Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (20 page)

I
woke up last Saturday fairly comfortable with my own mediocrity, not knowing what was in store for me at my friend James’s Christmas party. First of all, James should know not to invite me anywhere. It wasn’t so long ago that I showed up drunk and in my underwear (practically) at a party thrown by the Democratic Leadership Convention held in New Orleans during the jazz festival. I came because James invited me, and I danced until my hair unfurled in a lacquer-matted cascade, threw myself at a few men—including, I think, the governor of Indiana—and left clutching a tropical cocktail and a fistful of those little quiches some poor server was offering from a platter. I remember little else of that night, except that James didn’t seem embarrassed by me. He keeps inviting me places. What is
wrong
with that man?

Like why didn’t he
warn
me that Peter Gabriel was coming to his party? How could James let me walk right into his house not knowing I was about to shake hands with a dapper-looking man
whose face I didn’t immediately place and whose name I didn’t immediately hear, but to whom I nodded my greeting anyway, only to discover, midhandshake, that this was
Peter Gabriel!!! Peter Gabriel!!! Jesus God!
standing right there at the end of my outstretched hand, smiling at me like he has any business at all being flesh and bone.

“Peter Gabriel?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“
Solsbury Hill?
”

“Yes.”

Let me give you some background. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a music junkie. On the contrary, there was just the one song, and I didn’t hole myself up with my headphones and rebel against my parents and lament over the big tub of turd the world was turning out to be. Instead, I was confused and timid, and I pretty much had the personality of a cornered rat. My father, the largely jobless alcoholic with big dreams and even bigger fears, and my mother, the missile scientist who took night classes in cosmetology because her own dreams were inversely simple, created a home atmosphere as comfortable as a sealed chamber full of whizzing Ninja blades.

Our household seemed like a sad dungeon for my parents’ faltered hopes, and you couldn’t sit there very long without hearing those broken aspirations flap around the room like trapped bats. This situation was unbearable to a budding romantic like myself, so to escape I’d sit in my sister’s rusty Celica and play Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” over and over on her car stereo, running down her battery and getting the crap beat out of me because of it. But it was worth the reprieve, because when you’re young like that, and sad, you have your hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, and you’re searching for a string to pull you through. And for reasons more corny than the importance I’m placing on it now, my hand found that song. Does that make sense?

Later, after my parents’ inevitable divorce, I moved to Zurich with my mother, and it was there that I realized the true frailty of
her health. During the day she seemed like a perfectly normal weapons specialist with a hankering for beef jerky and Salem menthols, but at night she was crippled by coughing fits, barely able to keep from drowning in the pools of fluid forming in her own lungs. Unable to sleep, I spent nights watching obscure music videos, including the one with Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel clutching each other and singing “Don’t Give Up.”

“Don’t give up,” I’d mentally implore as I sat outside my mother’s bedroom door and waited for her suffering to subside. The day came when I realized that the not giving up wasn’t up to me, and two facts about my mother became apparent: One, that she would be dead soon unless she quit smoking, and two, that she would never quit smoking.

A year later, after she died in my arms, it was one of those times I could have given up but didn’t. I was rescued, I guess, by the safety net I’d woven over time with the threads I’d collected from when I had my hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, searching for a down payment on the possibility that life might not be such a basket of crap after all. So the
least
James could have done is let me prepare. I mean,
Peter Gabriel
. Jesus God! There was Peter Gabriel, at James’s party, at the end of my hand—my outstretched hand. “You, you, you…” I blathered to him, but then the woman who had brought him extricated him from my grasp and led him away. I continued to sputter even after he was gone.

“You helped pull me through,” I finally finished.

Since
when did watching two people tongue each other in public make me so
angry?
When did I get so caught up in this misanthropic, mole-flecked emotional crust that I can’t handle two college kids practically copulating right there on the plaza in Barcelona? What is
with
me?

I mean, there’s other stuff to look at. Even though I’m only here for the day, I don’t want to be blind to beauty, because it’s too easy to tote your personal sensory-deprivation devise with you wherever you go, to grow your own little layers of rust around the cracks in your heart, and heartbreak is the whole purpose of life. Without it we wouldn’t cherish anything. I once had a kindly professor who, in spite of my inner oath to prioritize good grades above ever actually learning something in college, made me understand the poems of T. S. Eliot. “April is the cruelest month,” he quoted from Eliot, and to demonstrate the meaning behind the verse, he led me to the
courtyard outside the classroom. There he pointed to a tree, its branches as brown as old photographs.

“Do you see that?” he asked, indicating the minuscule blossoms forming from the deadness of the branches. “
That
is why April is so cruel.”

I sensed then that later I’d become familiar with how painful it is to bleed life back into an atrophied part of yourself, to come alive after the comfort of deadness. It’s a rite of passage you can’t avoid if you expect to reach levels of enrichment in your life. The passage is easy to bypass though. For example, if my hotel room didn’t happen to smell like a jailhouse toilet I might not have left it at all, opting instead to spend the few hours until my flight home in my usual manner: flicking the porno channels in perfectly timed, three-minute intervals so the hotel wouldn’t bill the movie to my room. But instead I bounded to the street, heading straight for a huge plaza packed with people, including at least four Peruvian flute bands and the before-mentioned young couple dry-humping each other on a street corner next to my bus, where I watched them from a window seat as I waited for the bus to make its timed departure from the plaza.

Get a room
, I silently fumed at the two lovers. I mean, Jesus God! If I wanted a porno peep show I could have stolen it from my hotel. Look at them! Undulating like two electrical wires, attached by their tongues as if their taste buds were capable of keeping each other alive. It’s easy to stare at people like this, because, believe me, they don’t see you looking. So I wasn’t the only one on the bus beating them with my eyeballs. And then the girl extricated herself from her lover’s young tentacles and boarded the bus along with the rest of us.
Oh
, I thought,
so that’s what this is all about
. It’s good-bye.

But Spain isn’t famous for its timely precision, and the bus stayed there with its engine idling long after its scheduled departure. The girl sat two seats in front of me with her hand pressed against the window, with the boy on the other side, his hand opposite hers, separated by the glass. They stayed that way, with eyes
large with longing, angering people all around them until enough time had passed to make it obvious the lovers weren’t putting on a performance. These were, simply, two young people who hadn’t yet learned to lock a chastity belt around their chests, so their hearts were all out there, exposed and flailing like little crabs without their exoskeletons.

As we watched them silently reach for each other, our faces softened. They were two fools with their toes sticking over the ledge of their teens, about to jump, ass first, into the fantastic crap fest that is their twenties, and about to be hit with the brick of knowledge that the world is not their personal balloon on a string after all. Why ram that home ahead of time? How does it harm us to let them sweep through life in ignorance of any true agony other than their longing for each other? How does it harm us to let them not be blind to their own beauty?

The bus lurched forward and began its journey. We watched the boy grow smaller in the distance, his arm outstretched like all your lost hopes trying to remind you they’re not so lost after all. And then we felt it, that stinging of the eyes, and, What is that? That ache. It’s the ache that accompanies the cruelty of coming alive after enjoying the comfort of deadness for so long.

Just
because I’m a flight attendant doesn’t mean I’m not nervous when I fly. I’d hate it just as much as the next person to have bloody chunks of my body shower down on complete strangers. So I try to remember to wear pants when I work, as opposed to the dress option of my uniform, because if the plane crashes, I want to lower the odds of my corpse ending up inside the pages of
Newsweek
with my skirt over my head. And the thought of having to be cleaned up after kind of creeps me out as well. I’d hate to have my kidney end up on someone’s car antenna and not even be able to
apologize
to those people.

I’m not kidding. I really worry about this stuff. That’s why I’m such a safety freak when I fly. Even as a passenger I always put my tray table up, turn off my CD player, and narc on people who don’t put their bags in the overhead bin. A guy once sitting next to me tried to tell me the rules were not about safety but were just arbitrary
commands to keep us occupied since we would all die on impact anyway.

Ha! He better die outta my way. I don’t want to be tripping over his shit while I’m trying to outrun the ball of fire roaring through the fuselage. I count the number of rows to the closest exit in order to feel my way out of a smoke-filled cabin if necessary, and I bitch at people who use their cell phone after we back away from the gate. I don’t screw around.

Because, you know, safety is important. People think it’s our youth we try to resurrect as we age, but actually it’s the feeling of childhood safety and security we spend our lives trying to recapture. Try to recall the last time you felt really, really secure. You were, like,
eleven
, right? I remember back when I believed in Hell, I used to sleep with my father’s Bible under my pillow. It was around then that any illusion that I was somehow protected from evil by my youth and innocence was dispelled.

I think I can trace it to the Hillside Strangler back in the seventies. Two of their victims were pre-teens—tortured horribly before the killers snuffed them out. I lived in their crime territory at the time, a Los Angeles suburb called the Hollywood Riviera, and after the killers were caught I remember hearing they had taken surveillance photos of future victims from their van, and that some of the photos the police found featured a classmate of mine.

Back then it wasn’t customary for throngs of psychologists to descend upon schoolchildren to buffer them from the horrors of the world after reality has reared its hideous face too close to their innocent eyes. We were left to form conclusions on our own, and mine led me to the belief that there is an intrinsic awfulness in the world. Something inside me set about forming the emotional exoskeleton I thought I’d need to survive it. Why dig under levels of magma to reach Hell, when it’s right outside the door?

But I wish I had that early feeling of security back. I do. I wish I had more evidence in my life that I once felt perfectly secure, that I used to run barefoot out the front door to catch blowfish off the end
of a pier. My friend Art has a booth at Antiques on Amsterdam in Virginia-Highland, and I walked in there the other day and spied a sixties Hans Wagner folding chair and just froze. “That
chair
!” I cried. “We had that chair in our living room when I was growing up! I used to sit in it and watch
Match Game
!” I had to have it. I had to add it to the growing throng of secondhand impostor tokens from my past I’ve been collecting in an attempt to re-create a world in which I once felt unfettered by all these pedestrian fears.

I’m no different than almost anyone. Why do you think eight-track tapes are so collectible? It’s not like people
play
them. Instead, they cherish them like a surviving light that leads straight to the magic of their past, to the time when they had buttered toast for breakfast and friends circling outside on bicycles. Back when the world was their personal balloon on a string, before their father’s Bible fell off the back of an El Camino on the San Diego freeway and erupted into a tornado of confetti that rained down on cars spanning two entire exits. Before, back when they felt safe. So don’t tell me it’s not about safety. It’s
all
about safety.