Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (29 page)

I
wondered why my kitchen smells like cocaine. I was sniffing the air in there once, thinking, “What is that,
narcotics
?” when Daniel told me I should clean something while I’m at it. But I don’t want to disrupt the comingling of different states of decay that had randomly come together to create this bouquet. I like how it reminds me of college.

Because that’s how it is with smells, and this place is a total bog of odors. Not only has the room that serves as my office smelled funny since the day I moved in—like shedded skin, I would think, or the car seat of an old German cab driver—but it’s got this mystery moisture that steams the place up every once in a while. It attacks my supply of office stationery and seals all the envelopes. I wonder if this weird atmospheric effect could be caused by a decomposing dead body in the boarded-up fireplace, because the police never did recover the rest of the torso to match that severed human head. And I can’t think of a worthy reason to wall up a perfectly good fireplace
other than to create a tomb for human remains. I thought about tearing down the wall to uncover the fireplace—because fireplaces do wonders for property value—but I decided to let it rest. Maybe the smell will go away.

I prefer smells that remind me of stuff. For example, I love the smell of clean concrete because it reminds me of the cinder-block bathroom at the Via Paraiso Park in Monterey, California, where I got bit on the nose by a bulldog when I was five years old. I remember I had to remain perfectly still—crouched on all fours, with a bulldog on the end of my nose—until he finally relaxed his jaws and let me go. I like to say that’s why I have a big nose to this day, but the truth is I was born with it, and that’s probably what attracted the dog in the first place—maybe he thought it was a sausage. Another time, I went to the park and found the trees clustered with monarch butterflies. My sisters and I plucked them off the trunks and put them in our hair. We walked around with our heads all aflutter, like sweet little Medusas. Whenever I smell clean concrete I think of monarch butterflies and bulldogs kind enough to let me keep my nose. Not a bad trade, since it’s a common enough aroma.

So is the mothball smell in my closets. I need that smell in my life. It reminds me of a trip I took with my mother to Palo Alto when I was six to visit her aging friend, who embroidered doilies and kept a supply of yarn covered in mothballs in her cabinets. The smell made my eyes melt sometimes. One day the three of us went to a restaurant with a hundred cuckoo clocks that all chimed madly every hour. We stayed there all afternoon so I could catch the show over and over, and the waitress didn’t even seem that irritated with us for taking up her table. “I promise I’ll bring you back,” my mother had said. I never saw the place again, but every time I open my closet, I am brought back.

Considering
my neighborhood, it’s almost alarming that, in my entire time there, I’ve only come across two corpses in the street. The second was that poor boy, or really I just saw his legs and arms…and the blood. Christ, I should have paid more attention to details.

When I saw my first street corpse, the police were already there. They had covered the woman, who had been hit by a car as she crossed the road, and she lay where she was struck, in the center of the street, and I remember her bare foot sticking out from under the sheet. And groceries. She must have been walking home after shopping.

The memory of her bare foot always reminded me of an Argentine pervert my older sister secretly wed years ago. His name was or was not Ricardo, and he was a pimp and a thief, but amazingly he had an oily charm, and, God, could he tell a story. He kept us up half the night one time, telling us about a dangerous strip of road in rural
Argentina known for hellacious auto accidents, and every time the police pulled the bodies out of the wreckage either the left foot or both feet—but
especially
the left foot—of the dead person would be bare.

Ricardo went into such
detail
, describing how even sturdy construction boots could be found on the floors of trucks, still tightly laced but somehow separated from the left foot when the coroner sometimes needed two assistants to pull the other ones off at the morgue. The locals believed the victims lost their shoes because they couldn’t take their first step into the kingdom of heaven with a covered foot. “There are hundreds of old shoes along that road,” Ricardo said in his hushed Latin accent, “from having flown off the feet of the dead.”

That’s the detail of the dead woman I always remember: her bare left foot, along with packets of Top Ramen and a torn box of cat food strewn about as plastic bags danced in the wind of passing cars. I always think how, when she left the house that day, the last thing on that woman’s mind must have been the possibility of dying on the pavement with dried noodles crowning her head. Maybe if she had paid more attention to detail, like the oncoming car, she would have made it home to feed her cat.

But as I said, the police were already there, so I was not needed in that scenario. The boy is a different story. His blood was so robustly red, practically the color of blackberries, so I could almost understand why Lary mistook it for a melted Popsicle when I brought him there later that day. The boy was gone but his blood was still there.

“He was
dead!
” I shriek. Jesus! I hate how Lary always questions me.

“How could you tell?”

“I could just
tell!
”

It was in the details, even though I wish I had paid more attention to them. When I called the police to report a dead boy on the sidewalk down the street they needed all kinds of details,
sensible
details I didn’t remember, such as the address in front of which the body lay, the number of people surrounding him, their genders and what they were wearing.

“Are you sure he was dead?” the officer asked.

“I’m sure.”

“How could you tell?”

I could tell by the blood, there was so
much
of it. It was young blood, the color of blackberries. My own is practically the color of marmalade, but it always has been. You could look at a picture of me when I was nine and see that I had the weight of the ages in my eyes. I could tell by the sheet covering the boy’s body, and the face of the woman who placed it there, that the boy was dead. Her expression was one of utter frustration, a reaction to witnessing an act of unfathomable waste. “Here was a perfectly good human,” her face was saying, “and someone had to go and wreck him.”

I continued to recite details, remembering that the boy was face up under the sheet, that his arms were outstretched with palms skyward, that the cuffs of his trousers were rolled, that the blood stain on the sidewalk was in the shape of a map of Australia, that the bed-sheet covering him had pink pinstripes and light blue piping along the hem. They were trivial particulars, but it seemed important to honor them at the time so that this boy’s dying on the sidewalk surrounded by strangers wouldn’t be—in my life at least—a minor detail.

“Anything else?” asked the officer when my voice finally trailed off.

Silence. “No,” I surrendered. “There is nothing else.”

God
, I can’t keep from thinking about those notorious missing torsos in my neighborhood. I don’t think they ever uncovered the missing pieces to match the found pieces, let alone figure out who the pieces once belonged to, or for that matter—and probably most important—who was responsible for separating the pieces from their other pieces to begin with.

Today I waved like a parade-float prop as I drove past the crack dealers who hang out down the street. They no longer try to intimidate me with menacing glares meant to make my hand dart for the autolock on the door panel. They know I’m their neighbor, and that my doors were locked long before I even backed out of the driveway. Like it or not, I’ve stumbled into a home here, guarded by an incontinent pit bull, who will promptly pee on you if you try to burgle us.

But no one has tried to burgle me, and if they did they wouldn’t
garner much booty because the most valuable item in here is my velvet Elvis collection, which I hear can command double figures on eBay, especially the “crying” Elvis with a shirt collar the size of old Cadillac fenders. I figure I’ve escaped break-ins because—barring the crack dealers, addicts, and whores—I have tons of other nice neighbors here, and after months of deliberation I’m definitely, without a doubt, just about practically almost certain that none of them are responsible for the cut up body pieces the police found before I moved in, or for the torsos still to be stumbled upon that are probably just bones by now anyway.

Grant and Lary really liked the new place, and claimed I would never be happy because I’m never not longing for something. But I am happy, sometimes. Truly. The other day at dusk we sat in my backyard, and on weeknights the air is always full of the smell of fresh cake from the Nabisco factory nearby. There are tiki torches in my backyard now, and a new fence, which keeps Cookie from escaping to pee on the drug dealers down the street. Even the drug dealers down the street are scarcer these days, and my artist friend Patrick just bought a house a few doors down, which he’s fixing up fabulously. Next door, Monty and Greta were mixing strawberry daiquiris and waving us over from their kitchen window.
God
, I thought,
this place is so nice. This place is practically perfect
. And then I remembered what was missing. It’s the torsos. The unfound torsos. To me they will always be out there, waiting to be stumbled over in the dark.

When
I was little, my mother would come home from a day devising weapons, pull together a tamale pie for us kids, and then be off in time to catch the night cosmetology classes at the local community college. She practiced makeup application on my sisters and me, and I was the only girl in fourth grade who wore textured false eyelashes. The notes my teachers sent home made my mother laugh. She never became a cosmetologist, but she did move to Switzerland to construct a missile-tracking strategy.

My usual M.O. for Mother’s Day—renting a truckload of animated Disney movies that induce a mental enema—is already failing me. I might have lost my ability to lose myself in fantasy, which is tragic, because I believe it’s essential to maintain a fantasy of some kind throughout your life. My mother’s fantasy was that she would survive liver cancer, and she held on to it until one day in a Tijuana
cancer clinic years ago. The moment she lost it is the memory that’s been tormenting me lately.

When we were really young, my two sisters and I were goofing around with my mother in front of the bathroom mirror, but we quit laughing when she suddenly exclaimed, “You’re all so pretty, and I’m so ugly.” Of course my mother was not ugly. It must have been one of those intermittent moments women have as they lose their youth, the kind of moments I have now. Maybe it’s a lapse in fantasy, where we imagine ourselves to be as youthful as we’ve always felt, and then we have that certainty shattered temporarily, perhaps when presented with three supple replicas of your youth laughing up at you in the bathroom mirror.

When she arrived at the Mexican clinic, where, for five thousand dollars a day, Haitian doctors administered a cancer treatment unapproved by the United States, my mother was so close to death that she literally looked like a corpse, except for the sounds of her laborious breathing. On one of her better days, my sister Kim and I rigged a wheelchair to take her outside, but the excursion was awkward because the clinic was surrounded by unleveled concrete slabs. Another problem, as I remember vividly, was that the outside of the clinic was literally walled with two-way mirrors.

We were facing the clinic, trying to maneuver over the cumbersome paving, when I looked up to see my mother watching herself in the reflection of the building. Her deterioration had been rapid since she had last seen herself. She was bald, and the definition of her skull showed sharply through her thin, blistered skin. Because of her failing liver, her flesh was a pronounced yellow. Deep wrinkles lined her lips like stitching on a baseball seam. Her eyes were sunken and incandescently jaundiced. This is the precise mental Polaroid that continues to haunt me. Not just my mother’s face, but the entire reflection in the panel of two-way mirrors. My sister and I, young and robust, were caught once
again in the same reflection as my mother, who was watching herself with a defeated lucidity. That was exactly the moment at which she lost her fantasy of surviving. It is an almost unbearable memory.

“Take me inside,” she said. Silently, we did.