I feel sorry for the poor prostitutes, too. Not only do they have to fuck the skank-ass flotsam who are their normal clientele, but they have to bow to extorted blowjobs demanded by the police officers, too. You gotta marvel at the power of crack cocaine, you really do. I cannot think of a harder job than being a whore, and for something to have such a hold on you, to the point where you sacrifice everything to it, to the point you have nothing left to offer except your own orifices again and again, that is a mighty hook to have in you, I swear.
But still I guess it gets to them once in a while, these whores in our neighborhood. Rumor has it they resist occasionally, sometimes to their extreme detriment. Two have been shot recently by police. One of them was Pox Face, who is dead now. The other shot whore is not dead, or not as dead as Pox Face, anyway. The police said they did it in self-defense, because each girl had suddenly wielded a knife or pepper spray or both, though it’s reported that Pox Face had been shot in the back. Her sister hangs out on Dill Avenue up the street from my house, and she herself is a prostitute, and she complains all the time about having to submit to the sexual whims of the police, and how it will be even worse now that she knows they killed her sister, who was nonviolent and didn’t even own shoes let alone a canister of pepper spray.
So I figure the police are too busy wagging their dicks at these girls to do anything productive. I thank God every day for my dog Cookie, a pit bull that looks like a furry cross between a crocodile and a barracuda. She has teeth as big as ballpoint pens, though she’s never bitten a soul except me when she was a puppy. These drug dealers don’t know that, though, and they cut a wide path when they see me coming their way with her on a leash. I had no idea a mean-looking dog would be so effective in warding off evil in a bad neighborhood, but I’m convinced it’s the one thing that separates my house from Honnie and Todd’s. I figure if they had a mean-looking dog, as opposed to the sweet-looking little boxer puppy they presently have, then maybe the drug dealer would not be so emboldened as to set their house on fire.
But who’s to say why they are targeted and I am not, and who’s to say I won’t be next? So I am trying to prepare for that. I put in an alarm system and I make sure Cookie keeps looking mean, even though if anyone broke into my house to set it on fire she’d probably foil them only because she peed on their efforts out of sheer excitement to see them. But the drug dealers next door don’t need to know that. They can just keep on believing she’ll rip their heads right off their shoulders. It’s a small comfort, but it’s all I have to rely on right now.
Beautiful Loser
YOU’D THINK HE’D BE MORE INVENTIVE, because Lary is nothing if not glorious about meting out humiliation, but he probably went easy on Milly because she’s a baby, and a beautiful one at that. So all he came up with was the stamping of her head.
“You should put ‘REJECT’ in red letters, right on her forehead,” he suggests. “I really do have a stamp for that, you know.”
“She is not a reject, you bag of crap!” I shrieked, but my heart wasn’t in the shrieking, and Lary could tell. God, this has got me in a slough of despondency, this whole thing with Milly’s preschool—or her lack of a preschool, to be more accurate. I’d gotten the phone message the night before. “I’m sorry to say Milly didn’t get in,” said the administrator, “but the good news is that everyone else did.”
Everyone—everyone—but Milly. I’m told they had exactly one excess applicant and Milly lost the lottery. “Look at her,” Lary says, “she has no idea she’s starting life out as a loser.”
Christ, how’s that for hitting a chord? And he’s right, she has no idea. She seems perfectly happy hanging out with me all day. But shouldn’t she be out there, interacting with the world and other babies? I mean besides Lary, who only qualifies as an infant in the emotional sense. He’s offered to babysit before, but only because he’s completely confident I’d let a rabid raccoon babysit my daughter before resorting to him. I mean, last week he let her play with a big rusty razor blade, for chrissakes! Or at least that’s what it looked like.
“It’s a spatula,” Lary said, “calm down.” We were at his place preparing for the cocktail party he throws every other year to remind himself there’s a world outside his warehouse—because he really can close himself up alone in there for months at a time sometimes—and he’d had enough of me and my multitude of minor freaks over Milly’s safety.
“She’s not going to kill herself with a kitchen utensil,” he said, pointing to Milly’s prone body strapped in her stroller. “Look at her, she’s safe.”
Look at her. She’s not safe. This is Lary’s place we’re talking about; roll her two feet in any direction and she’ll end up with fish hooks in her head. But how is this any less perilous than the world in general? Even Lary locks himself away from it occasionally, preferring his own personal den of hidden disasters to the uncertainty of out there.
Safety, ha! I thought, here’s to hoping there is such a thing. I have a coconut shell carved in the shape of a monkey’s face I’ve kept for decades because it reminds me of the year I lived in Melbourne Beach, Florida. I was nine and never wore shoes that year. I simply leapt out of the house shoeless every day and walked to the river where I’d catch sailor fish from the pier and let them go. On blustery days I climbed to the crests of pine trees and let the wind sway me back and forth. I wish I had other items to remind me of this period in my life, the last time I felt completely safe, because . . . well, let’s just say you would not catch me shoeless today. Today I cover my toes, among other things.
And I shield Milly, but I want her to be spiritually barefoot, too. I want her to spring up each day unweighted by the bunk that will eventually mire us all in time. Mired like me. Like I feel so bad about the preschool.
“Get used to it,” says Lary, who has taken to calling Milly “The Unchosen One.” He reminds me of the regrettable period a few years ago in which he, Grant, and I once sought self-improvement from professional motivators. Lary even went as far as to join a seminar with the aim to make him a more loving person. After the second session they asked him not to return. And Grant! Grant didn’t even get that far; they barred his attendance after one phone call. Me? I was told “there’s nothing we can do to help you.” We gathered at Daniel’s place afterward and laughed about it, completely certain we were safe from ever fitting in.
“So you see? Milly is safe,” Lary tries to console. “Safe from ever being normal.”
The Only Piece Missing
DAMN, THEY DID NOT find the body to match the severed head in a sack after all. I tell you, I was wary right from the beginning, when Michael called to tell me he’d heard on the news they’d finally found the decapitated corpse to match the head in a plastic bag police found five years ago in my neighborhood, Capitol View. For one, that particular headless torso would just be bones by now, wouldn’t it? It sounded like the one they found in Walker County last fall was fresher than that. So unless the killer was keeping it frozen all these years that scenario did not make sense.
I was right. It turned out the Walker County corpse had its own head, in Johnson City, Tennessee, with three holes in it. Not only that, they think the killer is the same guy who cut off the heads and hands of a seventeen-year-old newlywed last October. That boy’s head and hands were found floating in a lake outside Johnson City, and later the rest of his body, plus that of his teenage wife, were found in a self-storage bin in the same vicinity, relatively. The suspected killer is in jail in New York on “unrelated drug charges,” but, personally, if you ask me, I think drugs are definitely related to this, including the still-unidentified head and sacks of other body parts they found scattered in Capitol View years ago. Until they find the killer or the identities of the people who lost their parts, it all seems so unfinished to me. It all just seems to be hanging there, like a safe suspended by dental floss, waiting to drop. And I hate that.
I would prefer things not to be scattered. I would prefer that t
hey find all the pieces and match them up in little labeled forensic tubs and notify family members and other interested parties (like me) that these pieces, though still dismembered, are at least no longer disembodied. If it were my murdered limbs, my dead ass would feel lousy knowing that parts of my corpse were still out there, waiting to be stumbled upon by neighborhood kids. My stand is that your own cut-up body parts are personal, and you don’t want just anybody looking at them. That is my biggest peeve about plane crashes, too, because I seriously loathe the idea of my body chunks showering down on complete strangers.
But I guess there are certain things to which you just have to become accustomed. Sometimes things remain scattered. They stay unfinished. The pieces stay missing. In fact they almost always do. Like I made my father a coat once, all except for the sleeve cuffs, because I could not figure out how the hell to attach them. I got past everything else—and this was a complicated coat, mind you, with duck down insulation and zippers and snaps and stuff—and I mastered them all except for the sleeves. So for two years that coat stayed unfinished, a masterpiece of intricate handiwork defeated by simple sleeve cuffs, which remained missing pieces.
My father kept expecting it, though. I’d been making coats since I was fifteen, the year before my mother left him. Call it a phase, but I used to like making complicated things from scratch. There were hundreds of pieces that had to come together for these coats, and I would personally burn the edges of each article of insulation by candle to keep the nylon frays from scattering, because who likes to leave things scattered? But for my dad’s coat I decided to graduate to knit sleeve cuffs, and that is what conquered me.
Finally I just hemmed the sleeves without the cuffs, which was kind of crazy because who wants a down jacket with no sleeve cuffs to keep the snow out? Even though we lived in California, I still envisioned my father having to change a flat in a blizzard somewhere, grateful that he had his daughter’s handmade down jacket to stave off the storm, only now his wrists would be frostbitten because important pieces were missing. But I finished it as best I could, because my father kept expecting it, and about four months after I finally gave it to him he died, which was not expected at all.
My sister and mother went to collect his effects, and upon their return they gave the coat back to me. My mother said the coat was not hanging in his closet with his other clothes, but rather from a nail on the wall in his dining room. “He must have liked looking at it,” she said. So I took the jacket back and hung it from a nail on the wall in my room. I liked looking at it, too. I no longer thought of it as unfinished, as having scattered or missing pieces. When I looked at it the only piece missing was the man inside.
An Odd Comfort
MY FRIEND DENNIS is visiting from San Francisco, and I’m all atwitter. He’s one of my oldest friends, and I seriously love this person. He has saved me from so much. In fact, the next to the last time I saw him he was saving me from a cluster fuck, and I mean that literally.
I was in San Francisco, not to visit Dennis but my other friend Joanie, who had a guy she wanted me to meet, seeing as how my then-boyfriend had just dumped me like a load of toxic waste—I mean he ugly dumped me. I came home one day and there were lists taped up all over our dining room walls, titled “Five-Year Goals,” “Ten-Year Goals,” and so on. I had to go and ask where I fit on his lists. I seriously think I could have kept that truth at bay for awhile, probably for goddam decades, but I guess it wasn’t in me, that capacity for falsehood. I had to go and ask him, and he had to go and tell me.
So that Thanksgiving, I mean that very weekend, he moved me out of our apartment. I like to think it wouldn’t have been so hard if he hadn’t been so happy throughout, but the truth is it would have been hard nonetheless. It made for a bad Thanksgiving, me alone eating mushroom gravy out of the can and watching Dennis Miller’s talk show back before they stupidly pulled it from network television. But hell, at least I had the odd comfort of my ex-boyfriend, who would call occasionally to say he’d forgiven himself for how he’d treated me.
During this time Joanie lost all her worldly possessions in a wildfire, and was living in a furnished apartment outside San Francisco until she could recoup. I went there thinking I could help her cope, because I think it’s times like this that your friends serve as emotional oxygen to your breathless heart, and you must pass from one to the other, borrowing air until you can breathe on your own again. But once I arrived, Joanie didn’t turn to me for comfort.
No. She took comfort in a most odd way. First, that man she wanted me to meet? It was her boyfriend’s best friend, but by the time I’d arrived, she’d developed a crush on him herself. “Joanie, whichever one you decide you want, I’ll distract the other, okay?” I told her, not fathoming she’d decide not to decide and end up in bed with both.
I swear, it’s not easy pretending you’re asleep on the couch when three people are fucking on the floor right beside you. By morning they’d mercifully moved to the bedroom and, left to wander her apartment on my own, I tried to drown out the howlings coming from Joanie’s bedroom by making long-distance calls on her phone.
“Just join in,” Lary suggested. “That’s what I’d do.”
“Retard,” I said, “I would rather rip out my kidneys with a crowbar.”
But Lary could only comfort me for so long before he had to go grade a door down with an industrial sander or something, so soon I was alone again, and utterly miserable. Seriously, there’s nothing sadder—nothing that’ll make you more certain you’re wasting your life—than spending the day in a strange apartment in a strange city waiting for your friend to finish getting fucked by strange men.
Eventually I ran out of numbers to call and chose, simply, to leave quietly, and for good. Joanie’s apartment was serviced by an exterior security gate, and once past that there was no turning back. Plus, my coat was locked in her car, and I had to abandon it to walk, freezing, to the car-parts store on the corner.
It was there I called Dennis. It had been three years since I’d last seen him, in San Diego where he served as a college intern at the magazine where I worked as a tortured copy editor, but still he pulled up to the curb fifteen minutes later, where I was waiting by the phone booth clutching a plastic sack.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked.
“A headlight,” I said. He didn’t even ask why I bought a headlight in California when my car was in Georgia.
He took me to a coffeehouse, and there I poured forth, not just about Joanie, but about everything. “You’d think the man you loved would include you in his five-year plan, or even his ten-year plan,” I blubbered, recounting my most recent Eiffel-Tower-inthe-ass moment. I’d been having them a lot lately, doleful reminders that the world was not my personal balloon on a string after all. “You’d think I’d fucking fit somewhere.”
Dennis just let me leak until I didn’t have any air left, then he took me to his family home to sleep in his sister’s bedroom. What I remember most about his childhood home is the counter spaces. They were cluttered with wondrous things it must have taken decades to collect, and I loved the way his house smelled, like heavily peppered vegetables.
I don’t know how Dennis explained to his family why his college friend showed up coatless on a cold winter day to spend the night, but I think it says a lot for them that they let me stay as long as I wanted, sitting there at their dining table, taking an odd comfort in the commingling of aromas that made up their family. They let me borrow their air until I could breathe on my own again, and for that I will always be grateful.
First Words
I’M NOT ALL THAT PROUD that one of my first words in Italian is “maggot.” You’d think I’d come up with something a little more useful, like “help,” but I’ve been here with Milly for two weeks and I still don’t know that word.
I’m here on a company-paid excursion to learn this language and put another interpreter qualification under my belt, which will take me far in the eyes of the nea
rly bankrupt airline I barely still work for. I qualified as an interpreter years ago in German and Spanish, but now all of a sudden I’ve become rusty at picking up languages. My problem is I keep searching through the dictionary for basic words of immediate use, like “need” or “have,” and I get all caught up with phrases I see on the way, like “acid test.” I see that and I suddenly think I cannot possibly communicate with Italians without knowing how to say “acid test,” it’s such a useful phrase! Or “zombie” or “polyunsaturated.” Seriously, these words are so universal, and I want to make it a point to learn words that matter.
For example, I remember years ago when my older sister’s Argentine ex-boyfriend, a busboy who could barely speak English, once used the word “compensation” in a sentence. It can be an impressive word when it’s the only decipherable one in a slew of words being spewed forth by an angry Argentine demanding restitution for having slipped in the alleyway behind his apartment building. It was a good performance, too, seeing as how he himself had unscrewed the bulb in the building’s exterior lamp to ensure there’d be insufficient lighting when he ventured back there.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 11