Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

The loosely associated group of crashers who frequent Napoleon’s guest house: touring musicians, bored kids with nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, and anyone whose job isn’t really a job (like “painter”) have agreed that the key should remain under the mat—the first place any desperate individual would look—to honor Napoleon’s memory. Not that we remember him, but he’s become a kind of saint to us. He shelters the lonely and the lost, wrapping them in a soft blanket of Christmas lights and old-man smell.

So the key stays where Napoleon left it because if somebody wants to break in here , well then, we should make it easy for ’em. Clearly, they need Napoleon’s soft blanket.

I gotta get rid of these fucking donuts; they’re making me sick and they aren’t gonna get any prettier. Maybe I’ll leave them here on the floor for the Animal.

We don’t know what the Animal is, only that it gets in sometimes and eats cornflakes out of the cabinet, which is fine ’cause I didn’t like the look of those dead-guy cornflakes anyway. Once, a painter named Jeff actually took the Animal to the face . It leaped out of the apartment and jumped on his head when he opened the door. This is the closest encounter any of us have had with it. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the night and the stairwell was too dark for him to get a good look at it; the Animal just knocked him backwards down the stairs and took off.

Jeff was thrilled. The next time I saw him, he was still giddy, glowing with pride. “Kristin!” he said dreamily. “The most wonderful thing happened…”

This guy looks just like Jimmy Stewart. I tried to imagine him falling backwards in the dark, limbs flailing, fur wrapped around his head. For some reason, I saw this happening in black and white—maybe ’cause of the Jimmy Stewart thing—which made it even creepier. But Jeff was so happy telling the story, he looked dewy. Painters are so sick. I wouldn’t want an animal jumping on my face in the dark.

I gotta admit I was enchanted, though. “Did it make a noise?” I asked him. “Was it furry? Did it smell weird?” He couldn’t remember much; he was falling down stairs. Happily falling, having taken a wild animal to the face, but too distracted by gravity to pay attention to much else. In retrospect, he figured it had been furry and was about the size of a watermelon.

This was relevant information, as we had had a kind of meeting on the subject once, the gaggle of lost souls who use this apartment when they have nowhere else to go. The Animal hadn’t yet gone for the cornflakes—it had only shuffled around the apartment in the dark, which was, I admit, a little spooky. Subsequently, there had been murmurings of “ghosts” walking around at night, and most of the musicians are such pussies they were scared to sleep here anymore. Some of them wanted to have a Narragansett medicine woman smudge the place with sage to relieve it of its restless spirits.

“Look,” a drummer named Manny said gravely over the cold leftovers of two greasy pizzas. Candles flickered near the open window, the dancing shadows making it look more like a séance than the overgrown Cub Scout meeting it really was. “She’s really nice, I’ve met her. She doesn’t dress weird or anything. She charges a nominal fee and all we have to do is fast or fuck off for, like, a day and a half.”

“What?!” yelled a painter, laughing. Painters think musicians are ridiculous. There seems to be a general consensus among them that painting is high art, music low. Can’t say that I blame them; musicians are sorta ridiculous. I’m a guitar player, so technically I’m one myself, but I don’t stick up for us all that often.

Manny, clearly more afraid of ghosts than painters, held his ground. “This place is definitely haunted,” he said. “I hear noises, but when I check ’em out, there’s nobody there!” He pushed a lock of purple hair behind his ear. For some reason, none of us musicians have normal hair—another thing that makes us seem ridiculous to the painters. Mine is blue, there is a lime green and a fuzzy-yellow-chick yellow… together, we look like an Easter basket. Chalk white and glossy jet-black are close to normal, but those two are goth kids—at least once a day, a painter will turn to them and yell, “Happy Halloween!”

“Fast?” The painter stared at Manny, wide-eyed.

“Don’t eat,” explained Manny.

“I know what it means . I just think you’re a moron.” The other painters laughed. The musicians and neutral observers set quietly in the candle-light.

Manny shook his head. “Last night, something was walking near my face. It was weird.”

“It’s just the family downstairs bangin’ around,” said the painter. “They got like, twelve kids or something.”

“No, seriously. I could feel it moving. It was right next to my face.”

“Were you high?” asked the painter sarcastically.

“Yeah,” answered Manny, “but… it was right next to my face !”

You can tell painters and musicians apart by their uniforms and expressions. All the musicians except the goth kids wear torn blue jeans, flannel shirts and pajama tops and look perpetually stunned. Painters dress like it’s 1955, in white T-shirts, khakis and black loafers, all spattered liberally with paint. They either spatter their clothing on purpose so everyone can tell they’re painters or else they have a lot of trouble getting paint from brush to canvas, ’cause they’re really covered in the stuff.

Painters usually look like they’re about to laugh. Not smug; they just think everything is funny. “Let’s get him an exorcism,” said one. “He really wants one.”

Manny looked grim. “I’m not saying there’s an evil presence. Napoleon was a good man. But he died here. A violent death,” he said ominously, pointing at the splotches on the wall.

“That’s Michelob,” smirked the painter. “Napoleon probably had a Barcalounger and spasms. If you’re worried about hauntings, worry about the guy who died in those pajamas you’re wearing.” Manny winced. It was a little low, I thought, going after his clothes. Everybody knows you don’t buy pajamas from the Salvation Army if you’re not into the dead.

Manny’s girlfriend, the fuzzy-yellow-chick-haired chick, tried valiantly to come to his rescue. “Paranormal events occur in places where souls were unwilling to separate from their bodies at the time of death,” she explained carefully. “What if Napoleon’s soul wanted to stay home even though his body was dead?”

“This place is a shit hole. If you could fly, would you stay here?” The other painters laughed; everyone else was silent. Painters and musicians never agree on anything . It can be entertaining, but it can also be exhausting. They even order different pizzas.

I consider myself to be a neutral crasher; I don’t wear either uniform and I don’t side with anyone. The painters are almost always right, but I feel sorry for the hapless musicians who’re so mercilessly ridiculed, so I abstain from arguments and pizza.

The painters have made it clear that they feel I’m one of them, even going so far as to try to make me paint. They claim that making noise is the heathen’s way, a poor excuse for a calling. I guess they’re right, but I am a heathen. I mean, I’ve met me.

But I toured their studios anyway, watched them paint, let them lecture me and attempted to absorb the process of smearing colors onto cloth in order to impress upon observers a sense of “visual feeling.” I even took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design here in Providence. This is frowned upon by the “street” painters in Napoleon’s gang who believe that art is something which can’t be taught.