Crazy Little Thing (9 page)

Wilma Speaks

Wilma and Wanda stood on a street corner. It was
night and the only light came from the passing cars’ headlights. Wilma adjusted
her breasts and looked squarely at the camera. “Claire was a sugar-pie. You
know most people don’t treat us whores like real womens. Most white womens
thinks we’re below them. Like they be thinking I wanted to grow up to be a ho’.
Mmmhmm… when I was a li’l girl, I say to my mama, ‘Mama, you know what I wants
to be when I grows up? I wants to be ho’.’ Uhhuh, right. My story is the oldest
in the book. I got pregnant and dropped out of seventh grade. Had to go to work
to support my baby. Couldn’t make enough to pay for daycare so I fell into the
life and that’s all she wrote. Claire was so sweet. When I asted her to sneak
that medical mary jay wana candy outta the jail… I had it hid on my person —”

Wanda interrupted, “You mean
up
your person,
don’cha?”

Wilma laughed. “Yeah, I had it hid up my hootchie,
but Claire don’t be knowin’ none of that. Anyway it was in wrappers. I gave
Claire the candy and told her to sneak it out of the jail for me. I told her to
just get rid of it. I don’t know why I be sellin’ drugs anyways. Sellin’ pussy
is dangerous enough without gettin’ into no drugs. I hope she got her shit
straightened out. If you ast me, I don’t think Claire be wantin’ to get no
divorce.” Wilma crossed her arms. “I think she still be in love.”

A car pulled up alongside Wilma. The passenger
window powered down. “’Scuse me, I gots some bidness to take care of,” she
said. She sauntered over to car with an exaggerated swing of her hips. She
leaned over and peered inside the car. “How ya doin’, Sugar?”

The camera turned off.

Waffle House

If you’ve seen one Waffle House, you’ve seen them
all. But that’s what Claire liked about them. You go into a Waffle House, you
know what to expect. No surprises. As much as people liked to think they wanted
adventure and surprises, what they really craved was knowing what to expect.

Claire sat across the table from Ollie and G-Ray.
Oscar was stuffed into the backpack between Ollie’s feet. He seemed content
with an occasional scratch between the ears and nibble of waffle. Claire ate
her way through the front half of the menu. She had a stack of licked-clean
dishes a foot high sitting next to her. She had never eaten so much or been so
hungry in her life.

Claire saw Ollie staring at her wide-eyed. Claire
explained, “Jail makes a person hungry, I guess.” She belched and wished she
had some those elastic-waisted pants. Maybe they could stop at a Target and get
some. That was another place that was the same across America. A Target was a
Target was a Target… Who said that? Wasn’t it that lesbian who looked like
Caesar? What was her name, Gertrude something?

Claire’s phone beeped for the 578
^th
time.
She didn’t bother to look at the text. It was from Scarlet. And the last thing
she wanted to do was talk to Scarlet. She was just going to yell at her. She
could practically feel Scarlet’s uvula vibrating from 500 miles away.

Her butt began to itch. That was weird. Her butt
hadn’t broken out in hives since she’d been away from Scarlet. And now that
Scarlet was texting her approximately three times per minute her butt was back
to its old tricks. Could it be that she was allergic to Scarlet? How could she
be allergic to a person? As a child she’d had a dog who was allergic to dog
hair. That was kind of the same thing. She wondered if there was such a thing
as cats who were allergic to cats. She even knew a woman once who was allergic
to semen. That wouldn’t have been so bad except she was straight.

“Did you hear me, Claire?” G-Ray asked.

“No, what?”

“According to my calculations, we could get to Memphis
by late afternoon.”

“We are not going to Memphis,” Ollie said.

Claire ignored Ollie. “What’s in Memphis?”

G-Ray leaned forward and talked excitedly. “The home
of the King. My tocks have spoken. They want to go to Graceland.”

“Graceland? Elvis?” Claire asked.

“We are not going to Memphis,” Ollie said more
forcefully.

G-Ray nodded, saying, “The King is commanding an
audience with my tocks, man. I can feel them twitch every time they face east.”

Claire’s phone beeped again.

“Scarlet would have a shit-fit if she found out we
went to Memphis after the Tulsa fiasco,” Ollie said.

Claire popped another hard candy into her mouth. She
handed her phone to G-Ray, saying, “Hold onto this while I go to the ladies’
room.” She stood and headed for the bathroom.

“We are not going to Memphis!” Ollie called after
her.

Claire used the facilities and washed her hands
slowly. She took several deep breaths and squared her shoulders. She calculated
how many texts she’d have when she returned to the table. She’d been gone for
five minutes, if Scarlet texted every thirty seconds that would be a minimum of
ten texts but if Scarlet was thwarted in her desire to obtain an immediate
answer she’d double that number.

Ollie was right. Scarlet would have a cow if she
knew Claire was asserting her free will. The thought made her smile.

Claire was still grinning as she rejoined the
others. “How many texts while I was gone?”

“Twenty six,” G-Ray said. “That’s 5.2 texts a
minute.”

“I see.”

“Are you going to text her back?” G-Ray asked.

Claire shook her head. “Please delete all of them
for me. Text back that we’re going to Graceland and I’ll call her when we get
there.”

G-Ray whooped. “The tocks are rejoicing.”

“Two against one. We
are
going to Memphis,”
Claire said to Ollie.

Oscar yipped his pleasure. Ollie frowned at her dog.
“Traitor,” she muttered under breath.

Graceland

Claire slept through Arkansas and all the way over
the Mighty Mississippi and she didn’t wake up until the van was rolling though
the gates of Graceland. And she only woke up then because Ollie and G-Ray began
to sing “Love Me Tender” at the top of their lungs.

Claire sat up and looked at her hands. They were
orange and sticky. The front of her shirt was covered with some kind of orange
powder. “What is this?” she asked. “What’s this orange stuff all over me?”

Ollie said, “That’s Cheetoh dust. You ate a whole
bag of Cheetohs. I tried to take them away from you and you growled at me.”

Claire couldn’t believe it. She’d been sleep-eating.
What the hell was wrong with her? Why was she so hungry all the time? She
popped another candy in her mouth and considered the possibilities. Maybe she
was stress eating. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was PMS. Maybe she needed to
go buy some sweat pants because the jeans she was wearing were way too tight.
She popped open the top button and licked the Cheetoh residue off her fingers.

“Here we are,” Ollie said, throwing the van into
park.

“My tocks thank you,” G-Ray said. “Let’s go see
where the King lives.”

“Lived,” Ollie said. “He died, remember?”

“So some believe,” G-Ray retorted. He hopped out of
the van and did some elaborate stretches designed to loosen up his tocks.

Claire remembered her dream where Elvis came and
talked to her. “Maybe he’s still alive,” she said. “A lot of people have seen
him, you know.”

Ollie snorted. “Yeah, a lot of people claim to see
Santa Claus, too.”

“They say the same thing about aliens,” G-Ray said. 
He was bent over at the waist and looking between his legs at Claire. “But I’m
here to tell you, aliens are real, man. R.E.A.L.”

“It’s hard to take you seriously when you’re bent
over like that, G-ray,” Ollie said.

G-Ray straightened up, reached behind himself,
grabbed a butt cheek in each hand and squeezed them together as if they were a
mouth talking. He said in a high-pitched voice, “We are alien entities. Take us
to your leader.”

“The aliens are speaking through your butthole?”
Claire said.

“Stranger things have happened,” G-Ray said.

Claire burst into loud guffaws. Which turned out to
be a big mistake. The sudden expulsion of air sent a gust of Cheetoh dust out
her nostrils coating the back of the front seat and Ollie’s face with neon
orange powder.

Ollie’s orange covered face, which now resembled one
of the Oompa Loompa’s from the chocolate factory, sent Claire into fresh
hysterics. She held her belly and rolled around on the floor of the van and
made sounds like a barking seal.

Ollie grabbed a handful of tissues and mopped at her
face. Oscar whined and jumped out of the van. Ollie and G-Ray exchanged
concerned looks.

Finally, Claire sat up and wiped the tears from her
face. “Sorry,” she said to Ollie. “I’ve just never seen you orange before.”

Ollie got out of the van and tucked Oscar into her
backpack. Claire moved to the front seat and looked at her reflection in the
rear view mirror. She wiped the orange off her mouth and pulled her hair back
into a ponytail. She looked presentable except that her eyes were red and
bloodshot. Nothing more sleep wouldn’t cure.

*

Ollie was becoming more and more concerned about Claire.
All she did was eat and sleep, sleep and eat. Ollie couldn’t help but take it
personally. Maybe she was bad for Claire. Maybe being around Ollie for any
length of time was detrimental to Claire’s sanity. When she picked Claire up in
Houston, she was a well-groomed, successful woman with a job, making six
figures a year. Two days on the road with Ollie and Claire was packing on the
pounds, snoozing deliriously and blowing orange stuff out her nose.

“Candy anybody?” Claire asked.

Both Ollie and G-Ray shook their heads. “Okey
dokey,” Claire said, popping it into her mouth. “Too bad, ‘cause that’s the
last one.”

Ollie strapped the backpack with Oscar in it over
her shoulders and shut the van door.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Claire asked.

Ollie patted her pockets. “No, I don’t think so.”

“What about EZ?”

“She’s sleeping,” Ollie said.

“You’re going to leave her in the van?”

Ollie shrugged. “If she were awake she could go with
us.”

“You’re really going to just leave EZ in the van
while we tour Graceland?  Do you know how hot it can get in a locked car?”

“I cracked the windows.”

“Let me get this straight,” Claire said, “you take
the dog inside in your backpack, but it’s okay to leave a human locked up in
the car?”

“You have a better idea?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Claire said.

Ten minutes later EZ was ensconced in a wheelchair,
wearing dark sunglasses and being pushed by G-Ray. EZ’s head bobbed up and down
and every few minutes a loud snore bubbled out of her open mouth.

Ollie said to the ticket taker, “Three adults,
please.”

The ticket taker, who looked alarmingly like a very
old, very rumpled, very obese Ann-Margret, said, “I count four of you.”

Ollie pointed to EZ, “She doesn’t count. She’s
asleep.”

“Wake her up,” Ann-Margret said.

“I can’t,” Ollie said, throwing a dirty look at
Claire.

“Not my problem. That will be four adults. One
hundred and forty-eight dollars, please,” Ann-Margret said.

Ollie almost shit her pants. “One hundred and
forty-eight dollars!”

Ann-Margret rolled her eyes and held out her hand.
Ollie sighed and handed over the money. She wasn’t going to bitch about the
price of admission. She bit her tongue. She wasn’t going to bitch about the
price of admission. She clenched her jaw. She wasn’t going to bitch about the
price of admission.

Ollie Speaks

The camera focused in on a close-up of Ollie.

“There’s lots of things about myself that I’ve never
told Claire. She thinks my mom died when I was fourteen. I didn’t tell her
that, but she assumed it and I didn’t bother to correct her. Dad and I never
talk about Mom anyway. I never see her or talk to her. And it’s kinda hard to
tell somebody that your mom went crazy, you know?”

Ollie sighed and continued, “I freaked out about the
price of admission to Graceland. That much is true. But, hey, who wouldn’t
freak about prices that high? The part that upset me the most, though, was
recognizing my mother in me. That ever happen to you? You open your mouth and
hear your mother’s voice coming out?

I didn’t let on to G-Ray or Claire but I was kinda
excited to tour Graceland. Not that I’m an Elvis fan-girl or anything, but when
I was a kid I never got to see any famous attractions or theme parks. I grew up
poor. Not the kind of poor where I didn’t have enough to eat, but poor enough
that making ends meet was hard on my dad. My parents fought about money a lot.

Mom would take me places, but wouldn’t ever pay for
the ticket to go inside. This one time we went to visit the Alamo. I was about
eight or nine. Mom refused to buy the ticket to get inside. She said that
charging to learn about history was a rip-off. Instead, we stood across the
street and she read to me from a pamphlet about the Alamo while I looked at the
outside of it.

Another time she made me hide in the trunk of a car
to go to the drive-in movie so she wouldn’t have to pay for an extra person.
I’m pretty sure she was into self-medicating at the time… anyway, she forgot I
was back there until she drove back home and I yelled so loud the neighbor
heard me and she let me out.

The last time she took me somewhere was Six Flags.
She made me sit in the car all day in the parking lot and visualize riding the
roller coasters. I told Dad about that episode and even he had to admit that
something was wrong. Not long after that Mom went away for good. He committed
her and that was the last time I saw her. So when the ticket lady told me,
“That’ll be one hundred and forty-eight dollars,” I had this moment of wanting
to walk away. We could always do that video tour on the net or something. But
then I remembered the roller coaster and that made me fork over the money. I’ll
be damned if I’m going to go crazy like Mom did.

I even bought everybody a T-shirt that said
I’ve
Been to Graceland.
”

The camera shut off.