Body Parts and Perverts
IF YOU WERE A CONVICTED child-molesting masturbator, I suppose you would need to live somewhere, I was just hoping it wouldn’t be on my actual damn street. I was hoping, in my small world, all convicted child molesters could live in prison, maybe, perhaps bricked up inside a jailhouse toilet or something, not four blocks away from my front door. That’s practically ejaculation distance, according to Grant. Lary says I should shoot the pervert in the head and drag his body onto my property to feign an intrusion, but that’s Lary’s answer to everything. He is always wanting to shoot people and drag their bodies onto his property.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just lure them inside, then shoot them?” I ask.
“I’m not alluring,” he answers.
Besides, Lary wants to leave a big blood trail for the police to ignore. Ever since Lary shot at that burglar escaping down the street years ago, and the police told him not to miss next time, he has been itching to test the boundaries of their complacence. In fact, he’s been looking into the Georgia Bureau of Investigation sex-offender web page himself lately to see if any perverts are living on his own street within comfortable dragging distance, and I’m sure there are. But this is all sport to Lary, as he doesn’t have a kid.
I, on the other hand (and fantastically enough), do. I thought the severed human head in a plastic sack the police found on my street was bad enough. But no, there are also the arsonist drug dealers, the whores (alive and dead), the flying bullets, and now this child molester. These facts aren’t related to each other in any way; I just wanted to illustrate that it’s hard to shake the portensions you feel when you become a parent while living in a neighborhood littered with body parts and perverts.
Surprisingly, though, I’ve weathered it all, plus the occasional homeless crack addict knocking on my door for a handout, but still I worried almost every day that a good rain would uncover the rest of the severed head’s body parts somewhere within crawling distance of my kid, and I discovered that my bedroom had a boarded up fireplace within the wall, as well, which is a good place to conceal a corpse if you ask me, so I kept imagining I saw seepage through the plaster.
Today there are still plenty of homeless people around, but at least the crack factor has been dissipated a little, though 4 A.M. is still crack-whore happy hour here. I know this because once I drove Milly to Children’s Hospital in the middle of the night due to a fever I thought was hot as lava, and our neighborhood was boiling with whores at this time, along with addicts and dealers and other dregs of the trade. And then there is that child molester.
Lary has driven by his house a few times. So have Grant and Daniel, if for no other reason than it’s hard not to when you’re coming to visit me. They’re ready to pounce, they say, in case they catch the guy masturbating on a school bus or whatever. At this point, though, all they can do is watch, but at least watching is something.
In the meantime I’m so overcome with a general fear that I can do nothing but simply lie beside my sleeping girl and beg for forgiveness, because often I anguish over the groundless notion that there’s some kind of karmic roll-over policy, and that Milly will be made to suffer for my past apathies. And God knows I should have been a better person. I should have been a better daughter, sister, friend, whatever. I should have not stolen milk money from my first-grade classmates, I should have not taunted the neighborhood senile lady when I was ten, I should have—oh, God—I should have not deserted my father the night he died. If I had only done or not done these things, maybe we wouldn’t be living down the street from a convicted child-molesting masturbator right now, I would not be worrying about my little toddly woddly girl and how to keep her from the frosty, random fingers of evil that wrest up from the earth and lurk there, ready to rip your heart out from your ribs when, hey, they don’t have to go to the trouble after all. Because there your heart is, all bundled up and teetering around outside of you, all big-eyed and vanilla-smelling and dough-bellied, with tiny ears like intricate seashells you could stare at all day. There your heart is, smiling and laughing and waving at you from a distance, ready to be plucked like a little button mushroom. All you can do is watch, but at least watching is something.
An Idiot in a Bar
GIANT MICHAEL IS IMPLEMENTING a no-idiot policy at the Vortex and I seriously don’t know how he gets away with it. For one, the Vortex is a goddam bar. I myself have been an idiot in there many a time, the most recent being that time when he first introduced me to the perfect mojito, and then later Red Bull and vodka, which is like liquid crack if you ask me. Why would a friend do that to you? I actually ended up at a fetish nightclub, the Chamber, that night. Here I’d been living in Atlanta for almost the entire life of an Olsen twin, and I had managed to avoid the Chamber all that time. Then that night after being an idiot at the Vortex, I end up at the Chamber in my white work blouse watching burlesque and so wired on Red Bull I could probably set off car alarms across the street if I was concentrating (which I wasn’t). “If you discriminated against idiots,” I tell Giant Michael, “you’d hardly have any business.”
“On behalf of my customers, I’m offended by that,” he says, which makes me laugh, because Giant Michael isn’t offended by anything. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Lary and I used to hang out at the original Vortex on West Peachtree a hundred years ago, and we would make it our mission to offend everyone around us, and since the place was so small and Michael is so giant, he was always around us. “Juice me up, booze jockey,” I’d demand, thrusting my empty glass at him. He’s totally like emotional marble. He’s one of my oldest friends and the closest I’ve ever seen him get to actual angry was today with this whole anti-idiot campaign. He was damn near riled up, blaming everything on the yuppie onslaught of Midtown due to the recent outbreak of condo complexes all around. To Michael’s credit, Midtown really does look like a beehive lately, but that’s something any normal restaurant owner would be ecstatic about. Not Giant Michael. When I walked in, he was perusing a list of new T-shirt slogans he recently approved for his waitstaff. Among them are: “Your Village Called. Their Idiot Is Missing” and “Don’t Make Me Throw You Outta Here.”
“We just got a letter from a guy who brought his kids in here and told us he was outraged by the porn we have pinned to the walls,” he exclaims with a sweep of his arm. “Porn? Do you see any porn in here?”
Well, I personally wouldn’t classify it as porn, but among the immense clutter of vintage signage, toys, motorcycle parts, skeletons, and other oddities attached to the ceiling and walls, there is an autographed picture or two of strippers with pasties on their tits. “That’s not porn,” he insists, almost riling up again. In the foyer he has just, that day, mounted a collection of framed commandments for customers to follow, basically banning “tight asses, moochers, whiners, oblivious parents, idiots, and drunken idiots” from the premises.
“Aren’t you afraid of pissing people off?” I ask.
“What are they gonna do? Come up to me and tell me they’re an idiot and they resent the discrimination?” he says, and I have to think about that, because, though I wouldn’t want to represent all of idiotkind, I am nonetheless sensitive to my idiot side. I must like to take it out for walks occasionally, because I have done some pretty stupid things, believe me, many of them in bars. I tell them all to Michael, like how, in college during my fake I.D. stage, I was kinda famous for getting drunk and passing out in restaurant bathroom stalls.
“That’s nothing,” Giant Michael assures me. Then I tell him about the time years ago when I flashed my boobs at a bar in Key West, and he rolls his eyes like I could not possibly be more boring. He approves another T-shirt slogan. This one reads, “I’ll Hurt You if I Have To.”
Then I tell him about the time, back in my longhaired, silverring-on-every-finger stage when I, just for the fun of it, stole my friends boyfriend just as easily as plucking a feather from the air. All it took was two cocktails and about ten seconds
of eye contact and I had him in my hand like lotion. My friend’s name was Mary, and I remember she had brown Dorothy Hamill hair and liked to wear boyish shirts with turned-up Oxford collars.
They were new in their relationship, and in the weeks since they’d met, Mary had been incandescent with a glee that I guess I couldn’t bear. She had come into the bar clinging to him like sea kelp, all aglow and proud with moon-shaped eyes looking up at him like he was a wonder to behold. I just remember her face that night, her smiling face, and how it fell like a Malibu mudslide when she realized what was happening.
I confess all this to Michael, and I look up at him like he should throw me out right then, because here I am a self-confessed idiot in his bar, but instead he puts his arm around me. “You’re not an idiot,” he comforts me, “you’re a goddam fool,” and kisses the top of my head.
The Mummies
FOR YEARS I’D HEARD that the entertainment at the Chamber could be kinky, consisting of public genital piercings performed to a techno beat and such. I mean, it’s a fetish club, for chrissakes, and until last Friday the closest thing to a fetish club I’d encountered was a fag bar in Prague complete with stalls with holes in the walls that guys could back their asses against in order to have anonymous sex with someone in the next room.
I was with Lary that time, too, as well as Daniel and Grant. It was early in the evening, the stalls were unoccupied, and since Grant was not gay yet it fell to Daniel to explain to us what the holes were for—that and why there were toilet-paper dispensers attached to the bar. Then the bartender kicked us out on account of my being female, and my friends also for having been tainted by such close proximity to my ovaries and all. Lary tried to convince him I was a pre-op transsexual, but the bartender wasn’t buying it and ushered us out before I could kill the vibe by waving Kotex around or something.
Anyway, I’d never been to the Chamber before, not even when I was young, so I figured I had no business going there now, all old like I’d been feeling lately. Michael had bought me lunch that day while Milly was safely tucked away with relatives, and since he owns the Vortex bars, to him lunch starts at 5:30 P.M. and consists solely of mojitos and tortilla chips. Mojitos are those Cuban cocktails made with mint, sugar, lime, and rum. I’d fallen in love with them while attending a wedding in Miami last year. But there are bad bartenders down there just like anywhere, and sometimes I’d be handed some vile thing that tasted like a cup of fresh bile mixed with battery acid. I drank them anyway, and at one point I wandered into a gift store and came across a large book of photos, the sole subject of which was mummies.
All the mummies came from the same crypt in Italy, and it was impossible to pull my eyes away, even when I turned to the page of child mummies. They hung like dolls on a wall, all dressed in the Renaissance equivalent of their Sunday best, with ruffled collars and intricately croqueted jackets. It was heartbreaking, to think that so many mothers had to dress her dead children in these treasured vestments so their bodies could be hung for hundreds of years in a cold labyrinth.
My friends had to pull me away, and I finally found the perfect mojito when this little old Cuban lady bartender actually pulled out a mortar and pestle when I ordered. You know it’s gonna be a good mojito when the bartender uses tools favored by pharmacists and ancient apothecaries. So when Michael told me his bartender, Carla, makes a perfect mojito, I had to scoff, because I’d been graced by the little old Cuban lady. “Does Carla have a mortar and pestle?” I smirked.
“Of course,” Michael said.
Four mojitos later I was at the Chamber with Lary and Michael and their two hot girlfriends, waiting to catch burlesque performances. My friend Andy was there with his camera at the ready in case I started waving Kotex around so he could take a picture. He had been cracking me up all week with e-mails about the rat in his house. He’d never actually seen this rat, just the damage it wreaks, so he nicknamed the rat “Chupacabra,” after the mythical Mexican beast that mutilates livestock.
The rat made me think of the book of mummies again, because in it there was a picture of a mummified woman who must have died crouching in a corner, clutching her child. Also in her arms was the shriveled carcass of what looked like a rat, but turned out to be a small dog that just looked like a rat in its macerated condition. The mother-and-child mummy cluster sparked an ocean of questions inside me. How did they die? Were they poisoned? Were they killed quickly? Did they languish? Whatever the case, they must have crouched there—this woman and her child and her pet rat dog—crouched there for decades right where they died before being discovered. I keep seeing that picture in my mind, and the baby’s fists are balled up under its chin, reminding me of miniature rosebuds in a wedding bouquet.
So there I was at the Chamber, talking to Andy about his rat, surrounded by Lary and Michael and their two hot girlfriends Tatiana and Kristen, watching burlesque and wondering what had happened to the beings that made up the mummy cluster, what could have killed them so quickly or trapped them so unforgivably that the woman had nothing to do but clutch these treasured things and simply expire that way, crouching in a corner. There I was, flanked by my friends, and by the time we left I wasn’t feeling so old anymore.
Under the Sink
IN THE END, Lary did not die. Thank God. I do not need that guilt on my head, though his being dead would not have been my fault entirely. His being dead would have been his fault entirely, but I still would have felt fairly bad about it.
“What happened last night?” He asked me the next morning. “Why does the side of my head hurt?”
“You must have hit it when those three guys pulled you out of your car,” I suggested. “Or maybe it was when you fell under the sink.”
The falling was certainly a possibility, since he was already wobbling by the time he got to the Local, where we all were supposed to be guest bartenders that night to celebrate Grant’s last night working there.
I showed up only a little late, because to me, even though I was a “guest,” the evening had the ring of work about it, so I took my time getting there. Daniel, of course, was already elbow deep in dishwater by the time I walked through the door. He’s a great guest worker. I think I’ll tell him I’m having a “guest scullery maid” night at my house, featuring him. He’ll show up with his own mop and bucket, I’m telling you.
The occasion regaled Grant, the real bartender, who was working his last night at the Local before embarking on the full-time pursuit of his Sister Louisa vision, and he had the three of us show up to form a kind of celebratory farewell foursome. A treat to his regulars, he said, though in the end I believe I am the one who was treated. They all tipped the shit out of me.
“Too bad you were too drunk to get behind the bar,” I laughed at Lary as I counted my money, though immediately I realized Lary was behind the bar. He showed up at midnight and headed straight for the Jägermeister machine. That crap right there is enough to kill you if you ask me. It seriously looks like some poison I got into under our bathroom sink once when I was five. Brown sludge with stems and grit in it probably. Why it needs its own dispensing machine is a mystery to me; maybe it’s to better protect the person serving it. Lary had handed out a half dozen free shots of the stuff before Keiger, the one who owns the bar, stopped him and declared the Jägermeister machine officially broken, and Lary officially banned from behind the bar.
Ha! Don’t ever tell Lary to stay away from a broken thing. It’s like telling a kitten to stay away from an open can of tuna. Even drunk, Lary can fix anything—or build anything, for that matter, which might explain the scaffolding that mysteriously appeared in his kitchen last week. Lary claims he doesn’t even know how it got there, but I do. I bet there was something broken up there, and Lary was trying to reach it. He’ll probably invent time travel one day, because there are broken things all over history, and sooner or later Lary will figure out how to reach them. For example, if he was on the Titanic, he could have patched that hole with some indelible
paste he made from nail polish and pancake batter or something, and he could have done it shit-ass drunk, too.
So I kind of felt bad for Keiger, because he obviously did not know this about Lary, and it took all of an eye blink before Lary was back on that machine churning out megashots of the stuff until finally he was, literally, under the sink.
“Make sure he does not drive himself home,” Keiger told me once Lary found his way back to a bar stool, but by that time I was nearly fogged myself with that night’s made-up drink special. It was called the Honky Bitch, and it contained every sugary liqueur to be found behind the counter, with heavy emphasis on Bailey’s, and maybe a shot of soda or something. By the end of the night, Keiger looked like somebody shot in the gut, reconciled to the fact that no matter how hard he clutched his wound it wasn’t about to stop the bleeding.
Still he tried to keep an eye on Lary, but Keiger only has so many eyes, and Lary is quick, even shit-ass drunk. I remember I was on the phone calling Tatiana, Lary’s friend who lives nearby, to come and pick him up when suddenly I heard Keiger holler, “Where the hell’s Lary?” We all looked around, even under the sink, but Lary was not there, he was in his truck, backing out of the goddam parking lot. “Pull his ass out of that truck,” Keiger directed, and three guys ran out and literally did just that. They left his truck right there, too, halfway backed out, and then they stuffed Lary’s freckled, Jäger-soaked hide into a taxi.
For that reason Lary is alive today, probably. So in a way I guess Keiger did stop the bleeding that night, even if it was just Lary’s useless, crusty reptilian blood. I have to commend Keiger for that, too, because if it were me, and if that were my bar, and Lary hijacked the Jäger machine like he did, I would have left Lary right there where he fell the first time—under the sink.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 16