The Last Living Slut

by Roxana Shirazi

  “I like all human beings. You’re a human being, aren’t you?” His eyes were dead, like two stones. I thought my head would explode with the shock.

  “Here,” I said, pulling out the picture of the scan they had given me at the clinic. “This is the reality of things. This is why it hurts so bad.”

  “I can’t look at it,” he said. “It’s too hard.”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  “I have a concert now,” he said. “You should leave.”

  He walked me to the bus door. And then I ran. I ran so fast in my black boots that I thought my legs would come off. It was hard to breathe, as if I had cardboard in my chest. Where would I go? It was 11:30 at night. Everyone was inside at the concert. I was howling with pain and my heart would give me no comfort.

  I ran inside the venue and waited until Guns N’ Roses came on. I was blank. It had been so different in England. I’d been so happy then. As fat college kids hit on me, I sat frozen to my chair and watched Dizzy play the piano so beautifully.

  After the concert, I left the hall, went to the VIP section, and waited for Dizzy. But only Del came to talk to me. As he planted a kiss on the top of my head, I told him everything: about Dizzy, the pregnancy, the abortion.

  “There should never be any skin-on-skin contact,” was all he said.

  Dizzy never showed up. All I got from him was the inevitable text: “We’re leaving.”

  I walked out into the early hours. The place was icy and deserted. There were only gray roads and bleak wilderness around me. I was in the middle of nowhere.

  “Thanks for telling my road manager about the pregnancy,” Dizzy texted.

  “I don’t know how to get back,” I texted him. “Please, Diz, I know you are not like this. I am out here and I’m scared. And it’s freezing.”

  I started sobbing. Was I nothing? Nothing?

  I made my way out of the venue through the pitch-black night, the wind and rain slapping my made-up face raw. I walked for miles, past dark fields, along empty roads, until I finally found a taxi.

  Back in the hotel room, I paced up and down, hysterical, sobbing. I felt so alone. There were just walls and Ottawa and me. Where could I go? I was going mad with grief.

  I lay on the bed and degraded myself by answering the stream of abusive texts he was sending me; it was the only thing I could do to make things seem coherent and real. It felt like a terrifying jigsaw puzzle had sharded around me, and for some reason I felt like I needed him to put the pieces back together. I stared at the balcony. I wondered what would happen if I jumped. Would I get broken bones and that’s it? What if I did and my life became no more than a series of hospital visits?

  Pretty lingerie I’d bought especially for this trip was scattered all over the floor, a carnival of colors that now sickened me like too much candy. I cried so hard I thought I might throw up my heart.

  I lay down on the floor in the half light and called my mother. It must be morning in England. I howled down the phone as soon as she picked up. “Please, help me, Mum,” I said.

  My mother talked me back into sanity, calming me with her soothing tone and cooing morsels of love and tenderness.

  As I waited two days for my flight back home, I walked around like a zombie. Not eating, barely breathing. Every time I tried to sleep off the pain, I’d wake up with dread in my stomach. I was in a horror movie, with neither a slit of light to see with or a sliver of hope to guide me through the dark doom. I got no enjoyment from even eating a nice piece of food. I went to visit a close friend in Toronto, and even in her company I was like a dead piece of wood. I couldn’t make my brain understand that Dizzy had been capable of causing me so much pain and hurt. I was going mad.

  Chapter 53

  After recuperating at home for six weeks and soothing my nerves, I decided to go to LA. I’d been wanting to go there for a long time to see my friends and have some fun. I wanted to show myself that I was strong, still capable of loving life and being the cool girl I am. Though, maybe, on a subconscious level, I was also looking to get revenge for the way Dizzy had treated me.

  “You should go there and fuck all his friends,” Abigail told me with such torpedoing anger that it fired me up. “After what he’s done to you, that piece of human garbage deserves it.” Perhaps that was just what I needed. So I dragged my carcass back across the Atlantic.

  The Los Angeles rock scene, I soon discovered, was an incestuous community where everyone had fucked everyone else. The Rainbow was packed nightly with Nikki Sixx clones, hot and sexy but in their late thirties, aspiring musicians with jacked-up ’80s hair and tattoos. They compensated for their lack of real-world success by dating strippers, drinking abundantly, and banging as many chicks as they possibly could, so they could feel like rock stars instead of what they were—hired musicians in forgotten ’80s bands, usually not even fronted by their aging original members. These musicians—famous or otherwise—were usually married to, or lived with, women who had day jobs to support them financially. It was tragic to see so many wannabe and has-been rockers depending on their women to provide food and a roof over their heads. The world was full of chicks—myself included—who lived in adoration of these musicians on the Strip. All they had to do was be in an ’80s hair-metal band and chicks would jump on their dick faster than you could say “ugly wife.”

  On my second night in LA, I went to the Cat Club. The evening started with a promoter announcing, “From Hookers N’ Blow, Scott Griffin!” A rocker stood on stage with black hair and bad boy, I’m-gonna-fuck-you-baby energy exploding from him. A ding ding ding lit up inside me, like a slot machine hitting the jackpot: This is Dizzy’s band. Fucking Scott Griffin would be dirty, because he was Dizzy’s friend. He even looked easy.

  I stood at the front of the stage licking my lips, and he looked right back at me. He only seemed so hot because he was out-of-bounds, forbidden meat. He was slender and sinewy, dirty and rock-sleazy—the clichéd dumb musician type who would fuck me like a whore, pull my hair, and swagger onto the next girl with his cock still dripping and a beer bottle dangling from his curling lips.

  Sure enough, he came right up to me after the set and started talking to me in his sleazy rocker-boy sneer. His reptilian eyes were penciled heavily with black eyeliner, his gaze and pose that of a lazy-eyed carnivore. He looked like a male whore. He drawled out his words as if he had to think about them first, but his eyes lit up when he found out about Dizzy and me—as if the prospect of doing something so taboo made him want to fuck me even more.

  I could smell the testosterone oozing from him as I gave him more and more details. We went back to my hotel.

  Troy Patrick Farrell was different. He was breathtaking, his beauty humbling. I adored him from the moment I saw him. His hair was a naturally thick golden lion’s mane hanging lazily down his back. His eyes were languishing baby blue, with liner smudged around them that made them seem erotic and innocent. His face was boyish, yet exuded a pure, gorgeous sexuality. He seemed divine, because he was oblivious to all this about himself. Troy spoke softly, with attentive love in his voice. His milk-and-cookies-fed Chicago body was soft—not skinny, but not fat—and dressed in a lazy rock T-shirt and sweatbands. He was the drummer in White Lion.

  It was New Year’s Eve, 2006, and I was back at the Cat Club alone. I’d abandoned all my friends at the Key Club; I felt more at home at the Cat Club, where the matchbox intimacy and chocolate bar–size stage made me feel happy and warm. My unhappiness over Dizzy was beginning to dissolve, as if I were flying over the roofs and chimneys like Peter Pan without a care in the world. Though I was new to LA and alone on New Year’s Eve, I was the happiest I had been in a long time.

  Troy’s face stopped my heart. I knew he was also in Hookers N’ Blow and was Dizzy’s friend, but I really took to him. As we talked at the bar, he realized who I was.

  “Look, if it helps, it’s good you didn’t keep the baby,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been a good situation fo
r you. He already has four kids.”

  Troy was so sweet; he made me feel like a blushing teenager with her first crush. My heart did cartwheels when he smiled at me. Plenty of girls in the club wanted to talk to him; I think he had sugared them all. They looked at him with the same needy, achy look in their gooey eyes, as if he were Donny Osmond in the 1970s. In contrast, girls looked at Scott Griffin with wariness, as if he were Dracula at a blood bank.

  “I want to talk about Dizzy,” Troy said to me as the girls stood around patiently, like hungry pets waiting for morsels of food. “Do you like spooning? We can go back to your hotel and spoon.”

  I smiled noncommittally. I didn’t like the Dizzy part, but I felt like a teenager with Troy. I was overwhelmed with adoration and shyness. So I walked around and smoked many cigarettes in the back with all the people who were out for the New Year. Then I went back to the bar and casually bumped into Troy again. My insides were going swoosh with the glory of a ceremonial dance.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked as I walked past.

  “No. Why?”

  “You just walked away. Don’t you want to talk to me anymore?”

  I wished I could stay there and talk to him all night, but I didn’t want to seem too keen. The Cat Club began to close, and people started leaving.

  “Are you coming to my hotel?” I asked, gulping, as the words tumbled out of my mouth. “We can talk and have a few drinks.”

  “Yeah, I will. I’m just gonna help them clean up first,” Troy said as he started clearing glasses from behind the bar.

  I hung around for a bit. And everyone who knew about Dizzy and me could see I was waiting for Troy, Dizzy’s best friend. Kenny the barman, who monitored everything in the club with the storage capacity of a robot, looked on silently. “Here’s a key card,” I told Troy, handing him my spare. “Come over soon.”

  In my room, I hurriedly retouched my makeup and slipped into a gargantuan white bathrobe so bulky that it dragged around me, the sleeves continuing past my hands and the waist gathering miles of towel material around my body.

  I heard the key card click in the door. I sat on the bed and smiled. I felt like such a dork in my big robe.

  “I like you in that,” Troy said, and a smile slipped across my face. Here we were, alone in my big room, with me in my big robe, bathed in purring, honeyed light. He lay on his stomach on my bed. I took his shirt off so I could rub his back. He asked me for the whole story about Dizzy, and I told him as we cuddled. I felt like this kind of talk was contaminating the air, but I was happy to tell him the whole story, just as I’d told Scott. He was so sweet and such a great listener. I started to give him a massage, even though my hands had gone limp and weak from wanting to be good enough for him, pretty enough.

  “You’re so nice,” Troy said as I continued massaging him. “Why are you so nice?” Then suddenly he brought his hand out from under him and slid it between my inner thighs.

  “I’m just me,” I said. He shyly stroked my body and I kissed his back and touched his hair. I arched my back so he could reach higher up my legs. We didn’t speak; we only explored. He turned his head and I kissed him shyly. He was just so stunning, I had to pull away because it was too overwhelming. It felt too intimate. Moments later, he was leaning over me, his blond rugged mane smelling not of perfumes or additives but just of body smell, boy smell. He took his jeans off. His body was white and peachy. And when he kept his white tube socks on, I adored him for that. He was just so unaware, so pure. He kissed my face gently, then my chest and neck. Then he cuddled me and gazed at my face. He took my breath away. It didn’t feel like fucking or anything dirty. I felt like a beginner, without sexual skills or etiquette. I was lost, just a mass of hormones and giddiness and romantic butterflies. I couldn’t put on the porn-star act I did with others. I was the pure little girl me again. He could have said he wanted to do anything to me, and I would have said, “Okay, sir.” The only exception was when he wanted to go down on me: He was way too gorgeous, and I was way too in awe of him to let him put his mouth where it was dirty. He looked bewildered.

  “Why?” he asked, looking upset.

  “I just don’t like it. It’s too intimate.” I was being brutally honest. He must have thought I was crazy.

  I felt so happy with Troy on top of me, his sweaty hair in my face, his body on mine. I wanted to be good in bed, to perform as I usually did, but I just couldn’t put on an act for him. When he came on my pussy, I squeezed myself tight and absorbed it all into my labia. I came so hard that I kicked him like a pony.

  This is who I’d want to be my boyfriend, I thought. In the morning, when he left the room I knew what he was thinking: that he had to be loyal to his best friend. I could feel his guilt for having slept with me, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see him again.

  Chapter 54

  You are like Yoko Ono for Hookers n’Blow, The Barman said to me.

  “This is Dizzy. Fuck off!”

  Dizzy deposited his message on my voicemail the next day. It was New Year’s Day, and he had called to offer me his good wishes.

  “I am going to get you banned from everywhere I go,” he hissed when I called back.

  “Well, first of all, hello,” I replied. “Second of all, it is none of your business where I go. I can go wherever I want to.”

  I started crying, which encouraged him even further. “I’m gonna call everywhere I can and tell them what you are,” he screamed. “You won’t be going anywhere in this town.”

  “Well I’m going to the Cat Club with Troy on Thursday,” I said, trying to defend myself.

  “I’ve already told Troy about your slutty ways,” he seethed. “Who knows whose baby it even was?”

  “What about your slutty ways? Everyone in this town knows what a whore you are. I’ve already been told by all the girls.”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. The man I’d once been in love with had become an object of terror, a boogeyman, someone I feared. I was shaking all over as I put the phone down.

  Immediately, my life in LA was garroted. It seemed like he got me banned from the Cat Club, the Joint, and a few weekly rock parties I enjoyed. Even my friends got harassed if they happened to be in the same club as Dizzy. Everything about my life seemed restricted: where I went, whom I talked to, whom I slept with. I was trying, in my own way, to get Dizzy out of my system but he was trying to prevent it.

  One night at a party, a couple people told me about another girl who’d also gotten pregnant by Dizzy and suffered the same treatment. I decided to find out who she was.

  Sabrina was younger than me and more innocent. She was long-limbed and sleek as a gazelle, with lively, laughing eyes. She said Dizzy had gotten her pregnant about a year before; when she’d called to tell him she intended to keep their child, he had raged and insisted she terminate it. She was nearly three months pregnant when he stopped communicating with her. By then she’d decided to get an abortion, but she said Dizzy refused to help with her medical bills and isolated himself when she needed emotional support. After the abortion, Sabrina told me, she was depressed for months. Dizzy’s friends actually ended up offering her the emotional support she needed. I found so much comfort in talking to Sabrina. Here, finally, was another human being who knew how I felt inside.

  Troy and Scott Griffin were in a bitter rivalry to see who could fuck more chicks. They hated each other with a competitive intensity normally reserved for Mortal Kombat. And even though they both fucked many girls, Troy was boyfriend material, more romantic and loving. With Scott, what you saw was what you got. He never tried to hide or pretend. He was just a simple old horndog in heat, prowling the streets, sniffing pussy, and ramming his cock into at least two females a night. Any female would do: crusty old pussy, young fat ugly pussy, anything he sniffed, basically. Perhaps his hunger and childlike need for acceptance stemmed from the fact that, at thirty-eight, he still hadn’t made it, and was penniless and forced to beg girls for coffee, booze, and food.
>
  The sexual double standard of our society made its ugly form known to me more and more as I remained in LA. When I saw Troy one night at the Rainbow, he interrogated me about my sexual activities and history, his voice charged with disgust and disappointment—as if my promiscuity made me a bad human being while it was heroic and awe-inspiring when he and his “bros” fucked so many chicks and then patted one another on the back. Of course they had a problem with it when females did the exact same thing.

  Later that night at the Rainbow, as I cooed over Troy with my usual doe-eyed adoration, he told me he wanted to take me to Scott. My heart sank. We snuck around to the back of the now-forbidden Cat Club and saw Scott sitting by himself.

  “Scott, take her back and spoon her,” Troy said.

  I was so fucking upset. He was clearly giving me to Scott because he was pissed off that I’d slept with Scott before him. But I was lonely and needed someone to be with. So Scott came home with me that night and stayed with me for two days.

  “I’m gonna get kicked out of the band,” he muttered. “And this isn’t helping any.”

  “Then why are you seeing me?” I asked.

  He looked at me with those needy puppy eyes of his. “Because I like you.”

  I liked this honest whore. He had balls. He was risking his livelihood for pussy. I believed he really must have liked me.

  “That’s insane,” I said. “You’re Dizzy’s friend.”

  “He’s told me I’m not allowed to see you, but I told him I really like you and want to keep seeing you.” It was strange: Here he was, a guy in his late thirties, being ordered by his friend who he can fuck and who he can’t.