Thrill-Bent (12 page)

Blam! He got me again, this time in the sternum. I raced from the wide-open target of the tree to the clutter of patio furniture gathered in front of the sliding glass door that led to the dining room. The spray of water followed me as I ran, icing down my back and thighs. For someone who spent his days in an air-conditioned office adjusting insurance claims (whatever that meant), the Condor had excellent aim and devious athletic prowess. He had already moved past the bees and was crouching near the artichoke bush. I knew it was strictly out of bounds to pause in front of the window—we had just washed it last weekend, and I was sure my dad wouldn’t want to chance spattering it—but my hip was actually aching from the initial bombshell blast, and I wanted to check to make sure nothing was amiss. I had never been hurt by my dad’s spray before. I bent down to examine my glossy white skin there—a pink starfish-shaped splotch reached its stubby fingers toward the smooth hill of flesh over my pubic bone. I pressed on it briefly, and my white fingerprints emerged like animal tracks, then disappeared.

“Come on, Jan, get back in front of the tree. Let’s get this over with,” my father said, sounding bored and annoyed. He got up from his crouch slowly, adjusted the crotch of his bathing trunks, and moved a few steps toward me. Then he stopped, looked down, and adjusted his crotch again, punching that whole area a few times in succession. I never knew whether to look away from this. The hand holding the hose didn’t flinch. The mouth of the hose stayed pointed away from him into the flower bed, flowing wisps of water as gracefully as a Japanese fountain. Meanwhile, his groin was getting a pretty furious working over.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it!” he chanted, staccato bursts that accompanied every fisted wallop to his family jewels.

I waited a couple of beats for his flare-up to subside. “You practically broke my leg with that first squirt, Dad. Why didn’t you give me some warning?” I asked, drawing out the words in an attenuated whine, stalling for time. But before I could come up with my next maneuver, his free hand had darted out and grabbed me by the shoulder, flinging me away from the window and back toward the tree. Just as he released my shoulder, he let go with the hose, thumb over the spout to make for a stronger squall, dousing the whole back of my body in an arc of spray. I started to stumble as the momentum of his push and the water’s nudge propelled me forward, and I instinctively reached out toward the tree to steady myself. Its thick bark stopped me, and I paused to hug it for a moment, plastering my body against its girth. Within seconds, I felt the hose’s strong spray force itself across my butt-cheeks and between my legs. It was like a hand had grabbed me there, its cold fingers prying into my private places. I spun around, hands covering my face. Out of ideas, I simply ran around and around the tree as fast as I could, just like Little Black Sambo running from the tigers.

My father stood victorious a few yards away and laughed as he soaked me from every possible angle. I hated the splishy sound of my bare feet pounding the wet patio, now strewn with soggy dead flowers. I hated the way my pink nipples jiggled up and down, their little swells jumping like tiny acrobats. I lifted my knees in an exaggerated fashion as I ran, to avoid prolonged contact with the mottled ground.

“Ick! Ick! Ick!” I yelled, but I could feel myself coming clean even as I continually reeled around the same bend, greeting the same starting point again and again in the rondure of relentless deluge. The carpet of blossoms gradually dispersed, and the porous orange tiles were restored to their pristine condition under my squeaky clean feet. Every three seconds or so, when I’d come around the trunk of the tree, I stared right into my father’s face for the length of a fingersnap. What I saw there was a bright spark of recognition that lit us both: we contained the same grainy miasma of spongy internal organs and blood-red glue, the genetic cloud of Richman-ness that soiled us under our bathing suits and under our skin, muddy and unchangeable. It was roiling inside of us. It couldn’t be rinsed or scrubbed off.

K
ids in suburban Rio train-surf: after sniffing glue on the glossy green hill behind the statue of Christ, they jump onto the backs of SuperVia commuter trains that pass going 100-plus miles per hour through mountains and tunnels and dust-choked industrial gridirons. Kids in suburban San Diego skateboard on improvised half-pipes forty feet high (drainage ditches ravaged by erosion on the cliffs overlooking Sunset Beach)—or else down the concrete spiral ramps of enormous parking garages in the middle of the night, wearing baggy shorts and Vans, no kneepads or helmets or tape on their knuckles, after smoking bong loads of Mendocino redbud they buy from their fifth-period math teacher. Kids in suburban Mexico huff head cleaner off dirty rags; kids in suburban Norway slide down mammoth icebergs on scraps of cardboard. Even timid children who don’t relish the idea of hurtling into space at a death-defying rate like to stir things up. They shoplift, or throw rocks at cars. They jump off ranch-style roofs onto mini-tramps, scale fences to steal avocados from the neighbor’s tree; they light firecrackers, make prank phone calls, torture bugs, and pierce their own ears.

As soon as I get to Salt Lake City all I want to do is drink, smoke, fuck, curse, and have a double cappuccino. On the shuttle from baggage claim to the rental car lot, the only other passenger, the whitest man I’ve ever seen, gives me a practiced nod-’n’-smile combo (the official Mormon greeting, for those of you who haven’t read your Utah handbooks). This guy looks so squeaky clean I’m willing to believe he’s a world-class pervert. He’s not leering at me, or sneaking glances at my tattoos, or even trying to parlay our initial friendly nod-smile exchange into a friendly where-ya-flyin’-in-from exchange, which could so easily lead to a my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me exchange; in fact he hasn’t even re-crossed his legs or subtly fondled the leash to his Samsonite softsider—even though it’s after midnight and we’re the only two people on the fluorescent orange shuttle van (the Utah equivalent of last-call). I assume his reticence is due to pedophilia; it must be I’m at least three decades too old for mister smiley-face with his tabernacle-shaped bald spot and his Gary Numan tie (I don’t think he’s being retro, I think the 1980s are to Utah what the 1970s are to Kiss). I watch him from the corner of my eye, fantasizing about what he’s fantasizing about: the best I can come up with is a spread in a
Barely Legal
magazine I saw once featuring a pig-tailed blond whose white Sears briefs had somehow spilled down to her ankles, and boy was she confused and embarrassed, gazing straight at the camera with (I have to say) a pretty convincing aghast look on her face, her pubic area waxed and powdered to look like (I have to say) a pretty convincing pre-teen’s. Of course, I realize that my little fantasy is probably a Disneyland version of some real pedophile’s sexual daydream, which would include Little Debbie snack cakes and Garanimals and Beanie Babies in combinations I can’t even fathom. I have spent the three-hour plane ride resolving to uncover the stinking, not-as-pictured-in-the-brochure underside of this Brigham Young family-values town: I take personal offense at the idea that swarms of young people in an American urban center (okay, it’s not New York or even Chapel Hill, but Salt Lake’s population is over 300,000) are supposedly having a good time without the aid of drugs or alcohol or cigarettes or Jolt cola or premarital sex!

The last time I was here I was seven, traveling with my grandmother, whose mission it was to introduce me to my creamy-skinned, Hummel-collecting Mormon relatives, who turned out to be just as nice as my frizzy-haired, bridge-playing Jewish relatives were mean. You would think that the revelation would have lent a sense of equity and equilibrium to my wobbly ethnic identity, but my main mental snapshot from the trip is of projectile barfing in the middle of the fancy dining room on the twentieth floor of the Downtown Hilton, white gloved and clutching my fringed macrame purse. It may be that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has always rubbed me the wrong way (I remember rolling my eyes when my grandmother explained to me about Family Night: “... And once a week, one child and one parent put their heads together and plan an activity that the whole family can enjoy, like Charades! or Crazy Eights!”), or it may be that my experience at the Hilton infected me with the urge to splash Mormons with puce bile whenever possible, but in the thirty-plus years since that bulimic day, I have had a vivid recurring fantasy of exposing the dark side of Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake Gritty: Terror in the Tabernacle,
the TV miniseries would be called. But I wonder, as the shuttle bus glides smoothly through the curly intestines of the airport’s domain, if it would be more shocking to my sense of decorum if the white man with the rolling luggage isn’t in fact a pederast or a pedophile or even the type of guy who gets a secret thrill out of flipping through his daughter’s
dELiA*s
catalogue. If instead he is eliding eye contact with me simply because he is too busy evoking an olfactory image of the cup of instant hot cocoa he’s going to whip up as soon as he gets home. Or perhaps he is kicking himself for having missed an especially piquant family night (nachos and Twister?) while he was on his business trip. Maybe he respects his daughter’s privacy, hugs her often without getting even a little aroused, has a snow globe from Chicago or Minneapolis for her collection stashed in his softsider. I clear my throat loudly to see if he can be wrested from his domestic reverie.

“Excuse me,” I say, “do you happen to know where the Travelodge is, the one that’s near the Lagoon?” Betty hasn’t answered my last phone call, and I never got directions to my motel.

He doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t even take a moment to peruse my ringless fingers, my lack of offspring, my apparent age (on a good day, I look younger than my thirty-nine years; there is no day on which I resemble an adventurous teenager on Spring Break); he doesn’t pause to reflect on the anomaly of a woman traveling alone, her only luggage a battered flowery suitcase, shamelessly divulging that her destination is a jailbait theme park.

“There’s a Travelodge about a mile in, on Manilow Road,” he says brightly, happy to oblige, and pulls out a well-worn map from the outer pocket of his suitcase.

Manilow Road! I think I remember that Barry Manilow is from Salt Lake City, a Mormon who did missionary work in Namibia or somewhere before he started writing advertising jingles and got caught up in a world of uphill climbing, met Mandy (who came and gave without taking, much like Santa), and became an international star. I have no idea if I’m making this up, and every time I flash on the mental image of Barry’s claymation nose and puffy hair, a little voice in my head screams, “Jew! From Brooklyn!” and still I’m almost convinced that the street on which my Salt Lake Travelodge resides was named for a local boy made good, little Barry Manilow, the funny-looking kid with the big ears and the toy piano in his basement.

When I finally hit the Manilow Road exit in my seafoam-green Ford Fiesta rental, it’s almost two a.m., an hour whose ubiquitous closing-time connotations pale by the light of the dry and temperate Salt Lake City moon. It is a gorgeous night, clear and bright. The Utah mountains rise smooth and truculent in the distance like shoulder pads on a football player. Gas stations and fast food joints, none of which are open, greet me just past the freeway’s off ramp. A billboard advertising “The Lagoon” boasts fun for the whole family: indeed, the family pictured seems about to burst with glee, the boy sinking his whole face into a large breast-shaped pillow of cotton candy, the girl merrily choking the life out of a stuffed teddy bear with a bright ribbon, the mom and dad looking on with prideful satisfaction (the mom’s happiness dimples are so deep they are like a couple of extra smiles), seeming genuinely not to mind that their wallets are being drained at every junk food stand and souvenir shop in the park. In the billboard’s background, a waterslide splashes undismayed onlookers, and a roller coaster looms efficaciously in the distance. That must be the Tumbler! The coaster I’m here to see. Just as I pass the billboard, I see the Travelodge logo, that little bear sleepwalking in his nightcap and slippers. I swerve and brake at the same time, a dangerous combination even in a dry county, and manage to swoop over several lanes to the exit.

I’d kill for a Diet Coke, even a caffeine-free one, but I’m not getting my hopes up. The desk clerk looks up when I come in, alerted by the tink-tonk of the door’s bell, and she flashes me the signature nod-’n’-smile. I smile but don’t nod, refusing to be indoctrinated into the cult just yet. In spite of the generic greeting, I smell deviant behavior—I mean, a graveyard shift at an outskirts Travelodge isn’t exactly Family Night material. She seems capable and efficient as she pulls up my reservation on her computer screen and apprises me of my payment options, but I notice that the magazine she is reading is
Cat Fancy.
I can make out the sidebar features: “Purrs and Hisses” and “In the Mews.” The feline on the cover is feral and toothy and clearly wouldn’t hesitate to de-jugular any cat fancier who came between it and a greasy chicken bone in a Popeye’s parking lot. I notice scratch marks on the desk clerk’s wrist when she dangles my room key in front of me. Is she a part of some masochistic cult? Some sect of claw supplicants who work night jobs so they can devote all their daylight hours to cat-worship, flashing their clawed flesh as a sort of password to gain entrance to their high-security meeting places? I mean, I like cats too, but I don’t sit around at two in the morning reading magazines about them, flipping the pages with my bloodied fingers. I don’t keep a stash of pussy rags in my top desk drawer. As soon as the room key hits my open palm, the clerk goes right back to fancying cats, no nod, no smile. I skulk out, not even broaching the subject of possible Diet Coke availability.

My room is poolside. In fact it’s so poolside that I could, with a little engineering ingenuity, bounce from my mattress out the window and cannonball directly into the deep end. But I don’t mind the closetlike proportions of the room: the air conditioning works and its hum is tidal and lulling rather than rasping, and Magic Fingers is still a quarter. I pull my baby-doll nightie out of my bottle bag and put it on, winging my Bermuda shorts and Pep Girls T-shirt on the nightstand in what is I hope a vague simulation of hanging. Then I do what any weary traveler does: I collapse on the bed with the pillows fluffed up behind me (as much as it is possible to fluff polyester fiberfill), insert a quarter into the Magic Fingers coinbox (which promises that “total body relaxation is just seconds away!”), and grab the remote control. If the air conditioner is more hushed than I’d anticipated, the roar of the Magic Fingers more than makes up for lost decibels. These fingers don’t just rumble, they rumba and quake; the experience is the aural and sensual equivalent of lying in my bed in the Triangle next to the railroad tracks when a long train came speeding by. It is only slightly less fun and more hilarious than I remember from when I was a kid.

I switch on the TV, thinking that a booming dose of
Celebrity Fear Factor
or
Cribs
might be just the thing to drown out the babel of the Magic and thus stretch my entertainment quarter. It’s hard to even tell what’s going on on
20/20,
since my head is bouncing and jumping around so much, and Diane Sawyer’s sagacious eyes and flat lips seem fluttery and amped-up, like her features are getting ready to mutiny. The story concerns a teenage girl in Iowa, a pretty and popular cheerleader with perfect white orthodonted teeth and fluffy blond hair. They keep flashing a photograph of the cheerleading squad, an oddly still-life studio shot that actually benefits from my shaking perspective, and Diane tells us what a charmed and privileged life the cheerleader led, in a low, prophetic tone that might as well have subtitles: “Impending Doom! Popular Girl Headed for Crash Landing!” The prospect of tracking the demise of the kind of girl who taunted me with her very presence in high school is too attractive to channel-surf through, and I’m trying to somehow lessen the quaking of the bed so I can pay closer attention, sitting up straight and holding both sides of my head with my hands. This girl is thin and tan and I can tell she has a knowledge of the workings of sexuality and a confidence with the male gender beyond my wildest teenage dreams. She is the kind of girl whose photograph I used to tear out of
Seventeen
magazine and thumbtack to the wall next to my vanity mirror, as though through some process of voodoo osmosis I could pass through the mirror and come out the other side as a lanky, fresh-faced prom queen slut. My pasty, chubby, curly-headed, virginal self would be extracted, or vaporized like alcohol on a hot day, and I’d be left pure in a brave new world where I looked good in halter tops and my eyebrows weren’t voraciously overplucked.

This cheerleader’s mother is recounting the day when their entire lives changed, that afternoon in mid-August when the police knocked at their suburban door with a warrant to search the three-story house, saying they had reason to believe there was a dead baby on the premises. The cheerleader, when questioned by the officers, had seemed genuinely shocked and unknowing. Cut to Diane asking the girl if she’d been pregnant, or had recently given birth: the girl turns to her mother and makes that noise that teenage girls make, that voiceless appalled gasp that ricochets off the back of the throat and pops out of the open mouth in one percussive pant. A photograph of the cheerleader wearing a tennis outfit, holding a racquet aloft with a tennis sweater tossed casually across her shoulders, appears on the screen. The mother tells of a school fashion show a few weeks earlier, remembers being in the dressing room with her daughter pre-show as she primped and practiced her runway walk. “Her body looked the same as it always does,” Mom chimes, “I saw her in her bra and underwear!” A biological conundrum, or a weirdly blindered mom, since it turns out that the girl was indeed almost seven months pregnant in her tennis gear—the baby was born seven weeks premature—and her body was not the same as it always was at all, but housing a third-trimester tyke who probably didn’t appreciate being squeezed into a Spandex midriff slimmer. It turns out that one morning in mid-August, the cheerleader experienced labor pains and emerged from her second-floor bedroom, walked past the living room where her parents were watching a riveting Olympic diving competition, and down the stairs to the basement, where she lay on a red leather exercise bench, gave birth to a tiny baby boy, cut the umbilical cord with a pair of nail scissors, bagged him and twist-tied him and shoved him deep into a cardboard box under some camping equipment. Then she cleaned up the mess with some Brawny paper towels and called her best friend to go swimsuit shopping at the local mall. For the friend, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Getting pregnant and telling no one (except your best friend), praying for a miscarriage, snorting coke and drinking pitchers of margaritas throughout the pregnancy, continuing to slut around by night and wear a spandex midriff slimmer by day: these were actions that could be confided to a best friend without fear of recrimination. But excitedly hunting for a thong bikini two hours after passing a bright-blue seven-pound fetus through your vagina: here was an enigma too troubling for even the most seasoned bikini shopper not to confess to her mom. So the best friend’s mom called the local cops, who in turn called Child Protective Services, all of whom showed up waving search warrants and wearing urgent expressions on their faces.