Boring Girls(88)

I’d lie awake in bed and imagine glorious ways to destroy that band. The concept of lighting the bus on fire was always a good standby; the image of that fat *’s swollen, split flesh and the crackle of their hair blazing always calmed me. I entertained myself with images of poisoning them, putting something into their drinks and watching bloody foam stream from their lips. Even something as simple as driving a plain old stick from the backyard into Balthazar’s eye could often do it. When an image of his face would pop into my mind unbidden, I would immediately imagine driving my thumb into his eye, relishing the warmth of the spasm and clench around my thumb, the eye bursting beneath my thumbnail and all that weird congealed jelly stuff squirting out and down his cheek.

I also developed a pretty bad habit of digging my nails into the palm of my left hand, causing cuts that would bleed, as I had that day in the woods with Fern. I’d pull off the scabs when the wounds tried to heal, and after a while my palm was a mess and only got worse. I ended up getting a bunch of blood on my bed sheets because I tore off the scabs before bed or unknowingly in my sleep. The skin around the scabs would harden into dry ridges and I would tear those off too, stripping them along as far as they could go into the healthy areas of my palm and causing more blood to well up. I would wad up a white sock and clench it in my palm whenever I picked at it during the day. I kept all the bloody socks in a bag under my bed.

xXx

The whole throwing-up thing in Port Claim had definitely worked in our favour. Word had started getting around about the band in the months since that had happened, and there was a small but present demand for our crappy CD. Socks put together a cheap little website to sell them, and mail and money started trickling in. People wanted to know when we were playing in their city, if we wanted to play with their band, all kinds of stuff. We hadn’t played any shows in a long time, and it was pretty awesome that people really, really wanted us to.

And then we got a really amazing-sounding offer. We all knew Goreceps — I’d really gotten into their album Excrement from Birth. They were from the U.K., and we got an email from their manager offering us a tour with them. A week and a half touring across England, and two shows in Ireland and Scotland.

Of course there was the money issue. We’d have to cover our own flights, and four round-trip tickets to the U.K. were pretty expensive. But Goreceps’s manager assured us that the crowds there would be quite large, and they would pay us a small sum for each show. We could also sell our own merchandise and CDs. We had a few hundred dollars from the CDs we’d sold al-ready, and we could put that towards doing a run of T-shirts. So all we had to do was somehow scrounge up enough money for the flights — everything else would be taken care of.

I made the design for the T-shirt. Two blood-spattered women pressed against one another, dresses torn, faces skeletal, and eyes hollow beneath their long ratted hair. One was dark haired, the other pale. They pressed their bony hands together, the fingers entwined, gripping a hank of black hair. Dangling from their grasp was a severed head, several teeth wrenched from its dry gums, dark blood oozing from its scooped-out eye sockets. I pressed my pencil hard into the drawing, adding the best smirks I could to the girls’ exposed bone faces, willing their happiness to reflect in the dark hollows of their eyes. It was Judith and her maidservant and the head of Holofernes, but of course, it was me and Fern and the head of Balthazar. That legend, that myth, was going to be our reality. I pored over the drawing for hours and hours. I dreamed that my teeth had been sharpened down to pointy nubs, and I used them to bite through stomachs, chewing at spongy entrails while my mouth filled with blood over and over again.

Edgar’s parents agreed to loan us money for the flights. My parents agreed I could go. I hadn’t caused any tension in the house since that horrible night, and I think they were worried about me being depressed or something. The T-shirt was printed. We packed our bags for tour. Fern and Edgar would bring their guitars, Socks would share a drum kit with Goreceps. We filled our remaining suitcases with CDs, shirts to sell, and stage clothes, and went to the U.K.





THIRTY-SIX


It was called the Flesh for Lunch Tour and right when we got off the plane things felt very organized. We were met at the airport by Richard, who shook our hands, gave us laminated cards with a picture of Goreceps and our name on the front, and the tour dates on the back, and brought us to a van. We were exhausted and hoping we’d be able to sleep — it was early afternoon in London, but our body clocks were telling us it was 8 a.m. and we hadn’t been to sleep. Sleeping on planes is impossible. It’s such a horrible feeling sitting in the fake night they give you, where they dim the lights and everyone closes their eyes, and it seems like you’re the only one still awake, you’re the only one who didn’t plan ahead and stay up the night before so you’d actually be tired during fake night. You feel lonely and isolated, and you also get to panic because you know you’re going to land in a few hours and be just exhausted, destroyed, and expected to face a whole new day. And that’s what happened to us. Richard said we were going straight to the first venue, as there was a show that night. And so we did.