Chicken (7 page)

You'd never guess it, but this is even more suffocating than smothering under Georgia.

Change the record, boy.

Two-fifty, more if I can just keep my shit together, for cleaning naked? Are you kidding me? Shut the hell up and vacuum.

See … the thing is, Kristy … I get paid to dress up in women's clothing and do domestic chores while my clients make mad crazy samesex love.

Focus. The big badass vacuum cleaner is state-of-the-art and has
that jet engine right-before-takeoff sound. Makes me wish there was some dirt on the carpet to clean.

‘Tell the boy to stop vacuuming, Baby. Tell him to turn around and show us his ass,' says Sweety.

‘Stop vacuuming, boy,' says Baby. ‘Turn around and show us your ass.'

I turn off the vacuum cleaner. I turn around. I show them my ass. I'm breathing, I'm not looking, but my clams are getting sweaty. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Fifty more if I'm a good boy.

I listen as they make their gaspy, slurpy, sex breath sounds. It's kind of like listening to a kinky radio play with smell-o-rama.

‘Tell the boy to do the dishes, Baby,' says Sweety.

‘Go do the dishes, boy,' says Baby.

Sweety whispers and Baby giggles while I watch myself walk to the sink, turn on the water, soap up a brand-new scrubby-sponge, and start to wash the big pile of squeaky clean dishes.

Then it hits me. I'm pushing that big huge rock up that big huge mountain, knowing it's just gonna roll back down again. And then tomorrow I'm going to do it all over again. I'm Sisyphus, naked in a black see-through French maid's apron.

As I hold my breath, watching through the gigantic plate-glass window, an electric bucking bronco of brightwhite lightning rides right at me, thunder booms through the universe, and I really want to have sex with somebody.

 

I'
M COOKING
for Kristy. At her house. Baby and Sweety are a stain on the other side of the pillow now. I'm grilling onions, garlic, and Italian sausage for Kristy. I'm convinced this is what it smells like in heaven. We're talking about nothing really, just easy talk, thisandthat. It's warm and tasty in Kristy's kitchen. We're drinking some fifteen-dollar-a-bottle red wine I bought with my prostitute money. I felt like such a big boy buying it, the son of immigrants making good in this brave new world of swimming pools and movie stars. And the clerk didn't even ask for an ID, which I took as a very good sign.

The fifteen-dollar wine is making it even warmer in the kitchen. I'm going to make this girl fall in love with me, even if it kills me. I can live here. And if things get a little rough, we can borrow money from her parents, or even move in with them, God forbid; if we had to, we could. Barbecuing by the pool on Sunday afternoon. Getting some fatherly advice from her old man. ‘Can I call you, Dad?' ‘Why, sure, sonny …'

Kristy's wearing a Bullwinkle T. I do a wicked Bullwinkle, so I trot it out for her, that deep dumbass nasally cartoony singsong: ‘Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Nothing up my sleeve—' (Sleeve rip) ‘Presto!'
(Rooooooar!)
‘Oops, wrong sleeve.'

Kristy lets loose a gutbusting blast of laugh that makes me believe I just might be free after all.

Candles burn. Scarves are tied around bedposts and headboard. Joan of Arc, Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Babe Didrikson are stuck on her walls hearing voices from God, fingering a guitar, moaning the blues, being the First Lady, and sinking a twenty-footer.

Ethel Merman sings on the stereo—

I come home from school to find my mother stained with tears, which rain down her white-hot face. My little six-year-old heart sinks like a fat rock as she sits me down on that vast reservoir of a couch and sobs, shoulders shaking like an earthquake's cracking her dam.

We're m-m-m-moving, to Ala-b-b-b-b-bama.

Judging by her reaction, it sounds like a very bad place to be moving. I want to make everything better. I take her wet hand. Kiss her humid cheek. I'm being the best six-year-old husband I can. And learning valuable chicken skills.

So my dad hauls us all to the dark heart of the Deep South, where he runs a factory for his explosives company. Our all-American rocketship crash-lands in Hueytown, Alabama, south of Birmingham.

I want to be an American, and in Hueytown, Alabama, circa 1965, this means being a Bear Bryant-worshiping, cross-burning, sheet-wearing, Confederacy-loving good ol' boy.

Purple flowers in a yellow vase sit on Kristy's polished mahogany dresser. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know' is calligraphed on a piece of paper stuck on her wall. John Keats, who wrote those words, died when he was twenty-six. I figure I still have a good ten years left to do something great.

I'm sitting on Kristy's bed. We're in the neighborhood of four
A.M
., and it's a very exciting neighborhood. She tells me about Marty, her German shepherd, who sleeps with her when she's home. I see myself in her parents' backyard playing fetch with Marty. Kristy tells me about her little sister Rhonda, who tried to commit suicide – only she wasn't really trying to kill herself, it was
really just a cry for help. I see myself sitting on young Rhonda's bed, earnestly helping her overcome her depression, to the eternal gratitude of her adoring parents.

I feel like I could sit on Kristy's bed for the rest of my life listening to her talk. And she asks about my stories, so I tell her some of them, and she laughs in all the right places.

Then Kristy tells me she's tired. I don't move a muscle. She's gonna have to call AAA and have me towed out of there.

‘So, uh … you wanna crash here?'

She's trying to sound real casual, but she doesn't sound nearly as casual as she wants to.

‘Sure,' I whatever, pinwheels turning cartwheels in my head.

Then Kristy disappears into the bathroom while I honeymoon swoon on her bed.

How very different from the last two times I crashed. With Sunny. With the tall man in the
SEXY
shirt. I see myself driving back up the hills very quietly, breaking into Baby and Sweety's house dressed in a Richard Nixon mask, and wreaking my furious vengeance upon them.

Over sixty percent of sexual abuse survivors go on to abuse someone themselves. Over ninety percent of sex workers have been sexually abused.

I shake my head. Let out some air. Maybe I really can leave all this chickenshit behind. I don't have to do it if I don't want to. I'm here now, aren't I?

Crashing with Kristy.

In the George Wallace Elementary School yard, trying not to look like my eight-year-old new-boy hands are two sizes too big, I wait for the morning bell with gobs of grade-schoolers in little Alabaman cliques, surrounded on the wallflower fringes by the fat, the hopeless, and the future millionaires.

‘Where'd you get that sweater?' somebody asks Jordan Baylor, my cool cracker classmate.

‘Stoled it awffa dead nigger,' he drawls.

Everyone laughs.

‘It's not nice to call black people niggers,' I say without thinking.

‘What are you, a nigger lover? Hey, nigger lover!' Jordan Baylor, the cool kid, turns on me, hissing in that Ku Klux Klan youth way.

‘Hey, nigger lover!'

Everyone yells—

‘NIGGER LOVER!!! NIGGER LOVER!!!'

Someone spits on me. Everyone laughs again.

I'm ashamed that I repeated what my mom told me, embarrassed and exposed as a One-of-Them. But my upper lip is trained British stiff and never quivers.

The bell rings, and everyone buzzes off into George Wallace Elementary School. I wipe the spit off. It's cold and slimy.

The next time someone asks me where I got something, I say, ‘Stoled it awffa dead nigger.'

And everyone laughs.

‘Wanna crash on the couch … or in here?' Kristy's light as meringue.

What kind of a question is that?

‘I'll crash here, but I'm warning you, no funny business.' I get the laugh. One thing about being a chicken, it makes you cool in the fray.

‘That's too bad.' She gives me half a smirk. ‘I was gonna break out the scuba gear and the chaps.'

I don't volunteer that I was recently in a see-through French maid's apron situation.

Kristy wears a flannelly nightie, soft as babies, and smells of soap, lotion, and a woman's orgasm. No toxic-waste-dump smell here.

My shoes and socks are off, but my nuthugging elephantbells
and my skintight Malcolm X T are still on. She's under her yellow lamby comforter and ivory sweet sheets.

I slip under with her, and oh, it's good, baking in all that warm essence of Kristy.

‘Spoon?' I whisper.

Kristy turns her back and snuggles into me. I put my arm around her middle, fit my nooks into her crannies, and my crannies into her nooks. She puts her hand on my hand on her flat belly, and I dive into the smell of her hair. This is almost better than sex.

Almost.

I try not to move. I breathe. Be still. I want to be still, so I can soak it all in, but the gravitational pull of her womb is sucking me like the tide toward her moon.

Then, through no effort on my part, I feel myself begin to inflate, until I'm stiff as a wooden Indian. Still I don't move, waiting, enjoying this kid-on-Christmas-morning feeling, separated from Kristy by one thin layer of nuthugging elephantbells and a little nightie.

Then Kristy wiggles. Not much, mind you, but it's a clear wiggle, followed by a wrapping and a squeezing.

Well, that was that, and Katie, bar the door.

Hands are on skin, T is stripped off, nuthuggers are slid out of, and after many sweet deep kisses, I'm eye to eye with the pungent glory of Kristy.

I breathe her in. I breathe her out.

In. Out. In. Out.

No chemicals here. No cigarettes, no booze, no abuse. Kristy smells like life itself. I'm lovedrunk, the tip of my tongue hardwired into her sweet center.

This is so different from working sex. That's dank dark distant and mechanical, and I have to pump myself up into a loverstudguy to do it.

Here, now, when Kristy finally lets go all over me, I feel at one with the universe. I move up the bed and take her in my arms. I
don't even care if I have intercourse with her. I want to move in with her.

And now that she knows just how good I am, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm having that barbecue with her parents, and throwing a bone to Marty.

 

‘Y
OU'RE NOT GONNA BELIEVE
the shit that miserable painintheassbastard husband of mine's trying to pull. He's trying to hire his little chippy. Executive assistant – ha! Executive cocksucker more like it. If I didn't have a prenup I'd divorce that miserable prick so fast it'd make his balls spin.'

Same time. Same channel. Next week. Georgia's still smoking, this time in a loose puce housedressy thing and flat black shoes.

There was no hello from Georgia. She keeps watching me, but she hasn't looked in my eyes yet, like I'm a male Medusa lovemonster you must avert your eyes from, lest you turn into a pillar of salt or stone.

As Georgia yammers, I have a flash of waking up in Kristy's bed the morning after our crashing. Suddenly the scarves looked pretentious, the pictures on the wall schoolgirlie in the worst way. In fact, in the harsh light of day the room seemed like a pampered silverspoon princess room. Bet she never fried no chicken. Bet she never put on the see-through maid's uniform and scrubbed the clean dishes. Suddenly Kristy didn't seem so hot or pretty or cute. Her nose seemed a little pinched, her lips a little thin, her ass too big, and tits too small. A hair growing out of her left breast was really starting to annoy me. I wanted to get the hell out of there as bad as if she was a trick, and when Kristy offered to make me breakfast, I almost jumped out of my skintight Malcolm X T. I was trying to be coolcalmcollected about the whole thing, but my heebies were having jeebies. I told her I couldn't have breakfast cuz I had a job interview. I had to work that night, but I'd call her when I got off; maybe we could hang out.

There was no job interview. I wasn't working that night. I was
going to a party at Sunny's, a 3-D Fellini freakshow, and I was definitely not inviting Kristy.

I could feel her moving away, wondering if I'm weird damaged goods she should just cut loose now, before it's too late. Who the hell am I, anyway? Some whore. My guts tugged. Now I wanted her more than ever.

‘Hey, I had a great time last night.' I pulled her into me. I kissed her neck, my brain turning off and my body turning on. ‘You know, I was thinking, maybe
you
should be breakfast.' I snapped right into Mr Loverstudguy without even knowing it.

I fell into her bed and pulled Kristy down with me. She laughed. Now we were back on it. I kissed her lips, which were suddenly not so thin anymore, and I put my hands on her ass, which was suddenly not one bit too big. Kristy was great for breakfast. Then I pretended to make a phone call to reschedule the job interview I didn't really have, and took Kristy out to breakfast with my sexmoney. It was official. Kristy and I were a couple.

Then what am I doing here now with Georgia?

‘I'm sorry, what'd you say?' I say.

‘I said, I want to work on … that thing we talked about last week.' Georgia's shy high little-girl voice sucks me back to this Hollywood hotel room, as she lights another cigarette.

I'm skeptical about Georgia ever having an orgasm. Hell, she can't even say the word. But I'm certainly willing to give it the old college try. For a hundred bucks.

‘Sure.' I slip her a sly smile that says if anyone can help her have one, it's me.

I can feel Georgia's gaze hot on my legs and stomach and ass. There's no sex in her glance, but she does seem very interested in looking at me, like I'm an exotic animal at the zoo.

Did I mention I'm naked again?

‘Why don't you lie down on the bed?' I flip off the lights.

She gets on her back on the bed, and I put my head between her legs. This is better. I can breathe this time, which helps no matter what line of work you're in.

I take her hand, place her finger between her legs, and move it gently, trying to prime her pump. But when I move my hand away, her digit sits there like a limp fishstick.

Oh, my, this is a dry place to grow a flower of love. Gallons of water, summers of sun, and tons of shit will be required. There's a hundred-dollar bill laughing in my pocket.

It's like kissing dead flesh sprayed with Lemon Pledge. I work and I work and I work, but the jaws of life can't pry her out of the wreckage, and mouth-to-mouth is not working. Georgia's vagina has arrived DOA.

The great thing about cunnilingus as opposed to intercourse for a boy chicken is that the erection is superfluous, so the mind can wander without repercussion. So as I continue to try to resuscitate Georgia's Sleeping Beauty, I time-travel to Sunny's party. Maybe that black guy from the Hollywood Employment Agency'll be there. Maybe some crazy young girliegirl'll show me the meaning of life. Kristy's sitting at home. What would she think if she saw me here now on this bed between Georgia's legs? She'd flush me like a soiled toilet.

My dad loved smoking and taking home movies, and he did them both relentlessly. His 8mm Bell & Howell had a klieg light on top you could use to scan the exercise yard at Sing Sing, so in our home movies we squint stiff, grinning like bad TV movie-of-the-week actors trying to portray a happy family. And it's silent, so there's no chirrupy little Christmas sounds coming out of the jittery surreal family, captured like bugs in amber.

I'm four, it's Christmas morning, and the industrial-strength light is burning a hole in my little corneas as I swim in an ocean of G.I. Joes, sporting goods, and little stuffed dogs.

I spot my little Roy Rogers cowboy outfit. It gets no cooler than that for a four-year-old boy. I put on my little ten-gallon hat, slip on my little holster, and ease my guns in. Sharp I turn, a gunslinger squinting into the high-noon OK Corral Christmas
morning searchlight. I draw, whipping out my six-shooter, and rapid-fire the trigger with my left palm, while aiming straight into the camera, blasting away
rat-
a-
tat-
tat
, blazing bullets at the smoking dad behind the camera.

Bam!
I'm hit, plugged with hot lead. My gun falls in slow motion, I clutch my wee breast, sway painfully, then drop, and writhe on the floor in heroic American agony.

Then my whole body goes limp. It's peaceful in the womb of death, eyes closed to the roaring smoky spotlight. I lie there for a long time on the floor.

Dead.

‘Life is so peculiar – shoo be doo-wop do wah!'

Louis Armstrong sings; the gumbo's got a big hot kick hiding in it, and they ain't nobody here but us chickens. Three-D's become my home away from home. Although what home I'm away from is unclear. Sunny's my mothersuperior fatherconfessor bigbrother. But in the back of my mind, I know he only puts up with me because I'm making him money.

He asks all about Baby and Sweety. Apparently he knows them socially, and his pink's so tickled by my tale he can't help but shout out, ‘Hoooo-ie! Ain't that some shit!' and a good old-fashioned ‘
Et toi!
'

It's fun telling my war story in this Fraternity of Freaks.

Sunny gives me the lowdown on everyone:

Dave's six-foot-two, a long, lean, gorgeous orphan who survived institutionalized sexual molestation and will service anything that moves. Actually, it doesn't have to move: If you pay Dave, he'll schtup it.

Laura's not quite five feet, not quite ninety pounds, half Cherokee, half Irish, half Swedish. I say that's one half too many. Sunny says, ‘You don't know Laura.' She survived a mother who burned her with cigarettes, matches, candles. She hates men, hates women, and loves pain.

Cruella's six-foot-four and so black she's almost blue. She's got huge fake breasts, but everything else is real. Decked out in a sparkly evening gown with a slit that goes all the way up to there, she flashes incredible Betty Grable legs. If Betty Grable were a six-four black transsexual. She survived being found in a trash can when she was three days old. We talk about switch-hitting. Baseball, not sex. Turns out Cruella was an All-Star catcher in Little League. We make plans to take in a Dodgers game. One of my great regrets is that I never took in a Dodgers game with the cross-dressing Cruella.

Billyboy and Bobbygirl are sweet-sixteenish. They're Dixie chickens, identical-looking redheads. They survived being very successful commercial actor kids until they were thirteen, when their alcoholic father stole all their money and ran off with a model. Dad's in the process of drinking himself to death, and succeeding very well, apparently. They finish each other's sentences and are perhaps the most charming people I've ever met. They're great favorites of Sunny, as cash cows tend to be, and he treats them like long-lost inbred family. They're trying to sell a sitcom based on their life, and apparently NBC is interested.

We're one big happy nasty family, and I bask in the creepy comfort of it.

The family's on vacation in a Wild West ghost town when I'm ten. I've been looking forward to this for weeks, my mind alive with visions of Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp, with the great Roy Rogers singing on Trigger.

But it's nothing like that. Just old dead buildings. Not wild at all. No ghosts.

My father, my brother, and my two sisters pose
American
Gothic
for a family snapshot on a platform atop a scaffold the hangman used for executing cattle rustlers and low-down no-account murderous thieves and such.

I'm standing slightly apart from everyone, noose around my
neck, eyes bugging and arms stiff, a goofball kid criminal being hanged to death.

I've progressed from being shot at Christmas to hanging in the Old West.

Horse is his name. He's the guy I saw in the Hollywood Employment Agency waiting room. I thought I'd see him in 3-D, and here he is. Horse. He's still tight and black, but it turns out that under all that dark ice he's like an oversized goofy twelve-year-old, telling a story, or laughing at a joke, or saying hey to a friend. Then the next second he's an old man.

Sunny introduces me to Horse. ‘Show the boy why they cawll ya Horse,' Sunny laughs.

Horse smiles like he wants to be begged.

So Sunny begs.

‘Git it out! Come on, everybody… It's
showtime
!'

Everyone gathers around Horse, who gets a funny crooked smile on his face with a trace of sad behind it. He likes the attention, you can tell, but at the same time I can see that he feels like a freak among freaks.

‘Listen here, ya better git that badboy out, or there's gonna be trouble here ta-night!' Sunny's the ringmaster of bawdy debauchery, fueling the abused teenage hormones bouncing off the walls of 3-D.

Finally Horse unzips, fishes dramatically, and folds it out.

A baby's arm with an apple in the fist. I believe that's Tennessee Williams, but I'm not sure. Veins bulging like a relief map of the Amazon, it must weigh thirty pounds, and it looks like it'd take all the blood in his body just to fill it up. It's a cock that could launch a thousand ships. The crowd gasps, mouths agape at the magnitude of the thing. I am floored, like when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Turns out Horse has been making money with it since he was ten years old, when his big sister charged her friends a quarter to
look at it. By the time he was fourteen, that extraordinary organ was supporting his whole family. No one knows how old he is, but he makes a very good dollars.

Man, woman, doesn't make any difference – if you got coin, you can have some kind of sex with Horse. It takes a lot of money for him to actually put it in you, but you can pay to look at it, or touch it, or whatever else you want. If you pay, Horse will play.

He launches into a story about some trick who paid him three Gs to rub his thing on the guy's feet. He says it was a good business lesson, because he didn't want to do it, so he kept saying no, and the more he said no, the more money the trick offered him, until suddenly he was at three Gs, and he said yes. Turns out it was the easiest money he ever made: He rubbed it on the trick's feet for about thirty seconds, the freak cums, and that's it. He says he felt so bad taking all that money he almost gave some of it back.

Almost.

He waits a long time for the second ‘almost,' and he gets the big laugh.

‘Three grand for thirty seconds' work … damn, my mama'd be proud. She always said I'd make it in the white man's world.'

I saw Horse years later on the box of a pornographic movie, dressed as an old-time king surrounded by five or six very big-haired big-breasted babes staring struck dumb at his monument to manhood. He was wearing a crown, and that same sad sly crooked smile I saw that night in 3-D.

I smiled when I saw that box. There's Horse, making it in the white man's world. And the name of the movie, I believe, was
King Dong
.

Turns out Horse's real name is Gordon.

I'm nine. Lulu's our maid in Hueytown. She's a deep-black woman with a molasses heart, and a warm well of patience, good sense,
and human kindness. She introduces us to the rapture of barbecued chicken, the smoldering majesty of black-eyed peas, and the soothing beauty of sweet potato pie.

Lulu brings us baked goodies that make you glad you were born, and my mom gives her clothes and books for her kids. The other families make their maids take the bus home, but my mom drives Lulu in our faux-wood-paneled station wagon.

When we cross the railroad tracks into Coon Town, as my schoolmates at George Wallace Elementary School call it, I see big huge cars parked in front of crippled shanties with
FOR RENT
signs on them. Looking at those beat-to-shit, ramshackle shacks, I think, ‘Who in their right mind would want to rent a place like that, and why is there a shiny new car in front of it?'