Brett and Leslie: Chapter 14

Liars

I tried lying, a few years back. I found out you can’t jump into things as an adult amateur. Being an amoral piece of shit isn’t safe without lifelong practice. And thus I can’t pretend that I was more than mildly impressed by Brett’s artwork. I might accidentally start a war.

On the other hand, in 2023 I saw hipster scribbling from the 1990s scrawling that was similar, famous, except worse.

It was hanging in quasi-immoral glory on the hallowed gallery walls of the Pinault gallery in Paris, France. It was the kind of artwork that had words in it, because otherwise it was plain stupid. Sheets draped over a bathtub. Millions of euros. Euros didn’t even exist, back when Brett was with us.

Next to the sheets and bathtubs hang more words, written by someone even more dishonest, tacked to the wall like a fart solidified. This was one of the great lost avant-gardists of New York City, it insisted. Genius. I am beginning to hate that word.

If you’re NOT smoking crack, the only clear difference between this artist and Brett was that one was located in New York, the other in Wisconsin, and able to make a picture that didn’t need to rely on words, even if he wasn’t endowed with a magnificent work ethic. He coulda been a contender.

More to the point, even if I didn’t feel all that stimulated by the visual imprint of Brett’s mind, it was fun seeing those low-rent gallery walls hung with things I had seen being scribbled in my own filthy living room, I felt nothing remotely close to the rabid envy over this faint scrap of success that visibly tortured Leslie.

The show was mainly Julie and Johnnie’s work. But a whole little room was dedicated to Brett’s porn collages. And although the text on the wall accompanying it didn’t mention genius nor greatness nor being overlooked, it was indeed text on a wall, next to Brett’s work, and not Leslie’s.

Neither Leslie nor I could draw a recognisable tree if you put a gun to our heads. Nor had we ever tried. But whereas I was more than busy enough with my envy of other writers and musicians, the sight of his best friend’s name on a gallery wall, unaccompanied by his own name—any of his names—caused Leslie relentless, almost physical pain.

He half-assedly tried to control himself at first. We erred aimlessly through the gallery, looking up at the spirals of thighs and waiting for the call for musical entertainment, scooping up every unaccompanied vodka we could spot and competing to gulp them the fastest. I was dying of nerves myself; I had been onstage getting cigarettes whipped out of my mouth with a bullwhip more times than I could remember, but performing? I was sure I was going to fuck it up. Not that there was much to fuck up.

Leslie pretended his torture was the same, giggling loudly. But that sardonic, hawk-nosed face of his betrayed his dignity. It writhed as though some criminal cousin of Picasso’s had dumped out the vodka and replaced it with a mysterious vein-burning agent designed to inflict the greatest possible pain without m@rdering the drinker. When his bloodshot eyes fell upon Julie’s sweet ode to Brett’s synthetic breast fixation, Leslie coughed ethanol up his beak and I had to burp him like a baby.

It would have been pretty funny. Except for what happened.

Once again, I might have seen it coming—if I hadn’t been too absorbed by my own terror to realise that Leslie was becoming more binked out than he could handle. I mean, I sort of realized it, but I assumed he would notice that he was being ridiculous, and have some shame. I thought he would handle his irrational misery the same way I did: By punishing myself with booze.

I still hadn’t accepted this thing myself: That not everyone feels shame. While people who do try not to take being miserable as an excuse to get out of hand, your Leslies don’t have this kind of safety mechanism. They think their emotions are some kind of proof of something, so when they get too mad, that alone is an excuse to eruct like Vesuvius.

Not that Leslie didn’t ALSO punish himself with booze, but that only made his bad ideas sound even cooler to him.

While the lava was busy creeping ever nearer to the surface of the defective rump steak he called a brain, I was sloshing miserably through my developing crush on Julie—and the accompanying admiration of Johnnie for having her—in my usual way: By hiding from them.

I still do this.

I was hiding from Julie precisely because she had liked me so much. She even gave me a precious dress! So there was nowhere to go but down. No matter how much I like a person in return, I still find all of you direly unpredictable. Not to mention nearly as judgmental as I am.

Those twin unsheathed knives, swirling glibly through all waters, mean that no matter how careful I am, I will manage to stumble upon some subterranean trigger for your bullshit ire; the fact that it makes no sense to me makes it all the more terrifying. So whenever I have a successful social interaction, I tend to follow it up by hiding. That way I can’t screw up and make them hate me.

I mean, I’m not sure how I thought I could get lower than torpedo vomiting as an opening line; if Julie accepted that, what would offend her? And an art gallery in Manitowoc is a comically small place to try to avoid the guests of honour. But if people made any sense, nobody would need nukes.

So Leslie and I were bender pals, spending the two hours before our first-ever gig swallowing vodka and wine as fast as we could without gagging.

Which was pretty fast. If you’re from Wisconsin, two hours is not a short time to get drunk.

“He doesn’t need that drink,” Leslie said, indicating what must have been one of the first Hot Topic punks. The only thing home-made about the fellow’s gleaming fake bondage outfit—if you’d tried to hang him from the ceiling by it, he would have face-planted in seconds, a mental image as delicious as it was vivid—was as many patches Sharpied with inane political slogans as I had ever seen on Tim Ridiculous.

“Nope, he don’t,” I agreed—but I still didn’t have Leslie’s chutzpah, and watched almost in admiration as he elbowed the dinkus and absorbed his vodka drink. As Junior Ridiculous turned to bluster at us—”What the f@ck, man, that ain’t cool,” etc.—Leslie somehow found a can of beer in his Exploited backpack and handed it to me as we walked off giggling.

At T-minus 30 minutes, Brett grabbed me by the arm. He was wearing a policeman’s hat he had gotten somewhere.

“Heeeey, Village People!” I warbled. “Lookin’ felonious!”

“Hey! Hey, METRONOME! I think you need to slow down. You don’t look like you can keep enough time to walk.”

“Metro, shnetro,” I said cleverly.

“I’m serious, drink some Coke or something.”

“That shit’s bad for you. My uncle says he uses it to… ugh, what’s it called? Fix cars. He fixes cars. With Coke-uh-CO-la!”

“Have a Diet Coke then.”

“CAAAAAAANCER!”

“What?”

“Shit, did I od-fend somebody?”

“No, Lucy, you’re just… not making any sense.”

“Sense is not punk rock.”

“True, true, but we’re a surf punk band. You can’t throw up till after the gig.”

“Oh, THOSE are the rules, EH?!”

Something wet flew by my head. Suddenly, the boys were punching each other.

“You SPIT on me, motherfucker?” I heard Brett say. “What the FUCK?”

“Ha ha,” Leslie said, even more clever than I.

“Ohhhhh my god… you guys are so fucking drunk. I KNEW you were going to do this to me.”

“Oh—to YOU?!” Leslie stepped back, his beady eyes suddenly wide, and howled. “TO YOU!!! Is this your own personal show? Big shot! Fucking big shot! We’re going to do this to YEEEEEEW cause it’s YOUR SHOWWWWWW. Well, let me tell you something, Michelangelo—”

“Oh god, please don’t—”

“I’M the bandleader and you guys wouldn’t even HAVE this gig without me!” Leslie squeaked. People were beginning to look at us. I stopped giggling and realized dimly that something bad was going on. Brett had his head in his hands.

I hadn’t really thought about how important this must be to him.

I did now, but that didn’t change the fact that I was deeply, irretrievably drunk. Fortunately, I was also 21, so I firmly believed I could still play the drums.

Brett wasn’t so sure. He was even less sure about Leslie, who had by now grabbed another vodka and Coke from a girl who was too shy to defend herself and was muttering into it.

Brett buried his face in his hands some more, and I began to sweat. Brett also muttered to himself, which gave me a brief feeling that I was in some demented monastery; then he looked at us with profound resentment.

“OK… I didn’t want to have to do this. But… my old, uh, guy here has been calling my mom ever since I got into town… OK, you two, stay right FUCKING there and don’t drink anymore. Lucy, don’t let him drink. Fucking PLEASE. We have less than half an hour.”

“What guy?” I said, confused. I Irish whispered: “ARE YOU GONNA PAY SOMEONE TO KILL LESLIE?”

“Oh, fuck you assholes,” said Leslie.

“Leslie, are you listening?” For a minute, I thought Brett was going to slap him. “I’m gonna go meet my GUY, OK? You fucking got your way. There’s no way you dipshits can even stand up without it. This is gonna be, like, two days’ worth of tips, you… you @sshole. But if you take one more SIP of that drink, then you’re not getting any.”

Slowly, a light dawned over Leslie’s face. The gleam crept over his drool-laced mouth, somehow still crusted with the morning’s coffee; climbed up his nose and wrinkled it with glee; and finally, actually made it part-way into his glassy eyes. “YES!!!” he shouted. “Finally, jagbag!”

“This is not a reward!” Brett shouted over his shoulder, already heading out the door. “This is to keep you from ruining my shit for me!”

“Ha ha, if you sell any art, we better get more tomorrow!”

“You keep telling yourself that, you haemorrhoid. Is that phone booth still on this corner?”

“Like little Jack Horner!”

“I guess that means yes.” Brett gave us the finger and disappeared at a run.

I was still confused. “Phone booth?” I said. “Is he going to turn into Superman to kill you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Leslie said smugly. “We’re all gonna be Superman. Well, you’ll be super-Lucy.”

I can’t remember how they snuck me into the men’s room with them—I was beginning to black out—but I was wide, wide awake when we came out of it. And suddenly, I could see the point in being alive.

I couldn’t tell you why there was a point in being alive, but I couldn’t imagine how deluded I had been ten minutes ago, when I didn’t see one.

I immediately had to tell Julie:

“JULIE! IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE! THANK YOU FOR BEING MY FRIEND!”

She looked slightly shocked, but delighted; nonetheless, with a steely, indeed Superman-like determination—and wiping the white powder traces carefully from his nose before we stormed our stacks—Brett peeled me off of her and somehow got the three of us onto the makeshift stage.

The next half hour was probably the most fun I’ve had in my life. There might be a recording of it somewhere. I felt like Animal from the Muppets, flailing my home-cut hair; all I was meant to do on this planet was to bang on something with a stick while I floated some Leslie-like asshole up to the firmament, surfing the crowd like they were angels.

I think Leslie had fun, too. He looked like much less of a jerk than usual; he might have even smiled. He forgot where the chorus was several times, but it was a forgiving crowd. Brett worked hard at looking cool, pumping out that bass line like it was the least effortful thing in the world. Like most of him was on Planet Cool, saving new transmissions for next week. I could tell he looked happy, though.

“I need to play the drums!” I informed Julie, once we stumbled through. Why couldn’t I sit and wait and make her talk? Sure, she was shy and talked slowly. But I could have learned infinite things. As soon as the fear was gone, though, I had to keep yelling or it might come back.

“It feels so good! But… it’s not very important. Leslie says I’m a stupid monkey. Brett calls me the Metronome. Is that a good thing? Is it bad to waste my life only being the drummer? You don’t get reincarnated, or I’m not sure you do anyway. Is being a drummer wasting it?”

“Not everyone has to be… Leslie,” Julie laughed. “It’s OK. Look… I’m not even sure we get to choose. Right now I choose to be a vegetable farmer.”

“But that’s not as important as being a famous photographer!”

“It’s not?” she said. “I don’t think I’m famous, anyway.” She chuckled deeply. “Like I said… not everyone can be as famous as Leslie.”

We were fabulous.

I said to Brett: “Jeez… do you guys do this stuff all the time?”

“We used to,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

“I’m envious! You know, envy is different from jealousy. I’m envious. We should do this all the time!”

“Yeesh,” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this when it’s so great? We can have, like… real conversations! Not about Batman!”

He grimaced. “Yeah… once or twice. And then… well… then we all turn into Leslie. Like, all the time. It’s… dirty.”

The look on my face suddenly made me want to ask him for more drugs. My stomach lurched.

He took a look at my face and laughed. “Yeah. Like that.”

He patted me on my head, like suddenly he was six months older than I was, and not the other way around. “Enjoy tonight. We’re rock stars. It will never be this good again.”

“Life?” I said. “Or drugs?”

“Jesus! I meant just the drugs!” He pushed back his bangs, eyes shifting around. When he was trying to be friendly, he often looked like he was shoplifting. “Christ, I hope so.”

We laughed for no reason. We were having a good time, for real.

But… then we ran out of cocaine. But not vodka. Jesus, it was like somebody in back had a speed still.

I was OK; I had never been high before, so the wonder of the world seemed to go on forever. I talked to everyone; I was a real person. I didn’t even need more drinks. But once the pats on the back died down and the clapping went away, Leslie began to pound it back again. Like a champ.

Nobody ever proved that he started the fire, and not very much was destroyed, outside of the little room with Brett’s work.

But things were never really the same.