looking on as the guys in the pit beat the shit out of each other.
In a couple of years, when I started going to Riot Girl shows, I’d learn about the politics of mosh pits, and I’d become incensed that I’d spent years of my music-loving life fifty feet away from the stage because of all of the guys who controlled the venues and the audience with their bodies. But then I didn’t care. I was at a club in New York City! I wanted strange guys to bump into me and rub up against me and I craved the attention that comes from being one out of just a smattering of devoted female fans. I got off on the same testosterone rush everybody else did—the one that made me simultaneously feel like throwing a punch and running away.
The room was crowded, but nobody had staked out their places yet, except for the devoted line of hardcore fans pressed up against the stage. There were guys in beat-up leather biker jackets, rolled up jeans and suspenders, combat boots and Dr. Martins, and other hardcore band t-shirts like The Dead Kennedys, Social Distortion, and Black Flag. They had full or partially shaved heads, short and long Mohawks, and the occasional set of dreadlocks. I noticed a small circle of women sitting off to the side of the stage. Each wore a different version of a long hippie skirt with combat boots and a concert t-shirt. I craned my neck to read their t-shirts—Husker Du, Fugazi, and The Pixies.
I smelled him before he got his arm around my neck—a combination of his favorite weed and Miller beer and B.O.
“Annie!” He pulled me backwards with one arm and into his chest, wrapped his other arm around my waist, and sloppily kissed the side of my face. “Surprise!”
His body felt perfectly and alarmingly the same—the right fit, the best smell, pheromones and Darwin, animal genetics, and all of that shit. Fuck, I thought, hadn’t I changed at all?
I squirmed out of his hold and turned around to face him. “Julian!” His face messed me up even more—his too big nose, his red, red lips, those deep tile-blue eyes, the pale skin and the stubble around his mouth. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against mine. “My Annie.” His nose brushed against the tip of mine—our lips were an inch apart. I breathed in, got lost for a second in the space around his mouth, and then pulled away. Julian grabbed my hand. “Not so fast rabbit.” I stared down at my feet. I couldn’t look him in the eye; and I was aware of Jeb somewhere off in this cave, getting me a drink, coming back to find me, and maybe, just maybe caring.
“I know your boyfriend’s here.” Julian squeezed my hand tighter.
“Where’s your?” I paused, still not able to bring myself to call the girl who I’d seen on the mattress months ago and then at Willow’s funeral, what I knew her to be. Girlfriend, I willed my tongue to form the word. Say girlfriend.
“Girlfriend? She’s in the bathroom.”
“What’s her name again?”
“Stephanie.”
“Right.”
Julian rubbed his thumb along the top of my hand. I looked up at the low gritty stucco ceiling which was covered in gum and down at the concrete floor, anywhere to keep from looking him in the eyes. He took a step closer to me to let a giant guy with a pierced nose in a red flannel shirt pass behind him. His chest was pressed up against mine. The room was starting to fill up, body next to body. Everyone was six feet tall.
“Why are you here?” I shouted into his neck.
“You don’t own New York City.” Julian shouted back down into my ear, his lips just inches away from being able to kiss me. I felt an animal surge, a desperate wish for him to stick his tongue in my ear and run it up and down my neck. I leaned forward and into his chest. “You know I try to see the Buttholes whenever I can, and Stephanie has this crazy gay uncle who lives in Soho, so we’re crashing there.”
I wanted him to say, I’m here to see you. Or, I came for you. Some romantic comedy bullshit that Willow and I had always pretended we were above. I wanted to hear his voice soften for me the way it did the other day on the phone. I wanted a getaway car and a birthday cake, a la Sixteen Candles.
The Butthole Surfers began to project movies onto the back wall behind the stage and the crowed shuffled a foot closer to get in a better position. Julian pressed his body up against mine, wrapped his arms around my waist, and gave me a squeeze. I leaned back into him—I couldn’t help it—his cock pressed against my stomach, and for one glorious minute I forgot that anything had changed. I was with Julian at a show, just like before.
There was no Jeb or Stephanie, no Twig or Merilee, and maybe, just maybe if I didn’t think too hard, Willow was somewhere in this same crowd, trying to chat up the prettiest most confused looking girl she could find. And then the movie footage kicked in, and I remembered that I liked The Butthole Surfers more in theory than in reality. I stared at images of butchers sawing in half the carcasses of cows hanging from giant hooks, a surgeon cutting into the shaved chest of a man and prying it open with some gruesome looking forceps, and a field of sunflowers sped-up to bloom and die in an endlessly decaying loop.
I turned away from the screen and Julian’s breath on my neck just as Jeb pushed his way towards us from the back of the crowd. He had my shot in one hand and a beer in the other, and I my heart beat faster for all that he’d given me. I felt Julian slide his hands off of my waist, as Jeb inched closer. “He’s too old for you,” he whispered into my ear, and I knew that he was probably right.
Jeb handed me my shot and I drained it. He looked over at Julian and smiled. “Aren’t you from Lamott?”
“Yeah, I’m Julian.”
“Jeb.”
It occurred to me that I hadn’t told Jeb much about Julian. The bus had been its own landscape—a time capsule of sorts, a deep middle, during, but no before or after.
The projector came to abrupt stop and the band pounced onto the stage. Gibby Haynes ran out to the front of it and spit a giant stream of water out onto to us. His long, stringy brown hair flew around his head like a dark halo. He had on some kind of Lederhosen—weird embroidered felt knickers with matching suspenders—and nothing else. He grabbed the mic and howled something incomprehensibly at us. I searched the crowd for the circle of girls I’d seen before and saw them pressed up against the back wall. Some guy in front of me surged forward and into another guy in front of him. I held out my hand to steady him and to keep him from getting hurled back into me, but I could tell it was pointless. I sighed and turned to Jeb and Julian, who backed up to make a shield for me with their bodies.
“I gotta hang in the back.”
“Gotcha.” Jeb shimmied out of his leather jacket and held it out in my direction. “Would you mind holding this?”
I took the jacket, draped it over my arm, and inched my way through the crowd towards the wall of girls, bopping and nodding quietly in the back. I found my place against the wall, spaced out as Gibby kicked off his boots and danced a hearty bare-feet exposing jig, and remembered my messy arrival in the city earlier that day.
***
I’d barfed into the gutter, looked up, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Merilee handed the cab driver a wad of cash while Jeb wrestled my duffle bag out of the trunk. A line of homeless men and junkies snaked around the corner. One guy fixed his pale blue eyes on me.
“It’ll make you sick,” he muttered and kicked at a scrubby little tree. His pants were cinched tight with a makeshift belt he’d fashioned out of tied together plastic bags. I stood up straight and stepped back into the street, closer to the taxi, and to Jeb and Merilee, who had been, since our plane touched down on the steamy runway in New York, acting like the responsible parents I’d never had.
“Just come to my apartment.” Merilee walked over to me and put the back of her hand on my forehead. “Twig said he’d meet us there. I’ll make dinner.”
“She just needs air. I’m going to take her to the park.” Jeb said and I felt like a dog.
“I’m okay. I’m just carsick.” As shitty as I felt, I was too excited to have finally arrived in New York to admit that there was anything wrong. The cab sped off. My first taxi ride!
Merilee put her arm around my waist. Since we’d confided in each other by the pool, I’d felt her pulling me closer—watching me, trying to take care of me. I didn’t know how to respond, and I still wasn’t sure why she’d told me that she was pregnant.
“Come on Annie, let’s stretch our legs. I’ll show you Tompkins.” Jeb slung my bag over his shoulder and held out his hand impatiently for me to take. He had the same look in his eye he’d had in Little Rock when we went to look for his “friend.” Still, I was desperate to walk around the East Village and to see it through the prism of album covers, song lyrics, and daydreams that I’d cobbled together in the last few years.
“She’s got a fever.” Merilee looked through me and at Jeb. Since her solo interview with Kurt Loder in Dallas and since Jeb and I came back from the zoo in a sweaty, heaving pile, the band’s interactions had hit an all-time low. No one in the actual band spoke that night or on the plane the next day, which left Twig, the crew, and me to run interference.
“She’s a little pale, but that’s our Annie.”
Jeb strode off down 2nd Street, and I gave Merilee a tired good-bye wave. She pressed a scrap of notebook paper into the palm of my hand—her address in New York written in red-felt tip marker in girly, loopy cursive. “I’ll see you at Roseland, tomorrow night,” I said.
“I’ll be there, center stage, probably in a new dress.” Merilee squeezed my hand. “But come by if you need anything. You’ll like my place.”
I ran after Jeb to catch up. He walked quickly up Avenue A. The sun was hot and bright. We passed bodegas, bars, and restaurants. Each one looked to me like it might be the most interesting place I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted more than anything else to look like I belonged—so I kept my eyes down and took in Jeb’s occasional comment as if it was something I’d already innately intuited.
“That’s the gate of a community garden. Some metal worker fashioned it out of used car parts.”
“Uh, huh.”
“Odessa—they have great fries and shakes.”
“Yep.”
“All of the waitresses there are drag queens.”
“Of course.”
“There’s the anarchist’s bookstore.”
“Sure it is.”
“Jim Jarmusch lives over there.”
“I read that somewhere.”
Jeb and I walked through the iron gates of what looked more like a makeshift city than a park. I couldn’t see much grass, but it was tree-lined, even shady in places. There were tents, tarps, and lean-to(s) every couple of feet. Some looked elaborate—with milk crates out in front like rocking chairs on a porch—while others were more make-shift; a tarp draped on a clothesline between two trees or hung over a giant refrigerator box. Some of the tents were fastened at the bottom—tied up tight—while others had their tarps off to the side to expose the contents of whatever their owner had managed to accumulate. I saw small generators, pots and pans, books and magazines, boom boxes, clothing, bottles of wine, and food. The open tents looked like elaborate bird nests, with their owners sitting in the midst of all of their worldly possessions.
“Don’t stare baby,” Jeb grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me towards the brick buildings in the center of the park.
“I’m not,” I said, but I had been. The whole scene reminded me of the Hoovervilles I’d read about in high school; the elaborate makeshift tent cities that tramps and beggars made for themselves during the Great Depression on the outskirts of cities. Every summer growing up I went camping with my grandma in the Alleghany forest, so I knew too that every little campsite becomes a country unto itself with its own customs, delicacies, and personalities. But my grandma camped with senior citizens the occasional visiting grandkid. This campsite had a mix of people—shirtless young men reading from beat-up copies of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, runaway teenagers with dirt under their fingernails and smudged faces, homeless men and women, and drug addicts nodding off on nearby benches. “It’s like a little utopia.”
“Come on, Small Town.”
I shook my hand free from Jeb’s, annoyed. “I’m just going to sit on this bench, while you do whatever it is you have to do.”
Jeb barely looked back. I watched him disappear behind a squat brick house in the center of the park. I sat down and used my t-shirt to wipe the sweat off of my forehead and upper lip. I stared off into the distance at the small enclosed playground and the empty pool off to the side of the park.
“Smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke.” A dealer in a Ramones t-shirt walked by my bench. I ignored him. I remembered a Cheap Hits story about Keith’s night alone in this park. I could see how intense it might feel, and that I might not want to be there at night. My stomach still felt weird, and I leaned over to put my head between my knees. Maybe Merilee was right. Maybe I was sick. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t have to look at what was under the park bench; dried up pieces of dog shit, candy and condom wrappers, and a several small empty plastic bags.
I sat up again and looked over at the blanket someone had strung up between the two trees behind me to make a tent. There were several large holes in it and I could make out a lone figure in the triangular shadow of her fort. She stuck her head out the side of the blanket and looked up at the sky. It was her hair that got me first. The same shade of bleached-out blonde as Willow and the same ten inch Mohawk. She had a mole on her neck too, like the one Willow always talked about getting removed, and the same long earlobes. My heart skipped forward, and for half of a second I thought the thing I’d been secretly believing and hoping all along. It’s Willow! She’s alive! My visions were real! Somehow she managed to trick us all and run away like all of the other twenty-year-olds camped out in this park.
“Willow?” I turned around on the bench and leaned over the back of it.
The woman turned her head and stared at me. She wasn’t Willow at all. She had an entirely different face—brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and a long sharp nose with a couple of piercings in it. Her hair now that she was facing me looked wholly unlike Willow’s too—the shaving was uneven and patchy, with dark black roots. I felt stupid, tricked by my own hope.
“That’s a fucking hippie name. This is an anarchist scene.”
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else.” I put the back of my hand up to my forehead. It was hot and clammy.
“You shouldn’t stare into peoples’ houses,” the wanna-be Willow huffed and drew her head back under the blanket like a hermit crab backing up into its shell.
I sat there, slumped on the bench, stunned by the depths of my own longing. Grief, I was starting to see, had its own vision and logic. And yet I wasn’t entirely convinced that the mean anarchist cocooning in the tarp hadn’t been Willow for a split second. She wouldn’t entirely give up on me. She couldn’t just let me go, could she?
Jeb came out of the brick house practically giggling. He speed walked us to his apartment and hid out in the bathroom for so long that I fell asleep in front of the TV. When I woke up at dusk in a crabby stupor, he was waving concert tickets in front of my face and frying up eggs and bacon.
**
Gibby Haynes bent over behind the drum kit and re-emerged holding a giant bullhorn. He shouted into it, and the roiling mosh pit sped up. Several guys thrust their fists into the air. The two guitarists wandered around Gibby and created an anti-rhythm, more dissonance than melody. Gibby dropped the bullhorn, pulled a bottle out of his back pocket, and smashed it theatrically on top of his drummer’s head. It must have been fake because the drummer didn’t even flinch. The theatrics, I decided were the best thing about the show. The Surfers made a show about a show, rather than a fun performance on it’s own.
I knew from Julian who’d been to other Butthole shows, that sometimes if Gibby liked the crowd, he’d take off his clothes. Maybe that would catapult the back wall of women into caring. I looked down the row at us; Stephanie had joined the line at the other end and was holding a Butthole Surfers album up into the air. Her breasts strained against her too-tight t-shirt. Was she for real? Had she seen me? Did she care? Jeb’s jacket was heavy and pissing me off, so I stashed in on the floor next to one of my fellow wallflowers and wormed my way over to the bathroom. I felt feverish again at the memory of the near-Willow and the very real possibility that I might have to hang out with Stephanie and Julian or at least talk to them together. I needed to splash some water on my face.
The bathroom was a dark mess of caked on graffiti and piss stench. There were two stalls, one with a door and one without, and a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. I tried to lock the door behind me, but the doorknob was loose and ineffectual, so I stood in front of the chipped bathroom sink and stared into the shard of mirror that was still affixed to the wall. I saw a sweaty looking girl with a raw expanse of newly shaved head and dark circles under her eyes. I leaned in to read the graffiti next to the mirror. “Anarchy in the UK!”; “I wanna blow you!”; “Fuck God!”; “The revolution will not be televised.” Someone had drawn a bunch of cocks and balls around the perimeter of the mirror, and along the bottom, he or she scrawled in thick black marker, “Suck it!” I turned on the tap and watched as a slow stream of water trickled out.
The door opened and Julian came into the bathroom. His hair was plastered back onto his head and his t-shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“This bathroom is legendary.” He said it like he was conducting the official Lower East Side punk tour, and then went into the stall without a door. I heard him undo his belt and then the sound of his piss hitting the side of the toilet. He zipped back up, fastened his belt, and stood at the mouth of the stall, his hands up on either side of it. With the gross, graffiti-packed background, and his sweaty, lean body, he looked like an album cover for a really cool new band. “So why did you ditch?”
“Jeb asked me to go on the road.”
Julian rolled his eyes. “He’s thirty-five, you’re twenty, how is that real? And last time I checked you were still in love with me.”
“You’re such a narcissist.” I leaned against the sink, but I knew he wasn’t entirely wrong.
“You left that party and you bolted from Willow’s funeral because you couldn’t handle me.”
“So?” I felt the current of electricity between us.
“So?” Julian said in a girly voice.
“I keep seeing her.” I needed to tell someone who might understand.
“What do you mean?” Julian reached for my hand and pulled us both into the stall with the door. He closed it and turned the latch.
“In the park today, in mirrors, sometimes I think she’s behind me on the street or in the room.”
“She cheated by killing herself.” Julian put his hand on the back of my head to feel my stubble. I had that same feeling I had the night when I was tripping—that I do anything with him, anywhere. I thought of Stephanie earnestly holding up the album like she was at a Rolling Stones concert. He was mine first, I thought. “I can’t forgive her for that.”
“Why didn’t she tell us?” I leaned in and rested my cheek on Julian’s chest. “I saw her that day, wading by the river. I could have saved her.”
Julian stroked my hair. His heart beat fast against my ear. I closed my eyes. I wanted to savor him. “Annie, you couldn’t have. She was way too stubborn.”
Gibby Haynes howled from deep within the bowels of the club and I felt that animal thing in me finally in me snap. I pushed Julian back up against the wall of the stall and kissed him. He put his hands underneath my t-shirt and up my bra and I slid my hand down the front of his jeans and rubbed his dick. He groaned, undid the front of my jeans, and pushed them and my underwear down around my knees. I unfastened his belt and pulled him out of his boxers. I put one foot on top of the toilet seat for leverage while he pushed up against me and then inside of me. I gasped.
“Does he feel like this?” Julian picked me up and I wrapped my legs around his waist. I pressed my arms against the stall walls for support.
“No,” I breathed into his ear as he moved slowly back and forth.
“Do you miss me?”
“Yeah.”
“Turn around.” I pressed my face against the stall wall and squeezed my eyes shut. Julian pushed back inside of me and wrapped his arms around my chest. As he moved in and out of me, I flashed in and out of images—the graffiti around the bathroom mirror, Twig’s mouth against my ear in the bus, Merilee pressing her address into my hand, Jeb’s beautiful chiseled chin, and then I started to see light and white, to move into a tunneled-out version of myself; hollow, the core.
I saw me and only me, splayed out on the mattress at that party, touching myself. The stall went red and I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt like a parachute opening, a kid sledding down a steep hill, and a trombone slide all at once. I don’t know, I probably cried out, I don’t remember. I pressed my cheek up against the hot stall wall and Julian started to move faster and faster. He used one hand to pull at my hair and kept the other wrapped tightly around my waist. “Oh Annie,” he groaned, pulled out, and came on my back.
The bathroom door outside of the stall creaked open and Julian and I froze. Someone giggled.
“My stuff is pretty good.” It was Jeb.
“Do you have one of those little spoons?” Stephanie asked.
Julian turned his neck and mouthed into the side of my face, “Stephanie.” He put his index fingers to his lips. I shot him a dirty look. Duh, I wanted to shout.
“Let’s just use your pinky nail.” I could picture Jeb leaning over her, with his little bag of cocaine and her pressed up against him with her tight t-shirt and long blonde hair. I felt a pang of jealousy, but I knew for Jeb it was always more about the drug than the girl.
Julian shifted back on his feet and attempted to pull up his jeans, but his belt buckle clanged against the side of the stall. We both froze again. Julian rested his chin on my shoulder.
If Stephanie and Jeb heard anything, they didn’t let on.
“You can just wipe it on your teeth too.” Jeb inhaled.
“Uh, it tastes gross, but it makes my nose all tingly.”
I thought back to the after-party on the road outside of Nashville, the joy of that night and of talking, the way blow makes you feel like you can say anything and it’s smart and clever and fitting.
“You should come to one of our shows.” I imagined Jeb leaning against the sink. Casual, confidant, no big deal.
“Can you get me in for free?” I saw Stephanie looking up at him, flattered by the invitation.
“Sure.”
The both inhaled again deeply and then the door opened and they left. Julian let out a big puff of air. “Fuck.” He was still draped over me, his arms wrapped around my neck. He kissed the shaved part of my head, and I pressed up against him. We stayed that way for ten more seconds, and then Julian took a step back and grabbed a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser to clean off my back. I pulled up my underwear and jeans and turned around to face him. My nose tingled and I eyes felt watery. I wanted more than anything not to cry, to let him know that I was just as far gone as I was when he dumped me at Denny’s. Who knew what this was? Or what it meant?
Julian knew I was vulnerable. “Maybe this is going happen from time to time.”
I felt unlocked, whole again for a moment, and I didn’t want to go back. “Is that enough?”
Julian kissed my mouth and then the tip of my nose. “It’s more complicated now.” He draped his arms around my neck and I leaned into his chest. The floor felt wobbly, and I didn’t know what to say. The stall was a time capsule or a telephone booth, a place for time travel or transformation; I wasn’t sure which. But I knew I felt different—unhinged or broken open, definitely exposed. My two weeks on the road with Jeb felt now like a carnival, a shot of adrenaline for a mourning girl, a cover up.
“What should we do?” I listened to his heart thump against his chest. I’d been here before. I’d asked him this same question in the booth at Denny’s when he was breaking up with me.
Julian shrugged and kissed the top of my head. “I dunno Annie. Maybe we’ll find each other when we’re forty and settle down, but I can’t get locked into anything right now.”
“I’m not a lock,” I took a step back and folded my arms defensively. “And I’ll be totally different when I’m forty. I’ll have everything figured out.”
“I know you will, Annie, I know.” Julian turned the silver latch on the stall door and broke the spell. I walked out into the rest of the bathroom, out the second door, and into the steaming cave of the club. Julian squeezed my hand one last time and hurled himself back into the center of the pit. I saw his hair fly up over his head and his fist up in the air, and then I lost sight of him. Gibby’s Lederhosen suspenders hung around his knees, and the waistband had fallen down to expose a dark mass of pubic hair. The cave smelled like two hundred sweaty guys. I stared into the pit. I knew it had something to teach me about entropy or chaos, bodies in motion, collision, and accident, I just couldn’t figure out what.
I looked over at the back wall of women. They were still there, lined up, all tidy and neat. Stephanie was at the far end, scanning the crowd, no doubt for Julian. I looked back at the pit for Jeb, but I couldn’t see him. I put my hand in my pocket and fingered the torn edges of the scrap of paper Merilee had given me. It was warm against my body. I hadn’t yet looked at the address, but I knew it was close by. I pushed through the crowd near the back and made my way out into the hallway and towards the mouth of the club. I felt with a kind of certainty I’d never known before that there was nothing for me at that show, and that Jeb and Julian each in their own way, would always be just out of reach, an inch or two beyond my fingertips, no matter how far out I managed to stretch my arms.
When I got outside the August night air was humid and thick, but there was way more of it on the street then in the club. I breathed in deeply and puffed out my chest. You don’t need Julian and you don’t need Jeb, I told myself as I pulled the address out of my pocket. “93 Saint Marks Place. Vegan paradise.” Merilee had drawn a doodle of brick building with large windows. In one window, she’d even made a heart.
“Which way is Saint Marks?” I asked the bouncer, who was smoking a joint, and staring off into a traffic light.
He waved his hand in the direction of up, and exhaled a wall of smoke into the space between us. “Walk up the Bowery, stay right when the road forks, and you’ll hit it.”
“Thanks.” I started walking. I kept my head down and my eyes a foot in front of my feet. I took in the street trash—the cigarette butts with pink lipstick around the filter, the crushed beer cans, and piles of deli coffee cups and slice plates cascading out of the garbage cans on each corner. When I glanced up at the clusters of people, the New Yorkers, who had no idea I’d just landed here, and that this was my first time walking on a street alone, and who probably couldn’t have cared less, I felt a deep awe—at their beautiful indifference and total self-absorption. It was something to aspire to, a badge that said that you were real. I wanted their independence and what I saw that night as their deep commitment to self hood.
There were groups of teenagers in cut-offs shorts and permed hair, couples holding hands, a gnarled-looking squat woman in a flowered house dress and flip-flops whose wild hair reminded me of a troll doll, and several shoeless, nattering men, who called out to me for spare change and food. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was scared. I’d never walked alone in a city, the city, at night. I knew too, that I was making a break for it, running away for real this time and doing it alone, and that I had the guilty look of someone who was hoping to get away without getting caught.
I slowed down when I turned onto Saint Marks. It was the mosaics that caught my attention—on every corner the streetlamps were covered in shiny beads, shards of mirrors, and broken china. I stopped on the corner of Second Avenue and Saint Marks to run my fingers along the surface of the tiled lamppost. Whoever made them—years later I’d find out it was a Vietnam veteran named Jim Powers, aka, The Mosaic Man—also used words and images. There were several nutcrackers and Japanese cats, a picture of Jerry Garcia, and the words, “Neither more nor less,” and “Theater 80.” It looked like colored Braille—turquoise, fire engine red, cobalt, yellow—a coded message, a sign that I was in the right place and on a street that either once did or might still belong to artists. I walked past the head shops and sunglasses kiosks until I was in front of the address Merilee had given me. It was a small white brick building with a high iron gate around the stoop. I pressed the buzzer and waited.
“Look Ma! Our orphan came back!” Twig swung open the door and stood at the top of the stoop. He had his long hair tied up in a high ponytail and wore his usual uniform of a dirty jeans and a browning V-neck Hanes t-shirt.
“Annie!” I heard Merilee call out faintly from inside the building. I squinted and saw her silhouette in the screened window on the second floor.
Twig padded down the stoop stairs to unlock the gate, and pulled me for a sweaty hug. “Couldn’t hack it without me?”
I held onto him for too long, breathing into his neck and chest. I had a lump in my throat—some weird delay from processing what had just happened with Julian and Jeb. How could I explain that I’d gone back in time, and I’d gotten something that I once wanted, and I still wasn’t right or whole or even remotely content.
“You okay, vagabond?”
I let go of Twig and looked up into his deep green eyes. He squinted back down at me, winked, and pulled me through the door of the building and into the beautiful pressed tin hallway that led to Merilee’s apartment. “Yeah, better now,” I managed to croak.
“Did you hear that I’m going to be a daddy?” Twig whispered at me over his shoulder.
I shook my head, unsure if I was supposed to let on that I already knew. My head felt hot again and too big for my neck.
“Can you believe it? Me, a dad?”
I noticed an extra kick in his walk, some kind of ultra swagger that made it clear that he was happy.
By the time we got to Merilee’s door, I was holding the walls of the hallway for support. Merilee greeted us, all tiny and pretty, in a long black skirt and a red tank top. She was holding her black and white cat up to her face, but when she saw me, she put him down and took me by the elbow.
“Bed, now,” she said, pulling me towards the back of her apartment. “Jeb’s already called here twice,” she added. “What do you want me to say?”
“I guess you were right about the fever,” I said, staring up at the ceiling, as Twig unlaced my Converse and peeled off my socks. I pretended I didn’t hear the part about Jeb looking for me. The bed felt soft and cool—there were candles lit on the windowsill and an oscillating fan moving air back and forth across the room.
“I’m right about most things.” Merilee stared down at me from the edge of the bed. I looked up at her chin, at the way it jutted out into the world, all present, all confident. I wondered how she got that way. “Where is Jeb anyway?”
“I left him.” I paused and let the room spin a couple of times. “At the club,” I added in a whisper.
Merilee and Twig’s faces faded out and I fell asleep. Several times in the night, I heard Jeb’s voice floating down the hall from the answering machine. His voice, that longing, reminded me of the messages Willow’s mom had left for me before I ran away. At first he was gentle and calm, and then he sounded sadder and more desperate.
“Hey Annie, not sure if you’re there, but I just want to make sure you’re not lost out there in the big city.”
“Not sure why you left, but call me back, okay?”
“Back at my apartment. Miss you babe. I’ll wait for you here.”
“You gotta let me know what happened. We can fix it. I promise.”
When I woke up in early in the morning, it was still dark out. I tried to absorb the sounds of the East Village. I heard someone rummaging through the garbage downstairs and the crush and clank of beers cans getting thrown around. A siren wailed down Avenue A and a woman shouted, “You better learn how to love me!” Her high heels clicked angrily off down the street. I fell back asleep sandwiched between Twig and Merilee. We’d kicked off the blanket and sheet. Merilee turned and rested her hand on my hip. Twig pulled me into the crook of his armpit. “Triptych,” I thought as I drifted back off to sleep. “It’s called a triptych.”
22
Willow
We all had our collections. My dad loved—no shitting—stamps. He used to take me down to the Lamott post office when I was a kid to get the special issue ones. We’d stop at the drugstore for licorice, drive home all giddy, and sit at the dining room table with the lights as bright as we could get them. I must have been about eight and I loved to use the magnifying glass to stare into whatever tiny landscape each stamp held. I imagined I was Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys, looking for clues. My favorite was a series commemorating ancient Egypt, which had the pyramids, a desert sandscape, and mummies all on one tiny stamp. When we finished staring into those miniature worlds, we’d use my mom’s tweezers to glue them into photo albums.
My mom collected apples, well, anything that was a representation of an apple—she had apple figurines and tchotchkes, apple towels and potholders, apple earrings and necklaces, and apples on t-shirts, pillows, and blankets. When I was younger, I thought it was cute, and it made buying her presents easy. But when I became a weird, angry teenager, it struck me as a strange perversion, a block to thinking, too simple. What did the apple mean to my mother? Why did she love them so? And what deeper, more unnameable love was it hiding? I never got to ask.
I had my albums, all of us at Cheap Hits had our music and our concert t-shirts. Louder than Bombs and Horses still felt dear to me, and I would give anything to be able to slip my neck through the torn collar of my first Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt. But it was my military shirts that I missed the most. By the time I died, I’d probably amassed at least twenty-five different ones. You could buy them everywhere. Most Salvation Army stores had an entire rack of them. The trick for me was finding the shirts with the soldier’s nametag still affixed to it, and in a small size. At first I didn’t think too much about military clothes—I liked the obvious subversion of it—punks re-purposing government issue clothing, saying, “Fuck you!” to the system that killed and discriminated. Later, I realized that I liked the idea of a dyke in some tiny male soldier’s uniform. Somehow or other, we were trying each other on.
The living became my newest collection. Turns out, I took to haunting. I had a passion for it, considered it a calling. I’d never had a real job before, unless you counted working part-time at a record store a career—which I didn’t, and once they saw the size of my paycheck, my parents didn’t either. I loved Cheap Hits because I could hang out with my friends and control the music, but there wasn’t any heat for me there. I didn’t matter then and I couldn’t make a difference. I didn’t shape thought or change convention.
Annie, well, she was easy to follow. Confused enough to let me in and guilty enough to see. Her headspace was a jumble and her desires so unthinking, that sometimes she felt like a pulsing portal. I missed her because even though I’d never been in love with her, she was the girl I knew best and the one I’d loved the longest.
Then there was Merilee’s baby, that opening in the seam of the living world. I saw a hole, a rip on the horizon, and I wanted to crawl back into it. You see, even the dead have desires. I wanted bodies and warmth and sometimes I wanted out of the water.
At first, Annie and her friends—Twig, Merilee, and the rest of the bus—we’re all I needed. And then we got to New York, and the water changed. The East River was full of muck and garbage, the hardiest whiskered fish, and the bottoms of giant boats, dredging and channeling. The streets, it turned out, were wet too with puddles and piss and full of the remains of the day: food, cast-off clothing, old sewing machine tables, records, picture frames, stained mattresses, and people.
People, it turned out, could be garbage too. I mean, that wasn’t a surprise, I’d been treated like garbage for a lot of my life. God knows, I often felt like shit. But this was different. They were invisible, smelly, and thrown out, and yet they were making a go of it, holding on and getting by. Refusing to go away. Pitching a tent, staking a claim, marking territory in piss and a blue tarp. Pretty soon, I began to think of myself as a garbage collector. If I had a body, I’d have wanted to wear the garbage man’s standard issue green shirt. Garbage men, or sanitation workers, were an order, a clan. They had a code, a uniform, something I could subvert.
I began to love my (not) life among the oily ruins.
The East Village turned out to be the best place for passing and parlor tricks, and I found with time and concentration, I could leave the water. I found a home in the park. I liked picking through the garbage and eavesdropping on conversations about junk and evil landlords. I quickly mastered the art of impersonation and drag. I made temporary homes out of tattooed girls and dirty boys. I squatted in skulls and chests. I fashioned a nest out of newspapers and bird droppings. I ran with the anarchists’ dogs. We chased rats and sometimes one of us caught one in our teeth, and we shook it to death, and then nosed it with our snouts and walked away bored.
I read over the shoulders of the NYU and Parsons students who dared to sit in the park. One girl, with earrings up the side of her ear and freckles on her shoulders, was reading Leaves of Grass. I stared into her cleavage and managed to re-absorb a couple of lines from “Song of Myself,” a poem that had been nearly ruined for me in high school by a football player who decided to read Whitman out loud to the class in a mincing, prancing, sing-song voice once he found out that Whitman might have been gay.
Listener up there! What have you to confide in me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a
minute longer).
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I breathed in the smell of the girl’s neck and I realized that when I was alive the poem meant nothing to me. Now it made sense to whatever animal, vegetable mind I possessed. In death, I became democratic, erotic even. I contained multiple bodies and selves, and I contradicted myself, because I had no one self anymore. I became large, so that I could house movement and flux. What’s more contradictory than water and air? I became the many shards and beads of glass affixed to the lampposts on Saint Marks Place. Or maybe I wore the beads and glass like a necklace over one of my military shirts. It was one of the few good choices my mother made in those last two years. She buried me in one of my favorite shirts, somehow finally from the other side, she heard me. Maybe finally, I’d become that shaman.
In the park, I learned to talk to the other ghosts. I took them in, we mingled, and I ate their stories, like a communion wafer. They were all laborers and immigrants—people who made sense to me because I came from Lamott and because I died in a factory river. They rioted over bread and Black people. They clashed over drafts and the English. They trampled the trees and grass. They worked in slaughterhouses and got drunk in beer gardens. The police attacked them on horses. Eventually there were children and hippies, playgrounds, a Boys Club, and a band shell. The Grateful Dead came and Abbie Hoffman tried to make peace.
I don’t know, I wasn’t there for long. Eventually, I caught up with Annie. I followed her fever. I may have been the one who made her sick. It was too much to ingest maybe, but we tried our best.
Julian used to be mine too, but he shut himself off. I watched them in the bathroom, but then I turned away. Cocks disgust me. Hetero fucking. I’ve seen it all before—in movies and in pretty much every book I’ve ever been made to read. Boring.
I got out of there. We got out. And the street smelled like shit and sweat. We walked fast, Annie and me, and it felt good and right. Just us chickens, my mom used to say when my dad left for work in the morning. Just us rats, I used to say back.
23
Jeb
“How do you all feel about endings?” Merilee had a new dress on—it was red and white striped with a big collar and a fitted skirt. She wore it with a matching top hat. It made her look like a sexy peppermint ringmaster.
The crowd booed and whistled. We were halfway through our encore. I was sweating out of my eyeballs, and we’d just finished playing an old song, “Indian Summer,” from our first album. It was for our most devoted fans and a pain in the ass because I had to learn the guitar parts all over again, but I liked it. It was a different era, a younger Band of None. We didn’t write ornate, opaque songs like that anymore. Fuck if I even knew what the song was about.
“This is the last show on our tour!” Merilee purred into the mic as if nobody knew.
The crowed cheered wildly and I stared down into the front row. I was looking for Annie, who I missed far more than I thought possible.
Merilee took the mic off of the stand and turned her back to the audience. She looked across the stage at each of us—me, Terry, Bobby, and Ian—and grinned. Whirling back around to face the crowd, she coo-asked into the mic, “Do you want to be the first to know?”
The crowd roared, “Yes!”
“We’ve had an amazing time on tour! Some of us even fell in love!” Merilee looked over at me and winked. “But even the best things have to end, don’t you think?”
The crowd booed some more. I looked over at Terry, who was clutching his drumsticks. Bobby shot me a “WTF?” look. I strummed out a couple of chords to our next song in the hopes of distracting Merilee and moving back into the music.
“These men taught me everything I know—how to sing, write songs, dance, and love. And I was just fourteen when I met them.” She glanced over her shoulder in our direction, walked to the very front ledge of the stage, and knelt down. She did this every so often, usually to tell our fans some pretend secret or funny story about one of us. It made me nervous as fuck—she looked like she might fall of the stage or get devoured by our fans. A couple of girls in the front row stretched their hands out to touch Merilee’s shoulder and knee.
“But sometimes a girl gets restless and runs away.” Half of the crowd cheered, but the other half stayed quiet. “I grew up with one of those moms who lived in the kitchen. She hardly ever left our house—that 8 x 11 square of linoleum was her kingdom. The phone was in there, she made us lasagna and cookies, and the neighborhood ladies came over.” Merilee paused to sit down completely on her knees. The crowd leaned forward. “When she died I started to wonder if she stayed in there because she was afraid, you know?” I saw the front row of fans nod as if they knew what the fuck Merilee was talking about.
Bobby stepped out from behind his keyboard. He looked like he might barf.
“Or maybe she didn’t know how to make anything else?” Merilee wondered out loud to the crowd. She stood up, brushed off her dress, and walked back towards us. She looked deep in thought, oblivious to us, her band, and how we might feel. “And I gotta admit, she made the best eggplant parm and Italian wedding cookies of anyone in our neighborhood or family.”
“Well, I have some new recipes and I really want to try them out.” Merilee spoke still with her back to the audience. She looked over at me and I saw that her eyes were wet. I smiled back in spite of myself, probably because she was the first musician I ever got to love in person and I already felt nostalgic for us and for the band.
“We all have our own projects. Jeb’s starting a hardcore band with his friend Denny from New Orleans. They’re calling themselves The Sick Bastards. Ian’s going to play bass on Letterman for a while.” I looked over at Ian who shrugged at me and mouthed, “I just found out.” “Bobby and Terry are figuring out their next moves, but I know no matter what, you, our fans will support us all.” Merilee turned towards the audience and stared out into the bright lights. She was talking to everyone and no one, strangers and her family, but most of all she was talking to me. “The Band of None is breaking up,” she said loudly into the mic as if volume could make it stick.
Terry threw down his drumsticks and stalked off backstage. Bobby walked over to my mic and grabbed it. “Fuck you, Mer, fuck you.”
“And there’s that too,” Merilee said out to the audience as if she were tattling to a teacher.
My face felt too hot. I needed to finish this set, smoke a bowl, fuck Annie, and forget. We, the band, were, I knew, chumps. Now that it was out, in public, and my nostalgia wave had passed, I remembered that I wanted it done differently. Everyone in the band and our crew knew we were over, but I wanted each of us to write our own endings. Fuck, my new band wasn’t called The Sick Bastards. We were between names.
My heart sped up and my eyes went blurry and fuzzy. I’d never had a panic attack on stage before and I wasn’t about to let myself pass out like a pussy for what would turn out to be The Band of None’s last show. I lifted my guitar strap over my head, handed my guitar to Bobby who took it he was a roadie, jumped off the stage, pushed through the crowd, and out the front door. The fans, God love them, parted for me. They looked just as stunned as I felt. They made way, and for once they were quiet.
I walked into the lobby, past Toby and Tabitha at the merchandise table, and kicked open the front door to the club. I was greeted by one of the bouncers, Joey, a 250-pound Italian guy who grew up in Bay Ridge and liked to talk about fretwork and pussy. I swear he’d worked at Roseland since it opened in 1965. He’d seen a lot of band baggage spill out onto the carpet in front of the club.
“You okay man?” Joey fussed with the buttons on his giant pin-stripped suit coat. He opened the jaw of a pack of Marlboro Reds, shook one out, lit it, and passed it over to me.
I took a big drag off of it and shook my head no. I smoked it down to the filter and said, “You heard?”
Joey shook his head. “I’m out here. All I hear are screaming fans and couples drunk fighting about who is a bigger asshole.”
“The Band of None is history.” The nicotine went straight to my addled head. I felt jittery.
“I’ve seen a lot of bands break up and get back together.”
“Maybe we’ll get a new lead singer.” I took another drag. “One who is a less controlling bitch.”
Joey laughed and smashed the butt of his cigarette under the heel of his enormous loafer. “Maybe one you’re not so in love with.”
I motioned for him to give me another cigarette. I lit it and inhaled as deeply as I could. “It’s not like that, I mean, yes, I love her, but it’s complicated. A band, especially one that’s been around a while and achieved something is like a dysfunctional family. You meet a girl when you’re fifteen and you fall in love and then you spend every fucking waking moment together until you feel related.” I smashed the cigarette under my boot. “It’s like your girlfriend turned into your sister and business partner. Incest, basically.”
“You sound like you’re in Fleetwood Mac.” Joey flicked his butt in a long arc into the gutter and guffawed. “Now that is a miracle—the shit they’ve done to one another—but they keep writing songs and touring.”
We stood there under the awning of the marquee and stared out into the thin rain. I remembered Travis Bickle’s famous line from Taxi Driver. All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I thought about saying it out loud to Joey but aside from a far-off ambulance wail, 52nd Street was quiet and empty, and the lines seemed suddenly like archeology, an artifact from an older, more fucked up New York.
“Don’t you live by Tompkins Square Park? Did you hear about that wackjob who killed his girlfriend, cooked her in a stew, and fed her to the squatters?” Joey pulled another cigarette out of the pack and offered it to me. I shook my head no.
“Urban legend.” I felt resistant to this particular story. It was too ridiculous.
“The police nabbed him. He confessed and there’s even a witness who saw a finger floating in the soup.” Joey burned through his cigarette.
“Fuck.” It was all I could manage in response to something gruesome that really had no effect on me, and wouldn’t alter anything I ever said or did. I thought of my mom sitting in front of the police scanner like it was the goddam radio, her swollen ankles propped up onto the round hassock she kept in the kitchen near the dining room table I’d bought her, calling her friend Kay on the phone whenever another old crone had fallen changing a light bulb or the volunteer fire fighters had to use the jaws of life to pry somebody’s mangled body out of his own car.
I got used to that shit—the endless cataloging of gruesome details, the morbid talk that made up much of small town gossip, and was always spoken in a concerned hush. Sometime during high school, my mom stopped listening to Elvis and James Brown and switched over to the scanner. She traded in music for crime and she became my own personal police blotter. “Did you hear about what happened to Gladys Maycomb out on Route 9?” “I heard on the scanner, an ambulance had to be called to the Tuttmayers, cardiac arrest.” “A woman, over on 62, hit a deer and it flipped into the air and went through the windshield of another car.” Hmmm, really, shit, oh my god, that’s awful.
My mother still thought of violence as Biblical, everywhere, affecting mankind at every turn. I only cared about the stuff that happened right in front of me, to me, to my person or my little circle of friends. Was this how I’d become a New Yorker? Even the butcher of Tompkins Square Park didn’t feel close enough to scare me, though I felt some twitch in my shrunken urban heart for his girlfriend. I’d heard she was studying ballet at Julliard and working as a topless dancer at a bar. She sounded like Annie. Beautiful, but confused. Down on her luck, but hopeful. The ones that were walking around on the edge of the cliff, and maybe gonna trip and fall, the saving kind.
“I heard she was a dancer.” I played along.
“A stripper.” Joey cracked the knuckles on his left hand and winced. “Arthritis,” he said into the humid air underneath the marquee.
I should have known Merilee would blindside me. The day was all off. I’d spent it alternately miserable and angry about Annie, that she hadn’t called me, and that she’d just disappeared out of the club the night before without so much as a smoke signal. As I lay on the couch in my apartment, staring at the giant suitcase-carrying roaches who paraded across the counter tops even though I paid for an exterminator to come every fucking week and tasted the bitter coke hangover in the back of my throat, I imagined the newspaper headlines that would turn me into the next famous dirty old man.
“Small town sweetheart disappears into city’s music underworld.”
“Young upstate woman goes missing after less than 24 hours in the Village.”
“Tompkins Square Park eats another kid.”
“Top Forty Indie Guitar Darling’s young girlfriend is kidnapped.”
And then I took a nap and a shower, I picked up the phone when it rang and instead of hearing Annie’s high, sweet, off-pitch voice, telling that she missed me and wanted to come back, I heard the nasally wine of some desperate teenage fan, who’d never met me but was threatening to use her mom’s credit card to fly in from for the last show at Roseland. I talked her off of her ledge and called my dealer.
And when I finally got to Roseland, I felt tired and sad. Annie had been gone for less than a day, but I already missed her. I’d gotten used to seeing the road through her. She’d never been anywhere, so every new landscape and story I told made her those big green eyes pop out of her head. I loved how excited New York made her—even the garbage cans and the homeless guys were fascinating to her. I hadn’t felt that way in years. Maybe I needed more of that vision. Maybe I needed her next to me.
Backstage, I saw her standing next near the food table, cutting into a block of cheddar like nothing had ever happened, like we were all just back on the bus.
“Sorry, I disappeared.” Annie broke her slab of cheddar in two, and put one piece in her mouth. “I forgot that I hate the Butthole Surfers.”
“Where did you go?”
“I just walked. It’s a big deal for me to finally be in New York, so I headed north and I hit St. Marks Place and I got mesmerized by the lampposts and then I remembered I had Merilee’s address in my pocket.” She stared down at her cheese. Twenty-year-olds are shit liars—shifty-limbed, weird-eyed, bad alibis, you name it. “It was crazy, but when I took the scrap of paper out of my pocket, I was actually just two buildings away from hers.”
I weighed my options. “Well, the fucking stars were aligned,” I wanted to say. She looked up at me and blinked. I felt the tug of my dick against my pants. The skin around her eyes was wrinkle-free, like a baby’s. The sexy, smudgy thing she did around the edges was hot, and her lips were red and full, parted, as always.
“I was still feverish, so I passed out there.”
I had the mature, intellectual thought that I had no right to be jealous or territorial. She’d never agreed to be my girlfriend, and truth be told, I’d taken her for granted. Still, I thought of Annie as my girl, my project, mine, all mine, and I had the pissed off sensation that Merilee and Twig had stolen her from me, poached her when my guard was down.
I’d gotten used to her weird animal, oddly intellectual presence. She was always around, drawing something or leafing through some book one of the crew had left backstage. I got off on seeing her read Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Bukowski or looking over her shoulder as she tried to fix some old drawing of her dead friend. I guess I liked that she made things, had her own projects even on the road with the band. And Jesus, did I miss fucking her.
I pulled her into my chest, but she stiffened.
“It’s still a dangerous city,” I said and pawed at her hair.
I remembered the fifty odd times she’d melted into me since I met her—the way she pressed her hot little body up against my dick, no matter who we with or where we were.
“I was totally safe.” She took a tiny step back away from me and my dick fell. She’d never pulled away from me before.
Twig pushed out of Merilee’s door and past us. “Gotta go wait on a friend.” Annie smiled at him and turned her head a little to the side, like she was trying to get the movie-screen version, to fit him all in. “I was thinking I might stay with Merilee and Twig for a while.”
“You breaking up with me?” I felt like making her say it. I wanted to see her squirm, and to know where I stood.
She dropped her remaining piece of sweaty cheddar onto the food table. Her eyes roamed around my chest and towards my elbows and wrists, anywhere but my eyes. “It’s such a confusing time. I can think better at Merilee’s.”
Merilee stuck her head out of the door of her dressing room. “We on?” she interrupted us.
“Five.” I flexed my fingers a couple of times, willing my eight Tylenol to do their job and loosen my joints just enough so that I could start the first song.
“Righto.” Merilee slammed the door shut and Annie continued, “Being with you on the bus, traveling like that was the most amazing interlude, but now that we’ve landed in New York, I realize everything’s a mess in my life.”
“I can help you figure it out.” I looked over her shoulder at Velvet, the twin brothers, whose names I still couldn’t keep straight. They’d cornered a pretty girl with magenta hair and big tits. She was pointing in our direction, but they’d made a fence around her with their long legs and boring English accents.
“You’re confusing. I can’t think straight around you.” Annie pushed her hair behind her ears and looked up at me. Our eyes locked, and I sensed that about this part, she wasn’t lying.
“You know in The Odyssey? Odysseus is traveling and trying to get home and he keeps getting detained and waylaid. I’m not trying to get back to Lamott, but I am trying to get somewhere else, New York I guess, anywhere really. I see that now. You’re like a drug, no your like one of those women he meets on an island, Circe or Calypso, so tempting and so beautiful, but ultimately dangerous.” Annie took another baby step back away from me. She had a bright-eyed Eureka! look on her face, like the literature bullshit she’d just laid out had helped her finally say something right and true about me.
“I’m not dangerous.” I knew if I could just get her alone, away from the band and backstage, I could convince her otherwise.
“You’re incredibly persuasive. You are the only person, like ever, who got me out of Lamott.”
“But that’s a good thing,” I reasoned. “Just come over tonight, after the show. We can figure this all out.”
Annie shook her head no and her eyes shifted off of me, my face, our conversation, and towards Twig who had just skipped back in with his delivery. Maybe later he’d give me some.
I imagined her pussy, slick and tight, her slender twenty-year old waist, and mound of soft pubic hair that I could sink my dick into and maybe my face. I kept staring, settling into the fantasy as Annie and Twig turned away from me, from the entire room, and made a glowing halo of conversation around themselves. Such a beautiful angel, I thought to myself. You were lucky to get this time with her. I knew even at that moment, that it was going to be hard to be without my Annie, that she’d been different, special. Fuck, I was already feeling nostalgic, and she was ten feet away from me.
The double red doors of the club opened, and Twig stumbled out onto the sidewalk.
“Hey brother.” Joey extended a huge arm to catch Twig.
Twig mumbled something I couldn’t understand, grabbed for Joey’s arm like it was some kind of trapeze bar, and missed it entirely. He fell face first onto the dirty red carpet in front of the club.
“Easy fella.” Joey bent down to help Twig up and I looked on. I was used to Twig being falling-down drunk. Twig didn’t take Joey’s hand. Instead, he rolled over onto his back. I saw a thin trickle of blood streaming out of his nostril and onto the top of his lip. My heart sped up and I kneeled down next to him. “Twiggy?” I pushed his sweaty hair off of his forehead. “Twig!” I leaned over and shouted into ear.
He smiled up at me and whispered, “Daddy, I’m gonna be a Daddy.” And then his body started to convulse.
24
Twig
I was, in my addict way, happy. I died fucked up and at the center of it. Spectacle. Plain and simple. Everybody staring at me. Sure, the blood trickling out of my nose was nasty, and the convulsing made me look like a spaz in the midst of an epileptic fit. But the crowd, as all crowds do, did something for me. Jeb kneeling at my side, panicked and for once, totally present. The rock god humbled! Annie, Tabitha, and the rest of the band, in a shocked tight semi-halo of concerned light at my feet. Merilee clutching at her stomach and sobbing. I knew then, that I mattered to her, that she loved me, and that even if I did die; I’d have a legacy, someone to carry my ego-fueled DNA into the next generation. I was even on a red carpet when I kicked. You can’t beat that.
Like all scenes, mine had a frame around it. A police car followed the ambulance to the hospital, the paparazzi set up a campsite outside of the emergency rooms doors, and the news vans lined up and down 7th Avenue. For a week or two, my story ate all of the other stories, so nobody cared that The Band of None broke up and that Merilee was starting a solo career. There was no big press push to find out who was to blame or what each band member planned to do with his future. No sit down with Kurt Loder. No big article in Rolling Stone. I won. Movies beat music.
I didn’t have much time to think. I needed air. My heart was full of junk. I stepped outside, I opened my mouth, and I fell down. The street was wet and slick, like someone had put Vaseline over the camera lens and then took a long, panning shot. I was the cameraman, I decided as my frame closed in, narrowing eventually to a pinhole. I saw the lights underneath the marquee. I tried to focus in on one lone bulb, but they blurred together into a head-exploding brick of bright white sunlight. I was the star of my own movie, but the sun eclipsed me and whited me out.
I wished suddenly and desperately that I’d made more movies. I knew then that whatever tadpole was swimming around in Merilee’s stomach would never know me, and that they only way she’d have access to me was through the movies I’d made. She was luckier than some kids I guess. She would have a celluloid dad.
It was Annie who came forward, who for a moment blotted out the sun with her pale, worried face. She pushed my hair off of my forehead, rested her palm there, and squinted down into my eyes. Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear the words. I knew she’d seen her fair share of ghosts. The pinhole expanded for a second, and I saw Tabitha crouched down near my legs, pulling my stash out of my front jeans pocket, so I wouldn’t get caught with it. They were both good girls, and I felt the warm wash of something like luck. They were my angels, I decided—two runaways helping me home.
Annie kept her hand on my forehead, but Tabitha stood up and moved back into the crowd. I immediately missed her warm hand next to my dick. She’d always been efficient and determined, and now she was gone. The pinhole opened a little more, and I stared through legs and ankles to take in the gutter. A couple of taxis whizzed by—I saw streaks of yellow and the rust off a hubcap. My heart surged and I felt my legs and arms twitch and twist.
The pinhole closed in again until my screen was all black. You poor fucker, I thought, this stretch of sidewalk, this midtown nowhere, is your grave. I thought of my father and all of the cheesy things my relatives said to me when he died. He’ll be waiting for you on the other side. He’s with God now. He’s watching over us. I remembered the last movie my father took me to before the cancer really set in, and made it impossible for him to breath or walk.
We were all in Los Angeles then, and it was a matinee of Poltergeist. I was seventeen and making a lot of money. I felt like an adult, finally—I was supporting my parents. But I came out of that movie scared shitless. The clown doll under the bed, the closet portal to another realm, the kitchen chairs stacking on their own, defying gravity, the brother who was nearly swallowed alive by the tree outside of his window, the hysterical teenage sister who refused to stay, and the littlest sister, Carol Anne, who got pulled away from her family and into the T.V. The family’s split-level ranch, their whole matchy-match subdivision was built on top of a cemetery. The house was eventually swallowed up by the ground, crushed like a boat in a massive storm of bodies and decay.
I’d heard from a friend who’d worked on the set that they used real cadavers in a couple of scenes. My dad and I smoked a cigarette underneath the marquee in the bright L.A. sun. He hacked his way through two Lucky Strikes, and called me a “chickenshit” for being scared. I stared at him through my big Hollywood sunglasses. He already looked yellow and shrunken. I knew he’d been dead in a month. Everything that’s underneath must come up. What’s beneath finds a way out. You can’t bury the dead, I thought. Subconscious. Subterranean. Submarine. Submerge. Subdivide.
Annie’s hand slipped off my forehead and my body fell away from me. I crawled out from underneath my rock and out of my primordial ooze. I became sidewalk gum and street dirt. I ate New York.
25
Willow
Air pocket, cosmic burp, deft chamber, and black hole. The universe was slippery. There were chutes and ladders everywhere. Seams, rips, rents, rifts, and tears. I don’t want to get all twenty-sided die and say portals because that would be too easy, too human.
I was good at finding these rips. The horizon exposed itself to me like some girl flasher, all pink, all red, all pearly. It was sunset and she wanted me and so I passed through. I grew up in Lamott, which is basically a crack in the sidewalk of New York state. I’d hid out at Cheap Hits. I loved back staircases and obscure bands. I was antechamber, vestibule, and garret. Sideline, I did. Marginal, I knew. Way to the left, I loved.
It was a bloody show. I get now why it’s called an operating theater. Merilee squeezed Annie’s arm until she left a mark. She panted and she pushed. And then she stopped and we waited. And then it started all over again—this cycle of breathing, of pushing, of grunting, and of waiting. And the intervals became smaller and the pushing and grunting was more intense, more and more like an animal alone in the woods, doing the one thing nature believed it should do. The nurses were kind, not like any of the assholes at the free clinics I’d gone too, and the doctor was this petite Indian woman in surgical clogs, who had delivered thousands of babies.
“One more push mom, just one more,” the doctor had her hand in Merilee’s vagina. She had a hold of the baby’s head.
The nurses had already dismantled the lower parts of the bed so that the baby could more easily slide out. It’s like a spaceship, I thought. This being, her, us, we, come from outer space!
Annie wiped a strand of hair off of Merilee’s sweaty forehead. “This is it,” she said. “It’s her birthday.”
Merilee turned away from Annie and stared out the giant window at the New York skyline. It was three am and full of squares of light—each window a trapdoor into a whole other life. She groaned and sat up on her elbows. “She’ll be a New Yorker,” she said in the direction of a tallest building and she turned back to look at Annie.
“It’s going to be amazing!” Annie opened her eyes wide and locked them into Merilee’s. I saw, for the first time in a long while, the cat-like green intensity of her gaze. For these last nine months, since I’d died, I’d been in shadow. I’d come up to her from behind. I’d been playing tricks. I’d had my fun. I remembered from the withered once alive remnant of what I’d been, Willow instead of the ghost of Willow, that I loved her and that she was a fuck-up, but one of the good fuck-ups. She meant me no harm. She’d loved me as best she could, and even though she didn’t understand me, she’d wanted me alive. She’d wanted me next to her—breathing, dancing, and kicking. She wanted me so much that she could see me even when I was dead.
“A slow and steady push mom, here we go,” the doctor smiled up at Merilee through the triangular frame of her legs.
Annie pressed the side of her face next to Merilee’s and squeezed her eyes shut tight. I felt a deep vibration in the center of whatever it was that I had become. I saw eyelashes fluttering open and closed, a pitchfork struck against the side of a bookcase, a hummingbird dipping in and out of bell of a purple fushia, and the steady drone and buzz of a hive of bees. I was quivering. I was leaving. Good-bye, I thought for the first time since I’d died. Good-bye Annie.
And then Merilee pushed—harder than she’d ever pushed for anything—me, us, Eva, out.
Epilogue – 10th Street and Avenue C
Annie
The landlord didn’t speak English and when he showed me the closet that I could live in for $300 a month, his only words to me were, “Don’t burn.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t burn.”
“I don’t really smoke.” I shifted the weight of my duffle bag off of one shoulder and onto the other.
He sighed loudly in the direction of the armpit of his gray t-shirt and looked up. “Last girl. Big fire.”
I nodded and offered, “No candles, I promise.”
“Good,” he said and handed me the one key to the deadbolt. I watched him walk down the hallway and then I shut the door and turned the lock. It was the first and last time I ever saw him.
I’d found this place through a friend of a friend at Pratt where I’d started taking classes part time. She said that technically, the space wasn’t legal, which was why it was so cheap, but that it was safe enough and it could have it to myself. I’d been living with Merilee and Eva for the last year, and though I felt utterly devoted to them, I needed my own space. I’d never lived alone. I had to give it a try. Even if Merilee referred to it as my studio and insisted that I keep sleeping at her place, I’d hoped it could be a foothold, a way to cast a net, and to catch myself before I got too comfortable.
I wanted to live cheaply and artistically on my own terms. I wanted something of my own. Later, once I’d settled into the squalor of the space, I’d make a mantra for myself. “It’s all yours!” I’d chant as I watched the seventeenth mouse of the day scurry across the floor and out underneath my door. “It’s all yours!” I’d whisper as I inched past the junkie who regularly snoozed on the stairs between the 5th floor and mine, the top. “It’s all yours!” I screamed at no one when a cockroach cascaded out of the box and into my morning bowl of raisin bran.
I walked across the room to the one window facing the street. I set my duffle bag down and squinted out into the August sun. I had a view of the community pool across the street, which was packed with kids and their parents in brightly colored swimsuits. I squinted even more, so that the aquamarine of the pool and the gumball machine assortment of colors and patterns blurred together. I wanted to turn the view into a painting—to make it suddenly modern-day Impressionistic. Monet does the ghetto. I’d pay money for that.
The sound of kids screaming and the lifeguard blowing a whistle rose up to my sixth floor window. Before I lived in New York, it never occurred to me that the city would have swimming pools—and the pools’ sounds still struck me as weird, too country for Alphabet City. I could see myself swimming in that pool—in the red vintage fifties bikini I’d bought at a thrift store in Ithaca with Willow. I’d bring Merilee and Eva too, and we’d float around on our backs with the bright New York City summer sun on our faces—the three of us, in some way, all haunted.
Merilee and I talked often in those early months of Eva’s life about what it was like to carry another person’s death around with you. I came to think of ghosts as memories more than anything else, and haunting as a kind of active remembering. But I knew that Twig didn’t haunt Merilee in the way that Willow had haunted me. Twig was gone. Willow, was, well, somehow, in Eva. Not that I told this to Merilee. It’s not something you can explain to a new mother, especially not to one that’s depressed and overwhelmed and completely obsessed with every facet and finger of her new little baby. Besides, Eva was Eva too. I knew too, that objectively, when it came to accepting Willow’s suicide, I might always be crazy.
I stared past the pool at the complicated mash of power lines, pipes, and steam that made up the Con Ed plant at 14th Street and then I craned my neck to look East towards the river. Williamsburg was just over the horizon—low slung and still gritty, clueless about its own impending gentrification and high rises. I can do this, I thought. Because of the view.
I squatted down, pulled three albums out of my duffel bag, and propped them up on the windowsill. In the chaos surrounding Twig’s overdose, and my leaving Jeb to live with Merilee, I’d found a used record shop in the basement of a building on Spring Street in Soho. It was air conditioned and the owner let me browse for hours without buying anything. He was an aging gay hippie who wore Hawaiian shirts and spoke with a gentle voice. His whispering reminded me of the Lamott librarians I used to work for and sometimes he set aside records for me, and we’d listen to them when I was in the store. He learned not to ask me too much, and in my fantasies I imagined he was my New York city father, an older man, who took the time to learn my likes and dislikes, who somehow in his laid-back store owning way, managed to know me better than my own father ever did.
I took a step back to stare at the three records that had come to most define my past and my future—Prince’s Purple Rain, Patti Smith’s Horses, and The Band of None’s You’re With Me. Purple Ran has been the first record I’d learned front-to-back, and Prince was my first rock star crush. I was twelve when Purple Rain came out, and Willow’s father took us to see Prince and the Revolution in concert that year. Our seats sucked, and we mostly stared at the Jumbotron as Prince strutted across the stage, but I’ll never forget the screaming. I’d never heard so many girls screaming at one time, for one person. I loved the hysteria of that show—the way even twelve-year-olds like me and Willow could feel something animal and sexual.
After that, going to shows became our mission, and as Willow and I got weirder and more punk, the crazier the show, the better. Patti, well, Patti was just Patti—the androgynous poet, with the powerful voice, who had a VISION, and who Willow loved more than any other performer. In some ways those two album covers were similar. Prince and Patti both had an androgynous style, and a frank, sexy way of staring into the camera, but Prince’s steamy pin-up stare seemed all marketing to me now. Patti’s was entirely her own—etched onto her face and brought forth by desire.
The cover of You’re With Me was of an old photograph of kids from the 50s shooting bows and arrows in formation—on the back of the album was a blow-up of one of the little girl archers and blurry black and white pictures of the band. This was the album that made The Band of None famous—it came out when Willow and I were sixteen. I decided when I re-bought the album a couple of months ago that it was because of this particular record that I left Lamott with Jeb. That girl archer was me or thousands of other girls like me—fans who were ready to take aim, to shoot an arrow, and dream of its trajectory. I guess, we were hoping to be that arrow.
I rummaged around in the front pocket of my duffle bag for the rest of my charms and arranged them on the sill in front of the albums: a cerulean blue tube of oil paint, the smooth pieces of three purple shells I’d found at Coney Island, and the mythological deck of Tarot cards I wanted to learn how to read. I pulled the Tower card out of the front of the deck and propped it up in front of Patti Smith. In it, Poseidon swims, trident in hand towards a castle, while lightening rained down on his muscled back.
A fortune teller on St. Marks near Merilee’s apartment told me that this was in important card for me—and that I had to learn how to “be with the Tower energy.” I had no idea what this meant, so I decided to treat it literally, to keep the Tower close to my body and to hope for the best. My future, I knew, was mythological at best—bound up in images and stories I couldn’t decipher.
I didn’t yet know that my tube of cerulean blue would move from the East Village to Williamsburg to Astoria and eventually dry up during graduate school, and that the same junkie who slept in my building’s stairwell would eventually become one of my clients. How surprised we both were to figure out that I used to step over his body on my way to class, and that he’d made a conscious decision never to rob me because I looked so freaked out and young.
I didn’t know that Jeb’s second band would be more famous than The Band of None, and that often in the midst of some drunken Lamott/Band of None connect-the-dots party talk, I’d meet other girls who’d slept with Jeb, and who had even been on the road with the band for a show or two. I didn’t yet know that I’d come to think of us as a special kind of club—Jeb’s archers, little groupies flinging ourselves forward and into whatever bull’s eye we could hit. I didn’t know that none of us could keep him alive because I didn’t yet know that fucking wasn’t really an antidote to anything. I didn’t yet know that sometimes fucking was just fucking, and it had its own animal logic and a pure and simple joy.
I didn’t know that it would take me two hours to decide what to wear to his funeral because even dead I wanted to turn him on, and that Merilee would sob uncontrollably into the lap of my black lace dress in the taxi ride back to her place. I didn’t yet know how much they loved each other, and that even though I couldn’t admit it at the time, I had loved him too. I didn’t know that every neighborhood I lived in would become too expensive for me to stay in it, and that I too would become obsessed with artisanal cheeses and fair trade coffee.
I didn’t know that the buildings would fall and that once after a hurricane, the lower half of the city would go dark for a week. I didn’t know how bored we’d all be without the lights. I didn’t know that I’d spend years backsliding with Julian and that I liked sitting in a small room with someone and talking about their problems. I didn’t yet know that the stories people told themselves about their lives were fascinating and confusing. I didn’t know that this was myth making at its best—the moment when humans took something of their own from the gods and tried to refashion it. I didn’t yet know which stars would fade and shine and which ones would fall and rise.