You've moved to a hellhole, and you know it even before you learn, after several phone calls, that your packed belongings were delivered to an address in another sweltering suburb, not your own. Your birth control was among those belongings, and you've just moved in with your new lover, who recently inherited half a million dollars. Exactly two years from now he'll be broke and bitter and driving you to the airport in an alcoholic haze for a vacation he has no idea you're never coming back from.
Right now you're riding in the passenger seat of an expensive gray-market car with the sunroof open, head turned to the side as you look over your shoulder at your new world. The tangled jangle from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions is singing, "She's not sure if her heart is here to stay," and you don't know you're about to be faced with yet another life-changing decision, only a month after the one that brought you here. Tonight you're blissfully unaware.
The music reminds you of the Smiths, who you don't listen to so much anymore. Not since you noticed a black-eyed teenager, who had been committed by his parents, sitting in the darkness, listening to "Unlovable" over and over again.
It's late enough that the desert is colored a cool steel-blue, and the sky is almost sparkling. The person you want to please more than yourself these days reaches over and touches your bare knee with the back of his index finger. You're shocked by the intimacy of that one touch because you're the kind of person who doesn't really know how to be handled like a petal that might bruise if one poked it. The voice on the radio's still singing, and it says, "It's so hard to love when love was your disappointment." You hope against hope that this time it will be easy.
But the line sticks in your head and you go to the record store and buy Rattlesnakes and take it home and listen to the title track. It's about a girl who's somewhere preposterous, a place where she needs to carry a gun in order to protect herself from snakes. She looks for trouble out of boredom, but finds none because she's looking. "Her heart's like crazy paving, upside down and back to forth." Her name is Jody and she never sleeps "'cause there are always needles in the hay." You're just glad the nights are cool enough lately to lie in the yard and smoke when you don't sleep.
Rattlesnakes is a less soul-damaging substitute for the Smiths, eased by the fact that Lloyd Cole is a thick-jawed, pompadoured brooder who describes his band as a tragic cross between the Staple Singers and the Velvet Underground, and who makes references to Eva Marie Saint, Simone de Beauvoir, and Truman Capote all in one song. This is the music your subconscious knows you can handle without driving yourself to sympathetic, imagined depths of depression.
Two years from now, when you're packing your suitcase for the vacation that will take you away from the hellhole forever--the first good decision you've made in a very long time because you did it to please yourself--you make sure you've got your banged-up cassette of Rattlesnakes to listen to as your plane races toward the sky. Your lover pays so little attention to you these days that he didn't even notice most of your belongings had already been sent ahead. It's the day before your 24th birthday and he's driving you to the airport--he's down to his last car, and he had to borrow money from you in order to fill it with gas. You're looking out the window, saying a silent goodbye to a place you aren't sorry to be leaving. As he pulls over to let you off at the curb, and you remind yourself that he thinks you're coming back, he touches your bare knee with the back of his index finger and for a second you can't move. "See you in two weeks, sweetheart," he says. Determined that love will not always be your great disappointment, you decide to let him believe that.
