Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  Jesus God, looking back I’m surprised I survived. But somehow I was saved, and I’m glad I was, because to this day, when I reach a rough spot in my life, I look back on that moment and I am saved again, by the vision of kids clinging to the tips of trees that had come alive in the wind. Kids laughing in the rain and soaring through the storm.

  Security Issues

  NEXT WEEK I get to learn how to kill people, and I can’t wait. Not that I’m itching to slaughter folks at random, just those who are evil and have it in their head to kill me or others whose welfare I might happen to care about in that instance—the instance of the dangerous uproar. I’m looking forward to acquiring certain techniques that can stop these people, pretty definitely, once it becomes evident that such an instance is at hand. Should it happen, I don’t want to be standing there slack-jawed, as useful as a plankton-eating ocean slug. No, I want to be able to kill people in the name of airline security.

  I’ve taken self-defense courses before, but that’s just what they were, courses. This is not a course, this is training. I’ll be in training to be a bad-ass, and I’m supposed to expect to be bruised during training, too. I don’t care, I grew up being pummeled by every member of my family except my little sister, who was still bigger than me but just didn’t have it in her to hurt people. So bruises are no big deal. I got hit by a car in Costa Rica once, which bruised me up really good, but still I didn’t plunk down wailing over it. I was embarrassed, is all, to have found myself all of a sudden rolling around on the hood of a stranger’s car.

  After that I walked back to my pensione and promptly got bit in the leg by a black dog, which looked to be part pit bull and part ancient troll roaming the earth under an evil curse. Its teeth were as long and pointy as cayenne peppers, and they left a bloody blossom of gnarled flesh on my upper thigh. That there is testimony to my fortitude, I say, because I continued with my visit even though I was all dog-bit and car-hit, and only missed one day of work after I returned to Atlanta not because of my injuries, but because of the misguided conviction that I’d acquired a tapeworm during my travels.

  So I like to think I’m tough as Teflon. For example, when I was eight, my sisters and I were accosted by bullies on our way home from the county fair, where I’d excelled at a carnival game by throwing baseballs at stacks of comical dolls molded from what must have been melted bowling balls, they were so weighted. Still, I knocked enough down to win a stuffed snake, the kind with glued-on eyes and a wire inside so it could bend. The bullies tried to take it from me that day, but instead I thwacked the boss bully upside her head with it and ran away while she gripped her own ears, stunned. Her two minions took off after me, but it was one of the few times in my life when I couldn’t be caught. It’s a great recollection, but I fear the next time I’m threatened I’ll have more at stake than a stuffed snake.

  Hence the training. I have it in my head the only element missing to keep me from feeling completely secure is the ability to kill a person with a Q-tip or whatever. If I were brawny I would feel secure all the time, as brawny people all seem to feel, and I wouldn’t need to train in order to uncover secrets to survival for the physically meek. I would just rip the assailant’s brain right out the back of his skull, or threaten to do so, as I’ve heard a brawny boyfriend of mine once threaten, and for him the mere threat is always effective enough. I am not him, though.

  “You can’t kill a person with a Q-tip,” I’ve been informed by various members of certain security forces within the past half year, not even if you swab the Q-tip with rattlesnake venom. But still there must be some other simple-yet-deadly methods of self-defense, some MacGyver moves I can use to murder actively murderous people. When I fly I’ve taken to wearing my hair in a twist secured by a fancy lacquered chopstick. It’s plastic (the chopstick) but it would probably hold up if I had to stab someone in the eye with it.

  “Girl, you’ve got issues,” Grant tells me, but he’s hardly one to talk. Recently he personally tracked down the thief who took his moped, and wasn’t satisfied until the police arrived to slam the guy down and handcuff him right there on the floor of the Ponce de Leon public library. Still Grant thinks I am too enthusiastic about my upcoming training; “Issues,” he repeats.

  He might be right, because I have not felt secure in a long while. Looking back, I realize even when I clouted that evil cow with my carnival prize it only facilitated an escape for me and not my sisters, who were left behind to be terrorized. I always felt bad about that, and today I figure there’s no point in protecting myself unless I can protect others. I can’t help it, I want everyone to be safe, and until that happens I guess I will always have issues about security.

  True Nature

  IF I HAD A penis like Matt’s I’d probably have it hanging out all the time, too. I’d probably wave it around like a concert conductor every chance I got, which pretty much sums up what Matt does. “Matt had his dick out again last night,” Grant says.

  “Really?” I say, perking up.

  “Yep, he was standing at the end of the bar, I glanced over and there it was.”

  Grant’s seen Matt’s dick seven hundred times, starting from way back before Grant began bartending at the Local, whereas I’ve only seen it less than half that much, so the sight still holds novelty for me.

  “How’s it lookin’?” I ask Grant.

  “Like it’s carved out of marble.”

  I like to think Matt’s dick-wag fervor started five years ago when he began hanging out with Grant—who is famous for corrupting people and calling it “the search for truth”—though the truth is Matt may well have been corrupted beforehand. After all, Matt had been robbing banks for a long while before any of us ever even met him.

  But Matt likes to point out that he wasn’t the guy who actually went into the banks with the fake bombs and whatnot. Rather, Matt just provided getaway transportation for the gang, got it? But that still makes him a bank robber according to the FBI, which I’d say is a pretty important distinction. They threw him in jail, but he was out again before I got around to visiting him. I felt bad about that until Grant told me Matt hadn’t wanted visitors. Matt has been out for a while now, back to wagging his dick on impulse. “Same ol’ Matt,” Grant says.

  “Let’s hope so,” I say.

  The truth is Matt wasn’t the same. For one, he worked out while he was in prison, almost every day from the looks of it, and his body was as buff and smooth as polished pine. He still looks like an angel and probably always will, but now sometimes he also looks like he wishes people wouldn’t fall for the act so easily.

  Well, it’s hard not to. That act is his second nature (as vastly opposed to his true nature). The first time I saw Matt he was holding a puppy. Yes, a puppy. He was sitting on the stoop outside the apartment of my friend, who lived down the hall from me. His hair was long and blond, pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes were the size of coffee saucers, blue like the Caribbean Sea. When I looked at him it was all I could do to keep from falling over and foaming at the mouth. The puppy really didn’t help, either.

  “Sarah,” I called my friend later, “did you know there’s a blond god sitting on your doorstep?”

  She did. Later he moved in with her, then after that he moved across the hall from her, and somewhere in between he met Grant and portrayed the crucified Jesus in Grant’s art installation at Mary’s in East Atlanta in 1998.

  Matt had been a bank robber for about two years by then, but even so, out of the gaggle of Grant’s friends, he was still probably the best qualified to play Jesus. If not for him, Grant might have had to use Lary, who has long blond hair as well, but Lary is a fermented, misanthropic old lunatic who can’t hide his true nature. Matt, on the other hand, was expert at it.

  For Grant’s opening, Lary had custom built a massive wood cross with a step shelf for Matt’s feet and big pegs to which Matt’s hands were tied. For five dollars, Grant would provide you with a Polaroid of yourself next to Matt under a sign that
read, “Hang with Jesus!” Matt wore pretty much nothing but a big thistle crown and large drops of fake blood. At first there was a whisper of a cloth covering Matt’s loins, but I hear that soon fell away and nobody bothered to re-drape it.

  That night, a bond formed between Grant and Matt that endures to this day, and sometimes I wonder who is the poorer influence on the other. Before Grant, Matt was pretty good at hiding his true nature, but before Matt, Grant was pretty certain nobody’s true nature was worth hiding.

  “Do you kiss men?” Grant says Matt drunkenly shouted at him across the bar one night. “Because I can’t do that, you know, kiss a man.”

  Grant and Matt have kissed each other roughly five million times, even more than Matt and I have kissed each other, but this is owing to our days as neighbors, and all that kissing just seemed so innocent. Then I moved away and Matt went to jail and emerged with a harder body, among other things.

  “Hang with Jesus,” Grant laughs, “because Jesus is hung.”

  If Grant had a bell at his bar, he’d ring it every time Matt unzips his pants—and the bell would constantly be ringing, and pretty soon patrons would be clutching their bleeding eardrums. So, like everyone, Grant simply allows Matt to drop his act on occasion, because Matt looks too much like an angel for his own good. He can act like one, too, but at least he’s not such a shit as to allow people to fall for that act without flashing them a clue, now and again, to his true nature.

  My Mess

  INEED PROFESSIONAL HELP. I mean serious help. My fag friends are of no use to me now, as they’re always conveniently invisible when actual elbow grease is in order. When Grant came by the morning after Milly’s big birthday party, he didn’t even bother knocking. He just peeked in the window and saw the Chernobyl inside, then scrambled back to his car like a cowardly crab, the big pussy.

  Lary had stopped by Milly’s party on his way out of town again. He handed her a purple stuffed mermaid and assessed the kiddie-party chaos in progress. There must have been sixty people there, and the floor was an absolute ocean of shredded wrapping tissue and half-masticated cookies mixed with fruit punch and Polynesian chicken bits. It didn’t help that I served mai tais, either. Not to the kids, of course, but there was a luau theme, dammit, and I wanted the adults to have fun, too.

  And they did. By the end of the night, the inflatable palm tree had sprung a leak, the kids were making forts out of my furniture and some of my so-called adult friends were in the front yard brandishing my tiki torches like angry villagers from a Frankenstein movie.

  But the worst part was the piñata. A toddler trying to bust a piñata with a stick is like a fisherman trying to kill a whale with a fondue fork—I mean, sure, it’s possible, but it takes forever! So in the end we just put the piñata on the floor and let the kids tear it apart with their teeth and hands like little pit bulls pouncing on a pork chop. Disembodied papier-mâché piñata pieces flew willy-nilly, along with candy and gum and other rainbow-colored crap to make the paste on my floor complete.

  Before leaving, Lary patted my back in an uncharacteristic gesture of sympathy. “You don’t have to feed my cat tomorrow, if that helps,” he said, figuring I’d be too busy wallowing under all this waste like a bovine trapped in a tar pit.

  He was right. It’s been five days and I haven’t even scraped the teriyaki sauce off the ceiling yet. I was born without that house-cleaning chromosome most people take for granted. If it weren’t for my friend Polly the reincarnated putzfrau, who stayed after the party until midnight washing dishes the old-fashioned way—with a sponge and water—as opposed to my way, which is one load at a time in an unreliable ten-year-old automatic from which the dishes always emerge coated in mystery grit, I would not have one single piece of tableware left in my entire house, because I seriously would have found it easier to throw all the dirty stuff away and start over.

  This is all pretty pathetic considering I used to actually live with a maid, which means I wasted a good chance to learn something. I was seventeen and had moved to New Orleans on a whim and ended up rooming with my hotel’s maid when I ran low on money. Her name was Shirley, and she kept her afro in a scarf during work hours, but at night she shook it loose like a daffodil. She’d lived in New Orleans for years but had never been to Bourbon Street, so I took her to Gunga Din’s one night, where the motley female impersonators entertained the audience in their ripped fishnets and gave detailed descriptions of their upcoming sex-change operations. We sat in the middle of it all and laughed.

  After that Shirley refused to charge me rent, which was a good thing since I’d just lost my job waiting tables at the Gazebo in the French Quarter. I don’t know what I would have done if not for Shirley. She was twenty-six and kept her head above water by cleaning toilets at a low-end hotel, and she wouldn’t have taken my money even if I had it. I was a slob back then, too, and Shirley would occasionally peek her head in my door, exclaiming, “What a great mess.”

  Finally the day came when it was time to leave for home and finish high school. My mother sent me a ticket, and Shirley dispatched her grudging boyfriend to drive me to the airport in his stolen car with the steering shaft ripped open. Before leaving, I stood with Shirley in front of the house she’d shared with me, hugged her goodbye and told her I’d write. “You ain’t gonna write,” she laughed, but I insisted I would. She looked at me seriously then, her hair glistening abalone in the sunlight. “You ain’t gonna write,” she repeated, “but that’s okay.”

  I didn’t write. I was seventeen and hadn’t yet learned what a waste it is to let good people fall from your life like petals from a fragile rose. I wish I’d written Shirley. I wish I could take her hand right now and lead her into my world, show her the great mess that is my fife at the moment, so we could sit in the middle of it all and laugh again.

  Confessions of a Recovering Slut

  THANK GOD FOR GAY MEN, otherwise the burden would fall fully on us women to gratify the insatiable male need for sweaty buffalo sex, and I personally don’t have the time anymore. I mean it’s not like I’m still in college, which was back before all the really good-looking guys my age figured out they were gay. I was immersed in my pastime of being a blazing four-star slut—or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what I was, because it’s all a fog and I’m basing this on the rumors I spread about myself. But still, if classmates saw me today they’d be damn disappointed. “What happened to you?” they’d ask, and in response I’d have to wave them away from the corner where I’d probably be crouching with dried cake batter in my hair or something. “Go away,” I’d groan. “I’m tired.”

  Then they’d go away but their question wouldn’t. What happened to me? How did my appetites get all turned around? I’d chalk it up to oncoming maturity, but Grant is older than me and his sex life runs at a constant hummingbird pace. I get exhausted just hearing him talk. And Lary, who’s older than both of us, has women situated all over the world, the latest being a Bulgarian blackjack dealer he occasionally hooks up with in the Bahamas. Her accent is really heavy, so he doesn’t always understand her, but he’s almost certain that soon after they met he heard her tell him, “Fuck me until my ears bleed,” which did much to endear his feelings for her.

  “How romantic,” I tell him over the phone. He’s in Vail for the holidays, humping who knows what all. “By the way,” I add, “your cat is dead.”

  If I continue at this tempo I figure it’s just a matter of time before I turn into one of those drunken old cupcakes who hurl themselves at bartenders while they’re working because bartenders are trapped back there like zoo specimens, only worse because they’re obligated to talk to you in order to get tips. So I better snap out of this, because my theory is that it all evens out in the end. Like you might think you have no sex drive now, but in fact it’s always there, building up day after day, and unless you keep your engine oiled you’re gonna end up hit by this big rocket of horniness when you’re sixty or something, and then you’ll have no choice
but to troll your daughter’s boyfriends like those lecherous old acid vats you see on daytime talk shows.

  I don’t want to be like that, a horny old hardened hunk of lard asking neighborhood high school boys to help me with hard-to-reach zippers and such. Yuk. But that rocket can’t help but accumulate if this keeps up, because it never fails that when my head hits the pillow at night I think to myself, “Damn, I forgot to have acrobatic sex with someone today. Better do it tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes and I waste it feeding my friends’ pets while they’re off having sex somewhere exotic. It’s not even like I want to hear about it when they come home all flushed and eager to brag. I just wave them away. “If you need me I’ll be in the corner with a bowl of cake batter,” I say. Really, what happened to me?

  It would be cool if I could talk to my mother about this, because until she died I thought she was the epitome of sexual needlessness. She was a Birkenstock-wearing businesswoman who slept in a separate room from my father for half a decade before divorcing him after twenty-five years of marriage, and she seemed completely happy just to have her life to herself for once; her trailer near the beach in southern California, her kids in college, her occasional Friday excursions to Tijuana with her coworkers. Practically manless, she seemed so content to me. Then years later I was rifling through her effects and found a collection of rough drafts for a personal ad she’d placed in the paper. “Do you like walking barefoot in the grass? Holding hands under a tree? Watching the sunset from a hillside?” they read. The appeals were so achingly sweet, and dripping with romance and longing I’d never known her to feel.

  So I guess she got hit by a different kind of rocket, and here I’d never even seen her go on a date, which makes me worry that no one responded to her ad. But I can’t bear to leave it at that. I have to hope that maybe someone did respond, and she kept it secret from us, and she got to wiggle her toes in a meadow while holding his hand after all. I have to hope that she found what she was looking for, even fleetingly, and that she didn’t spend a single second sitting around alone, clutching an unanswered personal ad, asking herself, “What happened to me?”