There would be more burned houses and more dead children, like the teenager who was killed twelve days after my own child was born, shot at a MARTA stop by, police speculated, a jealous boyfriend. And let’s not forget the twelve-year-old who was shot in the chest that Halloween for throwing eggs in Phoenix Park, which was more in Lary’s neighborhood than mine, but Lary lives just three minutes away from me. Lary, though, is not all that freaked out by dead children, even that newborn that was found in a driveway up the way from him. Someone had bashed its head in, tied it up in a plastic sack, and tossed it onto a driveway.
“All I know is I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Lary swore.
He had come to my place to give me tips on how to bulletproof Milly’s room, a precaution I was starting to suspect would not matter. First, all I had in terms of materials were cookie sheets and cake pans, and Lary said they were not strong enough to stop a bullet, “but it would probably slow it down,” he said in a manner as close to comfortingly as his crusty barnacle ass could muster. But then he had to ruin that, even, by telling me a bullet doesn’t need a window to get inside.
“It could pass right through the wall,” he insisted. “Especially this wall,” he added, knocking on the new drywall that enclosed the former porch that now made up the nursery. So at that we went outside to assess any possible trajectories, especially from Crack Corner at the north end of the street, which is where a preponderance of the shootings had occurred. In the end we determined that the safest place for her bed was in front of the bureau right next to my own bed. That way, if a bullet passed through the wall to reach her it would also have to pass through my underwear drawer as well, which contained a bunch of bras with so much padding that a skydiver with a faulty parachute could land on them and live. There, I thought, it’s the best I could do.
But then I thought again. I read that the mother whose son was killed in the park near Lary had heard the shot the instant it happened. She ran to her son and reached him in time to hold his hand as he died. I’m sure she did the best she could have in the years that led up to that point, and I’m sure she tried hard to change whatever circumstances left her to live with her child in a place where kids were commonly killed; those changes just didn’t happen fast enough is all.
So I put the cake pans in the windows and was mindful of trajectory patterns from the corner where the other kids had been killed, but I also kept thinking about the mother who held her boy’s hand as he died, and how her changes didn’t happen fast enough. So I decided to start making some changes of my own, starting with a new mortgage lender, and you’d be surprised at how quick you can be when you’re trying to outrun a bullet on its way to an unintended target.
Hooked Fish
I’M CURLED UP UNDER MY DESK AGAIN; snarly-haired, gibbering, swatting at imaginary insects. I don’t even know what’s wrong. Maybe it’s about my job, for which I wear a uniform. I wear a uniform and a nametag and an apron. Sometimes I’m self-conscious about that. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll always be an apron-wearing, nametag-sporting bovine with hands all rough from lugging stuff. And then to make it worse I’ll get out my mental crystal ball and see myself at sixty, upper arms flapping like two turkey wattles, a face like a frying pan, and the nametag still there, the apron still there, setting quite a nice example for my daughter.
Jesus God, just ignore me. I’ll get over it. I’m operating at optimum stress capacity is all. I just put another house under contract, with a seemingly elephantine mortgage, and I’m petrified, but I’ve got Milly to think about. I didn’t go through this when I bought the house I presently occupy, because I paid maybe twenty dollars for this place. I remember thinking I could afford the mortgage even if I became confined to a wheelchair with a body like a ball of melted wax, working the controls with my tongue. What do I have to lose? I thought, and signed the papers.
Right beforehand I remember I’d gone to the New Orleans Jazz Festival, where I had occasion to dance on stage in my underwear and hang out for a time with two young heroin addicts, Ryan and Billy, who were on the faltering road to recovery. Ryan had been my waiter one morning and then greeted me later that day on the street, walking his bicycle beside me. “You’re alone again,” he said. “We’ll fix that.”
Soon we arrived at the place of his friend Billy, who had tattooed eyelids and was in the process of getting thrown out of his apartment. As we waited outside for Billy to gather his things, Ryan showed me the track marks on his arms, which were faint because it had been nine months since he’d shot up. “What drugs do you do?” he asked.
“None,” I replied.
“Lucky you,” he said, and meant it.
Billy emerged and was very gracious. “I’m sorry you have to see me like this,” he said, “but it’s very nice to meet you.” Everything he owned fit on the seat of his bike, which he walked beside Ryan and I. Billy had just been evicted at gunpoint because his roommate caught him with drugs in the apartment. “Did you do the drugs?” Ryan asked him.
“No, I was just thinking about doing them!” answered Billy, grief in his voice. “He doesn’t know what it’s like,” he said of his former roommate. “I’m a hooked fish, he’s not a hooked fish. He has no idea what it’s like!”
“I know what it’s like,” Ryan comforted his friend. Ryan could relate, he knew what it felt like to have one thing—in their case this drug—be the source of both boundless rapture and unendurable pain. He knew the delicious anguish it was to be the slave of such a thing. “I’m a hooked fish, too.”
“Hooked fish,” Billy repeated softly, shaking his head. “Is she a hooked fish?” he asked, indicating me.
“She’s a free fish,” Ryan said. Then we reached their destination, a tiny bar that was packed with revealers in the early afternoon. Ryan and Billy went inside, but after hearty goodbyes I decided to continue on alone. Free fish, I thought as I walked along. Free fish, that be me.
That seems like a million years ago, when actually it’s been barely an eye blink. Now here I am, everything I swore I’d never be. For example, I said I’d never complain about getting older, but it’s hard to be a hundred years old and not talk about it. Not that I’m exactly a hundred, but it feels that way when you go to places like Disney World and see thousands of parents pushing their perfectly healthy adolescent children around in rented plastic rickshaws and you hear yourself say, “When I was a kid I had to walk with my own feet!” Seriously, if I ever asked my parents to wheel me around all day like a lazy little pope they’d have coughed up ten years worth of tar and nicotine, they’d be laughing so hard. I mean, we grew feet for a reason, right? Or are we in the process of devolving back into the blobs we once were? What is the world coming to, with Disney World packed with little imposter invalids? Is this any place to raise children?
There it is again, me being what I swore I wouldn’t: someone freaked about the future. It wasn’t that long ago that I couldn’t see any further into the future than my minimart burrito, which the microwave finishes cooking in about four minutes. I was happily selfish and completely tunnel-visioned, running through the rain with arms outstretched. I could not have cared less, for example, about the danger of croaking like a lab rat from a mosquito-borne disease like the West Nile virus. Back then I would have glided naked on a skateboard through a festering nest of teeming mosquito larvae if it meant a decent margarita on the other side.
But not today. Not after this comet called momhood, which is just one sack of surprises after another, isn’t it? For example, Daniel points out that I’ve bought eight cans of Cutter insect repellant this summer, which he says is excessive. But I’m thinking about the future, see? And what I envision is cans of Cutter everywhere, at least two within arm’s reach of any possible position in our household, so I won’t even think of walking outside without coating my baby like a little cob of corn. I bought two more cans yesterday, I figure I can use them to physically club each mosquito as well. You can never be too careful.
So you see? I should have grown up daring, with wild hair and arms outstretched every chance I got. I shouldn’t be sitting here right now, a hundred-year-old person who is not a hundred years old. I thought I’d at least be tragic by this time in my life. The object of cult fame. Some kind of female Bukowski living under a freeway overpass creating masterpieces scratched out on fast-food wrappers and old grocery sacks. Beholden to nothing but embracing everything.
But no. Instead I am enslaved. I am such a big, proud, foolish jar of gibbering mom flesh here under my desk with colorless lips and ragged fingertips, no longer the person with nothing to lose, no longer the loser of nothing. I can hear Milly in the connecting room, making her toddler noises. “I’m a tiger,” she trills. “I’m a lion. I’m a kitty cat.”
I perk up. She’s naming all the members of the feline species, isn’t she? Is she a genius or what? I emerge from my dark place right then to find her growling at me sweetly with her fingers curled like little paws. The sight of her sends me awash in a roiling ocean of adoration. To think I almost missed out on motherhood, because I had nothing to lose and liked it that way, but now everything, everything, teeters on the tiniest strand of hair on Milly’s head. Her precious, unbearably vulnerable little vanilla-scented head. God! This is agonizing! I almost want to crawl back under my desk, but instead I kneel down to embrace my girl, who thankfully tolerates it for a good while. Still, long after she wrestles free, I remain there bowed before her, a hooked fish.
You Be the Man
WHEN I WAS FIVE I used to fantasize about fainting into the arms of another man, preferably during a dangerous battle of some kind. I don’t know what that says about me, but there it is; I thought the ultimate was to flat out faint in the middle of everything and be carried away from danger like a burdensome sack of maggots.
I based this on about seven hundred sci-fi movies from the fifties and sixties I watched in which exactly that happened; the female character was always fainting into the arms of the male character, who then somehow had to whisk her to safety while at the same time fighting the space monster with an old-time TV for a head.
So my sister and I would practice. We’d feign rushing somewhere only to be confronted by the sight of something so odious our only recourse would be to gingerly place the back of our hands to our foreheads and then collapse into a dainty pile right there on the indoor-outdoor carpeting. There we’d lie with our eyes closed, hissing at each other, “You be the man!” “No, you!”
Nobody wanted to be the man. We both just wanted to be saved.
Eventually we just got ourselves up. “Ain’t nobody coming to save you,” Lucinda called from the kitchen. Lucinda was the third childcare provider my mother had hired that year. The first one, Mrs. Perry, had to leave us to care for her husband, a trash man who eventually died from an infected sore of some kind. The second lasted for as long as it took her to knock on the door and hear our dog, Echo, barking. By the time my mother answered, the lady was already halfway back to her car. “I don’t like dogs,” she yelled over her shoulder.
Then came Lucinda, who had four kids of her own. She brought them with her to our house when she was on duty, from her nineteen-year-old daughter to her seven-year-old son, Lucas, including all their friends.
That’s how I figured out boys don’t fantasize about saving women. They fantasize about saving each other. Lucas and his friends would enact big battle scenes in which they performed feats of bravery to be recounted with awe by their buddies. They were wounded in these fantasies, like they’d been shot in the shoulder or something, yet still they were carrying their comrades away from danger. There was much yelling and sweating and gritting of teeth, and in the end they would all kind of collapse into a heap on the safe side of everything. Then they’d tend to each other, lauding the actions of their heroes, until it was time to pack on the imaginary ammunition again.
They were all very brave, I thought. Later Lucinda got fired because she left us in the care of her teenage daughter one day, whose idea of babysitting was to lock us out on the porch while she stayed inside and balled her boyfriend. My mother found out because the neighbors had heard us begging to be let back inside all afternoon. I was kind of sorry to see Lucinda go. I liked being surrounded by brave boys who saved each other.
“Ain’t nobody coming to save you,” Lucinda had said, and she was right. So I started having fantasies of a different kind. I was going to wake up every morning and conquer things, fell demons. I was going to be all kinds of crap. I made a list. I was going to hunt lions on safari in Africa. I was going to build mud huts in Borneo. I was going to become a war correspondent. I was going to traverse the Amazon in a cargo liner.
But I wasn’t even that old before reality hit me in the face like a frozen mackerel. First, my grade-school teachers wouldn’t even let me wear pants to school, and a lion hunter looks pretty lame in a skirt. Then there was the other basic, everyday drippings of sorrow and disappointment that clung to the walls of my household like moss. My father soon lost his job, then we lost that house and had to move like migrant workers over the next decade, hardly ever staying long enough to fully unpack. In high school I got so tired of walking into classrooms full of strange faces in the middle of the school year that I simply tied up like an overexercised show-horse one day and I wouldn’t do it anymore. Then I stopped going to high school all together, and wasn’t missed.
I got myself a boyfriend, that handsome heroine addict named Scott, and a job at a cocktail lounge where they didn’t blink when I told them I was twenty-three.
From there I made just about every wrong turn you can imagine making, and I felt the fire in me start to die like a treasured pet abandoned on a desert highway. In the end, I did not hunt lions in Africa, I did not build mud huts in Borneo, and I did not traverse the Amazon in a cargo liner. But, hey, I’m here. Ain’t nobody come to save me, and still I am here with a whole new definition for bravery. Bravery is the soft voice inside you that won’t die, the voice that whispers in your ear each morning and says, “All right, let’s try this again.”
Such a Mother
GIANT MICHAEL SAYS his friend can’t go to strip clubs anymore because he keeps falling in love with the dancers. “He wants to bring them home and take care of them,” Michael tells me, and I know how his friend feels, because who wouldn’t feel sorry for a girl who has to shave her pubic hair into a Hitler mustache to make a living? That has got to suck so bad that your heart just goes out to her.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Michael, who has talked me into going to the Cheetah in the middle of the day, “I can’t get past the Hitler mustache. It just seems so half done, why don’t they just shave it all off?”
Michael says something about how it makes for a good signal indicator, like a landing strip, and he thinks it’s sexy. But to me it just looks like a caterpillar trying to crawl up the girl’s tummy, and that just can’t be comfortable. Michael has lured me here, after three years of browbeating, to prove to me that the Cheetah is a nice place after all, especially at this time of the day, when the slobbery happy-hour hogs are off somewhere still hammering away on the keyboards in their cubicles. Michael’s right, it’s not bad here, I’m not uncomfortable in a room full of naked women, it’s just that I think, as a matter of protocol, men should be uncomfortable in such a situation, you know? Of course they’re not. They act like it’s as average as concrete, to be the minority among a crowd of beautiful nude girls.
It
doesn’t help that the girls are all so damn nice. Believe me, bitches don’t end up like this for a living; naked and shaking their overcropped poontangs in strangers’ faces. Bitches end up married for a living, then their husbands have to come to the Cheetah to be treated nice. Anyway, even a nice stripper would become a bitch if she had to be married for a living, because sometimes spouses just have a way of sucking all the sweetness out of each other.
Michael is not married, but he was once. So was I, and Michael likes to tell me that since I am now a single mother, I am about as attractive as a bad case of psoriasis. “Seriously, if I didn’t know you and I sidled up to you at the bar and started talking to you, the second you mentioned your kid I’d be across the room.”
I look at him like he’s speaking a different language. “You really think it matters to me whether you consider me fuck worthy?” I laugh, and I must laugh, because the alternatives are too lame. But really, do some guys seriously think I shouldn’t still be ecstatic over my child just because it might mean I’ll get laid less from now on? “Christ, Michael, all you’re saying is that my kid is an excellent tool for filtering assholes from my life, which is fine with me.”
But Michael likes to try and freak me out, anyway. Take the time we realized we both had had the same vivid dream when we were teenagers about a prophet who fell from a spaceship. Michael tried to get me thinking we needed to start a cult, to find all the other people with the same “vision,” but I wasn’t interested because I knew Michael would get to be the head of the cult (he’s 6 feet 7 inches and people tend to do what he says) while I’d have been relegated to single-mom pudding maker and Nike polisher, probably.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 20