the bull in the heather

[cutthroat]

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<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 01, 2006 09:33 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ November 21, 2006 10:21 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

"What's this? What are these?"

"Cigarettes."

"These aren't the right ones. Take them back, Nash. Get the right ones."

"Mo-om."

"I don't want to die smoking these fucking things."

Her hands stopped shaking long enough to snap the filter off a cigarette, scissoring it between the sour sunshine colored skin of her jaundiced knuckles. Fingertips flashing in a immaculate French manicure as she hammered another coffin nail between bloodless lips and stuck out her jaw in useless defiance as her only daughter leaned over the rail of the hospital bed (which was a rental, since neither of them could justify actually buying one) with a light.

[cutthroat]

Sissy Voorhees. Miss Georgia 1959. A true Southern debutante. A dying breed, the kind've woman that has children only because they'd match that gorgeous Suzy Homemaker gown they bought last week. And not like she saw us, her children as real innocent, tender babies anyway. We were just tiny adults, two more names to put on the guestlist, two more opinions about Which Dress Tonight?, her new hair rinse or latest suitor. My entire life, she was always far more glamorous -- smoking her long, impossibly thin Virginia Slims, lapping at a dry martini with bedroom eyes in a fashionable pair of hotpants -- than the other mothers.

None of the other kids in my class knew anything about what wine to drink with a rare steak, manicured eyebrows, dry humor and peroxide.

None of my friends had dress fittings and afternoon tea with gentlemen callers in seersucker suits.

She might not have been as supportive as she could've been, but the standard of beauty was so much more important than mental well-being. Therapy was cheaper than plastic surgery and Mama knew even the best surgeons in the world couldn't turn an ugly face around (we were, however, learning lots of other things about surgeons and doctors and the politics of hospitals). And who wants to live with all that scarring, anyway? So instead of teaching us (me and my big brother Otis, who started going by his middle name when he joined his first New York law firm) compassion, goodwill towards men and understanding, Mama schooled us in holding our liquor, fashion and class, and she helped us whet our tongues into sharp silvered swords.

We were her greatest accessory.

The doctors might've been cutting away the soft, estrogen soaked parts inside of her in an orderly, dehumanizing fashion but she clung to her beauty. Albeit sexless, it was all she had left, and even the chemo seemed to bless her.. Hairless (We have lots of wigs from when her hair first started falling out. We thought the results would be too dramatic, too devastating so we thousands of dollars on long curly Venus wigs, short cropped black pageboy numbers, and highdollar upswept bouffants, and even more on the film for the endless pictures. She would drape herself carelessly over her mechanical bed, careful to not knock her IV out as she struck disinterested supermodel poses while I snapped away with trashy lines encouragement like the coked out photogs she posed for in the early 80's. "Yah, give me some of that! (flash) Make it (flash) sexy! Make me want it (flashflash)!"), rare and alien, her elegance was only intensified now, glowing, distilled down to a saucer-sized duet of bayou brown eyes and the prim, proper fold of a southern belle's mouth.

Like she was some sort of exotic creature, with a willowboned neck and skin that cracked at the slightest abuse sent from another planet where sexuality was traded for high cheekbones and jaundice.

We didn't put the hospital bed in the front room until a few months ago. She was sleeping quite a bit, but I'm not sure if it was the morphine or just pure exhaustion from struggling to survive. I didn't ask. We both knew there wasn't much left that was working inside and any organs that they did leave behind behaved sluggishly. They knew. We knew. There wasn't much time for sunshine left. So we moved the bed directly under the pane glass window that overlooks the corner. Now she watches the streets and sometimes the people on the street watch her. Sometimes I wonder if they think it is some kind of joke.

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 02, 2006 10:45 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

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<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 02, 2006 01:31 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

Two years ago, the doctors had triumphantly raised their blades and proclaimed that they had gotten it all. The cancer was gone, they had won. They would lay down their weapons, replace them with high doses of medications and return to normal life. Visits to the hospital happened further and further apart, weeks blooming into months. Nashville enrolled in a small arts college in New York (Otis continued life relatively unaffected--he only came down for major surgeries and birthdays) and Sissy went back to her aerobics and dinner parties.







"You should call Otis. Have you talked to Otis? You're coming to Thanksgiving right? You and Willie can bring the chicken wings!"

"It's Wy-lie, mother," All the Voorheeses slaughtered Nash's boyfriend's name, dismissing him as a flighty undergrad with all the wrong breeding. "And we're not bringing chicken wings, we're bringing desert." Nashville paused, blowing on a fist of freshly painted nails with the phone pinched smartly between an ear and her shouldercap, carefully re-lidding the tacky red bottle of thick red laquer. "What's wrong with Otis? And are you doing Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving?"

"What do you mean on thanksgiving? When the hell else would we have it?"

"I don't know. Last year we didn't get around to it until Febuary. But what about Otis?"

"Oh," Her mother would start with a dramatic breath (no doubt practiced into the silverpitted slick of a mirror when she was a young girl, fingers strumming the bonework of her chest vapishly.) while Nashville drug the antique phenomenom of a corded telephone (rotary, none-the-less) across the hardwood floor of her apartment, slumping into an open window frame to light a cigarette. She would watch the slow-moving snarl of traffic roll down the gully of the street, flinching at the daring manuvers of the occasional bike messenger.

"He can't sleep and he's going to the hospital for tests because he's just not feeling right..To the hospital!" Sissy fades in and out easily. All she needed was an audience Nashville had spent her entire life ignoring the repetative screech of her mother's singsong and she dettached by instinct when she went monotone and babbling.

"Being alone there..You know," Nashville had floated to a pile of mail on the arm of the couch, thumbing through gallery invites, glossy magazines (her name nowhere near the cover, but familiar methed-out models leering like seventy nine pound jack-o-lanterns on the front) and committee letters. "It can't be good for him, and he wonders why he can't sleep."

"I just don't understand what he's thinking! I just don't get it! I don't know where he gets these ideas of his, he's just like your father. Well, not exactly. Ha!" Nashville trashed the department store circulars and credit card offers (they loved her more than the galleries did, the wide-eyed college innocent), cradling the phone to her ear as she clutched one of the kittens by the ankle and slid to the floor.

"Oh honey, your life would be so much different if your daddy was still alive."

"Huh?" Somewhere between her brother's sleeping disorder and damning New York lifestyle choices Sissy had abruptly shifted gears, the guts falling out of the conversation while Nashville nervously quietly waited on some sort of cue. Her father had died when she was six, from complications due to a severe spinal cord injury. For as long as Nash could remember, he rolled through the first floor of their expanisive Georgia home in a creaky-axeled wheelchair with Nashville riding on home-installed pegs on the back.

"You don't ever think he abadonded you, do you, sweetie? You know he didn't, don't you?"

"Oh.."







Two days before Thanksgiving, they found an acorn-sized mass growing on Sissy's stomach and she was beneath the knife three days later under the calm, weary eye of her children who had seen it coming all along.

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 01, 2006 02:25 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

Sometimes, I cannot even get through the threshold of our apartment anymore. The UPS man continues to pile the boxes in front of the door, like he if comes in close enough to put them away right, he might catch the sickness seeping in from the hospital bed in the middle of the room like a thick black stain. But now that I think about it, the apartment is starting to get smaller, more intimidating, walls replaced by cardboard boxes and closing in smaller every day, there's really no where to put them now. A darkening hole, a sad cardboard cellar where nothing but smoke and shadows and debt could live.

Now that she can't even go on her extravagant shopping sprees, she survives off the home shopping network. At least half a dozen boxes arrive every day. Linens, collectable figurines, tacky costume jewelry, Mohair teddy bears, purses, luggage locks, candle votives, wine glasses, vases. Most of it never makes it out of the packaging. Occasionally, we'll pull out the box cutter and slice open a few like Christmas morning, squealing and clutching embroidered napkins and silverware sets to our chest in elation. The first thing she ordered in our new apartment was a computer (still neatly boxed in my bedroom) and a collection of expensive looking oriental rugs that actually get some use underneath her hospital bed, to keep it from gouging the hardwood. She has steadily charged her way through six credit cards since then.

I've been trying to organize all the boxes away from the good window, but she's ready to close herself in completely. When she's awake, she turns away from the sun and strokes her hairless scalp, begging me to shut the blinds.

I try to seduce her with the most recent deliveries, fondling cheap packaging and trumpeting in excited tones.

"What could this one be?! Maybe it's that scrapbooking kit! Or that impressive knife set!"

More and more, she turns from me, like I'm too bright and closes her eyes, her quiet face folding into a wilted flower of romance and beauty.

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 01, 2006 09:44 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

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well pale face said
to the eyeball kid
she just goes clank and boom and steam
a halo, wings, horns and a tail
shoveling coal inside my dreams
there are no laws
she's made of cream
she's such a scream

all crooked lines
her fireplace
a milktrain so clean
machine gun haste

you'll ride the only wall of shame
and drag that chain across the state
her lips are red
she is the queen
she's such a scream</center>

[cutthroat]

"C'mon babe, we promised 'er someone fresh!"

He still sang in that leisurely blue-sky southern twang, and I could see his feet waltzing in a deceptive box-step, only now his knuckles are decked out in sovereign rings instead of barroom bruises.

"We don't want your typical high fashion Vogue magazine bullshit. Don't tell me you came all the way up to the big city just to turn down an offer like this!"

Alan had come a long way from his humble junkyard beginnings, building a name for himself out of gritty, surrealistic photospreads and a devastating Kentucky charm. I met him at a fashion designer friend's shoot in Savannah four years ago (Just months before Mama's first chemo treatment), my face replaced by a twin lens Seagull as I eschewed the hot bright lights and captured the girls as they powered the bruises on their knuckles and overanalyzed their finicky waistlines behind the scenes. He was a floundering agent at the time, half junkie hustler half hard working brown-noser, working under a vague umbrella of a few seedy magazines and I was easy to influence, pressing my portfolio into whoevers hands would open to it.

He would screech endless offers of the strange and obscene down his mobile phone at me, all hours of the night: "Hey babe, I've got these three pregnant chicks in a trailer park outside Carnesville who need twelve hundred bucks! Get down here and let's make some fucking stars!" And I can still see his nervous jive, slicking back an overgreased pompadour as he leered from behind the camera, clutching my shoulder and growling in rock quarry concert down the back of my neck.

He got me my first solo show in Atlanta and we collaborated on some of my most recognizable shots (the Might spread with Mina Watts), but we lost touch after a few years. I moved back in with my mother, started reading medical journals and he jetted off to New York, where he sutured himself into the sleaze and grime seamlessly, climbing the shiny silver ladder to the top. He was in a business where it was not offensive to stink of bourbon and stagger in cocaine-crooked maneuvers through lunch. Instead of helping welfare mothers make it 'til the first of the month, he was turning the fashion world onto it's newest chic, exploiting these dumb young models effortlessly. He was excited to finally have me in the city, to cut me into the sweetest deal he'd suckled so far, ready to move me into the limelight.

But I haven't got time. There's not much time.

"Send over one of those sexy young interns to watch my Mom and we'll see what I can do."

"They're not exactly baby-sitters, Nash. All we need is three hours, tops! Just give her a big ol' shot of morphine and get the fuck down here."

"I don't have time, Al. Sorry."

And I hang up before he can start begging, and turn my back on my mother before she turns that sad, wilted face on me. Before she clears the scum from her throat and lays into me. I've been meaning to move the telephone to the kitchen, and even after all this time I can't move fast enough before she's crooning in her withered symphony, stroking my nerves into white-hot bundles of shame with each cancer-crafted growl.

"You're not the one with no time left, Nashville."

"Mom."

"I don't know what you think you're gunna miss, baby." She turns her alien-like head to the window, her palm fondling phantom curls at her shoulders as she watches the street pulse with life and I wonder if she is jealous, of an oil-slick city that functioned with or without failures, eternally healing itself in baptisms of fire and blue sky. "You don't need me, you can find out for yourself what the dark looks like."

[cutthroat]

She's been opening my mail again.

This is the fourth time I've caught her, bonefingers heartlessly gutting my letters and spilling them on the sheets tented over her legs (that once upon a time went on for miles, only now a roadmap of varicose veins traveled the long pale distance), and when I walk in the room she looks up, eyelids melted away from dilated eyes in folds of decay and exhaustion, swelling in shock.

"Hey! What are you doing!"

"I'm your mother, Nashville!" She washes the momentary stain of guilt from her face with a blink of rheumy eyes, replacing it with a distressed, wounded patina as she crams the letter and envelope between her thighs.

"That's mine!"

"What? Are you trying to hide something from me?"

My mother will string me up with a silvery piano wire of guilt, she will filet the years off of me, peel the skin away on the past of a defiant teenage heart, reducing me to a little screaming child, soft pink and pigtailed, easy to cut with the fine edge of revenge. This is for running off to Denver with my twenty-six year old boyfriend, for ripping up my designer debutante dresses--or even worse, dressing my brother in them. She looks at me like I deserve these things. I'm selfish.

"You have your own mail to open!" I scream. I point at the walls of cardboard leaning in around us, absorbing any echoes and making my voice sound small and worthless. Somewhere behind these boxes, my pictures hang on the walls.

"Open your own fucking mail!" I grab one of the packages and throw it into the kitchen for bravado. It was satisfying, it twisted her lifeless mouth and the way it sang like a hurricane of broken glass, I'd bet it was those rose crystal wine glasses. There are probably boxes more somewhere.

What haven't I given to you. I want to choke the answers from her tar-clogged throat.

"Just what don't you want me to see, Nashville?! You got some big news, comin' in the mail?!" The leather-skinned queen could still spit venom--we could easily split open the night into forever with the scalpels of our shrieks, and she even managed to throw the crumpled letter over the railing of her hospital bed. She was morphine-eyed rage tonight with dust in her bones and nothing but barren empty space inside of her.

But she howled at me to put on a jacket before I slammed the front door behind me, belting me with a reminder me not to swear in her house.

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ October 03, 2006 01:49 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

[cutthroat]

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