Twenty years ago I lived in a shoddy apartment on the banks of the Nisqually river. I don't know what the area is like these days, but back then the river held the pink salmon they called chum and a handful of regular Native American fishermen who stood waist deep in the water, coaxing the fish to the hook and reel. My apartment building held just six studio units in various states of disrepair. Nothing else human sat for miles except for a mystery place I found in the woods, an abandoned mobile home park full of tin Airstream monsters and the tallest weeds you ever saw.
I lived there with my boyfriend and our two dogs, Brush and Zarhumba. Oh how I loved those dogs. I brought them home one day, found them down the Nisqually running, searching for food, just two sacks of furry bones and ticks. We weren't allowed to keep pets, but no one ever visited the complex. I would sit on the little redwood deck with Brush and Zarhumba while my boyfriend dug ditches for the highway department. I was pregnant and no one would hire me, so I sat and thought up a million ways to make money and listened to a Kenny Loggins eight-track tape over and over.
One day in mid-November my boyfriend lost his job. We stood in line at the employment assistance office in Tacoma day after day, filled out form after form, met with pasty faced placement officers and nothing, just nothing happened. I remember walking the parking lot looking for spare pennies and the thrill of finding thirty-one cents, exactly enough to buy a loaf of cheap bread. The local store held a month-long scratch card contest. With every purchase you received a small card with a secret prize. When you scratched off the thin gray film, you might find a twenty-percent discount, or perhaps a free gallon of milk. A few lucky cards had money prizes, nothing big mind you, but a buck or five or ten. They kept the cards in neon green beach buckets next to the register.
My boyfriend and I came up with a plan that November, a plan of desperation and laughter. We made a trip to the store with my thirty-one cents, and as I reached into my change purse to grab the change for the loaf of sorry bread sitting at the register, I "accidently" dropped the coins with a clutter and an "Oh Damn!" The cashier looked at me and my bulging belly with sympathy and bent down to collect the coins for me. By the time she found every last penny, my boyfriend was waiting outside with the entire prize card bucket.
I wish I could tell you we did this once, but truth be told we hit up every grocer in town. The Great Prize Bucket Heists we called our operation, and I took to calling my boyfriend Clyde. We scratched and scratched all those cards, hundreds of them, and ended with a grand tally of twenty-two dollars in prize money and several gallons of milk. Of course, we had to drive out of town to redeem our prizes, and with our cash we bought all the fixings for a huge Thanksgiving feast - a fat tom turkey, potatoes, yams, a pie, ice cream, green beans - and we ate ourselves into a tryptophan stupor. We bought a box of Milk Bones, too, and Brush and Zarhumba looked at the identical snacks with confusion.
I wrote a poem that Thanksgiving. I sat on the deck, back against the wall, frozen with food, tired and swollen and content. It's the only poem I've ever written. I don't know what possessed me to take a pencil and mark the occasion, but I did, and I stuck it in my wallet, and I keep it with me to this day. Here it is, and with it I wish you a marvelous Prize Bucket wonder of a Thanksgiving!
Nisqually
The water is so black and cold
it swirls with native fish, chum with pink tails and monsoon eyes
they sneak through mirror water and want to leave me a message
but I can't hear them
my ears are full, just like my belly
the grasses below the water collect the message
let it sink to the silt
sink to mud silt
I stared at all the women waiting in line. Most seemed part of small connected party groups, and I heard one woman in a tight denim jumpsuit unzipped to there squeal "Happy Birthday" to a friend. I listened to the group in front of me talk about an upcoming wedding, bridesmaids dresses, flowers, and men. Men, men, men. The women lining up behind me were no different. Men, men, men. Men doing wrong. Cute men. Bad men. Hairy men. Tight ass men.
Damn, I thought, is this what normal socially active women think? I remembered the last time I talked men with a group of girls. I stood in my kitchen stirring batter for mini-cheesecakes, the kind you make with vanilla wafers and canned cherry pie filling and packages of cream cheese. Two of my sisters leaned against the tile counter, watching, waiting, and we talked about our husbands and lovers as our children built a blanket fort in the living room. My favorite sister's oldest girl, the one who looks like her father with her long sad face and crooked teeth, stood just outside the kitchen. She was at that awkward stage, between little kid and older kid, and she wanted to be part of the cooking, part of the dishing, so I pretended I didn't know where she was and called her name. I handed her the vanilla wafers and told her to place one in each muffin tin. Our talk wasn't ribald lewd like these party women, wasn't full of innuendo and sass, just discussion of longing and disappointments and hopes for some good clear future. I wondered what my sisters would make of this flock of earthy doves.
I cleared my throat and jumped into the conversation behind me, agreed that men lack tact, and pulled out a handful of brochures and samples and passed them around. Everyone held an arm out for a spritz of Today, but the conversation soon drifted back to men. We slowly filed in to the club.
Nearly every seat in the house was taken. Small circular tables of different sizes dotted the floor, two to six to ten seated together, and I scanned the room looking for an empty chair. I found one, up front near the stage, an empty table for two, and I plunked my purse on the plastic glass top and sat in a chair with a stuffed vinyl seat pad. I'd never been in a strip club before. The lights shone soft yellow, orange, rose, made every woman look good, gave us all glowing skin and luminous eyes. A hidden speaker system played upbeat rock numbers, artists like Prince and Black Eyed Peas, just loud enough to cover the roll boom of the voices around me. Several male waiters, each wearing black spandex shorts, no shirt, and a bow tie, circled the room, taking orders, flexing muscles, flirting and grinning. I fumbled through my purse and realized I forgot my wallet at home.
"Just a glass of water, please, no ice," I answered when a streaked blonde waiter sided up close and leaned over me, rippling abdomen shiny with some kind of oil that smelled of beach and sand and salt and a hint of musk.
"No problem, Miss, you want to keep your wits about you, eh?" He winked and whirled around to the table behind me, all the while shaking his bum.
Lord have mercy, I thought. Just then a drum-roll cut through the music.
"Laaaaaaaaadddiiieeees of San Deigooooooooo!!!!!! Please put your hands together and welcome our own Surfside Hotties!!!!!
