“What am I, so fucking selfish that I can’t fit this kid in my life?” I laughed, acting all brave, but really I was so scared that later I just sat in my room shaking, I mean shaking, like a drug addict overdue for a fix.
After my first obstetrics appointment I paid my toll to the parking attendant, who rose the restraining arm to allow my car through, but instead of driving away I simply laid my forehead on my steering wheel and sobbed so hard it felt like major organs were leaking out of my eye sockets. The attendant let me stay there until I finished, then handed me a tissue volunteered from a woman in one of the four cars waiting patiently behind me. “Everything will be all right,” she said, not knowing what was wrong to begin with. “I know,” I said, and thanked her. I drove away marveling at how I could hold up four cars and not one of them honked. Wow, I thought, life really is full of surprises.
Flow Management
I’VE BEEN TOLD by trained professionals that my house is about to be sucked into the butthole to hell. Pretty much.
“See that right there?” one of them said, indicating a darkened border along the base of my foundation. “That there is moisture.”
Evidently moisture is like flesh-eating bacteria to a house, and whenever it rains on my house, which it has done a lot lately, the water just sorta pools around its foundation, potentially rotting it right out from under me, causing the whole structure, over time, to kind of cave in on itself and ultimately disappear like that place in the movie Poltergeist, I’m guessing, but minus the maggots.
Instead there’s mold. I wouldn’t even have noticed it if one of the professionals hadn’t shined a flashlight on it and pointed it out. “It’s not even fuzzy yet,” I told him. He looked at me like a neurologist might if he’d shown me an X-ray of my own personal brain tumor and I’d said, “That little thing? What’s the big deal?”
In short, it’s a big deal. Mold grows, and left on its own under a house it can thrive faster than a class-action lawsuit, releasing spores and things, which you inhale. So discovering even the tiniest little molecular bit of this stuff clinging to the foundation under your house is cause for panic, like finding anthrax in an air-conditioning vent.
So I had to call in the A-team, which for me is my contractor friend Art and his one employee, a bald, muscular, coffee-loving Lithuanian named Lucas. I hate to bother them because they are usually so busy building mansions and whatnot, and I always feel like my fix-it chores are so petty in comparison, like asking Michelangelo to paint the porch, but I don’t want the UPS guy looking through my window and calling 911 because I’m on the floor with foam spilling from my nostrils that is much too green to be boogers.
“Well, since you put it that way,” Art said, and he came right over. He brushed aside all the zillion-dollar estimates from the local foundation-repair mafia and said, “All these problems amount to one thing: You need to manage your flow.”
So he and Lucas set about building a network of gutters and drains that allowed the rain to flow away from my house, rather than settle in my basement like a teeming pool of poison. God, this is great! I thought. I’m not absorbing the problem, I’m deflecting it.
It’s the same philosophy they taught me in a self-defense class I took years ago: if someone is coming at you with a weapon, don’t just crouch there and stave yourself to absorb the blow, deflect the damn thing. So when the instructor came at me with his rubber knife and pretended to attempt to stab me—moving with the speed of a deep-sea diver—I, without fail, deflected the blade right into his thigh muscle. I was just as good with the rubber gun, too.
“All you need to worry about is this little hole right here,” the instructor said, pointing to the tip of the fake gun’s barrel. “Just make sure it isn’t pointed at you and you’ll be fine.” Then we’d spend the next fifteen minutes practicing the maneuvers we were taught, which amounted to deflecting the assailant’s gun-holding hand to ensure the little hole wasn’t pointed at our vital parts, so that if the assailant pulled the trigger before we could wrest the weapon from him, the bullet would hit one of our irrelevant parts, or, better, a bystander. “Manage the flow,” our instructor told us.
“I love this,” I told Grant while talking on my cell phone in my car. “That’s how I’m gonna live my life from now on. I’m just gonna stay put and deflect stuff. I’m not gonna absorb anything. I’m just gonna manage the flow.”
Grant is an expert at flow management. He once gave a party where he served only bread and wine, but had it all strategically situated in attractive settings throughout his art-laden house to instigate a flow pattern among guests that was conducive to lively conversation. (“Have you tried the multigrain? It’s over there by the chair covered in crack lighters.”)
“I know flow,” Grant said, or at least that’s what I think he said, because just then a Honda pulled in front of me and I had to brake so hard I could smell the rubber worn off my tires from the friction. The other driver stopped, too, but he hardly looked sorry at all. In fact, he almost looked like he thought it was my fault.
“That fucking prick, who the goddam fuck does he think he is? He’s lucky I didn’t crash into his ass and sue the shit out of him and the shit-eating idiots who insure him, can you fucking believe that? I cannot goddam fucking believe that cock-wagging asshole did not even apologize! Jesus goddam fucking Christ!” I hollered, the profanities flowing from me like water from a firehose, spewing and fuming until . . . what the hell was that now? What the goddam hell was that sound in my ear?
It took me a few moments before I realized it was coming through my cell phone head set. It was Grant, laughing. “Bitch,” he said, “you don’t deflect. You absorb. You are a sponge.”
False Fortune
THE FORTUNE COOKIE SAID, “You will die cold and alone,” and I’m glad I’m not the one who opened it. In fact, by the time it’s opened Lary will be long gone, which kind of sucks all the fun out of stuffing false fortunes into cookies at Chinese restaurants, if you ask me.
“Don’t you want to see their reaction?” I asked.
“Nah,” Lary said. “I can envision it.”
I figure if you’re just going to envision the result of an elaborate prank, then you might as well envision the whole thing from start to finish. It’s a lot easier than actually going to the restaurant, perusing their bowl of fortune cookies to pick out the ones whose real fortunes can be plucked from inside without disturbing their exterior, meticulously sliding the false fortunes inside, then covertly returning the tainted cookies back to the hostess stand.
“At the very least,” I said, “you should keep the cookies and give them to your friends. You could make them open them right there.”
“You want one?”
“Not the one that says I’ll die cold and alone.”
“You don’t get to pick your fortune,” Lary chided.
Christ, look who’s talking, the big Fortune Fucker Upper, swapping real fortunes for fake ones, messing with the order in the universe, laughing in the face of Satan or any other fill-in-the-blank karma-related crap we get fed from birth. My own fate changed completely when I met Lary, who, at the time, was attending the wedding of his ex-girlfriend Mary Jane, a wonderful girl he was a fool to let slip away. At the time I was on my way to being a normal person whose lot in life was to sit around burdened by a big sack of broken dreams like everybody else. But such are the dubious comforts of false fortune.
Lary spent many an hour with me barside at the original Vortex, talking me out of trying to fit in. He is nothing if not benevolent, you have to give him that. For example, he realizes that if he doesn’t let the women in his life slip away they’ll have him as the prize for their efforts, and he figures, rightly, that they deserve better. Besides, they don’t slip very far. To this day Lary remains devoted to Mary Jane and her family. But that doesn’t mean he won’t die cold and alone, in fact I think he’s determined to. I think that might be why he created all those false fortunes—so he won’t be a
lone in dying cold and alone.
But right now Lary is cold but not alone, hence he’s in the process of alienating all his friends to fix that. He won’t answer our calls and still won’t forgive me for giving up alcohol. If I called him right now he’d look at the display on his cell phone and ignore it. Sometimes I call him using Grant’s phone, because Grant is one of the few people whose phone calls Lary will take, not that that’s a good thing, because Grant is trying to talk Lary into moving to Mexico to live on a boat.
“Jesus God!” I bitched at Lary over Grant’s phone. “Don’t buy a boat. You’d be buried in barnacles the first month!”
But even as I said that I realized Lary is a barnacle. He’s got that crusty exterior, with hair the color of hay; he’s a salty dog that somehow ended up living in a dilapidated warehouse in Atlanta. He bought the place for nothing a decade ago, now it’s worth a fortune that’s all his if he sold it, which he easily could. He’s talking about moving to Isla Mujeres, an island in the Caribbean off the coast of Mexico. In fact, Isla Mujeres is where Grant once retired, having promised never to return to the dregs of normal society. That retirement lasted about five minutes before he was back ass-deep in the dregs, but Grant returns to the island every chance he gets, and the way he talks about the place makes us all long to go.
So that’s where I am right now. I’ve my own shit to sift through, obviously, and I wanted desperately to be alone to do it. Grant recommended a $35-a-night hotel, “with cold cold air-conditioning in the room and hot hot water in the shower,” which, now that I’m here, makes me wonder what he was comparing it to. I mean, the air conditioning is cold, sure, if you compared it to the breath of a dying person, and the shower water is hot if you compared it to refrigerated urine samples. “So fuck you,” I e-mail Grant, but I can almost hear him laughing. He knows it’s just the dregs talking, having clung to me from home, and he knows they will drop away soon enough.
And they did. I feel better now, and not in small part because I’m surrounded by such simple beauty. I spent yesterday alone but not cold, lying at a languid angle to the remarkably calm ocean, the horizon a parfait of blue hues, the air warming me like a womb. Suddenly a sense of gratitude washed over me like the ocean itself. I was thinking about my fortunes. There are so many, false and otherwise. From now on I’ll be better, I promise, at distinguishing the two.
Thank’s Life
KNOCKED UP AS I AM, I’m afforded what is for me a rare view, which is that of being the only sober person at the party. But that’s life. At first, when I realized this would be my lot in life for, like, pretty much ever (I mean let’s face it, I can’t be a boozer with a baby on my hip, how unattractive is that?), I thought, “Jesus God, what’s left to live for?” I mean sure, there’s food, but that was only fun for the first three months, when I got to pretend the whole world was my personal trough. You should have seen my car; it was a rolling wasteland of crumpled fast-food packets from drive-through joints, the floorboards crusted with dried cola. So that period was neat while it lasted, but when my body reached walrus status, my appetite kicked out of overdrive and I woke up one day full for good, so now the glut fest is finished and I’m back to wondering why I should get out of bed in the morning.
Then I felt my baby’s first kick and it all came together. . . .
Yeah, right! Fooled you. The fact is I haven’t reached that special moment of repose just yet. You know, the moment, that special revelation in which momhood and other cosmic thresholds suddenly come together in one big Birkenstock earth/heaven harmony. If this revelation is real I hope it comes soon, because as it stands I’m still freaked about the fact that this thing I’m growing inside me has eyeballs (I mean, you know, hopefully) and is going to be, like, looking at me soon, if not already. I wonder if it can see my kidneys.
And I wonder why I keep thinking of my mother’s friend, Bitsy, a lovable fossil from Hollywood’s heydey who used to be Burgess Meredith’s personal clerk and who claims to, back in the fifties when she was a crimson-lipped bombshell, have had sex with both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, but not at the same time. When my mother met Bitsy (at work, where she designed weapons for the American government and Bitsy was her secretary), Bitsy’s glory days were long gone but she still boasted a head of hair like Lucille Ball. They became fast friends that first day, when, sensing my mother’s cigarette withdrawal, Bitsy tossed her a Salem and said, “What are you, a fuckin’ nun?” That was in Santa Monica in the mid-seventies.
In San Diego almost two decades later, my mother didn’t crave companionship like you would have expected of a dying person, but Bitsy was fiercely devoted to her nonetheless and tried constantly to contact her. “Tell Bitsy Mom can’t come to the phone,” I was instructed to shout from her bedside, and my brother would tell Bitsy my mother couldn’t come to the phone. “Have her call me when she feels better,” Bitsy pleaded in her craggy, tobacco-shredded voice.
But my mother never felt better. She died, as it so happens, in my arms. Bill was there, too, holding her hand. It’s not as romantic as it sounds. At the time I was helping her sit upright in bed because her breathing had become labored, and I didn’t expect her to die right then, but she did. Her last words, spoken about fifteen minutes earlier, were used to request a cigarette. There was no moment of repose in which she became serenely reconciled with her inescapable fate and gathered us about her bed to bestow words of wisdom. I remember nothing like that. I remember her fighting with the ferocity of a rottweiler to hang on to every last second of her life, even if it meant unimaginable pain and self-inflicted solitude to protect her good friend from her suffering. That’s life, and this woman didn’t want to lose any of it. Today, when I feel my baby kick—and I do, I wasn’t making that part up—that’s what I think: that’s life.
Back in my mother’s bedroom that day, after her breathing stopped, I gently placed her back on her pillow, and just then the phone rang. My brother peeked his head through the door. “It’s Bitsy,” he whispered.
Silence. “Tell Bitsy Mom can’t come to the phone,” I said.
The Side of the Road
GRANT IS LOOKING for Jesus on eBay, which is new. Normally he looks for Jesus in dumpsters, or under musty piles of old clothes at junk stores. Once he found a fabulous Jesus at a parking-lot flea market just south of Soddy Daisy with the forehead all bleeding from the pointy brambles and everything. Sometimes Grant doesn’t have to look at all. Sometimes people see all kinds of Jesus and call Grant to tell him where to go. Sometimes they even call me and tell me to tell Grant where to go. “I saw some great Jesus at the new Dollar Store on More-land,” a recent phone message said. “Don’t forget to tell Grant.”
This must mean Sister Louisa is back in full force. She must have come here in her 1974 copper-colored Ford Pinto and set up camp in Grant’s head again, because Lord knows there is room. Yes, she is back now, in a big way beehive and all.
“I found a huge paint-by-numbers of Jesus riding a donkey through Jerusalem,” Grant exclaims, but I keep looking at his head, because I can’t believe his hair doesn’t have a residue of some kind, like a film of space-age polymer left over from his latest beehive. I swear Grant’s hair is like a storm cloud, a roiling mass of curly hay that shoots out of his head like fibrous lightning. It takes two beauticians armed with eight cans of industrial lacquer to tame it into a mile-high hairball, and it’s a serious wonder the result isn’t permanent, but the whole thing really does just wash out at the end of the day.
“Bitch, did you not hear me say I found me a Jesus on a donkey?” he repeats, and I admit I’m impressed. My favorite Sister Louisa piece of all time depicted that very scene, with the donkey saying, “Who is this Jesus and why is he on my back?” It was sold years ago, back when Sister Louisa first started making her assemblages while living in the Airstream trailer of Grant’s imagination. It was a doublewide trailer. Did I not say there is a lot of room in Grant’s head?
I personally found my first Jes
us in a thrift store in Costa Mesa when I was six. This Jesus had an imploring expression on his face and held out his hand like he was trying to coax a gun away from someone who just threatened suicide. I remember thinking, Who is this Jesus and what does he want me to put in his hand?
I found Jesus again in college, when an extremely horny follower of his named Jerry introduced us. Jesus and Jerry were buddies, I guess, because Jerry gave me his personal Bible and helped save my soul by convincing me to ask Jesus into my heart and shit—right there on my damn knees with Jerry’s sweaty palm on my head and his khaki-clad boner not half a foot from my face. Then Jesus went and told Jerry I wouldn’t “best represent” him as a wife, and Jerry dumped my barely saved self. He said he had to go where Jesus guided him. As I gave Jerry back his Bible, as he left me there, literally, on the side of the road, I remember thinking, Who is this Jesus and why is he guiding people down my pants?
Then Sister Louisa was born. Grant and Daniel and I had gone out in Grant’s truck to sift through garbage in the back streets of Tuscaloosa, and in the dusk we came upon an abandoned trailer, its back end crumpled like a discarded beer can. That night, as the sun buried itself burnt orange in the background, Grant stuck his hand through the window of that trailer to grab some old pots off a stovetop, and that is when we heard the voice.
“Who the hell there?” it boomed from inside the trailer. “I sayyed, who THE HELL there?”
Grant’s eyes popped out of his face like canned snakes, then he jumped behind the wheel of his truck and we peeled out of there like TV hooligans in a seventies crime drama.
Daniel and I were laughing so hard we thought we’d cough up our own shoes, because we’d just seen the great Grant Henry get caught burglarizing a homeless man living in an abandoned trailer. “Wanna check to see if there’s any pencils we can steal from blind beggars?” I teased him, but Grant was not listening to me. He had stopped all of a sudden, in a little mill village dotted with ramshackle shotgun shacks, and he was staring transfixed at a vision from his front window.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 5