suzanneDegnan
A Novel By Sherry Wood
Table of Contents
Part 1 Every Second of Daylight
Chapter 1 Lucky
Chapter 2 The Ringing
Chapter 3 Boys And Their Minions
Chapter 4 The News of the Day
Chapter 5 The Boy in the Tomato Suit
Chapter 6 Bleak Dick Catastrophe
Chapter 7 The Test
Chapter 8 Hello Goodbye
Chapter 9 Church Skin
Chapter 10 Down Comforter
Chapter 11 Searching
Chapter 12 Amour-Propre
Part 2 Chino Moreno
Chapter 13 The Hand That Pushes Her Away
Chapter 14 Dime Twirler Was Here
Chapter 15 Rescued Floating Devices
Chapter 16 Slam, Slam, Slam The Phone
Chapter 17 Black Skoda
Chapter 18 Room For Horses
Chapter 19 Lips-A-Go-Go
Chapter 20 The Finale of Love
Chapter 21 Shut Up, Lou Reed
Chapter 22 Repair Service
Chapter 23 The Silent Film of No
Chapter 24 Mermaids On The Tour Bus
Part 3 Not Rabbit, Rabid
Chapter 25 Blood-Sister’s Indigo Sock Drawer
Chapter 26 The Obsession Is On The Phone
Chapter 27 The Pod Dolls
Chapter 28 Crack The Skin And You’ll See There Are Ships Down Below
Chapter 29 Everywhere
Chapter 30 Nevada’s Definition of Pain
Chapter 31 This Is How She Holds Me
Part 4 Mr. Grunge
Chapter 32 Cool Shoes Untied
Chapter 33 Rainbow Sister
Chapter 34 Derail
Chapter 35 First Deep Breath Of The Night
Chapter 36 Deprep
Chapter 37 Valor
X:
They don't go away.
Me: No.
X: That's right.
Me:
So where do they go?
X: We go inside the people who can't
feel anymore, and we feel for them.
Me: Promise me you'll
never leave me alone like the living have.
X: I promise.
It's
not the drugs and it's definitely not a man
I'm still afraid but
I'm doing the best I can
Doing the best I can
I'm doing the
best I can.
- “Salt Flat Epic,” Veruca Salt.
Based on a true story.
PART I
Every Second Of Daylight
Chapter 1
Lucky
A boy in a hockey mask jumped off the stage and kicked me in the nose. I barely saw him – just a flash of the mask and the bottom of his dirty steel-toed Doc Marten as he delivered a swift kick to my face. I actually laughed at first at the brazenness of the attack, but once I felt the sticky floor against the palms of my hands everything started to sink in. This wasn’t the first time I’d been knocked down in a moshpit, so I knew the first rule of survival was get back up, get right back up right now.
I saw a slimy string of blood hanging down from the tip of my nose and felt the rubber of someone’s shoe burn my elbow as I tried to stand back up. I traced my tongue over my teeth to make sure I hadn’t lost any when a boy came flying at me and for the next several seconds I was just a puppet controlled by the movements of other bodies. I managed to move away from the pit and wiggled my nose. It just felt wet and numb. I glanced up at the stage but my vision was blurry… the stage was crooked… I could make out Louise Post singing, eyes closed, fingers on her guitar strings. I felt like I was falling…
It was Halloween of 1995. I’d moved from North Carolina to Chicago during a time when the music scene was thriving, and played bass in my sister’s band. Wilco had just released AM and was already creating big buzz even though they’d just formed a year ago – a year ago. My sister started a band called Veronica’s Car Crash three years ago, and was hungry for that kind of recognition. She knew all the right people and she seemed to have the drive and determination to get us where we wanted to be. This sort of commitment was new to me. My sister, Jeneane, was ready to take the band to the next level by the time I joined, and I was just getting used to being in it. We both adored Smashing Pumpkins, a band that had had been together since 1988 and had recently found commercial success with Siamese Dream. Our overall taste was a bit different – I was still into the heavier stuff like Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, and Danzig, while she was into the more pop-oriented Chicago bands flourishing at the time.
Tomorrow we were moving to Rogers Park, up on the north side of town. Our new place was much bigger than our current box in Wicker Park. We were going to soundproof a room and make it our official practice space. With another fierce winter coming up, not having to leave to rehearse in a rented practice hole was going to be convenient. At the new place, even if there was 4 feet of snow and the electricity went out, we could get along fine with some blankets, candles, an acoustic guitar, and drums.
The streetlights on Fullerton Avenue never seemed
to hit anything specific, especially in the fog. I could barely see Fireside Bowl’s rusty neon bowling pin marquee right above my head. It read BOWLING. I adored the simplicity of that. The fact that the marquee was even still standing was something of a miracle considering this place had been here since the 1940s. Now it doubled as a concert hall where young girls could get their faces kicked in. Behind a weathered brick wall across the street was one of the oldest cemeteries in the city. As I staggered my way out to the sidewalk I passed the black gate and the gravestones popped out at me like a yard of teeth.
Eventually Lindsay helped me find my way to an emergency room and we spent a few hours in the horror of a waiting area with blood and candy wrappers on the floor.
Earlier that evening as we waited in line for the show, Cinderellas and Richard Nixons trudged by and a cold wind swept in off the lake sharpening the air. The raindrops were getting fatter and cutting through the fog. It was 42 degrees, but with the cold, snapping wind, it felt like 20. The crazy weather fluffed up my hair and gave me rosy knuckles.
“Promise me one day people will wait out in the cold rain to see us play,” Jeneane said as we stood there shivering. Lindsay stood behind my sister, her chin resting on Jeneane’s shoulder.
“I promise.” Lindsay said, lackadaisical because she was stoned. She got stoned everywhere every day – behind the Starbucks dumpster, in the hallway of our building in Wicker Park where the paint fumes from aspiring artists covered the smell, and sometimes when she couldn’t hold off, in the aisle at the grocery store. I got stoned from smelling her hair. Take Pippi Longstocking, fix her teeth, make her taller and cuter, and give her drummer muscles – and you’d have our drummer Lindsay. She had a tattoo of the word Lucky in simple black font next to a small black heart on her arm. The tail of the Y wrapped around the heart and word like a snake. She got it shortly after she ran away from her hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota when she was sixteen, to convince herself she was lucky enough to survive on her own. Soon after she ran away she met my sister, and now they were closer than Jeneane and I had ever been. Maybe I’d get there – I’d try, I’d scratch at the walls bad times had built between us, or at least try to be the best bassist I could be.
Seven 0’clock arrived, time for the doors to open. We watched Nina and Louise, members of the band Veruca Salt, strut down the street – stilettos to cobblestone, white trouser socks pulled up to pink knees, shameless fur coats to blanket them from the cold city, flashy rings adorning their fingers, and tight vintage rock t-shirts to complete the ensemble. They didn’t walk like us and they didn’t seem cold like us. It was as if they were in a snow globe. Their world was magic. They skipped along, holding hands and slipped in through a special entrance for bands only. I longed for the day when I could go through that door and be the worshipped one, be the magic.
“Tomorrow,” Jeneane said tensely, “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives – we move, and we get settled and start padding the room.” Her eyes hit me when she said that last part, making sure she had my attention. True. I had a boyfriend now and he was starting to demand more of my time. I could practically hear them cringe whenever Lance came around. The band, the band, the band. The band was our child and I’d been neglecting it lately. I’d been too busy making out with Lance, clawing and moaning and dry-humping the days away with him. I was cheating on my beloved Theodore, a Fender Jazz Bass.
Then of course there was the fact that I was the only non-lesbian in the band. While Jeneane and Lindsay were the personification of butch, I was roaming around with Lance, who was 6’3, black, very male and very straight. Jeneane would never ask me to keep my personal life a secret but I could tell she wished I would. It was starting to create tension in the band, a band for which she’d been through a lot, as a write-up in The Reader recently explained:
“In 1994, on a long drive home to North Carolina to visit her parents and sick sister, singer Jeneane Barker’s Camaro slid off the icy road into a tree, killing her best friend and bassist Veronica Partridge. The bizarre thing was they’d been discussing calling it quits with the band (which at the time was called Two Girls From Sweden) and getting married minutes before the fatal crash. Jeneane explains, still shaken up over the crash, “As soon as I said, ‘You know, we shouldn’t do this with the band, its going to be a lot of work and I get the feeling its just not your thing,’ the tire skidded and I looked up and saw a tree as it split the car in half like a knife cutting cake.” Jeneane spent three weeks in the hospital “looking out the window and knowing my best friend was dead.” When she was released she didn’t go home to visit her parents, she just drove back to Chicago. “Most of the ride was silent with me just trying to come to grips with what just happened. You know, you have someone there right next to you in the car talking and suddenly they’re not around anymore – you will never see them again. I knew I had to go back to making music, it was the only thing that made life feel right.”
A few months later Jeneane’s sister Sarah moved up to Chicago and joined the band as their bassist. They were sitting in a downtown Starbucks when they met their drummer. “I never ever go to Starbucks,” Sarah makes sure to point out, “I usually go to Kokomo or whatever other kind of charming off-the-wall place I can find, but my sister wanted to stop there and that’s when all hell broke loose – the barista totally lost it on a customer and threw the tip jar clear across the room, so it slammed against bad art, and quarters, nickels and dimes plopped into piping hot coffee, splattering customers in the face,” Sarah tries to stop herself from laughing, clamping a hand over her mouth as if to cover up her crooked teeth. “I mean it was total mayhem,” she says once she’s calmed down. “I mean, I was like ‘I have to meet this girl.’”
They did meet this girl. Her name is Lindsay and her brick-wall focus behind the drums has left this band nowhere to go but up. So pay attention Chicago, because this band’s back on the road – and they’re going places.”
*Catch Veronica’s Car Crash w/ Bijou’s Wicked Teeth this Sunday at Elbow Room.
I was late for that show at Elbow Room because I was having sex with Lance. I got the ‘If you’re late one more time’ speech from Jeneane. Lance was a distraction, yes, but he was a beautiful one. I’ll say it again – he was a beautiful one. I was also with him right before I came here to see Veruca Salt. We were in the middle of another one of our torrid afternoons of play-fighting and teasing, of pawing and slapping, of sighing the gospel of come ‘ere and pushing away and pulling one another back and pushing each other away again. It all started with Lance mounting me on my incredibly tiny futon.
“What are you doing?” I asked when he started licking my armpit – something he’d never done before.
He stopped and looked down at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve just never had my armpit licked before,” I said between giggles.
“I want to know what every part of you tastes like, now shut up and let me do this.” He continued to lick me, his tongue eventually tracing over my hipbone as he undid my jeans. I knew what time it was and had to be at the show soon. I placed my hand on Lance’s shoulder and cooed, “No, don’t.”
“You don’t mean that,” he groveled, managing to slip a finger inside me. I almost gave in to the intense contact, folding my legs so my heels dangled in the air, but I pulled myself together at the last minute.
“No!” I said, pushing him off. Then we started kissing again, and the whole event repeated itself. I crawled on top of him and let him finger me while I bit his shoulder, while the phone rang, while fire trucks bellowed through the cracked window, while the sun weakened and a line began to form outside Fireside Bowl, where I should have been.
“Fuck me,” I sighed, and when he started to I pushed him away. “No…”
“You better stop this shit,” he warned, grabbing my wrists.
“Or...what?” I teased.
He started kissing me again. His wallet chain pressed against my hipbone, leaving a small red mark the size of a comma. He groped my left tit and bit my earlobe. Lance was perfect. 6’4 with an athletic build, his hair in seven neat tight braids, light brown skin, very strong and very perfect teeth. Lance was a biter. Sometimes when I made a responsive move to his touch he bit my neck as if to warn me to stay still. Sometimes I felt like I was wrestling with a bobcat. I had marks all over me from his bites. His favorite spot on my body was the fleshy part next to my hipbone. His obsession with gnawing on the skin there made wearing jeans painful…nearly impossible to manage.
His parents’ differences went beyond the fact that his mother was white and his father was black. Lance’s mother, Lacey Maddox, was a successful lawyer. She lived in a high-rise on Lake Shore Drive. She was in her early forties, a bit uptight, but very loyal and responsible. His father, Marcus Maddox, had been in prison since 1989. He was a devoted member of the gang The Taipans (the name came from the Indian Taipan snake, which carried the deadliest venom of any snake known to mankind). The gang was still very active, especially around housing projects like Cabrini Green.
Marcus had a very peculiar obsession with snakes. He named Lance after the poisonous snake Fer De Lance. Lance even bore a resemblance to the snake – his eyes and nose, his stubborn unbroken expression, and sometimes even the way he moved during foreplay was similar to a snake. Even the shade of light brown skin around the snake’s fangs was the same color as Lance’s skin. The snake’s head was triangular and pointed, like a lance or spearhead. They kept their venom in large glands behind their eyes and could still bite even if their heads had been chopped off. It was said the only way a person could survive a Fer De Lance snakebite was by cutting off whatever body part had been infected. How do I know all of this? Because Marcus loved to tell the story of the snake’s powers and aggressiveness to his son as if they were bedtime stories, and Lance was quite a talker at night when he couldn’t sleep, so he told me these things.
Lance had only been to visit his father once. His dad pressured him to join The Taipans during the visit. “You join ‘em and you’re immediately an absolute God – feared – your life’s on the street son, not in some minimum wage dump – you get respect when you’re a Taipan, you wanna be holdin’ a mop or a gun at the end of the day? Huh? You a Taipan and people see you and they just fucking hand you money so you don’t fuck ‘em up sideways.”
Deep down I wasn’t sure if Lance didn’t go to see his father out of lack of respect or if he was afraid that eventually his dad would convince him that becoming a Taipan was the right thing to do. Because if I saw a member of the gang I’d hand them any amount of money I had on me, and take off running. Once they had you, they had you. They showed no mercy, and each victim presented a chance to explore new torture tactics.
Lance told me once he was scared his father was going to force him into the gang somehow, no matter how many times he said he didn’t want to be in it, no matter how many times he said he’d rather, somehow, go to college. Marcus Maddox had connections on the inside as well as the outside. I could see the flicker of uncertainty in Lance’s eyes lately; he was thinking about leaving Chicago, which meant leaving me. He and his mother weren’t that close, mainly because she didn’t approve of the friends he hung out with. They were too much like Marcus when he was younger. I couldn’t let Lance leave, so in order to keep him around I felt like I needed to spend every second with him, neglecting the band in the process.
“Your wallet chain is hurting me,” I finally said. Lance stopped again, this time turning over on his back and staring at the ceiling. I could see the giant bulge in his pants as he breathed heavy dissatisfied pants. A few seconds later, he grabbed my hand and rubbed it against his penis. I closed my eyes for a minute as my palm began to burn from the fabric.
“Lance,” I said, a bit pissed, yanking my hand away. Sometimes he just didn’t take no for an answer. He never asked me about my band either, which was starting to annoy me. How many times had I been to the courts to watch him shoot balls on a Sunday afternoon? Something around 22. How many shows had he shown up at to see me play? Something around none. “I’m moving tomorrow,” I brought up, “To Rogers Park.”
“Yeah, you told me.” He sounded tired of the story, but I thought it was a big deal.
“Sorry, I don’t mean to bore you with the details of my life.”
“Hey,” he touched me, his knuckles grazing my thigh. There was a fire in me I wouldn’t be able to discipline for much longer. “I got shit on my mind, doll. You need help moving?”
“No.” I did but Jeneane and Lindsay would never let me hear the end of it if I needed – gasp – a man’s help.
Lance got on his knees so he was sitting on top of me and touched my face. “Now, you gonna pout like that?” he asked. I shook my head a little. My cheeks were very pink and warm.
“I’m excited about moving, I think we’re having a housewarming party – you’re coming right?” I looked up at him, my voice daft, my eyes batting kindly.
“Yeah.” His response was anything but convincing. His hand moved back to the warmth between my legs folding into a fist like he meant to punch it and before I could bend my legs so my knees met his chest in protest, he wrapped my legs around his back. I touched his face as he touched me in the most perverted way, taking two fingers and spreading me apart. He once blew marijuana smoke up inside me.
I kept my hand on his face. Lance had his mother’s delicate bone structure but his father’s cold, stunning dark eyes. He moved against me slowly. “You can’t start this shit and not end it.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“Go where?”
I managed to escape somehow, rolling out from under him like I would probably do if I were on fire.
“Fireside Bowl.”
“You didn’t tell me you were going there.” He sounded angry, like he had some personal vendetta when it came to the place. At least it was a switch from sounding totally bored.
“I thought I did,” I called out from the bathroom. Three seconds later he was standing in the doorway, arms crossed so the sleeves of his white t-shirt rose up and his muscles flexed. He watched me apply lip-gloss.
“No, you didn’t,” he said. I turned and looked at him. I let my lip-gloss drop in the sink.
“You mad?” I asked, in a bashful, slightly playful manner. I felt my knees go weak, felt that tingling sensation between my legs.
He took a few steps towards me. “Psychotically.” His voice was deeper than usual because he’d started smoking again. I remembered the day I teased If you wanna smoke you gotta be a rock star not an athlete.
I walked backwards until I felt the coldness of the bathroom wall bleed through my thin white shirt. This was it; he was going to take me now. He was going to ruin everything. He was going to make me late for the show. He got in front of me and pulled my shirt up in a quick lusty temperamental fit, material wadded between knuckles, and stopped a few seconds before shoving his other hand down my pants. He stared at my breasts for a minute as I stayed obediently and respectfully still.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said looking back up into my eyes.
“What?”
“One day – we fuck too hard to be together forever. Its like we hate each other – sometimes I think we do or we fuck to spite our parents or…people that don’t like to see us together. Sometimes we fuck like…like we’re trying to fuck the devil out of each other.”
I started to say something when he came in for a kiss. There were a lot of kisses in the world. Some light as a snowflake and others slammed into you like a wrecking ball. This was definitely the latter. I moaned and started to slide down the wall.
“But that’s cool,” he said, touching my chin after the first kiss was implanted on my brain and I couldn’t think. I felt drugged. Fer De Lance. He picked me up so my legs wrapped around him and I could see redness flood my face in the mirror behind us.
“Lance,” I helplessly whispered. He knew he had me now. My skinny little fingers slid across his shoulder blade. I tasted his skin. “Lance…”
“Its not who you’re with forever, its who you never forget,” he said. “You gonna forget me?” he asked, yanking my panties down and entering me with a violent thrust.
“Mmph!” I cried out, digging my fingers into his skin. It was too much, no warning, no easing it in. “Lance, fuck…” I moaned, saying something between ‘why and what’ before taking another deep breath.
“Huh?” he asked, pulling out and slamming it back in, “Huh, sweet girl?”
“No…no I can never forget you, Lance.”
I would never forget him because I was certain he was going to smash my heart soon. Just like this asshole just smashed my nose with his boot. I felt the wetness above my upper lip as I tried to fight my way out of the moshpit and get somewhere where I could stop the blood pouring from my nose. I couldn’t spot my sister or Lindsay from the barrage of flannel shirts and ripped jeans. Thirty-two minutes ago I’d accepted a Budweiser from Kim Deal and now my face felt broken. Crazy how fast life switched its gears and drove you crazy. I knew something was wrong, I’d been permanently hurt by that kick to the face. I started crying because I couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Sarah!” Lindsay had found me. I had no idea how but she had and she was on her way over, eyes holding me in the midst of all the chaos. She easily shoved people out of her way and wrapped her arm around my neck, pulling me over towards the wall near the bowling alleys with her strong arms. “Sweetie, what happened?” her fingers were in my hair, pulling strands back that were stuck in the blood on my face.
“I don’t know,” I sobbed, “Some guy just came flying out.”
She put her thumb and index finger under my chin and examined my face. “Jesus.”
A girl came flying out of nowhere screaming and jumping up to catch the drummer’s shirt that had just been flung into the crowd. Lindsay swung her hand up and snagged the shirt, pushing the girl away. Within seconds the shirt was over my nose and Lindsay was pinching it to try and stop the bleeding.
“Am I gonna die?” I had to ask. In between words I inhaled the stench of the drummer’s sweat. My vision was getting blurrier.
“No, but we need to get you to the bathroom so you can calm down.” Her hand latched onto mine and she took me down a dark hallway that seemed to be getting darker by the second – or maybe I was going blind.
“Lindsay,” I cried. She tightened her grip on my hand and took me into the bathroom.
A girl standing in front of a lopsided sink shrieked when she saw my reflection in the mirror above it. “Holy shit!”
“Fuck off,” Lindsay snapped as fast as the door slammed behind us. She pulled me into the last stall. I guess she thought if I were alone in a tight space where bodies weren’t being hurled at me left and right, I could calm down. She was right…but I couldn’t calm down much when my eyesight was fucked. She went back out into the bathroom. A few seconds later I heard that girl cry, “What the fuck was that for?”
“Shove it up your ass and out your throat,” Lindsay told her. Lindsay got into a knife fight once. It was right after I moved up here. She came home with blood all over her shirt and said someone tried to rob her so she stabbed the guy with her pocketknife. Ever since I’d respected her and been a bit leery of her at the same time.
I looked up from the toilet when she came back into the stall. The drummer’s shirt was in her hand. She pressed it against my injured face. It was wet with warm water.
“Shh,” she said. “You’re going to be okay. I’ve been hurt like this before, I know how you feel, but you know what? You’re going to be fine.” I figured she was talking about her dad. He used to beat her up all the time before she ran away.
“Yeah?” I wanted to believe that but my head hurt and I felt congested, congested with blood. I felt like I had the flu. And my eyes still weren’t working right, like I’d just woken up.
“You think you should go to the hospital?”
I hated hospitals – hated them. I had to go a lot as a child, so I cried when I said yes because I really wanted to say no. I was supposed to be out there, enjoying myself like everyone else. That shithead.
“Okay, alright, we’ll go to the hospital,” Lindsay decided.
Lindsay became my hero that night. Veruca Salt was her favorite band – this show was all she’d been talking about for the last two months, and now she was going to miss it in order to take me to the emergency room, in the rain no less. But the sequel of tonight’s evil waited for us back home. Jeneane. She was seething when we walked in because she felt like we just ditched her at the show. Even the sight of my bandaged face did little to skid her anger.
“Hey,” Lindsay said, closing the door behind her. It was four-fifteen in the morning and everything was packed up in boxes. This night had gone from soft rain-gray to red, blue and black. The true ache in all of this was the fact that we had to be up in three hours to move. The U-Haul had to be back by ten, leaving us with three hours to make at least two trips back and forth from Rogers Park to Wicker Park northwest of The Loop, not to mention a trip to storage to pick up Lindsay’s drums.
“Oh Christ.” I didn’t know who said that. It could have even been heard not because one of us actually said it but because we were all thinking it so hard.
“Your sister’s pretty banged up,” Lindsay needlessly pointed out.
“What the hell happened?” Jeneane asked. By this point the painkillers had set in and I felt like my head was a giant cotton ball. I eased myself down on my futon. I wished Lance were here to hold me, and then later he could go and mercilessly kick that guy’s ass. Maybe call on the Taipans.
“Remember that guy that pushed by you and got on stage? The one in the hockey mask?” Lindsay said.
“Oh yeah,” Jeneane recalled, unimpressed by the memory. She looked at me, her bitchiness slowly dissolving to make room for concern.
“He jumped off stage and kicked your sister right in the face…he was wearing steel-toed boots”
“Sherry?” her voice flooded with worry as she glided across the room. “Are you okay?” She stood over me for a minute before becoming upset with herself for being angry with us. She bit her trembling lip and fell to her knees to get a better look at me. She moved some hair out of my face and asked again, pleading, “Are you okay?”
I nodded but she still looked at me as if my face was crumbling away from its skull. Years of Danzig moshpits, Marilyn Manson moshpits, Deftones moshpits, Type O Negative, White Zombie, Nine Inch Nails, the list went on and on…and I got this from a Veruca Salt show? But I’d made it home alive. Maybe it was just paranoia giving me an irregular heartbeat. I was terrified I’d die in my sleep from some fucked up head injury.
“The doctor confirmed there’s nothing to worry about – she’ll have a really bad headache tomorrow and swelling for a few days.” There was a drawn out silence. “Anna’s helping us move right?”
I wondered for a second whether or not I could press charges against that asshole. There were no security guys in that place. In the mid-90s, most clubs where shows were held had no security; it was all about the music. Surviving the pit was up to you, and in some cases kids lived for the shows and didn’t even care to breathe once the band was done with their gig. And if you were lucky – like I had been back in ’94 – the band would hang out with you after, and you felt like you’d won them over by surviving the chaos of the moshpit.
“Mitch,” Jeneane painted the silence with her frankness, pointing out that Mitch would be helping us move tomorrow. He was a guy! I should have told Lance to help me.
Lindsay remained indifferent. “I’m sorry you got left alone – I was really afraid your sister was very hurt.”
Jeneane stood up and went into the kitchen and I couldn’t help but close my eyes. Sleep wasn’t something I’d be able to fight off much longer. Beneath the covers my hand searched for Lance’s sweatshirt he always left behind. It was my new teddy bear.
“No, it’s not that,” I heard my sister say. “I just really want it to happen for us. This band’s all I got.”
Chapter 2
The Ringing
I woke up cuddling the drummer’s Batman shirt crusty with my blood. How remarkable that yesterday afternoon the drummer of Veruca Salt was walking around the windy, rainy city with it on and now it was in the arms of a girl he didn’t even know, pressed lovingly against her naked breasts. Aw, rock n roll.
It was still raining when the alarm screamed the night off the windows. I felt a strip of incredible pain across my nose, pounding behind my eyes. The only thing that provided me immediate comfort was Lance’s sweatshirt burying my icy cold toes. I heard a slew of zippers by the door, followed by the sound of boxes sliding over boxes, and in the background the continuous plopping of huge raindrops against the window. This – this was awful.
“You need this, Jen?” Lindsay’s voice drifted from the kitchen.
“No,” Jeneane answered. I heard something drop into the wastebasket. There was nothing I wouldn’t give to be able to sleep through this day and move tomorrow. Then the buzzer went off. “Mitch!” Jeneane yelled into the intercom (I knew she did it to wake me up) “Come on up!”
“How ya doin’?” Lindsay’s voice suddenly hung directly over my head. I opened my eyes, praying I’d be able to see once I did. The first thing I saw was her Lucky tattoo, then her long brown hair flowing over the shoulders of her blue-green and white-checkered pajamas. Then I saw the door open and Mitch stepped inside.
“How’s it going?” he chuckled with dark amusement, always finding my sister’s bossy mood funny. I wished I could. His eyes moved around the room and paused on me. “Oh dear, what happened?”
“Bad moshpit incident,” Jeneane explained. “So we’ll need you to help us even more today, Sarah’s out of commission.”
“Oh, doll, I’m sorry.” Mitch said to me, sweet and sincere. I wished I could smile but I just lay there, cradling the Batman shirt with one hand as my other hand surfed the floor for my meds. I couldn’t find them. The little bottle probably tipped over on its side and rolled off somewhere. Damn. I couldn’t fetch it; I didn’t have it in me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the place was silent and half-empty. Lance. I wanted Lance. I pulled his sweatshirt over my sore face and drowned in the smell of him – an even blend of cigarettes, Sunday afternoon b-ball sweat, and the scent of his cologne. I closed my eyes again.
“Sarah?” my mom was calling my name. Back in the house I grew up in, that big three-story house, searching for me. “Sarah?” Every time she said my name more urgently. “Sarah!” I looked up at her. She was standing over the couch holding one of my baby dolls, shaking it so its head looked like it was going to fall off its neck. “She’s talking to you, Sarah! Can’t you hear her?”
I stared at the baby doll. I’d had it since I was a little girl. Her rubber legs were dirty, along with her little fingers. A stray cat I took in and named Sebastian had peed on her. She was sticky and dirty and I didn’t want to hold her. It had been a long time since I pulled her out of that box Christmas morning. Mom kept shaking the doll at me, yelling. “Sarah! Answer her! Answer her, Sarah!” She shook it harder and harder until the head finally popped off and landed on my stomach.
“Sarah?”
I came to in the backseat in the cab of the van. I could detect the faint smell of old vomit someone had worked to clean up but didn’t quite succeed. I’d been asleep, I’d been dreaming. I could see much better now. I moved my tongue around my parched mouth and looked at my sister’s lush red hair.
“I think you were having a bad dream,” Jeneane told me. She was sitting up front and Mitch was driving. “You kept saying, ‘Her head, her head.’ We’re almost at the new place.” She smiled. “How do you feel?”
“The fuckin’ meds are strong.”
“Got any left?” Lindsay joked. Or maybe she wasn’t.
“I put your things in that bag over there,” Jeneane pointed to the blue duffle bag next to Theodore. Theodore! That was the motivation I needed to sit up. It went better than I expected, and for the first time I thought I might just heal from last night’s horrific ordeal.
The drums, Jeneane’s other Les Paul, they were all here. Amps, toasters, record collections. Loud Lucy played in the tape deck. The only thing we needed now was for the rain to stop.
“6035 Winthrop Avenue,” Mitch muttered to himself, keeping an eye out for it. The enormous van slowed as he pulled over to the curb. I watched raindrops collect against the windows, erasing any view of the neighborhood surrounding us. Mitch looked over his shoulder at us.
“How you wanna do this? Maybe we should just wait this rain out.”
“I’m fine with that.” Lindsay was already in the process of rolling a thumb-sized joint. “We can pass this around and get so high we won’t even care.”
I laughed a little. She looked at me and I wondered how my face looked. “You look sexy,” she said, winking. We’d had an ongoing flirty relationship now for a few months. I was not gay. I loved loved men. I loved loving men and I loved hating men loved men. But I couldn’t forget the night Lindsay picked me up and threw me on my futon and started spanking me. I couldn’t forget that I sort of liked it and sort of wished she’d do it again.
Lindsay let me have the first puff of her joint because I was in pain. I passed it back to her. Mitch was still looking at us.
“I don’t know, are you guys seriously going to leave that doll up?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What doll?” I listened to the hard rain drum against the van’s roof since no one was answering me.
“There’s a fucking voodoo doll hanging on the wall in one of the bedrooms!” Mitch was so boisterous he sounded pissed. “And they’re just going to leave it up.”
“It must be there for a reason,” Lindsay said.
“Creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. Her eyes are huge – and her mouth is wide open like she’s screaming at you.”
“I’m sure it’s not a big deal,” Jeneane said, her voice barely audible over the hard rain.
“All I know is if I moved into a place and suddenly there’s a voodoo doll on the wall I’d be a bit freaked out,” Mitch kept on.
Now I was too curious to wait out the torrential downpour, or for the pot to wear off. I got out of the van. The rain felt strangely great on my face. I held my face up to the sky until the bandage was too wet to stick anymore. I let it fall to the ground. I let my hair get so wet it stuck to my face and my shirt clung to my breasts.
Jeneane rolled her window down and preached. “Sarah? Why aren’t you wearing a bra?”
“I’m not complaining,” Lindsay said.
Then Mitch chimed in. “You guys need a forth roommate?”
“Sarah, you’re going to get sick.” I didn’t respond to my sister because I was too drawn to our new home. The roof was split into two castle towers. No one mentioned what a pain in the ass the building’s front door was to unlock. It took me nearly two minutes to get inside the building. I stood in the foyer for a minute, soaked. My ears were ringing – last night’s concert, I thought, the loudness, the incident, the meds, the brief sleep, so many things could be contributed to the ringing. I looked back at the van parked in the rain and wondered if the people inside were talking about me. Sometimes I felt so disconnected from the world. Detached, severed. I turned around and my eyes crawled up the wooden staircase.
“Sarah?”
Was that my sister? The voice sounded closer than anything that could come from the van. The van’s windows were rolled up besides, with everyone still inside getting stoned. I heard my name called again and looked up the stairs leading to our 3rd floor apartment. The walls were covered with green and white striped wallpaper. I climbed up to the third floor. A mop and bucket were over by the window, which was cracked open so its ledge was splattered with rain.
X: Hey!
I looked around, trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming from when my face started to hurt again. Then I heard Mitch, Jeneane and Lindsay as they came into the building, laughing.
“I think you guys should do a creepy version of Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable,” Mitch was saying. “Like all goth, like,” he unnecessarily broke out into song, “Unforgettable…that’s what you are to me.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jeneane snarled, carrying a box up the stairs. Everyone was quiet for the next few seconds. I tried to hear that voice again but it didn’t reoccur. Once Lindsay unlocked the door to our new apartment, the first thing I did was look down the hallway. It was as narrow and silent as an abandoned railroad.
Its going to be a long road, isn’t it X? Yes, it is.
“I want to show you that doll,” Mitch said to me, brimming with the enthusiasm of a child. I followed him down the hallway to the last bedroom before the hallway spit out into the huge eccentric dining room. The doll was much bigger than I’d imagined, hanging above the window and radiator. In my head I pictured one of those dolls you bought in New Orleans, a dark keepsake made of straw that could fit in your pocket. This was something totally different – something handmade and about the size of a baby, made out of blue clay, its eyes and mouth thrown open in shock. The blue and white sundress it had on was old and tattered. Somehow, it looked like it felt cold. The doll wasn’t even hung straight; it dipped a little to the right. Someone should at least straighten her out, I thought.
X: Too late for that!
ME: Huh? Hello?
I looked back at the doll and noticed the little white pins poking her. There was one in her right eye, another in her heart and one in her crotch.
“I think it’s a good thing – a blessing,” Lindsay said, passing us by. “We still have a ton of stuff to bring up and its after nine,” she said. “Jen’s gonna freak if we have to pay for another day for the van.”
I just stared at the doll. Who made it and why? What were they thinking of as they waited for the clay to dry, as they poked her with the pins? I finally looked away from the doll and over at Mitch. “Thanks for, um, picking up the slack.”
“Yeah, no prob. Are you okay?”
“Huh?” I felt totally out of it. I just wanted to sit down. “Yeah…just sore.” He patted me on the back. “Well, hang in there kiddo.”
X: Yeah! Hang in there kiddo, and don’t go in the closet!
“Mitch!” Lindsay screamed. “Let’s go.”
“Fuckin’ hell, how do you put up with this?” he chuckled. I just shrugged as he left to go meet up with Lindsay. The first time I was left alone in the apartment I felt like I still wasn’t. I felt observed. Sometimes I felt like someone was playing a game of hide and seek. I could feel someone’s curiosity blossoming as I walked back down the hallway to the living room. This was the biggest room in the place by far. It was cold and smelled funny – like the bottom of a pan of burnt angel hair pasta. The tenants didn’t take everything with them. An antique wooden window of framed mirrors, for instance, hung in the living room facing the door.
Jeneane paused when she came back in with more boxes and looked at it. “Well…if you’re not ugly I guess it’s not that bad.”
She asked Lindsay later on in the kitchen if the mirror or the doll had been here when we checked the place out. I couldn’t recall.
“I don’t remember, I was high.” Lindsay answered. “I told you guys my parents are coming up tomorrow, right?”
How could you not remember seeing a voodoo doll the size of a baby hanging on the wall?
X: Well yeah, how could ya!
I had a headache all of a sudden.
“No,” Jeneane quipped. She folded her arms and strutted down the hallway.
“That’s supposed to be a good thing, they’re taking us out to dinner,” Lindsay said shortly before the door slammed. They’d left to get more boxes and I stayed behind. I felt funny – the way I did after I’d had a long telephone call and it ended and I was left surrounded by the silence of an empty room. I sat in the middle of the living room floor and closed my eyes because I felt a little dizzy.
The late night shows, the rain, you’re not taking care of yourself, Sarah. I know.
I opened my eyes and looked up at the hallway where Lindsay was standing a few seconds ago because I thought, for some reason, she was still there. I thought I felt her standing there just watching me with a demeanor impossible to distract. But no one was there.
“I mean Unforgettable?” Jeneane bitched from the kitchen a few minutes later, seething over Mitch’s comment. “Its like he doesn’t take us seriously – he doesn’t think we’re going to make it.”
Had Mitch left? Did he say goodbye? I felt like hours were passing like minutes. What was going on? Maybe it was the painkillers…I picked my hand up and studied it like I did once when I was a teenager and dropped acid.
“He was just joking around,” Lindsay said, “He’s a kook.”
I couldn’t stop looking around the living room. There was something about it. There was something about this place.
“Hey, Sarah?” Jeneane called.
“Yeah?” I reached over for the blue duffle bag to see what they’d packed while I was out cold. I unzipped it and saw Lance’s towel he used when he slept over. I couldn’t believe Jeneane actually packed that.
“Come in here with us!” Jeneane called out.
“Okay!” But I kept rummaging through the bag. She’d put my toothbrush in a Ziploc bag. She’d put the guitar picks I collected from Chi Cheng and Fieldy in another. My big sister did thoughtful things like this all the time. I went into the kitchen. As I passed the bedroom I could see the voodoo doll out of the corner of my eye, staring up at the ceiling like a choking victim desperate for air. The sight of it erased my plan to thank my sister for packing those things in such an orderly fashion straight from my mind.
I stood in the doorway of the kitchen as Jeneane looked down at the table. “We’re ordering pizza, we’re fam –
She stopped talking when she looked up at me and the chair’s pegs cried against the floor as she pushed it back and raced over to me.
“Shit, Linds, get a paper towel.” As Lindsay went to collect a napkin, Jeneane pinched the bridge of my bloody nose.
Chapter 3
Boys And Their Minions
I stood in the cold bathroom, looking in the mirror.
All those dreams, you know the ones you could never tell anybody about, they’re coming back to you now huh, huh, Sarah? Yes. And you don’t like it. You don’t like it, do you? No. And why is that? Because I never felt like they were dreams. And those attacks you had as a teenager when your body would go numb and helpless, you can’t stop wondering why huh, Sarah? No, I’ve never stopped.
I had purplish-blue lines under my eyes. I’d covered my nose with a new bandage. I looked like a monster. The doctor had said I wouldn’t suffer any more nosebleeds, but I knew I was dying. Last night was the first night of the rest of my death.
“Sarah! Pizza’s here!” Jeneane called out, snapping me out of my shellshock state. Her feet slapped against the wood floor as she hurried to answer the buzzer. “You said you were putting in!”
Must she always shout?
One of the first things I learned about Chicago was
that it never got completely dark here, especially
during the winter. The night-sky turned into a sheet of lilac glazed over by the glow of streetlamps, and everything smelled like snow, whether or not there was actually any falling yet.
Two hours passed since the pizza arrived and still all I could do was stare at an abandoned olive in the middle of a spot of grease on the box. Jeneane was doing her usual run-through of plans for the next week. She was a control freak; she could never relax. My sister strived to do all she could, to make her life as full as possible and leave an impact on the world. She felt the only way this could be accomplished was to constantly announce a schedule, for us as well as for her.
“Tomorrow we’ll go grocery shopping, then I say we get a bottle of wine and come back and start padding the room – the one I was going to originally have as my bedroom.”
“The one with the doll in it?” I supposed. That room? We were going to spend countless hours every day in that room? The ringing was coming back again. I could hardly hear what my sister was saying. It was as if someone was plugging my ears with their fingers.
“My parents are coming up tomorrow night,” Lindsay reminded, a bit weary.
“Oh…” Jeneane was thrown off course.
“Where are you gonna sleep then?” I asked, talking louder than everyone else in order to hear myself. “If you’re not going to use that as your bedroom?”
Jeneane looked thoroughly confused for the first time in her life. Things felt simpler in the old place. Then suddenly the phone rang. It was in the bedroom with the voodoo doll, so I didn’t want to go in there to answer.
I looked at Lindsay after Jeneane left to answer the phone. She gave me a cute grin because she knew we were both thinking the same thing – Why couldn’t Jeneane just fucking chill for one day and let things happen as they would? We just moved; we need a timeout.
“Sarah!” she screamed from her room. “Lance!”
I jumped up, shedding all my troubles for the time being, and raced to the phone.
“Hey,” I said into the phone, closing the door for privacy. I’d been dating him now for about five months and I still got nervous when I talked to him on the phone.
“Hey. You moved?” Lance asked.
“Yes.” My voice softened, that was the affect he had on me. Where was I? The walls felt like cotton candy.
“You like it?”
“I don’t know…its kind of weird,” I said, looking up at the voodoo doll.
“Just different, that’s all,” he assured. “Want me to come over?”
“Yes.” I never wanted anything more.
“Hey, you pack my sweatshirt?” he hurried to ask.
“Shit…”
“Oh…,” he teased, in the middle of chewing something I think. “Someone’s gonna get spanked.”
I think everyone was asleep except me. Where the fuck was Lance? It was one in the morning and he never showed. I was in bed with the covers over me, doing what people did when they slept – nothing. My eyes were closed but my mind was racing. I put my hand on my sore face and tried to think of one thing, just focus on one single nice thought, and hopefully transmit it into a dream. But it was too quiet – the quiet here was distracting.
At three am I woke up to someone stomping their feet next to the bed. My eyes were already glued to the hallway’s doorframe. Someone was here. They had been waiting for me to wake up. The voice I heard couldn’t be categorized as a girl’s or a boy’s, but something else, something unrefined, something dark and troubled and demanding. And when the voice spoke, my face hurt.
X: You awake!
ME:
Yes…
X: Good!
ME: What do you want?
ME: Hello?
Chapter 4
The News Of The Day
I had no idea this was where the knife was discarded – the tracks leading us from Rogers Park into the heart of the city. I had no idea that the steps we took to get to the grocery store were the same steps her killer took to dispose of his tools, and eventually her body parts.
The Jarvis Station was rundown and almost always empty of people. The turnstile was greasy, and the stairway banister was chipping of thick layers of its purplish blue paint. The El platform overlooked a bodega. Across the street from the bodega was a building I thought was abandoned until one evening I heard a guitar crying behind the dark window. That’s when I knew we weren’t the only band in this neighborhood; we weren’t the only ones still trying.
I had good news to report, the pain in my face and chest had subsided. I went to the grocery store, came back and unloaded groceries, had dinner and watched TV all without a single nosebleed. Around sunset, Jeneane began with the heavy-duty cleaning. Tracing the mop along the floor in a zigzag motion, bringing its cherry-wood charm back to life.
X: You have no idea who has walked on this floor!
“If you want, you can invite Lance tonight,” Jeneane spoke as she looked down at the mop. She was very good at mopping. My thoughts switched over to the idea of Lance sitting at the table with us, decked out in his raver/street attire as he played with his tongue ring, clicking it against the back of his teeth. Lance was a channel that only came in clear during sex. I wasn’t sure what Lindsay’s parents, whom I hadn’t met yet, would think of him. I wasn’t even sure what I thought of him, I just knew I had to keep seeing him to try and figure that out.
I knew the Cliff’s Notes about Lindsay’s parents. They’d been living on a farm in Minnesota for thirty years. I knew they were hardworking folk. They never traded in an old car for a newer one. What would they think of me? And my face looked horrific.
“Sarah?” Jeneane said, because it had been a while since she spoke and I never responded.
“Huh?”
“Are you and Lance still together?” she had stopped mopping and was giving me her undivided attention. The floor gleamed all around her. The sun shot through her red curls. All of it hurt my eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Did he do something?” Jeneane asked. Of course he did something, everyone did something, we had to do something, all the time. But I knew what she meant, of course. I just couldn’t say what he did in the bathroom, how could I? How rough he was sometimes – and other times he simply wasn’t there at all. It was all so abrasive. So I just lay there, drowning in my thoughts. One couldn’t talk while drowning. When I looked up to finally talk to Jeneane, she was gone. I heard the mop collide against the wall as she mopped the hallway, carrying on in the dining room. I plugged my nose because I couldn’t take the stinging smell of the mopping fluid any longer but then I had to let my nose go because of the pain that sprung up into my head whenever I touched it.
Sundown. I submitted myself to cleaning the kitchen. Jeneane was on her hands and knees in front of the refrigerator, stabbing at a sheet of black ice. A discolored shoestring dangled from a light bulb above her head.
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