Jeff came home just now with Dave, his friend who is visiting from out of town (for whom we recently threw this party). While Dave was on the back porch, I shared with my husband this little fact, tweeted earlier:
…Based on 7 Year Bitch’s “Dead Men Don’t Rape,” iTunes Genius recommends Black Flag’s “Slip it In.”
So Jeff says, “Go tell that story to Dave. Then ask him why that’s spooky.”
So I do.
And Dave tells me all about how he played some shows with 7 Year Bitch, back in the day (he was in some other band at the time, which, by his own admission, sucked), and how one of the band members once threw her instrument down, walked off the stage, demanded a cigarette from him and then that he buy her a drink, which he gladly did. (Dave noted that he didn’t sleep with her, not for lack of wanting to. As well as the unrelated fact that it wasn’t long after that, that she died of a heroin overdose.)
So Jeff comes out on the back porch and Dave and I are discussing 7 Year Bitch, among other aspects of the early 90s music scene. Jeff has no idea of Dave’s fleeting history with the band in question, he just thought Dave might remember that earlier in the evening, when they’d been out on the town, Jeff had actually been randomly singing/humming the Black Flag song in question. (Which doesn’t seem to be a song about rape at all, though it does exist, certainly, in curious juxtaposition with the 7 Year Bitch track concerned.)
At no time did I mention that it was my schizo, formerly prostituted girlfriend who’d first introduced me to 7 Year Bitch, and with it, to her own peculiar brand of gutterpunk*-infused lesbian separatism. (Which would morph into other philosophies as the months and years wore on; always, I was expected to keep up, to be plugged into her beliefs as they changed and to accept them as my own, no matter how frequently they changed. Which was sometimes an hour-by-hour occurrence. I mentioned she was schizo, right?)
Because, had I gone into that story, it would have been like peeling another layer off the collective onion that was awkwardly positioned, somehow, between the three of us. Who knows what else might have been revealed? I was tired, so tired.
“Please, God: no more material.”
_
* A specific-to-Minneapolis street youth reference. EDITED TO CLARIFY: According to my partner at the time, this was a specific-to-Minneapolis street youth reference, although I am not so certain of this now (nor am I sure of many other things she declared as fact back then), due in part to one kind commenter at this post. It’s something I’d like to research further in the future. The ever morphing language of street economies and cultures, and their variations by geography and other sub-groupings, is always a fascinating thing to me.
