I guess I should start with the first time I saw her away from the stage. She was still wearing the uniform (tattered baby-doll t-shirt worn ironically over old-school jeans that were obviously faded by a combination of time, cigarette smoke and spilled beer rather than some corporate dipshit’s prized chemical “treatment”), but it looked shabbier in the mid-morning sun. She looked shabbier too, or maybe just older – the sun was unforgiving to lines that cracked outward from her eyes, her mouth.
Maybe that’s why I could talk to her then, with her mantle of divinity obviously cast aside for the morning, sipping on a Dr. Pepper and looking over the selection of omelettes and pancakes like any other regular bar patron on a Sunday, nursing a hangover that wasn’t quite as bad as they’d hoped it would be. Or maybe it was the lack of the deafening throb that ordinarily would have been interfering, rendering any attempt at speech at least inaudible, if not completely meaningless.
“I’m sorry if I’m bothering you…I just wanted to tell you that I think your music is amazing,” I said, and I meant it too. The last time that I had seen her play (with her band, Pedophile Smile), I had experienced something like an out-of-body, near-death, epileptic’s epiphany sort of moment, and it wasn’t even brought on by high doses of pharmaceuticals. She could just pull you in with her, to the middle of this vast emotional maelstrom of merciless drums and pounding guitars and her voice (always that voice) and hold you there until you were desperate for some kind of release. It was like holding your breath late at night as a kid, knowing that eventually you’d have to let it out but imagining that somehow you’d never need to, that you could just exist forever in some kind of strange stasis that would exclude aging and death and God and all the other things that were making it impossible to sleep in the first place. At least, that’s how it was for me.
She pushed her sunglasses down over her eyes, releasing a small cascade of black hair that had been aimed at jet but had ended up somewhere between burnt umber and crayon black. “Do I know you? Are you friends with Jay?”, she said, and while that was hardly the most encouraging reply in the world, it sure beat “fuck off” or a hasty gesture to the waiter for help.
“What, Jay like ‘Jay and Silent Bob’? I always kind of wanted to meet that guy, you know, just to sort of bask in that whirlwind of energy - but now he’s apparently given up drugs and all that, so I bet he’s not nearly as fun to be around anymore.”
She half-snorted. “No, Jay like one of our roadies. His friends are always coming up to me at random times and saying random shit like that. I think, for those guys, it probably is the drugs. So…what’s up? You want me to sign your tits or something?”
I thought back to the last time that I’d done more than five push-ups without stopping. “No, it’s cool, I’ll leave you to your food and everything, I just wanted to say, you know, that I think that what you do is worth doing, you know, and I hope you make it, you know, if you want to and everything. To say ‘good luck’, I guess.”
And in a burst of eloquence, I was gone. At least I had had the foresight to pay out before I went over, otherwise I would have had to imagine her bemused half-smile following me around the place for minutes instead of seconds.
read part two of the story
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