Where Did You Sleep Last Night Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Lynn Crosbie

  Published in Canada in 2015 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Crosbie, Lynn, 1963–, author

  Where did you sleep last night? / by Lynn Crosbie.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-931-5 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77089-932-2 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8555.R61166W44 2015 C813’.54 C2015-900822-0 C2015-900880-8

  Cover illustration: Lola Landevic

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For my father, Douglas James Crosbie, with everlasting admiration and love, and to Francis, my adored and faithful Argos.

  My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep last night.

  In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine, I shivered the whole night through.

  — Nirvana, via Lead Belly

  THIS IS A TRUE STORY

  This is a story about two goofballs who are madly in love.

  With drugs and music and each other.

  They tried, we tried, to stay clean and true.

  But we ruined everything we touched.

  And in the end, two people died.

  In spite of everything, we were inseparable, in one way or another.

  In the beginning, though, it was just me, and simpler, more refined cruelties.

  ONE

  HERE COMES YOUR MAN

  “Hey pig!” was one of the many greetings thrown from cars, with bags of warm garbage, each day as I walked home, my chin tucked into my neck.

  At home, a cuff to the face for the bowl left in the sink.

  In my room, I sat under my dead boyfriend’s poster, and love flooded through my barren heart, as always.

  Except that on this day, something was different.

  I had bought heroin from the kid at school who was always stationed in the stairwell by the side door.

  I picked at the tightly packed tinfoil and the brown powder started to fall on the carpet.

  Panicking, I scraped the dope onto the back of Incesticide, formed a wormy line with my trembling fingers, and inhaled it with a dollar bill.

  Bam.

  My head blew back, then fell forward.

  All of my old fantasies — chaste ones, about kissing him under a mound of blankets that moved, almost imperceptibly — changed.

  I saw him, screaming at me, watched the tendons in his neck stiffen. I saw myself screaming back, my neck hyperextended like a reptile’s.

  “There were nights when the wind was so cold,” I sing into the blue-lit theatre.

  Standing still in Perspex-heeled, garnet sandals, and an amber-coloured silk-satin Armani Privé gown, with a cinched waist and crystal-covered train.

  I accept a bouquet of white lilies as the audience releases doves, doves that reveal what will happen, in passionate cries.

  He strips all the blankets from the bed and reveals himself to me. I fly to his side, and then we —

  He speaks to me, directly.

  “I’m coming for you,” he says.

  “You’re too kind,” I murmur to the audience.

  Then, “How?”

  “Don’t think, just let it happen,” he says, right into my ear.

  He is coming for me.

  My big, heart-kicking man.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I say, and the sky, his mercurial eyes, drenches me with warm rain.

  I am sticky and glowing and certain.

  “Hurry,” I say, as the room fills with water and the poster ejects its tacks and envelops me, dries my hair with its fine, glossy edges, and flings itself, invitingly, onto the bed.

  “Fermez les rideaux!” I tell one of the men in the crew, as I walk slowly towards him, peeling off the gown.

  I roll myself inside him. And we wait.

  TWO

  ONLY BECAUSE I LOVE AND FEEL SORRY FOR PEOPLE / KURT COBAIN, 1994–

  I just started watching her, out of nowhere. This chunky, miserable kid.

  She walked around with her head down, and looked insane when she tried to smile.

  She thought about me so much, is that what got my attention?

  When she said “he” or “him,” she meant me.

  When she was alone, she was pretty cool. She drew pictures of me and wrote songs, or she smoked and read and talked to her mangy cat about heavy things, or put on music and danced, stopping to say to me, “I love you, sweet daddy.”

  I wasn’t sure where I lived, and I hadn’t cared about anything for a long time.

  But something was pulling me back — where, I wasn’t sure, or why.

  What I do know is that everything would begin and end with this girl.

  It took all of my strength to land at the sliding door of the emergency room that bumped against my head until the paramedics swarmed and started working on me, yelling things about intubation and fluids.

  After I was admitted, and resting, a little boy stood in the doorway of my room.

  He said, “I thought you died alone, a long, long time ago.”

  THREE

  BLOOD AND GUTS IN CARNATION

  Before fate elbowed its way in, I wrote a suicide note every day.

  The last one started like this: “I hate myself and I want to die.”

  But those were his words.

  I crossed them out and wrote to my mother about our cat: “Please be nice to him.”

  “P.S. It’s not your fault.”

  But it was her fault.

  In 1997, my mother, Marianne Gray, a sexy, Carnation-born, dilettante, had a baby and named her Evelyn Curtis-Anne Deleuze Gray.

  That’s me, and that is my legacy: four suicides.

  My second names, in order: a singer whose music boils with misery; a poet who asphyxiated herself while wearing her dead mother’s fur coat and jewellery; and a philosopher who, racked with pain from cancer, poured himself out of a window in Paris.

  And, first and foremost, Evelyn McHale, who plunged to her death in 1947 from the top of the Empire State Building onto a car parked 1,454 feet below.

  The force of the blow tore her nylons off, ejected a single shoe, and rumpled her tailored grey suit, but she was beautiful in her metal nest. Her chalky face serene, her hair waving softly; her hand clutching her pearls.

  I think of her, sometimes, in a different setting; cradled by the black space beyond a stiff leg and clenched fist, a sweater that has unravelled into a river of cream.

  SUICIDES ARE TRAGIC heroes to my mother.

  She is moved
by the brutality of their lives; fascinated by their persistence, after death.

  It is possible that she wanted to be the distinguished, rueful mother of a dead teenager.

  The day they admitted me, they had to pry my fingers one at a time off my zip-lock-bagged poster.

  “Who is that?” someone said, and I could hear my mother’s incredulous reply.

  I said, “He’s here with me.”

  I must have been screaming, because they held me down and made more holes in my arm and poured the nirvana inside me.

  I SUSPECTED THAT I could look good with a minimum of effort. I’m a tall, racked, brunette, all legs and Bambi eyes.

  I was heavy, though, and dressed like a Walmart goth. I didn’t like people looking at me.

  My mother and I lived on the west coast near Seattle, the site of the revolution, she told me.

  She was vague about the details, however, and mostly rambled on about dresses she used to wear, and punk rock, and writing things like SLUT PROPHET on herself with a marker.

  The ambitious new guidance counselor, who had notified a few chicken-shit cuts on my wrists, arranged for me to see a doctor, Gary Donalds, in town.

  Gary asked me why I tried to “check out.”

  “To get some peace and quiet,” I said.

  “Why is the past so important to your mother?” he said, running a small lint brush over his razor-creased slacks.

  “Just look at her,” I said.

  We looked out the window and watched her leaning against her old Ford Festiva, smoking.

  Her short, cabbage-red hair lifted in the filthy breeze; her body, beneath her jeans and BIKINI KILL tee, looked unusually bloated.

  “What else does she have?”

  My doctor didn’t answer. The faintest riff of Seven Mary Three twisted from her car and turned into a little black bird with shining eyes.

  MARIANNE, MY MOTHER, was exceptional in her youth. I’ve seen the old pictures: shots of her in a serrated lace dress, slashed to the top of pink-ribboned stockings.

  In black shoes with spikes and a long raccoon scarf tossed over her shoulder and lost in her ribbons of pink-tinged, blood-red hair.

  One single lock curling over her marmalade-coloured eye, drinking from a bottle in a bathtub, blowing a kiss.

  One night, when she was drunk, I saw her going through the same pictures, and smiling.

  “We adopted a parrot that someone left in the bar,” she said.

  It is a picture of a smallish blond man and her, shot from behind. The parrot is sitting on her head, with a strand of her hair in its mouth.

  “What happened?”

  “It flew away the same night.

  “Everything leaves,” she said, jamming the pictures back into the box.

  “‘Danger!’ He would say that. And ‘Pretty girl,’” she said, turning pastel pink.

  MY FATHER WAS an orphan from Portland who lived in foster homes, places so evil that he would rub his arms whenever someone even said the word foster, his malnourished, spindly arms spotted with bald keloid scars and coiled burns.

  My mother’s parents were murdered when she was fifteen. She had been working at a film depot in the Carnation mini-mall, and this guy became obsessed with her.

  “My dad says I can’t date,” she told him, when he asked her to go hunting with him in the woods.

  He showed up one night when my mom was out with her boyfriend, and tortured then executed her parents.

  He left his phone number, covered in his bloody fingerprints, on the kitchen table, and a quick note: “They didn’t suffer. Much. I work weekends, Love from Boyle.”

  He was caught, tried, and hanged.

  My mother was sent through the system too, where she got placed with a decent family who sent her to school with lunch money; who checked her homework and bought her the Lee’s painter pants she loved, and gauzy Indian smocks.

  But they drew the line at her saying “You can’t tell me who to fuck, you’re not even my parents, scumbags.” She dropped out of high school and got a job in Seattle at Linda’s Tavern with a fake ID and low-cut, black catsuit.

  “I know this sounds fucked up,” she told me one night, while drinking ice-cold vodka. “But that Boyle guy? He freed me.”

  “You’re right,” I said, collecting my school work and going to my room. “That does sound fucked up.”

  She left a picture of them under my door that night. From the crime scene.

  My grandmother’s mouth a twisted O; my grandfather’s face not looking like a face anymore.

  I couldn’t take it. I tore it up and tossed it, but a skunk got into the garbage and for days there were flecks of them everywhere. His ear, like a fiddlehead; the pouch of her calico apron; their hands fused together.

  My mother said that they could barely stop kissing, even when she was in the room.

  “They were real lovebirds,” she said to me, wistfully.

  WE ACTUALLY LIVED an hour away from Seattle, in a tiny town on the east bank of the Snoqualmie River, called Carnation.

  It is named after the milk company.

  “Milk products,” I mean, like that sweet sludge in a can that my mother put in her coffee and gave, in a saucer, to Flip, our old, bug-eyed cat.

  In the morning, the cat stood beside my bed, staring at me balefully. He knew things were bad.

  One time he had my father’s bright yellow comb with him; a pair of silver cufflinks and a wide paisley tie.

  Flip tried to bite me as I gathered up these flashy remains of my plain and gentle father.

  “I miss him too,” I said, and scratched the cat until his black fur surrounded us in a small storm cloud.

  THE COBAINS HAD a cottage here, a long time ago, that we have all visited.

  It is recessed in the woods, and is a weird two-part structure with huge glass windows.

  One side is like a palace, and the other is a shed.

  Kids used to come with candles and messages until the property managers got dogs, and pretty well everyone lost interest.

  I have been to those woods at night, to whisper, “Don’t lie to me,” to the dead man I love.

  I will return one day, as someone else, and someone will say the same thing to me.

  I WENT TO Evaporated High, which is what we called it for so long I actually forgot its real name: it was chipped off the roof years ago.

  And you may have guessed that I was regarded as a loser, and not in a cool way.

  Whatever, I would think. These people will cease to exist for me soon enough.

  I ate lunch by myself. I sat in the back of my classes, staring out the window and writing a letter to a dead boy on an old paper menu from the Dragon Star.

  “Dear Elton,” I wrote.

  It has been a year since you died, and I miss you.

  I think a lot about the time we walked partway home together. Your Jewel binder fell out of your bag and you were so embarrassed, I said it was nice.

  ‘I’m dying of love for her,’ you said, and ran off.

  “I heard that Jewel dedicated ‘Panis Angelicus’ to ‘Elton, whose kindness matters’ at a concert last month.

  I knew that she meant you, even though she’s married to some cowboy.

  You made it.

  Today is quite cold, and the branches of the honey locust trees look like whip-tails.

  XO

  I slipped a pressed star magnolia into an envelope, and left the letter where they found him, by his locker, in a terrible sea of blood.

  ELTON WAS NOT the only one.

  A girl named Mary-Lou who wore homemade dresses and brown orthopaedic shoes emptied Drano into her mouth in math class; a boy with psoriasis and a retainer, whose name escapes me, walked in front of a car.

  He was waving, happily, at the kids s
moking by the door as he dropped, then rolled.

  In English class, Miss Weir, who drinks, always asked us what Hamlet meant by this: “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay there’s the rub.”

  “What is the rub?” she would say, with escalating distress.

  Jeffrey, who was quiet, had mercy on her one day and said, “Miss Weir, he is afraid that, if he dies, he will live on, in a kind of dream. Or nightmare.”

  When Miss Weir sat on Jeffrey’s lap to weep, the class went wild and the principal stormed in, yelling, “You degenerates are the reason I am bleeding out of every hole!”

  I WOULD WALK home alone, down streets made narrow by huge maple, red cedar, and cherry trees, and let myself in to the slightly slanted house my mother painted herself. Sno Ball violet and rich Chocodile.

  She was always at work, over at the dairy: when she returned, she smelled like cheese and cried, easily, and over nothing at all.

  I was locked in to my own misery, misery like a cage, preventing me from bathing and sleeping.

  Eventually, I would stand up and make dinner.

  A box of Shreddies and a bottle of carbonated misery.

  The knives, pointed towards the plates, were ready to go.

  WE WATCHED SOME of Last Days.

  She said that it was too hard for her to sit through.

  “He looks so much like him, it seems real,” she said. “But it isn’t.”

  “No?” I asked, distracted by a memory of the lead actor in a plunging black slip.

  “More die of heartbreak,” she said, and vomited into a bowl I emptied into the sink.

  I covered her with the afghan and went to my room, where I made a list under the heading “Cherchez la Femme” of the occurrences of the mystery woman Cobain was seen with shortly before his death.

  There were two plane tickets purchased from Los Angeles to Seattle, after he jumped the fence at Exodus.

  KC left a message saying, I’m staying with _.

  He was seen at Linda’s Tavern with her; at dinner, the next night.

  Her name is visibly carved in the bench in Viretta Park, where he was last seen, visibly shaken.