Read Confessions of a Recovering Slut Online
Authors: Hollis Gillespie
Confessions of a Recovering Slut
To my daughter on her thirtieth birthday
Trashy Bartenders with Beehive Hairdos
A Tapeworm and Other Parasites
Confessions of a Recovering Slut
T
HIS 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.
I
BET 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.”
L
ARY 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.”
L
ARY 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.”