Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

“What?” she yells, startling a nearby goth couple.

“I said, I don’t show off!” I yell back. The goth couple shuffles away. Father McGuire looks alarmed. Wiping more Tiger Balm tears off my face, I apologize. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to holler at you. I’m just nervous. I think I have to set up now. What I meant to say is”—I stand on tiptoe and whisper into her ear—“ I don’t show off. ”

Betty’s feeling sassy. She leans in, pressing her gleaming curls against my cheek, and whispers, too. “ You said it, not me. ”

“Well, it’s not about the show, it’s about the work ,” I say into her cheek.

“I’m working too hard to think about anything else. Can I have my beer back? You don’t drink anymore.”

“And you don’t drink yet ,” she says quietly, then straightens up and chirps, “Have fun!”

“Fun’s stupid.”

“Fun’s not stupid, it’s fun ,” she says, then sing-songs, “Work plus salesmanship equals success!”

“Hmmm… I’ve never heard that saying before,” I grumble . Why does she always do this to me before I play? Why can’t she wait until after the show to give me shit?

Confused members of the opening band walk by on their way to the bar with Shouldn’t you be on by now? expressions. They stare, wide-eyed, at the old cowgirl and the priest before turning to order their drinks.

I look at the dressing room door. Where the hell is my band and why aren’t they rescuing me? “Playing this kind of music isn’t an exercise in showing off,” I whine quietly to Betty.

“What is it an exercise in , then?” she asks gently.

“I don’t know,” I answer, trying to sound pitiful, “… shame?”

“In what ?” she shrieks, jumping back. Father McGuire looks sad.

I am instantly defensive. “Shame’s nothing to be ashamed of !”

She drops her jaw and stares at me for a second, then says briskly, “Oh, for the love of… quit that staring-into-space thing.” She pushes the beer bottle back into my hand. “You look without seeing. It hurts people’s feelings.”

“But I don’t want to see them.”

“Krissy, look at people!” To illustrate, she grabs my face and looks into my eyes fiercely. This seems to make them hurt more. “I’m telling you this for your own good. You don’t even blink when you play! It’s disturbing. Just look at the people you play for—they love you! Show them you’re in love with all of them!”

I look at her, confused. “I’m not in love with any of them.”

Her mouth tightens. “All you have to do is look at people,” she says slowly. “What the hell are you afraid of ?”

“People!” Duh-uh. The weird thing is, I don’t know anyone who’s more afraid of people than Betty.

She sighs. “I knew you had to be afraid of something .” Then she pulls a tube of fire-engine-red lipstick out of her purse, grabs my chin and rubs it all over my mouth. I wish she’d stop grabbing me and rubbing me with things . Father McGuire studies the results and puts his thumbs up, nodding. “At least they’ll look at you now, Krissy,” says Betty. She stands back to admire her work and her face softens.

“It’s okay to be scared, sweetheart,” she said. “How’re you gonna give ’em your heart if you don’t have one?”

She says Al Jolson told her that, too.

elizabeth june

My grandfather carefully parts the sheer curtains of his bedroom window on Lookout Mountain, then rests a rifle on the ledge. He stands quietly for a long time, gazing out the window at the peach trees in his backyard.

Suddenly, he fires the gun. A deafening crack and then silence.

“What did you shoot?” I ask, wide-eyed.

“A squirrel,” he says calmly. “He was after my peaches.”

Then he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and begins wiping the gun down with it. “I shoot that squirrel every day and every day he comes back for more peaches.”

People mill around the dressing room, talking, laughing and drinking. The chafing dish of horse-goat in gravy sits on the table, untouched. So does our warm orange soda. The other bands’ pitchers of beer have all been emptied, however. In the center of the commotion, my three bandmates are hunched over the set lists I wrote this afternoon. Leslie’s telling Dave the banana slug story while Tea pokes at song titles that Dave then crosses out with my magic marker. Dave is a puny little dishwater-blond like me and Tea, just a boy one; he also looks like a child.

“Who gave the drummer a pen?” I ask, carefully putting my Tiger Balmed contacts in their case, then leaning over his shoulder to look. My carefully written set lists are blackened with lines and arrows; songs are crossed out, moved around, exchanged for other songs. “You fusted it all up,” I tell him. “Nobody can read it now; everything’s crossed out.”

“Ev-ree-theeng,” coaches Tea kindly. “Not ev-ruh-thang .”

“Ev-ree-theeng,” I repeat. “Eh-vree-theeng’s fusted.”

Dave looks up at me and smiles. “Hi, Kris. Your set sucked, so I made up a new one.”

“Oh,” I squint at it. “Okay. I can’t see very well right now. Is it good?”

“No, this one sucks, too,” says Dave, “but less than yours.” He stares at me. “Are you crying ?”

Leslie stands and stretches. “We should probably play it whether it sucks or not. We’re supposed to be on now.”

“There’s gum on those set lists,” I offer helpfully.

“There’s gum on ev-ree-theeng ,” says Tea.

Our band was started on these two bullshit principles—well, they’re more like bullshit wishes , but here they are:

1. That people should be able to touch one another and feel each other’s pain. Physically, like you could place your hand on someone’s cheek and feel their toothache; and emotionally, if you move someone, touch them deeply, you have to take responsibility for that depth of feeling and care about them.

So it isn’t just pain that we should feel in each other—happiness should seep out of pores, and clouds of jealousy and all the different kinds of love and disappointment should float around us. We could walk in and out of people’s clouds to know what they’re feeling. That’d be the kindest way to live on planet earth.

2. That maybe our essential selves are drunk—not wasted, just kinda buzzed, enough to let go. If we were always a little tipsy, we’d be light, nonjudgmental, truthful. Our hang-ups’d be shaken off, there’d be no second-skin barriers to honesty. Oh, and also no hangovers.

We figure that if these two things were true, then it’d be okay for a band to sound like we do: sorta painful and a little out of control. We’d play what the audience felt and feel it at the same time and they’d feel it reflected back to them in sound and we’d all care about each other’s stories and clouds of feeling and… good luck with that , I think miserably through my stage fright, trudging past the knitters, hippies, junkies, drunks, painters and psychos.

I follow Leslie through the crowd, keeping a close eye on the fountain of dreadlocks making its way through the fuzzy room. Clearly, it isn’t okay for a band to sound like we do. If it was, nobody’d think we came from outer space, which is what everybody seems to think. Whatever. Don’t have time to care about that right now.

We don’t just have equipment to set up, we have a whole stage set: TVs tuned to static, a busted old Moog synthesizer (also tuned to static—it basically just sits onstage, drooling, like a demented robot friend), an ironing board we use as a percussion stand, lamps (because we prefer mood lighting to rock-show lighting), various car parts and kitchen utensils (for hitting), a movie screen we project slides onto and a pair of mannequin legs in a gold lamé miniskirt with a TV for a torso. All this may sound arty, but really, it’s just overenthusiastic.