My usual M.O. for Mother’s Day—renting a truckload of animated Disney movies that induce a mental enema—is already failing me. I might have lost my ability to lose myself in fantasy, which is tragic, because I believe it’s essential to maintain a fantasy of some kind throughout your life. My mother’s fantasy was that she would survive liver cancer, and she held on to it until one day in a Tijuana cancer clinic years ago. The moment she lost it is the memory that’s been tormenting me lately.
When we were really young, my two sisters and I were goofing around with my mother in front of the bathroom mirror, but we quit laughing when she suddenly exclaimed, “You’re all so pretty, and I’m so ugly.” Of course my mother was not ugly. It must have been one of those intermittent moments women have as they lose their youth, the kind of moments I have now. Maybe it’s a lapse in fantasy, where we imagine ourselves to be as youthful as we’ve always felt, and then we have that certainty shattered temporarily, perhaps when presented with three supple replicas of your youth laughing up at you in the bathroom mirror.
When she arrived at the Mexican clinic, where, for five thousand dollars a day, Haitian doctors administered a cancer treatment unapproved by the United States, my mother was so close to death that she literally looked like a corpse, except for the sounds of her laborious breathing. On one of her better days, my sister Kim and I rigged a wheelchair to take her outside, but the excursion was awkward because the clinic was surrounded by unleveled concrete slabs. Another problem, as I remember vividly, was that the outside of the clinic was literally walled with two-way mirrors.
We were facing the clinic, trying to maneuver over the cumbersome paving, when I looked up to see my mother watching herself in the reflection of the building. Her deterioration had been rapid since she had last seen herself. She was bald, and the definition of her skull showed sharply through her thin, blistered skin. Because of her failing liver, her flesh was a pronounced yellow. Deep wrinkles lined her lips like stitching on a baseball seam. Her eyes were sunken and incandescently jaundiced. This is the precise mental Polaroid that continues to haunt me. Not just my mother’s face, but the entire reflection in the panel of two-way mirrors. My sister and I, young and robust, were caught once again in the same reflection as my mother, who was watching herself with a defeated lucidity. That was exactly the moment at which she lost her fantasy of surviving. It is an almost unbearable memory.
“Take me inside,” she said. Silently, we did.
Myrtle the Lesbian Ghost
Most of my neighbors got uncomfortable when I talked about the lesbian ghost that lived with me. I’m thinking it wasn’t because they don’t believe in ghosts, but because they think mine might be offended if I’m wrong about her sexuality. I don’t think I’m wrong, because according to Miss Taylor, who is eighty-seven years old but whose brain is so sharp you could practically get a paper cut holding a conversation with her, “two spinster women who slept in the same bed” occupied this house in the early seventies, and one of them was shot and killed by a fourteen-year-old boy in her own—now my own—backyard.
“It was so sad,” recalls Miss Taylor, “because you couldn’t find a nicer couple of women.”
But even when Miss Taylor told me my backyard was once the scene of a murder, it didn’t dawn on me that my house was haunted, even though the ghost had been so active. It finally occurred to me the day my candlestick tipped over for the twentieth time. I don’t know why the ghost likes that particular candlestick so much, because there’s plenty of other things she could tip over on the bookshelf—rickety, kitschy things—but it was that same solid, wrought-iron candlestick every time. I think she picked it for the noise it makes. When it falls on the hardwood floor it clatters like heavy chains hitting dungeon bars.
At first I thought my cat was the culprit. You’d be amazed at what you can blame on your cat when you have a ghost in your house. In this case, I was in bed in the dark and suddenly, silently, the light in the next room would switch on. Not off, but on, which is eerie, because turning on a light in the pitch-dark announces someone’s arrival quite effectively. Each time, though, I figured my cat had brushed against the light switch on the wall or something, even though the switch is at chest level and my cat would have to be as tall as an ostrich to reach it.
And, thinking back, there’s no way my fifteen-year-old cat, Lucy, who’s as fat as a manatee and even less coordinated, could have climbed to the top of the bookcase without pitching the rest of the knickknacks across the room like an angry housewife. But every time I heard the clamor of the candlestick falling to the floor, I’d simply pick it up and put it back without another thought. And there were other signs too, like the cloud of mystery moisture that occasionally still steams up my office, but then one day that candlestick hurled itself right in front of me! It didn’t just fall, it practically flew off the shelf. After seeing that, I stood there, frozen with realization. “Oh, duh,” I finally said aloud. “I have a ghost.”
I call her “Myrtle.” Lately I’ve been keeping an eye on the candlestick, and when I see that it has inched forward on the shelf, I push it back. In response, Myrtle recently pitched a CD off the same bookshelf, but the effect wasn’t the same. But it’s okay, living with the spirit of this woman who suffered because of her trust in mankind: She had stepped outside to tell a boy to stop shooting squirrels, so the boy shot her instead. Back then I guess people were unaware of how callous a kid with a gun could be. I imagine she thought he would listen to her and respect her request to stop shooting up her property. He was just a child, after all. So she approached him unarmed and unsuspicious and died because of it. Unable to make her good-byes, she now made noises in my house instead. Recently, I let her knock the candlestick over again, because I know she likes the sound it creates. It’s the least I could do, seeing as how she walked out her backdoor one day not knowing she’d be leaving everything she loved behind, forever.
The New Ghost
I often wonder whether more than just the one ghost haunts my house, because there have been some departures from Myrtle’s usual routine. Take her favorite iron candlestick. I found it not just on the floor but bent up as well. And six pictures came crashing off my mantel the other day. That’s not like Myrtle, who has otherwise only been known to throw some CDs that are stacked near the candlestick. Her throwing things was really just her means of reminding me I have company. Destruction was not her point, because she picked only durable items to toss.
Which makes me wonder about the mantel. That’s new territory for her, and those pictures broke, glass flying everywhere. Before that, the most energy I’d seen Myrtle expend was the time she tried to change the lightbulb in my living room lamp. Of all the tricks a ghost could perform—blood dripping down the walls, a plague of maggots—Myrtle picked lightbulb changing.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like it wasn’t scary to return to the living room after only a minute and find a lightbulb on the floor when it used to be screwed into a lamp, under a shade. Myrtle must have done that, as she hates darkness and keeps turning on lights in the middle of the night. So after most of them burned out Myrtle must have been at work there, trying to help. That’s what I mean, Myrtle was a sweet woman before she was murdered in my backyard twenty-seven years ago. She thought she could walk up to that boy with a gun and ask him to stop shooting, and he would stop shooting and she would walk back inside to finish dinner with her female companion and that would be that. But instead she died on the grass out there. Then I moved in, and Myrtle tried to make herself known but I was distracted. It wasn’t until the candlestick flew off the shelf right in front of me that I finally figured it out. After that Myrtle seemed content to know I knew she was there.
I thought I saw her once, a faint apparition alongside me in the dark, but it turned out it was just my own reflection in the Plexiglas of a piece of Daniel’s artwork I’d forgotten I’d placed there earlier. Myrtle is not that ostentatious, as I said, she doesn’t even like th
e dark. I personally appreciate the dark sometimes, and can sit in it quietly all night on occasion, but in this house that’s not possible. Myrtle can only stand darkness for so long before, click!, suddenly a light comes on somewhere. I got tired of getting out of bed to turn them off, so I took to keeping a dim stained-glass lamp illuminated in the living room twenty-four hours a day, and I’ve learned to sleep with its glow wafting in from the doorway. When you have a ghost in your house, one of the first things you figure out is how to compromise.
But the broken glass—that’s a new trick. My neighbor Jim says his house is haunted by the ghost of an eight-year-old girl who died there years ago of leukemia. He thinks she made his basement stairs collapse underneath him one day. I remember thinking that was a bad prank for his ghost to pull, and I felt fortunate that Myrtle has been comparatively mild in her hauntings. But then all those pictures flew off my mantel, and now I’m worried that another ghost has moved in.
Maybe it’s the boy who was killed one block over, shot over a game of dice. Or maybe it’s the crack whore who was gunned down as she ran naked through the street trying to escape her assailant. That happened the week before I bought this place. Or it could be the addict on the corner who called me a bleachy-haired honky bitch after I accidentally almost hit him with my car. He didn’t look like he had much longer to live. What I don’t understand is why they would haunt my particular house. If it were me, I would pick a nicer place. But maybe ghosts don’t have power over who they haunt. Maybe that’s their lot in death, to go where they’re assigned, and linger there like a familiar scent forever. Last night, I thought I saw my new ghost in the purple hue of the permanently illuminated stained-glass lamp in the living room, but it turns out that, absent the pictures, the mirror over the mantel is newly exposed. So it wasn’t the new ghost after all, it was just me again.
Get Right with God
We were looking for a reason to live after hearing that Petra, the transvestite pizza-delivery boy, had moved to Chicago, where, I hear, they have pretty good pizza. But it was a blow regardless. It wasn’t until we dialed Milano’s on Ponce to request a delivery by Petra that the terrible fact slapped us in the face like a frozen mackerel: no more Petra. No more horn-rimmed glasses, sagging knee socks, and secondhand sweaters buttoned askew. We were crushed. We had loved her from afar, and we realized sadly that now we would have to love her from farther away, which did not fill the hole in our souls that Petra left behind. We were empty inside, needed emotional nourishment, needed hope—we needed, obviously, to get out of town.
Daniel, Grant, and I headed north, because we heard Chicago is kinda sorta in that direction. We knew we wouldn’t make it there; in fact, we hardly made it anywhere. It took us eleven hours just to get to Soddy-Daisy, and I swear to God I have no idea where Soddy-Daisy is, I just know it’s not very far from Atlanta, because when the counter girl at the QuikTrip told us where we were, Grant laughed so hard he bent over double, which upset a rack of Butterfingers.
“Eleven hours to get to Soddy-Daisy!” he kept laughing. Grant told us when we started out that he’s allergic to the Interstate, so we let him tool us through whatever side street and highway he wanted. We searched out flea markets, and Grant bought a stack of vented pie pans that he says will make wonderful wall sconces for his Peoplestown crack house, and Daniel was on the lookout for those Popsicle lamp shades that prisoners make. We found a few hanging from the ceiling of the snack shop at one of the flea markets, but they were made by the owner’s lifelong friend who had just been executed, so she said they weren’t for sale. Grant said we should try to steal them. We still don’t know if he was serious.
We didn’t steal the lamp shades, but we ended up wandering in the fog, passing a church marquee that said “Courage Is Fear Combined with Prayer,” as well as neglecting to stop at a perfectly good bowling alley complete with a karaoke bar in our quest for a place to crash for the night. In Soddy-Daisy we opted to continue driving until Daniel’s ass got tired from sitting on the tiny jumpbench tucked behind the bucket seats in Grant’s truck’s cab.
That decision led us to desolate Dayton, Tennessee, where we booked ourselves into a generic hotel and ate at an Italian restaurant called, curiously, the Golden Monkey. It turns out the name of the restaurant commemorated the famous First Amendment “monkey trial” in which Clarence Darrow defended an idealistic biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who was prosecuted for going against the church to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution. That was in 1925, and this is the Bible Belt. The teacher lost. Waiting for our spaghetti we looked around the restaurant, which was decorated with about a billion dusty stuffed carnival-booth monkeys. “You know,” Grant said absently, “courage is not fear combined with prayer. Courage is fear that said ‘fuck it.’”
The next morning we departed Dayton, and remembered why we started the trip to begin with, and that was to search for roadside religious signs so Grant could use them to panel the outside of the crack house in Peoplestown. Earlier, on a separate decorating whim, Grant had employed the neighborhood handyman’s young son to go through the area and collect used crack lighters by the bagful.
“I’ll pay him a nickel for two,” Grant told the handyman to tell his son.
“I hope you know what you’re asking,” said the handyman as he descended the outside steps, an ancient foam kneepad heaped around each ankle. “He’s an enterprising boy.”
A few days later Grant had a two plastic grocery bags full of discarded crack lighters, their metal mechanisms rusty and clotted with dirt, their bright plastic Bic bodies clamoring against each other like large colorful cockroaches. Grant already has two porch chairs upholstered with crack lighters. The lighters are laid flat against the surface of the wood and then drilled through with a screw to keep them in place. It’s wild, seeing a chair covered in colorful old lighters, but it’s not very comfortable to sit in, and sometimes the lighters aren’t all the way used up, so the fact that they have been drilled through lends to the possibility that your pants will smell like propane and be a little bit flammable when you get up. But the chairs are probably not for sitting anyway. They are, truly, something to look at.
The roadside religious signs, on the other hand, were less forthcoming than the crack lighters. We didn’t see our first one until the second day, but it was a beauty. Grant and Daniel, who was sitting in the front seat, spotted it immediately and began whooping like frat boys at a beer rally. Grant punched the breaks and the truck screeched to a stop. But I didn’t see the sign at first, even though it was bigger than the community satellite dish for an entire trailer park. The sheer hugeness of it is probably why I didn’t see it. Roadside religious signs, generally, are no bigger than the top of a coffee table, so when you’re looking for something that small sometimes it’s hard to see the big stuff. This one had its own post, as opposed to just being nailed to a tree, and it was made out of a great slab of roofing tin, with the words “Get Right with God” cut out of tar paper and nailed to it (“On both sides!” shrieked Grant). It took all three of us to carry it to the truck, and even then it was so big it wouldn’t lie flat on the bed. We had to angle it sideways, and that’s how we drove home, with a giant “Get Right with God” sign sticking almost straight up in the truck.
I thought Grant wanted it for his crack house. But soon afterward I came home one day to see that Grant had firmly planted the sign in my front yard, and there it remains to this day. It’s like a beacon, able to be seen from blocks away. I wonder how I ever missed it the first time.
Jesus Loves Atheists
When I was seven I had a crush on Satan. Not that I knew who he was, I just based everything on his picture. In the illustrated children’s Bible I remember one picture in particular, in which Jesus had just pushed Satan off a cliff, and Satan is sailing down through the air, a trail of red robes billowing behind him. He looked only slightly irritated at the inconvenience. He had hair as black as octopus ink, styled like Lyle Waggoner’s, a
n impeccably groomed beard, and a deep sunburn. ’Course that cloven hoof was kind of a downer, but hey, other than that I thought he was hot.
When my mother came home from work that day I told her I wanted to marry Satan when I grew up. She looked at me gravely, then said, “Kid, whatever you do, don’t get married.”
My affection for Satan soon fizzled (he’s too possessive). Then came a very brief period during which we were allowed to go to church, my two sisters and I, minus any money for the collection tray. We were all under ten, and I suppose my parents thought it was a good way to get us out of the house for a day. A church bus came by and collected the neighborhood kids every Sunday, and we sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on the way. Once there, every day, I approached the stage when the preacher called forth sinners from the audience who wanted their souls saved.
One day a lady usher stopped me in the aisle as I made my weekly pilgrimage. “You were saved last week, sweetie, and the week before that,” she said, leading me back to my seat, “…and the week before that.”
With my mother in 1989—a month later she was diagnosed with terminal cancer
“But it didn’t take,” I protested as she walked away, her knee-highs sagging around her ankles.
The preacher called my mother to complain about my behavior, and it was this, combined with the fact that we were actually starting to recite some of the stuff we learned in church (like how, after you’re dead and buried, devils take an elevator up to the underside of your coffin and kidnap you if you don’t tithe properly) that prompted my mother to call a stop to churchgoing. The bus still pulled up outside our apartment building every Sunday and honked, but my mother waved it away. The driver always waited a few minutes before leaving, as if performing a sad little vigil for three tiny lost souls. I worried briefly that I would go to Hell, but my mother said what she always said when I worried about that. “What bigger Hell is there than a heaven full of people like that?” my mother asked, indicating the departing bus. “Your soul, by the way, is fine.”
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch Page 21