Rock All Night(115)

“Ryan’s in the hottest rock band in the world. And according to you, he’s the heart and soul behind it. He’s won plenty already.”

“Yeah… just not the one he really wants.”

Her words broke my heart a little bit.

“Ryan’s not my type,” I said lamely.

“What’s your type – *s?”

“No. I – I’m in love with Derek.”

There. I finally said it.

Even if he hasn’t.

She nodded. “So… your type is *s.”

“No – ”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter – the * wants what the * wants. But don’t ever say I never gave you any good advice.”

The * wants what the * wants.

It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare.

But it turned out she was right about the other part – the part about giving me good advice.

I just didn’t see it at the time.





96




The night – and Riley’s story – continued amidst a flurry of shots.

She talked about the various punk rock bands she’d been in through the years, including the one she’d started when she was sixteen, called ‘Fuck You.’ When she first heard Cee-lo Green’s song by the same name, she immediately changed the band name to ‘Punk Rock Bitches’ because she didn’t want people thinking she took her band name from a Top 40 hit. That would have been very un-punk rock. (Although, technically, the Top 40 hit was titled ‘Forget You,’ and ‘Fuck You’ was the naughty, alternate version… but that didn’t seem to matter to 16-year-old Riley.)

She talked about how she started playing the drums when she was five years old, using overturned pots and pans as the bass and snares, and lids suspended on fishing line as the cymbals. Growing up, she got practice time on other kids’ real drum sets by trading them alcohol she shoplifted. She didn’t get her own set until she was seventeen, just three years before she joined Bigger. She paid for them by working on a phone sex line. She eventually got fired – but not because she was lying about her age to work there. No, it was because she pissed off too many customers. If she got mad at a caller, she liked to tell them things right before they were about to climax. Like their penises were too small. Or she would drop her voice and say she was actually a 65-year-old man named Hiram.

She talked about how she had been born to a sixteen-year-old girl who had gotten pregnant and given her up for adoption. She didn’t even know her mother’s first name, just that her last name was Wojtalik.

She talked a little about some of the foster homes she grew up in. Riley freely admitted she was the kid from hell – furious at the world, shutting everyone out, always in trouble, getting drunk daily by age twelve. As a result of her bad behavior, she got shuttled around a lot. Some of the foster homes were good… and some weren’t. She didn’t go into detail, but I could tell there was a lot of pain there. And there was some kind of abuse in her past. Whether it stopped at physical beatings like the one that Mr. Hopkins had given her at four years old, or whether it went beyond that into something worse, she wouldn’t say… but she never looked me in the eye once when she talked about it.

She finally brought up her sister, who was actually her foster sister. Megan was two years older than Riley. Their host family only kept them for the government checks. They’d kicked Megan out of the house the day she turned eighteen. A couple months later, Riley ran away and followed her foster sister to New York City.

Megan got a job as a waitress, went to community college at night, and lived with three other girls in a squalid dump in the Bronx. Riley would crash on their second-hand couch for weeks at a time, until the other girls got tired of her drunken rages and kicked her out. Even then, Megan would always give Riley some money out of what little she had, and always made sure Riley had something to eat.

Megan was the only person Riley still talked to from that period in her life. I could tell how much she loved her just from her voice – because it was the only time in the three weeks I’d know her that I’d ever heard her sound truly happy.





97




Riley eventually got tired of all the self-introspection.

“C’mon, Blondie,” she said, grabbing my hand. “If I can’t hit on you, I can least use you as chick-bait.”

We went out on the dance floor – which was no more than twenty feet square – and bumped and grinded along with at least forty other women, ranging from lipstick to sporty to full-on butch.

I got my fair share of attention from other women, including a few offers to buy me a drink. I turned them down, but told them I appreciated it. Everybody was cool; nobody got annoyed.

I had a fantastic time. When I didn’t have to fend off advances from Riley, she was actually a hell of a lot of fun to be around.


Riley hit on just about everybody else, though, over the course of the night. Her favorite trick was to wait until someone set their sights on me, then dart in and say, “Hey, have you met my friend Kaitlyn? She’s straight. But I’m not.”

She got a few make-outs from that approach.

There were more shots, and more dancing, and more laughter. For the first time in over a week, all my troubles were gone. No drama with Derek… no f*cking article to write…