Paradoxical Undressing

Kristin Hersh

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848872394
• eBook ISBN: 9780857893017
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Kristin Hersh was a preternaturally bright teenager, starting university at fifteen and with her band, Throwing Muses, playing rock clubs she was too young to frequent. By the age of seventeen she was living in her car, unable to sleep for the torment of strange songs swimming around her head - the songs for which she is now known. But just as her band was taking off, Hersh was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Paradoxical Undressing chronicles the unraveling of a young woman's personality, culminating in a suicide attempt; and then her arduous yet inspiring recovery, her unplanned pregnancy at the age of 19, and the birth of her first son. Playful, vivid, and wonderfully warm, this is a visceral and brave memoir by a truly original performer, told in a truly original voice.

Contents

SPRING 1985

SUMMER 1985

FALL 1985

WINTER 1986

SPRING 1986

SPRING 1985

The handmade Jesus on Napoleon’s living room wall has no face, just a gasping, caved-in head with blood dripping down its chest. He appears to have been crucified on some popsicle sticks. His mottled green and gold surface reminds us of fish scales and his paddle-shaped toes fan out like a tail. It is a singularly gruesome crucifix. We call it “Fish Jesus.”

The first time I saw it, I thought it was funny. It’s less funny at night when you’re alone. And even less funny tonight because next to me is a bag of horrible donuts one of the painters left for me as a joke. They look just like Fish Jesus. Oblong, greenish-gold and bloody with jelly, coconut maggots swarm over them. I really don’t wanna look at them anymore, but throwing them away would mean touching them and I don’t wanna do that, either.

So me and Fish Jesus and the donuts all lean against the wall, watching Christmas lights blink. It isn’t Christmas, but these were the only working lights left in this empty apartment when its old man died. He was named Napoleon. All we really know about him is that he lived here in Providence and now he’s dead, his body and most of his belongings carted away. And somehow he still pays his electric bill. Someone does, anyway, and it isn’t me or any of the other people I’ve seen use his electricity.

I also know where he hid his key (under the mat—Napoleon was a brilliant tactician), and tonight I need a place to stay. So I park myself under a sad crucifix and watch tiny blue, green, red and orange bulbs blink on and off. Insomniacs like to waste time.

The lights are comfortingly tacky, the garish blue ones my favorites. They remind me of being a little kid, hypnotized and mystified by Christmas. I open first one eye and then the other, to see if I can watch only the blue lights and ignore the other colors, but it’s hard and I’m boring myself, so I close both eyes to try and get some sleep. They pop right open again.

fish

i have a fish nailed to a cross on my apartment wall

This room is not a good thing to look at, but I look anyway. The wall-to-wall carpeting is a pukey beige, bleached in the center by a stain shaped like a hermit crab. The paneling on the walls is marked by big splotches of something that once sprayed across it. It has been suggested by sleepless crashers that these splotches are a clue as to how Napoleon died. The whole apartment smells like mold and disinfectant. And now, donuts.

It’s spring, but you’d never know it looking out Napoleon’s window. He lived and died in a gray world.

I’m glad it’s spring, though—Christmas decorations around here are the saddest things you ever saw. They hung, decomposing in the gray wind, through March. Just a few weeks ago, someone took down the dismal pink wreath, blackened with car exhaust, that hung around the fluorescent green sign across the street. This sign has always read, will always read: “Pumpkin Muffins 24 Hours.”

All the women who work in the donut shop below the sign look the same. They wear pink smocks and lean on the counter, smoking, all night long. I’m often a sleepless crasher in this apartment myself and I’ve spent many hours watching them to see if they ever move. They don’t. I’ve never even seen one light a new cigarette. It probably smells like mold, disinfectant and donuts in there, too.

The loosely associated group of people who frequent Napoleon’s guest house: touring musicians, bored kids with nowhere else to go or nothing else to do, and anyone whose job isn’t really a job (like “painter”) have agreed that the key should remain under the mat—the first place any desperate individual would look—to honor Napoleon’s memory. Not that we remember him, but he’s become a kind of saint to us. He shelters the lonely and the lost, wrapping them in a soft blanket of Christmas lights and old-man smell.

So the key stays where Napoleon left it because if somebody wants to break in here, well then, we should make it easy for ’em. Clearly, they need Napoleon’s soft blanket.

I gotta get rid of these fucking donuts; they’re making me sick and they aren’t gonna get any prettier. Maybe I’ll leave them here on the floor for the Animal.

We don’t know what the Animal is, only that it gets in sometimes and eats cornflakes out of the cabinet, which is fine ’cause I didn’t like the look of those dead-guy cornflakes anyway. Once, a painter named Jeff actually took the Animal to the face. It leaped out of the apartment and jumped on his head when he opened the door. This is the closest encounter any of us have had with it. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the night and the stairwell was too dark for him to get a good look at it; the Animal just knocked him backwards down the stairs and took off.

Jeff was thrilled. The next time I saw him, he was still giddy, glowing with pride. “Kristin!” he said dreamily. “The most wonderful thing happened . . .”

This guy looks just like Jimmy Stewart. I tried to imagine him falling backwards in the dark, limbs flailing, fur wrapped around his head. For some reason, I saw this happening in black and white—maybe ’cause of the Jimmy Stewart thing—which made it even creepier. But Jeff was so happy telling the story, he looked dewy. Painters are so sick. I wouldn’t want an animal jumping on my face in the dark.

I gotta admit I was enchanted, though. “Did it make a noise?” I asked him. “Was it furry? Did it smell weird?” He couldn’t remember much; he was falling down stairs. Happily falling, having taken a wild animal to the face, but too distracted by gravity to pay attention to much else. In retrospect, he figured it had been furry and was about the size of a watermelon.

This was relevant information, as we had had a kind of meeting on the subject once, the gaggle of lost souls who use this apartment when they have nowhere else to go. The Animal hadn’t yet gone for the cornflakes—it had only shuffled around the apartment in the dark, which was, I admit, a little spooky. Subsequently, there had been murmurings of “ghosts” walking around at night, and most of the musicians are such pussies they were scared to sleep here anymore. Some of them wanted to have a Narragansett medicine woman smudge the place with sage to relieve it of its restless spirits.

“Look,” a drummer named Manny said gravely over the cold leftovers of two greasy pizzas. Candles flickered near the open window, the dancing shadows making it look more like a séance than the overgrown Cub Scout meeting it really was. “She’s really nice, I’ve met her. She doesn’t dress weird or anything. She charges a nominal fee and all we have to do is fast or fuck off for, like, a day and a half.”

“What?!” yelled a painter, laughing. Painters think musicians are ridiculous. There seems to be a general consensus among them that painting is high art, music low. Can’t say that I blame them; musicians are sorta ridiculous. I’m a guitar player, so technically I’m one myself, but I don’t stick up for us all that often.

Manny, clearly more afraid of ghosts than painters, held his ground. “This place is definitely haunted,” he said. “I hear noises, but when I check ’em out, there’s nobody there!” He pushed a lock of purple hair behind his ear. For some reason, none of us musicians have normal hair—another thing that makes us seem ridiculous to the painters. Mine is blue, there is a lime green and a fuzzy-yellow-chick yellow . . . together, we look like an Easter basket. Chalk white and glossy jet-black are close to normal, but those two are goth kids—at least once a day, a painter will turn to them and yell, “Happy Halloween!”

“Fast?” The painter stared at Manny, wide-eyed.

“Don’t eat,” explained Manny.

“I know what it means. I just think you’re a moron.” The other painters laughed. The musicians and neutral observers sat quietly in the candlelight.

Manny shook his head. “Last night, something was walking near my face. It was weird.”

“It’s just the family downstairs bangin’ around,” said the painter. “They got like, twelve kids or something.”

“No, seriously. I could feel it moving. It was right next to my face.”

“Were you high?” asked the painter sarcastically.

“Yeah,” answered Manny, “but . . . it was right next to my face!”

You can tell painters and musicians apart by their uniforms and expressions. All the musicians except the goth kids wear torn blue jeans, flannel shirts and pajama tops and look perpetually stunned. Painters dress like it’s 1955, in white T-shirts, khakis and black loafers, all spattered liberally with paint. They either spatter their clothing on purpose so everyone can tell they’re painters or else they have a lot of trouble getting paint from brush to canvas, ’cause they’re really covered in the stuff.

Painters usually look like they’re about to laugh. Not smug; they just think everything is funny. “Let’s get him an exorcism,” said one. “He really wants one.”

Manny looked grim. “I’m not saying there’s an evil presence. Napoleon was a good man. But he died here. A violent death,” he said ominously, pointing at the splotches on the wall.

“That’s Michelob,” smirked the painter. “Napoleon probably had a Barcalounger and spasms. If you’re worried about hauntings, worry about the guy who died in those pajamas you’re wearing.” Manny winced. It was a little low, I thought, going after his clothes. Everybody knows you don’t buy pajamas from the Salvation Army if you’re not into the dead.

Manny’s girlfriend, the fuzzy-yellow-chick-haired chick, tried valiantly to come to his rescue. “Paranormal events occur in places where souls were unwilling to separate from their bodies at the time of death,” she explained carefully. “What if Napoleon’s soul wanted to stay home even though his body was dead?”

“This place is a shit hole. If you could fly, would you stay here?” The other painters laughed; everyone else was silent. Painters and musicians never agree on anything. It can be entertaining, but it can also be exhausting. They even order different pizzas.

I consider myself to be a neutral crasher; I don’t wear either uniform and I don’t side with anyone. The painters are almost always right, but I feel sorry for the hapless musicians who’re so mercilessly ridiculed, so I abstain from arguments and pizza.

The painters have made it clear that they feel I’m one of them, even going so far as to try to make me paint. They claim that making noise is the heathen’s way, a poor excuse for a calling. I guess they’re right, but I am a heathen. I mean, I’ve met me.

But I toured their studios anyway, watched them paint, let them lecture me and attempted to absorb the proces...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Contents
• About the Author