“She is such a professional,” he said, “and the voice. The voice from God.”
That is a strange thing that people sometimes say, especially strange if it’s a religious person saying it. Isn’t every voice a voice from God if you believe in God? Surely he didn’t put his back into making a few and then just slack off on the rest, what would be the point in that? Wouldn’t that ruin everything benevolent and awesome about God, who carried losers on the beach for the hell of it and whatnot? Did he only love bitches with the hot voices and asses he chose to arbitrarily give them? That hardly seemed fair. It seemed a good case for atheism, actually.
I said none of these things, of course. I stared at Jim Nabors and waited. His eyes were closed in telling, as though the story was a delicious broth to be savored. He described my mother’s eyes and tush, also possibly ordained, not to mention that comedic timing. My mom had played Rizzo. This made my face and fingers tingle with blood. Even as a kid I’d known that I hadn’t sprung from the starched and pressed womb of a Sandy.
“What had your dads told you about your birth mom before that?” asked Harrison, and I had to think a minute. It was not the kind of thing that came up a lot, and it was also a thing that I’d pretty much preemptively accepted. I had two men who cared for me and loved me and gave me an allowance; I had come out of a woman’s vagina and that woman was no longer hanging around.
“They just told me that she couldn’t keep me. There was some rustling in the background about the baby not being her husband’s …”
“Escandalo!”
“Well, my parents are gay, after all.”
“Yes.”
“But that was it, really. They never made it a thing and I was pretty lazy. I never thought to make it a thing.”
“Until Jim Nabors came to a wake at your house.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Wow. And how does Ben Vereen come into all of this?”
I shrugged a little, over it. C’est la vie! My dad is Ben Vereen! “Apparently, he and Adrienne had both been stranded in Dunsmuir, CA, in the middle of an almost unheard of snowstorm. Their cars had both broken down. They’d sought refuge at a little bar called The Rusty Bucket. There had been rooms upstairs.”
“Oh, tale as old as time,” said Harrison. “Just a drop in the rusty bucket.”
“People get lonely,” I said, “and full of alcohol, and what else is there? That’s where babies come from.”
“Did you ever ask your dads about it?”
“Not really. It seemed pointless to pursue. I was a happy kid, for the most part. I was much loved.”
“Well, that’s … sweet,” said Harrison after a moment. He tasted the word, as though not certain of its appropriateness in this context, like a man adding cumin to something, to a flan or shoe.
“But surely you understand marriages, being married.”
“That was an odd segue.”
“Yes, sorry,” I said, “I have problems with those.” It was the truth. I was a great blurter of things that had no association to whatever was being said, and yet I tried in vain to find some common denominator, some connective tissue, so that I could change the subject to something more palatable or less awkward, and it always ended up calling attention to itself in a really horrible way, like OJ Simpson falling into a wedding cake and then burning his hand and then falling off a boat in that Naked Gun movie.
I was caught, I guess between wanting to know everything and not wanting to know anything at all about Harrison’s wife. I was a product of the talk shows and soap operas of my youth, things that had entered insidiously into my brain after school as I enjoyed a juice bag while finishing up my homework. My main dad, Sam, worked the shop and my other dad, Chad, looked after the house and me during the day. He would watch the TV from a spot just inside the kitchen doorway, probably shoving a flour sack towel into a juice glass to dry it, and murmur softly at whatever goings on were going on, judging in an old-fashioned kind of way, which was hilarious and sad to me, even then. No one ever got it worse than the women who’d wrecked a home. No one. Not even the incest couple. The homewreckers were always dressed in short, shiny things, and they wore them as their skins, as though they might as well be sitting there naked. It was they for whom the most damning of the boos and catcalls were reserved. Nothing they said could redeem them. They did everything but sport those twiddly little black mustaches.
“Ought to be ashamed,” muttered Chad, who I called Pops. Sam was Dad. I introduced them as the Hardwicks, and just let people hammer it out for themselves. I got asked which one was the lady a bunch of times. The people asking weren’t trying to be offensive by and large; it was all that they knew to compartmentalize things. It was just human, very human.
“It’s one thing,” Pops would say to the television whores, “to have a little fun. It’s one thing to want to try something new once in a while.”
He didn’t know that I knew about Dad’s cheerleader magazines in the laundry room under the toboggan. His female cheerleader magazines. I’m not sure what I was even doing down there. Laundry? Smoking? Anyway, I didn’t try out for cheerleading the following year.
“I WILL TELL YOU ABOUT MY WIFE IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT HER,” said Harrison. He lay back as well and turned to me, going up on one elbow. “I don’t hate her. She’s not a bad woman. I’m not one of those guys who goes around saying, ‘oh that horrible bitch’ or whatever.”
“That’s good,” I said. I didn’t know if he wanted points for that or what. I had yet to understand that in affairs everything was points and degrees, all based on a system that was somehow both unknowable and innate. These were things that people understood but could not ever speak of, like racial slurs or head lice. Harrison wanted to be on the good side of the spectrum, where you could acknowledge the pain of others and still want what you want. It seemed a little too diplomatic in a baby-kissing sort of way. There was no way I could see that everyone could walk away unscathed, a better person in the end. Someone’s shit was ending up on the front lawn. Someone was getting bedroom slippers hurled at them.
“In a way, she’s like Adrienne Barbeau is to you. Everything that was ever good was good so long ago, and you start to question things. Like, did they even happen? Like, maybe I was so lonely that my scale of happiness was not what it would have been otherwise. I was in the Army …”
“Yes?” I said, interrupting. “Did you shower with other men?”
“Yes,” said Harrison, “why?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t know. Whenever I pictured the army I pictured death and showering. And push-ups. My only real connection with the military was from watching the cartoon of G.I. Joe, a depiction of a fifty-year war in which no one died. And reading was the best thing you could do. The worst, drugs.
“You just want to talk to anyone. You’re so lonely. You just want something to look forward to.”
I nodded, thinking numbly of Sybil, the way she’d circled our apartment in socks and nothing else, embracing a case-less pillow, singing “Easy to be Hard” from the movie Hair. She would really get into it, no matter how high I turned the TV up, and throw the pillow to the ground when she got to the part about “especially people who care about strangers.” I had never known Richard to care about strangers or social injustice, but whatever. Being separated from him, and more so being the one who was dumped, she remembered the relationship as much better than it had ever been. These were two people who, by the end, would rather leave the house than pass each other in the hallway. The question wasn’t “what did I do?” but “what the eff took so bloody long?” It reminded me of the time I rented Saving Private Ryan and watched the beginning Normandy scene through the narrow v’s of my fingers. The idea that anyone had lived through that seemed to defy any logic, just these defenseless sacks of tissue flailing and falling, limbs dangling. I would come back to the house every evening wondering who would be there. It wasn’t a judgment so much as an alliance to the odds. No person could wit
hstand so much for so long. People broke down and then they left.
“I played Adrienne Barbeau once on the show,” I said, “it was when we did a send up of Queen of the Amazons.”
“I’ve seen it. They did a good job with your wardrobe on that one.”
My wardrobe had been a parody of hers, which had been a tiny sort of native thing/bikini that appeared to be made out of beef jerky. For humor’s sake, mine was tinier and made from actual beef jerky. BBQ with a kick of Tabasco, sewn right over my knickers.
“I’ve always wondered whether or not she saw it. I looked very much like her in that costume.”
“Yes.”
“It was my Gypsy Rose Lee moment. Having jerky sewn onto my underwear and staring into this full-length mirror like, ‘I’m a girl, Mama! I’m a girl!’”
“You were very funny,” Harrison said kindly.
“I tried very hard. Sometimes I don’t try at all. Sometimes it’s like, ‘oh, fuck you. Give me my fucking pasties and I’ll go out and get my money and we’ll all just go home.’ But I wanted her to see it and think well of me.”
“She probably saw it. She’s always seemed really down to earth.”
“Yes,” I said. I got most of my fan mail, honestly, from prisons. Generally death row. The inmates always said that they were praying for me, in addition to the other things they wanted to do to/for me. I rarely got letters from regular people, maybe a kid who was staying up too late or something, once in a while an old woman who wanted me to put some pants on. Most people didn’t value me unless they were locked up somewhere, waiting to die.
Harrison and I lay there quietly for a moment, as though locked into a twin coffin. I imagined being married to him and watching him sleep, seeing the light fall through the blinds onto his back and neck, segmenting them with light. I imagined him without the theft and wondered if it was the same, the same attraction, the same cosmic pull. I was not above the idea that it was danger that drew me, the idea of being desirable and new. He didn’t treat me as though I were normal and a bit ordinary, a girl like the girl I was, who often read mail right at the mailbox in a wife beater and sweatpants with the waistband rolled down enough to reveal her tramp stamp, a heart with wide angel wings, wearing sunglasses and smoking.
“I guess that you are pretty bored,” I said.
“Now? Not a bit.”
“At home. In your life.”
“It isn’t what I expected,” he said, “but it’s the thing my brother did and all of my friends. I don’t know what else I was expecting. I guess it was one of those self-fulfilling deals.”
“Well, this isn’t where I assumed I’d be at twenty-nine,” I said, a little piquedly, “I went to an arts school.”
Harrison snorted out a laugh. He sounded like a boar with some kind of septum disorder. I laughed, too, then because we were on a bed in the middle of a store in spitting distance from the automotive department, and because we were in love and acting as though we could talk our way out of it. And my head hurt from it, and from sugar and wheat and grease and booze, the hard cocktail of love. I patted myself down for cigarettes.
“You can’t smoke in here, Miss,” said Charles Caraway himself, who had been getting closer and closer during the past hour, biding his time, clearing his throat threateningly. At my pat down, he’d made his move.
“I’m not smoking,” I said, “I was just touching myself,” and beside me Harrison went off on another round of laughter/animal noises.
Charles Caraway stood there, arms crossed over his middle like a fat little mall cop. He was wearing a sweater with a lot of swirling colors, an old Cosby deal, it looked the way carsickness feels. He wanted us to know that we were not welcome there, that we would not spend the night, that night or any night, and that we were suspicious people. The kind of suspicious people that don’t buy anything.
“I’ll miss this old girl,” said Harrison, patting the bed as though it were a carousel horse or suitcase, something that had given its life for the happiness of others. He turned to the salesman and said, “it was just two days away from retirement.”
“Yes,” said Charles Caraway, suddenly less angry than bone-tired, and he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, “you’re very clever. You’re both very clever and attractive; can you please just show it off somewhere else for a while?”
Harrison and I considered each other for a moment and I nodded, satisfied. I don’t know what else we could’ve wanted from the man other than for him to acknowledge our specialness, the grating dreck of it. We slid off the bed and left. Through cosmetics and grocery and garden and out into the night.
BEFORE HARRISON LEFT WE DROVE PAST MY HOUSE, THE HOUSE THAT was almost mine, the one I paid for in cash, a huge stack of bills that made me feel like a rapper or a cartoon duck. I liked seeing it. I liked walking past at night and imagining myself asleep inside, locked inside safe against zombies and prowlers and all other people, really. Just sleeping forever like some lazy princess.
“It’s nice,” said Harrison.
“It’s the only house I ever wanted,” I said, and it was true. There were far bigger places, like the mansion buffered by two stone lions out by my gynecologist’s office, but this house had swagger. It looked like the home of a disco woodcutter or a faded comedian possessed by the devil. Such a heady mixture of flash and rural like some crude mixed drink; unpasteurized milk and agave syrup, maple and the jellied eyes of some endangered bird.
“When are you moving in?”
“Sometime after shooting starts. I’m staying at the Monte Carlo right now. It’s under the overpass.”
“Let me give you a ride there,” said Harrison, and I looked at him through the slant of streetlight, a sweet, funny man in a nautically rolled hat and a blue hooded sweatshirt. His eyes looked very clear. He was a very nice man.
“I will get out here and walk,” I said. “It’s not far.”
And it wasn’t far but I’d had a lot to drink and so had the rest of Troubadour. It was a maze of small homes, streets with names of old fashioned girls like Mae and Bessie and Eppie. There was the Troubadour Center, a small gas-smelling park that housed a homeless shanty town, and then my hotel, a sunken red painted little jewel beneath the swirl of the off-ramp. It was Troubadour’s version of the Hotel Chelsea, I liked to say, and very few people knew what I meant or appreciated the irony. Harrison did both, the bastard.
“I don’t want you to worry about me,” he said. I slammed the passenger door and leaned back a bit through the window, “I’ve already made up my mind. I’m a very strong person.” He didn’t seem to believe these things but he said them well, anyway, like a child angling for a pet.
“Don’t pull your back on that porch,” I said, “Backs are tricky, I’ve heard.” Then I knocked twice on the hood, but he didn’t leave. He sat there parked, watching me as I walked away.
4.
I SPENT THE NEXT MONTH IN A TIRED, PISSED OFF STATE, SMOKING TOO much and starting shit just to start it. I began cracking my knuckles the way I imagined prisoners cracked theirs, as though I had nothing to lose, as though doing so would enrage police officers. I ate infrequently, and when I did I ate too much, steaks the size of toilet seats and chicken wings with thick brown-red sauce that collected under my acrylic nails and in the corners of my mouth like rust. I vomited out my lines. When it was time to move into my house I stood on the lawn smoking as the movers hauled my stuff inside along with the garish new shit I’d bought, horrible oriental rugs, ginger jars, a fake elephant’s foot for my umbrellas. And I didn’t even have an umbrella, was the thing. I imagined that this must’ve been the way that Keith Richards reacted when he found himself in love with a man who was already married. I imagined that he bought ginger jars up the ass. Rooms filled with ginger jars, great big fuck yous to life and society and the media and whatever. Yes. We were just alike, Keith Richards and I.
At night I would lock my doors and lie down on my new bed, actually, intentio
nally, the same model on which I’d lain with Harrison, and watch the ceiling fan, the eerily spinning daisy of it, and I would tell myself that I was better off this way. My art was fulfilled this way. I was cute and drunk and my teeth hurt all the time, and I couldn’t figure out how you could miss a person you didn’t know. It seemed a cosmic jerk-off, a painful alien blip, their follow up to anal probing.
One night I heard a woman chasing after a man after the bars had closed. I imagined her as blonde, raw-skinned and large boned, thick around the waist, wearing jeans and a flannel over a camisole. Some kind of too-high sandals that showcased cracked heels and scarlet painted hammertoes. She was pleading with the man, the likes of whom I could not picture.
If you ever loved me …
I love you, I’ll always love you.
I don’t know why any of this is happening …
Can you give me a minute; can’t you just give me a single minute?
To which the man called back, you’ve been asking for a minute for two and a half hours!
And she began pleading faster, as though his acknowledgment, such as it was, came like a gulp of water to her.
I listened to the two of them for blocks, until I couldn’t be sure whether or not it was really them, or the sound of a car mixed with the wind and the monotone of my own breath. I was so very still, feeling propelled, slingshot by my heart out into the world and lonely, complicated as math. How was I not that woman, with her sunburned skin and painful cracked heels and broken, yearning heart? How was I not that man, a tired, disembodied voice, a long silhouette fading?
SPURRED BY GUILT AND THE SAD WASHING MACHINE OF MY GUTS, I CALLED Troubadour Bath and Groom and asked Sybil if she’d have an early supper with me at Señor Squawk’s. She agreed, somewhat testily, and at first I attributed her bad mood to a tough day at work. She was always having tough days at work, although when you considered it was in her job description to express the anal glands of dogs, you couldn’t really blame her.
She Came From Beyond! Page 6
