Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  All of a sudden it occurred to me that, Jesus God!, this is what I have to go through to get to the other side, the side with the little knit booties and the baby jumper with “Born to Suck Tittie” embroidered across the front that a lesbian couple contributed to my baby shower. I have to become the two-headed creature! So, needless to say, I was still crying in my seat when the lights went up and the other future mother’s had left the room for a snack break.

  “Hey, you’re gonna do fine. Everything will be fine,” Daniel tried to console me.

  “That’s just not natural!” I sobbed into the cell phone.

  “C’mon,” he said, “you need to be stronger. You need to pick yourself up.” At that I stopped gibbering. I can do that, I thought. Picking things up is my specialty.

  Repent Immediately

  IDON’T FIND IT FUNNY that the delivery-room nurses decided to nickname my baby “Tomato Face.” I mean, aren’t most babies born with big red heads? And another thing, nobody told me there was so much seepage involved in new motherhood. I feel like a faulty Tupperware container. Actually Lary did try to warn me, but who can take him seriously? Especially when it comes to motherhood. He reminded me I shouldn’t bring my big-headed baby to his place because she would die—not that he would kill her himself, but that his place, a former abandoned candy factory, is about as safe for children as a bag of broken glass thrown at a spinning lawnmower blade, what with all the industrial tools Lary leaves strewn about. I don’t know what he uses that equipment for, but I think he might have sawed a car in half once. That’s probably what those pieces are under a tarp in the alleyway behind his warehouse. Anyway, with all those tools I don’t see why he can’t build my baby a protective iron bubble so I can hang out at his place like I used to. I don’t think that’s asking too much.

  Because otherwise I’m pretty much a prisoner here in my own home, a walking lactating lunch bucket for my newborn. What’s worse is that it looks like I’ll have to give up my God hobby as well. Back when Grant decided to become a fugitive from mediocrity and gave away everything he owned, I was happy to get his collection of crudely painted roadside religious signs. They’re propped up against the outside of my house right now, blaring “Get Right with God,” “Hell Hurts,” and “Repent Immediately!” The problem is people in my neighborhood think I mean it, and they’re mistaking me for some kind of missionary, and lately all the roadside flotsam who beg for money at intersections have been knocking at my door. “I am not a nun!” I have to shriek. “I am a recovering slut!”

  Sadder still is that the panhandlers are pretty much my only daytime company, captive in my home like I am, which is ironic because I didn’t buy this place to hang out in it. It’s only six minutes away from Poncey Highlands where I used to live, so I figured I’d always be over in my old neighborhood drinking lattes and tequila shooters and whatnot, and maybe I’d sleep in my house on those rare nights I didn’t stay out having wild sex with traveling Irish rugby players. In the meantime this place would quietly increase in value until I sold it for an assload of money and retired to a small island off the coast of Cancun like Grant did, only for real. There I would bake under the sun until my skin turned to beef jerky. It was a good plan.

  But things never go according to plan. In fact, I think if you’re really attached to controlling your future, you should plan for the opposite of what you want just to confuse the cosmic comedians whose sole job is to figure out what you think your future should hold so they can preclude it from ever happening. Because never, after a decade of making do with the faded memories of most of the members of my original family, did I think that I’d eventually grow a new one of my own. Never did I plan for this little sprogette, whose name is Milly, and whose head is still big but not red anymore.

  Pain in the Chest

  KNOCKERS ARE NEW TO ME. I bought my first bra when I was twenty-eight years old, and even then it was just an accessory. When I backpacked across the Greek islands six years earlier, I went topless as often as a toddler and was hardly more endowed. After returning to school that same year, I wore T-shirts with the sleeve holes ripped down to the waist, affording occasional side peeks at my tiny tits, and causing the head of the Bible club to complain.

  So I was never burdened with the desire for boobs. I once saw a girl on the patio at the Local who had fake breasts big enough to be seen with the naked eye from outer space, yet she wore a T-shirt with “STOP STARING AT THESE” written across her chest. If I were king, I would make her wear a sign that says, “I Paid Good Money to Become a Physical Freak, Ogle All You Want.” I think it would also be fitting for to cap her nipples with little rotating propellers that beep warnings like an approaching forklift, because a rack like hers is a hazard. I wonder how many of her ex-boyfriends are wearing eye patches.

  So, you know, I never understood the appeal of big boobs, and then I acquired them, and now it’s really a mystery to me. Three days after I spawned, I awoke in the hospital and found that two fleshy foreign objects had landed on my chest. They were so big that I couldn’t lay on my side because they’d bang together like boulders, which caused precisely enough pain to make my skeleton rip from my flesh and cling to the ceiling until an orderly came by with a broom and swatted it down. Occasionally, a nurse would stop in and latch my baby onto me like a little vampire, and then I’d think, “Oh, my God, I’m a damn dairy cow!”

  So I figured these breasts would just go away some day, overnight maybe, like the way they came. But to this day they are, literally, still hanging around. Not too long ago, I made the mistake of working an overnight trip figuring if they got engorged, I could just hang them over of the side of the hotel bed or something so they could drain. What a mistake that was. At optimum production cycle and no baby within reach to trip the release valve, my breasts exploded like loaded cigars. Or at least that’s what it felt like, because they grew big enough to be anchored by Boy Scouts in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. I thought I had some kind of flesh-eating breast cancer. On the plane home, I pilfered all the free sanitary napkins in the lavatory, shoved them into my bra and squeezed. I guess I was thinking that if I could just juice my boobs like oranges, all would be well.

  All was not well. My breasts were hard as hunks of Formica, and from the waist up I looked like a cheap stripper who had gotten her boob job done by some guy in a garage. All I could do was stumble off the plane and race back to Milly, who had been lovingly cared for in my absence. Maybe I’m imagining this part, because she’s only six months old after all, but I could swear you can tell by her face the kind of sight I was, limping toward her with snarly hair, fevered brow, broken buttons, and Kotex on my tits.

  The next day I decided it was time to properly start closing down this lactating lunch counter, and Milly took to the bottle for good. I had been her personal feedbag for months, so I thought I’d relish this moment. But instead, watching her eat without me, I felt a sudden pain in my chest. It was an ache, really, an ache to the beat of words spoken to me by a kindly old doorman at Waffle House a month earlier. He stood smiling over Milly’s carrier, her tiny hand grasping his wizened finger, and suddenly his eyes rounded knowingly. “One day you’ll blink,” he said, “and she’ll be grown.”

  No Turning Back

  LARY WON’T LET ME BORROW his Jesus Christ costume this year, and I don’t see why he’s so attached to it. It’s just a bed sheet, after all, with the words, “I’m Jesus Christ, Your Fucking Saviour,” scrawled across the back in black marker. “Goddammit, you walking stain on the butt end of the earth,” I shriek, because sometimes shrieking works with Lary, “Gimme it.”

  “Sorry,” he says, “why don’t you just make your own?”

  Of course I could make my own costume, but I get too complicated. I can’t just be a hobo or a serial killer or something simple. No. I have to be, like, an octopus with battery operated, individually animated tentacles with real suction cups and stuff.

  One year I was a sorceress, laden with a
cauldron, even, inside of which was an operating fog machine. My actual costume consisted of so much black lace, black chiffon, bejeweled brooches, and mystically glowing crystals that I looked like a walking gothic mansion. I was so exhausted after putting it all on that I paused to catch my breath and awakened four hours later, sitting upright on my couch with the illuminated skull atop my staff still blinking feebly.

  I can’t do that this year. I can’t. Already I have six pumpkins. Six. Yesterday I almost bought six more, but I had to stop myself because I was at one of those specialty markets that only offer organic, kosher, kinetic whatever-the-fuck farmed vegetables, and six pumpkins cost more than my entire car payment. So I put them all back, promising myself that, first chance, I’m stopping at one of those crap-ass grocery stores that sell pumpkins the size of Cinderella’s carriage, only all mutated. Those cost about a buck apiece because they’ve been injected with polypropylene and cultivated inside giant microwaves, probably.

  So I can’t possibly get started on a costume. It just might kill me. I need something simple. But since Lary won’t loan me his Jesus Christ costume I’ll have to battle my bent toward complicating things. Maybe I can just wear one of those stupid headbands with bloody eyeballs on springs, but I’m afraid the line has been crossed and it’s impossible to turn back.

  I’m reminded of one of my theology teachers in college—World Religion was the course—who told us on the first day of class to “leave now if you don’t want to complicate your life.” I didn’t know what the hell she meant. It’s just knowledge, I thought, but when none of us took her up on leaving right then, the professor shook her head and said, “There’ll be no turning back.”

  Until then I’d basically put as much thought into religion as my aborted Sunday school dabblings allowed me to have. I believed in heaven and hell. I believed Jesus looked like a honey-haired underwear model. I believed in the basic paper-doll parade of characters the Bible put forth.

  My mother said we were welcome to our own convictions as long as they weren’t made under duress, which explains why she’d yanked us out of Sunday school. Our preacher had me under major duress, having told me I’d go to hell for not tithing properly.

  “That’s just goddam ignorance,” my mother said.

  But ignorance is the natural state for budding college students, and I’d retained that arrested image of religion until the day when my professor said there was no turning back. I swear I think I was happy until then, happy in my ignorance and the simpleness of my life. But sometimes there is a difference between a happy life and a meaningful life.

  My professor, surprisingly, proceeded to teach us tolerance, which is an astonishingly painful lesson. I swear, it’s agony. The pain comes from revisiting all your past apathies through the eyes of those you injured. Like the time I helped humiliate a Hindu girl in fifth grade. Fifth grade. She was fragile and beautiful and raven-haired and for some reason she’d fainted in the bathroom near the playground at school.

  We thought she was faking it, so it was my idea to test her by plucking the jewel out of her nose. Only back then those things didn’t exactly pluck, they kinda screwed in, and we weren’t all that delicate. In short, we practically ripped her a new nostril, and she woke up screaming, and she kept screaming when she noticed her jewel missing. God, that girl could scream.

  No one knows what happened to the jewel, but after that the Indian girl never, ever spoke another word to us again. Not one, not even when we tried to get her to scream again, which was often. Unfortunately, nothing is more unbearable to an adolescent than a dignified quiet. I ache to go back there all the time in my mind, to the beautiful little screaming Hindu girl. I want to look into her injured eyes and implore, “Say something.” I want to apologize for making her tolerate my ignorance. I want it to be that simple, but nothing is simple anymore. Everything is complicated, and there is no turning back.

  Bill’s Heart

  BILL HAD A HEART ATTACK in Nicaragua, of all the inconsiderate places to almost croak. He’s been half dead for about a century now, and it would have been so simple for him to keel over in any number of accessible places, like Las Vegas, for chrissakes. He spent three weeks there recently, trying to hide from my sister Cheryl, who lives there and found him anyway. He avoided her, I’m thinking, because he gambled the money she gave him to start over after the bar he opened in Costa Rica sucked every cent out of his life. Bill likes to put all his chips on the table, so whether he wins or loses the results are big.

  Good thing he won in Vegas. In Costa Rica Bill hadn’t been so lucky. He’d been blathering about that place almost from the day my mother introduced him to me, about how he was going to open a bar on the beach there, with caramel-colored Ticas feeding him peyote pellets between tandem-action tongue baths or whatever. That was almost fifteen years ago, and he was living in his car, so I didn’t take him too seriously.

  But whaddo I know? It turns out by that time he had made and lost four fortunes, and years later he would amass his fifth, but first he became my mother’s best friend. When they’d met at that auction in Chula Vista, they were both bidding on a box of mostly broken ceramic beagles with bobbing heads, which I think is appropriate. Like I said, if there were ever two broken toys in the world—two total misfits searching for a haven in the storm of conformity—it was my mother and her friend Bill. At the time she had just lost her job designing defense missiles because government bombs had fallen out of fashion, and he was a paranoid, foul-mouthed, chain smoking, misanthropic, morally ambiguous old tarpit of an entrepreneur about to get rich again selling junk.

  Yes, junk. They became junk dealers, my mother and Bill, with a warehouse six times the size of my house by the time my mother fell ill. He was with me at her bedside when she died, and I just now realized for the first time that I’ve known Bill longer than my mother ever did, not that he’s been bearable all this time.

  But at least he made it to Costa Rica. In the mid-nineties he sold all his businesses, headed to the beach town of Quepos, and bought the biggest bar there. The bar turned out to be much nicer than I expected, with sixty or so festively painted tables on a point of turf overlooking the ocean. Earlier I’d gotten e-mails from other Atlanta residents who’d made it there before me, telling me they’d met my “stepfather” and heard the whole story about how I’d once won a bar fight in Ensenada by choking an assailant with her own necklace. I never corrected them on the stepfather issue, though for all I know Bill isn’t above having secretly married my mother. I mean, he certainly wasn’t above secretly using my social security number to open a bank account once.

  But like I said, Bill puts all his chips on the table, and in Costa Rica he lost everything. Then, after his casino caper that increased the money my sister gave him tenfold, he moved to Nicaragua and opened what amounts to be, I guess, a small hotel/brothel. He’s been raving about the idea since his experience in Costa Rica, where he noted that almost every hotel is also a whorehouse. From what I understand, Bill had quite a cash register humming at his new place until this heart attack hit him. Cheryl plans to go to him, and has sent me a card with directions to get there. “Take a taxi from the Managua airport to Granada,” it read, “and don’t wear any jewelry.”

  I’d already turned her down once, over the phone when she called to tell me Bill’s condition. “I can’t traipse off to Nica—goddam—RAGUA,” I protested. “Don’t they kidnap Americans there?”

  “Only important Americans,” she qualified. “Look, Holly, it’s Bill,” she implored.

  It’s Bill, that crusty bucket of phlegm. That big-eyed, big-mouthed, big-hearted old acid vat who held my mother’s hand as she died in my arms. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of crying if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but there he was that day, holding her hand and then me.

  It’s Bill. Bill, who has the personality of a honey-covered warthog but nonetheless taught me that it matters, you know, how you handle things, like the slipping away of pre
cious people you can’t keep clutched to you forever. Now he’s hurt and; God, I really hope it’s true about the Nicaraguan kidnappers, how they’re only interested in important people and not us, the lost and flailing, the little broken toys of the world whose only importance is to each other.

  The Drug Dealer Next Door

  IWAS ABSOLUTELY UNPREPARED for the house fire, which is sadly on par with my preparation for all things in general. For example, I still have a can of yams as big as a bongo drum left over from the impending holocaust the Y2K crossover was supposed to be, a reminder it was not me who had the foresight to stockpile food. No, Daniel is the one with the foresight. He brought the can of yams and hid it on the bottom shelf of my baker’s rack behind the recycle bin. Why he felt he had to hide the yams, I don’t know. Maybe he figured that, at the strike of midnight, marauding Y2K-unprepared people would storm my house and, seeing that we were unprepared as well, simply take their torches and move onto the next house, after which Daniel could pull out his can of yams and exclaim, “Ha! Fooled them!” and then we would feast until the world was right again. But having friends with the foresight to hide yams is pretty much the extent of my ability to prepare for the future.

  Honnie and Todd are having to prepare for the future as well, and they have put their plans for parenthood on hold, seeing as how they can’t fathom raising a baby in a home across the street from a crack house and next door to a violent drug dealer. It really, seriously, doesn’t help at all that the drug dealer next door has taken to setting their house on fire.

  “Great values,” Honnie says dryly. She is always very dry, whereas if I were her I wouldn’t be dry at all. I’d be bawling my eyes out. The fire was set in the basement and was extinguished by the fire department before it spread past the kitchen. The smoke damage alone set them back basically to the point they were at when they bought the place, before they’d spent months renovating the interior. The police are absolutely no help. In fact they are the opposite of help. This is Atlanta’s notorious Zone C, after all, made famous for corruption within the force. The officers are probably paid so much by the dealers not to do their job that they’re quite irked when people like Honnie and her family, and me, move here and expect a fundamental showing of effort. The reason, I figure, is because it interferes with their bribe taking and prostitute killing.