And then there was that time in Myanmar when Grumpy very deliberately peeled all the skin off her face in front of a broken mirror in a dingy roadside bathroom, only to discover an entirely different face underneath. What a night that turned out to be. A night that lasted almost three weeks and nearly broke up the band.

 

We had played at some godawful music festival in Phuket, where we are as out of place as bones in pudding. Used to be a fabulous open secret, Phuket, before it turned into a vacation hub and spring-break getaway for the rich and fatuous. After the show we hightailed it quick as possible up to Bangkok to dunk ourselves back into sordid reality and consume as much Bangkokian lunacy as we could absorb without melting. It was me who befriended an expat Brit named Jim-Jim in some sordid second-floor dive in Soi Cowboy. JJ had “retired” to Thailand with a wad of cash I can pretty much guarantee didn’t belong to him, which kept him perpetually afloat in Mekong Whiskey and other ingestibles. Occasionally he taught English or did “odd-jobs” (don’t ask) to supplement the bank account. Some might call him lazy, with a lifestyle that consisted of rolling out of bed as the sun choked to death behind the smoggy horizon, only to dive headfirst into debauchery night after night, but he worked harder at his “job” than any baker’s dozen of ER docs or sanitation engineers or lumberjacks combined. He was a true libertine, a hedonist par excellence, a master story-spinner and jokester and a trouble-magnet who always seemed to wiggle out from under the thumb of fate at the last minute and in the most unexpected ways. One of the most entertaining and invigorating people with whom we’ve ever drunk ourselves into comas, and I mourn him to this day.

 

Anyway, now that you’ve met him, forget him. Point is, JJ was the one who put a bug in my ear about the party up in Ayutthaya, and once JJ got in your ear, you belonged to him. As the band’s esteemed and gifted manager, I, Pinky Tourette, booked them on the next flight north and less than 24 hours later we were playing a gig to a crowd of misfits, freaks, and outcasts dancing in the moonlight among the ruined wats on the ancient island at the confluence of the Chao Phraya, Lopburi, and Pa Sak Rivers.

 

The boho crowd was our kind of people, the exact opposite of the Phuket set. The location exuded our kind of moldering ambiance and the girls poured their caustic little hearts into the gig. The show was among the band’s most memorable, or so I’m told; I don’t remember. I also don’t remember who suggested we head into Myanmar, or, for that matter, how we got there. But get there we did, flying into Mandalay (paying tribute to Kipling and Orwell) and heading southeast, finding ourselves crashing in wooden cabins at a resort on Inle Lake, with geckos thick on the walls and dripping from the ceiling.

 

This all took place during that brief window of time when the Burmese military relaxed their iron grip and allowed a glimmer of democracy into the country. The citizens were jubilant with their first taste of freedom and drunk with the promise it held. The newly elected leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, came out of the gate a winner and while she quickly soured in the eyes of the world for her defense of the Rohingya genocide, she was absolutely revered among her citizens for guiding them toward freedom. Of course, that all came crashing down when the army once again arbitrarily seized control in a shameful, bloody coup just a few short years after our impromptu jaunt through the county, reinstalling the military junta.

 

I should probably back up here to mention that the reason we were in this region to begin with (other than the hefty Phuket paycheck) was because we planned to party in Bangkok during Songkran, the annual water festival. If you’ve never attended, your life is lacking. And yet here we were, through happenstance, luck, and… let’s call it “intemperance,” in another country entirely on the festival dates. The good news was that Myanmar had their own simultaneous water festival, Thingyan, and it was all that and more.

 

Inle Lake is adjacent to another vast complex of temple ruins, and unlike, say, Angkor in Cambodia, it has yet to become a tourist hot-spot. We took longtail boats out on the water and rented motorbikes to cruise the barren fields between temple ruins, and the hot April sunshine baked us like lobsters.

 

Make no mistake, Myanmar is a polyglot of tropical jungles and plains, and it gets hot. Brutal hot. Hot enough to turn your tears to steam. Hot enough for natives to invent a festival where they douse one another in water for fun. Constantly. In great quantities. With no haven, no escape, no excuses, no time-outs for foreign interlopers, like for instance seven hungover female bandmembers and their weary manager.

 

And let me tell you, it is exhilarating. Locals mob the dirt roads waiting for passersby, armed with water guns, plastic bottles, buckets, tubs, ice chests, hoses, water cannons, you name it, ready to dump en masse on any and everyone for several days leading up to the Burmese New Year. Water is free, so everyone can and does participate in the fun, from the barefoot child in tattered rags to the withered granny holding an old paper cup. It’s a game, it’s a sport, it’s a holiday, it’s practically a religious conviction, and the country rings with laughter. Groups of teens rent flatbed trucks and crowd on the backs to plow through the gauntlet getting drenched. We couldn’t have been more soaked if we spent weeks in a raging storm. And we loved every second of it.

 

What does all this have to do with Grumpy peeling off her face? I’m getting to that. Because, you see, Myanmar isn’t exactly Beverly Hills. Hygiene is… let’s call it flexible. And water has to come from somewhere. From rusty taps dripping contaminated brown swill. From the lake, breeding ground for tropical insects and diseases. From places that, believe me, you don’t want to think about.

 

That might have had something to do with it. Our preceding nights of revelry in Thailand undoubtedly contributed. And Grumpy, well, Grumpy likes herself a party, even if she’s the only attendee, if you know what I mean. While the rest of us were drinking Dagon beer and toasting with sour wine from local vineyards around the lake, Grumpy was guzzling hellfire-potent homebrewed toddies made from fermented palm tree sap. And I’m just going to mention this as an aside, for no particular reason, no pertinence whatsoever, apropos of nothing, but northern Myanmar is the apex of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s top producers of opium, heroin, and meth. Ahem.

 

Okay, that’s the background. Let me set the stage. A small roadside stand built on stilts over the marshes next to the Nyaung Shwe pier jutting out into the lake. Rickety wooden stools underneath an awning made of palm leaves, propped up with shaved sticks. Sun flaming out over the water and the mountains beyond. Locals racing up and down the pier, tossing buckets of water or blasting a hidden firehose at passing boats heading out to catch the sunset or returning from a trip to the floating gardens. Although we were still amped up from the afternoon of aquatic motorbiking, we found ourselves talking in lowered tones as the sky shifted colors. None of us even noticed Grumpy staggering inside the shack to pee.

 

It was only later that I pieced this next part together: what Grumpy saw, what Grumpy did. In the bathroom, with its hole-in-the-floor toilet, she paused to look at herself in the grimy mirror and noticed a tiny flap of skin hanging down at her temple. No big deal; just sunburn peeling. She casually pinched it between her fingers and pulled. To her surprise, the entire top corner of her face came loose, flopping down like a bunny’s ear.

 

Strangely – or perhaps not, given the circumstances – Grumpy wasn’t the slightest bit alarmed. In fact, she was intrigued. There was no blood, for one thing. No visible bone beneath the hanging flap of flesh. Instead it looked like a whole new layer of skin; like a fresh, shiny new snakeskin beneath the old. And like a snake, Grumpy sloughed off her old skin, carefully peeling from the top corner of her face down, revealing the new face beneath.

 

The sun had just vanished over the mountains, leaving behind a burnished glow, when Grumpy reappeared. To us, she looked exactly the same. She wasn’t.

 

As she strode back to our cluster of stools – no, strutted is more accurate – she snapped at the owner of the stall in a decidedly condescending manner, demanding another drink. She called him “boy,” I remember distinctly, and she definitely used the word “fetch.” As in “fetch me a drink.” Like he was chattel, or a dog.

 

It didn’t escape the girls’ notice. They immediately unloaded a full arsenal of slurred mockery on Grumpy for her haughty tone, and when someone teased her by name, she was visibly affronted and corrected them. “My name is Hugh,” she said.

 

Well, we all fell about the place at that. It was a reference to old family folklore, from back when they were kids and Doc and Dopey were always bickering, always trying to one-up, insult, and outdo each other, and would spit out phrases like “smarter than you’ll ever be,” and “prettier than you’ll ever be,” and “more talented than you’ll ever be.”

 

Grumpy, who was younger than the two sisters, used to listen raptly to the arguments with furrowed brow, and one day she’d finally had enough and blurted out the question she’d been keeping bottled up inside: “Who’s Hugh Leverby?” From that moment on, Hugh Leverby came to represent the pinnacle of achievement. He was top of the game at everything. One couldn’t possible by richer than Hugh Leverby, a greater guitarist than Hugh Leverby, better dressed than Hugh Leverby.

 

So we laughed ourselves silly when Grumpy announced her name was Hugh, and we spent the rest of the evening making Hugh Leverby jokes. Only she wasn’t joking. Her new face, the one only she could see, was that of a man, a handsome, wealthy, privileged man who was, quite simply, the best. At whatever the world had to offer.

 

Eventually the sky grew dark, the drinks ran out, we retired to our gecko-encrusted cabins, and in the morning headed back to the states to resume touring. We kept ribbing Grumpy about her new name, only gradually realizing with creeping discomfort that something had shifted.

 

I have to point out here that the name Grumpy is most apt and well-deserved. She’s a born, inveterate cynic, just shy of a pessimist, resulting in her cockeyed, fatalistic attitude of Enjoy Today, for Tomorrow We are Toast.

 

No longer. Not Hugh Leverby. Hugh was brash, confident, self-assured, with a glint in his eye and a swagger in his walk. He was, quite frankly, annoying. I find it hard to put this into words, but Grumpy’s entire demeanor changed to someone who oozed entitlement, who expected deference, who lived on a level innately elevated above everyone else and he knew it and the rest of the world knew it and that meant we all somehow owed him something.

 

Needless to say, this did not go down well with the rest of the band, who were used to Grumpy’s cantankerousness and snide, sardonic attitude. Everyone got a bit edgy and uncomfortable, and conversations became shorter and sharper and less frequent, with responses snapped instead of spoken and raw nerves rubbing up against one another.

 

The shows suffered, as they always do when the band is in a snit. Blown notes became, instead of something to laugh off, excuses for a screaming match. Then came the last straw. Grumpy, or rather Hugh, began playing bass solos in concert. Showboating, lookit-me breaks. Now, anyone reading this, as a diehard fan of Thee Tourettes, knows full well that the band is the antithesis of that kind of excess. Some things are simply not meant to be. John Entwhistle, virtuoso that he is, into the Ramones don’t go.

 

So the girls convened and decided if we were to continue as a unit, we needed an intervention. Naturally, as glorified band babysitter, that job fell to me.

 

In my day I’ve had to fire my share of band members. I’ve had occasion to call the police to haul them away and lawyers to bail them out. I’ve had more eleventh-hour substance abuse conversations than I can count. None of them came close to the difficulty of telling Grumpy that she had to lose Hugh Leverby.

 

She snorted at first. The sort of expression that drips superiority and derision and disdain. Not even a laugh, for that connotes amusement. I didn’t even merit that. No matter. I kept talking. I’m adept at talking. One has to be, in my business. I reminded her of who she used to be, of the bond between the bandmembers, the sisters. Of the respect for one another that underpinned all the fights and the thrown ashtrays and momentary tragedies that loom large in every family before spontaneously fading into smoke.

 

Zero response. I talked about how much everyone admired Grumpy, relied on Grumpy the crude realist, the lucid-thinking one, the anchor, the reliable rock-solid bass that drove everything forward and held everything together.

 

Nothing. I couldn’t tell if she even heard a word. She was idly playing an invisible bass guitar the whole time. I was getting exactly nowhere and realized I had to do something drastic to get her attention. So I reached over and snatched the invisible bass out of her hands and smashed it to nonexistent splinters on the floor.

 

She was on her feet in an instant, seething, demanding to know what the hell I did that for. Pressing my advantage, I told her – or rather, him, Hugh Leverby – that there was more: his stockbroker had been arrested for fraud and his entire investment portfolio had been swallowed up in an elaborate pyramid scheme. He was broke.

 

At first he fumed, but as I pressed on he blanched, then sat down, stunned. The BMW had been repossessed, I told him, and his priceless gun collection had been seized. The maid and the cook and the gardener quit and were suing him for back pay. The dog ran away and the barn burned down.

 

I could see the glint dimming in his eyes by the second. The words came faster. His boat had sprung a leak and sunk, with all his tailored suits inside. His Rolexes had been stolen, along with his gold chains, cuff links, and the contents of his safe. The university called and rescinded his diploma. His dentist emailed and he needed all new teeth.

 

There was more, but you get the point. By the time I wound down, he was utterly deflated, hunched on the sofa like a weeping willow. “I have nothing left,” he said, or asked; the voice so small it was hard to tell if it was a statement or a question.

 

Pretty awful, I agreed. This world sure sucks. Raising his head, he looked at me dejectedly and nodded agreement. So unfair, I prodded. Can’t trust anything. He was nodding more thoughtfully now and I could see something in his eyes – in her eyes – flicker to life as she agreed and added that civilization was a scam and society was a long con and life was a sucker’s game, and that’s when I knew Grumpy was back.

 

We have never since spoken of Hugh Leverby. He is staked like a vampire and buried in the cemetery of regrettable detours. Nobody wants to risk mentioning his name and potentially pulling out the stake. Grumpy is back to her old self, brimming with abject cynicism and antipathy.

 

The delightful gloom has returned to our lives, coating everything in a patina of impending desperation and despair, reminding us to treat each moment as if it were our last. All is right in the world. Hallelujah.