Sisterhood of the infamo.., p.14
Sisterhood of the Infamous, page 14
“Nothing that should have been done a long time ago,” I said. I don’t think Leslie understood what I meant, because she offered to pay for a masseuse, someone who could perform miracles through foot rubs. I was intrigued but also dubious, not just about miracles but also about Leslie’s ability to follow through on her promise. It might take her weeks to deliver and no one was sure how much time Barb had left.
Leslie promised to come back and possibly bring her sister, and then she dissolved in the distance, like so many other kids in the neighborhood. Everyone was seeking higher ground when we were growing up, but technically, we were living in a canyon. I couldn’t decide whether it made the social climbing natural or more desperate.
“Your sister was a good friend,” a woman named Adele said. Her face and name were familiar, but I couldn’t place her. She said she was in junior high school with Barb, that they worked on the yearbook in ninth grade together. While they were laying out the faculty pictures, they changed the name of a teacher from Smith or Richards to “Asshole,” because this was the creepy teacher who was always hanging around the girls at recess, at lunch, and after school or in class when he could pull them out of math and English. Asshole was his nickname and he might not have been a teacher; he might have been a counselor or an administrator, and everyone called him Asshole, although I don’t remember. He had a harem, a stable, or a fan club—nowadays we’d call it a cult—and all his girls used his nickname with the strictest affection, though I can’t consider how much fear there was and wonder at the attentions of an older man. In the meantime, though, changing the man’s name to Asshole went unnoticed by the editors. When the yearbooks were delivered, the Asshole was still there beside the other teachers’ names. Barb was hysterical, thinking she’d be suspended from school, possibly expelled.
The entire yearbook staff was summoned to the principal’s office. Or maybe the principal was summoned to the yearbook classroom. Adele said, as she told the story, that she was losing her grasp on the details, but she was sure about what Barbara said to her and a few other girls. “‘You guys have nothing at stake, like I have,’ or something like that,” Adele said. “She was saying, ‘you guys aren’t like me. I’m going places. I’m going to college. I can’t have this on my record. It’ll ruin everything. It doesn’t matter what happens to you.’”
“What?” I practically shrieked, because here was a missing piece I thought I wanted. But it didn’t fit. It conflicted. Barb would never think of herself as better than someone, anyone, except her big sister, or maybe Irv. We were the equivalent of financial hazardous material sites to her. I was just a plain idiot. Irv was venal, selfish, and potentially narcissistic. These were criticisms that she could explain if she needed to, criticisms that could be proven like her mathematical theorems. But she’d never do this to her friends—the friends she once had; the friends who returned as she was dying. To them she was desperately fair, egalitarian, and this her allies believed was the source of her problems. Jacqueline and Nicole certainly didn’t subscribe to this principle; they were stuck up on top of their cruelty. That was the rap against them, the rap Helen and I heard over and over again; sometimes it was the rap against Jasmine. How could someone Barbara had picked—someone she had picked for love—turn out to be so much her opposite, conceited and belittling? Some of what I thought made her so sour over the years was how she must have turned this over in her mind without ever reaching an adequate conclusion.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, thinking back to the yearbook story.
“Nope,” Adele said.
“What did you say back to her?” I asked. “I mean, what did you do? Did you do anything? I—”
“We might have laughed, I don’t know,” Adele said as she shook her head. “That’s just who she was. She was under so much pressure.”
“To do what?”
“Be on the Honor Roll, magna cum laude, win a Nobel Prize, I don’t know,” Adele said. “Whatever she was supposed to do.”
“That was a lot,” I agreed, because wasn’t this the crux of everything, when it was decided that Barb had to be able to demonstrate her genius if the world was to continue spinning, and that all my brains were in my feet? Not that I’m complaining; I loved dancing. I thought it was understood that while I was dancing, my career wouldn’t last forever and eventually I’d be forced into some kind of conventional scenario: a husband, a child, maybe even college. I wasn’t getting off easy, even though Barb told me that I was. Why did she have to be the smart one, the one with aspirations and responsibilities? And why did her aspirations have to be so acceptable? We talked a lot about this, the summer before she started college and started starving herself. The anorexic summer, or anorectic, as Helen used to say. She could never bring herself to pronounce the word properly. I thought that was about denial, but I wondered how responsible Helen felt about it all, since as a parent she must have had a say into what her daughters were supposed to do—if she even looked at us in that way.
“Your sister could be so nice, but she also could be a real whack job,” Adele concluded. I know I was wrong to take some comfort in that, some confirmation that something was definitely off in Barb; people would so rarely say it. But her statement also carried a kind of sting. Not a direct sting, but something a little far off, maybe scattered the way pain can be under anesthesia. Like with liniment or a numbing agent, camphor or eucalyptus and mint oils. If there were a way for me to avoid pain while I was dancing, I would find it. Tape on my toes, wraps around my knees and ankles. I did not power through injuries or flaws; I inoculated myself against them through any means possible. Usually they were artificial. But the time for that was over, I knew. There was nothing I could do to avoid the inevitable with Barbara, and she was going to have to do all the hard work, again, while I just watched.
Chapter 11
Rot begins from the outside. In most cases, I will concede. Gangrene, for instance, doesn’t occur spontaneously. Neither does jaundice in newborns, since there is some external event—bruising in birth, incompatibility with the mother’s blood type—that precludes the official damage. You might say that its beginnings are certainly self-generated when it comes to jaundice in old people and alcoholics. Yet didn’t some of them have to imbibe a great deal of irritants to reverse the work of their bloodstream? And for the others, the innocents who find their blood suddenly wanting: couldn’t they have lived too long, gone slow motion overboard on too much of the world’s blights and venoms? I didn’t think I’d ever die this way. I always thought I’d starve or drink myself to death, stimulus or the lack of it from the outside. Others, I recognize, aren’t so lucky and blame it on their hardware. I suppose the real answer on rot depends on where you draw the line. I’m drawing it at the skin.
I’m drawing it at the mucous membranes of the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. The digestive system and genitalia are internal and certainly not the cause for any of my issues, at least none of the issues I’m talking about here. It was what was exposed on me that invited the rot in. In other words, it was not a conscious decision. Rot was ubiquitous. It still is. An artist, for another example, may pick up rot from the audience. This is not a complaint against the free market. This is about human nature and how it can be corrupted. When you are dying, most everything boils down to human nature, particularly the intractable aspects of it. I am the same person I was in high school, everyone tells me. That’s been my problem; I demanded too much of people and I still do, even though I should know at this stage that no one is perfect. Certainly I’m not. Look at me, septic and practically disintegrating. But shouldn’t people be nicer?
Think about the artist again. Any artist, not necessarily myself, and not Jasmine. An artist, based upon the reaction of her audience, may wish to retrench or expand her repertoire. Or a previously unseen, never before digested artist may arrive and deign to present something altogether different. But the audience insists on the same routine, a kind of reclamation. Not a recycling of familiar elements per se, but the audience clamors for product that is a reflection of itself, a recognition of its own clever tastes and remembrances. If people cannot see themselves in your art, then they will have a hard time seeing your vision. So don’t make anything that is too tart or recalls too much of the ancient. You can remind the audience of its age or give them something that will be recalled as the advent of a new era, yet not so far out as the avant-garde or the difficult.
This is where the rot comes in. Success is the result of careful navigation among these thickets—the old, the new, and the repetition that reinvents not just the artist but the audience as it perceives itself. The longevity of any performer depends not on resilience but on how judiciously she attends to manipulating these elements while avoiding the rot inherent in this process. Too much of the same and rot becomes exponential, doubling, tripling, and overwrought with its own awareness. It consumes the performer, though the audience might be happy, even satiated. I know I said this was not about Jasmine, but this is the situation she mastered: the juggling of style, substance, image, and content. By the time of her death, she had poured herself through every cultural trend and every legacy. She was a punk, then a hedonist-bohemian, a woman with big hair and massive lipstick, then a savvy businessperson who knew when to call and when to bluff. She continued to thrive as a mentor, a music business sage, or stateswoman.
Jasmine did not rot. Instead she “grew up,” she “matured,” or she “aged.” She indulged in all the stages in life that I never got around to; she went from rejecting “Jasmine” to embracing it, creating a moment of national reckoning in the process. When we first met, she was “Jasmine” at school, but on stage she was the leader of The Tainted and referred to herself as “The Taint.” But as she burrowed through all the musical trends, from punk to pop to jazz, she became known for her covers of standards and orchestrating her own lush arrangements. She was “Jazz I Am” for a while and eventually became Jasmine again in a moment of homecoming, a recognition of who she truly was. She happened to come out that day as well, and her risk-taking and honesty was hailed as a cultural statement, a new day for gay rights and reconciling the gay-straight divide. I was just a lesbian from the beginning; so my sexuality, and everything about it, meant nothing.
Hence the rot: I never “came out.” I never sat my mother and sister down at the kitchen table and explained to them myself and my desires. My desires just were and always had been. There had been no phases or questioning, no softening to sweetness, to bitter and rancid. My sister says everybody’s on a spectrum and all that matters is that you find someone, but I was never that enlightened. I am a homosexual, and I like a certain type: patently gorgeous, maternal, and authoritative. I have been this way for so long that I have soured into a poison against myself. I am a study in overgrowth and fecund imaginings. If I had thicker skin, perhaps; if I had not been so open to the world, porous to its trends and afflictions; if my intelligence was not so sponge-like and I had to do more than be exposed to some material in order to master it, inculcate it completely into my being, then perhaps my life would have been different. Because once Jasmine rejected me; once I was informed of what I was, the damnable, controlling, hounding, stubborn, inhuman perfectionist, then nothing ever again happened for me; nothing in love and nothing in music. If I am going to do anything, I have to live the life that I know, what I was able to process. And I just keep reliving it, the life I had for a few weeks, a few months, and I try to figure what went wrong and who, besides myself, I might blame for it.
My sister has seemed to manage to survive a similar collapse: not in love, but in her career. It has to be the case that she survived, because if she hadn’t survived, why would she ever come back to this city, which stands in such fierce judgment of its failures. Outcasts and exiles, or the people who couldn’t make it, even though they came close: people who were shown a way in. You should come back to Los Angeles only if you’ve figured a way through—been there, done that, it was beneath me, I’ve still got my soul. If you can’t affect this attitude, then you should never leave, because you will not be permitted back. Because you have to have something to show for your time in the wilderness. Autographs, film clips, photographs of yourself mingling or interceding with the rich and fabulous. Or everyone knows that you’ve failed, because they always expected you to fail, and in these beliefs, they must be confirmed. Someone must suffer when the system does not fulfill expectations. Someone must, or how else will we know it’s working when we have invested so much in it?
My sister is talking to me. How appropriate when we are discussing rot. The least that can be said of her is that for once in her life, she has excellent timing. She hasn’t said a word to me in days, it seems, and yet she is suddenly overcome with urgent matters she must divulge. She is sorry, or she says she is. She was never a good actress: I looked it up, what the critics said about her, and they said she was a lousy impersonator of genuine emotions. She did not know how to listen or wait for the other dancers’ actions. She just danced her steps as though she were up there alone, and her execution was often small and rushed. I don’t know what all of that meant. I mean, she had music; she had to dance to it. I don’t see how she could have moved any faster than the music demanded, but there you have it. Then again, she never seemed to be able to demonstrate any patience. The cops are coming, she’s saying, and she’s going to call people, because she can’t wait any longer. She’s not supposed to call people without my permission, but the cops are coming, and she can’t stop them once they get here.
My father used to call this a “song and dance”—whenever we got excited about something and couldn’t sit still long enough to explain it to him to his courtly satisfaction. My sister is alternately moving away from the bed and then rushing back to it to squeeze me on the arm or run her hand over my forehead. This is what is coming through the static of my exhaustion-saturated consciousness. That my sister is able to move around at all, I want to tell her, is proof that she hasn’t rotted away, as I am in the process of doing, but I can’t tell her that. Even if I had the wherewithal to speak at this moment, I could not say that—without her recitation of every orthopedic insult her body has withstood in the name of her art (an art that is dying, I’d like to add)—because it’s irrelevant. The same stories, told through the same dance steps, the same costumes, the same sets, and none of it addresses what’s going on outside in the world. It’s a cult that she was in, that she’s still in, something entirely self-contained. But the rot got her anyway, didn’t it? She always thought she was better than I was because she was selfless, dedicated, and unconcerned with what people thought and stuck with it until time and her body made it impossible. She can barely walk, she likes to say. I’m dying, but she can barely walk. You decide which is the greater tragedy. Let the cops come. What are they going to do, arrest me?
I suppose the cops could arrest me and haul me off to a hospital ward. They could put me on a heart-lung machine, or a ventilator, once my kidneys failed and my liver stopped working. They could bypass the death of my life functions and keep my organs from rotting until they were ready to make a decision—let me go, keep me alive for trial, and then dispose of me with all the other killers, though imagine the confusion that would inspire. Pull the plug or kill me while the plug was still in? Just as long as I don’t rot, stink up the gas chamber and the prison. Sometimes I think of Jasmine rotting. She must be coming apart after the stiffness and bloating. Her hair will fall out, her skin will retract, and the structure of her face—what made her so beautiful, desirable, and attractive—will collapse. She will no longer stand out but be, like the rest of us, another petrified skeleton. Soon I will experience everything that she has or will, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. Death: the great leveler. It’s the timing of death that makes it a source of so much frustration.
I died when Jasmine took off for Chicago to play with The Regent. People said I should have followed her. Jack and Nicky were going. They were no longer part of her entourage like I was. They’d been promoted. They were backing musicians. Song writing partners. Muses, inspirations. But CYA was my band in the beginning. I had started it, kept those girls on a schedule, and gotten us to the point where somebody started to notice, and I wanted more. I wanted to go all the way. But I had to go to college. I owed it to my parents, and I owed it to my intellect. Someone with my smarts comes around perhaps once a century. Use it or lose it, my father threatened.
My sister didn’t have to go to college because she owed nothing to anybody. All her brains were in her feet, my father said. If she had any brains at all. Gray matter, white matter, and the fat required to power either: when they were handing out the equipment, she didn’t get the memo. There was nothing to be done to change that, so let her dance. Let her dance her head off. My father had a million explanations why she couldn’t go to college, while it was my responsibility to attend, achieve, use the gifts that had been given to me, become somebody, and make a contribution to society. I stayed behind and followed this safe route, the one dug up for me. No rotting away for me, just math. Numbers, probabilities, and binary thinking.
I stayed behind and everybody went off to Chicago, the new home of the rock ‘n’ roll vanguard. Or so it seemed in all the newspaper reviews and photographs. You’d think that Los Angeles and everything that had happened here—including CYA, just starting to get the big gigs—were entirely inconsequential. Perhaps the L.A. scene had never existed. As if I—we—had never played before 350 people at Madame Wong’s before it burned down or opened for Jasmine and her band at the Whisky. We got through a half-hour set even though there were probably more than 500 people there, 500 seething, spitting, untethered men waiting and anticipating our nerves, our gaffs, and feedback—however we could blow it and we would, because we were kids. We were green. Untrained, unarranged, possibly talented but definitely, defiantly raw. We were not like Jasmine. We were amateurs.
