Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch

by Hollis Gillespie

  My mother yelled at him not to shock me like that. She’d not yet rebounded from the time I was five and came across the childbirth edition of Life magazine, which I’d opened to a picture of a naked lady with a big blue head popping out of her poon-tang. “That lady has a head coming out of her pee hole!” I wailed.

  My mother carted my crying ass away from the magazine and acted concerned about the possible shock I had just endured. She was forced to explain the facts of life to me right then, and while she tried to make it sound nice, she wasn’t all that adept at euphemisms. “That’s just where babies come from, and yes, it hurts like hell, but you’ll live,” she said, and she hugged me so tight she flattened two bubble-gum cigars in my front pocket.

  A decade later, she had another shock to impart. She came home and asked me to sit down. From the look on her face she obviously had something important to announce, and she didn’t know how to ease into it. “I’m leaving your father,” she blurted out, waiting for my traumatized reaction. When it didn’t come, she continued. “When you get back from school today I’ll be gone,” she said. “Gone.”

  But I was not shocked at all. Throughout my whole life I had known she would be leaving. For fifteen years I’d witnessed the simmering fury between my parents, hanging in the air like heavy smoke, each blaming the other for the calcified casket of emptiness their lives had become. Every day I’d seen my mother long for the life she felt my father denied her, and every day I’d seen my father marinate his sorrow with booze and bold proclamations. But my mother felt she had done a good job of protecting me from this, and she hadn’t realized her misery was as transparent as a shattered windshield. “I mean it,” she said. “I’m gone.”

  “I know,” I said lucidly, and at that, my mother crumbled like an autumn leaf. All the tears she’d kept hidden behind the basket of broken dreams in her heart broke free right then, and she lowered her head to her hands in shame. “I’m so sorry,” she wept, her shoulders shaking with the weight of her regret. I wanted to ask her what she was so sorry about, because I didn’t see how this was anyone’s fault, but instead, I hugged her very tight, which is what I hear you’re supposed to do with shock victims.

  Puppy Love

  Nothing like stumbling over a dead puppy to dick up your day, so thank God that didn’t happen, but it almost did.

  First, the puppy was not really a puppy, but one of those perpetual puppy-type dogs, one of those furry button-cute kind of pets, with long ears covered in curly fleece and legs that are the canine equivalent to one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. This is the kind of dog an ex-boyfriend of mine used to refer to as a “pussy pet.” If this guy saw that kind of dog, he would smirk dismissively and say in his Brazilian accent, “You cannot throw that dog against the wall,” because, to him, the inability to be thrown against the wall and emerge unfazed was a grievous shortcoming in an animal.

  So you could not have thrown this dog against the wall…I’m thinking, but I really don’t know for sure. I’ve never had a pussy-pet dog. Once I temporarily inherited two Labradors named Gracie and Amber. They were sisters, and both of them were the most comical, slobbery, eye-booger encrusted, walking wads of psoriasis you ever saw. Having birthed three litters, they each had hefty leftover dugs that dangled from their underbellies like big balls of soft warm dough. Amber had a problem with her left ear too, which occasionally swelled up like an eggplant and stuck straight out from her skull, making her look like she had a furry party balloon taped to her head. They also had some kind of skin allergy that, for some reason, caused them to chew all the hair off their hind parts. The eye-catching result was that they both sported big shiny red baboon asses. God, I loved them, and I still miss them too, even though I could never get Amber’s ear to go down.

  Then I had Cookie, an incontinent pit-bull puppy with a deformed tail that reminded me of a carrot pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk. She was routinely so happy to see visitors that she’d squat right there and pee at their feet. Believe it or not, it was a step up from her earlier puppy behavior, when people thought she was undisciplined just because, given the chance, she would chew on their skulls. The immensely tall Michael was always amazed to find her teeth in his head.

  I didn’t know what to make of this new dog I’d found wandering on Memorial Avenue near Oakland Cemetery. He was about to be made into a furry piece of street pizza by a passing semi when I rescued him. And this was no stray, because someone had obviously loved this animal, probably brushing his black terrier hair every night, and now they were left wondering what happened to him. He wore a blue collar, his green nylon leash was broken, and it looked like he’d been lost for a while, because he was sporting a layer of dirt that didn’t look customary on him. I brought him home, cleaned him up, and discovered that he was as mellow as a monk. He wasn’t even getting spooked by my big cat, Lucille, who was fifteen and missing her upper teeth but could still kick any dog’s ass, even (and probably especially) Cookie’s. I started calling the new dog “Scooter,” because that’s what I call all cute things whose names I don’t know, including small children.

  Scooter reminded me of a black dog my father brought home when I was seven. We named her Bonnie, and she was quite a slut, but I loved her anyway. I was sent to fetch her one morning and found her getting humped on by a neighborhood mutt. I had no idea what the hell was happening, so I set about trying to pull them apart. I did not know, nor should I have, that dogs get stuck when they’re doing it, because it’s part of their whole procreation process. So I could not separate them, and the most I could do was turn the mutt around so he was facing the other way and not actually on top of Bonnie. But all that accomplished was to turn them into a freakish set of whining Siamese dog twins fused at the ass.

  So the only thing I could do at that point was to sit on the curb beside them and commence wailing. I mean, here my Bonnie was stuck to another dog, probably permanently as far as I knew, and now I’d have to bring this mutant double-dog monster back home and try to explain it to my father. So I sat there and sobbed, occasionally shouting to the mutt, “Get off Bonnie!” but he just looked at me like he was extremely uncomfortable and stayed stuck.

  Eventually, a long-haired man emerged from the house across the street and rescued me. He was barefoot and bare chested, freshly roused out of bed by my wails. He carried a bucket of water and threw it on the dogs, which made them pop apart like a Tupperware set. The man was laughing so hard, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It had something to do with the dogs being “attached,” or “attachment” or whatever, and how I was supposed to make sure it didn’t happen again. But his words went unheeded, because a few months later Bonnie had her puppies, and I got attached anyway.

  Thank You, Dr. Melkonian

  I swear, I thought it was normal to have dreams about your teeth falling out. I thought those kinds of dreams were a universal norm, like the ones in which you’re naked on the college campus with nothing but a pot holder to hide your naughty bits. “You mean you don’t have the missing-teeth dreams?” I asked Daniel.

  “It’s just you,” he said. “You’re probably traumatized from the time Grant found the jar of teeth at the crack house.”

  Hell, yes, I was traumatized by the time Grant found the jar of teeth at the crack house. Who wouldn’t be? I’m hinky about teeth. When I was seven I had a baby molar rotting right out of my head. Our family dentist at that time was a nasty ape who always stabbed me in the gums with a needle as big as a dinosaur bone, then used the drill like he was perfecting a Cambodian torture technique. He would literally plant his knee on my chest to secure me to the dental chair. I’m not kidding.

  It wasn’t until I was a teenager and went to another dentist that I realized you weren’t supposed to feel the drill during a dental visit, let alone your dentist’s knee on your sternum. That’s what the needle is for, to administer Novocain, not to punch holes in your patient’s head. By then I’d had a hundred cavities, and when my mother he
ard the new dentist’s prognosis, she called him and told him he’d have to hire me so I could pay off my own damn dental bill.

  So he did. His name was Dr. Melkonian, and he made me the assistant to his receptionist, who was a kind old woman with ear-lobes covered in soft whiskers. The light from the setting sun in the office window behind her would sometimes illuminate her lobe fuzz and make it look as though wispy smoke were coming out of her ears. She was the nicest woman I’d ever met, and she used to tell me she could see the goodness in me even though they had to ask me to stop wearing halter tops to the office. I worked there every day after school for almost two years. It’s where I learned to type, and I became so deft at typing Dr. Melkonian’s name that I used to do it over and over so I would look busy. It’s an unusual name, and you almost have to be a concert pianist to punch it out on the keys. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian.

  The typing practice served well as a bridge to get me through my shift so I could get on with the mess of my life. During that time, my family was falling apart like a piece of stale coffee cake. We were living in Torrance, California, and my mother had moved out of the apartment where we lived and then forced my father to leave before she would move back. Only she didn’t move back right away because she’d become too attached to the condo she was renting in the Land of Swinging Separated People to move in the middle of her lease. For a while, my little sister and I actually lived alone. We were fourteen and sixteen, respectively, and I immediately began dating a very handsome heroin addict whose parents were wealthy psychiatrists. Luckily I had that fear of needles, and every day after school—or after I cut school—I had my job at Dr. Melkonian’s office, where I hit the typewriter. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian.

  It’s hard to miss, that name, so when I saw it in the paper years later it caught my eye. It was in the obituary section. This couldn’t be my Dr. Melkonian from Torrance, I thought, but I read on. He had moved to Atlanta from Torrance about a decade earlier to teach at Emory University. He’d died suddenly in his sleep, having lived all those years probably not ten miles away from me, and probably not even knowing how he had been the bridge for me so long ago and half a hemisphere away. He was the bridge that kept me from falling into a mote of lost hope that threatened my future. I wish I had thought to thank him for giving me a place to go, a place with a sweet old receptionist with a sunlit fuzzy halo, with a kind dentist who paid me for doing little more than type his name.

  More Inner Evil

  A friend of mine got married in a beautiful ceremony, which provided me with a good excuse to partake in a trough of champagne, especially since my date for the wedding, Lary, left with another woman.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked before bolting.

  “You’re my date, you dick!”

  “I knew you’d understand.”

  “Fuck you!”

  And off he went. Grant also watched him go. “Champagne?” he smiled, handing me a glass. He was using his sinister smile, a warning to me that he is very much in touch with his inner evil. He’s striving to influence others to achieve that evil, like he’s the new Ring Master of the Psycho Circus. I’ve been trying to trace the birth of this demon in Grant—because I used to know him pre-demon—and, as best as I can tell, it emerged for the first time one Monday night at Fuzzy’s, when Francine Reed was performing. That’s the night Grant invented “sandwich dancing,” which entails three or more people slow dancing in a drunken, undulating conga line. “I wanna be the meat!” Grant yells when it’s time to sandwich dance, which is usually every time Reed does her heart-stopping rendition of Etta James. I don’t know what it is about Reed, but her singing just seems to bring out the bad behavior in my friends. And I think I mean “bad” in a good way, sort of.

  That night, after the wedding, Grant invented “cluster kissing,” which I won’t describe, except to say that it involves both males and females and it seemed like a good idea at the time, swept up in the sweetness of the nuptials as I was. By this time our group had left the reception to attend a festival party held in a warehouse in the Old Fourth Ward. It was a great party, staged in a massive industrial labyrinth used to build movie sets. Art, music, and interesting people abounded. I drank, danced, laughed, and fumbled into the arms of my friends. “I love you, did you know that?” I’d say. “I love you! I mean it.” Cluster kiss. “I could die right now and be the happiest person in the universe!” Cluster kiss. Group hug. Sandwich dance. “I mean it! I could die!”

  In retrospect it’s ironic that—very nearby, and entirely unbeknownst to us at the time—a man did die that night. While I was inside the warehouse reveling in a platonic faux orgy with my friends, a social studies teacher and his girlfriend were parking in the side lot on their way to this same party. Soon after they left their car, an armed robber shot them both. The girl was hospitalized and recovered, but her boyfriend died. He was thirty-two years old, and probably the last thing on his mind as he took the keys out of his ignition that night was how little time he had left to live. Did he spend his last day worrying about bills, pondering past regrets, lamenting world affairs? Did he stop, contemplate his life, know that he was loved? Did he leave phone messages for his friends who now agonize over having erased them because they didn’t know they would never hear his voice or see his face again?

  “It could have been me,” I say to myself. And I’m right. And if it were me I would have spent the last moments of my life surrounded by a large number of my favorite people, hugging and kissing them with sticky champagne lips and sentimental abandon, happy to be alive, effectively under the spell of the demon in Grant, whose influence may not be so evil after all. “I love you, man!” Cluster kiss. Group hug. “I mean it.” And I do.

  Broken

  There must be something really wrong with the world when you can’t get a buzz off your codeine cough medicine. Christ if that doesn’t just suck all the fun out of being sick. I was chugging that stuff like shooters at a Hooters bar and I was still so lucid I could pilot a plane, plus I kept coughing like a late-stage lung-cancer victim. I had a good mind to go back to my pharmacist and accuse him of switching my prescription with pancake syrup, hoarding the good stuff for himself, because it’s not every day I get to do drugs. What rotten luck to have gotten my clutches on a legal narcotic, and it didn’t work! I had to find another way to fix myself.

  I could have called Lary. Not for drugs…though he seems to have drugs in his house he doesn’t even know about. Though Lary couldn’t cure me, he could fix my broken furnace. My loft was cold, I was cold, and that was why I had that bionic flu bug to begin with. I noticed something was wrong one morning while I was poking myself in bed, wondering why I felt harder than usual—since hardness isn’t a quality I would attribute to my body—when suddenly the reason for my condition occurred to me: I was frozen. Frozen because my furnace had done a death rattle in the middle of the night, and in the ensuing hours I basically got crusted over with ice, leaving me a bleachy-haired, flannel-clad, phlegmy Snow White after she bit into the bad apple and lay there preserved for eternity with woodland creatures coming from miles around to weep at her feet.

  Okay, not exactly like that, but I was cold. So to stay alive, I set about calling people to come and fix my broken furnace. I called Lary because when something is broken my first step is always to charm him into fixing it.

  “Goddammit, you walking pocket of pus,” I croaked into his cell phone, “get your meager ass over here and fix my furnace.”

  “Hi, whore,” he answered gamely. “I’m in Colorado.”

  “Huh?”

  “Been here all week. You’re supposed to feed my cat, remember? How’s my cat?”

  “Love ya,’bye!”

  So with Lary inconsiderately unavailable, my options fell to Daniel and Grant. Daniel was vetoed immediately because he couldn’t fix a broken furnace any more than he can perform eye surgery on himself. He’s an artist. He creates, he doesn’t mend. His
own garbage disposal has been broken for more than a year and he has yet to begin the highly technical process of dialing the building manager’s phone number so she can dispatch the superintendent to fix it.

  Grant

  So I called Grant. Grant could fix almost anything—not with his actual own hands, mind you, but he knows guys. There was his hardwood-floor guy, his electricity guy, his HVAC guy. What he can’t fix he leaves broken and figures it’s better for it. Like that time he found an ancient wooden pie chest on the side of the road. When I asked him if he planned to replace the rusty torn screen, he looked at me like I just asked him to eat beetles. “Its brokenness is what makes it so fabulous,” he gasped.

  But Grant sounded sad when he answered the phone. I’d been gone and hadn’t heard the news: That day he was on his way to a funeral with his daughter to grieve the deaths of her three friends who died together tragically over the weekend. Two of them were children. “She used to baby-sit those kids, Hollis,” Grant said, his voice thin. “She can’t stop crying.”

  Grant’s daughter had just turned eighteen, and adulthood didn’t waste time introducing her to the hardness of life. “She keeps sobbing, she keeps saying, ‘But Daddy…’” Grant grieved. “God, why does it break my heart so horribly to hear her say that?”

  I think I know why. It’s because the child in her was barely veiled by her new womanhood, and Grant heard his child appealing to him to make it all better, to wave a wand and make the world the way it was a few days ago, and he felt utter powerlessness to provide her that. “God, Hollis,” Grant lamented, “I couldn’t do anything but let her cry. I couldn’t fix it.” Instead he realized a tiny piece of her will have to remain broken, and she won’t be better off for it, just wiser and stronger as we all eventually become through the course of life, and a little less dependent on her father.