Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(37)

Have you met our Kinky Chinky?

Fucking freaks, men say, in the best way possible.

I love it when they kiss me, too. Especially Nelle. I position my face next to her face as often as possible, as close as I can, but none of this has to do with the men around us, or what they think.

Pervs, we say, once we get home to Harley’s house in the mornings, peeling off our plaid miniskirts, our studded belts. Disgusting needle-dicked pervs. But we like pervs. We’re good with them. Pervs get us whatever we want if we wear the right clothes, if we act stupid enough. We pick up pervs in downtown Fort Lauderdale, on the strip, on the beach, outside the Primanti Brothers pizza shop, at lot-parties. The pervs must be old enough to buy us alcohol, and scary enough to make the whole experience worth it.

One night, we meet a drug-dealer perv named Josh outside a downtown tattoo shop. He looks about thirty-five, with a chin-strap goatee and barely any hair on top. We decide that Josh will do anything for us, so long as we love up on one another. So long as we let him tell us what to do and follow his instructions. Josh likes me most because I’m the shy one, and because I’m a virgin. He wears a gold ring with his name on it, a little diamond inside the O. He cradles my face in his giant, jeweled hand and puts his tongue in my mouth. I’ll let you wear this ring as long as I own you, he says. As long as I can call you my little bitch.

I wear his ring on my thumb with great pride, knowing that I belong to someone. At school, everybody stares at the ring, the glittering JOSH. There are several Joshes at school, but no one can place where this one came from—not a Goldberg or a Greenberg or a Rothblatt—this other kind of Josh.

Josh likes to take us drag racing at night. The three of us are so drunk in the backseat, we barely ever look at his speedometer the way he would like us to. We are never impressed with Josh or his car, we just sit on each other’s laps, kissing, making jokes about dying together in a crash, till death do us part.

How ’bout I get you girls some Incredible Hulk? he says one night, when he’s tired of this. We usually drink Malibu with orange soda, and the sound of a new drink with a muscular name has us intrigued. Josh stops at a liquor store, picks up a bottle of Hennessy, and a mystical-looking bottle of milky-blue liquor. Rub it and a genie will come out, he says.

The next stop we make is at a 7-Eleven. Josh brings us three Big Gulp cups full of ice. He pours and mixes the two liquor bottles in the cups until we each have our own full bucket-sized cups of liquid. It’s a dirty swimming pool color; muddy. Careful, the Hulk’s vicious.

Do you even have a job? we ask. Do you go to college or something?

I go to the college of Hard Knocks, U.S.A., he says.

We drink the bitter-sweet through our straws. Harley and Nelle stick their monster-colored tongues out for Josh above the center console of the car—Please?—and he drops white pills of Xanax on them. Good girls.

I love bars, Harley says. You’re missing out, Kinky Chinky. Pills give you wings.

Josh drives us down to Miami. We have never seen it before, at night, lit up and strobing. We ask to stop in a pizza parlor to pee. Inside my stall, the walls begin to drip down around me. I’ve finished my Incredible Hulk, and my feet feel like they’re on a treadmill, rolling away. My hands reach for anything to hold on to so that I can stand up, or sit down, or keep my balance somewhere in between.

The green starts bursting out of me. I vomit on my bare legs, the floor, the toilet seat. I hear somebody else doing the same. A gagging chorus. The heels of our shoes slip through it, leaving squiggled trails of tile white. The three of us walk out of the parlor, onto the strip, goopy liquid running from our eyes, our mouths, down our chins. Josh is gone. I crawl down the sidewalk, spewing more green into the gutters. We stumble over one another and grip our shoes by the straps. The girls hold my hair.

I love you. I love you. I love you, too.

None of us can remember how we ever got home.



It was suicide, Nelle tells me. Nelle’s father committed suicide two years ago. She was at a friend’s house watching a movie when it happened. Her mother was out shopping, buying Nelle’s older sister a prom dress. Her dad called the friend’s house line.

Can I pick you up? he said to Nelle. Are you ready? I’ll come.

I’m busy right now—we just got to the good part. Can’t you wait until later?

He was found swinging in the garage—a strappy piece of workout equipment squeezed around his neck. His deep plum skin on a hospital gurney. Nelle knew it before it was declared.

She talks about this only once, and then tells me to forget it.

Doesn’t matter anymore, she says. That was then.

But he was her father.



We go back to Craig’s house for another party. Harley and I are lying belly down on Craig’s bed as a room full of people look at my new tat. Today I went to a tattoo parlor in East Boca and asked for a Hawaiian beach scene on my lower back. Something scenic, I said, or maybe Bob Marley lyrics—artist’s choice. What I got was a cartoon palm tree right above my crack, with some sway marks around it. Neon waves and a plumeria flower float around the tree, a few red clouds, the whole scene beaded with hardened blood.

Did it hurt? they say. Did it tickle?

Looks like a flaming meatball, says Craig.

Wasn’t so bad, I say, even though I cried the whole hour that warm, vibrating needle thrummed through my skin, until the man with plugs in his face said, Check it out in the mirror, hula hula girl.