Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  “What don’t you get?” asked Jeff in his studio on a freezing afternoon, as we studied one of his paintings together.

  “It’s too quiet,” I said.

  “Even the orange?” he asked, surprised.

  I stared at the orange, trying to see it as loud. “It just seems hard to make something matter if you don’t yell it.”

  “Kristin, whispering matters.”

  I looked at him. “Yeah, well, you don’t do that, either.”

  Jeff frowned thoughtfully. “Oh yeah.”

  It was painters who suggested that I keep this diary in the interim between making noise and artful sublimation. I don’t even know what a diary is, really—a book about now? That means you can’t write the ending first and work backwards, right?

  “Don’t worry,” they said. “Painting will come. Just give it time.”

  So far, so bad.

  Manny’s girlfriend sighed, slowly pushing pizza crusts around in the cardboard pizza box like a little train, the multicolored Christmas lights creating a shifting pattern for her to drive the train through. We all watched the crusts drive around. “I’m just saying, you should keep an open mind. Maybe Napoleon’s still living here. It’s his house, not ours.”

  The painters howled. “You guys are idiots!”

  Manny pouted, glaring at them. The girl shifted uncomfortably, blowing yellow hair out of her eyes, her pizza train slowing to a halt. “I said maybe . . .”

  We decided to sit up and listen for ghosts. Staying up all night wasn’t hard for the musicians, who were high, paranoid and scared shitless. Everyone else was bored until the noises began: scratching, shuffling, nothing too scary really, but when we crept into the kitchen as a group, there was nothing there.

  “Told you,” Manny hissed.

  The mystery was partially solved when the ghost turned out to be a furry, watermelon-sized face jumper that likes cornflakes and is good at hiding. We now have tremendous affection for the Animal, which is easy because it never shows itself. It politely devours whatever it can find and then takes off.

  We all act like it’s a magic bear, but the best thing it could be, really, is a raccoon and it’s probably just a cat. Though it might be Taffy, the neighbors’ dog who never comes when called. Our scary neighbors stand in their yard wearing bathrobes and yell “Taffy!” over and over again, but Taffy never shows up. Maybe Taffy lives with us now.

  When I give touring bands and lonely kids directions to this place, I always mention the Animal, in case it jumps on their faces. Displaced individuals can be sorta jumpy.

  I wish it were here right now, ’cause nobody else is. The more promiscuous and insecure of us have a rule: no sleeping alone at Napoleon’s. A rule I’m breaking tonight. “Taffy?” I call weakly and wait.

  Napoleon took his bed with him when he left, so when you stay here, you sleep on the floor, and the floor feels extra hard tonight. Extra hard is extra lonely, for some reason. Like you’re being punished for something you probably did but don’t remember doing.

  ♋ cartoons

  this war’s okay

  in a sweet old fashioned way

  like a game we play

  guilty of something we forgot

  We live in the woods in a communal dwelling, a gigantic barn full of hippies, one of whom tries to write “Be Together” on a parachute that stretches across our ceiling.

  He’s pretty stoned, though, so what he actually writes is “Be Togeater,” and no one has a replacement parachute or the money to buy one.

  I’m only three years old, so I shouldn’t be able to read it, but my mother, Crane, taught me to read when I was two. I’m sure she regrets having done this, as we lie on the couch together, staring at the ceiling. “I guess he just likes to spell things his own way,” she says.

  So we live under that magical sentiment for years, growing our own vegetables, drinking goat’s milk, and feeding the rats who live there togeater with us by hand, because rats are Buddha’s creatures, too.

  7:00. Slept almost three hours straight—a personal best. The Christmas lights’re going quietly apeshit in the sunshine, which is cooking the donuts. Reaching into the terrible bag before I can think about what I’m doing, I tear off a maggot-coated hunk and stuff it into Fish Jesus’s bloody maw—whistling in the sun. Should cheer up the next lonely visitor to Napoleon’s guest house, anyway.

  I leave, quietly locking the apartment door so as not to wake the thousands of children who live on the first floor, then let my eyes adjust to the dark stairwell, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Animal. Nope. Not unless it’s hiding behind a pile of old carpet at the bottom of the stairs. Then I lift the mat and place the key under it, silently thanking Napoleon for another night of creepy hospitality. On my way out the door, I peer into the pile of dusty carpet, just in case. “Taffy?” I ask it.

  Across the street, Taffy’s owner is standing on his front lawn in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette and holding the morning paper. “Mahnin!” he shouts through his cigarette when I step outside. This means “good morning” in Rhode Island. I smile. He smiles too, takes the cigarette out of his mouth and, spitting on the ground, starts walking toward me.

  Oh, crap. I can’t talk to this guy; I’ve tried. I can’t understand a word he says after mahnin. And he looks like a yeti, which makes it hard to listen to what he’s even trying to say. I always just squint and nod, watching his face move until he stops making noise, then back away. Quickly, before he can cross the street, I scramble into my car and start the engine. It sputters. I try again. Taffy’s dad watches. My dumb car. It doesn’t really work, can hardly breathe. “The Silver Bullet,” she’s called, and she is in fact silver, but she’s a fat-ass, logy version of a bullet. This morning, she coughs, wheezes, then suddenly heaves to life. Pulling away from Napoleon’s neighbor, I wave and he waves back, looking sad, his newspaper at his side.

  At the first intersection, the car stalls. I whip my head around to see if he’s following me, lumbering along, puffing his cigarette—“mahnin, mahnin”—his bathrobe blowing in the breeze. No wonder Taffy left. But the street behind me is empty and the Bullet’s engine kicks in again a second later, humming in her distinctive full-throated whine.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I say out loud in my relief. I’m from the South. I believe in politeness, even when it comes to machines. My family left Georgia when I was a kid, a well-mannered little Gomer, and here in Rhode Island I got beaten up for both my Southern accent and my politeness. Damn yankee kids’d never heard the word “ma’am” before.

  They tried to beat me up, anyway; I always won those fights. Didn’t clobber anybody, just hit ’em real hard and they fell down. Then I politely helped them up. Damn yankees. I’ve been trying to hide my accent ever since, but I’m still polite.

  Speeding is impolite, so I don’t do that. I tear, though . . . tear down the highway, through blizzards, thunderstorms and blazing sun ’cause I love driving. It’s a perfect world for a shy spaz like me. A shy person likes to be alone, and a spaz can’t sit still, right? So though my car sucks big time, it lets me race around without having to make eye contact with a single human. I take the Silver Bullet very seriously for this reason. And, yes, I talk to my car. She deserves it.

  ♋ arnica montana

  the desperate

  tearing down the highway

  like they got no place to stay

  The Bullet and I are doing the thirty-minute drive from Providence to Aquidneck Island together so I can swim laps and shower at the Y before school. Like most of the people in Napoleon’s gang of losers, I’m eighteen—the age where no one takes care of you—so most of my showers are taken at the Y. I’m not homeless per se—I just can’t stop for very long. I’m too . . . wired. And I have this idea that you could belong everywhere rather than just one place, so I don’t call anything “home.” Don’t know what I’d do there if I did. I’d just get antsy and wanna leave again.

  People who suffer because they h
ave nowhere in particular to go are those who can sit still, who sleep. I stopped doing these things last September, when I made a mistake and moved into the wrong place: a bad apartment christened “the Doghouse” by someone who painted that on the door. The Doghouse was the last place I played music on purpose, of my own volition.

  I innocently stepped through the door of the Doghouse and put my stuff down because I thought that if I lived alone for a while, music might speak to me, tell me its secrets. Music spoke, alright—it yelled—and as it turns out, it has no secrets. If you ask music a question, it answers and then just keeps talking louder and louder, never shuts up. Music yelled so loud and so much in the Doghouse, I can still hear it.

  I was used to sound tapping me on the shoulder and singing into my ear. I’ve heard music that no one else hears since I got hit by a car a couple years ago and sustained a double concussion. I didn’t know what to make of this at first, but eventually I came to feel lucky, special, as if I’d tapped into an intelligence. Songs played of their own accord, making themselves up; I listened and copied them down. Last fall, though, the music I heard began to feed off the Doghouse’s evil energy. Songs no longer tapped me on the shoulder; they slugged me in the jaw. Instead of singing to me, they screamed, burrowing into my brain as electricity.

  I got zapped so bad in that apartment, I don’t think I’ll ever rest again. In the Doghouse, sleep stopped coming, days stopped ending—now sleep doesn’t come and days don’t end. Sleeping pills slow my thinking, but they can’t shut down my red-hot brain. If I do manage to drop off, wild dreams wake me up. So I’m different now; my thinking is liquid and quick, I can function at all hours. My songs are different, too, and when I play them, I become them: evil, charged.

  I’m actually head over heels in love with these evil songs, in spite of myself. It’s hard not to be. They’re . . . arresting.

  Before I disappeared into the Doghouse, the songs I heard were not devils, they were floaty angels. Gentle and meandering, interesting if you took the time to pay attention, but they wouldn’t necessarily stop you in your tracks. Now the songs I bring to my band are essential, bursting: harsh black-and-white sketches that my bandmates color in with their own personal noise. These songs grab your face and shout at it.

  Do you want your face grabbed and shouted at? Probably not; at the very least, it’s irritating. But now that it’s happened to me, I know that music is as close to religion as I’ll ever get. It’s a spiritually and biologically sound endeavor—it’s healthy.

  Some music is healthy, anyway. I know a lot of bands who’re candy. Or beer. Fun and bad for you in a way that makes you feel good. For a minute. My band is . . . spinach, I guess. We’re ragged and bitter. But I swear to god, we’re good for you.

  When I finally left that messed-up apartment, I swore I’d never go back. I stuffed my guitar case full of frantic songs I’d scribbled down on a hundred pieces of paper, then took a minute to squint through the noise and try to figure out what exactly made the Doghouse so dark. It looked like a plain old apartment to me: wood floors, silver radiators, paint-flecked doorknobs and smudgy windows. Why this place and not, say, the house next door? Who knows, maybe the whole block is evil.

  But by the time I raced out the door and took off in the Silver Bullet, it was too late. I was branded; tattooed all over with Doghouse songs—each one a musical picture etched into my skin.

  I know that when my band plays these ugly tattoos, people can see them all over me, but I don’t care too much. I mean, shy people are generally not show-offs, but the burning that the songs do, the fact that I’m compelled to play them, makes me think they . . . matter? Maybe that’s not the right word. That they’re vital. And I respect that. I can feel sorry for myself without judging the music.

  Comfort isn’t necessarily comfortable, after all; sometimes you gotta wander into the woods. Everybody knows that.

  I never did go back there. Sometimes I park the Silver Bullet across the street from the Doghouse and stare at it, wondering what the hell is up with that place, but I don’t go inside. I know if I did, the walls’d close in. I made it out with my guitar and my brain, so I can look on the bright side: I got some wild songs out of it and I have evil’s big balls working for me now. Evil seems to know what it’s doing, though it isn’t ever very pretty.

  Doghouse songs are definitely not pretty—they sound like panicking—but they are beautiful. The cool thing they do is, they make memories now. A syringe of déjà vu injected into my bloodstream. All the best stories work this way, but a song has the ability to tell a nice loud story. Louder than orange.

  Which has made my band a work of obsession, a wholly satisfying closed circle. My bandmates and I are both conceited and pathetic about this: we think we’re the best band in the world and that nobody’ll ever like us. We play in clubs because that’s what bands do, but we don’t expect anybody to show up.

  Really, we’re just on our own planet, so it wouldn’t make sense to give a fuck about anybody else, which is sorta nice. If I had to survive the Doghouse to earn this planet, I’m okay with that; it’s a swell planet. I’ve spent a lot of time on it—almost twice as much as someone who sleeps. And this lingering Doghouse energy means that I can keep going, keep moving, keep looking around. I learn a lot, being awake all the time.

  For example, I learned this: we should belong everywhere.

  ♋ calm down, come down

  i don’t wanna calm down

  i don’t wanna come down

  On the lawn next to the library, I sit in the sun, my textbooks stacked beside me, and look for Betty. Peering through groups of college kids, I try to catch a glimpse of her hair. Betty’s hair changes daily, so I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for, except that she’s about fifty years older than all the other students, so it’s usually gray, champagne or white.

  Betty and I have a study date. I know I could go inside the library and start studying without her, but we go to school on the island, right on the water, and it’s just too beautiful out here. I avoid going inside buildings whenever possible, anyway; I kind of . . . disagree with them. Shouldn’t we live outside?

  Betty says this is never going to happen ’cause nobody else wants to live outside, just me. She says I need to learn to like buildings, that buildings aren’t something you’re even allowed to disagree with. “They’re everywhere,” she says. “And sometimes, you need to go inside them. Get used to it.”

  I get that. But I still disagree with them.

  Even childhood takes place inside buildings now, which doesn’t make sense—we shove kids indoors, make them sit still and be quiet when they should be going outside to run around and make noise. At least college classes allow for breaks when you can race out the door and breathe. I think I hold my breath when I’m in a classroom, “learning.” Learning to hold my breath.

  This university let me enroll a few years ago, before I was old enough, because my philosophy-professor father, who teaches there, told them they should. He sent them my records and then I had to have a meeting with three administrators in which I was expected to carry myself in collegiate fashion.

  My dad coached me on the way to the meeting. “Sit up straight. Lie. Smile.” I told him he was making me nervous. “Oh yeah, and don’t be nervous,” he continued. “Make eye contact. But not for too long—no piercing stares. And when they ask you a question, lie some more.”

  “About what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “That’s unpossible,” I said. “I can’t lie.”

  “Oh. And don’t make up any words.”

  I squinted up at him. “I make up words?”

  The three administrators I was meeting with, through glorious coincidence, all had flippy hair in the shape of yak horns. What’re the odds? They also looked angry. Three angry yaks.

  Everyone in the world calls my father “Dude” except for these three yaks. An old hippie with weird-ass white-blue eyes and big, curly hair, my dad l
ooks like a Dude. The yaks called him “Dr. Hersh,” though. I would’ve snickered if they hadn’t already looked so angry.

  “Very impressive grades,” the yak man said to me with a threatening glare. His flippy horns were tiny, right at the top of his forehead, and he was neck-less.

  “And test scores,” added the yak woman, grimacing. When she moved, her shoulder-length curls did not.

  The yak person of indiscriminate gender and chin-length horns frowned. “I think Ms. Hersh will be extremely happy here.”

  I sat up straight, made brief eye contact and assured them that I would be extremely happy holding my breath inside those buildings. I used only real words, as far as I know. The whole time, I was thinking Dorks always get straight A’s . . . do they not know this?

  “They weren’t so schmanky,” I said to Dude, walking down the hallway after the meeting, “but you don’t look like a Dr. Hersh.”

  “What do I look like?” He stopped and posed while I stared at him.

  “You look sorta like Dr. Who . . .”

  “Hmmm.” He stopped posing. “I wonder if I could get people to call me Dr. Who?”

  “That’d be cool. It might be weird to suggest it.”

  “Yeah. I’ll stick with Dude.”

  Now Dude makes me take all the groovy classes he teaches, to pay him back for getting me into college before I belonged there: Dream Symbolism, Native American Mythology, Yoga. “I’m trying not to grow up into a hippie,” I told him.

  “Good luck with that,” he said.