Brett and Leslie, Chapter Seven
Lawn Knife II: The Lady on Our Lawn
I ran outside, knives swinging. If you take ten of my memories from that summer, nine involved murdering grass and wishing it were people.
I didn't last long. After ten minutes of intermittent dry heaves and a crippling anise belch, I sat down in the middle of the lawn, then fell on my back, feet in the air. So much for the resilience of the human body. I had nothing in the tank except the sloshing green poison I had used as a conversational ploy.
“Fuck ’em,” I said. “I can’t finish.”
It felt like a whole, dry, feathers-on chicken made out of nausea was stuck in my throat, drying it down to the bone. “Fuck the ordinance, fuck the city, fuck the neighbors. ‘Breakin’ the law!’” I said, shamefully quoting a song that everyone quoted at the time. I hate it when people do that—I hate it so much that sometimes it becomes a tic and I blurt it out myself.
Fine, my shadow personality has always been a strange place. Yours isn’t? One of these days I’m going to be a real Regulation Human who counts for something, and wow, how sorry you’re scheduled to be, I thought, in the direction of, statistically, everyone. I lay in the grass, stared at the sky, hearing my shaggy, hissy cassette tape—the halfway point between the flawed warmth of vinyl recording and the perfect dystopian clang of the coming apocalypse—struggle and whine for me, running out of battery:
The streets of where I’m from
are paved with hearts
instead of gold
I hadn't really had my heart broken yet, but I thought I had, and I was working on it; I still didn’t realize how many shocks that meat lump in your chest can take. I probably still haven't. —So don't jinx yourself, asshole! —I wonder if it's offensive to call myself an asshole now. Well, plug it in to my lifetime utterances and we'll see if my Borg Score goes down.
The Borg seems to be a real thing, now. A lifetime of people trying to tell you what to do and think and say. All the science-fiction warnings I had worried about as a kid were on the verge of coming true, but I could only lie there in my sub-standard, overgrown grass patch, refusing to participate, because I was told too many times that no one wanted me. Smelling a faint whiff of pot, cement, and lots of hot grass; dogshit somewhere, my own Jagermeister death stench, on top of the usual wet-cement smell my body made when I had been drinking; the irritating whir of bees, dehydration, a sudden, sour taste in my mouth like a dirty lemon, the smell of Beauregard, his oily cologne...
“Oh, god…” I rolled my feet up under me and sprinted into the house, pushing past Paul the Asshole, who was lounging ambiguously in the entryway. “WATER!” I screamed.
“Huh?”
That was possibly the only time in his life when Paul’s favorite face—the “I am but an innocent bystander” face—was deployed sincerely.
I would have bowled over ten Pauls, as big of a lump as he was, to get my glass of water, but by the time I filled the glass it was too late: as I approached, I was exposed to the scent of the cappuccino-foam sink for too long, imagining I could smell Beauregard-Brand As£ in my clothes and hair... I realized I had to disconnect from my body because I had disliked all my choices so much that I gave up trying to choose and my life became a thing alien to me…
I began to run upstairs, then remembered what our toilet was like, and why I never puked in there unless I was desperate: nuclear back-splash. You had to gingerly defecate with the least force possible—never mind sticking my face in there.
I sprinted back down, out the front door; I’ll spare you most of the onomatopoeia this time around. Got out to the porch before I started making the same noises as the night before, lots of h and k sounds, as I hurled over the railing like the house was a cruise ship.
“Wow,” said a woman's voice, at once smiling and husky.
I thought it was in my head. I kept at my task.
“Nice lungs. You’ve got a good power barf, there.”
“Huh-hoo! Etc.,” I continued. “Guhhh!”
“Jeez, sweetie.”
“Kek.” I finally tried to look at the voice; I couldn't quite look up, but I tried to take in her shoes.
“JOHNNIE!” she yelled over her shoulder, as I struggled with cognition; “JOHNNIE! I THINK I FOUND Lucy! C’mere!”
“Kuh guh?” My eyes were running ruthlessly as the last few bile drops blew, but as the shoes came in focus, they widened; the woman on our lawn was wearing the old 1960s version of Wednesday Addams’s Mary Janes. There was even a tiny spider.
Big deal? Look, that stuff was hard to get—things from other countries, things that were different. Want French mustard?, get an airplane. Somebody who had shoes like that in 1995 didn't buy them from Zara for five dollars as part of their costume for the weekend—imagine, again, no Internet, no shopping anyplace except the stores near you, or through a paperback mail-order catalog, if you could get your hands on such a thing. To have anything cool out in Wisconsin took some planning and/or luck, you had to—
I must sound like every other sentence out of my mouth is "Kids these days.”
But it is genuinely amazing how the dimension of time keeps relentlessly rolling out under our feet like a treadmill.
Imagine if the North Pole itself were a death camp, and they forced you to walk north; that’s the dimension of time. And anyone who remembers fashion before the year 2000 knows that what you wore used to be much less of a matter of choice. Particularly if you didn't have much money, or if you liked weird stuff, or both. The whole Midwest’s-worth of annoying trustfundian punk-rock kids made pilgrimages to the same two stores in Chicago for shitty plastic boots and primitive goth gear. The rest of us watched the Goodwill like buzzards till something cool from the 1960s showed up in the dollar bin, and then we wore that twice a week, rotating with our one or two other cool outfits and our work T-shirts.
It was kind of… aesthetic, except it was based on luck instead of choice. Everyone you knew had their own classic look, like we were characters designed for a sitcom:
Here comes Brett in his 1975 oxblood loafers and red sunglasses from the dollar store. He must have to work today, he’s got the tuxedo shirt on, could use a wash under the pits. Lucy has her 1968 sunglasses perched over her regular glasses left over from 1988; it’s her day off, so she’s wearing a 1950s cotton gingham housedress that was accidentally tagged at 50 cents. They’re recurring characters on The Leslie Show.
So if somebody turned up on my lawn in these impossibly cool Wednesday Addams shoes, it wasn't going to be some random Heather; I don’t think Hot Topic even existed yet, or if it did, you never mentioned it in polite society.
And when my interlocutor said “Heyyyy, I hope you’re OK,” therefore, and followed it up with “I’m sorry, I’m not an axe murderer, my name is Julie, I’m friends with Brett and Leslie. Or is he Nigel now?”—I was panicked, but not completely surprised.
Star-struck and annoyed that this exquisite creature was Leslie’s friend, yes, but although I had never met the legendary Julie and Johnnie in person, she looked about as Brett and Leslie described her—I’ll give the two goobers that much: “Like a skinny Debbie Harry.” Whether they worshipped people or wanted to steal their wallets, they could slash out a good verbal caricature. (Even if they were completely fixated on whether people were skinny or fat, particularly Nigel/Leslie; either condition or a lack thereof was worth humiliating.)
“Leslie,” I managed, “Nigel is Leslie now. Although today I’m calling him shithea— huh, shit—H… Brek-kek-kek-kex-brrr-KKKKKAAAHHHHH!”
Julie giggled and yelled over her shoulder again: “Joooohnnneee! This is definitely the place!”
“Brek-kek-kek-KAUGH.”
I was proud to avoid hitting her shoes, then thought: Is the the best you can do, Lucy?—Not hitting probably-Julie’s shoes? You LUSH. Please think of something to say with words.
She petted me on the shoulder. “Ah, we’ve all been there. You need a drink of water?”
I couldn’t answer; the last of my puke was dribbling overboard. “I’ve heard so much about you!” she purred.
I opened one bleary eye at her. “Really?” I was genuinely confused. Nigel definitely thought of me as furniture, so it had to be Brett who said anything neutral-to-good about me. I’ll have to give him that, too. Then again, Leslie had weird ways of bragging about the fact that he knew people while technically slagging them; he even did it to Brett on the rare occasions when they weren’t following each other around slagging on everybody else. (I’ve never liked name-droppers, it seems like such a violation of privacy… but then I found out most people LIKE having their names dropped. They just don’t like being the audience.)
Whilst I ejected a final cloud of foam, I heard Julie laughing, over her shoulder as Johnnie finally appeared, carrying a large leather case. Her throaty laughter wasn’t annoying, even though technically it was similar to Yollie’s; how can anyone be that ironic and that sincere?
I didn't think much about it in the instant—on top of the repressed, healthy teenage narcissism I spent my early 20s catching up on, the nausea of the accreted hangover of a bender whose beginning was lost somewhere in the previous week was blinding—but of all the legends I could mention, these two deserved their status, as portrait artists, the most legendarily of all: they could see right through your skin and into your brainham. These are probably STILL the most legendary people I have ever met, and I had nothing more interesting to say than echoing the frogs’ chorus from Aristophanes, long before I had the faintest notion what it was.
Now she grinned and muttered conspiratorially: “That's how you know Nigel thinks you're a rock star—”
“—Yep—” said Johnnie, a tousled head smiling with sardonic but genuine cheer above an antique suit—
“—it’s when he says anything about you at all.”
I swear, I’d said nothing aloud. I was still, technically, in the process of meeting this woman. Through my vomit, not only did she read my thoughts through my face and say the nicest thing in response that she possibly could have said: Her husband, casually walking up our oily driveway behind her, watched her reading my mind and chorused.
They were so remarkable, they were like watching subatomic particles: it was impossible to appreciate in the moment how remarkable they were. Or that’s my excuse. I guess that's how people became legends, in the before times.
Now, you’re supposed to make a noisy video to TELL people how remarkable you are, till they believe you, or you sue, or you run out of money in your ad budget and go crawl under a rock where you slowly become a troll. But back then, you were quietly amazing for a long time, and then when you died all the assholes like me felt stupid for not knowing how to keep in touch with people.
It's almost worse because I DID know how amazing you were; but in my mind I’m never more than one awkward social interaction away from ruining any good impression I’ve made. And when I make a mistake, you will yank the friendship away, while it’s still a poor little nub, so I prefer to avoid seeing anyone. We’re becoming friends, that’s good enough. I guard my nubs. Poor woman had to be dead ten years before I realized why I was rude. I’m sorry, Julie.
Although, Jesus Christ, here's yet another character in Butt's story, draining my attention.
Either this is another tic of mine, or his invisibility cloak was something he did on purpose—orrrr perhaps any complaints Brett may have registered quietly, in the silence of the morning, in his own mind, about how probably nobody would even notice if he went into the lake and never came back, were justly tragic.
On the other hand, gimme a break, I was star-struck. The idea that anyone in Wisconsin could get paid enough money for their arty-farty to live on was fantastic, in every sense. I could barely grasp the possibility that bands from Chicago could be famous. That stuff seemed to live on a different plane, even if you had an artistic vocation. That vocation meant nothing, except you were ridiculous and doomed. No matter how much you loved the filmmaker John Waters—even I had seen John Waters!—although you lived sort of like you were a real artist, deep down you knew the score: you would never be Waters. He didn’t have heirs. And maybe his native Baltimore was shady, but it wasn’t obscure.
You weren’t even one of his characters. Even Julie and Johnnie didn’t have the budget for a film.
And yet, in Madison, when J and J came to visit, I became "Pukes off the Porch Like It's the Titanic Girl" (although the Titanic was still a mere ship, not a movie). I was secretly thrilled; it was better than being “Silent Dishwasher Girl, Is She Mentally Special?” (I mean, I was, but did everyone else need to rub it in?)
Shit! That reminded me, didn't I need to squirrel down to work at some point?—I'd already made prep cook at one job, and here I was, on the precipice of making cashier at the other! But which job did I have to get to? What the hell day was it?
“It's Saturday,” Julie chuckled, then visibly enjoyed my surprise.
“Oh! My god, I don't have to work till tomorrow... eleven AM, though. So... I can—”
“Hang out with us?” they chorused. “Badass!”
“Huh-huh,” I said, trying not to sound nervous. “Yeah… I just—”
“Can't get too drunk!” they giggled.
As though taking a guitar solo, Johnnie added: “Looks like you're doing great already,” pointing to my fake Jager tank, empty on the lawn. I must have smelled… legendary?
“Haha,” I said. “So... I take it you’re…”
“Yes, we are!” We all knew “are” meant J and J. Seriously, those two were a trip; I take no pleasure in telling you that you had to be there. I don’t like nostalgia, but I don’t like change. Even if we’re being marched by physics to our death, I have to admit, the place in space-time where life is doomed to live is lucky and exciting: We are standing at the spot where Time rolls out, always shoving us in one direction, pushing us in a spiral, yet always showing us something that is a little bit new.
At the time, I worried those two were going to think there was something too new about me. Or too not-new. Or—
Yeah, I forgot about Brett again. Sort of. In his own book. It’s probably subconscious, where the brainworms crawl. If you pin me down, OK OK, I was envious that Brett got to meet Julie first, and knew her more. He couldn’t even be tragic without prematurely disappearing, just outside the camera’s range… but I’m pretty sure he thought of himself as the camera, a belief system which suggests the show might not, indeed, go on.
If you think about the madness Brett-the-Camera never got to record, it's mind-blowing—the shit that has rolled out of the maw of Time since 1995. Especially considering his passive love for gore. Jesus, where to begin? If I could go back in time and tell us, we would think I was the Unabomber in a skirt. I would bust my beer bottle off at the neck and stick the stump in my face for growing up to be schizophrenic. Airplanes flying into buildings, seriously?—we lose another war, and by the end of it the Democrats are going to be the war party in the US Congress...
… and the books, the records, the art magazines—you know— everything you love? I’m not sure whether the arts fully justify our existence, but it certainly can’t be justified without them. And yet we loathe them.
The 20th century already hated the arts because their uses are a paradox. But now we hate them because we have confused them for narcotics, so they fail. Catharsis for anesthesia. A laxative for another cheese sandwich. If I feel pain, it isn’t working. ENTERTAIN US.
Each small, shining thread of personal vocation gets sucked into three-minute videos, stabbed by an algorithm, everything is MTV now—that or it’s local homemade cable TV, except the lowest common basement-dwellings shall be retrofittted for the mean girls to be made millionaires by the banally dumb force of momentum and numbers, and we’ll be too old anyway, those of us who survive… who cares?, everything will be the same sitcom forever—“Fast Times in the Uncanny Valley,” it will be huge!—or until World War three blasts off in the Ukraine, except we call it Ukraine now…
Yeah, Brett would have loved this shit.
“People think I’m ‘special,’ too,” Julie was saying, “especially when I wear this dress.” She could tell my mind had wandered, obviously, since she knew where it went—so she gave me a moment to catch up, coquettishly ruffling her polyester housedress up and down. It was a boat-neck with a boxy non-waist covered in polka dots till you got to the drop waist, where it turned into taffeta, pleats and stripes. The collar was gigantic, with a floppy bow. I’d never seen the like. It was superb. “Remember that time, Johnnie?”
He laughed happily. “THAT guy? ‘Is she—is she’—Oh, the look on his face, hee hee hee—”
“It was before I got diagnosed… uh, I was heavier then, I filled the dress out more, so the collar… yeah, and then it’s got this hem, so you can imagine…” Julie dissolved into giggles.
So Johnnie helped: “So this guy, we’re getting out of the car at the first Fleshtones show that got to Wisconsin… big, regular-flavor guy, with one of those heads that’s as big as—”
At “heads… big” they both shrieked inexplicably—
“He looks at us—pfft, sorry, I have to laugh a second—oh boy—and then looks at me, and points at her, and goes: “Is she—is she—is she r&arded?”
They laughed, then laughed again at my discomfort. The r-word was already becoming one of those insults you were afraid to even quote. “Do you want the dress? We can give you a souvenir of us meeting you…”
“Oh, that’s a great idea. She’s great, Julie.”
“Isn’t she, Johnnie?”
“She’s great,” they whispered, as though they were writing it on a joint floppy disk for later. She was already in the midst of disappearing, to return with the dress all but gift-wrapped in a retro shopping bag, and herself reclothed in an amazing black-and-white confection she must have stolen from a funeral in the 1970s, like a dandelion made of polyester lace.
By then, Brett and Leslie were clustered around us, giving me a headache. Julie patted me as she gave me the beautiful dress in its beautiful package; my usable wardrobe, outside of my band shirts, work shirts, and army shorts, had thus doubled. I kept it till 2018, when things got really bad, and I lost everything.
She disappeared again and returned with a clean glass of ice water—ice? In that kitchen? How?!—and then, without saying anything, told me it was OK for me to go in the house out of the sun and lie down till the boys quit yipping.
Dazed, I obeyed, and lay on the couch in the relative dark, clutching my gift, comfortingly drunk, as they all talked about visual artist stuff; I heard their laughter, spitting, tossing stuff off the porch as the sun crawled through the sky, eating the day.
It was wonderful to think I didn’t have to work today. Just hang out with some cool people. Is that what it was like if you were an artist?
I always thought of an artist’s job as doing art, but apparently there were all kinds of other things you had to do. Hanging out wouldn’t be that much fun when you felt like you had a lot of work pressing on you. Wasn’t that what a vocation was? Infinite work? And wasn’t the hanging-out part work, too? So infinite work on top of infinite work, and most of it is stuff that…
But hang on, what kind of artist prefers hanging out to doing their art? If you like the hanging-out part, why not be a bartender? The pay is amazing. Wait… Is that why the guys in all the best known bands are such assholes? And why they only put out two albums before they start to suck? And why… why almost nobody has even heard of the bands that are really the best, unless my ears are made wrong? Goddamn…
I began to feel uneasy… there was nothing on Earth I liked less than having to talk to people, even if they didn’t turn out to be Beauregard… but if I didn’t do art, what else would be meaningful? Helping people? But people are terrible! So why bother with art? Art is for the benefit of people, too. —But it makes them better people! —Not the shit that sells. Just get drunk. —So we can end up like Paul?
Wait… ‘diagnosed’? What was she diagnosed with?!…
It was too easy for me to go from wonderful to uneasy like that.
But I guess that’s how it is, being a mortal. It’s hardly gotten better since then. It seems like a bad deal: Truth is eternal, but I die?
I guess that’s maybe why so many people have this thing against the truth.
I leapt up from the couch and went to find my Kingsley Amis.
They came inside as the sun blazed down, whatever business they had been there for concluded, and the party began. J and J had brought along TWO Huber cases. The way we drank them, though, without screaming, fucking, or throwing up—it felt like my first cocktail party. We talked about things that were ostentiously random, as one does when speaking to the celebrities of one’s world. I felt like a debutante.
I did get too drunk.
But when I awoke to start it all again the next day, I felt ready to not do the same things all over again in a wheel of comfy horror.
I felt like I had the gumption to make a particular move I had been planning… if only my new and larger paycheck didn’t somehow get swiped away from me. I had already learned not to expect anything, even if I had more than earned it. Even if I had earned it a hundred times over. Sometimes this made me depressed.
But after Julie, it made me defiant.
Previously…
Chapter One: At Home in Hotel Hell