Lullaby for the Rain Girl (19 page)

“What’s up?” she said, her attention instantly slipping away from me and onto the apartment. She was through the door, past both Sherry and me, before she bothered to say: “I’m Rachel.”

3

Sherry and I both liked Peter immediately; he was polite, smart, articulate, and tidy, a young man who said he was studying at UCSB. He’d come from Texas, though his voice didn’t reflect any audible twang—“That’s what everybody thinks,” he said, putting his feet up on the milk crate we were using as a coffee table and sipping his coffee. “They expect to hear me
tawk
like I’s a
shit-kickah.”
He smiled. “People from Dallas don’t talk like shit-kickers. Actually I’ve never kicked any shit in my life.”

“I kick his shit for him,” Rachel interpolated, lying on her back on the floor. “His shit needs kicking sometimes.”

As much as Sherry and I instantly liked Peter, we disliked Rachel almost as quickly—and nearly as intensely. It was a mystery to me why these two people were together. Peter, twenty-one at the time, had the look of the CPA he said he was studying to be: clean-cut, clear-eyed, given to slacks and dress shirts and an impressive monogrammed briefcase which he carried, with no evident self-consciousness, everywhere. When they moved in later that day, the first thing that Peter hauled into their bedroom—with my help—was a filing cabinet, the drawers of which were filled with every document in the world—old report cards, syllabi for courses he’d taken, letters, legal documents and who knows what else, all impeccably arranged according to some organizational system he tried to explain to me but which left me, though admiring, befuddled. He also had a great deal of stereo and video equipment—high-end electronics for the time, including a fancy reel-to-reel tape recorder, turntable, television, and the first actual home video camera I’d ever seen—a big bulky thing that somehow connected up to one of his several VCRs through a baffling network of cords.

Rachel Blackburn could not have been more different if one had gone to a movie studio and asked Central Casting to find Peter’s complete antipode. She was sullen, inarticulate, dismissive—never, perhaps, completely rude, but seemingly oblivious of her impact on others. Her habits became apparent soon enough. She smoked everywhere—in the kitchen, in the bathroom (encouraging my own habit; Sherry had already mostly stopped, and Peter didn’t smoke at all). Her conversational responses were often little more than grunts. She casually took Sherry’s and my food from the refrigerator; not, I’m convinced, in deliberate acts of theft, but because she was genuinely oblivious as to how the food got there. I don’t think I saw her smile once in her first month living with us.

What she
did
do, mostly, was write songs. Or at least song lyrics. “Rachel and I have got a group together,” Peter explained on that first day, when we met. “That’s why we have all this audio and video equipment, for recording demos and videotaping performances. We rehearse in a warehouse down in Goleta.”

“But Peter,” Sherry said, “you guys don’t have any instruments. And I can’t see you in a rock band.”

“Oh, I’m not
in
the band,” he smiled. “I’m their manager. I’m working on getting them some gigs here in S.B. And Rachel doesn’t play an instrument.”

“What do you do, Rachel?” I asked. “In the band, I mean.”

“I sing,” she muttered. “Supposedly.”

“She does,” Peter said. “She’s good, too. And she writes the lyrics.”

“What’s the band called?” I asked.

Rachel snorted and rolled over onto her stomach, burping and bending her legs so that her bare feet stuck up into the air. I could see little tattoos on the tops of each of them: matching red roses with thorn-covered green stems dripping blood. She lit a cigarette. “We’re still fighting about that,” she explained.

“Not
fighting,
honey,” Peter said.

“I think the name should be Thrill Kill,” Rachel said. “Peter doesn’t like that.”

Peter seemed to consider it for a moment. “The
band
doesn’t like it. Being commercially minded, the other members seem to prefer the name The Raging Hormones. They think sex will sell over violence.”

“I don’t care about selling,” Rachel said, blowing smoke. “Fuck that. I don’t want to be the Eagles or some shit like that.”

“I
like
the Eagles,” Sherry said.

“Another name I think is good is The Motherfuckers.”

“Honey,” Peter said patiently, “with that name we wouldn’t be able to
advertise.”

“Shit,” she muttered, smoking.

“What kind of music is it?” I asked.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Peter said, smiling his affable smile. “We’ve got a rehearsal tonight. How would you like to come?”

Well, Sherry and I had nothing else doing, so we ended up following Peter and Rachel’s blue van that night down through some side streets in Goleta until we arrived at a mostly empty area, a place of warehouses and closed-up old shops.

“He’s great,” Sherry said. “I like him. I don’t think much of her, though.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But I’m guessing he keeps her in line. At least she doesn’t have a bass with a Marshall amp or a twenty-piece drum set or something with her. I mean, I think they’ll be okay.”

She looked at me dubiously. “I hope so, Ben,” she said.

“Hey, maybe they’ll go on to be famous. We can ride her coattails to glory.”

“Just make sure that’s
all
you ride of hers.”

I glanced at her and burst out laughing. “Oh my God,” I said, “you’re going to be jealous? Of
her?
That little stringy thing with the fishhooks in her face? And the hairy armpits?”

“She’s a
girl,
isn’t she?”

“Approximately.”

“I see you looking at all the beach bunnies at school.” She was smiling, but there was an edge to her voice.

“Well, you can’t blame a guy for
looking.”

“I guess.” We rode in silence for a moment. “Ben,” she said finally, “do you think I’m pretty?”

We came to a stoplight. I looked over at her. “What?”

“Pretty. Do you think I am?”

“Of course I think you’re pretty.”

She shrugged. “You don’t say it much anymore.”

I took her hand, leaned in to give her a quick kiss. “I’m sorry. School, work, trying to write something in my spare moments. It’s just time. You’re pretty. You’re beautiful.”

She smiled a little. “Okay.”

And I did think that she was pretty—I always had. But I also noticed that she had begun putting on some weight since we’d arrived in Santa Barbara. Her formerly strict running regimen had collapsed, and now I often found her sitting on the sofa with a pastry or donut in her hand. Her hair was as stunning as ever—very long now, cascading waves past her shoulders—but she took less time with it. She took less time with her appearance generally, in fact.

Finally the van ahead of us pulled into a tiny parking lot next to a building I would have assumed was empty; there were no signs of light or life coming from it. Actually, it quickly became apparent that people were there—when we got out of the car the sound of electric guitars being strummed in warm up and drum rolls and kicks being tossed out tentatively all but overwhelmed us. Stepping closer to the building, I realized that the reason we didn’t see any light from the windows was simply because they were so incredibly dirty.

The talent possessed by The Raging Hormones—or Thrill Kill, or The Motherfuckers, whatever they were called—wasn’t immediately apparent to me. There were four of them, including Rachel—guitar, bass, drums, three guys around twenty or twenty-one, each of them shaved bald or nearly so, all with lots of piercings everywhere. We were introduced to everyone and Rachel took her place before a microphone. There was some arguing about what they were going to play while they all knocked back bottle after bottle of Heineken. Peter was the go-between, and they clearly respected him. After a few minutes of shouting, they settled down and kicked into a song.

I wasn’t a fan of punk music; neither was Sherry. I was nineteen, yet, absurdly, punk made me feel old and out of it. I’d tried to listen to the Sex Pistols and a few of the L.A.-based bands of the time, but it all sounded like painful, speed-influenced thrashing to me. The songs were short, brutal, unmelodic. Few guitarists seemed to know more than three or four chords. It really just all seemed amateurish. Rachel and Peter’s band was no different, though they weren’t any worse than the rest of them—to my ears, at least. The drummer played loud and fast, the bass player banged away, the guitarist slammed his hands violently over the strings.

And Rachel Blackburn? If she possessed any stage presence or charisma, even any
talent,
it was invisible to me. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, other than the occasional “fuck” and “shit.” She stood at the microphone with her eyes closed, all but motionless, clutching it hard, and, as far as I was concerned, doing nothing but screaming. Occasionally the screaming stopped, along with the rest of the band. That appeared to indicate the end of the song.

“Not exactly the Eagles,” I whispered to Sherry during one such break.

“Not exactly anybody,” she agreed. “They’re
awful.”

But now I wonder if they really were. Later years familiarized me with high-end punk bands like X and The Clash; if I’d known of them then, I might have been able to see and hear this group with a better understanding. They were energetic, anyway. After a few songs the group seemed to loosen up. The guitarist’s hands flew; Rachel even opened her eyes and moved a little, jumping and swaying around her mike between bouts of screaming.

“Rachel and I met in S.B.,” Peter said to us during a break as we kicked back Heinekens—illegally for most of us, since we were underaged. I had no doubt Peter supplied the alcohol. “I’d come out from Dallas a few weeks before. Met at a party for some kids we both knew. Mutual friends.” He smiled. “You should have seen this band six months ago. They were going nowhere. They had a different drummer then—I told them they needed to fire that guy, and they did. Back then Rachel barely whispered into the microphone. I taught her how to scream like that.” He swallowed some beer. “I think we’re going to be big. I really do. Punk is just coming on now. Our sound is really coming together. And Rachel’s lyrics—well, you heard them.” I nodded, though neither Sherry nor I had understood a word. “Abuse, rape, civil rights—did you listen to ‘The Nightmare Engines’? The Holocaust. In a
punk
song.” He nodded. A little more practice, a few more gigs at parties and stuff like that, and I’m taking them down to L.A. We’ll audition at some clubs.”

“Good luck,” I said. “I hope it works out.”

“How can it miss?” he asked earnestly. “I mean, did you
hear
them?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m not a good judge, though. I’ve never been into punk. But they sound pretty good.”

“They’re more than that.” He nodded toward Rachel, who was conferring with the bassist about something. “They’re going to be big. Rachel’s going to be
huge.”

That was the first inkling I had that, for all Peter’s smiling charm, his judgment wasn’t all it might be. I couldn’t see little pinched-face, needs-a-bath Rachel Blackburn as a star—but then again, I reasoned, what did I know about it? We stayed for a while longer, then headed home.

We’d been in bed for hours when we heard the two of them unlocking the door and coming into the main room. Sherry was awake too, next to me.

“It’s weird,” she whispered, “having people in the house. In
our
house.”

“They paid their first and last month,” I said. “Things are sure a lot easier with our rent cut in half like this.”

“I know. But I miss having our own place. Just
us.”
She took my hand, held it tightly.

“We’ll be on our feet again soon,” I said. “In a few months either they’ll move out or we’ll get another place. It’ll be okay. It’s just for a little while.”

“Do you love me, Ben?”

I looked at her in the darkness. “Sherry, why are you suddenly so insecure? What is all this?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just feel like—like I’m going to lose you.”

“Lose me? Why?”

“There’s too many pretty girls in this town,” she said. “Maybe we should go home.”

“To Stone’s End? Are you kidding? What would we do there?”

She sighed. “I just want things to be like they were.”

“Aren’t they?”

In a few minutes we heard sounds coming from the other bedroom. It didn’t take long to realize what they were, though it should have been obvious from the first moment.

“Oh my God,” Sherry said.

We listened in the night to the sound of their bed rhythmically creaking, the sound of Rachel Blackburn’s guttural grunts and high moans.

Very suddenly I found myself with an erection. Sherry looked at me, a peculiar expression on her face. Then she turned and kissed me deeply, wildly, climbed on top of me, tickled my face with her hair, stroked me and slipped me inside her. She moaned then herself, gyrating passionately, not at all the very willing but quiet and submissive bed partner I was used to.