Celebrate the flaw
Lucky Yates and Anna are dating. Each other. After all the blustering they both did about how they'd grown a sturdy layer of rust around their emotions, how they were never again gonna get tricked into the yawning butthole of bad love by letting that layer soften a little, they both crumbled like stale coffee cake the second they had some alone-time together. Ha! How's that for conviction?
"We made out for, like, 90 minutes in my car," Anna giggled, not even a little ashamed.
"Bitch, you two were supposed to be my comrades in crusty solitude," I laughed. I'd introduced them four months ago, after listening to them both blather about their newfound backbones due to their respective freshly failed relationships, and how this was supposed to serve as a force field against future sentimental involvement of any kind. They each sounded about as convincing as recovering alcoholics hanging out at Hooters on free-beer night, so I thought they'd get along.
On the other hand, of course, if they end up hating each other, I deny any responsibility. Just like I deny responsibility for unleashing Lary into the world. Lary would have been here regardless. I swear, I did not create him. He came out demented the minute he was born, an event I don't even think involved an actual mammal -- just magma, maybe, coming from a crack in the Earth's core. I figure this is the reason for his famous fascination with Cheez Whiz. Maybe it reminds him of the primordial ooze from which he first crawled.
"Did you know they sell Cheez Whiz by the gallon?" he asked me the other day, and damn if he did not have a gallon of Cheez Whiz sitting right there on the bar stool next to him. Cheez Whiz of that mass doesn't come in a plastic jug like you might think, but a metal drum similar to the kind they use for commercial solvents. He claims he stole it from the Omni Hotel, off the set of a cooking show hosted by Emeril Lagasse, who seemed like he was "really hungover," according to Lary, and therefore didn't notice the pilfering. I have a hard time believing that a famous chef would need an industrial drum of Cheez Whiz, but then maybe he kept it around for the curiosity factor, because the sight of it really is a little mesmerizing. Cheez Whiz is like earwax, and not in just the obvious sense, but because you're only accustomed to encountering it in tiny amounts.
Lary has looked into making his own and swears the process is a heralded scientific achievement. "I always thought it would be like Superman squeezing coal into a diamond, but it's not," he says excitedly. "It's a subatomic reaction. It's what the Iraqis were working on before we invaded."
I swear I thought he was gonna start sleeping with that stuff, so I was surprised to hear he'd offered it to Grant to augment the appetizer buffet at the Sister Louisa art exhibit this Friday at the Radial Cafe ArtSpace. Everyone will be there: me, Lucky Yates, Anna, Lary, Daniel and the rest of the psycho circus -- which reminds me, Grant better step up on the grub. The last Sister Louisa art exhibit I attended featured cheese puffs, cut-up Krispy Kreme doughnuts and bad wine in a box, which Grant himself hauled around and squirted into people's cups. Amazingly, he still wonders why all his potted plants were dead within a week.
But this time Grant promises the drum of Cheez Whiz is just for display. He probably won't even open it. "Besides," he sniffs, "this is not about feeding your body, it's about feeding your goddamn soul."
I would laugh if not for the fact that, amazingly, people really do tend to derive emotional nourishment from Sister Louisa's trailer-vangelical wisdom, which is painted on the societal discards she collects from the side of the road, such as the cracked mirror graced with the statement, "Celebrate the Flaw."
I love looking in that mirror. I don't just see me, but the entire carnival that comprises my friends and family. We are all flawed in the most fabulous ways.
Take Lary, who seriously cannot recall how a complicated network of scaffolding came to be erected in his kitchen, or how that truck bed ended up on the roof of his house. "I just know it was harder to get down than it was to get up," is all he offers. Or Daniel, who spends his days at a mental hospital, not as a patient but as a care provider who teaches art to troubled children every day, a process that will suck the human faith out of anyone else. But somehow Daniel manages to emerge with most of himself in tow, some pieces having been left behind with the hope of future retrieval. And then there is Lucky Yates and Anna, two emotional refugees whose hearts have been used as toilet paper in the past, but who nonetheless decided to test their toes in the tub of love again. Christ, you have to commend them for that, right? However it turns out, at least they were brave enough to try. At least there is that to say about all of us. Rather than turn away, we decided to look into the mirror, see past the cracks and celebrate the flaw.
hollis.gillespie@creativeloafing.com
Hollis Gillespie will sign copies of her new book Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood at The Third Coming, art assemblages by Sister Louisa (aka Grant Henry), April 2, 8-10 p.m., Radial Cafe ArtSpace, 1530 DeKalb Ave., 404-659-6594.
