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+I got an A on this paper in Lit class...just an observation. ha.+
+08.08.04
+ 4:25 p.m.
+
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”
Tallulah Nation was born and bred on rock n roll. In a trailer some 40 miles north of New Orleans, she came screaming into this desperate world. “Daddy was a preacher and Mama was a go-go girl” with whiskey lips and heavy hand. Early on, the little girl learned the delicate art of cosmetic camouflage; always finding it ironic that the colors she chose to cover her secrets with always had such lovely and innocent names
Perfect Peach…Bashful Blush…Summer Rose
Mama, having been too drunk to remember to enroll Tallulah in school, would often drag her along on those lazy afternoons to the shitty little tavern she danced at, her audience a lonely toothless crowd…slippery hands and tongues darting between cracked dry lips in lewd gestures.
But Tallulah never saw any of this. She tucked herself behind the beer soaked stage where she would sip flat Mr. Pib and silently mouth the words to whatever rock song was thumping out of the rigged second-hand sound system.
Jim, Iggy, Mick, Lux
they all sang to her, promising her that other worlds existed
some she would never know, some she would become painfully familiar with.
And so it was, year after year Tallulah dreamed of bigger things. Glamour and decadence and escape
beautiful escape. She wanted to lick those guitar riffs and swallow the glory they had to offer. She was starving for a better life.
As she struggled through her vacant teenage years it was apparent the only things the good Lord had blessed her with were her striking features and frail delicate figure in which Vogue told her was “heroin chic.”
“Don’t eat
Don’t sleep
Detoxify, PURIFY!!!
A line or two, here and there, won’t kill you, in fact, it will keep you skinny and beautiful and worthy of God’s good graces and…and…”
And all the boys and all the men…they all had an agenda for the pretty little girl. The boys taught her how to shut her mouth and like it while the men sometimes gave her a little money for booze or groceries or both maybe…they didn’t care…
Grocery List:
Carton of winstons
1/5 southern comfort
4 Hungry Man fried chickn
gal. Milk
6 pak of Fresca
maxi pads (the big kind)
Time dragged by. Mama spent her days grinding against a metal pole and Tallulah kept herself occupied, never ignorant to the growing and constant anxiety plaguing her.
19 hit like a freight train and she awoke one soggy morning with a pounding desire, a need to run.
RunRunRunRunRunRunRunRunRunRunRunRun
Don’tLookBack Don’tLookBack Don’tLookBack
It became her mantra and by that week’s end, she found herself on a dirty Greyhound heading towards the City of Angels.
She liked that. How could something so angelic, so full of these demi-gods she worshipped be at all a bad choice? She followed their lyrics like scripture
Prophets in their own right, they were.
Three days later, she tumbled off the bus filthy and exhausted but the underlying current of excitement coursing through her kept her moving.
As it was, those first few days she spent in the sprawling metropolis could be marked and logged as the ultimate beginning of her decline. Although some might argue it started much farther back, most likely the day she ever had of misfortunate of taking her first breaths.
But here
Here was now home.
Back alleys, dirty little clubs, up-and-coming-working-on-an-LP-we’re-gonna-make-it-with-a-record-deal-someday-soon crash pads, a fumbling drunken night in bed earned her a toxic sanctuariary for a few weeks at a time. Odd jobs to see her through and two years later
She was Mama.
‘Tiny’s Titty Tavern,’ 3 afternoons a week for Happy Hour and Saturday nights when the “real” money rolled in. But Jim and Iggy and Mick and Lux weren’t there to serenade her. Instead, sleazy outdated heavy metal and misplaced country songs that gave her a sick longing for home, provided the rhythm of her slow and awkward exposure.
It was all so familiar. It was home.
Home.
Mama had sent her a postcard a few weeks earlier (or maybe it was months…she couldn’t remember…)
“Lula~
Just wantd to let you know Daddy got into somes trouble over touchin one of those snively little church girls, you know one of the camp councilers? Yea well I knows it was only a big ol’ stink becuz she is the dauter of one of those church guys that runs everything, wouldn’t be such a big deal in 2 months when she goes and turns 16 but it all blowd up big and now yer daddys up at state for god knows how long this time but to be honest Lula I’s gonna leave that sonofabich anyways becuz…get this Lula…we went one nite in some damn religious fit and pored all my booze rite on down the drane and then he went and shot the dog becuz he sweared that damn dog was the devil recinarnate or something I swear, Lu, he’s out of his damn mind yer daddy is…”
Tallulah couldn’t bring herself to care. She didn’t want to think about the shit-storm she had left some 2,000 miles behind her. Only late at night, when it was real quiet and all of her flat-mates were on the Nod would she allow fragments of distorted memories to seep into her opiate ridden head. She remembered an old gospel song from her 5’th year of life, a summer spent at Bible Retreat, “alone and forsaken by fate and by man/O’ Lord if you hear me please take hold my hand/ and follow you I will unto the promise land…”
Tallulah never dreamed on those nights.
August, 6’th
Missing Mile, Louisiana
“Isaiah Nation, pastor of The First New United Baptist Church of Redemption of Holy Sacred Honor (Godsboro, LA) was charged yesterday on multiple counts of child molestation, indecent exposure, corrupting a minor, and as this journalist just learned, unnecessary animal cruelty. The minor in question will remain anonymous. Mr. Nation was sentenced at Missing Mile County Court House yesterday to 7 years imprisonment, no parole. Further information will be released as this story unravels.”
“The Shepard never led his lambs astray, but what about his dog? Come out and show your support for FART (Forcing Animals into Righteous Territory). We will be hosting a gathering for fellow non-sinners and animal lovers at the Second Blessed Holy Baptist Church of the Sacred Mother Mary of Serenity and Redemption here in Missing Mile on Saturday, Aug. 14’th. At 1:00 in the afternoon. A memorial will be erected in honor of Stumpy, Pastor Nation’s beloved three-legged German Shepard that he took from us so prematurely. Jesus Juice and Crucifix Cookies will be served. Remember, fellow churchgoers, DOG is really GOD spelled backwards. Don’t our four (sometimes three) legged friends deserve a Holy voice???”
Evidence: red leather-bound writing journal found on the deceased, many pages torn from the binding except for the following:
: all night long on the broken glass/living inside a medicine chest :
- Tom Waits
-
: gimme danger little stranger and I’ll give you a piece/ gimme danger little stranger and I’ll feel your disease/ there’s nothing in my dreams but some ugly memories/ theres nothing left alive but a pair of glassy eyes :
- iggy and the stooges
: and yet I fight this battle all alone/ no one to cry to, no place to call home/ my gift of self is raped/ my privacy is raked/ repeating in my head/ if I cant be my own/ id feel better dead :
- alice in chains
: the needle tears a hole/ the old familiar sting/ try to kill it all away/ but I remember everything :
- nine inch nails
: Hear the trumpets hear the pipers/one hundred million angels singing/multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum/voices calling voices crying/some are born and some are dying/its Alpha and Omega kingdom come :
- Johnny Cash
Tallulah’s first and only child was born to her just after her 22’nd birthday. She hated being pregnant but somewhere
Deep inside
She loved the idea of being a mother.
Yet still, those pregnant months were rough on her. The long hours she put in at Titty Town (as she liked to refer to it as) were draining her of what little energy and hope she possessed. At first, Tallulah tried to clean up
Tried to become the upstanding girl that the god she loathed would want her to be…
However, failure was something she was familiar with and after three weeks, she gave in to that warm heart numbing burn she so desperately craved.
No one told her not to, she reasoned with herself in some half lidded denial that maybe she was no longer on the path to righteousness.
By the 7’th month she spit in the face of righteousness and after a particularlry vivid evening with a bottle of jack (“oh Mama, you’d be so fucking proud…”)
She found herself partially naked in the street burning a Motel 6 bible and smashing bottles until dawn.
But on that morning when Lilo was born, while Tallulah was still nursing a post-birthday hangover, she could do nothing but crawl her way to the bathroom, feeling the very fibers that held her stomach together tearing wide apart. She was afraid to look down for fear of seeing what her intestines looked like.
Lying back against a checkerboard of damp moldy tiles she felt the pain come faster
And hotter
Burning straight down her thighs and into her “Crimson Starlet” toenails.
The last thought in her sweaty head before it hit the tile was a lyric to an old song she thought she heard once as a teenager.
“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
and it's all over now, Baby Blue.”
- Bob Dylan
In the days following, Tallulah would slowly begin to understand
Not so exact events and
Incoherent moments
That had taken place the morning her daughter was born. Her daughter. HER daughter.
She gathered scattered pieces of the story…flat-mate awoke to the screams she did not remember making…couldn’t call the ambulance man, sorry…they cops would come you know how it is man…watch the Discovery Channel a lot…seen it done on TV…man, a lot of fuckin blood, man…thought you were like….fuckin dead…by the way…you got any shit cuz I really need something man I’m itchin all over…yea man like sorry about the kid and all…don’t know how she I mean IT died…look don’t fuckin scream at me Lu the blood really freaked me out and I think I’m like fucked up from it Lu like…you sure you don’t got anything?…ok ok….”
And then it was done.
Lilo Naomi Nation was born just before sunset but never took a breath. Some would agree, always amongst themselves and under their breath, that perhaps she was better off that way.
And Tallulah was never quite right after that…but Tallulah was never quite all right.
Empty eyes
Empty soul to match
And some said they spotted her here and there and around town, sinking further into the vacant Babylon her city of angels had become.
She was a distant shadow of herself
And to be totally honest, noone really cared.
Just another strung out blown out dropped out
Junkie.
A broken little wide eyed girl from a dirty swamp a million miles away…
For this reason no one paid much attention when her public death notice showed up in the local paper.
22
female.
No known living relatives
The cop who took the report recognized her, however. She had danced for him a few times and he always meant to ask her name. He did say she was found with a piece of shredded paper in her pocket.
It was town scripture from the Old Testament, a verse her father had given to her on her 16’th birthday…
“…she gave herself, a whore, to all the elite and defiled herself with all the idols of everyone she lusted after as she recalled the days of her youth. The soul who sins is the one who will die…”
Ezekiel 22:19