The Caged Tiger

A work of fiction

Every problem I ever had with women can be traced back to Shirley Manson, lead singer of Garbage.

I saw the music video for “I’m Only Happy When it Rains” when I was about thirteen. It was the first and least complicated sexual experience I ever had.

Shortly after that I began writing letters to her. Nothing creepy. I didn’t want her to think I was weird or desperate – just that, y’know, I was in love and that it didn’t matter if she’d ever love me back. They were the letters of a kid smitten with an older woman who seemed glamorous, soulful. Dangerous. That was probably the most alluring aspect. Someone who could transport me out of my mundane suburban existence and show me the real world.

In class I would fantasize about Shirley: my favorites were when the two of us would meet on a bridge – always a bridge, I wonder about the Freudian implications – in a far-off European city. Then we’d go to a bar or rock club and just before the first kiss we’d get involved in some kind of espionage adventure. Long story short, either she’d rescue me or I’d rescue her – I always preferred the scenarios where I was the rescuer, but just to mix it up sometimes she’d be my hero – and then we would have raucous, thrashing sex in some vaguely public location, like an apartment building courtyard, or in the elevator leading up to her hotel room.

The cities were always just ‘European,’ because at that point the farthest away from home I’d ever been was visiting relatives in the Bronx. But then I saw a picture of Pont Neuf, and suddenly all the time I should have been learning algebraic functions, or rules about past participles, I was in Paris, fucking the life out of the most glamorous woman in the world.

Looking back, I chose my first girlfriend because she had red hair. Not even the kind of electric rock-n-roll red I saw in Garbage’s music videos, or the surrealistic bloodiness in my trite pornographic fantasies. Just naturally red, more a sort of flattish orange than anything else. But she was the only redhead in our school, and at fourteen it was already pretty clear that no other hair color would do.

Predictably things didn’t work out. You can’t date a hair color, and you can’t always imagine you’re with someone else. I kept writing letters, c/o the addresses to record labels that I saw on the backs of Garbage’s CDs. Email had already started to gain popularity, but I thought my love for Shirley Manson was a purer love, and should be expressed by the effort of pens, ink, paper and stamps. So how was I supposed to know that she didn’t actually have mailboxes at any of the record companies?

I was fifteen when “Version 2.0” came out. The change in sound jarred me at first, but then I found myself altering my fantasies to accommodate. We’d still be in Paris, but instead of rock clubs and sleazy underground circles of guitar embezzlers or whatever, we’d be in techno clubs breaking up ecstasy rings and screwing in dark corners lit up by the occasional strobe light.

Girlfriend number two belonged to the club set, naturally. I pretended to ignore the fact that she was a blonde and wore a miniature backpack made out of some transparent, blue gel material. I suggested she dye her hair red, ‘cause it would look awesome. She responded by dying it a candy cane pink. She snuck me into my first club, Matrix. I took some X and remember being profoundly disappointed. I gave away my ‘real’ virginity later that same night. Woke up the next morning stone sober and thirsty. We broke up a week later.

By this point I began to fear my obsession/love was having a dangerous effect on my intelligence. Instead of studying I listened to the same three albums – ‘Garbage,’ ‘Version 2.0’, and ‘Angelfish,’ technically not Garbage but Shirley’s first band as lead singer, which I never really liked all that much – over and over again. Instead of paying attention in class, I was imagining myself in lurid sexual fantasies that would have embarrassed most pornographers – or so I told myself. I would cut class entirely and ride the train to Boston proper, trolling the South End, the Common and Lansdowne Street for Shirley Manson facsimiles. On the days when I didn’t go to school at all, I would include Cambridge in my search, and sit lonesome on a bench in Harvard Square. The closest I ever came was a barista at Starbucks, but she patiently explained that she was, in fact, a lesbian.

So I wrote the last letter I would write for almost a year. It was fairly direct, something along the lines of ‘Shirley, I still love you and believe I always will. But the strain of high school is beginning to wear on me, and if I don’t pull my grades up soon I’ll never be able to go to college and get a good job and have the money to travel wherever you go. So bon chance my darling, for now.’

After that I went full bore into my studies, and escaped the year with a ‘B’ average. To my surprise, and probably that of my art teacher as well, I discovered I had serious drawing talent. She was amazed and suspicious, particularly because for the first three quarters of the year I had drawn fuck all.

So over the summer I drew as much as I could: landscapes, still life, people I saw on the street. I spent a lot of time on Newbury Street in particular, because of the always-interesting cross-section of rich shoppers, fauxhemians, and freaks. At the end of the day I would look over my sketches with a mixture of surprise and pride. Every sketch that bore just a little bit too much of a resemblance to a certain Scot I threw in the trash.

Also during that summer I started dating girlfriend number three. She worked the counter at Newbury Comics. Everything about her was multi: multi-colored hair, multiple face piercing, and multiple personalities. She said she liked me because she had a thing for sensitive straight-laced boys who might take it up the butt. I didn’t know what she meant. Our ‘going out’ mostly consisted of me meeting her after work, lending her money to buy a bottle of Jack, then either going to the park to grope each other or heading to one of her friends’ places in Somerville. Whenever we did the latter I inevitably ended up walking alone to the train station at 5 in the morning to wait for the first train of the day. Sometimes we would go to rock clubs, but I always ended up losing her somewhere. By the time school started again I was glad for the excuse not to go to Newbury Street. I never thought of her as soulful or dangerous. At first I just thought she was kind of weird, then as time went on, desperate and pathetic. We didn’t keep in touch. She hated Garbage.

My art teacher encouraged me to take afternoon classes at Mass Art to ‘nurture my talent.’ I agreed mostly because I figured that if I spent my extra time in classes, I wouldn’t go to record stores trawling for deleted Garbage singles.

That’s where I met, well, not girlfriend number four, but rather ambiguous-touchy-feely-affectionate-female friend number one. She had dyed red hair (!) and took life-drawing classes to supplement her degree in performing arts. When we met she didn’t know I was still in high school, and didn’t treat me with any of the art school disdain I would come to know so well.

She was a self-described audiophile, and spent a good amount of free time creating headphone rigs using vacuum tubes and silver wire she braided herself. It didn’t matter to her what she listened to, she said, so long as it sounded absolutely brilliant. She was the only person I ever wanted to admit my Shirley Manson love to, but I never went through with it. Time away from my letter writing made me think of it as something shameful, even pathetic. Fanboyish. Also, all the time I spent with my friend took me out of my old habits. At least that’s what I told myself.

Whatever damage I had done to my grades in the first couple years of my Manson obsession was largely undone by the time senior year rolled around. Don’t ask me how, but I got early admission to Cooper Union. I don’t know what possessed them. Though I still listened to every Garbage album I had everyday – I was up to seven at that point, the original three plus two Japanese imports and a couple bootlegged concerts – I was no longer tempted to write letters to Manson. Sketches of female faces didn’t magically transform into her dark eyes and gash of a mouth. I had developed a crush on my friend and wanted to date her. Her quiet geekiness and technical proficiency – she built me a vacuum tube headphone amp that I use to this day – coupled with her natural good looks and subdued clothing sense seemed like exactly what I should want. She wasn’t mysterious or exotic: she didn’t seem dangerous in the way that I always wanted to encounter and somehow conquer. She was just good. And I liked her an awful lot.

She shot me down when I told her how I felt. Kindly, yes, but after that I didn’t want to see her anymore. She didn’t quibble.

Right around the spring of my senior year I went with my class on a school trip to Paris. A lot of people were in the mood for celebrating, but I wasn’t. My art teacher got special commendation for helping me get into Cooper Union. I spent a lot of the time that led up to the trip just wanting to be alone.

Our flight to Paris was delayed by several hours because someone managed to crash a Sky Chefs truck into the plane we were about to board. Stuck in the Logan international departures lounge with forty of my fellow students, I felt like a cockroach in a glue trap. I milled around for a while, listened to ‘Version 2.0’ on my Discman, and then I went over to look at the newsstand.

Shirley Manson stared back at me from the cover of a lad’s magazine. It promised an exclusive interview. I don’t remember picking it up, or taking it to the register. All I remember was that the funk I had been in for the past few months, ever since my friend and me stopped speaking, suddenly disappeared. I read about her disappointments in life and love, critical responses to the band and her music – and then she said one thing that took my breath away and incited an immediate desire to write her a letter.

‘I want a man who knows that when I say, “leave me alone” what I really mean is “tear my pants off and fuck me up the ass.”’

Things changed for me after that. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and embraced the new life I was about to enter. Paris was magnificent, everything I could’ve hoped for. Didn’t meet any redheads, but I walked the streets all night, went into clubs and danced with girls who didn’t speak English. I was more aggressive, not in a grab-ass or pushy kind of way, but simply able to make my intentions and desires known without using language. The response from these girls was like nothing I’d experienced.

My fantasies took on a new dimension as well. Rougher. A little more violent. Some of the danger that I always attributed to her, well, suddenly I started to possess a little in my dreams. It felt good to get out of my head, to temper the sensitive artiste with a little cock n’ balls.

Cooper Union had the same kind of pretension as Mass Art, indeed the same kind found at every art school, but it was enhanced by a heady mixture of entitlement and justified vanity. “Beautiful Garbage” was released that fall, and I listened to it everyday while I worked. Almost immediately I decided to focus my efforts on corporate design. In my spare time I started work on a graphic novel starring Shirley in less pornographic versions of my fantasies. Out of deference to her, I left myself out.

Most of my time was spent away from my classmates and mingling with students from other universities. Girlfriend number four was a drama student at NYU. We had sex for the first time in her dorm room while listening to “Beautiful Garbage,” specifically tracks two through nine. She was a brunette. I broke up with her because she drunk-dialed me too many times.

I went to my first BDSM club the week before the end of term. They played a techno version of “Milk” as I used a cat o’nine tails for the first time. It felt good, and I went back almost every week thereafter. It was one of the few clubs I’d been to that regularly played Garbage.

I met girlfriend number five in that club, three years into my time at Cooper. At that time I had already started to receive job offers in several different sectors. Apparently I had a bright career in front of me. My graphic novel – which to date consists only of images, no actual text – spanned almost a thousand pages and over four thousand individual illustrations.

When I met her, she worked in an architecture firm with one of those Teflon reputations, even though she was only a few years older than I was. She was a bottom who loved her men to wear leather cuffs – I had worn one since my second year – almost as much as she loved over-the-knee spanking. Her family came from Paris.

She also bore a near perfect resemblance to Shirley Manson.

It took a while to understand what was wrong. Ever since I read that interview, I wrote one letter a week to Shirley, every week, without fail. They were no longer the insipid, love-lorn letters of a thirteen-year old. Instead, I had simply written to her about my week. What was going on with classes, my illustrations and girlfriends. Family troubles. Bad dates. Funny things that had happened in clubs, BDSM and otherwise. It was like a one-sided pen pal, or speaking to a person in a coma. Call me crazy or obsessive or what you will, but that letter-a-week was just as important to me as any of my other relationships, including girlfriend number five. Maybe my attention was divided, or maybe she just began to realize that I seemed to be writing a lot of letters without ever getting one in return, but she became suspicious.

So that afternoon in early spring, when I came back to my apartment and found her reading the draft of the letter I had left on my desk – I still handwrote all my letters to Shirley – I didn’t back down from her accusations. I told her everything, from the way I felt the first time I saw the “I’m Only Happy When it Rains” music video, to swearing off letters and discovering a talent that would take me wherever I wanted to go, to how a simple, throwaway line in a magazine interview saved me from being trapped in my own brain and gave me the courage to pursue everything I ever wanted.

She packed the few belongings she had in my apartment and left that same evening. When she was gone, I sat down at my desk and drew a new page for my graphic novel. It was much simpler and less action-packed than the others. In it, Shirley Manson receives a letter. She reads it, and then sits down and writes a letter in return. She mails it.

After I finished the page, I sat for a long, long time. Then I addressed a new envelope to her agent – I had finally figured out the correct way to send fan mail – folded up my illustration, left my apartment and dropped it in a mailbox.

“Bleed Like Me” was released that same month. I took the day off from class, bought the album from the record store on the corner and, after rolling a couple new tubes into my headphone amp, pressed play. I listened to it once, all the way through. After the last track, “Happy Home,” I pressed eject, powered off the amp, and shelved the CD with the rest of my collection.

I was offered a job upon graduation at a prestigious – God I hate that word – design firm with offices in New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Tokyo. I had already done some work for them, and the pay was so exorbitant I decided to take a vacation to celebrate. In August I bought a first class ticket to Paris.

The flight took off from Newark, but was rerouted through Boston due to equipment trouble. So I sat in the departures lounge and listened to my iPod – I think it was the “Foo Fighters”– when suddenly I caught a glimpse of long red hair.

She stood in line at the Starbucks counter, leafing through her maroon passport. I don’t remember standing up, or pulling the headphones off my head, or making the decision to get in line behind her. All I remember is suddenly getting snapped out of my stupor when she placed her order.

‘Tall caramel macchiato, please.’

There was nothing I could think to say, no possible way to start a conversation. I had imagined her in thousands of scenarios, in all manner of situations and contexts. I had drawn and studied her face to the finest detail, tracking the beginnings of fine lines around her mouth and eyes. I knew every hairstyle she ever had since 1990.

Conversely, she knew – if she ever got or read any of the letters – the most intimate details of my life, from the time I was thirteen to twenty two. There was the possibility that I knew every inch of the woman standing not two feet in front of me, while knowing nothing of her mind or who she was, while she knew everything about me, except what I looked like.

I knew then that I was right to stop the letters. She was my first and truest love, but there were simply no words left.

She paid for her coffee and went to sit in the lounge. I approached the counter automatically, and as I ordered a tall coffee, looked down to see that she had left her passport behind.

Reality had finally caught up with me, and as I walked over to her, coffee in one hand and passport in the other, I knew everything would be okay.

‘Excuse me, miss?’

She looked up from a book she was reading. Her face was at once intimately recognizable and totally unfamiliar.

‘Yes?’

‘I think you left this on the counter,’ I said as I handed her the passport.

‘Oh, thank you. Can’t believe I forgot it there. Daft of me.’

Her voice was like the sound of my heartbeat and yet so new. The Edinburgh accent I thought I knew so well.

‘No problem. Uh…’

She arched her eyebrow. Apparently this had happened before.

‘Well, could I have your autograph?’

She smiled and reached into her purse for a pen.

‘Of course. Who shall I make it out to?’

I handed over the only piece of paper I had at hand: my ticket stub for Paris. I gave her my name.

When I said it, I saw on her face the briefest of pauses. The whole world seemed to have stopped. I felt thirteen all over again. It was all at once the most terrifying and most exhilarating moment of my life.

But then it was over. She finished the autograph and handed it back to me. ‘There you are. Always nice to meet a fan. Are you on your way to London?’

I relaxed and took the stub, and for an instant our hands touched. ‘No, I’m on my way to Paris.’

‘Gorgeous city, isn’t it?’

‘It is, indeed.’

She smiled politely once more, and indicating her passport said ‘Well, thanks again for this. I hope you have a good trip.’

Recognizing the end of our relationship, I took a step back and said, ‘Thanks for the autograph. And, y’know, enjoy your trip as well.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’