Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch

by Hollis Gillespie

  “Full frontal!” he shouts.

  The movie is a beautiful tri-part cinematic observance, and this segment in particular is about a young woman contemplating a crossroads in her life after receiving a marriage proposal. In one segment, Daniel and I play a bickering married couple, and in our scene all you see are the backs of our heads, but even then I bet you can tell we come across as naturally as two big fake breasts. The reason we were picked to appear in the film is because—this is important—when asked if they could come festoon our places with props and film equipment, we answered with one word, “’kay!”

  Then we heard the title. When I ask Darren why he spells it out—rather than simply saying it—while calling the scenes, he says it’s because he doesn’t want to use harsh language in case children are nearby. “F-U-C-K!” he recites. “Action!”

  I’m amused that he has a problem with that one word, seeing as how he cowrote the script. I have a bigger problem with euphemisms. There was once a local liquor store appropriately nicknamed “Horny Pete’s,” because the proprietor once tried to molest a seven-year-old girl, who escaped and ran screaming all the way home clutching her mother’s Salem menthols, which was the reason she had been dispatched on the errand in the first place. When she got home she handed over the cigarettes and commenced bawling her eyes out. “What the hell happened to you?” her mother asked, lighting up.

  “He…he…he,” the girl blubbered, “he pulled down his pants!”

  “He pulled down his pants?” the mother shrieked, and she wasn’t even thinking about the owner of the liquor store; she was thinking about a neighborhood kid known for pissing in public. When she heard that a grown man had flashed her daughter, her anger was so palpable that the smoke shooting from her nostrils was not from her cigarette. “We’re going to the police, and we’re gonna get that goddamn sick prick arrested,” and they drove to the station.

  That girl was me, and I’ll never forget the female police officer who took my statement. She had hair like Ethel Mertz and absurdly arched, penciled-in eyebrows. My mother waited outside the room while the officer asked me to tell her exactly what had happened. I told them that, before flashing me, the liquor store owner had tried to provide me with a little porno lesson by showing me pictures of couples in the throes of copulation, and he repeatedly used the word “fuck” along with all its conjugations. The officer, though, was uncomfortable with that word and asked me to substitute it with the phrase “make love.”

  “Every time you need to say that one word,” she explained patiently, “stop yourself and say ‘make love’ instead.”

  So I did. When we finished I was led back to my mother, who was assured that they would “lock his perverted ass up,” as she herself put it. On the way home I told her about the word substitutions the officer had requested of me while transcribing the statement. Upon hearing this she slammed the brakes so hard she needed to make that “mom arm save” maneuver to keep my un-seatbelted upper half from doing a face plant in the dashboard. Without saying a word, she drove straight back to the station, took my hand, and marched us up to the officer’s desk.

  “Excuse me,” she stated loudly. The officer looked up, and my mother continued. “He did not say ‘make love.’ Do you understand me? ‘Love’ has nothing to do with this. I don’t want my daughter associating what happened to her today with the word ‘love,’ am I making myself clear? I would like the statement to be completely accurate.”

  “It’s just one word,” the officer tried to argue.

  “The correct word is ‘fuck’—do you understand that? Now write it down.” She hovered while the officer rifled through her desk to retrieve a pen. “F-U-C-K,” my mother recited loudly, and we didn’t leave until she was satisfied that the statement, in all its conjugations, clearly reflected that one word.

  Not the End of the World

  When Lary shot at me the first time, I could tell he was secretly glad I didn’t die. It could have been an easy accident, my death, it could have been one of those “oh, fuck” moments that happen in an eye blink that you spend the rest of your wretched life wishing you could take back. I mean, if you were a normal person. Lary, on the other hand, keeps wishing he could take back the moment in which his compassion led his aim astray.

  I take issue with that. I don’t ever really remember wanting to die, but Lary insists his remorse is for my sake, claiming that I have since been begging to be put out of my misery. Take the time I called him, completely suicidal, according to him, years ago. I remember the incident, but needless to say our recollections differ. For one, it was he who called me, and this is exactly the conversation:

  Him: “What’s up?”

  Me (typically frustrated and hyperbolic): “Goddammit. I’m totally on the ledge, ready to jump.”

  Him: “Well, what’s stoppin’ ya?”

  I was speaking figuratively, goddammit, because my window didn’t even have a ledge, as I was living on the first floor of a renovated telephone factory. It was 10:30 in the morning and the world had ended already. This doesn’t usually happen until evening, after I have envisioned myself barefoot and stringy haired, collecting tin cans with callused hands that have yellow fingernails as thick as nickels. I envision scabs all over my body as well, though I don’t know where they came from, but I am definitely scabby in these nightmares, probably from sleeping on concrete.

  These panic attacks, in which I foresee myself living under a freeway overpass, are nothing new to me: I’ve been having them for, well, ever. We were renters, my family, and during my entire childhood we moved around like a pack of traveling circus-sideshow workers. My earliest memories are of hiding among moving boxes to get away from my parents, whose ferocious fights inevitably over-flowed menacingly upon my siblings and me. We moved every single year because my parents were notoriously cheap and refused to renew any lease that called for an increase in rent. Sometimes we moved because my mother scored government contract work designing missiles for the military. But since contracts come to an end, one week we’d be living in a palace, the next in a trailer two miles north of the Tijuana border. We were never actually homeless—or perhaps that’s all we ever were. But times have changed, or I hope they have, because after a childhood of transience, my dream is to own my own home.

  There’s nothing like trying to buy a house to trigger a big case of homelessness panic. Maybe it’s because my friend Grant keeps reminding me daily that if I bought a house I could lose it—like that!—because of my credit card debt. Here’s the story: After graduating college I took my fertile, virgin credit history and used it to collect charge cards like key-chain charms. This is great! I thought. Who needs to earn actual cash when all you have to do is flash one of these? Too bad you’re expected to pay back those balances, and not with a check so rubbery you can wrap your boyfriend’s dick with it in a pinch. After defaulting on every balance, I eventually agreed to a minimum payment plan that promised I’d be debt-free in only eight hundred years. Before I began to aspire to home ownership, this debt and I coexisted in blissful symbiosis. I made the minimum monthly payments on my giant balances, and the credit agencies never made a fuss about it, and they still don’t. But Grant explained to me that I have “credit cancer,” and that my outstanding credit card balance is a big financial tumor festering quietly until the day it becomes a five-headed hell-dog of a disease and infects everything I own and takes away my home. It was nicer not knowing this, back when I had both a big bank account and a big outstanding credit card balance. It hadn’t occurred to me to use one to diminish the other, but now, after I’ve siphoned off my bank account to cure myself of credit cancer, I’m as broke as I’ve always been, minus the comforting illusion of prosperity.

  So if, as I fear, I’m going to be homeless, I should get comfortable with it. As it happens I’ve actually had some practice. One night, years ago, in New Orleans my whole family was homeless because the Le Richelieu hotel got our reservations mixed up, having scheduled our
arrival for noon on the following day, instead of midnight that night. All the other hotels in New Orleans were booked solid, and the Le Richelieu (remember that name: LE RICHELIEU), unsympathetic to our situation, kicked all of us, a mother and her three daughters, into the street, in the middle of the night.

  “Well, it’s not the end of the world,” my mother sighed as we set out to wander the French Quarter until sunrise. At 3 A.M. we encountered an off-duty waitress on her way home from work. She took us in, and we slept on the floor of her living room. The next morning she wouldn’t even let us buy her breakfast. So we checked into our hotel, and that night we returned to her restaurant and requested her section. My mother tipped her $125, which is almost unheard of from a homeless person, especially a notoriously cheap one with the shower curtain from our hotel room stuffed into her purse.

  Stealing Home

  You would think that having a klepto in the family would be fun, but my mother could never steal the right things. For instance, what was with the pool cues? She collected pool cues like souvenir spoons, yet she couldn’t shoot a game to save herself from a jail sentence. In fact, I never once saw my mother play billiards, yet we always had pool cues piled in our house like giant pick-up sticks.

  This freaky theft fetish started after she left my father and moved into one of those apartment complexes catering to broken lives, the kind that offers fully furnished units stylishly decorated to look like bank lobbies. These places are usually stuffed with other finger-snapping separated people pretending to be ecstatic about their situations, and there is always a community billiard room.

  That’s when the pool cue fetish began. She also liked to steal lawn furniture and potted plants, but that was probably because, after the divorce was final, she moved to the beach in San Diego, where it’s taken for granted that people’s patios are to be routinely looted like Korean convenience stores. Out there, if it’s on your patio and not locked down, it’s considered you don’t really want it anyway, and the people who take the stuff almost think they’re doing you a service, like clearing dirty plates off your table at a restaurant.

  “Let me get that out of your way,” my mother thought every time she passed an unsecured beach chair. You’d think the chairs would have piled up in our house as well, like the pool cues, but her own patio was unrestricted, and her hot lawn furniture was stolen back from her almost as soon as she could arrange it in a welcoming pattern on her deck.

  I once watched a news program that profiled bands of thieving women who wore really loose muumuus and could, for instance, walk out of a department store with a TV between their knees. I remember thinking, “Why can’t Mom steal stuff like that?” Instead, what did we have? Pool cues, shower curtains, hotel-room keys, an entire sleeve of those individually wrapped little soaps from an airplane lavatory. Don’t ask me how, but she once stole a six-deck card shoe from a casino blackjack table. Do you know the sleight of hand required to steal off the top of a casino table? You practically need to be David Copperfield to pull that off.

  “Why didn’t you take the row of hundred-dollar chips right next to the card shoe?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” she blustered, eyes wide. “That would be stealing.”

  Mom had been stealing ever since I could remember. Whenever we moved, she would take something from the old place with her: sink fixtures, switch-plate covers, cabinet doors, a fireplace mantel. It got to the point where we needed a separate truck just to haul all the dismembered parts of our past residences.

  The pool cues were an enduring mystery though. Why would she take them, when she never played pool in her life? Everything else she could have at least used, even though most of it she never did. After she passed away we found a pink toilet seat she took from a hotel in New Orleans. My sisters and I, on the other hand, learned to play pool like prison parolees. We started young, back in grade school when we walked to my father’s favorite bar after class so we wouldn’t be home unsupervised while my mother was at work. We racked the balls while my dad belted beers and joked with the other regulars, and when the clock struck 5 P.M. we went home to greet my mother.

  She used to argue with him, saying that a bar was a bad place to bring up children, and why couldn’t we spend that time at a park or a pizza joint or somewhere more wholesome? “They like it there!” her husband would holler. “They’ve got pool, air hockey, Pong! It’s paradise!”

  Later, after she left him and we went to stay with her, she began presenting us with the pool cues. “I want you to feel at home,” she told us. It was the first time I saw her nervous.

  So maybe it does make sense, the pool cues and all. Looking back at all the parts she stole from our past homes, it almost got to the point where we didn’t need a new place at all, just walls to hold all the pieces of the old places together. Maybe that’s why she took all that random stuff—the bathroom medicine cabinets, the curtain rods, the doorknobs, the stairs (she actually took a wrought-iron spiral staircase once)—maybe she was simply, little by little, trying to steal us a home of our own.

  The Happiest Man Alive

  Lary insists he saved my life that day on the phone during one of my more memorable homelessness panics, but now he says he’s convinced suicide would have been the better option, hence his recurring offers to shoot me. But I think he’s secretly glad I decline them, because who else would he find to feed his fleabag cat while he’s away?

  Not Grant, that’s for sure. Grant doesn’t do cats, not since he baby-sat mine overnight one time and wouldn’t let her sleep on his head. Grant has a head like a nest of autumn leaves, cobwebs and all, and you can’t blame cats for wanting to sleep on it, but Grant says he was traumatized by waking up in the middle of the night with a cat on his head, and all I can say to that is “yeah, right,” because Grant has awakened to a lot worse, believe me. Sometimes I wonder if he is in some kind of personal contest to see what nightmare might be next to him when he opens his eyes in the morning. After picking up some slag from the Heretic, where he goes every week on “Lights Out” night, when everybody blindly balls each other in pitch-blackness, Grant would even sleep with his hand in a fist so as to hinder his watch from being stolen in the night. It didn’t work, so now he wears a cheap watch from Target and sleeps with his hands relaxed. Actually sleeps.

  “I wonder that I’m alive,” Grant says with a smile.

  See? I keep telling Lary that Grant is the one he should be worried about, not me, given Grant’s alarming lack of concern over his survival in dangerous situations. For example, I don’t think it’s exactly safe to be traipsing off into the woods with a trio of Mexican military cadets. But that’s Grant. He likes to hit on heterosexual men too, another dangerous endeavor. Sometimes I think the only reason Grant has heterosexual male friends at all is because he’s hoping one day to pounce on one in a weak moment and turn them to his side. He sincerely thinks all men are gay, except our friend Chris, but I know Grant is just saying that because Chris gets his hair cut for five dollars at a place on Metropolitan Parkway with a sign out front that advertises “Fades and Braids.” No self-respecting gay man alive would appear in public with haircuts that bad. Even Grant, with his cobwebs, keeps his curls in methodically gelled disarray. It’s just the bad haircut that keeps Chris from being fair game for Grant, and it’s a good thing too, because Chris would probably kill him if he tried anything.

  So, if you ask me, it’s Grant who is suicidal, not me, since he’s always offering it as an alternative whenever I ask him anything. The other day I called to tell him I was having a hard time finding curtains big enough to cover the clerestory windows in my loft. “What do I do?” I implored.

  “Suicide,” he said.

  Obviously, Grant needs help. I thought this phase would pass, but it just gets worse. Once I called him to see what he was doing. “Nothing,” he said, “I got no dreams, no goals, no aspirations…I’m the happiest man alive.”

  Curse of Financial Fools

  So no
w I’m cursed with some kind of property clock, as opposed to the biological type. I can just feel it tick, tick, ticking until I’m old and it’s too late to amass the fortune I always figured it would take to make a down payment. And regarding money, I take after my mother, who spent hers unwisely, as opposed to my father, who didn’t make any at all and also spent my mother’s money unwisely. I started work when I was fourteen, making $1.75 an hour as a trainee at Baskin-Robbins, and spent my entire first paycheck on a puka-shell necklace. A few months later I was fired for being morose. I’d just seen the movie Jaws, which affected me deeply, and I would spend most of my shifts sitting on top of the reach-in freezer wondering aloud what it would feel like to be bit in half by a shark. It didn’t help that my boss, Mrs. Beeson, had an amputated index finger on her right hand. Missing body parts always stoke the fire of an adolescent’s imagination.

  Later, of course, I got that job at the magazine. People who know me now laugh when they hear I used to have an office job, and that I used to share that office, which was the size of a guest bedroom, with three crusty copy editors: one an overbearing sexual pervert and two others who smoked like walking sausage factories. Our hate for one another was so thick it was almost nourishing, but it all ended for me quietly one day after I watched my boss eat a bowl of soup. It was that simple.

  The other magazine employees had normal work schedules, but my department was different. For example, on the day my brother was hospitalized for emergency heart surgery, I was reprimanded for having spent only eight hours at the office before leaving to be with him. “You really need to get back here and help us finish this work,” the senior copy editor said into my answering machine that night. He had big lips and a body like a seven-foot bowling pin. He used to play bongo drums for a defunct sixties band called Big Fat Momma. The time of that message was 10:21 P.M. A month later he sent me an odd but purely obscene e-mail about how he liked to stir chocolate fondue with his schlong. The e-mail’s last word was “creeeeeamy.”