Confessions of a Recovering Slut (11 page)

Because what else was I gonna do? She was living in Zurich at the time, and I couldn’t fly there from California to save her, especially since she didn’t want to be saved. I’d already tried talking her out of marrying Eddie a year earlier, and all that did was build a wall between us. We’d started out living in Zurich together, along with my mother who’d been contracted to design weapons for the Swiss government. When the contract expired, I tried to get Kim to come home to the States with me, explaining, with all the gentleness of an angry bobcat, that she’d be a fool to stay. “Alcoholic walrus,” for example, is what I called the man she loved. I blamed him for everything, too. I especially blamed him for the tent.

I didn’t expect her to turn me down. Kim and I had been roommates in college. She kept the place clean and made sure the bills were paid, and in return I kept my cadre of meaningless boyfriends down to basic parade level. It was a great setup, if you ask me. It just seemed natural that my sister and I would emerge from the mended shipwreck that made up our childhoods to have a home in the same place. In my mind she would always be there, being my little sister, believing everything I said. I remember when her dimpled fingers used to be too short to reach the bottom of a bag of candy, so I’d tell her the candy was gone and finish the bag myself. I remember accepting money from my mother for teaching her how to read when, really, she’d already learned on her own somehow. I remember having dreams in which she was horribly hurt and waking with inconsolable sobs. I still have those dreams. Those don’t go away.

Now here she was living in a tent and telling me it was nice. Sometimes I was fine with it. Sometimes I could put the thought of my homeless-but-for-a-tent little sister into a special compartment in my head and keep her there for long periods. “She says it’s nice,” I’d tell myself.

But other times I’d let it hit me with the dull thump of dead birds. Jesus God, this was my little sister, living in a tent halfway across the hemisphere, and in the end I left her there. I cannot believe I left her there. To this day I still don’t know what is best; to sit a world away while your little sister lives in a tent and do nothing but buffer your worry with walls you build in your brain, or to drop everything and make your way back to her, so that you can take her dimpled hand and bring her home. All I know is this: her home and my home had become two separate places, with walls all their own, and she knew that before I did.

She is no longer living in a tent, thank God. She lives in a nice house with real walls now, in Dayton, Ohio, of all places, with her husband Eddie, a big dreamer whom I’ve grown to love. We had our walls up, yes we did, my sister and I, but eventually our devotion returned. It made its way in, seeping through the cracks like insects, and after enough of that the walls weakened and we loved each other again, or we were brave enough to let each other know we never stopped.

I
F MY MOTHER HAD BEEN A BETTER THIEF
,
I would not be here right now. Not that she wasn’t skilled, mind you, she was. I’d even say she was better than Lary, who right now is the best klepto I know. But Lary relies on the obvious. For example, he will simply walk into the waiting room of an upscale plastic surgeon’s office with a hand truck and take the leather couch right out from under the newly lipo-sucked asses of the patients there. “Move aside,” he’d say. “Emergency couch removal.” Nobody would stop him because such a blatant theft is outside their sphere of experience. In short, they’d believe him because believing him would be so much more comfortable than confronting him.

My mother, too, occasionally used that technique—like once she stole all the patio furniture from the pool-side of the condo complex where she used to reside by simply backing a borrowed truck up to the gate and loading up—but she didn’t rely on it. Her expertise was much more refined. She had great sleight of hand. She could steal from
casinos
, for chrissakes. I cannot overemphasize the skill factor there, the dexterity you’d need to steal stuff off the top of a casino blackjack table. With that talent she could have performed her own show on one of Las Vegas’s lesser stages, say the Hoe-Daddy room at downtown’s Binion’s Horseshoe as opposed to the blow-ass velvet-curtain faux-Broadway number at the Venetian on the strip.

She took things from her office, too, and not just the industrial big blocks of Post-it notes, either, but outdated classified documents detailing projects she had been working on. She gave them to me once so I could present them as my own when I applied for a job as a technical writer for a company in Zurich that made corrugated materials. I was not qualified to be a technical writer for a cardboard-box company, especially a German-speaking company, but here we were living in Switzerland because my mother had scored work designing missiles for the Swiss government, and she wasn’t about to let a little thing like national security get in the way when I decided I wanted a job of my own. It wasn’t
America’s
national security, after all, just Switzerland’s.

Besides, she was always talking about how none of the stuff she designed for them ever seemed to work properly. Take the time she traveled to a Sardinian testing facility to trial the missile tracking device she helped design. The purpose of the weapon was to intercept enemy missiles and facilitate their destruction before they reached their target. It was a precursor to the Patriot missiles that are used in Iraq today, with the exception that her device didn’t work.

“It just fell the hell over,” she laughed afterward. “It fell right off its base and onto the goddam ground.”

So she stole those documents for those weapons and tried to get me to pass them off as my own, because a place that makes cardboard boxes surely could use a technical writer astute enough to build her own bomb, right? “Hell, yes,” she said, “get out there.”

Because here’s the thing: I was leaving and she knew it. I’d had enough of Switzerland and rich people and goddam fondue and humorlessness in general, which is how I viewed the country overall. I’d been there a year and a half, since I graduated from college, living there with my brilliant mother as she designed worthless weapons for a pussy-ass country known for its neutrality, and I was
bored
. I wanted my own job, I wanted to make my own damn way, and every Thursday I’d scan the
International Herald Tribune
classifieds and find companies throughout Europe looking for people to fill positions I figured I could passably fake my way into pulling off.

Unlike my mother, I did not have a contract keeping me in Zurich, and she could see me standing there at the ready, with one foot in her world and the other poised over the goddam banana peel that would make up the rest of my life, and if she wanted to she could have stolen that from me. She could have put her own foot down or gone ballistic or threatened all kinds of untold emotional tortures only mother’s can administer when their children threaten to forge away from them, or she could have simply told me the truth about how seriously sick she really was, about how little life she herself had left, and it would have been so easy for her to steal mine from me.

But she didn’t. She let me go. I left her in Zurich alone to finish her contract while I flew back to the States, where I proceeded over the next decade to consistently fall on my ass until finally I ended up where I belong. It could have been different, believe me. Right now I could be sitting here with a sack of broken dreams, a bitter bag of fears, wearing a badge on a lanyard around my neck, a technical writer, maybe, for a company that makes cardboard boxes. That’s where I’d be if my mother had been a better thief.

I
STILL HAVE A PICTURE
on my refrigerator of Grant and Daniel dressed as cowgirls. I think everyone should have a picture like this somewhere prominent in their house, of two total fairies trapped in their adolescence. They each have enough makeup on their faces to fill a bucket, and fake boobs so big they could float a houseboat.

I made their costumes myself, complete with yards of thick gold upholstery fringe I found at a salvage store. I actually sewed lassos and horse-shaped appliqués on their back pockets, too. It was good homemaking-type practice, seeing as how I used this same picture to adorn the invitations I sent for the baby shower these two supposedly threw for me.

I say “supposedly” because they hardly lifted a single bangle-weighted wrist to help me set up, and instead spent the whole pre-party prep time in Daniel’s bathroom drinking mimosas and drenching each other in cosmetics. When they emerged, they were both dressed as pregnant country-singing queens, ready for the party to start, while my authentically two-hundred-month pregnant ass was still busy preparing appetizer trays.

“Can you two at least
pretend
like you’re putting this party on and help?” I asked, but they waved me away, or maybe they were just waving in general, mindful as they were of their wet nail polish. Grant would not even so much as rinse off a cluster of grapes for me. I swear, sometimes I can see the true benefit behind having real females for girlfriends.

In the end I rolled up my sleeves, lumbered forth, and finished on my own. The result was a buffet and wine bar fit for a fleet of conquering Huns. It’s a good thing, too, because about five hundred people showed up, everyone laden with gaily wrapped baby-type presents. When I finished tearing into them all, there was enough ribbon and paper strewn about to fully stuff a plush toy the size of a Trojan horse.

And you would not have believed the baby booty. That alone is reason to see the true benefit behind having your baby shower fronted by two bossy fags, because they both nagged the hell out of me to register a wish list at a sprogette shop, then they pestered everyone invited to the party to pay attention to it, which everyone did. Later I heard from the saleslady there that she had to add things to the list to accommodate requests. “You didn’t have receiving blankets on the list, and you’re gonna need those.”

What the hell is a receiving blanket?
I thought. In fact, I didn’t know what the hell more than half the stuff was I’d been told I’d need. I put it on the list, though, and sure enough I got it handed to me wrapped in pastel-colored paper on the day of my shower. It was like magic. It took two cars and Lary’s old truck bed (minus the portion used up by the big wad of barbed wired) to haul it all back to my place, where I sat among it all like Jabba the Hut, wondering what to do with it. It was all very intimidating. For example, what are nipple shields? I was told I’d need them, and here I had them, and I don’t know what to do with them.

It was kind of like when I got my first ten-speed as a twelve-year-old. It was when my mother had been gainfully employed working with NASA on the last Apollo moon launch, so she had income then, as opposed to one Christmas a few years prior when she was between contracts and had to rely on charity to fill out the empty space under our tree. I guess to make up for that particular Christmas she went and bought me the biggest blow-ass ten-speed you ever saw, a top-of-the-line Schwinn with enough gears and googlydobs to run an efficient Swiss railway system.

The trouble was I had no idea how to work it. I literally used to just walk it to school every day, because I did not know even the first move to make to get it out of second gear, and my mother, an actual rocket scientist, was no help.

So I kept walking it to school, because, believe me, the bike garnered a hell of a lot of admiration from the other kids, particularly the boys, who would whistle at it like they were little construction workers and my bike was a big-chested blond. Normally they were like a swarm, these boys, all tormenting and daunting. It was all very intimidating. But the bike changed things. They’d ask to ride it, and I’d let them, because I figured if I’d insert the bike into their circle, everything would work. It was like adding a necessary mechanism to a complicated machine, and once all the parts were in place it ran flawlessly.

But all this baby booty, it was worse than a complicated bike. Once I got it home it all lay strewn about like a disassembled appliance. Breast pumps and bottle sterilizers, bassinettes and cradle bumpers, how do you work this stuff?

“Don’t worry,” my friend Jill told me. “The baby changes things. It’s like the baby is the battery that fits into all the stuff and makes it work.” Yes, that’s it, she promised me. I’ll have my daughter and, in a very big way—in wonderful ways I could not even imagine—she’ll fit into all my stuff and make it work.

M
Y COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED
by so many viruses I finally had to quarantine it to the corner of my house, where it sits to this day, surrounded by flares so no one will go near it. It’s truly evil, that computer, but I’m afraid to throw it away because it has stuff in there I need, like downloads of Grant’s face superimposed on the body of a fat masturbating lady.

I don’t know how to get that picture from my old computer to my new one, because I’ve converted to Macintosh, you know. Yes, I’ve got this new, sleek thing here that I can practically put in my pocket. Unlike my PC, it’s not polluted inside, its cogs and inner workings aren’t all crud covered, and when I turn it on it doesn’t sound like I’m trying to start up a rusty lawnmower.

My only beef is the color. It’s not just white, but
white
white, and I’m uncomfortable around so much purity. Lary says I should take black markers and just soil the thing once and for all, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I have a hard enough time just witnessing the natural erosion of things.

Take the car I bought when I was eighteen, the sleek Datsun 240Z I paid for with what was left of my share of my father’s, company-paid life insurance policy after I finished blowing half of it on cocaine for the gaggle of back-stabbing assholes that made up most of my friends back then. Jesus God, that car was gorgeous, as blue as the color of a prom queen’s eyes, with white racing stripes. I bought the car used, with ninety thousand miles on it, but to me it was as pure as Play-Doh fresh from the can. Within weeks I totaled it on the San Diego Freeway. The nice man I’d rear-ended gave me a ride home after they towed my wreckage away, as his huge Ford fuck-you mobile hardly sustained a scratch from the accident.