Tats (2 page)

I catch sight of a pole tent whipping in the wind about a hundred yards away. A bunch of people are herded under the tent, shoulder to shoulder, backs facing the wet. I un-bungee the boxes of cookies from the luggage rack, stuff them as best I can under my jacket and work my way through ankle deep mud all the way to the tent. The people all watch me approach with big eyes, but none of them dare say a word. I have to nudge and poke, muttering some polite ’scuse me’s before I make some room for myself. I’m about a head taller than everyone else here, what’s new, and a few people glance nervously at my dreadlocks. Which is exactly what I like about my locks; they give me a cushion of space around myself that most people are afraid to enter.

Well, this is about the last place I thought I’d be when I started out this morning. Teetering on the edge of an open grave, my boots sliding in the mud, clutching the damn thin mints under my jacket, with all these social-climbing, golf-playing, country club martini-drinking fat-asses ogling me like I’m the weird one.

I scan the crowd of faces and realize most of these people are my age, they just look way older. I don’t get it. Why do women in the midwest hit thirty and automatically lose all sense of style? It’s like hormones (or lack of) kick in and create an insatiable appetite for polyester flowers and capri pants. I pride myself on not having much fashion sense, but I don’t have to read any fashion magazine to know that capri pants do not make fat legs look thinner. And somebody should pull these women aside and tell them that more makeup doesn’t mean more beautiful. I once saw lipstick on a pig, but that didn’t make it pretty.

I’m just wet and cold and pissed off. These people don’t deserve shit from me. I remind myself that these people are actually out there running in the rat race. I’m just sitting on the sidelines watching. Besides, somebody they loved died and here I am making fun of their damn clothes.

I take a deep, ragged breath and try to think respectful thoughts.

I overhear snippets of the conversation whirling around me: ‘Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,’ ‘Instant implosion,’ ‘Homecoming Queen.’ A paunchy man about half my height leers at me and for a moment I think he’s eying my boobs before I realize he’s actually drooling over my cookies. I edge over and nonchalantly hide my cookies behind the closest large woman. I glance toward the sky, looking for a break in the weather and hopefully a break in my future.

And just like that...the rain stops, the clouds part and a golden spotlight of sunshine illuminates the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.

Well, okay, not really.

It’s still raining and the woman I left behind in bed is actually way more hot. But there’s just something about this one... Maybe it’s the fact that she has long red hair the color of hot copper pipes right after you weld them together. Or maybe it’s her eyes which are more purple than blue like the color of pvc pipe glue. And her tits... She has them sitting right out there like a window display. (I have this weird thing where I nickname women’s tits after famous couples in history. So, right away I name this pair Sonny and Cher.)

She’s standing out in the open a good twenty yards away from everyone under the tent, getting soaking wet and paying no never-mind to the foul weather. She sucks a long, hard drag off her wet cigarette and flicks it like an ace into the nearest puddle.

Something about that little flicking gesture warns me she’s a woman to be reckoned with.

Too bad she’s a hooker. I think that because she’s dressed like one. Not like a sleazy hooker, more like a hooker who takes pride in her work and respects the power of advertising. I’m thinking about how most hookers are really gay (so are strippers and playboy centerfolds. It’s true.) when I realize I’ve been gawking at Sonny and Cher for the last fifteen solid seconds. And the Hooker’s piercing me with her purple eyes like she knows the dirty thoughts I’m thinking.

I offer her a small smile, but she tilts her head to the side a tiny bit and squints at me. She’s either nearsighted or thinks I’m weird.

The double-wide woman I’ve been hiding behind turns around in her wet, wedgy shoes, slips in the mud and starts to topple. She makes a tiny little squeaky noise in her throat, “Eee eee eee...” She holds her arms out to the side and makes those little circles with her arms that most people do when they’re about to take a big fall. Her eyes meet mine and I recognize sheer panic. You know how you lean back in a chair on its hind legs and that split-second fear you have right before you fall over backward? That’s what her eyes tell me. I have a decision to make: help her out or save my own butt.

I jump back and let her take the spill on her own.

She kerplunks into the mud, splaying flat on her back and splashing water up knee-high. She wallows around, heaving her considerable bulk from side to side, trying to gain some momentum to get up before a paunchy man grabs her by her flailing hands and hefts her back upright.

She leaves an angel imprint in the muddy ground.

I laugh. God help me, I laugh. I can’t help it. Ever since I was a little kid, I get a kick out of people falling on their asses and I never grew out of it. I try to stifle my laughs by burying my face in my shoulder, but I end up snorting real loud and that just cracks me up harder.

Another peal of laughter joins in concert with my own and I look over to where it’s coming from. The Hooker is laughing so hard she’s actually slapping her knee with one hand and pointing at the fat woman with the other. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen somebody slap their knee when they laugh but, by God, she really is. 

Our eyes meet and this sends us both into fresh bouts of laughter. The Hooker laughs so hard, she doubles over, grabbing both her knees. I stop laughing. Not because it’s not funny anymore, but because when the Hooker bends over like that Sonny and Cher strain against her tight shirt, threatening to make an early entrance and I completely forget to laugh.

“How dare you!” hisses a lady right at me, causing me to jump a little. “How dare you laugh at my sister’s funeral!”

Oh, shit. Now I feel bad. “I’m sorry,” I mumble to the hissing lady. And just to show my remorse and goodwill, I hold out my cookie boxes and offer, “Want some cookies?”

I hand the boxes over to couple of kids and they start ripping into them right away. I back away from the hard stares of the mourners, turn around and see the Hooker walking toward me.

Women who are so self-assured in their sexuality thrill me and scare me at the same time. The scared part usually comes first. So, I hook my thumbs in my belt loops and try out my John Wayne stance. That doesn’t feel right and so I shift, hoping to strike a more
Rebel Without a Cause
pose.

The Hooker’s high heels sink in the mud with each step and make slurping noises in the earth as she pulls them back out, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She lifts her knees higher in the air and keeps on marching.

She stares straight at me and I get this eerie feeling that her stare is really a stab. I blink hard and look away. A spinning vertigo washes over me and I feel like I’m on a merry-go-round going much too fast. I inhale and hold my breath, hoping to God I don’t faint when she finally sucks her way over to me.

When I open my eyes, she’s standing right in front of me wearing a little smirk at the corners of her mouth and for a long, slow second I’m lost in her perfume and in her long, red hair and in the little rivulets of rain dripping into her cleavage. She’s soaked through and through and cold, too, because her nipples are hard and aimed right at me. The logical part of my brain takes over and I say, “You’re wet.”

She laughs in a throaty, unsettling way, looks like she’s about to say something, then takes it back. That’s when I get what I just said. I didn’t mean it that way, but I think that’s how the Hooker took it.

I try to cover with a quick question, “You want a Girl Scout cookie?”

She flashes her eyes at me and looks away. I guess that’s a no.

“I’m not a real Girl Scout,” I blurt.

She lights a cigarette, mumbles something I don’t quite catch, and hands me the lit cigarette with her lipstick marks on the butt. For some crazy reason I kind of like this and I put my lips right where her lipstick marks are.

The first drag off the cigarette scorches my throat. I don’t usually smoke or drink or get high or anything anymore unless somebody hands it to me, but lately, it seems like people have been handing me lots of stuff.

There’s an awkward pause and I take a few drags while pretending to watch the cattle graze on the cookies, but in reality I’m checking this woman out. She’s obviously bored and you can tell she’s somebody who doesn’t deal well with boredom. She’s got an entire animal print theme going on with her outfit, even the shoes, and I wonder what that means. Does it mean she has a wild side? Or does it mean if you get too close she’ll eat you alive? She feels me looking at her and tilts her chin up at me, looking my face over real careful before looking away again. I get a brief flash of something familiar, but there’s no way I’d have encountered this woman and not remember, so I just shrug it off.

Another drag off the hot cigarette and I blurt, “I
used
to be a Girl Scout. But I got kicked out for eating a brownie.”

She looks at me a little startled and before I know what I’m doing, I just keep blathering on and on. “Sorry. Bad joke. You know that little mechanism between your brain and your mouth that keeps you from blurting? I don’t have one.” I take another drag. “I think they call it Tourette’s.”

She lights herself a cigarette and takes her time sucking the lipstick off her teeth. She still hasn’t said a word. I’m starting to wonder if she even speaks English.

“Good fishing today,” I cast out there.

She squints one eye at me through the smoke and I take a minute to savor the crinkles around her eyes before I jab my cigarette in the direction of the cookie-grazing mourners. I explain, “All the cattle are facing east. That means good fishing.”

She throws her head back and laughs. Her laughter bubbles over from deep down in the well of her belly. She uses her whole body and every fiber of her being to laugh and it’s so contagious, I join in, too, and I know there’s nothing more delicious than this moment.

Her laughter finally dies down to a few short hiccups and sputters and she sets about to right herself. She sticks her hand down the front of her blouse and lifts and separates Sonny and Cher. She tugs on the front of her short skirt, but that doesn’t help too much because now it’s just riding up higher in the back and you can honest-to-God see some kind of animal print panties that look like they’re being devoured. And even though the rain has finally stopped and the sun is peeking out from behind the clouds, I know I’m not going anywhere. I’m sticking around for the show.

I hope I didn’t just say that out loud.

“What show?” she asks.

Thinking fast, I reply, “The...um, show, you know, the funeral services.” Okay, so that wasn’t thinking so fast.

Her lips twitch again and her eyes laugh at me like she knows she caught me in a lie and that I know that she knows she caught me in a lie. She ends up blowing a short puff of air through her nose in my direction. I don’t know if she thinks I’m funny haha or funny weird.

I try again. “This may sound retarded, but...you look familiar to me.”

Her gaze cuts a path from my boots to my face, she lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug and looks away. Her words come out in a cloud of smoke. “No one would even know you’re retarded if you didn’t tell them.”

Did she really just say that?

What the hell?

The merry-go-round I’m on screeches to a halt and shocks me back to reality where I know this woman is just another hooker and her hair is dyed and she’s wearing purple contact lenses, not to mention her tits probably aren’t even paid for yet.

“I’m going to pretend that you weren’t just a bitch,” I say with clenched teeth, because I swear to God, I’ll deck this Hooker Bitch, I’ll pick her up by her cheetah print panties and throw her into that open grave—a loud caw-like screech and a gust of Jean Nate blows this strange little woman right in front of us. She grabs the Hooker Bitch in a bear hug and talks absolutely nonstop: “Oh my God, Vivian, I’d recognize you anywhere. My God, how long’s it been? Fifteen years? Oh my God, hug me back! Don’t you remember me? Becky Sheldon! We were cheerleaders together! I was two years behind you in school!”

And to prove her point, Becky takes three steps backward, plants both feet and claps her hands to her thighs. “Ready, Okay!” she yells. What follows are some strange contorted moves that were probably titillating when she was fifteen years younger, but now just look fuckin’ strange. This woman who calls herself Becky spells in her loudest voice: “Gimme a C! Gimme an H! Gimme an A! R! G! E! R! S!

The Hooker Bitch stumbles a few steps back and bumps into me. She shakes her head at Becky. “I’m sorry, you’ve got the wrong person. I don’t even know how to spell Chargers.”

Oh my God, that’s how I know this woman! Vivian Baxter the cheerleader from high school about a billion years ago. I got kicked out of pep club because of her. Well, her and the other cheerleaders. I’d already gotten kicked off the basketball team for smoking pot in the locker room and was pushed into the pep club reject pile. I’d entertained myself by picking ice out of my pop and tossing it at the cheerleaders while they did their stupid cheers on the floor in front of us. I scored a lot of three-pointers, right down their little sailor suit tops. All the cheerleaders were mad as hell and sent their little homely wannabes out into the pep club bleachers to spy and that’s how I got nailed. Fat Julie Randall ratted me out. When Julie told Vivian she saw me throwing the ice, Vivian snuck up behind me in the bleachers and dumped an entire pop down the back of my shirt. I got kicked out of pep club, but Vivian didn’t get squat.

So this is what happens to cheerleaders after high school.

“Vivian, you’re so funny,” Becky says, “Where have you been all these years? God, girl, we are going to have to get together. Let’s do lunch tomorrow!”