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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
AJ was expected to mind the rest of us. Sometimes she would grab the magnifying glass out of the garage and let us try to burn pinholes through a Cornflakes box on the patio, but most often our general holler and hubbub would be too shattering on Aunt Patty's nerves, and she would order AJ to take us back to the rumpus room at the back of the house where they kept a TV so old it didn't know any programs but "Gunsmoke" and Popeye cartoons. We'd fight awhile about what we were going to play next, until finally AJ would drawl, "Hush you up, vermin!" and turn off the lights and bring in one of her tapers of incense. We would happily hush and pull the curtains closed while she told us truly terrifying stories about the bloodthirsty ghosts left over from Jean Lafitte's pirate crew; or about this friend whose sister had picked up a Cajun hitchhiker who turned out to be a homicidal maniac just bust out from a Louisiana prison for the criminally insane.
Once AJ even brought out the skull of a monster baby that had been given to her by a old blind prophetess in Lake Charles. Trying not to seem impressed, my cousin Doreen said it looked like a cat skull to her, but AJ said that was how they knew it was a demon baby, because it had been born with fangs and eyes where the pupil slits ran catwise, up and down, which is why as soon as the parents got home from the hospital they killed it themselves by emptying half a can of Raid into the baby's bottle. Then we all felt sorry for the kid, even if it was a cat-headed demon baby, and everyone got quiet and very respectful because we all knew this story was particularly true and poignant for AJ, on account of her toes.
When I was 12, AJ was the object of my very first crush. Of course, she was a senior in high school and I was only a seventh-grader, but I found I could use my stories about dead people to make myself interesting. I told her about Mr. Johnson, the old black janitor at my school who was still wearily scrubbing down the bathrooms even though he'd hung himself from a beam in the boiler room with a bright orange extension cord when I was in second grade. AJ seemed kind of disappointed by how ordinary most ghosts seemed to be, but when I tried to make my stories more exciting, like hers, she could always tell right away that I was lying. She'd look at me over the tops of her little round sunglasses and put on the heavy Black Girl accent she used to aggravate her daddy. "You axin' me to b'lieve dat, DK?" DK short for Dead Kennedy, which was her nickname for me. So I learned to stick to the facts.
Then AJ left high school, moved out of Uncle Walt's house and disappeared into the world of grown-ups, which it seemed to me then was another kind of dying.
I had other crushes, and dates, but after that first love I didn't talk about the dead until my junior year in high school, when I started going out with Josie Wells. Josie was the only girl in the history of Deer Park High to make the cheerleading team and then drop out without getting pregnant. She was blond, with six rings in her left ear and two useless doper parents. We got married a month after senior prom and moved to Houston proper. First, because I was damn good and ready to live someplace where nobody would start humming "Ghost Riders in the Sky" when I walked by, and second because it's never the wrong time to get the hell out of Deer Park.
Two years later Josie left me. She was pregnant at the time.
For the next ten months, I crashed in many shitty places: friends' apartments, shared houses, parked cars and, twice, the playground at Hermann Park. You know your life has taken a wrong turn when you're trying to get your beauty sleep in a tire swing.
I finally got my shit together enough to move into the Parkwood Apartments complex, which lies between the Astrodome and the Texas Medical Center. Parkwood is six square blocks of poorly maintained brick fourplexes built in the 1950s, all owned by the Baylor College of Medicine. Baylor doesn't specialize in real estate. As a result, both the maintenance and the rent are five years behind the times. On my budget, an excellent trade-off. Most of my neighbors were grad students from exotic places like China or Pakistan or Idaho, many with little kids. There was also a mix of old people on fixed incomes, and a sprinkling of the sort-of-working poor, like me. By the time Tom Hanlon called me about the dead girl in his garage, I had lived there for almost 11 years, getting fired and laid about the same number of times.
Every Monday night, my buddy Lee had me over for Foreign Film Indoctrination at his place, which is the other upstairs apartment in our fourplex. Lee had introduced me to Hong Kong action flicks, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as Indian disaster movies. He was also partial to Soviet-era Armenian musicals. You don't know how good you've got it, he liked to say, until you watch the Armenian proletariat burst into joyous song on the floor of a tractor-parts factory.
We were scheduled to watch a flick the day after my not-so-great outing with Megan, but I managed to lose my job at Petco, which took the zest out of me. A definite sign of aging, there. In my early 20s, the days I got canned were three or four of the finest in a calendar year. I'd get bored with my current job and start experimenting, searching for management's exact snapping point. At the Galleria Men's Wearhouse, for instance, mascara alone isn't enough for them to risk a wrongful dismissal suit, but even one pretty lame coat of lipstick puts them into a comfort zone, firing-wise.
Anyway, it was back to job searching. (I've done welfare, but I don't like it. It's embarrassing to show up and stand in line with, you know, single-parent amputees. Besides which, welfare doesn't pay enough if you have to buy chocolate-covered almonds at a dollar a box to send your daughter to science camp.)
I headed across the foul hallway to tell Lee I was going to bail on Monday Movie Madness. Parkwood Apartments doesn't bother air-conditioning public areas, so the foyer, staircase, landings and hallways in my building stay at a more or less constant 93 degrees from May until October, and stink like old gym socks from the mildew in the carpet. I slapped a couple of heat-drugged mosquitoes into small splotches on Lee's door by way of knocking.
Lee appeared holding two bottles of Pacifico with the tops already off. He's about my age, with the kind of scruffy good looks that make grown women want to tuck in his shirt. He gets fired less than me, and laid a whole lot more. Tonight he was wearing a peach-patterned bowling shirt and jean shorts. "'Bushmen'!" he said, handing me a brewski. "Tsui Hark moves the Chinese Hopping Vampire genre to the Kalahari desert. A classic."
"Can't do it." I took the beer.
He glanced sharply at me. "Uh, oh. You've got the chit, don't you?" Lee and I have this deal where only one of us is allowed to feel shitty at a time. If one guy has the feeling-shitty chit, the other one is honor-bound to suck it up. "Did you get fired again?"
"Screw you. It might have been my love life."
"You don't have a love life. So ... you gonna skip the movie, just stay home and lay low?" he said, holding the door open.
"Yeah," I said, coming inside. I sat down at his kitchen table.
"I got leftovers. How did you get gassed this time?"
"Ate cat food."
"Meaning, you ate cat food so you're not hungry for leftovers," Lee asked, "or ate cat food in regards to Got Fired?"
