Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (28 page)

I
never really thought about Lary having come from an actual family until recently, when he asked me to accompany him home to New York to attend his sister’s wedding. Okay, maybe he didn’t
ask
me, maybe I invited my own damn self when I heard he was going, just like I had to invite my own damn self when I heard he and Grant were headed on a road trip to Thomasville. Evidently, Lary needed to get some lady down there to sign over the warranty deed on the decrepit cinder-block mausoleum he calls home.

His home is a weathered old warehouse right downtown on a strip of road that used to be industrial until it got invaded by developers a few years back. Lary awoke one morning to discover that most of his neighboring buildings had been torn down and replaced by candy-colored Victorians with wraparound porches and loft projects with balconies that boasted “sweeping cityscape panoramas!” After that, Lary tried diverting the frenzy by taking to the street and
waving his gun like a lunatic, thinking he’d frighten away prospective neighbors, but all that did was help clear his community of real criminals—who evidently have a better-honed aversion to dangerous maniacs—which in turn made the place even more attractive to real-estate caravans. So Lary gave up, and now he lives in a crumbling old ex-factory in the center of a gentrified vista just south of the Capitol. Occasionally, though, he still stands out front to growl at his neighbors like Frankenstein’s monster, refusing to be banished by the meddlesome villagers.

I always thought Lary owned the place free and clear, having paid next to nothing for it years ago. And I always imagined him like the kid in the old Cracker Jack commercial, emptying his pockets on the previous owner’s counter to reveal a musty pile of pennies, paper clips, hermit crabs, and other sediment, then pointing to the old warehouse, “Pretty please?” Turns out that’s almost literally how it happened. “Take it,” the guy had said, scooping Lary’s offering into his palm, but then they left it at that—a handshake deal.

That’s why, a decade later, Lary needed to make a trip to Thomasville, to see the woman there who needed to sign the actual warranty deed before Lary could call the place his actual own. Her fourth husband from forty years back had lost the factory in a card game or something and had neglected to sign it over before the cement dried around his ankles and he was tossed overboard, I’m betting. Whatever the case, the situation provoked an actual adventure.

Grant joined Lary on the road trip because it just so happens Grant is a notary. Grant is always pulling stuff like this out of the lovely shit basket that is his past: He’s also a licensed real-estate agent, a licensed social worker, a minister ordained through the tabloid classifieds, a landscape architect, an antiques dealer, a bartender, an ex-seminary student at Princeton, an ex-husband to two ex-wives, a loving
father
, and, basically, the all-round show host of his own psycho circus that stretches all over the Southeast. For
example, it turned out his mild-mannered father lives not far from Thomasville, and this trip would be Grant’s opportunity to drop in on him and pretend he and Lary were lovers.

Of course, when I heard what they were up to I horned in on their plans like a pesky rash. “Goddammit,” I shrieked at Lary over the phone, “don’t you dare think you’re sneaking off without me. I’ll be back Thursday, got that? I’m good for anytime
after
that. My life is
wide open
after Thursday, so don’t you dare leave before then.”

The following Wednesday, Grant, who is gay, and Lary, who is not, happily headed south without me, and, what’s worse, Lary’s own ailing father had died days before, thereby robbing me of the self-appointed right to be the official shoulder Lary could cry on, in case he had it in him. I never knew much about Lary’s father, except that he was a fairly productive drunk who had divorced Lary’s mother when Lary was ten. It took me a decade just to get this out of the guy, because I seriously believe Lary prefers people to think he just happened onto the earth by crawling out of a tar pit somewhere rather than emerging from an actual family. In fact, another of his younger sisters wanted to visit him at home with her baby son, but he advised her against it on account of how he lives in that rundown warehouse, and her kid stood a good chance of accidentally ending up with rusty fishhooks imbedded in his head.

It’s in keeping with his personality that Lary, now fatherless, tells me it doesn’t feel any different than before, which makes me think I might not have been the right person to accompany him on the road trip after all. Sometimes your friends need something other than what you can give them, and sometimes you’ve got to let them look for it. Before Lary took the road home last Wednesday, he bid farewell to Grant’s father, who gave him a lasting hug. “I like you,” Grant’s father told him. “You and my son seem very happy together.”

It made me think about my own father again. A year after my mother divorced him, I moved to San Diego to begin college. I lived in an apartment on the beach with three untrustworthy, cocaine-addled
roommates, and I spent the last year of my father’s life ignoring school, doing drugs, and falling in love every fucking day. One night, a friend of mine invited me to accompany him on a private plane to L.A., where he had to pick up a “package.” My dad lived right by the airport, and I figured I could drop in on him while my friend ran his errand. So I went on the flight, but when we got to L.A., I didn’t go see my father because the prospect of a party loomed too irresistibly. That night at 12:03
A.M
. my father died. He was fifty-two.

I’m sure you’ve heard people use the term, “You just don’t get it.” Well, I figured out that the “it” is the point in life. I believe I was supposed to have been there when my father died, but it was a point in life I just didn’t get. I’ll always regret it, especially since, two months before his heart attack, my father told me the story of how his own mother died, and it was one of the only times I remember him communicating with me face-to-face, as an adult. He told me he was in college in Birmingham, and his friends were on their way to New Orleans and would be passing through my dad’s hometown, and they asked if he wanted to come along. He said he went and he was glad he did, because that weekend his mother had a heart attack and died in his arms.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if that’s how it really happened or if that’s how he liked to remember it. Sometimes I wonder if he made the same mistake I did: Instead of going home to his mother, he continued on with his friends, thinking he could catch her another time and leaving her to die alone.

My
neighbor Honnie found a dead dog in the front yard of her recently purchased home, and she took it as an omen. It was a weird morning for her anyway, what with the mystery man who lived in her crawl space, which in itself wouldn’t be that catastrophic, because Honnie and her husband, Todd, wouldn’t actually move into the house until later when he was gone and they were finished with the renovations. But the stranger had left piles of chicken bones and Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles strewn on the back porch every morning. He didn’t even stick around to say, “Hi, thanks for letting me live under your house while you fix it up.” He just bolted at sunrise and left his crap behind for Honnie to clean up.

I’d say Honnie and Todd officially had it worse than I did when I’d moved into Capitol View. I never found anything dead in my yard, or in my house either. I was looking pretty hard too, because the week before I closed on the house the police found that decapitated
human head in a plastic sack
on my street
, and they had yet to find the rest of the body to go with it. Which meant it was still out there. Somewhere. The headless body. Waiting for me to stumble on it in the dark. I was pretty sure it wasn’t actually in my house, since I’d searched high and low. And it was probably not under my house, since my contractor crawled around down there recently and all he found was the bottom half of a dead cricket. Actually, I found that. It was clinging to his hair when he emerged.

The reason I hired a contractor was because I needed a bigger house. Try as I did to buy a bigger house in the neighborhood, they all got snatched up faster than fat caterpillars at a crow orgy. Dead dogs and dead people aside, I guess this neighborhood officially qualifies as “hot.” Five minutes from downtown and still cheap, the houses sold before the signs could go up in the yard. Even my friend Chris’s grandmother’s Jamaican ex-caretaker from New Jersey knows Capitol View is “hot.” Now, that headless body could turn up nailed to the front door of a house for sale down the street and it wouldn’t deter prospective buyers. “It’s just cosmetic,” the real-estate agent would say, “easily fixed.”

There were bigger houses nearby that I liked, and each time I didn’t even haggle over price, I just said, “Sounds good, I’ll take it.” The problem was the sellers always changed their minds later and wanted more money—one time as much as $25,000 more. I guess these sellers were not sufficiently enlightened about the “hotness” of this neighborhood until they were effortlessly offered their asking prices, at which time they decided they weren’t asking enough. Those houses went to other buyers, who became my neighbors. They seem very nice. In the end, I decided to simply enlarge the house I already have.

Another neighbor of mine, a twenty-year-old young man named John Brown, died while in police custody. Witnesses—more neighbors of mine—said an officer beat him to death with his service flashlight, though preliminary autopsy reports are still ambiguous. Reportedly, Brown was helping a friend who’d been evicted from
the boardinghouse next door to his when the owner of the property called the police to report him trespassing. The police arrived, a pursuit ensued, and now Brown is dead. The next day the boardinghouse was ransacked and burned down, and the following day, Honnie found the deceased dog in her yard. In the end, though, she decided not to take it as an omen after all, deciding that if it were meant to be a message, the bearers would have placed the carcass right on her porch.

It was a weird morning for Honnie, and what made it even weirder was the burned-down house up the street. At the time, Honnie didn’t know why it burned down and neither did I. We chose to believe that it must have gone up in flames because this neighborhood was just so damn “hot.”

I’ve
taken to calling Michael “Mr. Midas” because everything he touches turns to gold, which still pisses me off—and not just because he won’t open a bar/restaurant in my neighborhood even though he bought a building there.

“God! How selfish
are
you?” I occasionally yell at him. I like to hit him too, because at six-foot-seven he doesn’t even feel it. When I visit Michael’s building, a warehouse that is slated to become a studio and art gallery and is within walking distance of my house, I point to a perfectly good section that would probably only take up almost all his space and I say, “Here, you could put the bar here. And the restaurant part could go over there, and you could serve blue-cheese dressing.”

In fact, that’s really all he needs to serve, just big bowls of blue-cheese dressing with stuff to stick in it: carrots, whole heads of cauliflower, my face. I could eat my own arm if it came coated with blue
cheese, and Michael’s blue-cheese dressing is my favorite. I tell him he should keep a tank of it on hand so I can wallow in it like a porpoise. But Michael, even though he calls himself my friend, does not think opening a bar/restaurant that serves only blue cheese is a sound business plan, and let’s face it, even though he looks like a craven beatnik, he’s never made a bad business move that I can see. It’s like he’s got this, I don’t know, window seat inside the force field against all evil and it’s infuriating. He has
never made a wrong move ever
! God! I just want to hit him again.

“Whatcha got there, Michael?”

“Life by the balls, Hollis.”

Slap, slappity slap, slap.

But my luck could be changing, because it just so happens that Michael bought his loft here at the same time I bought my house, which makes me think I must have made a right move for once. Woohoo! What’s this thing I feel under my feet? It’s the
bandwagon
! And I’m among the first to jump on it for once. So with Mr. Midas in my neighborhood, all this place needs is a cool restaurant to serve as the binding cornerstone of the community, because, charming as this place is, what with the crack whores comingling with budding yuppies looking for low house payments, there’s no getting away from the fact that the nearest Starbucks is
six minutes away
. I can’t have that. I need a place closer, a place I can crawl to once my arms evolve into flippers. Michael is the obvious answer.

“No way,” he says. “This neighborhood is not ready. If I opened a restaurant now, you would be the only customer.”

“Come on,” I plead, “you say that like it’s a
bad
thing.”