Cha-Ching!

Cha-Ching!

Ali Liebegott

San Francisco

Copyright © 2013 by Ali Liebegott

All Rights Reserved

Cover photo by Sara Seinberg

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the following for your various forms of support during the writing of this book: my family, Lucy Corin, Christina Frank, Pawsitive Tails, RADAR Productions & The RADAR Lab, Rainbow Grocery Co-Operative, Nikki Simms, Erin Conley, Cassie J. Sneider, Sarah Fran Wisby, and everyone at City Lights/Sister Spit Books.

Also, a deep gratitude goes to Beth Pickens for love, support, and editing help and Michelle Tea, for two decades of literary friendship.

Lastly, to Elaine Katzenberger for your expert editing skills. I'm eternally grateful.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Liebegott, Ali.

Cha-ching! / Ali Liebegott.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87286-570-9

1. Lesbians—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3612.I327C48 2013

813
'
.6--dc23

2012046896

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Avenue

San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

for famig and other famig

It was 1994, the year of bad, low-blood-sugar decisions. As soon as Theo was done watching her favorite episode of
Top 25 Best 911 Emergencies
she planned to leave her empty San Francisco apartment and move to New York. She sat on the cold hardwood floor and absorbed the grave situation of a man who'd become trapped in the bottom of a garbage truck. A passerby had called 911 after hearing what sounded like “human cries” coming from the truck.

Local police were instructed to pull over every garbage truck in a three-mile radius of where the man had reported the cries. When the right one was finally found, a policeman stood at the rear of the truck and spoke clearly into his megaphone, “Is anyone in there? Can you hear me?” while two sanitation workers in bright orange vests snickered in the background, smoking cigarettes.

The second time the policeman called into the garbage truck a tiny muffled voice said, “Yes, sir. I'm down here.”

This was Theo's favorite episode because the TV show never discussed how a person might find himself trapped in the bottom of a garbage truck. She knew there were only a few explanations: mental illness, drunkenness, homelessness, or a combination of the three, but by not exploring any of the options the TV show was saying, “Don't judge! We're all five decisions away from waking up in the bottom of a garbage truck.” And when the man was pulled gently by his arms from piles of oozing plastic bags, the TV show did him the additional honor of digitally blurring his face to protect his anonymity.

She snapped off the small black-and-white TV but remained seated in front of it until the last bit of light fizzled into the center of the screen like a dying star. Then she yanked the thick black cord from the wall. She wasn't moving this piece of shit all the way across the country. It was warm in her arms when she picked it up to carry it to the community free box. Theo climbed the two flights of stairs and opened the door that led to the roof. The cold San Francisco wind hit her squarely in the face. When she was sure she could steal no more warmth from the TV she set it down on the seat of a discarded gray office chair. There was almost never anything good in the free box, yet Theo looked at the pile daily when she passed it on her way to smoke. With the exception of her TV it held the same things as yesterday: the office chair, some shitty glass picture frames, rock-climbing shoes, and a broken, beige-carpeted cat tree. All of it was trash, really, but people often left trash in the free box when it wouldn't fit in the trash can or they didn't want to walk the extra paces to the garbage chute.

In New York Theo would be a person who didn't drink or smoke or watch TV. She'd transform herself into a well-read adult, starting with the complete works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then move her way through biographies of famous painters. She'd always wanted to take a painting class and find out if she was secretly a brilliant artist. In New York, she'd get a gym membership—she could read
Crime and Punishment
on the stationary bicycle. Before she turned thirty she wanted to be able to go to a party and have a conversation that involved
anything
besides details from true-crime shows.

Theo lived in a large white apartment building across from some housing projects that were painted a terrible baby-shit brown. When she first moved into the neighborhood, she didn't want to be like the people who went out of their way to walk on the opposite side of the street, but the regular group of boys on the corner who taunted and shouted and sometimes threw empty beer bottles at people's heads had quickly weakened her resolve. When she saw them outside, she learned to cross the street, look the other way, become very involved in lighting her cigarette.

Two weeks after moving into her apartment, the police cracked a pit bull ring in the projects. A swarm of cop cars screeched to a halt in the intersection, flung their doors open and kept their red and blue lights swirling as they ran in and busted the operation. The dogcatcher was a long-haired Latina butch named Denise who Theo knew from the bars. Denise did an intricate dance, pushing a ten-foot pole with a loop at the end toward each dog. She was like a lifeguard at a city pool inserting the pole into the water for the drowning swimmer, but to be saved the dogs needed to be calm and put their paws over the wire loop. And to be calm they needed to have had entirely different paths up until this point in their lives, needed to have grown up from puppyhood not being stabbed in the ribs with screwdrivers for the sole purpose of making them mean.

Denise herded the beautiful, unsaveable dogs one at a time out of the projects and into the convoy of white Animal Care and Control vans. They looked like old-fashioned baseball catchers with wire muzzles strapped over their jaws. Theo knew they would be euthanized as she watched them, one at a time, lunge at Denise, even while muzzled.

Theo had watched the entire scene while peeking out from behind the mini-blinds of her bedroom window. Her bedroom window was not unlike her small black-and-white TV in that it only got reception to a few stations. When Theo woke at 7
am
, she pulled her blinds up a few inches to turn on Taco Lady TV. The Taco Lady would have already arrived two hours ago in her pickup and speedily set up her mobile food cart, stretching a large, bright blue plastic tarp over the truck's rooftop and snapping two strong poles into place to create a little awning. She'd plugged a silver percolator into a generator and arranged a tall stack of Styrofoam cups to sell coffee to people walking to the bus stop. Even though there were “nice” cafes five blocks away, Theo was not willing to pay three dollars for a cup of coffee, nor did she want to sit next to people who wore two-hundred-dollar jeans. Instead, she shuffled across the street and for a single dollar purchased an enormous coffee and a dry Mexican pastry. It was like having a cameo appearance on the television show she was watching. Then she'd return to her apartment, sit down on her bed, and drink her coffee while watching the rest of Taco Lady TV. Many people shuffled over to the Taco Lady's truck for their morning provisions. Not everyone got a pastry. Some left with a tostada, slightly larger than the tiny white paper plate it was served on. When Theo walked to her job as a cashier at the Party Store she found those tiny plates in the gutter as far as ten blocks away. The plethora of discarded plates were the Taco Lady's own soaring stock index. Every day but Sunday the Taco Lady worked from 5
am
till midnight, opening a variety of coolers from the back of her truck to prepare tacos and tortas for the neighborhood. Theo often found herself worrying that the Taco Lady was not getting enough sleep.

On days that Theo was extra sensitive and the boys on the corner extra rambunctious, instead of leaving the house for something to eat she would try to go to sleep early, a trick she'd learned from reading Depression-era books about poor parents trying to distract the kids from their hunger. It rarely worked; often she just tossed and turned with a terrible hunger headache.

The Taco Lady had to put up with the boys' antics, too.

“Oh, you want me to pay? I thought it was free,” they said to her.

The Taco Lady would face them down stoically, wordlessly, until they fell into a quiet respect and paid.

Around noon, if Theo wasn't at work she'd change the channel from Taco Lady TV to Thug TV and start watching the boys on the corner shout at girls or fuck with each other or smoke a blunt, and late at night when she was sleeping, she'd be awoken by Screeching Tire TV. Some of those same boys would get into their classic cars and start doing donuts in the intersection until everything was obscured by the smoke of burning tires on pavement. The first time Theo had raised her blinds in the middle of the night and seen the smoke she'd panicked, wondering if there was a fire.

But today was the last day she would have to deal with those boys on the corner.

She lit what she hoped would be the last cigarette of her life and paced the perimeter of the roof, taking in the dome of City Hall. A few faint stars hovered shyly above the lights outlining the Bay Bridge, and Theo tried to make herself feel some emotion about leaving the city she'd lived in for ten years, but she felt only cold and hungover. Theo often compared her own lack of emotions to the kind displayed by characters in movies. If she were a character in a movie she'd get teary looking at City Hall, or have an epiphany about moving all the way across the country. At the very least she'd feel the devastating, crushing blow of knowing she would never again watch a crime show on the tiny black-and-white TV.

She'd gone out of her way in life to feel nothing and maybe it had backfired, the same way getting drunk every day and learning nothing in high school had backfired. She was almost thirty and had no idea what made a moon full or what countries bordered which. Once she'd bought a shower curtain with a map of the world to make up for the high school geography classes she'd been too drunk to learn anything in. But after bragging to everyone about Italy being the boot, she'd begun to turn the other way in the shower, irritated by her lack of knowledge.

Her lip throbbed. Her friends had thrown her a going away party, a last hurrah, and she'd accidentally bitten through her lip when a friend had flung her straight off the dance floor into a cement pillar. She felt ashamed. She was too old to be having bar injuries.

“I'm not drinking in New York,” she'd said, trying to get as drunk as possible to compensate for all the drunks she'd never have again.

Theo took a drag from her cigarette and hung her head over the edge of the rooftop. A green city garbage truck idled, and Theo saw the remnants of a giant supermarket sheet cake lying next to some dirty diapers. For a brief second she thought about the man from the TV show and wondered how he had survived. A breeze swept the garbage truck fumes right up into her face. She felt her stomach turn and then she retched a liquid pile of mostly gin and tonics littered with tiny pieces of undigested orange cheese.

If life could be started over any time any place, why not start over in New York, where at the very least a person could purchase a slice of pizza any hour of the day? Theo's belongings were already loaded in her truck. By the time she got to New York her hangover would be gone, her head would be clear and she would be something! An artist! An entrepreneur! An inventor! She had so many ideas: like the travel mug in the shape of a toilet, it would have a toilet seat that went down for a lid. She'd also always wanted to make a mood ring for alcoholics—the rainbow of colors could translate into words like
lonely
, and
sorry
, and
marry me
. A burst of laughter interrupted her entrepreneurial thoughts. The boys from the corner were up on the roof across the street. Her impulse was to duck down and hide but she remembered she was moving to New York as soon as she finished what was now the third of her last cigarettes and so she felt less afraid. She watched their silhouettes move and tried to decipher their indistinguishable murmurs. Their laughter sounded drug-induced. Theo watched as they walked together to the edge of the roof. She stood very still. What if they had that slingshot she'd seen them with a few weeks ago, using pigeons as target practice? What if this time they were aiming at her face?

“Now!” she heard one of the boys yell, and all four heaved a long duffel bag over the side of the roof. The bag fell fast and heavy, hitting the top of the Taco Lady's makeshift awning with a large
thwap
!
Then the awning gave way, its aluminum poles splaying out slowly like the legs on a tired giraffe. The Taco Lady scurried out and bent over the duffel bag. Then she screamed twice, and Theo heard the sharp yelp of a dog.

Theo ran down the stairs, two at a time. Her whole life she'd been terrible in an emergency, paralyzed by her own fear, but this was different—
a dog's life was at stake.
When the Taco Lady saw Theo approach, she began to gesture toward the sky and Theo didn't know if she was trying to indicate God or the falling dog. Theo pushed the fear down in her stomach and knelt down next to the blue duffel bag, where she was relieved to see the dog shivering. It wasn't dead. The pit bull watched her from the corners of its eyes and Theo studied the long scar that ran down the left side of its head, like an exaggerated part in the hair of a dapper, old-fashioned movie star.

“Hello,” Theo said to the dog.

The whites of the dog's giant eyes flicked over at her as it panted. She tried to send a message of trust from her heart into the dog's while assessing how she might pick it up. Should she unzip the bag and let the dog out, or carry it like a suitcase to the 24-hour vet? Theo looked over at the Taco Lady, who remained a safe distance away from any gore and then back at the dog.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” she said softly, reaching out to smooth the fur on the dog's head.

It let out a high shriek as Theo's hand approached.

“Okay,” she told the dog and then motioned to the Taco Lady, who remained frozen.

“Ayúdame, por favor,” Theo asked, holding one handle of the duffel bag out for the Taco Lady to grab.

She came over reluctantly, and together they lifted the dog. There was a smear of blood on the tarp where the dog had landed, and Theo felt a wave of panic go through her.

“I'm going to take it to the vet,” she said slowly.

“Veterinario?” the Taco Lady asked.

“Sí.”

The Taco Lady nodded, and they lifted the dog and carried it to Theo's truck, carefully setting it onto the passenger's seat.

The entire drive to the vet, Theo watched to make sure the dog was breathing and its eyes were open. She double parked when she arrived, leaving the dog on the passenger seat, still zipped in the duffel bag, and ran inside to tell the receptionist what had happened. Two young women in scrubs immediately ran to the truck and removed the dog, placing it on a stretcher and carrying it inside.