Geek Love Part 29

"I was thirty-eight years old," muses Miss Oly, "before I ever felt the burn of whiskey on my lip. But I knew it right away for what it was."

"The virgin's arms," nods Jimmy. "G.o.d's breath."

"I am amazed at all the years I spent without whiskey," says Oly.

"Just as well. It takes a lady of a certain age to contain the stuff. Particularly the Irish. No offense but a bit of weathering and experience are required not to go right off the edge with it. I would hesitate to serve Irish to a green schoolgirl. Mixes and vodka are enough for them to go wrong on. I couldn't look at myself shaving if I poured Irish for the young."

"Don't tell me you look?"

The diplomat McLarnin senses a delicacy about mirrors in Miss Oly, and deftly switches his bulk to block her exposure to the jolt of her own image reflected in shreds behind the bar bottles.

"You've a voice like mulled toddy, Miss O," grins Jimmy. "I cried like a busted banker at your story on the radio this morning."

"Hush," grunts Oly, ducking a peek into the empty darkness behind her. "The Story Lady of Station KBNK isn't supposed to be boozing at ten A.M. Today's show was an old tape. I called in sick. Besides, McLarnin, I have the voice of a baritone kazoo and your real name is Nelson. You were born in Nebraska. Admit it."

"You're bitter this morning, Miss O. And it leads you to grievous error. I was born up the street at Good Sam, fifty-six years ago, and I've lived in the sound of its sirens ever since. Not unlike yourself, I imagine."

"I was born in a trailer. No idea where it was parked at the time. But I was conceived here."

At 5:30 I am sitting on the windowsill of a deserted conference room on the fourth floor of the TAG Club, watching the circle drive inside the entrance gates. Miss Lick's sedan blows in on time and the lackey in the club uniform opens her door for her. He takes her keys and tools the car out to her private parking s.p.a.ce as she heads for the entrance. I get down off the sill and settle into an armchair to watch the wall clock.

I can feel her in the building. With my eyes closed I can see her crossing the lobby, nodding to the woman at the reception desk, clumping down the carpeted corridor to the elevator. I know exactly how she will stare at the elevator door, waiting for it to open, with her big hands folded in front of her to prevent fidgeting.

Usually I am in the locker room when she walks in. Today her face - ready to smile as she pushes through the door - will lift in puzzlement. She will skin down and get into her tank suit wondering about me. I can almost hear her splas.h.i.+ng into the footbath and feel the air move as the locker door hisses closed behind her. I can smell her heat mingling with the metallic green fumes of the chlorine in the unventilated cubicle.

There is no bulb in the ceiling fixture of the footbath. The only light is the grey murk that comes through the small diamond-shaped window in the door to the pool. She will be standing there, ankle-deep in chlorine water, peering through the thick, wire-reinforced gla.s.s. She will be searching the pool for me.

She stands, rotating her big shoulders, her elbows flapping like wings. She bends, hiking a foot out of the blue water, running her fingers between her toes, trading feet for the same ritual.

Planting both feet in the soup again she takes the plastic quart jar of chlorine from its niche in the tiled wall, opens it, and, ignoring the measuring scoop, sprinkles a goodly pinch of the sea-green crystals over the surface of the water.

The plan is simple. She is always the last one out of the pool. The lifeguard locks up and leaves as Miss Lick begins her second mile of laps. The respected Miss Lick has her own keys and can come in to swim at 3 A.M. if she wants to. She can certainly swim alone with her dwarf pal and lock up behind herself.

I, pale thing, always climb out before Miss Lick, and have showered and dressed before her pork palms slap the pool deck to hoist her out. Sitting on the bench in the locker room, I can always hear her sighing and swis.h.i.+ng for long peaceful minutes in the footbath before she comes in to scour herself under the shower. Miss Lick never gets enough of that chlorine footbath.

There is plenty of time to empty the full chlorine jar into the water of the footbath. It's simple to close the footbath door to the locker room and turn its deadbolt, and then slip out to the corridor and down to the hall door opening onto the pool.

I stand, silent, behind the tall stack of paddleboards until Miss Lick emerges from the pool, cascading water, and stomps over to the footbath door. As the door wheezes closed behind her I am there to twist the deadbolt.

The monster is caught in the closet with her eyes stinging in the rising chlorine. She is pounding the sides of her fists on the door to the locker room as I scuttle for the hall, run the few silent yards to the other entrance, and gasp my way in with my heart screaming hide-and-seek in my ears.

Her pounding fills the room. I race to my locker, scatter it empty, an ammonia jug in each hand, dragging toward that little hole in the door.

"Oly!" she bellows beyond the wood slab. The name freezes my lungs. The skin all over my body rises in pimples of fear.

"Oly! Are you all right?"

Now she is pounding on the poolside door. The drum wave moves away from me as I shove the tip of the hose into the hole. The stink of chlorine is strong from the small hole and my eyes water from bending close to it.

"Ahoy!" she roars at the far door. The pounding wood is like the beat of fists on my spine. With the jug under one arm, I carefully pour ammonia down the mouth of the funnel, watch it sear downward through the clear plastic tubing and rush through the door, toward its mingling with the chlorine and a new toxic ident.i.ty.

"Ahoy! Ahoy!!" Mary Lick would never yell "Help!"

A bubble of hysteria giggles up through me, rocking the jug tucked under my arm. A smack of ammonia fume hits my nose and the roof of my open mouth, burning. I turn my head, gasping. Almost spilling.

I hear splashes beyond the wood, and the pounding rips out again above my head. "Oly! Oly! Oly!" she screams. Her voice is harsh and ragged now. The ammonia jug is nearly empty. It's taking too long. The pounding stops. In the silence I can hear the faint trickle of the last ammonia running out of the tube and into the chlorine water on the other side. A weight hits the door, inches away from me, and slides, squeaking downward. Silence. Then the whisper, "What the f.u.c.k?" The words rush out of the funnel into my face with a strange sick breath that sets me coughing. She's found the tube. The funnel jerks from my hands, whips wildly through the air, smacks the wall, hops and twists on the floor. The funnel's open mouth shrieks, "What the f.u.c.k?" in a whisper. The end of the tubing spurts out of the hole beneath the hinge. The tube and the funnel fall dead to the floor. The whisper comes from the hole, "Daddy?" as I scramble away from the hole on my knees, coughing as the whisper comes again. I choke and hold my breath to hear as the hole says, "Please ... Please."

I know her locker combination. Scuttling for the lock I can hear the hiss of the whisper but I can't make out the words that press themselves through the hole. The dial sticks and clogs and I can hardly see through my tears. I miss and try again, with a high whine coming out of my own throat. The lock falls to the floor.

The holster is under her suit jacket, on the hook. I yank a bench close and climb to reach the gun. Jump back to the door on tiptoes with the fat gun heavy in one hand. I reach for the k.n.o.b to twist open the deadbolt and dodge as the door gushes open against me. The gas comes out and I choke and fall to my knees with fire in my eyes and a rake in my nose and throat.

She is huge, lying across the doorway. Her breath sounds high and it bubbles. Her white arms have tumbled over her red bloated face. She moans, a small sound from the wet heap of her chest. I drop the gun and pull her long arm by its wrist, crying, "Mary! Help me. Mary, move. Come on, Mary. Oh, Mary, I'm so sorry." And I am sorry and I don't care if she wakes and kills me if only she will wake up and move. I never meant this. I never wanted to hurt her. I only needed for her to die. Not this pain. Not this fear.

"Mary!" I yell, yanking on the heavy arm. "I didn't mean it like this." Miss Lick's eyes pop open, staring upside-down and furious. Her wrist flicks loose from my hands, swatting me, groping for me as I fall clattering against the forgotten gun on the floor. Her hand snaps onto my throat, hot and hard. A white light comes on behind my eyes as she lifts me above her with my right hand fluttering at her fingers on my throat and my left hand heavy with the gun. I am rising, until my ears explode and I begin a long, slow fall at the end of her arm, toward the tile floor, watching the sudden black hole where her right eye was, her big legs flopping in the footbath and the sputtering roll at the crotch of her tank suit as a dark liquid runs onto the tile. Her hand is still huge on my throat, but she's gone. I'm alone.

News article from the May 18 Portland Oregonian: Two women whose bodies were found huddled in the footbath of the Thomas R. Lick indoor swimming pavilion of the Timber Athletic Club following a hazardous fume alarm this morning were apparently victims of murder and suicide. Portland Police Detective M. L. Zusman, directing the on-site investigation, told reporters that both women had apparently died of gunshot wounds and that a gun had been found at the scene. The exact cause of the deaths will not be confirmed until the completion of post-mortem examinations by the Multnomah County Medical Examiner.

Investigation at the scene was delayed by the presence of irritating fumes from an unidentified gas present in the pool and locker-room area. The gas is currently undergoing laboratory a.n.a.lysis for identification. Fumes were first noticed by a janitor who entered the pool area for regularly scheduled cleaning at 8 A.M. Firefighters who responded to the alarm discovered the two bodies.

"At first we didn't know who did what to who," said Detective Zusman. "But a note was found on the scene. Or rather a notebook which seems to give an account of the incident up to a certain point." Contents of the note have not been revealed. The names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of their families. It is not known whether the victims were members of the prestigious private athletic and social club. TAC spokesmen refused to discuss the incident until more information is available. The Lick Pavilion will be closed until the police investigation is completed.

Earlier reports that one of the bodies was that of a handicapped child have since been contradicted. Police confirm that both victims were adults.

Delivered by regular mail, May 19: My Dear Miranda, Since you were a year old you've been told you were an orphan. This was not true. Your father died when you were very young but I, your mother, have been watching over you until now. I am your mother, I, the dwarf in Room #21.

Your name is not Miranda Barker but Miranda Binewski. Barker was the ironic label chosen by the Reverend Mother Aurora when you were still in diapers and first entered the convent school.

You will have a lot of questions. Enclosed are two keys. The long key is to my room, #21. On the floor in the closet is a big leather trunk. The short key will open the trunk. The top tray inside is full of your school records, photographs, sixteen years' worth of letters from Reverend Mother Aurora and Sister Lucy. They're addressed to me and they report on you. That should be enough to convince you that I'm not imagining our relations.h.i.+p out of drugs or lunacy.

The big manila envelope in the top tray of the trunk contains the deed and tax records for the house and all my financial papers. The deed is in your name. You can withdraw from, or write checks on, the trust account. You will also find the papers for the vault where all the other Binewskis currently rest. Please note that cremation is a family tradition. Beneath the tray is all the record there is of my history and yours.

Please take care of Crystal Lil. Her medical records and prescriptions are in the white folder in the big envelope. The trash goes out on Thursday nights and her bills need to be paid on the fifth of each month. She is your grandmother.

After twenty careful years of not revealing myself to you, I find it hard to reverse the process. For all you lacked in a parent, I hope you can eventually forgive me. I can't be sure what the trunk will mean to you, or the news that you aren't alone, that you are one of us. Yet I hope that someday you'll come to collect us all from the shelves of the vault. Take down Arty and Chick and Papa and the twins, and all that's left of the Jar Kin, and, by then, Lily and me. Open our metal jars and pour all the Binewski dust together into that big battered loving cup that first held only Grandpa B. Bolt us to the hood of your traveling machine and take us on the road again.

With love, Olympia Binewski.

(Known as McGurk).

Katherine Dunn.

In Her Own Words.

My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards, and palms. My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter. My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was two and I have never met him and have no memory of him. The story is that my older brother, 13 or so at the time, ran him out of the house with a kitchen knife for speaking roughly to our beloved Mom.

I was born in Garden City, Kansas, on the day the UN. treaty was signed, October 24, 1945, the only girl in a family of boys who spoiled me and taught me to swim, use a slingshot (for keeping one's distance in a fight), climb trees, and ride motorcycles. We were migrant workers during my early years-following the crops from farm to farm picking strawberries, beans, cherries, oranges, walnuts-living out of a car sometimes, tenant farming sometimes, holing up in government housing or rentals in the winters or when someone in the clan got a real job.

We're a tribe of storytellers and jokers. No family meal was complete unless one of us managed to deliver a punch line just as a sibling took a mouthful of milk so the laugh could spray the table.

We seemed to learn to read from the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, which my mother bought every week no matter what, and read out loud to us.

I was six or so when I decided to be a writer. There was a sick cat-we a.s.sumed it was rabid-in the neighborhood one summer day, and my big brother, Spike, was delegated to kill it so the little kids could go outside. I watched from a window as he snuck out the back door with his slingshot and a pocket full of ball bearings. He fed us rabbits and squirrels and pigeons with that slingshot. But this time I saw that foaming, staggering cat wobble out from behind a stack of old tires, and my brother drilled him clean between the ears. The cat dropped without a twitch, but that night, lying in bed (I can still see the airplanes on the blue wallpaper), I realized what death was and felt the whole aching universe zooming outwards. I suddenly knew I would die-end completely. And the real tragedy was that all the wonders I'd seen and smelt and felt would die with me. I couldn't bear it. And from that moment to this I've struggled to record as much of it as I can.

I was an ugly kid and had a deep, huge voice. My nickname was "Froggie" or "Toad" when people were p.i.s.sed at me. I turned it into an a.s.set by going into speech compet.i.tions, debates, and interpretive readings in high school. I'm the only kid in the immediate family who graduated from high school-my brothers saw to that.

Each of us had wild early times. I was big on running away and had adventures that ended with me being fetched home from juvenile detention centers up and down the Pacific coast. The November after I turned 18, within a day or two after J.F.K. was shot in Dallas, I was arrested in Independence, Missouri, for trying to cash a bad check. I was working with a traveling door-to-door-magazine-selling crew (my first cult experience) and ended up in the Kansas City slammer for a few weeks. I got out with a felony conviction, a two-year bench parole, and an incurable case of heebie-jeebies about jail. I never wanted to go back to THAT. I saw myself at a fork in the road, where my choices were a life of petty and extremely unglamorous crime, or getting my s.h.i.+t together in a major way. Despite my shaky school career, I'd always been a lunatic reader. I had pretensions of intellect, and had been scribbling diaries and stories and poems all my life. I enrolled at a local state school (Portland State University) and used a year's worth of good grades and professorial references to apply to Reed College in Portland. Reed took me in, gave me a scholars.h.i.+p, a warm room, three meals a day, and a chance. I'd been scuffling, slinging hash, and modeling at the art school, living in rooming houses. Reed was heaven. In my third year there I won a Rockefeller writing grant and a Music Corporation of America writing grant to work on my first novel, Attic. I took the money and ran off to Central America with my boyfriend. We later traveled the Southern U.S. and Canada, then ran out of money and holed up in Boston, where I wrote Attic while working three part-time jobs a day-proofreader for a printing house, invalid's companion, and Sugar Daddy wrapper at a Cambridge candy factory. I lived in a fog, waiting for a five-minute break to hide in a restroom and scratch into my notebook all the scenes that were playing in my head.

I'd planned conversations with editors since I was ten, sitting in a tree behind the Sparks, Nevada, library. So, when David Segal at Harper & Row accepted Attic, I took it for granted-took the money and went off to Greece with that same boyfriend to write Truck, the second book, for Harper & Row. This traveling, you understand, was the segundo backpack variety. Hitchhiking when necessary, hopping buses and trains. Renting single rooms in sleazy dives and eating out of a tin can, doing laundry in the shower. Not sightseeing so much as trying to disappear. I wasn't a hippie. In fact I despised them as fatuous ninnies who might be right but for all the wrong reasons. I was trying to escape from being an American during the Vietnam war. From 1969 to 1975, we were mostly in Europe, with just a couple of disastrous trips back to the U.S. to pull money together. My son was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1970.

Soon after Truck was published I got this lightning bolt - a Montessori moment - when I realized that I didn't know how to write. I'd been cranking the stuff all those years only semiconsciously. I opened my mouth and it poured out. It was about as deliberate and artful as belly-b.u.t.ton lint. I was a product of that era which abhorred formal training as interference with natural expression. I'd studied history, philosophy, behavioral psychology, and biology but never had a writing cla.s.s. As revelations go, this was a drag. I decided to give myself (this is the gauge of my ignorance) ten years to learn how to write.

We'd been scared out of Spain by the Lisbon earthquake in '69, and I got scared out of Ireland when a car bomb went off in Dublin and took a few-score people with it. It was a street I walked daily with my little boy. I'd been a c.o.c.k-a-hoop IRA sympathizer until then. I retired to my bed with galloping nausea and diarrhea in raw-a.s.sed terror. As soon as I could get up, I booked tickets for the States.

I went on turning out the bales of grunting, pretentious stones, a dreadful novel, miles of rolling ponderous Latinates. I stopped submitting anything to anybody because even I knew it was still lousy. I worked dingbat jobs to keep peanut b.u.t.ter on the table, slung hash and booze to pay the rent.

For years I was the Story Lady of Radio KBOO in Portland-every Sat.u.r.day morning at 10:00 A.M. I read anything from Lewis Carroll to Harlan Ellison, Kafka to Raymond Chandler. I was Red Ryder and the program was called Gremlin Time.

It was November 18, 1978, as I recall, when the Jonestown suicides took place. I'd discovered the n.a.z.i concentration camps when I was a kid leafing through old Life magazines in somebody's attic. Those images are still burnt into the backs of my eyes. I was slinging breakfast in a diner the day a customer walked in and showed me the Jonestown headlines. They hit me like a bullet in the chest and I still wake up shaking and sweating occasionally.

1979 was the year that the Geek fell into my lap one day in the Rose Garden in Portland's Was.h.i.+ngton Park - in very much the manner that Aloysius Binewski conceived his idea of designing children. I saw lines into the mysteries that puzzled me the most. I started work on it immediately, recognizing that this story could be the joining point where all I had tried to learn could finally connect with what I only half - jokingly call my "lyric mode." I proceeded cautiously-with long pauses, months away to make a living. But the story surrounded and engulfed me continuously.

In Portland, in 1980, I went to my first live boxing match. I'd always kept an eye on the sports pages and TV matches. But the shock waves of emotion that roared off the fighters stunned me. I was hooked. There has never been a better set topic for a writer.

I'd never even considered journalism - not that I looked down on it, but I had no notion of it as "writing." Besides, I still wasn't sure I could lay out a simple declarative sentence and the idea of having to abide by the facts was terrifying. But I started writing about boxing for the local alternative newspaper. It was intoxicating and addictive and the editors taught me a lot. I rediscoverd my own American language, and the joys of Anglo-Saxon. I stopped trying to run away from my background and re-embraced it with, maybe, a little too much gusto.

Most important was my discovery of the "Subject": that all my skills and talents were only tools in the service of the subject, that my success had to be measured in terms of how good a conduit I was for carrying the subject into the mind of the reader, that on their own my golden words didn't amount to a fart in the wind.

I still do occasional radio commercials and go on TV in P. R. junkets for my newspaper. My journalism has branched out to a lot of different topics-it's become my keyhole to the universe, the excuse to go anywhere, ask anything, pester anybody-and I'm still learning.

My son is 19 now, and in college. I just turned 44 with a howl of triumph. I never expected to survive this long. But my family tends to view mortality as a mere statistical probability, not a sure thing. That inherited optimism is insidious. It undermines the sternest logic. So, though I'm a slow learner, maybe I'll have life enough yet to write something that will punch out through time, and sit dustifying on some shelf waiting to talk to far-off generations. At least I'll have a h.e.l.l of a good time trying.