Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (23 page)

I
dislike being bled on. I once made Lary drive by the neighborhood in Atlanta where I’d seen my second corpse. I’d seen it earlier that same day, and there was still a puddle of blood on the sidewalk in the shape of Australia. Lary, peering out the driver’s side window, said it was a melted Popsicle and wouldn’t believe it was blood until I got out, stuck my finger in it, and came back inside the car to give him a closer look.

“Are you insane? I’m not gonna get it on me!” I shrieked. God! You’d think that Lary, more than anyone, would recognize actual blood when he saw it. He goes to the damn emergency room just about a hundred times a month. The most recent was necessitated by injuries sustained after he took acid and dove headfirst off some scaffolding in his living room. That he has scaffolding in his living room should tell you something about him. But I think he was kind of unsettled about the puddle that day. He probably dislikes being bled on as much as I do.

It’s a good thing he missed the soccer hooligans in Dublin last month. I’d never been to Dublin before, and at the time I was just hanging around loving the hell out of the place, because what’s not to love? There are cobblestone walkways and old pubs everywhere, shrimp-flavored potato chips, eight-hundred-year-old brass accents still shiny from daily polishing, and people
tip their hats
to you. It’s so damn finished and seemingly civilized in downtown Dublin that the men even wear pocket watches, for chrissakes, and every other café has curtains made of white lace. It’s lovely there, I swear, and it’s really the last place you’d expect to encounter other people’s blood.

It all happened while I was admiring some silver trinkets jangling from a street vendor’s pushcart, when suddenly the air became instilled with a different sort of loudness than before, something more frenetic than the normal business bustle of the day. The onset was all pretty subtle, actually, because the Irish are studied in the art of sustaining tirades. There was no war-whoop, no running for cover, no shouting of warnings. Nobody froze in their steps or crapped in their pants. The only omen of what was about to happen, the only thing that warned of an oncoming menace, was that everyone around me suddenly became extremely intent upon some menial task at hand. The change was immediate. One moment everybody was interacting with one another—commenting on the big soccer match, laughing at jokes—and the next they were rummaging grim-faced through a pocketbook, mindfully picking lint off a lapel, closely inspecting the incisors of an ancient lapdog. Even the pushcart vendor stopped talking to me midsentence to intently study a pebble caught in a crease of his sole. All this alerted me to switch myself to survival mode.

There was no big trick to it. I just adapted the demeanor of the people around me, which basically entailed making myself as boring as possible, thus enabling the hooligans to ignore me and move on to other potential victims, which they did. They chose a hapless, long-haired young man not far from me and descended on him like
piranhas on a pork chop. They were so thick on him he was invisible under the pile. It was over quickly too; the thugs lifted like mosquitoes swarming for fresh blood, and they were gone. This is when my instincts failed me.

“Do you think that guy’s okay?” I gasped to the pushcart vendor, who looked at me like I’d stepped on a twig and alerted the enemy to our hiding place. The hooligans were gone, but the injured guy, who was being helped to his feet by his friends, was near enough to hear me. Bloody-faced, he was no longer hapless; on the contrary, he was full of hate and pain right then, which he bore on me with the intensity of a hundred suns.

“Leave me alone, you stupid
bitch
,” he shouted, coming closer.
Fucking bitch!
” he hissed into my face. I looked around to see if anyone would intervene, but they were busy brushing dust off their coats or inspecting their watchbands or whatever. Luckily, I’m obviously too pathetic to serve as much of a trophy, even for a guy looking to reclaim his ego after having the shit kicked out of him in public, so he simply called me a bitch a few more times and then limped away, leaving me standing there, blinking. The pushcart vendor handed me a tissue.

“I’m not crying,” I snapped at him, angry that he hadn’t interceded on my behalf.

“Your face,” he said, and I looked in the mirror attached to the cart’s ballast and saw that my face was flecked with blood, which the injured guy had spewed on me while calling me a bitch.
God
, I thought as I wiped it off,
nothing like being bled on to dick up your day
. After that I stormed away, fuming so heavily that people began to cross the street to get away from me, and not another person tipped his hat to me for the rest of my stay.

Last
weekend my little sister, Kimberly, renewed her vows with her Swiss husband, Eddie. They wouldn’t have met if not for me, as I’m reminded often. They live in a tiny homestead in Arizona, and to attend the ceremony I had to fly to New Mexico and then drive through four hours of nothing to get to nowhere, which is where they live with their three-year-old daughter in a baby-blue mobile home, with a “For Sale” sign on the empty lot next door that touts an installed septic tank. There are some other mobile homes dotting the barren landscape nearby, but none as nice as theirs, which has a wood-paneled front door and an improvised canopy over the carport to protect their truck from the weather. Eddie painted the truck himself, in a camouflage pattern, and it’s quite the object of admiration among their neighbors, as is their video collection, which includes the entire
Die Hard
series.

They met in Zurich, Switzerland, when Kim was visiting me
after graduating from college. I’d had too much to drink in a pub one night, and Eddie offered to help Kim escort me home, and they haven’t spent a night apart since. She remained in Zurich after I moved back to the States, and married Eddie despite my very vocal objections, which included, but were not limited to, the fact that he was old enough to be her father, that he almost burned down our house after leaving a lit cigarette on a mattress, and that during drunken sprees he would show up at our door waving a gun. What I didn’t realize was that my sister truly loved Eddie, and that every word I said, instead of driving her from him, was serving to cement our own separation. And even if over the years Kim would eventually forgive these words, Eddie might not.

They moved to the States after their wedding, and for a while depended on my mother for housing and money. Eddie was always full of ideas—he was going to make a fortune by breeding rare cats, by teaching self-defense, by selling sandwiches—but drank himself stupid almost every night, which sparked my scorn and a fresh slew of appeals to my sister to reconsider her attachment to him. It’s easier for me to fly to Moscow than to reach them on that stark dot in the Arizona desert. Eddie quit drinking and now holds a job as a security guard, and my sister has an administrative position with the county. There are no relatives within thousands of miles of them, and I guess that’s the point. When I visit, I’m as docile as a circus animal, eager to please the ringmaster in order to be tossed the treasure of time spent with my sister and niece. During these visits, Eddie will commonly lead me out on his porch, gesture to the horizon, and say things like, “We’re going to buy three more acres and raise Korean pigs. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?” and I’ll look at the expanse of emptiness before us and nod, saying, “Yes, that’s a wonderful idea.”

My
mother was always enthusiastic about Christmas, which was odd for an atheist. “Stop that,” she would exclaim in response to my skeptical expression as she decorated the Christmas tree one year. She knew I was in my own atheism phase, and that I faulted her lack of commitment to the club. But she knew that my flirtation with atheism wouldn’t take, since her own beliefs had been formed with quiet resolve over the years. Mine, on the other hand, had formed instantly, after a failed affair with an asshole member of the God squad.

“Lighten up,” she said in response to my Christmas cynicism. “Did the Bible say Christ had this…” she shook a handful of aluminum tinsel in my direction, “…lining his little manger?” As a joke I later presented her with a stuffed Santa Claus nailed to a cross, but she failed to see the humor in that. So I concluded it was a bad joke, since my mother never failed to see humor if it was actually there.

The affair I had with the Jesus freak my senior year in college was almost embarrassingly clichéd. He’d made it his mission to save my soul because I kept showing up for class dressed like a hooker. He said he didn’t even have to be looking at the door to know when I walked in, because he could tell by the lascivious looks coming from the other guys that I’d arrived. “I can see your
breasts
,” he would hiss. “Johnny,” I laughed, “my tits are tiny, so you really must be
looking
for them.”

His seduction took a roundabout route: First he greased his way into becoming my friend, then he heaped love, salvation, and manifest fate into the fray. It was an effective ploy, and in the end I didn’t just take the bait, I swallowed the whole boat. When he inevitably dropped me, I hit the ground like a safe. I placed a call, sobbing, to my mother. She left work immediately to meet me at a coffee shop. (It would be years before I learned that, at the time, my mother faced a looming deadline for a project involving sensitive defense technology. One of her coworkers later told me that my mother breezed by their objections to her departure with, “My daughter’s been dumped by some dick Bible thumper. Gotta go.”)

She suggested the coffee shop because she wanted to feed me pie. It was her belief that pie was a good thing to provide to brokenhearted daughters. She herself could not make pie—aside from her specialty, tamale pie, which involved cornmeal and came out of a box—but she figured out a way to get her kids what she believed they needed, even though she herself couldn’t create it. For example, she didn’t know anything about romance, so when I started dating she gave me books—epic romances, with pictures of busty women fainting into the arms of muscular men on the cover—in the hopes they could prepare me for what to expect. When she discovered that it’s customary for these books to depict a heroine who gets gang-raped ten times a week, she backpedaled by pouring forth books on self-esteem. Since then, though, she had settled on the pie approach.

Just give her pie and let her cry
, she thought, and she was right.
I cried and cried. My mother sat across from me patiently, her deadline ticking away, and ordered more coffee. I catalogued all of my ex-boyfriend’s abuses:

“Then he took back the Bible he gave me,” I finished, blubbering.

As I said, my mother never failed to see the humor in a situation. “He took his Bible back?” she squeaked, her eyes round like little planets. Soon she was laughing so hard it looked like she might cough up a kidney.

“Well I guess you’re going straight to Hell,” my mother roared, slapping the table, “and that sure cuts your odds of having to see him again.” She collapsed into new peals of laughter, doubling over until she was lying flat in the booth with her feet kicking in the aisle, which upset the passing pie-laden waitresses on their way to deliver solace to other people.