Born a Pickle | by Page Getz
Before Disco Kennedy took over, Jiminy Christmas was a scrappy country band from the Ozarks that made no apologies for their bad habits and mullets. They were fronted by a wirey thing called Sirus Waylon, whose guitar was always missing a string, but he had the profane charisma of a drunken Jesus.
“Skank-
Disco always got the cowboy she wanted. She had slept with most of the boys varsity
basketball team and all of the girls varsity team, according to the bathroom stalls
of Mollasses High. Disco had a glitter fixation. She actually prefferred glitter
to gold and wore it from the neck down, on her lips and around her revolution-
Disco and her bestfriend Harlem Solvang, both seventeen, stood behind the makeshift plywood stage of the Blue Felony, spitting on their wrists, trying to rub off the giant X's the bouncer had written in permanent marker on their hands to keep them from drinking. Disco stared at Sirus as she licked the back of her hand. The ink only faded slightly, but the gesture got Sirus to cross the bar to meet her, as calculated.
“Buy me a crown,” she said, chewing on a straw.
«How old are you?»
«Legal in Thailand,» Disco said.
That was legal enough for Sirus and several rounds later, they rolled around naked on the pool table in his mother's basement, Disco talking dirty like he had never heard anyone talk dirty, until he was convinced that there could be no better woman. They went home that morning with carpet burn, cotton mouth and God's cruelest hangovers, but they both knew this was what they had been looking for. They seemed to have everything in common. They both smoked Marlboro Reds, preferred whisky to beer, and they both grew up on the side of town where there were no fathers.
They got matching tattoos of handcuffs on their second date and Sirus bought back his mother's wedding ring from Lerky's Pawn shop so he could propose on Elvis' birthday for good luck. When he slid the ring down the bar to her, after a gig, he didn't ask and she didn't answer. She just slipped the ring on her finger, held up her beer and said, «I love you, baby. Let's get fucking wasted.» And they did. She wrote a song about it called, Me and Sirus getting hitched and making out with a waitress on Elvis' birthday.
«You wanna hear a secret?» Disco asked, as they shared a cigarette, laying naked on the rusted trampoline in his mother's backyard later that night, in the fading scent of sex, bug spray and patchouli oil.
«I don't know. Maybe I don't. I heard about you. Everybody heard about it, Disco. This ain't California. People talk.»
»It's a different kind of secret.»
«All right then.»
«I'm fixin' to be in the circus,» she said, taking a drag.
« The circus? What, like an acrobat that juggles fire in your underwear?» he said, laughing through the smoke.
«Yeah, exactly like that. I practice every day and I've been doing carnie tours every summer since I was seven.»
«You're a carnie?»
«That's just until I get into the Circus of the Zodiac. I'm saving up for an audition in Las Vegas next summer.»
«Can't you just be a stripper like normal girls?»
« This is my fucking dream, Sirus. If you wanted a real wife you shoulda married a librarian.»
«Can you do some of them acr-
«Sirus Gettysburg Waylon, I'm telling you straight up 'fore we go working our mothers up in some church— I'm fixin' to be a circus star and if you can't take it, you can have your momma's pawn shop ring back 'cause there are plenty of cowboys looking for wives that can swallow fire. Nothin's fixin' to hold me back. You got that?»
«All right then,» Sirus said tipping his beer back for a long swig. «I guess I married a carnie.» And they rolled around naked on the trampoline until the sun caught up with them and the neighbors started talking. She wrote a song about it called A circus star, a cowboy and a broken condom on a trampoline.
Disco was dead serious about the circus. It wasn't just that she liked the idea of
wearing all of those sequins, candy-
When Disco was fifteen and didn't make the Mo High cheerleading squad on account of her bad manners and worse reputation, she got the Cheer Captain drunk and seduced her, posted the footage on Youtube and then ran away to Nashville thinking she might join the circus or get married if somebody asked. But nobody asked and she sold everything but her boots to keep from going home.
“I’ll sell my ass off my body before I sell them boots,” she told Harlem when she
called collect from a truck stop on the other side of the Ozarks. She made it to
Goodluck, Mississippi before she ran out of money, but Harlem didn't have any money
to wire her, so Disco took a job stripping at the The Petting Zoo Gentleman's Club
and a week later she had more than enough money to turn around and get home in time
for carnie season with a new wardrobe, a blue guitar, a new pair of boots and a song
writing habit. In Mississippi she picked up some valuable moves and more valuable
life skills from the feral girls of the brass pole. She wrote seven songs about
it that first night, starting with How I kept my boots in Goodluck, Mississippi and
ending with Why I went home with Dixie, the cross-
When Sirus found out she had been a stripper for a week, he was thrilled for an hour and then couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. «There are a lot of virginities you lose,» he told her the next day, as they hung off the barstools of the Blue Felony after their fifth shot of tequilla. «You know what they say,» Sirus said. «Once you're a pickle you can never go back to being a cucumber.»
Disco glanced over vacantly and Sirus could tell she was irritated by the effort. With only half her voice invested she said, «I never was a cucumber. I was born a pickle. If you wanted a cucumber, you shoulda married a librarian.»
Fate or Jesus stepped in one night when Sirus got home from a construction job early and he heard Disco singing Whose bed have your boots been under in the shower. When Sirus asked her to sing for the band, Disco wrote 117 songs and dropped out of high school. Though her mother was heartbroken, she told everyone they ever met about how Disco Kennedy was famous because she was on the radio twice. KFVR AM played, Sucker, a five verse song about video games and later that summer they played a ballad she wrote about her dog Lula who was hit by a station wagon on Delaware Street. It was called, The summer Lula bit it on Delaware Street.
Harlem got her a job at the May Day Diner, her dad's truckstop just outside of Mollasses, and Sirus and Disco rented a little white bungalow and named it The Whirlitzer House. In Mollasses everyone named their houses. It's just what they did. As soon as they had a house, somehow they had four stray dogs squatting in their back yard, which also just happens when you live on the edge of the south.
Sirus and Disco were married on a Monday, the cheapest day to get married. Since they couldn't afford a reception or a honeymoon, they were both back at work the next day, with only hangovers to show for it, which wasn't particularly unusual for either of them. Disco wrote a song about it called Why I'll never get married on a Monday again.
Disco hated the color white and from the day they moved in she felt personally oppressed
by the color of the house. To Disco, it was unsettling how close the color was to
an off-
«I'll paint it for you,» Sirus promised. But he never did.
«Paint it blue,» she told him one day as they were unloading groceries in the kitchen.
«What kinda blue?»
«I'll tell you exactly what kinda blue,» she said and she rummaged through a box of Lucky Charms cereal until she found a blue diamond marshmallow. «That blue.»
«You got it.»
The house stayed white and they started to hate each other by the second month of marriage. By summer they fought fiercely and without bounds, each accusing the other of holding them back. Sirus stayed up late drinking with the band after practice and Disco got up early to practice for her Circus of the Zodiac audition. This was the first year she was old enough to go. But since Disco joined the band, they were actually gathering a following and had been invited to perform their first big gig at the county’s annual America Festival. The rumor was that agents from Silver Dollar City would be there looking to book talent for the next year.
“It’s our big break,” Beaver, the drummer, said. “Parker McCoy told me. He said his cousin is some big deal from Nashville and they been hearing about a band called Jiminy Christmas with a new singer’s got the voice of sin— that’s what he said.” Sirus was a little jealous until Disco realized the America Festival landed on the same day as her audition for the circus and she refused to change her plans.
The week of the audition, they fought for days, slinging irreparable truths at each other with the desperate velocity of marriage. Disco screamed at Sirus over the kitchen table as the sweet potato casserole got cold.
«This is a prison! I told you I can't live in a white house!»
«You're a bad wife. You can't even make fried pickles right.»
«Who fries fucking pickles?»
«My momma and the entire state of Texas.»
«Texas is a joke.»
«I've told you before, don't you talk about Texas.»
«It's just a fucking klan rally full of drunks and fried pickles,» Disco's screaming hushed to the sober whisper of a verdict. «They don't even believe in global warming in Texas!»
«So what, now you believe in global warming?»
«You're a bad person and a bad husband.»
«Musicians don't make good husbands, you know that.»
“You’re not a musician, you’re just a drunk with a guitar.”
“Well you’re just a stripper who can’t even fry a pickle.”
“Fuck you, Sirus, if you wanted a cook you shoulda married a librarian,” Disco screamed and she packed up her blue guitar and her favorite cowboy boots to hitchike to Vegas. She made it as far as her mother's house three blocks away. Her mother told her to go home to her husband, where she belonged.
«But what if I’m supposed to be a circus star and I just end waiting tables at a truck stop for the rest of my life?»
“The world don’t need another acrobat, Disco.”
“Well, the world sure don’t need another waitress.”
“Least it’s honest,” her mother said, lighting up a Virginia Slim. “There ain't
nothing you need in Las Vegas, Nevada that you can't find right here in Molasses.
Open your eyes.”
“My eyes are open,” Disco said, stealing a cigarette and pulling
her mother’s arm closer so she could use her cherry to light up.
Her mother knew all about the bondage of dreams. She too had married a cowboy. «Don’t worry yourself, now. The Lord knows your name. When Jesus is good and ready he’ll show up at your front door looking for you.»
«You really believe that?»
«I know it,» her mother said. «You just make sure you get right with the Man and everything'll be alright.»
But her mother could tell she was sick for something, so she gave her a pile of money and dropped her off at the bus station. «I'm never coming back, momma.»
«I know it,» her mother said. «You take your vitamins and don't go catching your hair on fire.»
Disco arrived in Vegas at dusk, so she sat on a bench outside the station watching
the lights get brighter as the sun sunk under the horizon until she felt she had
slipped into a comic strip. It was a whole city of candy-
The next morning she showed up at the Circus Circus Casino for the audition six hours early and practiced in the valet parking lot, juggling fire and doing handsprings around the valets, until she had her routine all worked out.
Inside, Disco took her number and as she waited in the hall, there were a thousand girls in leapard skin and sequins stretching, flipping, twirling, juggling and walking on their hands. She watched every one of them, measuring their weaknesses and knew she was a better acrobat than any of them.
When a woman with a voice like tinsel called her number it echoed through her, but she couldn't move. There was nothing to stop her. There was no redneck husband, no more age restrictions, no poverty. She didn't even feel guilty for leaving. But she couldn't move. They called her number five times, each time with a pause that took her breath away, but she still couldn't move. Before they called the next number she rushed out of the casino and down Vegas Boulevard South. The sun seemed to shoot off of the garish metallic gauntlet of lights like knives in her eyes as she ran down the strip.
She found a gentlemen's club called The Foxhole, stripped a couple of hours, until she had enough money for a pack of cigarettes, a bus ticket and a new pair of boots.
The bus station was nearly abandoned when she arrived. A homeless man was sleeping on the bench outside, so she sat down on her suitcase and lit a cigarette. As she waited a bus pulled in with a fresh mob of tourists, showgirls and gamblers. She watched them scatter, their voices crisscrossing in an electric rhapsody.
And then she went home.
When Disco finally arrived back at the Whirlitzer, it was late even for a Saturday night. Even in the dark, she could tell in the dusty streetlamp haze that almost half of that old white house had been painted the most beautiful wrong shade of blueberry jellyfish blue she had ever seen. On the other half of the house were blue scribbles and streaks and someone had painted the words ROCK ME AMADEUS! across the side. All the lights were out inside, but the door was open and there were trails of blue footprints across the porch. The dogs scrambled around her, in disheveled rapture, like there had been no world before she was there.The band was passed out and the TV was left on psychic infomercials, casting warm pink shadows on the room.
Disco hesitated at the bedroom door, afraid first that Sirus wouldn't be there and then afraid he wouldn't be alone. When she cracked the door the room smelled lonely and she was relieved. She slipped into bed and Sirus opened his eyes, half drunk, half asleep.
«What happened to the house?» she asked.
«Your momma came by and took me and the guys to church this morning— get right with the Man. So I got right and bought some blue paint to s'prise you. Woody and Beaver and Indie was fixin' to help me paint it, but then we got to drinking.»
«How'd you know I was coming back?»
«Your momma said you'd be back.»
«Did she make you get saved?»
«Yup.»
«I'm sorry.»
«It wasn't so bad. They had a buffet. The Frito pie was good.»
«You gonna finish painting the house?»
«It's the wrong blue.»
«Yeah, but it's a good blue.»
And she wrote a song about it the next day called Why I gave up the circus to live in the wrong blue house.
