Cherokee Bride

“What the fuck are we listening to you crazy cunt?” I screamed into the ear of my old friend, James.

“Tori Amos!” He shouted back. “Home on the Range. Cherokee Edition!” He
leaned close, which means his car swerved dangerously onto the
shoulder, “I’ve turned it up louder than the Human ability to process
sound. I’ve turned it up to…” He paused, I gripped the dashboard and
ground my teeth, “…eleven!”

Actually, the stereo’s face unit said 29. But I got the point.

James was crazy enough. Driving at 100 miles per hour on Interstate 270
was worse. Listening to Tori Amos at a volume that I could feel deep in
my fillings was a little bit across the line. James weaved madly,
singing along, punching his stereo to change tracks. He had some
knock-off B side collection that he had bought in Milan a few years
ago. I knew it well, because it appeared every once in a while when
James wanted to cause trouble. Tonight, it seemed, we were about to
cause trouble. Though, the further north we went into the distant
suburbs, I began to wonder what sort of trouble we could possibly
cause.

The windows were down, sucking greedily on the tit of Washington’s late
spring, and I was staring hard at any other car on the road and,
occasionally, jumping and screaming.

It was an election summer and I was already feeling out of sorts. The
yellowjackets had nested, the wasps were introducing their young to the
world, and madness would reign no matter how the chips fell. We were
burning through the weeks and the same games were playing out.

I turned the volume up to 30 when we hit Sweet Dreams

Lie, lie, lies everywhere, said the father to the son. Your government breath gonna choke them to death.

James and I ended up in Germantown, where we kicked our way into my old
girlfriend Eileen’s house. She’d recently sold her gentrification
townhouse in Northeast DC and, loaded to the gills with money from a
refurbished slimepit, she had moved closer to her soulless fuck-head
job and bought a townhome in Germantown…which, in the space of eight
months, was already worth more than she had bought it for.

As a rule, Eileen is not fond of my friends. She tolerates me for
reasons unknown, but James was not a welcome site. Especially when he
came in, shirtless, wearing hob-nailed boots, purple-reflective
sunglasses and armed with a bottle of gin. James on gin was bad news.

“Land, land of liberty!” He screamed, “We’re run by constipated men!”

Eileen smiled graciously, “Is Tori back in style?”

“She died in the 90’s!” I shouted, slamming the B-side collection into
Eileen’s stereo and cranking it up to 15. It went to 20, but she hit me
once when I turned it up all the way and I still had an indentation in
my skull.

“You can so not do that!” she screamed against the music.

James pulled her aside, “Come on, Nacho’s ex-girlfriend, we came all
the way out here to charm up your Friday night. You’re a suburban girl
now. You’ll die alone out here, collapsed in the bathroom, the cats
eating your hands for days before the mailman finally complains about a
full mailbox.”

“I’m going to sell when it appreciates.”

“Fuck you and your money!” He grabbed her and started shaking her,
“Fuck you and this endless stream of easy money that follows you around
like a motherfucking virus!”

I pulled him off and, briefly, we struggled on Eileen’s shag carpet
while, cursing and spitting, she delivered several well-placed kicks to
both of us.

Many people, especially in this modern era, one hundred years after
Clinton was president, have left Tori Amos behind. She represents a
weepy past and failed to age past the Big Bang in ought-one.
Nevertheless, she’s always held a special place in my head. And not
just because I want to fuck tiny, troubled fake redheads for eleven
hours and twenty-seven minutes every night and/or until my heart
explodes. I always secretly felt she had this sort of talent that
filled a certain void. Coating herself in a veneer of Joni Mitchell and
Kate Bush, she managed to round out the strange world of 90’s music.
Her wavering, tense, emotional homage to Smells like Teen Spirit
haunted my world, and, above all, she was a local girl. Well,
Baltimore. But DC claims Baltimore whenever something famous comes out
of it, and she played in DC clubs as a child because Baltimore is a
vicious sleaze-pit and a tiny teenaged girl can’t play in the clubs up
there. Hell, Lisa Suckdog had a hard time playing in Baltimore’s indie
clubs.

Plus, Tori got me laid several times. She has my undying loyalty
because there’s nothing like recovering-Catholic, self-mutilation,
pre-medicated depression sex. Seriously. I may sound facetious but, let
me tell you, sex just isn’t the same now that all the troubled girls
are on drugs.

Sex with Eileen was no good, either, but she stayed in touch because
she was self-destructive, and I always respected that in her.

Once James was under control, the CD had reached Smells Like Teen Spirit
and the trouble was in the air. I had fucked off to Eileen’s kitchen to
raid her liquor cabinet, which was marred by cherry vodka, vanilla
vodka, and other vagina flavored vodkas. James and Eileen had reached a
tenuous truce and were sitting at opposite ends of the living room. I
decided we all needed to bring it down a notch, so I made a special
vagina mix with Eileen’s vodkas and one of her not very diet drinks and
brought each of them a glass.

“What the fuck is this?” James asked after his first sip.

“Cunt vodka.”

“Jesus Christ, Nacho.” Eileen protested, but she still drank the vodka.

“How about some normal man flavored vodka?”

“Stiff, thick, bitter? A certain aromatic, weedy aftertaste?”

“Um…” James put his glass down.

“No, no,” I pressed his shoulder, “This is still cunt flavored.”

“Cherry and vanilla?” Eileen asked.

I stared blankly at her for a minute, “Well, yes.”

She smiled. “See, that’s why we stuck together as long as we did.” She looked at James, “This boy’s mouth is golden.”

“I’m going to shit in your lungs in a minute,” James replied. “Both of you!”

Eileen shot back her vagina mix, banged the glass down, crossed to the
stereo and slammed in Atari Teenage Riot. The mood changed.

James took to the floor instantly, moshing with furniture, while Eileen
and I spun around until we almost threw up cunt vodka. We fell to the
floor together and I briefly considered punching her in the face before
she kneed me in the balls but, instead, James threw himself on top of
us with a scream.

“Suburbia, suburbia!” he screamed, his voice becoming shredded and
broken as he rolled on the carpet. Then, suddenly, he stopped.
“Motherfucker, I’m gonna throw up a whole vagina!”

Eileen was on her feet, panicked, “Bathroom! Bathroom!” She screamed,
“No cunts on the carpet! Not here! Not now! Not like this!”