Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (27 page)

Needless
to say, I was scared to move into my new house. I was afraid, now that it was all mine and things seemed to be going smoothly, that all of a sudden I would find the butthole to Hell in my backyard like what happened in
Poltergeist
or something. I wish I was more like Grant, who is fearless. He bought that house in Kirkwood with a dead chicken nailed to the door, and he didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t look at the holes in the floor, the crumbling walls, or the shifty bar across the street where prostitutes with botched gang-insignia tattoos were beaten by their pimps. He was looking at the house’s price, which was, like, five cents. He took a month to make it livable, and then sold it a year later for enough profit to pay cash for two other houses and live like King Tut ever since. He keeps telling me, “Honey, you gotta have vision.”

Like I said, Grant never picks the established neighborhoods. He bypassed East Atlanta, the city’s darling of the “up-and-coming”
communities, for Peoplestown, which is where he lives now, in that former crack house. Peoplestown has since ripened in value, as Grant knew it would, and now it’s time for him to move on. His neighborhood has become “fringe,” and Grant likes to live on the fringe of the fringe. He’s picked out a house in Atlanta’s Pittsburgh area, on the West End, which was good news for me, because the house I had under contract was in Capitol View, just a few blocks away.

Grant was proud of my purchase. He thinks that because I bought there I have “vision,” when the truth is I don’t. I’d heard that Capitol View—just five miles away from where I live now in Poncey Highlands—was a neighborhood gem-in-the-rough situated around a pristine park. I’d heard that a lot of gay people and artists are buying there, and I’d heard it touted as “Grant Park five years ago,” which are all really good signs if you ask me, just not super
visible
signs as of yet. So I did not have vision when I picked my house there. I had the opposite. I had to
cover
my eyes—to the crack addicts, to the ugly food store that’s just a front for alcoholics to lean on, to the rusty auto graveyard at the end of my block—and just sign the offer.

I liked it when Grant drove me through my future neighborhood, because he didn’t see the bad things. He saw what I paid for the house, which was, like, five cents. He sees original wood molding that’s never been painted, tiled fireplaces, wraparound porches, hardwood floors, eleven-foot ceilings, French doors. He sees “activity” in the neighborhood, which is code for investors buying abandoned houses and renovating. “Look,” Grant said, pointing to a wooden tripod perched on a front lawn, a telltale sign that the boarded-up house behind it is getting rewired and rehabbed, “I
love
this neighborhood!”

I’m glad Grant loves it, because I’m not ashamed to admit I wouldn’t have bought there otherwise. I might not have vision, but at least I know enough to pick another better pair of eyes to lead
me. Once I made a move on my own and chose a house in East Atlanta that I thought was perfect. Grant gave it the thumbs-down, but it seemed so marvelous I had it inspected anyway. Turns out the main joists were completely rotted through. The inspector pointed out the uneven doorjambs and the inch of space between the bathroom sink and the line of grout that formerly attached it to the wall. Without the joists to support it, the house was, in effect, getting the bottom sucked right out from under itself. Grant just grinned when I told him. “That right there is your butthole to Hell,” he said.

The
big, hard thing in my bed one night was not a man but a book titled
The Stanley Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Home Repair and Improvement
, which my contractor friend Roger gave to me. After I slept with that book I was hoping it would grant me a favor, perhaps suddenly become decipherable, because I was about to move into my house and it still had a lot of broken parts in it. My new neighborhood, Capitol View, seemed a little squalid, and so did my new two-bedroom house.

The problem with the home repair guide was that it didn’t provide a step
low enough
for me to start my climb. For instance, my bathroom didn’t have a shower, just a bathtub with a spigot. No overhead shower. None. Nowhere in this book does it have a chapter on how to install a showerhead where there is no shower. There is a chapter on how to
repair
a showerhead, how to
replace
a showerhead, but, like me when I bought the house, this book naively assumes that even the lowliest home in need of repair comes
equipped with certain basic amenities. But not my house. It’s funny too, because the lady who sold it to me looked really clean. I wonder how she got that way.

The plumber estimated that to turn my bathroom into a real bathroom it would cost $1,100, which led me to conclude that I’m sleeping with the wrong things. I should be sleeping with a plumber or, better yet, my contractor friend Roger. But I’ve always been a bad whore. I’ve never been able to “work it,” as Daniel likes to put it, or “ride the poon-tang tide,” as I like to put it. The most I can do is flirt, which doesn’t get me that far (though it does get me out of speeding tickets sometimes).

Lary is really handy when it comes to home repair, but he’s impervious to my flirting. I’ve left twenty-eight messages on his answering machine begging him to help, all beginning with endearments like, “Hey, you worthless stain on the butt end of the world” or “Hey, you turd-encrusted puckered poohole,” because to Lary that is flirting. But for ten years he’s been helping me fix things, and now he probably figures it’s time to pass on the home-repair hammer. Lary doesn’t even protect me anymore from the festering nest of big-butted spiders that live in the holly tree by my driveway. At night, when the spiders weave a giant web right in front of my car door and wait there for me like a dozen evil eight-legged Buddhas, I have to create a clear path for myself by flailing my arms around like Michael Stipe in that “Losing My Religion” video, sending web pieces and spider asses everywhere.
I am my own Sir Galahad
, I sigh to myself. That pleases me pretty much, and for a while I forget that in a few days I’ll have to wash my hair with a garden hose.

Fixing up my old new house

Jesus
God, what do you have to do to get people to help you around here? I mean, there I was, my muscles so sore it was agony just to go about my daily routine of wallowing on the couch like a walrus with a bellyful of fish, and, like,
nobody
would massage me. I mean, God! What was I, such a snarly-haired hag with halitosis that my so-called
good friends
couldn’t make a team effort to massage my body continuously until I was able to walk again without looking like I was undergoing a nerve-gas experiment?

And talking about “good friends,” where were mine when it came time to move my huge-ass houseload of furniture from my rented apartment into my newly purchased house? Scattered, that’s where. Scattered like a batch of freshly hatched spiders the second they saw me hauling a load of empty Chiquita banana boxes back from Kroger. They knew my philosophy about banana boxes,
how they’re the absolute best score for packing all your crap when you need to move (because they’re big and have the handle holes on the sides and everything), and I estimated that the
instant
they saw me backing a truckload of those suckers up to the loading dock they started
conspiring
as a group, creating excuses to be unavailable when I was scheduled to move.

Daniel actually bolted all the way to Florida. He had to put a whole
state line
between himself and me, his friend in need. And Grant! As always, Grant had something planned with his teenage daughter. His daughter is a permanent “Get Out of Jail Free” card. He always has something conveniently planned with her every time my life requires a showing of hard labor from my friends. “She’s eighteen,” I shouted, “she can lift boxes. Get both your asses over here!” But he had to drive her to her SAT test or something, as if her future is more important than my avoiding the prospect of ruining my manicure. Honestly, can we get some priorities here?

Lary, of course, came through, but only after I left twenty-eight messages on his answering machine begging him to help: “Stop pretending like you have a life without me and call me back, you booger-eating retard!” Finally my heavy flirting paid off and Lary showed up at my door with a hand truck.

This is the third time Lary has helped me move, and you’d think he’d ask for a blow job or something in return, but I can’t think of anything I’ve really done for him except once, on the flight home from Amsterdam, I let him have my business-class upgrade, but that was the morning after I’d accidentally locked him out of our
pensione
all night. I mean, sure, maybe I should have been a little worried when he hadn’t shown up by 5
A.M
., and maybe I should have paid a little more attention to that shouting outside my window, but one of the last audible sentences I remember hearing him say that night was, “Hey, this place is packed with prostitutes and they’re serving Afghani hash on the menu!” So I figured he was off getting a tongue bath from Russian hookers in a Jacuzzi of bubbling
bong water or something. I mean, God, this is
Lary
we’re talking about, the blond equivalent of Kramer on
Seinfeld
. Surely he was off spending the night at a genital piercing parlor, not throwing pebbles at my window. I was wrong, he was locked out, but he still showed up at my door with a hand truck last weekend.

“Try to stay out of the way,” he said.

“Sure,” I replied. “What are friends for?”