Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  “Look at her,” he kept saying. “Just look at her.” I followed his gaze, which rested on a tiny, ancient woman sleeping in a chair on the other side of a screen door, her dark skin withered like pressed autumn leaves, her body comfortably sunk into itself like a stack of warming dough. Her hands were folded in her lap like two tiny pet cats. We sat silently looking at the lovely little mummy for a few moments as the weak light from her shack illuminated her silhouette. “She is Jesus,” Grant gasped, and we all agreed. This is exactly how Grant Henry found Sister Louisa, sitting there sleeping on the side of the road.

  My Penis

  ICAN’T BELIEVE how picky men are about penises. You’d think they were women. And women, I swear, really aren’t that picky. As long as it functions we figure it’s a perfectly good penis, whether it’s the size of a totem pole or not, and if a girl tells you any different she’s pulling that fake-chaste, I’ve-only-been-with-one-other-man-and-that-was-against-my-will crap that we all master in order to make you feel great about your own pocket-packin’ status, which, I swear to God, is fine. We love it. Really. Whether it looks like it’s been carved out of marble or not. Which brings me to my real point: circumcision, and the lack thereof.

  You might wonder what business circumcision is of mine, since some people have argued that I have no penis of my own. But knocked up like I am, and freshly informed that the linebacker in my belly is, in fact, a boy, I say I’m gaining ground. On the sonogram last month—and we got a fuzzy view when the baby interrupted his break dance to bend over and moon us from behind—I saw it there plainly onscreen, kinda, in all it’s tiny, adorable glory: my penis.

  Until now I never knew I wanted one. But now that I have one I’m very protective of it, and it seems to me that the last thing any self-respecting penis-possessing person would want is to have someone come near their crotch with a scalpel, even if that person is wearing a surgical mask with a tank of anesthetic strapped to his back. I mean, please, stitches are involved, and a human-error factor, down there. I thought I would get some support on this stance from a few of my fellow tripods—I mean, they were born with their penises—but surprisingly I’ve been abandoned by my guy camp on this.

  I voiced my hesitation to my genetic counselor, putting it this way, “Can you give me a good, sound, medical reason to perform circumcision—which is surgery, right?—on my son?” To which she answered, simply, “No.” But they didn’t think a person sitting behind an actual desk in an actual office inside an actual hospital was qualified as an authority on the “snip” debate, so instead they turned to their own pathetic company to back themselves up.

  In classic gang-up mode, they first tried the archaic hygiene defense, and I don’t want to go into detail, but the word “cheese” was bandied about. But please, maybe back before we had showers and soap and loofahs, and people routinely washed off in pig troughs, and men wore boxers made out of tobacco leaves, maybe then the hygiene argument had some merit. So hygiene explains why the pruning practice got started, but not why we kept it up.

  I was especially surprised that Lary pounded the pro-snip line. Lary, who, even though he lives in an alleyway, still has a shower bigger than my kitchen, and has collected enough soap and oils and conditioner and scented enemas and stuff that his whole body could be covered by a big foreskin and he’d still be the cleanest, best-smelling man I know. And he’s not even gay.

  In all, their argument for circumcision amounts to the need for better washcloth access. This is a reason for surgery? God! Why not cut the lips off your face for better toothbrush access? Because, sure, it would work, but what’s wrong with leaving your lips where they are and just parting them when it’s time to scrub the hidden bits, if you know what I mean? So sorry, I don’t buy the Big Snip ritual just to save my son a nanosecond in the shower every day, which brought the Clip Club down to their last defense: conformity.

  “The other boys will make fun of him in the locker room,” said Giant Michael, who, I would like to point out, has shirked conformity his entire life and become a successful restaurant owner and all-around cool hep cat because of it. But Michael was tired of me, and tired of defending circumcision, and made the mistake of trying to end the discussion by pointing out I sure had a lot to say for someone with no penis. But he was wrong, and this time I had the sonogram printout to prove it.

  A Bad Sign

  EVEN BEFORE SHE got shot at, I told my neighbor Honnie that if a bullet ever came through my window I’d be out of this place faster than my feet could carry me, and even then I’d assumed the bullet would have been by accident, that someone would have shot at someone else and my window just got in the way.

  “I swear,” I said to Honnie, “I’d be gone. You’d see my legs spinning underneath me like a cartoon character.”

  I don’t remember what Honnie said next, but I wish I did, because in the end the bullet didn’t go through my window, it went through hers. And it was no accident. Someone stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, aimed a gun at her living room and pulled the trigger. Three times. The bullets ripped through the curtains and chipped the tile on one of the fireplaces inside the home Honnie shares with her husband, Todd, and her mother, Bren.

  “They didn’t make much noise when they came through,” Bren said sweetly of the bullets. “You’d think it would be louder than that.”

  If you want loud, you should have heard the girl who threatened Bren’s life earlier that day. The police didn’t think the incident merited the filing of a formal complaint, even though, when they arrived at the scene, the girl was still standing there screaming at Bren in front of her house. She was a little thing, the screaming girl, but God what a volcanic bitch she could be. According to her shrieks, Honnie’s house was going to be blown up or burned down or both. The girl didn’t even live in the crack house that started all this ruckus, the crack house in Capitol View that Honnie and her family were helping to close down. But the girl’s boyfriend lived there so she felt it was her mission to go door-to-door on a campaign to convince people Honnie and her family were part of the Klan.

  “Yeah, right,” says Honnie as Snoop Dogg’s “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” blares from the drug dealer’s house next door (. . . With a fat dick for your motherfuckin’ mouth!).

  “This is the first place a white supremacist would want to live,” she finishes wryly.

  Honnie and her family aren’t Klan members, they’re artists, and they bought a house eight blocks away from me for the same reason I bought mine in Capitol View not long ago, because this neighborhood is the last bastion of affordable homes so close to the city. You can buy a house here with a mortgage for less than what you’d pay for a facial package at a day spa. They got a good house, too, better than mine, even. It has four fireplaces, original molding, hardwood floors, and an in-law suite for Bren, who makes her own soap. I just think that says a lot about a person. She gives me homemade soap almost every time I come to visit, and it’s not because I smell.

  The house they bought was for sale back when I was looking for a house here, but I passed on it because there was a crack house across the street, a drug dealer next door, and it was separated by only one street from Metropolitan Parkway, a crime-ridden corridor that has lately also become known for child prostitution. So from the beginning, Honnie and Todd picked a risky street even by Capitol View standards, but still, the entire house cost less than what a law partner would spend on a luxury car. Bummer about those addicts and all, but hey, when was the last time you saw a wrap-around porch at that price?

  So Honnie and Todd bypassed the houses on the better streets because this house had high ceilings, those fabulous tiled fireplaces and, oh my God, that kitchen. You could host a seminar in that kitchen. My own kitchen counter is so small it couldn’t support a card game, but theirs is bigger than the width of my entire bathroom. So Honnie and Todd bought the place, jumped on it. After that, I guess the first bad sign would have been the dead dog.
r />   But Honnie did not take that as an omen. If the dead dog was a message from the drug dealers in the neighborhood, she surmised, then they would have thrown it on her doorstep and not just on her front yard. But looking back, you have to admit that having a dead dog tossed in your yard the day you move in is a bad sign. Then there was the crack house across the street.

  “You cannot imagine the hassle it is to have a crack house on your block,” Honnie tells me. But I think I can relate. I don’t have a crack house on my block, but eight houses away from mine is the intersection known as “Crack Corner,” where dealers congregate to make themselves available to addicts. They are constantly wandering into traffic, too, and I almost ran one down, which is how I got my nickname in the neighborhood. “Bleachy-haired honky bitch!” they’ve yelled at me since.

  So I think I can relate, but I’m wrong. For example, Honnie tells me she was driving to work one morning and looked over to see a whore giving blow jobs to three men standing in line along the side of the crack house. So Honnie is right, I can’t even imagine that. I didn’t even know it was possible to give head to three men at once. Would you have to be like a performing seal, tooting on horns or something? What?

  “Yeah, like that,” Honnie says dryly. “What a great way to start the day.” I didn’t know if she meant her having to look at it or the whore having to do it, but I figured either was bad so I didn’t press. I was there to sit vigil with her on her porch, so the dealer and drug addicts would know there was some neighborhood solidarity behind this kind couple and their mother. We actually had shifts. Mine was up when I saw Victoria walking up the path, her gait uneven and assisted by her cane. Victoria lives in the apartment complex on Metropolitan Parkway where, a few years ago, police found the bodies of a bridegroom and his best man on the day of their wedding ceremony. The two had come to partake in the strip joints along the Metropolitan Parkway corridor as part of a bachelor-party excursion and ended up dead. There are plenty of very bad people who live in that apartment complex, and plenty of good people, too.

  Victoria ambles up to Honnie’s porch and gives Honnie a hug. “Don’t you worry,” she tells us. “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt nobody while I’m here.”

  We Were Blind

  My LAYOVER HOTEL, it turns out, is only three blocks away from Sunset Boulevard, and the Whiskey-a-Go-Go is right there. The reason I’m bothered by this is that it took me three trips to figure it out.

  I mean, the Hollywood I remember, barely, used to be seedy and dangerous. There would be no way you could stay at a fancy hotel three blocks away from Sunset with signs in the windows that read, “Please be respectful of our neighbors by keeping noise to a minimum.” There would be no way you could be here three times and three blocks away from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go and not know it. You would have to be blind.

  Historically, or in my personal history anyway, the Whisky-a-Go-Go is beyond riotous, beyond big. It’s supposed to be surrounded by heroin addicts and other unwashed flotsam. There should not be a place to get a good cappuccino within walking distance. There should not be a swanky cafe with cloth-covered tables and a hostess podium on the sidewalk next door. But then again, I should not be here on business, either. Go figure.

  But back to the Whiskey, it should be sort of sinister, I swear. You should be scared when you stand in line there, hoping to get a glimpse of some screeching urchin with grommets embedded in his head while you hop around in the crowd like a crushed pogo in a puddle of what you’re hoping isn’t someone else’s piss.

  I was there exactly once, when I was sixteen and lived in a suburb of Los Angeles called Torrance that seemed to be an entire solar system away from Sunset Boulevard. It seriously seemed like we had to cross the continental divide to reach Hollywood, when in fact Torrance is just couple of freeway stops south, but to me it was the distance between my tepid existence and the mysterious frontier of all that is cool and bitchin’. To me it was galaxies away.

  I would not have gone at all if not for the practical blindness that befell my parents during their divorce. It was as if giant cracks formed in their awareness, cracks through which I willingly fell. My mother had moved out of our apartment and then booted my Dad’s ass out a few months later because she was tired of paying his rent. My sister and I stayed there alone, as my mother was loath to break her half-year lease on her place across town at the singles complex. So for that period between my father’s moving out and my mother’s neglecting to move back in, my little sister and I lived by ourselves with nothing but our own teenage brains to keep us in line. You can imagine the success of that situation.

  Enter my best friend Kathy, who drove me to Hollywood at midnight in a Pinto completely void of headlights. I mean there were literally none, and even the encasements that would have housed them were gone, with nothing left but some fray-tipped colored wires dangling as if the Pinto’s eyes had been plucked out in Oedipal fury. Kathy’s family was experiencing something she considered similar to my own situation. Her recently divorced mother had begun seriously dating a Coast Guard employee, and Kathy’s habit was to revolt so heinously in their presence that they were more grateful she was gone than worried where she’d be.

  Sunset Boulevard was appropriately packed with prostitutes and crazy people back then, each flinching reflexively as Kathy and I drew near in our lightless Pinto. I’m guessing they’d had few positive experiences that involved a car approaching with its headlights out. But we were not looking for trouble, we were looking for a parking space.

  At the Whiskey we danced until we physically damaged ourselves and those around us. To this day I don’t know if I got into a fight that night or if all that punching and hair pulling was just part of the normal punk reverie. At one point a girl had a hold of my hair like it was the handle to my head, but I didn’t take it personally, figuring it was my fault for wearing a ponytail to a punk-rock venue.

  We’d been unsuccessful in our search for a parking space, so Kathy had pulled onto the lawn of an apartment complex nearby and that’s where we’d left her car for the night. It could very well have been one of these residences right here across from my little boutique hotel, one of the places for whose benefit I am asked to keep quiet. Today this neighborhood is downright upscale. No wonder I didn’t recognize it.

  But for a second there last night, stopped at a light on the corner of Sunset and San Vincente, it came back to me. I caught a flicker of the fashionable crustiness this place used to encase. I saw the two of us, Kathy and I, lost in the cracks, slicing through the night in complete darkness on our way to a place galaxies away. You’d be surprised at the distance you can cover in a car with its eyes gouged out, and the things you can get away with when people can’t see you coming. That was us, careening through life like we had no idea we were blind.

  My Penis Is Missing

  YOU CAHHOT FATHOM the crap I’m about to get from everyone for the following confession, so here it is. It turns out, after all that cocky posturing on my part, all that bloviating about how I am officially a member of the human-tripod league due to the Y chromosome growing in my gut, all that waving around of a sonogram picture that was supposed to have been proof that the linebacker in my belly is, indeed, a boy—not to mention the goddam amnio results, which are error free—after all of that it turns out I don’t have a penis after all!

  Jesus God! I should have known. I mean, I was itching to braid hair, and that’s not like me at all. But I kept getting mental pictures of plastic barrettes and ribbons, and glittery little butterfly clips or whatever. I swear, this kid was headed for a hairdo so encrusted with cutesy little gadgets I could’ve used her head as a reflector to flag for help from the bottom of a well. So I was getting definite girl vibes from this baby all along. But a future mother’s instinct isn’t based in science like all those tests they put me through—tests in which bespectacled people poked at me like aliens inspecting an abducted bovine right before the farmer finds it dead in the field with its asshole missing
—those tests are scientific.

  So of course I believed them when they told me the results. But I should clarify myself here: the results were, in fact, accurate, but science doesn’t take into consideration the human fallacy factor, and in this case that factor consisted of a nurse who was pregnant herself, with a boy. Evidently, at the precise moment in which she was telling me the sex of my future child, her brain burped out “boy” instead of “girl,” thereby reducing these 100 percent sure-fire tests to a bunch of blathering snake-oil hokums that have all the accuracy of a blindfolded rooster pecking out winners on a racing form. Next time I might as well let my psychic friend Sherrie Cash rub bloody rabbit bladders on my belly, or whatever it is she does to determine the sex of the baby before it’s born.

  It’s not like I’m picky about the gender of my baby. I had all those tests performed because I wanted to make sure the baby wasn’t packing a basket of extra chromosomes or something, what with me being a hundred years old and my ovaries covered in cobwebs and all. Finding out the baby’s sex was supposed to be a side perk. It was three months before they discovered their mistake. Three months. Three months of me calling the kid “Maxwell” and fighting with my friends over my decision not to circumcise.

  And God! Was I cocky on the “clip” debate. Even though I was amazed at how hung up men could be on what other people’s penises should look like, what really pissed me off were women! Women who felt compelled to impose on me their disgust over the unpruned. “It’s gross,” they’d squeal, as if they’d ever be in a position to have sex with my son. You know, I still say that not one of these girls, regardless of all that preening, would pass up a bout of bestial fornication because of an intact foreskin. So drop the irritating chastity act, okay?