Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch

by Hollis Gillespie

  Severed Head in a Sack

  It was the night before I was about to close on the house I had under contract when I discovered that the police had recently found an unidentified decomposing human head in a plastic bag on my new street. And not only that, they found seven other plastic bags full of cut up legs and limbs and crap in the same neighborhood, and they figured, okay, mystery almost solved, sort of, since they have the rest of the body, you would think. But then the head in a bag didn’t match the body in seven bags, so now they had a bunch of bags of body parts and one bag of head parts that didn’t belong to each other!!!! So this not only meant that some sick amateur Frankenstein was killing people and tossing their parts around in Baggies like leftover chopped broccoli in my new “up and coming” in-town neighborhood, but that there was still out there, in my neighborhood, the decomposing torso to match the first decomposing head, and the decapitated head to match the bags of people parts found not too far from the head that didn’t belong to it.

  Got that? Good. Because, considering all the above, there are lots more sacks o’ surprises—all smelly and teeming with maggots—presumably still waiting out there in my new neighborhood for me to stumble upon in the dark, probably in back of my newly purchased home in that cute carriage-house garage that I never even bothered to have the seller unlock. I looked in the garage window and said, “Yeah, fine, whatever,” and didn’t even think it might be wise to investigate for piles of plastic bags settled into soft biomorphic shapes, with maybe some seepage or something—because if I had found that I would have offered a lot less for the place.

  But why be greedy? Because the house was “in town,” and therefore subject to the real-estate “frenzy” in which people were clamoring for in-town property like feral hogs set free in a field of sleeping newborn babies, and I got it for a good price, so there’s at least one bonus to house hunting in a neighborhood littered with so many unidentified human limbs it could pass for a looted Peruvian graveyard. What bargains! The house went up five thousand dollars in value just during the time I had it under contract. Woohoo! I thought to myself. I finally have a chunk of the city of Atlanta all to myself! Bummer about those dismembered corpses and all, but hey, at least I won’t have to spend hours of my day in line at some suburban Starbucks—mainly because Starbucks hadn’t yet been brave enough to open a franchise in these parts. In fact, I was so in on the ground floor that there wasn’t a coffeehouse to be seen in this section of southwest Atlanta where I would soon live. It was, however, the area in which the city’s biggest mass murder of the century recently occurred. How about that?

  Also in my new neighborhood were a couple of cool-looking thrift stores and a crack whore on crutches, who should not be mistaken for the other neighborhood whore, who was much healthier until she got shot dead while running naked down the middle of the street, four blocks away from my street. One good sign is that her killer didn’t dice up her body, which I take to mean that this neighborhood is definitely on the upswing, and that I definitely made a really good investment. Yep, I did.

  Another good investment for this neighborhood was Cookie the pit bull. The downside was she was three months old and weighed only twelve pounds. But the upside was that ten of those pounds seemed to be teeth. When she grows up, she’ll be able to rip the jugular out of the necks of all chainsaw-wielding killers bent on making a bag of human hash out of me, but for now the most pain I’d seen her inflict was one morning when I was smothering her with kisses and she accidentally bit my nipple. That really hurt, but I doubt drug-crazed killers will be deterred by me brandishing a puppy and threatening, “Get back or say good-bye to your nipple!” So I sure hope she grows fast, because—bargain or no bargain—it’ll be really hard to reap the rewards of this in-town investment with my severed head in a sack.

  Cookie the pit bull

  Butthole to Hell

  Needless to say, I was scared to move into my new house. I was afraid, now that it was all mine and things seemed to be going smoothly, that all of a sudden I would find the butthole to Hell in my backyard like what happened in Poltergeist or something. I wish I was more like Grant, who is fearless. He bought that house in Kirkwood with a dead chicken nailed to the door, and he didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t look at the holes in the floor, the crumbling walls, or the shifty bar across the street where prostitutes with botched gang-insignia tattoos were beaten by their pimps. He was looking at the house’s price, which was, like, five cents. He took a month to make it livable, and then sold it a year later for enough profit to pay cash for two other houses and live like King Tut ever since. He keeps telling me, “Honey, you gotta have vision.”

  Like I said, Grant never picks the established neighborhoods. He bypassed East Atlanta, the city’s darling of the “up-and-coming” communities, for Peoplestown, which is where he lives now, in that former crack house. Peoplestown has since ripened in value, as Grant knew it would, and now it’s time for him to move on. His neighborhood has become “fringe,” and Grant likes to live on the fringe of the fringe. He’s picked out a house in Atlanta’s Pittsburgh area, on the West End, which was good news for me, because the house I had under contract was in Capitol View, just a few blocks away.

  Grant was proud of my purchase. He thinks that because I bought there I have “vision,” when the truth is I don’t. I’d heard that Capitol View—just five miles away from where I live now in Poncey Highlands—was a neighborhood gem-in-the-rough situated around a pristine park. I’d heard that a lot of gay people and artists are buying there, and I’d heard it touted as “Grant Park five years ago,” which are all really good signs if you ask me, just not super visible signs as of yet. So I did not have vision when I picked my house there. I had the opposite. I had to cover my eyes—to the crack addicts, to the ugly food store that’s just a front for alcoholics to lean on, to the rusty auto graveyard at the end of my block—and just sign the offer.

  I liked it when Grant drove me through my future neighborhood, because he didn’t see the bad things. He saw what I paid for the house, which was, like, five cents. He sees original wood molding that’s never been painted, tiled fireplaces, wraparound porches, hardwood floors, eleven-foot ceilings, French doors. He sees “activity” in the neighborhood, which is code for investors buying abandoned houses and renovating. “Look,” Grant said, pointing to a wooden tripod perched on a front lawn, a telltale sign that the boarded-up house behind it is getting rewired and rehabbed, “I love this neighborhood!”

  I’m glad Grant loves it, because I’m not ashamed to admit I wouldn’t have bought there otherwise. I might not have vision, but at least I know enough to pick another better pair of eyes to lead me. Once I made a move on my own and chose a house in East Atlanta that I thought was perfect. Grant gave it the thumbs-down, but it seemed so marvelous I had it inspected anyway. Turns out the main joists were completely rotted through. The inspector pointed out the uneven doorjambs and the inch of space between the bathroom sink and the line of grout that formerly attached it to the wall. Without the joists to support it, the house was, in effect, getting the bottom sucked right out from under itself. Grant just grinned when I told him. “That right there is your butthole to Hell,” he said.

  I’ve Always Been a Bad Whore

  The big, hard thing in my bed one night was not a man but a book titled The Stanley Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Home Repair and Improvement, which my contractor friend Roger gave to me. After I slept with that book I was hoping it would grant me a favor, perhaps suddenly become decipherable, because I was about to move into my house and it still had a lot of broken parts in it. My new neighborhood, Capitol View, seemed a little squalid, and so did my new two-bedroom house.

  The problem with the home repair guide was that it didn’t provide a step low enough for me to start my climb. For instance, my bathroom didn’t have a shower, just a bathtub with a spigot. No overhead shower. None. Nowhere in this book does it have a chapter on how to install a showerhead where there
is no shower. There is a chapter on how to repair a showerhead, how to replace a showerhead, but, like me when I bought the house, this book naively assumes that even the lowliest home in need of repair comes equipped with certain basic amenities. But not my house. It’s funny too, because the lady who sold it to me looked really clean. I wonder how she got that way.

  The plumber estimated that to turn my bathroom into a real bathroom it would cost $1,100, which led me to conclude that I’m sleeping with the wrong things. I should be sleeping with a plumber or, better yet, my contractor friend Roger. But I’ve always been a bad whore. I’ve never been able to “work it,” as Daniel likes to put it, or “ride the poon-tang tide,” as I like to put it. The most I can do is flirt, which doesn’t get me that far (though it does get me out of speeding tickets sometimes).

  Lary is really handy when it comes to home repair, but he’s impervious to my flirting. I’ve left twenty-eight messages on his answering machine begging him to help, all beginning with endearments like, “Hey, you worthless stain on the butt end of the world” or “Hey, you turd-encrusted puckered poohole,” because to Lary that is flirting. But for ten years he’s been helping me fix things, and now he probably figures it’s time to pass on the home-repair hammer. Lary doesn’t even protect me anymore from the festering nest of big-butted spiders that live in the holly tree by my driveway. At night, when the spiders weave a giant web right in front of my car door and wait there for me like a dozen evil eight-legged Buddhas, I have to create a clear path for myself by flailing my arms around like Michael Stipe in that “Losing My Religion” video, sending web pieces and spider asses everywhere. I am my own Sir Galahad, I sigh to myself. That pleases me pretty much, and for a while I forget that in a few days I’ll have to wash my hair with a garden hose.

  Fixing up my old new house

  What Are Friends For?

  Jesus God, what do you have to do to get people to help you around here? I mean, there I was, my muscles so sore it was agony just to go about my daily routine of wallowing on the couch like a walrus with a bellyful of fish, and, like, nobody would massage me. I mean, God! What was I, such a snarly-haired hag with halitosis that my so-called good friends couldn’t make a team effort to massage my body continuously until I was able to walk again without looking like I was undergoing a nerve-gas experiment?

  And talking about “good friends,” where were mine when it came time to move my huge-ass houseload of furniture from my rented apartment into my newly purchased house? Scattered, that’s where. Scattered like a batch of freshly hatched spiders the second they saw me hauling a load of empty Chiquita banana boxes back from Kroger. They knew my philosophy about banana boxes, how they’re the absolute best score for packing all your crap when you need to move (because they’re big and have the handle holes on the sides and everything), and I estimated that the instant they saw me backing a truckload of those suckers up to the loading dock they started conspiring as a group, creating excuses to be unavailable when I was scheduled to move.

  Daniel actually bolted all the way to Florida. He had to put a whole state line between himself and me, his friend in need. And Grant! As always, Grant had something planned with his teenage daughter. His daughter is a permanent “Get Out of Jail Free” card. He always has something conveniently planned with her every time my life requires a showing of hard labor from my friends. “She’s eighteen,” I shouted, “she can lift boxes. Get both your asses over here!” But he had to drive her to her SAT test or something, as if her future is more important than my avoiding the prospect of ruining my manicure. Honestly, can we get some priorities here?

  Lary, of course, came through, but only after I left twenty-eight messages on his answering machine begging him to help: “Stop pretending like you have a life without me and call me back, you booger-eating retard!” Finally my heavy flirting paid off and Lary showed up at my door with a hand truck.

  This is the third time Lary has helped me move, and you’d think he’d ask for a blow job or something in return, but I can’t think of anything I’ve really done for him except once, on the flight home from Amsterdam, I let him have my business-class upgrade, but that was the morning after I’d accidentally locked him out of our pensione all night. I mean, sure, maybe I should have been a little worried when he hadn’t shown up by 5 A.M., and maybe I should have paid a little more attention to that shouting outside my window, but one of the last audible sentences I remember hearing him say that night was, “Hey, this place is packed with prostitutes and they’re serving Afghani hash on the menu!” So I figured he was off getting a tongue bath from Russian hookers in a Jacuzzi of bubbling bong water or something. I mean, God, this is Lary we’re talking about, the blond equivalent of Kramer on Seinfeld. Surely he was off spending the night at a genital piercing parlor, not throwing pebbles at my window. I was wrong, he was locked out, but he still showed up at my door with a hand truck last weekend.

  “Try to stay out of the way,” he said.

  “Sure,” I replied. “What are friends for?”

  The Road Home

  I never really thought about Lary having come from an actual family until recently, when he asked me to accompany him home to New York to attend his sister’s wedding. Okay, maybe he didn’t ask me, maybe I invited my own damn self when I heard he was going, just like I had to invite my own damn self when I heard he and Grant were headed on a road trip to Thomasville. Evidently, Lary needed to get some lady down there to sign over the warranty deed on the decrepit cinder-block mausoleum he calls home.

  His home is a weathered old warehouse right downtown on a strip of road that used to be industrial until it got invaded by developers a few years back. Lary awoke one morning to discover that most of his neighboring buildings had been torn down and replaced by candy-colored Victorians with wraparound porches and loft projects with balconies that boasted “sweeping cityscape panoramas!” After that, Lary tried diverting the frenzy by taking to the street and waving his gun like a lunatic, thinking he’d frighten away prospective neighbors, but all that did was help clear his community of real criminals—who evidently have a better-honed aversion to dangerous maniacs—which in turn made the place even more attractive to real-estate caravans. So Lary gave up, and now he lives in a crumbling old ex-factory in the center of a gentrified vista just south of the Capitol. Occasionally, though, he still stands out front to growl at his neighbors like Frankenstein’s monster, refusing to be banished by the meddlesome villagers.

  I always thought Lary owned the place free and clear, having paid next to nothing for it years ago. And I always imagined him like the kid in the old Cracker Jack commercial, emptying his pockets on the previous owner’s counter to reveal a musty pile of pennies, paper clips, hermit crabs, and other sediment, then pointing to the old warehouse, “Pretty please?” Turns out that’s almost literally how it happened. “Take it,” the guy had said, scooping Lary’s offering into his palm, but then they left it at that—a handshake deal.

  That’s why, a decade later, Lary needed to make a trip to Thomasville, to see the woman there who needed to sign the actual warranty deed before Lary could call the place his actual own. Her fourth husband from forty years back had lost the factory in a card game or something and had neglected to sign it over before the cement dried around his ankles and he was tossed overboard, I’m betting. Whatever the case, the situation provoked an actual adventure.

  Grant joined Lary on the road trip because it just so happens Grant is a notary. Grant is always pulling stuff like this out of the lovely shit basket that is his past: He’s also a licensed real-estate agent, a licensed social worker, a minister ordained through the tabloid classifieds, a landscape architect, an antiques dealer, a bartender, an ex-seminary student at Princeton, an ex-husband to two ex-wives, a loving father, and, basically, the all-round show host of his own psycho circus that stretches all over the Southeast. For example, it turned out his mild-mannered father lives not far from Thomasville, and this trip wo
uld be Grant’s opportunity to drop in on him and pretend he and Lary were lovers.

  Of course, when I heard what they were up to I horned in on their plans like a pesky rash. “Goddammit,” I shrieked at Lary over the phone, “don’t you dare think you’re sneaking off without me. I’ll be back Thursday, got that? I’m good for anytime after that. My life is wide open after Thursday, so don’t you dare leave before then.”

  The following Wednesday, Grant, who is gay, and Lary, who is not, happily headed south without me, and, what’s worse, Lary’s own ailing father had died days before, thereby robbing me of the self-appointed right to be the official shoulder Lary could cry on, in case he had it in him. I never knew much about Lary’s father, except that he was a fairly productive drunk who had divorced Lary’s mother when Lary was ten. It took me a decade just to get this out of the guy, because I seriously believe Lary prefers people to think he just happened onto the earth by crawling out of a tar pit somewhere rather than emerging from an actual family. In fact, another of his younger sisters wanted to visit him at home with her baby son, but he advised her against it on account of how he lives in that rundown warehouse, and her kid stood a good chance of accidentally ending up with rusty fishhooks imbedded in his head.

  It’s in keeping with his personality that Lary, now fatherless, tells me it doesn’t feel any different than before, which makes me think I might not have been the right person to accompany him on the road trip after all. Sometimes your friends need something other than what you can give them, and sometimes you’ve got to let them look for it. Before Lary took the road home last Wednesday, he bid farewell to Grant’s father, who gave him a lasting hug. “I like you,” Grant’s father told him. “You and my son seem very happy together.”