The Last Living Slut (31 page)

His usual voicemail message clicked on: “I can’t answer the phone, I’m losing my mind.”

I wailed into my phone like an animal in pain. “Please pick up, Dizzy, please. I’m at the clinic and I just saw the baby. It’s tiny, Diz. You don’t know. It was so beautiful. I don’t know if I can do it. It’s so hard. Please call me. Please. My phone is on.”

I huddled down by the clean white pavement. My body was a burden I couldn’t escape from. It enslaved me to decisions I could not make. I needed Diz. I wished he was here to hold me.

I walked across the street to a café to think. By day it was a café for office types; by night it was a hip-hop joint. I called Dizzy six or seven times but he didn’t pick up. He was with some girl; I just knew it. He knew that if he picked up the phone and I heard his voice, I’d get all lovey and emotional and change my mind and keep the baby. I wanted him to like me, but I knew if I kept this baby, he wouldn’t. He’d be mad. He’d shout at me. How would I live then? How could I be a single mother and have no one but my mum? How could I ever laugh with him and be in his arms if I kept his baby?

I walked back to the clinic with the most disgusting fear I’d ever felt. I felt like I was going to the butcher. If he had bothered to pick up his phone, to talk to me, to be there for me, then I would have kept our baby. I wouldn’t have had to kill it. This was his responsibility, too.

After I filled out more forms, a nurse took blood from my middle finger to check my blood type. My ears were deaf to the blare of white noise, white uniforms, and shrunken doctors around me. They took me to a tiny area next to the operating room and told me to change into a blue dressing gown. I complied. This was my fate, after all, and I must proceed in order to be successful, to get on with life and the order of things.

In the few minutes they left me alone to change, I clasped my hands together to pray. I sobbed hysterically into the cup of my palms, so that if they walked in they wouldn’t see how pathetic I was. “My baby, my baby, I love you. I love you so much. Tiger, Tiger, forgive me. Forgive me, please.” I rocked back and forth. My dressing gown, flimsy and blue, was soaked at the sleeves because I kept wiping my nose on it.

“Dear God, please make me strong. Give me iron strength, because this is what I have to do.”

They were waiting for me when I walked into the operating room. It was the length of a small bed and the width of another. There were three people: the doctor, a nurse, and an anesthesiologist. Next to the operating table was some kind of machine thing.

A huge man with a mustache gave me instructions: “Lie here and put your legs up on the stirrups.”

My knees buckled. I’m so pathetic. I thought I was brave.

I lay on the table, obedient and still. When I put my legs up, I noticed I hadn’t shaved. “Will I still be able to have babies?” I suddenly cried and stupid tears streamed down my face.

“Yes, you should be able to,” the doctor said kindly.

The huge man was the anesthesiologist and he slid a needle into a vein in my left hand. “It’ll just make you drowsy,” he said. “It won’t put you to sleep. You’ll be half awake.”

“So I’ll be able to see everything?” I asked.

My left arm froze, and I felt like I was drunk and floating in the sky with balloons. There were flowers underneath me and my skirts were light. The doctor, a short bony man with canals of wrinkles gouged in his pointy face, smiled at me.

“Are you okay?” He had an Italian accent.

I nodded. He put something in me, and twisted and turned it. He kept twisting and turning, like he was a plumber or something. I squeezed my eyes tight. I thought of my grandmother smiling and holding my hand. I thought of our house in Iran, the sunny garden where I played all the time. I was losing Tiger. The doctor was pulling, twisting, pulling at my insides. Then he removed something. It was my fucking baby. I knew it. It was out of my body.

He placed it in a container. The container was metal.

“There. It’s done. You can go.”

Slowly, I stood up. I was so woozy that I stumbled like I was doing a comedy walk. A nurse held my arm and helped me to a room to sit back with other women who’d also just come out. There were scores of them scattered around the airy, sunny room, lying on lounge chairs and drinking tea. We were women in unison, lolling around, dazed and drunken, quietly mulling over the decision we’d all just made that had changed our fate. The nurse handed me hot water and biscuits, and said I could leave when I felt ready. I was in shock, my body hummed like a fridge, buzzing serenely. I did my best to leave.

At my mother’s house, she made me soup. I lay on the plaid sofa and slept. Later that day we took a bus to my flat, where an e-mail from Dizzy awaited.

“I’m worried about you,” he wrote. “Let me know how you’re doing.”

Later, I was sitting with my mother, who was telling me how proud she was of me for making the right decision, when Dizzy called. He sounded terrified, as if he’d been holding his breath all day to see whether I had chickened out and kept the baby.

“I did it,” I told him. “I went through with it.”

I heard him sigh with immense relief. “We couldn’t have had this baby, honey. The world is such a fucked-up place to bring a baby into. It wasn’t the right time for both of us.”

“I wish you’d been there,” I said. “I really needed you.”

“I am sorry I wasn’t there. I’ve been so busy with Guns N’ Roses. We’re going on the road again.”

“Can I come and see you? You said I could stay with you.”

“I don’t know my schedule.”

“Okay. Let me know when I can come then,” I said. “The clinic, it was really expensive. About five hundred pounds.”

“I have to go,” he replied. “I’m in the middle of rehearsal.”

I just wanted to be numb. To forget. The only thing that would help me was being with another rock band.

Chapter 50

My Abortion was Running Down My Leg. I was Dead. I knew there was Only One Thing that would make Me Feel Better. I had to be with Josh Todd.

M
y abortion was running down my leg. I was dead. I knew there was only one thing that would make me feel better. I had to be with Josh Todd of Buckcherry. It would smooth the pain like cream marble on dry rot.

I had nothing. I had lost my soul. It had dissolved into the fumes of garbage trucks, and it resided above them now, singing a homeless song. I was walking like a mannequin. I was relieved that my legs worked, because my brain didn’t talk to my body anymore. My heart pumped out its wrenched pain. I needed to find Buckcherry’s tour bus. It was the brilliant warm light that would heal me.

My abortion was thick and clumpy, heavier than a period. So I let it be, to run free. I wanted to liberate it. It was the remnants of my baby with someone I loved. I marched to forget, to numb and to deaden.

I had bathed myself that day. I had washed and scrubbed, and wished that my child would come back. I missed Dizzy so much. But I knew that being with Josh Todd would make it better. He would be the smooth pink pill of happiness.

I was a groupie. This was what I deserved. Pain and tears and heartbreak should not—could not—enter the sphere of groupiedom. We were all meat. I had been slack, and I had paid the price.

So I focused on my destination: the Buckcherry tour bus, parked somewhere on the Nottingham streets, full of fish and chips and yellow lights and skint students on that September night. In my Tesco bag, I had a vibrator, condoms, wipes, and a vitamin shake my mother had made for me, worried that I’d become too pale from the loss of blood.

When I saw the tour bus, I smiled. Ever since I’d first met Josh Todd nearly a week earlier, and he’d played with my tits on stage during “Crazy Bitch” while I massaged his crotch, I’d known for dead certain that we were going to copulate. The attention felt good. He was a rock god. He was Steven Tyler—the way he moved, his swagger, his presence. Every inch of his naked, serpentine upper body was tattooed with runaway ink. Onstage, he roared with heartbreaking pain on a song like “Sorry” and with howling orgasms on a song like “Porno Star.” But I’d gone to the show with my little brother, and I was still hurting and raw over Dizzy, so I couldn’t imagine being intimate with anyone.

But four days later in Oxford, Josh had remembered me. He’d picked me out of all the pretty girls standing outside the tour bus. It had been two days after the abortion. I wasn’t bleeding then, but my left hand was bandaged in white clumpy dressing because of the anesthetic shot.

I had thought I’d forget as soon as I got with Josh Todd.

On the tour bus, he kissed me and I massaged his naked snaked back. I told him he needed to eat a few more cheeseburgers; he looked hurt that I thought he was too skinny. He was perfection, I told him. It was a well-known fact on the road that he had a thing for raven-haired and sultry girls.

When he noticed the bandages on my hand, though, a fear—of sexual disease or domestic violence—thundered across his face.

“What’s happened to you?” he asked.

“I just had an abortion two days ago.” I conveyed the information as daintily as I could, so he’d still want to be intimate with me.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you okay? You have to look after yourself—your spirit.”

“I’ll try.” I smiled with hope.

Josh led me to a bottle-green carpeted area in the back of the bus. Quietly, he undressed me and started to finger my vagina from behind while I bent over and rubbed my ass over his bulging crotch. At the clinic, they gave me a pamphlet warning of the danger of infection if I engaged in any sexual activity for two weeks after the termination. But this was Josh Todd. He would make me forget the pain.

Condoms were Josh’s obsession, and he whipped one out like a surgical instrument pivotal to saving a life. We kissed hard and grabbed each other like two savage animals. Sweat dripped off his tattoo-covered torso. He sucked and devoured my body as if I were yummy chicken. His face was that of a rock god, and I wanted to look at it. But he turned me around and penetrated me. I moaned as he roared into me, holding my round hips tightly. My pornographic moans bore through the bus’ corridor, and I felt bad. My bandage was unspooling as my body shuddered, full of Josh.

“Please let me swallow you.”

I sucked and swallowed him like it was the last soup on earth. He had been affectionate. I needed that.

Somewhere along the way, my bandage fell off, revealing the puncture of the anesthetic needle on my hand. He saw the pain in my face and we talked about Dizzy. Josh was a master of spiritual healing, though he couldn’t administer it to himself.

Now, a day later in Nottingham, I drank my vitamin shake. I hoped my breasts were big enough. They’d grown huge during my pregnancy—ballooned and aching. I knew I needed to be home in bed that night, but that would be madness.

Outside the tour bus, I saw the band’s crew. They greeted me beaming, like they knew.
I just want comfort tonight: I want to be with Josh.
I presented myself outside the bus as a beautiful glamour girl, my hair chestnut-brown and glossed, makeup a work of art, body voluptuous and ready. But Josh was still in the dressing rooms, so the band’s tour manager, Kyle, escorted me there to meet him.

Nottingham Rock City’s dressing rooms were a catacomb of naughty sex-play, with a beehive of squat, pocket-size niches tucked in the back of the venue. I found Josh in the Buckcherry dressing room with the rest of the band, stage-sweaty and signing posters for fans and taking photos with contest winners. He hugged me, and I removed my coat to reveal my corset and polka-dot bunny skirt.

“You look beautiful,” he said. “How have you been?”

“The train journey was so long,” I said.

He asked about my family and my background in a very concerned way, wanting details I didn’t find interesting. But he was generous with me, so I felt high and happy, and began to forget the clinic.

“Keith really likes you,” a roadie whispered in my ear, referring to Keith Nelson, the guitarist. “He wants to see you.”

“I can’t right now,” I said. “I’m with Josh.”

“I think you should go with Keith,” the roadie insisted. “He’s crazy about you.”

Keith was stereotypically sexy, muscular, and rockerish, but devoid of the sexual aura Josh Todd radioactivated. I didn’t want to be with Keith. I looked at Josh as Keith stood behind me waiting. I didn’t want to offend anyone. I wished Josh would say something. Maybe this was a test: I was supposed to perform my groupie part. Keith took my hand and led me away. I looked back at Josh, and he looked at me. My blood flowed heavier, and I felt disgusted with who I was. I missed Dizzy. I wished he was here.

Keith took me to an empty dressing room and locked the door. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling kept guard over empty beer bottles, an eyeliner-smeared mirror, a pile of soaked sandwiches. I looked over at Keith. He had unzipped his pants. I didn’t want to do this, but I wanted to be polite. He was a nice guy who always had to play second best to Josh. I couldn’t reject him. It would’ve been cruel.

I could feel myself bleeding in clumps as Keith pushed himself against the door to keep it shut.
How can I be doing this?
He had his dick in his hand, and it had a huge ring through it. It repulsed me. I got down and began to suck it, and it hurt my mouth. I opened up wider so the ring could fit into my mouth and throat. I gave him the best cock-sucking I could, so he could cum and I could leave. But he didn’t cum. He wanted to fuck me.

“Turn around,” he said.

I didn’t want to.

He lifted my skirt. My abortion was sliding down my leg.

“It’s just my period,” I said, not wanting to offend him.

He put a condom on and looked away from the mess as he entered me. That cockring choked my vagina, scraping my insides. He pumped away furiously and I felt nothing. I was dead. I closed my eyes and thought of sunshine, of my grandmother’s house where I played on the carpets.

Keith couldn’t stand the mess. He looked away in disgust. “Honey, it’s too much blood,” he said.