Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (17 page)

Kyle shoots me a betrayed look at first, and I shake my giant mouse head “No,” as if to say,
I never told a child that your sperm might be deficient
, but then reason seems to soften into him—he does know Missy, after all.

Kyle puts on a horrific fake smile that is so scary; it’s like he’s wearing invisible clown paint. He squats down to be eye-level with the demon. “That’s none of your business, is it cutie?”

I decide it’s best to intervene. “Bye, Kyle,” I smile, motioning for Missy to follow me as we leave my dressing room. Missy grabs my tail a little too tightly and uses it to pull me to our start positions for the “Goodbye Should Just Be Called
Catch You Later!”
dance.

“What do you see in him anyway?” asks Missy. Then she giggles.

When Missy’s mother called me for help, she caught me at a weak moment. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and around three a.m. I got up and watched a horrific birthing show on television. They showed babies coming out of crotches and then big jellyfish afterbabies, again coming out of crotches. The odd part was how I was more jealous than disgusted. I wanted to be the one screaming inside of a hot tub while Kyle rubbed my back and my cartoon stomach morphed and dropped out our very own child. Suddenly it was six a.m.; I’d been secretly crying since about four.

“Hello?”

Even as I picked up the phone, I wondered why I was picking up the phone; it was six in the morning. The answer, of course, was that I hoped it would be a tiny fetus calling on some human tissue receiver, asking if it could please leave its mommy and crawl into me.

“Hello?” There was a pause and then the strained voice added, “Blessed day.”

“I don’t go to church.” I started to hang up, but there was the sound of protest.

“No, wait—this is Mrs. Gowers, Missy’s mom. I’m sorry to call so early but I have a bit of an emergency.”

Apparently two of her other star children (she has three, Missy and a set of twin boys, all of them on television, all
Village of the Damned
genetically engineered-looking) had a callback and Missy’s nanny was sick. “When I told Missy that I didn’t know what to do with her, she specifically asked to spend the day with you.” Mrs. Gowers paused. “She likes working with you I suppose.”

Mrs. Gowers does not like me. I’m not beautiful and therefore am not a good role model for Missy.

“Sure,” I agreed. At first I thought we could spend the day like her siliconeasaurus mother would want us to: get mani/pedis, buy some pink things with ruffles, practice walking. But when Missy arrived she was very curious about the size of our house (“Are you poor? How poor are you? Are you ever, like, hungry but you can’t eat because food costs a lot to you?”), and these questions gave me a better idea.

Munchkin Burger touts itself as “the finest mini-burger palace in the land.” Missy was the only child there who wasn’t morbidly obese.

“Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew I was here,” Missy giggled. The skin around her mouth had taken on a greasy sheen.

“It’s called pigging out,” I said. This was Missy’s good side. Even though I knew she would tell her mother all about it later, pretend she hated it and make me out to be a total villain, here she was: my partner in crime. Eater of the forbidden fruit.

As the day went on, my urge to defile her perfection grew extreme. I had the thought of driving her down to some cantinas in Mexico to see if they’d let me drink free in exchange for Missy washing dishes.

“What now?” I asked. “Television?” Missy’s mouth dropped open. I suddenly realized that even though Missy is on television, she’s not allowed to watch it.

“I don’t want to get fat,” she said. “Do you think I’m fat?”

“Do you think
I’m
fat?”

Missy didn’t respond.

We did watch television. During each commercial, she immediately began to critique aspects of the actor’s performance and physical appearance, which I deeply appreciated. She is completely brutal. If someone’s right eye is even slightly higher than the left, she will not let this slide.

When her mother came to pick her up, Missy gave me a mini-hug, but then she ran screaming to the backseat of their deluxe SUV to see if her brothers were hired for the part. “My whole week will be ruined if they got it,” she told me. Apparently the Gowers children have a competitive streak.

I watched as they drove away down the road. When her mother finds out about Munchkin Burger, she will probably make Missy get a colonic.

A few hours later when Kyle got home, the contrast was nice. Adult World. It seemed a little amusement parky—sex, alcohol, swear words. I tried to take in the sudden quiet. It was
so
quiet. I told myself that there was something furious and wrong about the constant sound, color, and stimulation that children crave, their habitual need to celebrate and have a party. Life is not a party. I actually said this to Kyle: “Life is not a party.” I took it back as soon as I said it. It made him look sad.

“I don’t get people who have children as a move towards immortality. So that they can feel better about death or something.” He sipped his drink.

I made Kyle take me to a romantic restaurant to talk about the subject. It seemed more theoretical that way, like we were making conversation rather than
having
a conversation. Plus, if I felt myself starting to get upset, I could take a sip of martini in a slow, calculated manner, like a robot mannequin in a commercial about robot mannequins who enjoy martinis the way real, elegant people do.

“I would like to feel better about death though,” I admit.

“It’s just death. You’re not going to care when you’re dead.”

I want to write Kyle off as a simple person, but I know him and he is not simple. It’s unfair though, how he can have so much clarity about difficult things. Why have children? Why fear death? “I mean you and I certainly don’t have to have a child for the sake of our species. I think mankind is pretty set.”

“Well, Kyle, I wouldn’t want to have a child to benefit mankind. That would take all the fun out of it.” My hand finds my martini carefully, straightened, like a mission payload specialist guided it there. Grip. Sip.

“What, do you want it to give your life some kind of purpose?” He lingers on the word purpose and his garlicky breath finds my nose. It’s a little sexy, how he smells like garlic and doesn’t need a purpose. I suppose I find garlic-scented rebels somewhat nice.

“Well what is life’s purpose?”

I think I had this conversation on one of my first dates at a coffee shop; both my date and I were wearing black and brooding and my date’s attempted-suicide wrist scars were displayed frequently—he revealed them often, as if they helped to back up his argument.

Kyle leans into me, close enough to kiss. His buttery garlic lips, which are larger than mine and I am jealous of, hold a wry smile. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispers. “There is no purpose. Purpose is a concept someone made up to feel better about how weird everything is.”

But the thought of becoming a mother is a weirdness I want to feel out a little more. I will live with it for a while longer as if it were truly a baby; I will let it grow and see what shape it takes before I decide what to do with it. Until then, I can go on living each day as Missy’s secondary mother, a giant rodent who is slightly repulsed by her human offspring.

He and I make a toast to ourselves, to purposelessness lives and our candlelit table; dinner is expensive but the sex afterwards will be free.

My boyfriend Ginno is a pro-bowler. It is not as glamorous as it doesn’t sound. I was on the streets for a long time so I took the first chance I got to settle down. Ginno doesn’t know I’m really a man, but other than that we’re completely honest with one another.

I keep saying I don’t want to get married because “Honey, it’s a piece of paper. Know what else is a piece of paper? A dry-cleaning receipt.” Luckily Ginno isn’t much of a detective. He doesn’t dig too deep. He just goes to the alley and rolls the balls.

That was where he and I first met. Ginno was breaking the house record and a big crowd had gathered around him, so I put down my Sea Breeze and went to go see what the fuss was all about. My Tuesday night regular had been a no-show. This was fine by me; the guy’s cologne was suffocating. He liked to wear a captain’s hat and made me pretend the botched anchor tattoo on his arm didn’t look like a green worm.

I knocked my way up to the front of the crowd and there he was: trim moustache, thin-rimmed glasses, white bowling shoes that made him look kind of disabled. I don’t know, Ginno saw my breast implants and makeup and big hair and just fell for me. I do it up 80’s style or I don’t do it at all, go big or go home. That kind of thing.

He took me home that very night. When we got back to his place, I looked around and just decided
this is it:
I will become the queen of kitsch. Cuckoo clocks, red dice napkin holders, all of it. It was a gamble but it paid out almost instantly. The first week I moved in he won a regional that paid $10,000 and he split it with me 50/50.

I didn’t do what you’re thinking, drugs or whatnot. I put it back into us. I gave half of it back to Ginno to help with a down payment on a conversion van and spent the rest on gear for tournament travel—an eight-piece set of rolling luggage and a handful of velvet pantsuits. We also got a little dog named Gogo that I could take to all the practices and the games for company. I’m really in this thing with Ginno, committed. I go to every game, every time.

He practices weekdays at Pins and Pockkkets, an alley right down the street from our condo that opens at 9 a.m. It’s run by white supremacists. Ginno somehow hasn’t caught onto that. Please don’t get me wrong, that’s not my belief system—I’m a minority too, my upstairs vs. my downstairs. But it’s right next door and they just love Ginno so I turn a blind eye. I take Gogo (Chinese Crested, ugly as a newborn) there with me, and she and I sit at the gaming machine for most of the morning and the afternoon. I keep my fingernails long to tap cards on the screen with. It hardly takes any energy.

And they let me drink for free, because Ginno’s such a wiz. Their well vodka tastes awful but it’s not bad with 8oz of Clamato mixed in. All day long I get my vegetables. They let me play the claw machine for free too; I just have to give back all the stuffed animals I win before I leave because I’m so damn good.

Sometimes they talk about “queers” and throw around the n-word. It’s hard to keep my peace, but I don’t really like to open my mouth when I’m at the alley anyway—my breath smells like tomato and clam and Virginia Slim Menthols. When I see Ginno start to walk over towards me, I shove Altoids into my cheek pockets like I’m a hamster.

“You’ve given me a whole new life,” Ginno tells me every time I blow him. I don’t think that he was a virgin or anything before we got together–maybe he was; he doesn’t ever
move
during it, he just lies there frozen like he’s witnessing an earthquake. He certainly has never been with someone as experienced and in-tune to the cravings of the male organ as me. Few have. Less than eight hundred, I’d guess, if you count clients as well.

Supportive as I wanted to be, life at the alley got a little dull. So I found a hobby I could take to the lanes while Ginno practiced: bejeweling and sequencing holiday-theme sweatshirts. I began rolling my whole setup with me to the alley in the little suitcase from our new 8-piece luggage set. It took me a while to learn how to keep from gluing things on crooked when my buzz creeped up, but I adapted. Whatever I am, I’m nothing if not adaptable.

The sweatshirts got better and better. One day Ginno said, “Babe, those are good enough to sell.” So I went to a few boutiques and started consigning them. Things were rosy for our whole little family: just picture us in the living room after dinner, Gogo running around in a mini jewel-sequins bowler shirt, myself in a human-sized matching one, she and I literally the sparkling light of Ginno’s life.

Thank God, his mother is all the way across the country in a Montana nursing home, something about her spine. His sister lives there too. He doesn’t talk about his mother or his sister much, but I get the feeling that growing up they bossed him around. Even though he’s getting to be quite a big-name bowler, I hear them treat him like a nobody on the phone.

They didn’t even call when we were on ESPN with Gogo. Ginno placed second in Nationals–$30,000! Of course I ran from the stands with Gogo and we both planted kisses all over his face and the brushy inchworm of his moustache, “Jesus I’m SOMEONE!” I wanted to scream. Both of us, we were finally really somebody.

But the sad thing is, everybody is always somebody, even when he’s nobody. And I used to be a nobody’s somebody. I used to belong to a pimp named Daddy Valentine.

A few weeks after the win Gogo and I were multi-tasking: taking instructions off the TV on how to cook a roast and painting our nails at the same time. My toes were all stretched out with cotton balls and polish, the same color as Gogo’s. She’s a princess in pink.

When the doorbell rang I was a little baffled—Ginno wasn’t due home from the lanes for hours and it’s not like we have friends. But the vodka had made me cordial—vodka before cooking; vodka so that if and when I start another grease fire I don’t get overly agitated.

When I opened the door, a large zebra-print shoe landed on my toes and I yipped. “It’s your man, it’s Daddy V.” He took off his sunglasses, looked around the condo and whistled.

Daddy had been flipping through channels during Ginno’s bowling game and he’d recognized me on ESPN.

Gogo offered a small growl but was afraid of Daddy’s fur coat.

“Get out of here, Daddy. The person you knew is long dead. I mean it; leave or I’ll call the cops.” The estrogen has done such a great number on my voice. Despite feelings of terror stinging me all over like jellyfish tentacles, I couldn’t help but savor how much I sounded like a distressed heroine.

“Well now see,” and then Daddy reached into the purple silk lining of his leather jacket and pulled out a folder. I realized: I’m totally sunk. “I don’t think you’d want the police here, because then your lover man would find out he has a lover man.”