The Orange Eats Creeps Read online

  But it is about beginnings. I saw my first evisceration six miles back in the stockroom of a Coburg gas station. You could say I’m “beginning” to like life on the road. But of course no sooner have I said this than I step into the ladies’ room of a Chevron up on Goodpasture Loop… I was just done washing my hair in the sink when a man walked in. A surprise, the possibility of which I’d only ever played through in my mind 8,000 times. And here it was. I stared at him through cold water in my eyes for what felt like a long time… Frozen with fear I closed my eyes as he swallowed the distance between us; I made note of his nose breath on the back of my neck after he gathered my wet hair on top of my head in a fist ponytail. I opened my eyes just as Seth appeared in the doorway. What I didn’t see were the exchanged glances several minutes earlier in the trailmix aisle on the other side of the door, between Seth and the man, who was a great deal older but not very much taller than me. What I’ve always found to be true is if two beings are tuned into the right frequency then there is no need for anything else. Here words would only cloud the poetry of what was about to commence. Only poised choreography and a certain inept longing filled the space. With effortless grace the man yanked my skirt up over my butt while he simultaneously pushed my head down toward the sink. He was small and I barely noticed him.

  Back outside in the parking lot I choked on my own glowering sadness, each sigh bringing more tears. Burrowing into my sweatshirt I gummed a piece of candy with a mouth full of mucous as the other boys whooped and fake punched each other in the stomach. I lose track of them. Each boy in our group all seem to blend into one mechanical teen felon meathead in my mind. I’m only half affectionately looking out for them, bearing witness to the march of their pathetic, over-determined lives. Since all the boys are a bit older than me, they’ve been out on their own, away from their families, for a long time; they are legally “men” while I’m still a girl. I can’t picture myself being anyway else. For now I’m getting used to wearing the same clothes every day, eating ground-scored snacks and brushing my teeth with a bottle of tap water in the sand. I have agreed to show no signs of weakness.

  Some self-righteous Krishna Punx at the Portland free clinic tried to start a fight with us this afternoon, saying our lifestyle is immoral and we spread disease all over the world, singling me out for whoring it up “wicca-bad.” They cinched up their scarves and hissed in our direction Gypsy motherfuckers. Josh threw a cup of ice at them and we yelled, “We’re not waiting anymore, these assholes are trying to kill-slash-indict us,” and stormed through the back doors demanding our medicine. Yeesh, we’ve toured the countryside, fucking in breakrooms all over the Pacific Northwest. Just run in, barricade the door, bone down and run away. Problem is, these bloodsucking gakkers I truck with have been getting worse at jumping on trains, to the point where this morning Knowles tripped and hit his shoulder on the ledge; we scraped him up a bit dragging him over the side but he could easily have ended up under the damn train and that’d be where we’d leave him. Being high used to make it easy to jump on even modern trains, now there’s no bigger joke than watching five spindly losers try to scale a rail car doing 18 mph. There’s a couple tips some old hobos have told us — one from some lifer named Boom Box — and that’s to get your sneakers in shape. Also, don’t eat for twelve hours prior — no problem. Be drunk, taking a Quaalude will make it easier for your friend to hoist your body onto the train if you’re a girl. Try not to piss off other hobos with your yelling and fighting and dumb music. All dogs must be on a leash — “or a rope-leash.” Give the old-timer in the car a beer too. Being harassed on the street by a bunch of crappy-pants assholes in Dockers, straight-laced guys with knives hidden in satchels, tie clips with razor edges, etc., truly blows. They may be mortals but they sure as hell have a fuckin chip on their shoulder for us. They want us gone and will stop at nothing to annihilate our bodies with rock-hard force. The whole other section of society just doesn’t see us, we’re a bunch of friggin ghosts to them. And that helps.

  Seth, Knowles, Josh, Murph, and I were smoking cigarettes out in front of a diner in the middle of a moist Monmouth night after we robbed this guy who was totally baked for thirty bucks and some orange vitamins. From far away I begin to pick up the sound of seagulls, throngs of them, their oscillating squeaks building until, looking up, I’m able to make out the vague, blurry pods some distance overhead appearing out of the vapor, emerging as fuzzy flecks out of black, hundreds of them tossing up so much racket, visually too with the lame half-falling way they fly. I was sure something horrible had happened to produce this; perhaps a giant dumpster had been disturbed a mile or so off, behind a Safeway, a huge noise in itself, where the gulls had become increasingly upset as to scatter like flecks of ash from an amoral fire. In other news, historically speaking, I originally turned vampire on my fourteenth birthday three years ago, as a symptom of, or maybe a response to, things getting really bad at home. Kim was gone. When it’s just you and your friend alone together in the shark tank, and then they bail, you’re gonna want to follow them. I started sneaking out every night to suck men’s blood; my house mom had no idea until one morning I came home late and she was waiting for me. I kept it up and eventually got caught with my mouth on some guy’s neck in a Safeway breakroom. After that she power-drilled the window shut, warning me that if I kept it up she would send me away. I unscrewed it with a screwdriver, went out again, woke up in a married man’s car, this guy I met at another grocery store, and it was six a.m. I went home and went to sleep — fuck going to school. Later that day I awakened at one in the afternoon to my house mom and a social worker standing over me. My house mom told me to pack my shit ’cause I was moving. I went hysterical and cried non-stop. The social worker had to be an asshole about it and took me to a cemetery on the way to Eugene. He told me that seeing my sister’s grave might help me get with the program. “It’s empty,” I whispered, mildly, until he left me alone.

  Leaving town is a blessing. Who, other than me, is in bad shape? I feel like a dead person, my body is lame, I can’t see shit I’m so hungry. I can’t properly bend my fingers and the rain soaks my exposed skin in such an obvious way it just makes me mad. A sharp, damp darkness falls over everything around me. Other than thedamp alley where I’m sure Kim’s body has been dumped — or rather, sprung up in a channel of steam from some portal of Hell — other places and sites crop up to me at different junctures of the trip. I can realize it at will: casually lift a glance over passing landscape, and a patch of grass under a broken oak tree will throb and glow, a woeful stench wafting up from the spot where a runaway was buried and found months later. Tomorrow I will be walking along the tracks at sunset and stumble upon a golden stake posted at the precise location where a 13-year-old tramp was strangled and thrown into the back of a pickup truck. At times this extra-shitty perceptive gift is as much a curse, my brain’s receptors aching with the curious and projected knowledge of my sister’s demise in a bus station bathroom some 300 miles away in the state of Idaho, a “best guess.” If I could recognize the voice at the bottom of a urinal I would know it was really her. The fluorescent lighting would do something strange and permanent to my brain and at that moment a loud pinging noise would issue from a distant location and strike me as indelibly horrible. Eh, in the absence of that I keep running. I started taking whites to stay awake all the time — fuck sleep and its festival of sadness — that dream carnival, I said. Medications made me feel wild and exotic, like I could combust into irrational enjoyment at any moment. There were logistical reasons too. I could work longer and more effectively on uppers, so that made me more profitable. When I felt a depressed shittiness wash over me at the end of a day’s dosage, I would crawl into the freight car and pull a sheet of burlap over my bones and lapse into a horrible trance. Real dreams scare me; anti-dreams are a heightened sense of reality, a telepathy trance, and are (unfortunately) the by-product of my forgetting, of so much dead skin cells floating away with every labored, bloated br
eath. Make everything disappear, I thought for a minute; you could inject a needle into this wall and fill it with water until, cracking in half, it dissolved and ran as mud and silt on the ground, down a hillside and into a creek filled with concrete pebbles. The silt would stick to each cold, hard surface and make the stones bigger, more dangerous and mottled. Pick one up and throw it at me. There are rarely worse things than creeks, and creekbeds. There are letters to send. Rocks to throw out the window.

  Everything satisfies precisely.

  Engorge sticky pricks.

  Enrage secret processes.

  Endure sexy pretense.

  Emerge surrounded parasitically.

  Energy sufficiently pulverized.

  Erection scoff prevention.

  Endorphin scream passage.

  Ecstatic speed patriarch.

  Embers slash plastic.

  Embalm severe parents.

  Epidemic seduction procedure.

  Escape seemed possible.

  Enormous secretion property.

  Emergency sedative party.

  Empire syndrome purification.

  End species preservation…

  Knowles, Seth, and Josh were in among the potatoes and onions, in the produce section at Safeway, drinking ice beer. Hardly anybody was shopping cuz it was quarter to four a.m. Then came this skinny redhead kid Murph, with a willow tree tattoo all up his right arm, who looked like he wanted to steal some fruit. They gave him a beer. Just some lone wolf kid who probably ran away from his group home but we couldn’t tell for sure, he just seemed kind of crazy if only in that militant chain-smoking vegan sort of way. I was between checkout counters three and four looking through the new Us when Murphee ran up to me, flashed two willful black eyes, and slowly stepped on my foot until I looked up from my page. You think he liked me? A little young maybe but teen hobos don’t give a fuck. Five “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” pages later I carried our new friend piggy-back style through the swinging rubber doors to the back of the store where we had some coffee and a ménage à trois (making out only) with Seth in the breakroom, plastered with federal-government /state-of-Oregon “employee entitlements and stipulations” and some gross drawings with what I guess were employees’ names and arrows pointing to parts of the entangled bodies. Murph promised to quit his nonjob on the spot and run with us weirdos. Seth made sure he turned Murph into a vampire, into one of us gypsy motherfuckers. Murph got a little upset about it but really had no choice, now he has to stick with us forever.

  The next afternoon I was sitting out in front of a Eugene Taco Bell watching little brown birds descend on a crumpled tin of white noodles. They picked at it incessantly, tiny jabs making the container convulse on the pavement. They came up to me too, staring intently with jerky, sidelong glances. “Look, one just flew away with a noodle!” “It’s like all the proper birds in nature, tugging at the worm in the hole first thing in the morning — how do these know it’s not a worm?” Knowles and Josh, would-be “lovers” who only ate with knives, had been waiting around at a known day laborer pick-up spot in front of Big Creek Lumber for a week now but hadn’t gotten shit for work — probably cause the jerky contractors and their white trucks didn’t trust that a couple of emaciated white kids in tight, smelly jeans and monkey boots could do more than stand around and look sick. But they came back to our camp this morning with bruises and bloody rug burn, and told us about some crazy fucker who picked the two of them up for work on a concrete retaining wall at a big house in the woods. They got into the back of his big truck, but when they got to the place, no site, no wall, just a sketchy storage facility next to the freeway. The guy makes it clear that they’re gonna have sex with him — not for very much money either, like 18 bucks each, and they freak out cause they don’t do this kind of thing — sex for pay — so they try to beat their way out of the truck but the guy whips out a jump rope, one with big handles, and starts beating the crap out of Josh and Knowles. So they got pretty fucked up but were able to run away after Josh threw a handful of gravel in the guy’s face.

  There was evidently something about Seth that drew guys to him; his neurotic routine only made him that much more quizzically alluring. He had circus tattoos on much of his arms, figures which became poxed and sickly when his freckles came out. I guess he’d lived the circus life, all tears and bruises, so there was something to that, and the way he hoisted me up when he fucked me was special. Like a saber-tooth cat he clawed my lungs up so I couldn’t scream his name or tell stories about him to his enemies. He left a pin-prick on my soul that has been throbbing ever since; it will never completely seal. Running around with a bunch of his friends was weird and complicated. There were times I half-woke in the middle of the morning, my mind jogged to try to place the man in my bed — which one was he? Who did I most want it to be? This happened several times, the moment of forgetting, and was disorienting — not to mention Guilt City. Back in our Eugene trailer days there would be many mornings when I came home to find Seth sitting at a fold-down table, vacuously listening to tapes on a small boom box he had brought out from our bedroom, playing cassette single after cassette single… He was bent at having to work at a food co-op/ commune for money. Everyone staying out there lived a pretty much communist panhandling lifestyle. They shared everything: change they picked up off the sidewalk, the house, shit they groundscored, food, beer, and anything that got kicked-down. They were a pretty good group of squatters. The house routinely had a bunch of bands, with the usual circulating of Anarcho-Syndicalist literature in the vestibule, an array of moist couches on the back patio — half-eaten bowls of beans overflowing with cigarette butts. I sat on a low carpeted platform in the backyard and watched the band that at that moment sounded ludicrously scrappy and wild; its vocalist, in tiny cut-offs and boots, routinely dropped to the ground in stock-worship at the altar of destruction, writhing around, kicking up plumes of dust and foliage, grabbing some dude’s shins and singing into his crotch. He stood and urinated a little into his shorts, which gathered a brown stain of dust when he fell again. During the fourth song he puked on his microphone, singing a spout of bile into the audience in front of him. Walking around the compound I happened on an outbuilding where a makeout party was awkwardly winding down. Pools of beer soaked my feet, getting me to run away faster, while silly-fast rock played on a boom box in the corner. Passing this on my way to the backroom/kitchen, I ducked into heavy black drapes. Here I found Seth with two other guys and a girl, ensconced from the rest. I gathered they were a rare strain of yuppie punks, decadently resting on long low pieces of furniture. The girl was wearing a stretchy salmon shift, possibly one oversized turtleneck, and she photographed me at regular intervals without explanation, limply holding the camera at strange angles to herself, sighing when the flash failed to go off. I sat awkwardly perched on a stool in the middle of the room, the only place left, while Seth rolled cigarettes with the other dudes. A prehistoric bluegrass 45 rotated on the portable next to the door, the dead man sang a gigolo is the only way to go-o. The record cracked and popped, the sound of slowly opening a peanut butter sandwich. They let us sleep in an RV on the property and I woke alone in the afternoon with the sweet charred flavor of burnt baked beans wafting in through the window. Some flaky Anarchos had been heating up some shit at the campfire next to the car and then left it there for long enough to have reduced the can of beans to a firm, dry brick on the fire. I threw handfuls of dirt at the embers from a sensible distance until it went out, then walked for hours across town to the rail yard and hid in the bushes. As night fell I became aware of having walked somewhere else, more putrid and rust-smelling, and having awakened for real at about four a.m. I was in some waterbed, set in from the wall like a bedcave, and there was by my early calculation more than one other person in there. A few. I remember the others waking and they were all around me. I was breathing pillow and hair and I couldn’t fully wake up. I remember having a lot of things done, said, scratching some guy ’cause he tri
ed to kiss me. Another guy told me I had two choices: one, I will eat you; or two, I will cut your arms and legs off — for Love! When it was over I got some money, took some? Can’t say for sure. Got paid, whatever. Left that fuckin place and went back to the camp. Wrap the bones in newspaper and put the parcels in a black plastic bag. The objects that occupy my mind in these moments when white madness fades and bloodsucking rage emerges from a crack in my fractured teen psyche: one, my pornographic obsessions, memory, anarchy, reflections on the inability of men around me to relinquish claims on my body. Two, how to make what you do okay with yourself: living with the knowledge that your body will never get old, but as a vampire you’re both undead and dying all the time. Throw it away. This preserved teen body, something just a little off — is it the foggy eyes? Drained, heavy limbs, fecund core? Liquid bones? Is it our reptile brain? Homing, mating, aggression, defense of body, territory, Cinders, wind, and frost have irritated and roughed teen skin. Sickly and suffering from chronic under-nourishment, they appear to subsist almost entirely upon their fingernails, which they gnaw habitually. There is something about being 17 and being immortal, like wishing you could turn into a magical being and then waking up, looking into the mirror, and seeing that you are. Cuz you can’t see shit and you know it happened, you turned vampire. So one day my reptile brain thought, “I could tell that fuckin story.”