Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
SPRING 1985
SUMMER 1985
FALL 1985
WINTER 1986
SPRING 1986
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RAT GIRL
KRISTIN HERSH is a songwriter, guitarist, mother of four and the founder of the seminal art rock band Throwing Muses. Over the course of her two-decade career as a musician, she has released over twenty critically acclaimed albums, including nine solo albums and four with her current band, 50FootWave. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New Orleans.
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First published in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Martha Kristin O’Connell, 2010
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hersh, Kristin.
Rat girl / Kristin Hersh.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45902-7
1. Hersh, Kristin. 2. Singers—United States—Biography. 3. Alternative rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title. ML420.H387A3 2010
782.42166092—dc22
[B] 2010018507
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They say, “You are ill, so what appears to you is only unreal fantasy.” But that’s not strictly logical. I agree that ghosts only appear to the sick, but that only proves that they are unable to appear except to the sick, not that they don’t exist.
—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
The universe is godding.
—MICKY DOLENZ
This book is based on a diary I started when I was eighteen. Don’t know why I kept the diary for so many years; the combination of nostalgia and nausea I felt when reading it was pretty rough. I sort of held it out at arm’s length, the way you might keep the first fish you ever caught (it’s an accomplishment . . . it just stinks!). I do find it astonishing that, as a teenager, I was already trying to bring music and art together; a hell of a mission to take on. If Americans thought music and art belonged together, they wouldn’t have the Grammys!
I guess the diary was a bad luck charm—I really didn’t want history repeating itself. ’Cause it was certainly a strange book to pick up and read. Full of holes, it dissolved along with the drowning writer and each page was oddly like crawling in a window: you had to stand up carefully, squint, get your bearings. The diary was about a year long, from one spring to the next.
I seemed awfully young that first spring and not so young the next, though this wasn’t a year when a whole lot happened, in my opinion. It was a year when many things began, which is probably important. It was also a year I tried very hard to forget, so I know it was worth remembering. Some of it I don’t actually remember; I just read about it in the diary. I’m real okay with not remembering this stuff, though; like a lot of people’s stories, mine can be pretty embarrassing.
♋ Songs help with that. They don’t commit to linear time—they whiz around all your memories, collecting them into a goofy pile that somehow seems less goofy because it’s set to music. Songs’re weird: they tell the future and they tell the past, but they can’t seem to tell the difference. So I stuck lyrics from my songs into the text whenever they reflected on a moment and its reverberations.
Here’s a quote of mine: “I would never paint a picture, do a dance or write a book.” And here’s another one: “I’m not in the business of publishing pages from my diary.” I still say these things all the time. What I mean when I say them is that although I’m a musician, I’m not a particularly creative person, nor am I interested in self-expression—I don’t want people to listen to my songs so that they’ll care about me. That would be obnoxious.
I did, however, write this book based on pages from my diary because copying down a year isn’t a particularly creative thing to do. And it all happened twenty-five years ago, so it can’t really count as a story about me—that girl isn’t me anymore. Now it’s just a story.
And interestingly, it turns out to be a love story. One with no romance, only passion. Passion for sound, reptiles, old ladies, guitars, a car, water, weather, friends, colors, chords, children, a band, fish, light and shadow. It’s dedicated to my friends Betty and Mark, who both died while I was turning the story into this book. And can I just say: everything that wacky old Betty Hutton told me was true. The craziest things she said turned out to be particularly true. She was even right about “Throwing Muses” having too many syllables.
Betty taught me that you can’t tell the whole truth, as not all of it is pertinent or lovely. You have to leave things out in order to tell the story. Otherwise, people could miss the whaddyacallit . . . the point. Her story was full of brightly lit holes that allowed the point to show itself in sharp relief.
For what it’s worth, this is my old diary’s story, riddled with enormous holes and true.
Love,
Kristin
SPRING 1985
The handmade Jesus on Napoleon’s living room wall has no face, just a gasping, caved-in head with blood dripping down its chest. He appears to have been crucified on some popsicle sticks. His mottled green and gold surface reminds us of fish scales and his paddle-shaped toes fan out like a tail. It is a singularly gruesome crucifix. We call it “Fish Jesus.”
The first time I saw it, I thought it was funny. It’s less funny at night when you’re alone. And even less funny tonight because next to me is a bag of horrible donuts one of the painters left for me as a joke. They look just like Fish Jesus. Oblong, greenish-gold and bloody with jelly, coconut maggots swarm over them. I really don’t wanna look at them anymore, but throwing them away would mean touching them and I don’t wanna do that, either.
So me and Fish Jesus and the donuts all lean against the wall, watching Christmas lights blink. It isn’t Christmas, but these were the only working lights left in this empty apartment when its old man died. He was named Napoleon. All we really know about him is that he lived here in Providence and now he’s dead, his body and most of his belongings carted away. And somehow he still pays his electric bill. Someone does,
anyway, and it isn’t me or any of the other people I’ve seen use his electricity.
I also know where he hid his key (under the mat—Napoleon was a brilliant tactician), and tonight I need a place to stay. So I park myself under a sad crucifix and watch tiny blue, green, red and orange bulbs blink on and off. Insomniacs like to waste time.
The lights are comfortingly tacky, the garish blue ones my favorites. They remind me of being a little kid, hypnotized and mystified by Christmas. I open first one eye and then the other, to see if I can watch only the blue lights and ignore the other colors, but it’s hard and I’m boring myself, so I close both eyes to try and get some sleep. They pop right open again.
♋ fish
i have a fish nailed to a cross on my apartment wall
This room is not a good thing to look at, but I look anyway. The wall-to-wall carpeting is a pukey beige, bleached in the center by a stain shaped like a hermit crab. The paneling on the walls is marked by big splotches of something that once sprayed across it. It has been suggested by sleepless crashers that these splotches are a clue as to how Napoleon died. The whole apartment smells like mold and disinfectant. And now, donuts.
It’s spring, but you’d never know it looking out Napoleon’s window. He lived and died in a gray world.
I’m glad it’s spring, though—Christmas decorations around here are the saddest things you ever saw. They hung, decomposing in the gray wind, through March. Just a few weeks ago, someone took down the dismal pink wreath, blackened with car exhaust, that hung around the fluorescent green sign across the street. This sign has always read, will always read: “Pumpkin Muffins 24 Hours.”
All the women who work in the donut shop below the sign look the same. They wear pink smocks and lean on the counter, smoking, all night long. I’m often a sleepless crasher in this apartment myself and I’ve spent many hours watching them to see if they ever move. They don’t. I’ve never even seen one light a new cigarette. It probably smells like mold, disinfectant and donuts in there, too.
The loosely associated group of crashers who frequent Napoleon’s guest house: touring musicians, bored kids with nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, and anyone whose job isn’t really a job (like “painter”) have agreed that the key should remain under the mat—the first place any desperate individual would look—to honor Napoleon’s memory. Not that we remember him, but he’s become a kind of saint to us. He shelters the lonely and the lost, wrapping them in a soft blanket of Christmas lights and old-man smell.
So the key stays where Napoleon left it because if somebody wants to break in here, well then, we should make it easy for ’em. Clearly, they need Napoleon’s soft blanket.
I gotta get rid of these fucking donuts; they’re making me sick and they aren’t gonna get any prettier. Maybe I’ll leave them here on the floor for the Animal.
We don’t know what the Animal is, only that it gets in sometimes and eats cornflakes out of the cabinet, which is fine ’cause I didn’t like the look of those dead-guy cornflakes anyway. Once, a painter named Jeff actually took the Animal to the face. It leaped out of the apartment and jumped on his head when he opened the door. This is the closest encounter any of us have had with it. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the night and the stairwell was too dark for him to get a good look at it; the Animal just knocked him backwards down the stairs and took off.
Jeff was thrilled. The next time I saw him, he was still giddy, glowing with pride. “Kristin!” he said dreamily. “The most wonderful thing happened . . .”
This guy looks just like Jimmy Stewart. I tried to imagine him falling backwards in the dark, limbs flailing, fur wrapped around his head. For some reason, I saw this happening in black and white—maybe ’cause of the Jimmy Stewart thing—which made it even creepier. But Jeff was so happy telling the story, he looked dewy. Painters are so sick. I wouldn’t want an animal jumping on my face in the dark.
I gotta admit I was enchanted, though. “Did it make a noise?” I asked him. “Was it furry? Did it smell weird?” He couldn’t remember much; he was falling down stairs. Happily falling, having taken a wild animal to the face, but too distracted by gravity to pay attention to much else. In retrospect, he figured it had been furry and was about the size of a watermelon.
This was relevant information, as we had had a kind of meeting on the subject once, the gaggle of lost souls who use this apartment when they have nowhere else to go. The Animal hadn’t yet gone for the cornflakes—it had only shuffled around the apartment in the dark, which was, I admit, a little spooky. Subsequently, there had been murmurings of “ghosts” walking around at night, and most of the musicians are such pussies they were scared to sleep here anymore. Some of them wanted to have a Narragansett medicine woman smudge the place with sage to relieve it of its restless spirits.
“Look,” a drummer named Manny said gravely over the cold leftovers of two greasy pizzas. Candles flickered near the open window, the dancing shadows making it look more like a séance than the overgrown Cub Scout meeting it really was. “She’s really nice, I’ve met her. She doesn’t dress weird or anything. She charges a nominal fee and all we have to do is fast or fuck off for, like, a day and a half.”
“What?!” yelled a painter, laughing. Painters think musicians are ridiculous. There seems to be a general consensus among them that painting is high art, music low. Can’t say that I blame them; musicians are sorta ridiculous. I’m a guitar player, so technically I’m one myself, but I don’t stick up for us all that often.
Manny, clearly more afraid of ghosts than painters, held his ground. “This place is definitely haunted,” he said. “I hear noises, but when I check ’em out, there’s nobody there!” He pushed a lock of purple hair behind his ear. For some reason, none of us musicians have normal hair—another thing that makes us seem ridiculous to the painters. Mine is blue, there is a lime green and a fuzzy-yellow-chick yellow . . . together, we look like an Easter basket. Chalk white and glossy jet-black are close to normal, but those two are goth kids—at least once a day, a painter will turn to them and yell, “Happy Halloween!”
“Fast?” The painter stared at Manny, wide-eyed.
“Don’t eat,” explained Manny.
“I know what it means. I just think you’re a moron.” The other painters laughed. The musicians and neutral observers set quietly in the candle-light.
Manny shook his head. “Last night, something was walking near my face. It was weird.”
“It’s just the family downstairs bangin’ around,” said the painter. “They got like, twelve kids or something.”
“No, seriously. I could feel it moving. It was right next to my face.”
“Were you high?” asked the painter sarcastically.
“Yeah,” answered Manny, “but . . . it was right next to my face!”
You can tell painters and musicians apart by their uniforms and expressions. All the musicians except the goth kids wear torn blue jeans, flannel shirts and pajama tops and look perpetually stunned. Painters dress like it’s 1955, in white T-shirts, khakis and black loafers, all spattered liberally with paint. They either spatter their clothing on purpose so everyone can tell they’re painters or else they have a lot of trouble getting paint from brush to canvas, ’cause they’re really covered in the stuff.
Painters usually look like they’re about to laugh. Not smug; they just think everything is funny. “Let’s get him an exorcism,” said one. “He really wants one.”
Manny looked grim. “I’m not saying there’s an evil presence. Napoleon was a good man. But he died here. A violent death,” he said ominously, pointing at the splotches on the wall.
“That’s Michelob,” smirked the painter. “Napoleon probably had a Barcalounger and spasms. If you’re worried about hauntings, worry about the guy who died in those pajamas you’re wearing.” Manny winced. It was a little low, I thought, going after his clothes. Everybody knows you don’t buy pajamas from the Salvation Army if you’re not into the de
ad.
Manny’s girlfriend, the fuzzy-yellow-chick-haired chick, tried valiantly to come to his rescue. “Paranormal events occur in places where souls were unwilling to separate from their bodies at the time of death,” she explained carefully. “What if Napoleon’s soul wanted to stay home even though his body was dead?”
“This place is a shit hole. If you could fly, would you stay here?” The other painters laughed; everyone else was silent. Painters and musicians never agree on anything. It can be entertaining, but it can also be exhausting. They even order different pizzas.
I consider myself to be a neutral crasher; I don’t wear either uniform and I don’t side with anyone. The painters are almost always right, but I feel sorry for the hapless musicians who’re so mercilessly ridiculed, so I abstain from arguments and pizza.
The painters have made it clear that they feel I’m one of them, even going so far as to try to make me paint. They claim that making noise is the heathen’s way, a poor excuse for a calling. I guess they’re right, but I am a heathen. I mean, I’ve met me.
But I toured their studios anyway, watched them paint, let them lecture me and attempted to absorb the process of smearing colors onto cloth in order to impress upon observers a sense of “visual feeling.” I even took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design here in Providence. This is frowned upon by the “street” painters in Napoleon’s gang who believe that art is something which can’t be taught.
I thought some paintings were very beautiful—places to go—but ultimately, “I don’t get it,” was all I could think to say.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 1
