Luna Park Opium

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, baby,” I say, or
some other such crappy thing. He’s older, smells okay, very slight stubble
along his jaw. He’s got some thick hands. He’s maybe like a nice minor
league baseball umpire, I guess, but he’s nervous and serious and his blue
blue eyes dart around my face without noticing the terrific cleavage I’m
thrusting his way. He’s dressed like he’s on his way to a slightly fancy
barbecue, or maybe a boat party, a bit catalogy: khaki shorts, lightweight
sweater, loafers. The men I’ve been in boats with wear holed-out cut-offs
that show their pubes, they smell like rank toads.

Steve hooks his fingers through my belt loops, a junior high kind of
move, and I can tell it’s his first time with an escort. He looks scared, which
I hate, which happens all the time, and I look at him for a second and then
actually bat my eyelids. Finally Steve pulls me towards him, stiffly, grabs
my ass, stiffly. I fall into him with aplomb, just like I was taught.
I give a little moan, a little introductory, let’s-get-busy moan. I put my
hands down his pants. I say “Oh, God” and quiver like I’m touching gold. I
flip a switch with my foot and the bubble machine clunks on, which is when

I do the script:

“Doin’ it on another planet is out of this world! I love doin’ it! Do you
love doin’ it?” And then, in a bursting whisper, “Let’s space-fuck!” Then I
let my eyes sort of glaze and roll back, like Jesus-wow this is hot. It only
takes fifteen minutes.

Chief Betty and I run to the window to see what car he gets into. He
gets into a Mercedes with a dog in the front seat and the windows not even
cracked. “What a shit,” Chief Betty says. She’s a total softy for animals.
At 3:00, Chief Betty and I go to Pizza Hut. We order a thick-crust meatlovers
and chow down, not having had lunch on account of Frieda calling
in sick again. When she does that, and it’s happening more and more these
days, Chief Betty and I split her appointments where we can, and put the
tip money away in the vacation jar, which is just an empty peanut butter
jar with “Vacation Jar” written on it in big bubble letters underneath a cutout of Christian Slater with no shirt. We’re saving for a trip to the Sandals
Resort in Antigua where we will be worshipped by all the bronze hotties
who live there year-round. See, to them we’ll be the exotic ones—two sexy
girls from America with careers and MasterCards and independent lives.
Chief Betty goes on and on about her bitchy family on the reservation thirty miles away, how all they do is bitch at her. “Bitch bitch bitch!” she
says, like I don’t already know how she feels. I suck on my straw and nod
along.

Then Chief Betty asks, “Did you see Nasty’s scar today?” She’s talking
about Nasty’s recent c-section. A few months ago Miss Nasty had twins,
Albertina and Leaf, who she brings in when Vicki, our boss, is away, nurses
them right there in the welcome room in front of my clients.
“Yeah, I saw it,” I say, my stomach churning with cheese breadsticks,
which makes me think, oh jeez, it’s like I’m pregnant with breadsticks.

“Pretty sick, huh?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “That scar was grisly and repugnant.”

“No fucking way I’m having kids,” Chief Betty says, and I secretly think
who’d have kids with you, with your big nose and your bad habits and your
man voice.

After Pizza Hut, we go to TJ Maxx. She’s redoing her bedroom in this
very tasteful Laura Ashley style, so she heads straight to the back where all
the flowery bedspreads are on clearance. I try on strapless formals. I look
definitely hot in two, just okay in one, and more than a little hippy in the last
three. Well fuck. No more Pizza Hut for this Fat-Assy. No doubt, Mama’s
right. For the last few years she’s been telling me I’ve put it on and I’ve just
chalked it up to her ordinary meanness, but no, look at it, she’s right.
Mama’s been mean to me ever since what I know she considers my
biggest, most terrible failure, the loss of the 1992 Kansas State Spelling Bee,
which was when I was thirteen, when I wore my hair straight down to
my shoulders with my bangs curled dramatically under, when I stuck tiny
glitter-stars to my eyelids and penned fortune cookie fortunes on the bottom
of my feet for good luck. I was a shoo-in, because I had a gift, because I was in many ways like my hero, the first American female superstar, Annie Oakley, a woman with exactly the right biological ingredients to be the best in the world in at least one thing, which for her was sharpshooting, which for me is spelling. Annie Oakley had extra-good vision and extra-good steadiness, and was short, so much closer to the things on the ground she shot at, and how lucky for her to be born that way and to live in a time and place when she could discover and explore her talent, in Ohio, in the 1800s.

I have such talent. The teachers who really got me even said so, told me privately that spelling was my glory. Words just stay in my head, and I have immediate access to their correct spelling, with something like 99.8% accuracy. In the regional bees, I didn’t hesitate like the other kids, these
swishy boys and heavy-breathing girls who’d stand at the podium for a full minute with their fingers in their asses, repeating the word over and over, wasting everyone’s time asking for roots and origins. And the judges smiling at them! When it was my turn, the word they’d give me (cauterize, beauteous, fauteuil, anything!) would just arrange itself in my head real fast, one letter after the other, bam-bam-bam, like shots from a double-action
revolver. And I’d spit it out just as fast. But no one smiled at me.

I was supposed to go on to nationals, which I could’ve won easily by all
accounts. I had a gift, a gift meant to yield fabulous things, like a big college
scholarship, like a ticket to whatever I wanted my future to be. Those were
the lines I was fed, by Mama, by others.

But I did not win! During the state finals in Topeka I messed up on the word coiffeur, which means “a male hairdresser.” But it was not my fault! I
knew how to spell fucking coiffeur, please know. The judge (this mustached
man, this robber of my dreams, how I hate him) pronounced it like coiffure,
which is a word that means “a way of arranging the hair.” Which is not
coiffeur.

I was somewhat arrogant, I admit. I did not ask for the definition, I did
not ask that it be used in a sentence. I wanted to wow people. So I walked to
the mike, fluffed the fuchsia pageant dress I’d begged off my cousin Delayna,
and smiling, staring straight at my Mama where she sat at the edge of her
seat in the parents’ row, her corsage dyed to match my dress, both her hands
raised with fingers crossed, I spelled coiffure. Not coiffeur.

The judge said, “I’m sorry, Miss, that is incorrect,” three times before I
understood him.

And then things got a little nasty. I was like, “No, that’s not fair,” and Mama was yelling stuff like, “Oh no you don’t, not to my daughter,” while standing up on her chair, and then we got booted. All the way home, a terrible five-hour drive from Topeka, Mama cried. She pulled over at a rest stop just to slap me. She made me go wash the fortunes off my feet in that stinky rest stop bathroom.

I get a little teary thinking of what could have been, and all whom I’ve disappointed, Mama and definitely Trevyn, my twin soul, whose ghost I still communicate with sometimes via Ouija board, sometimes via the mirrored ceilings at work, sometimes via the television channel that would be HBO if I had any of the pay channels. Trevyn’s ghost says that even if I’d gone on and won nationals and been some sort of intellectual superstar we’d have never met, and he’d still have been killed in the tornado that razed the Dairy Queen where he worked decorating ice cream cakes. But maybe not, I so often think, and maybe in some way my losing made him die in a cataclysmic chain of events that ends with me here, in this scummy dressing room, heading steadily towards an unsavory fat whoredom, thinking of nothing but my sad little life, but secretly, underneath those thoughts, thinking where might I get a corn dog.

I’m about overcome by my emotions when Chief Betty finds me. She cackles and jabs me through the dressing room curtain. She says stinky-tits, stinky-tits. Well ha ha. Chief Betty does not like vulgar displays of emotion and I do not wish to appear weak in front of her, so I sniff up the tears and steady myself. I pull back the curtain, go “ta-da.”

At home I do a hundred crunches pronto. Then I turn on the TV and find Trevyn waiting for me like always. You can hardly see him except for a faint outline, though it’s clear he’s a frigging hottie with Johnny Depp bone structure. In the afterlife it’s windy, so his transparent hair always blows about behind him.

Evidently he’s having one of those weird days where he’s unresponsive and zombie-like, which happens from time to time, because when I say, “Hey, Babe,” he just stares at me through the TV snow, then starts reciting from the Cowley County Community College spring course catalog, which I have no idea how he has access to, but he does.

“Oh you ass-munch,” I shout at him. “I get your freaking hint!”

But I don’t turn him off, I just turn him down a little, then snuggle myself under the covers of my bed. It’s so hard to sleep lately, and the only trick I know is to try to imagine what my own skeleton looks like, which works but is scary.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, Trevyn’s still going on and on, but now just random shit, like about the time he took apart the engine of my Corsica that one real chilly Easter and dirty transmission fluid leaked all over him, magenta and streaky, and the time I went as Sexy Annie Oakley
for Halloween and he went as a giant marshmallow, and how when we
stuck our heads down to bob for apples, he tried to stick his tongue in my
ear but I elbowed him in a jokey way, and how it was then that he knew we
were twin souls, and that if one of us ever died, that one would haunt the
other one forever, not out of meanness, but out of love.

Next time Steve visits he wants me to call him Daddy. I say, “Sure, Daddy.
Anything else, Daddy?”

...Continued in Opium 5.