Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  Wherever we moved, my father found a bar exactly like this one. In Costa Mesa it was the Tin Lizzy; in Melbourne Beach, the Casino; in Nashua, Gino’s; in Torrance, the Albatross. In every instance he walked right in, broke the ice, picked a stool, and hardly left until it was time to start packing for a new city again. At every bar the bathrooms were an odyssey of graffiti slogans, and I could sit in them for hours reading the walls.

  That is except for the Tin Lizzy, where Kitty, the beehived bartender, had regularly policed the ladies room for graffiti to block out any profanities with a black Sharpie marker. My father liked Kitty fine, even though her nickname for him was “useless sack of crap.” I liked her fine, too, because she used to let me take the marker in the bathroom when she was too busy to censor the writings in there herself. I didn’t know good words from bad, so I’d emerge from the toilet occasionally to inquire.

  “Kitty. Is ‘twat’ a bad word?” I’d ask.

  “‘Twat,’” Kitty responded, taking time to exhale her lungful of cigarette smoke, “is a good word.”

  “How about ‘cunt’? Or ‘prick’? Or ‘shit’?”

  “Those are all perfectly good words,” Kitty responded. In the end I finally figured out there was only one word Kitty would take time to black out in the bathroom stalls, and that word was “nigger,” which explains why her ice didn’t exactly break the first time she met my father.

  Fucking Friends

  MY PROBLEM, I’M CONSTANTLY TOLD, is that I need to get laid. Which is funny, because I always thought I could trace the bane of my existence to sex. What has it ever led to except a big psycho pit of poisonous expectations? I have no idea how to behave, and I realize I never did. I can think of pathetically few examples in which it all went sort of seamlessly and I got to go on my way without ending up weighted with attachment.

  Lary and Grant, I swear, are no help whatsoever. All they ever do is point out my problem (or what they see as my problem anyway) without offering any viable solution. Grant has even offered to service me, which isn’t as crazy as you might think. He’s only been gay for 20 percent of his life, so it’d be nothing for him to cross back into hetero territory to help out a friend, or even just for old-time’s sake, not that we ever slept together in the old times.

  In fact, in the old times, when Grant was a heterosexual seminary student, he was so busy fucking other women he hardly had time to worry about being gay. The only problem was that, if the women weren’t already married, he’d end up marrying them himself, which, in case you haven’t noticed, sucks all the fun out of anonymous sex. So even Grant has a hard time having meaningless heterosexual sex. I think this is the sole reason he turned gay.

  As for me, it’s not like I can become a gay man for a day and get all my bestial buffalo-sex needs sated with one visit to the public toilet and then return to my family with nothing more than a mountain of HandiWipes in the backseat to betray me. No, I am totally trapped in my hetero-ness. Plus, I don’t even think I have bestial buffalo-sex needs.

  That right there is pressure, I tell you. For example, Grant must be some kind of super cock rocket when it comes to sex. Of course, this is by his own account, but he’s been telling these accounts for years now and I just put it all together.

  “Wait, that makes six guys in one day,” I interjected one afternoon at Java Vino. “Don’t you nap?”

  Java Vino is a new coffeehouse that Grant likes because, well, it’s new, and Grant has probably fucked everybody at all the old ones. Anyway, Grant’s been telling me these stories for years now, but it’s only recently that I’ve been listening to them with any intensity. In fact, lately his stories have become my basic reason for living. My favorite is the one about when he was a seminary student and he had a cluster fuck in a communal shower with a preacher and his wife. Just hearing that story amounts to the most sex I’ve had in—Christ, I’m embarrassed to tell you how long it’s been.

  Lary likes listening to Grant, too. He doesn’t even hang up on him anymore like he used to when he realized they were practically having phone sex. Now he puts all pretense aside and just pushes eagerly, “Yeah. Yeah, go on . . .”

  I myself don’t have any more stories. I told the one about the Danish backpacker on the island of Santorini, and the French Canadian on the ferryboat back to Italy, and whatever other meager, stupid-ass exploits from my college days that pale in comparison.

  Once a flight attendant introduced me to her fiancé, a pilot about whom she’d been blathering for the entire three days of our trip, and for two solid years after that I wondered why the hell this man was so rude to me, practically running away before his future wife even finished saying, “This is who I’ve been telling you about . . . ,” and then one day it just hit me like a complete comet from the archives of my repressed memories: oh, my God! I had bestial buffalo sex with that man on a layover in Frankfurt in 1998!

  I still like to laugh about that, how he remembered me and I did not remember him. It marks just about the only time I ever had meaningless sex that remained meaningless. I’d use the occasion to encourage myself if not for the fact that it really was forgettable in almost every sense.

  Then there was the time I fucked a friend. A dumb move, I admit. He loved me from afar and I toyed with him like he was a trained puppy. When I moved to Atlanta he wrote me from California, revealing his heart like an unhealed wound, all out in the open for the first time and worried what I might think. I never even wrote him back. To this day I believe my own heart is uglier because of that. To this day I am less inclined to reveal it.

  “You need to get laid,” Lary says again, and all I do is shake my head. That is so not even what I need. Either that or it is a fraction, a molecule, of what is missing in my life. But my friends, my fucking friends, only know how to offer solutions that would work for them. “I’ll fuck you,” Grant kindly offers again, which cheers me up a little, but not all the way.

  The Good Lie

  MY CHILD DOES NOT WANT to return to earth. We’ve been on Mars for about an hour now, a planet that looks a lot like a restaurant on Broadway, complete with costumed characters that intermittently visit our table to give my girl a three-eyed high five, and Milly is ecstatic.

  She’s at that age where she believes everything. “Mars looks like a cave,” she says. And it does. We’re in the windowless underbelly of the Paramount Building, and they’ve fashioned quite a cavelike little paradise down here. Everything is illuminated with a red glow, and everything looks good this way. The food, which is actually only passable theme-park fare, could be covered in E. coli and still look edible under this light. I could be a thousand-year-old sea tortoise and still look fuckable under this light. I wish the whole world was under this light.

  But it’s not, and there’s only so long you can sit on Mars before the crap the street vendors sell on Times Square starts calling your name. I coax Milly into leaving by telling her that back in Atlanta we have our very own alien who lives down the street, and she believes me. Good reason, Lary is the least human of anyone I know. So if this is a lie, it’s a good lie.

  Santa is also a good lie, I believe, so I’m feeding the Santa myth to my kid like it’s covered in chocolate and topped with a cherry. I don’t care what people think. Earlier I took Milly to the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, where she sat agog at the sight of Santa and his dancing North-Pole population. That’s right, I’m hoping she’ll glean that the world is a sweet place, with candy-cane lanes and snow flakes aflutter.

  On stage behind the Rockettes, there was a backdrop depicting the New York skyline, minus the twin towers, of course. To me it still looked a like a beautiful smile with its two front teeth knocked out, but by the time my girl grows up that gap will have been filled, if not by other buildings then by simple mass mental adjustment to what had transpired. The skyline will no longer be missing something, it will just be what it is, like the armless statue of Venus de Milo, which is so radiant in her flawed state we’d never think
to consider her unwhole.

  So I let Milly believe in Santa, which she does still, even after seeing a hundred of them dancing on stage in a “Santa Can Be All Places at All Times” kinda number. I’m so glad they performed that. I was wondering how I was gonna explain that part.

  Throughout, Milly was wide-eyed with trust. I’ll need to keep that mental Polaroid deep within me for the rest of my life, because soon enough the day will come when she’ll be a hard sell, not believing in anything, much less a word I say, even if I’m pointing to the ocean and telling her it’s wet. That’s just the sweet punishment of parenthood: to endure the diminishing level of your usefulness in your children’s eyes.

  It pains me to remember how young I was myself when skepticism befell me. When I was five, my family lived in a bungalow where we kept the Christmas lights up all year. They were the big-bulbed kind, too, and multicolored, the kind that cremate your corneas if you look at them long enough.

  We had a fake Christmas tree that was only about twice as complicated to construct as a Moroccan museum. We kids put that thing together every year, and the result was a crotchety-old-lady-with-osteoporosis kind of Christmas tree, but we packed on enough lights, tinsel, and canned snow to cover up the crooked spots.

  One Christmas Eve night my father very excitedly called my sisters and me outside to look at the sky. “Look up there,” he shouted. “It’s Santa Claus in the sky on his sleigh.”

  “Where? Where?” we shouted. “There! There!” he shouted back. And we kept peering into the sky where he pointed, through the reddish glow of the big-bulbed lights, peering so fiercely until suddenly my sister exclaimed wondrously, “I see him.”

  “I see him, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  And there we three stood, seeing Santa way high in the sky over our front yard, with nothing but my father’s word making it real. It was just two years later, at the age of seven, that I stopped believing his word. I don’t remember how exactly, I think the belief just dissipated from me like air from a slow leak. One day it was simply all gone, so that when my father pointed to the air on Christmas Eve I no longer saw anything, not even the reddish glow from the big bulbs.

  “Do you see him?” My father asked, his face close to mine, his eyes as wide as his smile, his arm straining to point at a spot on the empty horizon.

  “You see him, don’t you?” he implored, with the hint of fret-fulness on the edge of his voice. His wide eyes began rounding in a different way as he looked at me, his silent daughter.

  “I see him,” I said finally, with forced wonderment. “Yes, he’s right there,” I lied.

  With that my father’s face, fueled by my good lie, radiated with delight again, and he continued to point to the empty sky. That is how I remember him, reaching heavenward, where somewhere there was a Santa on his way to a sweet place, with candy-cane lanes and snowflakes aflutter.

  Getting Tagged

  LAST NIGHT LARY finally slept with a gay man. Before I go any further I’d like to say that, after all the time I wasted breaking into this man’s house looking for evidence he’s a big huge homo—and failing, I might add—you’d think it’d be harder for him to come right out with it. But no, he came right out with it.

  “I slept with Daniel last night,” he said, “or I tried to, anyway.”

  It was five in the morning at the Universal Studios Hilton, and I was downstairs in the lobby reading the last chapters of a crappy paperback, trying to deal with a bad case of jet brain. I swear, fly me anywhere west of Texas and I sleep worse than a cocktail waitress in a cocaine factory. That morning I was downstairs reading because my own hotel room was full of sleeping women—not gay, mind you, but then we can sleep with each other without getting tagged as such.

  “You wanna know the worst part about sleeping with gay men?” Lary complained. “It’s all that whispering,”

  Evidently Daniel and Grant had decided to get up in the middle of the night to try on all the clothes they bought at thrift stores the afternoon before. Grant tried on his “man skirt” again, which he thinks is very masculine, as well as his black-and-white polka-dotted faux-fur porkpie hat and his orange upholstered “man bag.”

  “That looks great on you!” “You have got to wear that!” Lary could hear those two whispering.

  Giant Michael was there, too, in the other bed. Earlier Grant had dictated the sleeping arrangements. “It’ll be boy-girl-boy-girl,” he insisted, and the hetero contingent didn’t argue. They know Grant’s motto this week: “Faith over fear, don’t choose the wrong f-word.”

  So, yes, one gay man was relegated to each bed. Grant immediately tagged Giant Michael’s bed for himself. Michael is 6 feet 7 inches after all, and tall men are known for packing a python in their pants, not that that’s a bad tag to live with.

  Anyway, they were all in L.A. to be in the audience on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, but you’d think they thought this was The Price Is Right or something, seeing as how they were set to storm the stage in case their name got called. Even Lary got so excited he actually entertained Grant’s suggestion he wear a hazard-cone-colored jumpsuit like the kind prisoners wear when they pick up trash on the roadside.

  “It’s perfect,” Grant shrieked when Lary tried it on, and I must say I agreed, but Lary decided against it, saying he didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as an escaped convict. That surprised me, because I’d have thought he would have loved that tag. I swear, you think you know people.

  I remember I tagged my brother-in-law, Eddie, for a loser the second I was sober enough to get a good look at him. That impression lasted for about eight years, roughly, even though he’d been cleaned up and productive for most of that time. He quit smoking, even, and had pretty much done just about everything else to wipe away the last remnants of dirt-clod to reveal the diamond underneath, but when I looked at him I still kept seeing the troubled person I’d tagged him as years ago, whereas my sister never saw that. She always saw the diamond inside.

  Before they settled in Dayton, when Eddie had asked her to move with him from her familiar San Diego to the middle of the Arizona desert to build a spiritual retreat, my sister hardly hesitated. He called it Angel Ranch, and he had dreams of people coming in droves to commune with nature and meditate. When I heard their plans I laughed so hard I thought I’d shoot champagne out my nose. “Jesus God, are they gonna fall on their asses or what?” I snorted.

  But damn if Eddie didn’t build that ranch, a series of rustic cabins surrounding a courtyard, with his bare hands. He dug a manmade pond, powered the entire compound with solar energy, and created a copper-accented sculpture garden on the property. I visited them there on occasion, and at sunset the statues sparkled against the barren desert ground from which they sprang, and if I were a spiritual person I might have meditated, but I was not.

  Though a few droves came to commune with nature after all, Eddie’s dream didn’t last. Those two lost everything, even the Indian blankets on the bunks in the cabins surrounding the courtyard. They had to leave it all behind and drive away with hardly more than what their car could carry, passing under the decorative archway Eddie had carved as a gateway to the property. Eddie didn’t look back, but if he did he would have seen the copper-accented sculpture garden shimmering in the distance, glowing like a diamond in a sea of dirt clods, and I think that’s when I finally started to take my tag off of him.

  But others remain. As of today, though, I will probably stop breaking into Lary’s house, and not just because he has finally given me a key, but because I’ve decided Lary simply is who he is and there’s no need to look further. “I can’t believe all I had to do to keep from getting tagged,” Lary said in the lobby that morning, “was sleep with a gay man.”

  A Road That Ended

  MEXICO, I BELIEVE, is a bad place to be when you are half dead, and Bill is not even half dead. “I’m all the way dead,” he croaks.

  He is not in Mexico either, not yet. But he is close. We both are. We�
�re in San Diego. I came here to visit Bill in the hospital, but since, according to Bill, they did what they could to kill him there, he checked his own lymphoma ass out before I got here, and after a bunch of panicked phone calls I found him in a hotel next to a freeway that leads to El Centro. When we used to live here with my mother, my little sister and I once took this freeway to drive to Mexicali, where we boarded a train to Mazatlan and partied like people who had their entire lives before them.

  Today Bill has his entire life before him, there just might not be much of it left is all. He looks about as bad as I expected he would, not any worse, which is good. He is not in good spirits, but he’ll pretend he is, which is also good, because that means he has resolve. As I’m sure you can tell, I am not new to this.

  I am not new to Mexico either. My mother checked into a Mexican cancer clinic as a last resort fourteen years ago, and to this day I can take you straight there. I’m proud of this because, believe me, that place is hard to navigate. You have to cross the border into Tijuana and follow the road signs to Rosarito Beach, but then you break left onto an obscure road that traverses a ravine, at the bottom of which are dozens of rusty mutilated cars with corpses probably decades old still trapped inside, then you take another left onto the second dirt road past the abandoned gateway to a once-ambitious but-never-built shopping mall, and right there, at the bottom of a cul-de-sac (if you can call it a cul-de-sac, because it’s really just a road that ended), is a big mirrored building where, for five hundred dollars a day, Haiti-trained doctors administer alternative cancer treatments not approved in the United States.