Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (22 page)

The
other day I was passing pileups on one of the car-encrusted shit smears Atlanta calls a freeway on-ramp when a refreshing realization came to me: One of the big benefits I enjoyed as the daughter of an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman is the heightened sense of driver awareness I acquired in my role as my drunk father’s front seat lookout as he lurched home with us in the family Fairlane.

“Dad,
stop
!” I’d yell at red lights.

“Watch
out
, you’re swerving!” I’d screech on causeways.

“Police car, Dad,
police car!
” I’d scream. On those occasions, my father would rifle around for one of the emergency packets of peanuts he kept strewn about the front seat. It must have fooled the police every time, because my father drove like an overmedicated mental patient but never got arrested. In fact, the worst thing I recall happening is that time he drove over a lady’s foot. She was trying to save the last parking spot at a popular picnic area until her
husband returned with the car. My father must have fooled her into thinking he wouldn’t run her ass down, because she sure took her time getting out of the way.

“That’s my quarter in the meter,” she whimpered as she limped away.

“And I thank you for that,” he called after her cheerily. By my father’s demeanor, you’d be fooled into thinking they were friends.

And fooling people, after all, was my father’s forte. His buddies at the bar thought he was independently wealthy, so that’s why he could afford to hang out all day. The bartender, Kitty, knew differently. Regardless, there was genuine affection between the two of them, probably because my father tipped her heartily with my mother’s money. He always laughed when she called him a useless sack of crap.

And my father fooled me in other ways as well. He had me thinking that he wrote all the words to “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” that he could speak fluent German when all he could say was “
eins, zwei, drei
,” that he was brilliant, and tall as a tree. I’d run across the yard and meet his car when he came home bleary-eyed and smiling. He’d carry me back into the house under his arm, talking about all the trailers he sold that day when really he hadn’t worked in months. I hugged his neck and looked up at him with gleaming young eyes of admiration.

My father

Then one day the school nurse discovered I had strep throat and needed to reach one of my parents to drive me to the doctor. If she was surprised that I gave her the number of my father’s favorite bar she didn’t show it, but when he arrived I guess he’d forgotten his peanut remedy because his breath was like a blowtorch and she refused to
release me to him. Unable to charm her, my father unsuccessfully tried intimidation instead. It fell upon our big biology teacher, who had once fed a bunny to a boa constrictor, to order my father off the property. He was about to argue, but then he saw my face, and right then he knew he couldn’t fool me anymore.

Looking back at the sad man he became after that, I remember, instead of coming home smiling, he came home searching because I had taken to hiding when I heard his car pull into the driveway. He died young in a one-room apartment soon after his family left him, and I realize how desperately he needed his children’s gleaming eyes of admiration to fool the most important person of all: himself. Looking back, I wish I had known to let him keep his illusions, but I was young, and had yet to learn the art of fooling people.

I
have horns. This fact confirms Lary’s view of me, as he has been calling me a demon almost since we met. “If I’m a demon then what the hell does that make
you
, nuclear Satan or something?” I ask, but he doesn’t even have to answer. He is Lary, and Satan can only aspire.

I found my horns in Grant’s kitchen and I’ve been wearing them ever since. They are red and glittery, sculpted from clay, and Daniel says they are quite a nice accessory to my daily attire. Grant will probably want them back, but they’ve grown on me. They are mine now, a glorious testimony to my inner evil. Years from now, when I’m super old and sitting in the carport next to my trailer, with my tiny dusty horns on my head, with half my face drooping southward like a mud slide in front of a Malibu beach house, I wonder if Grant, Daniel, and Lary will be there to hear me sputter, “You bastards, you made me what I am.”

That’s another one of my big fears, to end up alone in a trailer
park in Arizona, trying to fire up my Hibachi with arthritic fingers. I drove across country twice with my father in the Fairlane, through expansive, desolate stretches of total nowhere, dotted with lonely homesteads and occupied by ghosts who are not really ghosts, just people who might as well be. I wondered what happened to drive those people out there. Did they get there because they couldn’t contain their inner evil? Did evil sprout out of them like horns, repelling their friends? Were they banished to these desolate outposts because they couldn’t cope with regular people?
Normal
society?

Route 66

These people could be me, I was sure. They could
easily
be me. When I was six I took a standardized intelligence test along with the other kids in my school, and my results were not normal. Far from it. My mother made my father promise not to tell me, a promise he kind of kept. In looking back at my childhood, I’m totally surprised I endured. Let’s not forget while my mother made bombs and could design complicated weapons, she couldn’t follow a recipe more complex than “just add water.” As a result, she fed me so much junk food, I’m surprised I’m not sitting here right now with a tumor the size of a second head.

And my father, now, he’s a whole other sack of bats. For family entertainment he used to like to get drunk and pile us all in the car to cruise through the cemetery and watch the deer eat flowers off fresh graves. I had no idea this wasn’t normal.

One Halloween, at my seventh birthday party, I was dressed as a little devil, complete with horns and pitchfork, and my father decided he had a way to tell me but not “tell me” what he and my
mother knew about my brain. He took me aside and whispered fiercely, “Never forget this: You are
not
normal, you are more than that. You are smarter than me, smarter than your mother, smarter than anyone you know.”

I laughed, because it was so seldom that he was serious with me, and I had no idea what he meant. I tried to turn away to resume my party, but he had me by the upper arms. “Dad,” I said nervously, “I’m not smarter than you.”

“You are,” he said solemnly. “You are better than me. Never forget that. Be better than me,” and with that he was back to his old self, drinking Buds and making the other parents laugh.

But they didn’t buy his act. By that time nobody did. He ended up alone, like those people in the Arizona desert, with nobody to help him come to terms with his inner evil. He died suddenly one day in a furnished studio apartment next to the Los Angeles airport, as planes packed with strangers roared overhead. “Be better than me,” he’d said. But why? He wasn’t so bad.

Part of me longs to hang out at those homesteads in the middle of nowhere. I guess it’s because I want to know it’s really not that awful to be cut off from almost everyone. Maybe you could watch the sunset every night from a lawn chair on your carport, and you could have three crusty old coots for friends, who shuffle over occasionally with boxes of bad wine and a dozen doughnuts. They could help you light your Hibachi. They could help you with the hope that maybe you were wrong about your father. Maybe he wasn’t alone after all. Maybe he had friends he could show his horns to, friends like Daniel, Lary, and Grant, who could look at his inner evil and make him realize he wasn’t so evil after all.

My parents at the Grand Canyon, 1975

Not
that this matters
at all
, but Lary finally found the acid tabs he had accused me of stealing. He had been away on a nine-day excursion to Cancún, the Mexican sleaze pit some people sadly mistake for a resort (he was there on a
job
, mind you), and during that time he had let me stay at his place so I could deal with the fallout of a failed relationship. His place is a fortress, after all. It’s a concrete-and-steel former candy factory down by the stadium, where, on the back of his TV, he had duct-taped a handgun, and he instructed me to wave it around in front of the windows intermittently in order to keep the criminals away. When he returned he eventually made it to his kitchen and noticed the missing LSD buttons.

Ever since college, I’d bypassed heroin and acid, and gone straight to cocaine, because with cocaine you hit rock bottom quickly—unless you’re made out of money, in which case you can buy yourself ten extra minutes. My own personal rock bottom came one day in college, when I took stock of my life and saw that I came home every evening to a house full of unfaithful friends and impolite strangers passing a plate of blow around, and realized that I was sick of this crowd with their tight lips, limp dicks, and bloviating drug-induced benevolence (“I know I don’t know you that well, but
goddamn
you are beautiful”). And I was sick of myself, since I was the worst offender.
Fuck this
, I thought, and moved out the next day.

But my former friend Gina has never
not
been a heroin addict, ever since she was sixteen. She attended the same drug-awareness scare fest I had, but for some reason she was unaffected by the prospect of waking up in a nest of her own filth, jonesing for a fix. She had curly blond hair and long legs, and we used to make pot holders together in home ec. Now she was rheumy-eyed and absent, with a Rorschach pattern of ruined veins covering her broken body. A veteran of dozens of government-funded rehab programs, she had yet to reach her rock bottom, and it’s possible she never will, proving again and again the new depths to which she can fall. A day rarely goes by that I don’t recall the former luster of her hair, and wonder why, with our identical backgrounds, she grew up to face a tormented existence in which it’s a burden every day to wake up and find herself still alive and I…well, I did not.

So back to the missing acid: Lary found it where he put it, in his freezer. It was stuck to the back of a Precambrian potpie or something, and therefore well hidden throughout the years, so I was off the hook. “Did you eat it? Are you, like,
tripping
right now or something?” I asked when he told me the news, looking to see if his pupils had assumed a gyrating spiral pattern.

“Don’t worry, I’m throwing it away,” he said. “It’s old.”

Yes, I nodded, it is most definitely old.