“I was so naive to think I could leave after she turned eighteen,” Grant admitted. So he’s back in Atlanta, where his daughter needs him now more than ever, having hooked up with an unsavory boyfriend who is trying to talk her into signing her paychecks over to him. When Grant was fresh off the plane, his tan hadn’t faded and his sun-bleached hair was still coiled on his head like bright hay. He was even wearing shorts in the fifty-degree Georgia weather, a testimony to the fact that he’d been torn prematurely from his Caribbean paradise. I beamed with selfish bliss when he came back, and couldn’t help myself from taunting him, “Grant loves a woman. Grant loves a woman,” in singsong. To shut me up, he would get me in a headlock and rub his lips all over my face.
A Jar of Teeth
Grant and Daniel have pissed off God again. They’ve opened a retro-furniture store and art gallery across from a church on Charles Allen and called it “Sister Louisa’s Worldly Possessions in the Church of the Living Room.” They are selling porn-theme evangelical paintings created by a fake nun who lives in a beat-up Airstream outside Baton Rouge. The minister from the church across the street keeps coming over and telling them they’re going to Hell, but they are fearless. Especially Grant. I, personally, am not fearless, though it’s seldom in life that I actually scream—I mean the blood-curdling kind that makes your neighbors think you’re getting murdered. Actual screaming is reserved for when spiders land on my face, which has yet to happen, or for times like the one when Grant showed me a crusty jar of tobacco-colored loose human teeth.
“Look what I found in the crack house,” laughed Grant as he reached into the backseat of his truck. I don’t know what I expected, since the fact that he bought the house in the first place—it’s an actual crack house that he swears he can renovate—has taught me never to underestimate his ability to surprise people. “Can you believe this?” said Grant, pulling the jar from a satchel and shaking it near my face. When I registered what was in the jar—thirty or so human teeth, their roots winding upward like calcified worms—out came the scream. It was quite a long, loud scream, and had it been recorded, John Carpenter might have paid handsomely for its use as a sound effect. I knew the bathroom in which the teeth had rested before Grant exhumed them out of the mirrored medicine cabinet. The cabinet had been ripped out of the wall and laid flat to serve as some kind of drug caddy, judging from the razor blades and residual narcotics left on the surface. The bathroom was dark with bloody tissues strewn about, and I’m glad I didn’t find the teeth. Grant, on the other hand, always looks in places other people don’t. As I said, he is fearless.
Daniel outside Sister Louisa’s
Grant outside Sister Louisa’s
Consider this: The first time I walked into Grant Henry’s new crack-house home, there was a pile of human shit in the living room. I hadn’t noticed it at first, because there were other things demanding my attention, like the feeling that I was harming myself just by breathing the air in there. But Grant pointed out the feces to me when he had a free moment in his negotiations with the previous owner, a man who had once tried to donate the house to Habitat for Humanity, who had rejected his offer. The man literally could not give this house away, but Grant, notorious Atlanta used-furniture dealer and self-appointed pastor of the Church of the Living Room that he was, was not going to let a little shit get in the way when he saw something worth resurrecting. He bought the place (strewn crack lighters, crap, and all) for ten thousand dollars, three thousand more than the price the man had requested.
With an original Sister Louisa roadside sign
“Honey, it’s fabulous,” Grant said of his new home in Peoplestown as he drove Daniel and me back to his car. The chef at the Roman Lilly Café had lent us her ’59 Ford Fairlane because Grant had forgotten not to drive his nice car to brunch that day, and he didn’t want to park a new BMW convertible in front of a crack house (even though, soon afterward, he sold the BMW and re-adopted his truck after having to pass on picking up a discarded pie closet from the side of the road because it wouldn’t fit into the BMW’s front seat). Fabulous? I wondered. I reminded him that, in addition to the pile of shit, there was bloody toilet paper, rusty razor blades, and what looked to be lice-ridden sleeping bags littered throughout the house. There were holes as big as beds rotted through the wooden floors, every single window was broken, and it looked like homeless people had lit several campfires in what would be the bedroom if the house had had a conventional floor plan. Instead it was a three-room shotgun shack with no hallways, closets, cupboards, or even kitchen-counter space.
“Give me three months,” Grant said with certainty. “Three months, honey, and this new place will be fabulous.”
Daniel rode in the backseat. “Hollis,” he assured me, “when Grant bought his last house its condition was as bad, if not worse than this place. There was a dead chicken in a plastic bag nailed to the front door.”
“That’s right.” Grant nodded. He had just sold that house in East Atlanta for a $110,000 profit and had thrown a party to celebrate. He had owned the place for less than two years and had trained the local miscreants to stay off his property by sounding the alarm every time he saw them set foot on his lawn. But at least that place had space. This little crack house he just bought was the size of a single-wide trailer, and it didn’t help that Daniel was suggesting Grant throw another party in his new place, with invitations specifying that everybody bring their own Clorox.
Grant shook his head at our consternation and flashed us his smile that’s the size of a solar eclipse. “Honey, honey, honey,” he admonished us, “you gotta have vision.”
Nothin’ Harder Than a Preacher’s Dick
Two weeks later, Grant was shaking teeth in my face, again. I screamed, again. Something about a bunch of disembodied old teeth rattling around loose in a jar, making plinking sounds against the glass like a demonic musical instrument, is just spooky. What’s Grant going to find next? The rest of the body boarded up in the windowsill?
“Oh, it’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Grant, who planned to frame the teeth in a shadowbox and display it in his new home. “When I was four, we had a maid named Flossie who pulled out all her teeth and kept them in a jar.” Grant didn’t say why Flossie the maid pulled her own teeth out, but some things I guess you don’t question. Young Grant used to share a bedroom with Flossie, who slept on the bottom bunk and was too afraid of ghosts (which she called “haints”) to leave the room in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, so she kept a pot by the bed. “I used to wake up and look over the side of my bunk and there’d be big old Flossie peein’ in a pot,” said Grant. “I think I was traumatized,” he finished, laughing in a way that showed he definitely was not.
Now he and Daniel have opened a store that features porno-religious cha-cha. And when I say “porno” I am simply attaching my own personal interpretation to the works, even though I can’t imagine what else you would call a crudely painted plywood sign that proclaims “Nothin’ Harder Than a Preacher’s Dick!”
“You call it art,” Grant insisted, adding that whatever meaning I chose to attach to it was my own trip. So, in other words, if I see porno when I look at Sister Louisa’s art—and let’s face it, she doesn’t paint pictures or anything, just words—then it’s only because my own brain is a festering cesspool of tawdry thoughts that I’m projecting onto everything.
“It says ‘Preacher’s Dick,’” I emphasized, pointing to the sign. “I’m not making that up, it’s right there.”
Grant ignored me and stayed busy covering the interior of his new shop with white paint. “Everything, just white,” he’d said earlier. “A blank slate. Are you not loving this idea?” Of course it’s great, why wouldn’t it be? Just white. If you’re going to spend a lot of time projecting meanings onto things, what better surface color is there?
I wonder when it starts, this need for meaning. I can remember when I didn’t have that need, when I used to catch blowfish at the end of the pier
in Melbourne Beach, Florida. I am almost positive I was damn happy then. I had a rich friend who lived in a riverfront house, and a group of us would go there and play spin-the-bottle. Only we used the plastic baby Jesus from his parents’ Christmas nativity display instead of a bottle. It spun really well, and those baby Jesuses are inevitably reaching out with one hand—toward the heavens or whatever, or maybe toward all that gold, frankincense, and myrrh the wise men brought him, who knows—and that little hand made for a perfect pointer. It pointed at me to French kiss a kid named John Carnegie, a kiss we accomplished with lots of slobbering and lethargic pawing of each other, in perfect imitation of two groaning zombies from Night of the Living Dead.
Another school friend fancied herself something of a psychic, and one day at recess she told me about her vision—a vision of an angry river of blood. Among the flotsam and roiling debris was my favorite shirt, the shirt I happened to be wearing right then. “I saw that,” she said, pointing to the little embroidered sailboat on the front of my tank top, “I saw that shirt in the…in the blood.”
I realize now that display was meant to frighten me, but nothing frightens you when you are someone who has no need for meaning. My brain didn’t even go there. “River of blood?” I responded cheerily. “How cool is that?” I bounded happily away, leaving her with her little key chain pentagram charm jingling.
It was sometime around then, though, sometime between fishing barefoot off the pier and being busted for smoking some very poor-quality pot in the restroom at the skating rink that I became more attuned to a need for meaning. Something turned when I was twelve. I can date it to the time when my friends and I were in the midst of our ritual routine to terrorize the insane old lady who lived in our neighborhood. She used to walk out in her underwear and knock us off our bikes, and holler about how we were such Satan spawn. When she got in those moods, her husband would have to come and fetch her, and when he did we would flee, chanting “crazy lady” as we receded into the distance.
Wares from the Sister Louisa store
He was always quiet when he came to get her, murmuring “Now, now, Mabel” in her ear as she shrieked at the kids who buzzed around her like fruit bats. One day I was about to join the melee when I saw him take her arm and gently place his hand on the side of her face. She looked at him, and her anger immediately melted. Her eyes became lucid and knowing. “George,” she said, smiling. “It’s so good to see you.” And then he hugged her.
What is this? I thought. Old people don’t hug. But there they were, clinging to each other like lost children. Something happened to me then. Something inside me changed at that moment, and from that moment on I began my search for a reason—a reason why an eighty-year-old man would stand on the street in a small town in Florida embracing his wife of fifty-five years, burying his face in her hair so we wouldn’t see his tears.
Bad Vision
I’m sure I’m like most people when it comes to my friends, which is to say I love them dearly but sometimes I wonder how they got this far in life without someone driving a spike through their skull. Take Grant. And before I say what I’m going to say, you should know I’m only saying it out of jealousy. And before I even say that, I want to say this: Here’s a guy who one day decides he’s tired of being fat (and he wasn’t even fat—teddybearish would be more accurate), so he goes on the Body Ecology Diet, which has so many rules about mixing and matching foods you have to be an alchemist to understand it, and he drops sixty pounds faster than a sack of maggots. But here’s the thing: He didn’t even really follow the rules. He just used them as guidelines from which he made up his own rules, which worked better for him than the original ones. If you or I tried that…wait, I did try that. I went on that Body Ecology Diet for two weeks, and it worked fine for me until I fainted flat out at the Frankfurt airport and woke up in a wheelchair with no color in my lips and my carry-on luggage in my lap.
So there you go. Grant makes up his own rules, only you can’t copy him with any success. He plays with the world like a drunk kitten would play with a geriatric parakeet: He pounces on it and doesn’t care where the feathers fly, but none of them seem to land on him. As far as anyone can tell, he doesn’t even have a job, but he makes more money than I do. “I got no dreams, no goals, no aspirations,” he says, and there’s that grin again. “I’m the happiest man alive.”
It wouldn’t be so bad if Grant were at least sympathetic to the lost lemmings like me out there, but he’s not. Take, for example, my longing for a home of my own. As I’ve said, I’m not like those women who yearn to spawn, moving through life with their uterus on their sleeve hoping someone will inseminate them before cobwebs cover their ovaries. I don’t have a biological clock. What I have instead is that “property clock,” and I’ve begun the ritualistic preparation for the inevitable home-loan process. For example, I just replaced my cushy new Honda with a vintage 1974 International Scout, so I won’t have a car payment clouding my loan qualification. I love my Scout, I think it is quite possibly the coolest car outside of the original Apollo moon buggy, and I don’t want to hear anything bad about it or about my decision to make it my primary mode of transportation, period. Yet Grant, my dear friend, sat in the backseat while I drove around house hunting the other day and, like a big Buddha of bad Karma, let fly a constant stream of ill portents:
“I smell a new transmission in your future.”
“Is that the sound of metal against metal?”
“I estimate those u-joints will last another month, max.”
“Is that a toddler on a tricycle stuck in your car grille?”
When he’s not torturing me he pretends to feel my pain. Just how empathetic he really is is suspect, however. It was five months ago that he bought the crack house in Peoplestown with a pile of dehydrated human crap in the living room. He has since renovated it into an impressive home-decor folk-art enclave that people from all over the state come to see. He gives tours. He makes art out of the crack lighters that people in the neighborhood bring him by the bagload. Already three newcomers have bought homes in this neighborhood just to be near him, which means that he is almost single-handedly increasing the property values in Peoplestown. Sometimes he takes me on tours through the neighborhood and points out a few crumbling nailed-shut shacks that I swear must have a few bodies boarded up under the floors, and he says, in all seriousness, “Look at that! Move-in condition!”
My response is lackluster, because I know there’s no way I can do what he did. He shakes his head and says what he always says, “Honey, you gotta have vision.” I take another look at the shack he’s pointing at, but the only vision I have is of myself being eaten alive by black widow spiders.
One of Those Nights
Did you ever have one of those nights when you thought you were going to check out a new Mexican restaurant with your neighbors but they took too long getting ready so you figured you’d duck back into your place real fast in case someone left a phone message? Not that I was expecting anything special, what with how my life, one day about two years ago, suddenly became a social wasteland—I never thought it would stay that way, but there it is. Even so, by some stupid Pavlovian pull, I still check my messages thinking I might catch a cosmic break and the light will be blinking, and there’ll be a message other than the one I left myself the last time I checked my messages.
So anyway, all I’ve got on my mind is the hope that this new restaurant I’m about to visit will break the curse of crappy margaritas Atlanta seems to be suffering from. Maybe they’ll be able to mix one that doesn’t taste like battery acid, and since I once lived in a trailer two miles north of Tijuana, I consider myself an expert on all things Mexican, right? Anyway, I walk into my home and I see that, hey, looky there, the little light is blinking, but I still don’t think anything of it because I figure it’s probably that “editor” I met at a writers’ junket who turned out to be a closet Amway rep.
So I push the button on my answering machine and I hear the
voice of my little sister’s husband calling from Arizona, the person I used to unkindly refer to as “the drunk walrus,” and I think to myself, Why is he leaving me a message again so soon after the last message he left thanking me for those fashionable pretzel-printed Bermuda shorts I sent him for Christmas?
And then I hear him say, “…little Monica has been in an accident…”
And I just stop. I stop everything—breathing, thinking, living—everything. Little Monica, who just three years ago peeked up at me like a little blood-smudged kitten as I held her minutes after being pushed out of my little sister’s loins, and who, just by waving her tiny wrinkled fists and blinking her dark, almost cartoonishly huge eyes, elicited from me in that instant a lifelong slavish devotion, has been in an accident.
And so I’m stopped, but my bother-in-law’s message isn’t. It goes on. He’s saying stuff like “car door,” “crushed,” “medical helicopter,” “intensive care,” “spine,” “liver,” and “lacerated.”
The words actually seem to fly like evil bats out of the answering machine and down my throat. Jesus God, I think to myself, lacerated liver? She’s three years old, so her liver must be like, what, the size of a silver dollar? Right then I would fall to my knees if I could, but I’m stopped, and then Daniel comes through the door, laughing.
“What’s taking you so long?” he asks, and then he sees my face.
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch Page 7