Confessions of a Recovering Slut
Page 23
So like I said, I thought begging was behind me. I would rather die than beg, I’ve thought lots of times in the past decade. But lately that conviction has begun to crumble, mostly because of what I’ve read lately. Take the deputy who was shot by Al-Amin, the cop-killing Muslim cleric who is now serving life without possibility of parole. I read the deputy begged Al-Amin to let him live. He lay there on the asphalt, begging for his life. I think of that and realize my own arrogance. Rather die than beg? If it were me, with my life in someone else’s palm, put there by evil or other circumstances, teetering on being dismissed with one gassy-assed breath from my abductor, it would take me less than a second to assess the lovely shit basket that has become my life—the struggles, the failings, the loves both lost and found, the dreams both broken and not so broken, the tiny toehold of happiness I’ve finally managed to carve out for myself. It would take me less than a second, I tell you, and I would be begging.
Celebrate the Flaw
LUCKY YATES AND ANNA ARE DATING. Each other. After all the blustering they both did about how they’d grown a sturdy layer of rust around their emotions, how they were never again gonna get tricked into the yawning butthole of bad love by letting that layer soften a little, they both crumbled like stale coffee cake the second they had some alone-time together. Ha! How’s that for conviction?
“We made out for, like, ninety minutes in my car,” Anna said, not even a little ashamed.
“Bitch, you two were supposed to be my comrades in crusty solitude,” I laugh. I’d introduced them awhile ago, after listening to them both blather about newfound backbone due to their respective freshly failed relationships, and how this was supposed to serve as a force field against future sentimental involvement of any kind. They each sounded about as convincing as a recovering alcoholic hanging out at Hooters on free-beer night, so I thought they’d get along.
On the other hand, of course, if they end up hating each other I deny any responsibility. Just like I deny any responsibility for unleashing Lary into the world. Lary would have been here regardless. I swear I did not create him. He came out demented the minute he was born, an event I don’t think even involved an actual mammal—just magma, maybe, coming from a crack in the earth’s core. I figure this is the reason for his famous fascination with Cheez Whiz. Maybe it reminds him of the primordial ooze from which he first crawled.
“Did you know they sell Cheez Whiz by the gallon?” he asked me the other day, and damn if he did not have a gallon of Cheez Whiz sitting right there on the bar stool next to him. Cheez Whiz of that mass doesn’t come in a plastic jug like you might think, but a metal drum similar to the kind they use for commercial solvents. He says he stole it from the Omni Hotel, off the set of a cooking show hosted by Emeril Lagasse, who “was really hungover,” according to Lary. I have a hard time believing a famous chef would need an industrial drum of Cheez Whiz, but then maybe he kept it around for the curiosity factor, because the sight of it really is a little mesmerizing. Cheez Whiz is like earwax, and not just in the obvious sense, but because you’re only accustomed to encountering it in tiny amounts.
Lary has looked into making his own, and swears the process is a heralded scientific achievement. “I always thought it would be like Superman squeezing coal into a diamond, but it’s not,” he says excitedly. “It’s a subatomic reaction. It’s what the Iraqis were working on before we invaded.”
I swear I thought he was gonna start sleeping with that stuff, so I was surprised to hear he’d offered it to Grant to augment the appetizer buffet at his upcoming Sister Louisa art exhibit, titled “The Third Coming.” Everyone will be there: me, Lucky Yates, Anna, Lary, Daniel, and the rest of the psycho circus—which reminds me, Grant better step up on the grub. The last Sister Louisa art exhibit I attended featured cheese puffs, cut-up Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and bad wine in a box, which Grant himself hauled around and squirted into people’s cups. Amazingly, he still wonders why all his potted plants were dead within a week.
But this time Grant promises the drum of Cheez Whiz is just for display. He probably won’t even open it. “Besides,” he sniffs, “this is not about feeding your body, it’s about feeding your brain.”
I would laugh if not for the fact that, amazingly, people really do tend to derive emotional nourishment from Sister Louisa’s trailer-vangelical wisdom, which is painted on societal discards, such as the cracked mirror graced with the statement, Celebrate the flaw.
I love looking in that mirror. I don’t just see me, but the entire carnival that comprises my friends and family. We are all flawed in the most fabulous ways.
Take Lary, who seriously cannot recall how a complicated network of scaffolding came to be erected in his kitchen, or how that truck bed ended up on the roof of his house. “I just know it was harder to get down than it was to get up,” is all he offers. Or Daniel, who spends his days at a mental hospital, not as a patient but as a care provider who teaches art to troubled children every day, a process that will suck the human faith out of anyone else. But somehow he manages to emerge with most of himself in tow, the pieces having been left behind with the hope of future retrieval. Then there is Lucky Yates and Anna, two emotional refugees whose hearts were used as total toilet paper in the past, but who nonetheless decided to test their toes in the same tub again. Christ, you have got to commend them for that, right? However it turns out, at least they were brave enough to try. At least there is that to say about all of us. Rather than turn away, we decide to look into the mirror, see past the cracks, and celebrate the flaws.
Acknowledgments
THIS PAGE IS DEDICATED TO the people who believed in me, because if not for them, I might just be living in Lary’s truck right now, which still does not even have a front seat.
First, I want to thank my mother and father for not being perfect. In fact, if I were magically granted just one minute with them again, I’d tell them I love the person (and the mother) those imperfections caused me to become.
Then there is the rest of my family (which is by far not isolated to people who share my parents); my sister Kim and her husband Eddie, my other sister Cheryl, my brother Jim and his wife Cindy, my alleged stepfather Bill (who is also allegedly dead), and, of course, Daniel Troppy, Grant Henry, and Lary Blodgett, with a special thanks to the dear Daniel Keiger, who, among the many reasons he earned my gratitude, flat out refused to hire me as a bartender.
My daughter deserves my ultimate appreciation, as there is no greater catapult for self-improvement than the simple adoration bestowed on you from your child’s eyes, and the need to live up to it. Also, I want to emphasize that my daughter is not fatherless. On the contrary, she is very much loved and cared for in this regard.
Also, I owe an ocean of gratitude to my editors at Creative Loafing: Suzanne Van Atten, Jim Stawniak, Ken Edelstein, and Doug Monroe, as well as the staff and other writers there for producing a paper that surrounds my column with such quality. I also want to thank (again!) Patrick Best, Steve Hedberg, and Rebecca Burns, who were all there at the very beginning when my column was just an ember, fanning it so it wouldn’t die out. Damn am I grateful to them for that.
And thank God for Jay Leno, Jolie Ancel, Michele Conklin, Mike Henry, Jill Hannity, Judith Regan, Cassie Jones, Tammi Guthrie, Neal Boortz, and my producer at NPR’s All Things Considered, Sarah Sarasohn.
The following people also remain in my gratitude: Liz Lapidus, Josh Levs, Kathy Jett, Jesse Chamberlin, Sherrie Cash, Matt Barrineau, Marcia Wood, Tom Junod, Karyn Slaughter, Jim Hackler, Mary Rose Kelly, Julie Bookman, Michael Benoit, Teresia Mosher, Sarah Rosenberg, Lynn Lamousin, Corinne Lynch, Laura Geraci, Thomas Meagher, Nena Halford, Gina Speakmon, Jim Llewellyn, Anna Llewellyn, Lucky Yates, Bob and Lu Steed, Corinne Lynch, Michael Alvear, Randy Osborne, Polly Sheppard, Samuel Johnson, and, most importantly, the readers of my columns and books and my listeners on NPR.
Lastly, I’m so very thankful to my former neighbors of Capitol View, among them Miss Taylor, Monty
and Greta DeMayo, Muggs DeMayo, and especially Todd Kitchens, Honnie Goode, and her mother Bren. Their grace and dignity beautified the surroundings in a way that resonates to this day. Today the place is downright lovely.
About the Author
Photo by Jesse Chamberlin
HOLLIS GILLESPIE, a Writer’s Digest Breakout Author of the Year, is a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, the award-winning writer of “Mood Swing,” a humor column published in Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s major alternative weekly, and author of "The Ugly American," a travel column for Paste magazine. Also the author of Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, which Vanity Fair called “rib-crackingly funny,” she lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with two cats, an incontinent pit bull, and her six-year-old daughter.
www.hollisgillespie.com
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Praise
for Confessions of a Recovering Slut
“Gillespie’s profound observations about suffering and love sneak up on you at the very last second, buried as sly rewards for the careful reader.”
—New York Post
“Entertaining.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Gillespie masterfully mines her childhood, work travails, and misadventure for laugh-out-loud humor and eye-moistening pathos.”
—Bust
“A bleakly comic masterpiece.”
—Dallas Morning News
“Instantly relatable. . . . Beautiful beyond words.”
—Orlando Weekly
Also by Hollis Gillespie
Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood
Copyright
CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING SLUT. Copyright © 2005 by Hollis Gillespie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
* * *
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Gillespie, Hollis.
Confessions of a recovering slut and other love stories / Hollis
Gillespie.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-056207-2 (acid-free paper)
1. Gillespie, Hollis. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography.
I. Title: Half title : Confessions of a recovering slut. II. Title.
PN4874.G385A3 2005
070.92—dc22
[B]
2005046486
* * *
ISBN 13 978-0-06-083438-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 10 0-06-083438-2 (pbk.)
EPub Edition March 2014 ISBN 9780062354013
06 07 08 09 10 WBC/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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