The Facts of Life

I want a cowboy. I want someone who’s “fixin’ to go somewheres.” I want someone who walks slow, glides really, and wears a ten-gallon hat. I want someone who doesn’t think twice about wearing Wranglers and a big buckle. I want someone who fills out his clothes, hides his eyes under the rim of that ten-gallon hat, and calls any and every woman “ma’am.”

Oh pretty, pretty please, may I have a cowboy.

This is a prayer from a puddle in an alley, where I’m barely treading water. I am spiraling down the circuit of self destruction, relying upon the charity of people I barely know for a place to crash, a spare cigarette, pennies in the cracks of stained couches. When the charity runs thin, I hunker down with my come-and-go friends in whatever abandoned building we find in our solitary wanderings. My come-and-go friends let me stay, for comic relief or maybe my uncanny skill at scoring weed. Does it really matter which?

So, about that cowboy…

***

Lexia says that I have great hair for the times, really straight and not too thin or thick. She said I would have been worse off in the eighties when she was in school and all the girls were wearing their hair really high and large. Big hair days, she says.

Why’d you drop out of school, she says.

I’m hoping to bum some cigarettes off of her so I try to be really honest, you know, opening my soul to her about all the unwieldy shit I’ve seen. She seems disappointed, though, like she’s just waiting for that one kid whose story is gonna be worse than hers.

You would think somebody calls her “Sexy Lexy” or “Lexus” or something because her name is so pretty, but she’s one of those mis-named people who relishes her name but does not, exactly, wear it well. She’s fat, for one, and she’s missing her front teeth for another. She’s in her early thirties and she’s already had her teeth knocked out by some Romeo whose name she claims to have forgotten.

We all know she gets checks from welfare or something, but she tells people it’s her royalties for playing Blair on “Facts of Life.” Tony says she’s full of shit but we quiz her about the show and she seems to know all the answers. She says Tootie and Joe were cool but Natalie was a real bitch. She says she “did” George Clooney when he was on the show. Now, I know she is most definitely full of shit. Lexia has too many moles on her face to have slept with George Clooney. Not that he is a cowboy or anything.

So anyway, I have great hair. Lexia combs it out with her fingers and smoothes it down around my face, not motherly like (as if I would know what that was all about), but hairdresser like, and it turns out looking pretty good. I figure a cowboy might not pass me by. I’m only eighteen, after all, and with all my teeth still.

Lex, how did you say you lost your teeth again, I say.

She gives me that look like she’s not buying that I’ve forgotten and she’s certainly not going to be made a fool of again, but then she opens her mouth and she tells it all as though we’d never heard it before, which we haven’t because she’s improvising again. That’s her theory of life, by the way. I’m improvising as I go, she says.

This time she lost her teeth on the set of “Magnum P.I.” Lexia says there was a runaway stunt truck (it’s always a runaway something that causes it: runaway truck, runaway shopping cart, runaway boyfriend) that slammed into her, sent her flying into a light pole where her teeth were smashed out and her jaw was broken. Magnum P.I. himself carried her to the ambulance.

There’s a lot of “bullshiiiit” and “give it up” and Lexia looks really resolved like that’s really how it happened and it’s the story she’s gonna stick with from now on. It’s a pretty good story. I’d like for it to be true. But nobody wants anybody to be happy so Tony and Wallace are really giving her crap for it. Lexia gets up with a little sway and hop for balance and swaggers off with her middle fingers pointed behind her.

Lexia’s gone and I have no cigarettes. I should go down to Chinatown, where all the tourists go to shop for back scratchers and paper fans that smell like dreams. There’s a big hill there so tourists toss their butts before they’re done with them, unable to smoke and walk uphill at the same time.

His name was Bryant, by the way. The one who socked Lexia’s teeth out. She said his name by accident one time then changed her story like she was trying to take it back. So I remember it for her: Bryant. Just like the morning news man.

***

The first time I got high was better than all the times I went to church combined. Things get so much simpler, yet much more meaningful. I don’t think God would mind. It certainly isn’t much worse than fooling yourself that you’ll get into heaven if you never say the Lord’s name in vain while you’re still a child molesting asshole. I never saw any commandment like “Thou shalt not molest children,” did you?

So of course that’s what happened to me. Back in the 70’s some career-minded, bead-wearing hippie would have grabbed hold of me in a bear hug and used words like “breakthrough” and “inner discovery” and “life changing.” It would have been courageous of me to admit it and someone would have held me and told me so.

It’s not like that now. They just look at you and say mm hmm. Same hippie, but she’s heard it somewhere over a zillion times by now. To her, it’s like someone saying, “I went to the store today.” And, no matter what she says, her tone always sounds like, “Oh, really. And what did you get.” I never had a real therapist, just a school counselor, but they’re all from the same batter.

It’s not like I can remember it all that well, anyway. A lot of time has gone by and sometimes, if you think about something too much, it’s like you wear the memory thin and suddenly all sorts of fiction starts coloring the picture wrong. I know who did it and I know who didn’t stop it, but the rest has been filtered and altered. Like I can’t remember how old I was or what exactly happened, what things looked like or what was said. It keeps shifting in my memory, in and out of focus like one of those awful drug movies from the ‘60’s when they’d warp everything to make you think you’re tripping.

You could almost say I made it all up, you know, something from nothing. But there’s one thing about it I’ve never been able to shake and, if I let myself sink down, way down into the memory, the shadows shift and the events click back and forth like a video with a hiccup, but the feeling returns. That sick terror, shot through with deep pain like ink that stains your soul forever.

I never thought much about cowboys until I saw one on the news. You’ve seen him, I know. The one that brought that Mexican serial killer in to the authorities? I think he was something called a Texas Ranger. It sounds so Old West, like the snap of a padlock or like listening to thunder and rain from a warm dry place, well lit and shut tight. He is exactly what I need.

***

All the girls I ran with in high school are dead. Sounds like bullshit, smells like bullshit, looks like bullshit, but it’s true. They all died together on the way back from a Metallica concert, smacked into a guardrail and flew into oblivion. Just like a rock and roll anthem.

Therese, Jamie, and Becky. We took a lot of pictures together, playing dress up and dresses off, walking around the Winterscape Mall, snapping gum and verbally trashing the popular girls at school. Becky’s brothers, pot heads all, used to sell us a bag every once in awhile. We’d smoke it together, share and share alike, and then we’d get serious, telling secrets and crying over whatever, whenever, whomever. We smoked and drank and toked up and it was all really good. At that age no one quite expects anything from you yet so we ran wild, bummed cigarettes, and stole whatever we thought we could get away with.

Therese was a bitch, but her mom was a drunk so you could kind of forgive her. Jamie and Becky were sweet, just like their names. Jamie was from a totally normal family except for the whole Nazi Dad thing. He’d answer the phone the same way every time, not “Hello?” but, “This is Robert Kriss, to whom am I speaking?” And you couldn’t say, “This is so-and-so, is Jamie there?” You had to say your name, where you knew Jamie from and, polite as peaches, ask if you could please speak with Jamie if it wouldn’t be too much trouble please. We all only went over there a couple of times, with him constantly appearing in the doorway (no closed doors in that house) and listening in. I remember the house was very plain and neat. Jesus stared blankly at me from the wall.

They were a good bunch to run with and, of all the people I knew from before, I missed them and only them. Right before I took off Jamie found out she was pregnant again and she was a wreck. She didn’t want to go through another abortion, but her dad would most certainly drag her down to the clinic like a scared puppy dragged back to the scene of the crime, knowing he’s going to get the shit up his nose and a boot up his ass. Sometimes you have to wonder about how bad you think you have it.

Yesterday I found out they died. Mom came looking for me, brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as if for good luck or something, and bad news. She likes to be three-dimensional. She’s kind but tough, she’s naughty but repentant, bold but really just a scared little girl on the inside. She’s a fucking Billy Joel song.

When she held her arms open as an invitation for a hug I could only stare at her, wonder at her smell, like milk and fabric softener. She smelled just like a mother.

***

There’s an abandoned building on the corner of Docker and 6th that almost never gets raided by the cops. It is blissfully dark and pretty well insulated, just like a five star hotel if you close your eyes and take very shallow breaths. So when someone lets the light in, the unmistakable light of morning shot through with pink and gold, everyone writhes and moans. Snakes cuddled together.

We peer at the figure and I realize that it is Lexia all clean and dressed up. She’s got a bag of tacos and what looks like a gallon sized soda. She’s smiling and I think it can’t be her ‘cause she’s got a whole row of pearly, pretty teeth. Somebody says, What the fuck, Lexia. There are many mumbles of agreement. I ask her where she got those teeth.

A present from the Lord, she says and we all sit up. Lexia is a Godless woman and we all know from experience that religion is the first symptom of insanity. She knows we’re not happy to hear she’s found God and she cackles like some wretched, drunk witch and we realize she’s full of shit, thank God. Or whomever.

You assholes, she says and the tacos are passed around.

For now it’s not important why she looks so nice, where she found those clothes or even the teeth. I have not eaten in two days and the tacos smell of hot meat and waxy cheese. The first bite is somewhere between orgasm and waking up from a good nap. Briefly, I love Lexia. I don’t know why she does this kind of shit.

She starts prattling about the Blair thing as we smack and munch with greasy lips and bad manners. They’re shooting a pilot (what’d he do, somebody asks) and they want her to star as the rich mother figure who gives bad advice and saucy punchlines. They knew her from her days on “Facts” and specifically sought her out. We all say uh-huh and cool.

She’s quiet for awhile and I size her up. She really does look nice. She’s got some kind of suit on; it’s beige with a white blouse underneath. As I’m looking her over I can see other’s doing the same, their faces changing like clouds are passing overhead. I see that she is wearing new shoes and, finally, hose, actual hose. She fetches a pack of Benson and Hedges and lights one up, tossing one my way along with a pack of matches from Ribaldi’s. She is smoking a brand and all at once it hits me.

Are you serious, I ask. She just smiles a little and Tony says no fucking way but we’re all thinking alike, one organism approaching something akin to a thought. She’s getting up and I feel panicked, who will feed me, who will bullshit me all night long, but she is halfway through the door and I can only look after her. Lexia turns to us, morning light illuminating her from behind and she could be Blair, she really could be. I just wanted to say goodbye, she says.

Two days later I’m sucking on one of the packages of taco sauce she left behind. I’m thinking how I knew a movie star, one who maybe did George Clooney but probably not, I’m thinking about cowboys and how easy it would be to find my way home. Or, rather, to the place I grew up.

***

My mother took me out to Maggie’s Mexican Cantina and we tried to talk like I’d just been away to college but it didn’t go that way. Instead we ate as though dining alone until the end when she told me I’d have to get a job if I wanted to stay with her. I said fine a lot and we drove straight home and went to bed.

She’s a recovering heroin addict and she never lets you forget it. As for me, she is full of advice, even now after everything she put me through. I am not allowed to criticize her for her past, I am only to learn from it. I know that I will never touch heroin, that much she has taught me.

She’s taught me a lot, actually. Never give a man the chance to let you down. Always squeeze the toothpaste to the front of the tube. Never wear shorts with dressy shoes. Always wear foundation. Never leave hair in the sink. Always lock the bathroom door.

Actually, that’s one I leaned from one of her boyfriends. The lesson she says could never have happened.

The bathroom is tiny in this new place of hers. I keep the toothpaste rolled and the hair out of the sink. My towel, brown with pink flowers, is folded neatly beside hers and never on the floor. I put my pillow and blanket in the closet every morning and I am grateful for the couch with all its stains and cigarette burns. I eat as little as possible and think even less. Better to just coast, a wraith.

On Thursday I went to Kelly Kones to see about getting my old job back. I’d worked there just before I took off and I’d gotten along pretty well with the owners, though they didn’t like my group of friends hanging around all the time without buying anything. Once in awhile Becky would get a lime sherbet, but that was about it.

Kelly and I talk through customers and I ask about the job but she keeps changing the subject. She wants to know if I’ve heard about the Catholic church on Columbus, how they determined it had been arson and the whole community was in an uproar. Or did I hear about the stabbing at Bellingham Park right next to where she’d grown up, could you believe it?

“Gosh, I don’t know what to tell you, kid. We just don’t need another person right now. Have you tried the Burger King yet?”

“No, I thought I’d try here first.”

“Oh shucks. I’m really sorry, hon.’ But I hear the manager over there is a real peach.” She looks so hopeful and I know that she just doesn’t want me to hate her. I almost don’t.

***

They are all in the same cemetery, a detail we would have all delighted in at sixteen, fully alive and not the least bit afraid of death. I’m just wandering around, looking for them as I might have once, alone and not on my turf, needing to have a partner, if not three.

I can’t stop thinking about Jamie’s Nazi dad, with his set jaw and big, square glasses. There was this movie from a long time ago called “The Stepfather,” I think, and in it there’s this guy who seems all normal when he’s actually some kind of serial killer who, inevitably, will try to kill his newest wife and stepson. Whenever I saw that movie I thought of Mr. Kriss and his absolute need to control his family and environment. That dustless life where they are always on time and there are no secrets.

Eventually she lost it, defied him completely and ended up pregnant. There were plenty of angry calls to each of our houses as he searched for her, as well as unannounced visits as he tried to hunt her down. I can still see my mother half tanked with a Camel between her fingers screaming at him out on the sidewalk after he’d come barging into our house looking for his daughter. Good old mom, hustling him out the door and shrieking “What are you, a fucking psycho?” while the neighbors watched from their balconies with little kitten smiles on their faces.

I look over all the little gravestones pressed into the ground, but here is one standing upright and larger than the rest. It is pink and gray marble, highly reflective, and morbidly gorgeous. Something a community might have sprung for, in the midst of televised tragedy, provoked by the vision of twisted metal still steaming in the dead of night that has been played over and over on every local station. So in reverie I have stumbled upon the place where Therese is buried and I must sit down. As an idea, I can accept that they are all dead, but Therese as an individual is another matter. Therese, even though she was a bitch, still put herself between Mr. Kriss and his daughter on more than one occasion. On her stone I see her name, her dates of life, “My Baby” it says, and in the top left corner is a symbol, what I know to be one-third of a heart. Below it an inscription reads, “Friends forever.”

Mom had told me about it, how Mr. Kriss had paid for each stone to bear one-third of a broken heart with “Friends forever” written below. She said it had been in the paper, the headline saying something like, “Bittersweet End to Tragic Tale” or something equally revolting. She said the wreck was the talk of the town for weeks, that people held candlelight vigils at the crash site, and politicians made grand speeches about “protecting our youth from drugs and alcohol.”

And strange, now, as I stand before her, that bitch that ruled my life, that made me weak with self-doubt, yet would have defended me to the death, I feel her absence, but wonder if she ever felt mine. Three pieces of a broken heart, so ridiculous and vapid, yet I am jealous beyond breathing almost. I feel as though I have always been this wraith, nearly invisible and certainly without consequence. I cannot believe they went off and died without me.

***

Wallace says he saw Lexia on t.v. and I might have believed it a month ago but today I am wrapped in a trash bag and nursing a swollen lip. Sometimes at night I stare at the sky, hold my wrist, and listen to the pulse of me. It is slow, like something amphibious slithering under my skin.

I’ve finally lost a tooth, but I’m proud to say it wasn’t a man that knocked it loose. I believe, though, that my marketability has now bottomed out. A missing tooth marks a person, slaps a tag on your ass that reads REJECT so they send you off to some charitable organization for donation to be worn by some anemic, crusty-nosed kid with a choppy crew cut and a permanent Kool Aid stain around his mouth.

My mother let me have it when she caught me stealing money out of her purse. There was no discussion about whether that money was owed to me or not, a form of reparations maybe, just a shove, a punch, and a get out. I guess I never really believed that she owed me anything, it was just that the Burger King thing really hadn’t worked out and I needed the money for cigarettes.

I’ve lost weight and I really don’t have much else to lose but there is no food and I’m missing that one essential tooth, anyway. I could still score a job as a cook in some restaurant but the men paw constantly and they’re all ex-cons anyway. Besides, it makes me sick to cook in restaurants where boys take their first dates thinking they’re dining in a first-rate place when some of us in the back are finishing their meals. There are other ways to earn a living, but I am not there yet. I am not sure why, but there must be something in me still. A glimmer of something maybe.

Therese used to say that the belief God was the only way humans could ever feel clean. She said we were the filthiest animals on the planet because we spent our whole lives putting the most disgusting, unnatural elements in our bodies, like cocaine and Cheetos. So I asked her why she still ate stuff like Twinkies and cheeseburgers if she really felt that way. “Because God forgives me, asshole,” she said, lighting a butt out of the ashtray in Jamie’s rumpus room/pothead den.

So of course I obsessed about it, thought about my stinking insides, hot and working overtime to process the hundred alien chemicals I assaulted it with every day. I had a new respect for doctors, whose job it was to open these foul human bodies and fix the damage while smelling us, our horrible reek. On the streets you learn the depths of human odor and know that no animal on this earth has or could ever smell so wretched as the human animal. Again and again a line from some movie loops, “I want him to love me for what’s inside.” It’s all rotten, you see. Even healthy, we all smell like a tumor.

There are cowboys on the streets of this city. I smell their Stetson cologne. I hear the hollow clock of their boots receding. Once there was a slow, lazy draw of laughter from the well of my dreams and I awoke to the sight of a little boy in bright green pants and a clean white shirt peering down at me. My eyes opened to the sunlight and I heard his little yip of a scream as he realized that I was not dead or, worse, might be the undead awake to take him into the dark of the alley.

And once I saw a cowboy walking there, just there at the corner where the newspaper kiosk and the drugstore meet. My heart, securely held down with my thumb, undulated in that same, amphibian way. With my face pressed firmly into the cement I was sure I heard the heavy boom of his tread, watched as he stepped inside the Chinese buffet and, in the shadows, took off his hat.