by Sarah Bird
“Millie,” I huff out as we launch into the fifth replay of “Oh, Susanna.” All the bounding about has joggled loose a question that I cannot believe I’ve never asked. “What exactly is it you do all day?”
Millie stops dead and her smile turns sly. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Nipples Pucker
MISS MILLIE! Miss Millie!” The cries reach us over the screeching of brakes as Millie brings the recumbent bike to a stop. The half dozen tin pots in the trailer clang and clatter even more loudly than they had with every bump on the ride down. I am back on Dog Crap Lane and the ’bos are starting to swarm down out of the hills.
Piles of blankets and grimy sleeping bags sprout legs and walk toward us. A dog with one blue eye and one brown, bandanna around his neck, leads the way. Then it is beards and sunburns, missing teeth and body odor.
Body odor?
Body odor is far too close for comfort. I am reaching for the button to raise an automatic window, to put a thick pane of impact-resistant glass between myself and the vagrants, when I remember that I am not sitting high above them all in the Escalade. I recall that I am no longer, either figuratively or literally, looking down on the men. That I myself am one vote away from working for food. And, splayed out on the front seat of a tandem recumbent bike, staring at roughly zipper level, that gap seems to be closing rapidly. I spring off the bike and scurry away as the pack closes in.
“Well, look who’s here,” Millie calls out with unforced delight as the first man reaches us. “Joe, look at you. You got a haircut!”
“Cut ’em all, Miss Millie.” Joe, a bullet-headed guy with the build of a bouncer, answers in a thick Cajun accent as he rubs a meaty hand over his shaved head.
Millie laughs at the old joke. “Does the Loozeeana Man want his usual Pickapeppa sauce?”
“You know what I always say, ‘A day without Pickapeppa is like’”—Millie chimes in on what is obviously a familiar line—“‘a day without sunshine’!” She splashes a couple of tortillas with the thick, brown sauce. From one aluminum pot she produces a couple of hard-boiled eggs; from another, an orange.
Joe, grinning, takes eggs and orange, lumbers away, and the next man steps up.
“Curtis! I thought you’d gone back to Kansas City.”
Curtis is a spindly African American guy with twigs and dead grass in his hair and a smile that stars pay thousands for. “You know I couldn’t stay away too long from you, Miss Millie.”
“The usual for you, Curtis? Stubb’s Bar-B-Q sauce and two tortillas?”
“You read me like a book.”
“One of the classics, Curtis. A book no one ever gets tired of.”
Curtis beams as Millie hands him a couple of tortillas. He holds them in his horny palms while Millie squirts puddles of sauce on each one; then he slips the two eggs she gives him into the pocket of his grimy brown hoodie.
“And your vitamin C, good sir.”
Curtis takes an orange from Millie’s hand with a courtly bow, sweeping a pretend hat from his head. “I am in your debt, kind lady.”
The other homeless men wait patiently until Curtis has his turn; then the next one ambles forward. Millie knows each man’s name and something about him.
“Carl, how’s that hand?”
“I told you I coulda done them stitches myself.”
“Carl, that was a horrible gash. Thank you for letting me take you to the clinic.”
“Lotta motherfuckin’ trouble for a little motherfuckin’ scratch.”
All right, that’s more like it. The snarling sociopath lurking beneath all this Capraesque clowning emerges. To my surprise, however, the other ’bos immediately turn on Carl. They badger and insult him until he apologizes.
“Uh, sorry for the language, Miss Millie.”
“Thank you for the apology, Carl,” Millie says, as if her entire world hangs on how Carl the Hobo treats her. “You’re a Hellmann’s man, right?”
“I’m a hell of a man, all right, but I’ll take a little dab of that mayo.”
Carl leaves and another bum takes his place. “Jesse, are you drunk already?”
A wino, maybe a beero, some lifelong fan of all things fermented, Jesse is glassy eyed and putting off a stench that has even his buddies on Dog Crap Lane giving him a wide berth. Only Millie stands her ground, smiling as if the Jesse she sees and smells is the one who once came from the maternity ward wrapped in a powder blue receiving blanket, all pink and clean and smelling brand-new. Jesse is as toothless as a newborn and works his lips for a few seconds before getting a collection of grunts and wheezes out, “Yes, ma’am. Sure am.”
“Starting awfully early, Jesse. Should I just splash a little bourbon on your tortillas?”
The last gets a big laugh from Jesse, and he perks up enough to offer the riposte: “Jim Beam, if you got ’er, ma’am.”
Still chortling, pleased with his sally, Jesse takes his tortillas with ketchup, claims a couple of eggs, an orange, and shuffles away.
Each succeeding man is issued the same fare along with his choice of condiments: pickled jalapeño, squirt of mustard, Pickapeppa, mayo, ketchup, mustard. No bourbon. No Jim Beam. Each one takes the food, but what he really lines up and waits patiently for is to hear Millie say his name and speak to him in a kindly manner. To have a woman acknowledge his existence in some way other than by raising a thick pane of impact-resistant glass.
I have always suspected that Millie is the most purely good person I’ve ever met. It is now clear that her goodness is of a Mother Teresa quality. In a million years, I could never dive into that mosh pit of microbial horror, scraggly beards, and WILL WORK FOR BEER signs. Backing even farther away, I keep one eye on the hobo mob, alert for any sign of a psychotic break or Vietnam flashback, while searching the trail for a possible rescuer. Where are all the annoying twits broadcasting into cell phones when you need them?
When the last vagabond has been issued his tortillas, eggs, and orange, and flapped back into the hills from whence he’d come, Millie hops onto the bike, rings the bell jauntily, and calls out, “All aboard for the next stop!”
Instead of huffing back up Twenty-fourth Street to the house as I expected, Millie heads south on Lamar. We breeze past Pease Park as it winds along Shoal Creek, where a new crew of bare-chested young men hurl Frisbees with the grace of Greek discus throwers.
“Millie,” I yell back over my shoulder, “I read an article that says the organizations that work with the homeless advise against giving them money.”
“Did you see me giving anyone any money?” Her question has a giggly lilt that says she’s had this discussion before and is pleased and prepared to be having it again.
“Well, you know, you’re not supposed to do things that will discourage them from getting into programs.”
“I don’t think a couple of tortillas are going to stop anyone who really wants it from getting help. Might even give him or her enough strength to stand in lines and fill out a lot of forms.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Sort of. But this, what I do, it’s just between me and them. Between friends. In those programs you’re talking about who’s going to know that Curtis likes Stubb’s barbecue sauce or that Carl prefers Hellmann’s?”
We turn east on César Chávez. The Colorado River sparkles beside us. Pink and white clouds of blossoms fuzz the trees lining the bank. A slender scull with eight rowers torpedoes through the silver water. The scenery grows less pastoral the farther east we go. Soon we are in a neighborhood where houses are painted lime green and hot pink. Here and there an old bathtub shelters a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. We zigzag through vacant lots and convenience stores that sell barbacoa tacos and phone cards for prepaid calls to Mexico. A warehouse next to the railroad tracks overflows with used office furniture. Several battered Aeron chairs and Herman Miller workstations are piled up outside. I have located the dot-com burial ground.
A few blocks later we come upon a vacant lo
t where day laborers of the undocumented variety mill about. A pickup truck with a magnetic sign on the driver’s door that reads AKINS LANDSCAPING pulls up, and the men swarm around the driver’s window. The driver, wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and a gimme cap with a picture of a fish and the word BASSWIPE on the front, yells a few rudimentary questions in construction site Spanish. Four men hop into the bed of the pickup and settle themselves beside an overturned wheelbarrow and a load of manure covered by a blue tarp.
The rejected men left behind at the day labor lot are downcast until they catch sight of Millie. Everyone lights up and begins hailing her in excited Spanish. Millie answers with equal enthusiasm.
“Heriberto! Chuy! Alejandro! Que está pasando, hombres?” Then she is hauling out her condiment assortment, the palette of self-expression that is her gift to these strangers in a strange land.
“Salsa fresca, sí?”
“Jes, Mees Meelie.”
“Tomas, te gusta el salsa tomatillo, verdad?”
“Sí, me gusta mucho.”
“Chipotle para usted, señor?”
“Muchisimas gracias, señorita.”
Each man is served his eggs, tortillas, his moment of recognition. Each one comes away nourished.
On the long pull uphill, back to the university, Millie detours over to the Drag. But the shops and restaurants along the stretch of Guadalupe across from the campus are not what interest her. The empty aluminum pots and pans in the trailer clatter as we come to a halt next to the Baptist church on the corner of Twenty-second and Guadalupe. A tribe of street kids lounging on the front steps take turns harrying passersby. Their pleas for spare change range from the ingratiating—“Please, mister, I just need two dollars and fifty-three cents more for a phone card to call home”—to the insulting—“Come on, you fat-ass sorority bitch, gimme your money; you don’t need another cheeseburger.”
They light up instantly upon spotting Millie and then, just as quickly, bury their enthusiasm behind masks of adolescent sullenness. After we stop, they wait for several minutes, then saunter over desultorily as if they were headed in that direction anyway. Millie greets each one of the street kids like a celebrity.
“Spood! Look at you! I like the hair beads.” A lanky kid hiding beneath an oversize army jacket, cheeks spangled with acne, touches the beads braided into his long, lank hair and dips his head to hide his pleasure at the compliment.
“Kat? Is that you? Kat, where have you been? I’ve missed seeing you.” A pudgy girl, her low-slung jeans exposing a puppy tummy of baby fat, rushes up and tells Millie a long, convoluted story about staying with her aunt in Dripping Springs and going to school there until the aunt’s boyfriend took off in the middle of the night and stole her aunt’s car and how somehow that all led to her being back here on the street with her “real friends.”
Kat has a cute Betty Boop voice which sounds funny when she tells Millie about “all them hos and bee-yotches back in Dripping.”
An emaciated boy tattooed from the top of his shaved head to his toes approaches shyly. “Hag War!” Millie calls out to him. As he gets closer, I can see that the tattoos are leopard spots and that what Millie has called him is “Jaguar” with a Spanish pronunciation.
“Jaguar, you got some new tats.”
He claws the air with a slow-motion feline grace, but doesn’t answer.
“You still have those wild contacts?” Millie asks.
The boy opens his eyes wide to display amber irises with vertical black slits for pupils, more like a demonic goat than a jaguar but distinctly not human, which seems to be the idea. I try to calculate how many thousands of dollars’ worth of body modification the young man is sporting, give up, and move on to the larger question of why “adults” are aiding and abetting him in this process.
I also wonder why Millie is not handing out grub to this crew. Then I notice the crumpled McDonald’s bags and Starbucks Venti-size cups littering the church steps; these kids aren’t interested in hard-boiled eggs and tortillas.
The only member of the tribe who doesn’t congregate around Millie is a girl in her late teens, pale as steam. She huddles in the shadow of the church. Her eyes are caked in black liner; she wears leather bondage pants, motorcycle boots, and a muscle shirt that displays ropy biceps ringed with a bracelet of thorn tattoos. She gives off a sexy dangerous androgynous vibe like both the coolest bad boy and hottest bad girl in high school. She sidles over and shoots me a look so icy my nipples pucker.
I nod her way and try to project Millie’s saintliness but end up giving the girl a tight, tucked-lip Protestant smile.
The girl returns my smile with a jolly “Fuck you, bitch.”
I invite her to do the same.
Millie comes over. “Oh, good, you met Nikki.”
Nikki flips us both off and skulks back to the front steps of the church.
Millie watches her depart, concern dimpling her features. “Nikki seems a little down today.”
“Nikki seems a little homicidal today.”
“I’ll just go and check on her.”
Somehow Millie is not repelled by the girl’s shield of steely disdain and plops down next to her. Nikki looks away. Kat hovers beside me, watching Nikki intently.
A Prius honks. The driver leans out of his window, points at the recumbent bike parked in the street, and yells at me to “Move that monstrosity!” I wave for him to go around the bike with an outstretched middle finger. He squeals past, purposely scraping the side of the bike. Sanjeev’s lead pipe construction does a lot more damage to his Prius than the Prius does to the bike. By the time I take my thumbs out of my ears, stop waggling my fingers at the car swerving out of sight, and check back on Millie, Nikki is sobbing in her arms.
The cute, chubby Kat, watching her friend, leans toward me and explains in a whisper, “Nikki’s dog, Zebra Dog, run off.”
“Oh.”
“She’s been waiting for Millie to come so she could talk to her.”
“Uh-huh.”
As Nikki dries her tears, Kat asks me, “Are you an old girl?”
I shrug and smile amiably the way you do when you’re in a foreign country and have no idea what anyone is saying, so you end up grinning and nodding your way into a three-way with a henna vendor and a camel.
When Millie brings Nikki over to us, Millie’s shirt is streaked with inky puddles of eyeliner from where Nikki has cried on her. Nikki is still scowling, but she looks even better with the Marilyn Manson makeup washed off.
“I see you’ve met my buddy Kat,” Millie says, putting her arm around the pudgy girl. Kat bounces worshipful beams between Millie and Nikki. “And you know my friend Nikki.” Somehow Millie manages to get her arm over Nikki’s shoulders even though the girl is half a foot taller than she is. “Girls, this is one of my best friends, Blythe Young. Blythe is hanging with me for a while. A long while, I hope.”
I nudge Millie. “We should probably head back. I need to soak garbanzo beans or scrub grout with a toothbrush or one of the other fun activities I get to do while hanging with you.”
Nikki cuts a wary glance my way. Like me, Nikki receives on the cynical, sarcastic frequencies otherwise known as reality, which Millie and Kat both seem blissfully oblivious to. Nikki narrows her eyes and I feel as if the girl can see right through me and thinks that Millie needs to be protected from me.
Millie answers, “Oh, we don’t have to leave quite yet.”
“If we don’t, your boyfriend is going to get grumpy.”
“Boyfriend!” Kat pops her eyes at Millie. “You have a boyfriend! And you didn’t tell us!”
Millie glares at me. “That’s just Blythe imagining things.”
“Details! Details! Details!” Kat squeals.
Millie used to squeal that exact word at me when we lived together and she wanted to know more about my romantic encounters. But Millie is not in a details mood. In fact, she is plainly pissed off. “Blythe was making a joke. Not a particula
rly funny joke.”
On the way back to Seneca, Millie gives me the silent treatment.
“Millie, I’m sorry, but those kids will never meet Sanjeev.”
“That’s not the point. I asked you never to mention Sanjeev and me.”
“I’m sorry, Millie. I am a jerk.”
“You are a jerk.”
“I just said that.”
“Blythe, I’m not kidding. A promise is a promise and I must have your word on this.”
“You have it, Millie. I’m sorry. Really truly sorry. I screwed up and I won’t ever do it again.”
Millie nods but doesn’t say anything, and I make a note to myself to seriously never ever say anything, to anyone, ever again about Sanjeev. Then, as we pass the Pi Phi sorority house, Tara-like with its Greek pillars and Old South plantation style, I recall an event Wretched Xcess coordinated there when a former sister married a young tech baron rich enough to rent the place for his bride’s dream wedding. The ice cherub sculpture with handmade vodka flowing through his plumbing would have kept Millie and her boys in eggs, tortillas, and condiments for a year. This realization causes me to ponder yet another significant question: “So, you don’t actually have a job. Who pays your rent and buys the eggs and stuff?”
“Another question I thought you’d never ask. Wow, Sleeping Beauty, you are really starting to wake up.”
Penance for Our Sins
EXFOLIATE.
That is all I can think as I glance around at the women packed into the living room for this meeting of the Old Girls. Millie, who is at the center of the gathering, has made a sign reading WELCOME SENECA HOUSE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION. I recognize a few faces, since many of the women lived in the house during my first tenure.
The room is aswirl in more formless flax, hemp, linen, nubby cotton tunics, rebozos, and stretch-waist pants than a yoga instructors’ conference.