Lullaby for the Rain Girl (28 page)

second Tuesday in July;

and of death, 4:23 p.m.,

same day, “9 hours” typed

antiseptically under
Length of Stay

in This City or Town;

and the third—

head and two hands

engulfed in waves of

Kodak satin

in a coffin smaller

than any coffin should be.

I speak to her sometimes,

this little big sister—parents

dead now too, and buried and burned

with them answers, or what we take

for answers. At times

I dream I find her grave open

in moonlight, her powdery bones

left to splinter and crumble

in spitting rain. At times

I dream I hold her in my arms,

still a baby, but my arms are air,

as they are also when I’m awake.

I speak to her sometimes

to fill the hole that is my life,

yet in speaking the hole

only widens. O Rachel,

O paper, ink, and footprints,

what there is for me

of love, what is it

I so need to tell you?

There’s nothing to say, and no one

to say it to, and yet there is

this need, this wild hunger raging

in the place my heart should be,

to tell you, to say it,

to let you know.

When I looked up, having read it through several times, I was surprised to see that she was out of the shower already, toweling off her hair in the doorway and looking at me.

“Bad?” she said.

“Good,” I said. “More than good.”

“Aw.” She bounded over suddenly and leapt onto the bed. “You wouldn’t think that if I didn’t fuck you so well.”

“Yes, I would.” I studied the pages. “It must have been—hard. To write.”

“Hard?” She shook her head vehemently. “The hard part was
living
it, Benja-me-me. Writing it was easy. My writing is only good when it’s easy. It just sort of came out of me,” she said, “like diarrhea.” She took the pages from me and looked at them. “So just remember, the next time we have sex, that you’re sort of fucking a dead girl too.”

“Now that’s really morbid. Even by your standards.”

“Ha! Well, I didn’t mean it literally. You know what I mean.”

“Let’s find out if I do.”

We made love for a while. I didn’t feel I was fucking a dead girl, yet there was a sense—a sense I would never acknowledge to her—of Rachel as being somehow far away from me, unknowable, some essential part of her closed even as we went at it as athletically as ever. And when we were finished, when she rolled to her side and vanished into a deep slumber, yes, there was a moment, looking at her little naked form curled up atop the sheets, that it seemed as if I were looking not at a live young woman but at a frail shade, someone with one foot here and one already poised to step into another world, a spirit world, a world of distant ghosts, her true home.

# # #

Something began to happen between us.

“Hit me,” she said one night in bed.

“What?”

“Hit me. When we’re fucking. I want to know what it feels like.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Just hit me. Slap me in the face. Slap me in the face right when I’m coming. And turn the camera on. So I can watch later.”

“Why? I’m not going to do that.”

“I want you to.”

“No.”

“I just want to know what it feels like.”

“No.”

“Benja-me-me...”

“No.”

“Shit,” she said, turning away from me. “You’re no fun.”

# # #

Such moments—there were more than one—passed quickly. For the most part, Rachel continued to be the delightful companion she’d been since our relationship had begun; I’ve rarely laughed as much with anyone, thought admittedly some of it was gallows humor. She would read book after book about the Holocaust, sharing aloud particularly gruesome facts and stories, sometimes giggling as she read. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, particularly when she managed to get me giggling, too. I was aware that there was nothing funny about it, yet that, perhaps, was what made us laugh: our own reality was so inescapably different, so romantic, sexual,
alive,
that reading about such ghastly things seemed comical in comparison. We weren’t laughing at the victims, we were laughing at our own good fortune, the miraculous fate that put us here, where we were, when there were so many other times and places we might have been.

My school load was light during the summer, so we took quick trips here and there. Once we drove down to L.A.—Rachel finally made it—to see the punk band X playing at the Whiskey a-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip. Rachel had insisted that I listen to their records with her, and I had to admit the intensity, even the brilliance of what I heard. Songs like “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” were revelations to me, musically and lyrically. I felt I finally understood what Rachel had been trying to do with the late, lamented Motherfuckers.

I understood better still during the show, when she and I were packed in with several hundred punks with black leather, green hair and Mohawks, all of them screaming the lyrics back at the band during every song, jumping onto the stage and then sky-surfing back off again into the raised hands of the audience. It was loud, rude, sweaty, raucous. I’d been to concerts over the years, Fleetwood Mac (Sherry’s favorite) and Pink Floyd, but nothing had prepared me for the
raw
quality of a punk show. It struck me that nowhere did I smell pot smoke—an unimaginable thing at most rock concerts. I pointed this out to Rachel.

“That’s because they’re all on speed!” she shouted in my ear, helpfully.

“Are
you?”
I shouted back.

“Shit no! I’m on acid!” And with that she marched to the front, near the bass player, and jumped up onto the stage, gave everyone a quick wave, and dived—literally dived, like a swimmer—into the crowd. I was terrified she’d be trampled, but all these rowdy drugged-out people caught her and placed her gently down.

“That was fun!” she shouted. “Why don’t you do it?”

“Because I’m not on acid!” I shouted back. “And I’m not on speed!”

“You’re
no fun,
Benja-me-me!” she yelled, laughing.

But that was the only time we attended such an event. Mostly we were busy at home: as our rent ran out we had to search for another apartment, which we eventually found on East Sola Street, which at that time represented the closest thing Santa Barbara had to a “bad part of town.” It wasn’t bad, actually, but it was old and run-down, and our tiny apartment—one bedroom this time—had more than one cockroach flitting about when the lights were off. The stove and oven appeared to be from the 1950s. The carpet had old cigarette burns. But it was cheap, and our neighbors weren’t bums, simply low-end working people: fast-food employees, guys who worked at car washes or did day labor. Some college students, too. I missed our original apartment badly—it was palatial by the standards of our new one—yet we were at the age that such a diminution in living standards could be treated as a joke.

In truth, we had fun there. Rachel especially liked the lax rules on noise, which allowed her to blast the Ramones and the Clash and the Sex Pistols at whatever volume she wanted. (Luckily she needed quiet in order to write and have sex, as did I.) Neighbors would come by and stay for hours, drinking our beer or bringing their own. None of these people meant anything to either of us; it was just that kind of place, that’s all. A hangout. We went to their apartments just as casually to drink or smoke weed, listen to records, watch TV. (I discovered in this period that watching
That’s Incredible!
while high was an experience not to be missed.)

But amidst these drug-fueled and salacious adventures we worked too, especially late at night, after we’d had sex and after the various neighbors’ parties had quieted. At two or three in the morning we’d be scribbling away by the light of our two little lamps, munching crackers or potato chips and sharing a can of Orange Crush or Mountain Dew.

I’d read enough old novels to know that I was slowly drifting into what would once have been called a “dissolute” life. I was clearly drinking too much, smoking too much pot. But I was having too much fun to worry about it.

“Do you think,” she asked one night, mock-serious, “that we’ll look back on this years from now and think these were the best years of our lives?”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “I hope not. It’s great, but I hope it’s not all downhill from here.”

“Do you see a future?”

“A future?”

“Yeah. For us.”

“Well...everybody has a future.”

“Except dead people.”

“Well, except dead people.”

8

Something began to happen between us.

“Rachel?”

“Mm.”

“Are you okay?”

“Mm.”

“Are you? Rachel?”

“...I’m okay. Let me sleep.”

“You don’t look very good. Did you take something?”

“...Always take something.”

“C’mon. Get up.”

“Uh-uh. Leave me alone.”

“Open your eyes.”

“Leave me alone. I’m okay...just some pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

“Sleeping pills. The ones in the medicine cabinet.”

“We have sleeping pills?”

“...Peter’s.”

“How many did you take?”

“I dunno...Not many.”

“Can you stand up?”

“Don’t want to...sleepy.”

“Rachel, you look sick. You’re too pale.”

“Shut up. Lemme sleep.”

“If you can’t get up I’m going to call 911.”

“Lemme sleep.”

“Come on. It’s up or the paramedics are coming. Your choice.”

“Fuck
off.”

“Okay. I’m going to call now.”

“Wait. I’ll get up. Jesus. I just want to fucking
sleep.”

“I’ll help you.”

“’S okay.”

“There. You’re sitting up. Can you stand?”

“Don’t want to.”

“Can
you? Can you get to the bathroom?”

“Mm.”

“Hold your head up. Come on.”

“Bastard. I just wanna sleep.”

“Up. Come on. Good. Hey, you opened your eyes. Good job.”

“I’m
okay,
Benja-me-me...me-me...me-me-me.”

“Come on. Time to take a cold shower. Drink some water. Wake up.”

“I’m awake, I’m awake. Why do you want me awake? Middle of the night...”

“It’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”

“...Early.”

“You had the breakfast shift today. You were supposed to be in at seven.”

“Really?”

“I covered for you. I left you alone this morning and went in. I just thought you were sleepy.”

“I
am.”

“Shit, Rachel. Sleeping pills? How long has this been going on?”

“Not long. I need ’em to sleep. Too much speed.”

“Stop taking speed and you won’t need sleeping pills.”

“Smart ass.”

“And since when have you been taking so much speed? I thought you just took it now and then...”

“I’m up. I’m
up,
okay?”

“Okay.”

# # #

She started missing work more often. Sometimes I could cover for her, but since we frequently had the same schedule, I couldn’t always. She slept a lot, did a lot of drugs—some I knew about (pot, speed, LSD), some I no doubt didn’t. At times I would come home to find her in rather mysterious conversations on the phone with people I didn’t seem to quite know, though at least twice that I recall she was talking to Peter and crying.

I could see she was falling apart, but didn’t have any idea how to deal with it. She would rally; she still had many good days, when she was bright and focused, when she would go to work on time and do well, when she was ready for writing and love at the end of the day.

“You really need to send out your poems,” I said, trying to encourage her.
“I’m
going to do it, if you don’t. I’ll type up some of your best ones and send them to a good literary journal. See if I don’t.”