LIZA’S HORRIBLE SO-CALLED LIFE, Part 2

Part One Was 2 Weeks Ago

This piece is an excerpt from Cintra’s novel “Colors Insulting to Nature” which appeared on Salon.com in 2004. 

High school, for most people, gets boiled down to select formative experiences that can still make the person writhe like a cold ball of worms, twenty years later. The agent of Liza's demise, what the Greeks would call ate -- the "blindness of folly" that led our hero to her destruction -- was her unwillingness to accept, during the first two months of high school, that she would be reviled by the popular kids forever. Something had to give, she thought. There had to be an "Ugly Duckling" moment that would subvert her lowly status: a new haircut, or a talent contest, or maybe just the right animal-print spandex unitard. This delusion, brought on by rapt consumption of certain films and sitcoms, would be her undoing at Annabella Sorkin's Halloween party. Lorna, having lived through her own Great Death of Hope the year before, warned Liza to no avail.

"We're just going to be, like, delivery people, like pizza guys. They're not interested in us, they just want drugs."

"But maybe they'll decide we're cool and then we'll get to go to more parties."

"I don't understand why you want to hang out with them anyway... Oh wait, yes I do, oh fuck Liza."

"What?!"

"You're going to throw yourself at Tonto." Lorna's tone was mournful.

"No I'm not," said Liza, hating herself for her ecstatic dreams of devouring his sinister mouth.

"Yes you are," said Lorna.

Liza desperately wanted to stay away from Tonto Grosvenor, but her hormones fizzed and popped like bacon grease every time he slipped her another well-turned character assassination:

. . . FIST IT UP YOUR CAKEHOLE, YOU SPIT-SHINED DISCO PIG . . .
. . . YOU CHEAP RENTAL BACK-HO . . .
. . . YOU DOUCHE-HUFFER . . .

Halloween had always been an incriminating holiday for Liza, whose mother had curious ideas about what constituted "dress-up." While other schoolchildren arrived at Halloween parties wearing handmade panda suits, faerie princess gowns with yards of pink tulle, or respectable, store-bought Superman or Wonder Woman masks with printed nylon coveralls, Peppy had always dug into her box of sequined Reno finery and tarted up Liza in cocktail dresses, wobbling lines of liquid eyeliner, and a long black wig. "Tell people you're a gypsy fortune-teller," Peppy would slur. "Pull up your bra strap."

"I can see your future, all right," a smirking mother once said to Liza while dropping Tootsie Rolls into her plastic pumpkin.

Liza and Lorna rooted through a Hefty bag of Peppy's old outfits, considering what to wear to the party, taking occasional breaks to smoke cigarettes in the backyard.

"That's a horrible habit!" Noreen yelled down at them from the kitchen window. "You look ridiculous smoking with those young little faces! You should stop trying to be things you're not!" Noreen slammed the window shut.

"I like your grandma." Lorna laughed.

At Peppy's urging, Ned had gotten a driver's license at the beginning of the month. Peppy had taken to getting drunk so early in the day she was rightfully worried about her ability to steer to and from the supermarket, and was sick of being berated in the car by Noreen. For Liza and Lorna, this meant that Ned was their chauffeur, by right.

"You're coming to the Halloween party with us," Liza informed him.

"No I'm NOT." Ned was petrified at the idea of being in an unstructured environment where teens would be making out.

"You'll be in costume," Liza begged.

("Get on with the horrible life-altering Incident of Shame already," you're thinking at this point. To soothe your impatience, we Fast-Forward: Liza and Lorna, moving in kung fu blurs, compose costumes. Lorna steals a bag of pot from her spaced-out mother, and Ned is bribed with a promise of $20 in after-pot-sales. Tonto passes more hair-raisingly rude notes to Liza. Liza and Lorna consume five more packs of Marlboro Lights. That is all, and now it is The Night.)

The Honda wheezed up the driveway of an enormous modern stilt house perched on a hill in Belvedere. The Sorkin home was exquisite: long and spacious with walls of polished Carpathian elm burl, a Japanese garden with koi-filled Zen pond, enormous picture windows and a wraparound balcony with a view that stretched and rolled like a beautiful nude over Angel Island and Alcatraz, the marinas and dark green hills of Sausalito, the black satin sheets of the bay and the twinkling Golden Gate Bridge, finally meeting the horizon in the sparkling tiara of San Francisco, city of jewels -- a soul-stirring luxury view that made those fortunate enough to be standing on that balcony, hanging over the fog as it poured like steamed milk down the hills, intoxicated with a feeling of owning the world.

The house hurt Liza, it was so beautiful.

"I never want to go back to my shit-hole of a room," Liza said to Lorna as they threw their coats on the pile on Annabella Sorkin's nineteenth-century four-poster bed. "Me either," said Lorna. "Me threether," mumbled Ned, looking at Annabella's sleek personal home entertainment setup.

Lorna and Liza looked fairly wonderful in their mermaid ensembles. They had hot-glued glitter and shells to bikini tops, and cut and stapled two of Peppy's old sequined dresses into remedial fish-tails. The crimping iron was used to excellent effect; Lorna's hair was big and purple, Liza's huge and green with food coloring and glitter. Liza's ordinarily vulgar makeup looked appropriate and whimsical. Together they were snazzy and fantastic; they felt full of the strange power of new personalities (as a successfully transformative outfit will do) and strong hopes of a fabulous entrance and subsequent social improvement. Ned, likewise, was happy to be seen in his Long John Silver costume, and proud of how well the components had come together at the Salvation Army. Ike had rigged him a fake peg leg with Ace bandages, big pants, and a toilet plunger. The eyepatch hid his lazy eye, and his portliness was in character. "Arrgh, ye swabby," he said happily, waving his hook at the moth-eaten stuffed woodpecker hot-glued to his epaulet in lieu of a parrot.

Most kids at the party weren't Miwok Butte students, but private and prep-school types who knew one another through country, yacht, and ski clubs. They seemed to be a whiter, shinier race of superior young humans, dressed in movie-quality French Court ensembles with powdered wigs, Sherlock Holmes tweeds, and die-cast metal armor.

"Shit, those are the best costumes I have ever seen."

"Moneymoneymoney," Lorna murmured, watching a girl (who must have been Annabella Sorkin) in a huge, satin Scarlett O'Hara hoop dress swan over to the doorway to kiss a seven-foot tennis ball can.

Dezi Grosvenor waddled up to Lorna wearing an adorable penguin suit, fanning his face with $300 in twenties.

"You look great! You bring it?" Dezi squealed.

"I don't know if I brought that much," Lorna said, suddenly self-conscious.

"Meet me in the master bathroom. It's the big black one with the Jacuzzi and the palm trees!" With that he wobbled down the hall. Two attractive cat-girls pounced up against his plush breast with meowling delight.

"LOOK! IT'S CAPTAIN QUASIMODO AND THE SEAWHORES!" shouted Tonto's familiar voice. Liza felt goose bumps spray from her knees up to her shoulders. Tonto was dressed like an Indian -- he had, in fact, dressed like an Indian for nine of the fifteen Halloweens of his life. Each year, his schtick had gotten a little better. The long, feathered headdress, fringed buckskin pants, beaded accessories, and hairless, painted torso, along with his customary long braids, was more than Liza's young lust could bear. Behind him, Dino Grosvenor (Lawrence of Arabia) was chatting intimately with Chantal Baumgarten, powdered and sublime in a vintage silk geisha ensemble, fresh from rehearsals for the Eiderdijken Academy production of The Mikado. Liza looked down at her hot-glue mermaid outfit, which was leaving a snail-trail of glitter and escaped sequins, and the old leaden feeling of inescapable trashiness settled into her stomach, ruining her mood.

Liza and Lorna proceeded to the bar, which boasted an impressive alcohol selection.

"I'm going to drink heavily, like I've never drunk before," announced Liza.

"You're the one that wanted to make friends with these people. Don't make it your personal Waterloo." Lorna sounded ominous.

"Whatever that means!"

Liza poured herself an extra-large glass of triple sec.

"I'm gonna go find Dezi," Lorna said, watching Liza watch Tonto. "Try not to do anything you'll regret later, OK?"

"How will I ever know what I regret later if I never do anything, ever?" Liza asked loudly in a perturbed tone.

"That's one way of looking at it," Lorna said doubtfully.

"I'm not going to be around these assholes next year," Liza said, as her inner disgrace generator picked up speed. "I'm going to New York. To the High School of Performing Arts." She made this announcement with belligerent denial; she and Lorna both knew that dream had shriveled on the vine. She downed the rest of her glass of triple sec, slammed the glass down, and mock-gagged. "Jesus, what was that stuff? These people obviously don't know their liquor."

"Next year's a long way off," Lorna cautioned, her monotone implying she knew it would do no good.

As Lorna went off in search of the master bathroom, Liza remained at the bar to watch Tonto and his boy sycophants play mumblety-peg in the kitchen, stabbing a paring knife between their splayed fingers.

"Liza!" Tonto shouted. "Come here! Lay on this butcher block and we'll amputate your upper half so you can be all fish."

"Yeah RIGHT," Liza brayed artlessly, her head suddenly glowing like a kerosene lamp. She tottered over to Tonto, her legs pinned together by her tight tail.

"Want to make a movie?" Tonto asked. "I've got a camcorder and a cot."

His groupies laughed.

"It would depend on the role," Liza said, not getting it. "You have to call my agent."

(The only thing worse than this naive and grandiose comment was the Taser jolt of embarrassment Liza felt, eleven years later, when she finally realized what Tonto actually meant.)

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Theme song by Jack Black

Artwork: “Mommie,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020