Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch

by Hollis Gillespie

  It made me think about my own father again. A year after my mother divorced him, I moved to San Diego to begin college. I lived in an apartment on the beach with three untrustworthy, cocaine-addled roommates, and I spent the last year of my father’s life ignoring school, doing drugs, and falling in love every fucking day. One night, a friend of mine invited me to accompany him on a private plane to L.A., where he had to pick up a “package.” My dad lived right by the airport, and I figured I could drop in on him while my friend ran his errand. So I went on the flight, but when we got to L.A., I didn’t go see my father because the prospect of a party loomed too irresistibly. That night at 12:03 A.M. my father died. He was fifty-two.

  I’m sure you’ve heard people use the term, “You just don’t get it.” Well, I figured out that the “it” is the point in life. I believe I was supposed to have been there when my father died, but it was a point in life I just didn’t get. I’ll always regret it, especially since, two months before his heart attack, my father told me the story of how his own mother died, and it was one of the only times I remember him communicating with me face-to-face, as an adult. He told me he was in college in Birmingham, and his friends were on their way to New Orleans and would be passing through my dad’s hometown, and they asked if he wanted to come along. He said he went and he was glad he did, because that weekend his mother had a heart attack and died in his arms.

  Sometimes I wonder, though, if that’s how it really happened or if that’s how he liked to remember it. Sometimes I wonder if he made the same mistake I did: Instead of going home to his mother, he continued on with his friends, thinking he could catch her another time and leaving her to die alone.

  Hot Neighborhood

  My neighbor Honnie found a dead dog in the front yard of her recently purchased home, and she took it as an omen. It was a weird morning for her anyway, what with the mystery man who lived in her crawl space, which in itself wouldn’t be that catastrophic, because Honnie and her husband, Todd, wouldn’t actually move into the house until later when he was gone and they were finished with the renovations. But the stranger had left piles of chicken bones and Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles strewn on the back porch every morning. He didn’t even stick around to say, “Hi, thanks for letting me live under your house while you fix it up.” He just bolted at sunrise and left his crap behind for Honnie to clean up.

  I’d say Honnie and Todd officially had it worse than I did when I’d moved into Capitol View. I never found anything dead in my yard, or in my house either. I was looking pretty hard too, because the week before I closed on the house the police found that decapitated human head in a plastic sack on my street, and they had yet to find the rest of the body to go with it. Which meant it was still out there. Somewhere. The headless body. Waiting for me to stumble on it in the dark. I was pretty sure it wasn’t actually in my house, since I’d searched high and low. And it was probably not under my house, since my contractor crawled around down there recently and all he found was the bottom half of a dead cricket. Actually, I found that. It was clinging to his hair when he emerged.

  The reason I hired a contractor was because I needed a bigger house. Try as I did to buy a bigger house in the neighborhood, they all got snatched up faster than fat caterpillars at a crow orgy. Dead dogs and dead people aside, I guess this neighborhood officially qualifies as “hot.” Five minutes from downtown and still cheap, the houses sold before the signs could go up in the yard. Even my friend Chris’s grandmother’s Jamaican ex-caretaker from New Jersey knows Capitol View is “hot.” Now, that headless body could turn up nailed to the front door of a house for sale down the street and it wouldn’t deter prospective buyers. “It’s just cosmetic,” the real-estate agent would say, “easily fixed.”

  There were bigger houses nearby that I liked, and each time I didn’t even haggle over price, I just said, “Sounds good, I’ll take it.” The problem was the sellers always changed their minds later and wanted more money—one time as much as $25,000 more. I guess these sellers were not sufficiently enlightened about the “hotness” of this neighborhood until they were effortlessly offered their asking prices, at which time they decided they weren’t asking enough. Those houses went to other buyers, who became my neighbors. They seem very nice. In the end, I decided to simply enlarge the house I already have.

  Another neighbor of mine, a twenty-year-old young man named John Brown, died while in police custody. Witnesses—more neighbors of mine—said an officer beat him to death with his service flashlight, though preliminary autopsy reports are still ambiguous. Reportedly, Brown was helping a friend who’d been evicted from the boardinghouse next door to his when the owner of the property called the police to report him trespassing. The police arrived, a pursuit ensued, and now Brown is dead. The next day the boardinghouse was ransacked and burned down, and the following day, Honnie found the deceased dog in her yard. In the end, though, she decided not to take it as an omen after all, deciding that if it were meant to be a message, the bearers would have placed the carcass right on her porch.

  It was a weird morning for Honnie, and what made it even weirder was the burned-down house up the street. At the time, Honnie didn’t know why it burned down and neither did I. We chose to believe that it must have gone up in flames because this neighborhood was just so damn “hot.”

  The Bandwagon

  I’ve taken to calling Michael “Mr. Midas” because everything he touches turns to gold, which still pisses me off—and not just because he won’t open a bar/restaurant in my neighborhood even though he bought a building there.

  “God! How selfish are you?” I occasionally yell at him. I like to hit him too, because at six-foot-seven he doesn’t even feel it. When I visit Michael’s building, a warehouse that is slated to become a studio and art gallery and is within walking distance of my house, I point to a perfectly good section that would probably only take up almost all his space and I say, “Here, you could put the bar here. And the restaurant part could go over there, and you could serve blue-cheese dressing.”

  In fact, that’s really all he needs to serve, just big bowls of blue-cheese dressing with stuff to stick in it: carrots, whole heads of cauliflower, my face. I could eat my own arm if it came coated with blue cheese, and Michael’s blue-cheese dressing is my favorite. I tell him he should keep a tank of it on hand so I can wallow in it like a porpoise. But Michael, even though he calls himself my friend, does not think opening a bar/restaurant that serves only blue cheese is a sound business plan, and let’s face it, even though he looks like a craven beatnik, he’s never made a bad business move that I can see. It’s like he’s got this, I don’t know, window seat inside the force field against all evil and it’s infuriating. He has never made a wrong move ever! God! I just want to hit him again.

  “Whatcha got there, Michael?”

  “Life by the balls, Hollis.”

  Slap, slappity slap, slap.

  But my luck could be changing, because it just so happens that Michael bought his loft here at the same time I bought my house, which makes me think I must have made a right move for once. Woohoo! What’s this thing I feel under my feet? It’s the bandwagon! And I’m among the first to jump on it for once. So with Mr. Midas in my neighborhood, all this place needs is a cool restaurant to serve as the binding cornerstone of the community, because, charming as this place is, what with the crack whores comingling with budding yuppies looking for low house payments, there’s no getting away from the fact that the nearest Starbucks is six minutes away. I can’t have that. I need a place closer, a place I can crawl to once my arms evolve into flippers. Michael is the obvious answer.

  “No way,” he says. “This neighborhood is not ready. If I opened a restaurant now, you would be the only customer.”

  “Come on,” I plead, “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  A Bog of Odors

  I wondered why my kitchen smells like cocaine. I was sniffing the air in there once, thinking, “What is that, na
rcotics?” when Daniel told me I should clean something while I’m at it. But I don’t want to disrupt the comingling of different states of decay that had randomly come together to create this bouquet. I like how it reminds me of college.

  Because that’s how it is with smells, and this place is a total bog of odors. Not only has the room that serves as my office smelled funny since the day I moved in—like shedded skin, I would think, or the car seat of an old German cab driver—but it’s got this mystery moisture that steams the place up every once in a while. It attacks my supply of office stationery and seals all the envelopes. I wonder if this weird atmospheric effect could be caused by a decomposing dead body in the boarded-up fireplace, because the police never did recover the rest of the torso to match that severed human head. And I can’t think of a worthy reason to wall up a perfectly good fireplace other than to create a tomb for human remains. I thought about tearing down the wall to uncover the fireplace—because fireplaces do wonders for property value—but I decided to let it rest. Maybe the smell will go away.

  I prefer smells that remind me of stuff. For example, I love the smell of clean concrete because it reminds me of the cinder-block bathroom at the Via Paraiso Park in Monterey, California, where I got bit on the nose by a bulldog when I was five years old. I remember I had to remain perfectly still—crouched on all fours, with a bulldog on the end of my nose—until he finally relaxed his jaws and let me go. I like to say that’s why I have a big nose to this day, but the truth is I was born with it, and that’s probably what attracted the dog in the first place—maybe he thought it was a sausage. Another time, I went to the park and found the trees clustered with monarch butterflies. My sisters and I plucked them off the trunks and put them in our hair. We walked around with our heads all aflutter, like sweet little Medusas. Whenever I smell clean concrete I think of monarch butterflies and bulldogs kind enough to let me keep my nose. Not a bad trade, since it’s a common enough aroma.

  So is the mothball smell in my closets. I need that smell in my life. It reminds me of a trip I took with my mother to Palo Alto when I was six to visit her aging friend, who embroidered doilies and kept a supply of yarn covered in mothballs in her cabinets. The smell made my eyes melt sometimes. One day the three of us went to a restaurant with a hundred cuckoo clocks that all chimed madly every hour. We stayed there all afternoon so I could catch the show over and over, and the waitress didn’t even seem that irritated with us for taking up her table. “I promise I’ll bring you back,” my mother had said. I never saw the place again, but every time I open my closet, I am brought back.

  Minor Details

  Considering my neighborhood, it’s almost alarming that, in my entire time there, I’ve only come across two corpses in the street. The second was that poor boy, or really I just saw his legs and arms…and the blood. Christ, I should have paid more attention to details.

  When I saw my first street corpse, the police were already there. They had covered the woman, who had been hit by a car as she crossed the road, and she lay where she was struck, in the center of the street, and I remember her bare foot sticking out from under the sheet. And groceries. She must have been walking home after shopping.

  The memory of her bare foot always reminded me of an Argentine pervert my older sister secretly wed years ago. His name was or was not Ricardo, and he was a pimp and a thief, but amazingly he had an oily charm, and, God, could he tell a story. He kept us up half the night one time, telling us about a dangerous strip of road in rural Argentina known for hellacious auto accidents, and every time the police pulled the bodies out of the wreckage either the left foot or both feet—but especially the left foot—of the dead person would be bare.

  Ricardo went into such detail, describing how even sturdy construction boots could be found on the floors of trucks, still tightly laced but somehow separated from the left foot when the coroner sometimes needed two assistants to pull the other ones off at the morgue. The locals believed the victims lost their shoes because they couldn’t take their first step into the kingdom of heaven with a covered foot. “There are hundreds of old shoes along that road,” Ricardo said in his hushed Latin accent, “from having flown off the feet of the dead.”

  That’s the detail of the dead woman I always remember: her bare left foot, along with packets of Top Ramen and a torn box of cat food strewn about as plastic bags danced in the wind of passing cars. I always think how, when she left the house that day, the last thing on that woman’s mind must have been the possibility of dying on the pavement with dried noodles crowning her head. Maybe if she had paid more attention to detail, like the oncoming car, she would have made it home to feed her cat.

  But as I said, the police were already there, so I was not needed in that scenario. The boy is a different story. His blood was so robustly red, practically the color of blackberries, so I could almost understand why Lary mistook it for a melted Popsicle when I brought him there later that day. The boy was gone but his blood was still there.

  “He was dead!” I shriek. Jesus! I hate how Lary always questions me.

  “How could you tell?”

  “I could just tell!”

  It was in the details, even though I wish I had paid more attention to them. When I called the police to report a dead boy on the sidewalk down the street they needed all kinds of details, sensible details I didn’t remember, such as the address in front of which the body lay, the number of people surrounding him, their genders and what they were wearing.

  “Are you sure he was dead?” the officer asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “How could you tell?”

  I could tell by the blood, there was so much of it. It was young blood, the color of blackberries. My own is practically the color of marmalade, but it always has been. You could look at a picture of me when I was nine and see that I had the weight of the ages in my eyes. I could tell by the sheet covering the boy’s body, and the face of the woman who placed it there, that the boy was dead. Her expression was one of utter frustration, a reaction to witnessing an act of unfathomable waste. “Here was a perfectly good human,” her face was saying, “and someone had to go and wreck him.”

  I continued to recite details, remembering that the boy was face up under the sheet, that his arms were outstretched with palms skyward, that the cuffs of his trousers were rolled, that the blood stain on the sidewalk was in the shape of a map of Australia, that the bed-sheet covering him had pink pinstripes and light blue piping along the hem. They were trivial particulars, but it seemed important to honor them at the time so that this boy’s dying on the sidewalk surrounded by strangers wouldn’t be—in my life at least—a minor detail.

  “Anything else?” asked the officer when my voice finally trailed off.

  Silence. “No,” I surrendered. “There is nothing else.”

  Missing Pieces

  God, I can’t keep from thinking about those notorious missing torsos in my neighborhood. I don’t think they ever uncovered the missing pieces to match the found pieces, let alone figure out who the pieces once belonged to, or for that matter—and probably most important—who was responsible for separating the pieces from their other pieces to begin with.

  Today I waved like a parade-float prop as I drove past the crack dealers who hang out down the street. They no longer try to intimidate me with menacing glares meant to make my hand dart for the autolock on the door panel. They know I’m their neighbor, and that my doors were locked long before I even backed out of the driveway. Like it or not, I’ve stumbled into a home here, guarded by an incontinent pit bull, who will promptly pee on you if you try to burgle us.

  But no one has tried to burgle me, and if they did they wouldn’t garner much booty because the most valuable item in here is my velvet Elvis collection, which I hear can command double figures on eBay, especially the “crying” Elvis with a shirt collar the size of old Cadillac fenders. I figure I’ve escaped break-ins because—barring the crack dealers, addicts, and
whores—I have tons of other nice neighbors here, and after months of deliberation I’m definitely, without a doubt, just about practically almost certain that none of them are responsible for the cut up body pieces the police found before I moved in, or for the torsos still to be stumbled upon that are probably just bones by now anyway.

  Grant and Lary really liked the new place, and claimed I would never be happy because I’m never not longing for something. But I am happy, sometimes. Truly. The other day at dusk we sat in my backyard, and on weeknights the air is always full of the smell of fresh cake from the Nabisco factory nearby. There are tiki torches in my backyard now, and a new fence, which keeps Cookie from escaping to pee on the drug dealers down the street. Even the drug dealers down the street are scarcer these days, and my artist friend Patrick just bought a house a few doors down, which he’s fixing up fabulously. Next door, Monty and Greta were mixing strawberry daiquiris and waving us over from their kitchen window. God, I thought, this place is so nice. This place is practically perfect. And then I remembered what was missing. It’s the torsos. The unfound torsos. To me they will always be out there, waiting to be stumbled over in the dark.

  My Mother’s Reflection

  When I was little, my mother would come home from a day devising weapons, pull together a tamale pie for us kids, and then be off in time to catch the night cosmetology classes at the local community college. She practiced makeup application on my sisters and me, and I was the only girl in fourth grade who wore textured false eyelashes. The notes my teachers sent home made my mother laugh. She never became a cosmetologist, but she did move to Switzerland to construct a missile-tracking strategy.