Birthday Stuff

In 7th grade Penelope Cashdollar ate a Twix bar and drank a can of Sprite every day at school. She called it her “addiction”. Her only friend, Ashley, was now getting a new kind of attention that Penelope did not get and decided to sit with other people at lunch sometimes. She was “branching out”.

On one of Ashley’s “branching out” days Penny noticed a phone number on her Sprite can. There was still 10 minutes before the bell, so she decided to use the cafeteria’s payphone to call the number and see what would happen. It was unlike her, but she was lonely and wanted to talk.

She told the representative there was a fingernail in her Sprite that poked her in the lip. A week later a cardboard tube from the Coca Cola Companies arrived in the mail. It was a poster of a can of Sprite flying mid-air, and in perfect harmony with crystalline ice cubes. She hung it on the ceiling above her bed.

Falling asleep, she imagined the can dripping with condensation and ice as it descended in slow motion from above and softly landing all around her with an elfin sparkle.

Calling strangers became a new hobby and Ashley wanted in.

Ashley closed her eyes, opened to a random page in the yellow pages and pointed to a number. Penny would make the call.

“Angels Luxelife Escorts,” Ashley read. “What’s an escort?”

“We’re about to find out,” Penelope replied.

A woman’s sexy voice answered. “Angel’s Luxelife Escorts.”

“Hi… What’s an escort?”

The voice went limp. “It’s a girlfriend you pay to take out on a date.”

Penelope spoke before she had a chance to think.

“Do you have a birthday special?”

She slammed the heavy black handset on the metal service hanger. Ashley winced.

It wasn’t that Penelope didn’t like Ashley. It was more that sometimes she found Ashley’s presence in the world difficult to understand, the same way she found algebra confusing. Ashley was too perfect, too smart, too small, too without a sugar addiction. Sometimes Penelope thought she wanted to be Ashley and sometimes she wasn’t sure what she wanted.

Most mornings the two friends walked to school together, but after the spate of prank calling, Penelope found herself leaving her house early to avoid Ashley. She wandered the streets of their small, dumb town, having told her mother that she needed extra help on algebra. What she needed was help on life, but she didn’t think either of her parents were equipped to offer that to her. Their lives were too simple, their loves too meager. So she haunted the streets, looking into the windows of the craftsmans and ranches and mock-Tudors that lined the leafy streets as the sun rose, wondering what it was like to have a life inside one of them.

One morning Penelope left her house even earlier than usual. Her clothes smelled like they always did; her mother bought strongly perfumed detergent to cover up the smell of cooking that permeated their house and their clothes and their hair. Penelope bought a Sprite from the 7-11 and then bought an air freshener too. She took the air freshener, called Seaside Daydream, out of the package and rubbed it all over her clothes, hoping to mask what was already there.

“What died and is decomposing in someone’s backpack!? I swear to god.”

The revulsion in Ashley’s voice was mortifying.

Penelope hurried to the locker room to check the Lost and Found bin for a shirt that didn’t smell. All she could find was an extra large black t-shirt that said “THIS TOO SHALL PASTA” underneath a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. It fit her like a dress, but that was better than smelling like something that repulsed Ashley.

She quickly changed into the t-shirt and threw away the Seaside Daydream air freshener that had totally ruined her backpack. “More like Seaside Nightmare,” she murmured.

At lunch that day she waited in line at the vending machine behind an 8th grade boy with unwashed sandy hair. He had a Walkman clipped to his belt, and tinny sounds of grunge rock wailed from his orange foam headphones.

He turned around, “Do you have a dime I can have?”

No 8th grade boy had ever spoken to her before, much less asked her a question. Without a word, she uncluctched her hand and gave him a dime.

“Thanks,” he said, and turned back to the vending machine to insert the dime. He punched the code “11” and the metal coil swirled to release the last Twix bar in the machine. He grabbed it and said “I like your shirt,” before walking away.

The bell rang. Ten cents too short for a candy bar, Penelope left the cafeteria alone and headed to Algebra in a daze and without her fix. There were tests laid out on every desk. She had forgotten to study again.

Accepting her fate, she sat down and wrote Penny $ on the top right corner of the paper. “This too shall pasta,” she told herself.

The algebra test was a total fail, but Penelope could wait to tell her parents until they were paying bills. She’d figured that out years ago—if things were already bad for them, you couldn’t make it much worse with a bad grade.

Rather than focus on the test, Penelope was learning to focus on the positives: she had a new shirt, and the 8th grader with greasy hair had made her think it might actually be cool. She was starting to think there might be an inexorable chain of cause and effect at work in her life. The same way that the prank calling made her want to avoid Ashley, this too shall pasta made her want more dumb t-shirts. She’d been going to the Goodwill with her mom since she was a kid, but that night she started to go alone, scouring the aisles for another slogan.

Every night that week Penelope rode her bike to the thrift store, never actually buying anything because she was a little short on funds at the moment. She was too scared of the consequences to actually shoplift, but she made mental notes to herself about what shirts she would steal and rip up, what would go with her imagined black bra and her imagined second ear piercing (done, in her imagination, in the back of art class and filled with a safety pin).

At school the next Monday, Ashley stopped Penelope by her locker.

“What’s up with you?” Ashley asked.

“What do you mean?”

”You haven’t called me in like forever. And I thought we were gonna hang at the park this weekend but you never showed.”

It was my birthday, and I decided to spend it sitting at the bar I’d been working at for the past 10 years in the small seaside town of Astoria, Oregon, where I decided to move to after dropping out of college and throwing a dart at a map in an attempt to be adventurous.

Max, the bartender who was working, was making me a birthday surprise. A woman I’d never seen before sat down next to me and ordered a Mai Tai. She wore a strong synthetic perfume and had pointy, pink fingernails. She finished a text and placed her phone face down on the dirty bar before looking at me with interest. “Tell me something about you.”

The 6 o’clock news played on the tv screen in the corner. “Nasa-funded study: industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?”

“It’s my birthday. I’m 32 today.”

“Oh, well happy birthday then.” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Tell me something from when you were 22.”

“I had sex for money.”

“That makes two of us! Now, something from when you were 12.”

“My best friend was killed by a school bus.”

Max slid a frozen daquiri to me and a mai tai to her.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

I still occasionally played back the last words Ashley ever said to me. “I thought we were gonna hang at the park this weekend but you never showed.” I still thought about how if I had actually responded to her and had a conversation instead of awkwardly running off she would have gone outside 1 minute later and not been hit by the bus.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Penny.”

“Nice to meet you, Penny,” she said, and tapped the side of her glass with her fingernails.

My daiquiri wasn’t too sweet and the slush froze my muscles as it slid down my throat. Max knew how to make them.

“Enough about me,” I said to the woman. “What about you? What’s your name, for starters?”

After ten years at the Tangled Knot I was used to talking to strangers. A bartender was better than a therapist, most people seemed to think. I wasn’t used to the ease with which this woman had excavated my past. Even Max didn’t know about Ashley and now she did–this woman who looked like she belonged on Rodeo Drive, not Astoria. The necklace around her neck was bright even in the dull light of the bar. It was shaped like a rope and I had the feeling it was real gold.

“Jade,” she said.

“Okay Jade. Since it’s my birthday I want to know–what else do we have in common?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve both done sex work. What else?”

She put her index finger on her chin, like she was thinking really hard about it. Like it was a math problem in 7th grade.

“Are you going to finish that?”

I wasn’t drunk–at least, not that drunk–but for a second it was like I was back there, in my twelve year old puppy body, sitting at the table pushing peas around on my plate and listening to my mother griping at me. It was what I’d been doing right before the phone rang, right before I found out.

“What?”

“Your daiquiri,” Max said, pointing at it and raising his eyebrows at me. Max plucked his unibrow and was the soul of discretion. We were great friends; I didn’t even know how old he was.

“Bottoms up,” I said.

“My best friend was killed too,” Jade said.

They were on their way to a Green Day concert. Jade was riding in the passenger seat when a piece of rebar flew out of the pickup truck that was driving in front of them. The rebar broke through the windshield and impaled her friend in the heart while she was driving, killing her instantly.

Even though I’d had a friend die, I didn’t quite know how to respond to such a traumatic experience.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said.

She shrugged and tapped the bar with her fingernails. “That’s just how things go sometimes.”

Jade was on her way back to southern California after being on “assignment” in Seattle. When I asked her what she did she said she worked in “logistics” and couldn’t say much more because of a NDA, but she liked the job because it had lots of flexibility that allowed her to be in charge of her time. She described herself as a very spontaneous person and had decided to drive down Highway 1 on the way back home to Las Vegas with the intention of “seeing what would happen along the way”. The Tangled Knot’s neon sign spoke to her, so here she was.

A small man with thinning hair and a friendly demeanor asked Max to turn on the karaoke machine. A minute later “Time of Your Life” by Green Day started to play.

Jade smiled. “I think that’s the Universe telling us we need another round.”

When we left the bar the air was unusually warm with a mist-like rain activating the petrichor smell of the wet pavement. I was tired and had every intention to go home and get some sleep. Jade walked me to my car, and instead of saying goodbye got in the front passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I didn’t mind being blunt; never had.

“I’ve got a feeling you’re not doing anything else for your birthday, is that right?” Jade said. She kept tapping her fingernails, this time of the dashboard of my beat up Datsun.

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

She shrugged and said, “I’m as into god-filled solitude as anyone, but something tells me that’s not what you actually want.”

In college I’d been friends with a group of men who placed importance on birthday sex. It didn’t matter if it was good, it mattered that it happened. One of them, a boy named Ben who never truly became a man because he killed himself before he got the chance, resorted to trolling the bowling alley for likely candidates on what turned out to be his last birthday. I don’t remember now, whether he was successful or not.

I did my own nail tapping on the gear shift of the Datsun and then turned to Jade so I could see her full profile, silhouetted as it was against the pewter colored river. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. I wasn’t like Jade; I didn’t live my life doing things just to see what would happen. It had always seemed to me that something bad would happen if I did things that way. But Jade felt different, and it turned out that birthday sex was a great way to celebrate.