Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (15 page)

My
sister Cheryl called and asked me to visit over the holidays. It was seven in the morning her time, and she was drunk. But I can respect that. She’s a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas, her shift ended at 3
A.M
., so she was four hours into a hard-ass happy hour, and she missed me. Only it’s not the
me
me she misses—not the struggling homeowner-wannabe me, the working Joe with no money me. No, she misses the
old
me.

“Holly, what happened to you?” she slurs. “You used to go to nightclubs half naked, stay up all night dancing. You used to be so wild.”

“Cher,” I sigh, “I used to shit in my diapers too, and I don’t do that anymore either.”

Las Vegas holds fond memories for us. Our mother was a “junket” junkie, and she’d take us out of school to accompany her on eight-hour bus rides to Binion’s Horseshoe along with fifty or so other booze-addled revelers, each with a fistful of coupons and endless buckets of nickels dancing in their dreams.

Cheryl, in particular, loves the way it was back then, back when she and I were best friends because we moved so much we were unable to get to know anyone else. In grade school we played “Puff, the Magic Dragon” so many times that our father’s portable stereo practically imploded under the strain. We thought we knew the words too. “Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the Ottomiss…” we sang.

Later we realized Puff actually frolicked in the “autumn mist,” but by then “Ottomiss” had morphed in our minds into an actual place like the Emerald City or Cinderella’s palace. To us, in Ottomiss, big luminous castles beckoned in a landscape that looked like a giant unearthed chest of treasure, with sparkling jewels spilling over the side, where you could bound through fields of marigolds as soft as the eyelashes of a million angels with your best friend by your side. It was a place where big dreams came true.

But then I figured out what the song was really saying, especially that whole crappy part where Jackie Paper grows up and dumps poor Puff, who then spends eternity in an empty paradise wailing for his lifelong friend. I hate that part. I mean, how hard would it be for Jackie to go back? Just for a visit, just to press his head against Puff’s sweet scaly brow and, for a day, frolic in the Ottomiss again? How hard
is
that? But Jackie never goes back, and Puff remains trapped in a land that no longer exists.

“Fuck
this
,” I said, and never played the song again.

Sometime after that, Cheryl and I grew apart. Later, I realized it occurred when my parents separated. Cheryl was eighteen, and she used that opportunity to move in with her boyfriend. My brother had long moved out on his own, leaving my younger sister and me, both minors, to live by ourselves for a while in a beachside apartment that both our parents had temporarily vacated, not that they didn’t check in on us occasionally. This kind of left us feeling like we had little to rely on.

Cheryl especially, because she’d always been somewhat of a tortured sentimentalist. She still talks about her beloved cat, Casey, who for years used to meet her at her car door when she parked across the street after returning home late at night. Back then she was known for her beaming beauty fetchingly coupled with her penchant for hard partying. She still talks about Casey because she couldn’t rely on much. She couldn’t rely on me not to move across the country, she couldn’t rely on her parents, she couldn’t rely on her boyfriends not to abuse her, she couldn’t even rely on herself, really, not to keep making bad decisions in her life. But at least she could rely on her cat to meet her at her car door when she parked across the street. But Casey got old, and one night he was killed by a car right there on the street as he crossed it to meet her.

At nine in front of the famous Binion’s Horseshoe $1 million display

I wish I could say Cheryl has never been the same since, but she has been exactly the same—the same crazy behavior, the same wild nights, the same fantasy of eternal youth. I know she’s simply grasping for some purpose to lend to her passing years, and I know we’re alike. I just hide my panic better than she does is all.

“Can’t you come visit?” she asked, pausing to puff on her cigarette. “Just for a day?”

I said I’d come because, all around her, even at that early hour, I know the skyline is awash in flashing lights, the Strip is laid out like a magic miniature golf park for massive giants, and there are bright marquees depicting buckets of riches and the promise of dreams granted, and in the middle of it all is my sister, Cheryl, and I don’t want her to be trapped in a land that no longer exists.

I’d
had two cocktails and it wasn’t even 10
A.M
., which led me to conclude that I loved Las Vegas. How could anybody not love it? It’s so radiantly cheap and impure. Right then I was in the Venetian Hotel on the Strip, a hotel that is the total ass end of tacky, and as much as I would have loved to wallow in the chlorinated canals of the replicated Italian village upstairs, I preferred the casino on the ground floor even better because I liked the noise.

“One more,” I told the bartender.

He asked me where I’m from. I told him Atlanta, even though that’s not entirely true. I was born in Burbank but haven’t been back since, so I’ve learned not to take the question too literally. People are too attached to hometowns, I think, so I let mine go and just pick a city, and I would pick Las Vegas, only I tend to confine my answers to places I’ve actually lived.

The bartender, who is from Denver, notices that I’m one-handed
today, because the other is clutching my backpack with a lobster-like grip. I might love Vegas, but I still don’t trust the crusty pocket-picking flotsam who live here. “Here’s some advice,” said the bartender. “If someone tries to steal your purse, let go.” It turned out his friend’s daughter was knifed in downtown Vegas by a purse snatcher because she wouldn’t let go.

My parents’ wedding chapel in Las Vegas, behind the Frontier Hotel

“Let go,” he repeated.

I was eight when I first came to Vegas. For us, it was a family vacation spot before the city figured out it was profitable to bill itself that way. For my mother, who was uncomfortable with conventional displays of parental endearment, gambling became the perfect conduit for family bonding. “Don’t get suffocated by your safety net, kid,” she’d narrate as she played. “Let go of your chips and go for it.”

On one of these family outings, I found a menu of services from the notorious Chicken Ranch whorehouse and learned that in the market of legalized prostitution the going rate for a tongue bath was only $95.
Is that all?
I thought, and to this day I can’t think of a harder job than being a whore.

“Give me that!” my mother shrieked, trying to snatch the menu from my hand. “I said
let go!
”

I let go of it, but she didn’t. Years later I found the menu again in a box of her possessions, along with her wedding bouquet. The fragile rosebuds were browned and curled like the little fists of a half a dozen mummified babies. It was hardly recognizable from the
day my parents got married thirty-seven years earlier at the Little Church of the West behind the Frontier Hotel on the Vegas Strip. Their wedding picture shows my father looking dapper, like Desi Arnaz, and my mother looking like she had no idea what’s in store for her. In the picture they were holding hands, but eventually they let go, and I mean that more than in the literal sense.

During the famous MGM Grand Hotel fire twenty-six years later, which killed eighty-four people, heat and smoke had trapped people and pushed others to the outer ledges of the upper floors, where news cameras were trained on them as they clung, dangling, from their useless skytop perches. I hoped the people would hang on, but they didn’t. One woman’s skirt bellowed above her head as she fell. “No, no, no,
no!
” onlookers cried in anguish. Another group of victims was found in an elevator lobby. They died clutching the suitcases they refused to let go, having wasted valuable time packing them before attempting to evacuate.

Still other victims were found in one of the hotel rooms, five of them holding hands and looking like they were asleep, except for the shadows of soot around their nostrils and mouths. They had let go, but not of each other. My guess is that they ventured as far as they could, then, upon realizing the inevitability of their predicament, decided not to cling to things like frantically packed suitcases or the hotel’s unforgiving exterior ridge but instead spent their final moments in the simple comfort of human contact.

Parents’ wedding

So there you have it: perfect
examples of the importance of knowing when to let go, and when not to. It’s like gambling, I guess. Back before my mother had gotten good at gambling, she used to play the nickel slot machines at Circus Circus, while trapeze artists performed without a net in the atrium above the casino floor. When she won her first twenty-dollar jackpot, my mother, uncomfortable with most human contact, surprised me by hugging me tightly in her excitement. It’s no wonder I love Vegas, because it takes a long time for four hundred nickels to fall out of a slot machine.