Excerpt - Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat
 
Evil lurked, crossed its legs, laughed that creepy little monster-movie cackle
and waited for me to make it home. . .
 
"Have a nice day," I called cheerfully to the bus driver on my way past
her, on my way home from jail, but she didn't say anything. Maybe I was
overly enthusiastic in poking her in the hip. Maybe it was because she
was wearing brown and UPS drivers are the only ones who have a nice day
wearing brown since everyone wants to have sex with them. UPS drivers
knew that long gone were the days when people killed the messenger,
because now everyone wanted to fuck the messenger.
 
I didn't know if anyone wanted to have sex with the bus driver, but her
pockets were gaping out at the sides of her hips like Hustler beaver
shots and I wanted to poke her there. What can I say? I am not made of
stone. Open tissue boxes make me blush and I ravage my ears with Q-Tips
until my eyes flutter and roll back in my head.
 
Who'd have ever thought anyone wearing the color of a cardboard box
would be sexy? The one who came up with the idea had his fingers firmly
crammed between America's giggling knees.
 
Now, life may not be fair, but every once in a while it all really does
come out in the wash.
 
San Francisco used to have a population who had sex but they died off
and the rest had just been evicted to give way to a generation of
ambitious Latte People with secretary spread, who think they can take
over the world with a computer platform shift. When they got undressed,
what you saw most often wasn't cellulite. No, it was the textured weave
of their office chairs.
 
Lattes are good. But Latte People are usually nouveau computer bohemians
who think they're actually artists. This is more like spending a night in jail and
calling yourself a P.O.W.
   
And the same way that Martha Stewart, and Oprah will be the only ones
left to repopulate the world after the nuclear war, after the Silicon
Valley boom, the UPS drivers were the only working class left in San
Francisco who were having lots of actual sex with real people.
 
And typically they were the “vockies" in high school who took the
vocational classes and weren't sure what to do after graduation, and
since they didn't inherit the luxury of sitting around, wasting their
firm-breasted decades roaming around the castle annoying the New England
maids and crashing little airplanes into oceans for fun, they joined UPS instead.
 
But they're having the last monster-movie laugh. For a little carpal
tunnel syndrome in exchange, these silent heroes of commerce in America
spend all day acting like honeybees in big trucks, going from place,
having sex in between delivering computer chips and boxes of money to
companies so the rest of us can go online and have imaginary e-mail sex.

And that's a good thing because the downside, of course, is that
jerking off can be out of the question. Like trying to stroke yourself
with an old dried-up monkey paw. It's almost as if the three ironic
wishes had already been granted. And the carpal tunnel the UPS drivers
endured on the way to earning their own decadent  routes of cheap sex
meant that they had to clutch packages tightly between their wrists on
the way to your door, but it also helped them cover the wet spots in their
pants left there by that last lady who wore frilly ankle socks and a size 18 baby-doll
dress./The one who tried to hide the small pile of stretch marks on her stomach, and
called him “Daddy-o" in an old little girl's cancer-throated drawl.
 
This carpal tunnel from all that repetitive scanning means that they're
also not real good at grabbing your tits---they can only fling their
limp hands at your rock-hard nipples---but that's not what the
housewives are answering the door for anyhow. And with three-minutes-
per-address already figured out in their schedules, don't expect to
come. Maybe later, through an erotic memory you can hold up like a
flash card whenever you need to masturbate yourself senseless.
 
But no one was masturbating anymore. San Francisco had gone from being
a city of people who used to pole-dance around parking meters for spare
quarters, to a city that only had time to read dirty "instant messages"
on AOL and bought Darwinistic daily affirmation calendars that had
chants like,“Come on, old man! Get up off the ground or I'll fuck you
right there."
 
So the last of the city's original renters were evicted for the
slightest infractions, like pets farting too much, so the apartment
could be rented out for four, five, and seven times more to people
wearing sitcom hairstyles and sporting the vaudevillian sense of
justice that comes with it.
 
Sushi bars had spread around the edges of the neighborhood like bread
mold. Used diapers no longer blew around the streets like sagebrush. I
passed them by, just me, my duffel, and a brand-new, working-class
future staggering for footing. I was young, but I knew enough to know
that where there is sushi and the little neatly rolled up and arranged
attitudes to go with it, there are usually cappuccino frappes to wash
it all down afterward. The Gap and Starbucks are the ghetto liquor
stores of the yuppie neighborhoods. The few remaining people in ill-
fitting used clothing danced and hopped around the city's fault lines,
doing the magical earthquake dance with lottery tickets in their teeth.
 
When I finally got home, my old motorcycle was there, waiting for me in
front of my place, covered in spider webs, covered in black city grit,
with pieces of paper taped and tucked all over her, fluttering in the
wind, waving me home to the finish line. But these papers didn't say
“welcome home," or “we love you," or “for a good time come to Aggie's
birthday party." No.
 
Because is there anyone around here named Aggie anymore?
 
No, those children had been evicted from my block, replaced by babies
who'd been lulled to sleep with John Philip Sousa so they'd march out
of the womb with blind ambition and no free time. Babies named
Zacharria and Taylor who're lactose intolerant and allergic to wheat
and kitty cats and get ear infections. Pale, splotchy children
squinting at the sun who looked like they'd never make it, but would
live to grow up, annoy the maids and crash airplanes. The faded papers
flapping in the wind was an archive of months of frustration and the
new wave of puckered intolerance and suburban brutality: The Latte

 People wanted me to move my bike. They used the kind of clenched-jaw
“please"s that sounded more like very well-practiced legal threats.
 
I was the last of the Mujer Ricans, just about surrounded by computer
programmers on all four sides, and a lot of them never even left their
houses. These were the folks who were filling the void left by all the
gay artists who died in the eighties and nineties.
 
When the computer programmers left their houses, instead of having sex
with UPS drivers like the last guys, their eyes quickly darted away
from neighbors like their ingrown sex drives and they scampered through
these gentrified streets of fear like screen savers.
 
Those computer folks around here are not internationally famous for
their social skills. They pick their noses on dates and snort when they
tell scatological jokes, and I won't even mention what the boys are
like.
 
But I guess if I was paying $75,000 a month for a two-bedroom
apartment, I'd never leave it either, because I'd want to get my
money's worth. I'd spend all weekend ejaculating all over the hardwood
floors and sliding through all the rooms on garbage bags.
 
So you see, after getting out of jail, I went back to my city, but my
city wasn't there because it was suddenly too expensive for anyone
interesting to live there.
 
None of us have really been the same ever since the computer
programmers, delirious with Silicon Valley's kisses, came to dinner and
peed all over the toilet seat out of excitement.
 
And fifty years after the GI bill that started the whole suburban,
distant-milk thing, the Russians are busy playing Cowboys and Indians
while the Japanese are setting their endangered species pets free for
Lent, apologizing for greed and finding God now that the economy's bad
and they've got a minute. Our own neurotic baby boomers are hoarding
homes and parcels of land like baseball cards and frantically jamming
shoe boxes of deeds under their Swedish dux beds.
This is the story of what happened . . . why I'd ride back on my
motorcycle in an invisible muumuu, with a box of crayons wedged under
my clamp-like breasts to save the city . . . It's the story of how the
lone-riding UPS driver became king, and why receptionists everywhere
were wiping delivery semen from the corners of their data-entry mouths
with long fingernails as they curtly answered the phone: “Blah blah dot
com Incorporated."
 
And it's also the story of bored and disillusioned suburbanites who
find poverty as fascinating as going up to roadkill, spreading its legs
and sniffing it. And while the shrinking middle class is busy checking
the sofa cushions for change, they're getting clubbed like baby seals
for the trendy jackets with the embroidered name tags.
 
It's the story of screaming renters getting dry-fucked, falling to
their knees crying “uncle!" and how their screams got lost in the mail.
 
Oh yes. That's the way history is. We all get lost in the phone books
of time and we all lose our girlish figures. We all get the chance to
become the scary one the children would run from and tell campfire
stories about. We all get our turn. Oh, yes, we do---and don't you
forget it. Even if you manage to go out in a decapitated head-on-
collision blaze of glory in your baby-skinned mid-thirties. Because not
only does no one get out of here alive, no one gets out of here pretty.
We all go the way of the Vikings, and so, too, passed the people in San
Francisco who used to actually have sex.
 
A sticky garbage bag blew across my feet.  And THAT, along with the
fishy battle cry of sushi, should've told us all that we needed to
know. But as you know, it doesn't ever start or end with sushi. No, no,
no. Sushi is merely a fishy battle cry for a new era....
 
And so we all ran, ran, ran as fast as we could away from the Silicon
Valley Latte People, frantically tearing across the bridges for their
lives like the chick in the woods in those slasher horror movies. Tits
bounced, mascara ran.
 
....Hoochie Mama. Say no to decaf nonfat lattes and say YES to being a
bitch... I DID."

 

Home / Appearances / Merchandise / Books / Press info / Photos / Show Reviews / SCRIPT

E@ErikaLopez.com

Erika Lopez P.O. Box 410011 / San Francisco, CA 94141