Goodbye Charlie
Runner-up 2013 Editors’ Prize, Spoon River Poetry Review
I was three when my father first smacked me. With my little fists holding onto the crib, I spit up the cough syrup he had forced into my mouth. It smelled like the dead blue bird my mother once found under our porch. I knew the odor was coming from me.
Years later, we moved to Harbor Way in San Diego, and I began to steal from department stores. The first time I shopped alone, I took a hat. It was as handsome as the fox it had once been, and I threw it in a trashcan on the street. Sometimes, I would try to be obvious, carrying the sweater over my arm, tags hanging, and walk right past the guard.
One night Nicole and I were lying side by side, and she was lifting up her bare legs one at a time, showing me how perfect they were. She started to cry because her mother was ill. She put her face against mine and her hand on my thigh. I thought she was me and all I really was doing was touching myself.
Soon after, I was sitting in a phone booth, resting there because I had just been rejected from a San Francisco TV station. I wanted to be a camera operator. At the end of the interview, the man said to me “why do you want this job, any ape can do it, the zooming in and out, it’s all automatic.” He didn’t want a woman running his cameras. The phone rang in the phone booth. I heard a man’s voice. He asked me to meet him.
When Charlie and I met, he said “You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something, nowadays everybody is crazy.” I glanced down at my body and couldn’t determine where my legs or arms ended, it was more like looking at your body than being in it, like looking at a photo of yourself as a child and not being a child anymore.
Within a month we moved, along with twelve other women, to a property near Topanga Canyon. Charlie asked the women of the family to have sex with the owner of the place, and this is how we got to stay there for free.
The eighty-year-old owner liked me the most. I tried to disappear while he was doing it to me. I imagined I was dust particles floating up into the sunlight.
I started to hear doors locking around me. I spoke in short sentences and tried to smile. I had pain when I urinated and I bled.
Alone in the doctor’s office, the doctor told me I had gonorrhea and that I needed to start an antibiotic treatment or I might never have children.
I went into the doctor’s bathroom, and sat on the floor. That was the first time I ever thought about being a mother. I realized that if I had a child I could be my own family. I knew I would be an outcast if I left, but I hoped one person could make history even if it was her own.
Then I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. My face was pretty in the mirror, and I did not cry or say bad things about myself. I felt like a woman in a detective story. I took out my lipstick and wrote “Goodbye Charlie” on the bathroom mirror. I wish I could have used blood.