Coal to Diamonds (9 page)

Kathy was the first feminist I had ever met. Whatever I’d gleaned about feminism via Riot Grrrl now came into sharp focus in the form of the girl standing in front of me. I remember hearing the word “feminist” when I was just a kid—eleven years old—and identifying with it even then, though in a Feminism 101/Gloria Steinem/Girl Power way, too young to comprehend anything deeper. Kathy seemed to understand the detailed picture of feminism, though it was hard to get her to talk about what she knew because she was so crazy quiet. In a gang of loudmouths, all of us hollering and laughing all the time, Kathy was remarkable for her silence. She didn’t feel like she had to talk to anyone. She just hung around with all her hair in her face, projecting cool, radical wisdom. When she did speak, you could hear how she spoke without a Southern accent.
You’re so quiet!
I’d exclaim, and she’d sink deeper into her long, glossy bangs. I didn’t know she hated that I did that, the way shy people always hate it when you make a fuss out of their shyness. I just wanted to interact with her so badly and she was so aloof.

Kathy was the first girl I ever knew I had a crush on. I had a crush. On a girl. I was delighted by it, really. I just hung around, waiting for her to speak, enchanted by her quiet, so different from me. She shrugged.
If I don’t have anything to say, I don’t say it
. Well, I’m just the opposite. If I don’t have anything to say, I’m going to
say everything. Kathy was such a mystery to me. I thought she was the best thing I’d ever seen, and I still feel that way about her. She was always wearing leopard-print tights. We had to work so hard for what we had. If you were lucky you could find something good to wear at the Goodwill or Wal-Mart, but that was it. God knows how many paychecks it took Kathy to save up and order her cool leopard leggings through the mail. Those tights were her trademark. So was her voice, the way she talked like a Riot Grrrl, or like a Valley Girl, like she came from a faraway state that had an ocean and a lot of people having all sorts of conversations in their super-cool voices.

Jeri and Nathan sort of talked like that too, like they were torn, wanting to ditch their native accents but scared of sounding phony. I thought my own voice sounded dumb, lumbering, beside Kathy’s. I tried to copy her, but it didn’t work out for me. My accent is seared onto my voice same as my fingerprints are grooved into my thumbs.

Kathy lived with her mother, who was a good, sweet Christian lady who had psychological problems that had put her through hell in the ’70s. Her inappropriateness was sporadic and jarring, like how she taught Kathy to call her vagina her pussy, not her privates like other little girls. It must have been a shock to hear the P-word coming out of the innocent mouth of a tiny girl. No wonder Kathy didn’t talk much.

Nathan’s band, Mrs. Garrett, was named after the shrill, bouffanted den mother from the ’80s TV show
The Facts of Life
. He had a second band, with Jeri, first called Space Kadet, then Boy Pussy USA—Boy Pussy for short. Their flyers were hand-drawn cartoons of the band members in dresses with pieces of food flying out of their mouths. They drew big bouffant hairdos onto their cartoon heads. God, I wanted them to like me so bad! I had never been so on edge.

Under their influence, my fashion slowly improved. We were so far removed from everything—punk, Riot Grrrl—that our expression
of the culture had its own special Arkansas spin. We weren’t exactly punk rock, though we tried. I had a new Mr. Potato Head ringer T, replacing the Pearl Jam T-shirt I’d been living in. I wore wacky shoes and purple fingernail polish and baby barrettes in my hair.

I wanted to get my nose pierced so badly! In bigger cities, piercing boutiques had sprung up. You could buy fancy jewelry made especially for noses or eyebrows or belly buttons there. Not in Judsonia. I went to the Town and Country Plaza, where a hair salon next to the JCPenney would pierce your ears for you. I went inside and asked the lady if she’d do my nose.
Your what?
She looked at me like I was crazy, but she took the metal piercer and angled it up inside my nose. I’m sure there is some sanitary law against that. The piercing gun was bulky and my nostril was too small. Since she couldn’t get the angle right, my nose was pierced on a slant, but it was pierced, and it looked cool.

I looked way better, more worthy of the company of my new friends. Because slowly, that’s who they were becoming—my friends.

It took more than a nose ring for Nathan to warm up to me, though. Nathan had single-handedly created a punk scene in our shitty small town. He’d even gotten Dub Narcotic Sound System to come and play. Nathan put on shows in the Legion Hut; they only charged twenty-four dollars to rent the place. Nathan was a hero. Part Native American, he has hair that is naturally coal black—the color everyone stained their necks trying to get from a box. His hair always looked cool. He’s worn thick Buddy Holly glasses for as long as I’ve known him. He was so committed to his look that he wore three-piece polyester suits and a ten-pound dog chain around his neck, even during the brutal Arkansas summer. The school administration eventually banned Nathan’s chains; unfortunately for them, there was no banning polyester. Nathan was a distraction in the classroom. He just sat there like a big “Fuck you, Arkansas” and got his ass kicked by jocks all the time
for it. He got fag-bashed, the prevailing wisdom being that any guy who looked weird must be a fag. But Nathan wasn’t gay.
Just taking one for the team
, he’d say philosophically. Assholes would spit their food at him in the cafeteria, and he’d pick it up and eat it. Such style! I never knew anyone who got beat up more than Nathan. He was so suspicious of me, it set me on edge. Our tiny punk scene was a bit of a boy’s club, and I was a girl—a fat, loud, nerdy, obnoxious girl.

The first time I went to Nathan’s I was chased off the land by a shotgun. Nathan’s dad, Eddie, loved guns. He chased me off the land, wasted, in a golf cart, because I’d been shooting bottle rockets into their barn.
I’ll shoot your ass!
Nathan actually gets a lot of his character from his dad.

Nathan was one of two kids. His mom ran off. She was awful. She would meet Nathan at the end of the long road that led to his house and take his lunch money for drugs. She’d leave for weeks at a time before leaving for good. She would call his younger sister and promise she was coming home for Christmas, and the sister would wrap up a bunch of presents. There was a stockpile of gifts collecting dust in a closet at Nathan’s for this woman who never came through. It was a familiar scene to me because I’d seen the same thing happen with the mother of the three A’s. She’d talk a big game about coming to see my cousins, but then she’d never show up, or she’d show up late on a school night a week later. Knowing that kind of stuff about Nathan made me feel closer to him.

What bands do you know?
Nathan asked me one day, like it was a quiz. I was sure there were right answers and wrong answers, but I only knew the bands I knew, so I answered honestly.
Melanie. Mama Cass
. Nathan ignored me. I was way into Missy Elliott. But I loved Raoul and Skinned Teen and Sleater-Kinney too. I still love Sleater-Kinney.
Call the Doctor
stands the test of time; it’s one of the best albums ever made.

Nathan had a musician’s pride in his knowledge and appreciation
of all sorts of music, not just punk. One night at Jeri’s he was talking about blues records, and I leapt at the chance to be impressive. I loved the blues!
I love Billie Holiday
, I chimed in. Nathan looked over at me.

Yeah, I like him too
.

Come again?

Billie Holiday, I like him too
, he repeated.

Yep
, I croaked.
Billie Holiday … He’s excellent
.

Nathan just wanted to know everything. I knew something about music that he didn’t; I had seen his cool façade crack and caught a glimpse of another insecure teen. It helped me relax. They were all just nerds on the inside too. Of course Nathan was guarded, getting his ass kicked all over town. He had finally found his group of people and it was hard to let a new one in.

It was eventually Jeri who got the others to warm up to me. Jeri’s a redhead, and, when we were teens, his hair was long and filthy. Jeri wore Nintendo controllers around his neck like jewelry; he was obsessed with
Mortal Kombat
. He’d cut the legs off his pants and pin them to the sleeves of his T-shirts with safety pins. He cut up his socks and wore them as arm warmers. He wore Dickies shirts that he wrote all over with Sharpies. The shirts said things like
REJECT ALL AMERICAN
. At one point he’d broken both his wrists and was walking around with a pair of casts tagged up in the most hilarious shit. He was a brilliant techie and had been busted when he was fifteen years old for hacking into the phone company and stealing long-distance for a year.

I knew from the moment I met Jeri that he was gay. I could tell, and I wanted him to know that I could tell, and to tell him it was okay with me because I was gay too. One night at the county fair, walking the midway with all the crazy lights flashing, I whispered in Jeri’s ear (please feel free to laugh at this),
I’m a flaming bisexual!
Bisexuality seemed cool. I could have these gay insides but still keep my boyfriend, Anthony. Maybe there’d still be a way to get pregnant and have babies and the gay part would fade away.

Oh, that’s cool
, Jeri said. Jennifer was walking beside him, bored, but we hardly noticed her. The truth was, the four of us were growing very close, and my friendship with Jennifer started to go by the wayside. Jeri and I were especially tight and had deep conversations, the kind he couldn’t have with Nathan, who was all jokes and music. Jeri was sensitive behind his constant goofing; he wanted friendships that could get deep and serious too—because life was pretty much always absurd, but it wasn’t always funny.

I was hanging out at Jeri’s house one afternoon, watching some shitty talk show. The topic that day was “Fat People Who Dress Too Sexy for Their Size.” Those shows were always on, and I’d seen them before, watched them at my mother’s home, slumped on the couch next to her.
Oh, slap the cookie out of my hand if I ever get that big
, she’d say. In Jeri’s bedroom, sloshing around on his waterbed, I looked at the television and said,
Oh my god, look at those women
.

Who cares?
Jeri, who is fat, said.
What makes somebody “too fat”? Why does it have to be like that?

Jeri had been reading Nomy Lamm’s fat-positive zine
I’m So Fucking Beautiful
. Those zines were creating a feminist subculture, and their ideas trickled down to me, through Jeri, and I eventually started using the word “fat” positively. After that, I started to realize just how much my body image had been affecting my life. I never felt like a real singer. Real singers were small and had sweet, soft voices and sounded like the girls from the Murmurs, or else they had shrill punk rock crazy voices like a cheerleader turned inside out, like Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill. That’s what I wanted to sound like. I just didn’t have that sort of voice, and so I hated the voice and the image I had for so long. I hated how my voice was so conventional. I was a choir kid, a choir nerd, and my voice worked when it was put in the service of praising Jesus, but put into the service of punk rock it sounded all wrong to my ears.

It’s really funny now. When Gossip first started getting reviews, a common sentiment among critics was:
A punk singer who can actually sing!
But back when I was just starting to learn what I sounded like, I hated it. I was a fat kid, a fat girl all my life, and I was always really loud. If a whole room of people were talking, guaranteed I’d be the one who got in trouble. I often tried to make myself smaller, for survival’s sake. If my body was going to be big, maybe my voice could balance it out and be softer, sweeter, more gracious. I could be comfortable in my body, but the stress of the world bearing down on me made me not love the loud, wild swell of my voice. It made me mad, not being able to achieve the breathy little-girl sound I heard other girls achieving. On the Little Miss Muffet tape Nathan was selling I sounded tortured, audibly trying to strangle the big, powerful voice I’d been gifted with, trying to stomp it down to something meek and fluffy.

I’d started singing when I was six years old, and I thought I would be a singer when I grew up. It wasn’t till I was older that I thought, Oh, I’m too fat to be a singer for a living. No one who looks like me is a singer. I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment. I’ll be a nurse like my mom, I thought. When I realized I wasn’t going to grow out of my chubby stage, I also realized that I was okay with my body, but I was just about the only one. I wasn’t allowed to wear a bikini as a little kid. People called me Bubble Butt because I always had a shelfy little butt, and my bubble butt was not allowed in a bikini. I was always comfortable being a weird kid, a daydreamer, and being fat just seemed to tie in with everything else. It was other people’s shame that I found jarring. As I got older, my friends would say things like,
Your face is so pretty, if you just lost weight you’d be so pretty
. My mother was always dieting, and it felt like she was just as ashamed of me as she was of herself. Mom always thought she was ugly, and I always thought it was weird that we looked just like her, all us kids, and she would talk about how ugly she was. How could she do that and
not expect her kids to do the same thing? Now I understand she has body dysmorphic disorder—a screwed-up idea of what she looks like—but when I was small it just made me feel bad.

When I got older I was able to say,
Mom, I don’t want to hear about it
. And she stopped, but she continued to make comments about herself and other people. After I was about twelve I never heard another thing about losing weight, or about my size. Instead, she said good things about my imagination. She embraced that I could sing and that helped me a lot. I started trying to imagine how I could make singing my job, my whole life. I thought maybe I could make a living as a choir teacher. Not as glamorous as being a singer in a band, but I’d still get to be singing all the time. I couldn’t let go of my voice, because it was what I was good at. Hair, and singing. They were the only things I got praise for. I always knew deep in my heart singing was what I would do, even when everything around me was saying it wasn’t possible for a fat girl, even when I hated my voice for being too big and too powerful.