Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

All four of us believe our stage set is beautiful, but it probably isn’t, which is why we call it “the crap.” Once in place, the crap becomes a dimly lit obstacle course. Tonight, it is a smeary dimly lit obstacle course with a halo around it.

A blond cloud next to me comes into focus as Tea untangles her guitar cord from the mannequin legs. I stare too long, trying to figure out which blur is Tea and which is the legs. She stops. “Are you okay?” she asks.

I squint at her. “Is that you?” I ask, pointing. “Or is that?”

“Holy shit,” she says, walking away.

The lights go down, but it doesn’t matter ’cause I’m working in a fog anyway. I find center stage and drop the mic stand about a foot ’cause the singer in the first band was tall. Feeling my pedals to make sure they’re in the right order, I carefully place the greasy beer bottle down on top of my set list, then run through my settings as fast as I can with the guitar volume low. When I hear Dave’s sticks count us in, I turn the volume back up and hit the two pedals I need for the first song, ready to focus. Well, ready to lose focus. Trying not to see won’t be too hard tonight , I think to myself as the song starts. Now: no more thinking.

Wait. Is that smoke? A smoke machine? We’re already halfway through the intro and there’s already choking smoke everywhere, billowing onto the stage; it looks like we’re on fire. I didn’t know this club had a smoke machine. They must’ve just gotten it ’cause whoever’s working it is really enthusiastic. We repeat the intro.

Then the clouds start flashing; it looks like lightning. Aw, crap. Strobe lights. Strobes’re supposed to make you look cool, but they make you play retarded. ‘Cause the last time you saw your hand, it was on a different fret, and brains aren’t smart enough to fill in the missing milliseconds. Mine isn’t, anyway. Maybe I didn’t play enough video games as a child, so my reaction time is slow.

We play the intro a third time. Aaaah! This sucks . We’re all playing our parts, but just barely. It looks like a war zone and it feels like total chaos.

Tea walks over to me through the smoke and flashing lights, rolling her eyes in frustration, then presses her face up against her guitar neck and laughs, shaking her head. As she walks away, Leslie comes from the other side and peers at me through a flashing cloud, mock coughing. We wrote our parts with the intent to make every measure fascinating, which is great when you’re sitting in a circle facing each other in your practice space, less so when the complexity of the material is lost on a visually overwhelmed audience, and just annoying when we can’t even see our instruments. I have to sing in a second—we can’t play the intro again —and the microphone’s lost in smoke. So’s the guy working the smoke machine, wherever he is. I’d like to find him and hurt him. I can’t even stare into space; space is gone.

This is so dumb . Closing my eyes, I try to lose myself in the pounding noise. I let my hands feel their way along the neck of the guitar and let my lips find the microphone by themselves. When they do, I bump into the mic with my whole face, which makes a loud thunk . The band sounds like a confused thunderstorm, though, and a sweaty, shirtless guy in the front row keeps jumping up through the smoke, yelling “You’re so RA-A-A-A-W! ” over and over again, so I figure I’m the only one who hears the face-thunk.

Then, suddenly, after the first verse, my guitar sound gets very loud and bright. I whip around and see the shape of a body on the floor near my amp. What the hell? Somebody’s messing with my amp? I shoot a get-the-fuckout-of-here look in the shape’s direction, but it just slithers under the smoke like it’s escaping the fire and reaches for my pedals, so I step on its hand. It turns over and lies back on the floor, smiling up at me—a leering drunk. Nobody I know. The second verse is gone; no idea what I’m supposed to be singing. I can’t think up here. I mean, I can’t stop thinking. I wonder what Tea’s playing. I can’t tell. I can’t even hear Dave. Wish that dick soundman had actually put kick and snare in my monitors instead of just saying he did it. The drunk guy just lies at my feet.

Leslie looks at the figure on the floor, disgusted, and moves toward it ominously, the silver buckles on her motorcycle boots glinting in the lights. I recognize in her movement the intent to kick the jerk and shake my head at her, alarmed.

She shrugs and walks away, keeps her bass line going the whole time. Distracted, I’ve stopped singing; I’m letting chords ring out and losing track ( god, poor Betty wanted me to flirt up here ) but Leslie never misses a beat. Never. Dave never misses a beat, either; he smashes delicately, the deep sound of his kit punctuated by the metallic knocking of cowbells, mixing bowls, hubcaps and busted tambourines. It’s beautiful. But Dave never messes up because he can’t be distracted. He’s just as nearsighted as I am and lost in his own world back there behind the drum kit. If he looks up, it’s like a mole digging his way up from underground, squinting in the sunlight.

Dave and I both love the gentleness of blurry vision. “We’re lucky to have the option of a visual softening agent,” he said once. “I can talk to someone for an hour thinking they’re someone else. It’s so Shakespearean .”

Right now, he’s liquifying the song, somehow murdering perfectly, with finesse. Thank god, ’cause I’m not. I’m sucking perfectly. I’ve sung one verse and one chorus, but the rest of the song has been a pretty goddamn free-form instrumental. I cue the band to end it. Ugh… make it stop. As the last chord fades, the drunk stands up triumphantly, with my beer in his hand— hope he gets Tiger Balm lips —sways dangerously for a few seconds, then stage-dives into the crowd. They separate and he plummets to the floor. Instantly, the first couple of rows close in again around his still form; they aren’t missing a beat, either. I love it when a crowd effortlessly swallows a whole human.

Making my way through the smoke to fix the settings on my amp, I bump into Tea. She grabs my arm. “Sorry!” she says. “What’d he do?”

“He fusted my amp.”

“Fusted it permanently?”

I mess with knobs until it sounds good. “Nah.”

“What’d he do that for?”

I shake my head, shrugging, and then go back to the front of the stage, bend over my set list and try to follow Dave’s magic marker arrows up and down the paper. They go in all directions, blending with scribbled song titles. There’s also a dark green smear across the middle of the paper that looks like… guacamole? We had guacamole? I thought they only gave us horse and orange soda.

I’m still trying to figure out what song is next when I realize that the beer the drunk took has been replaced with a new one. I look up to thank the person who gave it to me, but all I see is jostling crowd bodies talking, laughing and hooting. Then the smoke clears and a gentle blue light washes the stage. As a cue, Leslie leans over me and smiles, then starts the next song.

“Stand Up . ” Good. That’s as easy as Throwing Muses gets: no time changes, fairly predictable chord progression and almost normal chords; it just has to be really tight. And Leslie’s always tight. As long as I can remember the words. Don’t think.

“See no evil, think no evil, speak only evil” is how the band describes my MO and it’s a pretty accurate description. I don’t know what I’m doing up here, but evil knows. Evil tells stories from my life that I can’t follow, makes Throwing Muses sound like the Doghouse. And like finding home in a foreign country, I’m here, but I take nothing for granted.