“That numb shit left me for a seventeen-year-old, did you know? I walked into my bedroom in an eighty dollar peach-colored La Perla bra and panty set for his forty-fifth birthday and he’s bulldozing a child from behind in our marital bed. Does that sound like any sort of kiddie book to you? No? Well, that’s what I fucking thought.”
I was often not just taken aback by the things she said but paralyzed by them. I would shake my head in a small terrified way, long ponytails swinging, lips retreating between my teeth like the polyps of a sea anemone. Just as I had done with most of the gym teachers I’d known in my lifetime, I sat very still and hoped not to be called upon.
She was too thin and the skin of her face too tight and her clothes hung on her. She often wore sunglasses of comical size. I sometimes considered her look to be “foreign burn victim about town,” although I could never bring myself to say such a thing out loud. Once I thought that she’d read it off my mind and I panicked; she’d sort of lunged at me for no discernible reason. Later, I’d find out that she’d gotten the idea somehow that I might have swiped her wallet. She had no grounds to go on of course, she just didn’t mind looking a fool, or drawing blood, where money was concerned.
I WAS DRESSED IN MY OLD SPACE TEEN GET-UP—JEAN CUT-OFFS SO SHORT the whites of the pockets hung down in some kind of half-mast surrender and a blue, white, and black checked plaid men’s button-down shirt, buttoned down. Worst of all, modesty dictated that I wear these orangey tan-colored tights beneath my cut-offs, the kind that the Hooters girls wear, and then hard-soled booties to mimic bare feet. Actual bare feet were out of the question; a sommelier, of all people, told me that once a guy who knew a guy had told him about a guy who’d stepped on a hypodermic needle and contracted hepatitis B, and I was fearful enough to take heed. I was being paid obscene money to be shamed and made uncomfortable; my brain could digest it if I thought about it as some wacky kids’ game show, the kind where you dive out of a big plastic nose into a vat of green ooze and win a state-of-the-art water gun, or whatever.
My first photo opportunity of the convention was with the Japan chapter of the ICFB! fan club, who appeared to be three small well-kept gentlemen, apparently instrumental in getting my job back. No sooner had I canted my hip and pointed my ray-gun jauntily, I was barraged by several dozen Korean men, all of whom had previously been in the bathroom, I guess, grasping and pinching and bumping into me with boundless energy like some bastard, robotic three-hole-punch. I can only imagine the finished photos looked like something out of a banned issue of Hustler from the sixties, something rubberized, sterile and non-consensual.
“You did good out there,” said Sally, her teeth clenched around a cigarette she should not have been smoking inside, “you took it like a man and that’s all anyone can ask from a woman.”
The shock of that, that bustle of hips and elbows combined with my own casual starvation, had brought me close to white-out conditions, and I backed up against the nearest wall to slide down the length of it. Enclosed in a milky sort of iris I could see Sally’s pointed red pumps, one pushed down enough to reveal a nipple-like corn-pad adhered to her big toe. I muttered out something that didn’t remotely sound like what I’d wanted to say; what came out had very long vowels, or maybe I was just hearing them that way, drawn-out for the hearing-impaired or intoxicated.
“Yes, you rest,” said Sally, sounding very far away, “I’ll come get you when the Intergalactic Panel convenes.”
It occurred to me that I was in the only place in the world where such a statement might be as likely true as it was a hallucination, and I thought about granola bars and slept.
SHOES. A BROWN SORT OF BLACK AND SHINED TO A HIGH GLOSS, WHICH made me think of glazed donuts, which in turn made me think of happiness.
“Can I have an autograph?”
I moaned low, my head in my hands like a soft bomb. It was imperative to not be a dick, I knew that, no matter how dick-like my first reactions may have felt.
I tried out some words, “There’s a scheduled time for that, sir. It’s called the Intergalactic Panel.”
“Sounds like the last word on panels.”
“Yes. Yes. Ow. It will be starting very soon, sir, so if you don’t mind, this backstage area is for the talent …”
That was met with a laugh like cigarette-clogged cabinet doors swinging solemnly.
“What? You don’t have the same appreciation for your American fans that you do for the ones from Korea?”
“I value all of my fans, sir,” I said, blinking. While unconscious, I’d dreamed of being a child; the time my family house-sat for my aunt and uncle in Weed, CA. They’d had the first VCR of anyone we knew, a Betamax. A year after they bought it, my uncle would scold my fathers lightly for buying the four-head VHS they’d read about in Consumer Reports. I dreamed that while my dads swam in my aunt and uncle’s Doughboy, I’d stayed in the house and attempted to eat an envelope of my aunt’s cherry-flavored Kool-Aid, and it ruptured and was unsweetened, besides. In my dream, one of my fathers had called me out of the house and poolside, and I was standing there, hennaed blood-red across my face, torso and hands, maintaining my innocence.
“THERE WERE LOTS OF THEM IN THE CABINET,” I SAID NOW, THINKING that there had been. Reds and oranges and purples, all seducing me with their haughtily powdered variety.
“Lots of what in the cabinet? Are you okay?”
I nodded stiffly. Or maybe I shook my head, or did nothing at all.
The face that appeared before me did not belong to the freshly-shined donut shoes; it was Isaac in his space coveralls. He’d grown a mustache and some kind of goatee; it gave him the appearance of a horrible beaver-faced man, and I flinched.
“Gotta get goin’, champ! This is the big leagues.” He smelled like too much aftershave and not enough mouthwash. There was a shuffling, a stalling of time, and a hand was offered. I was pulled to my feet.
“I’m taller than I remember,” I remarked, looking down. Then there was a paper cup in my hand and I was drinking.
The man who’d offered the hand and the cup was Isaac’s height but thinner, and his blue spacesuit was actually a blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans. He had a wool hat on, the brim rolled several times in a jaunty, nautical way, and his eyes were a kind of gray green blue that seemed to change in front of you like those weather maps they have, storms closing in and enveloping, warm fronts creeping up like fingers of surf against the shore, and I couldn’t tell if I was feeling better or worse.
“You look as though you could use a cheeseburger, Madame,” he said, and then I knew it was Harrison. In the short time we’d chatted, nothing had been so romanticized, so fetishized, as the humble cheeseburger. We’d detailed our demands like letters to Santa Claus. No tomato, ever, but sometimes lettuce. Never mayo. Bacon, of course. No sweet potato fries. No whole-wheat bun. Preferably American cheese but never a blue, and not a cheddar sharp enough to overwhelm the taste of the meat. Medium, which was illegal in some states, like California, the orange and tan-oil scented place of my birth. Imagine, I had written once to Brain_Damage67, a burger like a gun or a Chinese throwing star, banned as a book from the sixties. Maybe I had named an actual banned book, which would’ve meant that I had gone to the trouble of researching a banned book, because even then I was half in love with him.
“You all know me,” said Harrison, “you know what I do.” A line from Jaws for Christ’s sake. It was too much, like being at the hard end of a beating. I kept shaking my head and nothing kept happening.
He stuck out his hand to Isaac and said, “Harrison Rice,” like the old timey-est of product placements. Harrison Rice comes out fluffy and perfect every time! Never clumps like some of those “foreign” brands! And what the hell kind of background did it signify? Long Grain-ian? Brown? Jasmine?
“Isaac,” said Isaac, sounding unsure, “and this is Easy.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said. “When is our thing?”
“The Intergalactic Pan
el?”
“Yes, yes, whatever you say.”
“It’s, like, now.”
It was then, vision clearing in a gradual way like kicking through underbrush, that I realized that not only was I not backstage, I was smack-dab in the middle of the Babylon 5 auction showcase. I was bracketed by life-sized dummies of Na’Toth, some kind of alien, snake woman in a long robe and Londo Mollari, who looked like a bird-headed kabuki guy dressed in one of Michael Jackson’s middle career soldier get-ups.
“Jesus,” I said. My fingers worked towards my mouth, as if to guide a cigarette.
“They shall be judged by the company they keep,” said Harrison.
“Will you be here later?” I asked, half to Na’Toth.
“I don’t see where else I would ever want to be,” he said, and looking at him I felt the same joyous fear I’d felt at seventeen after getting a strangely oversized “blue” Chihuahua as a birthday gift. He hadn’t been any kind of blue, of course, more a kind of brown that had shots of indigo if you squinted long and hard enough. My delightful ideas of stuffed squeaky hamburgers with eyes and fancy dog sweaters were tempered with the horror of ownership, of being responsible for something’s life. That Fuck! I have a dog! feeling returned to me now, looking into Harrison’s meteorologically blue eyes. It was part finality, part acceptance and two parts bus ticket.
“I will see you after the panel,” I said, each word a slow, careful bubble from my mouth, a fragile little hiccup, “back here by the lizard woman.”
“Okay. I’ll have a corn dog waiting for you.”
And he would, I just knew it. He was not the sort of man who lied about corn dogs. Things like that you can tell right away.
AFTER, I PUT ON PANTS AND WE WENT FOR A WALK THROUGH THE VARious booths and exhibits, the portioned off little Monopoly houses that made up the convention.
“It’s not one of the better ones,” I said, simply parroting something that Sally had told me in the car, although once I had my bearings I could see that she’d really had a point. For example, the obese singer who’d won an early season of American Idol had a booth of his own, looking like a cartoon walrus in a three-piece suit.
“Well, that just means that you get to be the star of it,” said Harrison.
“I don’t know. Maybe. It sort of seems like being the star of a house fire.”
The auditorium had last housed an all-child performance of Equus; the walls were still awash with fake blood and bridles, painted in spots to look like the library in Dr. Dysart’s office. The titles were meant to be viewed from a distance, up close they were jumbled together thoughts and words. Something About Psychology. Sexual Horse Obsessions. And, oddest of all: Pickles, Envelopes, Non-Fat Milk.
“The old grocery list as art deal,” said Harrison. He had a gap between his front teeth, which seemed an unfair advantage. This, what we were a part of, was what they call a meet-cute, and I am generally opposed to them. Most people do not meet in line for the world’s largest roller coaster, or whatever. Most people do not collide with someone on an ice skating rink and then decide they are in love and should marry. It just doesn’t happen. People meet at work, or at a bar, or through other people. People meet online when they are lonely and need things and that is what happened to us really, truly when we met, so, anyway.
We eased past a booth filled with elderly golf stars demonstrating a handheld video game system based on elderly golf stars. They seemed to very much disapprove of our walking by without stopping. One turned to the other and threw his hands up widely, as though to say, you see? I told you this was a dumb idea.
“God, you have to want it more than that,” said Harrison. “Troubadour has a very large number of seniors,” I said, “and they all vote. The rest of us fear them more than a little.”
“Jesus, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m a homeowner,” I said. It was my new thing to say. It saved me, I thought, from revealing too much of my true self, which, as I knew in my deepest heart of hearts, was more than half dumb-ass.
“Yes, but why? Why someone like you?”
I shrugged a little, pleased that I’d pulled the wool over someone, at least for the time being. Harrison knew that I was originally from San Francisco, that I’d attended the School of the Arts, that my parents had owned a frame shop on the corner of Market and Castro, and he seemed to think that all of those things combined to mean something. Maybe that I had been surrounded by art and opportunity, or maybe he’d just seen Fame too many times.
“Troubadour is my town,” I said, and it was. It seemed a doctor’s note for being unemployed, living in that town. It even sounded sad. Troubadour. “They say that it was founded by folk singers, and that that lasted a while until the loggers came, and then the loggers chased them away.”
“Bull. Shit.”
“That’s what they say. There’s no library, though, so one can’t be sure.”
I sighed a little, lover-like.
Nearly sixty miles over the California border amidst the hot, dry breezes that blew through Southern Oregon’s Forfeit Valley, in the shadow of the immense blue swooping skeleton that was once the nation’s largest water slide, lay the sad, still town of Troubadour, as insignificant a place, as foul and accursed, as has ever graced a map. On some of the finer maps, actually, Troubadour was not included at all. On some of the finer maps, actually, Troubadour was showcased as a tiny gray gap between the town of Prospect and the town of Twee. Some of the more upward thinking cartographers came up with the splendid idea of selling this space to elite members of the public with something to say and a great deal more money than sense. On maps such as these instead of a tiny gray gap between the town of Prospect and the town of Twee you might find the message Black Sabbath Rawks!! or Edith Ann Walliker Will You Marry Me? Love, Toby. P.S.—Black Sabbath Rawks!
The town itself was constructed like a child’s valentine, visible glue, letters backward, glitter held in place with scotch tape. There was a market and a hardware store, a laundromat and a small, understaffed hospital. There were very few jobs and even fewer men who wanted to fill them. Most people got their money from out of town, from sympathetic monocle-wearing relatives, by selling their blood or plasma, by writing letters to celebrities and pretending to be sick children, or through telemarketing scams geared towards stealing from the elderly.
There were spaces between buildings, between houses and shops, wide unexplained unpaved gaps where nothing collected or grew, like long awkward pauses in conversations. The entire town was like a condemned building full of runaways, a beat-down country where children will jump into rivers polluted with rotting meat and human waste for American coins.
It was a block of ice in the winter, a flat, hot rock in the summer. You could walk the distance of it in a quarter of a day and when you reached the scorched outskirts, be overtaken with a stoned kind of fuzziness, feeling like a person at the edge of the world, of any world, the sun puddled down to slurpy watercolors at the horizon. Then you turned around and there was Jack in the Box.
I had such admiration for Troubadour, the kind of town with no need for a functioning elementary school but which welcomed two rival Fatty Arbuckle museums, oddly enough, since no one could get a clear answer to whether Mr. Arbuckle had even ever pissed in our town. We had a TV station and a local news team, though in the hotter months no one really showed up all that often and the station took to playing two movies over and over all day, the creepy-ass cartoon version of Animal Farm and the animated French film Fantastic Planet, which is a lot of tiny naked humans as pets of giant blue things with gills and red eyes. It was about animal rights. Or human rights, or something. Maybe it was one of those deals where it was actually about nothing, and every person who saw it added their own parable, like a big stewing pot of mistrust. Seeing those films back to back was like sliding backwards into a dark well and worrying that you won’t fall fast enough. I can’t explain it otherwise if you haven’t watched a sinister carto
on pig playing cards at a table, chewing at a cigar and contemplating Communism. Your eyeballs want to vomit or commit suicide; you have to retrain yourself to speak to other humans. During cooler parts of the year the news team would mainly go on and on about their days, or complain that things were more expensive than they once had been.
“Four dollars for a little carton of blackberries is a lot of money for blackberries,” was a common complaint, “and yet try and taste one in the store! You might as well rob a bank so far as they’re concerned.”
Once a local man called in with a marriage proposal and his girlfriend said no on the air. That made the news team laugh quite a bit. Then they talked about it again on the following day.
They grow pears in Troubadour, and meth. The pears get a lot of play around Christmas but the meth business is hopping all year round. Great double-wide trailers abound, hissing and trembling vaguely, like things you would not want to step on in the dark. Men in headscarves stand guard, chewing with their arms crossed as though they are waiting to be filmed or maybe are being filmed already. It’s a tough-luck town; people don’t expect such hardship without a reality show.
To me the lovely streets of my birth city, long and willowy as the arms of a supermodel, where you could turn any corner and take a picture that would make a valid postcard, was perhaps too good for me, or for anyone. In the five years I’d lived in Troubadour, I’d gotten in two fights with two different women about the same brand of coconut pie at the same big-box store, and that is what made it my home. My self-serving ambition-less life was just a drop in the bucket. And I had a job. And owned a home. I was actually thinking of running for mayor.
“It’s one of those situations where you could do a whole lot better but I’m not sure you could do any worse,” said Harrison, and he’d only seen the airport.
“I just love really hard,” I said, sounding stupid, sounding like the type of girl who says that she loves really hard. “I won’t give up on a thing just because it’s a parody. It’s not Troubadour’s fault it’s a parody.”
She Came From Beyond! Page 4