by Sarah Bird
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Pemberton Heights
April 3, 2003 4:15 A.M.
April 3, 2003 6:00 A.M.
April 3, 2003 11:00 A.M.
April 3, 2003 1:30 P.M.
April 3, 2003 2:15 P.M.
April 3, 2003 3:45 P.M.
April 3, 2003 5:15 P.M.
Seneca House
Time Stops
In the Dark Forest of the World
It’s Called a Conscience
The Warm Ocean of Petrodollars
Smell the Dividend Tax Cuts
Gravity Lost Its Hold
A Simple Majority Vote
An Ocean of Nectar
Like Cells in a Body
A Fallen Woman
The Transitoriness of Life
You Never Turn a Stranger Out
Nipples Pucker
Penance for Our Sins
What You Love on This Earth
Psycho Porker
The Socialite’s Oath
The Dogs of Law
Guilty as Sin
Vast Assumptions
Cast Out
A Hunger That Has Nothing to Do with Food
A Free-range Buccaneer
The Salty, Wet Ones
That Which Is Truly Right and Truly Proper
The Tee Town Trifecta
Find Your Path
Hump the Ancient Shag
Queen of the Stoners
Happy Horseshit
Original Sin
An Abrupt Harmonic Convergence
A Natural Affinity for the Larcenous
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Sarah Bird
Copyright
… and to the Republic
“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
—former First Lady Barbara Bush, after meeting Katrina evacuees at the Astrodome, September 5, 2005
Bill Moyers: What happened to the moral compass?
Thomas Frank: It got demagnetized by money.
—NOW, July 9, 2004
The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.
—Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game, 1939
“…the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”
Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.
—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, 1905
This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes.
—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, 1848
PEMBERTON HEIGHTS
* * *
Kippie Lee Teeter
Requests the honor of your presence at a garden party, une fête champêtre, a ladies’ luncheon. Call it what you will, this event wouldn’t be complete without you!
April 3, 2003
One o’clock until the cows come home. 7 Hargrove Lane Amuse-bouches & other delectables
Catering by Bly the Young’s Wretched Xcess
Event Coordination Extraordinaire
* * *
April 3, 2003
4:15 A.M.
FOUR-FIFTEEN in the morning is the perfect time to catalog the one commodity I am still rich in: regrets. I keep trying to pare that lengthy list down to a manageably brief inventory of everything I failed to acquire during marriage to a scion of one of America’s wealthiest dynasties. Over the past few months, I have smelted a King Solomon’s mine of lost swag down to the few basics I most regret either not obtaining or not hanging on to:
1. A husband
2. A home
3. A Pap smear
I’ve added and removed “4. Children” from the list several times. Currently, they are off.
Recently I’ve also started to regret christening myself Blythe Young. I chose the name at the end of my sophomore year at Abilene High School. It was a decided improvement over the one my mother had saddled me with, Chanterelle Young. I was tired of being taken for either a stripper or, far worse, exactly what I was, the daughter of a trailer-trash tramp of a mother too stupid to know that in her single, solitary moment of maternal lyricism she had named her only child after a mushroom.
Eighteen years later, however, instead of blithe and young, I feel burdened and every day of my thirty-three years. What I am is divorced, desperate, and currently clinging frantically to a very tenuous toehold here in Bamsie Beiver’s historically significant carriage house. Although Bamsie redid the main house in meticulous turn-of-the-century detail for maximum “authenticity” and “tax benefits,” my abode never received such tender ministrations. Renovations on the carriage house appear to have started and stopped once the horse turds were swept out.
The sky lightens to a clotted gray signaling that no matter how much I might wish otherwise a new day is dawning. I brace myself for the next item on the chronic insomniac’s agenda: an elaborate road trip revisiting all the points in my life where I took disastrously wrong turns. First up, the prenup. I put the prenup on hold, since it is more than a wrong turn; that damned prenup is its own entire journey of the damned with an itinerary drawn up by my former mother-in-law, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, known more generally as Peggy Biggs-Dix. Peggy ruined my life. Without her I would still be Mrs. Henry “Trey” Biggs-Dix the Third, mistress of Pemberton Palace. I would still be sleeping on Frette sheets, numbered like works of art, thick and dense as deep sleep itself. I would still be breathing in air that smelled of lavender, eucalyptus, and the kind of clean that only generations of really dirty money can buy. Without Peggy, I wouldn’t be where I am now, huddled in Bamsie’s dank carriage house, staring down bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy? Who am I kidding? I was bankrupt when I married Trey. I believed he would rescue me. But his succubus of a mother sliced my oxygen hose and left me gasping on the ocean floor. No, it is what lurks beyond bankruptcy that is so terrifying. I forbid myself to burrow any farther into this rathole. My future will be decided today. So, although the lengthy list of things I would rather be doing than coordinating Kippie Lee’s garden party would lead off with “Anything” and finish up with “Gum surgery,” I have no choice. One, just one, just one healthy check, will keep me alive long enough to regroup and come back to fight another day.
In another city. Under another name.
Kippie Lee’s check is my last, rapidly fading hope for staying out of debtor’s prison. The words “debtor’s prison” fill my mind with images from A Rake’s Progress. Wastrels in powdered wigs despoiling themselves at the gaming tables. Blowsy slatterns in mobcaps with beauty marks painted over syphilitic sores. Grand ladies in Marie Antoinette wigs amusing themselves by gawking at the debt-maddened lunatics imprisoned in Bedlam. The vision is highly motivating.
It is do-or-die time. I have to get that check. Failure is not an option. Semper Fi.
Already imagining I have Kippie Lee’s check, I prioritize my list of creditors into Vultures and Jackals. Vultures—my unpaid employees, the IRS, inattentive suppliers—won’t attack until I’ve stopped moving. I can let them wait. The Jackals, on the other hand—Sprint, Visa, American Express, MasterCard, Loan Sharks ‘R’ Us—are already nipping at my hindquarters with their massive, wildebeest-thigh-crushing jaws. This pack will have to be seen to first. I plan to scatter precisely enough dollars in the path of the Jackals to make them unlock their cruel masseters and release my gluteals. T
hat will give me some breathing room.
Thus bolstered, I struggle to clear my mind so that I can get a bit more sleep. Instead, the hamsters on their wheels turn even faster. They pull me back, all the way back to the day when I met Henry “Trey” “Tree Tree” “Double T” Biggs-Dix the Third. Back to the beginning of the end.
I met Trey shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and I was in financial free fall owing to the first incarnation of Wretched Xcess Event Coordination Extraordinaire going belly-up. Wretched Xcess was not just the name of my business but the encapsulation of an entire zeitgeist as manifested in Austin, Texas. That was a heady time when too much was never enough and the clever boys in the backward caps, Teva sandals, and cargo shorts could not burn through their venture capital fast enough. Excess, that’s what my clever boys wanted and that’s what I provided.
Drunk with the rest of the country at the vast money kegger thrown by the venture capitalists, I expanded to meet the needs of my ever-more-demanding clientele. Though the Bubble Boys were still padding around in flip-flops, they could tell their Beluga from their Ossetra. And, in every case, they wanted the Beluga. They also wanted the titanium chafing dishes, the Baccarat crystal, and the tablecloths with a four-digit thread count embroidered by French nuns that I felt forced to acquire. High-end all the way. Leveraged to the max. That was when I should have worried. But I had fallen under the spell of my bright boys. We were rewriting the laws of trade and were all going to retire by the age of thirty-three. Thirty-four at the latest. Working was for chumps. We would float together forever on the bubble that had already lofted us so much higher than we could have ever dreamed.
And then?
Pop.
A bubble. Yes, I could have dealt with a bubble. But did it have to be filled with deadly swamp gas?
We all fell. Just some of us, weighted down with titanium chafing dishes and tablecloths heavy as rugs, hit significantly harder than those who’d pulled rip cords on parachutes in varying hues of gold. Or who’d simply moved into Mom’s garage. Mom’s garage was never an option for me, since my mother, Vicki Jo, was herself living in a garage. Griz’s Hawg Heaven Harley Garage to be exact, owned by her “old man.”
Vicki Jo keeps in touch by sending photos taken while she is “riding bitch” on the back of a chromed-out Harley-Davidson, piloted by Griz himself, whom Mom proudly describes as “a 1%er Outlaw Bandido thru and thru.” In most of the photos, my mother is hiking up her top to reveal the bouncing maternal mammaries tanned to a rich, beef-jerky brown. I have to give Vicki Jo this: She has great tits for a woman her age and could almost pass for the thirty-nine she claims. At least when her very inconvenient thirty-three-year-old daughter isn’t around. As for Griz, imagine a circus bear riding a motorcycle. Now stick a Nazi helmet atop its sloping head, give it a wallet on a chain, and there you have my mother’s paramour.
Yes, my mother is a biker chick. Vicki Jo warned me early and often that mothering was not her “bag.” My father had promised to do all the raising if Vicki Jo would handle the birthing. Mom couldn’t help but feel she’d been welshed on when her husband died of a heart attack shortly after “the kid” was born. Making the best of a bad deal, my mother got a “shitty-ass, monkey fuck of a job” with the phone company and grudgingly kept me in sneakers and Clearasil for the next sixteen years with periodic memos that this wasn’t “the tour” she had “signed on for” and that “we all got to float our own boat in this world.” The instant I turned sixteen, Vicki Jo informed me that the “gravy train” had stopped and that her “me time” had begun.
Mom’s answer to “What happens to a dream deferred?” was to move to Myrtle Beach, home to a very active biker scene and purchase a wardrobe of leathers, cutoffs, halter tops, and bandannas. Vicki Jo looked upon my childhood as an annuity and felt that every dime she’d put into raising me should have been accumulating interest and be available for withdrawal at any moment. The last time she hit me up for a loan so that Griz could get a valve job before the big Suck, Bang, and Blow Rally, she had been peeved that I was broke.
“What happened to that rich dude you married?”
“Being married to me didn’t make him one penny less rich.”
“Goddammit, don’t tell me you signed a prenup?”
“Okay, I won’t.”
“What’s that monkey fuck’s name? Me and Griz are going to pay a visit on his sorry ass.”
“Ethan Hawke.”
“Gimme the son of a bitch’s number.”
“I’ll get back to you on that.”
I don’t mention my mother much. All right, I don’t mention my mother ever. It isn’t that I’m ashamed of her. Or, okay, it isn’t just that I’m ashamed of her; I fear the response if I tell the truth. Maybe illustrate it with a snapshot of Mom, riding high behind Griz, top hiked up, tan Mommy muffins exposed, big drunk grin on her leathery face. I fear that my confidant will look from the photograph to me, then back and say, “Ah, that explains it.” Because all my mother explains is the obvious: Girls who aren’t born rich have to work what the Lord gave them a lot harder than girls who are. We have to work it a lot harder. That is all my mother explains.
April 3, 2003
6:00 A.M.
I AM STILL wide awake when the radio alarm clicks on. I half listen to a story about some superhero file clerk shooting her way like Rambo out of an Iraqi hospital. With an impossible to-do list, I jump into the shower and have just started sudsing up with the last of my Bulgari Thé Blanc shower gel when Trey calls out to me from the next room. My heart stops. I can’t make out exactly what my ex-husband is saying, but he uses the earnest and heartfelt tone he puts on when he’s trying to sound earnest and heartfelt. And/or get laid.
I’m saved. The hope of being rescued from having to perpetrate Kippie Lee’s party makes me giddy with relief.
“Trey?” I trill, stepping naked from the shower, ready to jump into whatever reconciliation/farewell-fuck scenario he might be playing out. I open the door, imagining how dewy and soft-focus I look in the cloud of escaping steam, and behold an empty room. On the radio, President Bush is telling an audience of marines at Camp Lejeune that their brothers in arms have “performed brilliantly in Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
I consider it cruel and unusual punishment that the leader of the free world sounds exactly like my ex-husband. Though I know that this bitter disappointment gives me every right to a minibreak-down, I cannot allow myself such a luxury. I cannot hurl myself onto Bamsie’s lumpy bed and sob my heart out because no one is coming to save me, because no one was ever coming to save me. No, today I have to be a warrior, and I have to gird myself accordingly.
I appraise my wardrobe and consider the critical choice of what to wear. This day, more than any since the divorce, I have to establish that I still belong on Kippie Lee’s side of the social divide. I zip past my Marc Jacobs, my Anna Suis, my Prada. I need more armament than they provide to make it through the coming ordeal. I need the closest thing I have to true haute couture; I need the suit of lights. I pluck out my shimmering Zac Posen gold duchesse satin suit. Just putting it on recalls the exquisite feeling of all the fittings I managed to finagle. A garment custom-fitted by Zac Posen with nine additional arcing darts undulating between hand-finished French seams is like wearing an all-access backstage pass.
Shoes? The Christian Louboutins, of course, with their ultraexclusive sliver of red on the inside of the heels. I want to broadcast class, not go Sex and the City with Jimmy Choos. I want to get paid, not laid. But which ones? Are the berry peep-toes accessorized with a Swarovski crystal the size of a golf ball too much? I think not. I slip them on and check the effect: intimidatingly prosperous. I can pull off anything in my twinkling shoes and the suit of lights.
On the radio, Bush signs off. “May God bless our country and all who defend her. Semper Fi.”
Did our president just say “Semper Fi”? The very words I’d been thinking to myself just moments earlier?
&nbs
p; It is as if George W. Bush himself has blessed my mission and promised that everything would turn out fine. What could possibly go wrong?
April 3, 2003
11:00 A.M.
AH, PEMBERTON HEIGHTS, the creamy white filling squirting out of Austin’s exclusive Tarrytown Twinkie.
The image calms my jittery nerves as I pilot the Kia Sedona minivan that has replaced my beloved Escalade toward the street where Trey and I lived not so very long ago. I am about to switch off the radio and concentrate on dodging crippling grief when the word “Enron” pops out at me. I turn the volume up.
I have to stay current on the Enron situation for that rare occasion when one of the ladies wants to talk about something other than Italian glass tile and who’s had work done. Since the consensus view on Enron among Kippie Lee’s group is “government witch hunt,” I need to collect further evidence of big government’s attempt to throw sand into the gears that power free enterprise and the American way. But the only news on the Enron front today is that indictments naming the participants in a gaudy array of fraud schemes will remain sealed for another month.
Drat.
I turn the radio off and brace myself. Kippie Lee’s gigando manse is directly beneath Pemberton Palace where I lived high on a hill above them all during my short marriage. It is bad enough rattling onto my old street in a minivan, but even worse is having to arrive without backup, since I can’t afford to hire minions for any but the barest minimum of essential hours. Consequently, I am all by myself when I step up to the front door of Kippie Lee Teeter’s titanic French Provincial. The Teeters tore down not one, not two, but three houses to construct their Xanadu. Petitions started circulating the day the foundation was poured to ban such McMansions forever from Pee Heights in particular, and the whole precious 78703 zip code in general.
