True-Seeing

The author is an ugly, weasely little man, whose hair in pictures often looks unctuous.

She knows this, but when she’s reading his work, she forgets. Only someone worthy of her lust could compose such paragraphs, filled as they were with universal insights and illuminations. And she was not alone in her feelings. He had a whole army of fan girls who normally would not look twice at him on the streets, would probably fart in his presence, knowing full well he would be able to connect it back to them as the source. And he had more than an army of these women, he had a battalion.

She wondered, did the same principle hold true for say, Ann Rule? Yes, the scope of what the two writers composed was entirely different, but there were fervent true crime fans. And what genre would her weasel- cum- lothario’s composition’s fall under anyway? Wow-moment memoir?

But. But. And there was a but. He was fucking up, and she knew if she talked to other women in his wow-moment battalion some of them would say the same thing, would still be true-seeing enough to have noticed. He needed to lay off the daily emails. They were so detailed, so everyday nuanced, that they could see him growing in his conceit. His transformative power had gone to his head. He was believing his own hype. He was ugly, they made him beautiful and he was making himself ugly again.

If she could give him one bit of advice, it would be lay off the daily emails. She’d add, groom your mystique. Finally, if she still had his attention, she’d say wash your hair.

The Death Car

The Ford Fordor that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in on a windy, rural Louisiana back road became known as The Death Car. It toured the country afterward, dented like a tin can and riddled with holes from 167 bullets that had given their bodies the same treatment. We came to refer to my father’s blue, beat- up station wagon with its wood paneling and sloping hood like an ant eater’s snout by the same name: The Death Car. It sat in our driveway for a full year after his death, the newspaper he had bought on that day still waiting for him on the back seat. I had planned on grabbing the paper and saving it, adding it to the growing collection under my bed that commemorated important worldly events, but never did. When the car was finally towed away for use by some desperate charity, I wasn’t around to collect the memento mori.

When my mother kicked me out of the house for using heroin my senior year of high school*, I assumed she’d let me come back home. I assumed I’d have plenty of places to go and not being able to handle her guilt and worry, she’d not only let me come back, she’d beg me to come back. I was intensely wrong. My bad reputation and her itchy phone finger were formidable enemies, prefacing me like a disclaimer wherever I went. My arrival at any friend’s house always seemed to come after her phone call to their parents. Soon enough I had no place to stay that didn’t involve sneaking in through a window or an unlocked door in the middle of the night. So when I wore out my welcome or found the window locked, I’d go to my father’s car in the driveway, utilizing its broken door locks, and sleep inside, reading the newspaper on the back seat over and over again till I fell asleep.

One morning I awoke to my grandmother staring me down through the back passenger side window. The look of disgust on her face reached through the glass and shook me awake violently. She never liked our neighbors, but suddenly they were the most important people in the world. While her weighted glare had melted the window's glass, her greatest wish was to build it back up again tinted black.

My grandmother had always disliked my father, with his six children by two different women, his lack of papered education and uninspired employment history, but death had given him the ability to live up to a very basic parental responsibility, one worthy of recognition if only she could have seen past her grudges and embarrassment to acknowledge it.

When I had nowhere else to go, my father had taken me in.

© Fiona Helmsley

* her hope was to force me into going to rehab.