Liz Phair

morning-after reflections when we plant our feet facing in the direction we wish to go and vow never to deviate from honesty, empathy, and inspiration.

I remember one photo shoot I did at the beginning of my career, maybe my first or second ever. Some newspaper in Chicago commissioned it and threw a party for themselves during the session. They laid me out on a fur carpet, wearing nothing but trousers and suspenders over my nipples, while anonymous guests—strangers—sipped cocktails and watched me from the periphery. It was disturbing, like the orgy scene in the film Eyes Wide Shut. I could hear the spectators commenting, but I couldn’t see them very well, because I was under bright lights while they were in the dim candlelit recesses of the studio.

Some of my lyrics are explicit, so I’m sure they expected me to dance around and be outrageous. But I couldn’t move. I just lay there, a photo-shoot virgin, dull-eyed and mute. I was so freaked out that I retreated inside myself, disconnecting mentally from my surroundings. They were left with an empty shell of a person to work with. It was like bad sex. No one knew what to do about it. I didn’t know how to say no back then. I didn’t have a manager. I had no concept of what was normal for my profession.

The funny thing was, although I felt exploited and I hated it, it was the way my makeup looked that made me cry afterward. The makeup artist was the nicest, sweetest man, and my only ally in this upsetting situation, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his heavy bronzer, nude lips, and spidery fake eyelashes made me feel clownish and ashamed, like a dog wearing a cone collar or one of the last kids to be picked for a PE team. I kept thinking about how many people in the city were going to see me looking like this, and I was devastated.

I stand in my dressing room, staring at my naked body. It’s been ravaged by pregnancy: a road map of stretch marks and veins, a sullen little pooch where the baby bump was. I’m the kind of person who notices every microfluctuation in my figure. All I want is to have some control back, to feel like I am the master of my own ship so I can focus on caring for my newborn son. Yet on top of everything, I also have to contend with this stranger I see in the reflection. It’s going to take a lot of work to put myself back together again. My tits are the size of cantaloupes. All of a sudden, milk shoots straight out of both nipples, like bullets out of the fembots in an Austin Powers movie, spraying all over the mirror. I clasp my hands over my chest, trying to stanch the flow, but it squirts out between my fingers. I am horrified, and I have absolutely no idea what to do. Tears springs to my eyes. I cry out for the one person I depend on above all others. “Moooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!”

“Try this.”

Nate shoves a forkful of pasta into Matt’s mouth.

“It’s really fucking good.”

“Oh my God.”

Matt groans like he’s just tasted Aphrodite’s bathwater.

So, in the end, what’s it all for? Here I was feeling like a star, and being treated like a star, but what’s important in real life is doing the decent thing. It’s like Camus says in The Plague, that there’s an absurdity to the universe, and you can either do nothing or continue to push to do the best you can. And the best you can do is just do the decent thing. There’s no payoff. The good people of the world are those who, in spite of there being no payoff, do the decent thing anyway. That’s what being human is. That’s the example of a human, being.

I can remember a time when we’d stay in bed all day having sex, then throw on jeans and T-shirts and meet our friends for dinner. Now when we go out on “date night” (an awful term), I’m anxious the whole time that our son is missing me, that he doesn’t like the babysitter, that he’s crying for any one of a hundred possible reasons and can’t convey his needs well enough yet. Jim is frustrated, but he doesn’t criticize me. It’s a relief when we come home early.

The thing is, I’m on tour. I’m busy and tired. It is crucial to me that I show up for all my gigs, give my fans a performance they love, and collect my pay. Nothing—not illness, injury, or an act of God—is going to stand in my way. This isn’t some playground on wheels or bacchanalian circus in the sky. This is business, and I take my job very seriously. I don’t have time for the weather to fuck up my itinerary.

I’m also a mother. My son is entering high school. I need to be there for him, to make sure he’s supervised and has someone to talk to during this vulnerable transition into adulthood. If I have to be out on the road, I’m going to make sure that my time away from home counts. I’m going to crush it every night and leave the audiences cheering. We accomplished that goal at our show tonight. We rocked the house, played the hits, unearthed some rarities. People were hanging over the balconies, singing all the lyrics. It was a total madhouse backstage.

That was only a few hours ago, and yet it’s hard to believe any of it was real now that I’m out here by myself braving the cold, dark night. The rock-and-roll lifestyle trains you to withstand extremes. One minute you’re partying in a mansion, the next you’re parked in a urine-soaked alley. But the fact that I’m determined to go through this ordeal to get back on track with our schedule goes beyond dedication. It borders on self-punishment.

I was a sham, a fraud. The world saw me as a renegade, a fearless maverick, and here I was nervous about making the one big jaunt of my day to the grocery store to flirt with a checkout clerk. This Trader Joe’s guy was paid to be friendly. It wasn’t even a challenge. I didn’t care. I needed something to make the pain disappear for half an hour, and this worked. The pot didn’t work, the booze didn’t work, but this did. I would come home from Trader Joe’s on the days I’d seen him feeling happy and attractive, like I had something to look forward to in life. Where was the harm in it? In the grand scheme of things it seemed like an innocent if embarrassing indulgence. What could go wrong?