But when I checked in they did not ask me to hand over a credit card. They just gave me the goddam key! The handle is broken on my suitcase, and the bellhop carried it to my room cradled in his arms like a large child even though I kept telling him he could extend the other handle and just roll it along the floor. He declined politely, and then I realized those floors are part marble. My suitcase is as battered and jagged as a broken grocery cart, and it makes a shrill keening sound when you roll it. I’ve been deaf and blind to it lately, but nothing like interjecting your crap-ass suitcase in surroundings like this to trigger a miracle cure. I’d have been embarrassed if I was still the easily embarrassed type.
But thank God I’m not. I have skin as thick as nickels. At the airport our crew was met by a driver carrying a sign, and he was very officious until I actually—I am not kidding—-fell out of the van and landed flat-ass in the gutter. At the time I was totally out of uniform, wearing Grant’s tangerine swing coat, and damn if my heel didn’t catch in the cuff. It sent me sailing out of that car like a flapping, wild-eyed albatross. I hit the ground like a sack of cement. People came running from across the street to make sure I was all right. “I swear,” I laughed, “I’m fine.”
Hell, that was nothing. I have fallen down before, and I’ve stayed down, too, pinned there underneath all my own demons. I laid there and let my brain become my enemy. For example, by the time I’d started interviewing with the airlines after college, I’d already been very enthusiastically laid off from my two previous jobs, my most recent boss having helped me along my way by literally tossing my personal office equipment out the door as I frantically called my mother from a pay phone across the street.
She herself had just lost her job due to government cutbacks, and had traded in her Buick for an old VW van that she was using to haul stuff to the swap meet, where she’d lay out a plastic tarp and set out her secondhand wares. When she came to get me that day, she had emptied the van of most of those wares, which included a box of broken ceramic beagles, to make room for my dinosaur desktop computer and other office tackle that had survived the tossing. She was half finished packing up my stuff when she noticed me still sitting there on the curb, crying.
“Get your ass up,” she said to me, exasperated. “I said get it up.”
Normally she would have taken me for pie at a local coffee shop afterward, but she was broke herself, owing in no small part to the fact that I had used her American Express card to pay my rent the month before. The past half year had been a hard (and, for my mother, expensive) period of perspective adjustment for me regarding my mother’s transition from well-paid missile scientist to self-employed junk purveyor in partnership with her best friend Bill, and at that point it had almost, but not fully, settled in my head that I could no longer depend on her to supplement my meager-to-absent income as I pursued cool-sounding but low-paying pee-on positions at artsy magazines.
“What’s this?” I asked when we’d finished, indicating a metal-looking apparatus on her dashboard. “That’s my coin belt,” she said proudly as she put the van in gear and we left the curb. “Isn’t it neat?”
Coin belt? I thought, and at that I let go of my last toehold in denial regarding my mother’s situation. It had come down to coins for her, literally, and how many she could collect.
“Yes, it’s neat,” I agreed, and burst forth with a whole new set of sobs. She kept asking me if I was all right, and I said I was. The next week I began looking for less-glamorous jobs with paychecks that could cover my bills. Until I found one I got up at 5 A.M. every weekend to help my mother set up her booth at the swap meet. It turned out there is little time for staying down when you’ve got boxes of broken ceramic beagles to sell.
“Are you all right?” the driver kept asking, all worried as he helped gather my fallen-ass self off the curb. “I really am,” I assured him. I mean, seriously, what good am I if I can’t get my ass up?
Trashy Bartenders with Beehive Hairdos
GRANT HAS ALWAYS WANTED a beehive hairdo, which is news to me. I mean, you think you know your friends and what they’ve always wanted, because always having wanted something is a pretty big part of your personality. But Grant had kept his beehive-hairdo desire kind of quiet until yesterday, when suddenly he ploughed through my front door talking about beehives like they’ve been on his mind since he was born.
“I cannot wait” he kept saying, pacing back and forth, his hands looking for something to squeeze. “I’ve got an appointment at the beauty parlor this afternoon!” he shrieked, pinching me in half with a bear hug.
Grant’s hair, pre-beehive, reminds me of a big, thick ball of brown yarn being attacked by bats. It’s all uncoiled and long and alive somehow. I can’t imagine his hair structured into a stiffened upsweep, but Grant says that’s exactly the reason he’s been growing it out all these years. “I’ve always wanted a beehive hairdo,” he said, adding that I should have known because he has a painting by Sister Louisa he sometimes displays in his living room. The subject is a librarian with a beehive, and the caption reads, “The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God.”
“Girl, where have you been?” Grant chided me before setting off to the hair salon.
I heard they charged him double because he took up triple the time of a normal appointment, but damn, the result was fine. A full foot high, his beehive was a wonder in construction, and so stiff it could deflect a shower of sharpened axes. At the Local, where Grant bartends, hordes of people piled in to view the ’do, having heard about it, and Grant made a fortune in tips.
“I wonder if I can keep this thing for another day,” Grant laughed the morning after, but he’d already removed thirty-three hair pins, and worried simultaneously that he might have destroyed the hairdo’s foundation and that the hairdo might just be indestructible after all, since after removing all that metal the beehive still stood there, unweakened, sturdy as ever, like it was frozen in Formica. “It’s never going away,” Grant said, awed.
Of course it’s never going away. I know about trashy bartenders with beehive hairdos, as Grant is not the first beehived bartender I ever met. In grade school, I used to walk to the same bar every day after class, where I was practically babysat by a bartender named Kit. The bar, called the Tin Lizzy, was my father’s hangout. It was located next to a liquor store owned by a man who I thought sure took a long time to tuck in his shirt whenever I went in there to buy penny candy. It turns out he was masturbating back there behind the counter, but that’s another story.
Kit had a beehive bleached the color of cotton balls, and she actually kept things stored in there; pens, check stubs, dollar bills. Her hair was as thin as duck down, so these items clung there as if caught, like moths in a web, and you could even see the lines the leaded pencils left on her scalp.
Kit’s shift started at 6 A.M. and my father would arrive every morning after breakfast and stay the day. His routine was so predictable that my sisters and I listed the Tin Lizzy as my father’s daytime phone number on our school documents.
Kit knew my father, who had lost his job selling trailers again, was tipping her with my mother’s money, so she let us eat all the potato chips and processed-beef logs we could stand, and kept a supply of quarters on hand so we could play pool, air hockey, and Pong until 5:30 when we’d walk home to meet our mother, who, surprisingly, held Kit in low regard.
“She’s trashy,” my mother would say, but didn’t explain further.
Sometimes Kit would stay after her shift and let my father and other guys buy her beers, so I saw her drunk more than once, but drunk adults were nothing new to me. I even walked in on Kit in the bathroom once, sitting there on the toilet with her panties around her ankles. I screamed I was so mortified with myself, but she calmed me down and told me to come inside and close the door behind me.
“Listen, kid,” she said, and I could see there were lots of stripes on her head from all the pencils she’d put there earlier, “don’t hang out at bars anymore. Tel
l your dad to take you somewhere else. There’s not even any windows here, for chrissakes.”
I have to say I was surprised, because I thought Kit liked having me there every day, but here she was, literally, telling me to get out.
“Get out,” she said, and damn if she didn’t start bawling her eyes out right then. “Get out,” she repeated, and I would have left right then but she had a hold of my hand, so I stayed with her until she let go. To this day I’m amazed at the resilience of that memory, the image of Kit crying on the toilet, clutching my hand, the incredible awkwardness of that moment. I’m trying to do what she said, I’m trying to get out, but to this day I still have a soft spot in my heart for trashy bartenders with beehive hairdos.
Do Crazy
NEVER ASK GRANT’S ADVICE, because usually he’ll only tell you one of two things: “Suicide,” or “You need to fuck a fat black man.” Personally I don’t think either qualifies as real guidance, but I guess it depends on who you are.
Take Lary, for example, though I doubt he ever fucked a fat black man, I have to wonder about the suicide part.
As far as I know, Lary is still alive, but not for a preponderance of effort. Almost annually he ends up in the hospital because he flung himself off the top of something. He argues this is just a hazard of his job, which has to do with production lighting and involves a lot of scaffolding and ladders and whatnot, combined with the fact that he likes to take acid while climbing things. “I’m not suicidal,” Lary says.
“Ha! You are a lying goddam sack of rabid bats!” I tell him. “What about the gun? You had a goddam gun to your head once!”
Here I’m just going by what he told me. I never actually saw Lary point a gun to his own head, though the mental visual I can conjure is very pleasing. No, the gun incident is what Lary himself told me he did way back when his neighborhood was even more of a crime-ridden shit pit than my own, and people often tried to break into the dilapidated warehouse Lary calls a home—or they simply knocked on his door, which Lary hates just as much.
So Lary bought a gun and waved it around with his drapes open, which was only half effective in keeping criminals away. So then he started wandering the street in front of his warehouse, waving the gun around and shouting, which was a little more effective. But the problem wasn’t completely eradicated until he started wandering the street, shouting, waving the gun around, and then pointing it to his own head!
“After that nobody came near me,” Lary says. “It was great.”
“That’s right. Do crazy,” Grant concurs, finally adding a third piece of advice to his standard string. “It works every time. People stay away from crazy. People are afraid of crazy.”
Grant learned this after he bought a run-down house in Kirk-wood with a dead chicken nailed to the doorjamb and a drug club across the street where crack whores evidently went just to get roughed up. In the first three months they stole fifteen hundred dollars worth of landscaping equipment from Grant, as well as his entire illegal collection of taxidermied endangered animals.
At that point Grant thought the appropriate measure would be to get tough, so he stood vigil in his living room night after night, and the second he saw a miscreant set foot on his lawn he would sound the house alarm, an ear-piercing shrill he thought surely would train them, Pavlovian-style, not to come near his house.
He was wrong. They stole his ex-wife’s entire collection of heirloom Christmas decorations next, as well as other stuff. “I’d always see people in the neighborhood wearing my clothes,” he laughs. He sold that house the next year, then bought another one near me in Peoplestown.
At first people stole from him there, too, making for some well-dressed crack addicts in Peoplestown, but then Grant met Papa Smurf, a wizened, drug- and alcohol-addicted neighborhood fixture, whose habit was to stand on the sidewalk and stare at Grant through rheumy eyes every afternoon. When Papa Smurf finally approached Grant, he was wearing shoes too big and too familiar.
“Is you a saint?” he asked.
“No,” Grant answered, “I am not.”
Papa Smurf must not have believed him, because he took to confessing to Grant on a regular basis. “God has given me the affliction of addiction,” he’d say, then he’d totter off to his apartment located above a corner market across the street, where he lived alone. Nobody ever bothered Papa Smurf.
So Grant asked his advice. “How do I keep people from bothering me?” he said. Papa Smurf considered Grant’s question, and then offered this wisdom: “Don’t do mean. Mean don’t work,” he counseled. “Do crazy. People’s afraid o’ crazy.”
As it turns out, Grant does crazy very well. He festooned the outside of his house with crack lighters, painted religious figures and plywood signs with sayings like, God is coming, repent immediately. Nobody bothered him again. A few months later, Papa Smurf died alone in his apartment. He’d been dead four days before officials gained access to his home, where they found him near the door, on his knees.
“Four days in ninety-degree heat,” says Grant, remembering that he’d watched from his porch as the coroner carried a shovel up the stairs to remove Papa Smurf’s body.
After that Grant didn’t care much about his stuff anymore. He gave it all away. Seriously. He invited people over to take what they wanted. I got a concrete Virgin Mary painted “haint” blue, a pair of wooden shoes, and a lamp stand covered in crack lighters. Lary took a mechanical nun that breathes fire. In the end, Grant started life over with little more than one pair of shorts and eight pairs of prescription sunglasses. Of course we all think he’s insane, he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Don’t do mean. Do crazy,” he says. “People’s afraid o’ crazy.”
Hard Head
ICAN’T BELIEVE I was conscious when my head was cracked open, and for the record I’d like to say I’ve always resented how my family blames me for it and refers to the incident as the time “Holly cracked her head open.” It’s not like I picked up the brick my own self and hit my head with it. The brick was thrown at me by an asshole neighborhood kid. He stood in the courtyard of our apartment building maybe six feet away with the brick in his hand, shouting, “Little girl, you better move because I’m gonna throw this brick.”
My sister Cheryl was with him. “Move, Holly, he’s gonna throw the brick.”
A gaggle of neighborhood kids were there as well. “Move, because he’s gonna throw that there brick.”
Of course I didn’t move, I was two, for God’s sake. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Besides, only four days earlier I had taken my mother’s cricket cage full of family jewelry and passed it out among these very same kids to ensure their undying friendship. Surely they wouldn’t allow harm to happen to me after that, would they?
Those ungrateful, two-faced little shitholes. They let that boy throw the brick. To this day, I think back and I’m amazed, because it’s not like the courtyard was small and narrow and my twenty-pound, two-year-old ass was taking up the entire sidewalk. Though I heard him, it still made perfect sense, even to my baby brain, that if the boy wanted to throw the brick, he could easily aim at an empty spot.
My father said my head qualifies as an empty spot, but he was happy I survived and joking was his way of showing it. Besides, my head was not empty, it was full of blood and stuff. Our babysitter, a big Hawaiian lady who slept in a hammock in her living room, kept saying, “So much blood in such a little body.” She was in a good position to gauge, too, because she’d laid me on the couch in the living room and hung my head over the armrest so the blood could drip directly into a Pyrex mixing bowl. Cheryl kept bringing the kids by to see my brains, which I don’t think were actually showing, but she kept pointing to the crack in my head anyway, saying, “Look, brains!” and they believed her.
The doctor stitched my brains back in my head and when my parents confronted the boy who threw the brick, he just shrugged and said, “I told her to move.” In grade school I took to parting my hair directly down the
center, which exposed the scar. If someone asked about it, my family would say, “That’s where Holly cracked her head open,” and I couldn’t believe they still blamed me for that.
Later I fell in love with a boy three years ahead of me in high school. He had eyes like wide horizons, and my breath would quicken the second I saw his face. God, did I adore him, with my heart hung out there like a freshly caught fish, all exposed to the air and gasping.
This boy was an adventurist, though, and he was only sticking around, he said, until he’d earned enough money to move to Australia, where he planned to spend the rest of his life surfing and bussing tables at a seaside diner. Though I heard him I always figured things would work out anyway. Maybe he would take me with him or maybe he wouldn’t go, after all.
He used to take me to the beach in San Clemente so we could surf next to the nuclear-power plant, where the waves were supposed to be really awesome. I never did catch on, though. Surfing has got to be the hardest sport known to man. To this day I don’t understand the appeal of bobbing around in big waves with a bunch of wooden torpedoes darting at your skull. So I would sit on the beach and watch, and when he came in from the ocean I would cling to him like locks of his own hair.
He would always tell me about Australia, how the waves were bigger than buildings and people still lived off the land like pioneers. He had visions of himself sleeping in a mud hut off the highway, which ran along the beach, and in the mornings he would roll up his meager belongings, stash them behind a tree, and surf until it was time to clock in at the diner, where they wouldn’t mind that he showed up for work soaking wet every day.
Confessions of a Recovering Slut Page 3
