“I hope we play good,” he says, shaking his head.
I laugh. “Not too good.”
“Right. They don’t like too good, do they?” He grabs a beer and opens it, then sits down on a grimy bench covered in graffiti. “How about cute? Should we play cute?”
“Maybe.” It’s so sad when people care about bullshit. It’s like watching him pine for a bimbo, and he’s not a bad guy. Of course, his band describes itself as “an A and R guy’s wet dream.” How embarrassing. These bands are incredibly adept at buying their own hype; Betty would hate them. Except that they’re so good at showing off. What they do is sell counter-culture as approachable yet hip. Which is manipulative and extremely effective. People like that fool practically everybody. Trying to be cool is so lame. “Cute’s been done to death,” I say. “Smug is in; you could try smug.”
He takes a sip of his beer and stares at nothing. “Smug,” he sighs.
I smile. “You can do it!”
He turns to face me, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Oops. “I mean play nice. I’ve seen you play nice.”
“Sounds like a euphemism for sucking,” he grumbles.
“I thought you did that on purpose,” I say.
“What, suck?!” he leans forward and some of his beer spills on the floor.
“Watch it,” I say, looking around for a paper towel. I can’t find one, so I grab a wad of Kleenex out of my sister’s backpack and wipe up the spilled beer. He watches me clean up his beer. “Thanks,” he says.
“No problem.”
“Did you just tell me that I suck?”
“Did I? I don’t think so.” I toss the beer-soaked Kleenex into the trash. I’m such a jerk.
“I’m pretty sure you did,” he sighs, taking another sip and staring at nothing again.
“That doesn’t sound like me,” I say pathetically. “I thought I said you guys played nice.”
“It’s okay.” He looks at me, grim. “Honesty’s important.”
I sit down on the bench next to him. “No, it’s not.”
He stares at nothing again. “We do kinda suck on purpose,” he says thoughtfully.
Gee, that’s sad. And true. Nobody’s more an artist than anybody else but bands like his pollute the impulse. It’s mean to suck—it’s rude. He’s a good person; he should have the decency to be a good musician.
He can probably tell I think that, but, of course, I can’t say it out loud. “You’re lucky,” I tell him. “My band’s a mutant. Nobody’ll ever like us. Y’all know how to sell yourselves. That’s not a negative attribute; it’ll get you far.”
He quits staring at nothing to search my face. “You shoulda stuck with ‘smug.’ ”
Unlike A and R guys’ wet dreams, my band is very suspicious of its fans. We could stand to buy a little of our own hype. When people come to our shows, it confuses us; we can’t imagine what they’re doing there. We like Throwing Muses ’cause we are Throwing Muses. But why do they keep showing up?
We figure they gotta have some ulterior motive. The four of us stare into the packed bar from the dressing room, making guesses as to why the people in the audience are people in the audience and not people at home. Leslie turns around to look at us. “Thirsty?”
“Lonely?” guesses Tea.
“Lost?” I ask.
“I don’t understand it.” Dave shakes his head and shrugs. “We’re so not fun.”
We stare into the noisy room full of happy, sweaty people, trying to imagine feeling what they’re feeling and reflecting it back at them. “At least we know they’re buzzed,” says Tea.
♋ pneuma
i tongue a socket
you feel the jolt
When we get home after the show, a three-letter word is written on the message wall in between cartoons and quotes: “IVO” with a twelve-digit phone number after it. I don’t know what that stands for. International . . . Voting Organization? Can you vote internationally? I know we can’t afford to call them back anyway; that’s a ton of numbers. The poor I.V.O., I think. They don’t know how far away they are.
In the morning, the front porch holds a carton of cigarettes, a cinder block painted blue, a bottle of essential oil that says “rain” on it, and a flyer inviting us to join the neighborhood softball team. I place all this except the cinder block—which is gonna stay where it is—on the kitchen table and then try to face my pills again.
The roaches that scatter when I lift a glass off the rack have always intrigued me; I think of them as guys who know where they’re headed. But roaches and nausea don’t go well together. Their scurrying supercharges the nausea and I throw my pills away without trying to take them. When I do, I see yesterday’s flowers sticking up out of the garbage.
The phone rings. Who calls every morning? I’m scared the ringing’ll wake my bandmates and we had a late night. So I cross the room, take a deep breath and pick up the receiver, putting it to my ear. After about four seconds of long distance crackling, a man says “Hello?” in an upper class British accent.
I wait, hoping he’ll hang up, but the crackling continues. “Hi.”
“Oh, hello! Is this a member of Throwing Muses?”
Oh, shoot . . . phone for me! What’re the odds? “Yes. This is Kristin.”
“Oh, Kristin!” He sounds very excited. About what? “Hello!”
“Hi!”
“My name is Ivowattsrussell. I run 4AD Records out of London.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
“Ivo. Watts. Russell,” he articulates. This guy talks like the goddamn queen.
“Could you spell that?” I say, looking at yesterday’s message on the wall.
He pauses, then starts spelling. “I-v-o-w . . .” Hey, it’s the I.V. O.! I don’t remember sending any demos to England. Ivo’s still spelling. “. . . u-s-s—”
“Oh, it’s okay,” I interrupt. “I just meant your first name. It’s written here on our wall. I’ve never met anyone named that before. I thought you were an international voting organization.”
Silence for a few seconds. “Oh, I see!” He laughs, then pauses again. “Can you vote internationally?”
“I doubt it. Who would you vote for? King of the world?”
“Yes . . . well . . . it’s nice to meet you.”
I can’t think of anything to say, so I nod, then remember that I’m not allowed to. “Yeah. Hi.” I roll my eyes. Brilliant.
“I’m calling about your self-released cassette. I think it’s really brilliant.”
Hey, I’m brilliant after all. “Thank you very much.”
“You should make a record that sounds just like it.”
“Yeah, we should.”
“However, I regret to say, I don’t sign American bands.”
“Oh.” What’d he call for? “Well, that’s too bad.”
“It is, actually. I love your music. If there’s anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask.”
I laugh. “I’ll try to think of something.”
Silence again. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks.
“You mean right now?” I shake my head. “I mean, no. No, thanks. Sweet of you to call, though.”
“Of course. Nice to finally meet you. Goodbye!” I hear a dull clatter, then the crackling on the line stops.
While I’m standing there, still holding the receiver up to my ear, Dave walks out of his bedroom. Seeing me on the phone, he drops his jaw in mock horror. “Who’re you talking to?” he whispers.
“Nobody.” I hold the dead phone out to him.
Dave nods, taking the tea kettle off the stove and filling it at the sink. “That makes sense, I guess. You aren’t scared of the phone if nobody’s on it.” He turns to me and narrows his eyes. “But what do you and the phone talk about . . . ?”
“See this?” I point to the IVO on the message wall. “I talked to it. It’s a man and it’s English. From England. That’
s why the phone number’s so long.”
Dave frowns. “You’d think that if you speak the same language, they’d knock off a few numbers.”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
Ivo calls the next day, asks for me, and then tells me again that he has an English record company that doesn’t sign American bands, expressing his regret that such is the case, given Throwing Muses’ “integrity.” The next morning, he calls to say that he’s still enjoying our music and also doesn’t sign American bands, which is a shame because he owns a whole record company all the way over there in England. Then he calls again the next day to say pretty much the same thing, asking if I’d thought of anything he could do for us. The next day, he doesn’t call.
I find that I’m disappointed. I’ve had this flu for almost a week now, so during the day, I can’t really do anything but feel crappy and talk to Ivo on the phone. I like trying to picture where he is, though all I ever come up with is a weird amalgam of Buckingham Palace and Monty Python sketches.
We always reach a dead end talking about music because he can’t sign my American band and I don’t know how to ask him for help. He probably wants to help us find an American deal, but we don’t want one; they seem so evil. So Ivo and I talk about everything else. He’s really fucking funny, especially with that accent. It makes everything he says entertaining, but he’s also genuinely entertaining. And open, childlike. I picture him as a six-year-old with a bowler hat.
I’m guessing that he hasn’t called because he’s ready to move on to other, more English bands, when the phone rings. “I’m calling to tell you about a boil . . .” he says in his man-queen voice, a little breathless. Apparently, he had a boil on his neck that burst in a café and sprayed all over the wall. “It was lovely,” he sighs.
“Sounds nice,” I say. “Wish I could have seen it.”
“Maybe you could picture it,” he says. “It was like a verruca and a carbuncle combined.”
“A what and a what?”
“Like a wart and a . . . uh . . .”
“It’s okay. I’m a little pukey with the flu right now. I wouldn’t wanna picture anything too gross.”
“I had the flu myself, last week,” he says. “Dismal.”
“Maybe I caught it from you.”
“Impossible. I caught it from a curry.”
“Oh. I caught it from a rainy night.”
“You know what you should do,” he says. “Put your feet in hot water and put an ice bag on your head.”
“Ice bag?” I wish I had the queen’s voice so I could use it to say “ice bag.”
“Or maybe it’s the other way around . . .” He gets suddenly brisk. “Please give me a call,” he says, “if there’s any way I can be of help to you. You have my number, right?”
“I do. It’s written on the wall here. But I can’t afford to call it. Too many numbers.”
“I see.” He sounds serious. Usually he sounds goofy—well, like the queen in a goofy mood. “Is there anything you . . . need?”
“We need a cat,” I answer. “We have mice but none of us wanna get into the mousetrap thing.” I tell him that Dave’s mattress has been squeaking at night even when he lies perfectly still, and that he and Leslie actually cornered a mouse that ran out of it, then tried to kill it with hair spray.
“Can you kill things with hair spray?” asks Ivo.
“No. It sneezed and ran into the toaster.”
“Oh my. Then what happened?”
“Then they tried to toast it.”
“Ah,” he says. “Did they succeed?”
“No, they just singed its fur. I think all that hair spray protected it.”
“You’re lucky it didn’t explode . . .”
“I know. Then they felt bad, so they let it go and it ran right back into Dave’s mattress.”
“I see,” says Ivo.
“That toaster cost twenty dollars. So now we’re talking about cats.”
He thinks. “I have two cats,” he says. “They’re both rather nasty, but you can have the pretty one.”
“Why’s it pretty?” I ask. “What’s it look like?”
“Well, like a big . . . cat,” he answers.
“You mean like a cat, but big?”
“That’s right. And I’ll throw in some catnip. He’s wild about catnip; makes him quite mad.”
“Your cat’s on drugs? Okay, we’ll take it.”
A few days later, we receive a contract from 4AD Records. “But he doesn’t sign American bands,” I say.
“Who doesn’t?” asks Tea, reading it.
“Ivo.”
She looks at me. “I—V—O? From the wall?”
“Yeah. He was gonna give us a cat.”
This is Ivo’s offer: to fund, release and work one record, then see how we all feel. That’s the contract. What the hell, doesn’t he know how the music business works? Who is he, anyway? Another misguided angel.
Behind the door in the shed is a box full of kittens. The mother cat, wrapped around her babies, purrs loudly.
I’ve never seen this cat before; she seems to have come out of nowhere, so I figure she must be an angel in cat form, delivering all this happiness unto our shed.
Zoë lies near them, panting and smiling. My little brother whispers, “They’re named Jake. All of them, except for the girl kitten. And she’s named Jake, too.”
A vial of blue fluid tells me I’m pregnant. The fluid is beautiful, aquamarine. The sun shines through it as I stare and stare. I’m in shock. So I don’t have the flu. I thought birth control worked.
Some boys like little rat girls. Not many, but a few. I’ve always been grateful for the ones that did. Now I’m not so sure.
All us teenage females know that pregnancy is a remote possibility. So you get an abortion and move on. We all know that, too.
I stare into the blue fluid, hoping it can tell me more.
It doesn’t, so I find my way to the bus station and buy a ticket to Providence. In the bus station, I make a deal with my brain: we will not think until we get to the beach. This is surprisingly easy. I stare out the bus window instead of thinking. Soon things start to look familiar and Providence comes into view.
At the Providence bus station, I buy a ticket home, to the island. I’m so sick. Then I look out another window until the view begins to look familiar. And so tired. From the bus station on the island, I walk to the ocean.
Now I have to think.
Sitting on a cement wall, looking out at the sea, I kick off my shoes and stick my feet in the sand. The water is beautiful, aquamarine.
I feel as if there is a light in my middle. One I shouldn’t put out.
So much for our record deal. And everything else.
It’s late September. The last few days of ocean swimming. I pull off my jeans and jump into the water in my T-shirt.
♋ 37 hours
like flying on fire
I listened when the soothers spoke kindly of wayward chemicals and I know they meant it when they decided my reality wasn’t theirs, but now I need permission to stop taking pills. Brain-fuzzing is one thing, teratogenic compounds another—drugs could put out the light in my middle. And not taking them could make me manic again. Or depressed. I don’t know what to do.
So I’m reading every psychiatry book I can find. They aren’t written for me. Most of the books intended to help you help yourself are in the “self-help” section, and you don’t wanna go there. You’d think helping yourself’ d be a ballsy thing to do, but self-help’s the whiniest section of all.
I went to a bookstore first. Everybody all glasses and sweaters and constantly asking if I need any “help.” Well, obviously—if there was a “desperation” section, I’d be in that. They probably thought I was shoplifting; they always think I’m shoplifting. ’Cause I dress homeless, I guess. Please . . . if I were shoplifting, I’d dress nice.
I stood in this bookstore for about an hour, tearing through whiny books for whiny people wh
o wanna learn how to whine more coherently, looking for information. I couldn’t find any. It’s so condescending to fill books with everything but information. Like us laymen can’t handle it. It’s fucking research, for christ sake . . . share it.
Soon I realized I wasn’t looking to help myself; I was looking for someone else to help me. So much for ballsy. I’m whinier than I thought. So I thanked the helpful sweater people and left; went to the library, where they leave you alone. The library’s full of panicky students cramming in cubicles. Still all glasses and sweaters, but these people are too preoccupied with their own stress to even look up.
Poring over reference books all afternoon, college textbooks and drug manuals, I’ve learned that the medications I’m supposed to be taking are, of course, potentially dangerous to a fetus. I already stopped taking them anyway; I can’t keep ’em down.
I look down at my snake bag. An alcoholic is always an alcoholic—I am always me. Soon a manhole cover will throw itself off and evil will fly out and suck me in. So far, evil hasn’t, though. I’m hoping this means that, for now, I can handle my own twisted chemicals better than the light in my middle can handle those that have been prescribed for me.
♋ silica
play a grown-up
’til you grow up
I’ve made an appointment with a psychiatrist to ask permission to stop taking the drugs I already stopped taking. If he tells me I’m not allowed to do this, then I know I have to have an abortion. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened to somebody. But I feel like I gotta serve this light as best I can, give it every shot at living before I give up. Maybe that’s stupid. But I haven’t met the light yet; it could be great. Its existence is my fault, anyway, my responsibility.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 22
