The first time I smelled Steve was on a hot June night at a DIY  house show (1) in the Fort Sanders /UT campus area of Knoxville ,Tennessee.  Pharimones had a lead role in jump starting our love. On the front porch there were several thrift store couches, chairs and other pieces of living room furniture in varied states of decay. When he first saw me I was,"trapped," in a couch because the springs were broken and I had consumed enough PBR that I didn't want or need to move at the moment. Plus, it gave me a good vantage point and physical position to possibly meet him.

Steve's band, The Lonely Heart Killers, (one of many oxymorons in our relationship) had just finished playing. When he meandered onto the porch and sank next to me on the couch to roll a cigarette I became awkard and I knew I was in trouble. All I could get out of my mouth was, "I really liked your band." I felt like Henry Rollins must have felt when he met Iggy Pop for the first time. Luckily my band, The Kissing Virus, was on next so instead of trying to charm him with my existential wit I was able to perform for him while hiding behind my guitar. Planets had shifted and the night sky was falling in line on my side.

After the show was over and most of the people had slithered home I meandered onto the porch and this time found him sinking in the same seat I had been in earlier. When I sat down next to him he says," I really liked your band too." Laughter cut the obvious attraction between us just enough for us to sit there talking and enjoying comfortable silences until dawn.

With the combination of endorphins, some Willie Nelson records, cheap beer and the new sunlight we walked to a greasy diner down the street from the couch. We knew that we either got on board with coffee and a shared spinach omlette or run the risk of losing time that had suddenly become incredibly precious.

I found out Steve was from Jonas Ridge, NC, and lived at the DIY house.  He had come to Knoxville to meet and work with other artists. Jonas Ridge's population was less than a hundred and his family life there was lacking in love, food, running water and electricity. The first minute I saw him I felt like I wanted to meet his family, share his bed and be his other half. After hearing about his dad, Dane and his Uncle Snake's bar called,The Bloodbath, their moonshining operation and collection of banjos and sawed off shotguns the family didn't matter so much. In five long minutes Steve had made my short childhood seem more like a Rockwell painting than one of the Frieda Kahlo accident series paintings.

As the daughter of a drunk and depressed bluesman/ farmer in Mississippi I knew pain. At fourteen I took the pain,turned it into anger and ran away to the streets of Austin,TX where the punk shows were plenty and the," crusties," I met always knew of a place to eat and sleep. I fell in love a lot as a teen because I was looking for someone to save me with their love. Unfortunately all I got was a few new scars and an STD.

On my eighteenth birthday I came,"home." I had this dream in my head of a reuniting where we would shed tears, apologize and promise to learn new coping skills. Instead I found an even more hostile environment than I had left. I vowed to never return...again. The Memphis College of Art offered me a scholarship and financial aid so I was certain I would find what I was looking for at art school. My problem was that wherever I ran away from I was still there with myself.  While in school I started playing guitar and singing in a band called, Pump Action Reatards. We would tour in a stinky van during the Summer and play locally during each semester.

I met a guy in Chicago while touring one year and fell for him in a long, well planned second. Since I was sure that this was ,"The One," I transferred to The Art Institute and moved into a house next door to Mr. Tim Rutili. I ditched school after a few weeks because I couldn't miss a Friends of Betty or Red Red Meat show. I spent all of my time away from work recording and learning more about songwriting and Tim. His skeletons were written into his lyrics. I loved his dark side and didn't mind that his girlfriend had died of AIDS since I had seen him last. I liked his brooding nature and took his pain on myself. After all I deserved this right? For a place in his heart I could even overlook the wife and child he had forgotten to mention until I had signed my lease. They were seperated and he let me take on his seperation anxiety too.

My music turned into his music but since I was also holding on to his anger for him he kept his consistant dream like poetic lyrics while I began writing with the sadness of Townes Van Zandt, the anger of Jello Biafra and the voice of Come's,Thaylia Zadek. When I saw him leaving his apartment one morning with my friend Katy I was pierced by their drunken dissheveled motel sex look.

Tim was gone but he still lingered like the rest of them did. My self pity had become so comfortable that I went out with it every night and drank it to sleep. That's when I met a fellow Austin,TX musician named David. The first night we met I went home with him and watched,"Barfly," while taking shots of whiskey every time Faye Dunaway or Mickey Rourke did. I woke up naked, wet and cold. I assumed we had sex but I knew he had urinated on me while we were sleeping. This guy was going to fix me for sure.

In Austin he had sang in a band that I, of course,"Loved," called, Scratch Acid. The line in one of their songs went," I'm not using my body now so you can play with it if you want to." For the whole winter that is what he did. If he didn't have ,"whiskey dick," we tried to have sex that meant something more than a song lyric. I learned to sleep on the floor so I would be dry when I woke up hungover. I was nineteen and had been in true love seventeen times. I gave away so many pieces of my heart that I am amazed blood still pumps through me.

David started a new band called The Jesus Lizard and suddenly I found myself alone and afraid of who I was now. I left him and moved back to the place I said I would never go again; Mississippi.

I returned because my grandfather who I loved like a god and wished I could find in a man my age; had a stroke. I actually moved into an apartment in Memphis but would travel one hundred miles round trip everyday so I could bathe, dress, shave and feed him. Then I would take him to physical, occupational and speech therapy Monday through Friday. The majority of my days were spent sending away press kits to indie labels and looking for that next true love. It worked. I got signed to a label called Tim/Kerr (no relation to the real Tim Kerr). They gave me a deal of one album with the option to renew the contrct. Life had always been a race so why should this be any different. When the A&R representative called and asked if I could have my band ready in five weeks to play the North by Northwest showcase and do a couple of instore performances with another guy on their label at that time named, Daniel Johnson I said yes and decided I would figure it out after the fact. That is what a true strong woman does according to Nancy Bush. She says yes first and then figures out how to pull it off.

I lived above my friend Jeff who had a band called,68 Comeback. They had just released a record but weren't planning to tour on it until Fall. It was May so I borrowed his drummer. Here comes true trouble again. Jeff Bouck is a feminine featured strait guy who looked like a model, drummed with passion and was incredibly intellegent. Of course my endorphins began planning our wedding as soon as I met him.

My dad hired a maid to take care of my grandpa and I hit the road headed for Dallas with Jeff. We met up with our bass player there. Practiced for the next three weeks to play the showcase and then drove back across country to record in an analog studio I demanded in my contract called, Easley's. Thanks to Mrs. Bush I had acted like a true strong woman.

Jeff and I arrived in Texas and we took up residence with his parents while we were there. Our bedrooms were next door to each other. I was sure I could get him to love me as much as I thought I loved him in this isolated living situation.

It took three days before we met Mark to begin rehearsals. I had romantisized the idea that our practice space would evoke a John Hurt image. It was a shotgun style house in the middle of a field in Waxahatchie,TX.  In my mind I thought we would play all night, take smoke breaks on the front porch and fall in love under the Texas sky.

When I actually saw the place my dreams were already beginning to sour.

The house had no windows, electricity or running water. We powered our amps with a generator that worked when it felt like it. Sort of like the guys in my band. One night we had to call off practice because a copperhead came into the practice room and wouldn't leave. I had a lot in common with that snake metaphorically. More than my college psychology classes would even allow me to recall.

I was tormented and lamented over Jeff day and night. I cooked vegan macrobiotic food for him every night and even put his financial needs before my own. Somehow we made it to Portland. Mark let me know at the last minute that his seventeen year old girlfriend would be traveling with us. The drive went something like this: I listened to loud metal, a lot of Sabbath and even Guns and Roses when I really wanted to piss everyone off the most. Jeff slept the entire way there while Mark and Christy made out in the back seat so I couldn't miss them in the rearview. They arrived well rested, over sexed and I arrived underslept and pissed at the world.

The in store performances were disasters as was our show at Berbati's Pan. It didn't help that Gus Van Sant, Steven Malkmus and Klaus Flouride were in the crowd not to see me but to see Daniel Johnson. I started drinking sake onstage so by the time our band backed Daniel I couldn't get my guitar in standard 440 tuning. Mr. Flouride helped me tune. We had practiced once for fifteen minutes with Daniel who writes songs with lyrics that feel as desperate as I did at that point. I was so ashamed of our our performance that I hid behind a Centapede machine after the show until everyone had gone.

The trip to the studio was grueling. Jeff had told me he was going to move in with his girlfriend in New York after the record was done. Mark informed me he was on probation and we had to stop in every state when we crossed the line to get an officer's signature. The studio was worse. Jeff quit four or five times. I told him I loved him. Our label had only sent twelve of the sixteen thousand needed to record and mix the record. We finished recording but couldn't get our calls returned by anybody at the label. We heard rumors they were selling out to Mercury and it was true. In the end, the songs were to tape but no four grand-no final mix. I left Jeff in Memphis, drove Mark back to Texas and then got in my van and drove as far east as I could. I ended up in Charlotte where I was to stay with another ex lover I knew from Chicago. He was working on a book and I had my sites set on him. He was going to have to be the one.

As soon as I got to Charlotte they evacuated the place because of a hurricaine. It suited me fine because my ex had decided that day he was in love.

" I never thought I could be so in love," he sais before I left.

I laughed, cried and sang my way to Knoxville. I had lived there for eight months years ago. That is the longest I had lived anywhere since I was twelve. I decided I would get a room at the YWCA and get a practice space so I could work on new music. I was still trying to call Tim/Kerr but by that time it did not matter anyway. The studio where my masters were burned to the ground.

No more chasing that elusive creature called love unless it was a guitar. That's when I started,The Kissing Virus. To me the name meant you wanted love from somebody so much you would die for it. I spent all of my time working, writing and recording. We played a lot of shows and got a new van. Things were starting to feel stable. I began to laugh and began to make close friends. I was learning what it meant to be a friend; to give love plutonically and recieve it in return. I began writing some of the best material ever. I practiced all the time and got better at my craft. When we weren't playing somewhere around the southeast we played a lot of house shows because it was like the old school days where there was no all ages venue. Life was good.

Then, there was that night when the planets shifted, the stars aligned and the Steve meandered out onto the porch. We wrote together, moved in together, started a catering business together and we fell in love slowly -for me- and we kept getting stronger and smarter and older. We respected each other and I lived in the same house for two whole years. We built our lives around each other. He was tall, blonde, beautiful and helping him was helping me. These were good, real love filled days and nights with incredible sex even after three years. I did meet his dad, Dane and his Uncle Snake. The Bloodbath was real and in a trailor on Buckeye Holler Road. I couldn't make this up.

After I had met his dad I understood his pain more than I ever could have without meeting the man. A cathartic experience to Dane was to get drunk and fire the shotgun off of the back porch of the trailor/bar. It felt good to leave. Somehow I accidentally left a piece of Steve there in his memories. He needed more love now than ever before. I was thankful to be there for him.

One day I was putting away laundry and a syringe fell out from the lip of the closet. I got a chair and began to go through Steve's things. There were more needles ans a lot of pills that said,"OC 80," and " MS Contin 100." What the hell were these?

I drove like the mad woman I am to the catering business. He was in the stock room with a needle in his arm.

" We can beat this together Steve. I will help you. I love you."

He was nodding out and didn't seem to care about the gravity orconsequences of the situation.

"Is that junk love to you?"

"Huh?"

Then there was a long silence. He began to come around after the rush and the intial shock to the system of that CNS depressing high. I felt betrayed. I felt like he had a lover in secret. He did. I drove home and tried to think in third person. What does a person do or not do in the name of love? I need a sign...show me a fucking sign. I looked up and saw an actual sign for a drug detox/rehab. I called them when I got home. It did not take me long to figure out that nobody would help him because we were uninsured. It gave me someting more tangible to be pissed of about. I had worked so hard for years and all of that endurace, all of those tests all the love I tried to get and give...what was any of it for really? I sat and read the Tao Te Ching. I read the Bible, I prayed, I pleaded,I begged. Then I just cried for hours. So many years of endless searching and now I was tired.

Steve came home from work and we talked. He did not want to give up the drugs. He told me he had been on them on and off long before he knew me. I did the Nancy Reagan thing and told him I was moving out. I had nowhere to go and he had spent our entire savings.

"Say yes and figure out how later."

I slept in the van for two nights. I did not go to work on those days. I needed to think and learn. The third day away was my birthday. I decided to go by the house and try to talk with him. I was going to try to make a plan. I needed to be on autopilot. The house was quiet and the animals had not been fed. He's a jerk I said to myself as I walked into the dining room and saw,"I LOVE YOU KIMORHINE." It had been written in betadine. That will have to be  covered in Kilz I thought to myself. His car was there but I could not find him anywhere. I started yelling for him. I called his friends but all of them said they hadn't seen him. I was paranoid and thought that at least one of them was lying to me. They were probably using with him.

I went to the carport and I was going to get some of my things out of the staorage room. As the door opened and the light from outside crept up the dark walls and an orange extensiom chord lay unraveled on the gravel floor. Why was the table knocked over? His boots why were his  boots, they are...what the...no no no no no no no no no no no no no no is all I could scream as I fell on the floor feeling like I was dying. Steve had left us all. I went inside and vomited then laid down on our bed and just smelled him. My first true love. I'll never forget that night, the porch, his smell, his eyes. He was so tall and blonde. It was such a contrast to my small boddy and long black hair and green eyes that used to sparkle but now they were black, cold, dead old and just stared into a vision of that night when the planets shifted. It was three years later but it was another hot night in June.