Sisterhood of the infamo.., p.13
Sisterhood of the Infamous, page 13
Jack and Nicky wanted Jasmine to come to a rehearsal and hear us play. Her parents were musicians, they said. I knew that. Who didn’t? Who didn’t know that her mother was a percussionist, one of the only women on the studio scene in Los Angeles? Who didn’t know that her father sang backing vocals and was a guitarist for the Beach Boys with Glen Campbell, that he played for Stevie Wonder, and that he wrote songs with the Eagles? Everyone knew, of course, or everyone who knew Jasmine knew, because of how Jasmine was, with her clothes, her hair, and the girls she selected to hang out with her—the girls who were named deliberately, so their name meant something. Not like me, Jack, or Nicky, but girls named Carole with the all-telling “e,” for the actress Carole Lombard; girls named after characters in books and poems, or girls named after animals (deer, lynx, and leopards). As long as they were girls whose names came with an explanation, that said something about how they were being raised to be iconoclasts by their most unusual parents, then and only then could they be in Jasmine’s inner circle. Jasmine was named for the night-blooming trees that grew in the hills and that her father planted for her mother as a wedding present.
We knew that Jasmine’s parents were musicians because of the concerts she went to and the T-shirts she wore to school the next day. We knew Jasmine’s parents were breathlessly adjacent to fame, because of all of Jasmine’s uncles and aunts, godmothers and godfathers, and the presents they gave her—albums and sentimentally significant rings and necklaces. Jasmine wore a gold chain with a star at its center against her throat; Holly Near had given it to her or maybe Laura Nyro or maybe someone else, Maria Muldaur. It was impossible to keep up. Jasmine did not walk or run but glided on campus, propelled along by the girls who followed her—Bambi, Guinevere, Althea, Montserrat—with their paisley scarves and velvet hats. If Jasmine and her entourage were coming to one of our rehearsals, I knew we had to be ready. So I waited until my parents were out of town and began making arrangements.
I couldn’t get rid of my sister, but she was rarely home. She was in charge but too busy dancing to care what I was doing. I was taking apart my parents’ bedroom. I separated the mattress from the box spring and put both against the street-facing walls for insulation. The pillows, I put in the picture windows and held them in place by closing the wooden shutters on them. The oriental rugs in our living and dining rooms I used to float our instruments and amplifiers. I cleared the chest of drawers, moved it into my room and kept the door shut on that crime scene—that’s what my father called my room when he wasn’t calling it anarchy. The chairs from the dining room I put in semi-circular rows. We had only eight dining chairs, so it was a most exclusive venue I had put together for Jasmine, and then I invited her over.
Jack and Nicky would be there, of course, and our new drummer, an older girl, maybe she was twenty; she called herself Howard. Jack and Nicky had found her somewhere—the classifieds, through Santorini, maybe through Bev—I didn’t care. Jasmine was coming over. I expected her to say no, so I asked in a rush, telling her my parents were out of town on the other side of the world in Israel, or maybe by that time Europe. She could bring her people; we’d make it into a party. I gasped when she said yes. Jack and Nicky couldn’t quite believe it, until they convinced themselves this was not something I would lie about.
Jasmine was coming to hear us play and Jack and Nicky were convinced she’d get us into a real studio; so we could make a demo. Jasmine could get the demo to her contacts, through her parents, and then we’d get some gigs. Not out in the Valley or at The Masque where everybody could play, but at a real club, maybe as an opening act. Maybe Jasmine could get the demo to some programmers she had to have known, through her parents (maybe Rodney on the Rock) and make the demo our first hit single. Jack and Nicky also wanted to be famous, though they probably wouldn’t have admitted it. They wanted to be famous, but they just wore it better, making it less obvious, though it was right there on their mouths. They figured out how to put on lipstick the right way, so that it didn’t smear off and didn’t make them look like clowns or drunks. And they knew how to use makeup so that it was not merely painted on. It complied with their vision of themselves. Not like when we were junior high punks and the lipstick we tried went from our lips to the corners of our mouths like we were kids with grape juice moustaches. Purple lipstick: Jack and Nicky knowingly called it “smashed fig.” There was a private significance to figs for Jack and Nicky, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was. I had to find out for myself.
Jasmine came to see us in this same bedroom. The room I’m dying in now. I have lived my entire life in this room. Conception, stardom, and death. These things should not all occur in the same room. There should be more than a beginning, middle, and end to a life. There should be padding, space, breathing room, a chance to forget the embarrassing parts, and embellish the better ones. You need to create a life out of a life, but I didn’t do that. I have only this time, this event, this room where Jasmine showed up with her entourage—she traveled with a group of girls who were always with her, their faces hidden underneath big hats and long scarves so I never really knew who they were—and the people poured out of the bedroom into the hall, out of the sliding glass door and onto the patio, and we held our rehearsal. It wasn’t even a real gig. We played what we thought would be our hits, “Jail Break,” “Teacher’s Got a Rap Sheet,” and a new one, “I Hate Homework:” “So you’re going to college/But I piss on your Golden Book of Knowledge/Shove it down your throat/Everything you know is rote.” I howled out the words on that one, because I had the most credibility on this subject.
Jasmine said we had a sound and that she was glad she’d come to see us. We tried to get her to say more—to get her to make a promise. Take us to your connections, show us your inside track, and give us a chance; please, please, please, we’re desperate. I was desperate. When you’re dying, you can’t be desperate. You might inadvertently speed up the process, miss that birthday or anniversary you’re holding on for, one last milestone, one more achievement—one more chance to say that you exerted your will, this time over your dying biological systems, and you succeeded. So I am not desperate now. I am too drugged, too slow and buffeted, to exert anything or avoid what is coming. But when Jasmine was here, in this bedroom, we were four high school girls who had always gotten what we needed but not what we wanted. What we wanted most of all was an improbable, near-magical, potentially diabolical chance at being big—bigger than our parents, our teachers, and the high school seniors, bigger than anyone who had ever been bigger than us. We wanted revenge for being small, invisible, and irrelevant. And we wanted, we needed, we demanded that Jasmine give it to us.
Things started to happen pretty fast after that. We hadn’t broken through, but we had a place in line. We had a number in the queue. We did not know what the number was, but we were heroes when we got back to school after that weekend. Somehow, we had been promoted, elevated, or touched by the hand of the powers that were. I felt as though I had penetrated the nucleus of how everything is run. I was observing the mechanics of the universe. I observed the orbit of Jasmine widening to grant me admittance before it closed up again.
Jack and Nicky tried to play it cool, as though it was all inevitable. Deserved even. Someone other than Santorini wanted photos, to build us a portfolio. I was breathless. Much the same way I am now, though the sensation is far less pleasant now than it was that week. Then I was deliberately running out the clock. Until I could get to school in the mornings. Until I could get out of school in the afternoons. Until I could get to Jack’s or Nicky’s. Until I could finally get to Jasmine’s to meet her parents, see their studio, and find out how we would sound when we played in it. Until I could distract Jasmine away from the crowds that seemed to choke her and have her talk to me about my songs and my musicianship. I was going to have to use more of the minor chords if I wanted to write a real hit, something with a hook that would slither into people’s ears and then reach down to their throats. You want to compel your melody and words onto their tongues and lips. I was also in need of a look, a stage persona, and switch it on and off when I needed if I was going to be able to live through this. I was going to have to quit being such a baby about school and homework because I had to undergo an entirely new course of study. I had to learn how to really listen to music—hear how it was made and hear the contact between mouth, hands, and feet on the instruments—the banter of fingers on the keyboard, the guitar pick bright and steady as it thrashes against the guitar strings, the drumstick balanced among the fingers as it summons the cymbals, or the foot pommeling the pedal on the drums. I had to be able to use all my senses, and my commitment had to be total: I had to choose between myself and my parents, music or college, what I wanted and what people wanted for me, the friends I have now, or the friends I might get.
Jasmine walked through the front door of this house and changed my life for a couple of months. Maybe for several months. For the space of a school year, which is nine months. But a little less than that if I’m going to be accurate, because it was all over by the time I graduated from high school. Done. Finished. Everything was irreparably completed. The band’s run, the band itself, my relationship with Jasmine, and my shot at being famous. My life almost changed and then it changed back. My life has been like that shot of my front door—the camera trained on it in case someone walks up to it, out of it, or through it. But cameras are like mouths that feed off shadows, obstructions to the light, or silhouettes that manage to have more than one dimension, and there are no figures, no shadows, or silhouettes darkening my door. No one has ever walked through it as Jasmine did. No one is coming to see me. My life has been a backdrop for my parents’ lives and my sister’s. I was a yardstick for their parenting skills or the lack of them—their devotion and selflessness, though the needle ran in the other direction for some of the skills. Fill in the blanks; the answer should be obvious. All I did was provide perspective to the people who made it—Jack and Nicky and all the Jacks and Nickys out there, the people who rarely look back because they don’t need to look back. They don’t need to take stock of where they’ve been because they’re never going back. Jack and Nicky are never going to visit me and neither is Jasmine, and that is almost a relief. Because I do not have to wait, I do not have to take my turn, I do not have to be polite or patient, I do not have to do any of the things you do to hide your desperation, because I am not desperate. I am simply decided. I have been decided for some time.
Chapter 10
Sometimes, it seemed like a party, with all the people coming in and out. I guess that’s what funerals are, or wakes; reunions on unhappy occasions, though in our case, we still had the body alive and in front of us. We talked over Barbara’s body, across the big bed, while Barbara slept. Technically, Maria reminded us every so often, Barbara was not sleeping. She could hear everything we were saying. And she could understand all of it, too, like when we laughed or when we had nothing but pity to add to the conversation. Morphine was responsible for part of her silence, and exhaustion and boredom were responsible for the rest.
I told myself I was going to learn about my sister from the visitors. I thought I’d finally be given the missing pieces: the facts that explained how she came to be who she was. I wanted to know why she stopped living after the whole punk and Jasmine escapade. Or anything I didn’t already know: hobbies she picked up; acts of kindness she performed; friends she’d made who had nothing to do with all her grievances, the record business, and Jasmine; and friends untainted by the whole kindergarten-through-12th grade experience. Outside of work, Barbara had made a few lasting friendships; we called these people who were high on the notification list. But they were unavailable during the week or inconsolable about Barb’s condition. So we wound up treading over the same old experiences with familiar characters, the same years, places, and guilty parties.
“Are they coming?” Barb would ask every now and then. I knew who she was talking about, those girls from her band. But I would try to act stupid, like I had no idea who they were.
“Why didn’t they come?” she’d ask constantly, like whenever she pulled herself out of unconsciousness, and she must have thought the day had ended or was starting again. So her obsessions had to start up again with her.
I said to Barbara, “I don’t know why they’re not here. Maybe they don’t know what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?” Barb said.
“A lot,” I said. I was trying to keep things simple. “I already told you.”
“If they were coming, you’d tell me?” Barb asked, because she knew no one really liked them. Our parents didn’t like them, and the friends Barb made after high school couldn’t have liked them, since Barb must have told them all of the trials and humiliation they put her through. Always baiting her, cutting her out. Jacqueline and Nicole: they were a pair if not a couple. Barbara was the third wheel. Jacqueline and Nicole went by their nicknames, Jack and Nicky, because they made them sound tough, maybe butch, or dangerous. Barbara wanted a nickname like theirs too, but she obviously had nothing to work with. Sometimes they called her “Bra Bra” just to be casually cruel.
“If they come, you’ll wake me up?” Barb asked.
“Of course,” I said, because I had asked people—people from junior high and high school who passed through those days—where I could find them. Everyone remembered them, but no one knew where they were. They’d gone off with Jasmine to become rock stars. They were famous, I think, for a while; I wasn’t exactly paying attention. Then they came back, or they stopped being famous, or they went into hiding. Wherever the formerly famous go once they’ve been brought down by time and more upwardly famous people.
“At least your father isn’t here,” a friend of Helen’s said. Her name was Lillian, and she had gone to college with Helen. She knew Irv when he was still marriage material, fully employed and sober. “Can you imagine, he’d be out there with the reporters, telling them I don’t know what for,” Lillian said. “Then he’d be back here, hassling the nurses, acting like he was the doctor.”
“That’s not the Irv I knew,” said Alice, another one of Helen’s gang. My mother and her friends thought calling themselves a “gang” was edgy, like they spent their days marauding through department stores and tea rooms on Wilshire Boulevard.
“Nevertheless,” I said, because I could not tell whether Alice was defending our father or lamenting how far he had fallen. He supposedly had so much promise, though no one could say what that promise was for. “That was the Irv who raised you girls,” Lillian said. “I was there. I saw it.”
“You know, it’s a shame your mother’s life has to end like this,” Alice went on, and what she meant by that could have been anything—as in Helen’s life had been completely contained and packaged in this house, and once Barbara was no longer living in it, all would be lost. Or Alice might have meant that Helen had poured all her life into Barbara, her mind and emotions into the maintenance and sustenance of her younger daughter, and what did Barb do with it? But Alice couldn’t have been thinking like that; she must have understood that cancer is neither someone’s fault nor secret wish. Or Alice could have meant that I was extraneous, as unnecessary to the story of Helen’s life as Irv was. I had always been merely passing through, in and out, and I had no kind of impact. My husband reminded me, before I came to California to be with Barbara, that all this was not about me, and it wasn’t. But how could I not feel that way when I was going to be the only one left to live with the damage.
“Let’s leave Barbara alone,” I said to Alice, “and maybe make it last a little longer.” As she obediently shuffled off, Alice promised to visit in the next few days; so she couldn’t have understood the turn our conversation had taken, unless she was as dull as Helen indiscreetly said she was. I tried to take some comfort in that.
“I can’t believe I’m not going to have my little Barbara anymore,” said Leslie, who had grown up around the corner from our house. She had a sister my age, and the four of us were in Brownies and Girl Scouts together until we got to that age when Brownies and Girl Scouts became humiliating. “That’s what I used to call her, my little Barbara,” Leslie said. “What am I going to do? She was the littlest…” Leslie went on. I was tempted to say Leslie had done well enough without seeing her little Barbara for decades. But I was pacing myself. I was nursing my outrage.
“You think she’s still the littlest?” Leslie asked, but I shook my head ambivalently. “You think she remembers how I used to call her that, that I missed her?” Although together we dropped the adult-sanctioned after-school activities, it was Leslie and her sister who made the final break. The high school we were destined to attend was notorious for the usual reasons—violence, lax academics, a prison atmosphere, and an undisciplined approach to learning—and Leslie and her sister transferred to another high school with more cachet than ours, somewhere in the San Fernando Valley or west of Beverly Hills. So long as it was not seedy old Hollywood.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come by earlier, I’ve got so much going on,” Leslie said. “So much work, so many properties….” I wondered whether it was hellish to be so weighed down with tangible success, but it must come with some intangibles I could not dare to imagine, like stress. “Is there anything I can do? I know a doctor—”
