Amy pays with a debit card and the lady asks for her signature.
“Why do I have to sign if it’s a debit?” Amy asks.
The girl smacks her gum as she explains, “We have to track all the purchases. People like to get high on meth, steal people’s identities, and buy porn.”
Amy doesn’t know what to say to that. “Oh,” she replies.
“God, I can’t believe we’re doing this backwards,” I say to Amy. “I thought it was porn, identity theft, then meth.”
Amy sighs and shakes her head. “I guess we’ll get it right next time.” She hooks her arm through mine. “Let’s just skip the identity theft and go home to our meth.”
I pat her hand. “Okay, honey.”
The girl behind the counter starts to put the Hummingbird in a black plastic bag. Amy waves her hand, “I don’t need a bag.”
“You sure?” she asks.
“Yeah.” Amy grabs the vibe and tucks it into her purse. It fits snugly.
The girl shrugs. “Have fun, ladies,” she says.
We’re on the road again, driving fast but aimless, zipping north on the 205 to the 84 west, racing along next to the MAX train. I refuse to roll up the windows, so we yell to hear each other over the wind and the Pretty Girls Make Graves album. I smoke three cigarettes between Cathie’s and Lloyd Center, careful not to burn my long hair as it whips around in front of my face. Amy’s fingers are fast on her phone. omg i bought a vibrator!!
I pull the car into the mall parking lot so we can ride the train for free downtown. You’re not supposed to do this, but everyone does.
We get off the train in Chinatown and walk to Voodoo Doughnut so Amy can get the one with cocoa puffs on top. She says she needs some comfort after being traumatized by the wiener wall. I smile at her fake drama.
The line outside the tiny shop is understandably long and most of the people waiting for doughnuts are dressed to go out—punks in torn-up jeans and spikes, sorority girls with hard nipples pressing against their tube tops. I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but Amy, in her platform sandals and halter top, looks like she could go clubbing. She’s even got big sweeping strokes of purple eye shadow over each eye.
“Shit,” I whisper.
“What?” Amy looks up from her phone.
I point. “It’s Liz.”
“Oh crap,” Amy says. She knows Liz is my ex-girlfriend and that our break-up sucked, but she doesn’t know that Liz dumped me after she found out I was “humping that whore from Hillsboro”—her alliteration, not mine.
Liz is easy to spot in a crowd. She looks like a Latina pin-up with dark skin, big eyes, and pouty lips. She dresses like a vintage model in big black Mary Janes, fishnets, and bright red lipstick. She keeps her black hair cut short in this sexy Louise Brooks kind of way.
I still want to fuck her.
I suddenly wish I’d worn something cool. Liz loved my soft butch look. She said it was best when I wore my long auburn hair loose with pinstripe pants and a button-up shirt.
Amy watches me staring. “Do you want to go?”
“No,” I say. “There’s room for two lesbos in this doughnut shop.”
Liz doesn’t even notice me while she orders a McMin-nville cream—my favorite too, a custard-filled doughnut with maple frosting.
Some skinny dyke wearing tight jeans and Converse sneakers has her arm around Liz’s waist the whole time, but I realize when they turn to leave that the girl is remarkably flat-chested and her face is blunt and chiseled under her big black glasses.
Then I see his Adam’s apple.
I want to stop myself but I can’t. I follow them out the door and leave Amy standing at the counter.
I yell down the street, “I didn’t realize you were into dudes, Liz!”
Liz and her boyfriend turn around. She blinks once, slowly, her eyes weighed down by multiple layers of mascara, and says, “I’m not, Kate. I just like people who aren’t assholes.” She nods at the doughnut shop, where Amy is still inside. “Have fun with your puta nueva,” she adds. Liz knows that Amy is only a friend, but everybody is competition to her.
Her boyfriend flips me off. Liz sashays down the street and doesn’t look back.
Amy appears next to me, her mouth full of chocolate cereal and frosting. “You are a total failure at life, you know that, right?”
I shrug. Amy doesn’t get it. Amy didn’t make Liz come in a parked car. I still get off to the image of Liz in her tight black dress, leaning her head back with her red mouth open while I worked her clit with my fingers. And tonight I’ll probably fantasize about pushing her up against the wall of that doughnut shop and reaching my hand inside her fishnet stockings. I loved the way she held the back of my neck when I fucked her, forcing my lips against hers. She gave the dirtiest kisses.
Amy licks her fingers. “Let’s go to Backspace,” she offers. It’s one of the few late-night coffee shops downtown, which means it’s always full of high school kids. I don’t really want to go but, until we turn twenty-one we don’t have many other options.
Amy buys a second latte and grabs a deck of cards from another table. There’s a group of boys with laptops at a big table in the back and they’re all playing some computer game together. One of them leans back in his chair and sighs, “This is so fucking gay, dudes.”
Amy deals gin, which means she wants to talk. We’ve been playing gin since we were in the Girl Scouts. We used to play a quarter per point against other troops and clean them out. She spent all her money on makeup and I bought books. “How old is Liz, anyway?” she asks.
“Twenty-five,” I say.
“So does that mean it was, like, statutory rape when you were dating?”
“Nope. Just sodomy.”
“Oh.” Amy looks a little disappointed, like she was hoping for a felony, but her face brightens as she lays out her hand. “Gin.”
“You’re a cunt,” I tell her and slap my cards on the table.
She shrugs. “Homo.”
“Prude.”
“Dyke.”
“Breeder.”
Amy deals another hand and then leans across the table to whisper, “Don’t be mad that you can never have me.”
“Mad?” I point at her bug-bite titties. “There’s nothing there to motorboat. Forget it.”
Amy shakes her shoulders in an effort to make her nonexistent tits jiggle, which makes me snort. “Is that why you loved Liz?” Amy asks. “Because of her motorboat-ability?”
“And her apartment,” I answer. “It was nice to have a place where I could escape.”
Amy nods as she picks a discard. “I didn’t see you much then.”
“Yeah,” I say. I feel my cheeks tinge pink. It’s true. I dated Liz for nine months, right at the end of our senior year. I would live at her place on the weekends and never answer my cell phone. Amy sent me so many texts: where r u? call me. iron chef tonight? answer yr damn phone, plz!!
But I didn’t want to deal with anyone else. I just wanted to be in Liz’s apartment and see her looking disheveled in the morning. I loved the way she would roll over and smile at me with crusty raccoon eyes. “Morning, Glory,” she would say. Then she’d kiss me and I’d run my hands over her bare breasts, over her back, into her panties.
“Well, too bad she was a nut job,” Amy laments.
I nod and half-smile. “And now she’s straight too.”
Liz had moods sharp like knives. She said she was stressed with grad school and would apologize, but then she’d go into rages, break dishes, and yell at me to get out. One time she bit me so hard on my arm it left a scar. My mom asked if a dog did it.
“Some of it was good,” I say. Amy looks up from her cards. “I loved going to brunch with her on Sundays. And she wrote me letters, even when we saw each other every day. Sometimes we just sat together on her porch, reading books and smoking cigarettes.”
Amy nods thoughtfully. Then she gives me a big smile and I groan. “Gin,” she says.
B
y the time we head back across the river, the train is almost empty. We sit side by side, Amy texting a mini-novella while I stare out the window. so then i got a donut and kate was a total bitch to her ex and we played gin and i won every time and we’re heading home now so maybe i’ll come over later and you can meet my hummingbird?
A guy about our age in an Old Navy T-shirt is sitting across the aisle. He’s rocking his head back and forth singing “Brown Eyed Girl” to himself. “Sha la la la la la la la la la ti da,” he mumbles. He’s got short brown hair and a hooked nose. I look at his hands because he’s drumming his fingers on his leg and his hands are all fucked up and scarred and dirty. He looks familiar.
He catches me looking at him and lopes over to our seats. He goes, “Hey.” He’s got pale skin and he smells wet and sour, like a gutter that’s been pissed in too many times. I breathe through my mouth. I look at Amy and we don’t say anything.
The guy smiles like one half of his mouth is all shot up with Novocain. “Hey,” he says again, and leans closer to Amy. “You’re really pretty.” She tenses up but doesn’t move. He runs a finger along the edge of her hair, from the base of her neck down to her shoulder blade.
I swat his hand away. “Hey, man. Don’t fucking touch her!”
Amy is red and frozen, not looking at either of us.
The guy straightens up and laughs. “Whatever. I’m just giving her a compliment.” His Adam’s apple bobs in his neck and suddenly I want to wrap my hands around his throat. Make him shut up. Make him sorry. His eyes roll around, like he’s not sure where to look. He stares into Amy’s lap, at her purse. “Hey,” he says again, and points. “What’s what?”
The Hummingbird is sticking out of her bag. He can see the cupped tip and the edge of the package, where it says, Requires two AA batteries, in large print. “It’s a toothbrush,” Amy says, and tries to push it down into her purse.
“Nah,” he says. “That’s a dildo.” He stretches it out into two heavy syllables: Dill. Dough. He laughs again and I want to crush his windpipe. My fingernails are digging into my palms.
He touches Amy’s neck. “You need some help, honey? Need a man to help you, baby doll?”
Amy cringes and I leap over her, shoving him with force. There are three other people on the train and they are all working very hard to seem like they are not looking at us.
I warn him, “Keep your fucking hands and your compliments to yourself.”
“Don’t touch me, you fat fucking dyke,” he growls. His glassy eyes darken and he pushes me back, so I stumble into Amy, who, miraculously, is still texting. this is so crazy!!
I take a deep breath and feel my body hum. There’s a rush of blood that starts in my feet and burns straight up my legs to my pussy. It feels like an hour passes before the train stops and the doors slowly pull apart, and in one moment I do two things—I stomp on his foot, which distracts him enough to look down for a fraction of a second, then I jam the palm of my hand upward into his face and I hear his nose pop into my fingers. Suddenly there’s blood streaming down my forearm and I yell, “Run!” to Amy, who’s already jumped out and is racing to the parking lot.
I run as hard as I can, pausing only once to glance over my shoulder, and I see that he’s stepped off the train but he’s not going to catch us. He’s stumbling around with blood all over his shirt. The last thing I hear from him is a muffled cry like a broken animal.
Amy shouts for the keys and I toss them to her. She sprints ahead to the car and has the engine started before I even reach the passenger door.
We burn through signals regardless of their color and pull onto the freeway. The blood on my hand slowly dries and turns brown. Amy stares straight ahead, a death grip on the wheel, her chest heaving. Her right foot is planted to the floor. The album is still blasting from the stereo and we don’t turn it down.
Stand up so I can see you
Shout out so I can hear you
Reach out so I can touch you
This is our emergency
This is our emergency
A moment turns into half an hour. I make Amy turn around at Multnomah Falls, the scenic area thirty miles east of where we started.
“I don’t want to go to Idaho,” I say. I try to make it funny but she doesn’t respond.
Amy quietly, slowly pulls the car around. She looks left and right three times. Stops. She finally speaks: “Do you think we lost him?”
In the dark night, it’s so funny, all I can do is laugh, and finally Amy laughs too, and I say, “He never even had us.”
SHANGHAIED
BY GIGI LITTLE
Old Town
Eight o’clock
So, I’m walking down this seedy street in Old Town with Kit and Rhonda, silently lamenting my sorrowful existence—how rent’s going up again, how I need some new clothes, how good cheese is so fucking expensive—and up ahead, on the next corner, here’s this old woman begging. How’s that for juxtaposition?
In other words, I’m a pathetic, whiny bitch.
She’s squat like a folding chair. Hunched, head straight out from the crossbar of her shoulders. Hand out at the people walking by. And this funny look on her face, this little twisted thing with her lips, almost a smile—and, damn, look at her eyes. She’s got crooked eyes. Like she’s wearing crooked glasses, but she’s not wearing glasses at all.
“Spare change?” she says. “Pretty jewelry?”
And that’s the thing that really has me reaching into my purse. Pretty jewelry. Because Jesus, I mean, just look at her.
All right, it’s not the dress—that’s just some old house-dress. Yellow faded to white. Some splattery stain covering it that, when I step close enough, turns out to be what was once a pattern of flowers. But her hat. That’s bright blue velvet. With one of those little feathers at the side and some torn net hanging from the brim. And her jewelry. Trying so hard to be pretty. She’s covered in junky plastic—big earrings, clinking bracelets—old and broken. And what looks like—step closer—clippings of wire circled around her fingers. Necklaces made of tied-together pieces of gutter-stained string and buttons and faded sequins. Step right in front of her now, and the brooch pinned to her chest is an arthritic metal claw with no rhinestones.
She looks her crooked eyes down my face to the pearls at my neck. “Pretty jewelry?”
I’ve got a fistful of coins and I step up and hang it over her open hand and let go.
Her other hand comes up fast. Takes a jabbing snatch at me.
Her rough, knobby fingers around the four of mine.
The top of my head does that scared thing where it feels like someone’s cracked a raw egg up there. I hang my mouth open but my brain forgets what screaming’s for, and then she lets go. And now we’re walking away, Kit glancing back. That touch still on my fingers. The way the squirm hangs around in your stomach after the scare’s over.
Rhonda’s good enough to wait until we’re one step away from being out of earshot. “My friend,” she says, “you are such a sap.”
Nine o’clock
After a couple hours walking through the dungeons and opium dens below the streets of Portland you need a drink. It was thick hot down there, and dark. They gave us flashlights and said, Now, direct your attention to this corner where, in eighteen-hundred- and-I-can’t-remember, men were held captive in foul prison cells.
Rhonda had the reaction I thought she’d have: “Shanghai Tunnels? Shit, that was more like the Shanghai Basement.”
But if you enjoy good lore and don’t mind close, dark spaces where the air is like breathing dirt and it’s so hot you could keel over but for being constantly revived by the exquisite reek of body odor coming off the tourist next to you, it’s quite a hoot.
Me, I love good lore. Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it’s not only historical, it’s a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way
to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you’ll hear, including the one about George Washington and the cherry tree. Look it up.
But after the tunnels and then the old woman grabbing my hand, we had to get out of Old Town. I said we could walk to the Pearl District, but Rhonda always has to call a cab. She couldn’t have gotten very far anyway on those shoes of hers that are somewhere between fuck-me pumps and fuck-you pumps. She sat in the middle so she could lean in between the front seats and show her boobs to the cab driver.
And now we’re at the Everett Street Bistro, Rhonda’s favorite place—sitting at her favorite sidewalk table. I wanted to sit inside, and I’m trying to drown my frustrations in some sort of sugar-on-the-rim, house-infused, fruit-muddled, herb-atomized cocktail, and pommes frites with a side of béarnaise sauce.
Kit is big blue eyes over an even bluer drink. “No, seriously, Rhonda, there are tunnels running all under this city. From Old Town all the way to the Willamette River.”
Kit’s reciting word for word what the tour guide said. She smiles like the tour guide did. Her large, goaty teeth are a shade of blue.
“You want to know what I think?” Rhonda says, pointing a pomme frite at us. “I think they heard some old legend, found a basement, threw some old, broken shit down there, and started charging admission.”
“No, seriously,” says Kit and her blue teeth. “Back in the day, the bars were full of trap doors, and if you were an able-bodied man and you got yourself drunk, bang, down you’d go, to be chained up and shanghaied away on some pirate boat.”
Again: tour guide. Except that her two drinks—closing in on three—are making Kit both more emphatic and less articulate. And I’m pretty sure the tour guide didn’t say anything about pirates.
Rhonda rolls her eyes. It’s ticking me off. She’s rolling her eyes at the lore of our city. Which in my book is like you’re dissing my story. I mean, this evening’s entertainment was my idea. And first she’s making cracks under her breath the whole tour, then she’s acting like me giving some change to a woman on the street is the most obvious act of chumpdom she’s ever seen. I’m going inside to find a waiter and ask if this place has a trap door I can shove her down.
Portland Noir Page 18