Brett and Leslie: Chapter Five
Netty-working
Probably half the bar thought I was a neurotic monkey, when I think back. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in O’Cayz without hitting someone who mutually thought I was annoying. Tonight, for example, you had Nick Ridiculous over there in the corner, wearing what looked like children’s pyjama shorts under his bloated gut and that stupid baseball hat covered in political patches.
Mr. Ridiculous had moved here maybe a year ago from Highland Park—some gadjillion-dollar suburb in Illinois—and immediately started trying to “organise” the “scene.” He looked only half-drunk tonight but was already mouthing the words “Fuck you, whore” at me every time he caught my eye.
I glared at him: It’s not my fault if I don’t find discussing Trotsky to be a sexual turn-on! That was too complicated to mouth successfully, so he switched to a slightly stupider fake scowl than usual. I guess it wasn’t Nick’s fault that Leslie had dressed me like a Hot Topic hooker.
Comrade Killjoy over there wasn’t the only annoying prick in the crowd; I followed those Zimas with as many screwdrivers as my five dollars I had for the night could buy, which was way more than you would think. Some mall punks showed up in dresses similar to mine, which made me feel even more disgusting: Leslie’s manner of dragging us to a random night at O’Cayz could be classified as networking within the indie-band space.
Well, except at the time, that whole last phrase would sound like gibberish. It took another decade for some asshole to infect the regulation humans with the concept of “networking.”
Yeah, something like networking has always existed. But it wasn’t always a universal job requirement that spread, like sh&t on your shoe, from business to the arts to bartending. It used to be considered trashy. Cheating. “Schmooze” was what you called it, before the entire disgusting behavior got a rebrand—“rebrand,” that was also also not yet a word—so successful that you woke up one day and schmoozing, now under a genteel Newspeak alias, was suddenly mandatory.
Out of the countless coinages we’ve committed since 1995, how is it that every one of them makes you sound like an a&&hole? That shouldn’t be physically possible.
All of this swampy, greasy-palmed terrain used to be the territory of losers. People with more ambition than talent, out to bamboozle the world. They’d go hang out with other assholes, who had something, and who needed their egos stroked so bad that in exchange, they would give you some of that thing. The more precious the thing, the deeper you had to stick your tongue (except physically sticking your tongue in their asshole would have been less filthy than stripping friendship of everything but parody): Country-club memberships, an “in” at a publishing house or record company, some Wall Street stuff… it might get you far in life, on the surface, but you would never know what it was like to f&ck someone who respected you.
Well, now that everyone does it, all you get from the sale of your dignity is a cubicle. Or a shovel.
WAS IT WORTH IT, JERKS?
Think about it: How would you define networking?
Maybe it seems like a normal part of life. But what if I made you spell it out into words? It sounds boring. But it’s darker than that. You choose to spend your precious time to make “friends” with the right people, because they can get you ahead in “your industry”—as though it belonged to you, and not the other way around. Then you credit your hard work for your success. How do you live with the burden of such talent?
You’re harnessing cronyism. Which is… I mean, nobody in history has ever been able to eradicate cronyism or nepotism, so OK, you don’t want to be left behind. But making a virtue of it is making it worse. People feel morally fine hiring their incompetent friends. I hope you aren’t flying today.
And what do you think it does to your insides? Do you have time for real friends? Between the back-slapping and the odd afternoon spent pretending to do the job? Do you know the difference? Were you already like this in eighth grade?
Imagine hanging out with somebody because you like them. No other calculations. Imagine being sincere.
—AND WASTE MY TIME? TIME IS SINCERELY MONEY, ASSHOLE!
…
We’ve made a world full of Leslies.
I know, I know—you’re going to wonder how this sh&t can fall out of my hypocrite mouth: It doesn’t sound like I was hanging out with Leslie and Brett because I sincerely liked them, does it?
Well, ya got me there, except no: I didn’t like anyone. Except my guinea pig. I’m not selling myself as some three-miracle saint of brotherly love. I’m maybe marginally more of an expert on friendship than a schmoozer. MAYBE.
I knew Brett and Leslie were assholes. But they had one up on most assholes: they sincerely didn’t bore me.
Well… not until I got bored of wanting to wring Leslie’s neck. And I was getting there. Tonight was shaping up to be the precise opposite of an exception.
For instance, I could in fact have drunk eight dollars’ worth of screwdrivers, as that was my budget for the night. Except, every time I got up to the bar to make an order, Leslie would stick his big, chewed-up pointer finger in there and add a drink for himself. He knew it was such a fight to get through the throng to the bartender—who could barely hear the order, much less understand me if I tried to explain that no, don’t make that drink, that guy is trying to freeload—that my need to get my vodka would overpower my wish to spend what remained of my little paycheck fragments for myself.
But that was ordinary Leslie. Worse, the clumsy schmoozing felt like a vicious attack on the illusion of magic. Being at a punk show with ulterior motives was like battery acid dumped all over the romance.
I dunno, maybe I’m unusually bad at protecting my illusions. Or good? That night was the first time I noticed how obnoxious a tiny, smoky room full of antisocial drunks and noise could be. We treated it like a religion. But I remember perching in a corner, watching Leslie jerk his chin front and back to the monster-movie sound track they were playing between bands, looking around to see who noticed how much he appreciated this esoteric nugget of coolness—only Nick Ridiculous was looking—and I wondered whether this ritual wouldn’t be a chore without the cups of poison.
“Chore Without a Chalice”—that could be a band name!, I interrupted myself. Well, song name, maybe. Straight-edge band? I remembered my straight-edger high school boyfriend and winced. Jesus, what is this thing I have for losers?!
As I had hoped, we missed the first opening band. They were known assholes—although the Jewish keyboard player who walked around all over the UW campus dressed as Hitler all the time is one of those people I wish I had kept in touch with. I was hiding behind drinks number six and seven while trying to light my cigarette with my two free fingers when Leslie finally found his intended victims, poking their greasy heads out from the curtain that served as backstage:
The Senseless Pickles.
The instant I saw them—waving at Leslie with lopsided “howdy” grins—I sighed so hard I would have lost my cigarette if my lips weren’t so chapped.
The Senseless Pickles looked like Fritz the unemployed Elvis impersonator, if you split him into a quartet of varying heights. They wore matching bowling shirts, with some local beer brand that wasn’t Huber embroidered on a weird neck pocket.
What do you know: A mediocre punkskabilly band that marketed itself as “The Senseless Pickles” approved of beverages containing alcohol.
Yeah, we all did. Reindeer approve too, and those monkeys when they get their hands on rotten fruit. My guinea pig can’t get enough beer. You like it too much, it will end you. Why should I listen to your demo, again?
I wasn’t SURE they’d sound mediocre, but I would have bet a paycheck.
And yet—there they were, in all their high-self-esteem lameness, touring the country, being helped out and tolerated, while I was dragged behind Leslie’s runaway train, hoping he could hit the balance between drunk and sober long enough to practice our two songs. I don’t know, maybe I’m merely envious of other people’s… what?
I lost my train of thought right there, like I’m still drunk on vodka, decades later. What mysterious, rotten fruit did I envy, and which I lack to the point that I preferred rotting in a dishroom to working in a phone bank? Social mojo? Not that the Senseless Pickles had much, but they had the second-best thing:
They were too dull to notice the grating nature of their huckstery.
I tend to operate by brute force, sure; but these types operate via brute force that’s not even their own. They find the cool local record producer guy’s house in their hometown and make romantic gestures under his window till he bequeaths them stickers and a tour van.
And there was Brett, shadowing Leslie, acting cool as hard as he could and laughing at all of their jokes. He found the lead singer and locked on with his big brown cow eyes.
Now, before I tell you the next part, don't get me wrong: Never let it be said that I'm definitely trying to hint that Brett was gay, OK? Nor am I giggling about it, nor did I, unless it was to annoy Leslie. I don't know about the Regulation Humans, but if you were even close to not being hermetically surrounded by absolute normies, being gay or bisexual in the 1990s wasn't that big of a deal. We mocked the singer Morrissey relentlessly for being coy about it—like, dude, we KNOW, and so what?
Brett went out of his way to be weird, otherwise. He lived his life in a milieu about half a world out from the center from Morrissey, so I have no idea what motivation he would have had to pretend not to be queer. Yeah, on the map, we were buried neck deep in Middle America, but have you ever been in the woods? Some people out there still believe in a Christian God, but it only gets weirder from there.
But maybe Brett wasn’t as cool with Brett as he let on. Maybe he secretly wanted to be a real live human, eh? How did he imagine getting there? I wasn’t as weird as he was, whether you count percentage-gayness or no, and I never found a place. They eventually notice.
There’s no way he was too dumb to know he had nothing to lose.
Whatever; I couldn't see through that thick skull then, and certainly not now. All’s I’m saying is that when Leslie introduced us the Incognito Mosquitoes to the Senseless Pickles, it reminded me of a high school prom (OK fine, a movie about a high school prom; I didn't go to mine). There were four Pickles and three of us, and a corner of my mind couldn’t help thinking that the only way for this to be symmetrical was for one of the opposing team to be into dudes.
As it was, Pickle #3, the only hot one, had a girlfriend. She seemed high maintenance and intimidating, with not only a real hairdo and 1950s lipstick, but lip LINER, too, an almost-matching red. She meant business. She was about to start coming off to me as hostile, but then she noticed my eye.
"Oh, goodness," she said, reaching towards my glasses without asking. I ducked my head away as subtly as I could, which wasn't very, so she swung back into being hostile, a land-speed record to match the hot-rod tattoo between her boobs.
"Ha, ha," said Leslie. "She just uh, just had an unfortunate..."
A sticky, adenoidal voice broke in. "Aw, did she have a breakup with her boyfriend? Poor thing, she looks so sweet. He didn’t know what he had, honey."
This was from the fourth and largest Pickle: tall, with a massive beer belly, and he definitely bathed the least. I could smell him through the Leslie Reek Blast Radius, even with Leslie standing right between us.
"Yeah, she—"
"I'm not 'breaking up' with anyone!'" I spat. "Claude is NOT my boyfriend, he's my—"
"That's right, Lucy, you gotta wash that man right out of your hair. He's NOT your boyfriend ANYMORE.” Leslie patted my head and I bit him. "Awaaaahhh! She's just wasting away from grief, man, the little..."
Leslie struggled to not say "bitch" for so long, he forgot he was talking.
Not that the smelly Pickle noticed; I got the feeling he was used to hearing that all girls within his smell blast radius were married, so this was raw meat. Not that MY dumb ass noticed much more than what he did next, which was to ask me what I wanted to drink, he was buying.
Did I mention I was holding two drinks when this conversation began? By the time Fourth Pickle got back from the bar with screwdriver number eight and/or nine, they were both inside of me. “Thanks,” I said, “uh…”
“NIGEL!” Pickle #4 thundered. For a moment, I was disconcerted. “How could you fail to properly introduce me to this damsel?”
“NIGEL?!” I shrieked. I threw back my head and giggled, realising too late that this looked like flirting. “Oh my god, Leslie, did you—”
“Shut up,” Leslie hissed, then added, “darling. Although I’m not dating her, and her legal name is Lucy the Lezzie. And this is, uh… I thought your name was Beauregard, wasn’t it?”
“Lezzie?” chorused “Beauregard” and I, confused, for different reasons.
“Ah, I mean Lezzie as in lezzzzzzz party!” Leslie/Nigel hooted, trying to slide his feet apart disco style. He almost fell down. I realised with some sympathy that he had crossed the line into the fog of booze. “It’s an inside joke.”
“Oh,” said Beauregard, dubiously. “And Beauregard is, uh…” He hid his mouth with his hand and hissed conspiratorially at us: “Beauregard is my name when I’m in my OTHER band. The alt-country one.” He got close enough to whisper: “Which name do YOU prefer, little lady?”
I struggled not to gag on his breath, and giggled again; now that I was worried about appearing to flirt, I couldn’t stop. Sometimes half of my brain thinks the other half is a mean parent and it’s not going to do what that b*tch says. “Beauregard is…”
I desperately wanted to say “Beauregard is slightly less confusing, for reasons of which the both of you ought to be ashamed,” but instead it came out “Beauregard is cute.”
Beauregard cracked what I suppose was a grin, which released an especial puff of stench.
While I was recovering, they somehow launched into an endless discussion of everyone’s guitar and drum gear; the only interesting part was Brett bragging about my apple-red bass like he’d selected it himself. They didn’t seem to notice when I sidled away from the blended gang and went in back to play pinball.
As the Pickles went backstage to get ready for their set, Leslie found me again, Brett in tow. "Good job not quite f*cking THAT up," Nigel said, slapping a flipper at random.
“Good job fucking up my game! That was my last quarter… do you have any change?”
“Shameless panhandling, Lucy! What are you, Paul’s mom? Ha ha he has haha ha,” he said. I stared at him incredulously. He shrugged, drunk enough to be suddenly sheepish. He was saved by the stereo cutting out and the Pickles taking the stage—to use a slightly too aggrandizing phrase. They hopped up on a foot-tall plywood platform, five feet deep and ten feet wide, in front of a former shop-window facing the street; he huge window was now painted black, but the occasional drunk driver would suddenly appear through it in a waterfall of breaking glass. Legend had it this once decapitated a guitarist.
"MMMMmm?" I said, shifting my feet contentedly in place. My mood had improved immeasurably. On the way backstage, Beauregard had stopped by to ask if I needed a drink. I told him I was a superhero who needed a screwdriver in each hand to dismantle the villain; although I’m fairly sure he knew that was a joke, he came back bearing another pair of bucket-sized vodka-and-orange-juices, before giving me a GI salute and lumbering up to his drumkit. He was the drummer, too! A match made in Heaven.
“What was I supposed to be f*cking up, anyway?" I said. "YOU f*cked it up. Or you tried. We all got our free drinks.”
“Shhhh, show’s starting. Do they think we know Garbage?”
I squinted at him. “Oh, NIGEL. What did you tell them!? Is this one of your things where you expect me to be on board with lying for you, but you didn’t even tell me what you wanted me to lie about?”
“Lucy…” Leslie put his head in his hand dramatically, as though the mental defective here were me. “Yeah, something like that. And I didn't get a free drink.”
"Except for the ones you mooched from me!" I snarled.
He ignored that and looped back sarcastically, imitating me: "‘Do they think we know Garbage…’ Jeeeezzus! Yeah, Lucy. They think we know Garbage. That’s what’s going on here. They’re gonna let us open for ’em because… yeah, Garbage. Just… don't be rude, and yeah, pretend you're a music producer. Or Shirley Manson. After an industrial accident.”
"Ohhhh kaaaaay," I said cheerfully. “But what would Shirley Manson be doing in an industrial zone?”
“Buying crack? I don’t know, just try to seem cool. And COOL, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but I didn’t want to listen to Leslie’s voice anymore, so I smiled and head-banged.
The Pickles, as it turned out, were worse than mediocre. But the vodka was hitting me the right way. Sometimes it did that, and the life into which I had wandered in the absence of anything better seemed almost worth the trouble. Guitar amps—sometimes they sound like actual heaven, it doesn't matter what kind of a baboon is strumming the strings. Even if you're listening to it on a cassette tape, the next day, in a 120-degree dishroom with exactly the hangover you earned whilst discovering it.
It would have maybe been healthier to find all that music on the Internet, rather than tracking it down on the rough streets of Meatsville, where I needed to consume my own volume in vodka and orange juice to tolerate all my “friends.” But people don't love things as much when they’re easy. I'm not going to say the Humpers, or the Devil Dogs, or Boris the Sprinkler, or the Makers, were not objectively great bands anyway—but the fact that I had to swim through a mosh pit or wait for the mail to get to their recordings added something in my brainham that could reach out to the plain sound and make a third thing—to bastardize a claim some goofball rock journalist made about a suicide.
But for every Humpers you found, there were hundreds and thousands of Pickles. All of them thought they were Humpers, and all of them insisted on being heard.
Hm. Maybe all change IS superficial.
By the time the Pickles got off the stage, their name almost seemed clever. For the duration of about half a gallon of vodka, as usual at 21, I felt invincible. But after that, also as usual, there was a point where my mere humanity felt like a bat to the side of the head.
After the show ground down, we got a ride back to the house with the Pickles, so thank something for that. They needed a floor to crash, although I strongly suspected Beauregard figured he would have a spot in my bed; I was placed on his lap, to save space in a capacious van. I played along with the artifice, since Beauregard smelled marginally better than the discoloured cloth seats. I stuck my head out the window, long, uncombed waves of hair flapping like a cocker spaniel.
Odd: When you’re young, or old, time is mashed and stretched, and I was only a few years past the time when I still thought “cloth seats” were “claw seats,” because my dad’s weird composite accent was too much for even his kids.
When I was very small, he had a Volkswagen Bug, with seats of extra-stinky N*zi polymers impregnated with tobacco smoke. I’m not sure whether he loved it to excess, or if he was merely broke or cheap—he drove it with the same glee you’d expect from the owner of a Jaguar, or a Tiger tank—but in any case he kept it till you could see the snow on the road under the car, because of the hole. The floor was rusted through by the road-salt of dozens of winters. I remember the brown and white of the snow and dirt, with a bit of orange on the gravel roads when the highway ended, spooling out beneath my boots, till we sped up and it went by too fast to see, my eyes like TV static. Chilly, but fun, and the engine worked.
Eventually, it didn’t work, and Dad’s big ambition after the Bug was to acquire a vehicle with those coveted “claw seats,” which gave me vague but horrible nightmares. He juggled the words excitedly in his teeth for months, claw seats claw seats!, and he was bemused when I cried all the way to the car dealership.
Imagine my relief when all he inflicted on us was carpet.
Riding along on Beauregard, on the other side of the mystery of adolescence, I could have laughed at my old self, like I laugh at that self now. “Claw seats,” ha ha ha. Hey, let’s start a band. Laugh all the way to the grave, and maybe you’ll catch up with yourself one day, genius.
Dad would have never let his claw seats get that dirty.
We piled from the tour van into the house, where we found somebody had drunk all the Zima. After Leslie wasted time smashing a Stray Cats LP he mistakenly believed to be Paul’s (it was Brett’s), we piled back in and barely made it to that one liquor store on the edge of every town that’s open late—a one-van drag race which sobered us up enough to decide we also needed some of that nasty 90s trucker speed.
Nostrils aflame, three pills apiece, we went barrelling back to the house. Alas, for years, I had been eating trucker speed for like the normies ate Prozac. So once we got back to the ranch and started in on the disgusting swill we had grabbed in our haste, I began to fuzz in and out.
I guess it didn’t help that the beverage was a ballsy attempt to rip off Jägermeister’s rich, weird, Ostrogothy herbal formula, but with nuclear waste and rotten peat. Sprawled across our kingdom of 1970s couches, we bragged about god knows what, stealing oxygen.
At some point, Leslie decided he wanted to “shred” with the guitar player, and talked him into it. At first, I was all for it, since the Zima thieves were probably passed out right above the amp stack. You want to blast Paul and Yollie awake, be my guest. As the two of them couch-vaulted in the direction of the practice room, Leslie rapped me way too many times on a shoulder bone and mouthed “WE’RE OLLLL-MOST IN! WE’RE GONNA OPEN FOR UM THE NEXT TIME THEY PLAY O’CAYZ!”
The guy could clearly hear him. But that’s probably not why we didn’t get the gig.
There was a clatter of strings and feedback from the gear, followed by a gratifying death-rattle from Paul. Never worked a day in his life, but somehow he got his maw around so much weed, his waking ritual sounded like a 400-year-old Silene. Then a series of surprisingly not-bad noises began, and the rest of the Pickles vaulted after them, one by one… except, you guessed it, “Beauregard.”
Why even bother giving yourself a stage name? It made Nigel and Leslie sound cool by comparison. And the social smell was something else.
To be fair, I have an unfortunately acute sense of smell. Before my first cigarette, I was convinced I was a lesbian. I don’t know if it’s the cold, but young men in Wisconsin don’t wash themselves enough. Like the booze, the cigarettes I smoked are regrettable now, in ways. But I could be a weirdly calculating kid, and I had my reasons—and some unexpected events you could pretend were my reasons. Everybody knows smoking ruins your sense of smell. Or, in my case, it took the edge off.
I didn’t plan for lung cancer to rescue the full spectrum of my precious sexuality, though. That was a happy side effect.
I started smoking because the only way to ever get a break working in a restaurant was to threaten to have a nicotine fit.
Oh, the labor law says everyone gets a nice break, bless your heart? Restaurant owners used labor law to wipe their ass, unless it was the minimum/maximum wage. They almost had to break it, the industry had such thin margins. If they ever saw you not frantically running around, you got the dreaded couplet-lecture:
Time to lean? / Time to clean.
But if the dishwasher looks like she might choke the customers the next time they send back a dessert uneaten with a Virginia Slims stubbed out in it? The customers are the ones who won’t pay more than six dollars for a cut of beef that costs five before you pay someone to cook it; their fickleness runs down the margins, even though they toss out half of what they order. Then again, we needed them, so if we might kill them, that the boss respected. So I got wise, bought a $2 pack of Basic, let one hang from my lip, and started shaking. It made them so nervous, they didn’t remember I didn’t smoke. Repeat this for 40 days and suddenly, not only are you not lying anymore about being a smoker—you’re also ready for the rain of men.
Once I knew that work-life balance (also not a phrase yet) was better as a smoker, I chain-smoked with two hands, like a total adolescent. Or a child, tugging on a manager's apron for one more cancer break, determined to kill me faster than anyone else could do, starting with my least favorite sense… smoking even helped with the dishroom stink.
And YET, I could STILL SMELL this Beauregard son of a bitch.
OK fine, I shouldn’t dehumanise him; he was kind of a nice guy, I guess, probably, even if he apparently failed to spare a thought for others, ever. Maybe the tour van life was rough—but his bandmates didn’t stink like a corpse. Maybe he didn’t know it was normal to be clean; maybe his parents were too poor for a bathtub… in the 1980s? I mean, I’d seen it happen, but this band douche wasn’t from a place like that, was he? He had guitars and practice spaces and the embroidered shirt and all the gear, and none of these guys seemed to have jobs.
And he seemed sadly, tragically desperate to get laid. Taking on this drunk girl with battered glasses and a pummelled eye, obviously out of her mind, who knows how crazy?, but laid out on a platter in a schmooze, like you’re clearly the loser in the band who needs this and who will settle for this kind of thing… did he know what was going on? I don't know whether I did, or whether I pieced it together in retrospective; I can’t recall. At any rate there came a point where he said that which I wished he wouldn’t say:
“So… young mad' moizelle … they make you sleep out here like a coon hound, or you got your own beddy-room?” He put a limp, clammy hand on my leg. It was so heavy my leg fell off the couch.
I felt my heart sink into my sneakers—“coon hound”? Nobody had said that for 50 years. “Beddy-room”?!? Sounded more like a peddy-room. Where the hell was he pretending to be from?
And yet, the next thing I remember was sitting in my closet, with Beauregard on my bed, probably leaving a Beauregard stain, in the yellow light of a lamp my grandma gave me when I was a little kid. He had somehow commandeered a whole thing of fake Jägermeister, specially for us two, packaged in a big tin can. It glistened in his hand like a lance. We talked about nothing.
“You sure can put ’em away, sweet lady,” he said, finally sounding annoyed. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He poured me another.
And that was it: like a floodgate exhausted and opening, nature took her course.
Flowed into her channel.
My lips parted, slow then quick, and in a hoarse voice, leaning in close, I said:
“BLEAAAAAAAAAAAGH blé blé blé!
“BleAAAgh laaaagh laaaagh làggggg BAUUUU hUH-lauuuuuuuuuughhhhhhHHHH! Ugh,” I continued. “Hhhh.”
I’ve been told I have a unique-sounding vomit, thank you very much.
And I’ve wondered ever after: When squid shoot ink to defend themselves, do they decide to aim and fire?
I never decided to puke on Beauregard; gross! Even if he hadn’t been the smelliest person in all of punk rock, it was gross. I was subhuman. I don’t know if anyone has ever been so justly angry at me.
And yet… I couldn’t have picked a better time…
Well, I take that back, but that’s a completely different, even longer story. Maybe I’ll tell you someday. But for now, you can imagine how much Leslie and I both wanted to push each other out of a window when the sun, that bastard, came up again. The only reason we didn’t was we were distracted by the urge to defenestrate our own, cataclysmically hung over, semi-human remains.
And what was the person this book is supposed to be about doing this whole time?
Well, my guess is, Brett did the best networking out of anyone. Fat lotta good it did him. There was less luck for the wacky then.
Previously:
Chapter One: At Home in Hotel Hell