Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (11 page)

Grant
—in a move no one could have predicted—has become a professional bartender at an actual bar on Ponce de Leon Avenue called the Local. How the hell this all happened I have no idea. In all the years I’ve known Grant the only interest I’ve seen him take in cocktails was his penchant for demanding, like a petulant emperor, that they be handed to him. He once made a mean pitcher of Midori margaritas, and when he’s on that diet of his he can throw together some pungent cups of vodka and unsweetened, unfiltered, unflavorful cranberry juice that he always tries to push off on us but, really, it’s about as easy to swallow as a big bowl of sperm. But let’s face it, bartending involves, like,
ingredients
and stuff, some of them probably perishable.

Until recently Grant didn’t even own a refrigerator. Or an oven, come to think of it, and at parties he simply served loaves of bread. You would think that if there was a bartender hiding under his
freckled hide somewhere, there would have been maybe a cabinet in his kitchen with liquor in it other than the signature big bottle of vodka that he probably gargles with before going to bed. The making of drinks was not a talent I ever suspected he possessed.

In fact, I’m suspicious of his ability to
make
anything. Like I personally
made
curtains to cover my windows. I finally had to after I woke up one morning with perverted workmen leering down at me through my bedroom’s clerestory windows as I slept topless in tatty underwear. So I bought reams of cheap muslin, and damn if I didn’t fashion some stylish window treatments that only occasionally resembled the cast-off grave garments of mummies. Grant, on the other hand, draped lacy kitchen aprons across his windows. Of course it looked fabulous, but it’s not like he
made
them. I mean he just
put
them there, so why should he get credit for that?

Once we had to construct a vendor tent so Daniel could showcase his work at a folk-art festival (right before Daniel discovered he hates folk-art festivals because they’re too much like carnivals). So there we were—or I should say there
I
was—trying to construct the booth while Grant and Daniel spent their time twirling the tent poles like batons.

So Grant didn’t make that booth, I did. All Grant made was a crude bullhorn from a rolled-up piece of poster board so he could blare like a sideshow barker, “Come see the artist formerly known as Daniel, now known as the ‘Festival Whore’!!” And, Jesus God!, Daniel soon discovered he
hated
being there and having to sell his art like flea-market flotsam. Grant just laughed. “
Festival Whore
!!” he barked over and over through the bullhorn.

That day, after the festival whore fiasco, we toasted the sunset from the top of the Telephone Factory, where Daniel and I live. That was the first time Grant told us it was our duty to catapult one another into greatness. “Dare to leap,” he said, and he acted like he was going to leap off the top of the building. Daniel and I did nothing to stop him; we knew there were bushes below that would probably break his fall.

“Clarity” is ironically Grant’s mantra, and he uses it when he’s making us be clear about what we want to accomplish in life. He’s not so perfect, what with his twelve different careers in the past six months, and his retirement that lasted, like, five minutes. Now he’s into this bartending thing, which is a complete comet out of nowhere.

But Grant thinks it all makes sense. “It’s all coming together,” he says excitedly. Bartending, he argues, combines all his passions—people, conversation, creativity, sex, and
booze
—all essential ingredients of the cosmic cocktail that is his life. It is all coming together to create the momentum that will catapult him to heights heretofore unknown. And I guess I can’t say Grant never
made
anything after all. Looking back to the Telephone Factory rooftop that night, Grant made us beholden to one another. “Our duty,” he said, “is to catapult each other into greatness!”

We are not great yet, but at least we sometimes experience moments of immeasurable glee. At least we are not wholly miserable every minute of the day, and we know we have made one another into what we are today.

I
swear, I had no idea it was bad practice to stand on top of your toilet tank. But even Grant says he knew this, which is humbling because if you ask me he is always on top of something scary. Let’s not forget that his living room had once actually been
used
as a toilet, with mummified curls of human crap right there on the carpet—and Grant stood there in the middle of it all and handed the owner a check for less than what you’d spend on a used truck. He fixed it up very nice too, but in all the work he did on that place, and especially in the bathroom, all the cleaning and scraping and painting and decontaminating, he never stood on the top of the toilet tank in order to reach places to get it done.

“Hell no,” he says, “you could bust a bolt and be knee-deep in sewage in no time.”

Actually, it takes about a month to get knee-deep in sewage. Today my place smells like a stadium urinal, all because I thought
I’d been clever to paint my whole powder room without needing to drag in a step stool, because to me, that toilet tank was
begging
to be stood on. I’ve been standing on toilet tanks my whole life. The first time was after I hit my cousin Kelly across the head with my shoe.

When I was five and she was about seven, my cousin Kelly used to be trusted to look after me, but all she ever did was dress up in her mother’s underwear in the name of the Lord and strangle me unconscious. “Holly, it’s Jesus, I command that you bow before me,” she would call from under the flapping laundry line behind her house. She wore my aunt’s white slip pulled over her T-shirt and dungarees. It billowed around her ankles like a delicate nylon shroud.

“No!” I’d yell from my hiding place in the small vineyard my aunt and uncle cultivated farther back on their California property. “You’re gonna choke me again!”

“I won’t! I’m Jesus!” she responded incredulously. “Now get over here!” So, as always, I went. I was afraid not to. I had seen Kelly shit in the woods and wipe her ass with an oak leaf. A girl capable of that was capable of anything. I knew she would strangle me, but the evil you know is less terrifying than the evil you don’t, and I didn’t know what she would do if I made her chase me down. So I went, knelt before her, and waited to feel her bony fingers around my neck. Later I’d regain consciousness and see her face hovering over me, feigning concern. The slip was off, the evil Jesus gone, and she was Kelly again.

I remember Kelly’s father kept a “game room” in their house, which had lamps with leather shades and bases made of clustered deer antlers. There were mounted animal heads on the walls and a real bear-skin rug in front of the fireplace. I used to lie down and stare into the bear’s marble eyes, touch the necrofied flesh on its forehead, and wonder how such a majestic creature ended up a lowly footpad for this freaky family. “Please wake up and eat the evil Jesus,” I silently implored it, but even at the age of five I knew revenge would have to come at my own hands.

So I plotted and decided that the best method of attack would come at a moment of complete repose, when Kelly was in her “Kelly” phase, her mother’s underwear folded neatly in a drawer and not accessible as a shroud. That moment came when she was in the game room, her back to me, talking to a friend on the phone. I had planned to clout her on the head with one of the antler lamps, but at the last second decided that my own shoe would work fine.

“STOP CHOKING ME!” I shrieked, and swung the shoe in my hand with all my might. Startled, Kelly turned to look at me just in time for the thick rubber sole to make a satisfying
thwack
against the side of her skull. Her ensuing scream was shrill enough, I’m sure, to make her friend’s ear hemorrhage on the other line. I darted away and locked myself in the bathroom.

But the lock was one of those flimsy kinds you can pop from the other side as easily as a pushpin, so I ended up having to barricade the door with my own body—bracing my feet against the toilet tank—while my cousin shoved from the other side. I can’t believe I kept her at bay until my mother intervened, at which point my aunt asked her to never leave me there again.

“Kid,” my mother said in the car on the way home after I told her what happened, “I’m glad you locked yourself in the bathroom.”

Because of that experience, I always thought toilet tanks were as sturdy as tree trunks, and stood on them almost every chance I got, especially since my mother kept a coin bank on the top shelf of our bathroom towel rack, which was accessible to any adolescent by simple toilet-tank ascent.

The bank was in the shape of a little wooden beer keg, with a slot on top to receive the coins but no other opening to retrieve them once they were inside. My mother said that’s what she liked about it, the inability to put out what she’d put in. But with tweezers and a light touch, I became quite deft at putting out what my mother had put in.

I used to take the money to the liquor store where the proprietor used to masturbate behind the counter when kids came in to
buy penny candy. But it’s not like I knew what he was doing back there, not at first anyway. I just thought he was just taking a really long time to tuck in his shirt. Then the day came when he showed me the picture of two people copulating, and tried to get me to agree that it was a good idea.

It was a hot day, and I was wearing a bathing suit with a big buckle on the front, a mini version of Ursula Andress’s famous Bond-girl getup, and damn if he didn’t reach out and grab ahold of that buckle and start pulling me back behind the counter with him! Jesus God, there I was about to be molested by the man who sold me my mother’s menthol cigarettes, and I couldn’t think of what to do except get to the bathroom and lock the door. I knew where it was because, junior klepto that I was, I used to steal candy from this very place by packing my pockets, walking into the restroom, and pitching the candy through the window to the alley on the other side. Either a friend was waiting there, or I’d simply retrieve the contraband later at my leisure. So after I extricated my bathing-suit buckle from this man’s bony claw, I ran straight to the bathroom, where I locked the door, climbed the toilet tank, and this time pitched
myself
out the window. That is how I escaped from Horny Pete.

I have my mother to thank for it, I think, because if she had not stood up for me at my cousin’s house like she had, I don’t know if I’d have had the mettle to do what I did at the liquor store. She instilled that grit in me, and over time I’ve started to feel better about things, even about taking the coins from my mother’s bank, because no matter how hard some will try, for good or for bad, in the end no one—I mean
no one
, not even you—can put out what your mother has put in.

As
I looked for houses to buy, I underwent pre–separation anxiety from the place I rent at the Telephone Factory, a beautiful loft in Poncey Highlands that I could never afford to buy even if I sat ass up in stirrups every day producing Aryan eggs to sell on the black market. The only reason I could afford to rent it was because the developer received funds to renovate via a bond referendum, a condition of which was that eleven of the loft apartments be made available to “moderate income” tenants. He allocated those units to ten struggling artists and me, a writer. So Daniel and I lucked out and got fabulous lofts. He lives across the hall from me and has a huge patio courtyard, while mine has a view of the city and is so big I can ride my bike around in the living room. The rent is only $475 a month, and all we have had to do to stay there is keep our income under $22,000 a year. Clermont Lounge is right up the street too, and we go there about once a week. On one visit, Grant caused the big stripper we
call “Butterball” to fall off the stage by making her reach too far for her dollar tip. She hit the ground like a sack of cement.

Grant, of course, has his nice new crack house to call home, and doesn’t live here, and Lary has the pile of cinder block and bent steel that used to be a candy factory to call home. Lary owns his house, but even so, Daniel and I used to consider ourselves to be the lucky ones. We thought we caught a cosmic break with our loft spaces, since all we had to do to maintain the status quo was to stay failures.

That has been harder than you might think. When we moved there, Daniel and I both joked about how we were going to be eighty years old and still living there with no money. I would be on stage at the Clermont, with my walker, shaking my ancient tits like two sacks of taffy to make a buck. That sounded fine to me at the time. But then we met Grant, and he kept buying houses, fixing them up and selling them, and making truckloads of money—and he made it look
so easy
. He told Daniel that he could buy a house with a credit card, and that he even had the house picked out for him right across the street from his own, a little shotgun shack that had been foreclosed on. Daniel tried too, and made an offer, but it went to another guy, some artist who moved into the neighborhood to be near Grant. The house sold for fifteen thousand dollars.

I admire Daniel for making that effort, because we were both fugitives from our bad credit reports. His stemmed from a defaulted student loan and accompanying fees that had multiplied over the years like tribbles on the starship
Enterprise
. My own credit problems stemmed from a post-college period during which I lived like a soap-opera actress on the income of a part-time receptionist. But at least Daniel still
has
credit cards. At that point, I didn’t even have that anymore. Here’s what a crawling piece of wasted space I am: First, I got turned down for credit at one of those big, blow-ass department stores that goes out and recruits future credit card holders by having salespeople shove applications through your car window as you’re driving past the mall. I was curious
why they had turned me down, seeing as how they’re not that picky, this department store, having extended a huge reservoir of credit to my crusty friend Lary, who basically lives in an alley. So I wondered, what’s with the rejection? I popped Equifax a request for my credit report.

Upon inspection of said credit report I discovered a mysterious lien filed against me in the state court of my hometown of San Diego. Somebody had sued me, won, and I’d never known anything about it. Because of my fugue-like fear of bureaucracy, I wanted to move to the hills and live under a lean-to fashioned from sticks and a pair of piss-stained homeless man’s pants. “They’ll never find me here,” I’d cackle, while spearing rodents with my foot-long, tobacco-colored toenails. My own mother once got a notice saying she owed the IRS $1,500, but rather than pay it, she, like,
went underground
. Within a few years, that debt had increased to $150,000. Stuff like this scares me to death. It’s terrifying that everything can be taken from you just because of a blip on some government computer that could be wrong, but you can’t fight it because you don’t know where to start. But my mother didn’t have everything taken from her. She made sure to divest herself of everything before that could happen, and she never let herself get too attached to
things
. Even on the day my little sister almost drowned, my mother’s gratitude over a tragedy diverted could only be shown by taking Kimberly by the shoulders and shaking her briskly.

Then some molecular piece of me that rebels against the dominant walking-apology part of my personality stopped and said,
Hey, maybe the lien is a mistake, so before you tunnel underground at least attempt to rectify it
.

So after letters to both Equifax and the San Diego court system resulted in a big, huge cavernous basket of
nothing
(I mean, at least they could have sent me a swastika lapel pin), I actually
flew
to San Diego, rented a car, and spent a day doing a fire drill of every municipal building in the city until I tracked down the demon lien. It had been awarded to the franchise tax board of California, which
issued the case because, so partial were they to my presence in their territory, they had mistakenly continued to assess California taxes against me after I became a resident of Georgia. The sum total—with fees, penalties, and various other drippings the bureaucratic quagmire loves to attach to crap like this—was more than I could afford even if I spent the rest of my life giving bionic blow jobs for cash.

So I swallowed my fear and went straight to the state tax office. I was sure they’d slap the cuffs on me the second I came through the door, but instead a tax technician graciously decided to help me. I know she was gracious because she told me so.

“I like to help people, so you’re lucky you got me,” she said as she set about eradicating the false tax assessments. Now here’s where I’m the crawling piece of wasted space: After having my credit fucked up and having to interrupt my life and fly across the country because of a falsehood her office generated, I, like,
believed
her. Boy, am I lucky, I thought, and genuflected as I backed out of the door.