Daria opens her eyes and squints at the dazzling slivers of sunlight leaking in around the edges of the thick hotel drapes. Alex must have drawn them. She can hear him snoring softly behind her, hogging most of the bed. And she can hear someone b.u.mping about in the hall outside the room and tries to remember if she hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. She blinks at the light, unable to recall any details of the nightmare that woke her. She used to write her dreams in a notebook, because Dr. Dalby said there might be something that would help Niki, but she stopped doing that a long time ago.
Daria looks at the clock radio and is relieved to see it"s still early, still five minutes till noon, so there"s plenty of time for her to get her s.h.i.t together, maybe even eat some-110 thing before the Tower Records thing. If she"s lucky, she might have another twenty or thirty minutes before Jarod starts calling to make sure she"s up and moving, to make sure she"s sober and in the same city, the same state, the same time zone, as the rest of the band.
She pushes back the blanket and sheets, the heavy down comforter, and sits up, naked and shivering, wanting a cigarette but needing to p.i.s.s worse, wondering where her clothes have gone. Alex"s faded Pixies shirt is tangled in the covers, so she slips it on and then goes to the bathroom without trying to wake him. Alex sleeps like the dead and wakes like a grizzly bear on crack, and she knows better than to try to get him moving before there"s lots of strong black coffee on hand.
Daria flips on the bathroom light and almost manages not to see her reflection in the big mirror above the sink until she"s wiped herself dry and flushed. Then she sits on the toilet, still shivering, staring back at her face, and wonders what kind of fool would want to see themselves taking a squirt first thing in the morning.
"You look like h.e.l.l," she whispers. "You know that, don"t you? You look like death on a bad day."
Through the bathroom wall, she can hear the barely m.u.f.fled roar of a vacuum cleaner from the room across the hallway and thinks about offering the maid a fifty to find some other room to clean, another room at the other end of the hall or, better yet, on another floor altogether.
It"s hardly been eighteen hours since she left the house on Alamo Square, and already it seems like another life, someone else"s life, almost as unreal now as the forgotten nightmare. That house and Niki, something she keeps trying to wake up from. She thinks about Alex, asleep on the bed, Alex holding her in the night, the solid, undeniable fact of him, and the thought brings hardly any guilt at all. Ten years of her life spent watching out for Niki, and she wasn"t lying when she told Alex that she still loved her. Ten years making sure Niki was safe, that she was taking her meds, that she didn"t hurt herself, and there"s nothing left. No more 111.
she can do. Nothing but regret that what she did was never enough, and there"s no way she can ever save Niki Ky.
Need and desire are not enough. There was a time when she thought they could be, somehow, if she believed, if she gave everything she had, but that time"s pa.s.sed, and she knows that it"ll never come again.
"Hey, you stole my f.u.c.kin" shirt," Alex says, mumbling around a cigarette, and Daria wonders how long he"s been standing there in the doorway, watching her. He"s naked, and she smiles at the small tattoo on his left hip-a grinning, winged cupid armed with a machine gun. He got that years before they met, the price of a bet he lost to some former girlfriend or another. Every now and then, he talks about having it removed, but she doubts he ever will.
" "Hey" yourself. I thought you were asleep," she says.
"Yeah, well, you p.i.s.s louder than any woman I"ve ever known."
"You"re saying I woke you up taking a p.i.s.s?"
"Sounded like G.o.dd.a.m.n Niagara Falls in here."
"Shut up and give me a cigarette," she says, and he takes another long drag, then gives her his.
"What are you doing in here, anyway?" he asks and then ma.s.sages his bloodshot eyes.
"Niagara Falls, remember?"
"I"m gonna call room service and get some f.u.c.king coffee and s.h.i.t," he says. "You want anything?"
"I should probably eat something."
"Yeah, you probably should. You"re skin and bones, you know that? Want a m.u.f.fin? I bet they have m.u.f.fins."
"Yeah," she replies. "A m.u.f.fin would be good," but her stomach roils at the thought of solid food.
"Well, if they ain"t got m.u.f.fins, you want some toast and jam?"
"Sure. Whatever."
Alex nods his head, scratches himself a moment, then turns around and disappears into the darkness.
"And turn on a light," she shouts after him, "before you trip over something and break your neck."
112.
A few seconds later, she hears him pulling the drapes open, and he curses as the bright midday sun floods the room. Daria looks back at the mirror, at her pale face and matted, bleach-stripped hair. Her face that looks like it"s aged ten years in the last five, and she wishes she could go back to bed, back to Alex, and forget about the signing and the show and everything else.
She stands up and turns on the tap, icy water gushing into the marble sink, and sets her cigarette down on the edge of the counter. Daria splashes her face and the back of her neck, gasping as the cold stings her skin, dragging her the rest of the way awake. She bends over and dunks her head into the basin, sloshing water out onto the floor.
The gurgle from the tap is so loud that she can"t hear anything else, and she holds her breath and keeps her head in the sink as long as she can stand it.
The white hotel towel smells too clean, like detergent and fabric softener, but it feels good against her face, against her scalp, and when she"s done, most of her hair is standing straight up.
"They have m.u.f.fins," Alex shouts. "You want blueberry or bran?"
"Blueberry," she shouts back, reaching for her cigarette.
It"s a little damp, but she hardly notices, the nicotine just about her best friend in the world right now.
"They say they"re out of blueberry," Alex yells.
Daria frowns and drops the wet towel on the tile at her feet. "You just asked me which I wanted."
"I didn"t know they were out. He just f.u.c.kin" told me."
"I f.u.c.king hate bran m.u.f.fins. Everyone hates bran m.u.f.fins."
And she hears him ordering her toast.
"You want blueberry or strawberry jam?" he shouts.
"Surprise me," she mutters, just loud enough that she won"t have to repeat herself, no longer interested in trying to eat. She turns off the water and flicks the b.u.t.t of her cigarette into the toilet. It drowns with a faint hiss. She steps out of the bathroom, and the sunlight through the balcony doors is disorienting and hurts her eyes.
113.
"He didn"t tell me they were out of blueberry," Alex says again, stepping into a pair of boxers. "I don"t know why he didn"t tell me that to start with."
"It doesn"t matter. I"m not hungry, anyway. If I tried to eat right now I"d probably just throw it up. I need a drink."
Alex stops rummaging through a navy-blue backpack and glances at the pint of Seagram"s still sitting on the floor near the foot of the bed. "Try to eat some of the toast first, Dar," he says. "Just a few bites? Maybe a cup of coffee, yeah?"
"Let"s not start in with that right now, Alex. I"m not in the mood for mothering. My head hurts, and I"m cold, and my stomach"s killing me, and I want a drink, not a lecture on nutrition."
"Put on some clothes if you"re cold."
"Just lay off, okay?"
He sighs and goes back to digging through the backpack. "It"s your funeral, love. Just don"t expect me to hang around for the service, if you get my drift."
"I get your f.u.c.king drift," she says and sits down beside his guitar case. "No one"s asking you to hold my hand. I need a lover, not a nursemaid."
"That, dear, is a matter of opinion."
While Alex dresses, Daria sits on the floor drinking bourbon and staring at the city and the gray-blue sky beyond the balcony doors. For a moment, she can"t remember what month it is, what season, summer or spring or autumn, but the confusion pa.s.ses, the way it always does.
She never loses her way for very long. This is where I am, this is when I am.
"Maybe you better turn the ringer back on," Alex says, and she looks at the phone on the end table beside the bed.
The red-orange message light is blinking urgently. "I bet your cell"s off, too. I bet you had it off all night."
"As a matter of fact," she replies and watches the blinking light as she takes a drink of bourbon. It hits her empty stomach like a small grenade, and she closes her eyes until the pain pa.s.ses.
114.
"If you"re gonna puke, aim away from the guitar."
"I"m not going to puke," Daria whispers, though she might. It"s always a possibility. She opens her eyes again and stares at the phone.
"There"s a message. It might be important," Alex says.
"It"s always important. When was it ever not f.u.c.king important?"
"Would you rather talk to Jarod or have him pounding on the door?"
And she almost slips, then, almost says, That"s not what I"m afraid of, Alex. It might be Niki, or Marvin, but she catches herself and doesn"t say anything at all. The pain in her belly is melting as the Seagram"s warms her from the inside out, and she"s beginning to feel a little less lost, a little more in control. It isn"t Niki on the phone, and it isn"t Marvin. It"s only Jarod Parris or someone else that she has absolutely no desire to talk to. She looks away from the phone and takes another swallow of whiskey.
"I promised you"d be sober," Alex says and zips his backpack closed.
"You shouldn"t make promises I can"t keep," she tells him. "That"s pretty much the same thing as lying."
"You know, Dar, I bet Keith Barry used to say s.h.i.t like that to you. h.e.l.l, I wouldn"t be surprised if you were quoting the motherf.u.c.ker."
And for a moment she"s too stunned to reply, to tell him to shove it up his self-righteous, hypocritical a.s.s, too stunned to do anything but sit there on the floor and stare at the morning light shining through the last couple of inches of amber liquid in the bottle.
"You ever let yourself think about that?" Alex asks, sitting down on a corner of the bed. "You"re a smart girl. You don"t need me to connect the dots for you."
Daria screws the cap back on the bottle and considers hurling it at the sliding doors, wonders if she could throw it hard enough to shatter the tall sheets of plate gla.s.s.
"That"s not fair," she says very softly. "That"s not fair, and you know it."
115.
"You think? Then tell me this-just how long"s it been since you went a whole day without getting wasted?"
"Keith was a junky-"
"And you"re an alcoholic. Six of one, half dozen of the other, babe."
"Jesus, you"ve got some f.u.c.king nerve," she says and laughs a dry, dead sort of a laugh. "Where the h.e.l.l do you get off saying something like that to me?"
"I should have said it a year ago. I should have said it after that s.h.i.t you pulled in London."
"I"m not a G.o.dd.a.m.n alcoholic," and Daria wraps her right hand tightly around the neck of the Seagram"s bottle, thinking again about flinging it at the balcony doors. She imagines the satisfying explosion as the gla.s.s shatters, raining whiskey and deadly razor shards to the street twenty-seven stories below. She imagines people on the sidewalk, hearing the noise, looking up- "h.e.l.l, Dar. I don"t expect n.o.body in this f.u.c.ked-up business to stay clean twenty-four/seven. They"d have to be a b.l.o.o.d.y saint or something. But you"re falling apart, and I can"t stand by and watch it happen."
"What are you saying, Alex?" she asks him, not wanting to hear the answer, but not strong enough to keep the question to herself, either.
"All I"m saying is there"s some heavy s.h.i.t you gotta deal with, love, and you gotta do it soon. I"m saying I can"t pretend to look the other way anymore. I"ve been doing that too long as it is."
"It"s your f.u.c.king bottle, a.s.shole," she says and holds it up. He reaches down and takes it from her.
"Yeah, it is. Maybe that"s where we have to start."
Daria stares at her empty hand for a moment, the ghost of the bottle still pressed into her flesh.
"Don"t f.u.c.king talk to me about Keith Barry, you understand? Not ever again. If it makes you feel better about yourself to tell me I"m a drunk, fine, whatever, but that"s the last time I want to hear his name from your lips."
116.
Alex nods, then tosses the bottle into the air, end over end, and catches it.
"You have no idea what you"re talking about. You weren"t there and you have no idea-" and she stops, her voice too unsteady to continue. Too close to tears and the last thing she"s going to do now is let him see her cry.
"b.u.g.g.e.r," he says, shrugs and tosses the bottle again, catches it again. "Fair enough. All I know is what you"ve told me. But the rest of this-"
"Can wait," she says and reaches for her panties lying on the carpet near the guitar case. She sniffs at them and tries to remember the last time she put on a clean pair. Not San Francisco, so it must have been Little Rock, the night Marvin called to tell her that Niki had tried to kill herself. Not even three days, but it feels like at least three weeks.
"Yes ma"am," Alex says. "You"re the boss," and then there"s a loud knock at the door, three sharp raps, and Daria"s heart jumps. But it"s only room service, just the breakfast she has no interest in, the toast and jam instead of a blueberry m.u.f.fin.
"Just a second," Alex shouts, pulling on his jeans. "I"m coming."
When he goes to the door, Daria picks up the bottle of whiskey again and wonders if there"s enough left to get her through the next few hours.
Excerpt from "Outside the Vicious Circle: A Conversation with Daria Parker" ( Women Who Rock, March 2002; pp. 28-29): WWR: Is there any chance that you"ll ever record any of the songs you wrote with Stiff Kitten or, going even farther back, Yer Funeral or Ecstatic Wreck?
DP: I don"t think so. Stiff Kitten is a place and a time I"d prefer not to revisit. It was important to me, that band and those songs, and the things I learned back then. I probably couldn"t have gotten where I am now without 117.
them. But they"re still part of the past. I"m not a very nostalgic person. I"m more interested in the songs that I haven"t written yet than the songs that I wrote when I was really still just a kid. As for Yer Funeral, I think the best thing you could say about Yer Funeral is that we didn"t last very long, and we were really f.u.c.king loud.
Loud was important. I was determined to be as loud as the boys, all those punker a.s.sholes who acted like girls had no place in the scene. It was a big deal to me back then, standing my ground. And I think it was even worse, being stuck in a place like Birmingham. I was lit-erally the only woman doing what I was doing, and so I got a lot of resentment for that. It was a boy"s club, you know, and I think I definitely threw a wrench into their d.i.c.k-measuring contests.
WWR: In the piece that Rolling Stone did last year, they describe the death of Keith Barry (guitarist for Stiff Kitten) as a turning point in your career. Do you think that"s true?
DP: Yeah, well, Rolling Stone was talking out their a.s.s, which is nothing new. I didn"t even have a career back then. All I had was my ba.s.s and a c.r.a.ppy job at a coffee shop and a junky boyfriend. After Keith died, I didn"t even have that anymore. I mean, he died and that was the end of Stiff Kitten and it was almost the end of me.
It"s the sort of thing I look back on now and I don"t even begin to understand how I lived through it, or why I bothered. I think, mostly, I was too p.i.s.sed at him to give up. He was really good-f.u.c.king genius good-and he just p.i.s.sed it away that night in Atlanta. So yeah, I guess it was a turning point in the sense that it tore everything in the world down and forced me to start over from scratch. It forced me to find ways to stay alive when all I wanted to do was lie down and die. But I don"t like calling it a "turning point" in my career. That seems to trivialize Keith"s death, somehow. It"s what happened, 118 and we are who we are, all of us, because of the things that happen to us.
WWR: It"s pretty obvious that some of the songs on Exit West were an attempt to express your feelings about his death and its effect on you, and maybe your feelings on suicide in general. I"m thinking, of course, of "Seldom Seen," but also "Bleeding Day" and "Standing Near Heaven."
DP: You don"t live through a suicide, no matter who you are, whether it"s accidental or intentional, without it leaving a profound mark on what you do. If you"re an artist, it comes out in your work, sooner or later, at least if you"re any sort of honest artist. If you"re a writer, how do you not write about it? Even years later, you still find yourself thinking about it, having bad dreams about it, writing about it, wondering what you didn"t do that might have prevented it, or what you did do that might have caused it. It colors the whole world. It turns everything into guilt and confusion and bitterness. When Keith died, I think my first reaction, after the shock, was anger. I was furious because I knew-I f.u.c.king knew- that he"d changed everything forever, and no matter what I did, I could never, ever make it the way it was before. Even if I somehow made it better someday, he"d taken a choice away from me and forced me into this other place for the rest of my life. He"d punched this big f.u.c.king hole in me, and there was no way it would ever go away completely. That probably sounds selfish, but so was what he did to me, and to the band, to himself.
So, yeah, a lot of that anger"s in "Bleeding Day" and "Seldom Seen." I had to put it somewhere. It"s not the sort of thing you can carry around inside you forever. It starts to eat your soul.