I'm Your Girl (14 page)

3: Dan

Why did I wave? What possible reason could I have had to wave at a complete stranger? I never quite know what to do with my hands. Private Sidney didn’t seem to mind, but that was over ten years ago when I was in my sexual prime. Cat Eyes didn’t wave back, and I can’t blame her. It must have been hard for her to wave and hold onto her umbrella at the same time, and besides, she doesn’t know me from Adam. I hope she doesn’t think I’m stalking her.

And she drives a Beamer? That girl must be paid. Classy, paid, and smoking hot.

And out of my league completely
.

But at least she smiled. I think. More of a squinty smirk than a smile. Maybe she doesn’t like Eric B. and Rakim. Maybe she has issues with Subarus. Maybe—

Maybe she thinks I’m stalking her
.

I ought to be going. I guess it’s off to my favorite restaurant, the Williamson Road Pancake House, a retro diner complete with Formica counter and taped-up stools that still spin. I need to drown my sorrows in a slice of apple pie covered with cheddar cheese. I can always get the “Norm” treatment there. Gladys will greet me at the door by name, seat me in my favorite booth looking out on the taillights and headlights of Williamson Road, and bring me hot tea with lemon. Gladys will ask, “Where’s your girl, Danny?” I’ll say something like, “You’re my girl, Gladys.” She’ll say, “Oh, go on,” then I’ll finish with, “I wish you were sixty years younger, Gladys.” Then I’ll pretend to read the menu, pretend to agonize over my decision, eat my pie, flirt with Gladys, and leave a two-dollar tip for a two-dollar check.

On second thought, I don’t want to hit on an octogenarian tonight. It doesn’t seem fitting somehow.

And I don’t have four dollars to my name.

So, I go home to my gray squat apartment building (also known as “the Cube”), right across the street from the pancake house, and park next to the big, green Dumpster. Tonight it’s filled to overflowing, and because of Election Day tomorrow, the city won’t get to it until Wednesday. That will give Cat Stevens, my cat, more time to eat garbage.

Cat Stevens really isn’t my cat. She’s just a huge black and white tabby with Groucho Marx eyebrows who just happens to live in the alley outside my windows. When I first moved in, I threw some frozen leftovers into the alley and heard a nasty cat snarl. That’s how Cat Stevens and I met. All it took was a frozen chunk of potato salad. I still don’t know why I put the potato salad in the freezer. I found my car keys in an ice cube tray once, even found my driver’s license in the crisper. Yeah, that Kelvinator is a vacuum, a black hole for all the things I can’t find.

But getting back to Cat Stevens. The best thing about her is that she’s not picky. She loves my cooking.

I have, however, stopped freezing the leftovers.

I leave the Subaru and head up the sidewalk to the lower entrance of the Cube as the rain subsides. I used to hang out on the porch in front of the entrance with the old super, Mr. Reardon. The man drank whiskey, smoked unfiltered Camels all day long, and still kept his wits about him as he sat on an overturned milk crate. He never said anything worth remembering, but it was always nice to have someone to speak to at the end of a long day taming nine- and ten-year-olds. A shame he died, and it wasn’t even lung or liver cancer. A city bus hit him while he was on his way to get some smokes. His milk crate now holds some of my old records, my little TV on top—my shrine to Mr. Reardon.

The neighborhood around the Cube has a long and storied past but not much of a future. Davis Pizza used to crank out strange pizzas, even using peanut butter as a topping, but not many people ever went in there, because the weekly hotel next door became, well, a whorehouse. Young (and I use that term as loosely as they behave) ladies hang out behind the sliding glass doors of the hotel. Kind of reminds me of what I saw in the red-light district in Amsterdam, though those Dutch women were much hotter. I don’t know how many times I’ve whistled “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” as I’ve passed by that hotel on the way to Ralph’s One-Stop to pay too much for beer
.

The tattoo parlor that used to be next to Davis Pizza was once a booming business, as was America’s Cash Express, a check-cashing place. I’ll bet they were in business together. So many teenaged girls went first to the check-cashing place then on to the tattoo parlor to get pierced somewhere new: eyebrows, belly buttons, noses, and I’m sure even other more tender places. I’ve never understood that. Paying someone to give you pain
.

Wait a minute. I just paid for Beth’s meal. I’ve been pierced, too
.

And no woman gets to see my tattoo until at least the sixth date. Actually, it’s more of a brand than a tattoo, forever preserved on my ass, courtesy of the delightful Private Sidney and her Golden Hot curling iron. “Turn around,” Sidney had said. Being naïve and dumb, I had turned around. And that shit had hurt. Twice she got me before I could wrestle that curling iron away. It’s faded some, but it still looks like an
X
on my left cheek. I’m a white boy with an
X
on my ass
.

I tiptoe down the linoleum-floored hallway, open the door to apartment #2, and enter as quietly as possible. As soon as I close the door with the tiniest little click, the door of the apartment across the hall slams opens, and I hear a knock. Stella must sit by that peephole all day. She needs to get cable or something.

“Mister?” Knock-knock. “Mister, have you seen my husband?”

“No,” I say through the door. I don’t look through my peephole at Stella’s face anymore. Very large pores and acne scars. Bags under her eyes. And she’s barely twenty. At least she didn’t bring her colicky baby, Tito Jr., this time.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

I look down at the two-by-fours I’ve had to pound into my door on the inside, praying that they’ll hold when her equally young husband, Tito, comes home from his drunk and tries to kick in the wrong door, looking for his Stella. It is one strange relationship. She looks for him all day, but when he comes home, she won’t open the door. And since Tito has no sense of direction and obviously can’t discern a number two from a number three when he’s tanked, he kicks in my door, shouting, “I loves ya, baby! Ya know I loves ya, baby!”

My neighbors across the hall: the happy couple.

I haven’t seen the man in #1 since he moved in, but I know he likes to order pizza. I trip over empty boxes that he just throws out into the hallway instead of carrying them to the Dumpster. Once I figured out that he never left his apartment—or ran much water for that matter, which is kind of gross—I took it upon myself to take out his trash
.

My other neighbor: the unbathed garbage giver
.

I look at the ceiling and hear my upstairs neighbors sloshing around in the tub again. Very thin walls and floors in the Cube. They can’t have much body hair left, the amount of time they spend squeaking around up there, and I’ll bet they never have to scrub the tub. One day I came home and found that a rectangle from my suspended ceiling had fallen to the floor, narrowly missing my La-Z-Boy, and a large puddle of water on my shiny gray carpet. I had then looked up through the ceiling into the eyes of one of the swimmers, who introduced himself as “Rob.”

“You okay down there?” Rob had asked
.

“Uh, yeah,” I had said, as if being able to look through your own ceiling into the eyes of a man who humped his woman in a tub above your living room was a normal occurrence.

“I’ll have this thing fixed and caulked in no time,” he had said.

You or your woman? I had thought at the time.

My upstairs neighbors: tub humpers.

When I first moved in, I decorated as cheaply as possible, focusing first on my books. I used cinder blocks and two-by-fours for shelving, and over the past few years, I’ve added quite a few more levels. One day soon they’ll touch the ceiling. I don’t know how many books I own, but it has to number in the thousands. And unlike some people, I’ve read them all, some more than once. I don’t have them organized or anything anal like that. I just put them where they fit, and from the looks of things, I’ll need to get more cinder blocks in time for the holidays. For whatever reason, my family thinks that as a teacher I need more books to read. And because they’re all on the West Coast, and because they’re cheaper than me, they mail me books—book rate, of course
.

Other than the La-Z-Boy, the books, a stereo with a turntable, a collection of records from when rap was young and contained no “bee-otches,” and a dusty thirteen-inch TV complete with rabbit ears antenna, there’s only an oak coatrack and a futon in the main room. No reason to be in here tonight. I have no one to squint at the TV with me, no one to help me warm up the futon
.

I turn off the light to the main room and enter my kitchen/office. Instead of a kitchen table, I eat all my meals on an old cherry secretary, an antique with a drop-down desk. Not many women have had the privilege of eating on an authentic, century-old cherry secretary. It barely has room for a plate and a glass, and I have to eat the runny foods like Jell-O, mixed veggies, or anything with gravy first or the juices will run off the plate.

I’ve been planning to level it, but not tonight. Nothing is on the level tonight.

The sink holds one spoon, one knife, one fork, and one chipped china plate—as it should. Okay, it only holds those because they’re all I own. No sense in investing in more than I need, and I save a mint on dish liquid. I have one pot, one pan, and one dish towel, too. I am an army of one in the kitchen.

I have but one plant, a Ma Plub tree, which sits in the corner in a rattan basket next to the garbage can. It was a gift from Jewel over two years ago, and she told me that the Ma Plub tree has medicinal properties. “My mother’s people”—the Thai—“use it to treat diarrhea and stop bleeding.” How nice. I’ve been hoping that the tree would die a slow, horrible death. I don’t water it, haven’t replanted it, and haven’t done anything but curse at it. I even keep the kitchen window blind down at all times, yet there it is, flourishing, dropping leaves and small white flowers occasionally, sprouting fruit that I hurl at the alley wall. I’d offer it to Cat Stevens, but I don’t think she’s a vegetarian. I just don’t want to get rid of it in case Jewel should come back. That would be the first thing she’d notice. I know she’s not coming back, but if she did, I’d take her back in a second, even regive her the ring she threw at me.

After I cussed her out for giving it back in the first place, of course.

The Kelvinator rattles on as I turn off the kitchen light and enter my bedroom, tossing my coat onto the king-sized bed. I don’t have mirrors on the headboard. I have more class than that. But because the room is so small, I have to edge around the bed to get to the walk-in closet and bathroom. And it isn’t as if I’ve been very busy on that bed. Yet, whenever a woman sees it for the first time, she automatically assumes that I’m some sort of a Rico Suave Don Juan out for a piece.

“So I’m an active sleeper,” I tell them, but they don’t buy it.

I tried to sleep in a single bed when I first moved in, but I kept falling out. Living in a tent in Saudi messed me up that way. I need space when I sleep.

After peeling down to my underwear and sliding into bed, I pick up my well-thumbed copy of the collected works of William Shakespeare, hold it out in front of me, and drop it into my lap. It opens to Act I, scene five of
Twelfth Night.
A romantic comedy. How fitting. I’ve been using Willie’s writing as a kind of horoscope ever since I read
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
when I was a kid. I close my eyes and play “eeny-meeny-miney-mo” with the pages, ending on the right. I scan down the page looking for anything remotely relevant to my day.

And I get an eyeful.

In this scene, Olivia, a countess, is unveiling her face to Viola, a young lady posing as a young man. Willie’s on tonight. A countess and a she-boy. Shakespeare and his cross-dressers. Anyway, Viola the she-boy describes Olivia’s face as “beauty truly blent” yet says the countess is “the cruell’st she alive.”

The cruelest “she” alive, her beauty truly blended. Here’s Jewel Mekla Manowong once again, that ungodly mixture of Thai and black, that marriage of Southeast Asian and African that made her the most exquisite, most exotic woman I’ve ever known. Her mother named her Mekla after a Thai goddess who used a crystal ball to blind Ramasura, her almost lover. I guess that makes me Ramasura the Second. Mekla soon became “Jewel” once she and her mother moved to Cleveland without her father, a young American soldier who left Thailand in the early seventies without even knowing he had a daughter.

I keep reading and see the countess listing her features: “two lips, indifferent red…two grey eyes…”

Jewel’s eyes weren’t gray. They were so dark a blue they were almost purple. Maybe Willie is referring to Cat Eyes. Her eyes were light, but were they gray? I should have stared longer.

The word “rudeness” jumps out at me from Viola’s lips: “The rudeness that hath appeared in me have I learned from my entertainment. What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead; to your ears, divinity, to any other’s, profanation.”

Yeah, I was kind of rude, staring at Cat Eyes’ legs like that. She didn’t seem to mind; I mean, she nodded in my general direction, right?