Colorado Springs was 31 degrees and clear when we arrived on Tuesday, the third of November.  By the time the band kicked 8,527 asses at the World Arena Wednesday night, it was sleeting and 24 degrees.  It was messy, and the roads were turning treacherous.  Heather had worn a green long-sleeve sweater over a pale-blue vest and two pairs of tights during the show and swore she would freeze to death if she had to walk the forty yards from the arena to the bus in her skirt afterwards.  She made Sal go get her a blanket for the walk.  Once on the bus, she made the driver, Kenny, crank up the heat as high as it would go and told him to keep it that way until we reached Denver.  In an attempt to keep from suffocating, Krystal shed one article of clothing after another until she was down to bike shorts and a sport bra.  Then she threatened to kick Heather’s ass off the bus because she’d turned it into a fucking furnace (Krystal’s phrasing).  They had a nasty fight.  Lilly and Celeste watched but didn’t say anything.  Heather ended up in one of the bunks, crying and shivering under every blanket she could find.  Krystal told Kenny to turn the motherfucking heat down (Krystal’s phrasing).

     It was bitter cold and snowing like hell in Denver when we slipped off 1-25 and crunched into the Ramada Inn parking lot at 1:10 in the morning.  Among the girls, only Heather had ever been in falling snow, during several Christmas vacations with her family.  But Heather hadn’t been a stick figure then with virtually no insulating body fat, so her bitching escalated.  Krystal and Celeste had been in snow in the mountains but had never watched it coming down softly and peacefully.  Lilly had never seen snow in person.

     We had four days off before playing at the Magness Arena on Monday.  The snow kept up, the wind blew it sideways, and Krystal, Celeste, and Lilly had fun running around in it while some of the other motel guests marveled at how excited three girls could get over shitty weather.  Lothar was never far from Krystal.  They would wrestle and play and kiss each other openly in front of me and the other two girls and anybody else who was around.  Heather sometimes watched the fun from the window of her heated room.  Once, she ventured outside to throw a few snowballs but ran back in when the cold began hurting her.

     “You need to eat,” I said when I’d had all I could take of her complaining.  It was Friday, and I hadn’t seen her eat anything substantial since Tuesday night in Colorado Springs, when she managed four bites (I counted) of a turkey sandwich from Subway.

     She looked at me from her bed, smothered under a heap of blankets she’d made housekeeping bring her after I’d refused to stay in the room unless she turned the heat down.

     “I’m serious,” I said when she just kept staring at me as if I’d spoken Chinese.  “You’re freezing because you don’t have any food in your body.”

     “I can’t eat.”

     “No, you won’t eat.”

     “No, Gary – I can’t.  Nothing tastes good.  I drank some of Celeste’s carrot juice crap earlier and almost threw up.”

     “What do you think we should do, then?  We got lucky this time, only being in cold weather for a couple shows.  What if we go to Europe?  And what if it’s winter?  You know how cold it gets in some places over there?  And what if we tour in the U.S. in the winter next year?  Minnesota, Vermont, North Dakota?”

     “Are you done?” she said.

     I looked outside, through a window bleeding with condensation.  Celeste and Lilly were building a snowman.  They were nagging Sal to help, so he broke an eight-foot bare branch off a tree, and Lilly used it for one of the snowman’s arms.  Now Frosty looked like he was about to do a pole vault.  Krystal and Lothar were sitting hip-to-hip on a picnic table they’d raked the snow off.  Moe was stationed under the eaves by the office fifteen feet away, keeping an eye on them.  The girls had on knit caps, ear muffs, and down jackets – Krystal’s pink, Lilly’s and Celeste’s sky-blue.  They looked healthy and happy and content.  I turned back to Heather, who looked wasted with her unbrushed hair, blotchy face, and bony arms resting on top of the blanket like two halves of a broken crutch.  Had she just taken a bad turn in the last week, or had she looked this bad for a long time and I had somehow missed it – or made myself overlook it?

     “I’m going to be fine,” she said.  “Come here, okay?”

     I went to the bed and sat with her.

She laid her hand on mine.  “Let me try to explain something.  When I go to bed at night, at home, mainly, but out here too, only here it’s different, because I’ve got Lilly with me . . . but when I go to bed, I lay there all alone, and I think about what I am.  Here I am, this person that all these people see on a stage and in magazines and on TV and all that, but when I’m laying there in bed, I’m just me.  It’s quiet and dark and scary, and I’m just that body, with all those parts, and I realize I have absolutely no control.  I don’t even know who I am.  But then I think about emptiness and hunger, and I can find myself in that.  I wish I could find myself in something else, but I can’t.  No matter what I do, it’s never enough.  I’m trying hard to make it enough, but so far it’s not working.  Not enough to define me to myself.”

     “And hunger defines you.”

     “Yes.  Look, I can make it through the next few shows.  All that matters right now is getting to the twenty-third, then we’ll be back home for the last six.”

     I squeezed her hand, very gently.  “Why do you torture yourself?  I wish I understood, but I don’t.”

     She started to speak, stopped herself, then spewed it out.  “When I don’t eat, the emptiness is so powerful, I can’t even describe it.  It’s like I can totally, totally own the whole world, how we always talk about.  Then at least things make sense.  It’s like . . . it’s like as long as I’m in the right place inside, with my body, everything on the outside works.  But if I’m not where I need to be inside, if I’m eating like a pig, killing myself with food, it all falls apart.  I’m telling you this because you’re the only person on this earth that I trust.  You know that, right?”

I said now I did.

“I know you don’t understand, but I wish you’d support me for once.”

“I always support you.”

“I’m not going to lose weight forever, but I have to right now.  At this time in my life.”

     “You’re starving to death at this time in your life.”

“I’m not starving to death.”

     “Heather, listen . . . try to listen.  You have so much.  Why are you throwing it away?  Why are you risking it?  How much do you weigh?”

     She shrugged.

     “I know you know – I know you weigh every goddamn day.”

     “You don’t know that.  Did Lilly tell you that?”

     “You carry a scale around in your suitcase.  People with anorexia are obsessed–”

     “Oh, now I’m an anorexic?  That’s stupid.”

     “How much do you weigh?”

     “Come on, Gary, that’s stupid.”

     “How much do you weigh?”

     “I don’t know.  About eighty-five.”

     I got up and started putting on my jacket.  I’d spotted another tree branch the girls could use as a back-up pole for Frosty.  I hadn’t worked on a snowman since I was twelve years old.

     “Gary, eighty-five isn’t a problem,” Heather said.

I didn’t think eighty-five pounds would carry her through the next five shows until we hit warmer southern California, much less the next twelve until we could say it is finished, for now.