Lawrence.com

So I said before that I intended to cheat furiously on my NaNoWriMo project. It looks like I'm not going to have to; with 21 days to go, I'm nearly at the halfway point. God bless bourbon and Baby Einstein, in no particular order.Anyway, since my last post sparked absolutely NO discussion, and since I'm drunk enough (and therefore egotistical enough) to think I merit more than one post per week. . . .Another excerpt. This one is funnier, and less depressing, but really, really gross. And funny. Did I mention funny?February 14th, 1998It was Valentine's day, and I had a date. A real, live, actual date, not a hookup, not an impaired and over-lubricated tumble on the futon, not giving someone a ride to a keg party so he could hook up with some hot chick. A guy, a dealer, but not mine, and not an addict himself, was going to take me out. Dinner. Movie. The whole nine yards. I hadn't had one of those in almost two years, and goddamn was I looking forward to it.I spent the afternoon picking out clothes, refreshing my auburn dye job, plucking my eyebrows, putting my hair up in curlers, and just generally being giddy. It was like being a normal person for once, and it felt divine. So Otis was supposed to pick me up at seven, then we were going out for Chinese food and to catch a late movie. I had slept for something like eighteen hours the night before; I didn't want to be strung out. I'd been very deliberately saving my last bit of speed for just before we left, so I could be fabulous but not truly tweeked, and at six-thirty I scraped the last line out of my quarter-gram bag and lined it up on the mirror, then waited patiently another fifteen minutes before snorting it. I was out now, but no worries; Otis, when he visited to talk and just hang out, always left me a parting gift, and I had no reason to think that tonight would be any different, especially since I had plans to screw his skinny brains out when he brought me back home. By seven-fifteen I was telling myself for the fifth or so time that he was just running late, probably had gotten a call on his cell on the way over from a customer, and he was, above all, a concientious businessman. By seven-thirty I was peering out through my peephole twice a minute or more, listening intently for the sound of his car pulling into the parking lot just outside my door. By eight I broke down and called; it went straight through to voicemail.Sonofabitch. Probably the prospect of deflowering yet another high school girl had presented itself. He could have called, at least. Bastard. Fucker.But I still didn't pull my hair back into its customary knot, still didn't change out of my pretty but uncomfortable clothes, still didn't kick off the high heels. There was a very solid possibility that he might drop by after seeing his latest conquest home by curfew, and although I was mad as hell, I would listen with good will and laugh at the appropriate places when he regaled me with the sordid details, as was his habit. He did, after all, give me free speed.Eleven thirty rolled around and I was thoroughly dejected, half-heartedly scrawling at a poem detailing in lavish adjectives and melodramatic metaphor just how despondent I was. I may have even pressed a pale wrist to my wan forehead a time or two--that's just how very Gothic I felt.There came at the door a rapid pounding, wordless shrieking, incoherent but eloquent of panic. I looked out the peephole out of habit, and made out the vague shape of a large female knocking and looking frantically behind her. "Who is it?'"Let me in! Oh, please, dear God, let me in! They're trying to rape me, they're right behind me!"I didn't think twice, but quickly shot the deadbolt back and flung open the door. The ugliest woman I have ever seen came barreling into the living room, carrying with her what seemed like dozens of plastic shopping bags stuffed full of various clothing."Oh, Jesus, thank you, thank you, they want to rape me, you saved my life!"She dumped her bags on the floor with no ceremony, began to peel off several coats, jackets, and sweaters. Even without the added bulk, she was huge, sloppy fat, pendulous breasts hanging to what I could only assume was her waist. Her hair was jet-black, thick and long and straight, and had it not been filthy and tangled would have most likely been beautiful. Her skin was rough-textured, pitted and pock-marked, a huge craterous moon, and dark-complected, with large bushy eyebrows and an unmistakeable shadowy moustache. Her eyes were wild and rolling about like those of a horse who smells smoke, her arms dark with purplish sores, others that had faded to a permanent dark brown, scaly with dryness or some sort of condition like eczema. Without invitation she plopped herself down on the sofa, in MY spot, at that, and helped herself to one of my cigarettes. Then she sprang to her feet again, and began pacing.I was about to ask what all the panic was about, since I had been looking cautiously out the barely-cracked door, fully expecting at any moment to see a band of armed thugs rounding the corner into the lot, in pursuit of their prey, although honestly, why anyone in their right mind would want to rape this caricature of undesireability was absolutely beyond me. But I hadn't yet learned enough suspicion, I still believed people when they told me things, especially when those people were so obviously in distress and the things they were telling were so very dramatic. Anyway, the parking lot and the street beyond it remained empty and silent, not so much as a passing car.But I didn't need to. Pacing, if her lumbering near-waddle could be called that, she began spouting her tale of woe."Motherfuckers! My own daughter! I knew she was evil, knew it when she was a baby. Bad shit happened when she was around, she made it happen, I knew it. She set the kitchen afire before she turn a year old, just thinkin bout it, I saw it with my own eyes. Shit!"She then turned and began addressing the space directly beside her, tilting her head upward as though talking to a much taller person. "You tell me, Jesus, why this shit gotta happen to me? I been good. I say my prayers. I tell folks about Your glory. Why you gotta send me this devil baby? Why you gotta make my life so hard?"She listened a moment, her head titled thoughtfully to one side, then screeched and began waving her hand dismissively in the direction of this invisible person. "No, no, fuck that, that don't account for nothin'. You listen to me, now, something wrong with that girl. I ain't talkin to you no more, you ain't makin no sense."She turns to me and shrugs extravagantly, setting her long breasts to swaying hypnotically. "Girl, I love my Lord and Savior, but sometimes he talk pure bullshit.""So. . ." I begin, not having the slightest idea how one goes about conversing with an obvious schizophrenic. "Who was chasing you? Someone was trying to rape you?"She shrieked again, a high and bloodcurdling noise, then flung her cigarette to the floor and ground it out under her shoe. "My own goddamn daughter, that's who! My own flesh and blood! Comes over with one of her dyke pals, says they work together, but me, I know better than that. And her with three babies of her own to look after. They come in and start making themselves drinks, and she say, 'Hey, Momma, why don't you try one of these?' So I take a swig, it tastes all wrong, she done went and put somethin in it. I get to feelin all funny-like. My own daughter! My flesh and blood, tryin to drug me! And don't think I don't know what they would've done to me once I got out of my head, no sir, I knows all about what those sick dykes do to poor ladies when they're helpless. I always knew that girl was evil, yes I did.""Um, so they chased you when you left?""Oh, yeah. Unh-huh. She comes runnin outta the house after me, screamin 'Don't go, Momma, where you gonna go this time a night?' But no, sir, my boy Aaron done told me you was a good girl, and told me where you lived, everybody knows this place. I come straight here, Jesus said you'd take me in."Oh, shit. I made a mental note to kick Aaron in the balls if I ever saw him again. Vaguely, I remembered him saying something about his momma not being quite right in the head, at least not when she went off her meds. "Where's your bathroom? I gotta take a shit."Well, what was I supposed to do? Hell, I thought she'd probably squat down and do it right on the floor, so I hastily pointed her in the right direction.She didn't bother closing the door, just pulled down her filthy pants and unspeakable tent-sized panties down around her swollen ankles and plopped that gigantic ass down on the seat.I have never in my life heard noises that even come close to the ones that proceeded to issue from this lunatic's colon. Amplified by the concave porcelain of the toilet and my own shocked disgust, it sounded like the end of the world as narrated by Rimbaud. Great stacatto blats of flatulence, horrid squirtings and squelchings, and the grunting. The groaning and praying and incessant grunting. (Once, during my labor to deliver Penny, I began to think that the wounded-moose bellows issuing from my own throat sounded vaguely familiar, and between contractions I racked my brain until I remembered where I'd first heard that sound. This is it.) At times it sounded like she was giving birth to some abominable Cthonic nightmare via her anus; at others, like her entire digestive tract was being torn loose and voided in great gushes of filth.And the smell. Jesus tits, the smell. I know that the phrase "It smelled like something crawled up his ass and died" is utterly cliched, and it doesn't even begin to describe that stench. Like an equitorial abattoir sealed up for a month and then stumbled upon haplessly, that unspeakable reek was a tangible mass advancing through the open door like the spiked wall of a shrinking room in an Indiana Jones movie. I have stumbled across the rotting and bloated carcasses of animals when wandering through fields as a child, have been present when my father had to deal with some problem that required opening up the septic tank beside the house. Once, when I was young, we left on a week's summer vacation to Texas and when we returned, we found that a nine-foot blacksnake had become caught somehow in the attic, and died, probably about the time we left. There was a puddle of rotting slime on the floor of the utility room, where its ichors had soaked through the acoustic cieling tiles and dripped down. That smell was Chanel No. 5 compared to the vapors emanating from this lunatic's rectum. There was a lot more wrong with this woman that just the chemical imbalances in her brain. No human being should be able to produce those kinds of odors.I went to close the door, but she shot out a hand to hold it open, the better to continue her rambling. As I began lighting every scented candle and stick of incense I could find, cursing for the first time that the one window had been nailed shut and painted over, she took up her tirade again."Oh, it's not just that bitch daughter. They all want it. I got somethin no man can resist. I got it, girl, I didn't ask for it, but the good Lord chose to give it to me just the same. I can't even start tellin you the trouble it's brung me. All my life, they been chasin after me for a piece of what I got. They can smell it, even through the phone. They come runnin and they won't leave me alone. I can give a man what he wants, all right, but I just don't want to no more. NO MORE, Jesus God, no more!"I located a bottle of Vicks Vap-O-Rub in a cardboard box shoved in a cabinet. I scraped its contents out into a saucepan, added some water, and put it on a burner to simmer. I wondered if I would have to throw out the couch, and anything else made of fabric that couldn't be laundered in hot water and bleach.Finally, with one last prolonged explosive spurt, she groaned with the satisfaction of a job well done. I sneaked a look into the john, in time to see her perfuctorily wipe, absentmindedly and but once, back-to-front, and was very, very glad I had nothing left in my stomach when I saw her dimpled and saggy asscheek, adorned with streaks and droplets of excrement, exposed for a moment as she stood to pull up her drawers.She left the bathroom without flushing, much less washing her hands, and I steeled myself against the stink, deciding that since it was already coating my nasal passages, the back of my throat, even my tongue, with its tangible film of rank fetor, I might as well go in, and flushed the toilet. And then flush it again. And again. When I finally, somehow, managed to get this maniac out of my house, I would have to attack the bathroom with Clorox; the bowl and seat of the toilet, and several inches of floor surrounding it, were splattered with shit. How she managed to get it on the floor is still beyond me, but then, I had been trying not to watch the process itself. I had enough material for sleep-stealing nightmares, thank you very much."And they all know about it," she continued, fishing another of my cigarettes out of its pack. Silently blessing my mother, who regularly bought me groceries and cigarettes and filled the tank of my car but refused to give me cash, I opened the freezer and withdrew a fresh pack. I was trying to keep a running tab of what she touched and would therefore have to be thrown out."Oh, yes, they all know. The gov'ment, yes sir, they're after me, too. Girl, I can't tell you how many times they done took me and I had to escape. Me, I'm a Cherokee princess, you know, soon as my daddy dies I get myself a casino, and my momma, she was a witch, so I just put the hoodoo on them, and they let me waltz right out. But it gets so HARD!"At this she collapsed on the floor, an avalanche of rippling fat and dirty clothes, fell to her knees, then thrust down her arms, and before I knew it she was lying face-down in my living room sobbing with heartwrenching sincerity. Had she not just transformed my meticulously clean bathroom into something that looked like a stall in the CBGB john, I would have hugged her, most likely (I'm a sucker for crying), stroked her hair and told her everything was okay. As it was, however, I just looked on in horrified fascination, sitting on the couch with my knees drawn up and my arms wrapped around them. Within minutes her crying didn't so much subside as stop suddenly, like someone had flipped a switch. She hauled herself off the floor, and this time she was pissed. Her eyebrows lowered and bunched together, the eyes beneath them afire with irrational rage. I was scared witless; she outweighed me by a good two hundred pounds, and I was in seriously deep shit if she decided that I was one of "Them". I held my breath and tried to look as harmless and yet sympathetic as I possibly could, but I needn't have worried.She turned again to the same spot she'd been talking to before, her fists clenched and thrust down at her sides, planted her feet wide apart and let loose an admirable stream of expletives. "Goddamn you to hell, you son-of-a-cunt! Fuck you! You shit-heel sumbitch! I'll put my foot up your ass, you don't start givin me a good reason, right the fuck now! Go on, you just try and tell me why you do this to me when you supposed to love me so much?" She paused, and again did that oddly bird-like head tilt. "Nuh uh, nuh uh, that don't cut it. No sir." Another pause, then, "Will you just shut up a minute and let me talk? I been good. I done raised my babies right, I made em say their prayers and beat em when they was bad. So why you gotta put this heavy load on my back? Why you gotta make it so I can't even get peace in my own home without my own daughter, my own flesh and blood, tryin to drug me up so she and that dyke can rape me and do any ol thing?"She turned back to me, the rage vanished, replaced on her face with anguish. "Girl, you don't even know. Don't nobody know what I been through. The CIA, they done took me again last year. Said I had to go on and serve my country, an if I didn't, they'd cut off my check."Another impossible shift--the grief washed away, her eyes went smoldering and cunning. "I got it, yes sir, I got it like you wouldn't believe." Her bloated hands began wandering over that vast heap of flesh, caressing her breasts, thrusting between her legs before withdrawing and sliding back over her bulbous belly, up her squat neck, to fluff her matted hair in a parody of wanton sensuality. It was a burlesque done by John Waters, and it was so grotesque I couldn't laugh even if I hadn't been afraid to. "Mmm-hmm, the men, they all want it. Now even my own goddam daughter can't keep her hands off me. So the CIA, they says I gotta go over to Russia, let the commies get a good whiff of me, keep them so busy chasin after what I got that they forget all about them damned bombs. But I don't let no white man touch me, see, I only go after niggers, they know how to give me what I need."Well, that explains Aaron, I thought, his chocolate skin and the hint of Native American bone structure that sculpted his face into such attractive planes. I think that she must have been quite pretty, even beautiful when she was young, before the diabetes and the schizophrenia and god only knows what drugs and liquors ravaged her flesh and her form. She begins to look at me more closely, the delusional lust in her eyes bleeding out to be replaced by suspicion. "You startin to get ideas, girl? You think you can get a piece of this?" I shake my head frantically, terrified again that her paranoia might turn towards me, but then she cocks her head and listened for a minute, and said, "Uh huh, okay, Jesus done told me you don't mean me no harm. He got plans for you too, girl, God help you, but you can't run away from what's been writ."The last thing I wanted was to hear what her Jesus had in store for me. The show had been fascinating, all right, but I began to realize that it was very, very important for me to get this madwoman out of my apartment before Jesus changed his mind about my trustworthiness. But how?And here's where I get clever. "Did you hear that?" I asked, starting upright in my seat. "Hear what? He talkin to you too, now? Oh, Lord, I don't wish that on nobody. What's he sayin?""No, no, outside. There it is again!"I jumped up and ran past her to the door, screwed my eye up to the peephole, then drew back with a terrified gasp. "Oh, shit, they're here! There's two ladies, and they've got a whole bunch of men with them. Men in suits."She screamed, then immediately began to pull on the layers of outer garments she'd shed upon entering. "Lord, lord, girl, you can't let them get me, you don't know what they do to me with their wires and their machines! You gotta hide me, you gotta tell them I ain't here!""There's no place in here to hide, it's too small, besides, they have machines that can tell if you're lying," I frantically improvised. "Tell you what, if you go out that back door, the one in the kitchen, there's another door that leads up to the second floor. You go up that, then go down the hall, and then back down the stairs in front and get out the main door where the mailboxes are. I'll stall them as long as I can, then tell them you went out the back and over the fence when I can't anymore.""Girl, God bless you and keep you, Aaron was right about you, you's a good girl. You be careful, don't you dare tell them 'bout Jesus and his plans for you, or they'll be after you, too." She gathered up the many plastic bags she'd brought with her, and while her back was turned I surreptitiously kicked the hollow aluminum door. "Oh, God, they're gonna break it down!"And with that, she scurried out the flimsy kitchen door, which I shut behind her, and then locked, although the lock didn't work properly, and as an afterthought, drug a chair from the bar over and wedged it under the doorknob. Only then did I sink to the floor, exhausted, bewildered, wondering how the hell I went from getting dolled up for a date to participating in a schizophrenic delusion in the space of six hours.I started laughing, hysterically, shaking with the absurdity of this farce that had just played itself out in my cramped apartment. I thought about turning it into a poem, or maybe a story, but it was just too ludicrous to be put to words, or so I thought at the time. Then I hauled myself up off the floor, tied my hair back, changed my clothes, and spent the remainder of that Valentine's day bleaching every surface that batshit-crazy woman had even come close to.It wasn't a date, it wasn't roses and chocolates, but it was. . .well, it was something.