“Ready?” Pen said to Sparky, who was now holding the side of the couch.
“Yep. Let her rip, figuratively speaking,” Sparky added.
They took the side pieces up to Sparky’s apartment and then came back for the couch. Cheryl and Vibro pushed up the bottom of the couch and Sparky and Lexus pulled the top. Through a community effort, the couch reached its final destination with no injuries, save a scraped finger on Sparky’s part and Lexus catching her elbow on the doorframe.
They all sat on the couch after Pen and Sparky put the arms back on. Vibro stroked the leather. “This is nice, but where’s the rest of your furniture?” she said, looking around the nearly empty apartment.
“Her ex-girlfriend, the Eye-Biter, is holding it hostage,” Lexus said. “So she bought new stuff.”
Vibro looked around. “Where is it?”
“It’s in those boxes over there,” Sparky said.
“Serious assemblage,” Vibro said. “IKEA?”
“Yeah,” Sparky said.
“So you’re not going back?” Vibro said.
“Nope.”
“I should get rid of my girlfriend. Even it if means buying new furniture,” Vibro said. “Well, I must be off. It was nice to meet you and if you need anything I’m just down the hall.” Vibro got up. Sparky tried not to watch her go, but she couldn’t help herself. The woman was gorgeous.
“Can I help put your furniture together?” Pen said.
Sparky smiled at her. “I would love that. I mean, if it’s all right with Cheryl and Lexus.”
Pen seemed surprised, Sparky thought, like she didn’t usually have to ask to do something, like no one cared before. Sparky had worked with street kids and knew one when she saw one.
She’d spent one summer helping in a youth program after graduating from high school. She’d done it with her friend, Adele. Adele’s baby sister had run away from home and died of a drug overdose on the streets of Seattle. She and Sparky had worked with a city program to get kids off the street. An innovative city director sent kids out to talk to other kids about getting help. They’d handed out toiletries and socks. It was a little known fact that street people always needed socks because if your feet got fucked up you were screwed. After that, she and Adele had headed up a workshop to help kids study for their GED exam. They were perfect for the job. Having just graduated themselves, they still had the stuff in their heads.
It had been the most rewarding time of Sparky’s life. She still did some community work—or rather she had. She and Uncle Milton had helped on the Habitat for Humanity houses, where a licensed electrician was an asset. Now that Wesson wasn’t around to complain about Sparky spending so much time away from home, maybe she’d volunteer again.
“Of course you can help,” Lexus said, smiling warmly at Sparky. “That’s what Moonies do—they help each other.”
“Oh, crap.” Cheryl leapt up. “I forgot about the ice cream.”
“We’re going to have root beer floats,” Pen said. She scrambled to help Cheryl. They stared down at the landing. “It’s leaking,” she said, pointing at the bag in alarm.
“Okay, let’s go. I think we can still rescue it,” Cheryl said. “Bye, Sparky.”
“Bye, Sparky,” Pen said.
“I’ll be right behind you,” Lexus told them. After they left, she looked at Sparky. “Pen’s been living on the fringes.”
Sparky had never seen the serious side of Lexus. “I gathered that. I used to work with street kids.”
“You did? That’s awesome. Pen’s got a lot of potential, but I don’t think she’d used to all this. I found food stashed in her underwear drawer—some Saltines and peanut butter. And oh, my goodness, you should have seen the state of her underwear. It was rags,” Lexus said, letting out a heavy sigh.
“It’s like that. People don’t usually see your underwear. You need coats and shirts and pants—and kids especially want to blend in and that means not looking poor and homeless.”
“Is it the same way with food? I mean, do we need to feed her more? She is kinda thin.”
“Yes. Food is a concern. I think when she feels more secure, like she knows she’d going to have three square meals a day, she won’t hoard. Why was she on the streets? Did she run away?” Sparky asked.
“I don’t know that she was homeless exactly. Her mother died recently and they were living in a cheap motel at the time.”
“That means they probably got evicted and her mom couldn’t get the cash together to get another apartment.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lay this all on you,” Lexus said, studying her fingernails. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up when you spend time with her.”
“It’s fine. That’s what Moonies do. I’d love to help with Pen. They’re not throwaway kids like a lot of people think. I’ve seen amazing turnarounds.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Sparky said.
“That’s fabulous!” She gave Sparky a big hug. “Gotta go.” She flew from the room.
Sparky leaned back on her new couch. This was going to be all right, she thought, and then she smiled.
Chapter Five
The What For’s of Girlfriends
Vibro glared down at her girlfriend, who was holding a bottle of Stoli vodka in her clenched fist. She was passed out on the couch and drooling on Vibro’s grandmother’s cross-stitched pillow. Vibro had always liked her apartment with its gleaming wood floors, big windows and tasteful furniture—a T35 mini-sectional bonded leather with chaise couch and a Wenge coffee table accompanied by a Venere black entertainment center. Christ-on-a-bike, the chaise even had a built-in ambient light feature. And now it was not only being desecrated by her slob of a girlfriend, but a glass without a coaster was violating the surface of the coffee table. It was an outrage.
The cross-stitched pillow her girlfriend was drooling on depicted a pastoral scene of cows, barns and silos. Granted, it didn’t go with the modern furniture, but Vibro had kept it for sentimental reasons. It was one of the few things Vibro had taken with her when she graduated from college and vaulted from Cowville (not its real name), Nebraska, to Seattle. She’d gotten her diploma and, while all the ceremonial hubbub was going on, had made a hasty exit to the bus station. She caught the first Greyhound leaving, which was how she ended up in Seattle. This turned out perfectly, because she liked it here. She only felt a small pang of guilt for leaving her overbearing, micromanaging parents. She’d done all they’d asked—she hadn’t gotten pregnant or done drugs. She’d graduated high school and completed her college education. As far as she was concerned she’d fulfilled her part of the bargain.
Her girlfriend Jennifer was a philandering drunk who was in denial about both behaviors. Which made Vibro an idiot-in-denial for staying with her. She looked down at Jennifer on the couch and contemplated various passive-aggressive behaviors.
She chose two of her favorites. She got a bowl of water and her old-fashioned alarm clock with the ringing bell and hammer device. She stuck Jennifer’s hand in the bowl, the old slumber party trick, and set the alarm for ten minutes after she usually left for work. The philandering drunk that everyone else in the building called the “Babylonian,” a reference to the “Whore of Babylon,” would hopefully pee her pants and have a rude awakening.
Vibro went to work, where she could passively and aggressively stew about what a fucked-up girlfriend she had. She worked at May Your Dreams Come True Fortune Cookies, Inc. When she’d first arrived in Seattle, she had taken her hard-won earnings from working at the Dairy Freeze serving ice cream for the seemingly endless days of her youth and rented a studio apartment. She’d spent the first two years doing the usual waitress/receptionist/house cleaner stuff before deciding she needed a career. Not just any career, either, but the strangest one she could find. She had vowed never to be “normal” again when she’d left Nebraska. It was time to fully realize that ambition.
The Chink helped her achieve her goal. She’d gone
to see him after seeing his ad in the local paper. The office was in the warehouse district in a building that looked like it should’ve been condemned. She rang the bell as instructed by the hand-lettered sign, and a tiny Asian man opened the door.
“You Vibro Squirm?”
At first she was taken aback. Her name, as she had told him on the phone, was Victoria Seaborne. Which was entirely too normal, now that she thought about it. It was a sign, she thought. She might not get the job, but in any case she had acquired an interesting new name.
“Yes,” she said.
“Come in, come in. I am The Chink,” he said and bowed.
“Chink?” she inquired, wondering if he was joking. It was downright racist.
“Ah, yes, I know what you tinking. But I have long Chinese name, so I call myself ‘THE Chink.’ So you call me THE Chink too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Follow me.”
The inside of the building was nice compared to the outside. The loft where the office was located had shiny wood floors and one entire side of the giant room had floor-to-ceiling windows and on the floor in front of them and covering the sills was a forest of bonsai trees. On the back wall was a bar with stools and a small kitchen with a fridge. In the middle of the room were two leather couches and an oversized coffee table. Facing the windows were four identical square tables, each with one chair.
“These are the worktables. I put a bonsai forest so my fortune cookie writers can gaze at them and contemplate good ideas for cookies. And over here is the Zen garden, also for contemplation. This is very nice work space, very full of creative energy. You creative?”
“Oh, yes,” Vibro said. She was already thinking of herself as Vibro. “I love all the Japanese stuff. But aren’t you Chinese?” She sort of expected Ming vases and Mao outfits.
The Chink coughed. “Well, you see I am Japanese.”
“But you talk like a Chinese person.”
“Well, yes. I sell Chinese fortune cookies so I need to sound Chinese. So the Japanese person must become a Chinese person. You see? I am Japanese with a Chinese accent.”
She nodded.
“And you keep my secret?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You have writing experience?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What kind?”
“Uh…I’m a poet,” she said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She’d studied poetry in college—a seminar on Emily Dickinson. Dickinson seemed a good base for Chinese one-liners.
“A poet!” He seemed really impressed. “A poet—this very exciting. You perfect for job. Is this a poet outfit?” He gestured at her outfit.
“Uh, yeah.” That day she was wearing a Gomez Addams gray and white pinstripe suit with white spats. Vibro felt bad for lying, but wasn’t a Japanese man masquerading as a Chinese man lying as well? His was definitely a bigger falsehood.
Besides Gomez Addams probably did write erotic poetry. He seemed the type anyway, always fawning over his wife and all. She told herself she would study a lot of poetry if she got the job to make up for her fib. She had stayed true to her promise too. This had an unexpected side effect. She’d actually started writing poetry and ended up going to that stupid writing conference where she met the bane of her existence—her girlfriend, Jennifer.
“Now, schedule for job Monday through Thursday. We do long days—ten hours—but lots of breaks. Creativity needs break. That’s why that and that,” he said, pointing to the kitchenette and the couches. “How that sound? You start Monday and meet other girls.”
“How much does it pay?” Vibro asked. She didn’t want to get involved in a sweatshop. Maybe this nice office was really just a front.
“Pays twenty-five an hour and stock options.”
“What? Why don’t you have oodles of people lined up for this job?” she blurted.
The Chink sighed. “Well, you see, Seattle kind of artists think this job is stupid, very stupid job, and below or beneath or under or beside them—I don’t know. Other girls, Dolores and Mary Lou, don’t care about that stuff. Dolores writing a manifesto and Mary Lou write country-and-western songs, and now we have poet. See, I show those stuck-up artists. This good job. Big money in Chinese fortune cookies, sell all over world. This big company with little slips of paper. Low overhead too. Lots of tiny papers in one box. You see?”
“Yes, I do.”
Now, ten years later, she was perched atop her desk, eating dill pickle-flavored Pringles and a banana alternately. She often sat on her desk, using her chair as a footstool. It made her feel more creative, more like an artist than an office worker. She’d already written her morning quota of fifty very poetic, very morose fortunes for some unsuspecting Chinese food patrons. Her favorite one read, “You will sauce many peanuts in the future.”
Between eating the Pringles and the banana, she checked her cell phone records online to see how many times that cheating, drunken whore of a girlfriend of hers was texting her “other” girlfriend. Yes, despite her denials, her live-in girlfriend obviously had a girlfriend-on-the-side. Again.
Vibro should have walked away the first time Jennifer cheated on her, a mere six months after their commitment ceremony, but somehow Jennifer had turned the whole situation around. She told Vibro she wasn’t “meeting her needs” and if they worked things out their “relationship would grow deeper and more meaningful.” Thinking back on that now made her feel even more foolish.
Vibro had come home early from a play she and her friend Rolonda, a drag queen of prodigious girth and height, had attended. The play, Chicks with Dicks, featured “lesbianettes,” as Rolonda called them, meaning short lesbians, running around with dildos strapped to their foreheads and trying to take over the planet and restore the lost matriarchy. Rolonda had been disappointed because she thought the play was going to be about drag queens—not lesbianettes.
When Vibro got home Jennifer was having dinner with a “friend.” Vibro remembered the scene all too vividly. It was a candlelit dinner complete with soft music—Enya, Vibro recalled, a CD she had since snapped into three pieces—and wine, a pinot grigio from Oregon, a state she would never visit since she couldn’t snap it into three pieces. Jennifer and her guest had moved on from dinner to rolling around on Vibro’s T35 bonded-leather mini-sectional.
She’d come in the door and seen discarded high heels on the floor and a tiny red-sequined dinner jacket casually tossed onto the chaise. Over the Enya she heard moaning. “What the fuck is going on here?” Vibro said, clicking the CD player off.
Two heads popped up from the couch. “Vibro?” Jennifer said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here, remember? A better question would be what is she doing here?” Vibro said, jabbing a finger in the direction of the woman in a red-sequined dress whose beehive hairdo was seriously mussed.
Jennifer didn’t miss a beat. “This is my new friend, Samantha. We work together.”
“Well, isn’t that great? Now you’ve got a fuck buddy at work.”
“She’s married,” Jennifer said, like that changed anything.
“Even better. Why don’t I call her life partner and tell her that Samantha is dry humping another woman on my sectional couch.”
“She’s straight and married,” Jennifer said.
“Okay then, I’ll call her husband. I’m sure that’ll make him really happy. Men love to be emasculated—it should do wonders for their marriage.”
Samantha was already up and looking around for her shoes.
“Oh, here, let me help you,” Vibro said, picking up the red shoes and, being a softball player, expertly pitching them at the woman, who ducked just in time to avoid a head shot.
Samantha grabbed her shoes, snatched up her dinner jacket and was out the door before Vibro could throw anything else at her. “Stay the fuck away from my girlfriend or I will hunt you down,” Vibro screamed after her.
Jennifer had sobbed and begged, telling Vibro that it didn’t mean anything. That
she was just lonely. That they needed to have sex more often. That Vibro wasn’t meeting her needs.
After extracting a promise from her for no more dalliances, Vibro had cut her a pass. She hated herself for it then and even more now.
Three years later, Jennifer was still talking about her needs and flirting with other women. What a load of crap. Needs in Vibro’s world were about needing to buy groceries and pay the utility bills. Christ-on-a-bike, Jennifer didn’t even pay rent. All she was responsible for was the utilities and she didn’t pay those half the time.
Eight hundred and forty texts in three hours. How the fuck did a person do that and find time to squeeze in a job? Of course, jobs were not what they used to be, Vibro thought. Here she was, scrolling through her phone bill and eating while on the job. Her conscience got hold of her. She sat down and scribbled out ten more very poetic, very morose fortunes.
“Jesus Christ and God damn it,” Vibro said. Her cellular carrier had just emailed her that Jennifer’s phone usage data plan was about to go over quota. She got off her desk and paced the length of the room.
Dolores, her manifesto-writing co-worker, said, “Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is not a swear word.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dolores, give it a rest.”
Dolores Rodriguez Alvarez crossed herself and gave Vibro the finger. Dolores was a contradiction’s contradiction. She was a devout Catholic and a religious agitator, twice denounced by the Diocese for the sexually explicit nature of her feminist writings. A mother of five boys, she “thanked God they were boys so they would never be reduced to selling their private parts for a living.” To her all women were forced into some kind of prostitution.
Dolores was in her fifties but still pretty with a round face, long lashes and full lips. Her black hair was piled high on her head in that sixties kind of bouffant style reminiscent of Annette Funicello. She wore cherry red lipstick, and her long red fingernails tapped on her keyboard while she wrote feminist fortunes such as “If your woman brings home the bacon, you’d better cook it for her.”
Love Over Moon Street Page 4
