I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

by Stephanie Kuehnert

  Louisa let her arm drop, lowering the gun. “It wasn’t suicide, Michael. Molly and I just made it look that way. I shot him right in the head. I don’t know how we got away with it. I should be in prison.” She spoke without the slightest waver, staring at the gun. “After his funeral, I asked his mother for this, told her I’d get rid of it. I meant to use it on myself. But maybe I’ll take it to the cops, turn myself in. I deserve to be in prison.”

  My dad sat down beside her. Louisa’s tightly drawn mouth and glassy eyes made her look twice her age. He slowly lifted his hand and placed it against the middle of her back, burying his fingers in the ends of her platinum hair. He blurted without thinking, “Eric deserved what he got after the way he beat you up in the parking lot that night. I could have killed him myself for that. I should have.”

  “That’s the night I killed him.” Louisa proceeded to describe how she went to Eric’s house to confront him about his abuse. He dragged her down into the basement and brutally raped her. He was drunk and eventually passed out on top of her, so she crawled out from under him and staggered over to his father’s gun collection. She picked up a gun, contemplating killing herself with it, but unable to do so, she called Molly. Then Eric woke up and came after her again. She still had the gun in hand, so she fired.

  “I can’t tell you the details, Emily,” my dad whispered. “I just can’t.”

  “It’s okay, Dad.” I huddled against him. I knew some of what Louisa felt firsthand. I remembered the stench of Johnny’s alcohol-laden breath when he’d pinned me against the door of our apartment. But I’d ended up with a few cuts and bruises, nothing more. If Johnny had done what Eric did, if he had even tried, and I managed to wrestle that knife away from him, I would have stabbed him straight in the heart. “She knew it was self-defense, didn’t she?” I asked.

  I felt Dad shake his head no. “I tried to tell her that. Molly tried. I even thought about letting her turn herself in, so that a judge could rule self-defense, but in those days in a town like Carlisle, too many people would have said she was asking for it. Instead, I tried to help her forget. I suggested we leave Carlisle, go to Chicago. I’m the one who taught your mother that running away was the answer. I shouldn’t have been shocked when she decided she had to keep running to escape the guilt.”

  His body quaked as he sobbed and I embraced him, soothing, “It’s not your fault.”

  He shirked out of my arms and stared at me fiercely. “I let your mother leave you, Emily, and I promised her that I would never tell you the real reason why. You should hate me.”

  I ripped off my sunglasses. “Well, I can’t and I can’t hate her either. I need you and I still just want her to come home.” I flung myself against his chest again and he wrapped strong arms around me.

  “I do, too, baby,” he murmured. “I still hope she’ll come back for you.”

  I sniffled and scooted backward, lighting another Winston. “What about for you? Do you still love her?”

  My dad borrowed my cigarette to light his own. “Yeah.”

  “You gonna put your ring back on now or do you have a new girlfriend?” I rubbed my dry lips anxiously, unprepared for that kind of a change.

  He snorted. “In Carlisle? Are you kidding? Who wants to date the guy who wore his wedding ring for nineteen years after his wife left him? I’d have to move to the next county, probably the next state.”

  That succeeded in coaxing a laugh from me, but then my smile faltered. “I can’t go back to Carlisle with you, Dad.”

  “I didn’t think you would. I figured I’d be taking you to Regan’s.”

  “You don’t have to take me—”

  “You don’t have a choice,” he chastised. “I haven’t seen you in a year. You admitted you have a drug problem. And you’re moving back to the city where that bastard—”

  “Dad, I’m fine,” I snapped, cutting him off before he could say Johnny’s name.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he shot back.

  We glared at each other until I bit my lip and said “Thank you”; at the same time he said, “Besides, you want your guitar back, don’t you?”

  “You have it?” I leapt up, heading for his truck. I crawled inside and retrieved the case, but hesitated to open it.

  “I restrung it, had to play it myself a few times while I had it.” He gently glossed over the condition it had been left in.

  “Johnny did that.” I faced my father and promised, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  He nodded and patted my back. “Let me drive you back to Regan’s, then.”

  I looked across the bridge to where I’d parked on the westbound side of the highway. “What about my car?”

  “Tom and I will come back for it,” he assured me. “Give you and Regan some time to catch up.”

  Regan opened the door wearing a tank top and boxers, her hair—nearly as long as mine had been and just as black—piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She blinked sleepy hazel eyes at my dad. Then he stepped aside to reveal me, and both of her hands flew to her mouth. When she dropped them, she was smiling and crying at the same time. She said, “I don’t know if I want to slap you or hug you,” but she already had her arms around me.

  She pulled me inside, shouting for Tom. He emerged from the bedroom, face stubbly and sleep-creased, and embraced me while Regan still clung to my hand.

  Regan and Tom were renting an entire house in the ’burbs for what they paid for their apartment in the city. When Tom and my dad left to retrieve my car, Regan took me downstairs into their basement and we sat on the couch that had belonged to her parents. “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

  Even though I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I knew I owed her that much. It took me an hour to tell her the whole story, including what my father had told me at the oasis. When I finished, I was curled up with my head on Regan’s lap.

  “God, Emily,” she sighed, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ve been through so much, and Louisa …”

  “She’s strong, but not in the ways I imagined. And I just wish she was strong enough to come home.”

  “I’m glad you were that strong.”

  I laughed and sat up wearily. “I don’t feel strong. Just tired.”

  “Want me to make up the couch for you?”

  My gaze drifted to the right and fell on Regan’s drum set. Her basement really was like a smaller version of her parents’ and it felt so comforting. One of Tom’s acoustic guitars leaned against a wood-paneled wall. The urgency I’d felt at the beginning of my drive from New Orleans stirred. “I want to play.”

  Regan and I ran through some of our old favorites as I loosened stiff fingers, but when my dad and Tom returned two hours later, Regan was following my lead, finding the rhythm for something new. My hands danced over simple chords and my voice scratched out the words: “Where you going? Where you been? New Orleans, Boston, California. Where you headed now? Did you ever leave California? Don’t know where you went, but I’m going home.”

  I wasn’t aware of my dad’s presence until I heard him clapping. I looked up, face flushing. He offered me my favorite guitar, suggesting, “Try it electric.”

  I traded instruments with him. “Only if you sit in, lend me some acoustic texture.”

  “What are you calling this one?” Tom asked, approaching his bass.

  “All Roads Lead to Rock ’n’ Roll.”

  My dad stuck around for a week to make sure I got situated at Tom and Regan’s. I knew it was hard for him to be in Chicago; he saw Louisa’s face sketched in the skyline and heard her voice in the traffic, the wind, the waves on the lake. We mostly stayed in Regan’s tree-lined neighborhood and one day I commented, “I hate to admit it, but I think I like the suburbs. A twenty-minute train ride and I can be downtown in the thick of it, but it actually gets quiet here sometimes. I think I’ll look for an apartment nearby.”

  “I think you should stay with Regan for a while,” my dad cautioned
.

  He was adamant about me taking things slowly. He watched She Laughs rehearse day and night and played with us occasionally, but insisted, “Don’t throw yourself back into it too fast.”

  Before I could object that I knew how to take care of myself, Regan piped up, “Don’t worry, everything is going to happen on me and Tom’s terms this time.”

  “We’ll make decisions as a band,” I agreed, recognizing that Regan and my dad were right. Part of the reason I picked up the guitar so often was to temper drug cravings. Whether I liked it or not, I needed someone looking out for me and She Laughs had to function collectively this time, so we didn’t self-destruct.

  We rehearsed for three months before picking up gigs around Chicago again. And even though everyone clamored for us to release something, it wasn’t until a year after my return, in August of 1997, that we put out our self-titled debut album with Capone Records.

  Regan had always wanted us to sign with them and maintained a friendship with Frank, the label owner, in my absence. After hearing “All Roads Lead to Rock ’n’ Roll” and the other new songs that played like a diary of my year on the run, he said, “Please do one record with me before some major label comes and snatches you away.” We eagerly shook his tattooed hand.

  The record release party was held at Metro, the same place where we’d performed the radio station show two and a half years earlier, but this time Regan and I didn’t argue. We rocked a six-song set that, short as it may have been, was undoubtedly the most successful show of our career. Reps from four major labels came to see it. Three of them had been hounding us for weeks. We’d gone to several fancy dinners, but always left without signing contracts because no one had been able to talk music with us like Frank did, even if they did have shaggy hair and a few tattoos to seem authentic.

  “We don’t have to sign with any of them,” I assured Regan as we headed to Smart Bar, the bar below Metro, where our party would continue into the wee hours, execs trying to lure us to their tables as our album blared on the sound system.

  Regan fingered her hair, cut short and spiky again and currently dyed blue. “Well, we’re definitely turning down the guy who promised to take Tom to the Playboy Mansion.”

  Tom stuck out his lower lip in a mock pout, but added, “And I’m not so sure about the guy who brought Dom Perignon to us before the show either. He said something about courtside seats at the Lakers game if we come out to L.A. I don’t think he has a clue.”

  We sat down at an inconspicuous table in the corner, sneaking past a third rep. I jerked my head in his direction. “I wasn’t pleased with that guy. He said he’d give us the biggest advance any female-fronted band had ever seen. If he can’t see past female-fronted …”

  “He doesn’t get it,” the three of us finished in unison.

  Frank came over with his arm slung around the shoulders of a dainty, curly-haired girl with glasses. He flashed us his usual lazy grin and said, “If you’re going to leave me for anyone, leave me for Lucy,” introducing the mysterious fourth rep.

  Regan spat her Coke back into her glass. “You signed my sister’s band July Lies to No Wave Records in Minneapolis in 1992.”

  My jaw dropped as the girl pushed the cat-eye glasses up her nose. “You saw our first show at River’s Edge.”

  “Yes and yes. You were pretty good back then, but this.” She paused so we could listen to me snarl “New Orleans, Boston, California” over Regan’s thunderous drumbeat. “This is the most honest song I’ve heard in three years.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  She tucked messy mahogany waves behind her ear. “Will you let me sit down and tell you why I left No Wave for Reprise?”

  Tom glanced at Regan and me, then stood up, offering her his stool.

  Ten minutes later, she slapped a business card down in front of each of us. “I’m not going to promise to take you to fancy Hollywood parties because I don’t think you’re interested. I’m not going to bust out a brick of cocaine to bribe you with because if you do that stuff, I’m not interested. I’m not going to cut you the biggest advance check in the world because you wouldn’t outsell it and my bosses would drop you without giving you a real shot. Instead, we’ll put the money into promotion and I’ll get you a good contract so you’ll have the same creative control you do right now. You pick the producer, the studio. But you’ll have ten times the distribution. Think about it. Call me tomorrow.”

  When she left, the three of us sat speechless for a solid minute. I rarely drank since my return from New Orleans, but I announced, “I think I have to drink to that.”

  We wandered over to the front bar. I got a Midori Sour, Tom got a beer, and Regan got another Coke. We clinked our glasses together, toasting, “To Reprise.”

  Then Tom went off to talk to some friends while Regan and I daydreamed the way we had back in her parents’ basement, where we’d diligently taught ourselves three power-chord punk songs and laughed at all the hair-metal guys on MTV. One day, we said, we’d turn the tables. Girls on top, where they belong. We’d play the boys’ game better than they could play it themselves. Rocking harder. Having boy groupies. Dating movie stars and male models. Using rock gods as arm candy. Of course, Regan was in a committed relationship now, but she could still fantasize and I needed to, because my thoughts landed on Johnny more often than I wanted to admit.

  Miraculously, I hadn’t run into him at all during my first year back in Chicago. Initially I felt uneasy every time I entered one of his usual haunts, but he never turned up. I learned he was touring the album of songs he’d written while we were together. I’d hoped he was out of my life for good, but I should have known better.

  “Here comes trouble.” Regan’s hazel eyes narrowed at the lanky guy with spiky, champagne-colored hair getting his ID checked at the entrance at the top of the stairs. From what I could see, Johnny looked almost exactly the same as he had when I left him, just another skinny boy in a faded T-shirt and jeans. But it was the way he moved—confident, eyes always scouting, the curl of his lip when he found what he wanted—that made him different.

  “Jesus Christ!” I groaned. “He picks tonight to run into me? To-freakin’-night?”

  Regan slunk off her stool, dragging me with her. I followed her through the door that divided the front of the bar from the dance floor, ducking, we hoped, out of his line of vision, but I couldn’t help glancing back in his direction.

  Two years after breaking up with Johnny, sometimes I didn’t remember him in the way I knew I should. The end of our relationship, not the beginning, should have been playing on a loop in my mind. But Johnny shoved his way into my dreams again on summer nights when I lay twisted in my sweaty sheets and a hot breeze cascaded into my stuffy apartment, mimicking the air at River’s Edge when we first met.

  I dreamt about stage-diving. I let myself go limp, riding the current of the crowd like a dead body in a river. My head turns to the right and there, through the waving, pumping hands, is Johnny. I see him in slices that I won’t put together until later: silver eyes, the curve of his jaw, the O of his lips cheering me on. And then, entwined in his fingers, I see the thing I won’t notice I’m missing until I’m back onstage: my necklace, my mother’s locket. He reaches out, trying to give it back, pushing past heads and hands, but my body rises up and away on the wave of grasping and releasing fingers. Take me back. His voice hangs in the air around me. Take me back.

  I shook off the recollection as Regan and I found stools at the back bar. After about twenty minutes, Regan figured Johnny hadn’t seen us, so she left me to use the bathroom. Of course, Johnny had probably been waiting for just such an opportunity.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked without looking at him, feeling his shoulder brush mine as he sat down beside me. I stared straight down into the green of my drink, its sticky film coating the back of my throat and making it even harder for me to speak without my voice squeaking.

  “Like I’d miss the most happening part
y in Chicago.” His muscled arm rubbed against mine as he lifted his hand to signal the bartender. “Jack and Coke,” he told her. She flicked her head in acknowledgment.

  Instead of noting that he still drank whiskey despite its role in the incident that had broken us up, I scoffed, clearing my sickly sweet throat in the process. “The after-party for a record release show at Metro is hardly the most happening party in Chicago.”

  I refused to look at Johnny. My eyes followed the bartender, the drink she slid to him, the dark blue fingernails that pulled his crumpled dollar bills toward her. Next, she poured a beer for a red-haired girl down the bar. Beneath the straps of the redhead’s shimmering gold tank top, she had wings tattooed on her back. As she walked away I watched the wings disappear to the other side of the dance floor. I wished I had wings to fly into the steamy August night. I wished Regan’s tousled, indigo head would come through the door, Tom towering behind her. I combed the crowded room for someone familiar who could rescue me, one of the fans or industry people who’d swarmed me after the show, but they’d already gotten what they wanted from me.

  “I’ve never seen so many A&R types. It’s got to take something pretty interesting to get them out to see a local band on a Tuesday night.” Johnny leaned even closer to me, so he didn’t have to shout over the music.

  “Oh, I get it.” I finished my drink in one swallow and swung my bare legs around on my stool, finally facing him. “You, A&R types, flies, shit …” I flung my hand up to give my clichéd insult more impact. In the process, my stubby middle fingernail chipped against the bridge of his nose, marring his creamy skin with a little red line. My gaze hovered on the scratch, but avoided his silver bullet eyes. “I’m out of here,” I said snottily, rocking off the bar stool and smoothing my shiny black skirt as I stood.

  “Emily, you’re not going to run out on your own release party, are you?” He lightly teased me like he used to, little competitive gibes.

  My mouth twisted into a cruel smile. “Why not? Tomorrow morning, we’re signing a major deal. I’ll be back in the studio to record the next album within a year. I’ve got hundreds of songs in me, Johnny. What about you? I heard you’re still playing the same set from two years ago. Writer’s block? Lack of talent?” I wasn’t normally one to brag. Hearing my voice, my guitar work on the CD blaring from the speakers that night had honestly made me uncomfortable until that moment. Then I let a choppy guitar riff punctuate my comment like laughter. “Hundreds of songs, Johnny,” I repeated, meeting those gray orbs for the first time, dulled as scuffed marbles by the power of my words. “And you can’t compete with a single riff.”