Rat Girl: A Memoir by Kristin Hersh

Author:Kristin Hersh [Hersh, Kristin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

♋ candyland

don’t look for shame

you’re better off without it

Standing at a pay phone in the pale yellow light of a summer evening, I call each band member, one by one, just to hear their voices. It’s medicine, listening to them talk on the other end of a pay phone—everything they say is sweetness washing over me.

I need it. This has been a bitter month.

♋ silver sun

only sweetness

that’s all

to shake off the bitter

And it sounds like my bandmates’ve been talking to each other in my absence, ’cause they all say the same thing: they tell me they wanna quit school and focus on Throwing Muses. They must’ve thought I disappeared ’cause I was losing interest. “I’m cool with that,” I say. “I don’t have a lot going on right now.”

When I hang up after the third phone call, I stand, staring at the phone, wondering what “focus on Throwing Muses” means exactly. So I start all over again, calling each band member in turn.

“People’re always telling us we’re wasting time in Providence,” explains Tea. This is true, people do tell us that; I never knew what it meant. But by the end of six phone calls, we’re moving to Boston, where, apparently, no one wastes time.

We’ll go apartment hunting together and I’ll call whatever we rent “home.” I can handle that, I think. I’m still now. Turns out there’s just a fine line between belonging everywhere and belonging nowhere anyway.

I used to see my bandmates as my allies in evil, the best devil’s angels our religion could create. Now they seem to clear the air, make everything clean and good—regular angels, forgiving me for the blast of heat I injected into our lives and our sound. ’Cause there’s no devil’s breath in those lungs: Tea, Dave and Leslie smite the disease right out of religious disease and leave only religion. Their energy is forward movement, not downward spiraling.

I watch my shaking hand hang up the phone. Oh, yeah. Lithium tremors. I can’t play guitar anymore.

Sitting on Jeff’ s floor, I run painstakingly through Throwing Muses songs, one after the other, begging my twitchy hands to straighten up and fly right. I’ve been avoiding the guitar because of its creepy powers and I don’t wanna ask for trouble; I just gotta know I can still play, for the band’s sake. When I took the guitar out of its case, I promised myself that the minute I felt charged or evil, I would put it down and walk away.

Turns out I was flattering myself, though, ’cause evil wants nothing to do with this screwed up monster body. My hands shudder and fumble their way through mild approximations of the songs, sticking to the strings, then slipping off the strings, muting ringing tones and then letting ugly notes ring when they should’ve been muted.

Syncopated rhythms are particularly embarrassing; they just sound like stuttering fragments. They trip, slip and fall. Eventually, I put the guitar back in its case, wondering why the devil hast forsaken me and how I feel about that.

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