Until May of 2009, Lubbock, my friends, was dry. Not arid. Though it"s that too - arid enough to choke on. But it was Alcoholess. Except in bars and restaurants during certain times. To purchase "packaged" booze, you had to drive 25 minutes or more to a drive-through liquor barn type alcohol hut. Load up. Drive back. Stealthily sneak your load up at night through the side doors to the girl"s dorm - carrying giant suitcases of beer up several flights of stairs, or bottles shoved down your pants.
The environmental extremes in Lubbock are stockyard cow s.h.i.t smell so pungent it makes your eyes water as well as causing a special gagging reflex, and hot wind orange dust storms so thick you can"t even see the hand in front of your face that also feel like you are being attacked by little Lubbock evil devil pins if you venture out.
Avenue Q, Buddy Holly Plaza. Big bronze Buddy Holly statue. Google it. Buddy, he"s circled by a walk of fame including greats like Waylon Jennings and the venerable Mac Davis. Budfest takes place during the first week of September, Buddy Holly"s birthday. During Budfest, drunk West Texans dress up like Buddy and his woman and ... holler.
Prairie Dog town. Picture a very large dirt area contained by a cement fence in the middle of nowhere. A cement fence about knee-high. And inside the cement fence? A great many holes in the ground. And in the holes? Prairie dogs. So if you were drunk and high and sitting on the cement wall in the middle of the night, the thing to do would be shine a flashlight and then throw rocks at all the heads. Like a grown up whack-a-mole. What"s not to like?
Yeah. And when I say flat? I mean if you jump you can see Dallas.
Lubbock. Great place. Honestly you should save up.
By day I went to swim practice at 5:30 a.m. and breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and cla.s.ses 10:00 a.m. through 3:00 p.m. and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and dinner at 7:00 p.m. every day but Sunday with a pack of hot swimmer women and then the nights were ours.
All night. Every night. As much night as you could get in you before 5:30 a.m.
I was in love or something like it with my roommate within a month of meeting her. Maybe it was her drinking ability, or her swearing ability, or her rock and roll or her Bose speakers and kick a.s.s stereo or her being from Chicago and thinking West Texans were cretins or her b.u.t.terfly stud shoulders or her big t.i.ts or her bandana or her torn up jeans or her one-hit pipe. Maybe it was just her name. Amy. Amy, what you wanna do. I think, I could fall for you, for awhile maybe longer if I do.
I don"t know how much you know about swimmer partying but, well, it"s formidable. College swimmers are nearly all on some kind of scholarship. That"s money. There were the two British twins with spikey bleached hair. There were endless Barbie Texans with hairspray and drawls. There was a fantastic senior d.y.k.e and an amazingly beautiful boy-bodied Asian woman and mystical. Romanian. Of those with p.e.c.k.e.rs, there was a tall lanky tow head with hair as white as mine whose last name was Creamer that I fell for like a blond brick house, there was a surfer So Cal king of Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello and beer dude, there was a two-stepping horn dog from Dallas, there was a guy from Amy"s hometown who orchestrated the mandorm parties, and a whole pack of swimmer guys with rockets in their pockets and shaved skin in places regular guys didn"t know about.
When I say we partied, I mean an epic poem.
About halfway through the year my days became swim practice at 5:30 a.m. big melon headed hangover and skip G.o.dforsaken cafeteria s.h.i.tty instant eggs breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and skip cla.s.ses at 10:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 12 noon drink hair of the dog beer eat cold pizza and Haagen Dazs ice-cream and listen to Zeppelin get high take a test once every week or so and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and f.u.c.k dorm dinners they taste like s.h.i.t and you have to sit with a bunch of West Texan f.u.c.kwaddery lets go out early and drink lets. .h.i.t the Rock-Z and dance and dance and dance and drink and barf and screw every day every night.
I lost my scholarship the second year. I flunked out the third.
Love Grenade I.
I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE KIND OF WOMAN JAMES Taylor would sing: I feel fine, anytime she"s around me now to. "Something in the Way She Moves." You know that song. Don"t you wish someone wanted to sing that song to you?
Alas, my song would be Blood on Her Skin, Dripping with Sin, Do it again, Living Dead Girl. Yeah. By Rob Zombie. Because in college I was a living dead girl.
My first husband, beautiful boyman, reminded me of James Taylor. Of how exactly like his hands, exactly his voice, exactly his long lean body. Exactly his introverted acoustic guitar genius, exactly his artist eyes, exactly his ego underneath all that thin man. I shoulda been with Rob Zombie but I wasn"t. For a few years, in Lubbock, Texas, where I"d come on a swimming scholarship, I was with a JT man named Phillip.
Me: Doc combat boots. Kohl-a LOT - rac.o.o.ning my eyes. Ripped to s.h.i.t tights and plaid catholic girl skirt and black leather biker jacket. No hairspray, no fingernail polish, no purse. Utterly out of place in Lubbock, Texas.
Those years were filled with him painting and playing guitar and me listening and getting high and making love and oh yeah, going to school. Which by the third year I"d flunked out of. The only As I received were in Philosophy. And that was because the professor was high every cla.s.s so we just sat around shooting philosophical s.h.i.t until we all started coming to cla.s.s high too. Going to school, sleeping with Phillip. Trying not to fall in love with my roommate Amy. And swimming - though every month of each year the swimmer in me drowned a little more in alcohol and oceans of s.e.x.
It was snowing the night of the first breakup in Lubbock. Snow in Lubbock looks weirdly dumb - Lubbock is as flat as flat gets. No mountains. No trees. No hills. When it snows in Lubbock one must get drunk and drive around. Don"t think badly of me. Remember what I told you - Lubbock is dry. So a woman gets ... thirsty. And there isn"t much to "hit" in the dead of night, and even if there was you would see it a mile away.
So it was a drive around night. After a while we stopped. And I was drunk as a monkey, and I climbed up onto the shoulders of the Buddy Holly statue in a cemetery-ish park.
The Buddy Holly statue isn"t all that high, by the way. But I was acting like I was king of the world.
The main event was Phillip. Phillip cut the fingertips out of his gloves and played guitar at the base of the Buddy Holly statue. He played the acoustic opening to " Wish You Were Here." Which he"d picked out of the sky by ear. He played "Sweet Baby James." Then he played "Suzanne." At Buddy Holly"s feet. With a drunk a.s.s blonde lifting her shirt up to the 30 degree night sky going "f.u.c.k ALL Y"ALLLLLLL. EAT ME. WOOOOOOOOOOO." To no one in particular except Lubbock.
I"d been with Phillip for about a year. How I fell for him was I heard his voice behind my head right after I walked past him in the dorm hall. He had the deepest voice I"d ever heard on a white boy. It was the kind of voice that curled around the top of your spine and jaw and made your mouth open, wanting. In my head was I am so far from my father I am so far from my father I amsofarfrommyfatherIamsofarfrommyfather.
When I turned around, there he was. With shoulder-length locks of hair, thick as s.h.i.t eyelashes, Moccasin boots, and a guitar.
There he was that night, down in the snow playing "Suzanne." Singing the night wide open. Me perched atop Buddy Holly sort of cross-eyed, looking at stars and drooling on Buddy"s bronzed head. Even angry girls can be moved to tears.
There are two reasons for us going busto.
Reason one: I spent the entire year making poor beautiful Phillip break into strangers" homes at night to f.u.c.k on the floor. I don"t know why. It did a real number on him, I can tell you. He"d get so terrified, but he"d do it, and I"d run and turn a light on and he"d nearly coronary leaping with his 6" 3" lanky a.s.s body to turn it back off. I"d break into whatever liquor I could find and he"d try to fill the bottles back up with water and replace the lids and restore them to their sanct.i.ty. I"d scavenge the medicine cabinets and he"d chase me around in the dark trying to rescue little white pills.
And when we"d f.u.c.k I"d climb on top of him and ride the art of his c.o.c.k as hard as I could, wishing I was his guitar and not some f.u.c.ked up damaged girl so that his fingers would strum me to death, strum me clean, strum me calm, strum me into a woman he"d write a song for. My shirt off and my t.i.ts white moons and my head rocked back and my hair crazy. And he"d c.u.m so hard I thought my spine might shatter - because those long and lean guys have huge c.o.c.ks - and then we"d breathe and look at each other in the dark of a home we"d broken into and entered, and then he"d become terrified again and jump up and zip up faster than the speed of light, leaving me like sticky residue on a movie theater floor. Laughing the laugh of broken girls.
G.o.d. Poor Phillip. I wish I could go back and apologize. He was never cut out for a woman like me with a rage in her bigger than Texas. Although I"ve since learned that extreme pa.s.sivity has its own power.
Reason two: he was too beautiful. Way more beautiful than me and way more beautiful than a beautiful woman. Have you met these men? His too beautiful voice and his beautiful hands and his beautiful c.o.c.k. But the beauty went all haywire on the inside because he thought he was s.h.i.t. And that thinking he was s.h.i.t? It transformed him into the exact opposite of me - the most pa.s.sive man on the planet. Particularly around any kind of high energy or conflict. Which was basically me, in the flesh.
And when my rage would come, he"d ... well, he"d fall asleep.
He"s the only person I"ve ever met who would fall asleep in the middle of an argument, his chin on his hand, his eyes closing just as you are getting to the moment of victory. I never saw anyone do that but him. Drove me crazy. All my mighty energy with nowhere to go. I nearly imploded or spontaneously combusted dozens of times.
Phillip came from a big a.s.s southern Baptist Christian family, all of whom sang. So there were a great many family Christian hymn sing-alongs on family front porches with family harmony rising and falling in their voices. And his father was the voice of G.o.d once removed, and his older brother was the voice of G.o.d twice removed, and the other three people besides Phillip were sisters, so that third removed G.o.d voice fell upon his slender shoulders. I mean how many G.o.dd.a.m.n times can you sing "I"ll Fly Away" or the dreaded "Amazing Grace?" No wonder he was so tired.
And here"s why the micromovements of a girl woman"s s.e.xual history matters. Phillip"s older brother had already been through the reject G.o.d, leave home, become a pot smoking musician, have a family, return to the fold and take on the man mantle chapters. But Phillip had just hit the reject G.o.d, leave home, become a pot smoking artist and carry around a guilt bigger than Texas. He was the outcast son, unable to join the hymns on the porch.
And me, it was a secret shame I was carrying.
When Phillip wanted hand jobs instead of f.u.c.king and I couldn"t do it and I couldn"t do it and I couldn"t do it, and when I wanted to suck his c.o.c.k and he wouldn"t let me wouldn"t let me wouldn"t let me, we met our wounds in each other"s bodies. Guilt in the form of a beautiful gentle man and shame in the form of an angry girl became our s.e.xuality.
The night he finally let me put my mouth on him we were listening to "Comfortably Numb," which he"d played himself first until we got too high. In my mouth his c.o.c.k made me feel forgiven. I don"t know why. But once I"d turned him, he went anywhere I asked him to go with me.
There we were that night breaking up in the snow. A still shot of drunken rage looking down on gentle beauty. Well, I went a little wacko, which used to happen a lot back then, and I started a fight with him. I don"t know why. I remember looking at the top of his head and thinking look, it"s an angel, and my very next thought was, spit on his head. I told you, I don"t know why. Why did I eat paper as I kid when I was scared? My panties were sopping and my head was spinning and it was cold and hot at the same time and it was so beautiful there in the snow and flat and quiet and music.
So I went in for the kill. I mean I s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the cold dark air as easily as he pulled songs from the sky and wrapped it in displaced rage and vodka breath and hurled it down at the top of his unsuspecting head until his neck nearly snapped. The way women in their twenties who are working out their ouch on everyone they meet do. Open wound girls. Swinging fist girls.
And we argued - or I did anyway - Phillip sort of ducked and growled - all the way to the car, a puke yellow beater mobile Pinto station wagon with faux wood paneling, and I kept it up inside the car, and he was having to drive with the window rolled down because we were too broke to get the windshield wipers fixed and it was snowing. In between trying to defend himself he had his head in and out of the window to see the road, but that didn"t stop me, did it, I just got louder and bigger and hornier and more horribly chaotically blond. My father"s rage and trespa.s.s in my voice and hands, in my very skin.
Phillip. Which means lover of horses. Or brotherhood. His voice was never meant for yelling.
That"s when it happened.
At the crescendo of my rage opera. In the dumb a.s.s Pinto. Near my anger o.r.g.a.s.m.
He fell asleep.
The car sort of slowed and made a limp arc toward the curb, until it stopped, and his head fell gently forward onto the steering wheel.
I remember staring at him for a minute, dumbfounded by the moment, seeing - really seeing - how G.o.dd.a.m.n beautiful his face, his mouth, his long fingered mesmerizing hands ... knowing I could never, ever keep a boy like that because the shear velocity of my anger and confusion would eat him alive ... and feeling as sad as a girl who will never have a boy like that could feel... crying... a long mile of greenyellowred streetlights blinking us down ... and then snapping out of it and yelling at the top of my lungs "WAKE UP MOTHERf.u.c.kER ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! YOU f.u.c.kING FELL ASLEEP YOU COULD HAVE KILLED US!"
Then I leapt out of the car and slammed the Pinto door and ran down a snow alley behind a stranger"s snow house in my Doc combat boots. Running and running thud-footed how you do in snow and kind of crying so that my Kohl melted down my cheeks and kind of laughing and reaching inside my black leather jacket for my vodka flask and never looking back at him in his beater mobile wood paneled Pinto station wagon, sleeping, or was he singing...
That"s a great line, isn"t it.
That"s a great ending.
But lives aren"t James Taylor songs, and girls like me don"t just run off into the snow and go away.
I didn"t break up with him that night.
When we really broke up, well, let"s just say it wasn"t a James Taylor song. And what we made between rage and love and falling asleep - what lived and died between us - haunts me still.
That dramatic ending was just the beginning.
In the end, I made that boy marry me.
The Other Lubbock.
ONE OF THE RED RAIDER SWIMMER GUYS WAS A DEALER. I don"t think I ever saw Monty not high. His skin looked ashen - even stretched as it was over athlete muscles. His eyes always had rings around them. His face had little holes in it. He did not live in the dorms. He lived with two other non swimmer guys in a house. In his house, there was a bas.e.m.e.nt. The bas.e.m.e.nt door had a marijuana leaf on it with a smiley face in the center. And it was locked. To enter, you needed to know the knock.
Two.
Three.
One.
The first time I went down into Monty"s bas.e.m.e.nt I was with Amy. When he opened up, we went in - we were the only women that night. We were fishing for a little danger. Briefly I felt weird. Then weirdly, I didn"t. There were maybe four guys in there besides us. One of those four was also a swimmer. When I looked at him, I couldn"t tell if his eyes were open or closed, but he smiled and nodded and waved.
The room was dark- and not just because the walls were painted black with all kinds of glow in the dark and neon s.h.i.t all over them. The carpet was dark red s.h.a.g. One s.h.i.t brown old sofa, three lava lamps, three posters: Che and Jimi and Malcolm. A fish tank with a bunch of tetras and a giant angel fish glowed blue green in the corner. A small refrigerator, a.s.sorted gla.s.s bongs, and a big a.s.s coffee table upon which were a variety of items not so good to name. One Love in our ears.
Monty came over with pills in his hand and said, "Choose one, and I"ll tell you what it does." I picked a capsule with a red cap on one side and a yellow cap on the other.
Amy pa.s.sed, shaking her head, saying " Nuh uh, captain fantastic," reaching for a bong.
Monty looked at me and laughed a cla.s.sic stoner laugh - huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhow about you take two?"
"What"s it do?"
"Don"t you want to know what it is?"
"I just want to know what it does," I said, feigning bad-a.s.sery.
By that time in my collegiate athletic career I could give a s.h.i.t about good citizenship. When I competed, I didn"t even make the board. No one in the pool turned their head at the finish to see me. I was lucky I hadn"t drowned. I"d become the kind of woman whose mouth was stuck in a permanent "yes" shape. All I wanted was experience - especially if it would numb the f.u.c.k out of my brain. My I don"t know who the f.u.c.k I am-ism. My I don"t know what"s wrong with me. My couldn"t someone, please, anyone, love me? I would have put anything in my mouths.
" Well, this particular little beauty will sedate your a.s.s and make you dreamy."
I opened my mouth and ate it instantly.
He was right, I became sleepy, but not quite dreamy, so I asked for another. Two more women showed up. They didn"t look like swimmers. Too skinny. Long stringy hair. Glitter nail polish. They wore tube tops and Levis and flip-flops and giggled. They ate acid tabs and danced.
Amy tried to get me to go back home that night but Monty talked me out of it. "I"ll walk her back, I"ll walk her," He kept saying.
The walk back was one of the funnier nights of my life. Oddly, I remember it. 3:00, maybe 4:00 a.m. Black night. Warm. We made a pit stop in the reflecting pool on campus where I laid down with all my clothes on, laughing, laughing. I said, "Look at me! I"m Ophelia!"
Monty said, "Am I Hamlet?"
"f.u.c.k yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!" I screamed, and rolled around in 10-inch deep water illuminated by underwater lights. Campus police showed up and wrote things on small pieces of I"m not really a cop paper and handed them to us and told us to go home. After they left we ate them. Then we b.u.mble f.u.c.ked on the ground under a tree - my own pants were baffling me and I was too gone to really get it on but Monty didn"t seem to mind. Then we played a game where we would run as fast as we could and dive into shrubbery. The next day at swim practice I was covered in shrub sc.r.a.pes and scratches and my head felt like cotton.
Again.
I wanted to do it again.
I wanted to eat all the colors and see what I felt. No. I wanted to eat all the colors to get to the not feel. But even that was not enough for a burning girl.
One night there were white lines on mirrors ready for me when I entered. " Look," I said laughing, "I"m Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz! Poppies!" Breathing in the white, breathing out comprehension and emotion.
What I learned about Lubbock from the people in that bas.e.m.e.nt was a different brand of education. Someone"s father had been kidnapped and murdered. Police found him in the stockyards under the hooves and s.h.i.t of cows. Someone"s brother had O.D."d and killed his girlfriend on the way under with a shard of gla.s.s from a mirror. Someone"s mother had murdered his brother and sister - ages seven and 12 - because jesus told her to. They were wicked, jesus had said into her ear. One woman"s uncle was a pedophile, but no one in the family was willing to send him to the slammer, so they gave him an attic apartment. Another woman"s brother hustled c.o.ke over the border. One guy"s Mexican best friend had been found with his hands and his d.i.c.k cut off next to the train tracks - the severed items in a Glad bag. Monty"s half-brother was in the state hospital for repeatedly raping a r.e.t.a.r.ded girl neighbor.
I don"t know how else to tell this but straight no chaser. These dramas ... these over the top horror stories seething with blood and immorality ... they made me feel better. Like television does. Less like a damaged daughter. A failed student. A s.l.u.t. An athlete gone to seed. And what was in the bas.e.m.e.nt helped feelings leave my body altogether, so I didn"t need to know who I was, or why, or anything at all.
Two.
Three.
One.
When I walked into the bas.e.m.e.nt the second year, I was nearly always by myself. I didn"t care who else was there. I didn"t care what the room looked like. What posters were on the walls. What the s.h.i.t brown couch had all over it. What did interest me was the set-up on the table. There sat a spoon and a tray with cotton, a lighter and a syringe. I picked the spoon up and put it in my mouth. Monty said "huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu huh where do you want it?"
I said "Here," and slapped my arm hard enough to raise a vein.
Zombie FOR PART OF MY LUBBOCK LIFE I BECAME A ZOMBIE. Not a flesh eating one. Gross. I"m no cannibal. No, I was of the high functional type, like so many of the people around you right. This. Second. We"re everywhere.
In zombieland I met an M.D. one night at a club who snorted enough to drop an elephant. His license plate read "DR IS IN." I met a cop with chronic back pain from a gunshot wound who smoked it rolled up in little brown cigarettes. I met a Mexican sculptor who cooked it up with peyote. I met a woman who took care of toddlers during the day and left reality every night and came back to tend to children in the morning with droopy eyelids. My creative writing teacher, two swimmers, a football star, the owner of a popular restaurant, musicians, artists, and oh yeah. Junkie zombies.
I liked the fang of the needle. I liked chasing the dragon. I still like watching the action of a syringe in an arm. It actually makes my mouth water. Even in movies.
30 seconds from being to nothingness.
And I liked how my life, and what it was and wasn"t, simply left.
When you enter zombieland, everything looks a little like it is underwater. Slow motion and thick. Other people look a bit cartoonish - their movements too quick, their mouths and eyes sometimes taking on weird shapes, their arms and legs occasionally morphing into snakes or animal heads. Sometimes you find yourself giggling at inappropriate times. Also, things are sleepy. Like in a lucid dream.
Actually, it"s exactly like lucid dreaming. According to neurobiology, in a lucid dream, the first thing that happens is that the dreamer recognizes they are dreaming. When the area of the brain that is usually off during sleep is activated the recognition of dreaming occurs, the dreamer must be careful to let the dream delusions continue but be conscious enough to recognize them. It"s a process some people theorize as the s.p.a.ce between reason and emotion.
The zombie is also in this kind of s.p.a.ce between reason and emotion - and more. Ask any high functional zombie - or a recovered zombie - and they will tell you right away that life was like awaking dream. Boy howdy. Though for some it is a nightmare beyond language.
In a general sense, for me it was cool in zombieland. For example, I could sit in one spot all day and look at light changes on the wall with absolute fascination until night fell. Another time I dipped my hand in blue paint again and again and covered a white wall of my apartment with hands. Though I admit at one point the hands became menacing and threatened to consume me, later they were again benign, even able to sing me to sleep through little mouths on their palms.
I guess now that I"m thinking about it, zombie state is also a good deal like hypnosis or meditation. In hypnosis or meditation, you shift awareness from the physical world and enter the deeper world of the subconscious. Sometimes this makes your regular body go numb. Neither zombies nor hypnosis/meditation folks are freaked out by this. In zombieland, when you are so relaxed your mouth feels lax as water and your muscles drop down into the warm flush, you are going somewhere important of the mind. Down and deep. Into the world of dreams.
But another tricky thing about zombieland is that in the dimension of dreams you might experience body distortions, vibrations, or weird shaking. The key was not to panic. It didn"t mean you were turning into a Quaker. It was normal. It meant your body was ready to "go" where your mind was taking it. It meant you were going on the nod.
And there is no such thing as time. No past, no present, no future. Or else they are all there at once. So the slowing and slurring of language, the heaviness in your legs, the oddity of your hands turning to giant leaden b.a.l.l.s that swing slowly from your arms, the big wad of pillowcase in your mouth, these are all body modifications needed to go where you are going. Though I distinctly remember things going better when I did not leave the apartment. I had, for lack of a better phrase, night blindness and dumb girl head out in the world. Plus there was the problem of legs and arms.
Or maybe I saw the world for what it was, no place for a girl like me. Why not ... leave?