‘My penis bone is never gonna get bigger,’ I complain to Sundae. ‘I could make Glad a lot more money…’
‘Well, Glad aspires to be a world-class pimp and to make the trucker’s handbooks, but he also wants to be Santa Claus too. It is a hard combination for him. It makes him suffer terribly,’ Sundae says mournfully.
I bow my head in deference to the contradictory proclivities of our pimp.
‘Sometimes if you want more leash, you have to prove you can handle it…’ Sundae mumbles while rolling over his anklet socks so they lie just so.
‘What do you mean?’ I squat down next to him.
‘Well, you just gotta go after what you want,’ Sundae says into his shin as he fluffs the lace on the sock. ‘There is more than one truck stop around. There are a few drivers that will ride you over…’ She presses a finger to her lips without looking at me.
‘I won’t say a word,’ I say and smile.
My every other Thursday 7 p.m. gave me a ride up. After he put his Ben Davies black jeans on back over his ebony thong and lace-trimmed garter belt, I told him I had to see the Jackalope—the one with the antlers so big it is said fifty truckers can hang their caps on a point and there is still antler to spare.
‘Why? You made me spit further than a llama,’ he says buttoning up his red and black Coldmaster thermal long johns shirt over his Victoria’s Secret Midnight Miracle Bra.
‘I know,’ I say and twirl a curl with my index finger the way I’ve seen Sarah do every time she asks for a man to make an honest woman out of her. ‘But I feel my powers slipping some, and if they do, well, Glad might take me off the lot for…’ I sigh like Sarah, ‘For who knows how long until the malevolent drain on my magic disperses.’
‘Malevolent, you say? That bad?’ He shakes his head while lacing up his heavy steel-toe boots over his nylons, the seams running precisely up the back of his calves. ‘Well, I agree. I think you need to pet the Jackalope to safeguard that sorcery you practice over every panty-wearing trucker in this hemisphere.’
He drives me over the Cheat, which I know Glad will never cross to get me.
‘Too much evil sortilege,’ Glad always says when someone suggests he open a franchise over Cheat Ridge. ‘Many a man’s been defrauded from his life by those mountains and river.’
He wouldn’t even let one of his whores, even one who has completely lost their divinity, cross the Cheat for a pilgrimage to be restored by the patron saint of lot lizards: Holy Jack’s Jackalope.
As soon as we pull into the gravel lot of the Holy we get slammed with the lingering scent of all the lizards’ French colognes and perfumes, so strong it even masks the putrid scent of the bar’s coal still behind back.
‘Well, I’m going to drink a fair number of bourbon branches while you do your supplication,’ he says. He checks his stocking seams under his cuffs and leaves for the dim insides of the quarry stone bar.
I walk around the side to where I see a line that stretches out the door. The lizards stand in their evening finest, the most palpable pinks, Armageddon reds, and enigmatic blacks. I pause before they spot me, shine my Mary Janes on the backs of my white knee-highs, and hike up my plaid skirt some. I dig out my lipstick from the separate makeup compartment in the leather overnight pack Sundae leant me and do a swift retouch. I jostle my curls and get close enough for them to see me. Most look out of habit, give me the once-over, then turn away with a dismissive flick of their locks.
Sarah always says before she goes man shopping, ‘I look so good when I enter this bar, I’ll make all the bitches nervouser than long-tailed cats at a rocking chair convention.’
A few of the younger girls keep their gaze on me and even give embarrassed half-smiles. No one wants to be thought of as needing to be here on this line, needing to be healed by the Jackalope. Being a lot lizard is one thing; being a failed one is a travesty.
I notice many lizards wear thick, mirrored highway-patrol shades and Palestinian head shrouds over their Dolly Parton wigs.
I smile back too energetically, so only the last girl on the line doesn’t flick her head away in superiority at my obvious relief. She nods at me when I get to the end of the line. I nod back. I lean out and peer into the gloomy light of the bar. I can make out what looks like the spotlit tips of white-striped antler, its huge points spreading out and up like the arms of Jesus.
‘Good Lord, these hoes are taking their sweet time,’ the girl in front of me mutters without looking at me. ‘Been an hour near past and this line hardly moved. You’d think that Jackalope was paying these hoes by the minute!’
I notice her left eye behind her Hollywood sunglasses is half shut in black-and-blue lumps hardly concealed by streaks of powdery beige foundation.
‘The trick is to use an oil-based, yellow-tone foundation. You should never use matte!’ Sarah would say, wincing while tentatively sponging on tan goop. ‘I swear it should say so on the bottle: “Do not under any circumstance use matte to cover your man’s fist kisses.” ’
The girl notices me staring at her bruise and taps it like a lucky charm. ‘My bell got rung…’ She laughs coarsely.
I nod again. A few of the other lizards turn to us and scowl. No one else is talking, not even smoking. Just silently waiting in line like doughnuts on a conveyer belt waiting for filling.
‘I gotta make more…’ she says and swishes her mouth nervously back and forth as if she was getting ready to spit Listerine.
I want to tell her I’m well on my way to being one of Glading Grateful ETC’s,… of the world-renowned Doves, top moneymakers. And I want all the lizards on the line to overhear it too. I want them to know I don’t need to see the Jackalope and that I don’t even belong in this line. I’m an interloper, if the truth be known. I’m just hoping to speed up the process of earning one of the biggest raccoon penis bones ever.
‘I know what you mean,’ is what I say in a whisper so she’ll whisper back.
She smiles with her lips turned down and reaches out her hand. ‘Pooh. Not like shit. Like Pooh-Bear.’ The lizards turn toward us again. A few shush us.
‘Hi, Pooh,’ I whisper. ‘I’m Sar…’ I start, but remember I am trying to conceal my identity and don’t want Glad to be able to track me down. ‘Rrr,’ I mumble and try to think of a name.
‘Cool! Hi, She-Ra!’ She shakes my hand again.
‘
She-Ra: Princess of Power
was my favorite cartoon!’
‘Would you please?!’ a goodbuddy lizard dressed like a waiter in leather pants hisses out to us.
Pooh rolls her eyes and leans into my ear. ‘I even had the She-Ra action figure.’
‘She-Ra?’
She nods rapidly. The line takes little steps forward.
‘Where you work at, She-Ra?’ she whispers.
‘Uh, around,’ I whisper back.
She gives her glasses a shove up her nose bridge, which is so short the shades just slide back down again.
‘I work at Three Crutches.’ Her eyebrows go up above her glasses like fast little winks and she tilts her head at me expectantly. I nod.
‘You ain’t heard of Three Crutches?’ she says incredulously under her breath. I shrug. ‘Well, it’s only the roughest, toughest truck stop in all of West Virginia.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I wince in sympathy for what horrors she probably has had to endure.
‘I guess you ain’t heard of Le Loup either?’
‘Uh-uh.’
She leans in and cups my ear with her hand and says into it, ‘He’s the roughest, toughest pimp in all of West Virginia.’ Her breath smells faintly like rubbing alcohol. ‘And he’s my man.’ She steps back and regards me cautiously, as if I’ll be so impressed, I just might spontaneously explode. I want to tell her about Glad.
I cup my hand and place it around her ear that’s covered with so many silver rings all the way around it looks like a shower curtain holder. ‘Do you want to get away from him?’ I whisper.
She steps back again, pushes on her glasses and shakes her head. ‘Are you nuts?’ she says too loud.
‘Some whores have no fucking respect,’ one of the Palestinian Dolly Wigs mutters.
I am his bestest and mostest and he loves me!’ Pooh mutters to me. ‘He took me in and made me everything I am!’ She turns her back to me.
We say nothing, just take baby steps as the line painfully crawls toward the gaping stone doorway.
The woods are creaking with little snaps and rustles around us, the way woods do at the start of spring. The faint chugging of the still blends in with the steady hum of the grunts, hoots, and hollering of the truckers and pimps inside. More lizards stand in line behind me and I feel proud of myself for resisting the urge to glance at them. Pooh turns as each new one approaches and I hope she notices I’m not turning. Her eyes skip over me like I’ve evaporated. I notice she is smiling at the new lizards, but I can tell by the defeated way she turns back to face forward none of them has returned her smile, which gives me a righteous feeling of vindication.
Suddenly a shot goes off in the bar followed by the sound of a bottle smashing, and all the lizards stiffen with anticipation. They all watch the bar side to see if their pimp is coming raging out to grab them off the line like an angry parent pulling their kid from the playground. But the gruff bellow of ‘Gentlemen, it was just an inadvertent discharge’ calms the shouts in the bar and the line relaxes.
I stare up at the light coming down in shafts like long carrot stalks through the dogwood trees. By accident I lose my footing and step hard on the foot of the lizard behind me.
‘Christ help me for I have sinned,’ she says when I turn around to apologize. Her eyes are turned up so only the whites are showing and her blue lacquered lids quiver around them like a Jell-O mold. Her fingers are spread apart and tensed.
‘Oh, shit!’ Pooh laughs. ‘Now you look like her! Can you look any more spooked?!’
I laugh, but it’s out of relief that Pooh’s talking to me again, so it’s a little overdone and she eyes me suspiciously.
‘We’re almost there,’ I say and point to the entrance of the Holy Jackalope shrine.
She turns toward it. ‘About time too. When I heard that gunshot, I was for certain Le Loup would snatch me off this line before the sheriff showed. And I’ll be John Browned if we actually make it in there.’ I feel a surge of tenderness that she’s included me, which dissolves into an irritating pathetic awareness at how lonesome I felt when she ignored me.
‘Is your hair that color and curl nature-wise?’ Pooh asks and waves a hand through my hair, then casually jerks out half a handful of her short bleached platinum shag and flings it to the ground. ‘I’m always jealous of girls that have albino hair.’
She catches me looking at her head. She makes a distracting noise like an orangutan and fluffs her hair so the bald patches are camouflaged.
I clear my throat in a friendly chimp kind of way and tell her, ‘I’m not an albino. At least I don’t think I am.’ It doesn’t occur to me to mention I’m not really a girl.
Suddenly we get blasted by a hail of spitball shushes from the lizards around us. Pooh uses her line placement superiority to glare at the lizards queued behind us. Some of them cluck their tongues and suck their teeth. One of them says, ‘You better watch it,
missies,’
which gives me an emery-board chill that isn’t exactly unpleasant.
We move forward in line silently. Pooh turns to me now and then and mimics a lizard’s face in various sordid sex acts; the ‘choking on a pork bone’ face, the ‘sat on lickin’ butt’ face, and the ever-popular ‘drunk trucker penis in the ear’ face. That one makes me laugh out loud when I recognize it. I turn my face down expecting to be chastised, but I hear Pooh say JesusFuckShitFuck, and other lizards around us murmuring the same in reverent tones so I look up and I see the glowing aura of the Jackalope from inside the bar not six feet in front of us and I say it too, ‘JesusFuckShitFuck.’
Pooh steps inside the stone entrance and I nearly smash my face following her.
I’ve heard it said many bars have tried to copy Holy Jack’s by mounting up and doing dramatic lighting on a Jackalope. But just ’cause a bug squashed on a windshield looks like the Virgin Mary don’t mean it’s gonna be turnin’ no bitters into brandy.
I’ve heard it said the barkeep at Holy Jack’s had done some school way up North and he was just applying the crafty trickery you can’t help but acquire being up North, but I saw no hidden spotlights hanging from the pine rafters. No hot-air vents or red coils either. Besides the candles all the lizards light and burn at its base, I saw nothing preternatural to account for the unearthly glow and intense heat radiating down on us from the Holy Jackalope. It’s so bright that those wearing shades don’t even notice to take them off.
Mine and Pooh’s mouths hang as we make our way into the small side room, past the lizards sobbing, filing out through to the bar.
I’ve heard it said too that women have brought their husbands that won’t quit drinking their hairspray and nail-polish remover. Mommas have brought their strip-mine babies born with arms growing out of their heads like rabbit ear antennas. Grandparents have brought their grandchildren blinded from masturbating. Not one of them was ever cured.
It’s been said that it was Highway Patrol that hit and killed this Jackalope and a pack of renegade lot lizards held the wild run-over beast in their arms, cradling its bleeding head next to their exposed bosoms, warming its paws under their skirts and in their privates, and sucking on its once tiny antlers with their painted mouths. And when the Jackalope passed, the lizards not only had the first real orgasms of their lives, but they suddenly were transformed into the most desired lot lizards at any truck stop ever. How that run-over Jackalope made its way here is of great mystery, but its charm for down-and-out trucker hoes spread to every lot lizard the world over.
I have to shield my eyes against its glow, but slowly I take it in. Caught in mid lead it lunges out, all four and a half feet of it. Steel brackets support it and bolt it to the wall. Every down-and-out pimp has made an attempt to steal this Jackalope. That’s why a true-life Pinkerton guard sits off to the side, scowling.