Cha-Ching! (11 page)

“Give me your money or I'm going to stab you,” the junkie said.

“Money?” Theo said incredulously.

She was only carrying three dollars and the brown bag with a six-dollar bottle of wine.

Theo heard herself repeat, “Money?”

He stepped closer and touched the point of the knife blade to her stomach.

“Give me your money or I'm going to stab you,” he said, making his voice quieter this time.

Unlike the times when Theo had been a helpless observer of other people's emergencies, she was now filled with an adrenaline born of outrage. She couldn't help but feel the junkie was a novice; in fact, she'd never been so sure of anything. She was practically clairvoyant as she used her x-ray vision on his fingers that were pinching the handle of the knife flimsily, like an amateur learning to toss a Frisbee.

“Money?” she said again, this time more angrily. Every thirty-cent roll she'd eaten in Yonkers burned inside her, and she wrapped her fingers around the neck of the wine bottle and began to swing it at his head. You can kill a person by hitting them in the head with a bottle. You can smash their skull. Theo knew this as she felt her arm whirl towards
his face.

Did the bottle slip out of the bag? Or did she intentionally miss his head and smash it into the wall behind him just to scare him? The bright fluorescent lobby lights reflected off the white tile walls as the dark red wine ran down. Theo watched the junkie's face freeze after the bottle crashed inches from his ear, and then he scampered away and she heard the gate slam shut. Her hands shook from adrenaline as she moved her toe over a broken piece of glass on the floor, making a scraping sound. The thick smell of red wine rose up around her, and something primordial made her want to lick some off the floor—she knew exactly how it would taste.

She'd had many drinking dreams since she'd quit—sometimes she drank accidentally, other times rebelliously with a giant
Fuck You
. The unnerving thing about all the drinking dreams was how she could taste the alcohol, exactly as it had tasted in real life. Upon waking she'd be filled with remorse that she'd given up her tenuous sobriety—only to have that remorse replaced by a sense of awe that her cells, her DNA and her subconscious had all kept such careful catalogs that they could provide, when needed, the exact flavor of a gin she'd drunk once in the tenth grade.

Theo climbed the five flights of stairs to the apartment number on the slip of paper, adrenaline making her knees wobble. The whole way up she said to herself:
bad math.
She'd given up her six-dollar bottle of wine instead of the three dollars in her pocket.

Finally, she reached the landing of the apartment; on the other side of a thick steel door she could hear music and the lively sounds of a party. She rang the doorbell. Someone opened the door and Theo looked in at the room full of strangers. Marisol was kneeling on the floor by an oven, looking inside the broiler to check on a giant pan of paella. The kitchen was full of laughing and chain-smoking dykes, all drinking wine and oblivious to the fact that just moments before there had been a knife pointed at Theo's gut.

“Wow,” Marisol said when she looked up and saw Theo in the doorway. “I wasn't sure you would come.”

“Hi,” Theo responded, suddenly shy.

“This is Theo, everyone,” Marisol said.

Theo waved.

“How are you?” Marisol asked.

Theo didn't want to ruin the party but it seemed insane to not share what had just happened to her.

“Um, I just got held up at knifepoint by a junkie in the lobby.”

“What?!” everyone screamed.

“I swung a bottle of wine at his head and then he ran out.”

“Do you think he's still there?” Marisol asked, and then some dykes bolted downstairs.

The girl who had opened the door gave up her chair and sat Theo down.

“Let me make you a drink. What are you drinking?” she asked.

Theo was trying to light a match but her hands were shaking too much. She didn't want to cry, and she felt the adrenaline moving her in that direction.

Marisol took the cigarette from her and lit it, handing it back with a shot of tequila.

The smell of tequila rose to Theo's nose. She hated tequila. On her sixteenth birthday she'd drunk so much of it that she passed out facedown on the beach, alcohol poisoned. The police had plucked up her body and rushed her to the hospital.

“I think I just want a Coke right now,” she told Marisol, avoiding the conversation about the tequila.

The dykes came back from the lobby, reporting what Theo already knew to be true, that the junkie was long gone and the only thing that remained was the bright tile wall streaked with red wine and the brown paper bag and shattered glass lying in a puddle on the floor. Theo recounted the story to the roomful of strangers, downing her can of Coke and chain-smoking as they listened. Then she explained to the horrified group how she'd found herself renting a room in Yonkers that had carpet the color of Ronald McDonald's hair and working for a boss who called people
You Fucking Faggot
all day and how Theo had confronted him in her calmest voice, telling him she was gay and his use of the word
faggot
upset her. When she'd finished, he'd nodded his head contritely and apologized. Then he opened his desk drawer, pulled out a
Playboy
magazine and tossed it at her, saying, “I bet you would like some of the toys in here!”

“You could sue him,” Marisol said.

Theo would never have read Marisol as queer if she hadn't flirted with her. And she was stunned at how nice the strangers at the party were. They all seemed interested in offering her solutions to improve her life and giving her drinks. At various points throughout the evening someone else handed Theo a freshly poured glass of wine and Theo, who'd become tired of saying, “I'm not drinking,” instead said, “Thank you,” promptly abandoning the glass among a sea of others where someone would eventually mistake it for their own.

When the party was over Marisol asked Theo if she was heading back to Brooklyn. They walked to the subway together shyly, Theo reviewing the wide array of emotions the night had held. Her lungs hurt from smoking. She wanted to hold Marisol's hand but the train was packed with people drunk from holiday parties. She'd caught one of the guys checking out Marisol, and now she felt self-conscious.

As they pulled into the 53rd Street station, Theo stood up.

“Will you give me your phone number?” she asked Marisol.

“You're not going to ask me to come home with you?”

“I am,” Theo said. “But just not tonight.”

Marisol took a pen out of her purse and wrote her phone number on a cigarette, handing it to Theo.

Theo stood on the platform holding Marisol's gaze through the window until the train had pulled out of the station. On the walk home she was a mix of excitement about Marisol and fear that behind every shadow was a man with a knife. She hurried home to a sleeping Cary Grant. She petted the dog's side until Cary Grant woke up, beating her tail wildly into the bed.

“Hello, good dog,” Theo said quietly.

She let the dog into the backyard and stood in the cold while she went to the bathroom. There was no way she was going to walk Cary Grant down the street at 2
am
. When she walked back in the house she could see the mousetraps were all full but she didn't have the energy to empty them. Cary Grant hopped back into bed waiting for her. She had taken to pawing at Theo or Sammy when she wanted them to lift up the comforter so she could go underneath. Theo let her under and the dog curled in a circle and plastered her body against hers.

“Someone pulled a knife on me,” Theo whispered stroking Cary Grant's ribs.

While she stared at the ceiling waiting for Sammy to come home she wondered if anyone had cleaned up the broken wine bottle in the lobby.

Theo looked at Marisol's phone number all day but could not muster the courage to call her. What if she called and Marisol had lost interest? Then her good luck streak would be over. She told Sammy she was going to take her out to dinner to celebrate getting her first A on a Reiki test. She was happy for Sammy, but it filled her with panic when it seemed like other people had embarked on a plan for life while she had none. When Sammy said, “I love massage school,” Theo heard, “Theo, you don't have a plan for life.”

The closest Theo had come to a dream was to be an artist, but she had no talent. She tried to learn to draw, practicing collages or charcoal outlines of Styrofoam cones alone and in classes at the community college.
Anyone can learn to draw. Learning to draw is just learning to see.
That's what every teacher said. But for Theo it wasn't true. No matter how hard she tried, she was unable to transfer the pictures she saw in her head onto paper, and her teachers didn't encourage her.

Still, Henry Darger and Vincent Van Gogh were her heroes. Darger had been a janitor for sixty-seven years, and Van Gogh unable to earn money in his lifetime, or to do anything else than just paint and live with coal miners and see prostitutes and lick turpentine from his brushes. In the end, Darger would've been just a creepy janitor, and Van Gogh, a redhead who enjoyed a prostitute, if no one had canonized their work. Theo loved the swirling brushstrokes of Van Gogh's skies, bedposts and floorboards. She wanted to eat the canvases, they were so thick with paint. She wanted to live in his bedrooms, sleep in his four-poster beds, wear his little black boots. But Darger and Van Gogh were famous men, and Theo, a timid sirma'amsir who had spent her life at jobs in party stores, parking lots, hospital cafeterias, night hotel desks, and any other place that would afford her time alone to read about these men she could never be.

Theo swept up four dead mice and reset the traps, and she and Sammy headed out to Bay Ridge where a restaurant was having a lobster night. A banner hung outside announcing,
Monday Night! One-pound lobsters for $5.99
!
Theo and Sammy entered through giant French doors. Votive candles flickered on all the tables. They sat down at a small table by the wall, and Sammy looked at the extensive tap beer menu.

A waiter came over to take their drink order, and it took Theo a moment to recognize him.

“Big Vic!” she said. “Do you remember me?”

“What's up?” he smiled, shaking her hand.

“This is the guy who I met at the OTB,” Theo told Sammy.

“Victor,” Big Vic said, extending his hand to Sammy.

“Sammy.”

“I'm actually going to Atlantic City tonight,” Big Vic said.

“Really?” Theo asked.

“After work. I'm gonna take the bus,” Big Vic said. “You guys should come.”

“Maybe,” Theo heard herself say. “We'll think about it.”

“We were going to get the lobster special,” Sammy said.

Theo could tell Sammy was having a low-blood-sugar moment. Big Vic looked over his shoulder nervously at a man sitting at the end of the bar and then said, “Don't do that.”

“How come?” Theo asked.

“Well,” he looked afraid, “the owner is kind of a scumbag and he buys half the lobsters dead. A guy just sent his back because the inside looked like mashed potatoes.”

“No,” Sammy said laughing.

Big Vic smiled and nodded.

“And sometimes there's this weird green stuff inside. And when I told the owner he was just like, ‘Tell them that's what the females look like. That they're pregnant and those are the eggs.'”

Sammy was laughing harder now. “Those are the females,” she intoned in her best nature documentary voice.

Big Vic smiled, flashing the gap in his teeth.

“She's stoned,” Theo said, explaining Sammy's giggling. “So what should we eat?”

“I'll hook you up,” Big Vic said taking their menus.

He returned a short while later with a pitcher of stout, two glasses, a plate of nachos, wings, and BBQ pork sandwiches.

Theo watched Sammy pour the dark beer into her glass and take a big gulp.

“You want a Coke, girl?” Sammy asked

“I'm not sure,” Theo said, fixating on the pitcher of beer. She could conjure the exact bitter taste of it.

What had seemed so clear when she left San Francisco—she must not drink alcohol ever again, no matter what—now felt like incomprehensible dream logic. Plus, she had never exactly told Sammy she was trying to be on the wagon or that she'd quit drinking many times before. Theo reached across the table and grabbed the pitcher, pouring herself a glass.

“Just because you poured it doesn't mean you have to drink it,” she told herself.

But she'd already taken the drink when she ran toward the first thought instead of away. Now it was just a formality to swallow the beer.

“I thought you didn't like beer,” Sammy said.

The worst thing that can happen to someone who quits drinking and then decides to drink again is when people start questioning that decision as a glass is raised. Theo ignored Sammy and took a big swallow of her beer. She waited to feel regret or happiness or relief—all emotions she'd felt before when she'd decided to say fuck it and crash a bottle over herself like she was a yacht, but this time she strangely felt nothing except the bitter beer dripping down the back of her throat.

“Maybe I'm not an alcoholic anymore,” she thought, and the whole world cracked wide open.
People are alcoholics if they let themselves be alcoholics. Americans are so busy pathologizing everything.
Theo let the warm blanket of beer drape over her brain.

By the time dinner was over Sammy was sleepy and no longer wanted to take an impromptu trip to Atlantic City. Theo drove her home, got her envelope of cash, and emptied the mousetraps. When she went to sweep up the last one she saw that the mouse was still alive.

“Girl!” she screamed, and Sammy hung back in the doorway timidly.

“Girl, what?”

“It only caught half the body!”

The mouse lay very still until Theo tried to get close and then it squirmed and flashed its tiny beady eye at her in fear. She started crying.

“What should I do, girl?” Theo asked.

“I don't know girl.”

“Get me a bag. You have to help me. I need your help.”

Theo didn't feel drunk from the beer, just a familiar heavy despondency in her body.

Sammy returned with a plastic bag.

“You have to hold it open. I'm going to sweep the mouse into the dustpan and then put it in the bag, okay? All you have to do is hold the bag open and then I'll take care of the rest.”

“Girl,” Sammy said, stuck on repeat.

Theo moved the broom around the back of the stove and swept the mouse out while Cary Grant watched. She didn't want the dog to see the mouse squirm and then have this whole situation go from bad to worse if she had some kind of prey instinct.

“I'm so sorry,” Theo told the mouse, dumping the whole trap into the plastic bag.

She set down the dustpan and took the bag from Sammy, who was standing pale and frozen. Outside, she dropped it into the trash can. If only she'd listened to Bill about the glue traps. She knew she should do something now to put the mouse out of its misery, drop a rock, or get a hammer, but she couldn't, so she went back into the house sobbing. She couldn't believe she'd let herself start drinking again. When she came back inside Sammy was standing behind the bar making herself a drink with a martini shaker she'd bought at IKEA.

“Want a drink, girl?” she said.

Theo nodded. “Make mine out of gin,” she said.

•

Theo sat at the bar drinking her martini and staring at Marisol's phone number written on the cigarette.

“Should I call her?” she asked Sammy.

“You better hurry. It's almost ten and she's a librarian, right?”

“Should I ask her to go to Atlantic City?”

“No,” Sammy said. “With Big Vic? Maybe that's not a good first date.”

Theo nodded and put the cigarette inside the envelope of cash in her jacket pocket. She had about $3,500 left from her Buttermilk winnings. Even though she didn't want to separate the lucky bills she counted out a thousand dollars and put it in her coffee can in case she came into some bad luck.

“Will you let Cary Grant sleep under the covers?” she asked Sammy.

“Of course. Have fun, girl.”

Theo picked Big Vic up from work when he got off— driving would be faster than taking the bus. On the drive he told her about himself: He was twenty-three and had lived with his girlfriend in an apartment with no heat since he was eighteen; every night she makes him dinner even though he gets a free meal from work. He eats after his shift and then goes home and eats again, because he doesn't want to let her down. He'd lied about where he was going tonight, telling her he was spending the night at his mom's; his mother was confined to a wheelchair from a premature stroke. In fact, tomorrow he was supposed to meet a guy so he could buy a minivan for when he takes her to her doctor's appointments in the wheelchair. He already bought his girlfriend a leather jacket for Christmas: “It's nice. It's not for standing on the corner.”

Big Vic had played baseball his whole life; he was a pretty decent third base. A few years back some scouts from the Atlanta Braves farm team had looked at him. But when Theo tried to get him to talk about it more, he wouldn't. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Atlantic City, and after the first fifteen minutes they didn't say much more to each other except when Big Vic asked if Sammy was her girl.

“No, she's like my brother. We met in jail.”

Big Vic's eyes got big and Theo said, “It's not as dramatic as it sounds. I like a different girl.” She wished Marisol were in the truck with them.

“It's so weird we're going to Atlantic City together,” she said. “We don't even know each other.

“You're lucky, girl. We're a team. We're gonna win that money tonight!”

“Cha-Ching!” Theo said, and they high-fived.

By the time they could see the lights of Atlantic City they'd both gotten their second wind. Big Vic went straight to the blackjack table while Theo sat down at a
Wheel of Fortune
slot machine. The casino was decorated for Christmas and full of people sitting alone.

Theo heard a cocktail waitress say, “Cocktails, cocktails,” as if she were a bird mother calling to Theo, her lost bird child who'd fluttered into low foliage to hide her broken wings.

“Cocktails?” the waitress said looking right into Theo's eyes. She was wearing a red Santa hat that said
naughty
.

“Gin and tonic, please.”

I can quit drinking again tomorrow
, she thought, lighting a cigarette and feeding one of the new hundred-dollar bills she'd won at the OTB into her
Wheel of Fortune
slot machine. Lucky money. Lucky money, Theo thought. The machine registered 400 credits and then shouted,
WHEEL. OF. FORTUNE!
so loudly Theo jumped back. Had she won something already? She was confused and looked at a woman at the end of her row who was scowling into the screen of her own slot machine and slamming her hand down on the play buttons, making a slap sound each time she did so.

“Well, Merry Christmas,” Theo thought, looking away quickly from the woman's bad vibes.

Theo pushed the
spin
button and watched the three wheels whirl to a halt. Nothing, so she hit the button again. A red seven, a blue seven and an orange. It seemed like something, but the red block numbers that kept track of her credits only dwindled. She read the game rules printed on the side of the slot machine. In order to win, she needed the special Wheel of Fortune symbol to stop exactly in the middle of the black line on the third wheel. Then she would enter the bonus round and hit the
spin
button again and it would activate the giant wheel on top of her slot machine. Her grumpy neighbor had just activated the bonus round and her machine had shouted,
WHEEL. OF. FORTUNE!
The woman did an elaborate superstitious hand movement, wiggling her fingertips at the screen before pressing the
spin
button. The simulated sound of a wheel ticking very fast started up, and as the ticking slowed, so did the wheel, waiting to settle on the winning amount. A person could win from 25 to 10,000 quarters. And of course the 10,000 was placed in a slot between 25 and 30.

“C'mon, Wheel!” Theo heard herself squeal, rooting for the woman. She felt her blood rise as she saw the woman's wheel settling near 10,000 quarters.

“Stop, stop, stop!” the woman screamed futilely as the wheel settled on 30. She'd won 30 quarters.

“Goddamn you!” she screamed at the machine.

Theo wanted to say:
It could be worse, you could've won 25 quarters
.

Then the woman reached into her purse and fed a crisp hundred-dollar bill into the machine, even though she still had credits left.

Theo wanted to move to get away from the woman's bad vibes. Plus, she wondered if Big Vic was winning. With the exception of winning four quarters on a single cherry, she'd gotten nothing from her machine. The colorful Wheel of Fortune symbol that reminded Theo of some kind of tool for teaching people to learn fractions kept landing just above and just below the black line. The first time it happened her heart leapt and she had paused, waiting for a chance to enter the bonus round. But now she understood the machine was trying to trick her, letting the symbol appear like a carrot before a horse. Even though she wanted to leave the machine she was afraid to, because what if it suddenly hit? She'd already invested some money in it.

The Sexy Santa cocktail waitress came back with Theo's gin and tonic, and Theo realized she didn't have any singles to tip her.