Suicide Blonde (9 page)

“It wasn't really that bad,” I said. And it seemed true. Watching the skinhead beating was more riveting and I cried the time my mother called me a bitch. This feeling was so familiar, what happened to me was never real. Emotional experiences happened to others. I got the picture in my head of my mother, brooding, dangerous. And me leaning toward her, caught up in the aura of her pain.

“So now you know what it's like to do the thing most repulsive to women.” She took two hundred dollars from her pocket and passed it to me. I started to talk . . . how good it would be to make a lot of money. How I would get my own apartment and a car so we could drive down Highway 1 to L.A.

Madison's cheeks flushed, she looked into her glass. “It's not about money, it's about death.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “I know that.” I was quiet, thinking it over. The glitter in her hair caught light and for a moment there in the half light she looked demonic.

She asked if I'd seen Pig.

“Not since I started,” I told her.

Madison wound the top of the bottle down. “I met Pig at a titty bar south of Market. If I let her touch my tits she would give me twenty dollars. Eventually she offered to pay me to come over and walk up and down her spine.”

“Then you lived with her?”

“Only after she begged me. I was a lap dancer and lived with a guy who sculpted naked ladies. He got hooked on heroin and started stealing from me. I holed up at Pig's. It wasn't so bad until she started to get that look whenever I went near her. One night she was looking at me.” Madison burlesqued Pig's dreamy eyes. “And I realized if I slept with her, she would think of it forever. So I did her and it was O.K., till she started moaning.”

Madison laughed. I knew I should too, but her attitude toward Pig was cruel and adolescent. It was one thing to say Pig had taken advantage of her, another to make fun of her sexuality. She doubled over laughing. I felt uncomfortable and watched the street light move on the curtains. Madison was acting crazy, but I didn't trust my observations because the chair ribs hurt my back and the rug was rough on my bare feet. My bourbon looked like a flame—
I have done the thing I was most afraid of .
. .
what will happen now?

A
FTERWORK MADISON TOOK ME TO A PLACE IN CHINATOWN JUST
off Grant Street called the Buddah Bar. High black-vinyl stools and a sagging string of blinking paper lanterns lined the bar. When the bartender saw Madison he nodded hello and hit a little brass bell attached to the cash register. A slim woman appeared in an electrician's jumpsuit wearing round wire frames with rose-colored glass. She led us silently down the back stairs and along a narrow hallway to a metal door fortified by several dead-bolt locks. I swayed woozily . . . time no longer held me. I felt lucky, freed, as I had been, by a fifth of bourbon. I watched a vein in Madison's temple pulse, stepped back so I could mouth, without her seeing me, “She is wild . . . she is dangerous.” Madison pounded the door with the side of her fist.

“Open up,” she said. “It's me.” The eyehole darkened and then a melodious voice, I thought at first it came from inside my drunken head, said . . . “Madison dear, hold on.” The tone was deep, but slightly tilted like a woman's. Keys jangled and the first of many locks clicked back.

“Habee is a hermaphrodite,” Madison whispered. “If you're nice to him he may show you.” She licked her fingers and smoothed her eyebrows. The door opened and there was Habee, a Lebanese man in coffee-colored silk pajamas, his long hair held in a braid down his back. He had small breasts like a teenager and was deeply tan like people who live out-of-doors.

“Delighted,” Habee said, swinging his hands open and kissing Madison. “If Madison hasn't told you,” he said, turning to me, “this is where it all leaves off.”

“This is a friend of mine,” she said as we stepped inside. “Isn't she lovely?”

Habee held my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forced my head to the left for a profile. Then took my hands, turned them over and back. He shook his head.

“I haven't seen anything like her since I was in Amsterdam.” He led us to one of the low tables in the middle of the room. Sweet smoke hung near the ceiling, the walls were tiled in mosque patterns of blues and greens, and maroon Orientals covered the floors. Four high standing candelabras gave the place plenty of light. No hard furniture to sit on, just pillows and several short wooden tables for hookah pipes. There were shadows behind the drapes dividing the room into private compartments and a soft smell of sweat. A man in a tuxedo was lying down with his hand propping up his head. His hair was slick and black and when he sat up to greet me, he kissed my hand.

“Better to search for heaven than not,” he said.

“Oh loosen up,” Habee said. “You're behaving all wrong.” The man got up, bowed, put one arm over his head and the other elegantly out to the side and tiny-stepped on his tiptoes away from us toward another group of people talking near the gold tile fireplace on the far side of the room.

“What'sa matter with Georgie?” Madison said.

“Oh, you know, he doesn't really like girls.”

“I do,” she said, pressing her shoulder against mine. I could tell she was glad I was here. She'd matched me shot for shot at Carmen's, but had gotten only more dignified . . . more prophetic. She'd told me I'd eventually regret every night of my life except for this one. And with the bourbon surrounding everything with a lovely halo of melancholy, I thought,
She is so right.

Habee lit the opium in the glass bottom of the hookah pipe and the perfumed smoke wafted toward me.

“I must tell you both,” Habee said, taking short puffs to keep the smoke coming, “about a trip I just took to Mexico. I went to see an old friend of mine. I had no idea it would be so fantastic. He and about twenty others stay in caves by the water. All day they swim and fuck. A woman brings their food. They just stretch out in the sun like otters, it was the most remarkable thing.”

“Sounds like you found your calling,” Madison said, accepting the pipe, adjusting the hose so the smoke could move easily into her mouth.

“No, my best times were in the circus. I had a lovely gown . . . silk with blue roses. And there was a boy who gave me flowers. Really, he got quite obsessed with me and would wait until late to walk me to my trailer.” Habee took the pipe himself, puffed a thoughtful pigeon of smoke. “Anyway, it had to do with a rainy day and a back rub.”

“Sounds lurid,” I said, taking the mouthpiece and putting it to my lips. The smoke was smooth as milk.

“Yes?” Habee said, opening his eyes wide and waiting.

“Well.” I exhaled. “Did you hurt him?”

Habee smiled and took the pipe. “I assure you I did not. But that reminds me of a theory I'm developing. I think if men still hunted for deer or bear, more of them would be happy with their wives. Because now, you see, all men can hunt is women. It's terrible for them, their last connection to that savage wild man. They hunt. They kill.”

“Kill?” Madison said.

“You know, the moment a man comes, he's taken what he needs to feed himself.”

I felt queasy about his theory and about the little boy. I felt confused. I knew adultery was O.K., as was homosexuality and prostitution, but what about incest and older people taking advantage of younger ones? What about murder and cannibalism? It all made me uneasy because I could foresee being able to understand almost anything. I knew extreme behavior-hate, lust, domination—could be, as in Madison's case, just an extreme type of self-preservation. And I knew too that Habee would agree with Madison, that it was a weak and herdish thing to be “good.” Being nice was just a cover for weakness. I knew too that I was capable of knowing what was good for me, but doing the opposite. Once while I was home on Christmas break from school I slept with an old lover in some strange house he had the keys to. The sheets smelled like other people's bodies. My lover was melancholy, drank beers, brooded. It made me feel uneasy, even now, because I'd known it wasn't right to go there every evening to fuck and smoke cigarettes in a stranger's bed, but I did it anyway.

Everything around me seemed suddenly lushly alive. The ceramic patterns on the walls looked like DNA chains. Madison was talking about a john who had only wanted to kiss. “And he kissed so fake,” she said, “like he thought he was a movie star.”

She turned to me and put her lips on mine, opened her mouth and let her tongue wiggle around. Her mouth tasted of melon and I felt as if I were swimming in very warm water.

“The two of you are wonderful to behold,” Habee said, patting his heart.

Madison laughed and started to tell about a time when she was little. She'd forced all the kids in her neighborhood to take communion: wine made from poison sumac berries.

Had she really wanted to kiss me or was she showing off for Habee? Even her most intimate gestures were ambiguous. She was listening to him talk now about his mother, how she never woke, sleeping with her hands palsied up and the pee trickling into the clear plastic bag beside her. “It is a shame,” he said, “that such a precious spirit has taken flight.” Then Madison told about her mother, how she'd been raped and murdered in a lot behind the local grocery store, how the guy poured lighter fluid over her and set the whole field on fire.

“Jesus,” I said. “You don't just tell a story like that.”

They both looked at me, surprised the story startled me. Habee patted me coldly, turned to Madison, who told how the police had searched for the man though he was never found. Watching Madison talk I realized her coldness and cruelty were ways, known only to herself, of feeling more strongly than others.

Shadows shifted again behind the silk divider near us. A man breathed rhythmically and I could see a pelvis swaying against the rear and back of a bent figure. The sound of skin slapping skin reminded me of the skinheads. Madison touched my arm and said, “He's agreed to show you.” Habee was waiting, with his fingers splitting his pajamas, showing me his cunt, which was wide and lovely with folds and folds of pink skin. From inside came the limp cock, tiny balls too. I thought strangely of my mother, how she walked around the house in a half-slip, how she showed me rashes on her thighs, a pimple on her breast, how there seemed no delineation between her pain and mine. I asked, “Does any of it work?” He leaned toward me, his strong smell of cinnamon and the sweet smoke of opium swirled and he said, “It all depends on what you mean.”

C h a p t e r

E i g h t

I
T WAS NEARLY DAWN. THE TRAFFIC LIGHT'S REDS, YELLOWS AND
greens were magic in the blue half light. We left Habee's and walked through Chinatown. Madison stopped to chat with the live chickens in the cage of the poultry store, then pointed at a jade display of lovers in a variety of sexual positions. We were headed for a diner in the Tenderloin that Madison said had the best marmalade toast in San Francisco. My body felt light and the littlest details were miraculous: the store window with a row of old man's hats, the elegant way Madison flung her cigarette. The lightening sky reminded me of when I was young, before I knew the difference between living things and dead ones.

The diner was classic, white tile with Art Deco aluminum details. A sign written in longhand advertised the breakfast specials. Madison pulled the door open. Her exhaustion manifested itself as speedy strength. We took a booth near the front windows. There were a couple of drag queens at the counter eating pie and a black man two booths down with a little white mutt on his lap. I'd seen him around on his bike carrying the dog in the front basket. The waitress slapped down the plastic-covered menus, stood with her pen poised over her pad. She was thin like a boy, her netted hair resting on her head like a crown.

“Two breakfast specials,” Madison said, lighting another cigarette, “with extra jam.”

“How do you want your eggs?” the waitress asked.

“Over easy,” she said and the drag queens laughed.

She drank one cup of coffee after another, looking out the window at the steam rising from a manhole cover. I inhaled her smoke, watched the shoulders of the Mexican fry-cook stooping over the grill. She was like a man in her insistence on quiet camaraderie. Madison sipped her coffee, opened another small plastic container of cream, three more packets of sugar. There was pain in her face, but it was hard to tell if it was for her mother. It was horrible to imagine her mother, vulnerable in a flimsy flowered housedress, dragged behind the grocery store. Madison arranged her life so she'd be close to her mother, close to death. The waitress set the plates down roughly. My eggs were runny. The yokes reminded me of body fluids and the bacon scent was nauseating. I pushed my plate away. Madison cut her egg whites with her fork into splinters, then reached one up tentatively to her mouth. She concentrated entirely on eating, swallowing firmly. She sniffed her toast, emptied two containers of marmalade on the slices and took a bite. The sun was there now, pink on the flesh-tone buildings across the street. A bald man came in with a lunch bag and a newspaper.

“Is that story about your mother true?” My nerves were wasted and it upset me so much to ask that my hand trembled on the coffee cup. She seemed angry.

“I used to be like you. I went around sticking my nose in everyone's business, thinking I was a garbage pail for everyone's misery. Everything seemed so sad, too sad to bear.”

“You think compassion is a malady?”

“Everybody does,” Madison said. “Now I just try to forget myself by forcing my body into extreme situations. You may think I'm a fool, but it's the way I saved myself.”

“Did you ever ask someone for help?” I hated myself, I sounded like a goddamn television commercial.

“You mean God?” She laughed. “I know I should make peace with my past, but I can't. Therapy is for people like you, who have little problems, like divorced parents or husbands who can't get it up.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I think people can help each other.”

“Well, you probably believe in democracy too.” She lifted her yolk onto her toast.

The coffee was hitting my nerves hard. I wanted her to stay with me. I suddenly felt horribly lonely. “What I meant was, I want to help you.”

“I can't stomach this,” she said, throwing down her fork. “Why can't you just sit there quietly and watch me eat?”

*  *  *

I
HURRIED BACK TO THE APARTMENT, LAY DOWN ON THE BED
and pretended to be dead. I fell off quickly, had dreams of the dead, vivid and horrible. I opened my mouth and lizards came out. I dreamt I was walking naked in the Tenderloin with a baby made of cheese and another the size of a matchstick. To make the small one grow, I put it in warm water, but it turned blue. I tried to breast-feed it, and at first, it was amazing: the milk, the baby's adorable little mouth, but then it turned into a thick black catfish with long insect antennae. A man spoke Spanish in the next room, his voice rose until he was screaming and I opened my eyes and realized it was the phone ringing.

“Finally,” my mother said, when I picked up. “Where have you been?”

“I started a new job last night.”

“Waitressing?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I lied.

“Make lots of money?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Maybe you can get yourself some new clothes.” I cradled the phone to my shoulder and shut the curtain against the growing morning light. “I called you because of these incredible stories I heard at a party last night. Remember Timmy Rollins? He dropped out of college and started working as night janitor at the big insurance building on the highway? Last week when he found his girlfriend with another man, he broke her jaw and pulled out half the hair on her head.”

“Jesus!” I said.

“And do you remember June?”

“The one with the fluffy sweaters?”

“That's right. Well, she was cleaning up her VCR unit and noticed an unfamiliar tape, so she popped it in, and there was her husband having sex with a young woman.”

“No way,” I said, imagining the wife in her robe watching her husband with a woman much like herself, only ten years younger. The TV screen buzzing.

“I'll tell you,” my mother went on, “someone should write a book on man's true character.”

“Is that girl Timmy beat up O.K.?” I asked.

“You only get one chance in life, and for women that chance comes early. Before you know it, the million-dollar-baby thing is gone.” I didn't answer. It made me angry that she hated men yet sometimes sided with them. She wanted to believe, even though Dad had left her, that the patriarchy would care for her.

I was thinking of Madison, realizing she was similar to my mother, both believed that hate was sustaining. They each had a well-developed sense of doom and were convinced it was unresolvable, convinced the only way to lessen their pain was to pass it on to others.

“Do you ever pretend that you're dead?” I asked her.

“Jesse, why would you ask me something so morbid?”

“Because I'm exhausted,” I said.

She harrumphed. “You only have one mother.”

“And I only have one life.”

“You call playing house a life?”

“I'll call you,” I said.

“Do you have to go?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said and hung up.

When I thought of the expensive tailored clothes she'd worn as a teenager, still kept in plastic in her dresser, or of the TV show about a career woman she'd watched faithfully when we were little kids, I felt a searing empathy. But on the phone her semiotic stories always carried a curse for me and it was all I could do to protect myself. Too, I felt responsible, still, that Dad had dumped her, mostly because it was hard to pretend that she, or anyone really, was easy to love.

I rolled over on my stomach, moved my arms just under my hip bones, and cupped my palms over my pussy—it was a position I had used since I was a baby. Through the bed I heard the voice of a Chinese woman below and, above, the footfalls of the lovers rising, the woman's fluttering feet in the kitchen, the man in the shower. I imagined my mother coming to me. She layover me, and started to pulse her pelvis. There was something so familiar about giving her pleasure, something I'd been trying to do all of my life.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT I WENT IN THROUGH THE BACK DOOR AT
Carmen's, saw Madison waiting at the top of the stairs. The stairwell was dimly lit and I liked the priestly way she stood, wearing the same clothes as last night. As I got closer I could tell she was high.

“The snake beguiled me and I ate,” she said. I felt uncomfortable. Whenever time lapsed, she seemed to forget the status of our relationship. “I have a hardcore upstairs,” she said, somewhat bored. “He likes an audience.”

“I just watch?”

Madison nodded.

“O.K.” I followed, her scent rich like menstrual blood. I was curious, I still hadn't felt that exquisite kick of perversity. A man sat on the bed—he was younger than I had imagined, with pale blond hair and small perverse features. In his bow tie and expensive suit, he looked awkward as a game bird in Madison's space-age room.

“I thought I told you to undress,” Madison said, not looking at the man as she poured me an inch of bourbon in a blue glass.

The man slipped off his shoe, then pulled his sock off and folded it into the loafer. He removed his other shoe, rolled the sock down, placed that sock inside of the other shoe. His hands shook as he put both shoes together next to the bed. He unzipped his pants, stepped out one leg at a time, folded them neatly and placed the pants on top of his shoes. Then he undid his bow tie and took off his shirt, till he stood in his flowered boxers, shivering, looking anxious and pleased.

“Those too,” Madison said firmly. He pulled them down, folded the boxers on the top of his pile. His skin goose-pimpled and he looked at her longingly, waiting for directions.

“Bend over the bed,” she ordered.

He draped himself over the edge. Cracked his butt so I could see his anus, dark pubic hair curling around it. I slung down the bourbon, my organs glowing like a space heater. Was this Madison's idea of intimacy, me staring into this guy's asshole?

She sat down at her dressing table, got out a fingernail clipper and snapped the white nail from her thumb. The man gasped. Madison worked on the other hand, with each snap of a fingernail the man moaned. She took off a go-go boot, folded her foot up onto the chair and clipped her toenails.

“This woman here,” she said, “is going to tell your little boys all about you.”

I winced. Though the man didn't say anything I could tell she'd excited him. Now that I knew something about her past, Madison was no less of an enigma. She wanted to escape her own consciousness in another's flesh, but it made me uncomfortable that it wasn't sex she considered exciting, but the idea of evil. Madison preferred the narrative, the “then I do this” to the reality. She considered the sexual narrative holy and could thus disentangle herself from the act.

She took off her other boot, a deep click for the thick nail of her big toe and then smaller snaps as she cut the nails in decreasing size. She put each boot back on and zipped them up. She opened a drawer and took out a rubber glove. Pulled it up over her hand and snapped it at her elbow. She took up a tube of lubricating jelly and squeezed some over the glove, spreading it out so the rubber gleamed. She straightened two fingers and squeezed a drop out onto the tip. When the man heard her stand he sighed and spread his cheeks further. I could see his hard cock peeking out between his stomach and the bed.

Madison sat next to him and slid two fingers slowly into his anus. She slipped in a third finger, moved them in to the hilt. The man's legs jangled softly. With a continual slow movement back and forth she pushed her whole hand in, then her wrist, her forearm. She fisted her hand and the man sucked air. His back arched, his pink anus was stretched wide as a mouth. Madison moved her arm in and out, she seemed fascinated by the way the rubber glove disappeared inside the man's asshole. She punched up hard, the man raised his head, gasped. Her arm in to the elbow, she flexed her bicep and grabbed for his bowels. The man made a series of vowel sounds. Then a hard “Hhhhhhhhhh” that rose high like a cat's scream. Madison's lips opened into a snarl and I could see the muscles of her neck strain and flex. He splayed his arms and legs wildly like a bug with a pin through its belly.

“Madison,” I yelled instinctually. She looked at me, but her eyes were dead. She had gone away from me, away from the man, the room and Carmen's, away from San Francisco too. Madison was on the lot behind the grocery store watching the flames. She quickly looked back down, reached around the man to restrain him with a tight arm around his waist. She knew fathers didn't have to be loving toward their children, that mothers could be raped like schoolgirls, that people's relationships to one another are sinister, violent, even murderous. He wailed, his eyes bulged and he swung his head side to side. “Madison,” I yelled again, but she was concentrating now, reaching her fingers up toward his heart.
She wants his heart
, I thought,
because she doesn't have one of her own.
I ran out of the room, down the back stairs and onto the street.

I
WAS HEADED FOR THE BLACK ROSE TO FIND BELL. WATCHING
Madison's fist made me realize Bell had never treated me like a lover. He lived with me to appease his dead father and I stayed with him because his loving disinterest was exactly the kind of mixed signal I used to get from my mother. I wondered if Bell missed me. I'll tell him how I whored myself because he rejected my body—not just its surface, but its general longing. I'll tell him that there is more strength in low moments than in powerful ones. “Bell,” I will say, “there is something centering about despair.” But he would be disappointed that I had left Madison's, say I was fascist to think that heterosexual sex was the only cosmically right kind, that whenever one body enters another it was life-affirming.

Bell sat in the corner of the Black Rose in a red leather booth. He seemed different, with his dirty hair parted to the side and the lining of his coat ripped so it hung down like a rag. He looked up, grabbed my hand and kissed the palm deeply.

“I convinced myself that you were dead,” he said, pulling me across the table to him. He smelled of stale smoke and beerish sweat. “You must come back.”

I pulled away and sat back. “I can't do that.”

“You don't understand.” He looked into my eyes, his skin was liverish, puffy. “I'm afraid I'm going crazy.”