Ample Breasts Bursting with Desire
Fifteen years ago, I took a boat to Greece with my typewriter stuffed in my backpack. My mission was to write a novel packed with insights on female angst about sex and other important stuff. But mostly sex, because some months earlier I’d read one of those epic romances in which the heroine gets her clothes ripped off and raped every other page, then she ends up falling in love with the man who treats her the crappiest. In these books the main character always has “ample breasts bursting with desire” and she’s always “awash in an unfathomable sea of pleasure,” when really she’s just being used like a toilet seat by the man camp.
I went to Greece to write the “anti” of that. Exactly what it would consist of, I didn’t know, but I knew I couldn’t write it at home. I had to roam, because I thought characters and adventure couldn’t be found right in front of you. So off to Greece I went—Corfu, to be exact—where immediately I was accosted by two yelling, foul-mouthed, greasy-haired hobbits who clutched at me like evil puppies fighting for a chew toy. It turns out these two men were rivaling nightclub owners, and it was common for them to pluck potential customers fresh off the bus like caged roosters waiting for a food pellet.
I was saved from this fracas by a spiky-haired guy named Dax, a charming part-time petty thief who worked the ratty parasailing ride in the lagoon at the bottom of the cliff. We became good friends. He was living out of his sleeping bag on the communal balcony of a nearby villa, and I rented a private room there on the third floor. The villa would have been the perfect place to write if I’d ever got around to it, but I was too busy being with Dax. He squired me about the island on the back of his rusty Vespa and talked me into consuming copious ouzo shooters and tiny fried squid with the eyeballs still attached.
Then one night he stumbled into my room, drunk. Due to a small act of larceny (“It was just a crate of melons,” Dax insisted, “and they were rancid!”), he had to leave the island at sunrise and wanted me to come with him. I told him no, because I had this here book to write, you see, about love and sex and stuff. He stopped swaying for a moment to stare at me intently, then shook his head sadly. I’ll always remember exactly that, the shaking of his head sadly, because you acquire moments in your life that come to signify certain regrets, not the agonizing variety of regret, like the “if only I took the toaster off the edge of the bathtub” range of regret but the other kind—the nagging little pangs you feel when you look back and wonder what you were thinking.
That morning Dax had tried to comfort me because I’d encountered a crippled man selling fried dough on the beach and—being the bleeding-heart little plebeian I was—the sight had left me bereft. “Don’t be sad. He loves his life,” Dax said of the invalid. “He lives on the beach, doesn’t need shoes, eats all the doughnuts he wants…” and on he went, listing all the reasons why this particular person need look no further than the sight in front of him for untold delights.
But my gloom persisted, mostly because later that afternoon I got caught in a fight between nightclub owners again. This time one of them threw a boulder at the other, which hit me instead. It struck my shoulder blade and numbed my right arm all the way to the fingertips. Typing would have been hard if I had picked that point to get around to it. That’s why Dax stole the rancid melons. He’d smashed them onto the courtyard of the nightclub owned by the odious man who hurt me, taking care not to hit anyone. He’d just wanted to make the floor slippery to hinder any reveling in general and dancing in particular. Afterward Dax was identified almost immediately, though, owing to the freckles on his face and bright flames tattooed on both forearms. “Take that,” they said he’d hollered as he hurled the melons, “for my friend.”
Later he stood in my room, shaking his head, dismayed that I would pass up true adventure for the sake of a fake one I’d never get around to inventing. After I turned him down he paced the room a few times, looking ready to argue with me, then picked up his satchel only to throw it down again and fiercely hug me good-bye with his brightly burning arms. He left without another word. At the time I was surprised Dax chose not to quarrel with my conviction, but today I remember precisely the sad shaking of his head, and I realize that right then he saw how I was crippled, blind to the sight of untold delights right in front of me.
In Greece at age twenty-two
In My Head
I can tell when the holidays arrive, because my hypochondria becomes completely activated. I become convinced my liver is the size of a sea elephant, living inside me like an angry unborn twin with teeth and everything. I wish there was a way I could take a look to make sure, I mean other than with an X-ray machine, which would be hard to steal. I could make an appointment at the doctor’s office, I know, but my reputation there is still tainted after my tapeworm panic on Christmas Eve 1998.
One year I felt this pain in my side. It wasn’t my appendix, because that was cut out of me on Christmas in 1996, a monumental event that proved that sometimes this was not all in my head. I mean, seriously, they wouldn’t have opened me up and taken out an organ (would they?) unless there was something really wrong with it. So the newest pain was not my appendix, so it must have been another organ, and I figured it must be my liver, seeing as how I’d been drinking like a frat boy at a beer fest lately.
I admit I’d been partaking in a lot of festive elixirs, but it was the holidays. I had to survive them somehow. In fact, that’s what made it all so difficult. How do you separate crazed panic from perfect reality? How was I supposed to know that the flesh-eating ass cancer I freaked about a few Thanksgivings ago was really just the result of sitting all day in my underwear on top of a lost earring? On the other hand, the 1997 incident was easy, because that year I got accidentally stabbed in the head over the holidays. It’s not like I was imagining that. It happened, I tell you, and the coworker who did it (with the pointy edge of a metal cabinet door that had flown off its hinges) was super sorry, and still sends me cards sometimes. I walked around for weeks afterward, with stitches and everything, looking like a Tijuana cocktail waitress. See? Sometimes this is not all in my head!
My hypochondria started back in grade school when, the day before Thanksgiving, my life sciences teacher showed the class a close-up of a bisected clogged human artery. “This is what happens when you eat crappy food,” she said in her crone voice, holding the photo aloft. “When this guy died, his arteries were so stiff you could snap them in half like a piece of dried pasta,” she added, thrusting the photo forward, which caused her upper arms to quiver like two turkey wattles. “Dried pasta,” she reiterated, and I swear it was years before I could eat SpaghettiOs again.
It didn’t help at all that my parents dropped me and my sisters off at the cineplex that year to watch Scrooge and The Aristocats, chaperoned by my big brother, who took the tickets and accidentally on purpose walked us into the wrong theater, where we sat through four showings of Tales from the Crypt instead. He kept telling us the cartoon was coming on next, right after this part showing a lady getting her whole arm hacked off by a mad magician for the twentieth time, or whatever. That night I had to invent an earache just so I could sleep in my parents’ bed, and believe me, my parents were not cuddly people, and their bed was not comfortable either.
For one thing it had ashtrays in it, and books, tons of books. One in particular was The Exorcist. Jesus God, I wish my mother had hidden that book a little better, because after reading it I have never been so scared of a book in my life. Oh, my God, I remember thinking, how can this happen to a little girl? A pretty, pious, sweet little girl who went to church and everything? If that could happen to her, then what about me?
So that’s the year it started. That year I was possessed by the devil for the holidays. I began twitching my shoulders and thrashing my head at odd moments, because I could feel Satan simmering inside me, and I thought if I stayed still too long I’d barf up a big nest of snakes, which would be very embarrassing. Finally my mother confronted me on
e night—I was hard to miss, twitching and thrashing, right there in bed with her—“What is the goddamn matter with you?” she shouted.
I told her the truth, that I was afraid I was going to Hell, that Lucifer’s minions would drag me down through the butthole of oblivion to the heart of all awfulness, where devils will poke at my festering sores with fondue forks for all eternity. At that my mother eyed me keenly over the top of her book before muttering just one sentence. “Kid,” she said, “Hell is all in your head.”
My Outstretched Hand
I woke up last Saturday fairly comfortable with my own mediocrity, not knowing what was in store for me at my friend James’s Christmas party. First of all, James should know not to invite me anywhere. It wasn’t so long ago that I showed up drunk and in my underwear (practically) at a party thrown by the Democratic Leadership Convention held in New Orleans during the jazz festival. I came because James invited me, and I danced until my hair unfurled in a lacquer-matted cascade, threw myself at a few men—including, I think, the governor of Indiana—and left clutching a tropical cocktail and a fistful of those little quiches some poor server was offering from a platter. I remember little else of that night, except that James didn’t seem embarrassed by me. He keeps inviting me places. What is wrong with that man?
Like why didn’t he warn me that Peter Gabriel was coming to his party? How could James let me walk right into his house not knowing I was about to shake hands with a dapper-looking man whose face I didn’t immediately place and whose name I didn’t immediately hear, but to whom I nodded my greeting anyway, only to discover, midhandshake, that this was Peter Gabriel!!! Peter Gabriel!!! Jesus God! standing right there at the end of my outstretched hand, smiling at me like he has any business at all being flesh and bone.
“Peter Gabriel?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Solsbury Hill?”
“Yes.”
Let me give you some background. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a music junkie. On the contrary, there was just the one song, and I didn’t hole myself up with my headphones and rebel against my parents and lament over the big tub of turd the world was turning out to be. Instead, I was confused and timid, and I pretty much had the personality of a cornered rat. My father, the largely jobless alcoholic with big dreams and even bigger fears, and my mother, the missile scientist who took night classes in cosmetology because her own dreams were inversely simple, created a home atmosphere as comfortable as a sealed chamber full of whizzing Ninja blades.
Our household seemed like a sad dungeon for my parents’ faltered hopes, and you couldn’t sit there very long without hearing those broken aspirations flap around the room like trapped bats. This situation was unbearable to a budding romantic like myself, so to escape I’d sit in my sister’s rusty Celica and play Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” over and over on her car stereo, running down her battery and getting the crap beat out of me because of it. But it was worth the reprieve, because when you’re young like that, and sad, you have your hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, and you’re searching for a string to pull you through. And for reasons more corny than the importance I’m placing on it now, my hand found that song. Does that make sense?
Later, after my parents’ inevitable divorce, I moved to Zurich with my mother, and it was there that I realized the true frailty of her health. During the day she seemed like a perfectly normal weapons specialist with a hankering for beef jerky and Salem menthols, but at night she was crippled by coughing fits, barely able to keep from drowning in the pools of fluid forming in her own lungs. Unable to sleep, I spent nights watching obscure music videos, including the one with Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel clutching each other and singing “Don’t Give Up.”
“Don’t give up,” I’d mentally implore as I sat outside my mother’s bedroom door and waited for her suffering to subside. The day came when I realized that the not giving up wasn’t up to me, and two facts about my mother became apparent: One, that she would be dead soon unless she quit smoking, and two, that she would never quit smoking.
A year later, after she died in my arms, it was one of those times I could have given up but didn’t. I was rescued, I guess, by the safety net I’d woven over time with the threads I’d collected from when I had my hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, searching for a down payment on the possibility that life might not be such a basket of crap after all. So the least James could have done is let me prepare. I mean, Peter Gabriel. Jesus God! There was Peter Gabriel, at James’s party, at the end of my hand—my outstretched hand. “You, you, you…” I blathered to him, but then the woman who had brought him extricated him from my grasp and led him away. I continued to sputter even after he was gone.
“You helped pull me through,” I finally finished.
The Long Good-bye
Since when did watching two people tongue each other in public make me so angry? When did I get so caught up in this misanthropic, mole-flecked emotional crust that I can’t handle two college kids practically copulating right there on the plaza in Barcelona? What is with me?
I mean, there’s other stuff to look at. Even though I’m only here for the day, I don’t want to be blind to beauty, because it’s too easy to tote your personal sensory-deprivation devise with you wherever you go, to grow your own little layers of rust around the cracks in your heart, and heartbreak is the whole purpose of life. Without it we wouldn’t cherish anything. I once had a kindly professor who, in spite of my inner oath to prioritize good grades above ever actually learning something in college, made me understand the poems of T. S. Eliot. “April is the cruelest month,” he quoted from Eliot, and to demonstrate the meaning behind the verse, he led me to the courtyard outside the classroom. There he pointed to a tree, its branches as brown as old photographs.
“Do you see that?” he asked, indicating the minuscule blossoms forming from the deadness of the branches. “That is why April is so cruel.”
I sensed then that later I’d become familiar with how painful it is to bleed life back into an atrophied part of yourself, to come alive after the comfort of deadness. It’s a rite of passage you can’t avoid if you expect to reach levels of enrichment in your life. The passage is easy to bypass though. For example, if my hotel room didn’t happen to smell like a jailhouse toilet I might not have left it at all, opting instead to spend the few hours until my flight home in my usual manner: flicking the porno channels in perfectly timed, three-minute intervals so the hotel wouldn’t bill the movie to my room. But instead I bounded to the street, heading straight for a huge plaza packed with people, including at least four Peruvian flute bands and the before-mentioned young couple dry-humping each other on a street corner next to my bus, where I watched them from a window seat as I waited for the bus to make its timed departure from the plaza.
Get a room, I silently fumed at the two lovers. I mean, Jesus God! If I wanted a porno peep show I could have stolen it from my hotel. Look at them! Undulating like two electrical wires, attached by their tongues as if their taste buds were capable of keeping each other alive. It’s easy to stare at people like this, because, believe me, they don’t see you looking. So I wasn’t the only one on the bus beating them with my eyeballs. And then the girl extricated herself from her lover’s young tentacles and boarded the bus along with the rest of us. Oh, I thought, so that’s what this is all about. It’s good-bye.
But Spain isn’t famous for its timely precision, and the bus stayed there with its engine idling long after its scheduled departure. The girl sat two seats in front of me with her hand pressed against the window, with the boy on the other side, his hand opposite hers, separated by the glass. They stayed that way, with eyes large with longing, angering people all around them until enough time had passed to make it obvious the lovers weren’t putting on a performance. These were, simply, two young people who hadn’t yet learned to lock a chastity belt around their chests, so their hearts were all out there, exposed and flailing like little crabs w
ithout their exoskeletons.
As we watched them silently reach for each other, our faces softened. They were two fools with their toes sticking over the ledge of their teens, about to jump, ass first, into the fantastic crap fest that is their twenties, and about to be hit with the brick of knowledge that the world is not their personal balloon on a string after all. Why ram that home ahead of time? How does it harm us to let them sweep through life in ignorance of any true agony other than their longing for each other? How does it harm us to let them not be blind to their own beauty?
The bus lurched forward and began its journey. We watched the boy grow smaller in the distance, his arm outstretched like all your lost hopes trying to remind you they’re not so lost after all. And then we felt it, that stinging of the eyes, and, What is that? That ache. It’s the ache that accompanies the cruelty of coming alive after enjoying the comfort of deadness for so long.
It’s All About Safety
Just because I’m a flight attendant doesn’t mean I’m not nervous when I fly. I’d hate it just as much as the next person to have bloody chunks of my body shower down on complete strangers. So I try to remember to wear pants when I work, as opposed to the dress option of my uniform, because if the plane crashes, I want to lower the odds of my corpse ending up inside the pages of Newsweek with my skirt over my head. And the thought of having to be cleaned up after kind of creeps me out as well. I’d hate to have my kidney end up on someone’s car antenna and not even be able to apologize to those people.
I’m not kidding. I really worry about this stuff. That’s why I’m such a safety freak when I fly. Even as a passenger I always put my tray table up, turn off my CD player, and narc on people who don’t put their bags in the overhead bin. A guy once sitting next to me tried to tell me the rules were not about safety but were just arbitrary commands to keep us occupied since we would all die on impact anyway.
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch Page 14