Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (4 page)

When
Lary shot at me the first time, I could tell he was secretly glad I didn’t die. It could have been an easy accident, my death, it could have been one of those “oh, fuck” moments that happen in an eye blink that you spend the rest of your wretched life wishing you could take back. I mean, if you were a normal person. Lary, on the other hand, keeps wishing he could take back the moment in which his compassion led his aim astray.

I take issue with that. I don’t ever really remember wanting to die, but Lary insists his remorse is for my sake, claiming that I have since been begging to be put out of my misery. Take the time I called him, completely suicidal, according to him, years ago. I remember the incident, but needless to say our recollections differ. For one, it was he who called
me
, and this is exactly the conversation:

Him: “What’s up?”

Me (typically frustrated and hyperbolic): “Goddammit. I’m totally on the ledge, ready to jump.”

Him: “Well, what’s
stoppin
’ ya?”

I was speaking figuratively, goddammit, because my window didn’t even have a ledge, as I was living on the first floor of a renovated telephone factory. It was 10:30 in the morning and the world had ended already. This doesn’t usually happen until evening, after I have envisioned myself barefoot and stringy haired, collecting tin cans with callused hands that have yellow fingernails as thick as nickels. I envision scabs all over my body as well, though I don’t know where they came from, but I am definitely scabby in these nightmares, probably from sleeping on concrete.

These panic attacks, in which I foresee myself living under a freeway overpass, are nothing new to me: I’ve been having them for, well, ever. We were renters, my family, and during my entire childhood we moved around like a pack of traveling circus-sideshow workers. My earliest memories are of hiding among moving boxes to get away from my parents, whose ferocious fights inevitably over-flowed menacingly upon my siblings and me. We moved every single year because my parents were notoriously cheap and refused to renew any lease that called for an increase in rent. Sometimes we moved because my mother scored government contract work designing missiles for the military. But since contracts come to an end, one week we’d be living in a palace, the next in a trailer two miles north of the Tijuana border. We were never actually homeless—or perhaps that’s all we
ever
were. But times have changed, or I hope they have, because after a childhood of transience, my dream is to own my own home.

There’s nothing like trying to buy a house to trigger a big case of homelessness panic. Maybe it’s because my friend Grant keeps reminding me daily that if I bought a house I could lose it—like
that!
—because of my credit card debt. Here’s the story: After graduating
college I took my fertile, virgin credit history and used it to collect charge cards like key-chain charms.
This is great!
I thought.
Who needs to earn actual cash when all you have to do is flash one of these?
Too bad you’re expected to pay back those balances, and not with a check so rubbery you can wrap your boyfriend’s dick with it in a pinch. After defaulting on every balance, I eventually agreed to a minimum payment plan that promised I’d be debt-free in only eight hundred years. Before I began to aspire to home ownership, this debt and I coexisted in blissful symbiosis. I made the minimum monthly payments on my giant balances, and the credit agencies never made a fuss about it, and they still don’t. But Grant explained to me that I have “credit cancer,” and that my outstanding credit card balance is a big financial tumor festering quietly until the day it becomes a five-headed hell-dog of a disease and
infects everything I own and takes away my home
. It was nicer not knowing this, back when I had both a big bank account
and
a big outstanding credit card balance. It hadn’t occurred to me to use one to diminish the other, but now, after I’ve siphoned off my bank account to cure myself of credit cancer, I’m as broke as I’ve always been, minus the comforting illusion of prosperity.

So if, as I fear, I’m going to be homeless, I should get comfortable with it. As it happens I’ve actually had some practice. One night, years ago, in New Orleans my whole family was homeless because the Le Richelieu hotel got our reservations mixed up, having scheduled our arrival for noon on the following day, instead of midnight that night. All the other hotels in New Orleans were booked solid, and the Le Richelieu (remember that name: LE RICHELIEU), unsympathetic to our situation, kicked all of us, a mother and her three daughters, into the street, in the middle of the night.

“Well, it’s not the end of the world,” my mother sighed as we set out to wander the French Quarter until sunrise. At 3
A.M
. we encountered an off-duty waitress on her way home from work. She
took us in, and we slept on the floor of her living room. The next morning she wouldn’t even let us buy her breakfast. So we checked into our hotel, and that night we returned to her restaurant and requested her section. My mother tipped her $125, which is almost unheard of from a homeless person, especially a notoriously cheap one with the shower curtain from our hotel room stuffed into her purse.

You
would think that having a klepto in the family would be fun, but my mother could never steal the right things. For instance, what was with the
pool cues
? She collected pool cues like souvenir spoons, yet she couldn’t shoot a game to save herself from a jail sentence. In fact, I never once saw my mother play billiards, yet we always had pool cues piled in our house like giant pick-up sticks.

This freaky theft fetish started after she left my father and moved into one of those apartment complexes catering to broken lives, the kind that offers fully furnished units stylishly decorated to look like bank lobbies. These places are usually stuffed with other finger-snapping separated people pretending to be ecstatic about their situations, and there is always a community billiard room.

That’s when the pool cue fetish began. She also liked to steal lawn furniture and potted plants, but that was probably because, after the divorce was final, she moved to the beach in San Diego,
where it’s taken for granted that people’s patios are to be routinely looted like Korean convenience stores. Out there, if it’s on your patio and not locked down, it’s considered you don’t really want it anyway, and the people who take the stuff almost think they’re doing you a service, like clearing dirty plates off your table at a restaurant.

“Let me get that out of your way,” my mother thought every time she passed an unsecured beach chair. You’d think the chairs would have piled up in our house as well, like the pool cues, but her own patio was unrestricted, and her hot lawn furniture was stolen back from her almost as soon as she could arrange it in a welcoming pattern on her deck.

I once watched a news program that profiled bands of thieving women who wore really loose muumuus and could, for instance, walk out of a department store with a TV between their knees. I remember thinking, “Why can’t Mom steal stuff like that?” Instead, what did we have? Pool cues, shower curtains, hotel-room keys, an entire sleeve of those individually wrapped little soaps from an airplane lavatory. Don’t ask me how, but she once stole a six-deck card shoe from a casino blackjack table. Do you know the sleight of hand required to steal off the top of a casino table? You practically need to be David Copperfield to pull that off.

“Why didn’t you take the row of hundred-dollar chips
right next
to the card shoe?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” she blustered, eyes wide. “That would be
stealing
.”

Mom had been stealing ever since I could remember. Whenever we moved, she would take something from the old place with her: sink fixtures, switch-plate covers, cabinet doors, a fireplace mantel. It got to the point where we needed a separate truck just to haul all the dismembered parts of our past residences.

The pool cues were an enduring mystery though. Why would she take them, when she never played pool in her life? Everything else she could have at least used, even though most of it she never
did. After she passed away we found a pink toilet seat she took from a hotel in New Orleans. My sisters and I, on the other hand, learned to play pool like prison parolees. We started young, back in grade school when we walked to my father’s favorite bar after class so we wouldn’t be home unsupervised while my mother was at work. We racked the balls while my dad belted beers and joked with the other regulars, and when the clock struck 5
P.M
. we went home to greet my mother.

She used to argue with him, saying that a bar was a bad place to bring up children, and why couldn’t we spend that time at a park or a pizza joint or somewhere more wholesome? “They like it there!” her husband would holler. “They’ve got pool, air hockey, Pong! It’s paradise!”

Later, after she left him and we went to stay with her, she began presenting us with the pool cues. “I want you to feel at home,” she told us. It was the first time I saw her nervous.

So maybe it does make sense, the pool cues and all. Looking back at all the parts she stole from our past homes, it almost got to the point where we didn’t need a new place at all, just walls to hold all the pieces of the old places together. Maybe that’s why she took all that random stuff—the bathroom medicine cabinets, the curtain rods, the doorknobs, the
stairs
(she actually took a wrought-iron spiral staircase once)—maybe she was simply, little by little, trying to steal us a home of our own.

Lary
insists he saved my life that day on the phone during one of my more memorable homelessness panics, but now he says he’s convinced suicide would have been the better option, hence his recurring offers to shoot me. But I think he’s secretly glad I decline them, because who else would he find to feed his fleabag cat while he’s away?

Not Grant, that’s for sure. Grant doesn’t do cats, not since he baby-sat mine overnight one time and wouldn’t let her sleep on his head. Grant has a head like a nest of autumn leaves, cobwebs and all, and you can’t blame cats for wanting to sleep on it, but Grant says he was traumatized by waking up in the middle of the night with a cat on his head, and all I can say to that is “yeah, right,” because Grant has awakened to a lot worse, believe me. Sometimes I wonder if he is in some kind of personal contest to see what nightmare might be next to him when he opens his eyes in the morning. After picking up some slag from the Heretic, where he goes every
week on “Lights Out” night, when everybody blindly balls each other in pitch-blackness, Grant would even sleep with his hand in a fist so as to hinder his watch from being stolen in the night. It didn’t work, so now he wears a cheap watch from Target and sleeps with his hands relaxed. Actually
sleeps
.

“I wonder that I’m alive,” Grant says with a smile.

See? I keep telling Lary that
Grant
is the one he should be worried about, not me, given Grant’s alarming lack of concern over his survival in dangerous situations. For example, I don’t think it’s exactly
safe
to be traipsing off into the woods with a trio of Mexican military cadets. But that’s Grant. He likes to hit on heterosexual men too, another dangerous endeavor. Sometimes I think the only reason Grant has heterosexual male friends at all is because he’s hoping one day to pounce on one in a weak moment and turn them to his side. He sincerely thinks all men are gay, except our friend Chris, but I know Grant is just saying that because Chris gets his hair cut for five dollars at a place on Metropolitan Parkway with a sign out front that advertises “Fades and Braids.” No self-respecting gay man alive would appear in public with haircuts that bad. Even Grant, with his cobwebs, keeps his curls in methodically gelled disarray. It’s just the bad haircut that keeps Chris from being fair game for Grant, and it’s a good thing too, because Chris would probably kill him if he tried anything.

So, if you ask me, it’s Grant who is suicidal, not me, since he’s always offering it as an alternative whenever I ask him anything. The other day I called to tell him I was having a hard time finding curtains big enough to cover the clerestory windows in my loft. “What do I do?” I implored.

“Suicide,” he said.

Obviously, Grant needs help. I thought this phase would pass, but it just gets worse. Once I called him to see what he was doing. “Nothing,” he said, “I got no dreams, no goals, no aspirations…I’m the happiest man alive.”