Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (16 page)

I’m
almost positive not many people have been forced to look at porno with one of their parents, so I consider myself unique in that way. It happened years ago, when my mother and siblings and I got lost in Amsterdam on our way to the Anne Frank House and ended up in the Red Light District instead. It’s not that we wouldn’t each have ambled there on purpose eventually, just not together as a unit, because Amsterdam’s Red Light District is probably the worst place on the planet for a family outing. At one point, we passed a movie bill picturing a man in a rubber suit wallowing in his own shit—and I’m just assuming it was his own, because even now my brain wants to make the best of it. For all I know it could have been a crap collective, which is an adequate metaphor given the situation.

“Look,” hollered my brother, Jim, “that theater across the street has a ‘
Live Vibrator’ show!
” My sister Cheryl was unimpressed. “Live vibrator?” she mumbled. “In the States, we call that a penis.”

Christ
, I thought to myself, clutching my eyes.
Where am I?

If my father had been alive he would have pulled us out of there by our hair. Let me tell you, it’s really embarrassing to walk around with your father’s fist ensnared in your hair. So it was a good thing he was not there with us in Amsterdam, because if he had been he would have burst into flames, and left my siblings and me with our scalps blistered where his fingers had once clutched our hair. Even that would probably not have kept Jim from the “Live Vibrator” show.

The Amsterdam Red Light District has since been cleaned up somewhat, but back then it was absolutely saturated in porno. You couldn’t
not
look at it, unless you wanted to close your eyes and feel your way through, which I strongly discourage. And the whores were not nice either, so we couldn’t ask them directions. They really seemed to resent freeloading onlookers, and one even threw a bucket of toilet-bowl water on a crowd that had converged outside her display window. It missed us and hit some backpackers, who couldn’t scramble away fast enough.

“That was close,” my mother laughed as we darted down the street. She stopped in front of a bookstore window, where a magazine cover depicted a pile of limbs in the throes of sweaty cluster sex. The close-up photo was so severe the subjects were hardly discernible. “What is
that?
” my mother asked as she peered at it closely. “Do I see a
hoof
in there?”

We wandered into an X-rated magazine store, where the locals were shopping for sex toys with the seriousness of a politician’s wife picking out vegetables for an important dinner. From a distance I could hear my mother talking to the clerk in loud, slowly pronounced English, “I don’t get it; what’s so sexy about a big rubber fist?”

We lost each other soon after that. Cheryl and I stayed together, bound by some black Afghani hash we had bought in a coffee shop. It came balled up in dark chocolate fudge and was listed on the menu under “Bom Boms.” The waiter recommended it to us with
the following endorsement: “Honey, they gonna knock yo’ tits off.” We ate some and then spent hours laughing and listening to an old man retch at the end of the bar.

Later, at the hotel, we heard that my sister lost my mother at the Sex Museum, a four-story structure near the train station that chronicles the history of pornography. Kim became engrossed in an arcade video titled “Jocks in Socks,” and evidently the video was tucked out of view, because my mother thoroughly searched for Kim before approaching the man in the ticket booth to ensure she wasn’t missing a section of the museum. “Young man,” she said to him. “I’ve been up and down the four floors here, is there any more?” To which the man, his eyes sweeping the scores of exhibits devoted to every sexual fetish you could imagine (and scores more you couldn’t), responded, “Lady, isn’t that enough?”

The
last time I was mugged, I could have let go of my purse and saved myself some decorum. But no, my fingers fastened on the strap like the jaws of a little pit bull on a pork chop. You should have seen the thief’s face when she looked back to see me still there, hanging on. I was surprised myself: I didn’t know I was that quick, but because I hung on, I did a face plant in the sidewalk. Even then I didn’t let go, and I was dragged behind the thief in an incredibly undignified manner.

The mugging occurred in Zurich, and traditionally the Swiss reserve their crime quotient for thievery on a much more massive scale—such as the jillions in Jewish assets their banks have hoarded since the Second World War—but lately miscreants of a trivial nature have threaded themselves through the country’s cracks, probably enticed by the easy game, as I can’t think of a single Swiss citizen who would value a wallet over suitable social behavior.

But me? I hung on, and while I was being dragged, I remember
thinking,
Yes, I bet this is very attractive, especially since my entire body has been blessed with the flexibility of a redwood with the single exception of my elbows, which are double-jointed and can bend inward unnaturally
. When the thief doubled back to try yanking and twisting the purse from my grasp, my arm simply flopped about and contorted like an angry eel, yet I still hung on. Finally, the thief gave up, and the disgusted onlookers recommenced their strolling. One gentleman and his companion sidestepped me like a pile of poo. “Her bag must contain something very valuable,” he said in a tone that revealed he thought the opposite.

I’d have been angry if I didn’t concede his point. Essentially, I’d just risked my life for a small wad of foreign money, two tampons, and one half-masticated, fuzz-covered peppermint pellet. “Hanging on to crap will kill you,” I’ve heard Grant say a zillion times, which seems appropriate, because he is always divesting himself of his stuff. He’s accumulated and dispersed the contents of at least a dozen households since I’ve met him. His present house is little more than a funnel for furniture—a big colon, kind of—as things are put there just to be passed through. To know Grant is to know his mantra: “Let it go. Let it go.”

I try to remember that when I find myself suddenly still furious over offenses from the distant past, such as the time my college roommate fucked my useless boyfriend, or the time I think my grade-school teacher was trying to secretly dry-hump me while we stood in line for the cafeteria, or the time my older sister beat the crap out of me with a wooden spatula, or even the time some bitchy plebe gave me really bad service at the photo-processing counter. You can harbor an entire catalog of slights like these, resentments you thought were long gone that suddenly bubble into your brain one day while you’re driving. Pretty soon there you are screaming and conducting imaginary arguments with people who are probably long dead. So what possible good comes out of hanging on?

But it’s not always that easy, knowing when to let go of things. Take hope, for example. I have this insane hope that the world will
one day be relatively free of people pissing out their territory—religion-wise, values-wise, otherwise—and that there really might be a universal plateau we can reach. Lary says I should let that go, and start stockpiling weapons. But I can’t, and I really wonder whether that weakens or strengthens me as a person.

In Zurich, the thief gave up on me, and simply walked away.
Walked
, with a curious look on her face. She had severely plucked eyebrows and braided hair the color of highway hazard cones, and she didn’t speak German. I know this because I saw her again as I turned the corner, talking to the rest of her ratty gang, one of whom started to make his way toward me before she stopped him. So we watched each other, the thief and I, and then something funny happened.

We laughed. We just did, somewhat sheepishly, and as I continued on my way she said something to her friend. I don’t speak their language, but I have an idea what it was. “That’s the one,” she was saying, “who won’t let go.”

Twice
in my life I have awakened in a pool of urine—and it wasn’t even mine. That’s what happens when you own a new puppy, and fail to understand that the incessant whining you hear at 2
A.M
. doesn’t mean she wants to be taken out of her cage and cuddled while you continue to sleep. People are a little harder to train than puppies.

Take gambling, for example. Gambling was a big bonding thing between my mother and me. As a mathematician and missile scientist, she was addicted to blackjack, and thus those junkets to Vegas became our common family outing. My mother even took pride in the fact that she was evicted from the Golden Nugget because the pit boss discovered her ability, like Dustin Hoffman’s in
Rain Man
, to keep track of dealt cards, even if the dealer was using a six-deck shoe. “I’m a threat,” she’d beam. “They’re afraid of me.” And they were, because she usually won. Usually. Sometimes she followed the odds and they bit her in the ass. At these times she’d end up
busted but always ready to bounce back, reasoning, “What was I
supposed
to do, back away from a good hand?”

She’d try to coach me sometimes. If the dealer dealt me an eleven, she’d insist I double my bet, even though I’m a timid gambler. I mean, I can’t even count. I’d have to hold my cards out for the dealer to count because they always hate it if you take too long. So it intimidated me to slap more money down on the odds I’d win.
But those were the odds
, and my mother’s philosophy was always to play the odds rather than cover your losses. “You gotta keep puttin’ your chips on the table, kid. Don’t be afraid,” she’d say. “But if you lose three times in a row, I don’t care how much you like the dealer, find another table.”

My brother never learned to leave the table. He would sit there stubbornly, losing hand after hand, convinced that the more he lost the more certain it was that he would eventually win it back. He usually busted, and would end up tracking my mother down at another table hoping she would pitch him a few chips from her winnings. “He won’t learn,” she’d say, “you got to leave a losing table.”

Words of wisdom, I say. Because sometimes it’s hard to leave a losing table. You get comfortable there. The dealer might be nice, he counts your cards for you, the other players are nice, they laugh at your jokes. But you keep losing and losing just the same, and then you give it your last shot and you have nothing left. At that point, if you ever acquire any more chips, it’s hard to put them on another table because you don’t want to risk losing them. I mean, everyone usually experiences some loss in their lives: They trusted someone who sold them out, they loved someone who lied to them, they lost someone who was dear to them. It happens.

But, unlike puppies, we can’t be trained not to make the same mistake over and over. The best we can hope for is to recognize the odds, and to be brave enough to back up a good hand if we have it. According to my mother, if the odds are in your favor, grab at ’em.
“You got to put your chips on the table, kid. Don’t be afraid.” Don’t get suffocated by your safety net. That way, if you lose you can’t say you didn’t try. You read the signs, they said “thumbs-up,” and you went for it. Who could fault you for that? It’s like she always said, “If you’re gonna fall on your ass, it’s best to land on both butt cheeks.”