Coal to Diamonds (12 page)

You know, he was a real person
, Tobi Vail said. We shut up, embarrassed. At the time I’d had no idea they’d known each other, let alone been close. Truly, I was in culture shock. It was so crazy. It blew my mind right open. These true icons of the ’90s weren’t just real people, they were my new neighbors.

Olympia was all-encompassing. I was still dating Anthony, even though I had basically forgotten about him, and people would often ask me if he was coming out to stay with me. I couldn’t imagine that happening.

Not only was Arkansas fast receding, Olympia seemed to fold time. Everything was so distracting, there was always so much to do, before I knew it days had passed, then weeks. It wasn’t that I made a decision to stay in Olympia as much as I just never got around to going back to Arkansas. Something was happening to me. I was starting to live my life, I guess.

I knew Anthony had a girlfriend on the side, and it didn’t bother me. Anthony was like a backup plan. If something bad happened, if Olympia suddenly didn’t work out, I could go back and have babies. Only Anthony had moved on too. Technically he was cheating on me, and I didn’t even care because I was so happy to be away from Arkansas, doing something different.

When I called Anthony and he said he wanted to break up, I knew not to fight it. Something inside me rose to accept my life, and I just said okay. What was severed was bigger than our high
school romance. Now there was nothing left in Arkansas for me to go back to. I walked out onto the porch, where Kathy and Nathan were hanging out with Joey Casio, and I told them what happened.

You should stay
, they all agreed.

Jeri and Nathan had brought their band, Boy Pussy USA, from Arkansas to Olympia. With Boy Pussy USA there was always an elaborate plan. One day I came home and found all my blush completely used up. Jeri and Nathan had thought up a new sort of performance. They had used my makeup to create fake sunburns all over their bodies and pretended to be a Christian homo couple just back from a tropical vacation. They wore short shorts, tank tops, and were covered head to toe in my cheap red blush. They were booked that night at a pool hall that was also a laundromat where we did our laundry sometimes. Jocks hung out at the billiard hall—imagine that—so when Boy Pussy USA got booked for a show there, they devised their sunburned-homo plan to antagonize the jocks.

Olympia was full of misfits from other places who had never had the luxury of a gang to back them up. It felt powerful to storm into a full bar and have just as many punks there as jocks. Perhaps we were cocky troublemakers. But, to us, we were empowered in a situation that had been beyond our control for so long.

And so sexism, racism, and homophobia were dealt with on a whole new, confrontational plane in Olympia. I grew up with bigotry all around me in Arkansas, but the tensions in Olympia, between the regular logging-town folks who came into the city to go to the nightclubs and the freaky punk queers who lived in Olympia, exerted a giant influence over the city. There was a lot of anger and persecution, much of it taking the form of fag-bashing. As usual, Nathan got harassed more than anyone I knew, even though he wasn’t gay. One time he got jumped by three boys who pulled him by his scarf onto the ground and started kicking him,
calling him a faggot. They kicked him in the head, just a block from where we were living.

That night when Boy Pussy USA got to the pool hall/laundromat, things didn’t escalate. It was just funny to watch a bunch of jocks standing around totally confused. No one really knew what to make of Nathan and Jeri. What else was new?

One afternoon at the beat-up carny punk house on Percival Street, Boy Pussy USA were practicing down in the basement. One of the reasons there was such a music explosion in Olympia was how cheap it was to rent a house with a basement that you could convert into a practice space or recording studio. Everyone’s basement had instruments stuffed into its dusty corners. On this one day Kathy, who had never played drums in her life, joined Nathan in the basement and started messing with Jeri’s drums. She hollered,
Beth, you should come sing in our blues band!
It was a boring day. We had time to kill, and, on a whim, that was how we killed it.

We put together three songs—“Heartbeats,” “Say My Name,” and “Tough Love.” Then Nathan set up a show. We only had three weeks to prepare for it, which freaked out Kathy but didn’t bother me. I just didn’t take myself seriously enough to care. Plus none of the other bands we were playing with were serious, either. The show was at a space called 510 Columbia. (It’s an antiques store now; Olympia has turned into a town of Thai restaurants and antiques stores.) Our debut was opening for Boy Pussy USA’s Halloween incarnation, Zombie Beat. It was an honor.

There were only a few people at the show that night, but that was no surprise. We didn’t really ever expect anyone to be there because there were so many things going on in Olympia, people were pretty spoiled for choice. We had fun with or without an audience. Kathy, who could not bear to have anyone look at her while she played, had asked Joey Casio to stand onstage in front of her drums so no one could see her. She was too nervous. The most
nerve-racking thing for me was that Rachel Carns was in the audience. She was so easy to spot in the thin crowd, with her dark hair and dramatic, Sharpied eyebrows, listening and watching intensely. That made my day. I didn’t care if anyone else was there. Rachel Carns! Watching me sing! When we had finished our three songs she helped me climb off the stage, taking my hand and planting a kiss on it. I truly didn’t care about what might happen to me for the rest of my life. Pretty much nothing was going to top Rachel Carns kissing my hand as she helped me off the stage. It remains one of the most amazing moments of my life.

After our set, Zombie Beat—Jeri and Nathan’s latest hilarious persona—played. Jeri would pretend he was a zombie, and Nathan begged the audience not to clap, because it made the zombie so mad. Of course everyone would keep clapping, to enrage the zombie. The act required fake blood, and the best stuff we could get our hands on was the free taco sauce packets at Taco Bell, so that’s what we used. When I jumped onstage to be attacked by zombie Jeri, the sauce went into my eyes and I felt like I had been pepper-sprayed, it hurt so bad. Thank god Gossip had played first because I don’t know how I would have been able to sing after being Taco Bell pepper-sprayed.

Five months after opening for Zombie Beat, the Gossip set list had swelled from three to five songs, and we were playing around Olympia all the time. I had grown more confident, letting myself begin to really love the performance of singing, taking all that energy from the crowd and hurling it right back at them.

In 1999 K Records asked us to do an EP. Calvin Johnson started K in the early ’80s. Calvin was Olympia’s premier indie rock overlord. K’s motto was “Exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre since 1982.” He’d started K just to get his friends’ music out into the world and wound up with one of the biggest, most respected anticorporate DIY indie
punk labels ever. And Gossip was in the right place at the right time. We said yes immediately. The EP featured “Jailbreak,” one of the first songs we ever wrote, plus three other songs. We were labelmates with the wild electro-art feminists Chicks on Speed, with the cult classic avant-garde musicians Mecca Normal, and with Calvin’s own band, Beat Happening.

Shortly after we recorded the EP, Sleater-Kinney asked us to go on tour with them. Carrie Brownstein had seen us play at some house party and thought we would fit well into their tour lineup. She passed the invitation to Nathan, the most social member of our band.

People were astounded that Sleater-Kinney had invited us to tour with them, but I didn’t get why everyone was so worked up. Sleater-Kinney was a punk band to me. I had listened to
Call the Doctor
on repeat, and I knew it was an honor to go on tour with a band I loved so much, but I just hadn’t realized how big the indie punk world was.

Our first show in Minneapolis was at 7th Street Entry, where part of
Purple Rain
had been filmed. The max capacity was nearly the population of my entire hometown. We were suddenly playing real venues, with tech people who treated us like we were real musicians, and out there beyond the stage—a real audience. Hundreds of people.

On that six-week tour every venue we played was legit, not a laundromat or a friend’s living room. We didn’t have to worry about people showing up, because Sleater-Kinney drew tons of fans to every show. They took such good care of us—in New York they paid us a bonus. To see the country that way—to tour as a band like that for the first time—was insane. Our first show ever in San Francisco was at the Fillmore. It sounded so intimidating, but the less intimate the setting, the easier it was to play a show. The energy is more spread out in a place like that, less concentrated. For me, the intimacy of our early shows was nice, but it’s
really
nice to have a lot of people around you. You can get away with a lot more.

We drove alongside Sleater-Kinney in a Mazda MPV—a small minivan. Our driver was a seventeen-year-old named Kelly Bakko, and the minivan belonged to her dad. After a while we felt bad just having Kelly, aka Little Kelly, aka Sassy Lassie, as our roadie. We wanted her to have a more glamorous role in the tour, so we made her our dancer. She would stand up on the stage and jerk around in this slow, glitchy way. We didn’t pay Little Kelly, because we didn’t know we were supposed to. We had no merchandise to sell, because we hadn’t put out a record yet. Inside the van, there was no place to put your feet down because we had crammed coolers into all the available floor space, along with Kathy’s drums and Nathan’s amp, an old Peavey that we joked would die any day, and Gossip would die along with it. The Peavey only had one speaker—it was supposed to have two; it was absolutely busted. On that first tour, all our luggage was stuffed in a case on the roof that Sleater-Kinney called the Hamburger, because it looked like the container a fast-food hamburger comes in. They always knew which minivan we were in because they’d spot the Hamburger bobbing in the sea of vehicles on the highway.

With shows every night, I started to realize how naturally performing came to me. It felt totally normal to be up there on a stage in front of hundreds of people. I was quick-witted. Performing wasn’t that different from being a fat fifth grader just trying to keep her friends laughing. At one show a girl clambered onstage holding a dog leash and begging me to leash her up and tug her around the stage like a dog, which was embarrassing for both of us. Instead of letting the situation spiral into a shameful experience, I made a cheesy showbiz wisecrack à la Mae West—
Come see me after the show
—and sent the girl and her leash on their way. Disaster averted. The Sleater-Kinney ladies commented on it after the show, impressed by how I’d handled the situation, but it didn’t seem like a big deal to me; it was just what came naturally. But slowly things were falling into place. I was getting an understanding of myself in the world. I hadn’t known I was a fast
thinker. In fact, I thought I was slow. People associate being fat with being slow, and I probably internalized that. It wasn’t until I was onstage that I realized I thought fast on my feet. That was how I’d learned to deal with the world. It’s why I love that one jackass in the audience who needs to steal a little bit of my spotlight, usually by shouting stupid insults. I love a heckler! They switch on my creativity and I don’t even care that I’m being made fun of, because it’s like this great game that we’re playing—one that I always win.

My size has helped make me an amazing performer too. The cliché of the Funny Fat Friend: I absolutely was that character—I
am
that character. At school, I had to beat people to the punch, making fun of myself before they got the chance to make fun of me. I had to be more charming, more sharp, more hilarious. Fat kids are always trying extra hard to get people to like them, because so many people are ready to hate them on sight. And at the same time, fat kids learn pretty quickly not to give a fuck. It’s a complicated bag of tools I acquired, and I’ve put them all to work onstage—wit, thinking on my feet, not giving a fuck. I have survival skills that other people don’t have. I feel sorry for people who hit thirty, thirty-five years old and find themselves with more weight on their bones, for people who’ve had skinny privilege and then have it taken away from them. I have had a lifetime to adjust to seeing how people treat women who aren’t their idea of beautiful and therefore aren’t their idea of useful, and I had to find ways to become useful to myself.

I don’t know if Nathan or Kathy understood what a big deal it was to be touring with Sleater-Kinney, or that it was the start of the next significant cycle in all our lives. I know I didn’t. But it was a big deal. When you’re on tour you’re not thinking, Oh let’s do this again! You’re just going show to show doing what people ask you to do, and having fun. It didn’t dawn on me that this is
what some people did for a living. In my world, people worked fast food, got greasy serving corn dogs, put on a smock and made corporate sandwiches. Maybe if you were lucky you scored a waitress or bartender gig where you could collect tips. But making a real, sustainable living traveling around in a band, playing punk shows every night? Not part of my reality.

Living in Olympia had warped my brain into believing that all bands were made up of queer punk feminists who understood fat politics. It was like all the bands in Olympia were soundtracking a shared revolution; most everyone understood that things were fucked, and, to some degree, you could trust that your musical peers were on the same page as you politically. Outside Olympia, people were homophobic, fatphobic; full of unchecked racism and sexism; thought poor people were trashy. As Gossip kept bringing me deeper into the mainstream music industry, I came into contact with more people, bands, and labels that might share the punk aesthetic, but not the politics that drew me to punk in the first place. I was so naïve, thinking everyone in bands was all the same, all little angry feminist queers who’d just busted out from our oppressive small-town homes. No way.