Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (21 page)

This
New Year, I resolve to be more picky about where I put my tongue. It’s the same resolution I make every year in memory of an oceanography professor I heard about in college, who licked a sea anemone (or maybe it was a sea urchin) during a field trip at the beach to show his students how harmless they are. He was wrong. He’d momentarily confused an anemone with an urchin and forgot which one was poisonous and which one needed a good licking. His tongue swelled to the size of a kielbasa sausage, blocked his airway, and he died writhing on the ground, with his fingers clutching his throat while his students laughed at him hysterically, unaware until it was too late that he wasn’t just putting on a really good act.

I think about that at the start of each new year because—what with serial killers, plane wrecks, weapons, disease, “acts of God,” acts of those who claim to be acting in the name of God, gangs, killer sea creatures, plain stupidity, cholesterol, and those tiny fish
bones that can get caught in your colon—I’m just amazed I survived another year.

I’m always amazed by it, and I always prepare for escape in case the above-mentioned survival is ever threatened. I used to keep an army knife in my pocket because I have a fear of being locked in a trunk. My friend told me about a woman who, after her abductors locked her in their trunk, saved herself by ripping out the wires that led to the taillights. The car was pulled over by an alert policeman, and the killers were foiled. “Can you believe she thought of that?” my friend asked.

Hell, yes, I can. I think of stuff like that all the time. That’s where the pocket knife comes in. I figure I could chisel my way out of the trunk at an intersection or something, or at least spring up after the killer rapists open the trunk and use the knife’s menacing can-opener tool to peck at their eyes. I’d lead the police back to the crime scene hours later, where the killer rapists would still be crawling around clutching at their empty sockets. Am I the only one who thinks of these things?

My pocket knife, though, was finally confiscated by Albuquerque airport security. “I was gonna use that to cut myself free from a malfunctioning seatbelt in the event of a crash,” I whimpered as I saw the guard toss it into a box that contained a massive assortment of clippers, files, tweezers, and, oddly, a curling iron. With the pocket knife gone, now I’ll just have to think of a different way to escape in order to run away from danger.

Running away brings to mind one day back in high school, which I spent ignoring class and driving down the coast of San Diego. I came to a stoplight and suddenly saw all these people jogging. What are they
running
from? I panicked. Should I be running too? This was the year after the PSA crash of 1978, in which a 727 jet collided with an out-of-control Cessna, sending them both nose-first into the ground and turning a suburban San Diego cul-de-sac into a charred pit of destroyed homes and lives. The wreck happened about a mile from where we had just moved, and I remember
hearing about a man who reached for his wife in bed that morning only to notice that her breasts were much bigger than they should have been. Of course it wasn’t his wife he was embracing after all, but an unlucky dead woman who had fallen through the roof because the plane she was in had disintegrated in the air over his house.

If you go to that section of San Diego today, there is no trace of the crash, other than a marked newness to the homes that had to be rebuilt in comparison to the ones that didn’t. There is no sign, no ceremonial marker that I know of, that distinguishes this neighborhood as a place of painful history—a place where, among other things, a man dozed with his wife one minute and awoke clutching the corpse of another woman the next. It is over. It is smooth. It is smoothed over.

But I still sometimes panic when I see people jogging. At first glance, they are not just running, they are running
away
, and I don’t want to be left behind to face whatever threat they are fleeing. After that initial second passes, though, I realize there is no threat. None you can see coming anyway. None you can point to while warning others. None you can’t avoid by staying focused, by not confusing a sea anemone with a sea urchin. To this day I still think about that poor man’s flat-chested wife. I always figured she got crushed by a beverage cart or something, and that’s why she was gone when he reached for her. But now I look at it differently. She was gone, I like to think, because she escaped.

My
friend is fucking her boss, which I think is a really bad business move. She won’t listen to me, though, because she believes she’s “climbing the corporate ladder” when really all she’s climbing is the sweaty, crass, married ass of a pockmarked, balding bag of bacon fat with, like, a
clipboard
or whatever it is that midlevel incompetent corporate suck-ups wave around these days to exude a false air of importance.

“Are you
insane?
” I ask her. “Are you a drooling, booger-eating
idiot?
”

We are at Eats, a pseudo-edgy chow house on Ponce de Leon Avenue, where a lot of office-badge-wearing people now like to lunch it seems. They line up at the counter and crowd the aisles with their magnetized identity cards clipped to lanyards around their necks, reminding me of tagged animals marked for scientific study. They mill about in their Dockers and prudent dresses, bumping into one another softly with their cafeteria trays before selecting
a seat. I used to hate that about this place, but now I think it’s nice. Don’t ask me why.

“If you don’t wise up, your ass is so canned,” I warn my friend, but as I said, she is not listening to me. She’s got that infuriating, faraway look in her eyes, like she’s remembering the bionic blow job she gave her boss before coming here. Jesus God. How frustrating. How do you talk sense to someone in this situation, someone who is so tragically mistaken in her smugness? She thinks she is securing her future, she thinks she’s distinguishing herself from the rest of the turd pellets in the pile. Christ, it’s like watching a kid nosedive into an empty pool.

Little does she know her shelf life is already eroding. My guess is she has a few weeks, tops, before that selfish diaper wipe dumps her like a load of toxic waste. He’s a
guy
, after all, and most guys formulate excuses to bolt long before they even have the actual sex. I mean, seriously, guys will make up early-morning squash matches during the
appetizer course
, thus eliminating the obligation for any cuddle time should their date decide to copulate with them after dinner. So, c’mon, what
guy
wants to hang out forty hours a week with somebody he’s balling?

“Canned,” I reiterate to my friend, “like a truckload of tuna.”

I speak as a witness and not from experience, which is surprising. I mean, of all the wrong moves I’ve made in my life, you’d think boss-humping could easily be among them, but I was never a corporate-climber type. In addition, of the few office jobs I’ve had, my bosses were either gay or running the company from a minimum-security prison, and therefore impervious to my wiles. One time, though, when I was waiting tables in college, my boss took me aside and informed me the restaurant was firing half the staff, but I could ensure my position if I partook in acrobatic sex with him on the table in the break room right then.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, “if I lay you I get to keep my crappy-ass job?” Then I laughed so hard I nearly coughed up the pitcher of margaritas I had drunk by the pool before showing up for
work that day. I didn’t screw him and he didn’t fire me, but he did can the poor cocktail waitress who
was
sleeping with him. Her name was Becky, and she wore chunky-heel shoes when stilettos were in style. I remember she served us all after work one night when my coworkers and I were sousing ourselves at the bar, everybody young and grandstanding about their design on life, especially me because I’d just been accepted to a program to study literature at a university in Oxford, England, and I had plans for myself.

“I’m climbing out of this tar pit, people,” I laughed, clinking cocktails in celebration with my wait-staff friends, each with big dreams too. I remember Becky was widely despised for sleeping with the boss, who was absent that night, but she weathered the sneers anyway. She was my age and had a six-year-old daughter who lived far away with relatives. “I want to open my own place,” Becky joined in, “have my own business.”

We toasted to her dream but almost broke our eyeballs rolling them at one another afterward. “…
have my own business
,” we mimicked the minute she turned her back to fetch another round. It didn’t occur to me then that she probably had that dream because it ensured her against having to sleep with the boss to climb ahead.

A few days later Becky got fired, and I saw her afterward in the parking lot, sitting in her relic of a Celica, her forehead resting on her steering wheel as she sobbed. I was watching her from the window of the restaurant, as was nearly the rest of the floor staff on duty that day. We all stood there, none of us having ever really needed a job before, none of us with a six-year-old girl we were trying to become worthy enough to raise, none of us trapped in a mess we thought we could climb out of by balling the boss. We all stood there, watching Becky cry, and none of us went to her.

Lary
told me I needed drugs. He said I was way too upset about my phone connection, or my
lack
of a phone connection, to deal with the situation lucidly, so a few tabs of acid were in order. “You should try it,” he said, sounding like a bad actor with a bit part in
The Cross and the Switchblade
. “It makes you feel good.”

“What’re you, my
pusher?
” I yelled. Lary had been trying to foist acid on me a lot. He even stashed it in weird places all over his house because he knew I’d hang out there when he was gone and I bet he was hoping I would ingest it accidentally. Once he even accused me of stealing some acid buttons he had hoarded in his freezer. “They were right here,” he kept saying, staring at the icy abyss, “wrapped in tinfoil and plastic. Are you sure you didn’t eat them? Because if you ate them, I don’t care.”

Me? Eat acid? Even back when I
did
drugs I didn’t eat acid. After having been forced to attend that drug-awareness forum in
grade school, in which all those former LSD and heroin addicts recounted their horror stories, I didn’t want to end up like them, living in sleazy tenements littered with needles and unwashed underwear. So, no, I didn’t take his acid.

“C’mon,” Lary still implores. “It’ll make you feel connected.”

I doubt drugs would help with my connection. BellSouth claimed my phone line was working perfectly, but if that were true I wouldn’t be spending forty cents a minute like your average cell phone bovine, in line at the drugstore and such, begging the phone company to fix what’s making my land line act like a radio receiver for the construction crane across the street. When I pick it up all I hear is
beep beep beep
. In spite of this, customer service still says my connection is fine.

Believe me, it’s not. And because these are the holidays, people might try to reach me, like relatives. But as Daniel has always pointed out, I have no relatives, and that’s why I keep old pictures of total strangers on my mantel, to fake friends and visitors into thinking I have a history. His words gave me pause, because I never thought of it that way, that those old photographs might be surrogates for my missing relatives. I just thought they were really pretty, all those sepia portraits of other people’s ancestors. There are three wedding pictures of various women festooned with white lace and brooches, a girl of pre-Raphaelite beauty holding a bouquet, and, my favorite, an old lady with a baby on her knee.

So maybe it’s true that I like having these pictures because I have no evidence of my own ancestry. Solitude has its perks, but sometimes I wish I had a real extended family rather than my mother’s gaggle of asshole siblings and their spawn. She’d estranged herself from them by the time I was nine, but I briefly reconnected with a few at her funeral, where they eyed my sisters and me with misgiving, as if afraid our newfound orphan status would require them to act as real family members or something.

Rather than remain connected to them, I collected old pictures I found at flea markets and thrift stores instead. The genuine articles,
pictures of my own family, had long been abandoned, and now they just cluttered the empty corridors of memory. I replaced those photos with new ones. I like to look at the one of the old lady with a baby on her knee—she must have been dead for decades—and I try to see into her sunken eye sockets. I try to envision how she must have sat down that morning to twist her hair into a Bavarian bun at the nape of her neck before tying a gingham apron around her waist. I wonder what she would have thought if she knew that, a century later, her picture would end up in the hands of an unconnected person, her photo serving as an impostor relic from someone else’s past. Might she have been happier to remain unfound?

If I were her, I would want to be found. So I look at her now, with her toothless grin and her proud grip on her grandson, and if I gaze long enough I can see that, yes, there is definite possibility there. There is a possibility that the person who abandoned this photograph regrets having done so. That person could be related to me. That person could have
been
me. I look closer and suddenly feel a connection. Yes, I realize, she is mine. I finally found her, and I will never throw her away again.