The Exene Chronicles

Chapter 9

“You’re so careful with the scissors. I don’t have that kind of patience. Just tear it, see?” Ryan ripped a photo of Siouxsie Sioux out of an old copy of Rolling Stone. The girls had felt quite grand, pooling their babysitting cash and having Lia’s father write them a check for the subscription. The old copies worked perfectly for the collages. Their months of handiwork lay stashed beneath Lia’s bed in a thick folder.

One afternoon, Ryan had casually cut up a couple of old family pictures and aimlessly pasted the faces of her mother, father, and brother onto photos of random things, a telephone pole or the body of a horse. Only Lia had a hard time accepting such an odd, slightly disturbing act as the “joke” Ryan named it in order to minimize the scandalized shriek Lia emitted as she watched Ryan take a scissors to the snapshots.

“Ryan! Are you crazy? That’s so morbid!”

“I’m entitled to my rage, Lia. Every day, I tell them how hard it is, gooney football players staring at my chest and whispering like dorks. Even Mr. Brown, that creep. He just stared at me when I went up after class to ask him about the homework. It was like I wasn’t even human, like there was nothing going on with me above the neck.”

Ryan moved her hands swiftly as she spoke, as though she had to work fast in order to control her swelling anger. “Every time, they say the same thing. ‘Oh, honey. It’s just a rough phase. Ignore those boys; they’re just immature and stupid. Besides, it’s normal. Lots of girls go through this type of thing, not just you.’ Well, who says it’s normal? What makes them think they have the right? You’d think my own parents would take my side.”

Lia couldn’t really argue with Ryan’s impassioned defense. She simply looked on quietly as Ryan applied dark ink to her cutouts, blackening her parents’ eyes and scratching angry words across their thin paper chests as though they were wearing sloganed T-shirts. “Traitor!” Or, “I suck!” The words seemed to scream. Sometimes Ryan even fashioned little cardboard coffins out of scissors and glue and sent them to an early grave.

Lia came up with the more jovial idea of casting themselves in party scenes. Here was a swivel-headed Lia at a New York fete with Annabella Lwin. There was Ryan, standing shoulder to shoulder with Debbie Harry and Patti Smith backstage after a concert in London.

“Noel Redding is like this crazy red-haired guitarist. Anyway, sometimes he and the drummer, you know, for the Hendrix Experience, used to gang up on Jimi. They called him a n****r even.” Lia breathlessly related this newly gleaned information.

“That’s crazy. I mean, he was, like, Jimi Hendrix … ” Ryan reflected as she smeared glue onto the back of the picture of Siouxsie Sioux.

“I know. Even he had to put up with crap.” Lia sighed. “I wish there was no school tomorrow. I just want to stay home and finish this collage, or run away to England.” And yet, The Clash played on in the background, and it was as if the Coronado Bridge linked directly to the Tower Bridge in London and birthed them unto the world, the mauling rhythms of punk a golden ring in the mouth of a dark horse.