I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “What you just told me, that’s what I really needed to hear about Louisa tonight,” I told Molly softly.

  She squeezed my shoulders, drawing me into her embrace again. “Call your band She Laughs, Em. Keep laughing and dancing and don’t take no shit.”

  THE WORST THING YOU COULD DO

  Regan was the last person in the world I thought would fall in love. Well, almost. The last person besides me.

  The morning after the groupie incident with Number Eight, I went down to Regan’s soundproofed basement to rehearse before she even woke up. I played “Louder, Harder, Faster,” the first song I’d ever written, over and over again on acoustic guitar. It was a song about sex with rock gods that I’d come up with a few months before I’d even lost my virginity. I snarled the chorus: “Play it harder. Play it faster. Louder. Harder. Faster. So loudhardfast that I forget your name. After all, did I even know it in the first place,” and played so viciously that eventually a string snapped, lashing into my pinkie. I swore and sucked on my injured finger.

  “Careful there,” Regan said with a smirk, wandering into the room in her pajamas. She plopped down on the couch beside me. “Haven’t heard you play that one in a while.”

  “And I’m not playing it again,” I mumbled around my finger.

  Regan took the guitar from my lap and started to remove the broken string. “Why? It isn’t that bad.”

  “It is after last night.”

  She arched an eyebrow and I sighed, rubbing my finger on my dirty jeans as I launched into the story. I concluded with my three-mile walk of shame and my conversation with her mother.

  “Well, at least we got a cool band name out of it,” Regan consoled.

  I picked at the flap of skin on my pinkie. “Yeah, great, but no one’s going to respect us because they think we’re groupies.”

  “You’re right. No more sleeping with musicians.”

  “After last night, no more sleeping around for me, period,” I said. “Our music is all that matters to me.”

  Regan nodded solemnly. “Me, too. No more guys. They’re boring anyway. From now on we just focus on the band. Okay?” She extended her pinkie and I smiled and wrapped my injured one around it. “Now let’s write some new songs,” she said, grinning.

  So, a pact was made. But that was before Regan laid her eyes on Tom Fawcett.

  Tom was a lanky loner a year younger than us. He’d transformed from an ostracized band geek—whose president-of-the-PTA, church-fund-raising-queen fascist of a mother made him wear ill-fitting, button-down shirts and dress pants—into a scruffy punk-rocker kid in one summer. He stalked into the lunchroom on the first day of school with the baby fat shaved off his razor-sharp cheekbones, bleached hair erratically sticking up around black headphones, a Social Distortion T-shirt, and ripped jeans. The look in his long-lashed, heavy-lidded brown eyes told everyone who’d pushed him around in the past to back off. And he might’ve been hungover on his first day of high school, which was pretty cool.

  When she saw him, Regan’s jaw dropped. It was like when Christian Slater shows up in the cafeteria for the first time in Heathers—except, fortunately, Tom didn’t shoot anyone. “How come I never noticed …” Regan stammered with that wide-eyed look Winona Ryder had when she noticed her ill-fated love interest for the first time.

  “That’s Tom Fawcett, dude.” I shrugged, appreciating his beauty, sure, but not finding it earth-shattering.

  “I know, but … Emily, he’s like … cool. How come we’ve never seen him at River’s Edge?”

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “Like Sarah Fawcett would let her precious only child hang out with delinquents like us.”

  Regan shook her head, awestruck. “I can’t believe he’s related to her. I can’t believe he’s from Carlisle.”

  And I knew then that she wanted him wanted him. Like wanted him to be her boyfriend. This was ground neither of us had treaded before. I would have understood if she wanted to break our pact to sleep with him. But to fall for him? To want him for more than a night or two? And to obsessively watch him from afar, incapable of talking to him, like some typical lovesick teenager? The change in my best friend was disturbing to say the least.

  The madness went on for two months, but when Regan decided to be Rizzo from Grease for Halloween, I hoped she’d start acting like a badass Stockard Channing again and less like a sappy Olivia Newton-John.

  “Aren’t you guys a little old to be dressing up and going around asking for candy?” Marissa teased as she walked into the bathroom that she and Regan shared while Regan and I were putting the finishing touches on our costumes.

  The bathroom adjoined their two bedrooms, and it hadn’t been painted since they were little girls. It had this rubber-ducky border around it. By the time Marissa was twelve, she was embarrassed by the ducks and started defacing them. Regan joined in even though she was only eight at the time. The ducks had X’s over their eyes, rainbow-colored feathers, and comic-strip thought balloons above their heads filled with back-and-forth banter between Regan and Marissa. Like, next to the toilet, a Regan duck threatened, “If you don’t pay me for my bracelet that you flushed last night, Mom and Dad will get a list of every bad thing you’ve done since I was born.” Marissa’s duck poetically retorted, “Sisters that betray die in gruesome ways.”

  I stepped out of Marissa’s path so she could grab her makeup bag from the side of the sink. “We plan to be big rock stars one day, remember? Our whole lives will be about dressing up and getting candy. Isn’t that what you’re going to do now?”

  July Lies was about to leave on their first big tour, opening for a Minneapolis band that had just scored a major-label deal. Marissa would be playing bass in midsize, all-ages clubs across the country because the singer of that band had caught a July Lies show at River’s Edge. I was bursting with pride for Marissa, not to mention feeling supercharged because she’d proven that big things could happen, even to bands from Carlisle. Regan, on the other hand, refused to be happy for her.

  Before Marissa could answer me, Regan grumbled, “And she’s not taking us.” She slumped onto the toilet, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Marissa turned away from the sink, her fawn-colored waves flying through the air like a shampoo commercial. She stared down at her little sister and sighed with a mixture of sympathy and annoyance. “Regan, you’re in school.”

  Regan narrowed her hazel eyes. The dreamy look that had been polluting her face evaporated. The only time Regan wasn’t thinking about Tom was when she was being pissed off at Marissa for leaving. “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have waited until summer to tour. Then we could have come with you.”

  “What, as little roadies?” Marissa laughed, which was very much the wrong thing to do.

  Regan leapt to her feet, stomping her black high-heeled sandals angrily. “As roadies? As an opening band! Don’t you remember your other band? She Laughs? The one you quit last weekend when you decided to tour with July Lies?”

  Marissa shook her head, still smiling. “You mean my little sister’s band that I agreed to play bass for until they found a bassist? You haven’t even played River’s Edge and you want to go on tour? Please, Regan, let’s not get into this again. I need to finish packing. Besides, I don’t think Rizzo would throw a temper tantrum. Emily, how could you have let her win?”

  As soon as Marissa glanced over at me, she started cackling. I’d put my bright yellow beehive wig on. “Damn,” Marissa giggled as she surveyed my lemon-colored, fifties-style prom dress and matching heels. “Frenchy, right? When she goes to the big dance? No wonder you gave in. Wow, you look …”

  “Like a pineapple,” I quipped, quoting the line from the movie. As pasty as I was, I knew I looked horrendous in yellow. But when Regan and I watched Grease at two in the morning a couple weeks earlier and decided to be Pink Ladies for Halloween, we’d gotten into a terrible argument over who should be Rizzo. Like a screaming-at-each-other, me-storming-out-of-her
-house-and-walking-home-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-then-not-speaking-for-practically-a-week kind of fight—and Regan and I never fought. Ultimately, I decided that since I related to Rizzo in real life, Frenchy would make a better costume. And I had to let Regan have something. She was taking the Marissa-going-on-tour thing really hard. She thought Marissa had a familial obligation to bum around Carlisle until we were old enough to escape with her, even though it was the fall of 1991, aptly dubbed by Sonic Youth as the year that punk broke, and Marissa needed to take advantage of the spotlight waiting to shine on the next great unknown band.

  Marissa sidestepped a mound of laundry to stand in the doorway and admire us. “You both look awesome! Really authentic.” She proudly clapped her hands.

  I paused in my application of pink lip gloss to study Regan. She did have Rizzo down from the shoes to the capris to the partially unbuttoned, cleavage-revealing red blouse. She’d even customized a pink jacket with “Pink Ladies” on the back in perfect black cursive letters. Regan pressed her lips together as she finished applying scarlet lipstick. She met her sister’s eyes in the mirror. “Well, you can’t find much in Carlisle except for out-of-date clothing.” She smiled at Marissa, showing that she’d given up the argument. And she was probably thinking about Tom Fawcett again.

  “I’ve got something for you!” Marissa exclaimed suddenly. She rummaged in the linen closet and threw black pillowcases at us.

  Regan rolled her eyes. “We aren’t actually going to trick-or-treat. We just like dressing up for Halloween.”

  I nodded in agreement, careful to keep my heavy wig from sliding off.

  “Sure you are! And this is your first stop!” Marissa led us into her bedroom. She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, her turquoise eyes dancing.

  Regan and I knew what was in that drawer. We took from it as often as we could without being noticed. Marissa had kept an overstocked, makeshift minibar since she was fourteen. God knows how she did it, seeing as they kept those bottles behind the counter. As she was at everything else, Marissa was probably just a more artful thief than Regan and I, though we had no trouble pilfering her stolen goods. We’d been holding our noses and draining little bottles of vodka and tequila since we were twelve, back when we were able to get drunk off of just one.

  Marissa scooped up handfuls of tiny Jose, Jack, Bacardi, Fleischmann’s, and Absolut bottles, then dumped them into our pillowcases. “Trick or treat!” She grinned, happy to corrupt us one last time before she left.

  We stuck around until five thirty to see Marissa off when her band came to pick her up. Then we went wandering in search of something fun to do. We seemed to forget every year that a holiday didn’t suddenly make Carlisle an interesting place to live. There was a pumpkin-carving contest at the annual Harvest Festival on Main Street. The adults there were a terrifying reminder of what we’d become if we didn’t escape Carlisle: folks who lived for Halloween, Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day, and Christmas because they loved to dress entirely in the color scheme of the holiday and wear appropriately themed socks. Little kids masqueraded as the cartoon characters of the moment—Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Bart Simpson—and bobbed for apples. Teenage girls in sexy kitty costumes plotted to sneak off and make out with meathead teenage boys who tossed pumpkins around like footballs.

  It was pathetic and Regan and I wanted none of it, so we headed for the older, less populated part of town. A pickup truck swerved down the street next to us.

  “Hey, sluttzzzz!” three guys slurred. Drunken football players whipped an egg in our general direction but missed.

  “Fuck you!” Regan and I shouted after them in unison. I wished we had something to throw, but I wasn’t wasting one of the little liquor bottles.

  We broke those out as we cut through a couple fields and a thatch of trees. “Tom’s place is, like, two houses down the road that way,” Regan announced, pointing with a bottle of Absolut in her hand and a dopey smile on her face.

  Ignoring her Tom comment, knowing I’d be hearing more as she got drunker, I focused instead on her drinking habits. “Why are you drinking all the Absoluts? First you drank all the Joses, and now you’re going to drink all the Absoluts, aren’t you?” On the other hand, I downed my bottles in the same order I used to eat my Halloween candy—one of each from least favorite to favorite, then starting over at the beginning again. I would have enough for about four rounds.

  We’d arrived at our old grammar school playground and Regan plunked down on one of the swings, looking confused. “Yeah. I don’t want to mix them up. If I drank the gin, then vodka, then rum, then tequila, then whiskey like you are, I would puke. Why the hell are you doing that?”

  I started to swing, the fabric of my yellow dress dragging on the ground until I caught some air. “They’re all going to end up mixed together anyway.”

  Regan jettisoned her heels, burying her bare feet in the dirty sand. “Why do you start with the Fleischmann’s? You hate gin.”

  “To get it over with, end on an up note.” I gazed dizzily at the rest of the playground as I swung. A few yards away from the swing set, there were three plastic animals—a duck, a horse, and a frog—that rocked back and forth on giant springs. I kicked off one lemon-yellow high heel midswing, aiming for the frog, but I missed.

  “That’s the stupidest method, Emily. You should drink the ones you like first. Once you get drunk, you won’t care.”

  “Yeah,” I said, releasing my other shoe and watching it land on target against the duck’s ass, causing it to rock forward and spring back. “But when I puke, I usually taste the last thing I drank, and it doesn’t seem as bad if it tastes like something I like.”

  “That’s why we have the peppermint schnapps, though. So you can puke minty fresh.” Regan patted her pillowcase, where she carried the bottle we’d stolen from Carlisle Groceries and Meats a couple weeks ago.

  “Put that stuff down and swing up here. Let’s have a contest, see who can jump farther.”

  Always up for a competition, Regan pumped her black-clad legs to catch up with me. When she finally did, we counted, “One, two, three!” and released. I landed closer to the plastic animals than she did, but only because the slick taffeta material of my dress caused me to slide across the sand on my knees, shredding the bottom of the dress along with the skin on my bare legs.

  “Dammit!” I whined, examining the damage. The combination of sand and the tulle layer of the dress had left a bloody rug burn on my knees and shins.

  Regan came over with our pillowcases, sniggering. “Here.” She thrust mine at me. “Alcohol makes everything better.”

  So we sat in the sand and drank. The long shadows from the swing set and the trees behind us faded into true darkness. It wasn’t long before the conversation turned, as I expected, to Tom Fawcett.

  “Have you noticed the way he, like, slllings his backpack?” Her tongue drunkenly stuck on “slings.” She awkwardly rocked forward off her hands to do a feeble imitation. “He sort of slouches and sighs into it. This little barely noticeable sigh of, like, being that weirdly beautiful boy in a sea of jock/hicks. Like—”

  “I definitely should not have let you be Rizzo,” I snapped. “This is the most un-Rizzo behavior I’ve ever seen. You’re like Sandy drooling over Danny freakin’ Zuko. Yuck!” I threw an empty minibottle of Absolut at her. “Why don’t you just hand over the pillowcase and the Pink Ladies jacket, because you’re too goddamn pure to be pink.”

  “Shut up!” Regan’s fake eyelashes weighed her eyelids down, but now she just looked wasted, not sultry, which was the original intent. She raised her finger slowly, and it hung there, pointing at me accusatorily until she came up with words in her defense. “He’s, like, my Kenickie, okay? You can go right ahead and be Marty and screw a bunch of guys, but I have my Kenickie, okay?”

  “I’m Frenchy!” I snorted. “And if he’s your Kenickie, don’t you need to sleep with him, think you’re knocked up, and avoid him until gradua
tion before you can be all gross over him?”

  “He’s my Kenickie,” she slurred again, reaching for the peppermint schnapps. She was down to her gin bottles and avoiding them like the plague, probably because, as I predicted, they’d make her puke if she drank them. “’Cept he’s hotter. Like Kurt Cobain. And he plays guitar and we should get him to join our band and make us really famous.”

  I snatched and almost hurled the schnapps bottle at her, but I didn’t want to waste the alcohol, so I tossed my cigarette butt at her instead. “Ow, bitch!” she muttered, brushing it off her pants, where I was satisfied to see it left a burn mark.

  “I’m the guitarist, and you and I will make the band famous, not some stupid guy.” I pounded my palms against the sand. “You’re selling me out for dick!”

  “Oh, Emily.” She clambered toward me, eyes getting misty so her eyeliner ran slightly. “I love you.” She flung herself on me in an awkward drunken hug, managing to take the schnapps bottle out of my hand in the process. “I would never sell you out for dick.” She slid down beside me, taking a contemplative drink. “I know it’s freaky how much I like him. It creeps me out, too. But I do and I know he plays all sorts of instruments. Remember he was in band in grammar school?”

  “Regan!” I laughed. “Everyone had to be in band in grammar school.”

  “Okay, yeah, but I overheard him talking to the music teacher, and he, like, plays everything, bass, guitar, drums, piano, even violin. He’s like a prodigy. We should let him in our band.”

  I liked that phrasing a lot better. “Let him? I guess we could let him, if he’s, like, really good.”

  “Awesome!” Regan jumped to her feet. “Let’s go tell him.”

  “Tell him now? Like, show up at his front door wasted? You think his evil mom is gonna let us in? She’ll call the cops.”