Chicken (4 page)

 

A
HUGE BILLBOARD
of the Marlboro Man roping a cow while sucking on a cigarette looms over the Hollywood Employment Agency on Sunset Boulevard. Sunny told me to show up in my grunt T with my nuthugging elephantbells at three o'clock on yet another perfect California Tuesday. I didn't know it at the time, but Frannie was a test for me, and this is my reward: an invitation to the Show.

I walk through the door marked
HOLLYWOOD EMPLOYMENT AGENCY
. It's a plain brown wrapper of an office, generic as a can of
BEANS
with beans printed on it. There's no art on the walls of clowns or sailboats or a kitty hanging from a limb by his paws with
HANG IN THERE
! written under it; no Muzak
Sound of Music
; no watercooler to schmooze around; only one nearly invisible couch with one magazine on it and one desk with one phone and one secretary, who has a face you forget even as you're looking at it.

I announce myself. I'm told to sit. No one else is in the waiting area. I pick up the magazine. It's one of those women's magazines with helpful tips on how to store leftovers and quizzes to see if you're compatible with your painintheassbastard husband. I try to read it, but I can't seem to penetrate its glossy surface.

What are you doing? Get the hell out. Now. No, man, you're the loverstudguy, you're here to get the Real Money. More pussy than you can shake a stick at. This is evil. Go call your mother and tell her you want to come home. Yeah, right. She told you to get lost, point-blank. They want to give you money for being hot. Shut the hell up and be an American.

‘What do you want me to be when I grow up?' I ask my mom when I'm four. The question takes her by surprise. She stops being a housewife and thinks about it.

‘I don't know,' she answers.

By the time she was twenty-eight my mom had four children under the age of eight to wrangle into a smooth running unit, but every day she makes a point to spend time with each of us. They hadn't invented the phrase ‘quality time,' but my mother was already spending it with her kids.

‘What do you want me to be when I grow up?' I ask my mom again, in the great tradition of four-year-olds who've asked the same question over and over and over for thousands of years.

‘I think you should do whatever makes you happy,' says my mom.

Mr Hartley has a professional tan, a gray suit, and a desk neat as an anal-retentive pin. He looks like he really could be an employment counselor. He certainly doesn't look like a chicken pimp.

‘Tell me about yourself,' says Mr Hartley.

‘Well …'

Rule number four: Say as little as possible. Just look like ya gotta big dick, boy – Sunny's voice rings in the bell jar of my head. I try to construct a well-endowed look on my face, but I'm afraid I look more constipated than hung.

‘… I go to Immaculate Heart College, and I'm a soccer player.'

That's as close to large-penised as I can get.

Mr Hartley nods his head and studies me like I'm a Negro buck for sale at a slave auction. I'm surprised he doesn't put his hands in my mouth and examine my teeth. But I don't resent being evaluated like a slab of beef; I take it as a challenge to prove I'm prime cut.

‘I just want to assure you … that I'm extremely enthusiastic about working.' I lean in and smile as I imagine having sex with
Mr Hartley's wife, and doing it better than him. ‘And I will do an excellent job.'

Mr Hartley's caught off guard for a second, and I can see he's the kind of guy who probably isn't very good at sex. Odd that he'd find this job for himself. But the power in the room has shifted, and I have it.

‘Are there … any things you're … uncomfortable with? For example, will you … work with men?'

Hmm. Maybe he thinks I was flirting with him. I imagine myself with a man in my mouth. Being in a man's mouth. I'm uncomfortable.

‘Well, actually, I'm not really interested in working with men,' I say.

‘Are you sure? Because I can get you a lot of work with men, and you wouldn't have to do anything except let them pleasure you.'

Pleasure me? Doesn't sound like pleasure to me. Makes me want to fly the chicken coop.

‘Hey, if you're not comfortable with that, no problem. Our policy is very strict; we don't ask anyone to do anything they're not comfortable with. We've found our clients and our customers are served better this way. So tell me what you're comfortable with.'

What sexual acts am I willing to perform for money that will keep me in my comfort zone? The voice that's never wrong is screaming at me to walk and never look back. But I can't move. My brain and my legs are playing tug-of-war and my brain is winning.

‘I guess the only thing I'm not comfortable with is men,' somehow comes out of me.

Once I accept the fact that I'm willing to have sex for money, basically everything becomes possible, except that which is not a possibility. And the only thing that seems impossible is having some man sexing me.

‘Okay, here's how it works.' Mr Hartley's all smoothed out, his engine purring. ‘We give you a pager. We ask that you keep the pager on you at all times, because this is a first-come, first-served
business.' He smiles, proud of his little joke. ‘When we page you, we ask that you call us back immediately. Sometimes the job'll be right away; sometimes you'll get up to a week's notice. When you call in, we give you a time, an address, a contact, a dollar amount, and any unusual details you need to know. Once you accept a job, you must perform the job. We're very strict on this point. If you accept a job and do not perform the job, you will not be called again. No drugs, no alcohol. You'll be paid in cash; the customer pays us separately. If you make arrangements with the customer for another date, you must inform us. Failure to do so will result in being immediately dropped from our client list. Is all this clear? Do you have any questions?'

I think for a minute.

‘I have one question,' I say. ‘When do I start?'

When I'm seven I enter an essay contest. The subject is ‘Why I Love America.'

Here's what I write:

‘I love America because she is the greatest country on Earth. In America you can do anything you want if you respect the law. President Johnson is a great president. Governor Wallace is a great governor and I respect him very much. I love America because everyone is free to respect one another, and any man can be the president. I respect my teachers and my parents. And I respect Alabama. And I love her, too.'

Now
there's
a guy who looks like he has a huge penis. That's a look I need to cultivate, all full of I-don't-give-a-damn and look-how-big-I-am. As the secretary gives me a pager, I study the guy waiting in the waiting area of the Hollywood Employment Agency. Tight black hair, tight black skin, tight black T, tight black pants, tight black eyes. When I catch his eye I smile. He does not smile back. I make a mental note not to smile so much,
because when you don't smile it makes you look like your penis is bigger.

At first the guy seems old. Hard to say how old really. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. They're all the same age to me. The only other age I'm aware of is Really Old, and that's anyone who's about to keel over dead. But as I study him out of the corner of my eye, I realize he's not old. He's actually about my age. His oldness is coming from the inside.

‘Mr. Hartley will see you now,' the secretary says to him. She does not smile. He does not smile. I must stop smiling.

I watch myself studying this manchild, who must certainly be a black boy prostitute. When he stands up I'm aware for the first time that this old young fellow is at least a head taller than me. It may be my imagination, but I swear I can see his knob outlined through the too-tight pants, and I'm simultaneously filled with shock and envy.

As I watch him smooth past me with that beautiful Superfly strut, I realize I need to be like him. So easy and so hard, so hungry and so full, so hot and so cool.

I see now that my former strut was wholly inadequate. So as I walk out of the Hollywood Employment Agency, I strut a whole new strut, a pumped-up teenboy with a rocket in my pocket and a lump of coal in my chickenheart.

I'm three, and much excitement grips our house, because Guests are coming over tonight. My little brother and I are dressed up in our white starchy collary shirts, blue suspenders, clip-on ties, short knee pants, wee white kneesocks. Our hairs are combed, our faces washed, and our shoes nice and neat. My mom's hair is bigger than usual, psoriasis torching on her elbows like roadside flares at an accident. My dad's joking a mile a minute, smoke roaring from his crew cut like the factory in his head's working overtime.

I've memorized
The Music Man
. I don't know why, I just have. And now it's my turn to get up and sing it for the Guests,
their big faces flooding me with warm wet heat as I sing and dance.

‘Ya got trouble, folks, right here in River City with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool—'

Word for word, note for note, just like on the record, all three-year-old Yankee Doodle Dandy, while the enormous Guests cheer, laugh, and clap, and my mom and dad shine at me in the hot spotlight of America.

I sit in Existentialism class trying to listen to Sister Tiffany explain how we're free to make our lives whatever we want them to be. She's schooling us on the myth of Sisyphus. Apparently Sisyphus did some heinous shit to the gods, so he got sentenced to pushing a big huge rock up a big huge mountain, every day for the rest of his life. Only when Sisyphus embraces the rock, becomes the rock, does this futile, pointless, punishing task become his joy.

At seventeen, I love thinking about all this. I'm bound and determined to find the joy inside my misery. But today I'm having real trouble focusing. All I can feel is that pager in my pocket, big as a garage-door opener, resting on my thigh like an invitation to hell. I want it to buzz. I hope it never buzzes.

Sister Tiffany brings me back. Incredible mind this nunbabe has: deep honest funny. No wonder the Catholic church gave her the heave-ho.

Am
I free to make my life whatever I want it to be? I feel trapped between my cock and a hard place, waiting for a date that I desperately need and feverishly fear.

Then I stare at Kristy. It helps to stare at Kristy. Kristy's small, with a little nose slotted between two big blue eyes blazing under waving brown hair. When I look at her I think, ‘Hey, maybe I am free after all.' I tail her out of Existentialism class. She smiled at me once during class in a way I was sure meant she wanted to have sex with me. Then again, I'm beginning to think everyone wants to have sex with me.

She sits on the green lawn, throws her head back, and basks in the Hollywood sun like she's in an Impressionist painting. Maybe I can make her fall in love with me. Maybe I can move in with her. She can introduce me to her folks. I can help her have a woman's orgasm.

I stop. Breathe. If I can do this maybe I can plug up some of the holes, stop the bleeding, right the ship. As much as I needed that bucket of chicken in the Dumpster, that's how hungry I am for Kristy.

Next thing I know I'm standing over her, trying to look like a loverstudguy and not some scared-to-death dink. I smile inside my mind. Here I am, a professional sex muffin, terrified by this girl Kristy.

Suddenly she realizes someone's standing over her, staring, and when she opens her eyes she recognizes me.

A huge long instant follows in which it's unclear whether Kristy wants me, or wants me to piss off. And she seems to be enjoying it.

‘Hi …'

Kristy finally smiles.

‘Hi …'

I smile.

‘How's it goin'?' she asks.

‘I'm feeling incredibly existential.' This is the first interaction I've had with a woman in a while that didn't involve a nun or a money-for-sex exchange.

‘Yeah, those nuns'll kick yer ass.' She grins.

‘Well, if I have to get my ass kicked, I want it kicked by a nun,' I say as I sit. This feels natural. I'm not thinking about my ass. Or my pager. Or my mom.

‘I'm just waiting for one of 'em to actually fly into class. I'd convert right then and there, I swear to God.' Kristy's definitely putting some flirty spin on the ball.

‘I don't think they can actually fly without the whole wimple thing,' I spin right back.

‘Yeah, I think it's an aerodynamic hand-of-God situation.' Kristy's so adorable. So normal. So not a freak like me.

I now move directly into the minefield in my mind. What do I do? Ask her if she wants a date? Tell her I'll give her a student discount? Suddenly this fun, sun-filled meeting of a boy and a girl becomes a war zone, and I'm staring into the barrel of my own gun. I'm stuck, struck dumb. I feel the pager cold and hard, and hear its call of the wild. I want to move into Kristy's life and bury myself there. I try to smile. It doesn't work. Then I remember I'm trying not to smile.

‘I gotta … you know … go …'

Even as it comes out of my mouth, I know it sounds weird and evasive and not at all the sort of thing that makes a girl fall in love with a boy. I want to buy her a hot chocolate, get her a puppy, tell her who I am. I want to do anything except what I'm about to do, which is run away from this nice normal smart funny loving American girl. I finger my pager, turn my back, and walk away from Kristy.