dollar girl

spencer dew
She's been standing in the corner all day, wearing a too-tight Don King iron-on t-shirt, her worldly belongings wadded tight in a plastic bag inside her fist, whispering "Welcome to Nashville" to anyone in earshot. To me she explains her theory of demons, how their system of kinship differs from ours, family structure in hell. She tells me there's far too much infighting for apocalypse to come anytime in the near future, then that she'd give me what she calls a "makeshift hand job" for twenty-five bucks.

We are at the bus station, maybe, or a waiting room somewhere, a free clinic, some kind of club, wherever these scenes take place, these conversations. I have been here longer than she has, leaning against a wall that may or may not be gently receding. My sweat comes in cold spasms, drenching, followed by shivers, as if my bones themselves are vibrating. My eyes have dried out all the way up my optic nerves, wicking back down my tongue, into my gut. When I try to speak, my pupils and scrotum ache, in unison.

She acts offended at first, of course, that I don't accept her offer. Then she's telling me how she consulted cards to determine the day to run away, that she carries a laminated guide to pressure points in her back pocket, that she can kill or cure with a touch, and would I buy her a tuna sandwich from the vending machine, a Grape Nehi?

These are both things the vending machine offers.

She tells me her daddy was a chicken hauler, her mother a Mormon till the puberty. There is a story about an apple orchard, but I don't pay attention, momentarily overcome with concern that some of my teeth might be missing. I take a painful survey with my tongue, finding all present and accounted for.

She tells me about her job at a strip club outside Memphis, working the afternoon shift, dealing out change. "They called me The Dollar Girl," she says, then begins to explain bill reading, a new divination technique, her own invention, the study of how a person folds and organizes their paper money. She tells me that this is a surer method than palms or auras, spine slope, fingernail clarity, or handwriting.

She's also experimenting with vocalization, reading the inflection people impose on a sample phrase. She has me say "sweet change of scene" three times, warns me to stay away from Geminis and Chinese food.

She shuts her eyes and says, "I might go back to school one day," though that may just be a quote from a song because after, in a lilting cadence, she says, "You look all guilty and forlorn," which has to be a lyric, and then, "For twenty bucks I'll ease you of your physical agony" which is either an allusion to a song or a purely extemporaneous composition, though the rhythm injects into my mind certain opening credit freeze-frames from a vague late 70s primetime action show, something about cops or gamblers, autopsies or rocket design.

In any case, I point out that my last coins have gone into the caramel nut log she's eating, that as soon as I can get the feeling back in my legs I should be moving on, in response to which she shrugs, puts her hand on my shoulder and in condolence tells me her theory of meta-divination, the pinnacle of the practice, "the eye of the pyramid, so to speak."

"Fortune telling by fortune telling," she says. A person's destine is read through their preferences of technique and their reactions to different options, their choices, their fears. Some people are I-Ching people. Some of those tend toward sunny prognostications, others toward blood and a stone-like indifference of fate. There are those who become addicted to energy work not because of external verification but just for that human touch, a need no horoscope can provide.

As a personal example, she strips it down to an either/or, asking me to choose which fortune I'd rather receive: "'An old debt will be repaid' or 'You will receive unexpected guests.'"

There are those, too, she warns me - as her bus or nurse or john shows up, out of the metaphoric machine, to drag her away into the purple smoke - those who always synthesize, who always crack two cookies, looking for something at once more intimate and more obscure.