“No,” I tell Lucky Yates, “please just climb a pyramid in Peru and fall off the top or something.” Now that is a good way to go if you ask me. In college I heard about a couple who accidentally did just that, and I remember thinking that had to be the coolest way to kick the bucket this side of being blown apart in the space shuttle. But Lucky Yates is pretty unbendable about the snake.
“I’m not gonna be sitting there in the snake’s belly, twiddling my thumbs going ‘Hiya,’” he says, smiling with his really white teeth. “I’ll be dead, got it?”
That’s just it. I don’t get it, this whole desire to die young before you become a burden on people. Fifty is downright spry if you ask me. I know plenty of people in their fifties and, goddam, let’s just say it would be a real waste to feed them to snakes. That’s not saying I myself expect to live much longer than fifty, not that I plan to pitch myself from the top of a pyramid or anything, it’s just that people in my family seem to drop like flies after the fifty mark, and I just don’t have any experience dealing with relatives who made it into old age.
But I hope I get old. I do. I want to go to the airport every chance I get and be wheeled around like a rickshaw passenger. It might be fun not to feel my feet, too, which I hear is what happens to old people who spent their life not eating right. It might be great to grab onto people as I stumble around. With my job as a flight attendant, I get grabbed a lot by the tottering elderly, and I really don’t mind that much. Once it was a ninety-year-old German woman who turned out to be an original Budweiser heiress. I saw her again about two years later, and she remembered me. She had given me her address and wondered why I hadn’t written, and I’d have felt bad about causing a rich old lady to await a letter from me that never came, but I was too busy marveling at the sharpness of her brain, and hoping beer played a factor in that.
Then there is Miss Taylor, who lives across the street from me in the crack neighborhood. She is in her eighties and sometimes dances barefoot in the rain, plus she planted sunflowers in her front yard that used to grow so tall they almost touched the rain gutters on her roof. Watching her one morning, I was struck by the difference between Miss Taylor and the memory of my own comparatively young mother, who couldn’t even climb out of a car without having to catch her breath. She used to embarrass me, I’m ashamed to admit, especially when she got so ill the only place that would take her was a Tijuana cancer clinic where, for five hundred dollars a day, they specialized in prolonging death once conventional doctors had deemed it inevitable. I used to have to carry her from her bed to the bathroom because she refused to use bedpans. Her habit was to start kicking the second she saw the Haiti-trained doctor coming through the door with a bedpan under his arm. Once she knocked it right out of his hand to the floor, where it clamored loud enough to wake the whole wing.
Now, whenever I wonder if I have the strength to deal with something seemingly insurmountable in my life, I just remember that Tijuana cancer clinic and how I had to cradle my own mother like an infant as her life leaked out of her. Now I know I can face anything, because it’s times like these that define you, they serve as a denominator of your character, and I’m grateful my mother bestowed this on me.
But, God, sometimes I’d give it up just to have her back. I wouldn’t care if she couldn’t dance in the rain, I wouldn’t care if there was hardly anything left of her except her colostomy bag connected to her head in a fishbowl, I just really wish she’d made it to old age and was still alive, and whatever burden that might mean to me—or her—I’d gladly bestow it or carry it. I would. But barring that, at least I have the memory of my mother alive and kicking at a Tijuana clinic, knocking bedpans to the floor and going out with a bang.
Bigger Things
THINGS ARE SHRINKING AGAIN, according to Lary. “I’m telling you,” he says, measuring random stuff in my house, “things are shrinking.” These days he carries a tape measure with him everywhere he goes. He moves to my refrigerator, retractable tape at the ready, and assesses its width, which is the same as it’s always been. Everything is the same as it’s always been, but that doesn’t matter. “Things are still shrinking,” Lary says, “including tape measures. Trust me.”
Of course I don’t trust Lary. This is a guy who, a few years ago, tried to grind black Afghani hash into the pores of my canvas suitcase so I’d be busted by the drug beagle as we came through customs on our way back from Amsterdam. He did not even try to be discreet.
“What the hell are you doing to my suitcase?” I shrieked at him as we sat at the airport waiting to board the plane with the rest of the cattle. But Lary did not even look up. “Your life is lacking drama,” he said. I almost missed the flight because I had to hose my bag off at the drinking fountain and then douse it with ten different perfumes from the tester tray at Duty Free. To this day I am still amazed the drug dog didn’t sink his teeth into my neck as I came back into the country.
It’s funny I should mention baggage, because it’s when the airlines got really strict about weighing luggage that Lary became convinced the universe is getting smaller. “Fifty pounds used to be bigger than this,” he said, indicating a carry-on bag loaded with his customary airplane supplies, which include Cheetos, white wine, and forged documents declaring him a federally registered child molester. The food and wine are there to keep him from taking hostages in case the plane gets stuck on the tarmac, and the documents are there in case the flight attendant tries to seat him next to an adolescent.
Then he started measuring his cat Mona. But to be honest Mona really was shrinking. Lary actually expects me to feed her while he’s away, and he’s away a lot lately. One time I opened his door and there was that decayed-flesh smell, and I thought, Christ, I really killed her this time, but it wasn’t Mona that was dead after all, but a rat she had killed to keep herself alive in between my appearances. After that I was even less attentive, knowing if need be she could subsist on woodland creatures that roam the decrepit mausoleum Lary calls a home.
But Lary has stabilized Mona’s shrinking process. It’s the rest of the world he’s worried about, and he’s starting to get me worried, too. Just this morning I was laying there on the bottom part of my daughter’s brand new bunk bed, looking at the mattress above me, trying to remember how my sisters and I used to make hammocks when we were kids. First we would take the blanket and tie it to one end of the top bunk and stretch it to the other and secure it somehow. The end effect was a big pocket of sorts, and we would climb inside and hang there like little larvae inside a cotton cocoon. I loved doing that. The knots themselves reminded me of a person’s head wrapped in a turban, and the hammock their giant tongue.
Anyway, I was looking at Milly’s top bunk wondering how the hell we all fit in there, giggling like we did. Surely bunk beds were bigger back then. Everything was bigger back then. The world was just so damn vast and unshoveled, full of mystery and funny turban-wearing people with giant tongues. I remember a big field of mud next to our house, as expansive as the Sahara desert. I used to play in it all day, just mud. Christ, it seems even mud was bigger back then.
That last part is owed to our elderly neighbor named Rocky, who had a Polaroid camera as big as the seat on a bar stool. Once he took our pictures as we played and we got to watch them develop before our very eyes. We were so fascinated Rocky let us keep them. He was always telling us big stories about pirates who used to bury their loot in that very mud field way back when. He’d point to a particular landmark and say things like, “Pirates are notorious for burying their fortunes near crabapple bushes,” and we’d rush over there and go digging for it, and damn if we didn’t find something every time. I realize now Rocky was burying it there himself. They were pieces of old rhinestone jewelry that probably belonged to his late wife, who I hear had died after cutting her hand on a rusty tin can. Afterward, every week or so, Rocky would scout a new spot and guide us to it, and we’d commence the gleeful process of uncovering new treasure.
Then one
day Rocky came by to tell us of a new pirate site, and we simply declined the invite. It’s not that we had grown weary of him, it’s just that we had grown. When Rocky turned to leave I could see he’d brought his Polaroid camera, and I almost called after him, but I stopped myself. I was on my way to bigger things, I thought, and people on their way to bigger things are too busy to uncover new treasure.
Testing Badly
BILL AND MY SISTER CHERYL are down in Nicaragua yelling at each other right now, probably, which is why I’m not looking forward to going there. Cheryl is down there helping him with the small hotel they both now own. Her help and the fact that she offered it so self-lessly after Bill’s heart attack (if that’s what that was) was a gesture for which, over time, I guess Bill didn’t show adequate appreciation, because as of now my sister has moved down his street and opened her own business.
“Her crust is getting thicker and I cannot reach her,” Bill writes. “Words fall on deaf ears. What fun we’re all having, functioning disfunctionally.”
“Bill’s crazy,” my sister had written earlier. “He’ll order a hamburger in the restaurant and spit it out on the floor, in front of the customers.”
Now, I love old Bill, even though he is about as cuddly as a menstruating sea urchin, and I love my sister, even though to this day she will have me in a headlock when the whim hits her (and it hits her about twice daily), but both of them are now imploring me to come to Nicaragua and I’m worried they want me to mediate or validate or something regarding this feud, and, Jesus God . . . I really, really don’t wanna.
For one, of course Bill is crazy. He was living in his car when my mother met him and, showing a judgment of character her daughters would all inherit, became his best friend. He has always smoked like a living chimney, but still his eyes are as big and blue and clear as if they were painted by a preschooler. But there’s good crazy and bad crazy, and Bill’s crazy borders on good most of the time. He survived being homeless and he survived his supposed heart attack, and he will survive this feud with my sister. But some survivors are so used to climbing over obstacles that they don’t know how to function when their path clears up, so they simply create other obstacles.
Of course my sister’s crust is thick. Bill’s known her half her life; he helped talk her out of her last bad boyfriend, a bipolar behaving strip-club manager who once embedded all his kitchen knives into the ceiling of her bedroom. Still it took her awhile to give up on that guy, because that girl does not give up on anything easily. Even her college education is testimony to that. She didn’t get her degree, mind you, seeing as how she tests badly, but she’s got five years of self-financed, full-time university studies in her brain, which is important.
Anyway, she could have carried Bill out of the jungle on her back if she had to, but Bill didn’t need her for that. He needed her to roll up her sleeves and take over, which she did. My sister jumped in with a big belly flop, splashing everyone around, and to her credit some of these people seriously needed some splashing. For example, she saw no use in a kitchen employee who couldn’t work a can opener. But like I said, Bill is crazy (although in a mostly good way), and maybe he had a use for that person that isn’t evident to your average thick-crusted newcomer. So they yelled about that.
Cheryl also fired the person who functioned as the hotel manager, seeing as how he had a habit of stealing from them and seriously harassing the other employees. But evidently Bill didn’t consider these to be bad traits in an employee, so they yelled about that, too.
My only thought is that Cheryl had come there when Bill was sick and infirm with a purpose to clear a path for him as he recovered, and mind you I don’t even know if Bill asked her to do it, but I suspect a clear path to Bill is like garlic to a vampire; if he can’t avoid it he’ll destroy it. In this case he did not have to look very hard for obstacles, he simply made one of my sister.
The last time I saw Cheryl it had been a few months since she moved to Nicaragua, and she was visiting the States to attend our little sister’s graduation from law school. I think it’s always been a touchy subject for Cheryl, her absence of a college degree, and all because she tests badly. After our mother died she moved alone to Las Vegas, and I used to worry about her living there, working an unforgiving job as a cocktail waitress, calling me at 10 A.M. already drunk and bitter, panicking over an army of inner evils, phantom and otherwise.
And Christ, did I worry when she moved to Nicaragua. But when I saw her when she visited last, her arms were toned and her skin was the color of caramel. She complained about Bill, and she smoked like a living chimney but her eyes were big and clear and green. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life, Holly,” she laughed, and I thought about how good it was to see this girl again. I hadn’t seen this girl—I mean this one, with the easy laugh and the absence of panic—for over a decade. Bill is testing her, yes, but he better watch out. This time she is not testing badly.
Half Naked
THIS IS HOW UNOBSERVANT I AM: I did not even notice the lady was naked from the waist down. I mean, Christ, how many half-naked women sitting five feet from your car outside in the cold would you fail to spot? Probably not many. But to be fair to myself, it’s not like I overlooked her, I saw her right away as I pulled up to park at the church where Milly’s preschool is located. The lady was sitting behind a chain-link gate that stood butt flush with the sidewalk, traversing a small concrete easement between two buildings. The lady was right up against the fencing, facing the sidewalk, looking like—and I don’t want to be disrespectful—but she looked like a placid creature in a cage. Like I said, I noticed her right away; I noticed her eyes, big and bleak, her hollow cheeks and the concave of her upper lip from the absence of teeth. I noticed how she was shivering, and I noticed her bare, bloody feet, I just didn’t notice her poor little bare ass is all.
Besides, church is the last place you’d expect to find a half-naked lady, right? It’s also probably the last place you’d expect to find me for that matter. I have gone to church maybe four times on a whim in my entire life, but one thing I noticed while there was that people were pretty well dressed, with hats and everything. My child’s preschool, the one that eventually admitted her, thankfully, happens to be attached to a church, but other than that it’s a secular establishment. I was a little worried at first about the church thing, but when I set foot in there and didn’t burst into flames, I figured it would be fine. Today I have to say I am mighty proud of myself for picking Milly’s preschool. She has friends of all religions and races, and at two she could speak Spanish—okay, to be truthful all she can say is aqui, but that’s pretty damn great if you ask me. When I was her age my biggest trick was fetching beer out of the fridge for my father.
Anyway, this preschool and church are located in the city, and evidently half-naked homeless people are more likely to end up there—trapped behind a locked gate in what amounts to be little more than a concrete crack between two buildings—than they would if these buildings were located in a suburban cul-de-sac. That is just something I knew going in, but still it’s surprising when you see it.
“She’s cold,” Milly’said, pointing to the lady behind the gate. I did not need to be told. We tried talking to her, but her response was incoherent. So I told her I’d be right back and took Milly to class. When I returned I saw the church’s pastor, Suzannah, unfastening the cumbersome padlock that secured the gate. Until then the half-naked lady had been trapped back there, and we still don’t know how she got in there short of climbing the chain link, and she didn’t look in any condition to shimmy. I could see my friend Fred walking toward us with a cup of tea he had bought at Kelly’s on the corner. Fred’s boy, Jake, is one of Milly’s best friends. He is a large, handsome child with eyes like liquid Christmas lights, all bright and inviting. Fred handed the tea to the half-naked lady, who promptly spilled it on her feet. Her feet looked just about frozen, so this could have been on purpose.
We discerned that she probably
had hypothermia, seeing as she must have spent the night outside in below-freezing weather, so an ambulance was called. In the meantime, another cup of tea was delivered and spilled on her feet, and her pants were found, marking the moment I finally figured out she was naked from the waist down.
I guess until then my brain was just filling in the blank where her pants should have been, offering her a dignity that didn’t exist at that particular moment but was hopefully bound to return. And it did. Suzannah helped her into her pants, and then she did something that I personally am ashamed to admit I would not have done. Suzannah put her arms around the lady—her whole arms—and tried to rub some warmth back into this lady’s poor hide.
For some reason I was really relieved to see that there are people braver than me, brave enough to be that kind to a crazy, bare-assed homeless person with bloody feet. Fred said so, too. He said that he was worried he’d be admonished for offering her the tea, worried there was a kind of “don’t feed the animals” mentality regarding homeless people in this neighborhood, because there is that attitude in other neighborhoods, believe me, mine in particular. I was once subjected to total public humiliation by a coffeehouse employee, who yelled at me from across the courtyard for ten minutes because I gave a buck to a beggar. “They’re like puppies, they’ll just keep coming back!” she hollered, and I had to slink away, chastised. But now here Suzannah was restoring my faith in humanity by holding this shivering, incoherent, half-naked homeless lady in her arms, holding this person with her whole arms until nobody was half-naked anymore.
Somewhere Else
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 13