Please visit Camp Strange: Bird Brain for my daily thoughts and news.

When I first started blogging, my sons were 7 and 9 years old. Now they are 13 and 15, much taller than me, strong, healthy, strange, and wonderful. I’m hoping to have them both guest blog here from time to time.

Thanks for hanging out at Camp Strange. Let the arts and crafts, ghost stories, and burnt hot dogs begin!

The boys in their Star Trek shirts

This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and coffee and dreams and let it finish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the temporal anomalies so here I sit.

One year and a couple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my sons and I started a family tradition by accident. We rented the first disk of what seemed like an endless set of Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs. When Star Trek played in real life I was busy trying to make a dead-end marriage work and my two young sons didn’t exist. I didn’t watch television then, but if I had, I wouldn’t have watched a sci-fi soap opera about humans and aliens chasing time.

I don’t remember those early shows now. All I remember is watching three boys huddled under a navy blue crocheted afghan, mouths open, eyes krazy-glued to the small screen in our sunroom while reflected images of people with ridged skulls and pointed ears flickered on three glass corner windows. They were hooked.

I made microwave popcorn and poured it into an orange bucket and added extra melted butter, this was our ritual once I put the parrot to bed, and the dog and cat would sleep on the couch between us, while my oldest son manned the remote control. I never suspected it would become part of our life like brushing teeth and doing homework. That first disk rental was a lark. But the first became the second, then the third, and a month later we were well into the first season and I began to hear my two youngest sons discuss the finer points of antimatter during waking hours and every chipped saucer in the cupboard became an impromptu model of the Enterprise star ship.

I can’t explain the hold it had on my sons, and then on me. I don’t remember the episodes the way they do. I’m sitting here crying while I type this, searching for a way to tell you how it transformed them into something a little bit better, how they started recognizing the world news for the first time and asking me when would our people stop fighting, start working together as one planet — simple ideas, good ideas, too simple for people who crave power. One day, a bad bad day, when many soldiers lost lives in that distant senseless war, my middle son stood with bare feet on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, listening to NPR, and clenched his fists in frustration.

“Why don’t they stop fighting? We’re never going to join a Federation of Planets if this continues. Don’t they know that? Why don’t they want to help end starvation instead? I wish we lived in the future.”

I wished we lived in that future, too, where replicators created gourmet meals and women wore flowing tunics and held important positions, and no wars raged on planet Earth because starvation was a memory from some other sick place and time. I loved that my sons saw this, wanted a future of space travel and social justice.

I bought my sons Star Trek uniform shirts and my youngest wore his every day. I had to wash it each night and have it on his bed every morning so that he became a Star Fleet cadet in his secret mind as he sat at a small wooden desk and counted on fingers in school. He begged me to tell Santa to bring him an Enterprise and a Wesley Crusher action figure for Christmas, and in the weeks leading up to the holiday I crossed my fingers and bid on star ships and space men at eBay.

The week before Christmas brought flu to my house. Everyone but me became feverish and listless. I was terrified. The news was filled with reports of children dying of flu, and I kept vigil with cold compresses and Tylenol and warm broth. We didn’t watch Star Trek this week, my sons could not leave bed, and I made noise with jingle bells in the living room and stomped my feet and ran into my sons’ room, two Star Trek action figures in hand, whooping and laughing that Santa stopped by a few days early to drop off a pre-Christmas present because they were so so good this year. My youngest barely smiled, he was so ill, but he grabbed his Wesley Crusher and placed him on his chest. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the ten-year-old girl next door died unexpectedly of flu. She played at my house every day for three years. She loved my boys and my dog and my middle son hid with her in the loft above the garage, pretending to be the President. We grieved terribly over the holiday, and my youngest carried his new Enterprise from room to room, still feverish, so lost and afraid. They can cure people instantly in Star Trek, with little metal boxes swirled above a sick body, but in this day and time only luck and grace and sparse science make decisions. I tried to explain this to my boys but they didn’t understand.

Something about the mythology, the space, the ongoing conundrums of time, kept my sons going, kept them full of hope. They started reading books about the solar system. They followed the NASA mission to Mars and knew more about it than their teachers. They built star ships of blankets and chairs in the sunroom and spent lazy Saturday afternoons playing with styrofoam planets. All peaceful, all scientific and humane. Children from the future.

The last season of Star Trek came too fast. We watched the last episode last night. My boys have grown tall and already those Star Trek shirts are getting tight. They look forward to renting Deep Space Nine episodes. I look forward to it, too, but my heart knows this time is over, no anomalies can bring it back.

Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s android science officer, shared his starship quarters with a sleek cat named Spot. Data wanted to be human, wanted to understand what makes some of us choose chocolate over vanilla, what makes us giggle when tickled, the strange and etheric connections that tie our species together. A cat’s fiercely independent streak can push a man to curse, can cause a woman to shake her fist in frustration. Maybe that gave Data a bit of a walk on the wild emotive side. But in my opinion, Data should have partnered with a dog.

My first dog lived to the overripe age of 21. Rascal left the planet with a million soft tumors folded into the sagging hollows of his belly, thick milky cataracts covering both eyes, and a serious incontinence problem. He left the way companion dogs often do, human arms gently cradling his neck, a vet’s needle in one arthritic leg.

Rascal followed me home from the first grade the very day I turned six. We lived one block from the Catholic school. I wore a green plaid skirt, dingy white collared blouse, and scuffed patent leather shoes. I wasn’t one of the cute girls. I knew that even at five-almost-six. I carried a hawkish nose, an angular chin, perpetual scabs on both knees. I was a bit chubby, a kid who loved buttered bread and mashed potatoes with gravy, a kid who flew down Cold Spring Hill on her banana bike, hands hovering above the handlebars in a show of terrified joy, no hands until I hit a stray divot of grass, flew over the front wheel, and skidded twenty feet, butt first, on a newly-laid sea of pea gravel. Thirty-eight years later, I still have a lopsided ass from that incident.

The pup trailed behind me, the cut of his exposed ribs pressing a pattern of interference waves into the air. I probably smelled like the cheap hotdogs and processed government cheese the nuns served at lunch. I probably smelled kind and defenseless, smelled like the kind of hungry human a dog could love. My parents let me keep him. We were inseparable.

Dogs bring out the doggedy god in humans the way cats bring out the meow in an android. We rolled in summer’s tall grass, drooled when the kitchen radiated the scent of spaghetti and meatballs, chased kids, dogs, cats, and imaginary friends down Cold Spring Hill, careful to avoid the evil gravel. It took me ’til my current age of 44, but now I know that every life is a lonely life, every person walks a tightrope over shark-infested waters. We all yearn to belong to a pack; we all feel isolated at times, lone hunters, sometimes even behind polarized shades that block any hint of sun. But at ten, at thirteen, at twenty-one, Rascal’s pack of me-and-you was my identity, my best den. He was Alpha. He let me bury sad eyes and big nose into his rough brown and black hide.

Rascal was all dog. He loved a good tummy rub, a handful of unwanted vegetable snuck under the table. He was smart, too, could drop butt to concrete on command, even faster when you held a Milk Bone. But he didn’t ask the big questions, didn’t pause in thanks or contemplation when the food hit the floor. He didn’t make many deliberate choices. He sure wasn’t Sissy.

Sissy came into our lives six years after Rascal passed. An elegant pooch with long white hair, she brought a certain sophistication to the household. Regular dog kibble? No thanks, not unless you added a couple raw eggs and sprinkled grated cheese on top. A jaunt around the neighborhood? Yes, but she would fetch the good lead with the snazzy rhinestones, never the cruddy canvas one with the oil stains. She learned a hundred commands, seemingly overnight. You could tell Sissy that Martin wanted to play and she’d seek him out, tennis ball in mouth, regardless of how long it took her to find him.

Dogs have taught me that animals have as much claim to the word “soul” as humans do. Rascal loved running, loved ketchup on fries, loved the carnal pleasure of sunlight on exposed body. He took his duties as Family Dog with some sense of responsibility; he protected us each day from the dastardly — his opinion — mailman by flashing his incisors with flourish and snarl. Sissy, however, took the whole soul bit a few gigantic leaps forward.

A couple nights a week we watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sissy lay at our feet, sleeping, legs sometimes twitching in REM slumber. One episode something strange happened. Data stepped into the holodeck, stepped into a dance lesson with sexy Dr. Crusher. My boys groaned, put hands over eyes to avoid any potential romantic display. They quickly lowered fingers when they realized Data was getting a tap dance lesson! Brilliant androids learn fast, and within two minutes, Data was step-ball-chaining and heel-shuffle-toeing as well as any old timey Vaudeville star. Dr. Crusher’s stiletto heels beat a tribal rhythm against the floor, her forehead beading with sweat, Data’s flat taps matching her stride for stride. I glanced at the boys to watch their reaction, and realized that Sissy was staring at the television.

Tap tap tap tap tappity tap!

Sissy head bobbed in time to the athletic display. She seemed to grin.

Tap tap tap tappity tappity tap tap!

Sissy sat up, faced the spectacle head on, her breath becoming labored, excited.

From that moment on, Sissy was a Trekkie. The boys prodded her with dangling feet every time Data appeared on screen. She seemed to understand the fuss, and after a week or two, started to utter a low gutteral howl whenever the childlike android stepped onto the bridge or beamed down to a new planet. Classical conditioning? True Data fandom? I wasn’t sure, and the boys didn’t care! They even set up special Data viewing nights for friends who didn’t believe we had a Star Trek android lovin’ dog.

One late afternoon, I heard a ruckus at the side door. The boys fell into the house, Sissy quick on their heels.

“Mom! Mom! Sissy saved us from the Borg!”

Martin paused to catch his breath, his small hands still would around the delicate leash. He began to hiccup.

“He’s not kidding, Mom!”

Louis unhooked the dog and Sissy sauntered to the water bowl for a good, long drink. The boys launched into a story about a gang of high school boys who taunted them in the alley, threatening to hurt their beloved dog.

“But Sissy showed them! Just like Data! She must have learned it from Star Trek!”

The conversation devolved into two boys arguing and one dog howling. I’ve never been quite sure exactly what happened in that alley, but my boys are still convinced to this day that Sissy reared on hind legs in a display of protection and, well, humanity.

Sissy got old, the way we all do, and started having seizures, then other neurological problems. I found myself with my arms gently holding her head, her neck, in a too-familiar tableau. In the end, the decision is never easy. When you choose the road of compassion, you choose what it means to be most human. Just ask Data. He’d understand.

Birdie reads a Star Trek cookbook

When my youngest son, Martin, chased gap-toothed girls through a dusty schoolyard, he carried a tiny Star Trek shuttlecraft in the front pocket of his jeans.

“Vroooooooooom! Ba-ba-ba-ba-bing! Bing!”

The shuttlecraft — torpedos armed and ready — made the noise of a boy’s pursed lips. It flew graceful arcs, one hand over head, around body, swooped low to the ground. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew Martin ripped the very fabric of space itself, ripping it into two, three thousand parallel universes. The edge of the galaxy never felt closer than when Martin careened around a corner.

“Phasers on stun!” The family dog raised one foggy head from a deep afternoon slumber, body pressed into cool tile, her eyes unable to quite focus on a homemade weapon fashioned out of duct tape and toilet paper tubes held two inches from her skull.

“What did you do with my tricorder? Answer me, alien from Zeta 3!”

Sissy must have given some invisible answer, ’cause Martin jumped her old body, jumped clear onto the sagging couch, then dropped, rolled from cushion to floor in Captain Kirk’s best move, as if he were practicing good fire-avoidance technique. Phaser and shuttlecraft never lost attack pattern. Four seconds later — a true temporal anomaly — I saw him outside the kitchen window, chasing the neighbor’s black cat, toilet paper tube set to one level beyond simple stun. The cat reacted in typical ennui, holding his ground, his hair unruffled, his expression enigmatic and aloof. We don’t have to travel far to find aliens.

I found that shuttlecraft in the garage one recent afternoon as I was looking for a box of nails. It hid under the corner of a heavy wooden box. I noticed the uneven surface of the box first, then the plastic body of the toy. I yanked it into the dusty air. I burst into tears. It had been a full year, even a bit longer, since Trek ruled Martin’s life. I set it on the ledge over the kitchen sink. I set it among the vitamin bottles and my grandma’s beloved tacky figurines. It looked out of place next to the pale pastel Victorian girl holding a parasol. It looked lonely next to the ginkgo biloba.

During that magic time, Martin wore a captain’s uniform every single day, wrist-ends frayed, chest pilled and faded to a gentle rust. He wrote the Stardate at the top of each school assignment. He knew more science than any other kid in the third grade, too, understood big words like “dimensional” and “velocity” and “quantum.” He wrote his own Pledge of Allegiance to the Federation of Planets — got suspended for that one — and argued every philosophical point at home and at school using tenets from the Prime Directive. On his birthday — Stardate –318876.26713974896 — I baked a shuttlecraft cake, served it with recipes I found in a Star Trek Cookbook. His friends didn’t “get” it, but Martin reverentially served them plates of goodies straight from a Replicator I fashioned out of a dead microwave oven.

The shuttlecraft let him pretend he was on the Away Team, the tiny group sent to monitor a new planet, a new situation. Two inches square of our world’s finest plastic gave him confidence. It gave him something bigger than himself to keep front and center when other kids teased, when they dangled their rich treasures like x-boxes and ipods in his face. He didn’t need that stuff. He didn’t even want that stuff. He had Trek.

When Gene Roddenberry penned that first Star Trek episode, when William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy donned those tight, futuristic pajamas, when Patrick Stewart closed Hamlet’s dusty covers and took the captain’s chair — they reached into a hundred million tight chests, a hundred million jaded beings’ tired minds. They reached into a point so deep inside us we didn’t know it existed. They yanked us into a battle for our own identity.

Who are you? Are you a warrior of peace, a woman, a man bent on scientific discovery, bent on bringing new people together? Do you stare at the stars, at the setting sun? Do you wonder why? Why are we such a violent species, yet why do we have such a huge capacity for love? Why do we feel the sore edges something missing? Are you a person of unusual origin, or strange proclivities? Then, man, you’re Trek. You’re part of the sister-and-brotherhood.

I remember my first Star Trek, remember sitting on a scarred wood floor and popping in a videotape — new technology back then — and watching Kirk and Bones save our corner of the galaxy. I was twelve years old, lonely and lost, a strange middle-school saxophone player, untethered to this kind planet. Trek pulled a bit at my soul. I remember having my mind blown by Spock’s rueful observation:

“It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.”

I quickly forget Trek. Cute boys, catty girls, band practice, SATs to consider; the life of a teenager is rife with academic obstacle and pointless social drama. I found it again five-and-a-half years ago, when Martin could count his age by the five fingers on one hand and two on the other. We watched Star Trek: The Original Series first, a couple shows a week, thanks to the wonders of Netflix. Martin was hooked — so was his older brother, Louis, a then old man in a 9-year-old boy’s body.

From Star Trek: The Original Series cheesy 70’s porn-like music and short-skirted fashion to The Next Generation and Lieutenant Tasha Yar’s stacked early 90’s ‘do to Captain Janeway of Voyager’s fierce and authoritative pantsuit, we fell into a funny rhythm of aware and sometimes subconscious mimicry. You can gauge which cast we followed if you look at our family portraits. My hair rose in Uhura’s bee-hive creation, then Yar’s stacky ‘do. I grew it out to look like Janeway, which is where it sits today, just past my shoulders, usually worn in her serious updo. Martin and Louis wore out one homemade uniform after the other. From Science Officer to First Officer, my boys chose new mentors each season. Martin chose Wesley Crusher for a long time. Louis picked Captain Picard. My sewing machine soon began to spew clouds of black smoke in protest. It would have required Scotty’s engineering finesse to fix it. I bought a new one.

One month, one week. That’s how long it took, if you strung the episodes together and subtracted the hikes upstairs to make popcorn and fetch glasses of lemonade. One month, one week digested in one-hour increments, spread over four years, two episodes a week. When it ended I didn’t quite know what to do. We moved on to Babylon 5 — a great series in its own right. But it wasn’t Trek.

A wintry New Mexican snow falls tonight, and Martin roams the neighborhood with four best friends, running off after dinner in boots and padded frost pants, running into the future more quickly than any starship caught in a temporal flux. He’s running into himself, running into hidden corners I will never find.

I’m wearing the Captain Janeway uniform I crafted from two old Salvation Army prom dresses, one red, one black. It, too, looks a bit frayed, sun faded, loose in some places now, tight in others. I’m a Starfleet captain tonight. I’m Janeway because she wore the Voyager pants, and I wear the slacks — a lighter version of pants, I’m afraid, here at home.

I’m wearing the colors of peace, science, and exploration. I’m wearing the color of memory, of summers spent discussing temporal shifts, of winters bundled under comforter and piled on the couch. I’m wearing the colors of time that slips away too damn fast, of time that I can only travel to in my memory. I don’t know how to capture it forever, except to tell you about it, to hope that somehow the writing of these adventures will help me remember when I’m 95 years old, thin and frail in my Janeway costume, in a nursing home, perhaps, or in one of my sons’ homes, a box of tissue in my Ready Room. I want to remember. I don’t mind the tears. I’m Captain Janeway tonight, looking into a swarm of uneven space before me, the view screen a bit hazy and chaotic, knowing that my crew will some day find their way home.

After washing the last dish, I glanced at the ledge above my sink. The shuttlecraft was gone. I stood still. Did I lose it? Did it fall into the old-fashioned sink when I wasn’t looking, tumble into a vortex of left-over dinner water? I looked at my right arm, at the frayed wrist of my uniform. The thin sound of boys’ laughter pours into my plastic-covered windows. The thin sound of memory, of love. I peek outside, and a hand races past me, a raised gloved hand carrying a tiny plastic piece of the future. And my son’s deepening  voice cuts the wind, as strong as any Shakespearean bard.

“Space. The final frontier…”

Martin in the desert

Sunday morning I packed one of those paper grocery bags with blood oranges from my backyard tree, a handful of shelled walnuts in a plastic baggie, a few cans of good ginger ale, a bag of homemade corn chips, a package of fig cookies, and I stuck it in the back of my van. I told the boys to grab a garden trowel and a hammer and a chisel from the bamboo shed, and I piled those in the van, too, along with five gallons of water and two empty Avon boxes. The boys piled into the middle seat with a pile of comic books between them and the dog and the pig shared the floor beneath their feet. I wanted to leave the pig at home but I thought about the furniture and baskets of macadamia nuts drying in the sunroom and the toys, oh man the toys, covering every available surface.

And we hit the road! Hit it hard, rolled south with salsa music blasting from a tin radio, then east past San Diego, into the boulder crater mountains my boys call Moon Valley. I glanced in the rear view mirror and watched the boys reading, dog sleeping, and pig pressing his body against 10’s legs and his snout against the side window, watching the rocks ribbon beside us and leaving a coat of thick drool along the window gasket.

I consulted a map as I drove, can of ginger ale between my legs. I bought the map at a junk shop in Escondido, from a comic book man with deep set eyes and thin fingers. He took a green ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and circled areas on the map.

“The best marine fossils are here. Mounds of ‘em. You can scoop them up with a shovel. Nothing like it in the county.” His breath smelled of coffee and alcohol and his eyes sunk deeper into his head as he looked at the map and wrote off-road directions along the side. “Now here you’ve got your petrified wood. Just grows right outta the ground like cabbage. You can only take twenty-five pounds a day, that’s the law. Sometimes Border Patrol is out in that area so don’t mess around with that.”

I pulled the van off at Ocotillo Wells and dove south, into the remnants of an ancient sea bed and followed those hand-written descriptions for four miles across a desert wash caked with dried mud and drying spring grasses. I drove until I knew my van would drive no more in the soft sand. We opened to the cool dry air and hiked down a crusty ravine into the oyster beds of many millions of years ago. The comic book man was right. Fossils littered the ground in every direction, fossils of hard rock oysters and chevron shells and delicate brain coral, some dark split black, some opalized into a gemstone hint of pearl and glass. The boys used small trowels to dig for the best specimens and I sat on a flat piece of granite and watched them pick and dig, pick and dig. The dog lay on the tailgate of my van, curled into a tight ball. Frankie the pig followed the boys and his sharp red harness stood out among the dull rock and our earth tone clothes.

Oysters. Frozen in time. I held a fossil and ran my hands over the rocky ridges, the smooth underside, imagined myself under hundreds of feet of water, an oyster in some other world sea. I thought about The Man, too, thought about our Saturday together, how he returned my call and invited me to walk a labyrinth with him in an ancient meditation practice.

I dressed in torn jeans and an orange long-sleeved t-shirt and drove to the scrub forest of his town and met him at the stone circle. We walked the path, the snake path, outer circles turning to inner twists, following the simple sand space between rows of smooth white stones. I walked three feet in front of The Man, kept my eyes on the ground, let foot fall in front of foot, and centuries of fossil life fell from my arms, chest, mind. I turned to look at my friend, this man of heaven who kissed me and left me in turmoil. I stepped two labyrinth rungs over, let him pass, watched him move with reverence and attention.

I know you, I thought. I remember you. I remember you. And something broke inside of me, broke and spilled on the sand below my body. I don’t know what it was, felt past-life heavy and useless. I jumped past the last maze hurdle, started running to my van, and didn’t look back.

I’m alone this afternoon the way I’m always alone though I share a house with kids and birds and dog and now a pig. I’m alone like those stolen fossils lying in the coastal sun by my front door. I left a man in a maze. And a man left me this morning, left me and this world for some new journey. Somehow that’s the way of my world.

The Old Las Vegas (NM) Armory

I’m working on the This Old House issue of my regional arts magazine, and in the process of writing a story on penitentiary tiles, I began to think about my adopted home town, Las Vegas, New Mexico.…

——-

My hometown in New England held a node on the Revolutionary road. Most of the townspeople — second and third generation Polish — worked at the State Hospital, an institution for the mentally challenged and the criminally insane. My family lived near the escape horn. Dark nights when patients snuck outside the grounds, the siren blew fear into the streets. Old Polish babcias would lock their doors, afraid of the “retarded.”

Our house sat across the street from the library, a quarter mile from the town common — a circular expanse of public park dotted with beetle-infected elm and cold Yankee statues. My parents purchased a beat-up Victorian mansion. It saw 200 years of strife, saw the clash of Tory and Rebel, saw the moment defiant men signed a document giving birth to our country. Runaway slaves hid in a secret room under our elegantly curved stairs during the Underground Railroad’s heyday.

The neighbors swore the ghost of the previous owner haunted the grounds. She hanged herself in the dilapidated barn in the backyard, the victim of alcoholism and small town gossip. The light from a single candle she placed in the loft flickered in the middle of the night, said the neighbors, and her moans hid behind the wind during winter storms. The Polish can be superstitious. Humans can be superstitious.

I look outside the drafty window bordering my desk here in Las Vegas and see that I’ve managed to find a place so much like my first small town, perhaps the one place in the world most like my fading memory. Ethnic food, devotion to the Virgin Mary, stately homes in various stages of repair and decay — if I were to describe a typical street, a typical family, you might think I were describing New Mexico Avenue.

We were the working poor. We were the stewards of pierogi recipes, of Catholic rosary ritual. We danced the polka to the music of accordion and guitar. We lived in rotting Victorians, in homes built during a time of hopeful excess. We shared butter and pickles, novenas to St. Jude, gossip across the clothesline, babysitting duties, the overflow of squash from our gardens. The years melt. They melt. My mind sometimes forgets which place hid the best raspberries, the first shock of autumn. I am as old as an old home. I hold as much layered memory, as much scar and rusty nail.

Polish, Spanish, doesn’t matter your heritage. Doesn’t matter the language you learn after birth.  We all live in homes, in lives ripe for remodel. This old house and heart spans 43 years of hope, regret, laughter, compromise. This old house chases fresh teenagers across a windy yard. This old house holds more wrinkles than money. This old house lives in an old house, a house I can’t afford to fix.

As I tell you this story, the toilet in my Las Vegas home decides to quit. Some fixit projects demand our wallets, our daylight hours. We may think we’re intellectual, urbane, an important fixture in our local landscape. Truth is, though, we’re just tourists, every one of us. One day all of these small towns will be forgotten, a layer of dust under an asteroid, perhaps, or some horror of our own destruction. While I’m around to enjoy it, I’m going to dive right into the deep end. This old house raises her arms to heaven, lets her feet dig deep into New Mexico’s finest caliche. Remodel me if you must. Just let me keep my front porch, my invitation to the world.

We’re Star Trek addicts…

A man called my cell phone. I didn’t catch the call, heard the ring as the shower pelted me with heat and hope. He left a short message, just a macho first name and telephone number. I stood in the bathroom, heat pouring from my hands, dialed his number.

“Hi! Is this Rocco? This is Birdie, the Avon Lady, returning your call!”

I sounded ridiculously alive, bright, as if I stood on the corner of Frantic and Spastic holding a dozen pink balloons. I applied the new Avon Super Shape Anti-Cellulite and Stretch Mark Cream to my belly with my left hand as I listened to his plea. I tried to remember how many days I had been using the product, tried to tell if it  was doing any good at all. Not really, I thought.

“Oh good. Good, good, good, good, good. I need an Avon Lady. Next Friday night. Not tonight. Next Friday. For a party. How much do you charge?”

He spoke in tiny bites, his voice a breathy growl. I stopped moving. My hand stuck to my belly, a dab of unrubbed cream beneath it. I cleared my throat.

“Ahem. Uh, Rocco? I am really not sure what you’re asking. I don’t hire myself out for parties. But heck, I might, if you need me to do makeovers or something. Can you tell me a little more about your party?”

I closed my eyes and waited for what I knew would be an unsavory answer.

“It’s, you know, one of those bachelor’s parties. For my friend. He’s getting married next Sunday. We don’t need makeovers. We need a girl. You know. A girl. I looked in the phone book but there ain’t nothing like that around here. Julio told me to call the Avon Lady. He said you were kinda old but still hot.”

I glanced at the hand pressing stretch mark cream into the belly that looked exactly 40 years old to the mirror in front of me. I squinted my eyes, tried to see beyond my own expectations. I guess I’m not that bad, I thought.

“Rocco?”

I used my sultry telephone sex voice, waited for him to say Yeah.

“Yeah? Heh heh heh.”

Rocco giggled, as if the anticipation of having an Avon Lady shed lotions at his party was the biggest secret fantasy of his life.

“Listen up, Rocco. This is important. Avon Ladies don’t strip. We don’t strip. Not even a little. We don’t normally attend bachelor parties, either, but I would be happy to drop off a nice gift basket of products from our Men’s Catalogue at the start of your party.”

I said “gift basket” like it was a chapter in the Kama Sutra, like I promised sixteen unusual positions with massage oil and sandalwood incense. Rocco didn’t peep. I heard him breathe, heard his brain cells whirl into activity. Should he say yes? I didn’t give him time.
“Rocco, I’ll be there right at the start of the party. I won’t come in, mind you, I’ll drop it at the door. But this gift basket will be the.… best. gift. basket. of your friend’s life. Now. The charge will be one hundred bucks, even. Can I expect a check or cash?”

Rocco mumbled his answer, gave me the party address, and I hung up the phone.

I pedaled my bike to Wal-Mart the day of Rocco’s party. I left it tethered to the dented mailbox standing sentry by the garden department and headed inside, past a canned pyramid of refried beans, past the little boys’ clothes, past toilet bowl cleaner and push-up bras and boxes of Little Debbie treats, straight to the clearance corner. Sure enough, I found just what I needed — a huge green woven Easter basket for the princely sum of one buck. I pried the pale plastic duck off the handle as I waited in line and handed it to the middle-aged cashier with my handful of loose change. She didn’t blink, just stuffed it in a wire bin filled with hangers and discarded merchandise as I waved goodbye. I hung the basket on the right side of my handle bars and headed home.

My two boys watched as I artfully crumpled pieces of pink tissue paper and layered it in the bottom of the basket. I added a spritz bottle of RPM, a Mesmerize Soap-on-a-Rope, a bottle of Avon Bug Guard, and three discontinued (and two-year-old but still smelly) Avon vanilla-scented candles.

“You’re charging how much for this basket?”

My older boy wrinkled his nose. I looked at the goods. The handle of the basket was discolored where the duck used to perch, so I rubbed it, tried to soften the harsh edge, but the oils from my hand made it worse.
“Nevermind how much. This is Avon Lady business, young man. Now you two clean your rooms and get ready for your club meeting.”

My boys shuffled down the hall. I heard them shove toys under the beds, hide dirty clothes in the closet, heard them change from school duds to Star Trek uniform in anticipation of the Sci-Fi Club movie night. I stared in my own closet. What does an Avon Lady with a gift basket wear to a stag party? I sifted through my clothes, looked for something demure, chaste, something that screamed No Stripping! A knock at my bedroom door interrupted my thoughts, and I cracked the door to see my youngest son in his yellow Science Officer’s shirt.

“Yeah? What do you need, honey? I’m trying to get dressed!”

“Mom! Can you wear your uniform, too?”

Why not? I grabbed my Star Trek Voyager Captain’s uniform, the full-sized one-piece one with the velvet piping I made for Halloween, and decided it was the perfect foil for a handful of horny bachelors. I added my gold-toned communicator pin and a pair of serious black boots and corralled my unruly hair into a commanding French twist.

“Ok, crew! Front and center!”

My boys fell into line and we marched to the car, the boys with stacks of dog-eared comic books, me with my gift basket and the directions to Rocco’s house. I dropped the boys off at the recreation center as twilight hit our hills. I left them with an official salute and pointed my car toward the railroad district, the poorest section of town. The vanilla candles gave off a chemical scent as I passed the train depot. I rolled down the windows, hiked the fan up to “high,” tried to force the sickly sweet odor as far away as I could, but other smells invaded my senses, made me roll the windows closed. Rusty cans and glass liquor bottles sprinkled the sides of the road like heavy forgotten confetti, the signs of someone’s pleasure turned environmental hazard. The splayed body of a dead dog hogged the middle of the street. The legs and arms formed a cross like a canine crucifix, and I swerved to avoid it. The sun continued falling behind the Rocky Mountains. I switched on my headlights just as I found Rocco’s street.

I parked my car nearly a block away. It was obvious which home housed the party. The thump, thump, thump of cranking bass shook the air. I felt my internal organs vibrate in time to Latino rap. I wished I carried a real Star Trek phaser. I climbed the rotten stairs leading to Rocco’s door and hovered at the top. The unmistakable bump and grind of cheesy porn music wafted through the door, mixed with the clink and pop of a thousand beer bottles and the rap baseline, an unholy symphony. I brushed the front of my uniform, arranged the gift basket neatly over my arm, and took a deep breath. I rang the bell, but I could tell it didn’t work. I knocked.

A scuttle of foot motion fractured the noise. Someone switched off the movie, and a pair of clicking shoes stopped at the door. I felt a cold eye inspect me through the peephole. I smiled my best Starfleet greeting. I heard the hard catch of a breath, then a Spanish swear. I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

“Oh, man! It’s a Narc!”

The sure hiccup of a deadbolt slid into place, bulging the door slightly out of its frame. I could see shadows running this way and that through the crack, and heard hushed voices in anxious code behind the relentless Latino rap. The man at the door didn’t budge. I could almost feel his breath through the pine. I rapped the knuckles of my left hand against the door and yelled.

“Hey! I’m just the Avon Lady! I’m no Narc! I have a gift basket for Rocco! Open up! Avon Calling!”

The man’s eye loomed in the peephole.

“Avon? Why you have that uniform on?”

He coughed. I extended my right arm with the basket and tilted it so he could inspect the contents. Several more pairs of feet collected behind the door, followed by the muffled sounds of pushing and shoving, jockeying for ocular position.

“That’s no Avon Lady.”

“Lemme see!”

“Who wears shit like that? Feds?”

“Yeah, that’s the Avon Lady. I see her around town. She’s got a, whatchamacallit, you know, a Yoda costume on.”

“She’s the stripper?”

The deadbolt released and the door opened. Five young men stepped back, let me enter. Another half-dozen guys milled about in the background. Empty pizza boxes covered every possible surface in the room, and the spaces between them were accented by empty Tecate cans. The room smelled like pepperoni and green chile and booze and pot. A poster of Che Guevara hung lopsided over a beige chenille couch. A pile of rented adult DVDs sat on the floor. I almost stepped on one sporting a bleach-blonde Latina’s generous backside.

One of the crowd stepped forward. He wore low-slung baggy jeans and a black t-shirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe on the back.

“I’m Rocco.”

He pulled a canvas wallet from a back pocket and removed some bills. We exchanged goods.

“So are you like the Avon Police? Heh heh.”

The men laughed. I held the money in my hand. My uniform had no pockets.

“I’m a Starfleet Captain. Ever see Star Trek?”

The men shrugged their shoulders in unison. I couldn’t tell if they meant Yes or No.

“Well, it’s a little different than what you were watching before I arrived. Now, I don’t know who the lucky guy is, but this gift basket has some items that will make you irresistible to your sweetie. I wish you a wonderful life!”

I turned to leave with a short wave.

“Hey, Lady! Wait!”

Rocco motioned to his posse to sit. They meandered to the couch, to the floor, pushing boxes, crusts, and cans out of the way, one of them parking his butt on a stained particleboard coffee table. Rocco handed the gift basket to a slight man in black canvas pants and a wife beater. He pawed through the contents, lifted the paper with the Bust Sculpt instructions to his eyes, held it close. His lips moved as he read.
“So why you wearing Star Wars? This some kind of joke?”

Rocco’s voice challenged me, chastised me, accused me of interrupting their stag party with some kind of white chick slap in the face. I stood for a moment, my heart beating too fast, too scared. The rap song ended and a new song began, one I knew, an upbeat love ballad called “Es Por Ti”  by sultry singing hunk, Juanes.

“Hey, I love this song!”

I paused, let the music move through my uniform, find my heart, let it slow, slow, make my pulse match its gentle beat. I closed my eyes, tried to think of a way out the door, a way out of trouble.

“Rocco, come here. Let’s dance.”

The men Wooooooo’d, fanned themselves in fake passion. Rocco’s eyes grew wide. He didn’t know what to do. I raised one Spock eyebrow and motioned to him with one finger and my lopsided smile.

“Come on, Rocco. I love this song.”

Rocco grinned and moved forward. I lifted my collar away from my neck and stuffed my cash inside my bra. The men giggled. I aligned my body and arms to dance the Cumbia. I figured he would remember the steps from childhood, from a Grandmom or aunt with Latin culture on her mind. He took position, and we danced. He smelled like pot, like six bottles of aftershave, like chile and beer. He knew the steps and I let him lead me through the minefield of bachelor excess.

“Listen, Rocco. I wore this outfit because my son asked me to. Star Trek is cool. It gives my boys hope that our world isn’t lost. You should watch it some time.”

I whispered my message as the song ended. The men-boys clapped and nodded in satisfaction.

“She’s all right. She can dance.”

I waved goodbye, let myself out the door. One plaintive cry followed me outside.

“Hey! Ain’t she gonna strip?”

This story would end here, with me a hundred bucks richer, one dance older, one stag party wiser, but something I didn’t expect happened. I stood in line at the drug store last week, still recovering from strep throat, a bag of strong cherry lozenges in my hand. A man walked past me, a man I recognized. A man from the party. He hovered next to me, rubbed his mustache with his hand, then lifted it in the split-fingered Vulcan salute any Star Trek fan knows.

“Larga vida y prosperidad.”

James Doohan died yesterday. My two young boys would tell you he played “Scotty” on the Star Trek original series. They would tell you he ruled the Engineering department, carried more brains and guts than tools, and knew how to massage life into fading dilithium crystals. They would tell you how he saved the Enterprise from certain warp core breach death, from Klingon and Romulan torpedos, from the bad choices of Captain Kirk himself. Scotty was The Man. My boys would tell you something else, too. Scotty was the only Star Trek character they met in real life.

A couple of years ago, when my boys first discovered Star Trek, I saw an ad in the newspaper. “Meet James Doohan” ran along the bottom of the page, in heavy black Helvetica. Why not? I thought. I grabbed the boys and we drove through the south canyons, to a book store stuffed in a new suburban strip mall. We parked between two white SUVs, in front of a cell tower shaped like a palm tree with antenna fronds and a hard green plastic exterior. Palm tree from the future, I thought. Just like Star Trek.

James Doohan sat at an elegant wooden table. He didn’t wear his engineer’s uniform. He wore beige Dockers and a blue knit sweater and had a few extra pounds and wrinkles, but it was Scotty just the same. A line snaked through the store, old men and young men and moms and teenagers carrying new Star Trek Original Series DVDs and copies of Doohan’s Beam Me Up, Scotty book, all ripe for autographs. My son, then 9, carried rolled blueprints of the Enterprise I bought off of eBay, and my youngest boy, then 7, carried his Scotty action figure. We were set.

Scotty greeted each fan with a handshake. I watched him lean close to hear each name, and he took time and care signing each book and DVD. Some people made Star Trek jokes, or asked about William Shatner’s behavior on set. Some stood quietly, shook his hand, then left without so much as a whisper. One man wore a Klingon communicator and addressed Scotty with the standard Klingon grunt, Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam — “today is a good day to die.” My boys stared at Scotty, didn’t notice the huge Harry Potter display or the cafe selling fresh chocolate chip cookies. They watched and listened as Scotty spoke with his crazy old world accent, as he focused on each individual person, one by one by one.

Soon it was our turn. 9 rolled his blueprints out on the table and pointed to the engineering section.

“Would you please sign my Enterprise blueprints, Sir?” Two rows of books framed my boy, as if he stood in one of the starship corridors. He spelled his name slowly, and Scotty smiled and bent down, scribbled a personal note and a signature in great flourish. 9 thanked him, and then paused. Oh, no, I thought, here it comes.

“Uh, Sir, may I ask a question?” I closed my eyes and bit my tongue and sent a quick prayer to whoever might be listening that 9 didn’t put Scotty on the spot. The old man nodded and grinned. 9 plowed ahead, asked a question about a specific time-traveling episode where Scotty pulled a miracle out of his uniformed butt, saved the Enterprise, the crew, a lost-cause planet, and the whole friggen universe at large. “So,” 9 continued, “how is this possible?” He didn’t stop talking, pointed out the temporal inconsistencies, the ways in which science declares These Things Impossible.

Oh man, I thought. Here it comes. I waited for Scotty to tell 9 that these things simply aren’t real, they are figments of some writer’s imagination, and he just acted, just pretended to fix a starship. 9 knows this already, I knew. But who wants to hear it from an idol?

Scotty motioned for 9 to come closer, to lean his head in for a big secret. 9 did, tipped one ear toward Scotty’s mouth, and to this day I remember word for word what he said.

“Son, all of these ideas come from the future. All of the people of Star Trek used the power of their own minds to discover what might be possible. Now it’s your turn to think about the future and to work at going boldly where no one has gone before. You can make these things possible.”

He leaned back as 9 nodded his head. 7 held out his action figure, and Scotty signed his own miniature chest. And me, I mouthed Thank You at Mr. James Doohan, and lifted my hand in the Live Long and Prosper Vulcan salute.

I don’t know anything more about James Doohan other than his work on the screen and that three minute intersection of galactic wonder. But in my heart, I know he changed the world for three simple people, made us think about the ways we can challenge our present, pull it into a wondrous future.

Thank you, Scotty. I miss you.

What the heck, I thought, and pulled an Avon Men’s Catalog from my backpack.

“Hey there! You look like quite a snazzy young man. Would you care for an Avon brochure geared toward fashion forward men and a few free samples?”

A black angle crow squawked from the swaying telephone wire above us, his beak pitched and angry, and I smiled and waved the Men’s book toward the sky. The man broke kissing concentration, broke into a beaded smile, and extended his hand to grab the brochure.

“Well sure, now. Why not?” His palm shone like a sailor’s warning sunrise, all fire orange angry with patches of missing skin as if someone grated his hands with the tiniest grit of a cheese grater.

He swung his purse out front, snapped open the tarnished silver buckle and stuck the book in a zippered compartment lined with a delicate floral print as if he’d done this a million times. His motions were easy, well-rehearsed, a man with deep purse knowledge. “But if you’re looking to sell some Avon, you should see my friend, Gail. She’s in that brown stucco behind the Spanish Manor.”

Purse man pointed to a hulking spread surrounded by an electronic gate. A small dirt drive ran beside the mansion, and I craned my neck to see the small home he referenced. I turned to thank him, but his back headed north, already many yards down the rich street, one lizard toe in front of the other, his purse slapping his butt in concrete rhythm.

I followed the dirt drive past six century plants, their spiked fronds open, inviting, thin stalks rising from their centers like the unrolled tongue of a butterfly. The mansion people littered their pristine sod lawn with generic marble statues of cupids and maidens and one lone fat hen. Gail’s house hid in an alcove of eucalyptus. Her yard consisted of decaying ice plant and a natural wood rail fence missing half of its support. Beach towns are like this, I thought. Filthy rich next to middle class next to the fallen forgotten.

I heard the music first, and in my next breath I heard the cats. A woman’s whimpering voice cut through the drawn drapes and shut glass, fell through the roof, slashed the walls, a plaintive cry of despair accompanied by plodding piano.

I went down to the river

to meet the widow

she gave me an apple

it was red

I slept in her black arms

for a century

she wanted nothing in return

I gave her nothing in return

I gave her nothing in return

the ghost of her husband

beautiful as a horse

pulled up an apple cart

full of millions of red apples

Cats howled along with the recording, and I stopped at the open gate. I leaned against a lichen-covered rail, backpack cutting into my sleeveless shoulders, and decided this house was just one hair too much, too loud, too decrepit, too sad for me to enter. But Gail saw me first, opened her white wood door, waved me across the yard, invited me closer with a solid wink and a hearty voice.

“Don’t you think Chan Marshall just has the most gorgeously sad voice? I’ve heard plenty of sad songs over the years, but I think this takes the crown. It could make Satan weep like a schoolgirl. Do Not listen to this song in the vicinity of razor blades!”

A black cat jumped from under a sage bush, ran for the door, crossed my path as sure as Gail’s weeping Satan.

I didn’t know about Gail long enough to form any kind of opinion as to what kind of residence she would keep. I might have pictured a comfy home with a an overstuffed couch and loveseat combo, an old avocado stove and fridge, tasteful ocean watercolor prints on the wall. The simple brown stucco home’s exterior looked retro, charming, a throwback to the days of scarred wooden surfboards and brown coconut tanning oil. She threw open her arms and grinned, and I gasped in surprise as much as confusion as I hauled my Avon crap over the threshold.

“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you look like a merry soul. Come on in!”

Gail towered over me, and as I passed I realized the top of my head barely grazed her chin. She wore slim black slacks and a crisp white men’s shirt with the arms rolled high and the hem loosely tied at her waist. A black bandana hugged her head, and it was obvious she had no hair. She didn’t have eyebrows either, at least I didn’t think she did because one was smudged as if she drew them on in the morning and then wiped her brow a couple of hours later in a fit of forgetfulness.

I stood in her foyer, breathing in that sweet sad music, trying to make sense of the space, the objects, the countless.… cats.

“Whatsa matter? Cat got your tongue?” Gail snorted and whooped, scooped two tabbies from a futuristic vertical zig-zag sculpture, powdercoated red, the backside painted black. She pointed to the artwork, her grin breaking into a full-tooth laugh as I stared at it without moving a muscle, my mouth trying to move, trying to make some kind of intelligent noise.

“It’s a chair, love. Ever see the TV show MacGyver? This is straight from the set. Sit down and tell me who you are.”

I perched on the edge of the zig-zag, afraid it would fold into a flat square on the floor beneath me, but it felt sturdy and true.

“Hi, I’m Avon. I mean I sell Avon. I’m an Avon Lady.” My voice cracked and waddled. I stared at a thousand Birdies staring back at me. The walls held a million mirrored squares set in concentric circular patterns. A velvet couch red and rolling like an angry ocean wave stood sentry in the middle of the room. Seven cats slept in the spaces between the curves, stray paws and curling tails flung over the sides.

“Ok, nameless Avon Lady who is not Avon but sells Avon. Give me one of your books. I do like a good lipcolor.” Gail took a seat upon a delicate white cushion. Everything in the room was black or red or white, and I noticed for the first time Gail’s carefully applied scarlet lips.

I handed her a brochure and rummaged through my bag for some samples. Damn. No lipstick. I pulled out a few squares of facial creams and my demo bottle of the new Naturals Pink Grapefruit & Rose Shampoo.

“Oh sorry! My name is Birdie! Here — take these samples! And would you care to smell the new Avon Naturals haircare stuff? It smells just like roses and grapefruits, and I love the way it makes my hair shine.” I held out the bottle and Gail grabbed it. Her hands were long and thin like her body, and she inhaled one, two, three deep lung times, snapping the lid shut at the same moment the CD stopped playing its last tune. A black and white mottled cat rubbed against my bare legs.

“Was this animal tested?” Gail turned the bottle over in her hands, squinted her eyes as if reading the fine print, and she opened it once more, smelling the shampoo with a satisfied nod.

“Oh no! None of the Avon products are tested on animals! No way, Jose! Avon does NOT do animal testing!” I stopped short, realized I was yelling when a Siamese yowled and jumped from his cozy perch on the window sill.

“No, love, that’s not what I meant. Is this shampoo safe for cats?” Gail wiped her left hand across her forehead, smudging her bad eyebrow. Tiny beads of sweat gathered at the edge of her bandana, and as she dropped her arm, I noticed it shook.

“Well, gosh, I don’t know. It is supposed to be a fairly “natural” sort of product, so I don’t see why you couldn’t bathe a cat with it.” As the words popped out of my mouth, I started giggling. I couldn’t imagine anyone bathing a cat with anything of any kind — let alone fruity Avon shampoo.

“The only way to find out is to give it the old college try, then. Come on, pick a cat.” Gail stood, handed me the bottle, turned her head right to left to show me just what an incredible cat selection she had, and I chose the fattest cat on the premises, a hefty white ball of fluff with a crook in his tail.

“Oh Lord. You picked a cat, you did. That’s my Hell Cat. His name is Fat Bastard.”

Gail swooped Fat Bastard into her skinny arms. He yowled and his fur blew into a tense porcupine balloon. A long mottled bruise peeked from under her shirt. I stared at it. The purple and blue seemed out of place. She wavered for a moment, then headed to a silver and black stereo system, pressed a couple of buttons and the sad wailing woman squeezed my tear ducts, forcing me to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. Gail didn’t notice.

“This way, Avon Lady whose name is Birdie.” She scratched Fat Bastard between the ears but he didn’t rest.

I wanted to ask her about her bandana, her colored arm. Oh man. I silently swore to myself. Why did I pull out the shampoo? Gail had no hair, had the pallid look of chemo or radiation or something medical and frightening and deeply sad. Crap.

“Now, I should explain why I would even begin to entertain the idea of washing a chat.” Gail used the French word for cat. She led me from the red and black parlour through a room perfectly white, unusually curved, with rounded corners and a slight arc to the ceiling. A white berber carpet met the walls, and in one corner a painted pine trunk — white, of course — sat, heavy and silent.

“I photograph cats. Maybe you’ve seen my work. Maybe not. You don’t look like much of cat person, if you don’t mind my saying. I would call you an exotic pet person, am I right? That fancy kilt gives it away. You probably like yodeling and campfires, too.” Gail continued walking, didn’t turn to see my expression of surprise.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. I do have a dog. But I keep parrots and lizards and guinea pigs and a pot-bellied pig, too.” I didn’t mention the hermit crabs, white mice and lone water frog. I definitely didn’t mention that yeah, I sort of yodel at times and hell yeah, I love camping almost as much as I love my kids. I kept thinking about the shampoo, wished I used my noggin a little better, wished I pulled out my demo bottle of the new Avon Extraordinary fragrance in its place. Double crap.

“See. Everyone is a type. You’re one of those neo-tacky-earth-mother types. At least you’re an animal lover. I wouldn’t have let you in if I thought otherwise.” Gail opened the door to a spacious bathroom sporting a six-foot tub with rotating jets and a pedestal sink. She placed Fat Bastard in the jacuzzi and closed the door behind us.

“Now. Your job is to watch and learn. Bet you never saw anyone wash a cat. In fact, I bet you wish you weren’t here right now.” Gail laughed loud and long. She tossed her head back in glee, left her hands on her hips like some kind of artistic cat-lovin’ minimalist pirate. She stopped laughing, leaned toward me and lifted one side of her mouth. “Cat photographers are the bravest people on the planet. Bet you didn’t know THAT!”

She was right. I didn’t know that, didn’t know a damn thing about cat photography, and yeah, she was right about that my wanting not to be there part. I felt pigeon-holed, silly, a piece of some pie-chart of human existence. I decided then and there never to yodel again. I watched Gail reach above the sink to the medicine cabinet. She opened it, pulled out a black fabric mesh. Fat Bastard sniffed the tub drain, seemingly oblivious to his fate.

“Now comes the hard part. Could you hand me Monsieur Bastard?”

I turned toward the tub and evaluated the situation. Fat Bastard stood at the front of the fixture, his nose pressed into the water spout. He looked harmless, even goofy, with irregular drops of water running down his whiskers. His fur was whiter than the fiberglass — whiter than anything I’d ever seen, almost translucent, like the hide of a Polar Bear. Gail rustled behind me, and I heard a cabinet open and close.

“Just scoop him up, Madame Avon. We need the element of surprise.”

“Ok.” I set the shampoo bottle on the marble floor and slid toward the tub.

“Hey, kitty, kitty, kitty. What a good kitty, kitty, kitty. Come to Birdie, kitty.” I bent at the waist and grabbed Fat Bastard. I expected him to growl and swat, but he twisted his body in supine submission.

“Awwww, he’s a sweetie! He’s no bastard!” I stepped away from the tub and raised my eyebrows in surprise at the strange contraption in Gail’s hands.

“Five minutes does not a relationship make, my dear Avon Lady.”

Gail stuck out her tongue and licked the end of a huge suction cup attached to a stick. She tilted toward the wall and pressed the apparatus into the decorative black tile with a grunt. It hung low over the bath. A metal hook stuck out from the bottom of the dowel. A few sections of simple chain swung from it. It looked some kind of railroad crane — the kind that raises and lowers boxcars onto the track.

“Now hand me le chat.” Gail still held the black mesh, and as I hoisted Fat Bastard away from my body, she took care to hide it behind her back. Fat Bastard didn’t notice. He stretched one paw and shifted his weight, seemingly happy to be perched in the crook of his owner’s arm.

What happened next I can’t even describe. It happened so fast! Gail whipped the mesh from behind her back and encapsulated Fat Bastard as stealthy and quick as a momma spider. Her arms rotated and pushed and patted the cat into a hairy cocoon with four windmill legs angry and wild. I heard the sound of a metallic zipper and one petulant meow. She attached the netting to the hanging structure and stepped back to admire her work. Fat Bastard’s legs swung beneath the netting. He looked like a fuzzy white jelly bean with a jaunty black zigzag design. Well, a jelly bean with legs, anyway. His feet barely reached the tub floor, and they made running motions, as if he was on some kind of S and M treadmill.

“Neat little invention, isn’t it? I designed it myself. I’d make a million dollars if I sold them on eBay.” Gail turned the cold water knob first, then the hot. She plugged the tub, and I watched Fat Bastard squirm and kick as the water rose to meet his belly.

“Wow. I never saw anything like it! What a cool idea. I can’t believe he didn’t scratch you. He doesn’t look very happy.” That was an understatement. Fat Bastard hissed and moaned and looked straight at me with evil slitted eyes.

I handed Gail the Avon Naturals Pink Grapefruit & Rose Shampoo. She squeezed a generous dollop in one palm and rubbed her hands together. Her bandana started inching up her forehead, exposing her bald head. I leaned over, pushed it back down as she rubbed Fat Bastard’s back and head with the suds.

“Thank you, Avon Birdie. I shaved it off. I didn’t want to watch it falling out in hunks.” Gail answered the question I was too afraid to ask. “It’s breast cancer. My aunt died at thirty. My sister died at thirty-two. I’m forty-six so I guess I am already on borrowed time.”

Gail continued washing her cat, ignoring his sputter and swat. She took a plastic tumbler and rinsed Fat Bastard with care. “Look, Avon Lady. I’m going to tell you something. I’m dying. I won’t be here long enough to see the finals from the cat food advertising campaign I just finished. But you are young, still, and apparently healthy. Listen to me, Birdie.”

I stopped staring at Fat Bastard. Gail stood, let the cat pitch and yaw as she stuck both hands on slim hips and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Avon Lady who is not Avon, name of Birdie, cat wash assistant and funny girl in strange Celtic clothes, I have some important advice for you.”

Fat Bastard chose that moment to yeowl holy hell. His face pressed against the mesh, one tooth snagged in the black material. I had no idea what Gail was about to say. Love is the answer? Always be kind? Watch your back? Get regular mammograms?

Gail laughed at her cat, remained arms akimbo, and let her gift to the world at large and kilt-covered Avon Ladies in general fly:

“You’ll always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.”

I dropped a book at Kilt Man’s house. I wrote a personal note on the back next to the naked foot advertising Avon Cracked Heel Relief Cream. “Hey” my note said “I feel like a heel, not calling you back and all, but my best friend died and I went to Europe.” I left it hanging on his iron gate, didn’t scale the wall like last time, kept on a stealth Avon mission just dropping and running, not standing still long enough to be seen. Green Day kept me company, and every now and then I saw a dog or a cat and shook my booty like a teenaged hip-hop dance student.

It felt good, listening to alien music, thinking about men who might call, touching the soft petals of velvet tiger lilies gracing the entrance to a stone mansion, watching the Latino gardeners hose and rake and clip hedges. I waved at each one, left them Avon samples and books on the hoods of their trucks. I cut through the canyon between the rich and the regular and picked a few yellow flowers for my hair. The two teenaged Christian girls at the tract house bordering the canyon sat under a fading ash tree. They looked as old as the neighborhood itself, lonely, tired of being home-schooled and isolated.

“Hey, girls! Girls! You guys want some free makeup samples?” I waved an Avon brochure their way. Their mom never ordered makeup from me, kept a clean-washed face on top of wholesome teddybear sweatshirts, but she did buy bubblebath and bar soap and once purchased a travel bible from the Avon Inspirations catalogue. The girls shook their heads no, sorry, no. I sat on the sidewalk and pulled an opaque bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink of warm water. Poor Christian girls. I cranked Green Day a little higher. No makeup. Geeze. Poor kids. I let my legs splay out in unladylike fashion, let pill bugs crawl over them, watched the girls sit and stare at each other, at the tree, the sky, the steady windows of the house.

“Uh, hey, girls? Do you guys have a boombox? I can teach you a dance if you like. I’m bored. Come on, dance with me.” I removed my headset and clicked the CD out of the case. “Come on, it’ll be fun. It’s OK, you’re mom knows me.”

The girls looked at each other again and the tall one rose, smiled at me, ran inside the house, returned with a black music player. She shook her long brown hair behind her head, and I hear it hit her crisp white shirt. They both wore skirts, sensible demure skirts with gym shorts underneath. I popped in Green Day and selected my son’s song.

“Now there’s exactly one bad word in this song. When it gets to that part I’ll yell out something else so you won’t hear it, ok? It’s a song about how difficult it is to walk your own unique path. I think you’ll both enjoy it. My son dances to this song, and he taught me this dance. He’s around your age, he goes to the high school. He’s had a tough life because he has a sensitive soul and he gets teased a lot. He’s good-looking, so that works in his favor, but being cute doesn’t stop people from saying mean things, does it? And hey, usually the worse thing when you live a single existence is honoring your own thoughts.” I shook my shoulders, rolled my head back and forth in preparation, bent down, hit play. The girls looked at each other, looked at the house as if afraid someone might see them, might hear me talk about dissent and personal power.

I walk a lonely road

The only one that I have ever known

Don’t know where it goes

But it’s home to me and I walk alone

I walk this empty street

On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Where the city sleeps

and I’m the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone

I walk alone

I walk alone

My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me

My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating

Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me

‘Til then I walk alone

I showed them how it’s done, how lonely people get up and dance, really dance, man, showed them how to shake those blues and stare them down. I repeated the steps, repeated, sang out loud, yelped Alleluia when the singer sang Fuck and slid across the grass for the grand finale. The girls laughed, started moving legs and arms in ways not quite hip-hop but just as fantastic, and I hit play again, and we all moved to the ways we didn’t match the rest of the universe. I saw a flutter from one of the house windows, saw their mom peek through and smile at the sight of the Avon Lady dancing with her daughters, waved and kept my hip-grinding to a minimum.

I left them giggling, sweaty, practicing their own moves, picked up my junk and hoofed it home. So much of my life reduces to dance, the dance of the mothership, I thought. I might be passing out stapled hunks of dead trees this Earth Day but part of me is sending morse code through my feet, telling the earth I need her against my body, need her to walk against, to help me walk alone.