Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (19 page)

I
wasn’t happy when Grant said that he wanted to hang human babies. His inspiration came from his refurbished crack house, which is empty—like a clean slate—and usually he wants to keep it that way. But, other times, he says he wants to host the occasional art installation, and that’s where the
ideas
come in. “We should take a bunch of babies,” he said excitedly, “and just hang them on hooks. It would be
fabulous!
”

He swept through the vast living room, his face alight with enthusiasm, his sandals shuffling on the polished wood floor. “There could just be babies all over the walls!” His voice rises and echoes off the cement. “Babies hanging like hams! I
love
it! Are you not loving this idea?”

I was not loving the idea. But Grant was unfazed, and he continued to soak up inspiration from his empty house. Thank God he finally got off the hanging-baby brainstorm and went back to entertaining
minimalism. “Nothing!” he spouts breathlessly. “Can’t you just
see
it? Bare walls, nominal possessions. A clean slate! I’m loving this idea.”

Who wouldn’t love it? A clean slate is the ultimate possession. My own slate looks more like Lary’s place. Lary lives in an altogether different warehouse than Grant, and has tools and torches strewn about. I’ve found that, these days, I enjoy it there more than ever. I hang out while he’s out of town, feed his cat, and eat his pistachios. It’s almost peaceful, sitting there amid another man’s junk, free from my own junk for the time being.

That’s the real hazard: my own junk. I’ve been trying to avoid it lately, pushing it into places like the closet in my office, and not even stacking it neatly. There’s my broken treadmill, two plastic trees, old area rugs, a large plywood sign Grant, Daniel, and I pilfered from the roadside, and a wind-up plastic penis with clown feet that hops. These are just a few items in my galaxy of crap, a precariously teetering danger zone that is the mirror of my own cluttered brain, which is painfully littered with memories of my perceived past atrocities.

Atrocities such as the time I allowed my classmates to taunt my little sister, who was fat. That memory murders me: I should have protected her. I should have been a better person. Instead I am who I am. Sometimes, just to rescue myself, I’ll rewrite the bad memories. If there’s ever a moment I wish with every atom to take back, it is the moment when my little sister looked at me to save her and saw that I wouldn’t. Her eyes rounded with the realization that she was utterly alone, and she held back her tears by pretending to pluck pills off her secondhand sweater. In my mind I go to my little sister, who is trying not to nervously pick at her sweater, trying instead to fold her hands with heartbreaking dignity atop the cafeteria table, and I take one of her hands and bring it to my cheek. In my mind I see her eyes smile with relief, and I dream for a second that maybe a clean slate is possible after all.

Fifteen
years ago, I took a boat to Greece with my typewriter stuffed in my backpack. My mission was to write a novel packed with insights on female angst about sex and other important stuff. But mostly sex, because some months earlier I’d read one of those epic romances in which the heroine gets her clothes ripped off and raped every other page, then she ends up falling in love with the man who treats her the crappiest. In these books the main character always has “ample breasts bursting with desire” and she’s always “awash in an unfathomable sea of pleasure,” when really she’s just being used like a toilet seat by the man camp.

I went to Greece to write the “anti” of that. Exactly what it would consist of, I didn’t know, but I knew I couldn’t write it at home. I had to roam, because I thought characters and adventure couldn’t be found right in front of you. So off to Greece I went—Corfu, to be exact—where immediately I was accosted by two yelling, foul-mouthed,
greasy-haired hobbits who clutched at me like evil puppies fighting for a chew toy. It turns out these two men were rivaling nightclub owners, and it was common for them to pluck potential customers fresh off the bus like caged roosters waiting for a food pellet.

I was saved from this fracas by a spiky-haired guy named Dax, a charming part-time petty thief who worked the ratty parasailing ride in the lagoon at the bottom of the cliff. We became good friends. He was living out of his sleeping bag on the communal balcony of a nearby villa, and I rented a private room there on the third floor. The villa would have been the perfect place to write if I’d ever got around to it, but I was too busy being with Dax. He squired me about the island on the back of his rusty Vespa and talked me into consuming copious ouzo shooters and tiny fried squid with the eyeballs still attached.

Then one night he stumbled into my room, drunk. Due to a small act of larceny (“It was just a crate of melons,” Dax insisted, “and they were rancid!”), he had to leave the island at sunrise and wanted me to come with him. I told him no, because I had this here book to write, you see, about love and sex and stuff. He stopped swaying for a moment to stare at me intently, then shook his head sadly. I’ll always remember exactly that, the shaking of his head sadly, because you acquire moments in your life that come to signify certain regrets, not the agonizing variety of regret, like the “if only I took the toaster off the edge of the bathtub” range of regret but the other kind—the nagging little pangs you feel when you look back and wonder what you were thinking.

That morning Dax had tried to comfort me because I’d encountered a crippled man selling fried dough on the beach and—being the bleeding-heart little plebeian I was—the sight had left me bereft. “Don’t be sad. He loves his life,” Dax said of the invalid. “He lives on the beach, doesn’t need shoes, eats all the doughnuts he wants…” and on he went, listing all the reasons why this particular person need look no further than the sight in front of him for untold delights.

But my gloom persisted, mostly because later that afternoon I
got caught in a fight between nightclub owners again. This time one of them threw a boulder at the other, which hit me instead. It struck my shoulder blade and numbed my right arm all the way to the fingertips. Typing would have been hard if I had picked that point to get around to it. That’s why Dax stole the rancid melons. He’d smashed them onto the courtyard of the nightclub owned by the odious man who hurt me, taking care not to hit anyone. He’d just wanted to make the floor slippery to hinder any reveling in general and dancing in particular. Afterward Dax was identified almost immediately, though, owing to the freckles on his face and bright flames tattooed on both forearms. “Take
that
,” they said he’d hollered as he hurled the melons, “for my
friend
.”

Later he stood in my room, shaking his head, dismayed that I would pass up true adventure for the sake of a fake one I’d never get around to inventing. After I turned him down he paced the room a few times, looking ready to argue with me, then picked up his satchel only to throw it down again and fiercely hug me good-bye with his brightly burning arms. He left without another word. At the time I was surprised Dax chose not to quarrel with my conviction, but today I remember precisely the sad shaking of his head, and I realize that right then he saw how I was crippled, blind to the sight of untold delights right in front of me.

In Greece at age twenty-two

I
can tell when the holidays arrive, because my hypochondria becomes completely activated. I become convinced my liver is the size of a sea elephant, living inside me like an angry unborn twin with teeth and everything. I wish there was a way I could take a look to make sure, I mean other than with an X-ray machine, which would be hard to steal. I could make an appointment at the doctor’s office, I know, but my reputation there is still tainted after my tapeworm panic on Christmas Eve 1998.

One year I felt this pain in my side. It wasn’t my appendix, because that was cut out of me on Christmas in 1996, a monumental event that proved that sometimes
this was not all in my head
. I mean, seriously, they wouldn’t have opened me up and taken out an
organ
(would they?) unless there was something really wrong with it. So the newest pain was not my appendix, so it must have been
another organ, and I figured it must be my liver, seeing as how I’d been drinking like a frat boy at a beer fest lately.

I admit I’d been partaking in a lot of festive elixirs, but it was the
holidays
. I had to survive them somehow. In fact, that’s what made it all so difficult. How do you separate crazed panic from perfect reality? How was I supposed to know that the flesh-eating ass cancer I freaked about a few Thanksgivings ago was really just the result of sitting all day in my underwear on top of a lost earring? On the other hand, the 1997 incident was easy, because that year I got accidentally stabbed in the head over the holidays. It’s not like I was
imagining
that. It happened, I tell you, and the coworker who did it (with the pointy edge of a metal cabinet door that had flown off its hinges) was super sorry, and still sends me cards sometimes. I walked around for weeks afterward, with stitches and everything, looking like a Tijuana cocktail waitress. See? Sometimes this is
not
all in my head!

My hypochondria started back in grade school when, the day before Thanksgiving, my life sciences teacher showed the class a close-up of a bisected clogged human artery. “This is what happens when you eat crappy food,” she said in her crone voice, holding the photo aloft. “When this guy died, his arteries were so stiff you could snap them in half like a piece of dried pasta,” she added, thrusting the photo forward, which caused her upper arms to quiver like two turkey wattles. “Dried pasta,” she reiterated, and I swear it was years before I could eat SpaghettiOs again.

It didn’t help at
all
that my parents dropped me and my sisters off at the cineplex that year to watch
Scrooge
and
The Aristocats
, chaperoned by my big brother, who took the tickets and accidentally on purpose walked us into the wrong theater, where we sat through four showings of
Tales from the Crypt
instead. He kept telling us the cartoon was coming on next, right after this part showing a lady getting her whole arm hacked off by a mad magician for the twentieth time, or whatever. That night I had to invent an earache just so I
could sleep in my parents’ bed, and believe me, my parents were not cuddly people, and their bed was not comfortable either.

For one thing it had
ashtrays
in it, and books, tons of books. One in particular was
The Exorcist
. Jesus God, I wish my mother had hidden that book a little better, because after reading it I have never been so scared of a book in my life.
Oh, my God
, I remember thinking, how can this happen to a little girl? A pretty, pious, sweet little girl who went to church and everything? If that could happen to her, then what about me?

So that’s the year it started. That year I was possessed by the devil for the holidays. I began twitching my shoulders and thrashing my head at odd moments, because I could feel Satan simmering inside me, and I thought if I stayed still too long I’d barf up a big nest of snakes, which would be very embarrassing. Finally my mother confronted me one night—I was hard to miss, twitching and thrashing, right there in bed with her—“What is the goddamn matter with you?” she shouted.

I told her the truth, that I was afraid I was going to Hell, that Lucifer’s minions would drag me down through the butthole of oblivion to the heart of all awfulness, where devils will poke at my festering sores with fondue forks for all eternity. At that my mother eyed me keenly over the top of her book before muttering just one sentence. “Kid,” she said, “Hell is all in your head.”