My Friend, Tenly Wilson (2,160 words)

 

Tenly Wilson was my friend. Before the fame and the fortune, before the boys and the drugs, and before her ultimate fall from grace, she was my friend. Even at the end, as she lay dying in a lumpy bed behind the locked door of room one-thirteen, she was my friend. She told me so.

We had gone to junior high and then high school together. She was the beautiful, eccentric, talented type and I the dark and portly, emotional sort. She sang and danced and twirled baton and I wore black clothes and tried my best to hide behind my too-long bangs. I had few friends and fewer dreams, while Tenly had all the friends and all the dreams.

I supported her in everything she did. When she sang a duet with Brad Petersen and won the eighth-grade talent show, I cheered the loudest. When she went to parties I was never invited to, I wished her a good time and I meant it. And when her solo singing career took off and she traveled the world, I sat in my room listening to her adventures over the phone each week, the aged black cordless stuck to my ear like a growth I didn’t want removed.

On the rare occasion I was able to go to one of her shows, I sat front and center, peering up at her through my hair, the world forgotten. She really was good at what she did. Her voice and her moves captured us all and wouldn’t let go. She was an original, an innovator. I often referred to her as the Janis Joplin of our time, though Tenly hated when I did. She just wanted to sing, she would say. And sing she did.

Two years ago, the phone rang at three in the morning. I picked it up and heard Tenly sobbing into the receiver. She was on a U.S. tour and had done a show in Tennessee earlier that evening. It was after six in the morning her time, and she’d just gotten back to her hotel room. She had been raped.

It was awful, she’d told me, how the men treated her wherever she went. She loved people and required love in return. Most of the men, she’d said, thought of her as free lunch. To them, she was nothing more than a singing and dancing street whore. They didn’t want to know her. They wanted inside her. And that night, one of them had gotten his way.

After the concert, she’d gone out drinking with a few fans. When the bars closed, one of them offered his place as a spot to continue the party. Tenly didn’t hesitate. She got into a van with five others -- three men and two women -- and told them to turn up the music. She had put her arms up and be-bopped her head side to side, laughing and singing along to the radio. She said she’d felt as free then as she ever had.

Only the van never made it to a party. Instead, it pulled into a field along a poorly-lit stretch of isolated road, its headlights dimming as it came to a stop. The music ceased and the men attacked. All three of the girls were raped. One lost consciousness after being struck when she’d resisted. Tenly and the other let it happen.

There’d been a police report filed, she’d said, but the chances of finding the men were slim. A van that could have been dark gray or black or blue wasn’t much to go on, the cop had said. You don’t remember what any of them looked like?

Tenly explained that they had been bigger guys with regular haircuts. And they had penises. And one of them hit really hard and probably had bruised knuckles. She didn’t remember a name, she didn’t know where they were from, and their faces were all a blur. The officers apologized and said they’d do what they could.

In the dark, in my bed, I asked if she was going to be okay. Yes, she’d told me. Her sobs were waning. I told her I’d come if she needed, but she said no. There was a show coming up in Los Angeles the very next week, and we could get together then.

When she arrived, I met with her and we never spoke of the rape. She seemed cheery enough, though she always had a drink in her hand. I was concerned but said nothing. What did I know about life as a star? It wasn’t my place to scold her. We laughed and talked and I listened to her stories and she asked about my folks. They were fine, I’d said, same old stuff.

We spoke of earlier times, times when we were inseparable. Attached at the hip, my mother used to say. We spent most days after school in my room, listening to records and giggling. In the summertime, we went to the movies often. Sometimes, we’d walk around the mall, window shopping and stuffing our faces with onion rings or French fries or Sno-Kones.

Her breasts had come in early and fast and big. While she was trying to keep up with her own bra size, I was trying to hide the chub rub spots worn into my black jeans where my thighs met. To say I wasn’t jealous would have been a lie, but I never felt animosity. I always wished I looked more like her, but I didn’t look like her and that was that.

She once said she envied me. Surprised, I asked what in the heck for. She said I was so grounded, so stable. She told me she wished she were more like that sometimes. I told her grounded and stable are great as long as you don’t want a bunch of friends, a boyfriend, or a cool reputation. She laughed and told me being popular wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. To this day, those words stick with me, close to my heart. Tenly Wilson didn’t tell just anybody those things. She told me. She told her friend.

Several months after she was raped, she showed up on the evening news. I’d been eating a microwave dinner when her face appeared on the television screen. She’d been arrested in New York for possession of illegal narcotics and public intoxication. I grabbed the phone and sat it beside me while I finished dinner, but she never called. Maybe she was too embarrassed. I wish she had.

I didn’t see her for the next year. We spoke on the phone at least once a week, but she never had a whole lot to say. I knew we weren’t growing apart. She was busy with her career and sometimes, she’d said, she didn’t even know where she was. She sighed and told me she’d thanked the people of New Orleans after giving a performance in Atlanta.

Still, she was young and beautiful and talented and when you were young and beautiful and talented, people forgot about small mistakes. They forgave. They moved on. But when you were a little overweight, quiet, and had the outward personality of a thumbtack, people never had to forgive or forget or move on because they never knew you were there in the first place.

It wasn’t until last year when things really got out of control for Tenly. She was hitting the drugs and booze hard and getting into bigger troubles. Her booking photos appeared on the news six times in a nine-month period. She looked more weathered in each one. By the fourth, I hardly recognized her. She’d lost a lot of weight, her hair was a mess, her mascara ran in bold black lines down her cheeks, and her eyes were hollow, devoid of life.

I called her several times, but she never picked up. I told myself she just needed space, a little time to get it together. Things were rough for her and they were only getting rougher. I suspected that her career might be in jeopardy. I was right.

Over the next three weeks, late-night television hosts poked fun of her. Comedians and other stars made jokes about her. The tabloids printed her booking photos on the front page along with awful messages written in bright colors. “Finished?” Tenly Wilson was a has-been. Almost everyone was cruel when referring to her, but a few celebrities kept it classy. One country singer called her an angel who flew too close to the ground. I liked that.

Late in the evening on Christmas Eve, I was sitting by my open bedroom window. Carolers were walking up and down the street singing holiday songs. It was nice. My parents had come over earlier to exchange gifts and spread seasonal-but-forced cheery wishes. I’d bought them a new laptop because mom had mentioned theirs was on the brink of extinction. I unwrapped boxes from them containing red, yellow, and pink shirts they knew I’d never wear. Nothing ever changed.

So there I sat, watching people sing from my bedroom window, wishing I were a part of anything at all. I was jarred from the carolers when the telephone rang. I rolled my eyes and moved from my spot to answer. It was Tenly. She was hurting. Bad. She needed me, and I was glad. She’d ended up in a Los Angeles motel room, bombed out of her mind on a cornucopia of substances. I told her I’d get there as quickly as I could and hung up.

Ninety minutes later, I sat holding her hand in a dilapidated and dark, smoke-filled room. She had been there a while, she’d told me. I asked her how long and she said it’d been long enough that she was calling it home.

When her ticket sales plummeted, her manager had turned his back. It was just business, he’d explained, nothing personal. No matter what you called it, Tenly told me, it meant she was fucked. Hard. She said she’d been smoking and drinking and popping any pills she could get her hands on since, and she wasn’t doing very well.

I asked what she meant and she said she was going to die. I squeezed her hand, told her not to talk like that, and she shook her head. You don’t understand, she said, I’m going to die. Soon. Tonight.

And she wanted me there.

I was scared and confused. Emotion welled up inside like a bomb had gone off. My bottom lip quivered and tears sailed down my cheeks. I covered my face and cried into my hands. I didn’t know what else to do.

Don't, she’d said. Just be here, with me. Be with me.

I wiped my eyes and sniffed loudly. I took her hand again and made a noise that was half sob and half giggle. I called her a bitch and told her she’d really done it this time. She laughed through tears of her own and told me she sure had.

Then she said that no matter where she’d gone or how many people she’d met, I was her only friend, and that was just the way she wanted it. I cried harder and leaned in to rest my head on the edge of the bed. It smelled of cigarettes and sweat.

She rubbed my back weakly and asked if I remembered the time we had ditched school and hitchhiked into the city for no reason at all. I laughed and said I did. She asked what the hell we were thinking and I replied that we weren’t. She nodded and smiled and told me she missed those times dearly. I said that we could have them back if she’d let me get her to a hospital. She said she was too far gone already and that it wouldn’t be long. She could feel herself fading, letting go.

I wrapped my arm around her and told her I loved her. She said she loved me, too, and that she always had. I stayed like that, hunched over in a chair with one arm around her, until she let out a long sigh and there was no more.

When I finally sat back up, I looked at her for a long time. Lying there, her head tilted to one side and her eyes closed, she looked happy. She looked satisfied, and I felt relief. As much as I hated it, I was relieved for her.

I often look back on things we’d done and said and seen. There is a great hole inside me now that she’s gone. It will never be filled and I don’t want it to be filled. That’s her place. That’s the part of me where she still lives and breathes and sings and dances and calls me on the phone.

That’s where my friend is.