Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (12 page)

My
father used to say I had him to thank for being alive, and I guess that’s technically true, though secretly I always thought I owed my life to a strange man who once held my mother’s hand. Maybe she shouldn’t have told me about him, maybe she should have kept him hidden along with the rest of her secrets she had locked under the chastity belt around her chest most of the time, but she let it crack one day when I was seven, and out came the story. After that I thought about him a lot, the strange man, in a way opposite of a nightmare but somewhat frightening nonetheless.

“What did he look like?” I’d ask my mother.

“He was very nice,” was all she’d say, “and tall.”

It wasn’t any use trying to imagine what I’d be like if my father were not my father, because my mother was already married to him when the strange man saved her life, so it’s not as if she could have taken a cosmic side turn to rescue me from my present self at that
point. No. She was already two kids into a bad marriage and was pregnant with her third. Seven months later she popped me out as easily as an olive pit, and named me after a female character in a newspaper comic strip titled “Smilin’ Jack,” or that’s what she said anyway. She told me many times that she named me after a character in this comic strip, which is about a pilot, and evidently in that strip, Smilin’ Jack had a girlfriend named Holly. I have no idea whether Smilin’ Jack really had a girlfriend named Holly, just that that’s what my mother told me. I don’t see why this matters, anyway. My name is Hollis. The character’s name was “Holly,” which is similar to my name but not my name. I ended up with a man’s name for some reason. A
strange man’s
name.

My mother at the beach

“What the hell are you talking about?” my mother would say, waving the smoke of her Salem menthol away from her face to eye me sternly. “I told you, your name came from a comic strip.”

At this point she would bustle me off before I asked any more questions, maybe send me to the liquor store down the street to buy another carton of cigarettes. At that time she didn’t know the store had been bought by that pervert who sat with his pants unzipped behind the counter. She was under the impression it was still owned by the nice man missing the two middle fingers on his right hand. That man once sold me a bongo drum for seventy cents after I’d misread the price tag. The real cost was seven dollars, not seven dimes, but he’d sold it to me anyway, holding out his chopped-up hand to take my change. But then one day he was gone and the pervert had taken his place. When he showed me that picture from the magazine of two people copulating, the girl in the photo didn’t look like she was having all that much fun. She looked like she was being stabbed to death, and maybe she was.

“Someone should save her,” I remember thinking as I rushed
home.

And being saved brought my thoughts back to the strange man who actually did save my mother, who even afterward never bothered to learn how to swim. I don’t know what she was doing in the ocean that day, anyway, pregnant like she was, in a tatty bathing suit even she admits would have been an embarrassment to her corpse. She always emphasized that point too, because if she had been out there as part of a plan or anything—if she had
meant
to get swept under by a strong wave—she would have worn the blue bathing suit with the ruffle and underwire, not the faded red-and-white polka-dot number that practically hung on her like a hospital gown.

But at least the red suit made her stand out from the rest of the crowd, which is why my father, drinking beer with his work buddies in the parking lot, noticed her heading toward the surf in the distance. It was during one of his rare periods of gainful employment selling trailers for a company based in northern California, and they were at the beach for a corporate-sponsored picnic. “What is she doing?” my father mused to his coworkers as he watched his wife wade into the water. “She can’t swim.”

And then my father laughed, because he didn’t know what else to do. It was his coworker who walked across the sand, out into the ocean, and took my mother’s hand. He was tall, like she remembered, and when the big wave crashed and the water tried to take her he wouldn’t let it. She remembered the powerful pull, she said, of both the sea and the strange man. She remembered she was already chiding herself for not having the foresight to die in the better bathing suit, and she remembered she had already let go, but he hadn’t.

After pulling her out of danger, he silently walked her back to her beach towel. Seven months after that I was born, and seven years after that I learned I had a strange man to thank for it. I would dream about him then, and in my dreams I had a happier mother, one who wouldn’t let go so easily. And I still think about the strange man a lot to this day, especially on those occasions when the world weighs on me like a lead sea. He is nice and tall, and his hand is outstretched.
I take it and he pulls me through.

It
was on one of my house-hunting excursions that I came close to killing a guy. Or maybe he might have survived, but I bet it would’ve hurt, getting hit by my car. The crack dealers standing by would’ve been really mad at me too, probably, for murdering or maiming their customer. For show I’m sure they would have dragged me out of my car and fractured my elbows at least because, you know, I would have
stopped
and all, after hitting the guy. It’s not like I could have
escaped
. So I would have pulled over and offered my arms obligingly, as if to convey, “Sorry I killed your friend, go ahead and break these.”

The guy I almost hit was doing one of those “asshole strolls,”
which is to say he picked the middle of the street as a starting point to walk into traffic, strolling at the speed of a diseased bovine, and in this situation my job was to slam on the brakes and sit there stewing until he was damn good and finished being in front of my car, because the only other choice I had was to run his ass down.

Bleachy-haired honky bitch

Or try to…but it’s not like I
tried
. I would have stopped if I had been paying attention. “Bleachy-haired honky bitch!” is what he hollered at me as my car barely missed him. He probably wasn’t sure which he was more pissed about—the fact that I almost killed him, or the fact that I hadn’t been noticing his nonchalance as he did the asshole stroll into ongoing traffic. This near miss occurred in Capitol View, on the West End, where the crack dealers have the privilege of not paying attention and where bleachy-haired honky bitches like me are supposed to be, well,
scared
.

At least, that is normally the correct order of things in Capitol View. And it was, at first. When I first started looking for houses there I was plenty scared, because a whore had been shot dead while running down the street naked. Usually I obligingly rolled to a stop in reverence of the asshole stroll every time, and I tried to appear appropriately frightened so as to show that their effort wasn’t wasted on me, because who knew whether that was a retractable hacksaw in their back pocket?

But crack dealers and dead whores don’t daunt those who have “vision.” I’m not one of them, mind you, but Grant, who has “vision,” told me that other people with “vision” would be buying houses there, and that it was best to get in on it while I could still buy a house with a monthly note less than what I paid to spay my cat. So I looked for a house, and even though I was plenty scared by
my potential new neighbors, what
really
scared me was the fear I’d make a bad investment.

“Just wait,” said my friend with “vision.” Creative poor people can’t afford Kirkwood and East Atlanta anymore, so the West End is the next wave. It looks like he’s right. Creative poor people are snatching up houses there like pigeons attacking an abandoned picnic. Caravans full of poor arty types come through every weekend, and off they scatter into the Land of Affordable Houses, with their body piercings and cargo pants, retro furniture and upscale-burrito breath. They hardly pay any mind to the crack dealers, who shake their heads dejectedly, knowing it’s a bad day for the neighborhood when bleachy-haired honky bitches can’t brake to accommodate a good asshole stroll.

My
father was the worst kind of bigot—not that he lynched people or anything like that. Not that I know of anyway. In fact, there is not much I know of my father’s past, except that he grew up fatherless in Alabama, and his mother died unexpectedly one night while he was still in college. Though my father was always rumored to be very charming and well liked by all except surly service personnel (such as the local grocery clerk who refused to cash any more of his rubber checks), as a preteen I always wondered what people saw in him.

For starters, his favorite daily ensemble consisted of a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of cutoff shorts made of printed material featuring big cartoon pretzels, and that hat fashioned from flattened Budweiser cans and blue yarn. I have solid evidence of this in an old picture of him taken in front of a monument in Washington, D.C., during one of our road treks across the country. His head crowned in beer cans, and his shirt loud and busy enough to be seen with the
naked eye from other planets, my father is grinning like he had no idea his daughter was dying of embarrassment. In the next frame on the same role of film is a picture of my sisters and me, the two of them smiling sweetly while my face is caught in the perpetual eye roll that became my signature expression that summer. I am swathed in what amounted to be a basket of rags, with the ass of my denim shorts an explosion of fabric patches. A few days prior to these photos, my father had kicked my denim-clad ass all over the city, all because a black man in Arlington Cemetery had asked me for a piece of candy, and I had given it to him. That’s what I mean when I say my father was the worst kind of bigot.

To make it worse, my father never said flat out that we were not allowed to be nice to black people, though you’d think the beatings would have been an effective Pavlovian method of molding our behavior. On the trip to Washington, D.C., my father fumed until we left Arlington Cemetery, barely able to hold back a butt-kicking until an acceptable excuse availed itself. Then an activist handed me a
Roe vs. Wade
pamphlet. At that, my father saw his opening, because I guess in his head people would be more accepting of a father smacking his kid around because of her interest in legalized abortions as opposed to smacking her around for having been nice to a negro. He snatched the pamphlet from my hand and began whacking me upside the head.

This tirade lasted into the evening, and finally I was given a reprieve when my sister befriended the black motel receptionist’s young son, who spent every afternoon waiting in the game room for his mother to finish work and walk him home. My sister brought the boy to our room, where my mother was cooking hamburgers on a hot plate in the bathroom, and asked if he could stay for dinner. With that, I felt my father’s fury lift off me like an escaping toxin, and there it lingered, waiting to be redirected.

On that particular trip we were on our way back to California, where my mother had procured another job designing defense missiles with a computer company that had recently won a large government
contract. We settled on a house south of L.A., on a hill in the Hollywood Riviera overlooking the ocean. Across the street lived a gaggle of rambunctious foster children cared for by a religious couple, and among them was a black girl named Sonya, who was my age. She was the first friend I made there. The ass-kickings lessened in intensity over time, as my father reconciled himself to the permanency of my friendship with this girl. Often he drove us both home from school. He’d heard Sonya had a white father, and while I knew this was not true, I didn’t correct him.

Sonya liked to spout lies like a carnival barker, but I usually enjoyed her stories. One day I discovered she had told our entire middle school that we were half sisters, sharing the same father. To my surprise, even the teachers believed her. This rumor thrived like a seabed, so well that, much later, when my father came to school to sign a permission slip, his identity was actually challenged by the school secretary.

“I happen to know she has a black father,” she said, pointing to me as I stood beside Sonya, “same as Sonya’s father.”

I cringed, feeling my father’s fury begin to grow like the foam in a bottle of shaken champagne. I think Sonya felt it too. I waited for the ass-kicking to commence, but instead my father simply glared at the secretary. “She has a white father,” he hissed, pointing to me, “same as Sonya’s father.”

With that, the secretary’s eyes brightened with realization. Apologizing for the gaffe, she handed my father Sonya’s permission slip to sign as well. Taken aback, his anger abruptly extinguished in mid-flare, my father signed the slip. The secretary seemed charmed by him after that, and as a preteen I wondered what she saw in him. “Let’s go, girls,” my father said, and with that, the secretary saw two girls follow their father out the door.