Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (18 page)

I
got lost on the way to Monterey once. It was years ago, and my sister Cheryl and I were driving there from southern California. The route was simple, an eight-hour shot down the freeway, but we were at that monstrously invincible fake-I.D. age, that sun-baked, silver-ring-on-every-finger age. In short, we were drunk and drugged, and basically lucky beyond measure that we ever survived to become the craggy, bleachy-haired ex-beach tramps with matching laugh lines that we are today. God, we were idiots.

Such amiable idiots. We started the road trip on a whim in the middle of the night, and I keep remembering the quiet lightning that fractured the blackness in the far-off horizon. Every few minutes there was this staggering display of silent radiance, like a big wizard in the distance was performing powerful spells. “Did you see that? There it is
again
!” we’d holler. I guess that’s what got us lost—looking
for the lightning—because eventually we decided that we wanted to be in the middle of the storm.

But we lost the lightning and never got close to the storm. Weird, I remember thinking from the front seat, no matter how fast we drive, the clouds are always ahead of us. Eventually the sun rose and the sky became evenly brilliant, and after much meandering we decided to follow our original plan, which was to track down one of our childhood homes, a place we simply referred to as “the pink house.”

I have trouble remembering why the pink house held a particular fondness for us, because by that time we had moved, literally, every year of our lives. I was five when we lived at the pink house. It was there that our little sister, Kimberly, lost her shoes, and we made her a new pair from fabric scraps in hopes of keeping our father from kicking our asses when he found out that her good ones were gone. Kimberly’s new shoes looked like plaid biblical sandals, and our father wasn’t fooled for a second. “No, really,” we cried as we dodged him between the moving boxes that were like permanent furniture at all our addresses, “She outgrew her other pair.”

“Dad was always getting pissed at us for losing things,” we laughed while we were lost that day. He even used to blame us for getting
him
lost during all the cross-country moves we made. We proved to be bad map readers on car trips, issuing random instructions like “take a right at the red dot.” After that, we were relegated to the backseat. “You’re a disgrace to the daughters of traveling trailer salesmen everywhere,” he chided us affectionately.

Driving around, Cheryl and I finally, via Iceland, I think, found the pink house. It had lost its original paint and was now a sort of maple color, but we recognized it from a small set of concrete steps imbedded in the grass that circled the terraced front yard like a little arena. “This is where Dad sat, right here,” Cheryl said, pointing to a specific spot on the concrete. She was referring to the only intact family photo we have to this day, which was taken while we all sat on those steps. “Kim was on his lap, I was next to him, you
were on Mom’s lap, and Jim was next to you,” she sighed, finished.

I guess it was important to her to find that exact spot. I’m looking at that picture right now, and in it the sun is beaming on the six of us, and Kim is wearing the shoes she later lost in the park. My father is the age I am today, and looking closely, I can see that on his left hand he wears a ring. I recognize it as his signet ring from the army. I wonder what happened to that ring. I didn’t even learn he’d served in the army until after he just up and died one day. Soldiers attended his burial, and they handed me the folded flag from atop his coffin to keep.

I wish they hadn’t done that. I wish they had handed it to my brother or someone else, because it wasn’t even two months later that I was moving again and that flag fell off the back of my friend’s El Camino while we were driving down the San Diego freeway. The flag billowed like a patriotic parachute as it caught car grille after car grille. His Bible was in that box too. I lost my daddy’s Bible too. Jesus God, looking back, I realize how I was always losing things. I lost my father’s flag and his Bible and probably that ring too. I lost every opportunity I had to find my way back to the bond we shared, like the one we had when we lived together in the pink house. I lost the lightning and never got close to the storm, didn’t I? I lost the point of it all, didn’t I?

Family photo

It’s
not like me to flash my tits in public—and I’m still suspicious over whether this actually happened, since I consider the three friends who testified to the act totally unreliable sources—but in my defense I’d like to say that we were in Key West. Key West is a place where people party until their senses are so deadened they wake up days later crusted to the bottom of a dock like human barnacles, and where, in some places, very well-muscled men tend bar in their boxer shorts, and where, on Halloween, it’s not uncommon to see tribes of totally naked women walking the streets wearing painted-on costumes. So the sight of my unimpressive chest is really
no big deal
. If it happened at all.

“It happened,” laughed my friend Jim. “You had to be there,” he continued, knowing that, in any real sense of the phrase, I wasn’t. We were sitting at Harpoon Harry’s, one of the more popular breakfast spots on the island, probably because it’s easy to crawl there, crab-like, from the Schooner Wharf bar, a dockside party mecca frequented
by the barely ambulatory bunch of salt licks that make up the local crowd of “regulars.” Nearby is another wharf bar and restaurant, Turtle Kraals, the place where my reported peekaboo occurred. If it happened at all. Accompanying me for breakfast that morning was the same cohort from the evening before; my other friend Paul; and a new acquaintance named Scott, a waiter at Margaritaville who was the person through whom Jim and I were to contact Paul, because a few days before Paul had left an ominous message on my answering machine that went something like, “Hollis, I’m in Key West. I’m hungover, homeless, and broke. Help.”

So, a few days later, Jim and I went to Key West and found Paul sitting on a bench, disheveled and unshaven, with a cigarette casually pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He had been living in a hammock on a boat for two weeks, showering out of an elevated plastic bag filled with sun-warmed water. He looked like one of the walking lost toys that that tropical land is famous for attracting. There’s a well-known danger to visiting Key West—you may get hit with a kind of blissful island dementia and melt into the crowd of colorful seamen and tall-talkers, drinking and dreaming, never to return home again. Everyone is susceptible.

A few days after we found Paul, at the culmination of a collective Key West–wide debauch, we were all sitting at Harpoon Harry’s, where Jim and Scott were exaggerating the number of maitais I’d belted the night before. “She had seven or eight just while I was sitting with her at Boston Billy’s,” exclaimed Jim.

“I counted twenty,” said Scott, a statement that made me snort with a disbelieving guffaw. Let me put it this way: It’s more possible to pass a planet through the birth canal of a fourteen-year-old Olympic gymnast than it is for me to consume twenty cocktails without waking up to see my bloody, severed head at the foot of my bed. On that morning I had been completely hangover-free, I pointed out, which was incontrovertible proof of my frugal alcohol consumption the night before. My foggy memory must have been due to a delayed bout of jet lag.

“It’s the Keys,” explained Jim. “The closer you get to the equator, the better you feel after a bender.”

“Besides,” said Scott, “you could still be drunk.”

After much investigative backtracking on my part, I determined that the boob-baring incident was nothing more than a tall tale evolved from the fact that the knot on my sarong was loose, making way for the possibility that, in a very demure, understated manner, an excess amount of cleavage could have been uncovered. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. If it happened at all.

With that mystery solved, Paul, Jim, and I bid Scott good-bye and hit the highway back up to Miami, where we got on the plane and patted each other on the back for staging such a successful escape from the alluring, velvety warm grip of Key West, the most enticing place on the planet to drop
off
the planet. One and a half hours later, when the plane descended through the clouds, we saw the cityscape of Atlanta, and reentered its atmosphere with all of our ensuing responsibilities, obligations, and other soul-sucking burdens still in place. When the plane landed and ground to a stop, we sighed and gathered our belongings along with our strength to face reality—and that’s only if we ever got on the plane at all.

Jim in postcard photo

Thank
God Lary’s cat didn’t die. This is the second day in a row I forgot to feed her, so I realized I better get off my ass and pass her some kibble, because Lary prides himself on his absolute lack of attachment to anything on earth except that cat. If he came home to a carcass he’d have to track me down and rip my face off my skull.

I raced over to Lary’s place all worried his cat would be scratching at the doorjamb in little kitty death throes, sputtering and stuff, and who wants to walk in on that? And then there’s the maggot factor. When, as a totally unsupervised seven-year-old walking home from the liquor store with two packs of Salem menthols for my mother, I once came across a dead cat in the gutter. Being seven and propelled by insanity, I decided to find a stick and flip it over.

Jesus God
. It was all furry and fine on top, but underneath it was boiling with maggots like that piece of meat on
Poltergeist
. I’ll never forget it. Before I flipped it, I was thinking maybe I could take it
home and present it to my mother as the perfect pet on account of its being dead and not needing expensive vaccinations or anything.

In the past she had reacted favorably to such offerings, like when I presented her with that poisoned fish wrapped in toilet paper I found floating in a polluted tributary behind the park. She was so attentive as she took the fish straight to the trash pail, graciously thanking me. That type of consideration was a rarity in my household, and I was hoping to score some more. But those maggots sucked all the fun out of everything. For days afterward I’d spontaneously break into shivers like a little alcoholic in detox.

I finally got Lary’s door open, and I say “finally” because he lives in that former candy factory with a complicated iron gate for a front door. Thank God I got in, because Lary loves the shit out of that cat. If anything bad happened to her he would be boneless, I mean just a big, boneless, jibbery mess of flesh. And I know how he feels. I’ve known Lary since back when we both thought there was nothing that could keep us tethered to the world. We were free and unfettered, with a big ball in our court called “nothing to lose.” Then he got himself that cat, and I got myself…well, him, I guess, and Daniel and Grant. If anything bad happened to them I would be boneless too. Just a quivering, useless bag of boneless larvae. Jesus God, that is scarier than an entire pit of ticks.

Finally I found Lary’s cat, alive but a little shrunken on account of her fast and all. She puffed up fine after I forced three cans of food down her throat.