Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (9 page)

I’d
been in Isla Mujeres for five days, and I was starting to turn into one of those human barnacles whose only goal is to make my own hats and go barefoot year round. I wanted to lie on the beach with a bottomless margarita in my hand, communicating only by scratching into the sand important messages like “Extra pineapple, please,” with no concern more dire than my diminishing supply of ointment.

I’ve worked hard to acquire this ability to blow off responsibility. I was really bad at it in the beginning: bringing my laptop along and spending four bucks a minute to return phone calls. But eventually I came around to sleeping until noon like Grant and the rest of the island expatriates, and converging at sunset for tropical cocktails at the tiki bar, with my body the color of old boat planks and wearing whatever had stuck to me from the floor when I rolled out of bed that day. And I would think to myself,
God! Life isn’t passing me by! This
is
the life! Why work? Why suffocate yourself with your safety net?
Why bear the flapping big albatross of petty obligations? Why freak out over a bunch of crap you can’t help?
“Bartender, another margarita, please!”

It was a bummer that they expected you to pay for those drinks—with money, not the fistful of soggy flotsam you pulled out of your pocket. I suppose I could formalize this life by moving to Isla Mujeres and getting a job, but my only island-type talent is sitting at the bar and begging for scraps at the bottom of the blender every time the bartender mixed a pitcher of piña coladas.

I couldn’t go into island retail, because I’d already pissed off all the shop owners by being a bitchy tourist. “Excuse me,” I once said to the clerk at a Cancún T-shirt shop called “T-shirt World” (or whatever), “but do you sell T-shirts here? I mean, I know you
have
T-shirts here, but I was wondering if you
sell
them, since I’ve been standing here for a good forty-five seconds and you haven’t waited on me. So I thought maybe this was a T-shirt museum or something, and all these T-shirts are just on display rather than actually for sale. Am I wrong?” So you see how I can’t exactly go back to these places and beg for work.

At Isla Mujeres

But I did catch what passed as a performance at one of the island’s finer hotels. It was a fire-eating guy in a loincloth. Well, he didn’t actually
eat
fire, he just spit it out. Well, he didn’t actually spit it out, he just sort of held a torch to his lips and spit lighter fluid into it, which caused a cloud of flames to seemingly burst forth from his face.

The important part is not his technique, but the fact that I was certain I could master it.
This
could be my ticket to a lifetime of island bliss. Imagine, I don’t have to swallow the fire, just spit it out. I can do that! Spitting, rather than swallowing, has always been my forte. The downside to life as a fire eater is not insurmountable. For
example, I’ve never been that attached to my eyebrows, and eyelashes are replaceable (heard of Max Factor?). And I’m already so sunburned my face looks like an old car seat, so what further harm could occur by immersing it in flames every Friday night? And with all the booze I’ve been swilling lately, a mouthful of lighter fluid would feel downright familiar! I can leave Atlanta, stop frying my soul, and move to the Caribbean and start frying my flesh. Who said happiness comes at a high price?

That was my mind-set when my plane landed back at Hartsfield after my trip. My plan was to go home, stuff my cats in a sack, and head straight back to the airport. But then I checked my messages, which included a few from editors with interesting assignments, and before I knew it, I was working again. It’s the story of my life: I keep meaning to permanently fall off the face of the earth, but I just can’t get around to it.

Isla Mujeres

I
love big lesbians. I’d be one myself if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not gay—not that I don’t try to fake it occasionally. I French kissed my incredibly hot friend Mary at a raucous bachelorette party almost two years ago. “Look at me, I’m
gay
!” I gleefully told Grant.

“You are not gay,” said Grant, who was also drunk. To illustrate his point he grabbed Mary and planted a passionate kiss on her himself, his big slippery lips flopping over her face like two wet tentacles. “There, I just tongued her whole head, that doesn’t make me straight.”

“Get your hands off my girlfriend,” I slurred, but Mary, who is straight, had already wandered off and was making out with Kevin, himself a hunky morsel whom Grant and I had both agreed would make a nice human chew toy. Watching them I had a wistful thought.
If I were a real lesbian, just think of all the
guys
I could turn on!

Right there is why fake lesbians like me probably piss the hell out of real ones, because surely the last thing on a real lesbian’s list of priorities is to get a
guy
off. But pretending there’s some possible chick-on-chick action in the wings has always been a straight girl’s reliable standby to get a guy’s attention…and if that doesn’t work then he’s probably gay.

I thought Lary was gay when I first met him. His face was a little too chiseled, his hair a little too blond, and his waist a little too thin not to spell f-l-a-m-e-r. As my friend Jim Hackler says, “If his waist is under thirty-four, but he is not, then he’s probably gay.” But then I visited Lary’s home, basically a renovated alleyway boasting little more than a bed and art supplies surrounding a bog of live mosquito larvae, and I determined that a gay man would rather rip out his own eyes with a rusty fondue fork than spend one night in that place. I myself stayed there once while Lary was on vacation, and his mattress felt like it was stuffed with bags of open switchblades. It almost renewed my suspicions that he might be gay, since his furnishings were obviously a ploy to ensure women wouldn’t overstay their welcome, but since then he’s upgraded the place to the point where it’s almost comfortable, and I hear the spiders have all been corralled into one corner.

Now Grant, even though he was an “acting” straight man when I met him, wasn’t fooling anybody. I saw a video of the wedding reception that followed his second marriage, shot only a short time before we became friends, and I had to lie down because I was laughing so hard. In the video, he had impeccable curly hair cut in an asymmetrical flip, two-toned shoes, and he breezed through the crowd with his hips swinging like saloon doors, offering appetizers from a plate. “What a fucking
fairy!
” I squealed, pointing at the screen. “I don’t know how this is possible, but you were more gay when you were
straight!
”

In the video his daughter twirled in the foyer of the reception area, watching the hem of her velvet dress balloon outward at her knees. She looked like a perfect little buttercup, and she had Grant’s
smile—such a big smile for a little girl. But she’s not little anymore. She’s the reason Grant returned from Mexico.

As I said, Grant had waited until the day after his daughter graduated from high school before he made his early retirement on that island. He had spent the afternoons sleeping on a hammock overlooking the bright blue ocean, which was more like a big turquoise pond, really, with tiny warm waves that lapped at his toes like a litter of liquid puppies. It was perfect, that ocean and that life, and its succession of caramel-colored young Latin lovers. No man on earth could have brought him back here, so the job fell to a young woman.

“I was so naive to think I could leave after she turned eighteen,” Grant admitted. So he’s back in Atlanta, where his daughter needs him now more than ever, having hooked up with an unsavory boyfriend who is trying to talk her into signing her paychecks over to him. When Grant was fresh off the plane, his tan hadn’t faded and his sun-bleached hair was still coiled on his head like bright hay. He was even wearing shorts in the fifty-degree Georgia weather, a testimony to the fact that he’d been torn prematurely from his Caribbean paradise. I beamed with selfish bliss when he came back, and couldn’t help myself from taunting him, “Grant loves a woman. Grant loves a woman,” in singsong. To shut me up, he would get me in a headlock and rub his lips all over my face.

Grant
and Daniel have pissed off God again. They’ve opened a retro-furniture store and art gallery across from a church on Charles Allen and called it “Sister Louisa’s Worldly Possessions in the Church of the Living Room.” They are selling porn-theme evangelical paintings created by a fake nun who lives in a beat-up Airstream outside Baton Rouge. The minister from the church across the street keeps coming over and telling them they’re going to Hell, but they are fearless. Especially Grant. I, personally, am not fearless, though it’s seldom in life that I actually scream—I mean the blood-curdling kind that makes your neighbors think you’re getting murdered. Actual screaming is reserved for when spiders land on my face, which has yet to happen, or for times like the one when Grant showed me a crusty jar of tobacco-colored loose human teeth.

“Look what I found in the crack house,” laughed Grant as he reached into the backseat of his truck. I don’t know what I expected,
since the fact that he bought the house in the first place—it’s an actual crack house that he swears he can renovate—has taught me never to underestimate his ability to surprise people. “Can you believe this?” said Grant, pulling the jar from a satchel and shaking it near my face. When I registered what was in the jar—thirty or so human teeth, their roots winding upward like calcified worms—out came the scream. It was quite a long, loud scream, and had it been recorded, John Carpenter might have paid handsomely for its use as a sound effect. I knew the bathroom in which the teeth had rested before Grant exhumed them out of the mirrored medicine cabinet. The cabinet had been ripped out of the wall and laid flat to serve as some kind of drug caddy, judging from the razor blades and residual narcotics left on the surface. The bathroom was dark with bloody tissues strewn about, and I’m glad I didn’t find the teeth. Grant, on the other hand, always looks in places other people don’t. As I said, he is fearless.

Daniel outside Sister Louisa’s

Grant outside Sister Louisa’s

Consider this: The first time I walked into Grant Henry’s new crack-house home, there was a pile of human shit in the living room. I hadn’t noticed it at first, because there were other things demanding my attention, like the feeling that I was harming myself just by breathing the air in there. But
Grant pointed out the feces to me when he had a free moment in his negotiations with the previous owner, a man who had once tried to donate the house to Habitat for Humanity, who had rejected his offer. The man literally could not
give
this house away, but Grant, notorious Atlanta used-furniture dealer and self-appointed pastor of the Church of the Living Room that he was, was not going to let a little shit get in the way when he saw something worth resurrecting. He bought the place (strewn crack lighters, crap, and all) for ten thousand dollars, three thousand more than the price the man had requested.

With an original Sister Louisa roadside sign

“Honey, it’s
fabulous
,” Grant said of his new home in Peoplestown as he drove Daniel and me back to his car. The chef at the Roman Lilly Café had lent us her ’59 Ford Fairlane because Grant had forgotten not to drive his nice car to brunch that day, and he didn’t want to park a new BMW convertible in front of a crack house (even though, soon afterward, he sold the BMW and re-adopted his truck after having to pass on picking up a discarded pie closet from the side of the road because it wouldn’t fit into the BMW’s front seat). Fabulous? I wondered. I reminded him that, in addition to the pile of shit, there was bloody toilet paper, rusty razor blades, and what looked to be lice-ridden sleeping bags littered throughout the house. There were holes as big as beds rotted through the wooden floors, every single window was broken, and it looked like homeless people had lit several campfires in what would be the bedroom if the house had had a conventional floor plan. Instead it was a three-room shotgun shack with no hallways, closets, cupboards, or even kitchen-counter space.

“Give me three months,” Grant said with certainty. “Three months, honey, and this new place will be
fabulous
.”

Daniel rode in the backseat. “Hollis,” he assured me, “when Grant bought his last house its condition was as bad, if not worse than this place. There was a dead chicken in a plastic bag nailed to the front door.”

“That’s right.” Grant nodded. He had just sold that house in East Atlanta for a $110,000 profit and had thrown a party to celebrate. He had owned the place for less than two years and had trained the local miscreants to stay off his property by sounding the alarm every time he saw them set foot on his lawn. But at least that place had space. This little crack house he just bought was the size of a single-wide trailer, and it didn’t help that Daniel was suggesting Grant throw another party in his new place, with invitations specifying that everybody bring their own Clorox.

Grant shook his head at our consternation and flashed us his smile that’s the size of a solar eclipse. “Honey, honey, honey,” he admonished us, “you gotta have vision.”