Invisible Monsters Remix

Mylar in celebration of a dead person’s birthday. Oh, but the tourists come. The you-gotta-see-this local hipsters bring their snarky tourist friends for a laugh. For an I-can’t-believe-somebody-did-this tour. Art students snap the kind of ironic pictures you’d expect. No bereaved survivors check for correct spelling or dates. Sometimes they pay extra—sometimes a lot extra, that’s where the pure profit is: the add-on expenses—to get names misspelled. Letters transposed. Freudian slips chiseled into marble.

She sleeps with the angles

With no overhead, the profit margin is stupendous. With such an income stream Daisy St. Patience need do nothing except count her money, and it’s this cash flow from Spitefield Park that gives her some elbow room. Daisy can take her own sweet time to assemble a top-notch stable. Daisy St. Patience: Loving Do-Gooder. Empathetic Hand-Holder.

It was Daisy who went to the Blue Girls everyone had forgotten about. Candy-Striper Daisy volunteered to bring cheer to those living nightmares consigned by next-of-kin to state hospitals, to locked wards, to watching television with their runny eyes for a lifetime on account of having a lumpy head the size of a microwave oven carved from gouda cheese. The Elephant Women. Those twisted, shambling gals with faces like torched Halloween masks. Their smiles like lumpy, red, knobby pomegranates turned inside out. The Born-That-Way girls. The In-a-Terrible-Accident girls, and the There-But-for-the-Grace-of-God girls. Like no one you’d want to meet in a dark alley late at night. Those horror movie ladies with heartbreaking names like “Fern” and “Penny,” Daisy sought them out and mentored them. These young cripples who crawled toward her on legs like boneless tentacles, and looked at her with their blue eyes set in faces like blood-red cauliflower, for them Lady Daisy lifted the hem of her own veil like a stage curtain. This is what Daisy St. Patience did after the end of the end of the last chapter. She did not don a veil and become a belly dancer. Nor did she take up playing ice hockey as a lifetime excuse to wear a goalie mask. Lady Daisy went to these wretched young ladies. Girls who, from their faces, you’d scarcely guess were still human. Daisy St. Patience reached out to gently, warmly, passionately grasp hold of their hands or claws or flippers, and she said, “I’d like to propose a partnership …”

Of these evolutionary dead ends, these mistakes of Mother Nature, Lady Daisy asked, “How would you like to see the world?” Adding, “And vice versa.”

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Eighteen

Chapter 10

ump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a “pussy strip” of surgical tape underneath, and Evie starts in with, “About your mutilated brother …?”

It’s not my favorite photographer or art director, either.

And I’m going back to Evie, “Yeah?” Busy sticking out my butt.

And the photographer goes, “Evie? That’s not pouting!”

The uglier the fashions, the worse places we’d have to pose to make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses. Sewage treatment plants. It’s the ugly bridesmaid tactic where you only look good by comparison. One shoot for Industry JeansWear, I was sure we’d have to pose kissing dead bodies.

These junked cars all have rusted holes through them, serrated edges, and I’m this close to naked and trying to remember when was my last tetanus shot. The photographer lowers his camera and says, “I’m only wasting film until you girls decide to pull in your stomachs.”

More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus yanking off your pussy strip if you’re not close-shaved.

About hell, I told Evie, “We’re shooting there tomorrow.”

So, now the art director says, “Evie, could you climb up a couple cars higher on the pile?” And this is wearing high heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are scattered on everywhere you might fall.

Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, “How exactly did your brother get mutilated?” You can only hold a real smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.

“It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our family’s burn barrel,” I say. “He was burning the trash and it exploded.”

And Evie says, “Somebody?”

And I say, “You’d think it was my mom, the way she screamed and tried to stop him bleeding.”

And the photographer says, “Girls, can you go up on your toes just a little?”

Evie goes, “A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off.”

We both go up on our toes.

I go, “It wasn’t so bad.”

“Wait a sec,” the art director says, “I need your feet to be not so close together.” Then he says, “Wider.” Then, “A little wider, please.” Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to hold.

Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.

“It’s a ball-peen hammer,” Evie says, “and you’re holding it wrong.”

“Honey,” the photographer says to Evie, “could you hold the chain saw a bit closer to your mouth, please?”

The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops crushed under the weight of being piled on top of each other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the backseats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from before seat belts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life. Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their exploded gas tanks.

“This is so rich,” Evie says, “how this is the place I’ve worked my whole life to get.”

The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against the cars.

“The whole time, growing up,” Evie says, “I just thought being a woman would be …not such a disappointment.”

All I ever wanted was to be an only child.

The photographer says, “Perfecto.”

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter 11

alf my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.

Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.

“Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.

The thing about Brandy is she’s got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she’s so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.