Tunesday : 88 Lines About 44 Women

88 Lines About 44 Women

(Campbell, M / Kaufman, D) Performed by The Nails

Deborah was a Catholic girl
She held out till the bitter end
Carla was a different type
She's the one who put it in
Mary was a black girl
I was afraid of a girl like that
Susan painted pictures
Sitting down like a Buddha sat

Reena was a nameless girl
A geographic memory
Cathy was a Jesus freak
She liked that kind of misery
Vicki had a special way
Of turning sex into a song
Kamela, who couldn't sing,
Kept the beat and kept it strong

Xylla was an archetype
The voodoo queen, the queen of wrath
Joan thought men were second best
To masturbating in a bath
Sherry was a feminist
She really had that gift of gab
Kathleen's point of view was this
Take whatever you can grab

Seattle was another girl
Who left her mark upon the map
Karen liked to tie me up
And left me hanging by a strap
Jeannie had this nightclub walk
That made grown men feel underage
Mary Ellen, who had a son,
Said I must go, but finally stayed

Gloria, the last taboo
Was shattered by her tongue one night
Mimi brought the taboo back
And held it up before the light
Marilyn, who knew no shame,
Was never ever satisfied
Julie came and went so fast
She didn't even say goodbye

Rhonda had a house in Venice
Lived on brown rice and cocaine
Patty had a house in Houston
Shot cough syrup in her veins
Linda thought her life was empty
Filled it up with alcohol
Katherine was much too pretty
She didn't do that shit at all

Uh huh, not Katherine

Pauline thought that love was simple
Turn it on and turn it off
Jean-Marie was complicated
Like some French filmmaker's plot
Gina was the perfect lady
Always had her stockings straight
Jackie was a rich punk rocker
Silver spoon and a paper plate

Sarah was a modern dancer
Lean pristine transparency
Janet wrote bad poetry
In a crazy kind of urgency
Tanya Turkish liked to fuck
While wearing leather biker boots
Brenda's strange obsession
Was for certain vegetables and fruit

Rowena was an artist's daughter
The deeper image shook her up
Dee Dee's mother left her father
Took his money and his truck
Debbie Ray had no such problems
Perfect Norman Rockwell home
Nina, 16, had a baby
Left her parents, lived alone

Bobbi joined a New Wave band
Changed her name to Bobbi Sox
Eloise, who played guitar,
Sang songs about whales and cops
Terri didn't give a shit
Was just a nihilist
Ronnie was much more my style
Cause she wrote songs just like this

Jezebel went forty days
Drinking nothing but Perrier
Dinah drove her Chevrolet
Into the San Francisco Bay
Judy came from Ohio
She's a Scientologist
Amaranta, here's a kiss
I chose you to end this list.

88 Lines was another song that could always get me and my friends up on the dance floor, and I don't think I ever knew that it was five years old before the first time I heard it. I can remember the transgressive thrill of singing along to the naughty lyrics and cuss words with my gang of freaks; me pretending I knew the words better than I did; spinning away from the group on the lines I didn't know so they couldn't see what nonwords my lips were forming (as if that ever works). But, last week was about the dancing; this week I want to talk about something else.

Resetting the scene: I had had an irreversible falling out with my best friends, and after graduating from high school, I immediately started working at Lilydale packing poultry. Over that summer I continued to correspond with my boyfriend Doug who lived in Winnipeg, but the first time I went to see him after he came back to Lethbridge for college, he acted cold and weird and I never saw him again. I was exhausted from the factory work, was feeling lonely and isolated, and although I was so sick of school that putting off university for a semester was the right decision, I was envious of the new friendships that Kevin was making there and was grateful to be included in their hijinx. And what hijinx they were!

Whenever we weren't sneaking into dance clubs underage, our number one activity was going for coffee. And since I'd have to get up early the next morning if it was a weekday, that meant herbal tea for me. The hijinx! Although we didn't know it at the time, I'm sure we were a dreaded appearance at whichever coffee shop we chose to patronise of an evening: three to eight young adults in thrift store clothes and mile-high hair, all wanting coffee or tea, expecting multiple refills, laughing loudly, likely not tipping. I usually drank Feeling Free, Kevin (who didn't need to get up terribly early) often got Earl Grey, and things got really crazy the time he accidentally ordered Feeling Grey. Crazy, right?

We went for coffee so often that we would run out of things to talk about, and many times, we'd play word games, often written ones. One of our favourite games was blind poetry: We'd take the white paper placemat and someone would write a poetic line, fold the edge of the paper down to hide the line, that person would announce what word ended the line (to hopefully give a clue to the poem's theme and set up the beginning of a simple AB AB rhyming scheme), and the paper would be passed person to person, always with the previous lines hidden, until a suitable number of stanzas were finished. Unfolding the placemats and reading out the poems were indescribably hilarious events -- like a faux artistic game of Mad Libs -- but sometimes, these poems were thematically cohesive enough to surprise us with their beauty. These we often kept.

During these months, Curtis and I spent a lot of time just hanging out at the river bottom, and for whatever reason, sometimes we invented songs to sing. We had a country tune about Lethbridge's famous river-bottom-spanning-train-bridge (although it has been in use for a hundred years, the engineer who originally built the bridge was so certain it would never stand up to trains that he jumped off it, committing suicide before the first train could prove him wrong), and this was our "Kenny and Dolly" number:

I'm just sittin here watchin

The train bridge a rockin

Rockin for your love

Some day it might fall

Some day you might call

Don't fall down on me

And we wrote a French song:

De temps a temps

Je pense que je peux

Trover l'homme pour moi

And I don't remember any more of that or why it was in French, but I'm trying to recall these songs now because of what came next: I also can't remember the why of this, but one boring afternoon, a bunch of us recorded the songs that we had accumulated over the months (and by "songs", that includes the pretty poems we had accidentally written, the songs Curtis and I came up with, and something we improvised on the spot for Feeling Grey). Kevin had a keyboard with synth drum beats (which doesn't sound unlike what The Nails had going on in 88 Lines...) and although he didn't actually know how to play the piano or read music, it was his keyboard and he was allowed to make all the fake music accompaniment (which increased the hilarity factor of the effort), and in the end, it wasn't unlike Ross "trying to find his sound".

Of course, this subgroup of VOMIT needed its own name, and it was probably Kevin who came up with "Men in Comas", and we ad libbed a theme song (that began with chanting in minor chords, "Men in comas, get an erection...") that we found hilarious. I remember another gospel choir-type number, and I got to sing the opening in my biggest Hallelujah voice:

I was born in a orphanage

I've always lived at the orphanage

And I will die at the orphanage

Because I'm ugl-eee-eee-eee-eee

Ugly as sin

And then everyone else joined in with the happy clapping and singing about how ugly I am. What hijinx! Eventually, all our songs were recorded, we moved on to other tomfoolery over the weeks, and just when we might have forgotten about Men in Comas, Kevin had a surprise: he had made cassettes for each of us, and for the cover art, he had found a picture of Marilyn Monroe's autopsy in a book at the library (oh, those pre-internet days) and by photocopying it over and over to play with the grayscale (oh, those pre-camera filter days), he was indeed able to transform a death picture of la Marilyn into that of a comatose man. Don't misunderstand: this music was terrible, this was nothing but a big game, but I loved driving around in my car with it cranked right up. I'm pretty sure I threw out the cassette not long after meeting Dave (it would be a little embarrassing out of context), but I'd love to see that cover art again; hear those awful songs. 

So this week's song was chosen primarily because (as I said last week) I want to memorialise those songs that we most loved dancing to, it has the lazy synth drumbeat/simple melody line that even Kevin would be able to reproduce, and it has this one appropriate couplet:

Janet wrote bad poetry

In a crazy kind of urgency

In a way, we were all Janets that year; there was a crazy urgency to life; a manic attempt to find my place. And one more thing: many years later, when Curtis was competing to join Edmonton's "Court" (this is mainly for lip-synching drag queens, but there are roles for non-dress-wearing men and women, too, and Curtis wanted to be "Crown Prince"), he asked me if I could sew him up a monk's cowl to perform this song in. I did and Dave and I went to see Curtis lip-synch along and it was totally hilarious: the irony of the monk singing these naughty lyrics about the women he has known; Curtis putting his hands together in prayer during the hummed intervals; very Gregorian. And Curtis won his place in the Court.

As these Tunesday posts are meant as a memoir project for my girls to read some day, here's what I want them to know: I realise I'm just your very unhip mother, but once upon a time, I was not only VOMIT (which I know I mentioned before) but I was also a part of the short-lived New Wave group Men in Comas (which I don't think I've mentioned?) Do with this information as you will.