Chapter 17 Florence
Just you wait, I’m gonna get her back,
The whole world will know,
I’m gonna get her back,
There’s nowhere she can go,
I’m gonna get her back,
Nowhere she can hide,
I’m gonna get her back,
Everyone will take my side.
I throw the covers off my body, suddenly hot.
That fucking song is in my brain so deep it’s showing up in my dreams. Or maybe I wasn’t asleep.
Maybe I can’t sleep anymore. Maybe years and years of coke and speed and whatever-the-hell-else fried the part of my brain that knew how to sleep and dream, and now I have no choice but to lie awake for the rest of my days.
It’s not true that you’ll die without sleep.
The human body’s more adaptable than we give it credit for.
When Callie suggested this place, she promised no one would know exactly where I was. She said it like that was supposed to make me feel safer. Now, in the middle of the night, without my phone, I feel stranded. If something happened to me here, no one would know.
I get out of bed, my bare feet cold against the hardwood floors. There’s a tiny white rug beside the bed, no bigger than a bathmat. This place could use some carpeting. The floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere make everything so goddamn drafty.
Drafty,
Nasty,
My skin is pasty.
How am I supposed to write anything halfway decent when I can’t get Joni Jewell’s fucking lyrics out of my head?
The chorus of dead musicians in my brain asks, What was your excuse before Joni released her song?
Janis Joplin laughs. Anger tingles beneath my skin. Before I attacked Joni, multiple witnesses heard me scream,
I’ll kill you for what you did to me.
I meant it, even though Callie was quick to point out that I didn’t exactly have a good reputation before Joni released that song.
Anyway, just because I meant it doesn’t mean I was going to do it.
Boy, did you lose your shit, the Kurt Cobain in my head says.
Joni Jewell’s got nothing on you, the Scott Harris says, trying to calm me. Most fans don’t know that Scott Harris had terrible stage fright. He had to get high before every performance. Not like me. For me, the performance was the high.
Callie told the press I didn’t know what I was saying. So-called journalists called me dangerous, unstable, a has-been, like they were schoolyard bullies throwing out angry taunts. I wonder if they even remember the things they called me before: visionary, important, ahead of her time.
Mom’s the only one who called me anything that stuck: Bad Mother.
Bad Mother, Big Brother’s
Watching you
Bad Mother, mother fucker
Ain’t you blue?
Mom called me shrill long before Rolling Stone ever heard my voice. Sometimes I think she wishes I were one of those stars whose drug use got the better of them, like Janis and Jim and Jimi. It’d be so much easier, with me out of the picture.
I walk to the Bose speaker in the living room and turn it on. Satellite radio. I scroll until I reach the nineties grunge station.
I turn the music up, but I can still hear Joni Jewell’s incessant warble inside my head.
Louder still, so that it feels like the hardwood floor beneath my feet is thumping.
Louder still, until I can’t hear anything but Kurt Cobain screaming in my ears.
His honest screams are so much prettier than Joni Jewell’s weak falsetto, aping her namesake for all she’s worth. When will the world notice that they’ve been hanging on to every word from a singer who can’t even be bothered to find her own voice?
Be authentic, my husband always said. People want to listen to something real.
I used to be something real.
But they all stopped listening to me.