I grew up thinking all this was normal.
This is not normal. But still, at family gatherings we used to laugh so hard it felt like our lungs would collapse. In the end, I think the only thing my parents really did wrong was not live long. Once, when I was studying literature in England at Oxford, my mother sent me a letter saying how proud she was. Of me. The letter was long and full of things I need to hear right now, but I was really young and thought my mother was as invincible as I was, and I used to have this bad habit of throwing everything away. So the letter is gone, and another reason I can’t sleep at night is because I stay awake trying to recall everything it said. I think if I concentrate hard enough I can hear my mother’s voice, and sometimes I do. She talks about my resolve, my determination, my ability to conquer things, and she says something else that wasn’t in the letter; advice good enough to pass onto my child. She says, “Don’t throw everything away.”
My Mother’s Trailer
LARY IS MAKING A LIST of his fears. “What the hell for?” I ask. “So I can do ’em all,” he says, and I have to laugh at that. God knows Lary has no fears that are easily faceable. Like he has no fear of skydiving or death or snakes or Satan or any other basic fright that strikes ice into the hearts of normal people. His biggest fear is living in a duplex on Chipmunk Lane in Lilburn, Georgia. His biggest fear is being surrounded by mid-income soccer moms who will insist he clean all the decayed auto parts off his driveway and who will call the police when he puts an old refrigerator in his front yard with a sign that says, “Great Playhouse.”
“What’re you gonna do? Move to a suburban cul-de-sac?” I ask.
“A fear is something that has a possibility of happening,” he jibbers, backpedaling. “I don’t care what happens or how good looking the girl is, I’ll never wake up on Chipmunk Lane.”
We are at the Local, and Keiger won’t front him a free dinner, even though I personally told Lary it was on the house. “Order anything you want,” I said magnanimously, because lately I’ve taken to telling customers there that their tab is on the house, even though I don’t own the place or have any right to give anything away. Keiger does own it, though, and it pleases me to see him swoop in after me and make people pay anyway. Before he bought this bar, Keiger parked cars for a living, and he’s said he has a fear of ending up back there again. So to help him out I offer to ease his way into bankruptcy, because I think it’s important to face your fears, but so far Keiger is not on board with this. He keeps making people pay anyway.
I personally have a fear of ending up in a trailer on a homestead in the middle of some dismal expanse of land. Like Keiger and his fear, I have experienced mine and don’t want to go back. For a long period after my parents divorced, I lived with my mother in a trailer two miles north of the Tijuana border, and I still haven’t decided if it was as bad as you might think. There was a clubhouse, for example, and monthly “mixers,” during which the trailer-park residents mingled over coffee and home-baked cinnamon cake. There were a lot of old people with missing limbs living there, too, and they seemed eager for company.
Our trailer itself wasn’t so bad, either. There was carpeting on the floor and blankets on the beds. But the front door was about as substantial as one you’d find on a kitchen cupboard in a real house, and every step you took in the place made it shake like a boxcar, a constant and unwelcome testimony to its impermanence.
I remember there was a collective effort on the part of the trailer owners to pretty up their lots. Most of the trailers had permanent-ish porches that were fashioned to provide access to the front door as though you were walking up to a real home as opposed to one on wheels, and the wheels themselves were often hidden by lattice fencing surrounding the underside of the trailer. But in my eyes all these efforts couldn’t belie that this place was little more than a shantytown.
The black widow didn’t help, either. I don’t have a fear of spiders in general, just poisonous ones in particular, and it seriously did not help that a big black widow lived in the storage shed in back of my mother’s trailer. I was constantly needing to get into that shed, too, because that is where most of my important stuff ended up, stuff like the one-eyed snake I won at a carnival when I was seven. There was not a lot of room in my mother’s trailer for these treasured items, so they were all relegated to the shed and guarded by the black widow, which lived at knee level just inside the door.
My practice was to simply open the door of the shed and sit there, wailing and pointing at it, which one day caused my heavy-set neighbor, Tillie, to shout at me. She was sitting in her wheelchair on her porch one day as I did this. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she hollered.
I told her about the poisonous spider and how, even if I stuck my hand in the shed on the whole other side away from the black widow, I might snag a piece of the web, therefore triggering the spider to somehow careen up onto my head and bite me on my brain.
Tillie had just had her legs amputated due to diabetes, and their bandaged stumps stuck out from beneath her large body like two big broken broomsticks. “Goddammit, girl, you’ve got feet, right? I ain’t got feet, but you do, right? Well, then, look at your foot and then look at the spider. Your foot is bigger, isn’t it? You’re a lot bigger. Now just stomp on that damn spider and shut the hell up.”
So I did as she said. I stomped on it, and to this day I continue to take Tillie’s advice any time I can. It was sage wisdom, after all. In the end, we are all bigger than our fears. We should all just stomp on them and shut the hell up.
A Bad Housekeeper
IT’S TOO BAD testicles are such an easy target. Really. And they always seem to be hanging there at table-corner height, which just makes them cumbersome. But to have them shot off, that right there is the motherfuck of all motherfucks, if you ask me, even though you could argue I have none of my own anymore—balls, that is.
That police deputy did, though, poor guy. He and his partner were just doing their job in my neighborhood, visiting from their own district, serving what they considered to be a low-risk warrant on Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a Muslim cleric who is supposed to be a pillar of our community, and for some reason Al-Amin pulled out an assault rifle and shot them both. Then while they lay there in the street wounded, Al-Amin slowly approached one and shot his balls off, three bullets to the groin, which killed him fairly efficiently, while the other deputy watched, horrified.
The next day I knew something was up in my neighborhood the second I turned the corner past the crack dealers and saw immediately that our regular contingent of whores were nowhere to be seen, especially Pox Face, who was probably the most visible hooker we had. That was not her actual name, just one I’d given her. I’ve only seen her through my car window, and she was so ugly I wondered whether the reason she was so reliably on the street was because she had a hard time getting any business, an assumption backed by her lack of shoes.
Pox Face used to wear an old pair of riding boots I’d picked up at a thrift store as part of a failed Halloween costume a few years back. I was going to be an old-fashioned stewardess, and the closest thing I could find to the kind of go-go boots they used to wear back in the good old days—back when Pucci designed the uniforms and everybody belted shots in the cockpit—were these lame riding boots. So I bought them, figuring I could paint them white, but thankfully ditched the idea. The boots, though, stayed with me until I moved to Capitol View.
It is the practice of me and my neighbors to leave useable items we no longer want on top of the lid of our trash containers the day trash is to be collected, seeing as how there are so many needy people in the neighborhood, and it takes probably ten minutes, tops, before the item is picked up and disbursed among the miscreants who populate this place. Those boots, though, must have stayed out there for hours. I was really surprised. I thought they’d go fast, even though they’re a size ten. Finally they got picked up by Pox Face, and she wore them until she lost them, because crack whores lose everything eventual
ly Every little thing.
But none of the whores were visible the morning after Al-Amin shot the balls off that deputy. What I did see, though, were police cars. I never saw so many police cars on Dill Avenue. The crack dealers were there, too. You can’t let a little cop killing get in the way of commerce, I guess.
Al-Amin is on the run right now, that’s why the police are canvassing our neighborhood. They believe he has a lot of supporters here, and he does. The Muslim population in our neighborhood is collectively aghast. They are insisting Al-Amin is innocent, a bastion of our community, and crediting him with having cleaned up the West End where we live. “He swept this place up,” they insist. If he is persecuted and put to death, they say, our neighborhood will be sentenced to death as well.
Now I’m not black and I’m not Muslim—not that I know of anyway, because the truth is both of my parents died before I started caring about heritage, thus making it hard for me to harangue them for information—but I am a resident of the community Al-Amin is credited with cleaning up, and I can tell you truthfully the man sucks as a housekeeper. First of all, leaving dead policemen lying around with their balls shot off is damn fucking messy. But besides that even, I have never once seen Al-Amin come by with his big broom to sweep up the dealers on Crack Corner down the street from my house, or to sweep up the pimps who peddle child prostitutes on Metropolitan Parkway, or even to help Honnie and Todd, who have been terrorized and shot at by the drug dealer next door since soon after they moved in. A lot of people in the neighborhood came forth to help them, to sit on their porch with them and hold vigil with them in a show of support. None of them were assault-rifle toting pillars, granted, but they did what they could. Where was Al-Amin then?
Maybe he was busy. I guess it takes time to stockpile weapons and plan a botched double cop killing, where you blast the balls off of one and leave the other lying there, looking at you, able to perfectly describe you plus the car you were driving. I guess it takes time to take stock in yourself, see that you have no balls, that you are just as nutless as the man you left dead in the street, then to run away and hide behind the faded faith of your neighbors.
Building Walls
IAM NOT DEAD, though there are ants in my bed, which blows my theory—I always thought you had to be dead before ants tried to eat you. I thought there was some kind of insect protocol when it came to insects and humans. Surely they don’t eat you alive, do they? Don’t forensic scientists use insect-feeding patterns as evidence to determine time of death?
I wouldn’t be wondering this if I didn’t live in a goddam peat bog. I swear, there must be a complete cosmic funnel through which all the spiders, ants, moths, and billion-legged robo-bugs in the world are sucked, and then there is my house, right under the butt end of the funnel, getting continuously crapped upon.
You’d think walls would make a difference, but they don’t. I had better protection when I was living in a tent, even though I never really lived in one except for that week I went whitewater rafting in Colorado. My little sister lived in a tent, though, actually lived there with her husband Eddie. She said it was nice, with interior tent walls that divided it into separate rooms.
When I think of my sister’s tent I think of Richard Burton in Cleopatra, when his army made “camp” before going into battle. Only Richard Burton’s tent was like a mansion, with massive candelabras and gilded doorframes. Doorframes, in a tent. There weren’t even doors, but there were red velvet drapes tied to the side with gold-tasseled cord. His bed, though, is what really cracked me up. It was an ornate, four-poster colossus, with about fifty pillows. That was a stupid-ass way to portray a Roman about to go into battle, but back when my sister told me she was living in a tent, I liked to think of the one Richard Burton had. “It’s nice,” she told me, and I really wanted to believe her.
Because what else was I gonna do? She was living in Zurich at the time, and I couldn’t fly there from California to save her, especially since she didn’t want to be saved. I’d already tried talking her out of marrying Eddie a year earlier, and all that did was build a wall between us. We’d started out living in Zurich together, along with my mother who’d been contracted to design weapons for the Swiss government. When the contract expired, I tried to get Kim to come home to the States with me, explaining, with all the gentleness of an angry bobcat, that she’d be a fool to stay. “Alcoholic walrus,” for example, is what I called the man she loved. I blamed him for everything, too. I especially blamed him for the tent.
I didn’t expect her to turn me down. Kim and I had been roommates in college. She kept the place clean and made sure the bills were paid, and in return I kept my cadre of meaningless boyfriends down to basic parade level. It was a great setup, if you ask me. It just seemed natural that my sister and I would emerge from the mended shipwreck that made up our childhoods to have a home in the same place. In my mind she would always be there, being my little sister, believing everything I said. I remember when her dimpled fingers used to be too short to reach the bottom of a bag of candy, so I’d tell her the candy was gone and finish the bag myself. I remember accepting money from my mother for teaching her how to read when, really, she’d already learned on her own somehow. I remember having dreams in which she was horribly hurt and waking with inconsolable sobs. I still have those dreams. Those don’t go away.
Now here she was living in a tent and telling me it was nice. Sometimes I was fine with it. Sometimes I could put the thought of my homeless-but-for-a-tent little sister into a special compartment in my head and keep her there for long periods. “She says it’s nice,” I’d tell myself.
But other times I’d let it hit me with the dull thump of dead birds. Jesus God, this was my little sister, living in a tent halfway across the hemisphere, and in the end I left her there. I cannot believe I left her there. To this day I still don’t know what is best; to sit a world away while your little sister lives in a tent and do nothing but buffer your worry with walls you build in your brain, or to drop everything and make your way back to her, so that you can take her dimpled hand and bring her home. All I know is this: her home and my home had become two separate places, with walls all their own, and she knew that before I did.
She is no longer living in a tent, thank God. She lives in a nice house with real walls now, in Dayton, Ohio, of all places, with her husband Eddie, a big dreamer whom I’ve grown to love. We had our walls up, yes we did, my sister and I, but eventually our devotion returned. It made its way in, seeping through the cracks like insects, and after enough of that the walls weakened and we loved each other again, or we were brave enough to let each other know we never stopped.
A Better Thief
IF MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A BETTER THIEF, I would not be here right now. Not that she wasn’t skilled, mind you, she was. I’d even say she was better than Lary, who right now is the best klepto I know. But Lary relies on the obvious. For example, he will simply walk into the waiting room of an upscale plastic surgeon’s office with a hand truck and take the leather couch right out from under the newly lipo-sucked asses of the patients there. “Move aside,” he’d say. “Emergency couch removal.” Nobody would stop him because such a blatant theft is outside their sphere of experience. In short, they’d believe him because believing him would be so much more comfortable than confronting him.
My mother, too, occasionally used that technique—like once she stole all the patio furniture from the pool-side of the condo complex where she used to reside by simply backing a borrowed truck up to the gate and loading up—but she didn’t rely on it. Her expertise was much more refined. She had great sleight of hand. She could steal from casinos, for chrissakes. I cannot overemphasize the skill factor there, the dexterity you’d need to steal stuff off the top of a casino blackjack table. With that talent she could have performed her own show on one of Las Vegas’s lesser stages, say the Hoe-Daddy room at downtown’s Binion’s Horseshoe as opposed to the blow-ass velvet-curtain faux-Broadway number at the Venetia
n on the strip.
She took things from her office, too, and not just the industrial big blocks of Post-it notes, either, but outdated classified documents detailing projects she had been working on. She gave them to me once so I could present them as my own when I applied for a job as a technical writer for a company in Zurich that made corrugated materials. I was not qualified to be a technical writer for a cardboard-box company, especially a German-speaking company, but here we were living in Switzerland because my mother had scored work designing missiles for the Swiss government, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like national security get in the way when I decided I wanted a job of my own. It wasn’t America’s national security, after all, just Switzerland’s.
Besides, she was always talking about how none of the stuff she designed for them ever seemed to work properly. Take the time she traveled to a Sardinian testing facility to trial the missile tracking device she helped design. The purpose of the weapon was to intercept enemy missiles and facilitate their destruction before they reached their target. It was a precursor to the Patriot missiles that are used in Iraq today, with the exception that her device didn’t work.
“It just fell the hell over,” she laughed afterward. “It fell right off its base and onto the goddam ground.”
So she stole those documents for those weapons and tried to get me to pass them off as my own, because a place that makes cardboard boxes surely could use a technical writer astute enough to build her own bomb, right? “Hell, yes,” she said, “get out there.”
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 8