Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (6 page)

My
little sister was saved by our dog once. She was on her way to the pool in our apartment complex and, since she was only eleven months old, faced certain death, no doubt. I was just three myself, but I remember that day, as I do the day my parents brought her home after she was born. “Look what we found in the hospital parking lot!” my father exclaimed that morning, wheeling the carriage into the room. That is about all I remember of that day, except for the fact that I never got a good look at the baby. People were constantly crowded around her carriage like car wreck witnesses, and she was so swathed in cotton she might as well have been a bundle of underwear. I couldn’t figure out the fuss, but the fuss soon dissipated. I mean, this was my mother’s fourth kid, after all. I was her third.

The day Kimberly came home from the hospital, while my father was joking with the well-meaning neighbors and the extended family members with whom we were still on speaking
terms, my mother sat alone on the patio, smoking her fourth menthol that morning. “Did you hear what I said, honey?” my father called out to her above the hearty guffaws of the visitors. She nodded and waved from the other side of the sliding glass door, mouthing the words “parking lot.” Most likely she had heard it before, another of my father’s well-worn shticks, which he probably pulled out and performed at all their previous spawnings. “Look what we found in the parking lot,” my father repeated, slapping his knee.

I don’t remember how my sister, eleven months later, actually came to
be
in a parking lot, alone and unnoticed by all except our smart mutt Echo, but she would have had to crawl across one to get to the pool. Evidently Echo stood between my sister and the water and barked so menacingly that it kept my sister from advancing. This drew the attention of our neighbor, a large Hawaiian lady with flared nostrils and black hair piled in a bun as big as a bicycle seat on top of her head. The scene startled her out of the hammock she had hung in her living room, and she bustled over to our place to knock on our open door and tell my father that my baby sister was at that moment being attacked by a dog down by the pool.

My father darted past her and across the parking lot, where he saw Echo holding vigil near the pool’s edge, where my sister wailed like a frustrated little seal, unable to reach the water and commence drowning. I’m told there was no tearful clutching of my sister to my father’s chest or anything, no shower of kisses on her cherished face and precious blond head. No, he simply took her by the hand and led her back home, where he opened another Budweiser and fashioned a barricade out of dining room chairs to keep my sister’s wanderings isolated to the area between his feet on the ottoman and his favorite game show on TV.

After that my mother insisted that Echo sleep inside with us, rather than on the patio behind the sliding glass door, even though it meant that our home became so infested with jumping fleas you could actually
see
them en masse like a little dusky cloud that always
stayed at ankle level above our carpet. It was two years after saving my sister that Echo gave birth to the litter of puppies under the big wooden desk in my brother’s bedroom. They were sweet little mutts like their mother, with coats of red fur that would turn wiry one day.

Then came the afternoon I thought it would be fun to place one of them on the end of a tennis racket and flip it like a furry little burger. When, weeks later, the guy who adopted it demanded another one because that one had died, my mother told me not to blame myself. “Some puppies don’t make it,” she said with little sentiment.

Echo, though, was a different story. That dog became a conduit for my mother’s sanity, a loving presence in the midst of an often unloving marriage fraught with blame and broken dreams. Often I would find my mother asleep on the couch in the morning, clutching Echo like a life preserver. When Echo died a decade later, it was my mother who found her curled up in the garage, under the big wooden desk that used to belong to my brother. She closed the door and wouldn’t let us come inside. My sisters and I hovered by the door waiting, but my mother stayed in there all morning, holding vigil over our old mutt Echo, the sweet old dog that saved people from drowning.

I’m
not suicidal, but sometimes I look around and wonder if I need any more evidence that I’m wasting my life. I don’t date. My three best friends are men, none of them romantic prospects (except possibly for each other). Two of them, Daniel and Grant, are addicted to colonics and take great pleasure in calling me with daily updates detailing their stool consistency. The other, Lary, drives a rusty BMW with big, plastic, biblical characters stolen from a lawn nativity scene sitting upright in the backseat like cab passengers. One of our favorite things to do together is go to the Clermont Lounge, where the strippers are all flawed in the most amazing ways. One is so fat we’ve nicknamed her “Butterball.” Another has so many tattoos she doesn’t even look naked when she’s naked. Another is the survivor of a botched boob job and had to have her implants removed, so now her tits just dangle there, withered, like two turkey wattles.

We pass out money and sit there, completely certain that we’re safe from meeting anyone remotely right for us. Sometimes a girlfriend will advise me to get away from these guys, to move to more conservative Sandy Springs and live in a stylish apartment building, which is known as an outpost for single airline pilots, rather than the renovated telephone factory where I now reside. But then I look at my job, which is artist/writer/photographer/flight attendant/foreign-language interpreter, and my office, which is decorated with plywood signs stolen from the roadside, and the bumper sticker on my car, which reads “Teenage Prostitute to the Stars,” and I realize,
Oh my God, I belong with these people!
So I’ve resigned myself to my place with them, and with that resignation I figure I might as well get myself pierced.

Roadside religious signs

The first time I saw body piercing I was in Amsterdam browsing through titles in the self-mutilation section of a bookstore when I
came across a picture of a woman who looked like she had her vagina impaled on the contents of an entire toolbox. After seeing that, it was a few days before I could unclench my knees. After that, the last place I figured I’d find myself was in a piercing parlor sitting in some kind of modified dental chair with—and maybe my memory is exaggerated here—
stirrups
, looking at a woman with hair like a nest of festering albino tarantulas. But there she was, coming at me with a spike bigger than the kind cavemen used to kill bison, and there I was, clasping Grant’s hand so tight he pulled away a lobster claw.

As piercings go, mine isn’t that exotic. It’s in plain view, on the inside of my ear, which means there’s no hardware clanking around in my underwear. Every once in a while some stranger standing next to me in line will hiss, “Did that hurt?” In which case I get to turn around with my usual aplomb and say, “Hell yes it hurt! I could have given birth to a full-grown grizzly bear and it wouldn’t have hurt half as much! Jesus God, ’course it hurt! And the
swelling!
I had a head like Elephant Man for two weeks! And that’s not even considering the ‘crust’ factor!”

A
lug wrench makes a decent weapon. I know this because I used to carry one in my glove compartment back when I drove my ancient Volkswagen, which cost me two hundred dollars and was held together by duct tape and silicone tile caulking. The car ran out of gas often back then because, like me, the gas gauge wasn’t working at the time. Hence I was stranded a lot, and I’d hike the highway to the nearest phone clutching my lug wrench in case I’d need to drive it like a metal stake through the skull of a passing serial killer.

“Nobody’s gonna leave my murdered carcass splayed on the roadside for early-morning joggers to trip across!” I’d tell myself as I stomped along. “I’m not gonna be lying there dead with every orifice violated, not me, because I’ve got this, you know,
thing
here, this metal whatever-it-is. So, yeah, I’d like to see somebody try something, especially now that I’ve decided constant practice swings are in order until I reach a safe destination.”

I’d walk along, throwing random jabs, spinning around, thinking I heard something. “Who’s there?” I’d hiss. “Take
that!
” And I’d continue to lunge about like a hallucinating heroin addict, because they’re out there, people who want to hurt you, and you have to be prepared.

Gather your weapons. Lary carries a gun in his glove compartment. I don’t know how comfortable I am with that because I really think a lug wrench would do fine. I’ve never had to hit anyone with mine, but I bet it would hurt. My mother once fought off a biker in New Orleans with a broken souvenir Hurricane glass from Pat O’Brien’s. He wasn’t actually trying to kill us or anything, the biker, in fact he was simply riding his Harley really slow and it kind of looked like he might have been leering in our direction. So my mother waved the weapon at him as he went by, and he kept going.

Looking back, you’d think my mother could have done better than a broken glass, seeing as how she made her living designing defense weapons. She probably also could have done better than to serve her kids bowls of Halloween candy for breakfast too, but at the time I thought it was great, and by first period I had such a sugar buzz I could bend spoons with my brain.

My father didn’t like us eating candy for breakfast, but he slept late because it took a lot of energy to charm people into buying him beers at his favorite bar all night. Sometimes, though, he’d make it a point to rise early and force-feed us something weird like Welsh rarebit topped with capers or whatever. He put capers on everything, and pearl onions. He liked to experiment with different cuisines, creating complicated entrées like oyster soufflé and homemade rabbit-bladder sausage and stuff, with capers and pearl onions everywhere.

He might as well have been asking us to eat battery acid, I mean that’s how eagerly we anticipated his dinners. We became experts at squirreling food in our pockets to feed to the dog on bathroom breaks. Sometimes my father would throw his hands up in exasperation at our philistine palates, then it would fall upon my mother to
make her famous tamale pie from a box, which required nothing more complicated than browning a pound of burger meat. We feasted on it like famine victims while my father stood in the corner of the kitchen and chain-smoked.

Once he went on a failed bread-baking binge, which resulted in about thirty loaves as dense as bricks wrapped in tinfoil that he kept by the kitchen door. I remember thinking those would make good weapons, and I planned to use them on any rapists attempting to invade the homestead.

A few months after my mother left us, she forced my father to leave our family apartment, having reached her limit, I suppose, when it came to paying his rent. After that she didn’t immediately move back in with us herself, opting to live out the lease on her temporary pad instead. During this time, whether my father was living with us or not, my sisters and I almost always ate dinner with my mother at her groovy singles apartment complex, chowing down on char-grilled hot dogs at the sleazy poolside “mixers.” But before my mother kicked him out, my father still cooked us dinners every night back at our family home in anticipation of our appearance, and I remember seeing their cold remnants in the kitchen the next morning, intact except for the small portions missing he had served himself. Once I noticed he’d made us a tamale pie, but not from a box, and he’d topped it with capers and pearl onions. Looking back, I wish we could have pretended we liked some of his meals, but when you’re young your weapon is honesty, which is perhaps the most merciless of them all.