Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  Because here’s the thing: I was leaving and she knew it. I’d had enough of Switzerland and rich people and goddam fondue and humorlessness in general, which is how I viewed the country overall. I’d been there a year and a half, since I graduated from college, living there with my brilliant mother as she designed worthless weapons for a pussy-ass country known for its neutrality, and I was bored. I wanted my own job, I wanted to make my own damn way, and every Thursday I’d scan the International Herald Tribune classifieds and find companies throughout Europe looking for people to fill positions I figured I could passably fake my way into pulling off.

  Unlike my mother, I did not have a contract keeping me in Zurich, and she could see me standing there at the ready, with one foot in her world and the other poised over the goddam banana peel that would make up the rest of my life, and if she wanted to she could have stolen that from me. She could have put her own foot down or gone ballistic or threatened all kinds of untold emotional tortures only mother’s can administer when their children threaten to forge away from them, or she could have simply told me the truth about how seriously sick she really was, about how little life she herself had left, and it would have been so easy for her to steal mine from me.

  But she didn’t. She let me go. I left her in Zurich alone to finish her contract while I flew back to the States, where I proceeded over the next decade to consistently fall on my ass until finally I ended up where I belong. It could have been different, believe me. Right now I could be sitting here with a sack of broken dreams, a bitter bag of fears, wearing a badge on a lanyard around my neck, a technical writer, maybe, for a company that makes cardboard boxes. That’s where I’d be if my mother had been a better thief.

  All My Stuff

  I STILL HAVE A PICTURE on my refrigerator of Grant and Daniel dressed as cowgirls. I think everyone should have a picture like this somewhere prominent in their house, of two total fairies trapped in their adolescence. They each have enough makeup on their faces to fill a bucket, and fake boobs so big they could float a houseboat.

  I made their costumes myself, complete with yards of thick gold upholstery fringe I found at a salvage store. I actually sewed lassos and horse-shaped appliqués on their back pockets, too. It was good homemaking-type practice, seeing as how I used this same picture to adorn the invitations I sent for the baby shower these two supposedly threw for me.

  I say “supposedly” because they hardly lifted a single bangle-weighted wrist to help me set up, and instead spent the whole pre-party prep time in Daniel’s bathroom drinking mimosas and drenching each other in cosmetics. When they emerged, they were both dressed as pregnant country-singing queens, ready for the party to start, while my authentically two-hundred-month pregnant ass was still busy preparing appetizer trays.

  “Can you two at least pretend like you’re putting this party on and help?” I asked, but they waved me away, or maybe they were just waving in general, mindful as they were of their wet nail polish. Grant would not even so much as rinse off a cluster of grapes for me. I swear, sometimes I can see the true benefit behind having real females for girlfriends.

  In the end I rolled up my sleeves, lumbered forth, and finished on my own. The result was a buffet and wine bar fit for a fleet of conquering Huns. It’s a good thing, too, because about five hundred people showed up, everyone laden with gaily wrapped baby-type presents. When I finished tearing into them all, there was enough ribbon and paper strewn about to fully stuff a plush toy the size of a Trojan horse.

  And you would not have believed the baby booty. That alone is reason to see the true benefit behind having your baby shower fronted by two bossy fags, because they both nagged the hell out of me to register a wish list at a sprogette shop, then they pestered everyone invited to the party to pay attention to it, which everyone did. Later I heard from the saleslady there that she had to add things to the list to accommodate requests. “You didn’t have receiving blankets on the list, and you’re gonna need those.”

  What the hell is a receiving blanket? I thought. In fact, I didn’t know what the hell more than half the stuff was I’d been told I’d need. I put it on the list, though, and sure enough I got it handed to me wrapped in pastel-colored paper on the day of my shower. It was like magic. It took two cars and Lary’s old truck bed (minus the portion used up by the big wad of barbed wired) to haul it all back to my place, where I sat among it all like Jabba the Hut, wondering what to do with it. It was all very intimidating. For example, what are nipple shields? I was told I’d need them, and here I had them, and I don’t know what to do with them.

  It was kind of like when I got my first ten-speed as a twelve-year-old. It was when my mother had been gainfully employed working with NASA on the last Apollo moon launch, so she had income then, as opposed to one Christmas a few years prior when she was between contracts and had to rely on charity to fill out the empty space under our tree. I guess to make up for that particular Christmas she went and bought me the biggest blow-ass ten-speed you ever saw, a top-of-the-line Schwinn with enough gears and googlydobs to run an efficient Swiss railway system.

  The trouble was I had no idea how to work it. I literally used to just walk it to school every day, because I did not know even the first move to make to get it out of second gear, and my mother, an actual rocket scientist, was no help.

  So I kept walking it to school, because, believe me, the bike garnered a hell of a lot of admiration from the other kids, particularly the boys, who would whistle at it like they were little construction workers and my bike was a big-chested blond. Normally they were like a swarm, these boys, all tormenting and daunting. It was all very intimidating. But the bike changed things. They’d ask to ride it, and I’d let them, because I figured if I’d insert the bike into their circle, everything would work. It was like adding a necessary mechanism to a complicated machine, and once all the parts were in place it ran flawlessly.

  But all this baby booty, it was worse than a complicated bike. Once I got it home it all lay strewn about like a disassembled appliance. Breast pumps and bottle sterilizers, bassinettes and cradle bumpers, how do you work this stuff?

  “Don’t worry,” my friend Jill told me. “The baby changes things. It’s like the baby is the battery that fits into all the stuff and makes it work.” Yes, that’s it, she promised me. I’ll have my daughter and, in a very big way—in wonderful ways I could not even imagine—she’ll fit into all my stuff and make it work.

  Natural Erosions

  MY COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED by so many viruses I finally had to quarantine it to the corner of my house, where it sits to this day, surrounded by flares so no one will go near it. It’s truly evil, that computer, but I’m afraid to throw it away because it has stuff in there I need, like downloads of Grant’s face superimposed on the body of a fat masturbating lady.

  I don’t know how to get that picture from my old computer to my new one, because I’ve converted to Macintosh, you know. Yes, I’ve got this new, sleek thing here that I can practically put in my pocket. Unlike my PC, it’s not polluted inside, its cogs and inner workings aren’t all crud covered, and when I turn it on it doesn’t sound like I’m trying to start up a rusty lawnmower.

  My only beef is the color. It’s not just white, but white white, and I’m uncomfortable around so much purity. Lary says I should take black markers and just soil the thing once and for all, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I have a hard enough time just witnessing the natural erosion of things.

  Take the car I bought when I was eighteen, the sleek Datsun 240Z I paid for with what was left of my share of my father’s, company-paid life insurance policy after I finished blowing half of it on cocaine for the gaggle of back-stabbing assholes that made up most of my friends back then. Jesus God, that car was gorgeous, as blue as the color of a prom queen’s eyes, with white racing stripes. I bought the car used, with ninety thousand miles on it, but to me it was as pure as Play-Doh fresh from the can. Within weeks I totaled it on th
e San Diego Freeway. The nice man I’d rear-ended gave me a ride home after they towed my wreckage away, as his huge Ford fuck-you mobile hardly sustained a scratch from the accident.

  “That’s right,” he said, pounding his dashboard, “this here is American made. Nothin’ better.”

  My father would have agreed with him, as when he died he’d had that job selling used cars. Every single one of them was American made. At his office a week after the funeral, when my father’s supervisor handed the checks to my sister and me, I noticed a poster taped over his desk that read, “Believe = Achieve.”

  Outside it was raining those big, fat, heavy raindrops that actually hurt when they hit your head. After getting into our second accident that day, we drove two hours home in that, not saying much to each other, but thinking a lot nonetheless.

  I was thinking of the time my father caught me in bed with Scott, that handsome heroin addict who would mark the first in a total toilet spin of awful men in my life. It was during the period when my younger sister and I were left to live on our own for a while, not that our parents didn’t check in on us occasionally.

  That’s how I was busted in bed with Scott. My father had broken the law by opening the unlocked sliding-glass door of his former home and letting himself inside. Scott and I were asleep in his former bed, but I’ve always been a light sleeper, and I bounded up just as my father walked into the room. Thank God I had on pajamas.

  “Dad,” I exclaimed, taking him by the arm and leading him back out to the living room, “what are you doing here?”

  “I came to check on you,” he said.

  I had it in my head that maybe my father didn’t get a good look at Scott, who still slept obliviously in the bedroom. Maybe, since Scott had long blond hair, I could get out of this by telling my Dad it was my friend Kathy who came to spend the night, and we both just fell asleep innocently while watching TV in his bedroom. Yeah, that’s it. He’ll believe that.

  “Of course I believe you,” he said softly, and I could hardly fathom this was the same man who beat the crap out of me four years earlier just because I accidentally accepted a Roe v. Wade pamphlet from an activist.

  I was relieved to have evaded a scene, but I still remember my father’s face; it was the face of a man witnessing the erosion of things all around him—his marriage, his health, his daughters purity—all of life’s natural erosions that you can’t do a damn thing about, but you tend to fight them anyway. Then the day comes when you catch your kid in bed with a boy, and that is the day you give up.

  “Don’t leave the sliding-glass door open anymore,” my father said before leaving. “It’s dangerous. You can get into all lands of trouble.” At that he closed the door quietly, and left his life behind.

  My Pile

  I’D BE THE BIGGEST KLEPTO of all time if not for the fact that I’m afraid of getting crapped on by the karma gods. This is especially painful to admit since I hate the whole concept of karma. Seriously. I believe you should do good things simply because you’re a good person, not because, ultimately, you have your own damn agenda in mind.

  Not that I’m all that good of a person, but still I can’t comfortably fit thievery into my life, otherwise I’d have a pile, I tell you. My own mother was a master thief. Consider the famous incident in which she stole a six-deck card shoe off the top of a blackjack table in Las Vegas. But truly what fun is a card shoe? Even if it comes with the chain still attached, at best it’s just something you can swing across the room and hit your sister in the head with. Other than that it has no use.

  It still irks me that my mother never stole useful things. No. She only stole stuff she thought people wouldn’t miss, like pool cues, ashtrays, hospital gowns, patio furniture, fireplace mantles, and so on. We had piles of this stuff, and I constantly lamented that my mother was not the land of klepto who came home with watches and earrings and other practical items.

  I found this out when I tried to place an order. I wasn’t even being all that demanding, I thought. It seemed simple enough to me, to walk into a toy store and steal a trampoline, especially since my mother had recently come home with a one hundred-pound potted tree she took from a local hotel lobby, but that day I learned there’s some kind of inner code among kleptos; they actually don’t consider themselves thieves.

  “I don’t steal” my mother gasped, angrily grinding her spent menthol into an ashtray printed with the tiger and little Negro logo of a Sambo’s coffee shop. “If you want a brand-new trampoline you have to pay for it your own goddam self.”

  Paying for it myself meant hours of door-to-door cupcake sales, during which I usually ate half my inventory. I also tried to sell caramel apples and blond brownies, but they weren’t as easy to push. There is just something about a cupcake being sold by a grade-schooler that sends housewives running for their wallets. If you tell them there’s a purpose to the sales, that’s even better.

  I had some great stories for why I was selling cupcakes, too, all culled from conversations I’d overheard coming from my parents’ bedroom, like the one about how I had to help pay for my brother’s education so he could get a college degree and do all the things my father never got to do. Or the one about how my sister lost her shoes at the park and our family was gonna have to live in the gutter if we had to keep buying her new pairs. But the one about needing money to put food on the table didn’t fare too well, not surprisingly, since cupcakes are actual food and there I was holding a whole tray. In this particular case, though, I found the truth worked wonders.

  “I’m selling cupcakes on account of my mom won’t steal me a trampoline,” I’d say, and I sold panloads. At ten cents apiece, though, I never did make enough to buy myself a major piece of playground equipment, so I didn’t get the trampoline. Instead I just amassed big pile of dimes, which I decided was better than a trampoline. I liked how a mess of dimes felt against my palms, all small, slippery, and flat. I took them out of their metal bank every day and played with them, letting them slip through my fingers, laughing like a mad little miser. “Mine, mine, all mine!” I’d cackle.

  Then the pile mysteriously started diminishing. At first it was just one or two dimes at a time—an amount someone wrongly thought I wouldn’t miss. Then one morning my pile was downright paltry! My father was home that morning because he just lost his job selling trailers again, and I’d overheard my mother being really upset because she personally decorated some of the trailers at the big trade show, and she was lamenting the loss of two carved mallard ducks and other accessories she’d paid for and wanted back. But when my father left a job, he didn’t go back, and those ducks were gone for good.

  That morning, when my father gave my sisters and me our lunch money, he doled it out in dimes. I didn’t say anything. Instead I just waited patiently, and eventually my pile of dimes began to grow again, as I knew it would. After that I took my pile to the swap meet every weekend until I found a carved duck. The lady wanted five dollars for it, and I thought about telling her one of my stories, but in the end opted on the truth and she let me have it for half my pile. The part she liked best, she said, was that I wanted to give it to my father to give to my mother. That and how I’d earned all those dimes my own goddam self.

  Picking Things Up

  IT’S SERIOUSLY DIFFICULT not to cry all the time lately, and not just because I’m the cesspool of hormones everyone said I would become during the final stretch—and I mean stretch—of this whole experiment in spawning I’ve been these past few months. For one thing, I cry because I wonder, Jesus God!, am I always going to be this waddling, puffy-faced planet with swollen feet who can’t even pick things up? Don’t get me wrong, I was never a good housekeeper. I take after my own mother, who was so oblivious to the roaches in our house that she didn’t notice we had a problem until they started attacking our heads while we were in bed.

  So I consider it a huge accomplishment over my upbringing that I specialize in picking things up. I’m not good at cleaning, per se, bec
ause I understand that cleaning entails the use of, like, sponges and special gloves and stuff. I seriously don’t get that. I can stare at my bathtub for an entire morning wondering why the hell it doesn’t clean itself since I splash water on it every day when I shower, but when I see a bath towel on the floor, I’m really good at picking it up and hanging it on the doorknob. See, that’s what I do, I pick things up. Now—huge, bloaty bag of bacon fat that I am—I can’t even do that. If I drop something I have to lack it all the way to Lary’s place so he can pick it up. Sometimes he is not even home, and when he gets home he has to yell, “Why the hell is there a spatula on my floor?” Then I have to cry.

  I cry all the time. And if I ever stop to wonder what the hell it is I’m crying about, I cry even harder because, oh, my God!, I’m gonna have a baby. You would be amazed at how pregnant a woman can get before that fact really sinks in. Here I am, knocked up now for eight and a half months, and the whole inevitability that all this will culminate in a squiggly little ball of bone and flesh with eyeballs and everything didn’t really hit me until I attended the perinatal classes at Crawford Long Hospital last weekend.

  It was there that they showed us those movies. Those grainy, gory, homegrown snuff films, with the difference being that, instead of someone ending up dead at the conclusion, someone ends up the opposite of that (“It’s alive! Alive!”), a twist that is almost as horrifying if you ask me. Inevitably there is a point in these films in which the mother becomes a growling, eye-rolling, foaming-at-the-mouth demon who can do little but thrash her head from side to side. At this point she puts her legs up and all of a sudden out pops this other head! It stays that way for awhile—I swear I think the obstetrician slows things down on purpose at this point so everyone can take in the “wonder” of it all—and the mother is lying there swinging her head around in silent agony while the other head is blinking its eyeballs. It was the Attack of the Two-Headed Creature!