Confessions of a Recovering Slut (19 page)

I have a memory like that. It’s a glimpse back to my brief period as a pyromaniac when I lived in Melbourne Beach, Florida, while my mother worked at NASA on the last Apollo moon launch. At the time it seemed that every third block or so there’d be acres of untended land that wove through the neighborhoods, rife with pointy plants, sand spurs, and pine trees. My friends and I would burrow ourselves deep within these places, certain we were safe from interference from the outside world, and we were probably right. Not even homeless people wandered into these rough spots, or not for long, anyway.

I was nine and smoking a half a pack a day. Not only that, but I was providing my friends with cigarettes as well, because my parents’ habits were so vociferous and they kept such a surplus supply of Marlboros that they never noticed a pack or two missing each morning.

So at first we were foraging ourselves into the rough spots so we could smoke cigarettes undetected every day, but we were nine, so it was just a matter of time before we turned our attention from burning our lungs to burning the wild growth around us. We lit fires like tribal warriors but they never got out of hand, probably because it rains every five minutes in Florida.

The rain, though, now
that
would get out of hand. I remember hanging out in one of these rough spots with my friends when all of a sudden the sky turned gray and began to boil, I tell you, and the wind was so stiff we had to hang onto the trunks of pine trees. High up in the air, above everything else, the tips of the trees were whipping around like kelp at the bottom of an active ocean bed.

I wish I could say it was my idea to climb to those tips, but the truth is I don’t know who thought of it. It’s possible it could have been a collective stroke of genius, because here we were a bunch of chain-smoking nine-year-olds anyway, so it’s obvious life held no value for us, but whatever the case this is what happened. Soon we were each clinging to the tip of our own pine tree and sailing through the air like total trapeze artists, laughing so hard we could barely keep our grip.

Jesus God, looking back I’m surprised I survived. But somehow I was saved, and I’m glad I was, because to this day, when I reach a rough spot in my life, I look back on that moment and I am saved again, by the vision of kids clinging to the tips of trees that had come alive in the wind. Kids laughing in the rain and soaring through the storm.

N
EXT WEEK I
get to learn how to kill people, and I can’t wait. Not that I’m itching to slaughter folks at random, just those who are evil and have it in their head to kill me or others whose welfare I might happen to care about in that instance—the instance of the dangerous uproar. I’m looking forward to acquiring certain techniques that can stop these people, pretty definitely, once it becomes evident that such an instance is at hand. Should it happen, I don’t want to be standing there slack-jawed, as useful as a plankton-eating ocean slug. No, I want to be able to kill people in the name of airline security.

I’ve taken self-defense courses before, but that’s just what they were,
courses
. This is not a course, this is
training
. I’ll be in training to be a bad-ass, and I’m supposed to expect to be bruised during training, too. I don’t care, I grew up being pummeled by every member of my family except my little sister, who was still bigger than me but just didn’t have it in her to hurt people. So bruises are no big deal. I got hit by a car in Costa Rica once, which bruised me up really good, but still I didn’t plunk down wailing over it. I was embarrassed, is all, to have found myself all of a sudden rolling around on the hood of a stranger’s car.

After that I walked back to my
pensione
and promptly got bit in the leg by a black dog, which looked to be part pit bull and part ancient troll roaming the earth under an evil curse. Its teeth were as long and pointy as cayenne peppers, and they left a bloody blossom of gnarled flesh on my upper thigh. That there is testimony to my fortitude, I say, because I continued with my visit even though I was all dog-bit and car-hit, and only missed one day of work after I returned to Atlanta not because of my injuries, but because of the misguided conviction that I’d acquired a tapeworm during my travels.

So I like to think I’m tough as Teflon. For example, when I was eight, my sisters and I were accosted by bullies on our way home from the county fair, where I’d excelled at a carnival game by throwing baseballs at stacks of comical dolls molded from what must have been melted bowling balls, they were so weighted. Still, I knocked enough down to win a stuffed snake, the kind with glued-on eyes and a wire inside so it could bend. The bullies tried to take it from me that day, but instead I thwacked the boss bully upside her head with it and ran away while she gripped her own ears, stunned. Her two minions took off after me, but it was one of the few times in my life when I couldn’t be caught. It’s a great recollection, but I fear the next time I’m threatened I’ll have more at stake than a stuffed snake.

Hence the training. I have it in my head the only element missing to keep me from feeling completely secure is the ability to kill a person with a Q-tip or whatever. If I were brawny I would feel secure all the time, as brawny people all seem to feel, and I wouldn’t need to train in order to uncover secrets to survival for the physically meek. I would just rip the assailant’s brain right out the back of his skull, or threaten to do so, as I’ve heard a brawny boyfriend of mine once threaten, and for him the mere threat is always effective enough. I am not him, though.

“You can’t kill a person with a Q-tip,” I’ve been informed by various members of certain security forces within the past half year, not even if you swab the Q-tip with rattlesnake venom. But still there must be some other simple-yet-deadly methods of self-defense, some MacGyver moves I can use to murder actively murderous people. When I fly I’ve taken to wearing my hair in a twist secured by a fancy lacquered chopstick. It’s plastic (the chopstick) but it would probably hold up if I had to stab someone in the eye with it.

“Girl, you’ve got issues,” Grant tells me, but he’s hardly one to talk. Recently he personally tracked down the thief who took his moped, and wasn’t satisfied until the police arrived to slam the guy down and handcuff him right there on the floor of the Ponce de Leon public library. Still Grant thinks I am too enthusiastic about my upcoming training; “Issues,” he repeats.

He might be right, because I have not felt secure in a long while. Looking back, I realize even when I clouted that evil cow with my carnival prize it only facilitated an escape for me and not my sisters, who were left behind to be terrorized. I always felt bad about that, and today I figure there’s no point in protecting myself unless I can protect others. I can’t help it, I want everyone to be safe, and until that happens I guess I will always have issues about security.

I
F I HAD A
penis like Matt’s I’d probably have it hanging out all the time, too. I’d probably wave it around like a concert conductor every chance I got, which pretty much sums up what Matt does. “Matt had his dick out again last night,” Grant says.

“Really?” I say, perking up.

“Yep, he was standing at the end of the bar, I glanced over and there it was.”

Grant’s seen Matt’s dick seven hundred times, starting from way back before Grant began bartending at the Local, whereas I’ve only seen it less than half that much, so the sight still holds novelty for me.

“How’s it lookin’?” I ask Grant.

“Like it’s carved out of marble.”

I like to think Matt’s dick-wag fervor started five years ago when he began hanging out with Grant—who is famous for corrupting people and calling it “the search for truth”—though the truth is Matt may well have been corrupted beforehand. After all, Matt had been robbing banks for a long while before any of us ever even met him.

But Matt likes to point out that he wasn’t the guy who actually went
into
the banks with the fake bombs and whatnot. Rather, Matt just provided getaway transportation for the gang, got it? But that still makes him a bank robber according to the FBI, which I’d say is a pretty important distinction. They threw him in jail, but he was out again before I got around to visiting him. I felt bad about that until Grant told me Matt hadn’t wanted visitors. Matt has been out for a while now, back to wagging his dick on impulse. “Same ol’ Matt,” Grant says.

“Let’s hope so,” I say.

The truth is Matt wasn’t the same. For one, he worked out while he was in prison, almost every day from the looks of it, and his body was as buff and smooth as polished pine. He still looks like an angel and probably always will, but now sometimes he also looks like he wishes people wouldn’t fall for the act so easily.

Well, it’s hard not to. That act is his second nature (as vastly opposed to his true nature). The first time I saw Matt he was holding a puppy. Yes, a puppy. He was sitting on the stoop outside the apartment of my friend, who lived down the hall from me. His hair was long and blond, pulled back in a ponytail, and his eyes were the size of coffee saucers, blue like the Caribbean Sea. When I looked at him it was all I could do to keep from falling over and foaming at the mouth. The puppy really didn’t help, either.

“Sarah,” I called my friend later, “did you know there’s a blond god sitting on your doorstep?”

She did. Later he moved in with her, then after that he moved across the hall from her, and somewhere in between he met Grant and portrayed the crucified Jesus in Grant’s art installation at Mary’s in East Atlanta in 1998.

Matt had been a bank robber for about two years by then, but even so, out of the gaggle of Grant’s friends, he was still probably the best qualified to play Jesus. If not for him, Grant might have had to use Lary, who has long blond hair as well, but Lary is a fermented, misanthropic old lunatic who can’t hide his true nature. Matt, on the other hand, was expert at it.

For Grant’s opening, Lary had custom built a massive wood cross with a step shelf for Matt’s feet and big pegs to which Matt’s hands were tied. For five dollars, Grant would provide you with a Polaroid of yourself next to Matt under a sign that read, “Hang with Jesus!” Matt wore pretty much nothing but a big thistle crown and large drops of fake blood. At first there was a whisper of a cloth covering Matt’s loins, but I hear that soon fell away and nobody bothered to re-drape it.

That night, a bond formed between Grant and Matt that endures to this day, and sometimes I wonder who is the poorer influence on the other. Before Grant, Matt was pretty good at hiding his true nature, but before Matt, Grant was pretty certain nobody’s true nature was worth hiding.

“Do you kiss men?” Grant says Matt drunkenly shouted at him across the bar one night. “Because I can’t do that, you know, kiss a man.”

Grant and Matt have kissed each other roughly five million times, even more than Matt and I have kissed each other, but this is owing to our days as neighbors, and all that kissing just seemed so innocent. Then I moved away and Matt went to jail and emerged with a harder body, among other things.

“Hang with Jesus,” Grant laughs, “because Jesus is
hung
.”

If Grant had a bell at his bar, he’d ring it every time Matt unzips his pants—and the bell would constantly be ringing, and pretty soon patrons would be clutching their bleeding eardrums. So, like everyone, Grant simply allows Matt to drop his act on occasion, because Matt looks too much like an angel for his own good. He can act like one, too, but at least he’s not such a shit as to allow people to fall for that act without flashing them a clue, now and again, to his true nature.

I
NEED PROFESSIONAL HELP
.
I mean serious help. My fag friends are of no use to me now, as they’re always conveniently invisible when actual elbow grease is in order. When Grant came by the morning after Milly’s big birthday party, he didn’t even bother knocking. He just peeked in the window and saw the Chernobyl inside, then scrambled back to his car like a cowardly crab, the big pussy.

Lary had stopped by Milly’s party on his way out of town again. He handed her a purple stuffed mermaid and assessed the kiddie-party chaos in progress. There must have been sixty people there, and the floor was an absolute ocean of shredded wrapping tissue and half-masticated cookies mixed with fruit punch and Polynesian chicken bits. It didn’t help that I served mai tais, either. Not to the
kids
, of course, but there was a luau theme, dammit, and I wanted the adults to have fun, too.

And they did. By the end of the night, the inflatable palm tree had sprung a leak, the kids were making forts out of my furniture and some of my so-called adult friends were in the front yard brandishing my tiki torches like angry villagers from a Frankenstein movie.

But the worst part was the piñata. A toddler trying to bust a piñata with a stick is like a fisherman trying to kill a whale with a fondue fork—I mean, sure, it’s
possible
, but it takes
forever!
So in the end we just put the piñata on the floor and let the kids tear it apart with their teeth and hands like little pit bulls pouncing on a pork chop. Disembodied papier-mâché piñata pieces flew willy-nilly, along with candy and gum and other rainbow-colored crap to make the paste on my floor complete.

Before leaving, Lary patted my back in an uncharacteristic gesture of sympathy. “You don’t have to feed my cat tomorrow, if that helps,” he said, figuring I’d be too busy wallowing under all this waste like a bovine trapped in a tar pit.

He was right. It’s been five days and I haven’t even scraped the teriyaki sauce off the ceiling yet. I was born without that house-cleaning chromosome most people take for granted. If it weren’t for my friend Polly the reincarnated putzfrau, who stayed after the party until midnight washing dishes the old-fashioned way—with a sponge and water—as opposed to my way, which is one load at a time in an unreliable ten-year-old automatic from which the dishes always emerge coated in mystery grit, I would not have one single piece of tableware left in my entire house, because I seriously would have found it easier to throw all the dirty stuff away and start over.