Coal to Diamonds (7 page)

At the beginning of junior high a girl who had been on my periphery became one of my most important friends. She was funny and laughed at everything. Crystal and I had a lot of fun together. Funny people are always my favorites. Somewhere in my box of pictures is one of us together at school, dressed exactly alike. We owned matching R.E.M. T-shirts. Together we redecorated her room. We listened to Nirvana’s
Incesticide
on cassette. We played it on repeat. Nirvana was our eighth-grade soundtrack. We spent days covering her pink ballerina wallpaper with big, psychedelic swirls of sidewalk chalk and sprayed the whole thing down with shellac so it would stay. We had so much fun together and stayed close for two summers, but as junior high was ending, Crystal met a boy, and eventually so did I.

I’d seen Anthony around my whole life, but we officially met on the school bus. I’d had my eye on him since junior high. He was noticeable in his Nirvana T-shirt. Nobody else had one of those, not even me. I thought Anthony was pretty cool. He was wearing a pair of really sad combat boots, and his hair was long. By the time we started dating, Anthony still had his Nirvana shirt, faded and better looking, and he still had the tragic combat boots with the frayed laces, but his tangle of long, cool hair was chopped off. His dad had given him an ultimatum: you can have long hair, or you can have a car. In Judsonia, the choice was easy. Wear your hair in a hairdo that gets you beat up and not have the wheels to
speed yourself away from your tormentors, or cut your mop and have freedom of movement.

One day I finally got up the courage to uncoolly ask if Anthony liked punk. He was so sweet and shy that he didn’t even speak, he just nodded yes. I asked him to a show and he nodded yes again. He finally gave me his phone number. I tried to play it cool, but I was stressed because I didn’t have a phone number to give him—I didn’t even know where I’d be sleeping that night.

One week later we were boyfriend-girlfriend and we stayed coupled up like that for three whole years. After school I would walk a mile to the pay phone to call him. If he wasn’t there it would be so depressing. It was even worse if he was in the bathroom, taking a shower. Phone calls cost a dime. If I had two dimes I could hang around for a minute and try again, but I often had only a single dime.

Anthony and I had a really sweet relationship. I told him about my uncle, and that I couldn’t remember ever being a virgin. Anthony was a feminist boy, compassionate and patient with me. He listened to a lot of the same music I did and we shared mix tapes. We had endless conversations about music, and with our information exchange, both of our music libraries doubled. He played guitar and I liked to sing, and since we had so many great influences, we decided to start the world’s shittiest band, Little Miss Muffet. Anthony named it.

Little Miss Muffet was so silly. We had one song called “Ziggy Nut.” I still don’t know what it was about. Our drummer, Joey Story, was only thirteen years old. He was kind of a surly kid, and he had a real sweet mom who let us practice in her living room.

Little Miss Muffet had our first show at this place called Hastings. It didn’t make any sense for us to be part of that show, but we were. Joey had an older brother named Dean, who was in a band called Room Fullove Thirteen. They sounded like Third Eye Blind or Blink-182, or something awful like that. They had fancy banners announcing their band. I felt like Room Fullove Thirteen
was just mocking us, all the time, because we were the shittiest band with the shittiest equipment, and you could tell they thought they were really going somewhere. They would take their equipment around in a trailer, while we showed up in our car with a busted-ass Peavey amp. Joey and Dean’s father, Mr. Story, was deep in the throes of a midlife crisis. He’d left Mrs. Story, bought a super-fancy car, and was fake-managing Room Fullove Thirteen. It was like something you’d see on TV, like a bad reality show that makes you cringe because the people all think they’re really going somewhere but you, the viewer, understand they’re going nowhere fast.

We played a couple of shows together. It made me realize that even within the “us” there is a “them.” Like, Room Fullove Thirteen were sort of weird for Arkansas, but next to nerds like me and Anthony, they were normal. They, like everyone else, didn’t know what to make of us.

There was Room Fullove Thirteen, Little Miss Muffet, and Nathan’s band, Mrs. Garrett, which is how I first learned of the whole Nathan phenomenon. Nathan had a tape distro, where he copied the shitty demo tapes of various bands and sold them to people via mail order, or at his shows. He put out a tape of Little Miss Muffet without even asking us! Nathan was so exciting and different, but he was only one of the cool new people I was meeting.

Around that time, my gay feelings were becoming unavoidable. I didn’t have any doubts about how I felt. I had two options: coming out and not knowing what the future held, or staying in and becoming a typical Judsonia woman. In my desperation, I wanted an easy out, and I figured that a baby would be a certain way to avoid the looming eternity of hellfire and brimstone I was sure was in store for me. Plus, so many other girls were having babies that it seemed normal. I started begging Anthony to knock me up. It is ironic that after spending so much time worrying I’d wind up pregnant, now that I was trying to make it happen, it just wouldn’t. It helped that Anthony flat-out refused—no sperm, no
baby. I think it must have been a real God spell that my mother put on me, if you want to know the truth. She never wanted us to wind up like her, saddled with so many babies, even as she kept having them. She wanted a different life for me, and she used her strange witchy ways to give me this one kind of protection, and it worked. Anthony didn’t knock me up, and I stayed gay inside; my secret.

Meanwhile, we were doing shows with Room Fullove Thirteen because there just weren’t that many bands to ask to play. The same small group of people were in all the bands, mixing around into different combinations. Little Miss Muffet and Room Fullove Thirteen, Mrs. Garrett, and Space Kadets, who were also called Boy Pussy USA. Not to forget my future friends Jeri Beard and Kathy Mendonca’s band, Poopoo Icee. They had a second band, the Velvet 45s. And there were the Puget Sounds and the Hips. Every day was a different band, almost. Someone would get inspired by a new cool band name and voilà, a fresh ensemble would debut. It was so exciting, this whole music thing, and up until then everything in Arkansas had been so incredibly boring.

It was Nathan who brought the whole scene together. Nathan is truly a magical person. He’s always been able to make things happen; he’s never bored. If he notices something being boring he fixes it really easily, and I felt that’s what he did with his hometown, Searcy.

Searcy was still Arkansas, but it was a little bigger, a little cooler, with more pipelines to the outside world. Nathan was too cool. He wasn’t wearing baggy jeans and a wallet chain, he was watching John Waters films and wearing a polyester suit. Really, really cool.

Our “audiences” were very small. Mostly we just played for each other, unless Room Fullove Thirteen were on the bill. They all had girlfriends who would stand at the front of the stage and sway and coo at them the whole time, and of course their ever-present manager-dad would be around. Once Mom came to listen to me sing. She was really into Little Miss Muffet and really sweet about
my voice. She hadn’t gotten to go to many of my things when I was a kid, choir and whatnot, so she tried to make up for it during my teen years.

Just because I was trying my hand at singing for bands didn’t mean I’d abandoned the choir. I was such a choir nerd I’d been voted choir president! Bet you didn’t even know such a position existed. I’d shamelessly campaigned for the slot, and I’d gotten it, because in spite of everything I was well liked. I had a
Why not?
attitude about things that freed me up to go after stuff a more hesitant nerd—or even worse, a more popular kid—might avoid.

As hard as it was to scrounge for music, desperately trying to hunt down what kids in other cities had easy access to, there was something special about that time. Each discovery was a treasure that could save your life, that made you more understandable to yourself. Every song was a message in a bottle cast into the ocean by someone just like you, in another land, who was waiting for you to join her, saying,
You’ll make it! You’ll make it!
I’m glad I came of age during that weird window before kids could download music on the Internet.

When Jennifer came into my life it really changed everything. I met my chosen family through Jennifer. She introduced me to my bandmates and best friends: her boyfriend, Jeri, and Kathy and Nathan. Jennifer was the daughter of Jo Ann, the lady who had introduced my mother to Tom. Jennifer had been living with her dad in Monroe, Louisiana, but then her dad got remarried and Jennifer couldn’t find her place in that family, so she came to Arkansas to stay with her mom. I could already relate to this girl skipping across state lines, trying to figure out where her home
was. Monroe wasn’t the coolest place to be stuck, but at least they had MTV. Judsonia had banned the station in the ’80s, so seeing music videos there was practically impossible. Jennifer came prepared. Before she left Louisiana she recorded a whole bunch of videos off MTV—Hole, Veruca Salt, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Alanis Morissette. We’d watch them over and over: Trent Reznor shirtless, Veruca Salt’s kittens, French bulldogs, and dolls, Nirvana’s apocalyptic high school cheerleaders in their black Converse. Jennifer showed me her videos and I showed her what I’d scrounged here and there. She was the answer to my prayers. Suddenly, I felt completely understood. She bridged the gap from choir girl to youth movement. I owe life as I know it to our brief but fulfilling friendship.

Everything about my meeting Jennifer was fated. We didn’t go to school together, and there was really no reason our paths should ever have crossed. Jennifer came to my mother’s house with her mom one night—a night that I happened to be there.

Jennifer was a little freaked out from landing in Arkansas. Monroe was a fascinating metropolis compared to Morning Sun, the town she was living in. Morning Sun has since been swallowed up by Searcy, so it’s a little more urban, but not much, and not then. It was amazing to have this girl about my age, just a year older, show up at my house in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas, liking the same kind of music I liked. Jennifer was wearing a really cool pair of pants that were super baggy. I wanted pants like that so bad but had no idea where to get them. In my town, to get Converse you had to ask a store to order them for you special, and for a bondage belt—a leather belt decorated with shiny silver loops—you had to go into a straight-up sex shop.

Jennifer came around at the moment when I was growing out of grunge and getting more into Riot Grrrl. Happening right alongside grunge, rising up and out of that same Pacific Northwest music scene that was spitting out Nirvana and the other boy bands, was a rebellious, smart, tough, and unabashedly female—
even feminine—movement being tagged Riot Grrrl. Riot Grrrl took the second-wave feminist adage “The personal is political” and brought it home to young women in the grunge and punk scenes. Think it’s sort of weird that all the bands are men, that grunge and punk boys are just as shitty to girls as a room full of frat boys? Riot Grrrl addressed it. Think it’s just a coincidence that pretty much every girl you have ever met has sustained some sort of sexual trauma? Riot Grrrl called the bullshit: it’s called misogyny, it’s a systemic cultural problem, it affects punk scenes, and it is political. The way girls are taught to hate their bodies unless they are skinny, inspiring self-loathing, self-hate, disordered eating? It’s political. Riot Grrrl said so. Homophobia is political, racism is political, and here was a revolution centered around music that affirmed girls, girlishness, females, and feminism, overtly, with all the fuck-you of punk rock. With grunge on one side of me and Riot Grrrl on the other, I finally felt like there was something out there in the larger world that maybe could catch me when and if I ever jumped out of this life in Arkansas.

At age twelve, I had begun identifying as a feminist. It was sometimes very confusing to be a feminist who loves a campy Greta Garbo brow and enjoys drawing on a Madonna mole. Discovering Riot Grrrl gave me insight into the beauty myth—my lipstick could be an inch thick and my hair could be a mile high, and my identity as a feminist was intact. So did I put my hairspray down? No. I moved my rattail comb from the front of my head to the back and bouffanted my hair. Just like the Huggy Bear song.

Riot Grrrl kept a magpie aesthetic, nicking styles from punk subcultures, from grunge and goth. It detested capitalism and so it was thrifted, secondhand, or you made it yourself. Riot Grrrl lifted its ban on capitalism long enough to slink into a mall and emerge with a head full of brightly colored plastic baby barrettes and Hello Kitty paraphernalia. It inverted the definitions of nerdy and cool.

Trapped in Arkansas, I dreamed of my soul sisters in Washington
State. It was hard out there to really stay on top of what was happening everywhere else, but by the time I caught on, Riot Grrrl had already shown up in
Time
magazine, and in the pages of
Sassy
. It was a real movement, big enough to send its ripples all the way to Judsonia. Never mind that Riot Grrrl was fading out in the places where it had begun; in Arkansas it was only beginning to reach us. It was still new, exotic, empowering, exciting. We couldn’t afford
Sassy
, so we didn’t have the latest info about trends the rest of the nation was experiencing, but that didn’t make us any less excited about it.

Jennifer and I would stay up late singing Counting Crows songs into a tape recorder and making up our own songs too. I loved to sing, I loved to take the thoughts in my mind and braid them into a melody. It felt good to push the sound out into the air with my body. Singing was simple and powerful at once. We would cover songs we liked, making them sound terrible, playing them back on the warbly, scratchy tape player, cracking up.