Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (25 page)

My
neighbor George looks damn good for someone who was electrocuted last year. I saw him yesterday with his wife, Judy, smiling like he always does, and I would never have known that, fairly recently, he fried the holy hell out of himself trying to fix an old air conditioner. I still feel a little bad about laughing when I heard the news, but you have to understand I’d been nagging those two for missing my birthday party for an entire
year
, and it wasn’t until now that Judy finally told me why.

“Well,” she said, almost sheepishly, “George got electrocuted.”

How do you
not
laugh when someone says that? That is a funny-ass reason for missing a party, and there George was, sitting right next to me, smiling and looking about as unelectrocuted as can be. I hugged him very tight right then, which is what I hear you’re supposed to do with shock victims.

George and Judy live upstairs from me in the old telephone factory. They used to sell furniture out of their truck, and now they
own Paris on Ponce, a giant antiques and retro-furniture labyrinth that reminds me of what the attic of Andy Warhol and Madame de Pompadour would have looked like had they ever got married and birthed a brood of poets and circus performers. George and Judy always put out a big tray of complimentary cookies and cider for paying customers, and considering how rarely I fall into that category, I’m amazed they’ve never slapped my hand away. I’ve gone in there and chowed from that tray like it was my personal trough, complaining the whole time how hot it was in there.

I now feel guilty for bitching about the heat, because it was when George finally got around to installing an air conditioner (which he probably excavated from underneath car wreckage at the bottom of a dried riverbed or something) that he went and electrocuted himself. Evidently he stood there, bug-eyed, for quite a while, paralyzed by the voltage running through his whole body, before he got tired of waiting for someone to save him and somehow mustered the oomph to wrest himself free from the current. Afterward, his shoes were all melted and it looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to his armpits. “He couldn’t come to your party with burned-up armpits, now could he?” Judy said, and I had to laugh again.

I am so happy George didn’t die, because until then I always equated electrocution with certain death. As a kid I was terrified I’d one day be falsely convicted of murder and have to face the electric chair. I once confessed my fears to my father. “Damn right they’ll electrocute you,” he said. “They’ll flip the switch as easy as a burger.”

My mother yelled at him not to shock me like that. She’d not yet rebounded from the time I was five and came across the childbirth edition of
Life
magazine, which I’d opened to a picture of a naked lady with a big blue head popping out of her poon-tang. “That lady has a head coming out of her pee hole!” I wailed.

My mother carted my crying ass away from the magazine and acted concerned about the possible shock I had just endured. She was forced to explain the facts of life to me right then, and while she tried to make it sound nice, she wasn’t all that adept at euphemisms.
“That’s just where babies come from, and yes, it hurts like hell, but you’ll live,” she said, and she hugged me so tight she flattened two bubble-gum cigars in my front pocket.

A decade later, she had another shock to impart. She came home and asked me to sit down. From the look on her face she obviously had something important to announce, and she didn’t know how to ease into it. “I’m leaving your father,” she blurted out, waiting for my traumatized reaction. When it didn’t come, she continued. “When you get back from school today I’ll be gone,” she said. “Gone.”

But I was not shocked at all. Throughout my whole life I had known she would be leaving. For fifteen years I’d witnessed the simmering fury between my parents, hanging in the air like heavy smoke, each blaming the other for the calcified casket of emptiness their lives had become. Every day I’d seen my mother long for the life she felt my father denied her, and every day I’d seen my father marinate his sorrow with booze and bold proclamations. But my mother felt she had done a good job of protecting me from this, and she hadn’t realized her misery was as transparent as a shattered windshield. “I mean it,” she said. “I’m gone.”

“I know,” I said lucidly, and at that, my mother crumbled like an autumn leaf. All the tears she’d kept hidden behind the basket of broken dreams in her heart broke free right then, and she lowered her head to her hands in shame. “I’m so sorry,” she wept, her shoulders shaking with the weight of her regret. I wanted to ask her what she was so sorry about, because I didn’t see how this was anyone’s fault, but instead, I hugged her very tight, which is what I hear you’re supposed to do with shock victims.

Nothing
like stumbling over a dead puppy to dick up your day, so thank God
that
didn’t happen, but it
almost
did.

First, the puppy was not really a puppy, but one of those perpetual puppy-type dogs, one of those furry button-cute kind of pets, with long ears covered in curly fleece and legs that are the canine equivalent to one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. This is the kind of dog an ex-boyfriend of mine used to refer to as a “pussy pet.” If this guy saw that kind of dog, he would smirk dismissively and say in his Brazilian accent, “You cannot throw that dog against the wall,” because, to him, the inability to be thrown against the wall and emerge unfazed was a grievous shortcoming in an animal.

So you could not have thrown this dog against the wall…I’m thinking, but I really don’t know for sure. I’ve never had a pussy-pet dog. Once I temporarily inherited two Labradors named Gracie and Amber. They were sisters, and both of them were the most comical,
slobbery, eye-booger encrusted, walking wads of psoriasis you ever saw. Having birthed three litters, they each had hefty leftover dugs that dangled from their underbellies like big balls of soft warm dough. Amber had a problem with her left ear too, which occasionally swelled up like an eggplant and stuck straight out from her skull, making her look like she had a furry party balloon taped to her head. They also had some kind of skin allergy that, for some reason, caused them to chew all the hair off their hind parts. The eye-catching result was that they both sported big shiny red baboon asses. God, I loved them, and I still miss them too, even though I could never get Amber’s ear to go down.

Then I had Cookie, an incontinent pit-bull puppy with a deformed tail that reminded me of a carrot pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk. She was routinely so happy to see visitors that she’d squat right there and pee at their feet. Believe it or not, it was a step up from her earlier puppy behavior, when people thought she was undisciplined just because, given the chance, she would chew on their skulls. The immensely tall Michael was always amazed to find her teeth in his head.

I didn’t know what to make of this new dog I’d found wandering on Memorial Avenue near Oakland Cemetery. He was about to be made into a furry piece of street pizza by a passing semi when I rescued him. And this was no stray, because someone had obviously loved this animal, probably brushing his black terrier hair every night, and now they were left wondering what happened to him. He wore a blue collar, his green nylon leash was broken, and it looked like he’d been lost for a while, because he was sporting a layer of dirt that didn’t look customary on him. I brought him home, cleaned him up, and discovered that he was as mellow as a monk. He wasn’t even getting spooked by my big cat, Lucille, who was fifteen and missing her upper teeth but could still kick any dog’s ass, even (and probably especially) Cookie’s. I started calling the new dog “Scooter,” because that’s what I call all cute things whose names I don’t know, including small children.

Scooter reminded me of a black dog my father brought home when I was seven. We named her Bonnie, and she was quite a slut, but I loved her anyway. I was sent to fetch her one morning and found her getting humped on by a neighborhood mutt. I had no idea what the hell was happening, so I set about trying to pull them apart. I did not know, nor should I have, that dogs get stuck when they’re doing it, because it’s part of their whole procreation process. So I could not separate them, and the most I could do was turn the mutt around so he was facing the other way and not actually on top of Bonnie. But all that accomplished was to turn them into a freakish set of whining Siamese dog twins fused at the ass.

So the only thing I could do at that point was to sit on the curb beside them and commence wailing. I mean, here my Bonnie was stuck to another dog, probably permanently as far as I knew, and now I’d have to bring this mutant double-dog monster back home and try to explain it to my father. So I sat there and sobbed, occasionally shouting to the mutt, “Get off Bonnie!” but he just looked at me like he was extremely uncomfortable and stayed stuck.

Eventually, a long-haired man emerged from the house across the street and rescued me. He was barefoot and bare chested, freshly roused out of bed by my wails. He carried a bucket of water and threw it on the dogs, which made them pop apart like a Tupperware set. The man was laughing so hard, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It had something to do with the dogs being “attached,” or “attachment” or whatever, and how I was supposed to make sure it didn’t happen again. But his words went unheeded, because a few months later Bonnie had her puppies, and I got attached anyway.

I
swear, I thought it was normal to have dreams about your teeth falling out. I thought those kinds of dreams were a universal norm, like the ones in which you’re naked on the college campus with nothing but a pot holder to hide your naughty bits. “You mean
you
don’t have the missing-teeth dreams?” I asked Daniel.

“It’s just you,” he said. “You’re probably traumatized from the time Grant found the jar of teeth at the crack house.”

Hell, yes, I was traumatized by the time Grant found the jar of teeth at the crack house. Who wouldn’t be? I’m hinky about teeth. When I was seven I had a baby molar rotting right out of my head. Our family dentist at that time was a nasty ape who always stabbed me in the gums with a needle as big as a dinosaur bone, then used the drill like he was perfecting a Cambodian torture technique. He would literally plant his knee on my chest to secure me to the dental chair. I’m not kidding.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager and went to another dentist that I realized you weren’t
supposed
to feel the drill during a dental visit, let alone your dentist’s knee on your sternum. That’s what the needle is for, to administer Novocain, not to punch holes in your patient’s head. By then I’d had a hundred cavities, and when my mother heard the new dentist’s prognosis, she called him and told him he’d have to hire me so I could pay off my own damn dental bill.

So he did. His name was Dr. Melkonian, and he made me the assistant to his receptionist, who was a kind old woman with ear-lobes covered in soft whiskers. The light from the setting sun in the office window behind her would sometimes illuminate her lobe fuzz and make it look as though wispy smoke were coming out of her ears. She was the nicest woman I’d ever met, and she used to tell me she could see the goodness in me even though they had to ask me to stop wearing halter tops to the office. I worked there every day after school for almost two years. It’s where I learned to type, and I became so deft at typing Dr. Melkonian’s name that I used to do it over and over so I would look busy. It’s an unusual name, and you almost have to be a concert pianist to punch it out on the keys.
Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian
.

The typing practice served well as a bridge to get me through my shift so I could get on with the mess of my life. During that time, my family was falling apart like a piece of stale coffee cake. We were living in Torrance, California, and my mother had moved out of the apartment where we lived and then forced my father to leave before she would move back. Only she didn’t move back right away because she’d become too attached to the condo she was renting in the Land of Swinging Separated People to move in the middle of her lease. For a while, my little sister and I actually lived alone. We were fourteen and sixteen, respectively, and I immediately began dating a very handsome heroin addict whose parents were wealthy psychiatrists. Luckily I had that fear of needles, and every day after school—or after I
cut
school—I had my job at Dr. Melkonian’s
office, where I hit the typewriter.
Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian. Dr. Melkonian
.

It’s hard to miss, that name, so when I saw it in the paper years later it caught my eye. It was in the obituary section.
This couldn’t be
my
Dr. Melkonian from Torrance
, I thought, but I read on. He had moved to Atlanta from Torrance about a decade earlier to teach at Emory University. He’d died suddenly in his sleep, having lived all those years probably not ten miles away from me, and probably not even knowing how he had been the bridge for me so long ago and half a hemisphere away. He was the bridge that kept me from falling into a mote of lost hope that threatened my future. I wish I had thought to thank him for giving me a place to go, a place with a sweet old receptionist with a sunlit fuzzy halo, with a kind dentist who paid me for doing little more than type his name.