Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  And Tubby. We play with him less lately, but he is still smartly dressed in a red slicker and matching rain boots, an outfit I picked out after a two-day storm — the weather was so dangerous we holed up and made squiggly pasta and watched old movies and —

  The little bear is in the trash.

  My heart twangs ominously. I move to pick it up but all I see is her, dripping wet and burnt caramel–colored, her strong, concave thighs open, exposing the pouched, purple lips of the slipper orchid between her legs.

  I leave the toy in the garbage and go.

  * * *

  The carrier bag contains paper towels, glass cleaner, oil soap, a sponge, and a bucket of hot water.

  I go to her apartment and spend a couple of hours cleaning her door, doormat, and peephole, remembering the time she cleaned my place. I have to rest for a while: I am weak and sick.

  Finally, I struggle to get up, and I am hanging a PLEASE DISTURB sign on her door with my number scratched on it when a slip of paper shoots out from beneath it.

  “Get lost,” it says in her ornate script.

  I do, leaving the bucket in the elevator.

  I hear someone say, “Bucket taking a ride,” as I hurry to the heavy doors and let them whoosh me outside.

  * * *

  And so I roam the streets, starving and burning for something to drink.

  I write FAMOUS ACTOR on a piece of cardboard and sit on Sunset, declaiming speeches from Hamlet but also selections from The Love Boat, a show I appeared on in my decline.

  I played a car salesman henpecked by his boorish wife who meets an actual mermaid in the moonlight.

  “I want to be with you, Sally,” I recite, as people hurry past. “I will jump in the water and grow glorious gills!”

  After several hours, I have enough money for a pizza slice and a few shots of Wild Turkey at some dump on Fairfax.

  An old barfly latches on to me, eventually recognizing me.

  “You’re a famous guy,” she says, puffing her chest out. In her dingy white angora sweater, she looks like a barnyard hen. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am scourging myself,” I say, letting my fingers walk on her thin, divoted thighs.

  “I have a place near here,” she says, tracing her stubble-fronted lips with her short, coral-colored nails.

  She reminds me of Siobhan, only worse, so much worse.

  I say, “That sounds like a suitable punishment.”

  She doesn’t seem to hear me: “Let’s do this,” she says brightly.

  I get into her dirty, oily bed, flinging aside a few slices of luncheon meat and a cigarette end.

  I watch her strip to her beige support pants and tan bra and attend to her when she joins me, eating her cheesy pussy, squeezing her deflated breasts until she cums, pissing in my face.

  “Sorry,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “I got carried away.”

  I mop my face with the burgundy sheet and smile. “Don’t apologize,” I say.

  I go to her bathroom and turn the mirror to face the wall. Get dressed and head for the door.

  “My name is Anna,” she says sourly, and I want to punch her so much.

  Sensing this, she throws up her hands. “You’re a wonderful lover,” she says.

  “You’re not wrong,” I say.

  I sleep a block from her house with an old man who may or may not be dead, inside of his cardboard home.

  What he is, unquestionably, is a blanket hog.

  “Don’t you share?” I say, yanking at the scrap of plaid wool as I fall, instantly, into a deep, torrid sleep.

  * * *

  I see Annabel one day.

  A few of the other indigent men and I steal a car and drive to Pasadena to try to sell some of our finds at the Rose Bowl.

  We make a booth out of scraps and cover it with broken appliances, used needles, empty bottles, and single shoes. People are disgusted, and avoid us.

  She is walking a black pug with a white circle over his right eye.

  Wearing a short flowered dress, flowered stockings, and flamingo-pink platforms.

  Her hair sways as she walks.

  “Annabel,” I cry involuntarily.

  She turns around.

  It’s not her — or it is, and she doesn’t know me.

  “Every time you left, I was certain you were fucking someone else,” I call after her, and hear several tsk tsks of sympathy. For her.

  Because I hate myself, I hate myself is what crawls silently through my throat like a stoma.

  I take off on the other guys and drive back. Sit on a sidewalk in Silver Lake and use a stone to write on the road: MADE SOME MISTAKES.

  Maybe it is the vision of Annabel not-Annabel, in all of her lilies and violets and cowslips and marigolds: I am showered in money.

  One fashionable young man even kneels beside me and pats my back.

  “I made mistakes too, man,” he says, and I burp noisily.

  “That’s it, that’s it,” he says soothingly, and I squall beside my handsome young mother as the sky fills with blue wildflowers and Queen Anne’s lace.

  * * *

  She is smart and beautiful, but she is funny too.

  Some nights, though I don’t want to, I remember her making me laugh.

  By brushing her teeth and running into the bedroom, foaming at the mouth and snarling, “Rabies!”

  By enticing telemarketers as a baby-voiced patsy, or scaring them as a lovesick sex criminal.

  By dancing, full on, if “Turn Me Loose” came on in a supermarket or coffee shop, and hitting every high, horrible note.

  By subjecting me to “Tick Tack,” a tickle assault that always left me begging her to stop, and leaving notes on the fridge like “My chopped-up body is in the crisper” or “Joe and Frank Hardy called re: the Aztec Warrior. Urgent.”

  And by telling long stories about kids she went to school with, imaginary ones like the Boy with Bug Legs, Gina the Ghost, and Murda.

  There’s so much more: and the things we made up together, like our decomposed Sonny and sad Cher impression, and an entire private language, but it hurts to think of any of this.

  It hurts because it’s dead, all of it: the people she invented, the words we used. She knew this when she chucked Tubby into the trash.

  I try to think of things I don’t like about her but I can’t, and that’s the way it is with someone you’re crazy about.

  The bad things become the same as the good things, different-shaped precious and semi-precious stones on a necklace, a one-of-a-kind piece your beautiful girl finds in a junk store, polishes, and wears to bed with nothing else, so you supplicate on each gem; you say, What joy has filled my heart.

  I sleep with my mouth open, hoping that heaven will lower a golden rope ladder, with blessings descending.

  * * *

  Heaven disregards me.

  Days and weeks pass.

  I am quite ghastly. I have not taken my meds, I live on street food or snacks plucked from Dumpsters and cheap alcohol. Ale, bourbon, corn likker — this is my brain on crazy.

  My clothes are fantastically filthy, as am I, and my wrists are electric with infection.

  At night, some of my new Skid Row associates and I make fires in steel drums, and I tell them about Annabel.

  They listen, because I have a naked photograph of her taken with the Instax Mini I gave her with obvious ulterior motives.

  She kindly obliged, leaving shot after shot under my pillow until she tired of it.

  In this one, oh Lamb of God, she is reclining spread-eagled on our bed, wearing a sheer pink scarf and matching pink knee-highs.

  A cigarette dangles from her purpled lips, her free hand holds her hair up, and she has written BIG MAN below a bruise I pulled from her neck.

  I flash it at them and tuck it
away: “Listen, you guys,” I say. “We had it, it was right there.”

  I know they won’t ask what, so I say, “Joy, joy was sitting in front of us and all we had to do was take it. But we were too scared, too careless, too dedicated to pain — ”

  I trail off and roll a cigarette.

  Pretty soon we are all plastered, and when one of the guys asks to see my nudie again, I refuse.

  “I’m sorry I betrayed you, baby,” I cry as they jump and roll me, taking my girl with them, leaving her big man blubbering in the dirt.

  * * *

  Over the next week, I have a few bum fights, over territory mostly, and learn how to make money doing the same.

  I use my anger over losing Annabel to win, and I accept my winnings — moonshine, cash, a roll of grimy Percocet, stolen wallets — with the serenity I have recently acquired.

  The serenity is this: I live like a broken-down swine because I am one.

  Yet I am, possibly, becoming stronger in my rump, pasterns, and cannon bones. Ernest Hemingway said this about livestock once, I’m quite certain.

  In addition to my new-found peace, I think my street-ruggedness and miscellaneous new scars make me look cool.

  In the evening, I dream of Annabel as Gustav Klimt’s Hope, II. Each night, I dream of her in every color, gazing at her beautifully enlarged belly, her eyes closed and doleful because a skull rests there among the pink, blue, and gold fish.

  I wake up, sick at what I have given away so thoughtlessly.

  My own baby, our baby.

  I join the mourners at her feet and cry, and the other bums kick and laugh at me.

  My golden queen walks slowly through the nightmares as well, picking them up like little sea monsters on the aqua-lined shore, questions unasked on her deep-red lips.

  “He did not make me stronger. What he did dissolved my memory, my decency, and the small part of me still capable of love,” is what I answer the glance that asks if Kray made me tough, after all.

  The circles on her robe move, stick and unstick: full moons bumping, watery stars.

  I gather all of her colors to my heart, and it bangs out another answer: me taking a chisel to my armature and seeing our child, a radiant boy who repairs us.

  “He cuts away at our dread, he murders what is past and carries us forward in his small, clefted arms,” I say loudly, and she moves gravely away from my sleep.

  “No, don’t leave me here,” I call after her, and there is nothing left but three unbroken threads, saffron, ultramarine, and fuchsia, that I braid as the sun comes up and pisses on the wall of the alley, waking me with its rotten force.

  * * *

  I am happy, in my way, talking to Annabel and carrying her sometimes, for she is somewhat heavy in her pregnancy.

  She is also far more beautiful. Her rosy-fingered face and full breasts, her small, puffy feet like marzipan, candy-darling, I want —

  “What? What the fuck do you want?”

  It seems I have walked up to a compact muscleman in a boar-hair unitard and whispered my delights to his rampant slice of mustache.

  “My girl,” I say, lightly stroking his long, sunlit hair, which is something like Annabel’s, and steam pours out of his ears.

  He makes a fist and a young couple yells at him to leave me alone, and then some schoolkids join in and start kicking him sharply, and I am grateful, but anxious to leave, when a man in a good jacket says, “Hey, aren’t you — wait, you’re Parnell Wilde!” and I am busted.

  Not quite: I make a labored run for it and manage to elude him, but I know he will get the word out.

  My idyll will end soon, that much is clear.

  “It has been beautiful,” I remark to one of my confrères, who is taking bets for a worm race to begin when the rain stops. “A genuine blessing,” I say, fishing around for a dollar to place on a stout, purplish fellow whose segmented body is both stylish and built for speed.

  * * *

  I root around in my Purdy Liquor bag and withdraw Annabel’s camisole.

  It is stained where the bouffage of her nipples left wine-dark tracks on the white muslin.

  I fold the cloth into a wafer and place it on my tongue, my eyes closed and effluent.

  And commence the epiklesis, Corpus Maria —

  * * *

  As expected, it is not long before the media finds me and ruins everything.

  It is the day I have traded a bottle of sherry for a zippered red vinyl jacket, a fedora, and short white socks.

  “Amma lie becoma truth!” I sing, one rubber-gloved hand on my crotch, the other tilting my hat at a rakish angle.

  “MULTI-MILLIONAIRE MOVIE STAR PARNELL WILDE’S CRAZY NEW JOB!” is the headline of the Enquirer story that is picked up everywhere.

  I know this because a Japanese tourist who gave me a dollar to take a selfie with me shows it to me on her phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You are really good!”

  “I won’t stop dancing,” I say, as if anyone has asked me to.

  I am deep into “Bad” — “I want you slap my face!” — when the officers arrive and seize me.

  “No, no,” I cry: my fans are outraged. I dance more, fiercely, dangerously.

  “Sorry, MJ,” the youngest cop says. “Your daughter wants you home. And your mechanic called. Your Jaguar is tuned and cleaned.”

  “I am unclean and unworthy,” I say, then, summoning Michael again, hold my head up and let the cameras rack and rack their shots of me in my good red lipstick, black eyeliner, and straight shining wig that flips at the bottom like crow feathers.

  I hold out my hands and they take me away.

  My fans are sorrowful, for I am almost young, and still so graceful.

  * * *

  I am taken to hospital for examination and to dry out.

  After that I am to be transferred back to police custody and charged.

  I have the DTs, millipedes in top hats performing for bird carcasses.

  My cries of “It’s a sin, it’s a sin!” die down eventually and dissolve into sobs of joy.

  “What’s the matter with you?” says a guard, obviously irritated.

  “There’s this girl,” I say, lighting up like bumpers, like poppers and flippers; like the whole backbox she dominates.

  “She’s the one for me,” I whisper.

  “So what,” the guard says, moving along.

  I hold my secret tight, along with my soiled pearl-collar cardigan and pink clutch, and it lights up throughout the night, making metallic snaps and mechanical roars.

  I and the other invisible, not visible, devotees of Shinto warm ourselves on this shrine all night, rising only to lay shocks of hyacinth on its cold, gleaming face.

  * * *

  I am returned to the police and spend a day in a cell, using rudimentary magic to amaze my new friends with the finger-removal scene from The Changeling.

  Pudge and Charles appear at the station just in time.

  A cute little padded wagon is igniting outside and prepared to take me away “for a nice, long rest,” according to Sheriff Meaty Balls — this is how I hear his name, and I become agitated that I may have to address him.

  Pudge is huge again, but different. How? Charles has plundered my wardrobe, to impress: gold and white–checked Turnbull & Asser shirt, brown gabardine Gucci slacks, gold Rolex, and caramel-colored Ferragamo loafers.

  Utterly cluelessly, however, he has tied an Old Navy sweatshirt over his shoulders. This the cops don’t notice, even though I wish to slap him with its cheap, saggy sleeves.

  They convince Sheriff Meaty Balls — oh, Mettibals — to release me into their custody.

  “He has to get back on his medication, and he has a film to shoot in three days,” Pudge says, with more than a little charm, which is something new for her.

  “Jus
t keep him out of trouble,” says the sheriff angrily. “He violently Thriller-danced into two of my best men.”

  She promises and we file out, wordlessly, and get into my car.

  Charles drives, after cracking a window. I don’t mind. I have tremors and stink like hell.

  No one says anything until we get stuck in traffic on the 405 and all burst out laughing.

  Pudge stammers, “Meaty balls!” and Charles counters with “Zombie-dance attack!” and we laugh, bent over, our stomachs aching, until we ache.

  “I’m so glad you’re back, Dad,” Pudge says, wiping her eyes, and I smile for the first time since Annabel was around.

  I am suddenly anxious to get home and shower and read that diary. It’s all I have left of her.

  I can’t go looking for her. I am too humiliated; she sounded so certain.

  But Tubby may still be in the trash.

  I breathe deeply and close my eyes. Feel something toward my daughter: what is it?

  I cannot say, so I reach forward and awkwardly muss her hair.

  She laughs; her belly jumps.

  Oh! She is so pregnant!

  “Four months,” she says, and adds wistfully, “It’s not Charles’s.”

  “It is,” he says, giving her belly a tap. “Fathers are made, not born.”

  Pudge throws her arms around him. The car swerves as she says, “I know, I know,” and cries and laughs.

  I look down at my lap. I am neither.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” says Christine, and I wonder at her kindness, her bursting, brand-new joy.

  * * *

  Page one is the screamer.

  “Is it still rape if you cum? Nothing ever felt so good, and so sickening, before or since,” she has written beside the frontispiece, a collage of Sid reclining in a field with several striking, slashed women. Soiled doves, she has captioned them. She is one.

  She has written these words in pink ink and centered them as if they are the epigraph to her entire life.