Brett and Leslie: Chapter One
At Home in Hotel Hell
I don't remember meeting my roommate Brett. I suppose I met him drunk at a party, where he would have been drunk with his best friend, Leslie. A party where none of us were invited. That was how you met people in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1995, especially if the people were Brett and Leslie.
I was looking for somebody to take over the empty room in The House. After months of begging Tony from Chicago to stop throwing his little girlfriend at the wall, the rest of us had finally kicked him out.
Tony had already put so many holes in the drywall, the security deposit was a lost cause, but at least we didn’t want to get evicted.
You wonder why dreams and ideas scare me?
“The House” was built on a dream—OK, we rented it on a dream—of having what you called a “punk house.”
A what? … OK, you take the demented grandchild of a literary salon and the primitive ancestor of a “content house.” You mix them with stale beer and dirt—A LOT of dirt—some throwing stars, bullwhips, broken televisions, drums and guitars, eight or nine boom boxes, a record player from Goodwill—the mid-century kind that comes in a suitcase and sounds like Purgatory—and a couple mannequins if you can steal them. Then deprive the inhabitants of any form of hope, much less funding. Now you got a punk house.
No YouTube, no Internet, nowhere to post or publish whatever the gang created there, unless somebody got in good with the guy from Pachinko who worked at the punk club. Then maybe you’d get a vinyl single at whose cover art Steve Albini might glance one day.
If you’re keeping score, vinyl records were already obsolete.
So… if you take the idea of an arts community, which is obnoxious to begin with—and you remove all hope and opportunity, what do you have left?
Scumbags.
You have scumbags. That’s what you have. The pure steam-distillation of opportunistic pond scum.
Oh, in theory, an art colony that offers no hope should be pure, right? No opportunity, no opportunists. Beauty and friends! I thought I could smell it; a secure home, but with its door open a crack to all the other misfit toys. A cool thing that you make to offer your little city as it freezes in the wind between two subarctic lakes.
No!—opportunists might make the world go round, but they’re the dumbest people in it. So the hopeless punk house fills with dirtbags, sniffling at whatever rat-droppings they can snaffle. Our dream was looking as stupid as anything.
If I only knew.
Not that Brett and Leslie were the house dirtbags, particularly. Those roles had already been claimed, mainly by Tony from Chicago and Paul the Asshole.
It couldn’t have been Leslie who won me over. Something about Brett must have made me think these two new dirtbags were at least not going to get the cops called too often. But it’s hard to remember anything about Brett without an image of Leslie taking over the visual field in your mind, dancing around like a Muppet in need of a beating. If you had to describe Leslie in a word, you’d pick “floppy.”
Leslie was not Leslie’s real name, but it’s what he demanded we call him. I do remember the time that Leslie “confessed" to me that his real name was Nigel, but when I believed that, he laughed at me.
It was that summer, the summer of 1995, in July. That shrieking, snorting donkey laugh. I can still hear it, scraping the hairs from deep in my ear. “Haaaw, you believed me! ‘Niiiigew’! You fink my name is Ni-gew! Have you even SEEN Spinal Tap?” (Sorry, these guys couldn’t spit out two sentences without making some stupid culture reference as an inside joke. Plus ça change.)
It sounds as mental to me now as it must to anyone sane, but two weeks before we had this conversation, these two and I had formed a... band.
You'll be stunned to hear that Leslie crowned himself singer/guitarist as a matter of course. At the moment we were merely standing in our kitchen getting shnockered, but Leslie had begun taking every opportunity he could to display monkey dominance over his rhythm section.
“Niiii-geeeeew! What’s wrong with yoooou?” he sang.
“Aside from my masochistic taste in roommates?”
“You’ll never get to write a song now, Ringo!” (I played the drums. Ringo Starr—Christ, look it up—was supposed to be stupid, so that’s how you insulted your drummer, you acted like we were all Ringo.)
“That’s not my real name, either.”
“That was a test,” he said, pointing his spit-covered, nicotine-yellow finger at me; if he wasn’t smoking, he was chewing on his hands. “And yooooo, faaaaaaaaiiled. You suck as bad as Brett!” He pivoted briefly towards Brett, to sneer. Earlier that day, Leslie had stolen Brett’s favorite boxer shorts; he still hadn’t gotten over the fact that Brett, in retaliation, had snuck up and set the shorts on fire while Leslie was wearing them.
“How do you know so much about Brett and sucking?” I grunted and shimmied closer to the fridge; I was using his triumphant distraction to try to grab one of my beers before he drank them all.
“Ha ha! You know it’s true. Even Sylvia!—you know what Sylvia said about you?”
“Let’s see…she said I love being nagged with rhetorical questions by a subhuman?” Jesus; he almost HAD drunk them all. I got the last; he was still talking.
“Sylvia said you rock like a neurotic monkey—and she’s desperate for pussy! Desperate! Even for a tw@t that looks like you, Lucy!”
“Pffft,” I said. No one believed poor Sylvia was actually a lesbian. Like Brett, she never, as far as I knew, fucked anybody. She was so emotionally wrapped up in Paul the Asshole, she seemed to be drowning. I don’t think it was sexual, but what do I know? I think she missed her biological brother, who had died in some horrible accident.
Sylvia wasn’t a roommate, but Paul the Asshole was; in fact, looking back, I’d wager he masterminded the train crash that ran him over.
Paul the Asshole, Smacky the Clown, and I were the founding House members. But Paul was the one who let Tony from Chicago glom on—who found him, told us he was a nice guy and his parents were in banking or something, when neither of them were fit to sign a lease, and it all ended up under my name. Paul hid behind such a thicket of Church of the Subgenius tattoos, we didn't notice he was in his thirties till it was too late. Sylvia knew what a scumbag he was, but she was so floaty on smack between her suicide attempts that she never thought to warn anyone.
This was the Iowa contingent, back when Iowa was the world capital of bathtub methamphetamines. Paul, Smacky, and Sylvia had all come to Wisco together from Iowa, to escape their habits—well, to trade meth for new methods of suicide. And Paul, despite looking like a rutabaga that grew hair, had a weird power over a certain kind of broken girl—broken being the only kind of girl they grow down in Iowa.
Paul’s story was truly special. His own parents, who actually WERE rich-ish bankers, put him in drug rehab when he was a teenager, which turned out to be a huge advantage in life—if you can call the existence Paul chose for himself a life.
Being in drug rehab back then was enough to prove to the government that you were a victim of mental illness. So having parents who were rich enough to solve their Paul problems by sticking him in rehab snagged that jack£ss the paperwork to scam a free, lifetime monthly disability check from Social Security.
Part of my paycheck was already trickling into Paul’s gaping, callous mouth before it even got to my sweaty, callused paws, in other words. And then he begged for more.
But how else was he supposed to avoid both work and his dad? Aside from swapping up his ear gauges, begging Tony for weed, pretending to be a pro skateboarder, and the general scams that occupied 98 percent of his hambrain, Paul didn’t have much else to do but mess with people.
Well, and borrow money from Sylvia, then make her beg to get it back.
That was one of the excuses Sylvia found to hang around our house, to the cruel amusement of Paul’s actual girlfriend, Yollie. Yollie wasn't on the lease or paying rent—I think she domiciled with her parents, on paper—but Yollie was the only person who got her own shelf for her stuff in the bathroom.
Christ, why have I never demanded what I’ve paid for?!
I figured that Sylvia, at least, thought I was cool. (Lord.) Sure, she didn’t want to sample my clam. But we were both chumps to the house’s scammer contingent, because we preferred to be useful… no, Lucy, quit editing your memories; we didn’t have a choice. Sylvia and I were both suckers for music who didn’t realise at the time that half the bands we listened to were from the UK, and they were on the dole; the other half were from the US, and grew up taking drugs in rich suburbs. We thought we could do what they did, just… demand from the world the right to do as we pleased.
But if you didn’t have rich parents who could get you on the Paul Plan, it was all but impossible to get that free government artist cheese without a baby, no matter how crazy you were, or even if you had a missing leg. I had two kitchen jobs at once. Sylvia wiped old-people butts for a living. She got paid a bit more, but I wasn’t complaining, as I could never do that job. I’d be in prison.
The gang didn’t have the slightest grasp on such subtleties; they enviously tracked her payday so they could hit her up for $5 or a pizza—same as they did with me, but worse. Not only did she have more to take, Sylvia binge ate, rode the horse, and tried suicide every six months, so that the rest of the time she could be the nicest girl in the world.
So, no way would she shit on me like that to impress Leslie. Eh? We were Team Useful. He was Team Slacker. Plus, other than Paul, she batted for Team Softball. Right?
"She meant I rock!” I decided. I tried to do a devil horn with my hand, but it came out a middle finger. “RAWK! as in rock and roll, dumb-f&ck. Can you imagine how much @ss a neurotic spider monkey would kick on the drums?! Those things are like little Bob Moulds with tails. I’m a rock monkey!”
Leslie took his own middle finger and slowly began to curette his greasy, triangular beak.
"No, reta*d, she meant you rock back and forth. Like the monkey who got the wire mom in that old experiment instead of the cloth mom." He imitated me rocking back and forth and rolled his bloodshot eyes. “That lil f§cker went CRAZY, Ringo!”
Brett—our main character—spoke up for the first time in forty minutes, flipping back his long, sandy skater bangs. His usual shtick was to cover his face with that rag-mop until he came up with something horrible to say to Leslie, so I thought I smelled a delicious tiff on its way:
“Wow, Galileo, you've heard about a whole science experiment? With real monkeys! I bet the last bottle of Huber that you heard it from a fifteen-year-old girl while you were trying to get the bra off her.” Brett’s head tilted one way, and his grin slanted the other, like a malnourished Cheshire Cat.
Leslie snickered in delight, ignoring the possibility that this could be meant as an insult. “Well, the high school girls here have all these ‘advanced placement’ classes, I gotta keep up. We’re not in Manitowoc anymore!”
Brett gave another smirk and failed to advance the topic, as long as Leslie was owning it—except I don’t think “owning it” was a phrase yet. We weren’t so much relaxing in the kitchen as we were hiding in there, as Paul was having one of his boring parties full of stoners listening to Slint. So it was easy for Leslie to change the subject, after a rummage in the fridge:
“Heyyyy, the last beer’s gone already! Was Smacky in here? Or Goober?! Who the fuck…”
I waved my bottle at him. “The person who bought the beer took it, bonehead. For once. You want more? You know where to find the stack of empties. Load it on the skateboard, if there’s enough for the free case. Or try stealing some Goldschläger from Mr. Math Rock in there.”
Unfortunately, the teenage-girl thing was probably true. As much as Brett and Leslie hated each other, and as gleefully as they would tattle on each other up to a point, there was a bedrock of dark secrets you probably couldn't get out of them with...
Well, now that I think about it, you could probably get it out of them with 45 minutes of beer withdrawal. But to accomplish that, you would have to live through it with them, and—that year? That wasn't happening to any of us, if we could help it. Not unless you tied us to a chair. Or chucked us in a cell.
See? This is why I can't remember anything specific about Brett. You always get distracted by Leslie.
I had hoped to give you a regular character description of Brett, like you would get in a twentieth-century novel, because that genre of image marks my memories from that time. You thought in beautiful loose pictures then, bright, with big frames, carved with leaves and curlicues, not greasy screens the size of a soda cracker. I can see a tableau of Brett, pigeon-toed in his oxblood wingtips with one peeled sole, drunk in golden sun on a sidewalk with nostrils flared at his own morbid joke—but I can't see Brett in motion, except via contrast with Leslie.
Brett with his bushy, lager-coloured hipster moustache, a decade avant la lettre; Leslie proud of his sideburns and his sloppy black pompadour. Brett with his shoulders thrown back, mocking the bold posture of a Ken doll while hiding in his helmet of hair; Leslie slouching forward, as though he had, despite the cry for attention broadcast by his bright-red plastic loafers, an equal and opposite desire to disappear—but also to stick his nose in wherever it would reach.
Leslie in a lime-green tuxedo shirt he stole from me; Brett in cutoff girls’ Guess jeans. All of us running down an alley, hopping a fence, landing in the trash, because Leslie can’t go to a party without pocketing something. He perhaps has a valve.
I might have less poetically-vague memories if all of this hadn't happened, Judas f***, almost 30 years ago. As you may have noticed, when I think back to the 1990s, I start swearing like a sailor again. I don't know whether I swore more back then, or if the whole world did.
Now, in the panopticon of fun, you feel like the internet uni-brain is counting every naughty word you say, and later it might decide to take off its belt if you don’t watch it.
Now, look at me: censoring my own f***, before they even punish me. When did I start doing that?!
Those of us who tried to build our dreams in the 1990s might strike the modern arteest as caveman-like, with our mellow bluntness, interest in history, and casual mild violence. We knew that cruel words were not the same as physical assault, as we were raised on a steady diet of both. But like our elders, we were as human as you are, and someday you'll see that with a shock (assuming YOU are fully human; oh, my!).
Your age of reason, in any era, starts with a high kick of skepticism, self-righteousness, hope; to us, there was no reasonable hope, and yet it seemed that we were destined to find a way to stop the vague disasters we could smell on the wind.
Fortunately, nobody ever listened to us—but our jackass contingent still found a way to do our part to hasten the dread march of history. We didn’t want to be like our cruel or distant parents, so we coddled our spawn till they couldn’t contain their murderous self-importance. We all forgot how to mourn. Catharsis is too much now. It huuuurts, Mommy. Queue up the sitcoms. Watch another episode. They taught the kids about nothing… except power.
Berserking in the opposite direction is not balance.
History’s become a pendulum on fire, spewing radiation. As a poet who’s been thrown out with the bathwater told: the center cannot hold. And yet we still imagine history as a victory parade, progressing into plastic dioramas ever more just and grand.
Til they melt.
How stubborn we are.
When I was a kid, the people in the past, with their quaintness and censors, their fixed ideas, greed, grim statues, and Grey State—they seemed like mindless cartoons. Dead to logic, yet sensitive as an intestine, opened in the sun. When you said “f*ck” or “sh*t,” the 1980s Republican ladies began to cluck like chickens, as though they couldn’t help but visualise f*cking or sh*tting.
Perverts! What kind of sheltered weirdo thinks that hard about a word? God knows what they got up to in those finishing schools.
But at the turn of the century, we were moving forward, ô yes: say what you like, run and hide from tribalism; you could hump anybody who was reasonably close to your own age and, in theory, it was nobody else’s business.
Ha! If we only KNEW.
The Kids think we’re afraid of the future, unaware that History is running in reverse. No, it took a lot out of me to make it to adulthood. I don’t want to regress with you. The natural crash is bad enough. One day we find that “destiny” and “idealistic” are other ways to say “newly stoned”:
Before you get a tolerance to adult hormones, they’re still a novel drug. The tenderness of oestrogen, the élan of man juice: You're better than those crusty, old junkies—feeling tired and hopeless will never happen to you. You are a fresh soul on the lark. Pumping color and life back into the shell of childhood.
It’s not all bad. My god—the depression we should have felt. The glee we were able to concoct! But as with all drugs, once the bloom is off the rose, you can eat a thousand pills—you’re still on Hell's elevator, strapped in, grinding down.
The self-importance drug will trick you into ignoring things you’ll wish you hadn’t. Then self-righteous madness like an ivy branch will grow from the back of your head, down your legs, like the handle of a pitcher, suspending you in the thrilling atmosphere of your vague but white-hot discontent, pouring nightmares out your mouth like cream…
At first, being held upside-down like a game animal gets you high.
As long as you’re young; this vertigo is what you chose in place of art.
But adults in this hell chase that feeling of importance forever—and you never get it back, not the real thing; only hysteria. You chose to be a little fox. You chose to raid the henhouse. Your eyes glaze, your hands tremble, and suddenly you see that your team, your cohort, your cronies, are not geniuses, nor special, nor the best friends and lovers ever…
They’re the same as everyone who has lost the years.
They’re us.
One sleepless night, a shock flips on the harsh lights of bartime, and you will see the ugly masks your friends and lovers chose to wear; the masks are bad enough, we lack the strength to see what's below. The foul accretion of stupid mistakes or guilty guile or both, like barnacles in a tourist bay, mixed with unnatural mammalian grime and heavy, heavy metals, dragging down; all they who slowly reveal themselves to be nothing more than vessels for the DNA experiment run by the gods, cranking the ceiling down lower, the claustrophobia makes our meat taste better…
But what’s your choice?—the alternative to being the plaything of the gods is finding you're a dead end in this sorting experiment. Nobody wants to make a baby with you, sometimes including you, so good luck figuring what YOUR life might mean either way.
It's a dilemma I saw coming, so I failed to piss away my time deciding, per the wisdom of my grandmother. This was her cute advice: “Wherever you go, your rear end is always behind you.” She said it with such relish. Your decisions are probably wrong… but unlikely to matter much. For each year, the vessel’s searchlights gain on the delta whence all streams tumble into Hell.
Even knowing enough not to worry about choosing doesn’t stop the agony of knowing all your choices are bad, though. Poverty or a gilded cage? Obscurity or humiliation? You can have your dignity, or you can have dinner, but the choice is the velvet glove.
Carpe diem, they told us? We were too busy sniffing at the storm. Under the glitter bombs, TV and tech, some of us failed to ignore the stench of death and hell.
“Did Sylvia really talk shit about me?” I muttered, causing Leslie’s sly face to light up with visible delight. “Well, next time she eats a bottle of pills, she can puke them back up all by herself.”
Then again, if memory serves—gods help me—the reason I was in a particularly foul mood that evening was because I had spent the afternoon cutting the lawn.
With a scissors. And a knife.
Maybe Madison wasn't much of a city, but they were boojie enough to get mad if your yard looked country. And nobody told me that when you rented a house, it was you, and not the landlord, who must cut the lawn; would you trim someone else’s pubes because you’re sleeping with them? We didn’t get so much as a manpower lawnmower (in our case, it would have been a me-power lawnmower) or a reminder. Nor did the neighbors dare come knock on our door before whining to the city.
Out of that clear, hot, and holy July sky, I got a nastygram from downtown, with an expensive-sounding threat and my name on it: Cut your lawn, or we're coming for you. They weren’t quite that rude, but the raw message was hard to polish.
The argument over who was getting stuck with the impossible chore was ritualized and brief. We all knew it was going to be me. Sylvia didn’t even live in the house. I started looking for sharp objects.
When I moved from my native village to the capital city of my land, my hopes about the wonderful, brilliant people I might find were shamefully naive—and that’s despite reading Jude the Obscure multiple times.
I present this cast of characters as evidence for my claim that I have been punished enough.