The Amsterdam Red Light District has since been cleaned up somewhat, but back then it was absolutely saturated in porno. You couldn’t not look at it, unless you wanted to close your eyes and feel your way through, which I strongly discourage. And the whores were not nice either, so we couldn’t ask them directions. They really seemed to resent freeloading onlookers, and one even threw a bucket of toilet-bowl water on a crowd that had converged outside her display window. It missed us and hit some backpackers, who couldn’t scramble away fast enough.
“That was close,” my mother laughed as we darted down the street. She stopped in front of a bookstore window, where a magazine cover depicted a pile of limbs in the throes of sweaty cluster sex. The close-up photo was so severe the subjects were hardly discernible. “What is that?” my mother asked as she peered at it closely. “Do I see a hoof in there?”
We wandered into an X-rated magazine store, where the locals were shopping for sex toys with the seriousness of a politician’s wife picking out vegetables for an important dinner. From a distance I could hear my mother talking to the clerk in loud, slowly pronounced English, “I don’t get it; what’s so sexy about a big rubber fist?”
We lost each other soon after that. Cheryl and I stayed together, bound by some black Afghani hash we had bought in a coffee shop. It came balled up in dark chocolate fudge and was listed on the menu under “Bom Boms.” The waiter recommended it to us with the following endorsement: “Honey, they gonna knock yo’ tits off.” We ate some and then spent hours laughing and listening to an old man retch at the end of the bar.
Later, at the hotel, we heard that my sister lost my mother at the Sex Museum, a four-story structure near the train station that chronicles the history of pornography. Kim became engrossed in an arcade video titled “Jocks in Socks,” and evidently the video was tucked out of view, because my mother thoroughly searched for Kim before approaching the man in the ticket booth to ensure she wasn’t missing a section of the museum. “Young man,” she said to him. “I’ve been up and down the four floors here, is there any more?” To which the man, his eyes sweeping the scores of exhibits devoted to every sexual fetish you could imagine (and scores more you couldn’t), responded, “Lady, isn’t that enough?”
Hanging on in Zurich
The last time I was mugged, I could have let go of my purse and saved myself some decorum. But no, my fingers fastened on the strap like the jaws of a little pit bull on a pork chop. You should have seen the thief’s face when she looked back to see me still there, hanging on. I was surprised myself: I didn’t know I was that quick, but because I hung on, I did a face plant in the sidewalk. Even then I didn’t let go, and I was dragged behind the thief in an incredibly undignified manner.
The mugging occurred in Zurich, and traditionally the Swiss reserve their crime quotient for thievery on a much more massive scale—such as the jillions in Jewish assets their banks have hoarded since the Second World War—but lately miscreants of a trivial nature have threaded themselves through the country’s cracks, probably enticed by the easy game, as I can’t think of a single Swiss citizen who would value a wallet over suitable social behavior.
But me? I hung on, and while I was being dragged, I remember thinking, Yes, I bet this is very attractive, especially since my entire body has been blessed with the flexibility of a redwood with the single exception of my elbows, which are double-jointed and can bend inward unnaturally. When the thief doubled back to try yanking and twisting the purse from my grasp, my arm simply flopped about and contorted like an angry eel, yet I still hung on. Finally, the thief gave up, and the disgusted onlookers recommenced their strolling. One gentleman and his companion sidestepped me like a pile of poo. “Her bag must contain something very valuable,” he said in a tone that revealed he thought the opposite.
I’d have been angry if I didn’t concede his point. Essentially, I’d just risked my life for a small wad of foreign money, two tampons, and one half-masticated, fuzz-covered peppermint pellet. “Hanging on to crap will kill you,” I’ve heard Grant say a zillion times, which seems appropriate, because he is always divesting himself of his stuff. He’s accumulated and dispersed the contents of at least a dozen households since I’ve met him. His present house is little more than a funnel for furniture—a big colon, kind of—as things are put there just to be passed through. To know Grant is to know his mantra: “Let it go. Let it go.”
I try to remember that when I find myself suddenly still furious over offenses from the distant past, such as the time my college roommate fucked my useless boyfriend, or the time I think my grade-school teacher was trying to secretly dry-hump me while we stood in line for the cafeteria, or the time my older sister beat the crap out of me with a wooden spatula, or even the time some bitchy plebe gave me really bad service at the photo-processing counter. You can harbor an entire catalog of slights like these, resentments you thought were long gone that suddenly bubble into your brain one day while you’re driving. Pretty soon there you are screaming and conducting imaginary arguments with people who are probably long dead. So what possible good comes out of hanging on?
But it’s not always that easy, knowing when to let go of things. Take hope, for example. I have this insane hope that the world will one day be relatively free of people pissing out their territory—religion-wise, values-wise, otherwise—and that there really might be a universal plateau we can reach. Lary says I should let that go, and start stockpiling weapons. But I can’t, and I really wonder whether that weakens or strengthens me as a person.
In Zurich, the thief gave up on me, and simply walked away. Walked, with a curious look on her face. She had severely plucked eyebrows and braided hair the color of highway hazard cones, and she didn’t speak German. I know this because I saw her again as I turned the corner, talking to the rest of her ratty gang, one of whom started to make his way toward me before she stopped him. So we watched each other, the thief and I, and then something funny happened.
We laughed. We just did, somewhat sheepishly, and as I continued on my way she said something to her friend. I don’t speak their language, but I have an idea what it was. “That’s the one,” she was saying, “who won’t let go.”
A Pool of Piss
Twice in my life I have awakened in a pool of urine—and it wasn’t even mine. That’s what happens when you own a new puppy, and fail to understand that the incessant whining you hear at 2 A.M. doesn’t mean she wants to be taken out of her cage and cuddled while you continue to sleep. People are a little harder to train than puppies.
Take gambling, for example. Gambling was a big bonding thing between my mother and me. As a mathematician and missile scientist, she was addicted to blackjack, and thus those junkets to Vegas became our common family outing. My mother even took pride in the fact that she was evicted from the Golden Nugget because the pit boss discovered her ability, like Dustin Hoffman’s in Rain Man, to keep track of dealt cards, even if the dealer was using a six-deck shoe. “I’m a threat,” she’d beam. “They’re afraid of me.” And they were, because she usually won. Usually. Sometimes she followed the odds and they bit her in the ass. At these times she’d end up busted but always ready to bounce back, reasoning, “What was I supposed to do, back away from a good hand?”
She’d try to coach me sometimes. If the dealer dealt me an eleven, she’d insist I double my bet, even though I’m a timid gambler. I mean, I can’t even count. I’d have to hold my cards out for the dealer to count because they always hate it if you take too long. So it intimidated me to slap more money down on the odds I’d win. But those were the odds, and my mother’s philosophy was always to play the odds rather than cover your losses. “You gotta keep puttin’ your chips on the table, kid. Don’t be afraid,” she’d say. “But if you lose three times in a row, I don’t care how much you like the dealer, find another table.”
My brother never learned to leave the table. He would sit there stubbornly, losing hand after hand, convinced that the more he
lost the more certain it was that he would eventually win it back. He usually busted, and would end up tracking my mother down at another table hoping she would pitch him a few chips from her winnings. “He won’t learn,” she’d say, “you got to leave a losing table.”
Words of wisdom, I say. Because sometimes it’s hard to leave a losing table. You get comfortable there. The dealer might be nice, he counts your cards for you, the other players are nice, they laugh at your jokes. But you keep losing and losing just the same, and then you give it your last shot and you have nothing left. At that point, if you ever acquire any more chips, it’s hard to put them on another table because you don’t want to risk losing them. I mean, everyone usually experiences some loss in their lives: They trusted someone who sold them out, they loved someone who lied to them, they lost someone who was dear to them. It happens.
But, unlike puppies, we can’t be trained not to make the same mistake over and over. The best we can hope for is to recognize the odds, and to be brave enough to back up a good hand if we have it. According to my mother, if the odds are in your favor, grab at ’em. “You got to put your chips on the table, kid. Don’t be afraid.” Don’t get suffocated by your safety net. That way, if you lose you can’t say you didn’t try. You read the signs, they said “thumbs-up,” and you went for it. Who could fault you for that? It’s like she always said, “If you’re gonna fall on your ass, it’s best to land on both butt cheeks.”
Born-Again Booze Weenie
I miss college. Not because of the gaggle of creatively starved fascists who were my professors but because back then I could drink. My favorite cocktail in college was this concoction called “Smith & Kearns.” It contained, as I remember, brandy, Kahlua, cream, vodka, soda, some other stuff, about a bucket of fermented potatoes, frog parts, ground glass, and two cans of lighter fluid. The bartender needed protective goggles to mix it. He then poured it into a large trough and we, the future of America, would soak our heads in it until it was time to take midterms.
I think that’s how it was, anyway, seeing as how my memory is kind of foggy. There’s probably video footage of it somewhere, and I’m sure it’ll show me having fun (and probably explain all those little mystery bruises people wake up with after a bender). Now, though, I can’t drink more than two glasses of wine without having to stop and look for my liver, which by that time will have escaped from my body out of self-preservation and can be found on the road hitchhiking its way to a healthier host. “Get back in my body!” I’ll have to yell to it, and my liver will just keep walking, waving me off. “I warned you,” it’ll say. “I’ve had it. The Chinese’ll pay good money for me.” Eventually we reunite, but not until I promise to remember I’m not in college anymore.
Because in college, for example, I could start out with tequila (“I’d like the worm extra bloated, please”), switch to kamikazes, and by the end of the evening be rifling through the cabinets like Kitty Dukakis looking for hair spray to mix with my Mountain Dew. The next day I’d bounce out of bed, read a book by Joan Didion, and have the report finished in time for my one o’clock class.
But by the time you get into your thirties, sometimes your body basically decides to issue a stop-loss order against any more alcohol damage, without warning or asking your permission or anything. It does this by suddenly making your hangovers so hellacious that they couldn’t hurt more if your brain actually had, during your sleep, transformed into a toxic ball of molten poison that shoots volcanic acid from your eye sockets every few seconds. This is your body’s way of saying, “Time for a new lifestyle, lush bucket.”
But the cruelest part is it takes a while before you figure out just how much your body will allow you to get away with. Sometimes you can have that second margarita and feel fine the next morning, and sometimes you feel like your head has been left on a stick outside for eight days under a shower of axes. Essentially it’s up to you to find the balance, so you keep playing hit-and-miss with your puny level of cocktail consumption until you find a happy medium. It’s either that or stop drinking altogether, which I did once…until one day I woke up to find my liver staring at me sternly. “What are you, dead?” it said.
An Ode to Crappy Cars
When I came to Atlanta eight years ago, it was in a ’69 yellow VW Bug with the door panel held in place by a roll of duct tape, with French fries permanently bonded to the floorboard under a crust of dried coffee. It cost me two hundred dollars, and it was barely above a moped in the motor evolution. The seatbelt left a streak of rust across the front of my clothes, and if it was raining outside, I got wet inside. Since then I’ve upgraded to Japanese, but when, in a department store parking lot, I saw a woman use her car door to accidentally scrape a thumbnail-sized piece of paint off the passenger side of my relatively new Honda, I thought to myself, God, I miss my Bug.
There’s a certain power in driving a crappy car. Take Lary: He drives the rusty, broken, rolling ball of Bondo that used to be a BMW in better days. As an added touch, of course, he has those big plastic biblical characters propped up in the backseat. His car is worse than a coffin on wheels, because a coffin would presumably provide you some protection from the elements. If you get in Lary’s car, insects and birds—thinking you’ll be dead soon enough anyway—will assume permission has been granted to scavenge off your body and will dive at you through the broken skylight, the broken window, or any of the saucer-sized gaps rusted through the frame.
“What are you doing?” I asked him once, when I found him sprinkling potato chips in the backseat.
“Gotta feed the woodland creatures,” he answered.
Once Lary watched through his rearview mirror as some fool in a Saab with a cellular phone stuck to his head backed into his car. The Saab was unscathed but there was a dent the size of a cigar box on Lary’s rear fender, and, get this, Lary didn’t care.
“I could have honked,” he said, noting that the accident was avoidable, “but it was worth getting hit just to see the expression on that guy’s face.” The Saab driver insisted Lary take a twenty-dollar bill for the damage. Lary used the money to buy a hundred-pound sack of birdseed.
“You don’t own a bird,” I reminded him.
“It’s for the pigeons so they’ll stop eating the Friskies I leave out for the alley cats,” he said.
The other day Lary looked out his living room window and saw his car sitting in a puddle. Upon closer inspection he discovered that the puddle was brake fluid. “I guess I better get that fixed,” he said, conceding that a car’s ability to stop is almost as important as its ability to go, “or maybe it means I need another car.”
I didn’t bother to point out that he already has another car—a perfectly preserved vintage Beemer he keeps covered in his carport—because I know what he means. He needs something disposable. It’s like that millionaire folk artist who, when asked why he lived so simply, answered, “If you own too many things, they start to own you.”
Confessions of a Festival Whore
It all started with the Tuscaloosa Folk Art Festival in October 1995. I went there with Daniel, up until this time referred to as a “real” artist, who was on his way to exhibit his work for the first time in a…well, I guess you would call it a “booth.” Also with us was Grant, the notorious proprietor of “Sister Louisa’s Worldly Possessions in the Church of the Living Room,” who makes his living by just touching things and having them turn to gold. “Dinner’s on me, honey!” is a common phone message from Grant after another of his mysterious, wallet-fattening transactions comes through. None of us know exactly how Grant stays in the black, but we’re almost positive it doesn’t involve the illegal sale of vital human organs.
Grant drove us to Tuscaloosa, with Daniel’s art stacked in the back of his truck and Al Green blaring from the CD player. When we got there none of us knew how to put up the borrowed vendor tent, so I struggled with it on my own until a veteran festival troll took pity on us and supervised. Soon we were set to go, with me and
Grant ready to hock art like carnival barkers, and Daniel…well, Daniel began reciting a mantra that would last him for the rest of the festival. It went something like this: “I hate this. I hate this. I hate this,” said in varying degrees of bile-spitting vehemence.
I guess it wasn’t until Daniel was actually there with his artistic vision displayed like an Amway exhibit for thousands of funnel-cake-greased fingers to fondle that he realized he had posted a huge dollar sign on his artistic soul. Here he was, an artist with pieces in galleries and museums across the country (as well as Mexico and Prague), shucking his work from under a striped awning, across from a man selling candleholders made from bent forks. After the first five minutes, Daniel wanted to tunnel underground. He was a good sport about it, though, nodding approvingly as I excitedly displayed the poodle-shaped toilet-paper cozy that I’d bought a few booths down and laughing when Grant pretended to bellow through a bullhorn, “Come see the artist formerly known as Daniel, now known as the ‘Festival Whore.’”
Daniel, me, and Grant driving to Tuscaloosa Art Fest in Grant’s truck
It was a juried event, and on the last day one of the judges bestowed a ribbon upon Daniel’s booth. Probably because he was almost completely deaf, this judge spoke in a booming voice that carried for blocks. “I think you’re the best artist at the whole festival,” he told Daniel, shouting it loud enough to be heard all the way across the pond. The judge stayed a while, telling us about how he became an ordained minister through the classified ad of a tabloid newspaper. He specialized in performing weddings that expired after one weekend, and once declined a request to perform a ceremony for a marriage that would expire after only one hour. “I’m not gonna marry any premature ejaculators!” he shouted, turning heads all around. We were quite tickled by it.
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