I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  “After midnight and only because we’re going to do that show—”

  “Shh.” He dropped the needle onto the record and fell into a cross-legged position in front of the stereo, sitting in a trance—hands in his lap, eyes closed, head bobbing—the way I used to do when I was playing DJ. When the song ended, he immediately flipped it over to side B.

  He did that about five times, repeating “God, you’re so good” whenever there was silence.

  Finally, my embarrassment boiled over and I put my hand firmly on his. “Please stop.”

  He smiled at me over his shoulder and relented, carefully returning the record to its sleeve. “No wonder the guy from Q101 wanted to book you as soon as he heard this.” Then he reassured me for the thousandth time, “It’s okay you’re missing my birthday dinner for it. You’ve given me the best present I’ve ever gotten right here.”

  I shook my head guiltily. Johnny’d had drinks with someone who put together local music showcases for the big alt-rock radio station and gave him a test-pressing of the seven-inch. He called Johnny two days later. The headliner had dropped out of their March show and the station wanted She Laughs. Problem was it was scheduled for the night of my father’s birthday and Molly already had this big dinner planned. I’d offered my dad and Regan’s parents tickets to the show instead and Molly had been all for it, but my dad came up with a million excuses. Hotels in Chicago were too expensive. He couldn’t ask for that time off work. Forty meant he was too old for that kind of thing.

  “Chicago’s filled with memories of Louisa for him,” Molly sighed when she called to back up my father’s decision that I play my concert while he kept to his original plans in Carlisle. “He really wants to visit you and see you play, but it’s going to take a while.”

  I had to leave Carlisle by noon on Dad’s birthday to get back to Chicago in time for sound check. And even though my dad seemed to be content with my decision, that night in the green room, just ten minutes before we were to go on, Regan plunked down beside me on the couch to express her displeasure for the millionth time.

  “I still think we should’ve turned this down and you should’ve had dinner with your dad. You shouldn’t listen to every single thing Johnny says. If they thought we were that good, they would have booked us for another show. I don’t know why Johnny gets so involved with everything and I really don’t get why you always defer to him. You used to trust your gut.”

  I glanced across the room where Johnny showed off our seven-inch to a music critic he’d invited. “Johnny helps because he wants to see us succeed,” I told her, just as I’d repeatedly told myself. “I don’t ‘defer’ to him, and I do my share of arguing with him. But I listen to his advice because he knows the business end of things better than us and he knows Chicago. I don’t know about you, but I still feel really lost here sometimes. I mean, in Carlisle, I could have gotten to your house blindfolded, but here I keep taking the train in the wrong direction,” I joked in an attempt to lighten the mood.

  Regan arched an eyebrow. “So that’s why you never come over.”

  “Regan …” I reached for her hand, but she moved it to tighten her blond-streaked pigtails. I let my fingers fall to the shabby couch and tugged some stuffing through a small hole in the fabric. “I see you at rehearsal every day,” I argued defensively. “Though I am getting sick of you showing up late and stinking of tequila.”

  Regan ignored that remark, her hazel eyes fixed angrily on Johnny. “If Johnny’s so good at playing the music biz, what the hell’s going on with his band?”

  “Regan, you know the bassist quit because he didn’t like the new direction they were going in. A direction I suggested, by the way, that Johnny went with because he listens to me, too. He’s auditioning people, but he has a record deal already, as you’re well aware.”

  “Right.” She fluttered her long eyelashes. “But for some reason, he’s convinced you to hold out on signing with Capone Records, so we don’t have one.”

  “Only because he thinks we can land a bigger deal,” I insisted.

  “And never mind my opinion that we should start out by working with an indie. Let’s not learn from my sister, who’s fighting to get out of her contract with DGC so that July Lies can go back to No Wave Records, a company that actually promoted and understood them. Let’s just sign to a major label as the token punk band and get totally shafted—”

  “Guys!” Apparently, Tom had noticed our bickering.

  When we both whipped our heads around and spat “What?” he cowered slightly.

  “We have to go on in ten minutes,” he meekly reminded us.

  Regan pushed herself off the couch. “Fine, guess I better go pee.”

  “AKA do a shot.”

  Regan flipped me the bird. I shook it off. I had to. We needed to go onstage. And we did such a good job that all was forgotten afterward. The energy of the music had us hugging again like it did after every show.

  So I chalked the incident up to Regan feeling the same way I had when she’d first fallen for Tom: a little bit of jealousy and a strong aversion to change. And since there was so much change going on for both of us, who could blame her. Sure, she continued to show up late and a little toasted to rehearsal and it pissed me off, but as long as she kept playing well, I couldn’t really complain.

  But Johnny and his band were usually leaving the practice space when Tom and I were arriving, and by May, he’d waited around with us for Regan often enough to form his own opinion. That’s when I learned the hard way about mixing business and pleasure. It ruined perfectly good sex.

  “Emily … Jesus … ,” Johnny sighed as he rolled off of me. He kissed my cheek and put his head down next to mine. I could feel both of our bodies emanating warmth, my skin still pulsating in every place he’d touched.

  “I love you,” I told him. I’d been using those words for six months, and they finally felt natural.

  My eyelids slipped down and I gazed at him through the blur of my lashes. Johnny and I made each other melt. Like me, Johnny looked hard as nails when he was onstage with his band or anywhere in the outside world. He turned the sneer into an art form. Combined with his slate-gray eyes that went dark as a threatening sky when he was angry, his sneer actually looked menacing, not ludicrous like it did on the majority of the punk boys who affected it. However, when we were in bed together, all of that was gone. Johnny’s sharp cheekbones were offset by soft, almost girlish lips that fluttered into a little smile. His eyes glowed a silvery light. Everything about him became tender. And it made me go soft like that, too.

  But that morning, Johnny’s voice broke into my romantic thoughts: “Emily, there’s something you really need to think about.”

  “Hmmm?” I responded, still spacey.

  “I don’t know the nice way to put this, so I’ll just say it. You need to find a new drummer for your band.”

  My body tensed and my head snapped to the side to face him. His lips clenched in a straight line and his gaze emptied of any mushy affection. He’d gone into full-on business mode.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “Regan and I are the band. There is no band without Regan.”

  “I know you feel that way and I didn’t want to say anything, but I don’t think Regan’s committed to the band anymore. All she wants to do is get drunk.” He kept his voice level, acting sympathetic while he did this little head-nodding thing in an attempt to subliminally convince me he was right.

  I couldn’t believe he’d brought this up not even five minutes after sex. My brain spun. “We’re a punk band, Johnny! Getting drunk is synonymous with that.” And what I didn’t tell him was that I couldn’t lecture anyone about using substances to cope with the fruits of success. When I’d whined about the crazy hours I had to keep between work and the band, one of the girls I waitressed with introduced me to her late-night study aid: her roommate’s ADD medication. I only used it occasionally because I had no interest in falling victim to th
e rock ’n’ roll junkie cliché. But really, it seemed like slightly stronger NoDoz, perfect for the days after late gigs when coffee wasn’t going to get me through a morning shift, an afternoon rehearsal, and time with Johnny.

  He propped himself up on his elbow, looking down on me. “Emily, I’ve told you since the day I met you that you are so much more than just a punk band.”

  Yeah, he did keep telling me that. Sometimes as a genuine compliment and sometimes as ammunition during our occasional drunken spats over She Laughs’ direction. He’d lay out all these plans and then fly off the handle when I joked about him being domineering. But those fights were supposed to take place at night before the angry makeup sex, not first thing in the morning during postcoital calm.

  I sat up furiously, the sheet slipping from my shoulders, exposing them to the chilly spring breeze that blew through the window next to our bed. “Are you my manager or my boyfriend? You can’t be both, and I don’t even want a goddamn manager.”

  I wrenched the sheet off the bed, wrapping it around myself before I stormed across our tiny one-room apartment to the bathroom.

  “Emily, come here,” Johnny pleaded. “I’m just trying to look out for you because I love you.”

  I glowered back at him. “If you loved me, you would know that Regan is like my sister and no one could ever make me abandon or betray her. Especially not a guy.” My last words dripped with venom. I slammed and locked the bathroom door.

  Seething, I paced back and forth in the small space between the door and the shower. The oversize T-shirt that I wore as a nightgown was draped over the towel rack, so I dropped the sheet and put that on. I needed to relax. My fingers started to itch, and my arm muscles tingled. The only thing that would soothe me was playing guitar. Fortunately, since the bathroom doubled as my sanctuary, the only place I could go for privacy in our apartment (and being an only child, I thrived on privacy in ways I wasn’t aware of until I moved in with Johnny and had none), I kept an old, acoustic guitar in the corner of the room, next to the toilet. I sat down on the side of the bathtub with it. After a few minutes, I’d totally forgotten about Johnny, finally perfecting a riff I’d been struggling with.

  “In the winter, no one knows. In the winter, she don’t go,” I sang, my voice a scratchy murmur. Then it arced into an edgy wail: “In his failure, I am sold. In his room, she grows old.” I played the song through twice and sighed with accomplishment.

  “That’s a great riff,” Johnny commented through the door.

  My aggravation returned the moment I was reminded of his existence. I got up and banged on the door. “Go away!” He didn’t respond. After a moment of silence, I added spitefully, “It may be a good riff, but it won’t be a song without Regan. She’s one of the best damn drummers out there.”

  I waited for Johnny to argue, but he surprised me. “You’re right,” he said softly. “And I’m really sorry about what I said. It was out of line.”

  I unlocked the door, opened it just a crack, and peered out suspiciously. Johnny sat directly across from the bathroom, his back against the short wall that separated our kitchen from the rest of the apartment. He took a drag from his cigarette and looked up at me, his eyes as placid as they had been in bed before he dropped his bombshell. “I am really sorry, Emily. I know Regan is like your sister.”

  I nodded and stepped out of the bathroom.

  He held the cigarette pack out to me, a peace offering. I accepted, easing onto the floor beside him. I decided I would just overlook everything that happened between the sex and the cigarette. I put my head on his shoulder, ignoring my increasingly nagging doubts about his intentions when it came to my career. But I shouldn’t have ignored my growing concern about Regan.

  Two weeks later, she failed to show up to rehearsal. Tom and I waited for an hour at the practice space. Normally, we would have let it go, but we had a show to play that night with Johnny’s band and we needed our drummer.

  “You stay here and wait in case she’s on her way. I’ll go by your place and check if she’s still there,” I instructed Tom, but he obviously had the same gut feeling I did.

  “I’m coming with you. She’s not on her way. This has been getting worse and worse. Something’s wrong this time.” Tom’s brown eyes flickered with concern, making him look eerily like my father.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t have said that.”

  Even though I felt it, too, hearing his words worsened my worry. Despite the heat of the windowless room, I shivered. Tom put his arm around my shoulders, steadying me as he led me to his van. But as soon as I was in the passenger’s seat, I was myself again. I reached over and pounded on the horn when slow cars pulled out in front of us.

  He pushed my arm away. “Emily, please calm down! We’ll be there as fast as we can. She’s probably just passed out.”

  After Tom unlocked the security door to his building, I flew up the stairs, taking two at a time. I banged frantically at the apartment door with both fists. “Regan, wake up! Let me in!”

  Tom was seconds behind me, so I moved aside to let him unlock the door. We both expected to find Regan passed out on the couch, bottle of tequila in hand, snoring away to Seinfeld reruns. The front door opened right into the living room. Seinfeld blared from the TV and a bottle sat on the coffee table, but it was obviously yesterday’s, converted that afternoon into an ashtray. The couch was empty.

  Tom hurried to the bedroom while I went to the bathroom door. I rattled the knob and found it locked. “Tom, she’s in here!” I called before hammering on the door. “Regan, let me in!” I was silent for a moment, but after hearing nothing except Tom’s heavy footfalls in the other room and canned laughter from the TV, I delivered a swift kick to the door with my steel-toed boots. Because of my height, I only succeeded in splintering the bottom. Tom got it open with one more determined kick, revealing Regan passed out next to the toilet, curled up like she’d tried to sleep there. A fifth of tequila lay tipped over on the floor beneath the sink, a thin, golden layer of liquor barely visible along the side of the bottle. We would have expected this scene—if it hadn’t been for the blood.

  Regan wore the clothes she usually slept in: Tom’s faded Pixies T-shirt and plaid boxer shorts. The boxers were soaked with blood, her thighs sticky and red. I dropped to my knees and crawled over to her.

  “Jesus Christ! What happened to her?” Tom screamed.

  I pressed my hand against her neck, which was thankfully still warm, and worked my fingers up toward her chin, feeling for her pulse. I didn’t breathe until I found it. I couldn’t tell if it was fainter than it was supposed to be, and in my muddled panic, I couldn’t figure out how to maneuver my hands so that I could feel her pulse and my own. I wanted to listen to her breathing, but Tom was still yelling. “Is she dead? Did she try to kill herself? Christ!”

  His face went from ashen to scarlet as he screamed, and back to gray again as he tried to throw himself on Regan. Even though he had eight inches and over fifty pounds on me, I managed to catch him.

  “Tom, cool it!” I held him above me like we were frozen in a wrestling match. “She’s not dead. She’s just …” I glanced from the blood to him, knowing I had to make sense of it before he totally flipped and made things worse. Alcohol. Blood coming from between her legs. Tom. It clicked. “I think she may have had a miscarriage or something. She drank too much and …” I paused because Tom had gone ghostly white.

  “She never said anything about being …”

  “Tom, there’s no time for this, okay? She’s losing blood. She’s probably got alcohol poisoning. She’s unconscious. We need to call 911. Can you call 911?” I tried to keep my words slow and even. He didn’t say anything, his eyes filling with tears. “Okay,” I said, sliding out from beneath him, allowing him to lie down on the floor beside Regan. “I’m going to call. Don’t move her. Just hold her hand.” I lifted his heavy palm and placed it on Regan’s arm before dashing into the living room in search of the phone.

>   I found it on the couch, and as I rapidly fired off the address to the operator, I noticed prescriptions on the table next to the saltshaker and mangled slices of lime. Antibiotics and painkillers, both prescribed for Regan. I rushed back into the bathroom.

  Tom’s face was pressed against the back of Regan’s neck, buried in her blond-streaked black hair. “I love you so much. Why didn’t you tell me what was wrong?”

  I felt like an intruder as I knelt over them. “Tom, the ambulance is on the way,” I whispered. His head rolled back, strands of his chin-length hair stuck to his damp cheeks.

  “She’s been so far away lately.” His voice shook. “What if she doesn’t wake up?”

  I extended my arms and he sat up to hug me. “She’s going to wake up,” I said, trying to sound sure of it. I numbed myself to keep him calm while worry churned in my stomach. I wanted to know what the prescriptions were for, if it had something to do with what happened to Regan, if she had some weird illness I wasn’t aware of. But instead of asking Tom these questions, I stroked his back and reminded him, “I’ve known Regan all my life. She’s the toughest girl in the world. She’s going to be fine.”

  While sitting in the waiting room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, I realized I’d been playing grown-up. The job, the apartment, the boyfriend, the band, and all the wheeling and dealing that went along with it. It had been like the punk-rock version of the board game Life. Spin the wheel, move along toward that goal of happily ever after, the million-dollar record contract, or whatever the hell I was supposed to be working for.

  Then suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore. Regan had almost died and she’d only turned nineteen a few months ago. I wasn’t even nineteen yet, but there I was, in charge. I had to handle everything because when we got to the emergency room, Tom couldn’t even speak. I had to sit him down in a chair and shove a People magazine into his hands, hoping he’d read about the never-ending O. J. Simpson trial to take his mind off of it. I had to call Regan’s parents and get screamed at by Molly that we were out of control. I had to tell the admitting nurse everything that I knew. And when I handed over the prescriptions, I had to take in the information that Regan hadn’t had a miscarriage, she’d had an abortion and medicated her pain in a way that could have killed her by thinning her blood. And I kept this information to myself because I would not be the one to break Tom’s and Molly’s hearts. Mine was broken enough, because before that, Regan had always told me everything.