Testing . . . testing. . . . It is early in the morning on June, oh, what the hell, June something, and I am tooling right down Interstate 95 to my new life. I just bought this cheap little recorder at an all-night diner where they had a lot of crap at the checkout. I also bought a rape whistle and a mood ring like I once had when I was in the ninth grade. I could’ve bought some fruit-flavored condoms (if that tells you what kind of place I was in), but I passed. I have taken a vow of celibacy, so relieved as hell to be out of the life that is now four hours behind me in the D.C. area. I plan to tell all on these tapes, my life, my secrets. I mean why not? I’m driving along thinking that that big old meteor or whatever it was that hit Jupiter could just as easily slam into Earth and wipe us all out and wouldn’t I be so sorry if I’d stayed in a miserable life? Wouldn’t I be sorry if I’d spent my days fretting over this calorie or that. Just prior to entering the marriage I’m now leaving, I was driving down this same interstate, and what did I see but a big white horse racing down the side of the road. At first I thought I was hallucinating, and then I thought it was a sign like from Revelation, coming for to carry me home or some such. Of course then I saw this red-faced farmer hauling ass, with a harness clutched in his hand and a deserted plow out in the middle of a tobacco field. Still, I should’ve taken heed. If a friend had told me that story, I’d have said, It’s a sign, stay single.
I’ve always been asked for advice by others. It comes to me naturally, whether I want the position or not. It’s like all I have to do is walk into a room, and within five minutes everybody who’s anybody with a problem has come up and affixed himself to me. I think of myself as a crazy magnet. I say, Step right up, step right up, put on your iron filings suit and get sucked my way. Give me your lost and crazed. Are you on drugs? Are you afraid to come out of the closet? Do you like to tell others every graphic detail of your sex life or intestinal functions? Well then, clearly, I’m the woman you’ve spent your life looking for. The trouble is that I’m so goddamned sick and tired of listening to all your crap that I have decided to set up shop and just talk to myself for a few months since all of you problem types out there just don’t happen to ever have time to listen.
If you’re listening to these tapes, then there’s a very good chance that I’m dead. So fine, listen. Sit back and enjoy yourself. My name is Mary Denise Parks, but everybody calls me Denny just like the restaurant. I am thirty-five years old and on my way to Fulton, North Carolina, where I have a job waiting for me. I am going to put my crazy magnet properties to good use and become a therapist. I have never been a therapist; I only took introduction to psych in college, where I majored in recreation. Serious recreation of course. I have spent the past several years going into rest homes and tossing balls of yarn into hands too old to catch and helping the more virile types glue dried beans onto boards in shapes of chickens and sunrises and so on. People say I’m good at what I do. People were crazy about me in Virginia, where I lived as the wife of an academic, an English professor who spent his whole life researching writers who had allergies. As a result, he spent an enormous amount of time studying the sneeze, what part of the brain controlled it, bright lights, and so on. He couldn’t shut up about that French guy who liked to watch others, if you know what I mean, and otherwise stayed corked up in his room his entire life writing one really long book, and then that woman poet from Boston whose name I can’t think of either. He referred to them as “the asthmatics,” which I said sounded like a punk rock band that might be into leather and little face masks, like Dennis Hopper used in Blue Velvet. People said my husband must be such an interesting person. Yeah, right, that’s why I felt inclined to take off all of my clothes while watching Body Heat in a public theater. William Hurt was so close I could have spit a Raisinet and hit him. I was almost shed of everything when the manager of the theater came and asked me to put my clothes back on, and then somebody called my husband to come and get me. He was so mad, his jaw clenched tightly. I faked several sneezes to distract him and went on about my business. I knew I was out of there.
So here I am; my godmother, who I have not seen since I was five years old, is waiting for me. She knows what happened in Virginia; my mother called to tell her. My husband said if I got some really intensive psychiatric help that he thought he might some day be able to forgive me. He said that if I would submit to his advice and suggestions that he could make everything work. This from a man who couldn’t even operate the VCR. This from a man who liked his sex like he liked his martinis, dry and neat. This from a man who couldn’t stand NOT knowing an answer to a question, even at the risk of making a fool of himself, which I now understand is why he picked such a subject as “the sneeze” to occupy his pitiful little life. I was out of there. I had known within a month of marrying the old bore that I had made a mistake; I knew when one of the young residents who regularly came to Sunrise Rest Home asked me on a date and I had to stop sorting out kernels of colored popcorn and think about it. I never wore my wedding ring at work with the excuse of fear of losing it, since I had to wash my hands with industrial-strength soap a zillion times a day. Now that I’ve been brushing up on my psychology a bit, I know better. I had a subconscious desire to be asked out. I stared into that young doctor’s big blue eyes, the dark circles underneath from all of his night hours tending the sick and the dying. I imagined myself in his arms, my mouth pressed against his. He said, “You know I don’t get many nights off, but I happen to be free this Friday and a friend of mine is having a party . . .” I watched his mouth moving with the words and all I could feel deep inside of me was the seed of truth and reality like a bean soaked in water to soften and expand, burst forth with a vine of reckoning that squeezed the life out of me. How could I have been so stupid as to think that at the age of thirty my life had been over? I was just another one of those women who thought she heard that stupid proverbial clock ticking and jumped into the first relationship that seemed somewhat decent. What did I know? I never knew my father. He died when I was an infant. This is what I have in common with my godmother, Quee Purdy (she pronounces it Pur DAY, like she might be French or something). She ended her letter to me saying just that: “We are women who spent years missing our fathers and who cling to every story and bit of information we can collect about the men who gave us life. We are women who understand psychology. We are held together by our love for one person, your mother (as finicky and difficult a person as she is, don’t say I said it). I am delighted to offer you a position in my newly founded and booming business: SMOKE-OUT SIGNALS, a place for addicts who want to quit.” She told me that if I happened to be a smoker that she’d take two weeks to straighten me out before I began working. She says that there are many nice folks in the town of Fulton, and she plans to introduce me to as many as she can. She says there are also numerous nuts to avoid, one of whom has just registered to come into Smoke-Out Signals. Quee calls her the Spandex Poet, says she is a birdlike, shriveled-up, whorish bimbo who specializes in haiku and penis imagery. Quee says that the two of us will have one hell of a wonderful time typing up notes on our clients and writing up the diagnostic papers.
The interstate is now flat as a board, and I’m within only a few miles of my destination. My mother grew up in this town, just two streets from where Quee lives. Whenever she talks about those growing-up years, she gets this far-off dreamy look like they might have been the best years she’s ever known, but still, in spite of Quee’s long-distance begging and my own questioning, she’d never ever move back. She would say something like: “Life goes on” or “On with the show!” Not long after I was born, Mom moved to New York thinking she had a chance of breaking into show business. We lived there just long enough for people in her hometown to refer to her as “the one who now lives in New York City,” like that might make her suddenly sophisticated—forget that she was waitressing and we were living in Queens in an old building that overlooked that huge cemetery where you’d need a map and compass and three days of food and w
ater to find your loved one. I was seven when she met my stepfather, who was in New York on business, and all it took was a marriage proposal and she kissed all that talk of Broadway and the northeastern experience good-bye, and there we were in Virginia in a two-story colonial house, with my mother sipping bourbon and churning out needlepoint pillows faster than most people can cough and spit. My mother’s desires to make me into a child star disappeared as soon as she saw our new veranda and reappeared in dreams of debutante parties and what she called “little girl schools” where I might wear a little uniform and knee socks, ride a horse side-saddle, and meet somebody who would become a famous academic type. So? Consider it damn done.
Anyway, I’m signing off for right now. As I say, if you are listening to my secret tapes, then chances are I’m dead. I hope that it’s something like the year 2050 instead of this year. I hope that I fell in love with a wonderful person and that I had a couple of perfect kids, a lucrative career, vegetable garden, rose arbor, good clothes, and leather accessories. I hope that people remember me fondly as a woman who had much insight into the lost and crazed who attached themselves to her. I hope people forget that I was stripping my clothes off in a public theater about the same time that poor Pee Wee Herman was doing things in another theater. Whoops! I shouldn’t have reminded you about Pee Wee, in hopes that people will have forgotten all about his little episode and that his program will be back on the air. I think of myself as the Pee Wee Defense Commission. I hope that out there in the world somewhere I will have people who feel that way about me.
I will delete what I just said come to think of it. What I just now did reminds me of a card I once saw on an airplane when I was seated in that emergency exit seat. The card said: “If you cannot perform in the event of an emergency or you cannot read this card, please alert your attendant.” Duh. Anyway, I hope that I’m remembered in a wonderful way. I hope that my funeral will be a happy, happy time. I would like to be cremated and thrown from the Empire State Building with a little bit left over for my remaining loved ones to put in little velvet bags and preserve like secret talismans. I want to be hurled to the wind on a bright clear sunny day. I want low humidity, so that my pieces will not stick like so much cheap cinder to the soot that already fills the city air. I want my pieces to blow. I would like for folks to tell stories and eat ice-cream sundaes. My funeral songs of choice are “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy” by the Tams and “Already Gone” by the Eagles.
Speaking of which, my tapes are going to be labeled like they contain music. Quee has already told me that she doesn’t care what I do in my garage apartment and she doesn’t care who I entertain. She doesn’t care what my sexual preference might be (hetero), and she doesn’t care if I have fifty pets (fur allergy). She doesn’t care what I eat, and she doesn’t care what I wear (I had told her that I’m a vegetarian and prefer all-cotton anything to a blend). She doesn’t care how I wear my hair (frizzy by nature, long by choice, auburn by henna), and she doesn’t care what kind of music I play EXCEPT, and she repeated EXCEPT, none of that crooning that people thought was something when she was younger. She said she hated Bing Crosby and she hated Frank Sinatra and most of all she hates Perry Como. That’s why this tape will read “Perry Como’s Christmas.” You have found this tape because my will instructed you to do so. If it turns out that I have died young, then I hope that the sky will darken and the rain will fall. I hope that people will stop what they are doing and feel my loss like a big empty hole, just for a second even, before they turn back to their televisions and telephones and video display terminals, because the truth is that if that has happened, then it is a damn shame. It is a big damn loss. It brings tears to my eyes just to think it.
SMOKE-OUT SIGNALS
Put your butt out and bring your butt in
Today’s the day—you’re guaranteed to win!
Quee has run her ad in the local paper for two weeks now and she already has folks booked on a waiting list. The word is spreading around Fulton and in neighboring towns. “If smoking is an addiction like they say,” she said on a local radio show, “then a smoker deserves to be treated like an addict. A smoker ought to be able to go somewhere like the Betty Ford Clinic and get loved and pampered right out of the addiction.”
“And just how do you do this?” the interviewer asked. He was a round, red-faced fella, originally from Raleigh, who smoked like a locomotive. “I mean, I’m an addict. What can you do for me?”
That was the beginning. Quee promised to take him and reshape him. She promised him good food and long hot baths, foot rubs and back massages, scented oils and fine wine, endless videos on her brand-new wide-screen TV. He would have his own room for two weeks; he would have her undivided attention.
“My wife might not like it,” he said and laughed a laugh that turned into a dry hack, a choking cough, a need to rush over to the watercooler while Quee completed her wonderful free advertising.
“What? Your wife wouldn’t like for you to stop choking and spitting all over creation? Your wife wouldn’t like for you to have white teeth as opposed to brown?” Quee leaned in close to the mike and cooed to her waiting public. “You will have round-the-clock therapy, be it physical massage or talk therapy. Put your butt out and bring your butt in, honey. I can cure you.”
NOW THE GUINEA pig DJ is in his last phase of the smoke-out. He’s as lazy as a coonhound—oiled and loosened, with pores that are clean and clear. Quee has knocked herself out on him because this success could cinch the business. The final phase of his treatment will include a little talk therapy from Denny, who ought to be arriving any second now, if she didn’t have to pull off the interstate to remove her clothing. The child temporarily lost her mind—totally, it sounds like—but at least she did have the good sense to get herself out of a bad situation.
Now Quee is seated on the big velvet ottoman with her client’s plump foot in her lap. She has greased the foot with bag balm, and now she’s massaging while he listens to his substitute newsperson on the radio. His arches melt under the firm pressure of her thumbs. “I may never go back to work,” he tells her, his eyes closed, terry cloth robe (furnished by Smoke-Out Signals) pulled loosely around his body. “Marry me, Quee.”
“Honey, you’re not old enough for me,” she says. “I like my men old enough to have gone around the block a couple of hundred times.” She watches him jerk and then relax when she twists his ankle around with a loud pop. “I’ve buried so many men that they call me the Hospice Lover in these parts. Besides, you’re married.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Besides we got to get you back on the radio and get this guy that murders the Queen’s English back selling ads where he ought to be.”
“He’s running overtime, too.” He shifts, giving Quee a glimpse up his hairy thigh. No thrill there. Lord, Lord, you can’t always be loving a man for his looks and parts. You gotta love the whole man, gotta find the heart and the soul. She preaches this very lecture all the time to her assistant, Alicia, who should already be here by now, steaming towels and getting ready for the future arrival of the Spandex Poet and several others chomping at the bit to get in. Quee’s house is a ranch-style that has been added on to twice and will continue to be added on to if business is good. Her dream is to have a big extension out into the backyard, kind of like those barracks on Gomer Pyle, USMC, which was a show she hated but watched faithfully way back because Lonnie thought it was hilarious. Lonnie used to always tell Quee that she resembled Lou Ann Poovey, Gomer’s girl, which of course was nowhere near true but was a sweet thought to be sure.
Alicia has kept a low profile with the radio man here, because her husband is also a DJ. Her husband, Jones Jameson, is known around the county as the local Howard Stern. He says horrible things on the radio, sex things, racist things. But he’s real handsome, and comes from money (at least what might be considered money in this neck of the woods), so people try very hard to overlook him. Alicia is his complete opposite and certainly deserves
better.
“The Big Man Jones isn’t here yet,” the substitute DJ is saying. “So we’re going to go ahead and have the Swap Shop show. If you’ve got something you’re itching to sell, something you mighta never woulda bought no way, then give us a call . . .”
“Turn it off, turn it off.” Quee’s client opens his eyes for the first time in an hour. “That idiot’s going to cause me to have to smoke again.”
“There, there, sweetie,” Quee presses into his arch, rubs up and down with her knuckles until he relaxes again. She kneads his squatty calves. When he’s almost asleep, she leads him back to his little room, which is kept dark and cool, turns on the ocean wave tape and the lava lamp and leaves him to the first of his several naps of the day. Sleep is very important to the person kicking a habit. Forget that he’s now as fat as a little toad. The only mirror in this end of the house is a skinny mirror that she borrowed on time from a department store over in Clemmonsville; of course she had to go out with the manager a couple of times to get it, but that’s what sacrifice is all about. She doesn’t dare let the fat little DJ anywhere near his clothes, yet. She keeps him in her loose terry cloth robes that she bought in bulk from one of the local textile mills; she has now ironed SOS onto all the pockets. Fat. That will be her next project; move over, Duke University, with your old rice diet, here comes Quee Purdy, healer of man, fully licensed driver on the byways of life who knows a little medicine, psychiatry, chiropractic whatever, and therapeutic massage. If Elvis were alive he’d book himself at Quee’s house.
Carolina Moon Page 3