Funny by L. L. Babb

Funny | L. L. Babb

Kiki spent six years in prison learning how to shut down. When she was released to the halfway house, her counselor tried to help her open up, share, look at life on the bright side. The bright side was blinding to Kiki. Her personality felt overworked, as if she were practicing some form of extreme yoga, yoga where a coat hanger was hooked inside her lips to make her smile. Her face felt like the side of a cliff, her mouth a small hole—a breeze might blow past like breath across the top of a bottle, and only a hollow sound emerge. She tried cultivating a shy presence, hoping no one would expect much from her. The other Kiki, the sociable Kiki, was gone. She’d used up her lifetime allotment of sociability. She’d overdone it. And hadn’t that been her problem her whole life? Overdoing it? Hence prison. Hence the halfway house. And really, if you thought about it, hence the children. Then, hence the absence of children. A whole life of hence, therefore, ergo.

Best not to speak. Who knew what calamitous sequence she might initiate?

“We won’t get anywhere,” her counselor said, “unless you start to talk to me,” and Kiki stretched her lips into a smile that made her eyes water. “Do you want to get your children back or don’t you?”

Kiki blinked to clear her vision. Thinking about her children stirred something inside her, a vague feeling in the pit of her stomach and a corresponding quickening of her pulse that could conceivably be interpreted as an emotion. Was that love? Her counselor waited, eyebrows up. Kiki opened her mouth to speak but that stiff smile wouldn’t move over to let the words out. And all she was trying for was what was expected of her—a yes, a for sure, a you betcha. With a positive attitude.

“You need to focus,” her counselor said.

At the halfway house, Kiki slept in a large room with seven other women, a cavernous and dark addition crammed with bunk beds tacked onto the back of a 1940’s bungalow in a seedy part of town. The blinds were always closed so no one could look in. The parole board called the home a Residential Reentry Center, conjuring in Kiki’s mind an industrial complex, a ward with rows of beds like an orphanage and steel reinforced windows. In fact, it was just a saggy house set back from the road and surrounded by overgrown juniper bushes. There was a mandatory recovery meeting every day at 6 pm before the women took turns making dinner. Men were the main topic of these recovery meetings—night after night the women said the same things, even as different women came and went. They spoke of absent fathers or fathers who wouldn’t leave them alone, boyfriends the women would have done anything to hold onto or get rid of, creeps who stalked them, ex-husbands and one-night stands, the loves of their lives and men they boned to get meth, bosses and teachers and pastors and all those men who were in charge. Kiki listened without speaking. These were not her stories.

She got a job washing dogs at a shop called Hair of the Dog. “My ex came up with the name,” the owner, Marcy, told her. “Lord, he was clever, that man.” Marcy talked so much Kiki wondered if she liked, or maybe didn’t even notice, her own silence. Marcy hadn’t had a drink in eight years. Her husband, cleverness notwithstanding, split rather than deal with a sober wife. Before Marcy hit her bottom, she bred champion toy poodles. Pictures of Marcy and her dogs were all over the walls of the shop. Marcy appeared determined in the photos, her tiny dogs groomed to look both fierce and silly—bully chests like prizefighters with fluffy pom poms on their tails. Ribbons hung from the picture frames. 

Three months after moving to the halfway house, Kiki was allowed a supervised visit with her children. A public place, lunch only, no physical contact. Her mother and her children sat huddled together at one side of the table while a single chair waited for Kiki on the other. No worries about who would have to sit next to her. The Denny’s staff had probably been warned. Watch out—crazy, alcoholic, non-custodial felon coming.

“I purposefully didn’t get a booth,” her mother said shrilly as Kiki approached the table. She half-expected a little nameplate in front of her chair. She hadn’t had time to go home and shower so she smelled of flea dip and the front of her shirt was damp.

Kiki couldn’t think of anything to say. She used to hold nothing back when talking to her mother. Miss Smart Mouth, her mother had called her. Sassy Pants. Now her mom was just a white-haired old lady in a pastel sweater set. Her face had gone soft with age, jowly. Kiki’s daughter looked scared shitless, ten years old and developing that disapproving glare just like her grandma, her hair pulled back into a ponytail so tight it looked like it hurt. Her son, well, her son. Kiki felt something shift in her when she looked at him. Who had taught him to stand up when a lady approached the table, even if the lady was just his mother, an ex-con fuzzy with dog hair? He was what now, fifteen? Kiki, though out of touch with the world for so long, could see the nerdish boy he’d become,a bully’s target with his belted jeans cinched too high, a home haircut, his hand outstretched for a shake like he was running for office, that terribly earnest smile.

Kiki didn’t sit down. What was the point? They weren’t her children anymore. Her children, the ones she would have raised, no longer existed. Feeling their eyes on her, waiting for her to say something, she suddenly  turned and rushed away, like she was fleeing a net poised to drop over her. She imagined them whispering behind her as she walked out. What was she doing? Where was she going? Why didn’t she say anything? Kiki had no answers.

Kiki didn’t ask to see her children again.

The grooming shop’s hours were ten to seven. Because she would miss the six o’clock meetings at the halfway house, Kiki received permission from her counselor to attend the lunchtime AA meetings in a church basement a short walk from the shop.

“Hello, I’m Kiki,” Kiki recited at the AA meetings. She said it, too, when she lifted each dog from its crate at work, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Let go and let God,” she whispered to a trembling Pekinese.

“Keep coming back, it works,” she cooed into the muddy ear of a German shepherd puppy.

“Sugar?” Marcy said, looking up from squeezing a Doberman’s anal glands.  “You don’t want to keep your pretty face so close to the dogs like you’re doing.”

At the halfway house and the AA meetings, Kiki avoided looking anyone in the eye. At work, she stared into the dogs’ faces. Their eyes were so human, so expressive. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Kiki reassured them, and she thought she could feel them relax into the sound of her voice. She loved their warm, wet bodies, the feel of the angular jutting bones of the tiny dogs and masculine heft of muscle on the large ones. It was all she could do to keep from throwing her arms around them all and hugging them to her chest.

The shop was closed on the weekends. Kiki missed the dogs then. It wasn’t one specific animal—she missed the idea of dogs. She found herself absentmindedly stroking the pilled comforter in the living room of the halfway house or sniffing her fingers in her sleep. Her hands always smelled like medicinal soap and the tips of her fingers stayed permanently puckered.

The noon AA meetings were attended by working people, mostly men, and most likely the same type of men the women talked about at the halfway house. These men used two hands to drink their coffee from tiny paper cups, slouched in the chairs or hunched over the table. Then there was Standup Mike, a gentle-looking middle-aged man who used to be a school teacher—big glasses and sweaters and curly brown hair not so much shot with gray as bazooka’d. Cannonballed. His eyes were large and brown and compassionate, like a golden retriever’s. He stood whenever he spoke, which was often. Had he spent so long in the classroom that he couldn’t speak without standing and pacing, lecturing? Everyone loved his stories—failed marriages, an estranged son, lost jobs, mayhem galore. He had once left a note for an ex-wife secured to her front door with a meat cleaver. He didn’t remember leaving the note or what it said but he also didn’t remember running from the police that same afternoon or crashing his car into a ditch. His drinking, his mistakes, his crimes were fodder for a series of amusing anecdotes: the time his pants fell down to his ankles during a DUI arrest, the time he kicked down the door of his neighbor’s house thinking it was his own home and that his wife had changed the locks. Kiki admired someone so normal looking who could lose control of himself so thoroughly and then open himself up to a roomful of strangers. He had done these things and retained his dignity. He had come back from the abyss with flair and great material.

Kiki had been like him once. She was the life of every party. She’d had loads of friends, was voted class clown in high school, crossed her eyes for her yearbook picture. Now she couldn’t remember the last time she’d made someone laugh, let alone the last time she had laughed herself.

She began to formulate the story of her drinking and her “crime” (Kiki always saw that word in quotes) as one of self-defense. Self-defense gone awry. The story needed some fleshing out, some interesting details, a tiny bit of pathos to contrast with the humor, a tad of back story. The self-defense idea was not a new concept; she had floated it past her attorney like a bobbing life preserver during the trial. Her attorney told her it was best if she let him speak for her.

She wanted to finally speak for herself, speak with the same kind of authority as Standup Mike, own her own life, albeit tweaked a little for entertainment purposes. It was a funny story, really, what had happened, why she ended up in prison. “It was him or me,” she practiced saying to the dogs. “It was wrong, of course, but it’s as simple as that. Justifiable.” If he had lived, she would have died. Maybe. Probably, at some future point.

She started sitting directly across from Standup Mike at meetings, studying him, week after week, watching the way he leaned his head toward whoever was speaking. She tipped her head forward too, leading with her forehead, not moving until she developed a crick in her neck and her pose felt awkward. How had she not noticed the way her head balanced on her neck before? Standup Mike pushed his glasses up on his nose using one finger on the bridge. He ran his hand through his hair and it settled right back where it had been. He steepled his big blunt fingers under his chin. When he said something kind to one of the few other women at the meetings, an old familiar feeling bubbled up in Kiki’s chest. Was that jealousy? She couldn’t be sure. When she mumbled the Lord’s prayer at the end of each meeting, she watched him as he closed his eyes and hung his head. She wanted to hear his voice separate from the others. She started getting to the meetings a few minutes early, staying late, lingering near the coffee pot. This seemed to encourage several of the other men to approach her but not Standup Mike. Standup Mike was older, kind of overweight, not really all that good-looking. That wasn’t important, though, because Kiki wasn’t interested in him romantically. She wanted to be him. 

“Start from the beginning,” she told a lanky golden doodle. “Not too far back.” The doodle rolled its eyes to gaze at her. “Start with the day it happened. The drinking, the fighting…” This was their weekend routine, but had they started drinking early or was it just her who had been drinking all morning? Beer, just beer at first. A hangover remedy for the night before, then a steady stream of cans, one after another. Losing a half-full beer somewhere and getting another from the fridge. He’d been fucking around again, seeing that friend of a friend of a girlfriend of someone on his softball team. Kiki could smell the funk of the woman on him. Plus, hadn’t he given her some kind of infection? She thought so. He was disgusting, that woman was disgusting. Bringing someone else’s filth home. 

“I can’t really talk about things like vaginal infections at a coed AA meeting, can I?” A bulldog grunted as she rinsed the folds of his skin. She’d skip that part. They were just arguing. Why they were arguing wasn’t important. Make it funny. Make it rueful. A shot or two of something harder, a brown burn, the last of a bottle, a flung glass. Her three-year-old daughter crying, “Stop it, stop it,” and running from the room. Hilarious.

“Things just sneak up on you,” she said to a sad and matted rescue pup. They needed more beer, more whiskey, more something. She was the one who drank everything, she should go. No, he should go. He threw the car keys at her, hitting her in the forehead. She felt the sting, the warmth of blood. He laughed. She hit his face with an open palm. He grabbed her hair at the base of her neck, snapped her head back, and threw her sideways. Something, some sharp corner of wood in the arm of the couch, bit her hip. Her son, distraught, appeared behind his father. Not in front of the kids, she thought. She was the one who had wanted everything to stop. 

“Okay, okay, I’ll go.” 

“Damn right, you’ll go,” her husband said. 

She picked up the keys and walked out the door and got into their car parked in the driveway. Her husband followed her out, standing by the garage in front of her, arms crossed, as if daring her to come back into the house.

“I wasn’t even angry anymore,” she said in the AA meeting. Standup Mike tipped his head in her direction as she spoke. He was listening. Everyone was listening. She looked around thoughtfully as if just remembering the whole thing as she spoke. Timing was everything. How she glanced at the rearview mirror and saw her face. A cut along her hairline! Blood! Goddammit! She paused for emphasis. “So, I just put the car in drive and hit the gas.”

She waited a beat, to provide a long suspenseful moment “I’ll never forget the look on his face,” Kiki said. “He was so surprised. The EMT’s said if he had been standing just a foot to the left, I would have pushed him through the garage door, which had more give. But that’s not what happened.”

Someone coughed.

“And then,” Kiki said, “wouldn’t you know it, I’m charged with manslaughter.” She laughed but it didn’t sound quite right. Perhaps she should have chuckled thoughtfully. She’d need to work on that.

“Jesus,” a woman said.

Kiki looked expectantly around the room. Standup Mike gazed down at his coffee cup. No one was smiling. No one had laughed, not once. No one would even look at her. The overhead lights gave off an insect-like buzz. In the quiet that went on and on, Kiki felt her mind break free, drifting up to the ceiling, hovering there, looking down. It was as if she could see herself clearly for the first time. So this was what everyone saw—the jury, her counselor, her mother, her kids. She was an aberration. A monster.

“Okay. Well,” the woman chairing the meeting said. “Thank you, Kiki.”

The room felt airless. Kiki opened her mouth and closed it then stood and walked out without looking back.

“Done early, hon?” Marcy said. Kiki went to the back of the room and put on her damp apron. “Benny there is up next. The owners think he rolled in something dead. He stinks.”

She knew Benny. A fucking long-haired Chihuahua. The orange menace, his owners called him when they dropped him off. Kiki rolled up her sleeves and lifted a shaking Benny from his crate. His eyes bulged in terror like he knew all about her, like he knew she shouldn’t be allowed to touch another living creature, ever. When she tried to put him in the tub, he extended all four legs like an umbrella opening up. Kiki wrestled with him while Benny alternated between growling at her and licking her fingers. He wiped his smell onto her apron then tried to crawl out of the tub via her neck. She looped his head through the lead to hold him still and started spraying him down.

“But it was funny,” she hissed to Benny. He stopped struggling suddenly and listened, staring into her face. The EMTs had testified in court about how she had laughed when they got there. But he wasn’t dead then, not yet. He was still talking, still drunk. Hell, he was laughing too. The prosecuting attorney had called her a psychopath, but that simply wasn’t true.

Kiki bent close to Benny. “And he started it, for fuck’s sake.” 

Benny turned and sank his four sharp canines into the apple of her cheek. Kiki reeled back, nearly lifting Benny out of the tub by his teeth. She grabbed her cheek with one hand and when she pulled it away, she saw blood on her fingers. Without thinking she snatched up the lead around his neck and lifted him up off his feet into the air.

It was so quick. Benny didn’t make a sound, couldn’t make a sound. She watched him as he hung suspended in the air in front of her, twisting, feet paddling, water dripping, a drowned rat on a fishing line. His eyes popped wider and rolled back, his tongue slipped out from between his lips, and his body convulsed. Kiki heard someone screaming her name, over and over, louder and louder, and still she held the dog up in the air. Because, really, the dog looked ridiculous jerking around like that. So funny. 

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