Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (26 page)

A
friend of mine got married in a beautiful ceremony, which provided me with a good excuse to partake in a trough of champagne, especially since my date for the wedding, Lary, left with another woman.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked before bolting.

“You’re my
date
, you dick!”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“Fuck you!”

And off he went. Grant also watched him go. “Champagne?” he smiled, handing me a glass. He was using his sinister smile, a warning to me that he is very much in touch with his inner evil. He’s striving to influence others to achieve that evil, like he’s the new Ring Master of the Psycho Circus. I’ve been trying to trace the birth of this demon in Grant—because I used to know him pre-demon—and, as best as I can tell, it emerged for the first time one Monday night at Fuzzy’s, when Francine Reed was performing. That’s the
night Grant invented “sandwich dancing,” which entails three or more people slow dancing in a drunken, undulating conga line. “I wanna be the meat!” Grant yells when it’s time to sandwich dance, which is usually every time Reed does her heart-stopping rendition of Etta James. I don’t know what it is about Reed, but her singing just seems to bring out the bad behavior in my friends. And I think I mean “bad” in a good way, sort of.

That night, after the wedding, Grant invented “cluster kissing,” which I won’t describe, except to say that it involves both males and females and it seemed like a good idea at the time, swept up in the sweetness of the nuptials as I was. By this time our group had left the reception to attend a festival party held in a warehouse in the Old Fourth Ward. It was a great party, staged in a massive industrial labyrinth used to build movie sets. Art, music, and interesting people abounded. I drank, danced, laughed, and fumbled into the arms of my friends. “I love you, did you know that?” I’d say. “I
love
you! I
mean
it.” Cluster kiss. “I could die right now and be the happiest person in the universe!” Cluster kiss. Group hug. Sandwich dance. “I
mean
it! I could
die
!”

In retrospect it’s ironic that—very nearby, and entirely unbeknownst to us at the time—a man
did
die that night. While I was inside the warehouse reveling in a platonic faux orgy with my friends, a social studies teacher and his girlfriend were parking in the side lot on their way to this same party. Soon after they left their car, an armed robber shot them both. The girl was hospitalized and recovered, but her boyfriend died. He was thirty-two years old, and probably the last thing on his mind as he took the keys out of his ignition that night was how little time he had left to live. Did he spend his last day worrying about bills, pondering past regrets, lamenting world affairs? Did he stop, contemplate his life, know that he was loved? Did he leave phone messages for his friends who now agonize over having erased them because they didn’t know they would never hear his voice or see his face again?

“It could have been me,” I say to myself. And I’m right. And if it
were me I would have spent the last moments of my life surrounded by a large number of my favorite people, hugging and kissing them with sticky champagne lips and sentimental abandon, happy to be alive, effectively under the spell of the demon in Grant, whose influence may not be so evil after all. “I
love
you, man!” Cluster kiss. Group hug. “I
mean
it.” And I do.

There
must be something really wrong with the world when you can’t get a buzz off your codeine cough medicine. Christ if that doesn’t just suck all the fun out of being sick. I was chugging that stuff like shooters at a Hooters bar and I was still so lucid I could pilot a plane, plus I kept coughing like a late-stage lung-cancer victim. I had a good mind to go back to my pharmacist and accuse him of switching my prescription with pancake syrup, hoarding the good stuff for himself, because it’s not every day I get to do drugs. What rotten luck to have gotten my clutches on a legal narcotic, and it didn’t work! I had to find another way to fix myself.

I could have called Lary. Not for drugs…though he seems to have drugs in his house he doesn’t even know about. Though Lary couldn’t cure me, he could fix my broken furnace. My loft was cold, I was cold, and that was why I had that bionic flu bug to begin with. I noticed something was wrong one morning while I was poking myself
in bed, wondering why I felt harder than usual—since hardness isn’t a quality I would attribute to my body—when suddenly the reason for my condition occurred to me: I was frozen. Frozen because my furnace had done a death rattle in the middle of the night, and in the ensuing hours I basically got crusted over with ice, leaving me a bleachy-haired, flannel-clad, phlegmy Snow White after she bit into the bad apple and lay there preserved for eternity with woodland creatures coming from miles around to weep at her feet.

Okay, not
exactly
like that, but I was cold. So to stay alive, I set about calling people to come and fix my broken furnace. I called Lary because when something is broken my first step is always to charm him into fixing it.

“Goddammit, you walking pocket of pus,” I croaked into his cell phone, “get your meager ass over here and fix my furnace.”

“Hi, whore,” he answered gamely. “I’m in Colorado.”

“Huh?”

“Been here all week. You’re supposed to feed my cat, remember? How’s my cat?”

“Love ya,’bye!”

So with Lary inconsiderately unavailable, my options fell to Daniel and Grant. Daniel was vetoed immediately because he couldn’t fix a broken furnace any more than he can perform eye surgery on himself. He’s an
artist
. He creates, he doesn’t
mend
. His own garbage disposal has been broken for more than a year and he has yet to begin the highly technical process of dialing the building manager’s phone number so she can dispatch the superintendent to fix it.

Grant

So I called Grant. Grant could fix almost anything—not with his actual own
hands, mind you, but he knows
guys
. There was his hardwood-floor guy, his electricity guy, his HVAC guy. What he can’t fix he leaves broken and figures it’s better for it. Like that time he found an ancient wooden pie chest on the side of the road. When I asked him if he planned to replace the rusty torn screen, he looked at me like I just asked him to eat beetles. “Its brokenness is what makes it so fabulous,” he gasped.

But Grant sounded sad when he answered the phone. I’d been gone and hadn’t heard the news: That day he was on his way to a funeral with his daughter to grieve the deaths of her three friends who died together tragically over the weekend. Two of them were children. “She used to baby-sit those kids, Hollis,” Grant said, his voice thin. “She can’t stop crying.”

Grant’s daughter had just turned eighteen, and adulthood didn’t waste time introducing her to the hardness of life. “She keeps sobbing, she keeps saying, ‘But Daddy…’” Grant grieved. “God, why does it break my heart so horribly to hear her say that?”

I think I know why. It’s because the child in her was barely veiled by her new womanhood, and Grant heard his child appealing to him to make it all better, to wave a wand and make the world the way it was a few days ago, and he felt utter powerlessness to provide her that. “God, Hollis,” Grant lamented, “I couldn’t do anything but let her cry. I couldn’t
fix
it.” Instead he realized a tiny piece of her will have to remain broken, and she won’t be better off for it, just wiser and stronger as we all eventually become through the course of life, and a little less dependent on her father.

It
was the night before I was about to close on the house I had under contract when I discovered that the police had recently found an unidentified decomposing human head in a plastic bag
on my new street
. And not only that, they found
seven other
plastic bags full of cut up legs and limbs and crap in the same neighborhood, and they figured, okay, mystery almost solved, sort of, since they have the rest of the body,
you would think. But then the head in a bag didn’t match the body in seven bags
, so now they had a bunch of bags of body parts and one bag of head parts that
didn’t belong to each other!!!!
So this not only meant that
some sick amateur Frankenstein
was killing people and tossing their parts around in Baggies like leftover chopped broccoli
in my new “up and coming” in-town neighborhood
, but that there was still out there,
in my neighborhood
, the decomposing torso to match the first decomposing head, and the
decapitated head to match the bags of people parts found not too far from the head that
didn’t belong to it
.

Got that? Good. Because, considering all the above, there are lots more sacks o’ surprises—all smelly and teeming with maggots—presumably still waiting out there in my new neighborhood for me to stumble upon in the dark, probably in back of my newly purchased home in that cute carriage-house garage that I never even bothered to have the seller unlock. I looked in the garage window and said, “Yeah, fine, whatever,” and didn’t even
think
it might be wise to investigate for piles of plastic bags settled into soft biomorphic shapes, with maybe some
seepage
or something—because if I had found that I would have offered a lot less for the place.

But why be greedy? Because the house was “in town,” and therefore subject to the real-estate “frenzy” in which people were clamoring for in-town property like feral hogs set free in a field of sleeping newborn babies, and I got it for a good price, so there’s at least one bonus to house hunting in a neighborhood littered with so many unidentified human limbs it could pass for a looted Peruvian graveyard. What bargains! The house went up five thousand dollars in value just during the time I had it under contract.
Woohoo!
I thought to myself. I finally have a chunk of the city of Atlanta all to myself! Bummer about those dismembered corpses and all, but hey, at least I won’t have to spend hours of my day in line at some
suburban
Starbucks—mainly because Starbucks hadn’t yet been brave enough to open a franchise in these parts. In fact, I was so
in on the ground floor
that there wasn’t a coffeehouse to be seen in this section of southwest Atlanta where I would soon live. It was, however, the area in which the city’s biggest mass murder of the century recently occurred. How about that?

Also in my new neighborhood were a couple of cool-looking thrift stores and a crack whore on crutches, who should not be mistaken for the other neighborhood whore, who was much healthier until she got shot dead while running naked down the middle of the
street, four blocks away from my street. One good sign is that her killer didn’t dice up her body, which I take to mean that this neighborhood is definitely on the upswing, and that I definitely made a really good investment. Yep, I did.

Another good investment for this neighborhood was Cookie the pit bull. The downside was she was three months old and weighed only twelve pounds. But the upside was that ten of those pounds seemed to be teeth. When she grows up, she’ll be able to rip the jugular out of the necks of all chainsaw-wielding killers bent on making a bag of human hash out of me, but for now the most pain I’d seen her inflict was one morning when I was smothering her with kisses and she accidentally bit my nipple. That
really
hurt, but I doubt drug-crazed killers will be deterred by me brandishing a puppy and threatening, “Get back or say good-bye to your nipple!” So I sure hope she grows fast, because—bargain or no bargain—it’ll be really hard to reap the rewards of this in-town investment with my severed head in a sack.

Cookie the pit bull