I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone Read online

  Signs were the only way we could communicate inside. No one really monitored the noise level at River’s Edge since there were no neighbors to complain. The warehouse had great natural acoustics. Across one end stretched a stage, built back before my father’s time. It was ridiculously large, allowing bands that shouldn’t have been performing outside of their own basements to feel like they were playing at an arena. The stage was located near a side door, so equipment could be unloaded easily. The small backstage area had a dingy, olive-green couch and a few raggedy chairs. Throughout the warehouse, ladders on the wall led to a catwalk that snaked all the way around the inside, eighteen feet above the floor. Sometimes kids climbed up there and watched the band, legs dangling through the metal rails. They dared each other to dive into the thrashing crowd below, but no one ever did.

  Audiences ranged from twenty to two hundred kids. Regan and I always scanned for faces we recognized from school. A crew of three older boys, all of whom wore the same leather jackets and spent lunch smoking in the parking lot, showed up semiregularly, but it looked like everyone else was at the game—football, basketball, baseball, whatever season it was. The kids at River’s Edge arrived in groups of three to five. Like us, they attended rural high schools filled with guys who donned Packers jerseys every Monday and chicks who wore their boyfriends’ varsity jackets with miniskirts or too-tight, acid-washed jeans. At school, multicolored hair, shredded and patched clothing, and studded, spiked accessories stood out like a neon billboard in the middle of a cornfield would, but at River’s Edge those things blended right in.

  By my senior year, when some of the local bands had begun to make names for themselves, more people started showing up—some of them from as far away as Milwaukee and Chicago—to see the legendary place where those country kids had gotten their start. They were probably disappointed to find it was much like any other club on the inside—dirty and dark, the concrete floor covered with that slimy mixture of ashes and beer—and we were the same group of kids found at any rock show. After all, it was the nineties. Just because we lived in the sticks didn’t mean we were completely cut off from subculture. We just took more shit from our neighbors and classmates for looking strange.

  The crowd thinned at the back of the warehouse by the main doors, but the area up to fifteen feet away from the stage was packed with sweaty, bouncing bodies. Regan barreled in, shoving burly guys twice her size out of her path. She liked to be right up front, getting slammed into the stage with the rhythm of the song. For some sick reason, I enjoyed being trampled and bruised, too. It was another phase that Marissa said we’d get over soon enough. Unless she really loved the band, Marissa stood at the back, splashing her drink on anyone who stepped on her toes. Since she played in July Lies, one of the best bands in the area, Marissa was queen of the scene. Regan and I could have shared her glory, but we liked to get hot, sticky, beat up, and dirty with the masses.

  That night, however, Regan dove into the crowd on a mission; I knew she noticed him when I had. Sam’s band was playing when we walked in.

  I’d never seen or heard them before. They had a dumb name, Dead Smurfs or Mikey’s Mom or something like that, but Sam was definitely practicing to be a rock god. His guitar hung low so that everyone could see his bare, tattooed chest. He had unwashed, blond hair that picked up the color of the lights. He thrashed a chord so hard that a string snapped, lacerating his finger, and he let it bleed. His voice was guttural and sexy. The music was fast and loud, just the way I liked it.

  I pushed through the pit, grabbing at Regan, who always danced with her elbows swinging to knock away all the bigger bodies threatening to crush her. She threw her arm around me in a sweaty embrace and then shoved me in front of her so that I was standing directly in front of Sam. Entranced by him, I couldn’t even tell if he was genuinely a good musician or if he just knew how to manipulate acoustics and energy. All I saw was that he oozed sex and danger. Regan agreed. After two songs, she pelted him with condoms, which she must have drunkenly decided would be a good sign.

  I whipped around, mouthing “Bitch!” at her. She laughed hysterically and pointed over my shoulder. I turned back to see Sam smiling down at me, his baby-blue eyes thirsting for fame.

  It wouldn’t be the last time I was deceived by a rock god, but it was the only time that my disappointment was unforeseen. Of course, I hadn’t expected or even wanted romance, but I had craved at least the pleasure of pain. I thought Sam would touch me with the raw power he used to play guitar. I thought he would kiss me and leave bruises on my skin as black-and-blue and dangerous as his voice. And I thought he would be able to satisfy the burn between my legs that surged every time I heard a distorted guitar. I slept with him because we worshipped at the same altars, because he oozed frenzied, furied rock energy, because I knew I could absorb it, make it mine. He thought I loved him for his inevitable future rock-god glory, but I had no interest in watching from backstage or vibing to the records he made, gleaming with gratitude that I was his muse. I thought that if we fused together, the world would screech like an amp so charged it caught fire. But it wasn’t anywhere near that good.

  I waited for him behind the stage and he made a beeline for me. After he introduced himself, Sam kissed me hard, shoving me against a steel beam. He tasted like stale beer. He bit my lower lip before thrusting his tongue into my mouth and exploring it violently. I dug my fingernails into his bare back and raked them down, feeling his skin splinter like weak wood. The scratch would become my trademark, the signature I left on every guy I hooked up with. He moaned into our kiss and I felt his pleasure vibrating down my throat and into my stomach. Sam pulled his hot mouth away from mine just enough to whisper, “Let’s go outside.”

  Behind Marissa’s car, we tumbled to the ground, pulling our Tshirts over our heads and tugging off each other’s jeans. Night had fallen while Sam’s band played, but the moon lit the sky. Our nakedness was protected from the eyes of others by darkness, though we could still see each other clearly. Sam rolled on top of me, hands groping greedily, stripping off my underwear and then his own as he sloppily sucked on my neck.

  “Whoa!” I firmly planted my palm against the Celtic cross tattooed on his chest. “Condom?”

  “Uhhh …”

  “Right pocket of my jeans,” I demanded.

  “Oh. Good,” he mumbled, scrambling backward and rooting through the pile of balled-up clothing at our feet.

  Yeah, thank god for Regan. No matter how hot and heavy the action, I wasn’t about to risk babies or STDs.

  When he finally got the thing on, he climbed back on top of me. Then he was inside me. I closed my eyes waiting, at first, for the powerful, hungry feeling I’d felt in his initial kiss. After a few minutes, I opened one eye, still expecting, at the very least, the bleeding ache that Regan had mentioned. Nothing. It didn’t feel like dancing while getting bruised by shoulders and elbows and knees. It didn’t even feel like drunkenly screaming along to my favorite song. There was nothing raw or even energetic about it. The only thing remotely musical that I could compare it to was tapping my foot. The band inside butchered an Iggy Pop song. As the tone-deaf singer wailed, “Can you feeeeel it?” I wondered the same thing. And the answer was, “Not really.”

  I opened both eyes to see Sam thrusting into me in a way that was so not rhythmic that I doubted whether he’d ever heard music, let alone played it. His eyes squeezed closed, brow furrowed in intense concentration. I thought briefly that maybe I was in so much pain I was numb, but then I felt bits of gravel and broken glass digging into my butt. His sweaty hair fell into his face; the moonlight that trickled through it made it look translucent, as fragile as a spider’s web. That’s when I saw past the grimace on his face, the tattoos that he’d probably conned someone into giving him, and realized how much he resembled a little boy. He was probably two years older than me, but his inevitable lack of experience still didn’t justify my disappointment.

  I groped behind me for the beer
that I’d left nearby, praying for a swallow of lukewarm backwash to alleviate my annoyance. Sam’s breathing got faster and more labored, like he was working really hard. He pressed his cheek against mine, his chest rubbing against my black bra, which he hadn’t even bothered to try to remove. I felt his leg muscles twitch and then he collapsed against me, leaving me with the impression of a dying fish.

  When he finally rolled off of me, I quickly pulled on my jeans. Sam sighed. “I’m going to write a song about you,” he murmured.

  I stifled my laughter with the beer can I’d found. Before he could make any more embarrassing statements, I got dressed and walked away. My idea of rock gods had been ruined. They were nothing more than little boys wearing stolen scowls. I knew that the next time I saw Sam play, I would realize his songs sucked. He would be nothing without his rock-god hair flying, his arms flailing, his chest dripping sweat, and his intense eyes zeroing in on every girl in the audience who believed him to be raw power. I would notice that he couldn’t even play four chords. And most important, I’d know that the sex wouldn’t even last through three songs.

  “Maybe he was just really bad,” Regan said, peering sympathetically at me as I lay stretched out in the backseat, reveling in my disillusionment. The wind blew in from both her and Marissa’s open windows, and I hoped that the smell of dirty barns was cleansing me of the scent of Sam’s sweat.

  “Well, regardless of that, I learned one thing. No guy fucks like they sound when they’re onstage or blaring at top volume on your stereo. And I’m sure this knowledge will change my life,” I quipped cynically.

  Regan winced. “I swear I’ll pick a better one next time.”

  “So will I,” I said with a laugh.

  “You girls need to do what I did,” Marissa chimed in. She turned down the original version of “Gimme Danger” that I insisted she put on so my memory of the song wouldn’t be tainted, and met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Start your own damn band!”

  Regan and I fell silent, but as the car sped toward the same part of Carlisle Louisa had blazed out of, I knew we both were thinking that Marissa was right.

  SKIN

  April 1981

  Introduced as Scarlet, she followed the haunting rhythm out onto the stage with her hips swaying and torso winding. All the girls before her had danced frenetically to fast pop songs, garbed in sequins and glitter. They tossed their gowns in the gutter, rubbed their tits, and splayed their legs with wild abandon in an attempt to suck up the sloppy, post–Mardi Gras energy like powder through a rolled dollar bill. The old men in the back of the club watched the dancers with empty eyes, hungrily swallowing bottles of cheap beer. They wiped their perspiring hands on faded slacks and—only once or twice a night—retrieved a grimy bill from their pockets and threw it at a stripper’s feet.

  They were not the ones the dancers worked to impress. Girls gyrated and writhed to plastic ballads for the men who sat right up front: the conventioneers who slid their wedding rings off before going out on the town and the college boys still too intoxicated to realize that Mardi Gras was over. They screamed catcalls, grabbed their crotches, and overturned the torn vinyl chairs, but their rowdy behavior was excused because they tipped well.

  After all, the club was at the edge of the French Quarter, a dim hole-in-the-wall on Esplanade that tourists only found when they turned off Bourbon Street and stumbled aimlessly in what they thought was the direction of their hotel. Bleary-eyed, they ignored the sticky floor, the chipped tables, the hum of the neon sign above the bar, and the gaudy gold curtain that functioned as the only decoration on the small stage aside from two black poles.

  Scarlet stepped through the curtain to do her last dance at two A. M. Her voluminous, crimson hair cascaded down her back and over her shoulders, covering her breasts. She wore a shimmering, pearly skirt slit up to her hips on both sides, revealing legs the vulnerable pink of the inside of a shell. She sauntered to the front of the stage, green and purple lights illuminating her ghostly skin. Her rib, hip, and wrist bones jutted out, looking as though they could scratch through her delicate surface like coral. As the hollow voice that skimmed above the plodding, icy beat of the music sang about a woman giving away the secrets of her past, Scarlet tossed back her hair, pulled off the skirt, and opened her seaweed-green eyes all in one fluid motion. She looked out at the grimy heads of the regulars, averting her gaze before she caught a glimpse of herself in the smudged mirrors behind them. Then, she peered down at the red-faced, younger boys. One of them, thick-necked, bloodshot eyes wide, hollered, “She’s a goddamn mermaid!” and stuffed her gold bikini bottoms with a ten-dollar bill.

  She shut her eyes again, dancing as she would naturally at a nightclub, a concert, or in the room she remembered with flimsy white curtains, a battered radio, and a bassinet beside the double bed. She twisted her body to a song too obscure for anyone to recognize, and thought about things that no one in the crowd would know. About the way her legs had gotten long when she was fifteen and every man and boy stopped to stare at them as she kicked up dust on her trek to school. About a thin-lipped teacher who wore a bra tight as a straitjacket to flatten her chest and constantly told her, “Those legs will get you into trouble.” About a lover left behind in the room with the white curtains whose gentle face she didn’t dare picture while dancing, who told her, “Those legs will save you.” And lastly, as the melancholy song about losing control crept into her ears, Scarlet thought about its singer, who had hanged himself less than a year ago. She let his voice possess her as her fingers fluttered to her throat, first pulling the strings of her top tight, and then untying them, letting the fabric fall away. She felt hands tangling around her legs, clawing at her hips, her stomach, and her thighs to stuff more money in her skimpy underwear. It’s only skin, she thought, they could rip away layers and layers of it and never get inside of me. They’ll never penetrate my thoughts. They’ll never even learn my name.

  Scarlet disappeared behind the gold curtain and went downstairs to the dressing room she shared with eight other girls. She sat on a metal folding chair in front of the mirror that spanned an entire wall and tossed her head back, carefully removing her red wig. She pulled her long, flaxen hair out of the two snaky coils beneath the hairnet, scratching at her tawny roots to relieve her sweaty scalp. After slipping into a pair of well-worn jeans and a T-shirt, she carefully wiped her makeup off with a damp tissue, attempting to erase all traces of Scarlet. But it was not until she got on the streetcar at Canal and St. Charles that she retrieved the felt bag she kept stashed at the bottom of her purse. Inside was a gold wedding band, and when she slid it on, she became the woman she would never let her audience know: Louisa Black.

  Normally, the ring was just another part of Louisa’s ritual, the final action she took to become herself again and sever any mental connection she had with the person she pretended to be at work, stepping away like an actress after playing a difficult role. Louisa had come to regard the ring as the simple symbol she reduced it to when people asked her about it. “Yes, I have a husband,” she always told them, speaking with an affectionate tone yet offering no explanation as to who or where her husband was.

  But that night, when Louisa put her wedding ring on, she clearly pictured Michael. She didn’t see him as she had first seen him, with his long fingers dancing over the strings of a guitar. She didn’t have a flash of the shy smile he wore when they were married in front of a judge in Chicago. Instead, Louisa was momentarily blinded by her image of Michael right before she’d decided to leave him: lying in their bed in his pale blue pajamas, his back propped up against the wooden headboard with their baby girl sleeping soundly on his lap, her rosy cheek pressed against his chest.

  As Louisa bent down to kiss their daughter before setting her in the bassinet beside their bed, she noticed how soft Emily was, thought about how she fit so perfectly against her body when she nursed. Emily’s skin felt like velvet or satin; it was like Louisa’s second skin. A skin that Loui
sa would have to shed.

  Since Emily’s birth, Louisa had been having the same dream of sitting in the kitchen nursing Emily, but with the milk going red. Bloodred. Louisa noticed it at the corner of Emily’s tiny lips, spreading quickly toward her cheeks, and, before long, her baby face resembled raw meat. Emily tried to pull her mouth away, began to shriek, but it was like her suckling had turned on a fire hose. She started choking, but Louisa froze, keeping her at her breast until Michael rushed in. “You’re killing her!” he shouted, but he couldn’t do anything, because as Emily turned blue, so did he. They both died right in front of Louisa while her breasts continued to leak blood.

  The dream was always the same and she had it every night. She awoke racked with guilt, unable to fall back asleep. She spent her days feeling less and less capable of caring for Emily. She didn’t have the words to explain it to Michael. Besides, nothing he could say could comfort her. Normal mothers didn’t see things like that night after night. Louisa felt that the dream’s message was clear: she did not deserve this child. She promised herself that if she had the nightmare one more time, she would leave.

  Louisa paused, didn’t want to set Emily down. She imagined holding Emily in her arms for years, her daughter growing rapidly like she had inside of Louisa’s womb. Her arms, legs, all of her would lengthen and strengthen. She would learn to speak, her voice musical but commanding. And Louisa would keep her snugly in her grip, pressed against her chest, until Emily was too big to hold. Too big to be hurt by Louisa’s secrets and memories. Or by the nightmare. If only she could stay awake until Emily was grown. “Pray,” she whispered to the sleeping infant as she reluctantly put her to bed. “Pray my dreams are sweet as you from now on, so I don’t have to go away.”