How we got to L.A.
was the bus stopped here and Billy got off and without him there was nowhere left to go.
After a few weeks sleeping head to head on their manager's sectional, the manager got sick of us and helped to find us a little placeâa dark studio with its own entrance around the back of his neighbor's house right in the center of Hollywood. At that time the band was still hoping that Billy would pull it together and we would be back on the road. Aaron would have a gig again and I could quit work at the Jet Strip and we'd be moving fast to somewhere new.
Our little room was gray and tiny. Gray walls, gray carpets, gray Venetian blinds. It was so small that you could almost lie in bed and grab a beer from the minifridge without getting up. There wasn't much room for our stuff so we stacked our clothes in crates. There was a minuscule sink and a toy stove and sometimes I even cooked. Mostly frozen stuff like breaded frozen chicken cutlets, Tater Tots, and string beans, but Aaron never complained even though I know he didn't come from eating like that. His father had been a different kind of jazz musician than mine, the kind that teaches at Berklee and gets interviewed on NPR. Still, he ate the chicken I made and was careful about not making me ashamed and that seemed like reason enough to wait quietly for things to get better. We ate on the bed or on the floor and set out places like it was a picnic.
I wasn't unhappy in that waiting place, waiting for things to change. I danced four nights a week at the club and he practiced or composed or whatever during the day while I made myself invisible. I shrank into something tiny and translucent on the bed, reading and watching his back as he hunched over and played, sitting in one of those fifties kitchen chairs with chrome legs and a padded vinyl seat. It was the only other furniture in the room. He blew a few notes or strummed the guitar, then sighed and jotted things down in a notebook that rested on top of the minifridge. I could have just faded into the comforter and spent forever invisible in that room with him. If I had ever wanted more I'd forgotten about it.
We went out once in a while to shop or go to the movies. We went to parties at artists' lofts or downtown clubs. About once a week we started smoking crystal with this couple we met at one of the parties, who lived out in Thousand Oaks. We would drive home through the hills and park at the overlook along Mulholland at five in the morning, where we'd look out at the flickering lights studded across the broad plateau of land that rose and fell, rose and fell, like it was breathing. I remember thinking that we were a part of each other and part of the car and the road and part of the whole beautiful ugly city stretched out before us. Every light was like a cell in a big organism that was us, and we were it. And I understood that I was a part of something bigger than us and bigger than Zion or anyplace like it and maybe as big as music or something equally boundless.
But most nights that I didn't work we stayed home and Aaron got progressively more despondent about the band. We took more pills, drank more, smoked more dope to keep it all fuzzy and warm, but really I knew, I saw, he was sliding away from me. He lay on the bed, arms behind his head, flat gaze at the TV set. I curled sideways into him, resting my head in the curve of his neck and my hand on his belt buckle. I remember he laid his palm on my head for a heartbeat. I remember he turned his lips to my hair.
What we were waiting for was for Billy to get right, to get off the junk, to go straight. That or for Aaron to score another gig, but Aaron was so busted up about Billy letting him down that he wasn't going to any other auditions, so effectively what we were waiting for was for Billy and Billy alone to save us. Billy lived in a guesthouse as dark as ours on a heavily Russian street in West Hollywood. When we went to see him, thick ladies would stare us down as we crossed paths with them on the sidewalk. The air wasn't friendly.
Billy called with ideas. Come over right away and listen. He never went out. Half the time when we got there he'd forgotten why he called. He always invited me along as if it was an afterthought, but I knew it wasn't. I knew I was as much a part of the equation as Aaron was. For a while, when the phone rang and it was Billy, I thought it might be the news that they were going into the studio or that he was booking another tour. But that was never it. It was always some idea he had that he couldn't tell us until we came over. Or it was an invite to a swanky party, but we had to come over to his house first to get him. There was never any party but we went anyway because it was an unwritten rule of the universe that you showed up when Billy called.
The last time I saw Billy was at the funeral, but the second-to-last time was when we got the guitar. The guitar I still have now. We knocked on Billy's door and he answered in loose jeans and a green sweater with a hole worn in the chest that you could see a small circle of white skin through. His wild curls were matted nearly flat on one side. He let us in without a hello even, looking confused like he forgot he had even invited us over.
I know that Francesca stopped over and cleaned up for him once in a while, so it wasn't totally filthy, but it stank. The apartment smelled like a thousand dead cigarettes and some burning plastic mystery poison. It was a one-bedroom with a barely used kitchen off to the side that had an empty fridge with some cans of SpaghettiOs and Coke and a stick of butter from last year.
The rug was gorgeous, with a blue-green underwater different-color sheen depending on which side you looked at it from. The furniture was modern and looked like sculpture, copies of famous designers I'd never heard of. Aaron told me but I forget the names now. The futon on the floor in the bedroom was the only afterthought, but Billy said it was because he was into Zen simplicity. The painting on the wall was one block of a slowly shifting shade of gray, shot through with a yellow horizon line. Relics from a better time. Like I said. Billy was famous, or whatever that means if you're a jazz musician, but still. He was.
We sat on the couch without an invitation. He ambled over to the suitcase Fender Rhodes organ in the corner that he bought right out of a church in Tennessee one year when he rolled through there on tour. I watched as he played a scrap of something I didn't understand, humming over the top and shouting explanations of certain bars to Aaronâwhat would go where in the arrangement. His fingers were white and long and looked clean and soft, untouched by elements or dishwater or time, though Billy was at least forty. The music was a mess. Not that I really knew, but I suspected he might have been making it up as he went.
I looked up at the ceiling. Directly above me was a spider spinning a web. The spider hovered for a minute. If the spider went left, I thought, they would tour again soon and everything would be okay. The spider went right. I wished even then that I could stop looking for signs.
“I dig it, man,” Aaron said when he was done. “When can the other guys hear it? When can we play it?”
“Soon, man, soon. I'm not ready. When I'm ready we play it. Now, run out and get us a bottle to celebrate, because I'm out. Leave your lady here to help me cook.”
He was punishing Aaron for bullshitting him. He knew it wasn't any good. And there wasn't anything to celebrate. But another unwritten rule of the universe was that you gave Billy what he asked for. Aaron left grudgingly.
When he was gone, Billy moved over to the couch and opened a funny little swing-out drawer in the cherrywood end table and pulled out some blackened foil with a halfsmoked glob of tar heroin sitting at the end of a charred trail in the center of it. I'm pretty sure he was shooting the dope when no one else was around. But socially he smoked it.
“Fucking California,” he said, meaning the dope. It was better in New York.
He lit a lighter underneath it and took a long hit off it before offering it to me. Aaron and I were by no means full-blown junkies like Billy, but we were chipping pretty regular by then and we were well on our way. It was Billy who had turned us on in the first place. I took the straw, soggy wet with his spit, and pulled a hit of smoke through it, leaning back against the couch and holding it in my lungs for as long as I could. And there it was. The okay. I imagined the fixing, the healing, the profound experience of relief traveling through the walls of the capillaries in my lungs and being carried by my blood vessels to the very extremities of my body. Like the films they show you in health class that explain the respiratory system and the circulatory system. Breathe in oxygen, breathe out carbon dioxide. Except it was heroin. Breathe in heroin. I wouldn't ever breathe it out if I didn't have to. I would stay there, breath held, time stopped, in my bubble of okay.
“I need a lady,” said Billy, dragging his gaze off the ceiling and onto me.
I breathed out, keeping my eyes trained on the light fixture. “You need to go out more to get a lady.”
He sighed, real dramatic, and we sat there for a while, him looking at me and me pretending like I didn't notice. I loved Aaron desperate crazy but I still wanted to kiss Billy right then. I think it was because Billy had a way of making me feel needed, as opposed to my suspicion that I was eventually going to be expendable as far as Aaron was concerned. Of course, Billy didn't really need me, either. But it didn't cost him anything to pretend.
“You play anything?” he asked. I'm pretty sure he knew I didn't.
“No. My dad was a horn player. But I don't play. I wish.”
“Right. Everyone says that. I wish I could play. What would you play?”
“I don't know. Maybe guitar. Nothing fancy. But just to be able to play a song.”
“Pick it up,” he said, pointing to the vintage Martin sitting on the unmade futon in the other room.
“No. I don't even want to touch that thing. I'll drop it or something.”
“You'd only drop it on the bed. Come on. Pick it up.”
I felt like I was doing something wrong when I sat down on the futon and put the guitar in my lap with my hand loosely around the neck like I was waiting for a request. I was flushed in the face and foggy from the drugs. Something about Billy made me red in the face and chest.
“Looks good on you,” he said. Then he walked over and sat down behind me.
He put his left hand over mine and moved each of my fingers to an uncomfortable spot.
“Strum it.”
I tentatively ran my thumb across the strings. It sounded awful.
“Press harder and try again.”
I did. And there was a chord. The most perfect thing, a chord.
We sat there playing like that for a minute. Then he formed the chord shapes with his left hand and I strummed the strings with my right. He pressed his chest against my back and rested his face against my hair. It was so strange to lean into him. I never even touched his hand usually. We weren't cozy; he was more like that with Aaron. He smelled like little boy sweat, like he'd been running around outside in the cold, sweating under his big coat. But I knew he hadn't been outside in days.
He played “Dead Flowers” and he sang light into my ear and it was nothing really. Like standing with my back to the band during sound check and feeling the music close to me, but not close enough. I knew when we put the guitar down it would be like it had never happened. He was just making me uncomfortable because he could. And because Aaron and I were caught in his web. His grip grew tighter as his world got smaller. Billy had to burn down everything around him and rise from the ashes again and again. That's what kept things interesting for him. Stick around long enough, you knew you would wind up a casualty, too. But you stuck around anyway.
When the song ended he left me sitting on the bed with the guitar.
“Do you like yourself?” he asked.
“Ask another question.”
Aaron came in then. Stood in the door with the paper bag in his arm. He had picked up some cereal and milk along with the scotch.
“Any luck with the SpaghettiOs?” he asked.
He didn't mind, really. It was only Billy. It was only a few chords. It was only me, after all, and I wasn't going anywhere.
There were no SpaghettiOs made, so I poured three bowls of Cheerios while he broke ice from the plastic molds in the freezer and poured two fingers of scotch into each of the heavy crystal glasses. Billy was married once. He still had the crystal.
He handed me the guitar as I walked out the door.
“To borrow. To learn on.”
Only when Billy gave me the guitar did Aaron start to bristle. Once we were in the car, he said, “What the hell were you two talking about? Do you have any idea how much that guitar is worth?”
I still have the guitar. I still haven't learned a thing.
Part of me never wants to see Billy again and part of me knows that I see him every day in my head anyway. Every day I think of Aaron and I find that Billy is there, too, our strange little triangle. I pretend I'm fighting to live in the present but really I'm having an affair with the past every secret moment. Talking to Billy feels like the most delicious admission of guilt. I've been pretending to be with a crazy man when really I've been with you all along.
We agree to meet at eight at a local Indian restaurant. It's the night before graduation.
1592 hours down. 8 hours left to go.
Twenty
I
shower back at the house and borrow a black dress from
Chandra that is too small for my boobs, too fancy for Indian food, and too flimsy for the cold weather. I pull on a tight pair of fishnets. In dim light, when I wear fishnets, you can't see the scars on my legs unless you look close.
The bodice of the dress boosts my now quite spectacular tits into a perfectly sculptured rolling porno landscape. I am pitched sideways with a strange sadness and a new stirring of what I suspect is anger. Anger at this alien being in my body and anger at myself for the thousand obvious reasons. Everything looks blown clear by a cold wind. I am that kind of altered. As I dress I feel wildly reckless. Thoughts of Jake and the echo of his slap roll through me in unguarded moments. Fuck him, I think, looking in the mirror and teasing my hair into a sixties-style half updo resembling Javier's Sharon Tate doll. And fuck me. Fuck me while you're at it.