Confessions of a Recovering Slut Read online

  Dedication

  To my daughter on her thirtieth birthday

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Big Enough

  Fake Salvation

  Stolen Things

  Fear of Falling

  Abortions in Hell

  A Rightful Nightmare

  Standing By

  Get It Up

  Trashy Bartenders with Beehive Hairdos

  Do Crazy

  Hard Head

  In-Flight Communication

  Perfectly Fine

  A Tapeworm and Other Parasites

  A Pink Line

  Flow Management

  False Fortune

  Thank’s Life

  The Side of the Road

  My Penis

  A Bad Sign

  We Were Blind

  My Penis Is Missing

  Fourteen Car Wrecks

  Digging a Hole

  Addictive Personalities

  Don’t Throw Everything Away

  My Mother’s Trailer

  A Bad Housekeeper

  Building Walls

  A Better Thief

  All My Stuff

  Natural Erosions

  My Pile

  Picking Things Up

  Repent Immediately

  Pain in the Chest

  No Turning Back

  Bill’s Heart

  The Drug Dealer Next Door

  Beautiful Loser

  The Only Piece Missing

  An Odd Comfort

  First Words

  My First Freshman Year

  Lost Love

  Snitches

  Out with a Bang

  Bigger Things

  Testing Badly

  Half Naked

  Somewhere Else

  Without Warning

  The Dead Guy

  Rough Spots

  Security Issues

  True Nature

  My Mess

  Confessions of a Recovering Slut

  Body Parts and Perverts

  An Idiot in a Bar

  The Mummies

  Under the Sink

  The Best in the World

  Lucy

  My Missing Life

  Perfectly Good Words

  Fucking Friends

  The Good Lie

  Getting Tagged

  A Road That Ended

  It Has Taken Its Toll

  Keeping Up Appearances

  Gay Shame

  Unintended Targets

  Hooked Fish

  You Be the Man

  Such a Mother

  Homeless

  Dead Stepfathers

  Over the Top

  Passed Out in a Parking Lot

  The Special Closet

  Give It Up

  The Begger

  Celebrate the Flaw

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Hollis Gillespie

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK IS THE SEQUEL to Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood, the success of which was such a surprise that I finally took back the Tiki glasses I stole from Trader Vic’s two years ago because God knows I didn’t want to get crapped on by the karma gods and interfere with whatever cosmic alignment had come to pass to bring me the blessing of a successful book.

  As in Bleachy, the stories here are almost entirely true (barring hyperbole, conjecture, and the occasional hallucination), though they are presented in an order that favors story line over actual chronology. In some instances the names have been changed to protect the guilty (and one innocent)—though, as ever, most of the guilty have demanded their names appear in bold print and plan to post highway signs hoping to direct readers to their front doors.

  Big Enough

  IBET THERE ARE BETTER WAYS to test your boyfriend’s affections than to fake like you’re considering breast implants, but I was winging it, people. For one, this guy technically didn’t consider himself my boyfriend, so that right there might have been my problem.

  “I’m considering breast implants, what do you think?” I asked him, knowing full well I have never, not even for a nanosecond, considered puffing myself up like a blowfish. I was just grasping for compliments, expecting him to fawn all over the place about how my stupid ass is already perfectly fine, especially my tits, which are big enough.

  Not huge, mind you. Let’s get that straight, though sometimes when I put on my special Robo Bra, the kind that magically grabs fat from my ass and pushes it all the way around so it sits up under my chin, I must say I can fake people into thinking I have cleavage as big as the butt crack of a college freshman, but that is fairly seldom. When I remove that bra there are always big red half moons embedded beneath each boob thanks to the underwires, and there are not many occasions when such a result is worth the effort, though passing through security at the Frankfurt airport certainly qualifies. That bra always sets off bells like a four-alarm fire, which means I’m set to get felt up like a drunk coed at a frat bash. It’s wonderful.

  Anyway, here I am sitting across from this guy over spaghetti, probably with pesto in my teeth, blobbering on like the pathetic idiot who is providing him oceans of commitment-free sex that I am, trying to cop some compliments on top of what will hopefully be a free meal, and thankfully he looks up at me with worry.

  “I had a friend who got implants, and they took forever to heal,” he begins, launching into this long story about the sufferings of this poor girl. I was thinking, Wow, isn’t that nice? He’s concerned about me. Sadly, even though you might be sleeping with someone, concern isn’t always evident. I once worked a flight where two first-class passengers who just met got drunk and ended up humping each other like fuck-crazed hounds right there in their seats, which is not at all something I’d recommend. Anyway, the plane was making a stop in Lexington, Kentucky, before continuing on to some other city, and damn if that man didn’t get up and leave that poor passed-out lady lying there spread out like a TV dinner for all the other people to gawk at as they disembarked. Christ, he could have covered her up, I thought to myself as I covered her up. So you see? Concern, I tell you, is not always a given when a lonely woman reaches out for affection.

  So there I was, a lonely woman reaching out for affection to this man who could not possibly have been a worse match for me. He was Catholic, for one, and I was raised by an atheist and a trailer salesman who, even though he was not atheist, didn’t want his daughter getting a God habit that would require him to drive her to church, thereby cutting into his Sunday morning beer time at the local tavern.

  Oddly, I recently graduated from a Catholic college, though I’d managed to do so without ever having set foot in its cathedral, which I hear was really nice. I remember people were always getting married in there, and I’d be bustling off to the financial aid office to stock up on all my soon-to-be-defaulted student loans when all of a sudden I’d have to dodge a crowd of people who looked to me to be dressed for a funeral until I saw the goddam eighties parade float that passed for a bride.

  “Yippee for her,” I always thought, because I had a lot of Catholic girlfriends and I know what they go through with all that fake sex until the wedding day, all those Indian burns on their pubic bones from the endless dry humping. “Forget that,” I’d laugh at them. “I’ll be over here having real sex with a soccer player on top of a running washing machine.”

  So other than that thin connection to Catholicism, this guy and I did not have a thing in common. For one, he actually told me that I should feel good because, of all the
girls he was sleeping with, I was the only one he actually allowed in his bedroom, and that is not even the most pathetic part. The most pathetic part is this: I did feel good when he said that.

  To top it off, here he was being all concerned about me, too, telling me about the horrors his friend had to endure with her own breast-implant fiasco. “I swear, she was bedridden for weeks,” he continued, “and then, to make matters even worse, the implants were the wrong size. They weren’t big enough, so she had to go back to the hospital and get them redone and go through it all over again.”

  Gosh, I sighed as he took my hand in his, he really cares for me. “So, in a nutshell,” he finished, “if you’re going to get implants, just make sure they’re big enough.”

  Fake Salvation

  LARY WANTS TO BE SAVED, which is news to me because I thought he was happy with his hell-bound self. “I thought you wanted to be left behind to battle the big lizards of Armageddon, or whatever,” I say. I really don’t know if there will be big lizards, I just remember hearing there’ll be “hell on Earth” (like there isn’t already).

  “Not saved saved,” Lary says, “but a fake salvation. I want to get on stage when the Benny Hinn convention comes back to town. I want him to slap me in the head so I can flop around.”

  Here I have to laugh, because Hinn’s handlers are pretty picky about whom they put on stage. I mean, they bypass all the authentic wheelchair-bound sick people, like the lady with Lou Gehrig’s disease hoping for a cure, and go straight to the vapid-faced bovines who would believe anything, it seems. Lary could not pull that off with his curly hair and hatchet face. His teeth are not sharpened, but look like they should be, and when he smiles at you you’re immediately disquieted, wondering whether he just put poison in your coffee and he’s looking forward to watching the results. In a crowd of Benny Hinn fanatics, Lary would stand out like a horny old uncle at a slumber party.

  “You’d be so busted,” I laugh. But Lary is adamant. “I can be possessed,” he protests. “I can get that look in my eye, I can twitch,” and here I have to agree with him, because I’ve seen Lary twitch. I have even seen him fake an epileptic fit just to scare off panhandlers approaching him on Peachtree Street. At first I thought it was a bit over the top, since just telling panhandlers “no” seems to work fine, but then I realized Lary likes scaring people, which is pretty much how Hinn and his coven keep their gravy boat afloat, by scaring people with threats of hell and devils who poke at you with their forked penises for all eternity. So, yes, Lary can twitch and he can get that look in his eye. Christ, who’d have thought Lary had qualities in common with members of the God squad? “In fact,” Lary continues, “I think we all need to be saved together, as a unit.”

  He’s talking about our friends Grant and Daniel and me, and of course I stop laughing. “No goddam way are you taking me to a revival circus!” I shriek. I went to one in high school once, and the experience was so painful it actually affected me physically. I’d been invited by someone from my sewing class, a fragile girl with a face like a pail of paste. The worst part was the speaking in tongues, which entailed, as far as I could tell, writhing at the foot of an icon and gibbering. When I got home that night my mother didn’t even look up from her book. “How’d you like church?” she asked, and I could still hear her laughing as I shut the door to my room and fell face down on my bunk.

  So, no, I am not willing to put myself through that again. I think Daniel would be on my side, too. He won’t set foot in a church unless it’s a famous European cathedral, and that’s only because it’s his practice to visit famous European cathedrals to drink shots of tequila in the very back pew. Sometimes, too, he likes to drive through my neighborhood and stop in front of small A.M.E. churches hoping to hear gospel music wafting to the street from the front door. Other than that, Daniel would not go to church even if his sweet Wal-Mart-greeter mother begged him from under her Sunday bonnet.

  Grant, on the other hand, would definitely enjoy a fake salvation, probably because he’s completely impervious to the real kind. That must be what he and Lary have in common. Me? I may be the daughter of a drunk and an atheist, but even so—even after the attack of the tongue-speaking God zombies—I think I still have some soil in me for the seed to be planted, and I think I need to be mindful about who tries to plant it there. After all, a fake salvation is only fake if you want it to be.

  “I’m just curious, why do you think the four of us should hold hands and be saved as a unit?” I ask Lary. “So we can all go to heaven together?”

  “Hell no,” Lary answers. “It’s so we can pull the others back if they start to lift away.”

  Stolen Things

  LARY IS NOT ALLOWED nice glasses at the Local anymore. Just for sitting next to him you’ll get your wine served in a water cup, I swear, and Keiger, the owner, has even instructed the waitresses to keep count of those, because Lary is “out of control,” he says. “He’s stealing all my stuff.”

  I personally think all the glass-stealing started last April, when he showed up at the Local with the aim to help Grant bartend, only he set up camp next to the mechanical Jaeger dispenser like it was his own personal canteen instead. Since then Lary has figured he pretty much owns the place, or acts like he does anyway, while Keiger is left to keep count of what’s missing after Lary leaves.

  Lary insists he is accountable. He says he steals glasses from other bars and restaurants to replace the glasses he stole from the Local, and vice versa, so it all evens out. “I’m cross-pollinating,” he says, except that now all the other bars are in for some crappy glassware, because Keiger is onto Lary’s shit, and it’s probably just a matter of time before the other bars are as well, as Lary does not even try to be subtle.

  I don’t know why Lary steals, but I suspect he genuinely thinks people will not miss what he takes. I myself stopped shoplifting at the age of five, after the second time I got caught. I’d gone into the Thrifty drugstore and commenced plucking earrings and other costume jewelry off the shelves and jamming them inside the folds of a rolled-up beach towel. But soon my bundle was so stuffed with stolen things it was the size of a mounted animal head and just as heavy, so it was inevitable, looking back, that a clerk would stop me.

  He hiked up his trouser legs before kneeling down to look me in the eye. “Whatcha got rolled up in that towel?” he asked, and I immediately affected such a great imitation of autism that to this day I wonder if, you know, it might be real. The clerk wisely decided not to push it and simply pointed his finger at me sternly. “I’m going to tell your father,” he said, and that was all he needed to say.

  I had never seen that man before, but in my five-year-old fake-autism head he very well could have hung out at the same bar my dad did every day, he could have been best buddies with my dad for all I knew, belting back dozens of beers in glasses that would probably stay unstolen. Maybe he had seen me in there playing air hockey with my sisters, maybe my dad had hooked his thumb in my direction and pointed me out to the guy, and now here I was in his store stealing things.

  I lived a mile away and ran the whole way home, dropping my shoplifted booty along the way. I looked back and saw a pair of fluorescent go-go earrings in the gutter with the tag still attached, winking at me in the distance like two hot-pink turds. But I turned around and ploughed ahead. There was supposed to be a shortcut through the woods but I always got lost when I tried to take it, and this time was no exception. I couldn’t even backtrack to follow the trail of price tags I’d left in my wake because, believe me, new stuff laying around on the ground unclaimed doesn’t stay that way long.

  So I simply hurled myself onto a hillock and lay there unclaimed myself, praying to a God I only knew from what my brother had told me one day when he pointed to the sky and said, “See that giant eye? That’s God.” I did not see an eye, but I did see some storm clouds with an opening in them that was eyelike. So I lay there praying to this eyelike opening whose memory, because it was a clear day, I had
to muster in my five-year-old fake-autism head.

  I prayed that my father would never find out that I had stolen things, because even though my mother was a major klepto and our house was full of stolen things, I knew my father drowned in his anguish over his own limits every day and wished better for me. I swore to the eyelike opening that I’d never steal again if only my father never discovered I’d stolen at all.

  When I finally walked through the door of our house, my dad was in the kitchen making a cake (a cake!) and to this day I believe I blew my wad with God on that first go. When my father turned toward me I thought he was gonna beat me with the lid of the tin flour canister—because God knew he beat us with that thing so many times it was now so dented it could hardly serve its normal purpose—but instead my father, who had not yet had that many beers, hiked his trouser legs up just like the Thrifty drugstore clerk had done, knelt down, and hugged me hello. I’ll always be grateful to God for that hug as well as those stolen moments in the kitchen afterward, when I thought my father would kill me and he baked me a cake instead.

  Fear of Falling

  I ONLY WEAR PANTS ON planes, never a skirt, because the last thing I want is the plane to crash and cause me to end up rumpled on the ground; dead with my skirt over my head. I also fear all the falling involved. I seriously hate the idea of landing on people, or ending up impaled on a piece of freestanding community art.

  Recently I totally forgot my pants-only policy because earlier I’d been stupidly hopping on Harleys outside a beach bar down in St. Augustine—and I say stupidly because I was warned not to by all the bikers who could see in my eyes what I wanted to do. But I did it anyway because, I swear, most of those bikers are proctologists or something, who only take their Harleys out on Sundays and don’t even drive them that fast. So I figured if a bunch of wobble-bellied family men could pretend to be bikers so could I, at least for a second while my friend took a picture. So I went skipping over there, and the first thing I did was fry the shit-eating fuck out of the inside of my shin on an exhaust pipe.