She sounded crazy because she was crazy. This was good for me to remember. These phone calls were the best breakup present Jenny could have given me. I listened to her psycho-ramble, and sometimes, when it was appropriate, I’d say, Yeah, I’m Sorry For That. Sometimes, the sharp reality of her pain really got me and I’d feel it, too; a haunting glimpse of what it must be like to be trapped on the inside of Jenny’s brain. As shitty as our tortured relationship was for me-this shitty, dramatic ending was worse for Jenny. I was getting away, but she was going to be stuck there inside her head for the rest of her life.
The morning of my call with the guy from Seattle, my face was puffy and I was almost hallucinating with sleep deprivation. I smeared some Preparation H under my eyes, which had submitted to a bit of crying during some of Jenny’s more expressive calls. I learned the Preparation H thing from a girl I worked with at a house in Oakland. It shrinks the little red saddlebags under my eyeballs right down. I wobbled into an outfit, packed my purse with the minimum; no toys, too early, just the condoms and the lube, my wallet, key, and that smear-proof lipstick. I swear, a million whores rejoiced when they finally came out with this stuff. Blowjobs require enough of a sacrifice of dignity without having to worry about looking like a clown, red smears all over the place, when you’re done.
The call was easy; the guy was still sleepy himself. I left him fumbling with the hotel coffee pot and hailed a cab outside.
That little fucking dog started its yapping. The poor thing never saw the inside of a house; it was just roped there to the chain-link fence that separated our paltry civilization from the wild roll of hillside. Its hair was long and its body was small. It looked like a bad wig someone had tossed onto the street, sort of matted and dingy. I bet it’d look like a real fancy pooch if someone ever cared to clean it up, but for now it looked like a piece of trash come to life. I tipped the driver well. If he were a good driver he’d be off my precarious street in about two minutes; if he were a hack he’d be out there forever, the dog ruining the day with its noise.
I knew something was wrong right away, because my door was open. The latch that held it shut had been busted off. It hung there on its hinge, the door. Thankfully, we were experiencing this summery weather up here, or else the wind would have been flapping it open and closed, open and closed, like that damn dog’s mouth, advertising to the shady neighborhood that my apartment was accepting explorers.
My neighborhood consists of: a gang of young boys who try to be intimidating and usually succeed; a shiftless family who occasionally steal my mail; the dude across the street who owns the dog, an Archie Bunker-type who looks like he’s stockpiling weapons and has American flags hung in his window in lieu of curtains; the little boy who lives downstairs from him whose efforts to befriend the ragamuffin canine result in bellows from the patriot and a scolding from the boy’s squat grandmother; a lesbian couple who bought the nicest house on the block-a dubious compliment-and who’ve allowed fear of their new surroundings to turn them into hostile bitches. Oh, and there’s Larry, lord of the mold, the man I pay rent to, who lives in the apartment above mine. It’s not exactly Mister Roger’s Neighborhood here. It’s like everyone has Seasonal Affective Disorder and we spend a good ten months of the year ensconced in clouds. The serotonin has all gone away, we’re unhappy people here on Porter Street.
I kicked off my heels and grabbed one in my fist, stiletto out, as a weapon. My front door gaped open behind me. I descended into the cave that was my home. Hello? I yelled. Hello, Motherfucker? Show Yourself, Fucker! I paused. Larry? I called. He has been known to come into my apartment on landlordy business, unannounced, totally illegal, I know, but what am I really going to do? Like I said, I’m biding my time here.
In my kitchen there’s a note. It’s on the back of a takeout menu, scrawled in a dried-up Sharpie. It’s faint and hard to read. I could decipher the word
I grabbed the menu and walked toward the door. I tried to study the text in the sunlight that shot down from the sky and pooled in the slight clearing of weeds outside my door. The phrase
Out in my yard, there was a clear path where the weeds had been trampled. I followed it, barefoot, my feet getting all gunked up. In the middle of the yard, I looked up at Larry’s apartment. What a jackass. What a totally useless landlord. He makes no repairs; he lets the yard turn into a jungle and my apartment into a mold-ridden health hazard. The only thing he was good for was simple presence; he was reliable like that. He rarely left his upstairs apartment, save for beer runs. He sat up there and drank and watched cable. He was a bulky guy with a lousy attitude, and I figured I could at least rely on him to ward off burglars, a simple crime deterrent. But he wasn’t even good for that. The sun reflected off his windows, making it impossible for me to see into his place. He could have been standing at the window looking out at me. I flipped him off just in case.
I followed the skinny trail of crushed weeds to the back of the yard. There was a depression there, a cement clearing that maybe an optimistic former tenant had once tried to garden in. It was filled with dirt that had turned muddy with trash and pooled rainwater. Who knows what else was in there. Today my life savings was. I could see the tips of bills sticking out from the sludge, like they’d been packed into the wet dirt and then stomped deeply into the skank of it. Yeah. There were footprints mashed into it, overlapping footprints going in all directions, like someone had just freaked out and moshed my money into the ground. The box it had all been stored in was off to the side, lying in the weeds, open and empty to the sky above us.
At first I felt nothing; and then quickly, swiftly, I wanted to die. As I stood there wanting to die, I could feel the sensation morph. I could feel it become energized and then it became the more dynamic feeling of wanting to kill. Then it lessened, became heavy, and I was filled with the desire to just kill myself.
I looked down at the mud. Maybe it was salvageable. I gently tugged the protruding corner of a hundred-dollar bill and it came off in my fingers. The mud was sopping, it was like coffee with a lot of grounds in it. It was, as I probed it with my fingers, more of a puddle than anything. I scooped up a liquidy pile of cash. I draped the paper across some bent stalks of weeds and it tore there, slunk into the ground like slurry.
My life was dissolving. I plunged my hands back into the puddle and brought out some more palmfuls of dark, indistinguishable nothing.
I started to cry. I started to hyperventilate. I thought of all the guys I’d fucked. I thought of all the mouths, gummy and slick, that had suctioned themselves to my breasts. I thought of my sweet, chafed pussy, and all it had been through. The gropes. The sweat-that beaded chests like the condensation on my bedroom walls-how it had splattered upon me. Oh, the noxious grunts, the gross sounds they made, the plain and hideous sight of their nudity. It was as if I had fucked them all for free. All I had were the bills in my purse, and rent was due today.
Fucking Jenny. Fucking sick Jenny. She didn’t even steal it. She was as broke as me, broker even, with a bigger drinking problem, more of a need for cash, and she didn’t even steal it. Her need to hurt me had blotted out even basic self-preservation. Under all my despair was a new fear now; fear of Jenny. She might as well have killed me, I thought, or at least sent someone to kick my ass.
I thought again about the men. The simple destruction of the money, the basis of those consensual trysts, now made every call an act of violence survived. I was shaking. I went back into my room and laid down on my futon. With both doors open to the beautiful day, I passed out.
When I awoke it was evening. The wind had stirred up on the hill and was blowing through my apartment like a little hurricane. My broken doors whined on their hinges. I padded into my kitchen, still in my whore clothes: a shimmery skirt-cheap from Ross-and a blousey lady-shirt, sheer, the ghost of my push-up bra a hazy vision beneath the fabric. Jenny had loved me in my whore outfits, months back when we had first hooked up. She had thought the getup hilarious, and it was. I remember her sitting squat on the dank wooden floor of my bedroom, her tiny hand spidering out around the fat bottle she was drinking from. Red-cheeked and giggling, she watched my transformation. I strung the lingerie around my body, pulling back my fried hair, removing my heavy horn- rimmed eyeglasses, and dusting my lids with shimmery powder. We’d fucked that first time, there on the floor, the splintery wood scraping my ass, scuffing my Payless pumps, and I didn’t even care; her mouth cold from the beer and tasting of bubbles.
Three months is not a long time for a relationship unless you’re a dyke. After the first few days, we were
