Coal to Diamonds (13 page)

While being aware and radical was normal in Olympia, being identified with queerness, feminism, and fat-positivity sometimes holds bands back in other places. Being associated with a political agenda can totally pigeonhole a band. But then, there are always people and publications who support radical bands even more, partly because they are so political. To this day, Gossip’s appearance on the cover of
Punk Planet
magazine remains one of the things I’m proudest of.
Punk Planet
helped punk keep its money where its mouth was. Its approach to punk was motivated at heart not by fashion or just music, but by an ethic that valued an equitable approach to any kind of cultural production. An interview with Thurston Moore and reviews of random seven-inch records by Midwestern teen punk bands could be sandwiched next to articles on feminism, media criticism, and visual art. RIP,
Punk Planet
.

We came back from tour a little different each time, but the homecoming was always the same: the frantic rush of having to find a job and then the halfhearted struggle to keep it. The A&W wouldn’t take me back, so after opening for Sleater-Kinney for six weeks I came home and got hired at Subway.

Working at Subway kind of ruled—it was right next to my house, so if I had to be at work at 9:30 I’d roll out of bed at 9:25. I’ve had a lot of disposable fast-food jobs over the years, and I actually felt lucky to have scored the role as a Subway “sandwich artist”; jobs in Olympia are really hard to come by. The economy there sucks. If you don’t land a state job, it’s pretty much food service or nothing. After Subway, I worked at Bagel Brothers, then at Metro, this stupid clothing store where you can find a sexy nurse outfit, or a French maid outfit, things like that—really annoying stuff. I worked there a total of five days before getting fired. After Metro I was hired at Batdorf & Bronson, a highly coveted coffee-shop job. Batdorf & Bronson offered stability. It was a grown-up job by Olympia standards, meaning you could get health insurance and a 401(k). I’d been around town long enough by then. In Olympia, that meant you got the good coffee-shop job. The point being: if you think coming back from a successful tour is glamorous, you are dead wrong.

Despite Olympia’s shitty job situation, it was a really magical place. The cost of living was so low that everyone was able to sort of skate by on random jobs and still have enough free time to steal their roommate’s blush and dress up as gay vacationers in nonsensical performance bands. What the town lacked in economic opportunity, it more than made up for with a community of supportive, innovative people who created a great art and music scene. There were always tons of people starting crazy projects, or willing to be enthusiastic about your crazy project.

Soon after we got back from tour, Kill Rock Stars asked if they could put out our full-length record. That’s when we started thinking that we could really be a band. Everyone was acting like we had already made it, but it was still so hard to take ourselves seriously.

The Kill Rock Stars office was literally across the street from our house. I used to go over and hang out after work, loitering and getting in the way and eavesdropping on town gossip. One day, when Nathan was doing the same, they just asked him if we wanted to put out a record. Nathan had already promised our first album to K, but I say that’s what you get for doing business with Nathan. I had no complaints about the switcheroo—I really think KRS is the best indie label around. Kill Rock Stars! It was super exciting. They’d put out Bikini Kill
and
Kathleen Hanna’s spoken-word CD, plus their label had Riot Grrrl bands like Bratmobile, and the British queers Huggy Bear, and they had even worked with Corin Tucker from her rough old band Heavens to Betsy all the way up to Sleater-Kinney. Not to mention Elliott Smith. Not to mention Nirvana. And now Gossip would be part of that legacy.

KRS hooked us up with Paul Schuster, who recorded bands at his house. I recorded my vocals in his bathroom, the rest of the band recorded their parts in his bedroom, and that was that. We had an album:
That’s Not What I Heard
. I was nineteen years old.

Once we had an album to promote, we had the incredibly good fortune to get picked up by a booking agent for Sonic Youth and Sleater-Kinney. Things started happening really fast. I didn’t realize how unusual it was to have things come our way so easily. They booked us our first headlining tour, in the United States. Our dancing roadie, Little Kelly, drove us across the USA once more in her dad’s minivan. U.S. Tour Round II; the hilarity ensued. Our entire band was still too young to drink. We only played under-twenty-one shows back then so that kids who were our age and younger could come see us. Most of the shows on the
Sleater-Kinney tour had been all-ages too, but occasionally there would be a show in a bar and we’d all have to hang around outside the venue until it was time for us to perform. Gossip never played twenty-one-plus shows until we’d all turned twenty-one, and then—how soon we forgot!

Our own tour was a lot smaller than the giant Sleater-Kinney one we’d just come home from, but it was every bit as fun. We were playing to much tinier crowds of about fifty people. Nathan would get paid out after the show and split the hundred-and-fifty-dollar guarantee among the three of us. It never occurred to us to have a band fund or anything. We just let whoever went into the gas station pay for the gas, and it worked out okay. I remember sitting around after a show, collecting my cut of the money, and Nathan saying,
We just made more than what we would have made working an eight-hour day
. It was true. Eight hours at minimum wage came out to about forty-eight dollars.

We felt rich. We
were
rich. It really did feel so luxurious. And we did it all pretty much ourselves. With a cellphone, compliments of KRS, and a binder full of directions, courtesy of our booking agent, we were turned loose on the country. That binder of directions looped us around the USA and guided us safely back to Olympia, our pockets full of road cash and our mouths full of stories for everyone we’d left behind. It was a charmed situation.

For a long time I really shortchanged us. I felt scared to admit that there was something special about our band and I chalked up our growing success to luck. I just couldn’t believe that my life could be heading in such an amazing direction, and that my bandmates and I were responsible for making that happen. That type of success just wasn’t something that happened to people like me.

Back in Arkansas, my mom’s phone had been cut off yet again, so it was hard to stay in touch with her. I could reach her at work, but it had taken me forever just to let her know I’d made it to
Washington safely. While I was on tour, Akasha had started dating this really stable guy who had a phone, so she was the one I was in touch with most often. During that time, we grew closer and closer, and she even named her baby after me. If you’d told me something like that would happen back when we were kids, I’d have laughed at you and called you crazy, but Akasha’s love for me was deep, and got stronger as we got older. Akasha sent care packages in the mail: a box of Tuna Helper and three liters of Mountain Dew, a fake Christmas tree box all crisscrossed with duct tape, full of food purchased back in Arkansas. Sometimes she’d clean out her pantry at home and send me everything.

When I was working at a T-shirt shop, starving, Akasha called me on the store phone one afternoon, and I started to tell her how hungry I was. She immediately offered to order me a pizza and have it delivered to my house. I was floored. It seemed magic, like my sister herself was going to materialize on my doorstep with a big steamy pizza in her hands. I was delirious with hunger, but she did it. She used her credit card to get a pizza delivered to my house in Olympia from her phone in Arkansas. That’s the kind of stuff she’d do for me. Back then, how I was living, I’d go three days without even realizing I hadn’t eaten. Or I’d just eat a packet of ramen every other day. I lost a lot of weight in Olympia, since I didn’t have enough money to feed myself. That, coupled with my new active lifestyle—roller skating down massive hills then stumbling back up them again—was like being on a crash diet.

Once Gossip started hitting the road, money got even more scarce. I had to quit my job in order to go on tour, and that quickly became my lifestyle—get a shitty job, make it work, ditch it to go on tour, come back, and scramble for another shitty job. I made some money on the road, but not so much that I wouldn’t have to put my whole life back together from scratch when I returned.

Things continued along at breakneck speed. We put out another EP,
Arkansas Heat
, after our tour and followed it up with our next album,
Movement
, which was a really exciting project.

John Goodmanson produced it, and he had produced Bikini Kill’s
Singles
, possibly the most genius collection of songs of all time. It was amazing to work with someone of that caliber.
Movement
became our first grown-up record. We went on a bunch of six-week U.S. tours to promote it.

In Olympia everyone was an artist with a day job. You had to pay your rent somehow, and your art wouldn’t do it. I never felt like I was living two lives—the successful, touring musician and the sandwich artist—until the release of
Standing in the Way of Control
, when the band blew up in London. The album was an unexpected hit, and the music magazine
NME
named me number one on their 2006 Cool List. That’s when things got weird.

In England I hung out with Grace Jones in her hotel room, became friends with Kate Moss, and met the Raincoats. I was asked to do a song with Jarvis Cocker from Pulp. There were honest-to-god paparazzi following me around. Having those experiences in England, and then returning home to the shitty rental house I shared with Jeri and my blind, ferocious cat—
that
felt like living a double life. But earlier, when we were touring the States, playing to crowds of fifty kids, and then returning to our minimum wage jobs in Olympia, that was not a double life. That was normal. I was recognizable; I was in a band good enough to go on tour, we got reviewed in
Spin
, but those things weren’t necessarily huge.

At some point I started to understand that, even though we weren’t getting big write-ups in magazines, Gossip was what I did for a living. I had to fill in the gaps with shitty jobs less and less. I was sustaining myself. When I called home, my family didn’t act like it was too big a deal. My brother was playing music in a traveling band too; we had other family members who’d been musicians. My life wasn’t that unusual. It honestly wasn’t until
Standing in the Way of Control
that my family started thinking that maybe I’d be doing this forever.

Olympia was a great place to be queer. Riot was a subculture that gave girls a lot of room to figure out who they were sexually. Lots of girls were queer, and lots of those queers lived in Olympia. Once I had let go of Anthony I was ready to get real about who I was. But the more I got into it, the more complicated it all seemed to become.

I had a hard time feeling like a lesbian, because I didn’t feel like I was attracted to girls. The girls I liked were always more like boys than girls, and I thought all lesbians only liked girls who were just like them. Butches went with butchy girls, and femmes went with femmes. I liked girls who were so different from me they were like a whole other species.

Enter Melanie.

We met at the mall, back when I was working at the A&W hot dog place. She was working at a cinnamon roll place. There was a mall directory that had all the stores’ and snack counters’ numbers. Melanie looked up A&W and rang me. We started talking all the time, and we’d each be in the back of our shops on the
telephone, talking to each other and ignoring customers, and then Melanie would say,
Let’s go to the counter and wave to each other
, and we’d put down the phone and run over to our registers and stick our hands up, smiling, goofy and giddy. Eventually we started hanging out after work. I would stay the night at her place and in the morning we’d get up and go to the mall together, squeezing our hands goodbye beneath the glare of the food court lights.

After we’d been going out for a little, Melanie asked me to move in with her and I said I would, as long as I could take Jeri with me. I packed up Jeri and moved him out of the carny punk house and into Melanie’s. We all lived together for almost two years. But something about it wasn’t right. I felt like I was playacting the life I thought lesbians were supposed to have. I was trying to be what I thought a lesbian should be—committed, domestic, nested, and not too feminine.

The whole time I was with Melanie, I didn’t understand I was a femme. For me, and for a lot of women, my personal feminist evolution mirrored pieces of the larger feminist journey through history—specifically the historical waves of feminism. So, it wasn’t a surprise that my early interpretation of feminism and my new lesbian identity included a rejection of anything that had been socially deemed “feminine.” It was my own personal bra-burning phase. With the (unfortunately still radical) feminist idea that a woman’s worth is not determined by how she looks comes a natural suspicion of everything society tells women they
have
to do in order to be pretty, and therefore valuable. Things like shaving, wearing makeup, dressing in skirts, wearing heels, and slipping into lingerie all fell under that category, so I cut my hair short and put on jeans. Looking back, I was trying to be a butch lez, which was the only sort of identifiable lesbian I saw growing up—women with short hair who looked boyish.