Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

I SWEAR, Lary’s cat cannot die in my own damn house, especially after I made a big show of kidnapping her from him for her own sake. I had to shove her all hissing and wailing into the front seat of my car, because the kidnapping idea came to me spontaneously, after I finally got fed up with forgetting to feed her at his place.

  “You hear that?” I yelled at Lary, holding the cell phone up to Mona’s howling. “Your cat’s coming with me. She’s not spending another day all alone in that big damn mausoleum you call a house while you’re somewhere else.”

  At that time Lary was working in New York, probably clinging to a carabiner attached to the top of a stadium that very second, adjusting stuff or whatever it is he does. None of us really know what he does. All I know is that back in the nineties he used to work adjusting stuff locally at rock concerts and we got in free. He’d just walk us in through the back stage, waving at everyone along the way. Once Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil slapped him on the back in passing. “Hey, Otis,” he said.

  “Who’s Otis?” I asked.

  “I am,” said Lary.

  Okay, a lot of people, I suppose, let their brain go to a different place when they’re punching the clock, like once I asked my coworker why she was so smiley what with the plane lurching in turbulence like it was being batted around by a big kitten in the sky, and her answer was, “I’m somewhere else. I’m on a sailboat in the Caribbean.” So I see how people might mentally transport themselves for a bit when stuff gets a little unbearable, but to create a whole other identity? And Lary’s job is not even unbearable. Not to him, anyway. He gets to show up hung over, lug stuff, hang from a harness, and come within a molecule of electrocuting himself. That’s what he does at home for fun.

  So it’s not like he’s unhappy, which is the biggest reason I can think of for imagining yourself somewhere else. I remember my family driving across the country in a Ford Fairlane with no air conditioning or seat belts, and the radio didn’t hardly work, either, except to bleat out a few notes here and there, making Hank Williams sound like the voice of grownups in the Charlie Brown cartoons. We drove through the desert like that, down Route 66, with both my parents wearing homemade hats fashioned from cut-up Budweiser cans and blue yarn.

  At first I wanted to toss myself from the Fairlane’s perpetually rolled-down window onto the Santa Fe train tracks that ran alongside the highway, except I was blocked in on either side by my sisters. It was our practice to fight at every rest stop over who’d have to sit on the middle hump in the backseat and it seemed I lost every goddam time, because I recall sitting in that potential shredded-windshield-meat seat for decades until I finally figured out how to send my brain somewhere else.

  Where I sent it is still a surprise to me, because up until then I’d had only two obsessive thoughts in my head; the first one involved my conviction I was suffering symptoms of every disease I’d been taught about in seventh grade Life Sciences class (including, but not limited to, sclerosis of both the arteries and liver), and the second thought involved Satan and my certainty that he’d possessed my soul.

  It did not help that the year before I’d read The Exorcist, a book (with pictures from the film!) my mother had left lying around like a bottle of prescription drugs for me to fuck with. After that I knew Satan was inside me looking for an orifice to pour out of, and I just tried to make sure there were places I could discreetly duck into once I could feel him about to roil his ugly head. Above anything else, I was more terrified of having to puke and piss in public.

  Those were the only two notions I thought crowded my head, but once we got on the open road my brain didn’t take me there, it took me somewhere else entirely. For some reason I constantly found myself on a Ferris wheel pining for an Australian carnival worker who took my tickets at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. I must have ridden that Ferris wheel fifty times just so I could feel him latch my barrier strap and hear him tell me to have a good ride. He had brown hair to his shoulders, a chipped tooth, and eyes the color of caramel apples. After awhile he just let me stay on board, too, and it wasn’t until we heard my father shouting at me from Wump-a-Weasel that he halted the ride to let me off.

  So that is where my brain took me on this road trip, thank God, because otherwise I don’t think I could have survived the constant worry about barfing up a nest of snakes onto my parents in the front seat. Instead I was somewhere else, I was on a Ferris wheel, falling in love every five minutes. I was hearing my caramel-eyed carnival worker tell me softly, “Have a good ride.”

  Without Warning

  LARY’S CAT WAS TOLERABLE for exactly five weeks, which really faked me into thinking that deep down she was a normal animal and it, of course, was Lary and his influence that caused her to be the demon he’d always claimed she was. Five weeks, I tell you.

  “Jesus God!” I shrieked at Lary over the phone. “Your cat all of a sudden, without warning, just turned into a total liquid shit bomb! Not only that, she’s stalking my cats! Stalking them like a panther in the wild!”

  “I told you,” Lary responded smugly. He’d warned me when I’d first kidnapped Mona from his place, after I’d become tired of forgetting to feed her there during his long absences this summer, that Mona embodies a very special kind of evil. “It’s been dormant until now. All that shit is to signal you to the presence of Satan.”

  Most of my house has mangled hardwood floors, so normally this would hardly be a problem, since I could just hose the place off, but Lary’s cat had gone out of her way to pick out the sparsely carpeted parts to crap upon, among other places, and we are not talking the kitty Tootsie-Roll turdlettes you would normally expect. No, Lary’s cat took the past five weeks to internally brew this special nuclear feline diarrhea with a unique nostril-eating odor, and she took her little cat asshole and splattered my entire place with it like stucco.

  On top of that she is tormenting my other cats, Lucy (who is sixteen years old, toothless, infirm, and hardly poses a threat) and Tinkerbell, who is shy and trepidacious, probably because she experiences post trauma from her childhood, when I played a game with her I liked to call “Circus Geek.” I’d still be playing this with her today, only she’s grown now and her head doesn’t fit in my mouth anymore. So Tinkerbell has issues, but at least her behavior is dependable. Lary’s cat, now, is a different story. She is entirely capable of passing as a sane animal for large stretches of time, after which she’ll erupt without warning into a volcano of crap and madness.

  I consider this rare in an animal, whereas with humans this type of personality switch is common. I once met a French guy in Nice named, I swear, Pierre. We were on a train to Paris to watch the Eiffel Tower light up for some celebration, I forget which; all I know is that when we got there Pierre was an angel and I was under his wing and wanted to stay there. When it was time to leave him and return to the States, I cried the big kind of sobs reserved for young military wives at wartime.

  “We will see each other again,” he whispered to me with the sad accent of a deposed king. The moon was full and my heart was heavy with a longing that, I swear to God, I thought would rip me in half, and he was right. We saw each other again.

  Without warning he came to Atlanta soon afterward, and I learned the first of many valuable lessons regarding European visitors, and that is they come to stay not for a few days or even a week, but for as goddam long as they goddam can. After a few months I tried to break it to him gently that maybe he ought to get the hell out of my life for a little bit. We were at a restaurant in Buckhead, as I was hoping the public surroundings would stave any theatrics on his part, but I was wrong.

  Without warning he stood, clutched his chest, and began to wail like a sick sea elephant, spouting all kinds of gibberish between sobs. “My father hated me and my mother wanted to abort me!” He howled, clutching at his hair. Luckily, his accent was so thick I don’t think anyone really understood what he was saying, but still he was flailing around like an albatross on the end of a harpoon, and all I could think to do wa
s leave.

  But Pierre followed me, insisting all the way home that I was honor bound as his hostess to continue our relationship. “I am your guest,” he kept hollering. “Do you understand? Your guest.” But the thicker his histrionics the more steely my resolve. “I want you gone by tonight,” I said evenly.

  I walked into my home without looking to see if he followed, which he didn’t exactly. Instead, he veered into the bushes along the wall of the house, and there he wallowed in the rain and mud, howling and blubbering, tearing at his own clothes. “The more I love you the more you push me away!” he cried.

  I ended up calling the police to have him escorted away. I remember handing the officer Pierre’s small bag of belongings as Pierre sat in the backseat of the police car, calm now, looking into my eyes, searching for some sign of the woman I was in Paris, the woman who clung to him like stray strips of cellophane. He thought he could find her in there somewhere, behind the hard-eyed statue with arms akimbo that had taken her place. Pierre continued to stare, beseechingly, but that girl was not there. Without warning, she had gone.

  The Dead Guy

  SERIOUSLY, I THOUGHT my days of stumbling across bodies on the side of the road were over. Not that my life has changed all that much lately, as if now it’s at a point less agreeable for dead strangers to be dumped near me—because my life has never been agreeable to that—I just thought I’d seen my share, that’s all.

  Each time I was in my car, and the dead people were just there, on the side of the road, within cigarette-butt flicking distance. They themselves were not in cars, though I suspect one of them may have been hit by one, hence causing her present state of deadness. But in any case, all of these corpses were just alone in the open air—I mean, aside from one or two well-meaning citizens or MARTA officers waiting for the police to arrive—with no wrecked cars or bicycles nearby to explain their state, lying on narrow, crowded roads in Atlanta neighborhoods.

  In the instant I came along, none of the corpses were to be avoided easily, and the first things I noticed were their shoes. I don’t know why their shoes always strike me; maybe it’s the thought of the dead person having gotten up that morning to put them on like any other morning, not knowing they wouldn’t be the ones to remove them that night, not knowing this would be the day they were due to die alone on the side of the road.

  I think people who know they’re gonna die put their shoes on differently every day. My mother, for example, knew her days were numbered, and she made sure that every morning her feet were covered in the kind of socks she liked, with a short cuff that was tight around the ankle and didn’t have to be folded down.

  My father, on the other hand, put his shoes on the day he died just like it was any other day. The shoes were chunky-heeled, cream-colored loafers with buckles across the tops, I kid you not. He put them on and walked out the door to meet the day like he had a million more before him. I don’t know why, but for me, the bigger tragedy is caught up in the not knowing.

  “Milly, look at me,” I say sweetly to her in the backseat as we approach the dead man, his feet splayed at odds to the curb. He’s wearing complicated sneakers, the kind with shoelaces and Velcro. I adjust the rearview mirror to reflect my face in Milly’s direction. “Look at me, honey.” I repeat, because I don’t want her to be looking at the side of the road. “Look at me and tell me a story.”

  I love Milly’s stories. They have no beginning or end, they’re just a farraginous montage of lovely little sentences. Her wishing-well wishes have the same quality. At Fellini’s the other day, she’d taken the stack of pennies I gave her and recited one word each as she plunked them into the fountain; “Mommy.” Plunk. “Mandy.” Plunk. “Miss Yvette.” Plunk. “Madelaine.” Plunk.

  “Aren’t you gonna to make a wish?” I asked.

  “I’m wishing for my friends,” she said, and on she went, reciting the names of the people she loves. “Cameron.” Plunk. “Jacob.” Plunk. . . .

  I don’t even know what that means and it makes me want to lie down and cry with pride. So imagine her stories. One night, driving along, she excitedly commanded, “Look at the moon!” I couldn’t find it at first, but she kept directing me, “Over there! Over there!” Soon there it was, the glorious moon, parting the evening darkness like a tiny slit in a dim blanket pitched over the atmosphere.

  “Do you see it? Do you see the moon?” Milly asked, and yes, I saw the moon. What a sight, a lovely crescent-shaped rip that let the light in through the night sky. “Good,” Milly finished softly, “because I made it for you.”

  That, folks, is the day my daughter hung the moon.

  “Look at me, honey,” I tell Milly as we pass the dead man on the side of the road. “Tell me a story.”

  “Okay,” she says. I can see her face in the rearview mirror, and she’s looking at my reflection, thank God. “You feel that?” Milly asks, and yes, I feel something. It’s a happy tapping on the back of my seat.

  “What is that?” I ask in that hyperexcited way parents talk to their kids when they’re trying to distract them from something.

  “It’s my feet! My feet! My feet!” Milly’squeals, laughing. “My feet are singing!”

  Her feet have been singing ever since we found her a pair of gold plastic slippers at the thrift store months ago. She puts them on in the morning and they don’t come off until she’s asleep at night, when I creep in and take them off myself.

  “My feet are singing!” Milly continues to laugh. “My feet are singing!” Tap, tap, tappity tap tap on the back of my seat. When we’re past the dead man on the side of the road, Milly’s feet continue to sing, and I have to adjust the rearview mirror again, because now it’s my face I don’t want my daughter to see.

  Rough Spots

  DANIEL’S AUNT ERMA had an oil well right outside her house. The kind that was always pumping, “so she always had a lot of money.” He was telling me about her the other day, his memory having been stirred by the sale on pomegranates at the Buford Highway Farmers Market.

  “Is this the same aunt who had a life-sized replica of Venus de Milo in her living room that lit up?” I asked. I liked that aunt, she always wore wigs, and we are not talking just any wigs, we are talking the kind that look like a yellow cotton farm exploded on your head, with a ribbon in the middle.

  No, this was a different aunt all together. In fact, Aunt Erma was not even really an aunt, but his mother’s cousin. She was like an aunt, though, a benevolent old aunt who collected husbands like cards in a poker game and kept her diamonds in the freezer and didn’t bother to keep it secret, either. pulling them out at every chance and joking about her “ice box.” The diamonds might not have been all that valuable, anyway, as one of her husbands had mined most of them himself, right outside the house, and they were big and yellow and mounted garishly.

  And Daniel remembers the pomegranates. She had a pomegranate tree in her backyard, and Daniel and his brother Darell would always head straight for the ripened fruit fallen at the trunk, and that is where I like to envision them both; barefoot at the base of a tree, feasting on pomegranates with their Aunt Erma’s ugly oil well pumping overhead and unearthed diamonds buried beneath.

  It must be memories like this that pull you through. For example, Daniel works teaching art to inmates at a children’s mental hospital. He doesn’t talk about it much, except to say he is seriously waiting for the day he might find diamonds in his own yard. Or oil. Or something. I don’t know. Neither of us do. All I know is that when Daniel sees pomegranates on sale at the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market he is saved, for a moment or so, from a rough spot; from the painful longing of something outside his reach right now. He is transported from the faces of the kids he hopes he is helping but can’t say for certain he is, to that place under a tree in the Texas sun, laughing and eating pomegranates until the juice ran down his arms in a web of red streaks.

  I have a memory like that. It’s a glimpse back to my brief period as a pyromaniac when I l
ived in Melbourne Beach, Florida, while my mother worked at NASA on the last Apollo moon launch. At the time it seemed that every third block or so there’d be acres of untended land that wove through the neighborhoods, rife with pointy plants, sand spurs, and pine trees. My friends and I would burrow ourselves deep within these places, certain we were safe from interference from the outside world, and we were probably right. Not even homeless people wandered into these rough spots, or not for long, anyway.

  I was nine and smoking a half a pack a day. Not only that, but I was providing my friends with cigarettes as well, because my parents’ habits were so vociferous and they kept such a surplus supply of Marlboros that they never noticed a pack or two missing each morning.

  So at first we were foraging ourselves into the rough spots so we could smoke cigarettes undetected every day, but we were nine, so it was just a matter of time before we turned our attention from burning our lungs to burning the wild growth around us. We lit fires like tribal warriors but they never got out of hand, probably because it rains every five minutes in Florida.

  The rain, though, now that would get out of hand. I remember hanging out in one of these rough spots with my friends when all of a sudden the sky turned gray and began to boil, I tell you, and the wind was so stiff we had to hang onto the trunks of pine trees. High up in the air, above everything else, the tips of the trees were whipping around like kelp at the bottom of an active ocean bed.

  I wish I could say it was my idea to climb to those tips, but the truth is I don’t know who thought of it. It’s possible it could have been a collective stroke of genius, because here we were a bunch of chain-smoking nine-year-olds anyway, so it’s obvious life held no value for us, but whatever the case this is what happened. Soon we were each clinging to the tip of our own pine tree and sailing through the air like total trapeze artists, laughing so hard we could barely keep our grip.