Tats (16 page)

Fuck the shoes. I’m not going back after them.

Vivian has the car keys hidden somewhere down her magic tits and I’m stuck without a ride unless I want to walk but I’m not desperate enough to walk down the middle of town in this god-awful getup.  I trudge across the parking lot, not even caring about the gravel biting my bare feet and throw open the door to the Mercedes. I sit in the passenger seat with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands and my feet on the dash and I cry and hiccup and think about how fuckin’ pitiful I am.

The driver’s side door opens and I try to turn the waterworks off and come out of this with some semblance of pride, but my damn heart hurts too bad.

Vivian quietly clicks her door closed and scoots over next to me until our shoulders touch.

“It’s all like some game to you, isn’t it?” I finally blubber. “You want me to want you, but you don’t want to want me. I’m supposed to fall in love with you, then you slap me and walk away feeling all good about yourself. Well, it’s not a game to me, Vivian. It’s my life. I have to live it.”

She reaches down her cleavage and pulls out a tissue. She swipes at my tear tracks and smudges and then tucks it back away.

“I can’t believe all this time you didn’t know I was a lesbian. I thought you knew. How the hell could you not know?” I ask. “Even Sonja could tell just by looking at me.”

“Who’s Sonja?”

“Never mind.”

“You’ve been a lesbian the whole time I’ve known you?” Vivian asks.

I look at her straight-on. “What d’ya mean?”

“I thought maybe you turned into a lesbian for me,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“Your ego’s that huge, Vivian? Your ego’s so huge, you thought I actually
turned
into a lesbian just for you?”

“Well,” she says, “I’ve had gay men go straight for me. What’s the difference?”

“Really? Damn...”

“And who has the huge ego here? You expect me to turn into a lesbian just for you.”

“No, I don’t,” I explain. “I don’t expect that exactly.”

“Then what do you expect exactly?”

“I just want you to love me. That’s all.”

“I do love you, you big goof.”

“Physically, too.”

Vivian shakes her head sadly. “I can’t. I don’t know how to do it and I probably wouldn’t be any good at it. I don’t want to do something I won’t be good at.”

“We could practice.”

She laughs.

“I don’t want you anyway,” I reason. “You’re too high maintenance and you make me wear weird girlie clothes.”

“You know what your problem is?” she asks. When I don’t answer she tells me anyway, “You have your loves confused.”

“No, my problem is that I keep falling for straight women.”

“Listen, Lee, if I were a lesbian, I’d be the best damn lesbian in the world. In the universe, that’s how great I’d be at all the lesbian stuff that I don’t even have the slightest idea what it is. I’d be the best lesbian with a capitol L and, honey, you’d be my first choice to be with. We would go off and do whatever lesbians do till the cows came home. But, believe you me, we’re better off this way.”

“
You’re
better off maybe.”

“No, darlin’. The sex would wear off eventually and then we’d be fighting and then we’d hate each other and then we’d be alone. But friends, like we are, real friends, this will last.” She reaches over and wraps her fingers in mine. “Till death do us part.”

She gently wipes away a few of my tears, hugs me to her chest and holds me tight.

I don’t know if it’s her words or the fact that she has my face sandwiched between her tits, but I’m starting to feel a little bit better.

“You’re sure?” I ask, raising my face to hers. “You’re sure you can’t love me the way I love you?”

She looks into my eyes for a long time before she answers, “Lee, if it’ll make you feel better...on my eightieth birthday...if we’re both unattached and alive...we’ll do it then.”

“Eighty? I don’t think I want to do it with an eighty-year-old woman.”

“We’ll turn out the lights,” she laughs. “We’ll turn out the lights and take our dentures out and turn our hearing aids down. And it’ll be the best sex we ever had.”

Well, at least I have something to look forward to.

Suddenly, Vivian wraps a hand around the back of my head and shoves my face in her lap, ordering, “Get down.”

“You changed your mind?” I mumble into her crotch.

“Ssshhhh,” she warns, lying down flat over my body. “They’re here. They just pulled in.”

I spit her dress out of my mouth and ask, “Prince Charles?”

“Him and two other guys.” She raises up and peeks over the dashboard. “I don’t think they saw us.”

I peek over the dash with her. Prince Charles and the same two goons I saw earlier are getting out of their BMW and heading for the school.

“Goddammit. I’m tired of this shit.” I twist around, reach into the backseat and grab my boots and pants.

“What’re you doing?” she asks, alarmed.

I slip on my boots and stick my hands in the pockets of my jeans until I find my knife. “Buying some time,” I answer.

I pop open my door and drop to the ground. I push the door almost closed and duck walk to the front bumper. I raise up a little and peek over the hood of the car parked next to us. As soon as P.C. and his goons open the school doors and walk inside, I scramble to their BMW.

I flip open my knife and stab a back tire. As soon as I pull my knife out, I hear a satisfying hiss. I do the next tire. And the next. And the next.

No way they’re getting four new tires this time of night. And good luck finding tires early on a Saturday morning.

I run back to the Mercedes and throw myself inside. Vivian guides our way out of the parking lot without turning on the headlights.

“Where to now?” I ask.

“The one place he knows I’ll never go. Home.”

Chapter Eight

I am calling this part of our adventure,
A Glimpse into the Life of a Cheerleader.
I have to admit, I’m excited to see the way Vivian grew up. Exactly what it is that makes her what she is. If I were to tag it myself, I’d put all my money on a
Leave it to Beaver-
type of childhood. June wears pearls and bakes pies. Ward works and always has time for his kids. The Beav, Vivian, approaches everything with a lopsided grin and a sense of well-being that every problem can be solved in thirty minutes. I guess that would make me Eddie Haskell. Goofy, bumbling, always into trouble, Eddie, that’s me.

Vivian maneuvers the car to the side of the street in front of her childhood home, and I am treated to a vision much like I expected. The only thing missing is the white picket fence. Do they still make white picket fences, I wonder? Next to the rented house I grew up in, Vivian’s home is perfect.

“This place is perfect,” I tell her with genuine awe in my tone. “I would’ve stayed here and never left.”

“Perfect on the outside,” she says. “Just like my mother. Appearances are everything. Thank God for my daddy. C’mon, let’s go see what old folks do at night.”

“Sleep probably,” I say. “Like normal folks.”

“Nothing’s normal about these folks. My mother never stops talking and Daddy’s going deaf. The result is that my mother screams constantly.”

Vivian gets the front door key out from under the welcome mat, unlocks the door and leads me inside.

Stepping into the living room is like one of those dreams/nightmares where you suddenly find yourself thrust on a stage and you’re in the middle of a live performance but you have absolutely no idea what play it is or what character you are or what your lines are. And you’re naked.

Little tiny lights beam down at us. I look to find the source of the light. Track lighting is everywhere—and I do mean everywhere. Little spotlights are shining down and illuminating dolls. Dozens upon dozens of dolls. My God, is that...?

“Marie Osmond. My mom loves Marie Osmond,” Vivian says simply like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

I find myself both attracted and repelled by a large four feet tall Marie Osmond doll. It’s eerily life-like. Especially the large, white teeth.

“She must have hundreds of Maries,” I whisper.

“It’s her life’s work,” she whispers back without a touch of sarcasm.

Dear God, what I have gotten myself into?

Vivian opens a cabinet, snags something from inside it, tippy-toes through the living room and disappears down a hallway. I trail after her, acutely aware of hundreds of little brown eyes following me out of the room.

Vivian’s room is not a bedroom, not by my standards and certainly not by any other standards. It’s a shrine. A shrine to Princess Vivian. The walls of the room are painted a deep, dark purple. Blue ribbons and certificates and trophies entirely cover one whole wall. In the far corner sits a large canopied bed. Purple, of course. There’s about a billion princess pillows and stuffed animals on it. A white vanity table with a little wicker stool sits in another corner. And there’s even her own bathroom and a huge walk-in closet. Princess all the way.

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “You should’ve painted the room purple.”

“I hate purple,” she says.

“That was a joke. Your room
is
purple.”

“I know,” she explains. “My mom hates purple, too. I did it just to piss her off.”

Vivian holds out both of her hands and shows me what she’s been hiding behind her back. It’s two porcelain dolls.

“Is that Elvis? Two Elvis dolls?”

“Elvi,” she corrects. “Just like cacti. And peni. Elvi. They’re decanters. Full of whiskey. It’s a game Dad and I play. I drink all the whiskey out of the Elvi. He fills them back up. Neither one of us tells Mom and we both pretend it never happened.”

She bites on one Elvi head and pops the cork. She spits the head onto her bed and chugs deep. “You can have fat Elvi,” she says, handing me a grinning Elvis decanter in a white jumpsuit.

Two Elvi later and I am bombed. Literally smashed. I sit under the purple bedspread which we have fashioned into a makeshift tent between the vanity table and the bed. It’s like we’re camping. Except we’re inside. And we’re drunk on Elvi. And we’ve taken some of her mom’s Xanax that Vivian found in the medicine cabinet. And the tent is a bedspread and not a real tent. I guess maybe it’s not much like camping after all.

Vivian raided the kitchen earlier and came back with an armload of cupcakes and a jar of peanut butter. I’m eating the peanut butter with my fingers and thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve had anything taste this good. I feel like laughing. Not because anything is particularly funny, but just because I can.

“So what do they call English muffins in England?” I ask around a glob of peanut butter. “Are they just muffins or what?”

Vivian stuffs another cupcake in her mouth and swallows it whole. She sucks on her front teeth before answering. “Scones.”

“And why don’t British people have an accent when they sing?”

She shrugs and pops another cupcake in her mouth.

I ask another. “Why do they call cigarettes faggots?”

“They think it’s weird that we call faggots faggots.”

“Are we supposed to call them cigarettes?”

Vivian laughs like that’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. I grab a cupcake and eat it in tiny bites like a squirrel.

“I’m glad I’m not a faggot,” I say through my squirrel teeth.

“I’m just glad I’m not a man,” Vivian says.

“Yeah, if I was a man and had a penis...” I pause to swallow the mushy chocolate.

Vivian interrupts, “Most men do have a penis.”

“But if I had a penis, I’d be very proud of it. I’d stick it in every hole I could find. I’d be touching it all the time. They’d have to lock me up,” I say.

“I would fuck anything and everything that moved,” Vivian agrees. “We’d be in prison right now sharing a cell.”

I laugh. “Well, just don’t bend over around me.”

“You’re such a faggot,” she says.

I burst into loud guffaws. We laugh together, doubled over, and when we finally come up we’re both wiping away tears.

“I just love drugs, don’t you?” she asks.

“I like the taste of baby aspirin.”

“Pain pills are my favorite. Especially little blue ones. Gotta love those blue pills.”

“I haven’t done too many drugs. Tried cocaine once. Never again.”

“Why?”

“I ended up in bed with a professional body builder.”

“Man or woman?” she asks.

“I’m still not sure,” I answer. “But at the end of three days, I swore right then and there if I could ever walk again, I’d walk out the door and never do it again.

“You know what I wanna do to you?” Vivian asks, peering at me wide-eyed and childlike.

“No,” I say straight-faced, “but I know what I
want
you to do to me.”

She slaps me playfully on the arm. “Stop it.”

“Nope, can’t do that. If I can agree to your so-called straight tendencies and agree to never touch you, the least you can do is acquiesce to my verbal flirtations.”

“Say that again. In plain English,” she counters.

“I said...show me your tits.”

“Okay. Why not, everyone else has seen them,” she agrees. “But only if you let me do to you what I want to do.”

“Hmmm...” I weigh the possibilities in each hand like a scale. “Done. Do with me what you will.”

This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Here I stand in the middle of Vivian’s fantasy bedroom, fully dressed in her old cheerleading uniform. She has on an identical uniform and looks happier than I’ve ever seen her. She has on the home games uniform and made me put on the away games uniform. “My mother would be so proud,” I say.

“I can still do the splits,” she brags.

“Yeah, well, I could never do the splits. So I’m sure as hell not gonna try them now.”

She tosses an extra set of pom-poms at me, saying, “Follow me.”

I’ve done some things I regret in my life but somehow I think this is going to be at the top of the list. I lethargically follow Vivian’s pom-pom motions.

“C’mon!” she shouts. “Where’s your spirit?”