Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (14 page)

Lary
started selling autographed pictures of Jesus, in case anyone’s interested. He got the idea after working the TV camera at a Benny Hinn religious revival conference years ago. He found himself surrounded by “thousands of these fucked-up Bible freaks” and it actually scared him, which says a lot, because almost nothing scares Lary. For example, one Halloween he showed up in white flowing robes with the words “I’m Jesus, Your Fucking Savior” scrawled across his back in black marker. “I’m tempting the gods,” he laughed, “like there are any.”

But the religious freak show at the old Georgia Dome scared Lary. “Why?” I asked him. “I mean, did you feel yourself start to convert? Was a tiny piece of your condemned soul tugging at the rest of you, threatening to draw you into the writhing throng? Threatening to chisel a crack in that crab shell you keep around your heart?”

“Hell, no,” he said, irritated that I implied he had a heart. “These people were insane, possessed. Shaking and twitching and foaming at the mouth and falling over one another.
Thousands
of them, surrounding me, screaming and moaning and chanting.” He shivered, as if the memory was too much for him.

And I get it. It’s like that Left Behind series of books in which all the good Christian folk get sucked into heaven and leave people like Lary to deal with the ensuing Hell on earth. “Rapture,” it’s called, and I’d probably fear it more if I’d been allowed to go to church as a kid. But my mother was an atheist and my father was too busy nursing his hangovers on Sunday mornings to drive us—both very viable reasons if you ask me.

“What bigger Hell is there,” my mother used to say, pointing her cigarette at a passing church bus, “than a heaven full of people like that?”

So I figure that explains why Lary was scared at the Benny Hinn conference. He must have looked around and found himself in pretty much a pit, packed with undulating, screaming, sweaty possessed people, heads flailing, voices modulating, arms reaching, fingers grasping. And the crying. God, the crying. “Wailing and wailing.” Lary shuddered, remembering that they sounded like sick sea elephants.

Lary realized he was alone in that pit, having been left behind by any sign of reason or civil decorum, and his whole personal philosophy was tested at that point. He believed it was foolish to go through life frightened by the prospect of Hell, because up until then he’d been so certain there was no Hell. But when he found himself in that pit with those people, penned in by an ocean of sobbing fanatics, the realization hit him that there certainly is a Hell after all, and that he was certainly in it. “Get me out of here,” he inwardly screamed.

I’ve felt that way before. In high school I once went to church with a fragile girl who had latched on to my inability to gracefully decline her efforts to salvage my endangered soul, and I decided to
take it as an opportunity to rebel against my irreligious upbringing. The church was not really a church but a cinder-block building that had all the beauty of a big public toilet. The service was a barely tolerable torrent of promised eternal agony for those who didn’t adhere to every letter of their particular sect, and when it was over, I felt a soaring relief interrupted by the distressing realization that it really wasn’t over after all. The worst was yet to come.

“Now we will speak in tongues,” the girl told me, her translucent skin glowing with an inner awfulness visible only to me. Speaking in tongues entailed, as far as I could tell, basically flopping around at the foot of an icon and babbling. I was a shy kid at fourteen, and tough, already having grown an emotional crust not easily penetrated by fervor of any kind, so my enthusiasm for flopping and babbling was found to be insufficient by this crowd. They tried to correct it by literally pushing me around. So there I was, the daughter of an atheist and a drunk, bobbing around in a little sea of gibbering religious freaks, bouncing from fist to fist like some infidel hot potato. In all, it failed to knock me free from my ingrained paganism. I did gibber a little though. “Get me out of here,” I gibbered again and again, drowned out by the bigger babbling around me.

Lary and I laugh because we have this in common: Both of us, at one point in our past, walked right into Hell and were left there alone for a while, begging to be freed until finally, graciously, we were. “Get me out of here,” we’d each pleaded inwardly. Yes, we’d pleaded, but to this day I’m still wondering to whom those pleas were made, and wondering who answered them.

I
have my father to thank for my unsaved soul, because my brother, for one, had tried for years to reserve me a window seat in heaven. This is before he became the embittered, godless Starbucks manager that he is today, back when he still had hope and would return from college for the holidays and lecture us on the flammability of our afterlives. He’d have to whisper all the eternal torments in store for my heathen sisters and me because if my father heard him he’d risk a beating with the top of that tin flour bin in the kitchen.

“Hell? I’ll give you
hell
,” my father once roared at my brother when he spied my sisters and me on our knees in the living room about to accept Jesus into our hearts. My father got in a few noisy
thwaks
with the flour bin cover before my brother bounded out the side door, shielding his head with his Bible like he was protecting his hairdo from wet weather.

I thought I could go back to finding solace in TV reruns and fantasizing
about being one of the five hundred dead fiancées of the Cartwright brothers, but no such luck. There we were, my sisters and me, on our knees, pretty far down the road to redemption, when my father figured he had to debrief us by breaking out the big illustrated children’s Bible, the one in which Satan was permanently sunburned and Jesus looked like a honey-haired underwear model. Regardless of the beatings and the bellowing and the downright banishment of my brother’s beliefs, my father didn’t generally disapprove of Bible thumping, he disapproved of my brother’s Bible thumping because he didn’t want his grade-school daughters getting a God habit that would require him to drive us places, like church and whatnot, which would’ve cut into his bar time at the local tavern.

“You got all the God you need right here in this book,” my father told us, tapping the children’s Bible with the same thick finger he always used to flick us in the head when we bothered him. So there we had to stay, on our knees, while my father read random passages in his imitation James Earl Jones voice until my mother, the one true atheist in the family, saved us by handing him an opened Budweiser.

I was grateful. I don’t like being on my knees. I remember accidentally ending up at some marathon mass in England once, lured there by my best friend, Laura, who was studying with me in the same Oxford college program that year. She told me we were just going to look at the interior of the cathedral because she was shocked I’d never seen one. I followed her inside like a bovine and suddenly we were filed into a pew and hemmed in all around by worshipers. Then the priest glided in, all cloaked in sparkly curtains like a parade float, with a pointy hat, and before I knew it we were spending the next five thousand years doing knee bends while the priest bellowed in some language only Beowulf could understand. “Fuck the hell out of you,” I hissed at Laura as we herded ourselves out of the cathedral afterward. She laughed in response. “Don’t you feel redeemed?”

Not really. It was a spring day in England, uncharacteristically warm, and the afternoon had been wasted while I’d been trapped under a dome of stained glass. This made me late meeting other friends at a pub, so I took a shortcut through a meadow that, I swear, the week before had been little more than a field of mud. In that time, though, it had bloomed to a level of luster that rivaled paradise. And I didn’t even see it at first. I was too busy blindly hurrying, as if there was actually a point to my arrival at wherever I was expected, when something caught my eye.

Is that a damn pony?
I asked myself, chuckling. Oh, my God, there was a pony grazing not ten yards away. The sight was simultaneously so puerile and so beautiful that I geared up myself to laugh again, but when I opened my mouth, a sob came out instead. A sob so deep it must have started somewhere in the back of my unsaved soul and gathered momentum over the years until it finally burst free, bringing every filament that made up the cynical mess of my life together right then, just for a second, to reveal the unfathomable beauty of the world. And for that second I knew I was young, and I knew neither would last—not the beauty before me nor the beauty within me. Suddenly I felt so fraught with longing, so overwhelmed at having survived the complete car wreck of my life in order to be there, in that meadow, in the middle of Oxford, where ponies roamed in the glow of a rare British sunset. It utterly defeated me, or it redeemed me…it doesn’t matter, as both occasions are marked by falling to your knees.

Thinking
back to our family Thanksgivings, it‘s a wonder I survived my childhood. My mother knew she couldn’t cook, so she compensated with what she considered her own flair. I remember more than one family dinner in which she simply slapped a bunch of Slim Jims on the table and told us to chow down. For fancy occasions she’d take the wrappers off before serving them. So if an entrée didn’t come in a can or a box loaded with enough chemicals to kill all lesser life forms, she didn’t dawdle with it. That was fine with me, because what kid likes fresh figs in their turkey stuffing anyway?

My father was worse in a way, because he occasionally fancied himself a cook, and would therefore experiment, as he did during his bread-baking binge, when the loaves came out dense as boulders and tasting like beer. The week he got his first food processor he made us a different type of homemade relish every night. That was
it though—just a bowl of relish every night for dinner. “Shouldn’t we be putting this
on
something?” we asked after a few spoonfuls.

“It’s
gourmet
cuisine, goddammit,” he shouted from his corner in the kitchen. For some reason he never joined us at the table but stood in the corner where the counters met, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, occasionally roaring at us for not appreciating the finer arts of food preparation. “Worthless, ungrateful brats,” he’d grumble as he watched us pick shredded rind of some kind from our teeth.

So just imagine Thanksgiving in this household. To start the day, we put out platters of fudge. Yes, fudge. The reckoning of fudge as an appetizer is lost on me now, but at the time it was my favorite Thanksgiving Day treat. We made it by melting marshmallow creme and Hershey’s chocolate chips together in a big pot. By the time dinner rolled around, we were all shaking from a sugar buzz big enough to set off car alarms across the street. Every year my father insisted the meal include cranberry sauce, which nobody ate. It was the kind that keeps the shape of a can—all grooved like it’s wrapped in a ribbed condom—and it sat there through dinner quivering like a kidney waiting for a transplant, totally untouched. Sometimes I’d find it in the refrigerator weeks later, all dried up and looking like a tongue.

It fell to my mother to cook the turkey after the famous barbecue fiasco of the late seventies, which was the result of another of my father’s experiments. That one ended with a cluster of his bar buddies passed out on our patio one Thanksgiving, a result of foodless boozing throughout the night because the Thanksgiving turkey my father had promised them was still nearly raw after rotating on a spit over coals for eleven hours. We had to wake them all the next morning, not to send them on their way but because dinner was ready, and that was only because my mother finally took the bird off the spit with her bare hands and threw it into the oven.

After that year my mother always cooked the turkey herself, a task she figured she could handle, because how many ingredients
does a turkey have after all? Just one, and that’s even if you count the gizzards, which I never really understood. For example, why do the entrails come in a little separate sack? The gizzards were always treated like a big biohazard, sitting in a bowl far away from everything. “Guts!” I squealed happily one year, preparing to plunder them for the sake of some really great practical jokes I had planned.

“
Don’t touch the gizzards!
” my mother shrieked. The gizzards, I vaguely remember her explaining, had to stay far away from the turkey as it cooks, otherwise there’d be food poisoning. Upon hearing that, I was certain the turkey was deadly. This was my mother after all, and the only recipes I trusted her to follow were the ones on the backs of boxes that required you to add water and let the chemicals do the cooking. Our kitchen cupboards were stocked with food like Kraft macaroni and cheese, which sold four boxes to the buck at Pic ’n’ Save, a local surplus store that offered old dry goods on the same shelf as motor oil. The directions called for butter as well as milk, but you could do without the butter in a pinch. The finished product was a bowl of noodles so bright orange you could use it to flag down passing aircraft.

It goes without saying that my family was not a family of chefs. Other holiday meals suffered as well: Take our traditional Fourth of July family barbecue, for instance, where my father used everything from paint thinner to hair spray to fuel a grill fire so huge it could cause traffic copters to fall smoldering from the sky. There’s still a patch on my brother’s scalp where the hair won’t grow back, thanks to my father’s infamous homemade “honey glaze” sauce that contained melted pure-cane sugar. It might as well have been a big bowl of boiling magma. It melted my father’s favorite rubber spatula, but not before a drop flicked onto my brother’s head. Screaming and clawing at his skull, my brother zigzagged all over the backyard before my mother was able to tackle him and pour beer on his head to keep my father’s lava from boring into his brain.

Though she was deft and quick thinking in that situation, I still didn’t trust my mother to follow directions closely enough to keep
the turkey from turning into a big teeming ball of Ebola bacteria. They say a diet of chemicals and preservatives can kill you—and it can, because lots of my family members croaked because of the life-load of crappy food they ate—but it took
decades
for that poison to work.

A turkey gizzard is a totally different story. One wrong bite of a turkey gizzard and you’re dead before your face hits the plate. It got so I had a gizzard phobia, and every year I begged my mother to banish them from the house. “All right, all
right
,” she finally agreed one year, dropping the little gizzard sack into the trash. “I don’t want to poison my family,” she finished. Satisfied, I bounded away, clutching a cupcake topped with enough red-tinted frosting to kill a cage of laboratory rats.

But back to the Thanksgiving barbecue calamity. That year, the resulting turkey had blackened skin and a pink interior, and anyone approaching it should have been waved away with lit flares. Among our guests that night was Rosie, my father’s skinny-legged alcoholic friend who was known to ball any man who happened to still be standing after the bars closed. She had a teased beehive and a tobacco-shredded laugh, and she kept cupping all the men’s crotches that night. This was less appreciated than you might expect. In the end, though, they all dissolved into the customary blubberings of drunk people. “I’m
thankful
for you, you know that?”

And I’m thankful that Rosie, who, swatted away by all the other guests, took to petting my adolescent head instead. Sitting there with this tearful woman was the first time I recall soaking up a sense of true desperation borne of loneliness. “You’re beautiful, and you’re smart too. I can tell,” she’d blubber, stroking my hair. “Beautiful and smart, don’t let anyone tell you different.” Since people had been telling me different all my life, I endured her attention. She passed out on our Herculon couch with a lit cigarette in her hand, a fire hazard if ever there was one, since the Herculon fabric of the seventies was, as far as I could tell, nothing more than woven dynamite wicks.

Rather than finish the smoke for her (I’d given up my pack-a-day habit the year before at the age of thirteen), I plucked the cigarette from her fingers and flicked it into our backyard. Inside, the guests continued to recount the things they were thankful for, even though technically it was the day after Thanksgiving. “I’m thankful I’m not Rosie,” laughed one. At the sound of her name, Rosie awakened, which prompted more laughter from her friends. “Rosie, what are you thankful for?” asked my father. But Rosie simply sat there, looking into the distance with welled-up eyes. “Rosie?” my father implored. She stared vacantly for a few more moments, then finally shook her head. “I’ll tell you what I’d
be
thankful for,” she said with her booze-beleaguered voice. “I’d be thankful for my goddamn cigarette. Where the hell is it?”