Confessions of a Recovering Slut (15 page)

I swear, it’s not easy pretending you’re asleep on the couch when three people are fucking on the floor right beside you. By morning they’d mercifully moved to the bedroom and, left to wander her apartment on my own, I tried to drown out the howlings coming from Joanie’s bedroom by making long-distance calls on her phone.

“Just join in,” Lary suggested. “That’s what I’d do.”

“Retard,” I said, “I would rather rip out my kidneys with a crowbar.”

But Lary could only comfort me for so long before he had to go grade a door down with an industrial sander or something, so soon I was alone again, and utterly miserable. Seriously, there’s nothing sadder—nothing that’ll make you more certain you’re wasting your life—than spending the day in a strange apartment in a strange city waiting for your friend to finish getting fucked by strange men.

Eventually I ran out of numbers to call and chose, simply, to leave quietly, and for good. Joanie’s apartment was serviced by an exterior security gate, and once past that there was no turning back. Plus, my coat was locked in her car, and I had to abandon it to walk, freezing, to the car-parts store on the corner.

It was there I called Dennis. It had been three years since I’d last seen him, in San Diego where he served as a college intern at the magazine where I worked as a tortured copy editor, but still he pulled up to the curb fifteen minutes later, where I was waiting by the phone booth clutching a plastic sack.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked.

“A headlight,” I said. He didn’t even ask why I bought a headlight in California when my car was in Georgia.

He took me to a coffeehouse, and there I poured forth, not just about Joanie, but about everything. “You’d think the man you loved would include you in his five-year plan, or even his ten-year plan,” I blubbered, recounting my most recent Eiffel-Tower-inthe-ass moment. I’d been having them a lot lately, doleful reminders that the world was not my personal balloon on a string after all. “You’d think I’d fucking
fit
somewhere.”

Dennis just let me leak until I didn’t have any air left, then he took me to his family home to sleep in his sister’s bedroom. What I remember most about his childhood home is the counter spaces. They were cluttered with wondrous things it must have taken decades to collect, and I loved the way his house smelled, like heavily peppered vegetables.

I don’t know how Dennis explained to his family why his college friend showed up coatless on a cold winter day to spend the night, but I think it says a lot for them that they let me stay as long as I wanted, sitting there at their dining table, taking an odd comfort in the commingling of aromas that made up their family. They let me borrow their air until I could breathe on my own again, and for that I will always be grateful.

I
’M NOT ALL THAT PROUD
that one of my first words in Italian is “maggot.” You’d think I’d come up with something a little more useful, like “help,” but I’ve been here with Milly for two weeks and I still don’t know that word.

I’m here on a company-paid excursion to learn this language and put another interpreter qualification under my belt, which will take me far in the eyes of the nearly bankrupt airline I barely still work for. I qualified as an interpreter years ago in German and Spanish, but now all of a sudden I’ve become rusty at picking up languages. My problem is I keep searching through the dictionary for basic words of immediate use, like “need” or “have,” and I get all caught up with phrases I see on the way, like “acid test.” I see that and I suddenly think I cannot possibly communicate with Italians without knowing how to say “acid test,” it’s such a useful phrase! Or “zombie” or “polyunsaturated.” Seriously, these words are so universal, and I want to make it a point to learn words that matter.

For example, I remember years ago when my older sister’s Argentine ex-boyfriend, a busboy who could barely speak English, once used the word “compensation” in a sentence. It can be an impressive word when it’s the only decipherable one in a slew of words being spewed forth by an angry Argentine demanding restitution for having slipped in the alleyway behind his apartment building. It was a good performance, too, seeing as how he himself had unscrewed the bulb in the building’s exterior lamp to ensure there’d be insufficient lighting when he ventured back there.

Yes, this man bypassed all the lesser words of the English language and cut right to the one everyone respects. I hear he owns a car dealership now.

So I always figured that would be a good way to absorb other languages; just pick the words that scare people and say them over and over until you own a car dealership or something. But I think you have to be a certain kind of person to recognize those words readily—not a person like me. For example, I’m not satisfied with knowing how to say a simple “thank you” in another language. I want to know how to say it in the most officious way possible. I want to know how to say, “I’m delighted by your kindness,” or “Your generosity amazes me,” or “I am humbled by the bounteousness of your humanity.”

People are generally flattered by my method, but I don’t see any of them clamoring to give me car dealerships. Even so, I like being able to thank people in pretty ways. Sometimes I don’t even say it to anyone in particular. I just say the words because I like the way they sound.

My mother always told me I spoke my very first word when I was a few months shy of two years old, and that word was “cigarette.” In actuality, though, the word was just “get,” but since I was indicating my mother’s cigarette with my hand when I said it, she thought it obvious I wanted to try a hit. “Whaddaya know? A kid after my own heart,” she said proudly; then she sat me atop the ironing board and put her lit Salem menthol in my mouth.

I coughed so violently I can actually recall the incident—it’s flapping around in my head like an escapee from the compendium of memories that are supposed to be locked in the subconscious of your first years, along with what it felt like to be born and whatnot. I remember sitting there on the ironing board, hacking my lungs out like a veteran, while my mother patted me on the back as if a good burping was all I needed to get me breathing again.

My father interrupted his own puffing to castigate her for a minute, telling her she shouldn’t share her cigarette with a two-year-old, taking care to part his own cloak of secondhand smoke so she could see he was serious. “She’s gotta know if she likes it,” my mother said, “the earlier the better.”

By the time I was thirteen I had a pack-a-day habit. Then suddenly that same year I’d decided I’d had enough and simply quit. Looking back, I guess thirteen qualifies as an early age to determine if you like smoking or not. If my mother were here I’d thank her very officiously for getting the wheels rolling so soon in that regard. I would say something in Italian perhaps, something like, “Your compassion is a vast ocean among mere puddles.”

But I can’t, those chances are past. Now I have Milly, and her first words emerged not long ago, like a foggy picture finally come into focus. Weeks beforehand, those words just sounded like the cooing of a pigeon. “Hoo koo. Hoo koo,” Milly would trill, always while handing you something. Then the sound evolved, “Hank hoo,” until one day it came out clear as a bell. “Thank you,” she said as she handed me the torn label from a can of cat food.

At her words—her first words—my heart almost clawed its way out of my chest, so desperate it was to attach itself to her like lovesick putty. I held her for five hundred years after that, or at least I wish I could have. “Thank you,” she kept repeating. “Thank you. Thank you.” Whaddaya know? I thought, soaking the top of her head with my tears. A kid after my own heart.

D
URING MY FIRST
freshman year of college I was the same as most of my fellow students—drug-addled and ignorant as a child. I even used to be jealous of my truly drug-addicted friends for being so skinny. “Damn,” I’d think, “look at that bitch, she has to jump around in the shower just to get wet! I
hate
her.”

I myself tried very hard to be an addict during that year. I was seventeen and living in a bay-front apartment with two other totally self-involved slags, who, when they weren’t fucking my boyfriend behind my back, were introducing him to a harem of other girls for basic blow-job consideration.

I tell you, that’s the problem with dating hot guys. This one wasn’t just hot, but drop-jaw hot, with long blond hair and eyes as blue as blowtorch flames. He looked like an angel, but
evil
. God, he was evil.

“Do you love me?” he once asked despondently. I wondered if that might be the reason he was acting so strange lately. Oh, the poor, handsome, sad little god. “Yeah,” I replied tentatively.

“That’s the problem,” he said, exasperated, “I don’t love you.”

Evil, I tell you. By the way, that is the only time I ever punched a man.

But he stayed in my life for as long as I let him. He once tried to pimp me off on a friend, and another time he and another drunk friend tried to gang rape me while my roommates laughed in the living room, ignoring my cries. Finally our brassy hairdresser neighbor heard me screaming from the sidewalk and simply walked in through our open front door. “What the hell’s going on here?” she shouted. At that the guys let me go and continued their marathon coke-snorting session in my kitchen.

I tried to let all this be okay with me. I tried to not care when I’d come home after my third work shift for the day to find the son of the owner of the Mexican restaurant where my roommates worked waiting for me in my bed like he was entitled to be there.

“Who is that asshole in my bed?” I’d ask the crowd of other strangers in my place. They rolled their eyes in a universal signal of indifference.

I was on my way to fitting in, I think, when thank God my old friend Kathy came to visit. She’d driven the two hours south from Torrance to San Diego, where I had moved since the two of us attended high school together, to assess my living situation.

“Look at the bay!” I’d say excitedly. “It’s right outside our window!”

She was unimpressed. She could care less about the close proximity of the ocean if it meant sharing an apartment with “these bitchy pigs,” indicating my roommates, who at the time were in the other room passed out under a pile of guys. “Get yer shit,” she said. “We’re outta here.” She began to gather my things.

And that is how I didn’t become a drug addict my first freshman year in college. Kathy threw my possessions in the back of her impeccable ’72 Ranchero, stopped for a minute to grab a pair of scissors and cut the crotches and armpits out of every single item of clothing my roommates had hanging on their clothesline over the carport, and moved my ass back up to Torrance, where I lived for the next four months with her sister Nadine in an apartment at least five miles from the beach.

Kathy herself lived with her mother in Rolling Hills, and she hadn’t spoken to her father in years. The last time she saw him, she said, was when she caught sight of him early one morning asleep in his car parked outside a bar. His head was resting halfway outside his window, as was his arm, which dripped a trail of blood down the car door.

“Didn’t you stop to help him?” I gasped.

“Fuck no,” she said. “I hope the bastard died that day.”

I used to wonder why Kathy would bother to save me but not her own father, but now I think I know the reason. It’s because she must have tried. She must have tried so many times growing up to make herself matter more to him than his own addictions, and because she couldn’t she probably took her father’s failures personally, and hated him for making her hate herself.

I started my second freshman year in a different college the following fall, and four years later I got a call from Kathy. I’d stupidly lost touch with her since the fiasco of my first freshman year, and was surprised to hear her voice.

“I’m just walking out the door to graduate!” I yelled happily into the phone. Yes, I was about to graduate like a normal person, someone who wasn’t hiding a secret first freshman year from school administrators. “Can I call you when I get back?” But I never talked to her again. I just hung up the phone like the person on the other line never saved my life at all, and, like an ignorant child, went about enjoying the gift she gave me without looking back.

M
ILL’S MITTENS ARE MISSING
.
Yes, she wears mittens even though it’s uncommonly hot out. They’re tokens of comfort, I figure, like a blanket. Daniel calls them gloves and taught her to say it, only she often drops consonants when she talks. Our cats Lucy and Tinkerbell have become “Oosy” and “Inky” to Milly, and her gloves, which are so small they didn’t even bother sewing fingers into them (they’re just fuzzy pouchlike things) are “love.” Yesterday, as I read the paper, I felt her fleeced little hand on my face, and I looked up to see her smiling at me, proudly sporting her mittens. “My love,” she said sweetly.

After that I knew I wouldn’t be going to Nicaragua to help my sister Cheryl tend to my mother’s best friend Bill, who, if he had any strength left, would probably use it to beat me with a fireplace poker. He’s pissed at me for disclosing that the hotel he runs down there doubles as a brothel, which is no surprise. It was in Costa Rica (where he owned a bar that was as profitable as a huge hemorrhage inside his wallet) that he was about to go into business with a Nigerian woman who ran a hotel/whorehouse on the beach up the street. When I last visited he gave me a tour of the place, careful to point out the laundry facilities.

The arrangement was to have been that the African madam would populate Bill’s bar with high-end whores every night, thus attracting an increase in patronage to his establishment. I don’t know how Bill planned to compensate the madam, or perhaps he didn’t, as they never did become business partners, though Bill left Costa Rica insisting his next business venture would be a facsimile of hers. I believed him, as Bill usually does what he says he will do.