The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

pretend like I wasn’t tripping, though my ultradilated eyes probably gave it away. “I interviewed you for 25th Parallel .”
    He politely pretended he remembered me, and I gave him a tape and scurried away before I could say anything too stupid. Crazed on drugs and still under the spell of Nancy, I stumbled to a backstage hospitality area—most likely Nine Inch Nails’s dressing room—where I found her waiting for me. We had sex, and I saw the devil in her eyes again. But I wasn’t scared. We were already well acquainted by then.
    When we were finished, we lowered our dresses and walked into the hall, where we ran into Nancy’s boyfriend, Carl, and my girlfriend, Teresa. It was a strange moment of recognition that seemed frozen in time. We stared at them and felt like they looked guilty. They stared at us and felt like we looked guilty. Nobody said anything about it. We all just knew, or thought we knew.
    Something had been bothering me about Teresa anyway. From the beginning of our relationship, there was an element of mystery about her, as if there was a skeleton she kept locked in the dark closet of her mind. She lived in a tiny house with her mother, who slept on a couch in the living room, and her brother, a walking contradiction. He was a perpetually drunk pickup-truck-driving redneck who was also into hip-hop and b-boy culture. Theoretically, this meant he should be beating himself up.
    It was never much fun sleeping over at Teresa’s, because her brother used to get violent and punch holes in her door, and her dog had fleas so I’d stay up half the night itching. Although it would have been better for both of us if we had just broken up, I was too insecure and too afraid of standing up on my own without using her as a crutch. It wasn’t about sex, it was about support—she paid for everything, gave me advice, treated me like a child, and tolerated my mental abuse. She was sweet, plain and nurturing, which was what I was looking for after my experience with Rachelle, who was cold-hearted, gorgeous and manipulative.
    But when I visited Teresa at her home on Mother’s Day, her eyes, which were always ringed with darkness, looked blacker and more clouded than usual. I asked her what was wrong, and, after trying to circumvent the question, she admitted that she had gotten pregnant in high school, carried the child to term and then put him up for adoption. After she said this, I started looking at her differently, noticing the stretch marks on her hips and the maternal way she treated everyone. I felt like I was fucking my own mother when I slept with her. Though I was deceiving her about Nancy, I still couldn’t help being hypocritical and feeling spiteful that, like every woman I had gone out with to that point—from pretentious Asia to two-timing Rachelle—Teresa had lied to me and betrayed me. To this day I still have a complex that every girl I meet has a kid or is going to try to have a kid with me. Usually, I’m right.
    I also started noticing that Teresa and Nancy were connected by some sort of balance that kept their collective weight in equilibrium. As Teresa grew fatter, Nancy kept getting skinnier. Part of the reason I fell under the influence of Nancy’s spell was that she saw the holes spreading in my armor and worked her way inside like the corrosive rust that she was.
    When I came down off the acid that morning after the Nine Inch Nails show, I also came down off Nancy’s spell. It was as if I had been on one long trip since the fourth of July. I fell asleep angry and confused, trying to figure out what had been wrong with me for the past few months. She called me up late that afternoon—just after I had woken up with the chorus of the worst song I would ever write, “She is not my girlfriend/I’m not who you think I am,” in my head—and gave me her usual shit about kicking Carl out of the house and moving me in. But this time I didn’t take it.
    â€œNo, there’s no way,” I exploded. “You know, this is total bullshit. First of all, this whole thing with the band isn’t going to work out. I want you out.”
    â€œBut it’s my band, too,” she insisted.
    â€œNo, it’s my band. It never was your band. You aren’t even in the band. You’re an extra, a prop, and I appreciate what you’ve done for us on stage, but it’s time to move