Radio Belly (2 page)

AT THE SECOND pottery class Shana discovers that if she hangs around long enough afterwards, she's free to wander among all the fresh-cut clay. Down in that underwater room, where sound bounces off the walls, it's easy to forget the lies, the friends, work. Everything retreats, as in the moments before sleep. She lifts the damp cloths covering the slabs of clay and admires their dense edges, her mouth watering, breath shallow, legs quivering as she breaks a piece off and rubs the creamy, rich mud between her fingers. This is a slippery secretion, she thinks, something straight from the world's wet, hot mouth. She imagines earth moving through her, coating her insides with mineral slime and, just to know what it feels like, she brings a smear of clay to her lips.

Rubbing that clay over tongue and teeth, it's easy to recall that there has always been a hunger. One bite and some part of her rushes way out ahead, while another, wiser part stays behind. It's a downhill, speedy feeling, like the body falling away. It's a Tarzan moment, her willpower caught in the middle of a jungle swoop. Something quiet speaks to her:
More.
She obeys. Chews. Swallows. Then the voice returns, stronger:
MoreMoreMore.

In the following weeks, it isn't just clay she craves. Soil too. At the dinner parties of so-called friends, Shana finds herself fishing it out of terra cotta pots by the handful. She disappears into second-storey bathrooms to choke it back, gagging as if on mouthfuls of sawdust until she learns to add water, to swirl it in her mouth, to let it glide down. This, she decides, is the final “fuck you,” spitting chunks of fertilizer like chicken bones into the designer sinks of the newly married, those very friends who claim Shana is the one that changed.

THE END COMES on a Friday a few weeks later. Shana arrives at the office late, having just fought her way through the ass-end of a hurricane.

“How
aaare
you, sweetie?” Phoebe asks in an impossible pitch, her eyebrows turned up in cartoon-faced concern.

“Shitty,” Shana answers. She's all gloom and baritone, in an effort to bring Phoebe down a notch. Then she realizes how tired she is of this role, how sick she is of Phoebe wearing her emotions all over her face, asking obvious questions before she's even in the door, calling her
sweetie,
of all things. Salty, Saucy, Skanky—fine—but not
sweetie.

“I was stuck behind some stupid cunt all the way up Boylston,” Shana continues.

Phoebe's face scrunches up. “What did you just say?”

“Boylston,” Shana replies.

Phoebe doesn't react, seems to be frozen on the spot, so Shana goes about her business, turning on the computer, checking voice mail.

“No,” she finally says, stepping out from behind her desk. “You said the C-word.” It may be the first time Phoebe's made an actual statement, the first authentic expression Shana's seen on her pretty little face, but now it's Shana's turn to withhold reaction. She fiddles with her e-mail. Touché.

Phoebe leans across Shana's desk, suddenly emboldened, like this is a showdown, Shana's desk a saloon bar. “The C-word,” she says.

Shana lets her lean closer, closer still, then yells at close range, “She was a
cunt!
”

She pretends not to notice Phoebe's frozen-faced disgust, as if the whole world spins on this one four-letter word. As if Shana has dropped a cunt-bomb onto her tender little mind and things will never be the same.

In the silence that follows, and feeling a certain charge in the air, Shana starts to wonder if things ever will be the same. She's discovered a word with some actual power, and Phoebe is so rattled that she's decided to take an early coffee break.
Good riddance. Cunt.
But before long the boss angles in the doorway and asks Shana to come to her office. Her features are taut, stapled down, her lipstick fierce.

Sitting back in the houndstooth chair in her corner office, the boss explains that Phoebe has been keeping track of Shana's profanities, that the C-word is crossing a line, and Shana should take a few days to “cool down” and “reprioritize.” Words reach Shana as if from a great distance. She nods, thinking only of the potted plant in her office—a corn plant, freshly watered, with wide, dark leaves.

Once the boss sets her free, Shana rushes back to her own office, goes straight to that corn plant, dips both hands in the cool, silky soil and brings it to her mouth, handful after handful.
I am animal,
she thinks, fingernails caked with dirt and drool,
all action and reaction.
Then, Phoebe's desk. She walks over and begins riffling through papers, her weekly planner, files and drawers, leaving muddy prints the whole way.

“MINERAL DEFICIENCY,” SHANA'S doctor says, practically watering at the mouth, delighted that Shana's body has at last produced something more compelling than a yeast infection. “But we should do rigorous testing,” she continues, spitting out the words, “to rule out something more serious.” She sputters on about the possibility of a brain tumour or impending stroke, about the procedure for proving there
is
a medical basis to Shana's recent outbursts. She keeps talking about the “incidents” at work, the need to get Shana's life “back on track.” Wet words. Shana wants to ask about the medical implications of loneliness or wrong turns. Instead—because she's sorry she even came here, because she's on some kind of roll—she calls the doctor an oversimplistic bitch and leaves.

Out on the sidewalk, squinting and stumbling in the bright white sun, Shana recalls having once heard that anger is just self-hatred that misses its mark. And something uplifting too, about one door closing so that another can open.

She has always been hungry, it's true. It's the same hunger now, just a more mature version. So many kinds of earth: red, black, brown. Silt. Clay. It's earth she's been after all along. The source of all things. The quickest route to her cravings. It's earth that tastes like everything her body has ever wanted. Like flesh or blood but cleaner. Like raw potatoes or fish skin. The musty updraft after rain. The beginnings of the world.

She recalls reading about an elderly woman who went out for milk one December day, slipped and fell headfirst into a ten-foot mound of snow on a busy corner. This was no clean drift either, but one of those piss-yellow piles left by the city plows, a gravelly mound with an air pocket. No family to notice her absence. Traffic spraying past. She wasn't found until the thaw. It is this thought, of an old woman's sensible pumps and bruised ankles sticking out of the snow, the thought that the city itself might be hungry, that sends Shana home and makes her stay.

All she wants is to sit on the floor in the middle of her apartment—TV off, radio off, lights off—and want nothing. She imagines she is an island (here fending off visions of mangoes/pineapples/drinks with umbrellas) caught up in something huge and ancient. Continental drift. The slow-change of landforms. She wants to give herself over to a geological sense of time. To fathom the passage of ice ages. Generations. To cast herself back to a time when four-letter words and casual answers to casual questions didn't threaten existence, a time of preliteracy.

She imagines roots (but not tubers, not potato chips or French fries) spreading like needy hands, cracking concrete above, displacing soil below. She thinks of ore being blasted, crushed down to unearth something that glints: gold, agate, quartz, running in seams, great underground ribbons (not layers of fudge or buckets of ice cream. Not spoons in pursuit of chocolate-covered almonds. Not caramel. Not marshmallows). She is not allowed to think of food. This is the number one rule. She is allowed to drink water if she wants. It helps her feel geological. She is allowed to think of minerals and the generations of men who have lusted after them, their dry hands and mouths, their bones now turned to dust.

IT IS ON a day like this. It is after hours of lying spread-eagled on the floor, forcing her breath from deep to shallow until she is just skimming the surface, just barely touching down with water-spider legs on the surface of what it means to be alive. It is after days of drinking only water, of imagining a body in decay, of trying to picture the exact moment when it becomes more earth than flesh that she realizes she is relieved her boyfriend is gone (and her job and her friends). That her mineral cravings are stronger than any feelings she had for those things. That what she really wants is to be alone, to fall away and be absorbed, mineral by mineral. Not to eat the dirt, but to have the dirt eat her. She breathes, deep this time, and the surface ripples.

On the other hand, Shana thinks, maybe all this dirt-eating and swearing is just another kind of life reaching out to her. Not a breaking down but a breaking through. Perhaps there is a life far from this city with its man-eating slush piles. She imagines a wide-open sky and a life lived under it. She thinks of the type of people who watch that sky—day in, day out—as if it were the world news, all there is to know.

Perhaps she'll get in her (red hatchback) Honda and drive for days without stopping, turning at last into some desperate, landlocked town to find an honest husband who comes home hungry from a long day bent over his good work. Perhaps she will have children, three, and a garden she will talk about as if it were her fourth. Perhaps a house with drafty floors and windowsills that weep, a wood stove and gumboots by the back door. And perhaps she will love those children and that husband and that garden in a way that makes her forget herself. Perhaps she's not so different from her mother and her mother's mother after all. Maybe from now on she will allow herself the pleasures she never thought were good enough.

Or, her Honda might follow the birds south this winter, south until the water swirls the other way and everything—the fruit, the language, the constellations—is made new again. Perhaps she'll raise llamas and live in a house shaped like a teardrop in the very centre of a desert. Maybe watching the sand dunes shift and the sky rearrange itself and her animals swell and burst year after year, reaching into their groaning bodies to pull out their young—the blood, the sweat, the matted fur—will deliver something of the miracle of life to her.

Perhaps she'll come off birth control and stop showering all together.

Or perhaps, soon, she will swallow her last mouthful of dirt, lick her teeth clean, and know: That is all, enough. Nothing broken—down or through. Perhaps then she'll know with certainty that she'd only ever meant to go up to this edge, not over, that like a cartographer of inner space, it was the view she was after, that she had merely wanted to know her way to this edge and to know her way back.

W
HEN I FIRST saw her, she was alone in the corner at a house party. She was all painted up—purple lips, hair a bluish-black and a tropical glow to her skin. I noticed she was putting back a glass of wine and a fistful of peanuts, not even tasting them so much as trying to throw them right at the problem. The problem, as far as I could see it? A rabbit hole where her heart should be, something gaping and vulnerable and with its own gravitational field—everything inwards, everything down. I saw this right away and you have to understand, Jason Jenson has never been much for seeing things. But the strangest part was I wanted to give myself over to that problem right away, to be swallowed whole with the rest of the peanuts.

She wasn't exactly small, even then, and I'm not one to talk about auras, but I could see something shimmering around her. The potential for all that flesh—what it wanted to be. Skin like toasted pastry. Big breasts pushed up and together until they made a straight line down her chest. When I finally got close, I could hear her body calling out to me.
Hot cross buns,
her sibilant breasts were saying,
Eat us! Love us!

I guess she saw me staring because she stuck out a puffy hand and said her name was Laureen. So what'd I do? I told her that was the worst name I'd ever heard, that it sounded like the last noise before a car wreck. Then I said something starting with, “Is that your face or...” and laughed at my own joke—
haw-haw-haw
—like I was doing the morning show. Thing is, in those days I was all morning show, all the time. I was really somebody and I needed everyone to know it.

I waited for her comeback, but instead she gave a hurt little smile, a crumpled croissant, and I could see I'd lost a fan.

“Sorry,” I said. “You ever suddenly realize what a dick you are?”

“No,” she said, “but I realize what a dick
you
are.”

I choked on air, squirmed a bit.

“One more chance,” she said, and that was that. Bingo-bango, I was hooked. People say it takes months to fall in love. Not true. With me and Laureen it took all of two minutes. The rest was just fallout.

“NO WAY! YOU'RE Jenson the
Jet?
” Laureen said later that night, licking salt and peanut skin from her long nails, the kind with the white stripe across the top. “I wake up at 8:25 every morning. Sometimes you're the only reason I get out of bed.”

The five-minute spot that had made me famous: 8:25 to 8:30. “Get the Jet” was the name of the segment. This was in the days before Google so the rules were simple: five minutes of rock 'n' roll trivia from random callers; for each question I got right, we added money to the prize pot; the first person to “Get the Jet” got the money. Innocent enough, except I'd been undefeated for two years running and in that time the jackpot had climbed to over $20,000. I can't explain what happened next. Maybe all that money brought out the mean in people, or maybe, this being a time before road rage, the commuters just needed an outlet. Either way, at some point the people banded together and started hurling trash talk along with their questions. Naturally, I hurled it back. It was a strange time in radio—that era between Casey Kasem and Howard Stern—and this was something brand new. Ratings jumped and the sponsors came running.

It must've looked like the Jet was flying pretty high, but the truth is in the months just before meeting Laureen, the bottom had fallen out of the whole thing. The talk had become more vicious, the questions harder, and I had no connection to the music anymore. Every guy with a guitar, every four-man band, it all sounded like the same damn song to me—all lonely howl and hammering need, just like every day of our long, sorry lives, the same parts reassembled. Alarm-clock ring and bleary-eyed commute. Drive-through coffee and donuts. Tired old jokes sandwiched between commercials and news. The same days and weeks and years circling back on us. I was tired of the insults, tired of the trick questions. All I wanted was a little human kindness.

Now, any DJ hoping to keep a career at a classic rock station knows to keep their Grateful Dead inclinations under wraps because, as far as the station manager's concerned, there are classic rock fans and there are Deadheads; a person can't be both. A good radio boss knows that if you're in “the family” it's just a matter of time before you start waxing live about the time Jerry played “Looks Like Rain” in Indiana and, lo and behold, a minute into the jam, the sky opened up and what'd it do? It rained. Oh boy, did it rain. You've never been so wet in your life.

I never believed it would happen to me, but when things got rough, it was the family I turned to.

I started playing bootlegs: old live cuts of rehearsals, all stops and restarts, the notes so loose they barely hung together; scratchy recordings where the front-stage banter was as loud as the music—“China Cat Sunflower” interrupted by “Hey, man, quit crowdin' my girl.”

I even had Deadheads calling up with their concert “miracles” and I told my own: the time I was walking along the highway outside a Michigan concert, one finger held up to the sky the way every Deadhead needing a ticket did in those days, finger like a lightning rod trying to bring down a miracle, the thunderclouds rolling in on the horizon. Just when I started to think I'd missed another one, some guy with a military cut and khakis pulled up in a station wagon beside me and handed over a stack of tickets saying, “My son won't be needin' these,” then got back in his car and drove off.

The new Grateful Dead content had cured me, I'd tapped into the fount of human kindness, but the morning show producers weren't pleased. The very same day I met Laureen, I was called into their office. “No more of this touchy-feely miracle shit,” they said. “Put on some Steppenwolf and get back to the trash talk. That's an order.”

“I REALLY GET what you're doing lately,” Laureen said that first night, leaning forward. She smelled just like a piña colada. “I'm a huge fan.”

“Thanks,” I said, and for the first time in a long time I meant it.

“No, of The Dead,” she said. “I mean, I like you too, but I'm a huge fan of The Dead.” She must've said some other stuff then about growing up on the road, but I wasn't paying attention.

I was watching her dark purple mouth, thinking it was shaped just like a heart. Thinking, who could resist a girl who walks around with her heart on her face like that? She turned to the TV, poured another glass of wine, threw it back, chewed her thumb, spat a piece of skin.

And that's when it started. Both of us saying the same thing at the same time, filling our first awkward silence in exactly the same way:

Her and me: “You're different.”

Me and her: “What?”

Us: “Stop that.”

No longer two: “What the hell?”

One: “Get out of my head.”

Me: “I mean, you're more forgiving than most listeners.”

Her: “I mean, you're more human, flawed.”

We stared at each other. We were two voices again, two heads, four eyes, ten senses—possibly twelve—stinging from the wet slap of separation, the air between us moist and electric. And that's it, the last moment before Jenson the Jet went the way of the peanuts, down Laureen's black hole with his best intentions, his ego, his sense of identity. Down he went and did he mind?

THERE WAS A brief interval here in which we attempted to get to know each other the usual way. There were late-night phone calls. I asked about her family. She said it was complicated. I asked about her work. She said she was at the cutting edge of sunless tanning—cream not bulbs. I asked her on a date, which led to an inevitable first kiss. It started on my front stoop on a Friday night, lips pressed sweetly, the two of us fumbling through the door, tripping over shoes all the way down the hall, soft slurping through the rest of the apartment and into the bedroom where, for three tongue-smashing days, we created our own language of licks and murmurs. At some point she slept and I adored her long enough to see her fingernails grow.

We emerged on Monday night famished, dehydrated and weakened by the miracles we'd encountered: of the human body, and of the love two people can go without for so long, of being two but being one and, finally, of having become so enamoured and so raw, as though over the course of three days we'd unpeeled each other and were now soft grapes bumping up against all the hard things of this world.

We never did get around to the long walks or commitment conversations because when she finally went to leave the bed on that Monday night, her wide, pale back (the only part of her body she couldn't reach with her tanning creams) curled and hunched up-down, up-down. She was crying, and it was right up there with the saddest things I'd ever seen, along with stillborn puppies and, once at a museum in the South, a pink baby floating in a green-glass bottle. Then she turned to me and said, “I don't think I can ever go back to my life,” and the thing is, I didn't think I could either.

TURNS OUT THE producers were wrong. The family was alive and well and everywhere. Ratings spiked. The morning show was getting listeners from all walks of life now: lawyers, teachers, housewives, runaways. Not only that, the family had people in high places. We were getting syndication offers, advertising dollars, airlines phoning up to add to the prize pot just because I had the word
Jet
in my name.

I married Laureen, got us a nice three-room apartment at the top of a glass tower and told the producers I'd be taking calls from home now. Those were the days. A little bit of trivia every morning and the rest of the time I helped Laureen pursue her passion. Fantasy Tan, Tahitian Breeze, Vanilla Beach, Caribbean Dream: she became a distributor of the latest and greatest self-tanning products. She ordered vats of lotions, transferred them into smaller bottles and dispatched them to salons all over the city. While I read up on rock 'n' roll history, she kept track of clients and products, imports and exports.

We gave our own skin over for testing. Laureen had calves in mind, but I wanted to transform the sad, blank canvas of her back. She monitored the product closely in the mirror for ease of application, grease or streak factor, its sheerness, its sheen, its fadeability. “
Fadeability
isn't a word,” I told her, but she didn't care.

We had six months of relative happiness. Six brief and beautiful months before I noticed just how much of a fan Laureen was. When she wasn't in her office talking tan, she was in the living room with me, talking Jerry. It was Jerry-this and Jerry-that. It was, “Most people don't know this...” and “Did you ever hear about the time...” almost as if she thought she knew more than me. Then came the questions: “What instruments did he play before the guitar?” and “How much did he weigh at his heaviest?” and “Where did his mother's mother grow up?” I'll admit there were times when I wondered if she really did know more than me, times when I wondered if I'd married my nemesis, the one person who could bring me down. I wondered if life could be so cruel. Then I just decided to put my foot down: no more Jerry-talk in the house. It was messing with my trivia, I said, not to mention our marriage.

She started taking her work very seriously after that. She started using the creams in excess—skimming off the top like any good dealer—and turned a deep orange, like carrots gone bad. She started wearing sundresses in the middle of winter, sunglasses in the house. I tried to steer her toward jeans and sweaters. I tried to love her for better or for worse, but I hardly recognized her anymore and that coconut smell was everywhere. She was making phone calls to women named Candy, Cindy, Carmen and Christy at all hours of the night: “You're really gonna like this one, hon. Glides on smooth and acts fast. What they're calling an
island
tan,” I'd hear her say through the walls. It was during one of these calls I overheard her say she grew up in “the family.” I couldn't believe what I was hearing—
the
family, not
a
family. This was a direct threat to my career, my identity, everything I held dear. I barged in on her. “You never told me you grew up in the
family
-family,” I screamed. She claimed she'd told me that first night. I said maybe I would've heard her if she hadn't been garburating peanuts in my ear the whole time. Her chin wobbled and I realized the Jet had gone too far. I apologized and offered to rub her favourite tanning cream onto her back. It took a whole week of backrubs. My palms had turned a ruddy orange by the time I was done, but I eventually got the whole story out of her.

After the Grateful Dead came out of their one-year hiatus in '75, when so many people were convinced the band's days were numbered, Laureen's mom and a bunch of college friends pooled their money and bought a decommissioned school bus. It was beet-red and rusted so badly they could see highway passing through holes in the floor, but it ran well. They took out the benches, covered the holes with plywood, put in hot plates, beds, hammocks, curtains, and every year, May to August, they hit the road. All through their childhoods, Laureen and a handful of other kids spent their summers chasing the Grateful Dead across America, concert to concert, camping at lakes and rivers in between.

At concerts, the moms would go with the girls from the bus to the mud pit in front of the stage, where they'd spin in their sundresses for hours: wild-haired, sandals stomping, daisy chains flying. Laureen knew all the words to all the songs, and she swears that sometimes she knew,
just knew,
which song was coming up next. She was so good that, in those loose moments between songs when the band pulled close to Jerry, people in the pit pulled close to Laureen—kids, moms and strangers, too—asking what was next, and let's just say Laureen was right more often than she was wrong.