The Last Living Slut (23 page)

“Hey, this is our tour manager, Bobby,” Brent said. “He’s the fucking best, man. Fucker has had to put up with us.” It wasn’t the first time I was struck by the pure affection between bands and their crew. It was an intimacy only achieved by having to witness every experience, every emotion, and every bodily fluid on a tour twenty-four hours a day.

I felt uncomfortable with the crew being present in a situation where physical intimacy was about to occur with a band. Lori was already whispering sweet nothings into my hair and hugging me. I wanted to suck her perky tender breasts like they were chicken.

I liked the company of this lovely band. They were fresh meat. They had an air of all-American wholesomeness and fresh-cut grass, which made them pheromone-crazed for a girl in rain-soaked, sleazy London. We partied a little, but a couple photographers and more crew filtered into the dressing room. It felt invasive. Secretly, I wanted the intruders to leave. They slowly trickled out but the odd amateur journalist-type remained, mulling in the corner.

This scene—inside a band’s dressing room—was the one place I felt truly comfortable and content. Watching rockers playing their instruments onstage was foreplay. Making out with the ravishing rockers afterward was the only way I got off.

I placed tiny kisses on James’ naked back, and he turned around to face me. From behind, Ty, the drummer, slid his hands between my thighs while Gene fooled around with Lori. The remaining intruders left to the drone of moans and kisses. We were all at play, tremoring to pre-orgasm, when a 250-pound, tattooed, white, skinhead security guy crashed into the room.

“Get out!” he trumpeted. He looked like an escaped convict.

“This is our dressing room,” Gene said.

“You have to leave this place,” he insisted vacuously, as if quoting a manual.

“Why? What’s wrong?” Ty asked from behind me, although his dick had gone soft by now.

“Just leave,” the security guy echoed.

“Hey man, this is our dressing room. Can
you
please leave?”

It was a standoff: a tableau of soft-spoken Midwestern gallantry amid topless girls versus a mentally challenged Cockney skinhead. What a damned pleasure.

The skinhead shuffled closer. “You better get your stuff and leave the building.” His pink cheeks were fluffed up like dough.

“What have we done?” Gene and Ty asked, trying to sound chivalrous.

I knew what they had done. They had dared to make out with girls in their dressing room. I could tell from the way the skinhead feigned a pantomime baddie look for Lori and me, that seeing other people engaged in sexual activity twisted and gnarled his insides.

“It’s okay, guys,” I said, grabbing my clothes. “We’ll go. You stay. It’s your dressing room.”

“You’re not goin’ anywhere.” The guys stood up, pissed off that their pussy was being taken away.

The guard waddled after us and held us back as the band left the building and climbed aboard their tour bus.

“They’re not comin’ in.” He pushed Lori and me into a fenced-off coop, where hundreds of fans stood huddled in the freezing blackness with markers and cameras. In a flash, Lori made a run for it, slipping through an opening in the fence. I felt my arm yanked as the guard’s sausage fingers dug into my flesh. I screamed, surprised and confused by his intense force. I tried to wriggle my arm from his grip, but he was still as stone. I then tried to appeal to his sense of logic.

“Please. Why are you doing this? I’m just standing here.”

I looked around at the scattering of fans, and everything became a coal-smudged blur. His fingernails, deep in my skin, had me choking back ribbons of tears. Suddenly, he started whispering obscenities in my ear, calling me every foul name he could. His words came thick and fast, unexpected, as if I were his sworn enemy. I looked over the fence to the tour bus, and saw Ty and James running over. They started pulling my other arm.

“If you take her on your bus, I’ll make sure you never play on a stage in this country again,” the guard announced. Fortunately, the band didn’t care. They just wanted to get me out of his claws. My bruises stung raw as I climbed on the bus. Leaning my head outside the window, I saw the fans still waiting and screaming, and I soothed my arm against the cold of the glass.

The bus stood still, waiting for the Avenged Sevenfold boys to get on the neighboring bus so both bands could make their way to Heathrow together. Ty got me a cranberry juice, and Lori and Brent were fascinated by the vast amounts of pubic hair abundant in the old German magazines they were looking at. Gene was in his bunk with a girl.

Under the table, James slid his fingers in between my thighs, but he was too all-American lukewarm apple pie to take it further. He needed more time. And I needed him to lay me. So I tried as hard as I could, kissing him and moaning so he would put out. But he wasn’t man enough.

So when the Avenged Sevenfold boys came on the bus a little later, I readily agreed to go with them back to their bus.

“The Rev”—Avenged Sevenfold’s drummer—“wants us,” Lori whispered excitedly.

But I wasn’t interested in him. His face was squished and angry; he looked like a rodent on crack. I dug Synyster Gates. So I walked over to Synyster, who was standing by the bus door.

“Hey.”

Beneath all that rock-star image, he was just a young boy. I wasn’t sure what he thought of me, but I wanted him.

I was polite.

“Would you like to do some water sports?” I asked charitably.

Water sports was something I’d been curious to try. It was a power thing as well as a submissive thing, which I enjoyed. It was also dirty and sleazy, which gave me a throbbing clit and made me want to conquer the world.

“You ever done it?”

“No. I haven’t,” he whispered with a cute twinkly smile. God, he was hot.

“Let’s go, then.”

I was low-key, trying not to be too loud. Synyster followed me outside, and it occurred to me he might feel obliged to do this to preserve his bad-boy metal persona, just like Donny had. I felt bad.

I kneeled in the grit and took my clothes off, anxious to avoid soiling my hand-embroidered corset. It was freezing cold, and my nipples stiffened into bullets. Synyster put down his beer and unzipped his heavy-metal pants, full of chains, studs, and assorted accessories. I smiled up at him and he smiled back. He reminded me of Slash: quiet and reserved, but with a heavy presence.

“Do it to me, baby,” I purred with my boobs pushed together for effect.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I want it.”

He unleashed his hot pee like a fountain all over my breasts, white and firm in the moonlight. I held my head back to expose my neck. The rush was like a roller coaster. I felt so turned on doing water sports with Synyster Gates. When he was done, we both stood up silently, and he took me on the bus to clean up.

Afterward, I could tell he was shy about what had happened. He was mumbling, and I just wanted to hold his hand and tell him it would be okay. The bus was sleek and bright and clean, laboratory-like. It was crisp and flowery like Korn’s tour bus, which I had been on uneventfully when I was in Belgium. What had I expected to find? Dead animals and blood smeared on the walls? Just then I heard Lori drawl, “Oh my god, this is such a cool bus.” The alcohol had put her in airhead mode. The ratlike Rev, holding her hand, pulled her upstairs. I didn’t like him but a niggling sense of adventure made me follow them. It was the wrong move.

I can only describe what ensued in the next half hour as nerdy frustration. The Rev tried to fuck me while the singer, M. Shadows, watched. When Synyster showed up, though, The Rev’s dick died. He kept trying to fuck, but his dick was spaghetti limp. He tried to shove it in again and again.

Because of all the chemical substances he’d consumed, he began foaming at the mouth. All of a sudden, his face went pale and twisted in deranged psychosis, and he slammed me onto the ground. I hit my head, then stood back up in a daze. I was angry, but mostly because I hadn’t gotten proper sex. I turned to leave. This made The Rev livid.

“Just go, then!” he shrieked.

As I grabbed Lori and my clothes, one of the crew guys thought it would be hilarious to draw swastikas all over my body and came after me with a black marker. I tried to push him off me, but he was really strong. My head was still sore from hitting the ground and my arm was hurting again. I ran out in the freezing cold, my body stained with swastikas and still horny. Apart from the water sports, it had been a very un-rock-and-roll night. I felt like I’d spent the evening with children.

Chapter 38

F
or four months after that I kept my head down, continuing my MA studies in Bath and participating in animal rights campaigns. I immersed myself in academia and felt instantly alive again. At the time, I was thinking about teaching gender theory at university and wanted to do my PhD. I was happy reading Virginia Woolf and Michel Foucault. Writing theory essays and joining discussion groups brought out the dorky real me. The university environment gave me stability and a self-love I’d rarely felt before. It was a welcome break from dumbing down my conversation every time I was with rock bands; I could never discuss poetry or postmodernism in their company.

But I still got off on rock ‘n’ roll, and I listened rapt to my friends’ stories every time they came back from a tour. Though I loved university, I was still addicted to my other life. It was a drug that made me euphoric and free, that made me feel like I belonged, although it was only a temporary high that wasn’t healthy for me at all. I got to have amazing sex on the road, but it wasn’t fulfilling, only momentarily amazing and wild. It was like planting the seeds of love, but then severing them at the source just as they were about to bloom.

I still thought about Scot, but choked out the feeling and stopped my heart whenever it fluttered. From now on, I decided, rock ‘n’ roll would be just a splash of fun with a dash of sweat. No one was gonna take my heart again.

Then I met Dizzy Reed.

Part 4
DEAD

Chapter 39

Have a Wonderful Time Aborting Your Children, You Piece of Shit.

“I
hope you go through more abortions to be honest. . . . Have a great life. Have a wonderful time aborting your children, you piece of shit.”

It was a February night in 2007. I was holed up in Hollywood and Guns N’ Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed was sending me text after text. Each one was intended to annihilate my spirit, which was trying so goddamn hard to be strong.

I was down on the floor. My body, ox-broad, concrete, coarse-spined, nonexistent. All I was aware of was the existence of my knee joints.

The square carpet under me was faultlessly cut. The orange lamp bled light above me, and I saw the walls with perfect clarity. It was two or three a.m. I was alone, wearing a starched shirt-dress covered in an epidemic of tiny white dots, red velvet platforms, spaghetti hair drizzled in spray, eyes caked in kohl, and lips gummy with coral gloss. I had to be strong. I wasn’t going to cry.

“I fucking loved you,” I texted him back. “I wanted to have our baby.” My heart was bursting. And if I jolted, it would overspill into my chest, a sea-bucket of emotion.

“You never loved me,” he replied. “You’re incapable of loving anyone you cold piece of shit.”

I couldn’t stop Dizzy Reed. It had been five months since the abortion and I still endured his abusive behavior. I just didn’t want him to hurt me anymore. I wanted him to stop. I wished he could be kind, the way he’d been back in England. It couldn’t all have been an elaborate masquerade. He must have some humanity somewhere. Inside, I had strength: I hoped God would help me not to fall apart. But my stupid eyes had a life of their own. My tears felt warm and free as they flushed down my face, swimming past my neck, itching my collarbone. I couldn’t stop them.

With my hands shaking like crazy, I sent him a long text back about what he had done to me, how he hadn’t been there for me after the abortion.

“I went through a lot because of this abortion. I just needed your emotional support. That’s all I wanted. Stop this.”

“Stay out of my life, you urine semen pussy-stained whore,” Dizzy texted back. “You have no place on this earth. None.”

I had this terror in my throat that was killing me. I couldn’t stop the fear. It was a gargantuan wall in my chest. And I felt weak. I couldn’t stop crying. I hated myself for being such a fucking wuss, for weeping so much.

I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to. I was fucking scared. That night the floor was my friend, my comforter. I didn’t want to leave it. I tried to reason with Dizzy, to use logic. After all, he was a forty-three-year-old man. He already had four children by three different women.

My one saving light was that I’d recently found out that he’d done the exact same thing to a twenty-four-year-old girl. I felt strangely comforted knowing there was someone out there who had gone through the same experience. I wanted to find her, my other half, my twin, the only one who would understand my pain. She was younger than me. I kept thinking her abortion must have hurt her more.