Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (24 page)

I
envy insane people. I saw one standing on the street corner in Portland once, wearing a sandwich board he’d fashioned by blacking out some panels of a cardboard banana box and draping them over his shoulders. The sandwich board was covered in odd evangelical scribblings, such as “Sex=AIDS=Hell,” and he stood there waving his arms and shouting verbal vomit to match. I thought it appropriate that you could still see the outline of bananas on the blacked-out cardboard panels. I must have been peering too closely, perhaps puncturing his little circle of insanity, because as I passed by he interrupted himself, pointed at me, and screamed, “
Filthy, evil, Godless whore!
”

I scurried away, trying not to smile. “How’d he know your pet name?” Lary joked to me over the phone later. Lary enjoys a minor level of insanity himself. He has an entire other personality he calls “Evil Otis,” who is always landing him in jail. Otis took over once when Lary was working on the roof of Philips Arena. The next thing
Lary knew, Otis was throwing boulders down at a police car on the street below. Afterward Lary had to get his ex-girlfriend to bail him out of the hoosegow. But Evil Otis has his upside too. Once Lary found himself in the Bahamas on the beach fucking a blonde Ukrainian casino dealer in public. If not for Otis, Lary says, he might miss out on stuff like this, making the occasional incarceration a fair price to pay for his appearances.

But Lary has yet to take up screaming on street corners. “Wouldn’t you
love
to do that?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it be great to be that insane and not care if people stare at you?”

“You don’t have it in you,” he said.

Ha! How little he knows me. In fact, I’m pretty sure I have it in me. My sister Cheryl definitely does. As a kid she was so crazy, even Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to enter our house. I remember one came to our door when our parents were out, and my older brother, then fourteen, asked her inside. The lady got as far as the living room, where she was assaulted by the sight of my sister Cheryl in the throes of one of her nuclear tantrums.

“
Goddammit!
” Cheryl was shrieking, flailing about and flicking water everywhere owing to the bucket my brother had dumped on her earlier in hopes of eliciting a tantrum that would provide the afternoon’s entertainment. It worked, and Cheryl was going full throttle; she was a heaving, snorting, snarly-faced, cussing mess of kid-like limbs on the floor, writhing like a pile of dying snakes. The lady lasted one nanosecond before turning on her heel and dashing, ashen-faced and screaming, back to the street. My brother laughed so hard he almost lost a lung. The lady’s retreat was exactly what he’d hoped for.

“Godless!” the lady screamed. “Awful, Godless little beasts!”

Jehovah’s Witnesses never knocked on our door again, I mean
never
, even after we moved across the country to Melbourne Beach, Florida. On the whole I was mildly disheartened, because I was hoping one day someone would take it upon themselves to save our souls, but I figure we must have been branded network-wide or
something, as if our household, no matter where it pitched itself, could not escape the earmark as a haven for Satan’s spawn. Our family pastime of hanging out at cemeteries to watch the woodland creatures eat flowers off fresh graves didn’t help either.

On Sundays, when our friends were at church, my sisters and I could be found barefoot at the splintery old town pier, trying to catch sailor fish by using clumps of canned shrimp cocktail as bait. I loved that pier. I remember the three of us, tanned and salty skinned, happy and languid, oblivious to our Godlessness, dragging the shredded shrimp bits along the surface of the river hoping to entice feebleminded fish to bite.

I went back to that pier once, decades later, after I’d moved to Atlanta and the rest of my family had fanned out, disconnected, all over the planet like tribeless nomads. It was exactly as I remembered: The pier was splintery and decrepit, beef-jerky colored, and you almost needed a tetanus shot just to set foot on it. I couldn’t believe I ever frolicked barefoot on that thing.

So I walked with covered feet to the end of the pier, where some kids were fishing. They’d catch one, reel it in, toss it back, and start over. They were barefoot and the sun was warm as a womb, baking them like little angel cakes. I sat on the edge nearby and dangled my legs over the water, attempting to impersonate a benign entity just sharing a pier with some carefree kids and not the lost lemming that I was—needful, searching for the scattered fragments of my heart, looking for a way to reconnect them to pass my Godless self off as whole—but I couldn’t manage it. Instead, the kids ended up staring at me, wondering who this person was, this insane person, shoeless now, blubbering on the end of a pier, with nothing but her sock to wipe her snot away.

I
find it infuriating that my friend Michael refuses to admit he’s a freak. First, at six-foot-seven, he’s so tall he doesn’t fit in a lot of places. He didn’t fit on the cramped upper floor of the first restaurant he bought here in Atlanta ten years ago with his two siblings (both of whom Michael likes to believe would be living on abandoned mattresses under a freeway overpass if not for him, by the way), and he doesn’t fit in the bathroom of my loft either, complaining that the only way he can sit on the toilet is to fold up his mantis-like legs and hang his feet in the tub.

I’m adamantly unsympathetic. We were both equally poor when we met a decade ago. Lary introduced me to him when Michael was waiting tables at his own restaurant, The Vortex, which thrived and then became the Vortex
chain
. Lary and I used to hang out at the original one, a comfy dive on West Peachtree Street, dreaming about the future and demanding that Michael make us stronger drinks.

Just look at us today, Michael and me; me with my rented loft that has a bathroom as big as my bed, and Michael with his chain of restaurants and his mansion on eight acres with a bathroom big enough to be used as a cult compound. “I swear,” I grumbled at him while freeloading at his midtown location, “you are such a freak.”

“Retard,” he snapped back, hardly distracted from his task, which was to build a big go-go cage. That’s right, a
go-go cage
, where girls in fur bikinis can undulate over people trying to dine. Michael all of a sudden figured this was the one thing missing at that particular restaurant location, so he immediately brought in a bunch of electric saws and drills from his truck, and started tearing the place up over by the bar, where there were people
eating
, I might add.

Okay, maybe they weren’t eating, but there were people drinking, with menus nearby. Or at least I was drinking, because Michael had bought me a margarita to remind me why I still stand him. That’s my boy—just because he’s rich doesn’t mean he’s forgotten about the dregs he left behind in the cesspool. Anyway, the go-go cage didn’t fit where it needed to fit, so rather than take my advice—which was to give up and use the failure as an excuse to soak his head in hooch—Michael did what he always does. It’s what separates a person like him, who has never easily fit in anywhere his entire life, from the tidal wave of plebes who constitute the average human morass. What he did is this: He carved a big chunk out of an obstruction so he could accommodate his vision of how things should be.

God! I hate to admit I envy him for his ability to just remove obstructions like that. I can’t remember ever doing something like that—not consciously anyway. I came to the realization that I’m the great giver-upper after I uncovered an old letter I wrote when I was six that my sister sent me along with a sack of other mementos from our childhood. She’d heard I regretted not saving such stuff myself, having thrown it all away a decade and a half ago because I didn’t have room for it in my apartment. I felt it didn’t fit into my life.

My letter, written in red crayon, espoused some pretty simple dreams for the future: “I wanna be…” I had written over and over, misspellings rampant. I wanted to be a tennis player on TV, I wanted to be a “pricess,” a “moofy star,” a “book riter.” “I wanna be,” I finished, “ever thing I wanna be.”

Christ, what a contrast to today, when all I wanna do is lie down it seems, because even sitting on the sidelines and watching a friend build something is too exhausting. It’s all in my head, Michael says. He has always said that. For ten years he has been telling me that. “I wanna be…” I told him way back when. “What the hell’s stopping you?” he laughed then, and still laughs now.

I suppose Michael and I are kindred spirits in that we’re both freaks, but he’ll pound out a place for himself while I’m content to let people purge me from their circle. Remember, at fourteen I got fired from my first job at an ice-cream parlor because of that habit I had sitting around wondering what it felt like to be bit in half by a shark. If that happened to Michael, he would have opened his own ice-cream parlor. He would have served shark shakes. He figured out a long time ago he didn’t fit on the same train with everyone else, so he’s accustomed to building his own tracks.

I build my own tracks too, but only because I’m one of those people whose search for a person to follow came up empty. See? I can’t even take credit for my individuality because I came at it reluctantly, unlike Michael, who relishes his freak status to the point he refuses to concede that he even is one. I’d copy him if I could, but that’s not possible, so I make my way with the six-year-old I used to be still haunting my thoughts.
I wanna be, I wanna be
, I hear her whisper in my ear on occasion, but graciously she has added to the list.
I wanna be fine
, she sometimes says now,
fine with my freak-ass self
.

Twice
now—
twice
in the past few months—Lary’s cat has had to fake her own death to get his attention. “I swear she’s really dead this time,” I had to shriek into Lary’s voice mail. “I can’t find her anywhere, and there’s a
smell
. I know that smell, it’s dead-cat smell, so get your worthless crusty ass back to Atlanta and look for your poor dead cat who died of loneliness, you selfish walking colostomy bag of cat-killing wasted space. Fuck you.”

Lary can’t escape, not from me, and not from his cat, Mona. No way. He had to fly all the way back from his work in Chicago, or Wisconsin, or the damn Bahamas (that was the first time Mona played dead), to look for his cat, who usually sleeps on a heated pillow atop a gilded pedestal in his living room, if you can call it a living room. (I personally call it a covered alleyway, but then I have to admit that since he’s added climate control it can be pretty nice sometimes, even though there are mosquito larvae living in the fountain in his foyer.)

In his absence, a tribe of feral kittens had moved into Lary’s carport, living under the upturned oil barrels. It served him right if you ask me, because Lary is not a kitten kind of guy. Mona doesn’t count, because we all concede that Mona must be a reincarnated gargoyle, and probably spent her past life perched above the very same doorway of the very same dilapidated old stone warehouse where Lary now lives. Years ago, on the day she appeared, she was obviously just returning home after a long absence, and she must have liked what Lary did to the place. He’s fashioned it into a passable habitat over the years, I must admit.

The feral kittens certainly agree. In the months since Lary’s been away on his series of failed escapes the kittens have made themselves at home, even slaughtering a squirrel and leaving it on his doormat like a fuzzy little sacrificial offering, with its fuzzy little throat ripped out. “Thanks for the digs,” the kittens were saying to Lary. “If you come home, we promise there’ll be plenty more where that came from.” But Mona’s tactics are more subtle, and more effective. Her practice is to go on a hunger strike and hide in an unused air-conditioning vent above the bathroom until he’s forced to return. Lary’s home now, probably for good, considering the weak economy, because it looks like no one will escape that.

I’m in danger of losing my job too—or at the very least any semblance of what it used to be—but Lary is much better equipped for poverty than I am. His place is paid for and tricked out like a survival bunker. I think he can even catch rainwater through some brick-lined flow patterns he created in imitation of the ancient Roman aqueducts. And there are a jillion plants in his home too, some of them probably edible, as are the kittens of course.

Lary

Lary’s been poor before, and it seems he’s been priming himself for when it happens again. I should learn from him. I wish I could just fake my own death like Lary’s cat did, but I know I’ll have to hang in there. Toughen up. Stick it out. My mother was in her midfifties when she lost her job as a computer weapons specialist during the government cutbacks of the late eighties, and right away she rolled up her sleeves and got another job selling packaged sandwiches from a catering truck parked at construction sites.

After that she became a junk dealer. She sold big-eyed ceramic beagles, old turntable parts, macramé owls, angel-shaped toilet-paper cozies, and all kinds of random crap at swap meets in the San Diego sports-arena parking lot. The local newspaper was so impressed with her tenacity it printed an article about her, entitled “From Missiles to Miscellaneous,” which featured an unflattering photo of my mother in a coin belt, standing next to a secondhand Catholic confessional priced at just seventy-five dollars. If I think hard enough I can still see her smiling back at me in that bad picture, smiling with steely resolve. “Don’t you dare,” she is saying to me. “Don’t you dare roll over and play dead.”