Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch

by Hollis Gillespie

  Hell Is a Festival

  Fuck festivals. I’ve felt that way since I went and became a bona fide festival-booth art pimp myself not long ago. Chalk it up to being a little lost, career-wise.

  I had a booth where I sold photography and begged friends to bring me beer because I felt trapped, fearing to leave lest some Dunwoody housewife let loose her inner klepto and pilfer one of my framed photographs, which I’d end up practically giving away by the festival’s end anyway. “Take it! Christ!” I’d grumble, funnel-cake flakes in my matted hair.

  To this day my friends marvel at the bad luck I’ve had weather-wise at every spring festival I entered, which totaled a whopping two before I packed up my entire frostbitten ass and vowed never to return. Grant didn’t even last that long. I’d talked him and Lary into reserving a booth next to me at the festival. Grant’s contribution featured his Sister Louisa pieces, among them a collection of “Rapture Shields” touted as protection against the inevitable gang of marauding pagans in the event the biblical prophecy of the Rapture came to light, along with a rack of old aprons. Lary sold gilded shrines.

  In truth, the Rapture Shields were a collection of trash can lids, and they got a lot of laughs, but I don’t remember anyone actually getting out a wallet for one. In fact, we were experiencing the coldest weather in spring festival history and couldn’t even take our hands out of our pockets. I swear it must have been thirty degrees, in May, and I am completely positive the dark side of the moon had warmer weather than Atlanta that weekend.

  Lary is mad at me for making him enter that festival, which is saying a lot, because Lary, though he may be lost like me, and evil, and happily admits he’s a thief, doesn’t hold grudges. But this is different, because he’s pretty protective of his art, and here I’d talked him into hawking it at a spring festival, and not just any spring festival, but the very spring festival that the Gods of Freezing Rain and Wind and Gray Skies and Suffocating High Atmospheric Pressure all picked to converge in the heavens and crap on.

  Daniel, Grant, and me on a tram in Prague

  Because of the terrible weather, there were maybe one and a half customers at the whole fair, and we’d catch glimpses of them from our abandoned vendor tents, wandering about in the abyss, bundled up like lost Eskimos. “Over here!” we’d shout, like castaways trying to flag down distant rescue efforts. By the end of the first day I’d sold one item, a thirty-dollar sympathy purchase from one of the event coordinators. One guy acted interested in the most expensive piece I had to sell, though, and he even told me he’d go to the ATM to get the cash to pay for it. But the other artists all nodded jadedly when I told them about it. “The ATM getaway,” they sympathized. “They all say that.”

  Of course by the second day Lary and Grant had pretty much abandoned their booth and urged me to follow suit, but I refused. So I stuck it out the next day, which is when the monsoon struck. People were leaning into the wind like old ladies trying to push through a stiff revolving door. Grant’s entire rack of aprons blew down the street, along with the sign I had hung on his booth that read “Please Steal This Shit.” By the time the flash flood started, the other artists and I were so exhausted we simply shrugged. Good, we thought, now we get to drown.

  Luckily I’d borrowed my vendor booth from my friend J.R., who is a metal artist. He designed the booth himself, and it was about as easy to put up as an Australian opera house, but just as sturdy. The other artists ran to it for cover, including J.R., whose new store-bought booth was leaking so bad he had to cover his art with a tarp. From there we watched the water roil down the street, sweeping people’s wares along with it, including a rusty tailgate from Grant’s Sister Louisa collection with the words “Get the Hell Outta Dodge” painted across it.

  I probably would have curled up and cried right then if not for the guy from the day before, who picked that time to pop in and hand me a wad of wet money fresh from the ATM. “I was afraid you’d be gone,” he said, tucking my most expensive piece under his arm. No, not gone, I thought as I took his money, just lost is all.

  Lost Things

  I got lost on the way to Monterey once. It was years ago, and my sister Cheryl and I were driving there from southern California. The route was simple, an eight-hour shot down the freeway, but we were at that monstrously invincible fake-I.D. age, that sun-baked, silver-ring-on-every-finger age. In short, we were drunk and drugged, and basically lucky beyond measure that we ever survived to become the craggy, bleachy-haired ex-beach tramps with matching laugh lines that we are today. God, we were idiots.

  Such amiable idiots. We started the road trip on a whim in the middle of the night, and I keep remembering the quiet lightning that fractured the blackness in the far-off horizon. Every few minutes there was this staggering display of silent radiance, like a big wizard in the distance was performing powerful spells. “Did you see that? There it is again!” we’d holler. I guess that’s what got us lost—looking for the lightning—because eventually we decided that we wanted to be in the middle of the storm.

  But we lost the lightning and never got close to the storm. Weird, I remember thinking from the front seat, no matter how fast we drive, the clouds are always ahead of us. Eventually the sun rose and the sky became evenly brilliant, and after much meandering we decided to follow our original plan, which was to track down one of our childhood homes, a place we simply referred to as “the pink house.”

  I have trouble remembering why the pink house held a particular fondness for us, because by that time we had moved, literally, every year of our lives. I was five when we lived at the pink house. It was there that our little sister, Kimberly, lost her shoes, and we made her a new pair from fabric scraps in hopes of keeping our father from kicking our asses when he found out that her good ones were gone. Kimberly’s new shoes looked like plaid biblical sandals, and our father wasn’t fooled for a second. “No, really,” we cried as we dodged him between the moving boxes that were like permanent furniture at all our addresses, “She outgrew her other pair.”

  “Dad was always getting pissed at us for losing things,” we laughed while we were lost that day. He even used to blame us for getting him lost during all the cross-country moves we made. We proved to be bad map readers on car trips, issuing random instructions like “take a right at the red dot.” After that, we were relegated to the backseat. “You’re a disgrace to the daughters of traveling trailer salesmen everywhere,” he chided us affectionately.

  Driving around, Cheryl and I finally, via Iceland, I think, found the pink house. It had lost its original paint and was now a sort of maple color, but we recognized it from a small set of concrete steps imbedded in the grass that circled the terraced front yard like a little arena. “This is where Dad sat, right here,” Cheryl said, pointing to a specific spot on the concrete. She was referring to the only intact family photo we have to this day, which was taken while we all sat on those steps. “Kim was on his lap, I was next to him, you were on Mom’s lap, and Jim was next to you,” she sighed, finished.

  I guess it was important to her to find that exact spot. I’m looking at that picture right now, and in it the sun is beaming on the six of us, and Kim is wearing the shoes she later lost in the park. My father is the age I am today, and looking closely, I can see that on his left hand he wears a ring. I recognize it as his signet ring from the army. I wonder what happened to that ring. I didn’t even learn he’d served in the army until after he just up and died one day. Soldiers attended his burial, and they handed me the folded flag from atop his coffin to keep.

  I wish they hadn’t done that. I wish they had handed it to my brother or someone else, because it wasn’t even two months later that I was moving again and that flag fell off the back of my friend’s El Camino while we were driving down the San Diego freeway. The flag billowed like a patriotic parachute as it caught car grille after car grille. His Bible was in that box too. I lost my daddy’s Bible too. Jesus God, looking back, I realize how I was always losing th
ings. I lost my father’s flag and his Bible and probably that ring too. I lost every opportunity I had to find my way back to the bond we shared, like the one we had when we lived together in the pink house. I lost the lightning and never got close to the storm, didn’t I? I lost the point of it all, didn’t I?

  Family photo

  Bare Breasts

  It’s not like me to flash my tits in public—and I’m still suspicious over whether this actually happened, since I consider the three friends who testified to the act totally unreliable sources—but in my defense I’d like to say that we were in Key West. Key West is a place where people party until their senses are so deadened they wake up days later crusted to the bottom of a dock like human barnacles, and where, in some places, very well-muscled men tend bar in their boxer shorts, and where, on Halloween, it’s not uncommon to see tribes of totally naked women walking the streets wearing painted-on costumes. So the sight of my unimpressive chest is really no big deal. If it happened at all.

  “It happened,” laughed my friend Jim. “You had to be there,” he continued, knowing that, in any real sense of the phrase, I wasn’t. We were sitting at Harpoon Harry’s, one of the more popular breakfast spots on the island, probably because it’s easy to crawl there, crab-like, from the Schooner Wharf bar, a dockside party mecca frequented by the barely ambulatory bunch of salt licks that make up the local crowd of “regulars.” Nearby is another wharf bar and restaurant, Turtle Kraals, the place where my reported peekaboo occurred. If it happened at all. Accompanying me for breakfast that morning was the same cohort from the evening before; my other friend Paul; and a new acquaintance named Scott, a waiter at Margaritaville who was the person through whom Jim and I were to contact Paul, because a few days before Paul had left an ominous message on my answering machine that went something like, “Hollis, I’m in Key West. I’m hungover, homeless, and broke. Help.”

  So, a few days later, Jim and I went to Key West and found Paul sitting on a bench, disheveled and unshaven, with a cigarette casually pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He had been living in a hammock on a boat for two weeks, showering out of an elevated plastic bag filled with sun-warmed water. He looked like one of the walking lost toys that that tropical land is famous for attracting. There’s a well-known danger to visiting Key West—you may get hit with a kind of blissful island dementia and melt into the crowd of colorful seamen and tall-talkers, drinking and dreaming, never to return home again. Everyone is susceptible.

  A few days after we found Paul, at the culmination of a collective Key West–wide debauch, we were all sitting at Harpoon Harry’s, where Jim and Scott were exaggerating the number of maitais I’d belted the night before. “She had seven or eight just while I was sitting with her at Boston Billy’s,” exclaimed Jim.

  “I counted twenty,” said Scott, a statement that made me snort with a disbelieving guffaw. Let me put it this way: It’s more possible to pass a planet through the birth canal of a fourteen-year-old Olympic gymnast than it is for me to consume twenty cocktails without waking up to see my bloody, severed head at the foot of my bed. On that morning I had been completely hangover-free, I pointed out, which was incontrovertible proof of my frugal alcohol consumption the night before. My foggy memory must have been due to a delayed bout of jet lag.

  “It’s the Keys,” explained Jim. “The closer you get to the equator, the better you feel after a bender.”

  “Besides,” said Scott, “you could still be drunk.”

  After much investigative backtracking on my part, I determined that the boob-baring incident was nothing more than a tall tale evolved from the fact that the knot on my sarong was loose, making way for the possibility that, in a very demure, understated manner, an excess amount of cleavage could have been uncovered. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. If it happened at all.

  With that mystery solved, Paul, Jim, and I bid Scott good-bye and hit the highway back up to Miami, where we got on the plane and patted each other on the back for staging such a successful escape from the alluring, velvety warm grip of Key West, the most enticing place on the planet to drop off the planet. One and a half hours later, when the plane descended through the clouds, we saw the cityscape of Atlanta, and reentered its atmosphere with all of our ensuing responsibilities, obligations, and other soul-sucking burdens still in place. When the plane landed and ground to a stop, we sighed and gathered our belongings along with our strength to face reality—and that’s only if we ever got on the plane at all.

  Jim in postcard photo

  A Dead Cat

  Thank God Lary’s cat didn’t die. This is the second day in a row I forgot to feed her, so I realized I better get off my ass and pass her some kibble, because Lary prides himself on his absolute lack of attachment to anything on earth except that cat. If he came home to a carcass he’d have to track me down and rip my face off my skull.

  I raced over to Lary’s place all worried his cat would be scratching at the doorjamb in little kitty death throes, sputtering and stuff, and who wants to walk in on that? And then there’s the maggot factor. When, as a totally unsupervised seven-year-old walking home from the liquor store with two packs of Salem menthols for my mother, I once came across a dead cat in the gutter. Being seven and propelled by insanity, I decided to find a stick and flip it over.

  Jesus God. It was all furry and fine on top, but underneath it was boiling with maggots like that piece of meat on Poltergeist. I’ll never forget it. Before I flipped it, I was thinking maybe I could take it home and present it to my mother as the perfect pet on account of its being dead and not needing expensive vaccinations or anything.

  In the past she had reacted favorably to such offerings, like when I presented her with that poisoned fish wrapped in toilet paper I found floating in a polluted tributary behind the park. She was so attentive as she took the fish straight to the trash pail, graciously thanking me. That type of consideration was a rarity in my household, and I was hoping to score some more. But those maggots sucked all the fun out of everything. For days afterward I’d spontaneously break into shivers like a little alcoholic in detox.

  I finally got Lary’s door open, and I say “finally” because he lives in that former candy factory with a complicated iron gate for a front door. Thank God I got in, because Lary loves the shit out of that cat. If anything bad happened to her he would be boneless, I mean just a big, boneless, jibbery mess of flesh. And I know how he feels. I’ve known Lary since back when we both thought there was nothing that could keep us tethered to the world. We were free and unfettered, with a big ball in our court called “nothing to lose.” Then he got himself that cat, and I got myself…well, him, I guess, and Daniel and Grant. If anything bad happened to them I would be boneless too. Just a quivering, useless bag of boneless larvae. Jesus God, that is scarier than an entire pit of ticks.

  Finally I found Lary’s cat, alive but a little shrunken on account of her fast and all. She puffed up fine after I forced three cans of food down her throat.

  A Clean Slate

  I wasn’t happy when Grant said that he wanted to hang human babies. His inspiration came from his refurbished crack house, which is empty—like a clean slate—and usually he wants to keep it that way. But, other times, he says he wants to host the occasional art installation, and that’s where the ideas come in. “We should take a bunch of babies,” he said excitedly, “and just hang them on hooks. It would be fabulous!”

  He swept through the vast living room, his face alight with enthusiasm, his sandals shuffling on the polished wood floor. “There could just be babies all over the walls!” His voice rises and echoes off the cement. “Babies hanging like hams! I love it! Are you not loving this idea?”

  I was not loving the idea. But Grant was unfazed, and he continued to soak up inspiration from his empty house. Thank God he finally got off the hanging-baby brainstorm and went back to entertaining minimalism. “Nothing!” he spouts breathlessly. “Can’t you just see it? Bar
e walls, nominal possessions. A clean slate! I’m loving this idea.”

  Who wouldn’t love it? A clean slate is the ultimate possession. My own slate looks more like Lary’s place. Lary lives in an altogether different warehouse than Grant, and has tools and torches strewn about. I’ve found that, these days, I enjoy it there more than ever. I hang out while he’s out of town, feed his cat, and eat his pistachios. It’s almost peaceful, sitting there amid another man’s junk, free from my own junk for the time being.

  That’s the real hazard: my own junk. I’ve been trying to avoid it lately, pushing it into places like the closet in my office, and not even stacking it neatly. There’s my broken treadmill, two plastic trees, old area rugs, a large plywood sign Grant, Daniel, and I pilfered from the roadside, and a wind-up plastic penis with clown feet that hops. These are just a few items in my galaxy of crap, a precariously teetering danger zone that is the mirror of my own cluttered brain, which is painfully littered with memories of my perceived past atrocities.

  Atrocities such as the time I allowed my classmates to taunt my little sister, who was fat. That memory murders me: I should have protected her. I should have been a better person. Instead I am who I am. Sometimes, just to rescue myself, I’ll rewrite the bad memories. If there’s ever a moment I wish with every atom to take back, it is the moment when my little sister looked at me to save her and saw that I wouldn’t. Her eyes rounded with the realization that she was utterly alone, and she held back her tears by pretending to pluck pills off her secondhand sweater. In my mind I go to my little sister, who is trying not to nervously pick at her sweater, trying instead to fold her hands with heartbreaking dignity atop the cafeteria table, and I take one of her hands and bring it to my cheek. In my mind I see her eyes smile with relief, and I dream for a second that maybe a clean slate is possible after all.