“Are you eating? The both of you?”
“We’re eating. I work in a restaurant and a cafeteria, Sis.”
“Sherry works in a bookstore. Does she eat the books?”
“No,” I said sourly. “I bring home scraps off people’s tables in a doggie bag for her.”
“Ben, come on. I’m just saying.”
“We’re okay, Sis.”
“All right, all right,” she said, wandering to the living room window and looking out. “Just remember that we can help you if you need it. My goodness,” she exclaimed, “at least you have a wonderful view. You know, this is a big place. Have you ever considered getting a roommate?”
We’d considered it, but always rejected the suggestion. This place was always so much our little love nest that it was impossible to imagine other people here. Anyway, the spare bedroom was my study; I had my typewriter and writing chair set up there, along with a portable radio and whatever books we still had (mostly those so tattered that no used bookstore would take them).
But it became apparent that we had to do something, particularly when Sherry began to grow depressed and listless.
“It’s not,” she said one night, “like I thought it would be, Ben.”
“Maybe I can find a better job.”
“It’s not that. Well, it’s partly that.”
“We just need more money, that’s all. And it’s hard. Full-time in school, full-time jobs...plus my part-time one. There aren’t enough hours in the day.”
“We have to change things somehow. I can’t go on like this. It’s too hard.”
I held her. She cried softly for a while. But then we made love, and that calmed both of us down again for a time. But even that wasn’t quite what it had been six months before. We were becoming used to each other. I’ll confess that at school I’d begun to notice some of the other girls in my courses, lovely tight-bodied things that would come to classes straight from the beach, a light summer blouse tossed over their bikini tops and the shortest of short-shorts over their bottoms. These girls were nearly bronze from all their time worshipping the sun. Their little tanned feet still had sand between the toes, sand that would sift down onto their flip-flops and drop onto the classroom floor in minute quantities as I watched idly. They had names like Linda and Joanie and Veronica. As I tried to listen to Mr. Surwillo talking about Biology or Ms. Powers discussing Cultural Anthropology I found my eyes and brain wandering constantly to these girls, my erection pressing against my shorts and my mind in bed with each of them in turn, or sometimes with two or three of them together. It was only with Ms. Gage, in my Great Women Novelists course, that I managed to consistently focus. I loved reading Jane Austen and George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and I loved talking about them. It helped that the California beach bunny ratio in that particular class was, for some reason, abnormally low.
We finally agreed, Sherry and I, to clear the study, put the things in our bedroom, and get a roommate. We discovered a roommate-locating service on Castillo Street and put in a listing. To our surprise, the phone was ringing by the time we got home. We made an appointment with a guy who said that he and his girlfriend needed a place to stay immediately, could they come right over? I said yes.
“I don’t know, Ben,” Sherry said. “Strangers in our house? This is our house. And there’s only one bathroom.”
“We’ve been through this,” I said, touching her. “If we can stand it for a few months, maybe we can get ahead a little financially. Get out from under this—this stone.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said glumly, turning away, not looking at me.
The doorbell sounded; I went to the door and opened it.
Before me stood a tall guy, even taller than me, and I’m six-two. He was well-groomed, wearing a white sports jacket and sunglasses. He whipped off the glasses and looked at me with strikingly bright and piercing gray eyes. He appeared to be maybe two or three years older than Sherry and me.
“Peter,” he said. “Peter Welch.” He held out his hand. “I called?”
“Right,” I said. His handshake turned out to be a bone-cruncher. “Nice to meet you, Peter. C’mon in.”
“Babe?” He turned, and as he did so I realized there was someone standing behind him. The girlfriend he’d mentioned, obviously. She was very small, hardly five feet. She wore blue jeans torn at the knees and a very old black T-shirt with some faded and broken words on it: The Flesheaters. Her face was small, pale, and pinched-looking. There were what appeared to be fishhooks in her eyebrows along with a plethora of silver rings in her earlobes. She had dry little pimples on her forehead; her black hair, short, straight, was disheveled and greasy; she wore odd, heavy blue makeup under her eyebrows. Her eyes, also dark, darted around impatiently, landing finally on me. She moved forward, not smiling.
“What’s up?” she said, her attention instantly slipping away from me and onto the apartment. She was through the door, past both Sherry and me, before she bothered to say: “I’m Rachel.”
3
Sherry and I both liked Peter immediately; he was polite, smart, articulate, and tidy, a young man who said he was studying at UCSB. He’d come from Texas, though his voice didn’t reflect any audible twang—“That’s what everybody thinks,” he said, putting his feet up on the milk crate we were using as a coffee table and sipping his coffee. “They expect to hear me tawk like I’s a shit-kickah.” He smiled. “People from Dallas don’t talk like shit-kickers. Actually I’ve never kicked any shit in my life.”
“I kick his shit for him,” Rachel interpolated, lying on her back on the floor. “His shit needs kicking sometimes.”
As much as Sherry and I instantly liked Peter, we disliked Rachel almost as quickly—and nearly as intensely. It was a mystery to me why these two people were together. Peter, twenty-one at the time, had the look of the CPA he said he was studying to be: clean-cut, clear-eyed, given to slacks and dress shirts and an impressive monogrammed briefcase which he carried, with no evident self-consciousness, everywhere. When they moved in later that day, the first thing that Peter hauled into their bedroom—with my help—was a filing cabinet, the drawers of which were filled with every document in the world—old report cards, syllabi for courses he’d taken, letters, legal documents and who knows what else, all impeccably arranged according to some organizational system he tried to explain to me but which left me, though admiring, befuddled. He also had a great deal of stereo and video equipment—high-end electronics for the time, including a fancy reel-to-reel tape recorder, turntable, television, and the first actual home video camera I’d ever seen—a big bulky thing that somehow connected up to one of his several VCRs through a baffling network of cords.
Rachel Blackburn could not have been more different if one had gone to a movie studio and asked Central Casting to find Peter’s complete antipode. She was sullen, inarticulate, dismissive—never, perhaps, completely rude, but seemingly oblivious of her impact on others. Her habits became apparent soon enough. She smoked everywhere—in the kitchen, in the bathroom (encouraging my own habit; Sherry had already mostly stopped, and Peter didn’t smoke at all). Her conversational responses were often little more than grunts. She casually took Sherry’s and my food from the refrigerator; not, I’m convinced, in deliberate acts of theft, but because she was genuinely oblivious as to how the food got there. I don’t think I saw her smile once in her first month living with us.
What she did do, mostly, was write songs. Or at least song lyrics. “Rachel and I have got a group together,” Peter explained on that first day, when we met. “That’s why we have all this audio and video equipment, for recording demos and videotaping performances. We rehearse in a warehouse down in Goleta.”
“But Peter,” Sherry said, “you guys don’t have any instruments. And I can’t see you in a rock band.”
“Oh, I’m not in the band,” he smiled. “I’m their manager. I’m working on getting them some gigs here in S.B. And Rachel doesn’t play an instrument.”
“I sing,” she muttered. “Supposedly.”
“She does,” Peter said. “She’s good, too. And she writes the lyrics.”
“What’s the band called?” I asked.
Rachel snorted and rolled over onto her stomach, burping and bending her legs so that her bare feet stuck up into the air. I could see little tattoos on the tops of each of them: matching red roses with thorn-covered green stems dripping blood. She lit a cigarette. “We’re still fighting about that,” she explained.
“Not fighting, honey,” Peter said.
“I think the name should be Thrill Kill,” Rachel said. “Peter doesn’t like that.”
Peter seemed to consider it for a moment. “The band doesn’t like it. Being commercially minded, the other members seem to prefer the name The Raging Hormones. They think sex will sell over violence.”
“I don’t care about selling,” Rachel said, blowing smoke. “Fuck that. I don’t want to be the Eagles or some shit like that.”
“I like the Eagles,” Sherry said.
“Another name I think is good is The Motherfuckers.”
“Honey,” Peter said patiently, “with that name we wouldn’t be able to advertise.”
“Shit,” she muttered, smoking.
“What kind of music is it?” I asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Peter said, smiling his affable smile. “We’ve got a rehearsal tonight. How would you like to come?”
Well, Sherry and I had nothing else doing, so we ended up following Peter and Rachel’s blue van that night down through some side streets in Goleta until we arrived at a mostly empty area, a place of warehouses and closed-up old shops.
“He’s great,” Sherry said. “I like him. I don’t think much of her, though.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “But I’m guessing he keeps her in line. At least she doesn’t have a bass with a Marshall amp or a twenty-piece drum set or something with her. I mean, I think they’ll be okay.”
She looked at me dubiously. “I hope so, Ben,” she said.
“Hey, maybe they’ll go on to be famous. We can ride her coattails to glory.”
“Just make sure that’s all you ride of hers.”
I glanced at her and burst out laughing. “Oh my God,” I said, “you’re going to be jealous? Of her? That little stringy thing with the fishhooks in her face? And the hairy armpits?”
“She’s a girl, isn’t she?”
“Approximately.”
“I see you looking at all the beach bunnies at school.” She was smiling, but there was an edge to her voice.
“Well, you can’t blame a guy for looking.”
“I guess.” We rode in silence for a moment. “Ben,” she said finally, “do you think I’m pretty?”
We came to a stoplight. I looked over at her. “What?”
“Pretty. Do you think I am?”
“Of course I think you’re pretty.”
She shrugged. “You don’t say it much anymore.”
I took her hand, leaned in to give her a quick kiss. “I’m sorry. School, work, trying to write something in my spare moments. It’s just time. You’re pretty. You’re beautiful.”
She smiled a little. “Okay.”
And I did think that she was pretty—I always had. But I also noticed that she had begun putting on some weight since we’d arrived in Santa Barbara. Her formerly strict running regimen had collapsed, and now I often found her sitting on the sofa with a pastry or donut in her hand. Her hair was as stunning as ever—very long now, cascading waves past her shoulders—but she took less time with it. She took less time with her appearance generally, in fact.
Finally the van ahead of us pulled into a tiny parking lot next to a building I would have assumed was empty; there were no signs of light or life coming from it. Actually, it quickly became apparent that people were there—when we got out of the car the sound of electric guitars being strummed in warm up and drum rolls and kicks being tossed out tentatively all but overwhelmed us. Stepping closer to the building, I realized that the reason we didn’t see any light from the windows was simply because they were so incredibly dirty.
The talent possessed by The Raging Hormones—or Thrill Kill, or The Motherfuckers, whatever they were called—wasn’t immediately apparent to me. There were four of them, including Rachel—guitar, bass, drums, three guys around twenty or twenty-one, each of them shaved bald or nearly so, all with lots of piercings everywhere. We were introduced to everyone and Rachel took her place before a microphone. There was some arguing about what they were going to play while they all knocked back bottle after bottle of Heineken. Peter was the go-between, and they clearly respected him. After a few minutes of shouting, they settled down and kicked into a song.
I wasn’t a fan of punk music; neither was Sherry. I was nineteen, yet, absurdly, punk made me feel old and out of it. I’d tried to listen to the Sex Pistols and a few of the L.A.-based bands of the time, but it all sounded like painful, speed-influenced thrashing to me. The songs were short, brutal, unmelodic. Few guitarists seemed to know more than three or four chords. It really just all seemed amateurish. Rachel and Peter’s band was no different, though they weren’t any worse than the rest of them—to my ears, at least. The drummer played loud and fast, the bass player banged away, the guitarist slammed his hands violently over the strings.
And Rachel Blackburn? If she possessed any stage presence or charisma, even any talent, it was invisible to me. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, other than the occasional “fuck” and “shit.” She stood at the microphone with her eyes closed, all but motionless, clutching it hard, and, as far as I was concerned, doing nothing but screaming. Occasionally the screaming stopped, along with the rest of the band. That appeared to indicate the end of the song.
“Not exactly the Eagles,” I whispered to Sherry during one such break.
“Not exactly anybody,” she agreed. “They’re awful.”
But now I wonder if they really were. Later years familiarized me with high-end punk bands like X and The Clash; if I’d known of them then, I might have been able to see and hear this group with a better understanding. They were energetic, anyway. After a few songs the group seemed to loosen up. The guitarist’s hands flew; Rachel even opened her eyes and moved a little, jumping and swaying around her mike between bouts of screaming.
“Rachel and I met in S.B.,” Peter said to us during a break as we kicked back Heinekens—illegally for most of us, since we were underaged. I had no doubt Peter supplied the alcohol. “I’d come out from Dallas a few weeks before. Met at a party for some kids we both knew. Mutual friends.” He smiled. “You should have seen this band six months ago. They were going nowhere. They had a different drummer then—I told them they needed to fire that guy, and they did. Back then Rachel barely whispered into the microphone. I taught her how to scream like that.” He swallowed some beer. “I think we’re going to be big. I really do. Punk is just coming on now. Our sound is really coming together. And Rachel’s lyrics—well, you heard them.” I nodded, though neither Sherry nor I had understood a word. “Abuse, rape, civil rights—did you listen to ‘The Nightmare Engines’? The Holocaust. In a punk song.” He nodded. A little more practice, a few more gigs at parties and stuff like that, and I’m taking them down to L.A. We’ll audition at some clubs.”
“Good luck,” I said. “I hope it works out.”
“How can it miss?” he asked earnestly. “I mean, did you hear them?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m not a good judge, though. I’ve never been into punk. But they sound pretty good.”
“They’re more than that.” He nodded toward Rachel, who was conferring with the bassist about something. “They’re going to be big. Rachel’s going to be huge.”
That was the first inkling I had that, for all Peter’s smiling charm, his judgment wasn’t all it might be. I couldn’t see little pinched-
face, needs-a-bath Rachel Blackburn as a star—but then again, I reasoned, what did I know about it? We stayed for a while longer, then headed home.
We’d been in bed for hours when we heard the two of them unlocking the door and coming into the main room. Sherry was awake too, next to me.
“It’s weird,” she whispered, “having people in the house. In our house.”
“They paid their first and last month,” I said. “Things are sure a lot easier with our rent cut in half like this.”
“I know. But I miss having our own place. Just us.” She took my hand, held it tightly.
“We’ll be on our feet again soon,” I said. “In a few months either they’ll move out or we’ll get another place. It’ll be okay. It’s just for a little while.”
“Do you love me, Ben?”
I looked at her in the darkness. “Sherry, why are you suddenly so insecure? What is all this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like—like I’m going to lose you.”
“Lose me? Why?”
“There’s too many pretty girls in this town,” she said. “Maybe we should go home.”
“To Stone’s End? Are you kidding? What would we do there?”
She sighed. “I just want things to be like they were.”
“Aren’t they?”
In a few minutes we heard sounds coming from the other bedroom. It didn’t take long to realize what they were, though it should have been obvious from the first moment.
“Oh my God,” Sherry said.
We listened in the night to the sound of their bed rhythmically creaking, the sound of Rachel Blackburn’s guttural grunts and high moans.
Very suddenly I found myself with an erection. Sherry looked at me, a peculiar expression on her face. Then she turned and kissed me deeply, wildly, climbed on top of me, tickled my face with her hair, stroked me and slipped me inside her. She moaned then herself, gyrating passionately, not at all the very willing but quiet and submissive bed partner I was used to.
When we finished she dropped her head to my chest. I could feel tears on my skin.
Lullaby for the Rain Girl Page 15
