Yes, this man bypassed all the lesser words of the English language and cut right to the one everyone respects. I hear he owns a car dealership now.
So I always figured that would be a good way to absorb other languages; just pick the words that scare people and say them over and over until you own a car dealership or something. But I think you have to be a certain kind of person to recognize those words readily—not a person like me. For example, I’m not satisfied with knowing how to say a simple “thank you” in another language. I want to know how to say it in the most officious way possible. I want to know how to say, “I’m delighted by your kindness,” or “Your generosity amazes me,” or “I am humbled by the bounteousness of your humanity.”
People are generally flattered by my method, but I don’t see any of them clamoring to give me car dealerships. Even so, I like being able to thank people in pretty ways. Sometimes I don’t even say it to anyone in particular. I just say the words because I like the way they sound.
My mother always told me I spoke my very first word when I was a few months shy of two years old, and that word was “cigarette.” In actuality, though, the word was just “get,” but since I was indicating my mother’s cigarette with my hand when I said it, she thought it obvious I wanted to try a hit. “Whaddaya know? A kid after my own heart,” she said proudly; then she sat me atop the ironing board and put her lit Salem menthol in my mouth.
I coughed so violently I can actually recall the incident—it’s flapping around in my head like an escapee from the compendium of memories that are supposed to be locked in the subconscious of your first years, along with what it felt like to be born and whatnot. I remember sitting there on the ironing board, hacking my lungs out like a veteran, while my mother patted me on the back as if a good burping was all I needed to get me breathing again.
My father interrupted his own puffing to castigate her for a minute, telling her she shouldn’t share her cigarette with a two-year-old, taking care to part his own cloak of secondhand smoke so she could see he was serious. “She’s gotta know if she likes it,” my mother said, “the earlier the better.”
By the time I was thirteen I had a pack-a-day habit. Then suddenly that same year I’d decided I’d had enough and simply quit. Looking back, I guess thirteen qualifies as an early age to determine if you like smoking or not. If my mother were here I’d thank her very officiously for getting the wheels rolling so soon in that regard. I would say something in Italian perhaps, something like, “Your compassion is a vast ocean among mere puddles.”
But I can’t, those chances are past. Now I have Milly, and her first words emerged not long ago, like a foggy picture finally come into focus. Weeks beforehand, those words just sounded like the cooing of a pigeon. “Hoo koo. Hoo koo,” Milly would trill, always while handing you something. Then the sound evolved, “Hank hoo,” until one day it came out clear as a bell. “Thank you,” she said as she handed me the torn label from a can of cat food.
At her words—her first words—my heart almost clawed its way out of my chest, so desperate it was to attach itself to her like lovesick putty. I held her for five hundred years after that, or at least I wish I could have. “Thank you,” she kept repeating. “Thank you. Thank you.” Whaddaya know? I thought, soaking the top of her head with my tears. A kid after my own heart.
My First Freshman Year
DURING MY FIRST freshman year of college I was the same as most of my fellow students—drug-addled and ignorant as a child. I even used to be jealous of my truly drug-addicted friends for being so skinny. “Damn,” I’d think, “look at that bitch, she has to jump around in the shower just to get wet! I hate her.”
I myself tried very hard to be an addict during that year. I was seventeen and living in a bay-front apartment with two other totally self-involved slags, who, when they weren’t fucking my boyfriend behind my back, were introducing him to a harem of other girls for basic blow-job consideration.
I tell you, that’s the problem with dating hot guys. This one wasn’t just hot, but drop-jaw hot, with long blond hair and eyes as blue as blowtorch flames. He looked like an angel, but evil. God, he was evil.
“Do you love me?” he once asked despondently. I wondered if that might be the reason he was acting so strange lately. Oh, the poor, handsome, sad little god. “Yeah,” I replied tentatively.
“That’s the problem,” he said, exasperated, “I don’t love you.”
Evil, I tell you. By the way, that is the only time I ever punched a man.
But he stayed in my life for as long as I let him. He once tried to pimp me off on a friend, and another time he and another drunk friend tried to gang rape me while my roommates laughed in the living room, ignoring my cries. Finally our brassy hairdresser neighbor heard me screaming from the sidewalk and simply walked in through our open front door. “What the hell’s going on here?” she shouted. At that the guys let me go and continued their marathon coke-snorting session in my kitchen.
I tried to let all this be okay with me. I tried to not care when I’d come home after my third work shift for the day to find the son of the owner of the Mexican restaurant where my roommates worked waiting for me in my bed like he was entitled to be there.
“Who is that asshole in my bed?” I’d ask the crowd of other strangers in my place. They rolled their eyes in a universal signal of indifference.
I was on my way to fitting in, I think, when thank God my old friend Kathy came to visit. She’d driven the two hours south from Torrance to San Diego, where I had moved since the two of us attended high school together, to assess my living situation.
“Look at the bay!” I’d say excitedly. “It’s right outside our window!”
She was unimpressed. She could care less about the close proximity of the ocean if it meant sharing an apartment with “these bitchy pigs,” indicating my roommates, who at the time were in the other room passed out under a pile of guys. “Get yer shit,” she said. “We’re outta here.” She began to gather my things.
And that is how I didn’t become a drug addict my first freshman year in college. Kathy threw my possessions in the back of her impeccable ’72 Ranchero, stopped for a minute to grab a pair of scissors and cut the crotches and armpits out of every single item of clothing my roommates had hanging on their clothesline over the carport, and moved my ass back up to Torrance, where I lived for the next four months with her sister Nadine in an apartment at least five miles from the beach.
Kathy herself lived with her mother in Rolling Hills, and she hadn’t spoken to her father in years. The last time she saw him, she said, was when she caught sight of him early one morning asleep in his car parked outside a bar. His head was resting halfway outside his window, as was his arm, which dripped a trail of blood down the car door.
“Didn’t you stop to help him?” I gasped.
“Fuck no,” she said. “I hope the bastard died that day.”
I used to wonder why Kathy would bother to save me but not her own father, but now I think I know the reason. It’s because she must have tried. She must have tried so many times growing up to make herself matter more to him than his own addictions, and because she couldn’t she probably took her father’s failures personally, and hated him for making her hate herself.
I started my second freshman year in a different college the following fall, and four years later I got a call from Kathy. I’d stupidly lost touch with her since the fiasco of my first freshman year, and was surprised to hear her voice.
“I’m just walking out the door to graduate!” I yelled happily into the phone. Yes, I was about to graduate like a normal person, someone who wasn’t hiding a secret first freshman year from school administrators. “Can I call you when I get back?” But I never talked to her again. I just hung up the phone like the person on the other line never saved my life at all, and, like an ignorant child, went about enjoying the gift she gave me without looking back.
Lost Love
MILL’S MI
TTENS ARE MISSING. Yes, she wears mittens even though it’s uncommonly hot out. They’re tokens of comfort, I figure, like a blanket. Daniel calls them gloves and taught her to say it, only she often drops consonants when she talks. Our cats Lucy and Tinkerbell have become “Oosy” and “Inky” to Milly, and her gloves, which are so small they didn’t even bother sewing fingers into them (they’re just fuzzy pouchlike things) are “love.” Yesterday, as I read the paper, I felt her fleeced little hand on my face, and I looked up to see her smiling at me, proudly sporting her mittens. “My love,” she said sweetly.
After that I knew I wouldn’t be going to Nicaragua to help my sister Cheryl tend to my mother’s best friend Bill, who, if he had any strength left, would probably use it to beat me with a fireplace poker. He’s pissed at me for disclosing that the hotel he runs down there doubles as a brothel, which is no surprise. It was in Costa Rica (where he owned a bar that was as profitable as a huge hemorrhage inside his wallet) that he was about to go into business with a Nigerian woman who ran a hotel/whorehouse on the beach up the street. When I last visited he gave me a tour of the place, careful to point out the laundry facilities.
The arrangement was to have been that the African madam would populate Bill’s bar with high-end whores every night, thus attracting an increase in patronage to his establishment. I don’t know how Bill planned to compensate the madam, or perhaps he didn’t, as they never did become business partners, though Bill left Costa Rica insisting his next business venture would be a facsimile of hers. I believed him, as Bill usually does what he says he will do.
Except die. He’s been blathering about how his end is near for years, only he keeps breathing, regardless of his recent heart attack. My sister Cheryl is bereft, and dropped everything to be by his side. She loves Bill like a musty old bedtime toy treasured since her infancy. They’ve spent countless hours together since my mother’s death; drinking, chain smoking, bitching about life in general and me in particular. I’ve changed, they complain. I used to be fun. I used to be brazen and braless, booze-addled, boy-crazy, and adventurous. Another one lost to the establishment, they toast, promising that they themselves will never sell out. And they never will.
Occasionally Bill tries to shake Cheryl free. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that Bill is unaccustomed to lasting attachments, even if you count my mother. When he met my mother she had only four years left to live, but through her Bill acquired Cheryl and, spiky old bag of magma that he is, Bill has become Cheryl’s token of comfort in life. He can’t shake her free. If he is lost she will find him, even in a jungle in Central America.
I made plans to go, too, and got Lary to commit as well. “We can fly into San Jose,” I told him, “rent a car and drive seven hours over bad highways and unsettled political terrain until we get to Granada. Sound good?” It sounded great to Lary, who immediately started honing his duck-and-jab maneuvers in the event of an attempted kidnapping. In Central America, Lary and I would stand out like purple rhinos at a wedding reception. He has hair like a curly halo of albino tarantulas, and I myself have been loudly referred to as “bleachy-haired honky bitch,” so by virtue of our un-Latin-ness alone we would make decent criminal targets.
“This’ll be a great story to tell your grandkids,” said Lary, who actually welcomed the prospect of living in a freshly dug dirt hole for a few months while demands for our ransom undoubtedly went ignored in Atlanta. “We’ll escape by climbing a rope we made out of our own hair,” he mused, excitedly. It started to sound fun even to me.
But then Milly’s mittens went missing. I hovered helplessly as she toddled to every corner of our house. “My love! My love!” she sobbed with those big, uninhibited tears I sometimes wish I could still muster myself. It’s difficult to describe the effect such a sight had on me, except to say that right then, for a second, I saw with clarity what was in store for me and my daughter. I realized we will lose each other one day, Milly and I, possibly more than once, but eventually for good. It’s a reality as inescapable as it is unbearable to think about. She will long for me one day, and I will be out of her grasp, and she will have to make do with a token of comfort. What is life, after all, if not a succession of searches like this?
“You pussy,” Lary chided when I bailed on our trip. I would have argued with him, but Milly was crying, and I was aching to help her find her lost love.
Snitches
THERE ARE TWO DRUG-ADDICT PANHANDLERS impersonating charity workers at the busy intersection near Honnie and Todd’s house, and it’s amazing anyone falls for their act. But I guess we are jaded in this neighborhood; we can spot a crack addict from five hundred paces, with their chalky lips, gray pallor, and taut cheekbones. But we are not newcomers, and there are a lot of newcomers coming through here lately.
They are coming for the same reason we first did, in search of an affordable home close to the city. But if they asked me, I’d tell them that, though the price of a home here is low, living here still comes at a very high cost.
Take the drug dealer next door to Honnie and Todd. He set their house on fire again. This was after they, along with other neighborhood activists, finally shut down the crack house across the street. After fruitless appeals to the police, they finally bypassed them and resorted to red tape to strangle the place. The county housing inspector slammed its owner with housing code violations like a blizzard of bureaucratic confetti, and rather than finance the mandated improvements, the owner simply emptied the house of tenants and put it up for sale. Now it’s been transformed from a skanky, illegal boarding house to a piece of hot property.
“It’s gorgeous in there,” said the real-estate agent representing the house. “It’s got four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and four fireplaces,” and hardly any used condoms stuck to the porch anymore. But this agent knows that fact won’t deter buyers, because at these prices most houses in Capitol View sell before the sign goes up in the yard, and this one was no exception. It sold in less than a week.
But the drug dealer next door to Honnie and Todd is not rolling over so easily. After the crack house closed down, thereby eradicating a big part of his customer base, he placed speakers in his widows and played Master P’s rap song “Snitches” continuously, at ear-bleeding decibels.
Then he set Honnie and Todd’s house on fire again. The fire department has taken to sending Honnie the bills for their service, which doesn’t help. It also doesn’t help that the police, when they came, did not arrest the drug dealer, but Honnie’s mother, Bren, instead. The drug dealer had told them that she—Honnie’s mother, the lady who makes her own soap—pointed a gun at him and he got one of his crack-addict cronies to corroborate his story, so damn if the police didn’t come and arrest that poor lady. She is about as peaceful and sweet as a nun. In fact, she almost is a nun. She’s a Baha’i worshiper who would not touch a gun if her life depended on it. Please, she brought that asshole drug dealer a basket of homemade soap when they first moved in next door. She and Honnie both offered to assist his girlfriend in enrolling in night cosmetology classes so she wouldn’t have to strip anymore; they even offered to babysit their two sad brats if the need ever arose. But then Honnie and her family helped close that crack house down, thereby immensely pissing off the drug dealer next door, and now the police are hauling Honnie’s sweet, peace-loving mother off to the hoosegaw based on the say-so of this prick, the guy who set their house on fucking fire! Twice!
It’s stuff like this that I’d tell newcomers in the neighborhood if they asked me. I’d also tell them about the neighbors who support Honnie and Todd and Bren, too. We all showed up, a crowd of us, at the courthouse when Bren appeared before a judge to answer the charges, and it turned out this same drug dealer had been getting all kinds of people hauled off by the police. He’d just point them out and say he’d been threatened by them, and the police would hone in like hornets to arrest them. A few days prior, the drug dealer had the police arrest the man across the street, a very personable retired electrici
an for the Ford Motor Company, who supposedly threatened the drug dealer by brandishing a shovel.
The judge dismissed the charges in all cases, but the irony isn’t lost on Bren that, while her life is constantly threatened by screaming crack addicts, gunshots, and an arsonist, the police rarely deem it necessary even to write a formal report, yet a known crack dealer can use these same police to cart off unfavored neighbors as though he has all the power of an ill-tempered emperor.
I always drive by Honnie’s house on my way home these days because she asked me to. So do a lot of her other friends who live nearby. Other than the drug dealer next door, her street is looking pretty nice now that the crack house is gone. Many houses have been bought up, fixed up, and landscaped. Others show for-sale signs put there by landowners who discovered the neighborhood is starting to pull in prices that make small-time whoring and drug dealing less profitable by comparison. In the middle of it, Honnie’s house sits there like a little jewel, with potted flowers on the porch, bullet holes in the window, burned baseboards in the kitchen, and music bellowing from one house over: “I got a slug for ya’ll muthafuckin’ snitches. . . .”
Out with a Bang
IPERSONALLY THINK FIFTY IS TOO YOUNG TO DIE, but Lucky Yates has it all planned out, sort of. He says he wants to be eaten by a snake in the Amazon or something. He wants to go out with a bang, though I don’t see how being swallowed whole qualifies. “That’s a slow death, not a bang death,” I point out, “and being broken down by digestive enzymes has gotta hurt, too.”
“Pythons suffocate you before they swallow you,” Anna corrects me, but I don’t buy that. Who’s to say you don’t regain consciousness with your body half swallowed? And what if the snake is swallowing you feet first? It’s not like you can run away at that point, so you have to just lay there like an idiot with half your body hanging out of a snake’s mouth for what could be hours.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 12