Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (17 page)

I
miss college. Not because of the gaggle of creatively starved fascists who were my professors but because back then I could
drink
. My favorite cocktail in college was this concoction called “Smith & Kearns.” It contained, as I remember, brandy, Kahlua, cream, vodka, soda, some other stuff, about a bucket of fermented potatoes, frog parts, ground glass, and two cans of lighter fluid. The bartender needed protective goggles to mix it. He then poured it into a large trough and we, the future of America, would soak our heads in it until it was time to take midterms.

I
think
that’s how it was, anyway, seeing as how my memory is kind of foggy. There’s probably video footage of it somewhere, and I’m sure it’ll show me having fun (and probably explain all those little mystery bruises people wake up with after a bender). Now, though, I can’t drink more than two glasses of wine without having to stop and look for my liver, which by that time will have escaped
from my body out of self-preservation and can be found on the road hitchhiking its way to a healthier host. “Get back in my body!” I’ll have to yell to it, and my liver will just keep walking, waving me off. “I warned you,” it’ll say. “I’ve had it. The Chinese’ll pay good money for me.” Eventually we reunite, but not until I promise to remember I’m not in college anymore.

Because in college, for example, I could start out with tequila (“I’d like the worm extra bloated, please”), switch to kamikazes, and by the end of the evening be rifling through the cabinets like Kitty Dukakis looking for hair spray to mix with my Mountain Dew. The next day I’d bounce out of bed, read a book by Joan Didion, and have the report finished in time for my one o’clock class.

But by the time you get into your thirties, sometimes your body basically decides to issue a stop-loss order against any more alcohol damage, without warning or asking your permission or anything. It does this by suddenly making your hangovers so hellacious that they couldn’t hurt more if your brain actually had, during your sleep, transformed into a toxic ball of molten poison that shoots volcanic acid from your eye sockets every few seconds. This is your body’s way of saying, “Time for a new lifestyle, lush bucket.”

But the cruelest part is it takes a while before you figure out just how much your body will allow you to get away with. Sometimes you can have that second margarita and feel fine the next morning, and sometimes you feel like your head has been left on a stick outside for eight days under a shower of axes. Essentially it’s up to you to find the balance, so you keep playing hit-and-miss with your puny level of cocktail consumption until you find a happy medium. It’s either that or stop drinking altogether, which I did once…until one day I woke up to find my liver staring at me sternly. “What are you,
dead
?” it said.

When
I came to Atlanta eight years ago, it was in a ’69 yellow VW Bug with the door panel held in place by a roll of duct tape, with French fries permanently bonded to the floorboard under a crust of dried coffee. It cost me two hundred dollars, and it was barely above a moped in the motor evolution. The seatbelt left a streak of rust across the front of my clothes, and if it was raining outside, I got wet inside. Since then I’ve upgraded to Japanese, but when, in a department store parking lot, I saw a woman use her car door to accidentally scrape a thumbnail-sized piece of paint off the passenger side of my relatively new Honda, I thought to myself,
God, I miss my Bug
.

There’s a certain power in driving a crappy car. Take Lary: He drives the rusty, broken, rolling ball of Bondo that used to be a BMW in better days. As an added touch, of course, he has those big plastic biblical characters propped up in the backseat. His car is
worse
than a coffin on wheels, because a coffin would presumably
provide you some protection from the elements. If you get in Lary’s car, insects and birds—thinking you’ll be dead soon enough anyway—will assume permission has been granted to scavenge off your body and will dive at you through the broken skylight, the broken window, or any of the saucer-sized gaps rusted through the frame.

“What are you doing?” I asked him once, when I found him sprinkling potato chips in the backseat.

“Gotta feed the woodland creatures,” he answered.

Once Lary watched through his rearview mirror as some fool in a Saab with a cellular phone stuck to his head backed into his car. The Saab was unscathed but there was a dent the size of a cigar box on Lary’s rear fender, and, get this, Lary
didn’t care
.

“I could have honked,” he said, noting that the accident was avoidable, “but it was worth getting hit just to see the expression on that guy’s face.” The Saab driver insisted Lary take a twenty-dollar bill for the damage. Lary used the money to buy a hundred-pound sack of birdseed.

“You don’t own a bird,” I reminded him.

“It’s for the pigeons so they’ll stop eating the Friskies I leave out for the alley cats,” he said.

The other day Lary looked out his living room window and saw his car sitting in a puddle. Upon closer inspection he discovered that the puddle was brake fluid. “I guess I better get that fixed,” he said, conceding that a car’s ability to stop is almost as important as its ability to go, “or maybe it means I need another car.”

I didn’t bother to point out that he already
has
another car—a perfectly preserved vintage Beemer he keeps covered in his carport—because I know what he means. He needs something disposable. It’s like that millionaire folk artist who, when asked why he lived so simply, answered, “If you own too many things, they start to own you.”

It
all started with the Tuscaloosa Folk Art Festival in October 1995. I went there with Daniel, up until this time referred to as a “real” artist, who was on his way to exhibit his work for the first time in a…well, I guess you would call it a “booth.” Also with us was Grant, the notorious proprietor of “Sister Louisa’s Worldly Possessions in the Church of the Living Room,” who makes his living by just touching things and having them turn to gold. “Dinner’s on me, honey!” is a common phone message from Grant after another of his mysterious, wallet-fattening transactions comes through. None of us know exactly how Grant stays in the black, but we’re almost positive it doesn’t involve the illegal sale of vital human organs.

Grant drove us to Tuscaloosa, with Daniel’s art stacked in the back of his truck and Al Green blaring from the CD player. When we got there none of us knew how to put up the borrowed vendor tent, so I struggled with it on my own until a veteran festival troll
took pity on us and supervised. Soon we were set to go, with me and Grant ready to hock art like carnival barkers, and Daniel…well, Daniel began reciting a mantra that would last him for the rest of the festival. It went something like this: “I hate this. I hate this. I hate this,” said in varying degrees of bile-spitting vehemence.

I guess it wasn’t until Daniel was actually there with his artistic vision displayed like an Amway exhibit for thousands of funnel-cake-greased fingers to fondle that he realized he had posted a huge dollar sign on his artistic soul. Here he was, an artist with pieces in galleries and museums across the country (as well as Mexico and Prague), shucking his work from under a striped awning, across from a man selling candleholders made from bent forks. After the first five minutes, Daniel wanted to tunnel underground. He was a good sport about it, though, nodding approvingly as I excitedly displayed the poodle-shaped toilet-paper cozy that I’d bought a few booths down and laughing when Grant pretended to bellow through a bullhorn, “Come see the artist formerly known as Daniel, now known as the ‘Festival Whore.’”

Daniel, me, and Grant driving to Tuscaloosa Art Fest in Grant’s truck

It was a juried event, and on the last day one of the judges bestowed a ribbon upon Daniel’s booth. Probably because he was almost completely deaf, this judge spoke in a booming voice that carried for blocks. “I think you’re the best artist at the whole festival,” he told Daniel, shouting it loud enough to be heard all the way across the pond. The judge stayed a while, telling us about how he became an ordained minister through the classified ad of a tabloid newspaper. He specialized in performing weddings that expired after one weekend, and once declined a request to perform a ceremony for a marriage that would expire after only one hour. “I’m not gonna marry any premature ejaculators!” he shouted, turning heads all around. We were quite tickled by it.

Fuck
festivals. I’ve felt that way since I went and became a bona fide festival-booth art pimp myself not long ago. Chalk it up to being a little lost, career-wise.

I had a booth where I sold photography and begged friends to bring me beer because I felt trapped, fearing to leave lest some Dunwoody housewife let loose her inner klepto and pilfer one of my framed photographs, which I’d end up practically giving away by the festival’s end anyway. “Take it! Christ!” I’d grumble, funnel-cake flakes in my matted hair.

To this day my friends marvel at the bad luck I’ve had weather-wise at every spring festival I entered, which totaled a whopping two before I packed up my entire frostbitten ass and vowed never to return. Grant didn’t even last that long. I’d talked him and Lary into reserving a booth next to me at the festival. Grant’s contribution featured his Sister Louisa pieces, among them a collection of “Rapture
Shields” touted as protection against the inevitable gang of marauding pagans in the event the biblical prophecy of the Rapture came to light, along with a rack of old aprons. Lary sold gilded shrines.

In truth, the Rapture Shields were a collection of trash can lids, and they got a lot of laughs, but I don’t remember anyone actually getting out a wallet for one. In fact, we were experiencing the coldest weather in spring festival history and couldn’t even take our hands out of our pockets. I swear it must have been thirty degrees,
in May
, and I am completely positive the dark side of the moon had warmer weather than Atlanta that weekend.

Lary is mad at me for making him enter that festival, which is saying a lot, because Lary, though he may be lost like me, and evil, and happily admits he’s a thief, doesn’t hold grudges. But this is different, because he’s pretty protective of his art, and here I’d talked him into hawking it at a spring festival, and not just any spring festival, but the very spring festival that the Gods of Freezing Rain and Wind and Gray Skies and Suffocating High Atmospheric Pressure all picked to converge in the heavens and crap on.

Daniel, Grant, and me on a tram in Prague

Because of the terrible weather, there were maybe one and a half customers at the whole fair, and we’d catch glimpses of them from our abandoned vendor tents, wandering about in the abyss, bundled up like lost Eskimos. “Over here!” we’d shout, like castaways trying to flag down distant rescue efforts. By the end of the first day I’d sold one item, a thirty-dollar sympathy purchase from one of the event coordinators. One guy acted interested in the most expensive piece I had to sell, though, and he even told me he’d go to the ATM to get the cash to pay for it. But the other artists all nodded jadedly when I told them about it. “The ATM getaway,” they sympathized. “They all say that.”

Of course by the second day Lary and Grant had pretty much abandoned their booth and urged me to follow suit, but I refused. So I stuck it out the next day, which is when the monsoon struck. People were leaning into the wind like old ladies trying to push through a stiff revolving door. Grant’s entire rack of aprons blew down the street, along with the sign I had hung on his booth that read “Please Steal This Shit.” By the time the flash flood started, the other artists and I were so exhausted we simply shrugged.
Good
, we thought,
now we get to drown
.

Luckily I’d borrowed my vendor booth from my friend J.R., who is a metal artist. He designed the booth himself, and it was about as easy to put up as an Australian opera house, but just as sturdy. The other artists ran to it for cover, including J.R., whose new store-bought booth was leaking so bad he had to cover his art with a tarp. From there we watched the water roil down the street, sweeping people’s wares along with it, including a rusty tailgate from Grant’s Sister Louisa collection with the words “Get the Hell Outta Dodge” painted across it.

I probably would have curled up and cried right then if not for the guy from the day before, who picked that time to pop in and hand me a wad of wet money fresh from the ATM. “I was afraid you’d be gone,” he said, tucking my most expensive piece under his arm.
No, not gone
, I thought as I took his money,
just lost is all
.