Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (13 page)

There
are billions of spiders on my ceiling, way up there where I can’t reach them with a broom, and I’m afraid one of them will swoop down and bite me on my brain. They must be at war with the roaches in my kitchen, because I notice those have taken to skirmishing in battalions lately. My exterminator even stood me up for my second follow-up appointment, probably because she’s petrified. I don’t blame her. I myself am constantly shrieking, “Is that a
roach
? What is this place, a
peat
bog?!?!? Do I live atop a
mass grave
or something?!?!?”

Daniel ignores me. He’s not that chivalrous when it comes to killing bugs anymore, not since my place turned into Amityville Horror for insects. If he had to kill bugs for me it would take up his entire day, so he does his share by coming over occasionally to slaughter some that cross his path, and I’m expected to do mine. But roaches don’t bother him as much as they do me, which is odd because he grew up in a house with a mother who could clean. My
own parents were wholly housework-impaired. Growing up, I remember at one point our bug infestation was so bad that roaches were actually falling off the ceiling
into our hair
.

“Kids,” my mother finally said, “I think we have a roach problem.”

“Really?” I smirked. “You mean the kitchen floor isn’t
supposed
to be crunchy like that?”

Our family’s solution was to move. We moved three times in one year, but not just to escape roaches. We were escaping other things, I suppose, but it coincidentally solved our bug problem. But only until the ones that followed us found each other and commenced copulating and created a new swarm of their own. You can’t get away. It was like being chased by little demons. Finally, we moved to Florida, where the roaches are giant and resemble big black tanks with antennae.

“Get comfortable with it,” my mother told us. She herself was still getting comfortable with the reason we moved there. She’d given up her nighttime cosmetology courses she’d so enjoyed in order to work on the space program at NASA, and to this day I believe my sisters and I were the only kids in class being raised by a rocket scientist who dreamed of one day working at a beauty parlor, but I could be wrong.

And the roaches—well, I never got comfortable with them. In my loft, it’s like an eco-experiment gone awry. On a trip to Mexico City, where I stayed at the Hotel Nikko, I spotted one in my bathroom, and I
recognized
him. That’s one of
mine!
Jesus God, how do they
find
me?

You’d think you could get away, but no. I remember once in second grade I had a baby molar that was rotting right out of my head, probably because of my mother’s penchant for leaving out bowls of Halloween candy for breakfast. The tooth had to be pulled, which necessitated a dental appointment, so my mother told me she’d pick me up at school after lunch. “Just wait for me in class,” she said.

I hated that dentist, so God, did I want to get away! I thought I
could escape the whole ordeal by making a break for it at recess and running home. Once there, I sequestered myself on the top shelf of the hall closet behind a box of notes my sisters and I had written, ironically, to the tooth fairy. My mother had kept them ever since our baby teeth began dropping from our puckers like pomegranate seeds. The teeth were in there too, along with the letters.
Ha!
I thought.
She’ll never find me here
.

It had always been my foolproof hideaway. I used to sit up there and listen to everyone look for me. “Anyone seen your sister?” my mother would ask. Sometimes I even detected concern. I’d smile and eventually come out as long as I was sure there wasn’t an ass-beating on the agenda.

So imagine my surprise when she came through the door that day and barreled straight toward my hiding place like a magnet drawn to a big tool. There I was, all quiet because I thought maybe I was still invisible, but she swiftly moved the box aside and reached for me. “Come,” she said simply. “You can’t get away.” I whimpered all the way to the office park. “How did you find me?” I asked. “You’ll feel better after it’s all over,” was all she said.

Of course I know now that I’d always been “found”—until then, she’d simply let me believe I had a hiding place. I think about that a lot these days, because I’m old enough to have a box of broken dreams all my own. Because she’s right, you know, you can’t get away. You need to look inside that box sometimes and see what isn’t beyond mending. You need to face your demons, and then feel better after it’s all over.

God
, I miss drinking during the day. I used to like to get it all over with early, you know: get drunk, pass out, wake up, and be hungover before the channel 3 news team started staring down at me like high school librarians. To this day, on those rare occasions when the sun shines brilliantly in the winter, I still feel that tug toward a restaurant patio, still hear that pitcher of margaritas cooing like a lover in my ear.

But my first real job after college sucked all the fun out of it for me. I worked for a publications company in La Jolla, in an office only two blocks from the beach and near this awful but insanely popular Mexican restaurant, Jose’s. I used to talk my friend Tom from the graphics department into joining me there for tequila-soaked lunches. Then we’d wobble to the cove and throw Frisbees at each other until we remembered we had jobs.

I loved Tom, his presence made my pointless job infinitely more tolerable. He made me a big sign once, of a mime with his thumbs
proudly tucked under his suspenders. It was dumb, made even more so by the caption “Never Mime,” but it harkened back to an inside joke of had-to-be-there hilarity surrounding an incident at the cove that involved a street performer, a copious amount of tequila, and pornographic balloon animals.

Tom and I had a great time working together until our company’s owner came back from prison. I had yet to meet our boss, Richard, because I was hired in the middle of his eighteen-month term at a minimum-security prison for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a young man’s trust fund, for which Richard had been the (very bad) executor. I considered his incarceration a perk when I applied for the job, because the fact is that even today, with the wizardry of modern communication, it’s still hard to harass your employees all the way from the hoosegow.

Then one day I walked into the office, and there were signs everywhere—not overt signs, like the kind Tom was good at making—but subtle, maddening signs that things were different. My coworkers were guarded, well dressed, and, worst of all,
working
. Tom hissed a warning before I could shriek out my usual obscene salutations. “
Richard’s back
,” he hissed. So I finally got to meet Richard, and immediately afterward he handed me an assignment that would take actual effort to complete.

God!
This sucks
, I thought. That day I could hardly get anyone to come to lunch with me, even after offering to pick up the tab on a round of shots. Only Tom took me up on it. In a spree of hooch-generated defiance, we spent the rest of the afternoon on a terrace overlooking the ocean at a restaurant we could afford only because of promotional coupons. Tom told me how he had lost his former job as a chauffeur in Atlantic City because he stopped the limo on the freeway to save a dog struck by a car, stuffing the injured animal into the front seat and ignoring the irate complaints of the paying passenger in back as he detoured to the animal hospital. “He was just lying there on the emergency lane with his legs broken but sitting
up, you know, watching the cars pass,” Tom recalled of the dog. “Every time a car went by it would ruffle the fur on his coat.”

As we belted more margaritas he kept talking about the dog. Stupidly, I thought he regretted losing his job as a driver. But I should have seen the signs. I should have seen Tom’s eyes—big, spaniel eyes rounded in regret—and his hands, cupping and uncupping his margarita glass in painful reminiscence. “Hey,” I said nervously when I saw the tears start to well up in his eyes. “Hey, Tom. So you lost your crappy job carting people around, so what?”

Then he told me the truth. He hadn’t saved the dog after all. As his limo passed the animal on the road, the wind ruffled the fur on its coat. He’d hated himself ever since, hated himself for not even slowing down as the dog looked up hopefully. Sometimes, though, Tom would rewrite history and see himself stopping the car and laying the injured animal in the front seat, oblivious to the bitching from the passenger in back. But Tom was incapable of maintaining this fake recollection, and after enough margaritas the truth would return. “I should have stopped,” he said softly, then his big eyes began to leak.

After we returned to work, Tom was canned but not me, so I quit out of sympathy. It was the least I could do for my kind friend, the guy who made me signs and supported my boozy ravings against the establishment, my Frisbee buddy with the sad eyes of a spaniel who is forever haunted by the ruffled fur of a dying dog he did nothing to save. Yes, I quit right on the spot.

Or I wish I had. Christ, I really wish I had. Instead, I just took it as a sign to stop drinking during the day.

I
was driving along that butt smear of a freeway section south of Freedom Parkway, the part where the badly planned number of lanes swell and contract like a big constipated boa constrictor, and I was thinking about life in general, and how it would be nice not to die that day in particular. I’ve had days, of course, when I felt differently. Nothing major, it’s just that there were times when I got out of bed completely burdened with the fact that I was still breathing, having missed a perfectly good opportunity to croak in my sleep. On those days I’d call Lary. “I’m on the ledge,” I’d bleat. “I’m gonna jump.”

“Well,” he always says, “what’s
stopping
ya?”

“I meant
figuratively
, you fuck!” I’d shriek, and shrieking at Lary always provides me with a reason to live. Soon I’d be chirping into the phone, “Why do you keep bags of cat litter in your dishwasher? I mean, what’s the
reason
for that?” But Lary’s redeeming quality is his complete comfort with lack of reason. A few years ago
the four of us, Daniel, Grant, Lary, and I, traveled to Prague, and I thought I’d be the tour guide, considering that I am, after all, an official foreign-language interpreter. I don’t speak Czech specifically, but on the average I’d traveled to Europe more times in one month than these three plebeians had in their lifetimes, so I assumed they would all sit at my knee enthralled with my knowledge the whole time, letting me explain the reasons for things.

“Wanna know why you should keep your head at armrest level when evacuating a smoke-filled aircraft?” I’d tweet smugly during the safety demonstration. “It’s because smoke rises while noxious chemical fumes sink, so the safest air is in between.”

Out of the perfect pureness of friendship, Daniel and Grant were prepared to ruin their vacation and provide me with a constant audience, but once in Prague, Lary kept ditching us only to reappear later with absorbing stories of peg-legged whores and, like, bald cab drivers with boils on their heads and stuff.

With Grant and Lary at a subway station in Prague

Soon even I had to admit—after a spitting fit of jealousy in
which I hit Lary with a plastic jar of Vaseline—that we’d have more fun if we just followed Lary around. After that we stuck to him like putty and, as a reward, were given a fascinating tour through the human sewage pipe of Prague. At one point we found ourselves in a sweaty underground gay bar belting shots of ouzo. Grant, who at that time was still an acting straight man (it was a bad act, but still), noticed that the walls along the dance floor were outfitted with rows of toilet-paper dispensers.

“What’s the
reason
for that?” he asked.

But Grant is another who feels no need to search for reason, so he simply resumed his practice of allowing the world to unfurl its surprises. The fact that he’s gay isn’t one of them. We all knew that before he did, or before he chose to tell us since on some level he always knew. Since then he has lived completely unfettered by expectations. “I feel so much better,” he likes to say, “since I gave up hope.”

A Jewish cemetery in Prague

Daniel and I wish we could be that way. In contrast we are always searching, and we don’t even know for what. “Why do I do this?” Daniel says sometimes, referring to his art. Usually it’s after a bad newspaper review or an unsuccessful meeting with a New York gallery. Once we both found ourselves in a slough of despond at his place, drinking wine while he colored in lips on the faces of his hand-drawn exhibit announcements. That was back when he did faces. “What’s the point?” he grieved while methodically brushing each envelope with a red crayon. There were hundreds of envelopes. “I should just give up.”

Prague

“Right,” I slobbered. I was there seeking solace myself because the editor who’d accepted my article at
Esquire
had just been fired, pulling the chair out from under the biggest milestone of my career. So I wasn’t jolly full of fun either, but still I perked up slightly when I saw that Daniel had accidentally skipped an envelope. “You missed one,” I said, handing him the culprit that escaped his crayon.

“Well,” Daniel said, stopping to correct the error, “there’s no reason for leaving the house without lips, now is there?” Then I helped him resume his task, because right then I realized there’s no time for seeking reasons to live when there are stacks of envelopes to be colored.