Authors: Beth Ditto
Once I was there, where I wanted to be, with my babysitters, I got scared. I thought, I am not going to get to go home. The
doctors didn’t think I was well enough. They would ask me what I thought about my life and I would tell them. I would tell them about Uncle Lee Roy and the three little A’s, about punching Freddie and cutting myself. It was always men asking me these questions, never women. Doctors. Women were the nurses, and there was bulletproof glass between the halls I roamed and the rooms they sat in, with their paperwork and their computers.
My roommate was a woman who just lay on her bed all day like a dead person. It was creepy. I would have preferred the screaming woman who wanted to kill me. Every morning at 7:00 we would get woken up to do crafts, or to go to group therapy, and my roommate would just lie there, refusing to participate. After a while they just left her alone. Flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, vacated.
In group therapy there was a man who had thrown himself in front of a car. He’d been there for six months. There was an abuse survivor who was addicted to drugs, and a woman who had so fallen apart her kids had been taken from her. There were people in the circle who could not hold a conversation that went above a twelve-year-old level, and we were all having therapy together. As if you could deal with all of us in the same way!
This is how low I’ve gotten, I thought; I’m in here with someone who flung himself in front of a car. To hear someone who had actually acted on his suicidal compulsion was a wake-up call. And at the same time, I thought, Of course I’m crazy. This is our support system? This is the babysitter? This is where people who survive rape and incest wind up? No one in the hospital was looking at our abuse from a feminist perspective. There was no feminism in the hospital, there was no queer-positivity. Up until that point I had never really cried. I had cried right after Aunt Jannie died, but that’s it. Now, in the hospital, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for me and for my little cousins and for my sister and my mother and for the women in group therapy and the woman who wanted to kill me and the woman who wouldn’t get out of bed and the man
who threw himself under the moving car. I cried and I cried and I thought, Well, maybe this is why I’m here. Maybe I had to find a place where I could finally cry. I’d driven Freddie to the end of his rope, till he had had enough and couldn’t take it anymore. I had reached out to my friend and she’d given me flowers. Jeri was so far away; no one had cars or money for a long-distance phone call. All I wanted was to be held twenty-four hours a day. And people can’t do that. They can’t hold you twenty-four hours a day. I knew that I needed to die or I needed to live, and I just needed a minute to figure out which. And to cry.
Freddie came to visit me twice. I was only released because he had come to get me. They wouldn’t let me leave alone, not in the terrible snow, which had not let up. I left the whiteness of the institution for the sharp, pretty whiteness of the outside. There was real air there, and I sucked it into my lungs. The snow felt like cold little kisses on my face. The gray sky felt gentle after the harsh lights that striped the ceiling of that hospital. A friend of Freddie’s who was in a queercore band called the Third Sex was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car outside, the motor running, steam from the snow rising up around her shaking car.
I had only been in the hospital for four days, but it seemed like forever. I felt changed from those hours, I felt like my life had shifted somehow, was different. The doctors had put me on Lexapro; one of the side effects was yawning and I was yawning once a minute, I swear. Ask Nathan. He could hardly be around me, because yawning is so contagious and I’d yawn and he’d yawn and I’d yawn again and it was yawning madness. The Lexapro wasn’t working. It made me so anxious I lay in bed like my psych ward roommate, my teeth chattering. It was awful, it made everything worse. They switched me to Prozac, and that started working. I took it all the time. But I hated the long, long walk to get my prescription filled. I always had this thing I internalized, how people
think fat people are lazy, and in my heart I was scared I was like that, lazy, so lazy I didn’t even want to get up and get my own medicine. But really, I just needed help. I needed someone to be there to make sure I took my medicine. My babysitter. I still needed that babysitter so bad.
I moved through it every day. My panic, my sadness, my exhaustion. When it got real bad I called Akasha. She said to me,
Beth, if you can’t take it week by week, you take it day by day. If you can’t take it hour by hour, you take it minute by minute, and if that doesn’t work you take it second by second, but you take it
. And that totally worked. Because it came from her. Because she knew how I grew up, and she knew what I was struggling with. And because she is not a woman of words, Akasha, so for her to come out with all that meant a lot. One of her favorite sayings is “Why would I write in a card, the card says it better than I do. The card says it all.” She says this every time she sends you a card, and then you get it in the mail with the little flourish of her signature and that’s it.
And so I knew I had to take my own steps toward happiness. I thought a lot about my sister’s advice:
week, day, hour, minute, second
. Taking it. The steps I have to take to stay sane. You have to go through the pain of things to heal them.
In 2005, Kathy left Gossip. It was heartbreaking. Our lives—Gossip’s life, and Kathy’s life—were going in two very different directions. It was the saddest moment the band had ever had. The instability of life in a band had hit its peak for Kathy, and she needed a job. A real job, one she could rely on, one that was constant and guaranteed. Nathan and I were so used to being unstable, we didn’t even notice it, and while Kathy had had her own instability growing up, she’s a Virgo and wasn’t interested in bringing childhood patterns of shaky scarcity into her adult life. Kathy needs stability, a rock; she’s earth, she needs to be grounded. It is not a grounding experience, being in a quasi-underground punk band.
While Kathy was grappling with her own experience of practical instability, I found myself at the mercy of my own emotional instability. After surviving my second nervous breakdown, after surviving hospitalization, I decided that my life needed to have a serious direction. And what could my purpose be if not Gossip? I would rededicate myself to touring and making music my life.
The intense energy it took to relocate to a new city, and the time spent getting back on my feet, had taken my focus away from the band.
Movement
hadn’t even been out for a year yet; we’d been on a tour and had a live album just come out,
Undead in NYC
. We’d even started on a new album, writing a bunch of songs that had felt so promising and inspiring, but everything got put on hold while the band settled into Portland and I settled into myself. We hadn’t all gotten together to practice in months. I was used to practicing all the time back in Olympia, and I didn’t like how far away music felt from me. And now especially, on the heels of such intense instability, I needed something I knew I could rely on. If my own life was something I couldn’t get behind 100 percent, I would put my energy into the service of this band that had made me so happy and see if that couldn’t keep me alive.
As if the universe itself wanted to confirm that I had made the right choice, Le Tigre invited us to go on tour with them. I was finally going to have my chance to meet Kathleen Hanna! But Kathy said no. She couldn’t handle another tour, the instability of it, having to return home and patch her life back together again. Her commitment to living that way was zero. And so Nathan and I had to tell her that we had to move on without her. You could say that we kicked her out of the band, but it didn’t feel like that. For us it was a choice between Gossip or keeping our pizza job, or our McDonald’s job, because that was all we had going for us outside our music life. Seriously—Nathan was working at McDonald’s. For me the choice was clear—I would rather be unstable in a band and tour all the time than be depressed in Portland, working at shitty places for shitty money. We made it our goal to be on the road as much as possible, and Kathy could not get behind it.
It just doesn’t work to keep getting these jobs and then having to quit them all the time
, Kathy said. And she was right. It had become tedious, and at this point we’d gotten and then abandoned jobs all over town. It was harder, upon each return, to find a place we hadn’t screwed over already. Kathy’s plan was to tour less. My and
Nathan’s way of solving the problem was to stay on tour as much as possible. We made a compromise: we’d find a drummer for the tour and then check back in when it was done.
It was so awful to have to give someone you love so dearly, someone who had been the most integral part of this creation, the very person who had invited me to step behind the mic and try to sing—to have to give her an ultimatum, to communicate that we would move on without her. It made me feel so cold, so ruthless. I plummeted into the conversation like jumping from a bridge. Nathan just sat there, and I did all the talking. Sometimes people—even people in the band—forget that Gossip is a group effort. It’s not just me, even though I’m the one with the biggest mouth. Nathan even made buttons once that read
GOSSIP IS A BAND
. It’s just the way people read the singer of a band as its leader, which gets encouraged by the fact that I am not a quiet person. So during our breakup conversation with Kathy, I talked my head off and Nathan sat there, mostly quiet. I just understood that if I agreed to have Gossip turn down the Le Tigre tour in order for Kathy to be able to stay at her job, then I would be putting her needs before my own, and I’d simply had it with putting other people before myself. It’s one thing to be a compassionate person, and a caring person, and to show up for your friends and help out, but it is another thing entirely to allow another person’s wants to determine the course of your destiny. And so Kathy left the band.
Kathy had written “Standing in the Way of Control” with us. She had written “Yr Mangled Heart” with us. She had written that album, had worked on it and made it the hit it became. When we signed with a major label I was adamant about her getting a chunk of money. When we got a publishing deal that included the sale of our records I made sure she got money for that too. I didn’t want to become something I hate, the person whose band makes it and they rip off the folks who’d helped them get to that level. I needed Kathy to be taken care of. There would be no Gossip without her. If there was any debt that was owed to her financially I made sure
we paid it and that when she left she left with a clean slate, nothing shady, feeling as good as she could about something that was in fact pretty awful.
But I couldn’t blame Kathy for wanting what she wanted. Right then, there was no way to know we wouldn’t just fall on our faces. But whether we took off like a bottle rocket or went down in a blazing minivan of glory, one thing was a sure bet: I was going to get to meet Kathleen Hanna! My Riot Grrrl heroine whose screamy voice I longed for mine to sound like, the reluctant leader of the badass pack. By her thirties, Kathleen Hanna had become a bona fide living legend, and she just kept moving forward with one awesome inspiration after another. From Bikini Kill to Julie Ruin, where she posed as a feminist librarian and made crazy electric beats. Now Le Tigre, dance sensations whose lyrics and beats were charged with overt political messages, whether they were shouting out to ignored feminist writers or weaving live antiwar protest samples into their beats. I could not believe our latest burst of good fortune.
I never looked at touring with Le Tigre as a great business opportunity. If we were looking for a way to weasel into the industry like that, we would have toured with Pearl Jam or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And believe me, it’s not that I dislike or distrust those bands, but I don’t think the people who listen to them are my people. It’s hard to play to crowds who couldn’t care less, or who are potentially super rude to women. I’m just not willing to put myself in that situation. I wanted to tour with a band I loved and whose audience would get Gossip and love us, and that was Le Tigre. And it was a chance to meet Kathleen Hanna! I am shamelessly starstruck by that woman and was not even going to try to play it cool.
But before we went on tour, we had to find a drummer. Nathan and I racked our brains, trying to come up with Gossip’s next member. Someone punk, we both agreed. And I couldn’t be in a band with two boys, so it had to be a female person. Hannah Blilie
had been playing drums in the band Shoplifting, which had put something out on Kill Rock Stars. Shoplifting had also worked to start a Bands Against Bush chapter in Seattle, organizing other bands and musicians to agitate against the U.S. government. We asked her to fill in for Kathy just for this tour. But as it turned out, Hannah was willing to tour all the time. And when we got back, Kathy had decided to return to school.
So many bands break up because of college. Nathan and I were united in our total lack of interest in higher education. College was just not something I’d ever cared about. Nothing I’ve ever wanted to do has required schooling, except maybe hairdressing, and I have all the time in the world to do that if I choose. Hannah was into being on the road and living the life of a traveling musician. And we could keep coming back to Kathy, but there was no way Kathy was going to suddenly turn her beat around and want to jump back onto the SS
Unstable
with me and Nathan, and so we soon invited Hannah to be a real member of Gossip. If I was going to take care of myself and patch together the life I wanted, then my band needed a committed, touring drummer. Nathan agreed.
It’s crazy the ups and downs we had had together, the three of us—me, Nathan, and Kathy. Though Kathy was the only one to call it quits, at various points it had been hard on us all, the instability and the poverty and the never knowing if anything was ever going to happen. During one era it was Nathan who was halfway about to quit the band, with some deranged plan to move to Canada, and Kathy and I dragged him back into it. Kathy and I are not visual people, and it’s always been Nathan who’s done the band’s graphics and album art. That is Nathan’s jam 100 percent. He had moved away to Vancouver to be with a girlfriend, and Kathy and I were struggling trying to put together some album art that didn’t look like it was made by a first-grader going wild with a jug of finger paints. This was back right before
Movement
came out. Kathy and I had tried to pull it together without him. Kathy, who came from no money, had splurged her savings on our van. We
even tried getting a new guitar player. Finally he saw that we were serious, that we weren’t going to quit the band just because he got bored and fell off. So he came back down from Canada and we were a trio again.