Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  That place is full of people full of hope. If they don’t have that they might as well save their money and die with their pants around their ankles like Elvis. All except Bill, though, who is hopeless and always has been. Hope is not what keeps him alive. His crusty cantankerousness keeps him alive. His complaining about life keeps him alive.

  “I’m all the way dead,” he complains again, hugging me but barely, he is so weak. He’s lying flat on his back, fully clothed in a freshly made bed. From what I hear he actually paid in advance for this room, whereas he paid the hospital for his thirty-day stay with a check, most likely from some phantom bank in Nicaragua, where he’s been living as a fugitive from mediocrity for the last few years.

  “You crusty old bucket of barnacles, you’ve been threatening to die for damn decades. I ain’t fallin’ for it this time,” I tell him, and I think I mean it. Bill probably is not done yet, even though he is on his way to the clinic in Mexico on the road that ended. That place finished my mother, but that’s only because it was her last resort. Bill is far from his last resort. He can barely sit up, but his eyes are still clear and blue, even larger now because the rest of him has shrunk. He has no hope, mind you, but he has plans.

  “In the hospital I bled to death a couple of times,” he’s telling me in normal tones, as if he were talking about a toilet overflow at the pensione he owns with my sister in Granada, “then I had a massive heart attack, which sucked. Those are pretty painful, you know. . . . ”

  The problem, he continues, is not even the lymphoma. It’s his heart, which evidently is too weak to sustain a full blast of chemotherapy. So he is on his way to the Tijuana clinic to strengthen it so he can come back and live through conventional medicine. I suppose I’ll go with him, even though nothing scares me more than getting stuck in Mexico with a dead relative, and Bill is not really my relative, even though he’s family. He was my mother’s best friend when her life was leaving her like air from an old beach ball. He found that mirrored clinic at the end of the Mexican road, and he drove my mother’s used VW van down there with me next to him and my mother lying flat on her back in the bed of the van, too weak to sit up. Bill pointed out the landmarks as he went.

  “You’re gonna need to know this,” he said. Mexico is famous for bad roads and bad road signage. I probably still have college friends stuck down there who, over a decade later, have not found their way back. “At the orange trailer you take a left, got that?” Bill continued. “Look for the gravel driveway with the big painted plaster Virgin Mary at the end. . . . ”

  Thus I memorized the path to the place on the road that ended. Bill was right. I was gonna need to know this.

  It Has Taken Its Toll

  HONNIE AND TODD SOLD THEIR HOUSE. Or I should say Grant sold their house. It took a showman like Grant to move that property once all the real-estate agents in the neighborhood put the bad juju on it. It’s funny that the damn crack house across the street sold in a week, but it took months for Honnie and Todd’s house to sell, even though it was all painted and polished with potted plants on the porch and all the smoke damage in the basement relatively repaired.

  The drug dealer next door, he is gone, too. He bashed all their windows in again, every single one, all the new windows they had replaced since the last time he bashed them all in. After that, though no one in the immediate vicinity who witnessed the act would file a formal report with the police, there was nonetheless such a show of support for Honnie and Todd by other neighbors that the police actually had to start at least appearing as if they were doing their job, especially since the mayor got involved and held a press conference right in Honnie’s living room.

  The mayor is a shady son of a bitch himself, about a half a step ahead of being indicted for fraud on all kinds of counts, and let’s not forget the big controversy surrounding the Atlanta strip clubs, a number of which were claiming he extorted money from them to keep them in operation only to shut them down anyway. So maybe it’s because of this that he decided he needed some image enhancement. Whatever the reason, the mayor picked Honnie and Todd’s plight as a platform, and you should have seen that crack dealer’s face when the news vans pulled up and parked on his yard.

  About a week later his house was raided by vice and they hauled his drug-dealing, dog-fighting ass off to jail along with his purple spandex-covered hellbitch of a girlfriend. It turns out they were living there on a low-income Section 8 allotment, which means the owner was receiving a government subsidy to supplement their rent. The owner of the house, of course, could not care less that his tenant was terrorizing the neighborhood, but the government is fairly averse to subsidizing drug dealers, or at least small-time drug dealers, and once the owner realized his monthly, taxpayer-funded lunch ticket was in jeopardy, he evicted their mean-hearted, arson asses onto the street.

  The drug dealer and his girlfriend had to leave the neighborhood after they made bail, and they could not even wreak any farewell havoc, either, because all their drugs had been confiscated, so they had no product with which to barter collusion from the crack cronies, and without the crack cronies as ready witnesses to falsify police reports, he could no longer tell police he was threatened by anyone. This effectively took his biggest weapon away, which in turn neutralized his lesser weapons. So he left and took his passel of torn-up, dog-fought pit bulls with him.

  Honnie’s family left next. We begged them to stay. Now that the drug dealer next door was gone, the neighborhood was almost nice. They even caught the cop killer Jamil Al-Amin. They found him hiding in a swamp down in Whitehall, Alabama, so it’s not like he’s lurking around with his assault rifle anymore, either. He’s in jail awaiting a capital murder case claiming, of course, that he was framed as part of a government conspiracy. But Honie and Todd had had enough of Capitol View. They wanted out, and who could blame them.

  As soon as the last remnants of the drug dealer’s evicted belongings were sifted through and dispersed among the miscreants that remained behind, Honnie put a sign in her yard. Her house was the nicest house for sale in the neighborhood, and it should have sold in a nanosecond, but real-estate agents steered their customers away. Months went by before it fell to Grant to take over. Grant has twelve hundred titles up his ass: he’s a licensed social worker, a notary public, and a minister, among other things, and goddam if he doesn’t also have a real-estate license left over from about five hundred lives ago. He had about twelve minutes before that license expired, so he set to work and sold that house for them in a few weeks. He said if he can talk the pants off a straight man, he can talk someone into buying a fine house in a perfectly passable neighborhood now that the crack house and drug dealer are gone.

  But he could not talk Honnie and Todd into staying. I hated to see them go. I really did. They had a yard sale soon beforehand, and I bought their vintage dinette set even though it would never fit into the tiny butler hutch I have for a dining room. They needed the money, though. Lord knows it’s expensive to put out fires and repair windows every five minutes. It’s expensive to be the examples the drug dealers are trying to set for what the rest of us in the neighborhood can expect if we try to resist them. It’s expensive to resist them anyway and fight for your right to live peacefully in your own home.

  “It has taken its toll, believe me,” says Honnie. She handed me her brand new messenger bag I just bought for ten dollars, and it wasn’t until I got home I realized she had put inside it a dress of hers she had for sale, which I’d admired but couldn’t afford. I wish I had known she’d done that so I could have thanked her before she left. In fact, I wish I could have thanked her period. I wish we all could have thanked her and her family both.

  Keeping Up Appearances

  OUR CHRISTMAS TREE IS NAKED from the waist down, which really shatters my confidence. It’s not that I care what the neighbors think, because all they see shining in our window is the tree’s glorious upper half, festooned in all our outdoor lights, no less. Grant insisted on that. No anem
ic little pin lights for him, because pin lights are for pussies. So our tree has lights as big as tortoise eggs, and bright enough to bleach your irises unless you squint. In fact, I’d advise against looking directly at our tree’s upper half at all unless it’s through a shaded windshield.

  But the lower half, now that’s a different story. It started out decorated like the rest, but then we unleashed Milly, who took five minutes to pilfer every ornament she could reach. The ones I didn’t pull out of her mouth I pulled out from under her covers. They made a pretty pile in the middle of her mattress, all the colorful bulbs, like the hidden booty of a baby pirate. I can’t believe I almost let her keep them. I really did, but then I thought, what if they break? That would look pretty bad, right? My daughter sleeping on a bed of shattered glass.

  We can’t have that. Think how it would look, me allowing my child to nap on a nest of broken ornaments. We can’t be busting me as a crappy mom in front of everybody like that. So I swept all the ornaments out of her reach, and as a consequence Milly shrieked so piercingly that lobsters in the middle of the ocean were probably signaled by her sound waves, but at least for the next five seconds or so I was certain I was exuding the appearance of a protective mother. At least there’s that, right? I mean, appearances are important.

  Just ask the fake charity worker who collects money through car windows on a street corner near our house. She thrusts a white bucket with a bogus aid-organization logo on it through your window, and she’s figured out that if she appears to have a handicap, people can be a lot more forthcoming with the fork-outs. I’ve noticed that over the past few months she’s perfected an entire fake sign language, one she supplements by moving her lips in an exaggerated way without making any actual noise. So people assume she’s deaf and dole out the green. I never give her any money myself because I’ve seen her walk straight to the crack house with her bucket of coins, turning to wave at people who call her name, but other than that her new act is impressive.

  There is another guy in our neighborhood who begs door to door, claiming he’s a veteran who needs milk for his newborn. That’s a double whammy, and I guess he figures he needs a double whammy in this neighborhood because we are not exactly a bunch of PTA parents here. I myself never trusted this man because newborns don’t drink cow’s milk, but Lary—crusty Lary, who once roared at me for fifteen solid minutes because I gave a handout to a homeless man in exchange for a free newspaper—helped him out anyway. A few days later he saw the same man loitering in front of the crack house around the corner, and the man tried to explain his presence there by saying he was ministering to sinners, but from Lary’s point of view the man didn’t appear to be ministering, he appeared to be participating, and Lary told him if he ever knocked on our doors again he would rip his heart out through his rib cage.

  Thus hardened, I’ve been confining my acts of goodwill to cutting small checks to big corporate charities lately—except for the occasional bag of pecans the neighborhood boys sell. I hate pecans, but I usually buy a bag anyway because it reminds me of when I was a kid and had to sell cupcakes door to door to earn money. I remember a fat lady named Mrs. Freedle who lived up the street from us and who always bought half a tray. Always. That was a slam dunk fortune for us, and she’d let us hang out and pet all her cats, too, who were really fat as well. We used to laugh about it afterward, like how we could always count on her to cough over the money on account of her cravings for sweets.

  But one day we knocked on her door and her grown daughter answered and told us Mrs. Freedle was in the hospital due to her really bad diabetes, which is a disease that prohibited her from eating sugar, she told us. So it turned out Mrs. Freedle never even ate our cupcakes after all, she was just buying them to promote our enterprise. After that I regretted having judged her by her appearance, figuring she was feasting on our cupcakes when really she was feeding them to her cats. When she came back from the hospital, she still paid for the cupcakes but insisted we give them away to someone who appeared to be hungry. So I always think of her when I pay the boys for a bag of pecans. “Give them to someone who looks hungry,” I say.

  Gay Shame

  GRANT STILL SAYS I SHOULD fuck a fat black man. Today, for some reason, Grant once again thinks fucking a fat black man will solve everyone’s woes, and I didn’t even know I had woes. I thought I had everything kind of quasi-handled, so why would I need a man in my life?

  “I didn’t say you need a man in your life,” says Grant, “I said you need a man in you.”

  It’s the day after Grant’s 109th birthday, or so he says, and he thinks that makes him sage enough to dole out guidance. “You’re a fine one to give advice,” I tell him. “You’ve been gay for six entire years and last weekend was your first appearance at Gay Pride.”

  I’ve even been to Gay Pride more often than Grant. Trapped in my heteroness, Gay Pride is like a droolfest for me with all its beautiful men, all these awesome physical morsels dancing about like chew toys on the end of a string. I usually go with Daniel and his brother Darell, who has recently gotten himself immensely buff—even his head is more muscular now. Leave it to a gay man to figure out how to improve muscle definition in his forehead. Maybe it’s all that oral sex.

  Daniel’s boyfriend Mitch has nicknamed Darell “Slut,” and Darell doesn’t seem to mind. I wish everyone was that unfazed by the word. When I was thirteen, I hung out for a time with a genuine slut named Mary, who had an extra-long thumbnail she said she could use to steal extra cocaine when the mirror was passed to her. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, so she illustrated by bringing the inside of her thumbnail to her nostril and sniffing mightily. I still didn’t understand, but pretended I did.

  Mary lived a few blocks away from me, and before my friends and I got to know her we knew of her. Everybody did. She was pleasant but sloppy looking, with a very developed body for a fourteen-year-old. She could have passed for eighteen, which evidently she did, because my father knew her from the neighborhood bar where he spent his days. My father told us that she picked up men at the bar and had sex with them in their cars in the parking lot.

  “She’s a slut,” he’d say. Why my father expressed contempt, rather than concern, for a fourteen-year-old girl who fucked his friends in the parking lot of a bar escapes me.

  Later, after my friends and I got to know Mary, she introduced me to Marlboro 100s (as opposed to the Marlboro regulars I’d been stealing from my father since I was nine) and Neil Young music. She was the first girl I met who was passionate about a particular music even though the singer, as she put it, “is so fucking ugly.” Up until that point I don’t think I knew ugly people could be talented.

  Mary normally acted very self-assured and knowledgeable, but she was only fourteen after all, and we were even younger than her, so it was only a matter of time until her youth reared itself, her toughness wore off, and she began to goof around. Once, Mary peddled me around town on the handlebars of my bicycle. She wore a safari hat and I waved a tennis racket in the air, and we sang “Old MacDonald” at the top of our lungs. It was testimony to our immaturity that we thought this was the most fun to be had this side of piloting your own Apollo moon buggy, and we laughed so hard we almost turned our tonsils inside out.

  As we rode toward my house, I asked Mary to slow down because I needed to use the bathroom. She asked to come inside, and, though it was the middle of the day and my father should have been at the bar, I could nonetheless see his car in the driveway, which meant he was home instead. I had to tell Mary she wasn’t allowed in my house, and asked her to wait for me outside on the sidewalk. “My father says you’re a slut,” I told her.

  For some reason I didn’t think she’d be hurt by that, I thought she’d think it was cool. But Mary was very hurt by it; there was nothing I could say to make her feel better. She wouldn’t wait for me, and stormed away, confused and tearful.

  She never spoke to me again, but years later I heard she got herself a girlfri
end. “Who would’ve thought that trashy Mary was really a lesbian?” laughed some of the codgers who hung out at the bar with my father. Today, when I go to Gay Pride, I see a lot of women who could be her, and they seem happy. But to this day I feel sorry for what I said to my slut friend Mary, and especially ashamed for asking her to wait for me outside.

  Unintended Targets

  CALL ME A PUSSY, but dead children freak me out. First there was the one who was eighteen and I guess you can argue he wasn’t a child, but eighteen is pretty damn young to be beaten to death with a flashlight.

  And I guess you can argue, as many did, that he really wasn’t beaten to death with a flashlight. Many argue that he would have died anyway, without the beating, on account of the drugs in his system, but I am of the mind that the beating didn’t help at all.

  And so were a lot of my neighbors, who gathered together and set fire to the house a few doors down from mine, as setting fire to people’s houses seems to be the neighborly way of settling disputes in my neighborhood. The house was owned by the man blamed for the boy’s death. He is not the man who gave the boy the drugs or even the person who beat him with a flashlight, but he is the man who called the police when the boy was trespassing on his property. The police in turn chased the boy, tackled him, and then the said beating commenced. Coincidentally or not, the boy died right after that.

  So I guess you could argue, as many did, that that dead kid doesn’t count, but that was my first dead kid and my first burned-down house since I’d moved into Capitol View a few months prior, so I personally counted him.

  Then there was the next boy, who was in his early teens and you cannot possibly argue that he wasn’t a kid. He was shot and killed by yet another kid for cheating at dice. This happened right across the street from the house that burned, and should not be confused with the incident in which a two-year-old was shot in the parking lot of an apartment complex nearby. That bullet passed through that girl’s leg and killed her grandmother, who was holding her at the time. The girl and her grandmother were unintended targets (someone cheating at dice was the target) whereas in the cheating-at-dice case that happened a few doors down from mine, that target was reached.