Pershall - Loud in the house of myself: memoir of a strange girl

While working at a shop in Brooklyn, my tattoo artist Denise had an apprentice named Tasha. One day we were all hanging out in the shop looking at a book of tattoo designs by the legendary artist Sailor Jerry. The drawings were crude but beautiful, and we laughed at three little pieces that had obviously been some sailors nicknames years ago. The first one was an eight ball, and beneath it, in plain block letters, it said, 8-ball. The next was a beer keg, and underneath it said, Guzzler. But the best by far was the third, a crossed fork and knife, with the words Chow Hound. It didnt take long before Tasha and I decided that, once she had Denises approval, shed tattoo Chow Hound on my butt. And indeed, one night several months later, Tasha got out her machine and half an hour later I had Chow Hound on my ass. While lying there with the two of them cackling over my flesh, I thought, what in Gods name am I doing? Here I am, a former anorexic, getting a tattoo proclaiming that not only do I like to eat, I like to eat a lot.

I am trying on identities again.

Its 1978, and Im with my mother in the Kmart in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which, at age seven, seems like the big city to me. I sit at a dressing table, wearing a Farrah Fawcett-style wig (because in those days, Kmart sold wigs) and a large floppy beige hat that is supposed to look like straw but is actually made of cheap nylon. Perched precariously on my nose is a pair of pink-tinted sunglasses several sizes too big. I am eating puffy peppermint meringue candies, for which my mother has not yet paid, and writing in a small blue notebook with yellow pages and a cutesy drawing of a flapper on the cover, for which she also has not yet paid. This is important work. I am taking notes.

Two women pass me and giggle. I glance at their reflections in the dressing table mirror and proceed to record every detail of their appearance and conversation, congratulating myself on how inconspicuous I am. I am Harriet the Spy, and I am training myself to be as surreptitious as possible.

Kmart doesnt have everything my mother wants, so we make a stop at Wal-Mart, which, besides the various Baptist churches in the area, is the hub of northwest Arkansas social life. My mother stops to chat with someone she knows and I am free. Wigless now, myself again, I run for my next disguise.

The crafts section is in the far right corner of the store, a distant wonderland of rickrack, fake flowers, and cheap fabric. In Wal-Mart, I am a dancer. I have the power to defy gravity. I fold myself into the bolts of multicolored mesh, trying to wrap myself so that it completely obscures my vision. I want to see nothing but my future, nothing but the costume I will wear when I am a decade older and famous and thousands of miles away from my thousand-person hometown of Prairie Grove, twenty miles south of Fayetteville. With age will come grace and sophistication. I will be magically teleported to New York City on waves of talent. I will be carried on a magic carpet of tulle. This is what I live for. It is what I have to believe to survive.

I learned about New York City from an episode of The Love Boat featuring Andy Warhol. He prowled around the ship with a Polaroid camera, a silver wig, and a pair of big red plastic glasses. From that point on, I relentlessly compared Prairie Grove to New York and knew it was where I belonged.

Prairie Grove is one of those small towns that seem removed from time. Fayetteville is, like the rest of America, being subsumed by subdivisions and strip malls, but Prairie Grove has hardly changed at all. There is still no McDonalds, no Starbucks. There are still only two traffic lights. They still hang the same battered light-up Santas and snowmen theyve used for at least thirty years on the light poles of Main Street at Christmas.

You can still stroll past Lou Anna Bellmans flower shop, and if the door is open youll smell carnations. You can fill prescriptions at Rexall Drug, where the same cracked orange plastic sign still announces the place, and the same three bottles of Lemon-Up shampoo sit on a half-empty shelf, a layer of dust cascading like snow down their plastic lemon caps. There are still cowboy boots and stiff indigo Wranglers to be bought at Crescents, where the dressing room still has pine paneling.

At the other end of the street is the Farmers & Merchants Bank and the Beehive Diner, where the air is saturated with countless years of cigarette smoke, cooking grease, and stale coffee, and the same faded photos of chimps in human clothing, dumping plates of spaghetti over their heads, still hang on the wall. The old Laundromat is still there, but the front of it is now a beauty shop.

Once youve ridden your bike through the ditch outside the Dersams house enough times, and made multiple barefoot treks to the One-Stop Mart to get the same slightly overfrozen Rocky Road ice cream cones, and worn a path through the overgrown field that is a shortcut between Marna Lynn Street and home, youve basically seen it all. If youre a strange and sensitive kid, youre ready to blow the joint by the time youre seven.

And I was that kid, the weird kid, the strange girl, the crazy one. In a town of a thousand people, reputations are hard to live down. There was a forced intimacy there I am deeply grateful not to have today, in New York City, where even though Im a tattooed lady with flaming red dreadlocks, I can exist in relative anonymity on a day-to-day basis. In Prairie Grove, people thought nothing of going to the gas station barefoot or with perm rods in their hair; they knew their neighbors well enough they might as well have been in their own living room. When you went to town, you saw the same characters, like the old lady who rode around with her poodle in the basket of her bike, or Mary Frances the square-dance teacher, or the unsmiling Hendersons, with their five kids lined up in the driveway half an hour before all the garage sales opened. And, most spectacularly and terrifyingly, there was Susannah, the March of Dimes poster child.

Susannah was the younger sister of Sheridan, one of the most popular girls in school, and she had a disease called Apert syndrome, which meant her face was all messed up, the middle part sunken in and her eyes bulging. They hung her posters in the window of Dillons grocery store, and although they terrified me, I had an intense urge to steal one. I wanted to do with it what Ramona Quimby did with her Halloween mask, hiding it under the couch cushions so she could sneak peeks at it and scare herself when she chose. I wanted to have Susannahs picture all to myself, knowing that just beneath my butt on the sofa was her crumpled weird eye. I wanted to stare at her face until I could almost see her reaching out to nub my own with her fused-together fingers, their one large nail growing straight across, then safely turn away at the last possible second. Most of all, I wanted to use her image as a tool, a barometer, that would help me test how off things were inside my head. I would know by how long it took before her picture started to look like it was going to come to lifeI often thought photographs or inanimate objects might just do so. As a child, my grasp on reality was tenuous, and it only became more so as I got older. (I spent a lot of time staring at my stuffed animals and looking away just before they turned into demons, as I felt certain they would if I stared too long. I felt compelled to do this most nights before falling asleep, perhaps as a way of assuring myself I had some degree of control over my terror.)