Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  When I was younger, music was sound: moving, but not alive. My guitar was a pretty hobby, not a passion. I wrote songs before the witch ran me over, but they were ideas, making stuff up. Now, “writing a song” means listening, buzzing an energy, my skin dancing with sparks. It really does feel like religion. Or a disease. Like a religious disease.

  The effect a song’s birth has on my body is sickening. Literally. The buzzing can actually make me vomit. Songs get stuck inside me and when I finally let them out . . . they’re too big, they make me sick.

  If I fall asleep, the song wakes me up, whispering, chanting and shouting, suggesting bass lines and backing vocals, piano parts and guitar solos. It’s that—the clattering noise of the thing, louder and louder, first whispering, then gasping with its own impact—that’s so upsetting, so overwhelming. A sickening frenzy. Ugh, lemme out of here.

  This is a goddamn song. I have a genuine love/hate relationship with these things.

  ♋ fear

  this is much better than me, okay?

  I grab a guitar from the backseat of the Bullet and try to find the notes I’m hearing, pick ’em out of the other notes and the pounding raindrops—a riotous mess of color.

  Each major chord is a primary color, its associated minor altered with a tinge of another color that makes it sadder; sevenths are altered by a secondary color that makes them twangy, and minor sevenths combine the original primary color with the sad shade and the twangy one, etc. Chord structure follows a logical pattern, in other words, until I start making them up. When I invent a chord, I invent a color. I mean, I don’t really invent a color, but it sure sounds like something I’ve never seen before, if that makes any sense.

  Sometimes a song will play a frenetic melody that achieves a rolling impression of a chord. The notes still vibrate against each other, but in a hypnotic rhythm that achieves its impression over the course of a phrase rather than a word, a color building itself out of its constituent colors in a pattern. The confusion is dazzling.

  Years of classical guitar lessons kept my fingers nimble enough to keep up but couldn’t prepare my brain for this . . . slow-mo implosion. It’s hard to concentrate.

  This part isn’t art, though; it’s science. Not rocket science—anybody could do it—but there’s no way it’s art. Art’s a mess, too emotional for its own good. Cool science counters hot art, takes sober measurements. It makes magic clean, refines the intangible.

  Dude unwittingly taught me this when I was six years old. He carefully placed a nylon-strung Yamaha guitar behind the living room couch and told me never to touch it because it wasn’t a toy. To a little kid, this means, “It’s not just a toy, it’s a great toy.” For months, first thing every morning, I’d run downstairs to stare at it.

  The guitar was so golden it looked fluorescent orange, with lovely, intricate patterns around the sound hole. I knew it was capable of great things, lying there in its case: mysterious, untapped potential, like an ancient farming implement or a magic wand. I particularly liked how the ends of the strings were frayed and textured, almost falling apart, yet stretched tight enough to do their work. Work I couldn’t hear because this was a forbidden instrument.

  It didn’t stay forbidden, though. Dude eventually felt bad enough to let me hold the guitar. He sat on the living room rug with me and placed my hands in the correct positions, right hand over the sound hole, left on the neck. The neck was huge. The instrument was huge; my tiny hands didn’t come close to having an effect on the guitar.

  “It’s just like that stupid horse,” I said, and Dude nodded sympathetically. I had recently ridden a horse for the first time and this experience had taught me that the space a six-year-old takes up on planet Earth is dreadfully, painfully small. Both the horse and the guitar had seemed attractive from a distance, useful. Up close, though, they were unmanageable. Beautiful behemoths.

  I was driven to play the guitar, but I hadn’t really wanted to ride the horse. I did it only because my mother came home from the grocery store one day and told me she’d seen our neighbor there. This was a boring story until she mentioned that the lady had invited me over to ride her outsized, bad-tempered ex-racehorse. I waited for Crane to tell me she’d politely declined for reasons of safety. Instead, while unpacking the groceries, she said lightly that accepting the woman’s invitation was the nice thing to do.

  Alarmed, I suggested that she be the one to ride the giant horse, as she was a giant lady and I was only six, but she shook her head at me, saying, “You like horses.”

  “I like them,” I replied. “I don’t need to get on one. Especially not that one.” I saw this horse bite his mistress on the shoulder once. She hit him really hard when he did this. Then the horse pranced around, angry, and the lady grabbed her hurt shoulder and kicked dirt. I just didn’t wanna get mixed up in anything like that. They seemed troubled.

  “It’ll be fine, Kristin,” my mother sighed. “Run along.”

  “What, right now?” She gave me an impatient look I knew well, and which I took as my cue to give up. Slowly, I walked next door and crouched near the corral, staying low so the neighbor lady wouldn’t see me out her back window. I figured if I waited long enough without her catching sight of me, I could just go home and say that I’d done the polite thing by showing up, but it hadn’t worked out.

  I watched the horse through the wooden fence as it stood at the far end of the corral, staring into the distance. He looked like a toy horse, very pretty and delicate. I decided I should probably get used to the idea of making friends with him. Wish I’d brought sugar, or a carrot. Maybe I’d be the only person he didn’t bite or something. Maybe he’d just been waiting for a child to come along and understand him. And not hit him. And we could jump the fence and go off into the fields beyond and—well, she didn’t see me, guess I can go home.

  I spun on my heels and headed for my house when the neighbor lady came out of hers. Dang! She herself was very horsy: she looked and smelled like a horse, and when she talked, it sounded like whinnying. I was intrigued by this world of horse-ness that was powerful enough to turn a human into an equine version of a human. It reminded me of the Greek myths Dude read to me in which people were condemned to live as trees and cows. I wasn’t intrigued enough to want to be a part of it, though. “Hey!” the horse lady called, walking over. “You want a Coke or you just wanna start riding?”

  I wanna go home. Did she ask me if I wanna go home? “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  She towered over me. “No what?”

  “Thank you.”

  She squinted down at me. “D’you wanna Coke or not?”

  “Um, no,” I answered. “Thank you.”

  She smiled sideways. “I remember being your age,” she said, hopping the fence. “I couldn’t wait to start riding either.” Whistling for her horse, she added, “All little girls love horses.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered sadly. I watched as the horse came sauntering over, growing exponentially larger with every step. He was a toy, then a dog, then briefly, a pony, then a normal horse, an elephant and finally, a building.

  The neighbor lady grabbed him by the reins and laughed at me. “C’mon!” she shouted happily, like she was telling me to jump into a pile of candy.

  Gingerly, I climbed over the fence and positioned myself under the horse’s chin. He was a twitching skyscraper and I was an ant. My neighbor whacked him with the palm of her hand and told him to stand still. I thought whacking him was a bad idea, but I said nothing. “You climb up over here,” she said, pointing to his side. “Whaddya, gonna ride his head?” she laughed. I laughed, too, as if I’d made a joke. “Go ahead, climb up.” She struggled to hold the reins as the horse waved its head around in an agitated manner.

  Walking to the side of the horse, I squinted up at the saddle. Climb a skyscraper. The massive ribcage in front of me heaved and trembled. I put my foot up in the air, past my own trembling, heaving ribcage, and shoved it into the stirrup. Hand over hand, I cl
imbed the swaying leather straps and swung myself onto the horse’s back. Not too shabby, I thought, gazing out into the pasture, feeling like a cowboy, my heart pounding.

  But instead of the horse’s mane and ears in front of me, I saw its butt and tail. I got up backwards, I thought. “You got up backwards,” whinnied the neighbor lady.

  ♋ soap and water

  in her doghouse

  she does it backwards

  “I won’t play guitar backwards, though,” I promised Dude and he smiled. But the guitar was uncomfortable to hold. It didn’t fit on my lap; I was simply too small. And its shiny finish was blinding, flashing light into my eyes whenever I shifted underneath it. Zoë lay next to me on the living room rug, her chin on her paws, looking worried.

  Zoë was way smarter than any human. Small enough to sneak around and watch whatever was going on and learn from it, with brilliant brown eyes that seemed to know . . . everything. Zoë was never wrong. She could catch a Frisbee ten feet in the air and catch a problem ten minutes before it happened. She’d refuse to get in a car headed for the vet’s office, but she’d leap joyfully into one that was going to the beach. She loved children and cats and hated snotty rich people. She was psychic. So when Zoë worried, I worried. I looked down at the guitar, then at her. Her eyebrows knitted. “What?” I asked her.

  Dude leaned over and carefully placed my fingers over the smooth strings, helping me thumb through my first “song.” E/ G/ A.

  It was disappointing. I had expected more impact. Nylon strings sound soft and muted, different from the shimmering clang of steel strings I thought I would hear, but I could get used to that. Something else was wrong.

  I frowned. “What is it?” asked Dude.

  I didn’t like how the chords sounded and I told him that. He looked hurt. “Why don’t you like them?”

  “They’re boring.”

  “But Bob Dylan plays these chords. And Neil Young.”

  “Mm-hm.” I looked down at my hands, willing them to play better. “They’re probably nice guys.” Handing the guitar back to Dude, I stared at it, perplexed. Why doesn’t it sound as cool as it looks? I glanced at Zoe and she looked back sadly.

  Dude took the guitar, then sat, staring at me. “‘Nice guys’?”

  I complained that the chords we’d played didn’t sound magenta enough. “. . . you know?”

  “No,” answered Dude, bewildered.

  “Well, red, I mean. I’ve heard red before. A million times. The first chord was red. And boring.”

  “E major’s red?” he asked. “E never sounded particularly red to me. You mean you think it’s a primary color?”

  “Yeah. We didn’t even play green.”

  “What chord is green?”

  I shook my head at Zoë, then glared impatiently at Dude. “Mix a blue chord with a yellow one. Duh-uh. It’s stronger and prettier that way. Like those fish.” The fish I meant were African cichlids, who change color when they lose too many fights. They get their asses kicked enough times and grow pale, while the winning fish develop bright, colorful scales and beautiful patterns. Dude and I always loved that these fish wear their hearts on their sleeves. I looked up at him. “If you play too many wimpy chords, you’re just asking for wimpy scales.”

  “Because the guitar kicks your ass?” He squinted in thought. “Are you calling Bob Dylan a loser?”

  “No, just a pale fish.”

  “Are you calling me a loser?”

  “No . . .”

  Dude looked at me sideways. “Are you calling my scales wimpy?” I shrugged and he handed me the guitar. “It’s yours,” he said. “Play colors.”

  ♋ spring

  all i want is green

  Play colors, I think to myself, as the swishing voices conspire against me. This song doesn’t sound like colors, it sounds like . . . machines. That nurse was right; I do hear machines.

  There are notes in there, though. I find them and play them, reduce the industrial orchestra I hear to a pathetic plunking. That melody needs a bed and chords come only through trial and error. So when a sound the guitar makes matches the sound that’s filling the Bullet, I keep that chord and move on to the next one. It gets easier each time, as one chord will set up the next, words in a sentence, then sentences in a paragraph.

  Voices playing counter to the guitar parts then form themselves into a kind of phonetic melody. These syllables pile themselves up into words and say things that are hard to grasp, hard to control, and I plug my ears to their meaning. I know I’ve lived the stories they tell, but I never wanted to tell them; the songs do. I’m just playing along.

  These are words that don’t talk to brains. Instead, they thump into chests, bashing and shrieking like poltergeists. If I try to jump into the song and write it myself, sorta hurry it along, my lyrics’ll stick out like ugly relatives. You can tell it’s me talking because suddenly the song isn’t beautiful anymore—it just makes sense. Or worse, it’s clever.

  The real song waits patiently for me to shut up and then picks up where it left off: time-tripping, speaking in math, bodies and dreams, landscapes, passed notes, pages from this diary, conversations, memories, newspapers and unmailed letters that crawled back out of the garbage—sometimes sweet, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, but always twisted up and painted in extravagantly ugly Technicolor: well-rehearsed Tourette’s.

  It’s not like I’ve embraced the songwriting process. I haven’t even accepted it; it’s too creepy. There’s an electrical component, for example—the lightning rod thing. I get all flitchy and my hair stands on end, like a seizure. With a heightened awareness of . . . meaning, for lack of a better word, that feels like possession. Whatever is important at that moment will jump up into the air and grab my electrified brain.

  ♋ the fuchsia wall

  then suddenly everything i see’s a love letter

  Playing a real song is like keeping a wild animal for a pet: gorgeous and terrifying, it lives in your house, but it’s never really yours. It’s an honor to stand next to this beast, and yet at the same time, you know it can kill you. It’s bigger, better, more important than you and scarier than any person could ever be.

  A real song doesn’t count listeners; it doesn’t even give a shit about the musician who plays it—it exists only for itself. So spiritual that it’s physical, so basic that it doesn’t say “look at me,” it says “look at us.”

  Listening to it is like watching nature: gross and great.

  So I respect music; it’s powerful—gods and devils. But I would never do this on purpose. Dave says that’s part of it: unless you have to do it, you could be lying.

  I watch Dude carry our TV up a winding staircase. He struggles, jammed into a narrow corner. He can go neither up nor down the stairs without dropping the television. He swears loudly about this.

  Then I hear a soft fluttering sound as a big moth flies in the open window next to Dude’s head. No, it’s a bat! I love bats! The swearing escalates as the bat flops around on Dude’s head, tangled in his hair.

  The bat squeaks, Dude yells. It’s gross and great.

  Mark pulls up on his moped in the gray dawn and beeps the wretched thing outside my window. Wow, he’s up early. Smiling at him through the rain-spattered glass, I push the passenger side door of the Bullet open and he climbs in, soaking wet. “You okay?” he asks through the song he can’t hear, taking off his backpack.

  “Sure. Are you?” I pull my Y towel out of the crack in the door and hand it to him.

  Mark puts the towel over his head and rubs his hair vigorously. “Thank you.”

  “Guess what? There was a snake next to your head last night.”

  He stops rubbing. “There was?” Peering from under the towel, he wipes his wet face with his hand. “Jesus, Kris. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “’Cause you were sleeping.” He gives me a blank look. The song dances around, begging for attention. I’ve gotten really good at hearing two worlds at once. I can carry on c
onversations now, albeit feebly, when a song is playing.

  I watch Mark fold the towel carefully. When he hands it back, I jam it into the door again. “You didn’t have to fold it, sweetie. I was just gonna do this with it.”

  “So you aren’t mad at me?” he asks.

  I turn to him, astonished. “Mad? At you?” He just stares, waiting for an answer. “Mark. I don’t get mad at you. I can’t get mad at you.”

  He stares for another second to make sure I’m telling the truth. “Okay.”

  “Has anyone ever been mad at you?” He nods. Sometimes I really hate songs. “Never think that again.”

  He isn’t smiling. “Okay.”

  I made smiling Mark stop smiling. What a terrible person. All that beige beauty; I don’t deserve him. Suddenly, it occurs to me that “camping” was probably his way of trying to find a place for me to sleep. Oh, god. He still cares where I sleep, still thinks I have a broken-home face. He’s so very kind. Mark is made of kindness. Kindness and fragility and beige. You have to be gentle with people like that. “Look in your backpack,” I tell him.

  Reaching in, he pulls out the heart I drew for him. The song jangles, whooshes and clatters. Mark looks at the drawing for a few seconds, then folds it up and sticks it back in his bag. “Thank you.”

  I can hardly hear him. Mark puts his backpack on and hugs me, then smiles a dim version of his gummy smile and leaves me with my lonelifying noise.

  ♋ him dancing

  i’ll be the runner