Confessions of a Recovering Slut

by Hollis Gillespie

  Even Michael admits he’s kind of a troglodyte in that area. Don’t get him wrong; single women are fine—single mothers, though, ought to have an island of their own. I’m reminded of my colleagues when I worked as a copy editor for a city magazine. I remember a fight we had one month when they insisted on giving a person featured in an article, who was a woman and a lawyer, the title of “female attorney.”

  “I don’t believe this,” I shrieked. “We don’t call the other attorneys ‘male attorneys’ or ‘hermaphro-fucking-dite attorneys’ or whatever, why do we qualify just the women?” But my ancient coworkers did nothing but light their fiftieth cigarette of the day and die a little more right before my eyes, and who can keep fighting in the face of that?

  So I left and here I am today, hanging out at the Cheetah with Giant Michael, my friend the mental simian, who is trying to explain to me that fake boobs are bad but pubic hair shaved into a tiny topiary is just fine. “Don’t you think some of these women have children?” I ask, indicating the nude beauties.

  “No,” he says, “they all take their money home to abusive boyfriends who spend it on drugs.”

  “Maybe not all,” I argue, and I make him give me lots of money to tip the undulating thing on stage. As I give her the money I tell her, “Please take care of yourself.”

  “Oh, my, God,” Michael barks at me when I get back to my seat. “You are such a mother.”

  Homeless

  LARY HAS OFFERED to let me live in his truck, but it doesn’t even have a front seat—just a lawn chair perched on the bare metal frame—so I declined. “If I have to I’ll move into that decayed crypt you call your home,” I tell him instead, “and I plan to use up all your faggy hair-care products while I’m there, too.”

  Lary, whose clothes are always covered with a Rorschach pattern of stains, nevertheless maintains a meticulous supply of salon-quality hair conditioner in his bathroom, which has proven to be a perk whenever I’ve had occasion to crash at his place in the past decade. These occasions are usually due to my intermittent bouts of homelessness over the years, and Lary is certain I’m due for another, and I’m worried he’s right. You see, I just bought another house, this one in a safer neighborhood, and considering the level of poverty at which a home-buying event traditionally leaves you, nothing makes you feel more in danger of becoming homeless than buying a house.

  Or at least I think I bought a house last Friday, I’m not sure. I mean, I showed up at closing, with every cent sucked out of my life and into a cashier’s check for the down payment, and this check was taken from me, and papers were signed, and keys were exchanged and backs were clapped and documents were filed and I was penniless and felt ready to vomit when it was all done. That part is clear.

  What isn’t so clear is the actual address of the house I bought. The closing documents don’t all agree on that, and I would think the actual address would be an important detail. But what do I know? I’m just the person with the money, and at closing my job was to hand that money out to everyone like a retarded kid who took his father’s wallet to the playground.

  Later, when I called the attorney’s office to point out that the property’s address had been misprinted on most of the documents in the closing package, she offered to rerecord the tax information, “if that’s what you want.” In all, everyone who walked out of the closing office with any money in their pocket is pretty certain the address gaffe is no big deal.

  Me? I can’t sleep. First of all, I’m really, really poor now. So it’s not like I can afford another place when the city forecloses on this one. Not that I wouldn’t have paid my taxes, mind you, it’s just that I’ll have paid them toward a phantom address and not the actual real one for which I hold a key right now. I realize the post-closing person said she’d rerecord that stuff, and she probably will as soon as she has a moment between taking money from people, but I have a sinking feeling that there the only person who ranks lower than a homebuyer is a former homebuyer who has already forked over their check. Think of a college coed who balls a frat boy at a keg party and later still wants him to notice to her; that is the level of success I felt I was having.

  “What’s that sound?” the post-closing agent probably asked herself when I told her it might be nice if the deed and stuff reflected the correct address as well, “Am I hearing voices from the dead planet of people who have already paid?”

  Lary is hardly any comfort. He has the same aversion to bureaucracy that I have, the same certainty that the government fucks up everything bad enough even when all the forms are filled out correctly. So Lary believes I’ll accidentally end up in some sewage-pipe of a prison somewhere, or at the very least on his doorstep again, this time with my toddler in tow. I myself don’t relish the prospect of childproofing the place known as Lary’s House of Broken Glass and Misplaced Narcotics, but at least those salon products can serve to extinguish an inferno if need be. “Really, the truck is very comfortable,” he keeps trying to persuade me, “and I’ll let you use my garden hose to wash your hair.”

  Lary himself didn’t pay taxes for years before a conscientious ex-girlfriend convinced him to turn himself in before the government found out and had him assassinated. After that an IRS auditor paid him a visit to inventory all his possessions for seizure in case an auction was in order. But the auditor made one tour around the abandoned warehouse Lary calls home, complete with insect larvae, rusty auto-body skeletons, and a tribe of alley cats living on the carport, and quickly discerned that Lary was indigent. “Give us a hundred bucks and we’ll call it even,” said the auditor, or something like that.

  “Easiest escape I ever made,” Lary likes to brag. I, on the other hand, believe he still owes a debt to society. He should do community service or something. Yes, that’s it, he should house a homeless family. “Now, before I get there, you know that scaffolding you have behind your couch that holds up the roof?” I tell him. “That has got to go.”

  Dead Stepfathers

  THIS MUST BE the season for dead stepfathers, I’m thinking, though Grant reminds me that his was real and mine might not have been. “I bet Bill really did marry my mother,” I contest. Bill had always said he did, anyway, and he always does what he says. In most cases it takes him a long time to get around to it, but he does it. That’s why I should have known he’d die. He always does what he says.

  He always said he loved my mother, while she never said anything. But that was her nature. For example, before she died she’d had a quiet affair with her boss that lasted five years. I like to believe he loved her immensely and would have married her in half a heartbeat, but it was not in her nature to marry someone who would love her like that. It was more in her nature to marry someone who loved her like Bill.

  “But he lives in his car!” I reminded her one day.

  “Not for long. I’m getting a place,” Bill said, because he was right there beside her. He was always right there beside her.

  And he did what he said, he got a place—an ocean-front apartment with two bedrooms and a balcony overlooking the sand. We still wonder how the hell he pulled that off on the income he made selling, for example, inflatable beach toys (with punctures patched) at the swap meet. He had a roommate, too, a tall, twenty-five-year-old, curly haired god named Brad who was as dumb as a bag of bait. Bill once caught him trying to blow-dry his hair in the bathtub.

  Brad would lug things, and my mother and Bill would haggle with people over those things and somehow it paid for their way through life, and then some. My mother rented her own almost-ocean-front apartment not far from Bill’s, and about midway between their places they opened their second shop, which sold the higher-end items that came from their warehouse-sized shop in Normal Heights, things like tea cups and crap I couldn’t understand. Bill would show me a signet on the bottom of a plate and insist that meant it was worth a lot, and I would wonder why he wasn’t selling black lacquer and chrome like the futon store across the street. Bill said he could sell the cup
for a fortune, and he did what he said. In short, everything was going so well. Then the dying began.

  My mother was first. She had been diagnosed with liver cancer and battled it heroically for a year before she died in her own bed with Bill standing beside her. It was the first time I’d ever seen his big eyes cry. Brad was next, felled by Kaposi’s sarcoma brought on by AIDS. Bill insisted the doctors misdiagnosed his friend, adamant that what Brad really suffered from was cat scratch fever. Still, Brad died in bed at the hospital with Bill standing beside him. Then a bunch more of Bill’s friends died from other diseases, Bill always beside them. It was the dying, Bill surmised to me later, that made him decide to sell everything and move to Central America.

  Not that he hadn’t been saying he’d move there since I met him, but I was still surprised when he did it, seeing as how his own health was hardly fabulous. For one, fat blue veins traversed his left leg entirely, making it look like the topography map of a forested region. That can’t be good, I thought to myself on a trip out there to see him. But Bill had been threatening to die for centuries, I thought, and this was no different.

  The last time I saw him he was in a roadside hotel in San Diego, aiming for Mexico, having abandoned the hospital and the cancer treatment he’d returned to the States to receive. “They want to kill me in there,” he insisted, which would have sounded paranoid if not for the fact that this was Bill, and wanting to kill him is a perfectly natural reaction to his presence. His plan was to go to Mexico, where mystical cures awaited.

  Grant says all his stepfathers married his mother in real weddings, with pictures and everything. His first stepfather is simply referred to as “the manly influence,” because he was a Marine and Grant’s mother felt her young sons needed a masculine presence in their lives, especially Grant, who by that time was probably already comparing upholstery swatches to wallpaper patterns. When Grant’s mother divorced his first stepfather, the suit didn’t go very well in her favor, and she and her three sons jumped on him right there in the courtroom, though Grant said he was just trying to break up the fight. Years later that same judge would preside over Grant’s first divorce, and Grant always felt he’d been unjustly scrutinized because of the incident.

  His second stepfather, the one Grant always referred to as “Leather Smeller,” is the one who died last week. He got his name because his mother found him in the closet one day, Grant recalled, wallowing in her leather coats, smelling her boots and masturbating. “That’s why she left him?” I marveled, because to me that is not a good reason to leave a perfectly good husband who buys you lots of leather products. If it were me I would have just got in there with him and told him to make room. But Grant’s mother is different from me, and their marriage ended, though their friendship never did. At the time Leather Smeller died he was in the hospital, holding the hands of Grant’s mother and Grant’s third and most recent stepfather. The three of them had been laughing and joking just moments before, relieved that he seemed to have just made it through a rough patch in his illness, when suddenly he grabbed their hands and simply perished right then and there.

  “Well, goddam,” I said to Grant, “is that a sweet way to die or what?”

  “Yes,” Grant agreed. He was on his way up there, but not to rummage through Leather Smeller’s things as his mother suggested he do, and especially not to retrieve Leather Smeller’s brand new laptop his mother insisted he check out, and especially especially not to haul all Leather Smeller’s vintage furniture off to his own storage compartment. Of course he might do all those things anyway, but that’s not his reason for going up there. “The man was my stepfather,” Grant reminded me. “You’d do the same.”

  He’s probably right. I certainly would have gone to California to find Bill’s body out in the desert and made sure it was buried or sprinkled or ground up and fed to pigeons or whatever the hell he wanted if I could have, but Bill went and died and didn’t tell anyone where he was headed when it happened. It wasn’t until last week I learned that he didn’t die in a random hospital, as I’d logically assumed, seeing as how cancer had consumed his body like kudzu. No, Bill died on Christmas damn day in a casino, and not just any casino, but one of those big blow-ass casinos that look like an electric oasis in the middle of the California desert. He was laughing and tipping people like a lottery winner, I was told.

  “That bastard,” I laughed. “I was all worried he died alone clutching his catheter or something.”

  “Hell no,” my sister informed me. “He was on a winning streak. He was throwing money around like it was confetti.”

  I have to smile at that. Bill always did love to gamble, and like I said he always bet big. He and my mother were junket junkies, always hopping on a bus full of other couples with coupons in their fists to make the eight-hour drive to Vegas and stay for two days nearly free in some subquality hotel, such as the Gold Spike, which is located off the Strip (off off the Strip) and has penny poker machines on the wall and blood stains on the carpet. They’d return with big stories about what they won or almost won, or how a blackjack dealer ever so subtly ensured the cards fell in their favor, or how Bill put all his chips on the come line and my mother took them back off right before the dice came up craps, or whatever.

  So I guess Bill had checked himself out of the hospital and wasn’t headed to a Mexican clinic for unconventional cancer treatment after all. I guess he had his own treatment in mind. I guess he didn’t want to gamble his last days on a fight he figured he couldn’t win, so instead he headed for his idea of heaven on earth and went out a winner. I think about that and I have to ask—well, goddam—is that a sweet way to die or what? Though still sometimes I worry that Bill died alone, after he himself held the hand of so many friends in their last moments. But then I think maybe he was not alone, maybe they were all there, my mother among them. Maybe they all came to the California desert that Christmas day to gently take Bill by the hand so he could finally close his eyes and, for the last time, do what he always said he would.

  Over the Top

  SOMEBODY STOP ME. Lary sure as hell won’t. He’s here right now, encouraging me. “There should be real flames shooting out right here,” he says, indicating the nostrils of the giant Styrofoam dragon standing in my living room, “or at least real smoke. And over here,” he continues, moving toward the towering pink and purple castle I personally built, with bricks and everything, “There’s got to be a drawbridge, or at least a moat.”

  Christ, for a second I was actually considering the moat option, thinking maybe I could put the castle in the middle of Milly’s inflatable wading pool. That’s where I put the palm tree last year, with the monkeys hanging off the fronds and the row of totem poles I hand-goddam-crafted out of, I’m not kidding, foam-rubber kneepads. That year was the “Hawaiian Luau” birthday-party theme, complete with pig and poi, I swear. A friend finally intervened when I had an authentic Hawaiian dance troupe on the line, trying to negotiate them down from their thousand-dollar-plus fee. “Maybe you could cut the war dance but keep the fire-eating,” she heard me say before she gently took the phone from my hand and said, simply, “Enough.”

  Ha! It was more than enough. It was over the top. I actually made thank-you notes, too, that featured a picture of Milly the morning after, sitting amidst a mountain of presents, ripped wrapping paper, shredded piñata, and the ankle-deep paste of trampled Polynesian food that covered everything. In it Milly is wearing red wooden shoes with her Powerpuff Girl pajamas, and the smile on her face is so radiant I just want to lean against a wall and clutch my chest.

  I lost the list of who gave what, though, so I couldn’t send the note cards. This year I plan to use them as coasters, keeping a stack of them right there next to the steaming turkey legs and mutton, or whatever it is that medieval people eat, for chrissakes. This year it’s a Renaissance theme, and I actually considered having a genuine jousting tournament, but realized I can’t really fit horses in my house, not without risking some crush
ed kids, anyway.

  “Kids got crushed all the time back then,” Lary offers. “It would be authentic to the times.”

  Luckily Lary is good for other things. Like when I called him to say I wanted to make a castle in my house, he didn’t even ask why. He just drove over here with a truck full of castle parts, or things that make great castle parts, and pretty soon I had one standing here, totally blocking my CD player on the bookshelf behind it. That’s why Lary insists on the drawbridge. By that time other friends had arrived. “You need a dragon to go with the castle,” one them said, and damn if one didn’t materialize. It’s every bit as big as the castle.

  “You don’t think it’s over the top?” I ask them.

  “Sometimes over the top is called for,” they say, pouring themselves another glass of wine. By the time they left there was paint, glue, newspaper, gift wrap, and party supplies strewn about as if my house had been barfed on by a parade of giant birthday cakes, and the party was still days away.

  I don’t know where I inherited this neurotic-entertainer chromosome. Neither of my parents had it: the extent of their hospitality often only resulted in an open can of mixed nuts on the coffee table. My mother, in particular, was never one to go over the top for a houseguest. My brother once brought his college roommate home for dinner, an occasion for which my mother made a passable pan of canned-sauce lasagne with crumbled hamburger dotting the surface like gravel shaken from a shoe. Throughout the evening she was barefoot and wore one of my father’s large button-down shirts over a pair of nylon shorts—or I’m assuming she was wearing shorts, anyway, as the shirt was long enough and the shorts short enough that the former completely camouflaged the latter, to the point that it seriously looked like my mother was serving us dinner in her underwear.