You only have to talk to Loren Paul for two minutes to realize that his socks don’t match. I met him when I was seventeen and nauseatingly normal. Loren was fifteen, but he’s never passed for normal in his life. I was walking alone that day, which I know is rare for a girl of seventeen, but twenty minutes before Loren threw his first pass, I sat in a doctor’s office full of artsy mood posters being told I was pregnant.
I held hands with myself and stared at a poster showing two beautiful people on the beach, arms around each other, gazing at the waves. The people, the sand, the sunset, all looked very fine and pure. The caption read, LOVE IS…BEAUTIFUL.
Young Dr. Betts smiled and pulled his chair close to mine and touched my knee. He had the teeth of a television preacher, lots of turquoise jewelry around his neck, and hair as long as anyone in Houston in 1964.
“Your tests are positive,” he smiled, putting pressure on my knee.
“You mean I’m knocked up?”
“Yes, Lana Sue, you are knocked up.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Walking down Bissonnet Road, I crossed the tracks and dazed my way up fast-food row. Pizza, burgers, roast beef slices, and ice cream, the franchise system was off and running in southwest Houston.
The father’s name was Ron and the problem was that I liked him. He was kind of sexy, and he treated me nice. He always paid for everything we did. I just didn’t know if I wanted to have a baby by or with him. I wanted to be a country-western singer, and a kid would slow me down. They weren’t even allowed in places where country singers sing.
My plan was to move fast. Patsy Cline died the March before, and no new supersexy superstar had stepped forward to take her place. Everyone was talking about the funny-dressing longhairs from England—Dave Clark Five and the Beatles—but I knew they wouldn’t last. Girls just liked the accents. No one could hit it big in music without fiddles.
The music scene was ripe for a new champion—me. Only I couldn’t tour pregnant.
At that time, women in Texas did not go in much for early termination. It was illegal, expensive, somewhat dangerous, and hard to pull off. Hell, I didn’t know anyone who had ever had one.
Six years later, I didn’t know many who hadn’t, but at seventeen I was no trendsetter. I lived with my parents and wore cotton panties.
This skinny, short kid stepped up beside me and said, “You look dejected.”
“I am dejected.” I’d seen him before. He was several grades behind me in school, which made a lot of difference. Normally, I’d have run across the street before someone saw me talking to a little boy and told Ron, but I suppose impregnation mixed me up. I didn’t tell him to get lost.
“You’re Lana Sue Goodwin,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m Loren Paul.”
I kept walking.
“I’m a Leo with my Venus in Scorpio,” he added.
“What the fuck’s that mean?” Dr. Betts was the first adult I’d ever said “fuck” to. The power made me reckless.
“It’s astrology. It means I’m sexy.”
“You’re five feet two and your voice squeaks. That’s not sexy. I wouldn’t even talk to you if I wasn’t dejected.”
He stuck both hands in his pockets and walked looking at the ground. I could tell he might cry at any moment.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just upset right now. I would rather be alone.”
“Lana Sue,” he said, not looking at me, “I think you have the nicest ass in Bellaire High School.”
He was on my outside when we reached the corner and I did it on purpose. The twerp asked for it, playing the wounded little boy and not watching where he walked. I passed just to the left of a stop sign and Loren walked into the pole, knocking himself silly.
Cute, huh? A nice how-I-met-Grandpa story to amuse the grandkids with on a rainy afternoon. Prove to them that Granny was once young and interesting. But there’s more. One extra bit that sets Loren apart from the thousands to millions of fifteen-year-old nerds who vow undying, unwanted love for the first girl who’s polite to them.
Loren caught a cab downtown that night and had Lana Sue tattooed on his lower back. Directly over the kidney.
Then, the little bastard never told me. What’s the use of mutilating yourself over someone if you don’t tell them? Eighteen years later, two husbands for me, a wife for Loren, three children between us, and enough frustration, boredom, grief, and nausea for six families, we met again and completed the pass in an eight-dollar-a-night motor court on the south side of Denver.
The sex wasn’t that good. We were both blotto drunk and Loren took forever in coming. I found myself listening to Dick Cavett interview a pretentious Gore Vidal on the TV in the next room. To be fair, Loren took so long because he made sure I got off before letting himself turn loose, and I wasn’t easy to arouse. I finally managed it, though, and twenty minutes later, so did he.
Lightning didn’t strike and the earth didn’t shake, but I wasn’t looking for lightning and quakes. I was looking to forget Ace and what a mess I’d made of my life. I sure as hell wasn’t looking for a new husband.
Loren relaxed me, and at the time I needed relaxation more than passion.
Afterwards, he mumbled something like, “Gee, thanks,” and rolled over to sleep. I thought that was odd, but all men are odd, so I answered, “You’re welcome.” I was wide awake. Wide awake, alone, and drunk in a sleazebag motel bed after making sweaty sex with a virtual stranger, knowing my husband was probably in the same situation, and not caring.
How’s that for a depressing scenario—American as Valium and ancient as recreational love.
Time for postcoital nicotine. I groped around the night stand for cigarettes and matches. To me, afterglow means the coal moving up and down in the darkness beside a snoring man. Making love depresses me sometimes.
One-handed, I lit a match and there it was, my own name staring at me from the back of what I thought was a one-night painkiller.
The match burnt my finger. With two hands this time, I lit another and cupped it close to his skin—LANA SUE in faded red with what had long ago been a black outline.
I hit him on the ass. “Hey.”
Loren raised his head. “Whassamattah?”
“My name’s on your back.”
He lowered his head again. “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”
“What’s my name doing on your body?”
“I paid a black man fifteen dollars to put it there.”
The match went out. I could burn him with the smoking stub or go to sleep and ignore everything.
Loren sighed and rolled over and slid his arm around my shoulders. I dropped the unlit cigarette and cuddled close with my hands under my chin. It felt nice.
He said, “Remember that day you walked me into the pole on Bissonnet?”
“Sure. I had a lot on my mind that day.”
“Well, you hurt my feelings. I knelt on the sidewalk, holding my bleeding nose and watching your beautiful ass swish away, and I swore that someday I’d get you.”
“That’s dumb.”
“I swore I’d seduce you and you wouldn’t be such a high-and-mighty senior who humiliates freshmen just because they have feelings.”
“So you carved my name on your back?”
“A black artist drew your name on my back. Years and years from then, when I conquered your body, I wanted you to find that tattoo and know I’d been lying in wait for you all that time. I wanted you to know Loren Paul is something special.”
“That’s hard to deny.”
“Yeah, I’m not like other guys.”
Hell, after that I had to marry Loren just to get back at him for what he did to get back at me.
• • •
I know what you’re thinking. I thought it too. The night Loren returned from his Flannery O’Connor grave trip, he drank himself comatose and I searched his entire body, hair roots to toe jamb. I’m the only name on it.
• • •
Once I asked Loren what his first wife thought of the tattoo.
“I told her it was a birthmark.”
“And she believed you?”
He shrugged. “She wanted to.”
Loren’s first wife, Ann, committed suicide while he was writing a book. Loren finished the book, which is why we’re rich and don’t have to do things we don’t want to do.
• • •
Before Loren, I’d been rich enough not to do the things I don’t want to do three times. All three times, I walked away from the man who came with the money. Being rich isn’t necessary. I also left a poor man, but I kind of regret that one.
The decision to go or stay never tears me apart or anything. I don’t think about it at all. One day, I’m fine, the next, I’m unhappy, the next, I’m gone. None of my formers ever suspects trouble because I don’t dream of leaving until the Crack. That’s what I call it—the Crack.
The Crack is the moment the situation turns impossible and I go from satisfied to dissatisfied. Dissatisfied to out the door takes about an hour. Sometimes I don’t want to go. Lord knows, I wanted to stay with Loren. I think. I just don’t have much control over my life.
Take my pal and ex-true love, Mickey Thunder. Way back in 1963—the morning after our last gig in an awful low-ceilinged club full of drunken soldiers in Fort Smith, Arkansas—my daddy and a hired investigator kicked in an unlocked door at the Fox Box Motel and found Mickey passed out on me and four other band members in stages of degeneracy on the floor. A week’s worth of beer cans, apple cores, butts, and slut magazines lay scattered around like we’d forgotten our upbringing. None of us wore any clothes. It was a real unpleasant scene and completely out of Daddy’s background.
Daddy was shocked. Screaming, “Statutory,” “Whore,” and “Oh my God,” he dragged me out of bed, out the door, then back in the door to throw a blanket over my body.
Mickey said, “Aw, Christ.”
Choosie said, “Tell him to fuck off, Lannie.”
I didn’t say anything. The fun was over.
But the second time, sixteen years later, after Ron and the twins and God knows how many dinner parties, tennis lessons, and charitable functions, I ran away with Mickey again.
This time I knew Mickey was the one for life. He’s such a drunk, I didn’t figure for life meant for my life, but I loved him and sure never figured on leaving him unburied.
I lasted fourteen months. One morning in a slum shack of a motel in Brigham City, Utah, life with Mickey wasn’t fun.
The room could have been the Fox Box held in a museum for future generations. That’s how much Mickey’s life had progressed. Mine too, come to think of it. The only difference was, the band members slept next door. Not much growth for all those years.
Mickey woke up with his usual hangover and his usual breath. He wasn’t as appetizing as he’d been at twenty. The long, bony face had become a waxy color—corpselike. His hand shook when he poured the first Jim Beam of the day.
“Are we going to make that album for Ace?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve made albums.”
“I haven’t.”
“It’s not something you want to do.”
“You got something against success?”
“Yep.” He lay back, covering his face with one arm. “Lannie, you’re not that good. You’re fine for our band and what we do, but Ace would throw you to that Nashville zoo, he’d have you dressing like Daisy Mae and bending over on Hee Haw. That’s not our style.”
“I am, too, good.”
He opened his eyes at me. “For you to make it in this business, you’re gonna have to suck some dicks, and I don’t want to be around to watch.”
Hell of a thing to say.
Mickey staggered into the bathroom to throw up. I followed and sat on the edge of the tub, pulling Mickey’s hair behind his ears so he wouldn’t puke on it.
He didn’t care I kept puke out of his hair because he didn’t care if he puked on it. I looked at his sharp nose and high cheekbones, the dent at his temple. Mickey hadn’t gained a pound of flesh since the first time I held his hair back while he hugged a toilet. Still looked like a death’s mask. Nothing changes but me.
Crack. I didn’t want to be there anymore. “I’ll do the album without you,” I said.
Mickey dry-heaved a couple of times and pulled himself up to the sink. He drank from the cold water tap before looking over at me. “That mean the partnership is over?”
“I suppose so.”
“Suit yourself.” He stood, facing the mirror. “I have to hit you now.”
“Why?” The man could hardly stand without help. In a fair fight, I’d have knocked his lights out.
“So you won’t be tempted to come back if you get lonely.”
“Okay.” Mickey hit me, though not very hard. He’s hit me a lot harder when we were making love.
That was that. I closed my suitcase and left.
• • •
More to the point, I didn’t want to leave Loren. I never want to leave, but I have no patience with insanity. Daddy burned me out on sensitive men. I could have handled the eccentric-novelist act, the buttoning-his-shirt-and-zipping-him-up-before-we-went-out-the-door routine. I could even have handled the silly fantasy with Marcie. Someday he’d luck out with her and I’d catch him and he’d spend the next twenty years paying the debt. One transgression makes a powerful weapon in the hands of a true bitch—which is what I suppose I am.
But to turn himself paranoid, depressive, neurotic, and an asshole on purpose. And it was on purpose. Loren knew he was slipping into compulsive fixation.
“To obsess, you have to ignore something,” I said. “And you’re ignoring me.”
“I cannot live in the present until I know what happened before. God better come up with some answers or else.”
Which seemed okay. He’d always been a little abstracted by that Buggie thing. I figured to let him wallow in it until he got bored with misery and realized I counted for something.
Only I never expected the side effects—the amazing amount of energy, the total lack of a need for sleep. He developed an awesome sex drive. I wouldn’t have minded that one so much, except, when we made love, he acted like he didn’t know who he was with. Twice he jumped me without saying a word before, during, or after. I can’t stand being ignored, especially when I’m fucking.
I caught him in the bathroom, whispering to Zelda. He put a padlock on his shorts drawer. I walked into the study while he was typing and Loren lurched forward, covering the page with his whole upper body.
At dinner that night, he babbled over an hour about his little sister that the Rangers killed. Sometimes he called her Kathy. Sometimes he called her Debby. He couldn’t remember.
He said, “They killed her for collecting Barbie dolls.”
Loren began to affect my peace of mind. I started waking up at three in the morning, unable to get back to sleep. I took four showers a day. As his sex drive soared, mine zilched, which upset me a lot because I’ve always been proud of my sex drive and I hate to lose something I’m proud of.
“Let’s sit naked in the creek,” Loren said.
“I’m not in the mood.”
“I’ll borrow a horse from the VanHorns and we can make it at full gallop.”
“I hate horses.”
“I think I’ll go watch the moon rise.”
“Go right ahead.”
Loren went out to lie on his back in the yard and discuss life with the moon and I reached for a Milky Way.
• • •
I couldn’t have been more than seven when I became aware of Daddy’s dark clouds. Sometimes, for no reason, he quit talking to me, quit loving me as far as I could see, and I felt so awful that I took comfort in candy. Or maybe I punished myself for letting him down, I don’t know. All I know is, every few months Daddy sat in his chair with no intention of ever doing anything again, and I stuffed myself with cupcakes, soda pop, Hershey bars, anything sweet I could find. I was sneaky about it, hid Ding Dongs in my bottom drawer and chocolate kisses in my dollhouse.
All through junior high and high school, I remember periodic nightmares of long silences and junk-food blues.
Now, whenever I feel rejected, I gorge. Who knows why? But the day Loren caught me spooning down white sugar, I knew something was terribly wrong.
• • •
The next day I found a gray hair in my brush, scalded myself on the morning coffee, and my six-hundred-dollar, fourteen-attachment, will-pick-up-anything-from-tenpenny-nails-to-carpet-patterns vacuum cleaner broke. Midway through my own room, it made a clattering sound, smelled like burning rubber, and stopped sucking.
Even sane, Loren can’t fix a drink, and in his infinite purity, he’d decided mechanical devices were beneath the dignity of him and his buddy God.
“My mind must be free to roam the skies of enlightenment,” he said the time I asked him to light the oven for dinner.
So, I had to take the vacuum cleaner apart, figure out the problem, and put it all back together again. Major decisions are ninety percent timing, you realize that? Three hours earlier, before the gray hair and the vacuum trauma, I wouldn’t have left Loren. I’d have brained him, but I wouldn’t have left. There’s no use talking that way, though, because you can’t change timing.
None of the damn pieces fit. I sat in the center of a dirty rug, surrounded by long tilings and tiny things and clumps of floor crud, right on the narrow edge of screaming and hurling the drapes attachment through the window, when Loren wandered in the door from the kitchen and walked through my nuts-and-washers-and-doodads-that-don’t-go-anywhere pile.
“Listen to this,” he said. “A one-eyed man is able to see, a lame man is able to tread. He treads on the tail of a tiger. The tiger bites the man.”
“Loren, you’re kicking my nuts.”
“What do you think that means, Lana Sue? It sounds like if everything isn’t perfect and you keep going anyway, you’ll get bit by a tiger. Does that mean handicapped people should just sit down and never move?”
“What book is that?”
Loren turned it around to show the cover. “The I Ching.”
“The whole damn house is falling apart and you’re reading the I Ching?”
“It seems relevant.”
I picked up a hollow, lightweight metal tube, usually used for vacuuming under things, and swung it as hard as I could into Loren’s temple.
“That’s it. Crack. You’re off the list, Loren. I hope God can cook, clean, and fuck ’cause you can’t and I won’t.”
Loren raised his hand to his head, feeling the place I’d whacked. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s the first truth you’ve found all day. You don’t understand anything and you’re understanding less by the minute.”
“Why did you hit me?”
I turned and headed for the door.
“Lana Sue, are you leaving?”
Whirling, “I’m not going down with you, Loren. You want to go insane, that’s your business, but don’t expect me to go with you. And don’t expect me to be here when you come back.”
He just looked at me, fingering the lump on his head.
Since Loren wouldn’t argue with me, all the way out to the truck I argued with myself. “Lana, what are you doing? You love this one. Don’t blow it.”
“I don’t have to put up with this crap anymore. There’s no excuse for living with a metaphysical boogieman.”
“Sure there is. Kick the vacuum pieces in the closet. They don’t matter.”
“I’m not killing my marriage so I won’t have to put a vacuum cleaner back together.”
“Bullshit.”
• • •
I stopped in Jackson long enough to gas up the Toyota before heading south. South is the secure way to head in a crisis. It’s warm all year in the South. Daddy lives there.
Rolling down all the windows, I jammed an Emmylou tape in the deck and cranked the truck up to 80.
Life wasn’t fair all of a sudden. I’d married one man who turned into someone else who forced me to do something I didn’t want to do.
I screamed into the wind, “My husband’s an idiot.”
“The others were idiots,” another voice said—a voice from a part of me I don’t see too often. “Loren’s good. Nothing good ever happened to you before. Don’t throw it away.”
“Fuck off, who asked you anyway?”
“You always talk like a slut when you’re upset.”
“Look what’s happened, I’m talking out loud to something that calls me a slut. This doesn’t happen to me…I’m normal.” I turned Emmylou up loud, hoping to drown the conversation, but inner voices are persistent suckers.
“Don’t shout when you’re alone, Lana Sue.”
“Shut up, creep.”
“Loren accepts you. He doesn’t judge or want anything from you. He doesn’t force anything on you.”
“He reads the I Ching out loud. He talks to the moon and it talks back. Do you want to live with a man who talks to the moon?”
“Do you want to live without him?”
I cranked the truck up to the 95-100 range, which scared me and my voices into shutting up. Wyoming flew past like it was on a video screen and nothing was real. I imagined if the Toyota crashed, a light would flash, a buzzer would honk, and I’d have to put in another quarter—not a good pretend game to play when you’re driving. A stray antelope could have turned the Lana Sue story into a tragedy without even knowing what hit him.
Emmylou sang a fast song about a pinball machine in Amarillo, Texas. I hummed along, picking the guitar breaks on the steering wheel. Our band played Amarillo several times—I even sang at the Golden Sandies Homecoming Dance way back in another life. I’ve had so many lives and sometimes they don’t connect.
The high-speed emotionalism wasn’t safe, and I’m not stupid—at least not for more than ten minutes—so I backed off on the accelerator, watching the sagebrush slow to a dull blur. Digging through the glove compartment, I replaced Emmylou with Bru Hau.
I got a hole in my boot, I got a hole in my coat, there’s a hole in my fancy shirt, I got a hole in my life, where my baby walked out.
The main attraction, and drawback, to country music is that if you’ve just left a husband, wife, or love of some kind, or even worse, been left by a husband, wife, or love of some kind, every single one of those syrupy, corny, otherwise trite songs touches you. Sometimes I don’t want to be touched.
Sure, it’s all been said before, but as I try to explain to Loren, all real emotions have been felt millions of times. Nothing sincere is original. Trite is basic, and if your emotions are basic, you relate to trite.
There was a hole in our love and she walked right through it,
To get a better point of view you might say that I blew it.
As Bru Hau’s heartbreak song got to me, the Toyota moved slower. I saw less and less of the high desert and more and more of what used to be. I slid into memories.
You work me too hard and your jokes ain’t funny
I can’t live in your life full of dreams and no money
More than slid. Skimming along Highway 89, rolling south away from Loren, I got down and mud-wrestled with my past.
Slime might be a better term than mud.