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Overview
Wickedly funny, realistic, and poignant, The Exes sheds a knowing light on the compromises and connections we all make in avid pursuit of our ambitions and dreams.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780684854427 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 07/02/1999 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From Part One: Hank
He used to wake up to the grit of Lilly's never-washed sheets, the smell of stale cigarettes, her clunky rings that fell off in the night and always ended up underneath him. It wasn't just the rings. Lilly's bed had been full of sharp objects. He'd wake up with a stabbing pain in his side and find that he'd been sleeping on a plastic army man or a barrette or a pencil stub or a Lucite ring.
Whatever it was, it would leave a weird set of wrinkles on his skin. In the beginning he had loved this, the way her bed branded him. After their first night together, he had tumbled out of her futon, pulled on his clothes and run to work because he was late; once he made it to the record store -- chest still heaving from the sprint down Mass. Ave. -- he'd lifted his shirt to show his coworkers the damage.
"Jesus," Sean had said, touching the marks. "What did she do to you, man?"
"It's her bed," Hank had explained, glowing with that new-relationship optimism. "Her bed is like the five-cent box at the Salvation Army. You wouldn't believe it. She does all her projects while she's lying under the covers. She's got everything in there -- glue stick, scissors, toys."
In those first weeks, he meditated on Lilly all day long. As he stood behind the cash register, he would keep pretending to scratch his nose; this was so he could continually get whiffs of her pussy. He never washed the smell of her off his fingers if he could help it. And those marks that her bed left on his skin -- the wrinkles, the indentations -- he almost wished they would last forever, instead of fading away entirely, his skin turning flat and blank again, as if nothing had ever happenedic," he'd said. "Man, you've got to cut her loose. Her mood ring's gone permanently black, you know what I mean?"
And it was true: something was seriously wrong with Lilly, something that couldn't be cured by cigarettes or megavitamins or valerian tea. She had this disease that basically came down to her needing to be the center of attention at all times. She wore boas and striped stockings, platform shoes and a long ski hat that hung like a tail from her head; her voice sounded on the edge of hysteria, and you never knew when she was going to burst out laughing or burst into tears, insult you in front of your friends, crash your bike into a telephone pole, or yell at a cop. This was not all bad. In fact it was what attracted him in the beginning. She had so much white-trash poetry about her, the wildness of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Wanda Jackson all rolled into one. She made his heart bang like a rockabilly drumbeat.
When he was still in high school, he heard an obscure sixties song called "The Green Fuz" for the first time -- somebody played it for him on a falling-apart stereo. The song sounded like it had been recorded in a basement on moldy tapes; you could just make out the furry sounds of the guitar chomping down on the melody, and the singer growling, "Come along, baby, and see where we go. We're the Green Fuz." That was it, the original garage-band sound, the first American punk rock, a primitive blast of outrage that sat like a heap of steaming dung on top of the minty-fresh wasteland of his suburban teenage life. Once he heard "The Green Fuz," he understood that guys like him -- guys with Ivory Soap skin and a drizzle of blond hair, guys from the Midwest who'd been Eagle Scouts - - guys like him could be raw, too. And right at that moment he began aching to make that kind of music, an ache that had never left him since.
The first time he saw Lilly, she was pogoing center stage at the Rat, her dreadlocks flying. He'd threaded his way through the crowd until he stood behind her so he could watch how she slitted her eyes as she bumped against the people around her. Her face was so shiny -- at first he thought she was drenched in sweat, and then he realized that she was crying.
"Don't cry," he said. Actually he'd had to yell it into her ear. And then she'd opened her eyes, put her arms around him, and they'd sort of slow-danced. Corny as it sounds, this all seemed perfectly natural at the time. More than natural. It seemed as if they were following a script.
And maybe it was part of the script, too, that their whole girlfriend-boyfriend thing would last only a year. It ended after the eight-track incident, as they later called it. They'd been standing in his room screaming at each other about something -- he couldn't even remember what afterward -- and Lilly had reached out a steel-tipped combat-booted toe and stepped on one of his eight-track tapes. She broke it with a twisting motion of her ankle, as if she were stubbing out a cigarette.
"Oh my God," he said, dropping down on his hands and knees to examine the shards. "This is Kiss's Love Gun. Do you know how many yard sales I went to before I found this?"
"Is that all you can say? You care more about your stupid tapes than me."
"You bet I do," he said, standing up and leaning near her, straining toward some awful moment.
"Well, fuck you," she yelled. And then she pushed over a pile of eight-tracks and beg an stomping on them, throwing them around until his room was hung with black streamers of tape and bits of the plastic cases.
None of their fights had ever before led to the destruction of rare musical media -- that was the thought that kept running through his mind. It seemed like they'd crossed some line together. He had stood absolutely still as she threw the tapes around, barely flinching when one of them hit his face. He'd felt like a slow-motion man stuck in the middle of a fast-motion film -- immobilized with anger, all his muscles tensed. He thought that if he moved at all, he would punch her, slam her against the wall, stick one of those tape shards into her eye.
And then, while he was still stuck there, she had stormed out and left him in the sudden silence of a room draped in black bunting. He knew then how deep the marks went, those wrinkled marks of daily hurt and insult. They wriggled all over his skin; they burrowed into his brain. He stumbled into the bathroom and leaned over the toilet. He thought he was going to puke, but nothing came out.
After the eight-track incident, they'd avoided each other for a week or so. Finally, they'd met at a diner to hash it all out. When Lilly slid into the booth opposite him, he sensed something between them had changed. She was oddly lucid and calm that night; so was he. Their madness together seemed to have broken like a fever.
There were certain meals with girlfriends he'd always remember, like the lime-and-peanut-flavored noodles he and Deb ate before they kissed that first time, lips still burning with spice; or the dripping containers of Chinese food that he and Kelly had once wolfed down as they sat out on her roof. With other women t hose important meals -- meals that felt like perfect moments of understanding -- came at the beginning of relationships. But with Lilly, the important meal came at the end.
They sat in Dell's Diner and ordered a piece of pecan pie with two forks. But when the pie came, they hadn't used the forks; instead, they'd taken turns picking pecans off the top of the pie. They'd eaten entirely with their hands, leaving a slick of yellow-goo pie filling untouched on the plate. He remembered watching her fingers, how her rings flashed with each delicate movement.
"Why are we so mean?" she'd asked him. "How does it start? I never notice it starting. It's like we're little kids who don't know how to play nicely together. We need some adult to come along and tell us to behave."
"I know," he said. "We always get so hysterical around each other." He meant that she got hysterical, but he didn't want to say that.
"So what are we going to do?"
"Well," he said, chewing reflectively on a pecan. "I guess we're going to have to figure out how to get along better."
"What if the only way is to break up?" she said. "I've been thinking that's maybe the only way. Were you thinking that?"
"No, but that makes perfect sense," he said. "God, that really depresses me."
"Actually, it might not be all that bad." She lit a cigarette and then passed it to him, as if they were inmates in the same cell. "I've already thought about it. I had this idea that we could be something else besides boyfriend and girlfriend."
"What do you mean? You mean like 'Let's just be friends'? Please, Lilly, don't start."
"No, no, no," she said, leaning forward.
"Well, what?"
"We could play music together." He remembered how she said t hat, looking straight at him with her gold eyes. Later he thought that maybe the moment he and Lilly broke up, they also fell in love. Not romantic love, but a new kind of love he didn't know the name for. Maybe he'd always been attracted to her as an artist; maybe their sexual relationship had been a rehearsal for some deeper connection.
Looking back years later, he realized how he'd been preparing her. When they met, she could pick out a few measly chords on her guitar; by the time they broke up, she could play anything from Led Zeppelin III. He'd spent a lot of time jamming with her, had helped her install a whammy bar on her Gibson and given her a bunch of effects boxes.
While they were sleeping together, they hadn't been able to jam together without ending up in a fight. He'd find himself nit-picking, always turning into her teacher. "Lilly, that bar chord is sloppy. Try to hold on tighter," he'd hear himself say, regretting it even as it came out of his mouth.
A comment like that could reduce her to tears. "I can't. I can't do it just the way you do, Hank," she would say. But all the while she was learning so fast it frightened him. He'd been noodling on his guitar since he was a kid, and here she was keeping up with him, improvising little melody lines as he played chord changes for her. He hated the idea that someday he might not have anything left to teach her.
Back then, back when they were sleeping together, she'd come up with ideas for songs and he'd almost always shoot them down. Months after they broke up, though, her ideas haunted him like the ghosts of songs, like tunes you half remember and can't get out of your head. She'd wanted, for instance, to tie a walkie -talkie to a microphone and sing to it from another walkie-talkie; she would be standing in another room -- maybe outside the house entirely -- as he accompanied the walkie-talkie with his guitar. At the time, he thought she'd come up with this idea just to be a pain in the butt. "The reason people play in the same room is so that they hear each other," he'd growled. "Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think that's important."
"Forget it. Just forget it," she'd said, and stormed out.
But months after they'd split, his instinct for what would make good music began to kick in again. He had to admit the walkie-talkie thing might have worked. It would have been a great gimmick on stage, anyway. One thing was for sure: it was better than any of the lame ideas his bandmates had come up with. He'd been in plenty of bands over the years -- bands that got mediocre reviews in grotty little fanzines; bands that posed together on the boardwalk, with Sonic Youth scowls on their faces; guitar-hero bands where everyone tried to drown each other out. He recognized in Lilly something that none of those pouting guys had -- something he didn't have himself.
So he'd called her and asked if she really wanted to be in a band with him. By this time, she'd fallen in love with some art fag, and he was going out with his upstairs neighbor, so the sexual thing was no longer an issue. "Sure I want to be in a band, Hank," she said over the phone. "I knew you'd come crawling back to me eventually." And then she'd laughed her just-this-side-of-hysteria laugh.
When they got together to practice that first time, she'd sat on her bed and he'd settled on a pile of dirty laundry on the opposite side of the room. They'd b een ultrapolite.
"Maybe you should speed that up a little," he'd heard himself say.
"Okay. Like this?" she would say, and try different kinds of riffs until he nodded.
And suddenly there was this good thing between them. It reminded him of one of his favorite tasks at work -- giving the guys in the warehouse instructions over the phone. Hank, who'd worked at the store for years, knew every inch of that warehouse. But the warehouse guys came and went -- they got promoted, or quit, or only worked during the summer -- so when they needed to find something they'd call him up. "Yo, man," they'd say. "We got some orders for Nancy Sinatra. We can find Frank but no Nancy."
"Okay, you see that stack of wooden crates?" he'd say.
"Um, wait a sec, okay, yeah."
"Now walk to your right." Hank would keep giving careful directions, moving the guy all around the warehouse until he was standing in just the right spot. Sometimes Hank would feel this incredible oneness with the person on the other end -- the guy who was letting Hank move his body around the warehouse, turn his head, look through his eyes. That was the kind of oneness he felt with Lilly now. Together they were exploring this vast, dark warehouse full of music. He knew the way around, but she was the one who could see and feel; she was the one who could reach up and grasp what glimmered in the half-light on the highest shelf.
"Why don't you work on some of your songs?" Hank told her after their first session. Making up songs was never a problem for Lilly. The next time they practiced, she began strumming her guitar and singing in the earnest, breathy way of a kid chanting a nursery rhyme: "If you peel off my Band-Aid do it quick, because it only hurts when you let it stick." The whole song was about Band-Aids; it sounded like a lullaby your dead aunt would sing to you in a dream.
A few days later, Lilly had called with that hysterical pitch in her voice. "I have to talk to you right now," she'd said. "I know what our band should be named. Okay, okay, you ready? We'll call ourselves the Exes. And the thing is, we will be exes -- everyone in the band will have gone out with someone else in the band."
"What?" He'd forgotten how intense Lilly could get. "We've only practiced twice. Let's not name this thing until we're sure it's going to work."
"No, no, I've figured it all out," she said. He could imagine her pacing around her room, smoking so furiously that she lit a new cigarette even before she stubbed out the old one.
"What did you say? The Exes? Everyone will get us confused with X. They'll think we're trying to be an X cover band."
"No," Lilly said impatiently. "I already thought of that. For one thing, X is broken up, so they're not around anyway. And on top of that, we'll have the gossip factor. Like, okay, everyone will hear about us and they'll say, 'That band is made up entirely of exes? Well, who went out with who? And how do they all get along now?' I'm telling you, Hank, people are going to go nuts trying to figure out how ex-boyfriends and -girlfriends can stand to be around each other enough to be in a band -- that will make us instantly intriguing."
Back when he was sleeping with Lilly, he would have said, "Forget it. This is crazy." But as her bandmate, he could see her idea had a certain genius. "So what about the other band members," he said. "I mean, do we have to sleep with them? What if the only drummer we can get is Roddy -- are you willing to do that for art?"
"No, silly. We can't sleep with someone just to get them in the band. That's cheating. We have to find people we've already gone out with. Or people who've gone out with each other."
Neither of them could think of any other exes that they wanted to be in a band with. "I guess we'll just have to find an ex-couple. What we really need is a bassist and a drummer," Hank said. "A bass player and a drummer who went out with each other, broke up, and now get along fine. That's not going to be easy."
But once he started asking around, he realized how incestuous the rock world was. All you had to do was locate the women rockers: every one of them had a whole constellation of musician exes.
Copyright © 1998 by Pagan Kennedy
Table of Contents
ContentsI. Hank
II. Lilly
III. Shaz
IV. Walt