After Barb and Krystal left, I put on Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident?, still one of Lilly’s all-time favorite records, and we sprawled out in the living room with beers and peanuts.  Lilly brought two beers for herself, and there was a lot more where those came from.  She was clearly planning to get seriously drunk.

“For some stupid reason I thought my life was going to settle into a nice little groove when I retired,” she said and twisted the cap off a bottle.  “Now Krystal’s going to move to Hawaii, and Heather’s going to put herself back in the meat grinder . . .”

“Things change, people change,” I said.

We sat there and listened to Axl screech through “Since I Don’t Have You.”  And that’s when it hit me: for three active years and seven more years on recordings, I’d been listening to Heather’s siren voice and always knew she sounded like somebody, but I could never place it.  She sounded like Axl.  A younger, female version, yes, but she had the same explosiveness, the same propensity to sail right into notes that should have been too high for her to reach and do it in the most lovely way imaginable.  It’s amazing how much you can miss in ten years.

A couple of bluebirds started a battle over food in the feeder outside the screen door.  Shadows were pushing across the back yard.  It had turned chilly, but nobody had taken the initiative to close the windows.

“I think I’m just feeling lost, that’s all,” Lilly said as Axl and company dragged out the ending of the song.  “Trying to make sense of the last ten years, see where I am.  I don’t really know where I am.”

“You’ll get back to normal after the attorney meetings.  Right now everything’s up in the air.  After all that, it’ll smooth out.”

“I guess.”

She carried her beers to where I was sitting, put one on a table, sat down on the arm of my recliner with the other one, slid over into my lap, and drank.  We listened to “New Rose,” “Down on the Farm,” “Human Being,” and “Raw Power,” saying nothing, just playing little finger games with each other with our free hands.

Lilly nodded her head to keep time with her favorite song on the album, “Ain’t it Fun.”  But maybe she was nodding to show her agreement with the lyrics: “Ain’t it fun when you’re taking care of number one?  Ain’t it fun when you feel like you just gotta get a gun.”  One could never tell with Lilly.

“I know what this song means now,” she said.

“You’ve known what it means for a long time.  The guy’s saying his life’s a total fucking disaster – oh boy, ain’t it fun.”

“Yeah, but now I got a person to put with those lyrics.  Only she’s not looking out for number one, and her gun’s her body.”

We listened some more: “Ain’t it fun when you’ve broken up every band that you’ve ever begun?  Ain’t it fun when you know that you’re gonna die young?”

“I don’t like thinking what she’s going to do to herself, running all over the country,” she said.

“Don’t worry about Heather.”

“I can’t not worry about her.”

“Then worry constructively.  She might do all right if she has somebody to watch her.  On the road, I mean.”

“What she needs is like a personal therapist, but not Nancy.  They’re too close.”

“I don’t think a therapist is the answer.  You see how well she’s done with all the therapy bullshit she’s been through since the band stopped.  She’s worse off now than when we were touring.”

“But how much worse would she have got if her mom didn’t throw her into rehab when she did?  We had a lot of dates still to go here and a bunch over in Europe.  Plus the next year, and the next, and the next.”  She shook her head.  “We didn’t understand it as good then, but now we do.  The road’s hard.  It’s going to be hard on her.”

Lilly was right, of course.  Heather had been crashing from both starvation and cocaine as Floozie neared its last hurrah – what would have happened if Linda hadn’t intervened when she did?  And all that made sense except for this: having nothing “useful” to do with her life was a much greater problem for Heather than having too much to do.  Being in a band had been her salvation.  Yes, she’d been a wreck on tour – and everywhere else – but since the band had ended, she’d been in and out of treatment constantly, and the times I’d seen her prior to most of the admissions, she’d stripped down to skeletal proportions, punishing herself for something that nobody, including her, would ever understand.  She’d gotten good at it, good enough to easily kill herself one day.  Maybe not this year or next year or five years from now, but someday she would fall into a mental funk that demanded the utter destruction of her body and her self, and she would arrange a large enough space of time without people around her, and she would just stop eating.  As badly as I hoped that wouldn’t happen, every instinct told me it would.

Therefore, it came down to two things: first, what would make Heather the happiest?  And second, what lifestyle was least likely to exacerbate her problems?  That’s why I had agreed so quickly to assist her however I could in putting together another band.  Truly it was one of those lesser-of-two-evils things, or the devil you know being better than the devil you don’t, or whatever the fuck.

Lilly sighed, drank the last of her second beer, went to the kitchen and got two more for her, one more for me, and sat down on the end table by my chair, rattling the lampshade with her shoulder.

“I really wanted to get off the road,” she said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I was tired of it,” she said, bored, deadpan.  “I was hoping to try and have a normal life in my old age.”

“You’ve got a little while before you hit old age.”

“Yeah.  So, if Heather starts a band, I guess I want to be in it.”

“In it?”

“We had our problems, but not that many.  I always looked up to her.  I was always closer to her than Krystal and Celeste.  Heather used to really watch out for me and take care of me, especially that first year.  I just thought she was so cool – I still do, only now she’s messed up and cool at the same time.”

Guns N’ Roses was playing “Hair of the Dog,” a song that sucked when Nazareth did it and sucked only slightly less now with a real band taking a stab at it.  I used the remote to turn it down.

“You better think a long time about this,” I said.

“I don’t need to think.  If I’m with her, I can watch out for her, like she used to do for me.”

“You can’t control other people.”

“No, but I can influence them.  Anyway, what fun would it be for her to do all that with three or four girls she doesn’t even know?  At least with me, she’ll have a friend.”

Lilly picked up the cordless phone and hit an auto-dial button.

“Are you calling her?”

She clicked off.  “I guess I ought to find out where you stand with all this before I go asking her for a job.”

“I stand with you.”

“You’re sure.”

“Uh-huh.”

She went over and sat on the couch and dialed Heather’s number again.  For somebody so small, she could make an awful lot of noise sitting down.  She threw some hair back over her right shoulder; a blasé whiff of cheap strawberry shampoo floated over to me.

“Guess who?” she said cheerily.  “Nothing, we just ate . . . uh, food . . . Krystal and Barb were over . . . fine, the usual, blah blah blah, look, Gary said you want to start a band.  Do you need a bass player?  Because as you know, I’m out of work now.”  She listened for about eight seconds.  “No, I’m ready to do something heavier than the Lilly music.  And I’m ready to share the responsibility and not have it all on my head.  That is such a pain.”

I drank some beer.

“I have no idea, but let’s get together after I finish with my meetings this week.  We’ll just talk it out, and Gary’ll help us . . . yeah, he’s great.  Look, I’m in the middle of about ten things, so call me.  I’ll call you.  Okay.  I love you, Heather.  Uh-huh, I know, see ya.”

She hung up.

“What a fucking mess,” she said and tapped the phone on her forehead a couple times.

I laughed.

“Don’t laugh – you’re right in the middle of it now, because if we do this, you’ll be doing the same thing you did before.”

“It might be fun.”

“One good thing is that we know a lot of people, and we can probably talk Robert into signing us.”

“Yeah, that’s a real good thing.”

She punched auto-dial again.

“Now who are you calling?”

“The most beautiful girl in the world,” she joked.

“When you get through with her, tell her I want to talk to Eric for a minute,” I joked back.

I wished we had a speaker phone, because I really wanted to hear Celeste’s reaction if Lilly was going to ask her to be in the new band.

“Is Celeste there? . . . Lilly Kaufman.”  Louder: “Lilly Kaufman – her bass player . . . really?  Thanks, I’m glad you like them.”  She covered the phone.  “Whoever that was has a bunch of my records.”  She waited thirty seconds.  “Sounds like there’s a mob over there.”  Then: “Hey, it’s Lilly . . . oh, nothing – or everything, depending on how you look at it.  You want to play drums in another all-girl metal band?”

I covered my laughter.  I could hear Celeste’s voice squeaking through the phone.

“Me and Heather.  We’re going to start a band . . . no, I feel great . . . you sure?  I’d think you got that hotel thing you’re running going on auto-pilot by now . . . well, will you at least think about it?  Come on, this is important.”

I shook my head in agreement with what Celeste was surely telling her.

She listened for a bit.  “Okay, Celeste, I just wanted to give you the first crack . . .”  She stopped talking and listened some more.  “Me and Gary?  Please.  We got better sense than that, no offense to you and Eric.”  She listened for close to two minutes, using her thumb and fingers at intervals to simulate a rattling mouth.  “Look – you know she’s going to do it whether she’s on the road or at home . . . no I don’t think that . . . no I don’t, Celeste, I just know that if I’m with her, maybe she can find whatever it is she’s looking for and . . . Celeste, I didn’t call to argue about Heather’s health, I just wanted to see if by some slight chance you wanted to play with us . . . okay, fine, I hope I didn’t take you away from your meatloaf!”

She hung up on Celeste.  “Goddamnit!”  She threw the phone at an empty chair.  “Fuck it – who cares how good she can play drums – she’s always been a bitch at heart.”

“You pissed her off?” I said, laughing openly now.

“She thinks I’m going to kill Heather by encouraging her.”  Mocking Celeste, she said, “You know if she starts touring, she’s gonna stop eating, just like she always did, yack yack yack, you think just because you’re who you are, you can save her, yackety yackety yackety.”  Lilly shook her head.  “She never liked me.”

“She liked you fine.  She still likes you.”

“She thinks Heather needs to be at home, close to a hospital, in other words basically crippled and dependent for the rest of her life.”

“And obviously she doesn’t want any part of the band.”

“She said I was crazy, and she wouldn’t leave Eric and the kids to go on the road for fifty million dollars.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Yeah, but at least now when the new band skyrockets to success, she can’t say I didn’t make the offer.  She said she figured me and you were going to get married, and she wondered why I wanted to go back to the insanity if I had a husband.  I think I really pissed her off when I said you and I got better sense than to get married.”

     “Yeah, she’s definitely locked into that domestic way of thinking.  Anyway, we’re better than a married couple.”

     “Better than those two, at least.”  She got up, noisily, came back over to my chair, took the remote from me, and turned up the music.

“Can’t put your arms around a memory,” she half-sang, half-spoke along with a line in the song that was playing.

I put my arms around her.  “Don’t ever be a memory for me.”

“Don’t ever stop loving me and giving me the freedom I need to do stupid stuff.”

“Too late for that,” I said and kissed her neck.  “I’m in it for the duration.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s a duration?”

“Forever.”

“And you’re sure about that.”

“Very.”

She kissed my cheek and snuggled closer.  “Remember that talk we had that time in Dallas, or wherever it was?  About sex and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Does all that still apply, or were you just saying it to appease me?”

“It’s always applied.”

“So . . . you think we ought to try it, see what happens, see how much it complicates our lives?”

I turned off the music and kissed her on the mouth.  Then in stages and with determination and with nothing left between us to sort out but plenty to complicate, we finally managed to make a kiss last all night.