Girlchild Read online

  The Government, known interchangeably as the State or the County, is the most feared entity outside the Calle. Its laws are unpredictable and its agents, known commonly as Johnny Law, the Man, or Those Fuckers, are considered difficult to appease. Dealings with the State are usually summed up via the following phrases: “they get you coming and going,” “can’t win for losing,” and “you can’t squeeze blood from a stone.” Despite the constant fear they engender, official vehicles are rarely seen patrolling the Calle, even to herd up the truant children who blatantly roam its curving streets. As so many Calle teenagers are what the State terms “emancipated minors,” a condition most commonly referred to on the Calle as “grown,” and already raising families of their own, the police have stopped bothering to keep track of who should or should not be in school and where their parents are.

  The Calle attitude toward sex and marriage is lenient yet constant as necessitated by the fear of being alone with oneself. It follows then that the main rituals of the Calle are first dates and funerals. Because of the effort extended in attempting to make a good impression, a long courtship is difficult to sustain. Buttoning shirts to the top button and forgoing a baseball hat causes emotional upset for most Calle males, and for this reason the wedding ceremony is also kept very short, most commonly based on the following pattern: the couple sits together for a public blessing by an elder in pressed pants and plastic nail tips, and there is an exchange of rings, or the promise of such exchange, and cigarettes. Quickie and drive-through wedding chapels have been erected throughout Reno for just this purpose, turning Nevada into a drive-through state for rites of passage. Both weddings and divorces are handled quickly and forgotten easily, as the many wedding rings rusting through their gold plate at the bottom of the Truckee River attest.

  Most other rituals concern the Calle bartenders and involve recovering lost souls who come to the Truck Stop or other local drinking establishments to be revived after their shifts downtown have ended. Bartenders serve the workers as well as listen to the much-repeated stories of those who no longer work, whose dimmed eyes suggest their souls are no longer recoverable, their mouths collecting stubborn white spit in the corners despite how much alcohol is poured into them. Alcohol is often considered the root cause of both the loss and the revival of Calle souls, but in some cases, usually those of young men whose eyes are still relatively bright and whose mouths don’t need wiping, it is understood that the bartender, if female and “a fox,” may be the one causing the mood swings and not the spirits. Should a patron’s mood swing toward the aggressive, he is immediately “cut off,” or refused service, by bartenders who are constantly vigilant of a bar’s contagious atmosphere. Violence is kept safely at home, as social pressure in the form of being eighty-sixed from any of the local bars is the most important governing factor in Calle society.

  jaywalk

  Mama makes false starts across the Calle’s single strip of busy pavement, the one that separates the Truck Stop from Hobee’s. She waits for the delivery trucks and lost tourists to roar past, and when her turn comes she pauses for balance and to check direction. And on some nights that direction doesn’t point toward home but right back inside, where the neon flows warmer and the only balance that’s worth a good goddamn is the one on her bar tab.

  periwinkle

  “Look at me,” Mama says. I’ve got a color-by-numbers book but I don’t read letters yet and Mama is tired of being bothered. I asked her which colors match Four and Seven already, and colored all those spots in, but when I ask about Three, she’s had it. She copycats, “Which one’s Three? What’s Seven? Show me Four.” She takes my crayon box and slams the colors out on the table, grabs one before it rolls off the edge, and matches it, letter side up, to the letters that jumble next to the number Four in the coloring book that is filled with smiling dinosaurs and the smiling flowers they eat. The Four I can recognize because numbers are easy and because this one is my own, my “this many” fingers I hold up when strangers lean in and ask, “And how old are you?”

  “O-R-A-N-G-E,” Mama spells it, her nail creasing into the page as she marks off the letters. “O-R-A-N-G-E. See how they match?” I follow her nail again, this time under the letters on the crayon’s label. “Do you get it or not?”

  Mama’s nail is painted a mean shade of R-E-D like her voice. That’s number Two. The red polish she always wears is to cover up number Seven, the Y-E-L-L-O-W her fingers turn from smoking her cigarettes all the way to the end, and all her yelling and slamming makes me B-L-U-E. Number One.

  I get it.

  The flame from her lighter flickers against her glasses, she draws the smoke in, breathes it back out, the smoke comes floating across the table G-R-A-Y, and I pick up the next crayon.

  shirley rose

  Grandma didn’t start out smart, she’d say, and however many years passed she never admitted to feeling much smarter. She didn’t feel too smart when she was thirteen and pregnant, and didn’t know why or how, and had an abortion on a table in a room in the dimly lit part of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. She didn’t feel too smart when she was sick for weeks after, crawling from her bed to the toilet to relieve both ends, her mouth lined with fever blisters from the infection that came and went in a flash, just like the baby’s father.

  Less than two years later, despite the scars and the lessons learned, she had another mouth to feed anyway. My mama. And then more and more, six by the time she was done and finally legal, twenty-one years old. Mama, true to tradition, found herself pregnant at age fifteen. Grandma had been too afraid to tell her daughters how babies happen, superstitious that simply saying the words would bring them to being, and so her daughters found out the same way she had. But Grandma wouldn’t put her girls—and girls they were—through the near-death of her own experience, and so Mama gave birth to my brother Winston when she was just three days into being sixteen years old. And then more mouths to feed, and then mine. But by the time I came along, even Roe v. Wade had a chance of sticking, and with it, so Grandma believed, the possibility of a Hendrix girl reaching womanhood with more than one choice in front of her. Grandma insisted that I take every opportunity, and she never missed a single opportunity to remind me of that expectation. Her superstitions about sharing the facts of life were so long gone by the time I came along that she didn’t even knock wood when she told me I’d better keep my legs closed if I wanted to keep my future open.

  the great strain of being

  From the side of highways all through the Sierras, signs say CHAINS INSTALLED $15. The desperate letters—and if your winter nights are spent on the icy shoulder with semis charging by, you are desperate—are rewritten every winter on the backs of flattened cigarette cartons, on the insides of cereal boxes, and left to flutter, hopeful in headlights on cold nights, on the mountain roads that rush people past the Calle to the casinos that beckon on the well-lit side of these Nevada hills. The signs do their work and drivers pull over, hop out long enough to get the chains from the trunk, while Dennis, sweating inside his Kmart jacket, crawls underneath the car, breathes exhaust, and hooks cold chains together. After an evening on the mountain, he climbs onto a barstool at the Truck Stop and hands Mama bills stiff with road salt, his fingers as bent as his spine, but when his blood flows warm again from alcohol and company and his hands get their feeling back, he gets up to pull a cloud of toilet paper from the roll and sits at the bar shaping gardens of flowers for the lushes and their boyfriends who’ll buy him a shot if the timing is right. But on the mountainside no one cares about the magic he can work with his hands. The cold metal sticks to his skin while the people sitting in their warm car above him are impatient for home, where the only thing cold is the ice falling from the dispenser built right into the refrigerator door, ice that is crushed or cubed at the push of a button. The man under their car has gloves but doesn’t wear them, wears them only between cars because they slow him down, and he is slowing down enough already. Was a time when he could do eight
cars an hour, but those days pass as the younger boys push him farther and farther from the summit.

  reno 411

  Tahoe’s about an hour’s drive from Reno and I’m pretty sure our firewood comes from there. Trees that knew the sound of the flowing waters of the Truckee and had critters thriving in their branches now sit in pieces under tarps and carports in Calle driveways to await their fate in Calle stoves. Trees have to be imported our way because, except under the command of Grandma’s iron green thumb, nothing grows here. Instead of wildlife all we’ve got is nightlife. Reno is just like Tahoe, only without anything beautiful, Tahoe but without the fresh air and fir trees, without fathers and sons out for their first fishing trip. Tiptoe up behind Tahoe and put a hand over its mouth. Bear down slowly until it doesn’t fight the developers pawing its land. That’s Reno. Add gamblers, prostitutes, and tourists so focused on their own thin dimes they can’t spare one red cent for each other, then put a blinking sign above it all that says WELCOME TO THE BIGGEST LITTLE SHITTY IN THE WORLD.

  dirt

  Grandma liked to refer to us as the Queens of the Calle. Here’s how she figured: Grandma’s trailer was a 1964 Regal, Mama’s and mine a 1972 Nobility, and if these homes, despite their lack of sewer pipe or central heating, could be factory-christened with fancy names in curling chrome, then so could we. Despite the lack of even a proper “throne” in Queen Grandma’s case, she insisted we have titles befitting the miracle of our design and not the reality of our destination.

  To her last days, Grandma could count on having running water but not always on having pipes that made it all the way to a septic tank. Owing to the cost of laying pipe and the trouble of permits, there are usually two varieties of tank in the trailer park: propane and septic. Grandma was always warm enough propane-wise because propane is available in small tanks, get-you-to-the-next-check-sized tanks, but she seldom had such a reliable hookup water-wise, and even when she did, there were risks of flooding, of the system backing up. There’s no sugarcoating it. Old septic tanks can’t handle shit. All of that glorious bathroom art consisting of grimacing cartoon characters, pants around their ankles, accompanied by witty verse about what can be flushed and what cannot: No hair combings / use the basket / there’s a darn good reason / why we ask it! These were likely written by relatives of mine and, along with color prints of unicorns, rampant and rainbowed, are the cornerstone of the White Trash Canon.

  No septic tank meant that Grandma had to handle her business, her “straightening up” as she liked to call it, another way. Usually the vehicle for this business was a Folgers Coffee can, the big one. And once, when staying over at Grandma’s, before she left the Calle, I left something in the coffee can. I was too young to realize that when Grandma had business of this sort she didn’t use the can but took herself across the street to the laundry house, and when the morning came and my deed discovered, Grandma was outraged, expecting as she did that I was born with a ready trailer-park instinct, and at the same time, a desire to leave it behind. I learned my lesson hard. The shit we create doesn’t ever disappear, especially when we leave it for someone else to clean up.

  Grandma did forgive me for the mess I’d left, but not before I saw her crazy rise, bright and blinding as the sun coming up over the mountains on the label of the Folgers can, as she smashed the lid on it that morning, opened the front door of the Regal, and threw the can into the street. Sometimes you can’t know what will set a body off, open it up quick and hot and show you in a flash that place inside that’s grim as meat and bent as bone, too delicate for touch and too raw for air. Her words went as wild as her eyes, “You’re no better than a dog,” and left no room for a breath of sorry, so I went outside to get away from the cursing. The can had rolled underneath her old van and I crawled toward it, gravel and grease sticking to my koala-bear PJ’s, and pushed until it rolled out the other side. I took it behind the lot to empty it, kicking up desert sand to cover my mistake. Then I pulled the hose away from the house and sprayed the can’s inside until it was supermarket shiny and I could see my face in the silver, angry and red. I stomped up the steps and threw the clean coffee can through the doorway onto the carpet, threw the lid in after it, and then slammed the door shut and sat my butt down on the bottom step to await retribution. But none came. Inside there was only quiet.

  And then laughter. The laughter went on for so long and sounded so much like my grandma, my usual and safe Grandma, that I couldn’t help but laugh too, until the screen door cracked open and Grandma said, “Go wash your feet, girl, and then get inside here and eat some breakfast.”

  This little lesson in trailer-park etiquette would be the big fight of our lives, but like drunks after a barroom brawl, an understanding was burned between us that would flicker even during a blackout. Sometimes it takes drawing a little blood to really know someone. We knew how hard we could push, but we knew how much we could forgive.

  I never stopped bringing my headaches and heartaches to her, in person or in the mail. Even after Grandma got out, as is said in trailer parks and other ghettoes, where leaving is an act of will akin to suicide, in force and determination, and in the loneliness it creates for those left behind as well as those who have moved on. I was as comfortable sharing my thoughts in an envelope as I was at her elbow, and whatever way they found her, she did her lunatic best to solve every problem. Even when it came to the questions I was afraid to bring to Mama, about just what fucking exactly had been done to me and why nobody saw:

  16 July 1988, the last hour of Thursday

  You’re suffering an unhappy time. You need no grand fillip or tired old clichés from Shirley Rose. You’ve heard them all. So will just write down a hug. Tell you I love you & reassure you that every life is full of “bleep,” all well worth slipping in! Everyone “loses” some of their early childhood memories, some more than others. It’s a protection device I suppose. When there’s a “thing” you don’t remember just tell me & we’ll “find” it for you.

  Always,

  Grammers

  nobody

  The estimated burn time for the average mobile home, top to bottom, aerial antennae to cinder block, drywall to stucco, is sixty seconds, and I do mean flat, aluminum to ash in the space of a “Brought to you by” or “Tonight at eleven.” And those sixty seconds are up even faster in homes whose only source of heating are propane tanks and woodstoves, the easiest sources of heat, because nobody needs your social for a gallon of propane and nobody checks your credit for a truckload of wood. Propane and kindling mean it’s a safe bet that nobody from the County is going to come down and see how your cables hook up. Nobody checks to see if you’re living right if you don’t try to do it official.

  single file

  My family tree leaves men largely out of the picture. I’m making it look like these women bore their children on their own. That’s nearly right but that’s not why I forget them. The men were mostly bad except for my brothers, who are innocent, and except for my pops, who wasn’t bad, just bearded, at least from what I can remember about him, a friendly man rolling onions across the carpet, his beard flashing smiling teeth in my mind. I can’t say for sure who left who first, but he didn’t come with us when Mama decided we were moving to Reno, where Grandma had laid the best foundation a trailer park family gets by learning the ins and outs of the Calle for us. And whatever I remember, all the men, bad, bearded, or brothers, are long gone, and maybe these aren’t my memories after all. Maybe they belong to V. White, “the worker,” whose strict accounts of that time before I was born, whose careful renderings of the life Mama used to live, subdue my own muted memories until hers is the loudest and maybe the only reliable voice. And because V. White has such authority, vested in her by none other than the State of California, the golden state of Mama’s early, golden years, and because V. White remembers everything with such 12-point precision, I’ll leave the judgments and the recollecting and the mystery of my father to her:

  4-8-69 HOME VISIT


  HENDRIX, Johanna #310,788

  Mrs. Hendrix has not been at home to receive several earlier calls from the worker, but she was at home this a.m., and had company. Some bearded gentleman had brought her some vegetables and onions. Mrs. Hendrix’s housekeeping standards continue to be good, and all her children of school age were in school, the youngest, Bobby, at home playing on the floor with the bearded guest.

  The purpose of the worker’s call was to encourage Mrs. Hendrix to follow through with the report from the Department of Employment. Mrs. Hendrix has taken the aptitude test and the note from Dr. Crampton, counselor, indicated that she had not reported for subsequent counseling. The worker was impressed with her score, as the test resulted in good potential for vocational training. The worker took the liberty of copying verbatim the comments from the counselor on her results and his opinion of her potential, in view of her limited formal education. Telling Mrs. Hendrix of her test results acted as a real spark, and Mrs. Hendrix went immediately to the telephone while the worker was still in the home, and called for an appointment with Dr. Crowell. She will accept their recommendations and seems enthusiastic about undertaking High School completion and job training, to make her able to provide for herself and her family independent of her unstable ex-husband, Gene Hendrix.