Thrill-Bent (4 page)

Flying by the foamy, swampy Cardiff lagoon on the east side of the highway, I remembered the time my mother drove right down into it, spaced out so completely that she didn’t realize she was veering until she’d veered right off the highway and we were nose-down in ten feet of pollywog-filled lagoon water. She looked stunned when the car stopped, just sat there gaping at her hands on the wheel, her mouth an uncomprehending O, her eyes searching for a way to reverse the actions of the previous moment. Then water started pouring in through the open windows, and I tried to release the latch on my passenger door in order to swim up to safety. But the car had submerged obliquely, swaying to the side, like those Cadillacs at Cadillac Ranch, and my door was wedged in and wouldn’t budge. I wriggled out of my seatbelt, reached across my mother, and opened her door. There was a brief pause after I yanked on the handle, the familiar click hanging in the air almost like a parody of underwater echo-distortion, and then a powerful sucking sound as green water invaded the vehicle, rushing in all at once when it discovered its opportunity. “Come on, Mom,” I mouthed, jabbing her thigh. She looked at me with her mouth still open and I couldn’t tell if she understood me or not. I unbuckled her seatbelt and pushed at her hips. She was heavy and uncooperative, so I crawled over her, plugged my nose, and swam up the few feet to oxygen. When I reached the surface, intending to dive back down and retrieve my mother, I saw that there was already a group of onlookers gathered at the bank of the lagoon. “Oh!” they said collectively when I emerged. A man in a checkered shirt jumped into the water and freestyled aggressively toward me, looking ridiculously dramatic and bizarre. “I’ve got to get my mom,” I said, before he could quite get his hands on me, and disappeared back under the murk. Just as I realized how hard it was to keep my eyes open in the cloudy paint-jar of the marsh, I bumped into my mother on her way up from the bottom. Her hair floated around her head like seaweed. I grabbed her waist and pushed her up into the air, holding my breath and pressing my soggy tennis-shoed feet into the sludgy primordial floor of the swamp. Checkered-shirt man must have grabbed her, because I was relieved of her weight almost immediately and my body buoyed to the surface. After that I just remember being wet and stinky, embarrassed beyond anything I had known, sitting with my ever-silent mother on the side of the road and waiting for the tow truck to arrive.

Being with my father in the car alone was a much different experience from being part of the carpool gang happily transported to and from school or swim class or the movies. When my friends and I were piled into the car, my dad donned his wacky chauffeur persona, with crazy driving pyrotechnics meant to confuse and amuse us. But a private roadtrip was different, better in some ways since I didn’t feel obliged to laugh at his spastic cursing, or worry about what my friends would think of my obviously peculiar dad. I could laugh, or not laugh, or cry with rage, as my father seemed crammed so tight inside his own head he wouldn’t have noticed if I turned into a giant rooster and started to crow. I was used to being ignored, though, during this ride to the pizza parlor. These were the black frames in between the bright ones, these lapses of attention from my dad. The disappearance of the face behind the hands, the scary momentary loss that makes the object so much more vital when found. As soon as we stepped into Besta-Wan, I would again materialize for my father. He made me guess which of his pockets held the quarters that I coveted for the jukebox, usually to play David Cassidy’s “I Woke Up in Love This Morning” as many times as I could before the pizza was ready. (I liked the part where he sang “Went to bed with you [pause] on my mind” because I understood that the pause contained some kind of sexual innuendo.) But on the road, my father’s concentration gave me a chance to observe him in his natural habitat. He was the opposite of my mother behind the wheel. He barely tapped the wheel to swerve away from imminent danger, changed lanes without signaling, so fast and crafty that the surrounding traffic seemed stock-still and deadpan, stuck in a blurred tableau of time and motion while our Fiat whipped in and out like a lone sperm on a stark microscopic slide.

It was on one of these rides that I dubbed my father “the Condor” (a bird we were learning about in my third-grade class) for his smooth, graceful soar and his keen raptorial eye. He never missed a trick. The tininess of my father’s car made sitting in it with him seem illicit, like dancing close in a room crammed with strangers. The intimate details of breath and warmth of skin were unavoidable. Even though the Condor paid no attention to me when we were in the car together, his eyes fastened to the road and his thoughts billowing inside his head, steaming out his ears in paisley swirls I could practically see, still, I felt my pulse trotting in my temples and I had to suck air in hard through my nose to get any oxygen to my brain. Goofing around at home was one thing—crawling all over him, bouncing on his knee, stepping on his feet while I wrapped my body around his torso—but being in the world with him, venturing out into the almost-night, just the two of us, felt more meaningful somehow.

I liked being with the Condor, and I liked being seen with him. Women noticed him as we drove by. They’d do double takes, craning to catch his eye or glimpse his profile at a red light. And it wasn’t just because we were doing eighty in a convertible; I’d seen the same phenomenon at the supermarket and the pizza parlor, anywhere my father and I were alone. Being alone with my father was like
being
my father; my need for attention would shrink until it was a tiny tablet dissolving under his tongue. I was spread thin across the membrane of his field of vision. I saw what he saw, saw what the world must be like from inside of his skin. It wasn’t that my dad was classically handsome; I’d seen how women looked at handsome men, with a complicated mix of curiosity and coaxing that tipped over into stuttering shyness. But with my father it was different, as though these women already knew him, as though they were trying to place his familiar face in their haunted, heated memories. A certain look would pass across their faces, a look it took me years to understand, the heady private pleasure of remembering bits and pieces, the wavy black hair or the little patch of beard under the purled and suck-able lower lip. And when the features fall into place there is a pang, a half-smile to which the face can’t help but surrender. I couldn’t say then and can’t say now whether any of these women had actually known my father, or whether my sense of tuning into a private frequency had more to do with a general adult playground of sexuality that I, despite my savvy interpretation of David Cassidy lyrics, had yet to fully grasp. But I noticed. And I felt lucky to have such a stone-fox chick-magnet for a father.

One Wednesday evening, turning the corner onto Encinitas Boulevard a mere block from the Besta-Wan Pizzeria, the Fiat made a jaunty series of lurches, a sputtering balletic sequence of coughs caused by my dad’s machine-gun gas-and-throttle dance. When we were on the highway and he’d lapse into one of his paroxysms, he’d simply take his foot off the gas and we’d coast for a few seconds, his hands tapping the wheel, his elbows flapping as he cawed and cursed into the tunnel of wind. Then his toe would gradually crawl onto the clutch, expertly upshifting until we were speeding along as before. Like a smooth DJ transitioning between songs, the Condor would grease the fold, erasing any harsh lines of demarcation between one velocity and another. But every once in a while the spell would come over him right in the middle of an intersection, and it was as if his body knew that to abandon the pedals would be potentially deadly. So he’d bank into his turn as usual, his forehead furrowed just enough so I could tell he was concentrating, and then he’d incorporate the drumbeat tapping of his limbs into the driving skills required for bringing us through the intersection to safety. On this Wednesday, however, something happened in between the stop sign and the right turn lane. Just as we were stammering into the middle of the road, a bright light careened out of the lavender dusk; it was like the sky split open and released a lightning bolt. A blaze of headlights marked us, an arrow tagging its prey, and then claimed us. A shiny maroon Buick hurtled through the stop, barreling into the left nostril of our poor Fiat with a resounding crack, so loud and blinding I thought for a moment we had burst into flames. We spun like a coin thrown onto an ice-skating rink. My dad’s arm was thrown across my chest like a plank across a door, strong and brown, with bright red polka dots blossoming all along its length. Glass was everywhere—in my hair, my eyes, my lap. Through the frame of the missing windshield, I saw the blue jangle of ocean and the purple sky, and then the color wheel repeated itself as we spun: blue, purple, gray buildings, white sidewalk. Blue-purple-gray-white. Blue-purple-gray-white. We gradually slowed to a stop, and my father’s hand dug into my shoulder, his bloody face pressed up against mine.

“Okay?” he whispered. “You okay, sweetie?” And I think I answered yes, yes, I’m fine, I am here with you, but I may not have found the words, because people came streaming in from everywhere, shouting and barking commands.
Get out, Stay in, That was crazy, Not your fault, Oh shit, Call an ambulance, Stay, Go, I saw everything, Jesus, Look at the blood, Look at the little girl.

It was strange being at Besta-Wan then, with the sky crow-black and endless. The sun had set and even the streaks of dusklight were gone from the horizon. I was perched on an ornate wrought-iron chair at a table on the porch of the restaurant, eating lukewarm pepperoni pizza and being told by the proprietress what a good girl I was. My father was still down the street, lit from above by a streetlamp so that his hair looked like a shiny black helmet. In the middle of a crowd, he gestured wildly to a policeman while two paramedics tried to persuade him onto a gurney. I had been told that my dad had to go to the hospital and that my mother would be coming to pick me up in a few minutes. I wanted to go to the hospital, too, to be hustled onto a white-sheeted gurney, to ride in a screaming ambulance, to be rolled through metal saloon doors into a bustling, sterilized environment. But it seemed that the blood all over me was my father’s blood, the prickling I’d felt in my eyes must have been the wind whipping through the fast vortex of our spindle. I did have a Band-Aid on my cheek where my dad had accidentally ground glass into my skin when he pressed his face to mine. The proprietress had Mercuro-chromed me in the pizza kitchen, telling me to take a sip of Fresca whenever I felt a sting.

I picked a piece of pepperoni off the edge of my slice. I didn’t like it when the pepperoni hung over the line of the cut crust; it meant that half the round orange disc rightfully belonged to another slice. And I hated to see the little half-moon crater in the slice that was lacking, its bare white undersoil wrinkled like a belly button. The oil on the surface of the pepperoni had hardened into candle wax, and its coagulated texture made me push my plate to the other side of the table.

“Had enough?” asked the proprietress. “Sweetie?” I squeezed my eyes shut for five seconds, then opened them again. Still no dad. I cycled through the process a few more times, but each time my eyes sprang open they were again greeted with absence.

Then I heard two men behind me on the porch say that they thought my father had seen the crash coming from a long way off. “Did you see how he hit the brakes, then tried to make a getaway? It was like his foot got confused, he was jumping all over the road like a rabbit!”

He always drives that way, I murmured under my breath to no one in particular. He’s a Condor. He’s a genius behind the wheel.

I
have been sitting on this big hard bed in this tiny concrete room in New Orleans, in a triangular and windowless building referred to by Ninth Ward locals simply as “The Triangle,” waiting for a guy named Casey. He said he would come over after work, which should have been about half an hour ago. I can’t believe I’m sitting here doing nothing but watching the door, I haven’t even turned on the television set or switched on WWOZ, I haven’t cracked open the Richard Ford novel I’m in the middle of—even though it would be appropriate, being all about infidelities and betrayals among emotionally complex-yet-somehow-stunted thirtysomethings in American cities other than LA or New York—and I haven’t changed my underwear or my lip gloss, checked to make sure the toilet is flushed and the incriminating notebook where I’ve recorded all of my experiences with Casey is stuffed safely under the box spring. I haven’t done anything other than stare at the shaft of sunlight that illuminates a corner of this scarlet bedspread, my bare ankle, a diamond-shaped swatch of the pearlized shower curtain that hangs about three feet from the bed. The front door is wide open, since that is the only natural light available in my little cell. I sit on the edge of the bed with my mouth hanging open, listening to the neighbors working on their muscle car across the street.

This is the scene that keeps replaying in my head to the rasping tune of a Pontiac V8 that won’t quite turn over: Casey leans against the doorway and smiles his shy smile, pulls the rubber band out of his ponytail. He snaps it at my knee, then walks over and kisses me deep and asks if we should keep the door open or closed. Before I can answer, he pulls off my underwear and ravenously goes down on me, kneeling on the floor by the bed, his throat humming and his tongue thick and warm, his hands kneading my ass until one finger slides into my asshole, almost by accident, and he keeps kneading, like he wants to subsist solely on me, on my pussy, on my slippery lining and my red-hot pebble of clit.

Something is sticking into my thigh, distracting me from my reverie. I pull the culprit from my pocket—a stiff square envelope whose edges are still as sharp as fan blades. My name and New York address, handwritten in wide, loopy letters on the front, are fading. I should probably stop carrying the thing around. When I extract the card from the envelope, a few sad dots of leftover confetti poof out into the air, swallowed and digested immediately by the vastness underneath the bed.
Your presence is requested,
the card says, in silver cursive font on a mauve background. There is an untidy spray of silver droplets next to the words—generic celebratory clip-art meant to suggest fireworks or a frothy extemporaneous fountain, a bottle of champagne being popped open, something sexual and uncontainable. I try not to, but I can’t help it: I open the card to peek once again at the Polaroid. There is my father looking handsome and tan, thinner than I remember, smiling at the camera with what appears to be cocktail-fueled satisfaction, clutching the orangey shoulder of a thirtysomething blond wearing a spandex halter top. Chantelle, that’s what the card’s signature says. Like always, my eyes zoom in on the bottom corner of the photo, where I can just make out her puckered left nipple through the clingy fabric, riding strangely high on her breast, parallel to her armpit.

In the ten years since I’ve seen my dad, I’ve given very little thought to his progressing life, preferring to imagine him as a static image, a buzzing and backlit face in a black-and-white movie on TCM. A disquieting dream scribbled into a notebook you only come across while spring cleaning. A photograph, but not this photograph. How old is this woman? She’s definitely younger than I am. Her snub nose and freckles are Lohan-esque; her clothes suggest Dixie Chicks, Suicide Slurpees. Is that my mother’s square-cut engagement ring on her left hand? I squint and hold the Polaroid closer to my face.

I met Casey on my first night in New Orleans, when I got out of the taxi I’d taken from the airport. The driver turned off the highway and drove along the Mississippi River for what felt like miles, past neglected brick buildings and sprawling, dilapidated wooden houses, past navy ships on the river so huge they looked like whole cities. Black kids were running in and out of the half-paved, half-dirt road, dribbling basketballs at midnight. An old man stood on a kitchen chair next to a telephone pole, nailing up a hand-painted wooden sign that said “Lemon Pie Thisaway” with an arrow pointing toward a yard full of skinny dogs barking rapid-fire. When we finally pulled up to the address on Royal Street—the one I’d been given by Betty, who arranged this month-long sublet—I was surprised to see a receiving line of sorts. Four paint-spattered men with varying lengths of facial hair wearing non-ironic rock-and-roll T-shirts stood in front of the Triangle, smoking. They looked at me anxiously as I got out of the cab.

When I’d told Betty about my idea of coming to New Orleans to sift through my roller coaster research, outline my plan of attack, and start writing my Cyclone segment, she immediately set out to make that happen. In true Betty style, she didn’t ask why I had to leave New York in order to do this, but instead focused on getting the editor-in-chief to approve a $100 per week stipend so that she could arrange this dirt-cheap sublet through a friend of a friend from college. I was relieved not to have to tell her that I needed a place far away from the intrusive voice—a voice, in fact, remarkably like Betty’s voice—that was constantly barging into my brain, harping:
Isn’t there a band playing somewhere tonight that you need to hear? Isn’t there a film festival that sounds intriguing? A gallery opening or a book signing? An e-mail or a phone call you haven’t returned? A cocktail with your name on it? A boyish man at the end of a bar somewhere, waiting for you to sidle over and strike up a conversation?

“Hi,” I said, and waved, even though they were standing three feet away from me. I suddenly felt really girly, carrying the Marimekko flowered fabric suitcase I’ve owned since sixth grade. All I wanted to do was crash in my furnished rental studio, where I’d been promised a set of clean sheets, and to get a decent night’s sleep so I could begin writing in the morning. But I sensed from the forced smiles on the faces of these late-night laborers that my plans were about to change. I started toward the entrance to the tiny, salmon-colored building, but one of the guys—casey, as it turned out—stepped in front of me and stamped his cigarette out on the stained sidewalk next to a tuft of scorched grass.

“Uh, I ... I ...” he stuttered, then stopped, looked down at his flattened cigarette butt, took a breath. “You must be Jan.”

“Yeah, how did you know?” I asked.

“We’re supposed to be fixing the place up for when you got here. But the owner said you were coming in tomorrow. We just finished painting the floor in there, and it’s gotta dry at least overnight.” He squinted as he revealed this truth to me, the way a kid would wince while taking a bite of brussel sprouts. “The whiff is pretty bad,” he added.

I set my bags on the sidewalk and tried to get Betty on the phone. The call went to voicemail, and I left her a wordless message: “Rrrrrgh!” How was she going to make the paint dry any faster from the Lower East Side, anyway?

The guys looked at me, and I looked at them. We stood clustered together in the doorway, our toes carefully margining the gray-painted concrete floor (not one of them could explain to me why you would paint a concrete floor gray) as we surveyed the situation. The studio, which was tucked in the vertex of the triangular warehouse, was about twelve feet by nine feet, mostly bed. The kitchen consisted of one piece of furniture, a contraption right out of Barbie’s Dream-house: it looked like a white metal cabinet, but if you flipped open the lid, there was a tiny sink and two electric burners, and opening the bottom doors revealed a midget refrigerator. Next to that was the shower stall (basically just a drain in the floor with a curtain rod around it), and then the door to a miniscule bathroom (the bathroom was so narrow, I would later discover, that it was pretty much impossible to insert a tampon while in there). On the opposite wall were two saw-horses covered with a board, holding up a Bondi blue iMac. From where we stood in the doorway, there was only about five feet of floor between us and the edge of the bed—too wide a space for me to confidently make the leap on my own, but narrow enough so that with some flying velocity I could avoid the wet paint entirely.

The guys volunteered to launch me. All I wanted to do was sleep anyway, until the paint dried. The smell was new-carish and innocent, something I could dream along with.

I walked around the corner of the building and lifted my skirt to pee in a trash-strewn lot so I wouldn’t be tempted to sleepwalk across the wet paint to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Casey stood guard, with his back to me. Even with his arms crossed against his chest and his feet planted wide apart in Secret Service stance, he looked like a ponytailed skater-boy in his paint-spattered Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. Something about his chivalry as he stood silhouetted in the yellow ooze of streetlamp made my loins clench and I couldn’t pee after all.

It was decided that the best method for Jan-launching would be for two of the guys to take my legs and the other two to grab me under the shoulders with my arms sticking straight out in front of me like an angel in a nativity play. We tried a run-through outside on the sidewalk, but we were all laughing so hard that it was difficult to gauge the efficacy of our plan. Once we were poised in the doorway, they swung me a few times first, to get some momentum going, and then, on the count of three, they let go.

I soared through the air and landed crouching on the farthest edge of the bed, my hands out in front of me sliding like hockey pucks over the slippery bedspread until they came down with two perfect splats on the moist gray floor. I lay there a moment, half-on/ half-off of the bed, my face so close to the paint I could lick it if I wanted, my torso edging over the lip of the mattress. They had overshot me. As I gingerly crawled backwards on my elbows toward the center of the bed with my wet palms raised in surrender, I felt my suitcase hit me on the ass and then land with a thwop on the large stack of pillows next to me.

“Guess we’ll have to start a Triangle Walk of Fame,” said one of the guys.

Casey took off his T-shirt and threw it to me. I wiped my hands all over Axl Rose’s face. Then I clambered under the covers, and someone turned out the light for me, leaving me to dream about making my mark in a sticky, soot-colored neighborhood in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, breathing in the mongrel smell of Casey’s chest and the toxic gray floorpaint.

After an hour of sitting on the bed and staring into space, I realize that Casey isn’t going to show. I am not terribly surprised. Pure sensualism is a lot to ask of someone. This is the evening before my flight to Houston, next stop on my roller coaster tour, and my best-laid plans are turning out to be exorbitant.

He said “I love you” the other day while we were fucking. I couldn’t help myself, I laughed. Just one tiny syllable, like a mew, came bursting forth before I could catch it. I wasn’t amused by his sincerity, but the whole clichéd scenario made me squirm: with him on top of me, I felt like we were illustrating a line from some female comedian’s stand-up routine.
Have you ever noticed the only time they use the L word is when they’re inside the V word? Ladies, you know what I’m talking about! Men, take a break!
But Casey knew it wasn’t a mew. He immediately got all gloomy and doe-eyed and amended his statement with, “You know, I mean ... as a
person!”

I take a big gulp of air, remembering his wounded face, his supple Southern accent. The smell of my just-washed hair is blending with the smell of my fresh sweat, and I reach inside my panties to run a finger through the slippery burrow there. I am tired of waiting. I put on my sandals and grab my keys, throw my father’s wedding invitation down on the bed, and do what I’ve been doing every sundown since I’ve arrived here. I walk to the swingset at the St. Claude community pool.

During the hour or so before the sun disappears completely behind the old garment factory, the residents of the Bywater—this mile-square community that stretches from the industrial canal to the Faubourg Marigny, from the crook of the Mississippi River to the fried chicken joints on Rampart Street—all come out to sit on their front steps and greet the evening, at least the ones who aren’t busy drinking at the bars or playing basketball in the streets or starting up dinner on the stove. The giant abandoned factory on Louisa Street, now haloed by a teasing golden light, is the largest building in the vicinity, taking up an entire city block. Painted a bright and hideous pink like the Triangle (there must have been a fire sale on the color), the building is rumored to be the inspiration for the Levy Pants Factory where Ignatius worked in John Kennedy Toole’s
A Confederacy of Dunces.
Sewing is the only word still mostly decipherable on its block-lettered massive side. I get a thrill every time I walk by, imagining Toole trudging alongside its towering walls to get to the bus stop or the grocery store, the deafening drone of the sewing machines inside providing a soundtrack for his lonely, snarky authorial existence. Apparently, it’s been dormant since the ’70s, but that huge hunk of Mamie Eisenhower-pink concrete is unmistakable from any vantage point in the neighborhood. I kick at the broken glass on the sidewalk, which starts up the Louisa Street dogs barking and hurling their big black bodies against wobbly chain link fences.

There is no such thing as a small dog in the Ninth Ward. There are no toy poodles or miniature schnauzers, no Shih Tzus or Bichon Frises or plain old pomeranians. The By-water has more “Beware of Dog” signs per square foot than any other place I’ve been; there appears to be a 1:1 ratio of ferocious dogs to assailable humans. My first week here, I scampered across the street in panicked fear whenever I heard a burst of barking, but I now realize that most of the canines are kept in yards behind passably sturdy fences. And, at this hour, most of their owners are camped out on the sidewalk drinking Abita Amber out of cans, yelling back at their dogs to shut the hell up or eat shit for supper.