The Best in the world
IF YOU’RE GONNA GET ROBBED, it might as well be by the best, and you’d have to be the best to rob my sister Cheryl. The last time somebody tried to take her purse, for example, not only did the robber not get away with it, my sister chased him down and gave him a concussion just for trying.
But this new thief, he did not take her purse, he took her money belt out from under her clothes, which, believe me, she did not take off, not on a bus in front of a stranger, anyway, and especially not since she moved to Nicaragua and became completely schooled in self-protective travel.
“Oh, he was good. I mean, he was the best in the world,” Cheryl laughs.
She is always laughing, but even so, her spirits are remarkably high for someone who just lost all the money it took her seven months to save, plus credit cards. She’s visiting again from Nicaragua, and she spent her first two days here on the phone canceling everything and retelling the story to the credit-card operators (“This pickpocket was like a laser surgeon, I swear!”), and they listened.
It’s hard not to listen to Cheryl. She talks at a decibel reserved for fire alarms, and always with the excitement of someone who just won a Winnebago on The Price Is Right. At first I worry people will begin to back away like you might do when you realize someone’s got a cog missing in their mental mechanism or whatever, and for the first few days of her visits I’m always ready to be her handler or something, to interject with a pert “She’s just so happy because she’s spent a long time deprived in Nicaragua.”
But Cheryl does not need a handler. People love her. We can’t even go to the grocery store without Cheryl inviting the cashier to come visit Granada to drink at the bar she owns there, or stay at the special pensione down the street from the bar, which she also owns with Bill. Bill is feuding with her hatefully now, but nonetheless he had given her most of the money the thief ended up taking. It was a spontaneous repayment for a long-since abandoned loan.
“Bill’s gambling again,” Cher sighs, and I nod but I don’t know how to take the news, because Bill is a really good gambler. It’s one of the things my mother and he had in common. After she died I found a homemade card-counting computer in her effects, one that fit into her shoe that she could work with her toes to produce a readout on a fake watch she wore around her wrist.
When I found that I immediately thought that my mother, who’d spent her adult life designing missiles for the government, had finally found something to do she didn’t hate, and I knew Bill had helped her get there somehow. If my mother had been alive when Bill moved to Central America, she probably would have followed him there, so Cheryl went instead.
I haven’t been to Nicaragua myself, but judging by Cheryl’s elation when she comes back, there is evidently very little there in terms of modern comfort. When Cheryl comes to Atlanta, she is always foaming at the mouth, practically, over things like warm water, for instance, or bread.
“Bread! Bring bread! They don’t have bread in Nicaragua!” she shouted gleefully at the waitress at Carroll Street Café her first night back. My sister’s eyes are freakishly green. They glow like two tiny nuclear reactions right there on her face. The waitress was really quick with the bread, and my sister tore into it like a wolf on an injured woodland creature.
“They don’t have bread in Nicaragua?” I asked.
“Not good bread,” Cheryl said, her mouth full of bread. “This is the best in the world,” she groaned.
It’s difficult not to be taken with someone who possesses such an unadulterated lust for everything. A trip to the drugstore, for example, turns Cheryl into such a quaking volcano of joy you just gotta lay down, you’re laughing so hard. She flits from display to display, squealing stuff like, “Oh, look! Peanut clusters! They don’t have these in Nicaragua! I’ve been dying for some of these!”
I used to think she was crazy, and tried to get Daniel, Grant, and Lary to agree with me, but they are crazy about her. Especially Daniel, who’s been devoted to her ever since that morning years ago when she made him her special breakfast smoothie, which contained two treeloads of fresh fruit “and my secret ingredient,” Cheryl said, emptying half a pint of Bacardi into the blender.
“That’s not breakfast, that’s a goddam daiquiri,” I pointed out, but Daniel and Cheryl were already on their second helping and I was feeling a bit peckish myself, so I poured myself one. We ended up at the Clermont Lounge that afternoon, with Cheryl becoming best friends with the strippers after gathering their advice on professional beaver-shaving techniques.
Now she’s back, her appetites so simple and yet so vociferous—the best kind to have, I guess. “Oh, my God,” she groans, sniffing something in her hand like it was the last pocket of oxygen on an airless planet. It’s a cup of cappuccino. “Oh my God,” she repeats, and I think I see actual tears of joy in her nuclear green eyes, “this is the best in the world.”
Lucy
GODDAM THAT STUPID, lousy cat Lucy. It’s not as if she was the nicest cat around, or even the prettiest, what with her upper teeth all gone due to that tumor that took over her face like magma, but she was reliable, at least.
And moody. Christ, that cat could psyche in a second. Don’t fall for all that purring. She could purr as loud as a lawnmower, but it was just a decoy to get you to reach out to her. Then the next thing you know that cat is wrapped around your hand like an evil oven mitt, all fangs and claws and wild green eyes imbedded in your arm up to your elbow. I hate to think of the damage she could have done if she had all her teeth.
Even so, I became accustomed to that craggy cloud of black-and-white fur looming through all the homes I’ve had in the fourteen years since I got her. I used to count how many addresses that was, but I can’t do that right now. There were just so goddam many, and thinking about them makes me realize how little I’ve had to rely on regarding continuity in my life. Lucy was not much, but I relied on her in that regard. She was with me almost as long as my own father, but she had the decency to die old for a cat, whereas my father died young for a man.
Recently I flew to San Diego, where I drove to a half dozen other old addresses just to see if they were still there. I don’t know why I do that. They are always still there, but whatever elements in them I’d treasured in my memory had vacated, thereby making them barely recognizable. It’s no minor heartbreak to barely recognize a piece of yourself, but I kept going from address to address anyway, hoping to find a spark of familiarity. There was none. So I came back to Atlanta, where there was.
Lucy started losing her teeth when she was just a year old, when that bump first appeared on her upper mandible. The vet gave her six months to live, so I took her home thinking I could make the craggy thing comfortable until it was time. Six months plus thirteen and a half years later it was time, but I didn’t think so. I kept hoping, you know, maybe she’d rally like she always had. I kept asking people, “How do you know it’s time?”
Everyone always said I would just know. I kept waiting to know, but the knowledge didn’t come even when she hid in my hamper for three days. That tumor kept getting bigger and bigger, too. She looked like a feline Elephant Man, but so? She’d always been ugly, now she was just uglier. Ugly is no reason to put a good cat down, is it? Then I took her out of the hamper and placed her in front of a bowl of canned peas.
Before I go on I have to say that by the time I’d first laid eyes on Lucy at the Humane Society, she had lived a hard six months of alley life during which I guess food was an uncertainty at best. That uncertainty must have stayed embedded in her feline brain the rest of her life, because she never passed up anything edible that I know of. She could even keep my full-grown pit bull Cookie at bay while she perused the dog food bowl for herself, and don’t even try to eat canned peas around her, because she will bat them right off your fork and into her own mouth. There were two occasions long ago when she mysteriously lost weight and withered down to a sack of twigs, but she quickly puffed up again and never los
t that craggy sparkle that caused Daniel to conclude Lucy was a reincarnated truck-stop waitress.
But this time, when I put her in front of the peas, it’s not so much that she wouldn’t eat them, it’s that she tried to so unsuccessfully. Watching her lower her weary, deformed face into the bowl, her hide hanging off her bones like laundry, I just knew.
Lucy was ugly and often mean, true, but she still let me hold her close in the night like the pink stuffed poodle I cherished as a child. I don’t know if Lucy enjoyed that or tolerated it for my sake, but in either act there is love, and you’d be hard pressed to let it go if you had it.
I made the appointment the next day. Daniel came with me, even though the only pet I’ve known him to have was a goldfish he “accidentally” ground up in the garbage disposal. He was still the right person to ask, though, because he understands attachment. He just wasn’t attached to that goldfish is all.
Lucy handled it perfectly. She lay peacefully on the table, exhausted and purring, and I looked into her wild green eyes for a long while. Then the Lucy-ness simply left her. Whatever elements in her I’d treasured—that spark of familiarity—had vacated. With that gone, she was barely recognizable, and it’s no minor heartbreak to barely recognize a piece of yourself.
My Missing Life
GRANT, THAT BITCH, has stolen my sister. Or my sister, that bitch, has stolen Grant. Or, goddamit, both those bitches have stolen my life!
They are, at this moment, traveling to New York in Grants blasphemous Rolling God Box—a retrofitted florist s van covered with typically inspired Sister Louisa sayings like “Jesus Curls His Hair with Holy Rollers,” and “Man Made God in His Image,”—and stopping every thirty-three miles to nail signs (“With Jesus nails, of course,” Grant insists) along the highway.
Or at least that was the plan, anyway, until they began getting surveilled by police helicopters somewhere around Maryland. But they were able to pick up the sign-nailing pace again once they crossed the Virginia state border, or whatever state border borders the state of Maryland. Along the way they spend their evenings in bowling-alley bars ordering exotic shots and hijacking the karaoke machine, or at least that’s what I’d do if it were my life being lived by me instead of being stolen by my sister and my best friend.
Grant will even admit he’s never been on a road trip this long, whereas for me the drive from Atlanta to New York would have been a complete cake walk, me being the daughter of a traveling trailer salesman. Of course my sister Cheryl is also the daughter of a traveling trailer salesman, which doesn’t help. As the victim of a stolen life, I must say it’s no comfort that the theft was able to occur so seamlessly. My father used to drive with both our unbuckled asses in the front seat as we charted the course for him, badly. Peering at the map, we’d advise, “Turn right at the red dot.”
Now Cheryl is advising that to Grant, and so far the trip has been milder than anticipated, even though they made sure to spend as much time as possible traveling through South Carolina. They have not even gotten beaten by police or sodomized by mullet-headed rednecks, as Grant was kind of hoping. What they are getting is flipped off.
“I can’t believe that twelve-year-old black girl just flipped us off,” my sister bellowed incredulously to me through Grant’s cell phone. “What girl? Where?” I ask frantically. Jesus, doesn’t she understand I need details if I’m going to live my own life through her?
Because right now I am living someone else’s, and I wish the person it belongs to would come back and reclaim it, because this person’s life sucks. Right now it’s steeped in cutoff dates, mean people, greedy pricks, and fear as I try to qualify for a home loan based on my meager income in an effort to move out of this neighborhood. I am so mired in credit checks and other bureaucratic quicksand that evidently my own sister had to come from Nicaragua and impersonate my old self so my best friends could be bookmarked to enjoy at a later date, and for that I guess I should be grateful, but as I said I am not myself. Instead I just look at Cheryl longingly from the life I’m in right now, wondering when I’ll get mine back.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cheryl kept asking before she left with Grant. She kept trying to sneak alcohol into me, too, hiding it in my orange juice and whatnot, but it’s been so long since I tasted booze that my senses are now hyperalert to its presence. I think Lary put her up to it. He is downright pissed at me for not drinking anymore. “Hollis,” he said seriously, “if you don’t drink, people are gonna think you’re an alcoholic.”
This is Lary here, the guy who is turning his warehouse into a haunted church this Halloween, with bloody flagellated Jesuses pawing at people like plague victims and everything. Since when does Lary care what people think?
“Leave me alone, you worthless stain on the butt end of the earth,” I growled at him, which encouraged him a little, like maybe I was starting to come back, but then I fucked that up by bursting into tears.
It’s my sister, I tell you. My sister is exhausting me. It’s not just because she takes stuff from me, like my life and other things she thinks I won’t miss, or because she rearranges all my furniture, or because she filled my cupboards and refrigerator with irresistible food for me that I don’t want in my house, like cheddar cheese and potato chips and deep-fried chocolate-covered butter sticks. No, it’s because she makes me dinner and tries to be helpful and always wants me to tell her what’s wrong with me precisely at the moment I need to pour all my energy into pretending everything’s fine.
She just always shows up when there are truths to be buried, and the truth is I am not fine. I am fearful and hesitant lately, and I am buried beneath things I think should be and pinnacles I think I should have reached by now. Like I should not be living across the street from a drug dealer, or down the street from Crack Corner, or in a house with a lawn where whores toss their soiled condoms. My sister has this awful ability to extract these buried truths; they emerge as if pulled by a powerful magnet, pulled out by the roots.
“It’s like heart surgery,” I tell Grant over the phone, our main mode of conversing lately. “I know I’ll be better because of it, but it’s fucking painful while it’s happening.” “THE TRUTH,” Grant hollers joyously from behind the wheel of his Rolling God Box. “THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.” Then I can hear them both laughing as they ride along in my missing life, stopping every thirty-three miles to nail up signs.
Perfectly Good Words
ISWEAR, GRANT’S ROLLING GOD BOX has been hardly vandalized at all, but to hear him tell it, you’d think thugs marauded over in droves, with torches and everything, to tear that van apart.
“I am sad to report that the Sister Louisa’s Rolling God Box was vandalized across the street from the St. James Baptist Church in Brooklyn where I parked it Saturday night as a Sunday-school lesson for the next morning,” he mourned in a mass e-mail last week.
“Someone took spray paint and blacked out the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘God,’” he continued. “I think it was a lesbian crack whore who likes preacher dick, because all those words were left alone.”
So here I’m envisioning a blackened relic that was once a white van covered in big-lettered Sister Louisaisms—such as “Jesus Loves a Crack Whore,” and “God Is Pissed”—limping back to Atlanta with pistons missing and maybe some heavy smoke belching out the ass end, too. But seriously, there are just a few black smudges, and on only one side. Yes, the “Gods” and “Jesuses” were blacked out on that side, but he can put them back easily enough, just paint them right back on top of the blacked-out parts.
“You pussy,” I tell him. “A couple of smudges. Big deal.”
“But those were perfectly good words,” Grant gasps. “Now they’re censored.”
Ha! Like he has never been censored before. I estimate he spent a good 75 percent of his life censored, and I’m being generous. By my estimate, Grant was free a few years prior to his having busted out of the closet at the age of forty-two. I’m figuring he really wasn’t all that ce
nsored during that time, just undecided about what he wanted to say. When he made up his mind, though, you couldn’t shut him up.
“Nothin’ Harder than a Preacher’s Dick!” the God Box blares in colored lettering along its uncensored side. Grant had driven that thing up to New York “goddam titty-ass” City and back, having spent a month in between trying hard to piss people off everywhere he went. In short, he was new in town and needed attention.
I guess he got it. I personally prefer other means of garnering attention when new in town. In fact, before I came to Atlanta, being new in town was nothing new to me. I’d moved every year of my life, and my method of coping was to blend, literally, into my surroundings. In my second school during my eighth-grade year, for example, I spent every recess hiding in the handicapped stall in the girl’s bathroom. This had become my habit ever since the fourth grade, when my father advised me that a good way to break the ice at a new school would be to march right up to the biggest person on the playground and demand, “Who’s the head nigger in charge?”
I wouldn’t say it was the worst advice, because it got me a lot of attention, just not the kind I wanted. By eighth grade I’d stopped listening to my father, in almost every sense. His way of blending into a new town was to find a particular kind of bar and go there every day. It was the kind of bar that opened at 6 A.M. and was completely devoid of natural light unless someone opened the door to enter, which wasn’t that often during my father’s favorite hours. The barstools were upholstered in red naugahyde and so was the cushioned bumper around the edge of the counter, where people propped their elbows for their first ten beers, their armpits for the next ten, and then their faces, probably, for any after that. There would be a jukebox, of course, with a smattering of songs by Blood, Sweat, and Tears being its most current offering.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 17