This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
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This happened at the turn of the century.
I hurt my back working construction, and when the compensation checks started I moved to a crack motel out on Highway 80. Eight stone cottages horseshoed around an office built to look like a lighthouse. Bonnie and Clyde hid out there once. Now it was rockheads and whores, a registered sex offender and me.
Thirty dollars a night, one sixty a week. No soap, no pillow case, one towel. Roaches you could hear stampede up the walls.
Anna, the Asian woman in the office, was pretty but mean as a shark on the rag. She had a German Shepherd that stuck its snout through a hole in the chain link fence and snapped at your legs.
That dog could’ve been a stuffed toy, I’d still been paranoid around it.
Fucked up.
I quit reporting to probation. No pee tests for me.
In the cottage next door was a Mexican girl about fifteen with skinny legs and a potbelly. She had runny sores on her neck.
“You want a blowjob, I can wear a towel on my neck. Or toilet paper.”
I made her wear both but she wasn’t very good. She said thank you after. I never had anybody say that.
Couple days later she beat on my door. My heart seized up—I was in bad shape for noises. She had an orange dress on a hanger and some stuff in a Wal-Mart sack. Kicked out.
The Holy in the Sky had already written me out of the will. If I turned away a sick kid, he’d put me down sooner not later.
I told her she had to score her own crack.
Gloria started using my mattress for business. She didn’t have many customers but a ten dollar whore fills chronic needs. Once or twice a night I had to exit the honeymoon suite.
Skitzing outside at night, that’s a whole new kind of terror, noises especially. Fatal impacts on Anna’s bug light. Owls in deep space. Car doors slamming like ambush fire.
Imagined or not, that German Shepherd back-hoeing under the fence.
With a bottle of Mad Dog I could sit at the picnic table beside the lighthouse maybe fifteen minutes. All Gloria needed usually.
Sometimes she’d start hollering, I’d run in and pull a trick off of her. A psychobilly with razor blades. A wheelchair veteran off his meds. A guy dead set on anal, waggling a foot long dick. Nothing pretty.
The worst was Sondra, a cycle-dyke Gloria put up with because she paid extra. To explain this little bitch I assumed Hannibal Lector and the monster in Alien had a love child.
First time I ran in on her, Gloria’s head was pinned in a dresser drawer and Sondra was carving into Gloria’s back with a screwdriver. When I chunked Sondra on the bed, swear to God, she coiled and hissed like a snake. I beat her flat with the lamp.
Cleaning up Gloria’s back I could make out something like a G-clef. Might have been a dollar sign backward. I couldn’t figure out how Sondra got so much done.
Next time the little bitch roared up on that shitty Sportster, I told Gloria to run her off. Not unless I had fifty bucks, Gloria said. That night Sondra chased my roomie outside with a pair of vise grips. They ran into the woods behind the motel.
I went in my room, locked my door. Smoked a rock and watched porn.
I didn’t see Gloria for two days.
She got back, she asked me did I know where she could sell Sondra’s bike.
“You got a title?”
“No.”
“Check with Dennis.”
Dennis the sex offender had a straight job and two cars that ran. I figured him for some cash.
I didn’t ask about Sondra.
Dennis gave Gloria two hundred for the bike. I wanted to throw a party, but Gloria bought four roses dipped in real gold from Anna and a bag of weed from a trick. It was sad, the trick not letting Gloria trade out.
Spring slipped off. Summer bore down. I hadn’t reported in seven months. Even if my probation officer had bothered to come around, he wouldn’t have recognized the aboriginal me.
The comp checks were still coming. Staying high now was like diving repeatedly over an empty pool and not landing. Something had to change. The only way I could see that happening was to run out of money and go to jail. Which was okay. I mean, I knew a crackivore who traded a kidney for it.
Fucked up.
Every few days I could sleep. During one of these spells the cottage caught on fire. I woke up to flames like living wallpaper. My heart stopped—I thought for good. In that split second I saw all the inaccuracies of my life.
At the hospital Dennis told me they found her body. The cops, firemen, whoever.
My burns were mostly second degree, which the doctor said are the painful kind but don’t scar. I still felt like that guy in English Patient. Without the friendly nurse. Mine, I think they knew the story and figured I got what was coming to me.
Anyway, Dennis said they found Gloria’s body in the cottage. I asked him how he knew and he said he took off work to watch them sort through the debris. He saw them scraping the thing into a bag. She was black and came apart. You know, crumbly. Like bacon in the microwave too long.
Dennis said it was arson, you know, somebody set the fire, but they couldn’t figure out why.
Anna came to the hospital, too. She brought her lawyer and yelled at me.
My P. O. found me. He said I was going to jail soon as the blisters dried up.
First day of the millennium, she called. I’d been out of jail a week, living with my mother.
“Hey, Curtis. You know who this is?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“How you doin’?”
“All right.”
“Me, too. My neck’s all better.”
There was this long silence, me trying to be mad at her. Hoping she at least felt bad. But I had thought a lot about that already and decided she didn’t feel much of anything.
I just hung up.
It turned out okay. Nobody’s going to miss Sondra.
And I kept my kidney.
