Confessions of a Recovering Slut (16 page)

Except die. He’s been blathering about how his end is near for years, only he keeps breathing, regardless of his recent heart attack. My sister Cheryl is bereft, and dropped everything to be by his side. She loves Bill like a musty old bedtime toy treasured since her infancy. They’ve spent countless hours together since my mother’s death; drinking, chain smoking, bitching about life in general and me in particular. I’ve changed, they complain. I used to be fun. I used to be brazen and braless, booze-addled, boy-crazy, and adventurous. Another one lost to the establishment, they toast, promising that they themselves will never sell out. And they never will.

Occasionally Bill tries to shake Cheryl free. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that Bill is unaccustomed to lasting attachments, even if you count my mother. When he met my mother she had only four years left to live, but through her Bill acquired Cheryl and, spiky old bag of magma that he is, Bill has become Cheryl’s token of comfort in life. He can’t shake her free. If he is lost she will find him, even in a jungle in Central America.

I made plans to go, too, and got Lary to commit as well. “We can fly into San Jose,” I told him, “rent a car and drive seven hours over bad highways and unsettled political terrain until we get to Granada. Sound good?” It sounded
great
to Lary, who immediately started honing his duck-and-jab maneuvers in the event of an attempted kidnapping. In Central America, Lary and I would stand out like purple rhinos at a wedding reception. He has hair like a curly halo of albino tarantulas, and I myself have been loudly referred to as “bleachy-haired honky bitch,” so by virtue of our un-Latin-ness alone we would make decent criminal targets.

“This’ll be a great story to tell your grandkids,” said Lary, who actually welcomed the prospect of living in a freshly dug dirt hole for a few months while demands for our ransom undoubtedly went ignored in Atlanta. “We’ll escape by climbing a rope we made out of our own hair,” he mused, excitedly. It started to sound fun even to me.

But then Milly’s mittens went missing. I hovered helplessly as she toddled to every corner of our house. “My love! My love!” she sobbed with those big, uninhibited tears I sometimes wish I could still muster myself. It’s difficult to describe the effect such a sight had on me, except to say that right then, for a second, I saw with clarity what was in store for me and my daughter. I realized we will lose each other one day, Milly and I, possibly more than once, but eventually for good. It’s a reality as inescapable as it is unbearable to think about. She will long for me one day, and I will be out of her grasp, and she will have to make do with a token of comfort. What is life, after all, if not a succession of searches like this?

“You pussy,” Lary chided when I bailed on our trip. I would have argued with him, but Milly was crying, and I was aching to help her find her lost love.

T
HERE ARE TWO DRUG-ADDICT PANHANDLERS
impersonating charity workers at the busy intersection near Honnie and Todd’s house, and it’s amazing anyone falls for their act. But I guess we are jaded in this neighborhood; we can spot a crack addict from five hundred paces, with their chalky lips, gray pallor, and taut cheekbones. But we are not newcomers, and there are a lot of newcomers coming through here lately.

They are coming for the same reason we first did, in search of an affordable home close to the city. But if they asked me, I’d tell them that, though the price of a home here is low, living here still comes at a very high cost.

Take the drug dealer next door to Honnie and Todd. He set their house on fire
again
. This was after they, along with other neighborhood activists, finally shut down the crack house across the street. After fruitless appeals to the police, they finally bypassed them and resorted to red tape to strangle the place. The county housing inspector slammed its owner with housing code violations like a blizzard of bureaucratic confetti, and rather than finance the mandated improvements, the owner simply emptied the house of tenants and put it up for sale. Now it’s been transformed from a skanky, illegal boarding house to a piece of hot property.

“It’s gorgeous in there,” said the real-estate agent representing the house. “It’s got four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and
four fireplaces
,” and hardly any used condoms stuck to the porch anymore. But this agent knows that fact won’t deter buyers, because at these prices most houses in Capitol View sell before the sign goes up in the yard, and this one was no exception. It sold in less than a week.

But the drug dealer next door to Honnie and Todd is not rolling over so easily. After the crack house closed down, thereby eradicating a big part of his customer base, he placed speakers in his widows and played Master P’s rap song “Snitches” continuously, at ear-bleeding decibels.

Then he set Honnie and Todd’s house on fire again. The fire department has taken to sending Honnie the bills for their service, which doesn’t help. It also doesn’t help that the police, when they came, did not arrest the drug dealer, but Honnie’s mother, Bren, instead. The drug dealer had told them that she—Honnie’s mother, the lady who makes her own soap—pointed a gun at him and he got one of his crack-addict cronies to corroborate his story, so damn if the police didn’t come and arrest that poor lady. She is about as peaceful and sweet as a nun. In fact, she almost is a nun. She’s a Baha’i worshiper who would not touch a gun if her life depended on it.
Please
, she brought that asshole drug dealer a basket of homemade soap when they first moved in next door. She and Honnie both offered to assist his girlfriend in enrolling in night cosmetology classes so she wouldn’t have to strip anymore; they even offered to babysit their two sad brats if the need ever arose. But then Honnie and her family helped close that crack house down, thereby immensely pissing off the drug dealer next door, and now the police are hauling Honnie’s sweet, peace-loving mother off to the hoosegaw based on the say-so of this prick, the guy who
set their house on fucking fire! Twice!

It’s stuff like this that I’d tell newcomers in the neighborhood if they asked me. I’d also tell them about the neighbors who support Honnie and Todd and Bren, too. We all showed up, a crowd of us, at the courthouse when Bren appeared before a judge to answer the charges, and it turned out this same drug dealer had been getting all kinds of people hauled off by the police. He’d just point them out and say he’d been threatened by them, and the police would hone in like hornets to arrest them. A few days prior, the drug dealer had the police arrest the man across the street, a very personable retired electrician for the Ford Motor Company, who supposedly threatened the drug dealer by brandishing a shovel.

The judge dismissed the charges in all cases, but the irony isn’t lost on Bren that, while her life is constantly threatened by screaming crack addicts, gunshots, and an arsonist, the police rarely deem it necessary even to write a formal report, yet a known crack dealer can use these same police to cart off unfavored neighbors as though he has all the power of an ill-tempered emperor.

I always drive by Honnie’s house on my way home these days because she asked me to. So do a lot of her other friends who live nearby. Other than the drug dealer next door, her street is looking pretty nice now that the crack house is gone. Many houses have been bought up, fixed up, and landscaped. Others show for-sale signs put there by landowners who discovered the neighborhood is starting to pull in prices that make small-time whoring and drug dealing less profitable by comparison. In the middle of it, Honnie’s house sits there like a little jewel, with potted flowers on the porch, bullet holes in the window, burned baseboards in the kitchen, and music bellowing from one house over: “
I got a slug for ya’ll muthafuckin’ snitches
. . . .”

I
PERSONALLY THINK FIFTY IS TOO YOUNG TO DIE
,
but Lucky Yates has it all planned out, sort of. He says he wants to be eaten by a snake in the Amazon or something. He wants to go out with a bang, though I don’t see how being swallowed whole qualifies. “That’s a slow death, not a bang death,” I point out, “and being broken down by digestive enzymes has gotta hurt, too.”

“Pythons suffocate you before they swallow you,” Anna corrects me, but I don’t buy that. Who’s to say you don’t regain consciousness with your body half swallowed? And what if the snake is swallowing you feet first? It’s not like you can run away at that point, so you have to just lay there like an idiot with half your body hanging out of a snake’s mouth for what could be hours.

“No,” I tell Lucky Yates, “please just climb a pyramid in Peru and fall off the top or something.” Now that is a good way to go if you ask me. In college I heard about a couple who accidentally did just that, and I remember thinking that had to be the coolest way to kick the bucket this side of being blown apart in the space shuttle. But Lucky Yates is pretty unbendable about the snake.

“I’m not gonna be sitting there in the snake’s belly, twiddling my thumbs going ‘Hiya,’” he says, smiling with his really white teeth. “I’ll be dead, got it?”

That’s just it. I don’t get it, this whole desire to die young before you become a burden on people. Fifty is downright spry if you ask me. I know plenty of people in their fifties and, goddam, let’s just say it would be a real waste to feed them to snakes. That’s not saying I myself expect to live much longer than fifty, not that I plan to pitch myself from the top of a pyramid or anything, it’s just that people in my family seem to drop like flies after the fifty mark, and I just don’t have any experience dealing with relatives who made it into old age.

But I hope I get old. I do. I want to go to the airport every chance I get and be wheeled around like a rickshaw passenger. It might be fun not to feel my feet, too, which I hear is what happens to old people who spent their life not eating right. It might be great to grab onto people as I stumble around. With my job as a flight attendant, I get grabbed a lot by the tottering elderly, and I really don’t mind that much. Once it was a ninety-year-old German woman who turned out to be an original Budweiser heiress. I saw her again about two years later, and she remembered me. She had given me her address and wondered why I hadn’t written, and I’d have felt bad about causing a rich old lady to await a letter from me that never came, but I was too busy marveling at the sharpness of her brain, and hoping beer played a factor in that.

Then there is Miss Taylor, who lives across the street from me in the crack neighborhood. She is in her eighties and sometimes dances barefoot in the rain, plus she planted sunflowers in her front yard that used to grow so tall they almost touched the rain gutters on her roof. Watching her one morning, I was struck by the difference between Miss Taylor and the memory of my own comparatively young mother, who couldn’t even climb out of a car without having to catch her breath. She used to embarrass me, I’m ashamed to admit, especially when she got so ill the only place that would take her was a Tijuana cancer clinic where, for five hundred dollars a day, they specialized in prolonging death once conventional doctors had deemed it inevitable. I used to have to carry her from her bed to the bathroom because she refused to use bedpans. Her habit was to start kicking the second she saw the Haiti-trained doctor coming through the door with a bedpan under his arm. Once she knocked it right out of his hand to the floor, where it clamored loud enough to wake the whole wing.

Now, whenever I wonder if I have the strength to deal with something seemingly insurmountable in my life, I just remember that Tijuana cancer clinic and how I had to cradle my own mother like an infant as her life leaked out of her. Now I know I can face anything, because it’s times like these that define you, they serve as a denominator of your character, and I’m grateful my mother bestowed this on me.

But, God, sometimes I’d give it up just to have her back. I wouldn’t care if she couldn’t dance in the rain, I wouldn’t care if there was hardly anything left of her except her colostomy bag connected to her head in a fishbowl, I just really wish she’d made it to old age and was still alive, and whatever burden that might mean to me—or her—I’d gladly bestow it or carry it. I would. But barring that, at least I have the memory of my mother alive and kicking at a Tijuana clinic, knocking bedpans to the floor and going out with a bang.

T
HINGS ARE SHRINKING AGAIN
,
according to Lary. “I’m telling you,” he says, measuring random stuff in my house, “things are shrinking.” These days he carries a tape measure with him everywhere he goes. He moves to my refrigerator, retractable tape at the ready, and assesses its width, which is the same as it’s always been. Everything is the same as it’s always been, but that doesn’t matter. “Things are still shrinking,” Lary says, “including tape measures. Trust me.”

Of course I don’t trust Lary. This is a guy who, a few years ago, tried to grind black Afghani hash into the pores of my canvas suitcase so I’d be busted by the drug beagle as we came through customs on our way back from Amsterdam. He did not even try to be discreet.

“What the hell are you doing to my suitcase?” I shrieked at him as we sat at the airport waiting to board the plane with the rest of the cattle. But Lary did not even look up. “Your life is lacking drama,” he said. I almost missed the flight because I had to hose my bag off at the drinking fountain and then douse it with ten different perfumes from the tester tray at Duty Free. To this day I am still amazed the drug dog didn’t sink his teeth into my neck as I came back into the country.

It’s funny I should mention baggage, because it’s when the airlines got really strict about weighing luggage that Lary became convinced the universe is getting smaller. “Fifty pounds used to be bigger than this,” he said, indicating a carry-on bag loaded with his customary airplane supplies, which include Cheetos, white wine, and forged documents declaring him a federally registered child molester. The food and wine are there to keep him from taking hostages in case the plane gets stuck on the tarmac, and the documents are there in case the flight attendant tries to seat him next to an adolescent.