Confessions of a Recovering Slut (2 page)

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 eye
like
. 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.

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.

“I told you not to hop on that Harley,” the biker said smugly. I would have hated his flat daiquiri-drinking ass but I was too busy pretending the burn didn’t hurt, which was almost impossible because it was seriously the most painful injury this side of having Spanish inquisitors pour molten lead down your anal cavity. At the time it was all I could do to run to the restroom so I could scream and sob in relative solitude. Soon my lower shin blossomed with enough blisters and blood and general redness to merit amputation, if you ask me, but according to a bunch of idiot off-duty doctors in leather chaps, all I needed was an ice pack and more margaritas.

I had to fly to Berlin two days later and I completely forgot about my whole pants-only policy due to this major flesh-eating leprosy of a burn on my leg. The last thing I needed was friction on it, so I just sprang off to work in my skirt like I had no idea I was inviting Murphy’s Law to come shit on my head.

Once there I realized the plane home was bound to crash. How could it not? Here I was in a uniform
skirt
, breaking my own rule about being careful to make a benign corpse in the event of a crash so as not to attract media photographers, and I had to deal with the knowledge on the entire crew-bus ride back to the Berlin airport, that the cosmic crap shooter was gonna let the ball land on my number now that I was unprepared.

The plane, of course, was scheduled to be full. I don’t know about you, but that’s half my panic right there. I just want some privacy when I die. My father, as far as I know, died alone in an efficiency apartment across the street from the Los Angeles airport, where he’d moved after my mother left him and took us with her to San Diego. He sold used cars in a lot next to the tarmac, and I heard he’d been dating a stewardess. A nice old stewardess.

I hope that is true. I hope he was not totally alone when his heart gave out, because he did not die right away. His neighbors told us they could hear him crying, and I am guessing it was fear, because he must have known what was happening, and I’m hoping he had a nice old stewardess with him to hold his hand to help him face the fear. They are good at that. They hold my hand all the time.

They’re used to it, as there are plenty of us flight attendants who are nervous to fly, especially these days, what with 9/11 sucking all the fun out of everything. I know one who won’t take off without her jar of lucky plums right there with her in her jump seat, so it was nothing when I confessed to them my fear the plane was bound to crash because I forgot to wear pants. They didn’t ridicule me as you might expect; instead they just eyed me levelly, drew the curtain across the back cross aisle, and one of them traded her pants for my skirt right there.

They remind me of mothers, which makes sense, because when I applied for this job one of them advised me the best way to get hired was to fake every characteristic of a codependent. “You gotta know the right way to take the blame for everything and apologize,” she said. So sometimes I wonder if my own mother might have made a good flight attendant if her propensity for designing missiles hadn’t panned out. I was always falling, it seemed, and my mother was always catching me, or she tried to, until the day came when she couldn’t anymore. That’s what parents do. They catch their kids when they fall.

Or they try to. And now I wish I could keep from thinking about this, because it makes the images of the parents looking for their children in lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks even more unbearable. All those flyers they passed out, juxtaposed with the footage of the planes impacting the towers, then the towers burning and the people in them at first waving for rescue and then abandoning hope and falling. Falling. Their skirts billowing, their suit jackets flapping. A few were holding hands. Falling. I hope the parents didn’t look too closely at the news footage. I hope they didn’t recognize a dress or a shirt or something, recognize their child falling, falling like tears down the face of a great structure stripped of its might. As I watched them fall I wanted to catch them. I don’t think there’s a flight attendant alive who saw that and didn’t long to cup each one of those people in her hands and keep them safe. But all I could do was watch. I couldn’t do a thing to save them and, Christ, I am so sorry for that.

I
T’S A SHAME
I am going to hell, because I think heaven can use someone like me. Heaven can definitely do with a little lightening up, I say. But, according to the pallid people in long sleeves who handed out pamphlets on the beach where I grew up, hell is where I’m headed.

I swear, I was just following my mother. She’d position herself in front of me with her arm out like a traffic cop every time the religious-pamphlet people came toward us. “Stay back,” she’d hiss, “this is
my daughter
.”

She announced that last part like it was some kind of universal call for propriety, and it worked. They stayed back, their pamphlets quivering in their pasty palms. But often they hollered at us as we passed: “You’re both going straight to hell. Did you know that?”

I didn’t think it was very fair that I should have to go to hell, too, but this was my
mother
here, and I couldn’t go taking pamphlets from people she just finished hissing at. From the little I knew about hell, it sounded super uncomfortable. To avoid going there, I certainly would have accepted a pamphlet—even after the awful
Roe v. Wade
incident in Washington, D.C., the year before, when I accidentally accepted a pamphlet advocating legal abortions. My father snatched it out of my hand and slapped the shit out of me with it right there on the steps to the Lincoln Memorial.

I didn’t think that was very fair, either. I did not even know what an abortion was, so of course I had to look it up when I got home. The only definition our dictionary offered was “of or pertaining to the act of stopping suddenly” or something like that. So I wondered why I got the crap slapped out of me because of a paper promoting the act of stopping suddenly, because what the hell is wrong with stopping suddenly? My own mother had done it in the car earlier that day. I practically still had a bruise from that braking-mom maneuver of hers in which she slung her arm out and slammed it against me in order to keep my unseatbelted ass from embedding itself into the dashboard. So I figured I learned a new word if nothing else, and then I got the crap kicked out of me all over again when my father found out I’d been telling people my mother had an abortion in the car.

Still nobody explained to me what was so bad about abortions. I had to find out for myself at the county fair, where an antiabortion group rented a booth and displayed a succession of plastic pink fetuses. They were arranged in ascending order according to age and size, and a fetus at four weeks looked like a pollywog to me, and I wondered why anyone would want one inside them.

My Life Sciences teacher had taught us about tapeworms the week before, and I wanted to know the difference between a fetus and a tapeworm. I mean, they both feed off you, don’t they? And we kill tapeworms, don’t we? In fact, that was the beginning of my tapeworm phobia, and I was pretty sure I even had a tapeworm living in me right then, as I always affected the symptoms of the disease of the week from my Life Sciences class. Earlier my teacher had taught us about arteriosclerosis and held up a big picture of a bisected clogged artery and told us the coroner could take this dead man’s veins and snap them in half like raw spaghetti. After that I went a whole week without eating my customary truckload of Halloween candy for breakfast before someone finally informed me that candy doesn’t contain a lot of cholesterol.

But tapeworms—now
that’s
a whole different story. I was in the process of wondering if tapeworms were such bad things after all, since I was such a failure at being a bulimic. (I swear, you had to get up from the table right after you ate every single time in order to have a successful hurling. Otherwise, your stomach, which is your enemy, went on and digested everything.) I just couldn’t muster the commitment it took, so it seemed to me a tapeworm was the ideal solution. All you had to do was sit there and let it leach up all your vitamins and minerals, and before you know it you’re emaciated and on the cover of
Cosmopolitan
.

So I asked the man at the booth to explain the difference between a fetus and a tapeworm, and he told me people who have tapeworms go to the doctor, and people who have abortions go to hell. He was about to hand me a pamphlet when my mother jumped in and did the braking-mom maneuver right there, and we weren’t even in a car. “Stay back,” she hissed at the man, “this is
my daughter
.”

So of course I was really embarrassed, because there I was, having been put to a sudden stop, which means my mother just gave me an abortion right there in front of the antiabortion guy. And here I was hell-bound because of it. I felt really bad about it until my mother told me what she always told me when I was afraid of going to hell. “Jesus Christ, Hollis,” she said, “what bigger hell is there than a heaven full of people like that?”