Confessions of a Recovering Slut (20 page)

This is all pretty pathetic considering I used to actually live with a maid, which means I wasted a good chance to learn something. I was seventeen and had moved to New Orleans on a whim and ended up rooming with my hotel’s maid when I ran low on money. Her name was Shirley, and she kept her afro in a scarf during work hours, but at night she shook it loose like a daffodil. She’d lived in New Orleans for years but had never been to Bourbon Street, so I took her to Gunga Din’s one night, where the motley female impersonators entertained the audience in their ripped fishnets and gave detailed descriptions of their upcoming sex-change operations. We sat in the middle of it all and laughed.

After that Shirley refused to charge me rent, which was a good thing since I’d just lost my job waiting tables at the Gazebo in the French Quarter. I don’t know what I would have done if not for Shirley. She was twenty-six and kept her head above water by cleaning toilets at a low-end hotel, and she wouldn’t have taken my money even if I had it. I was a slob back then, too, and Shirley would occasionally peek her head in my door, exclaiming, “What a great mess.”

Finally the day came when it was time to leave for home and finish high school. My mother sent me a ticket, and Shirley dispatched her grudging boyfriend to drive me to the airport in his stolen car with the steering shaft ripped open. Before leaving, I stood with Shirley in front of the house she’d shared with me, hugged her goodbye and told her I’d write. “You ain’t gonna write,” she laughed, but I insisted I would. She looked at me seriously then, her hair glistening abalone in the sunlight. “You ain’t gonna write,” she repeated, “but that’s okay.”

I didn’t write. I was seventeen and hadn’t yet learned what a waste it is to let good people fall from your life like petals from a fragile rose. I wish I’d written Shirley. I wish I could take her hand right now and lead her into my world, show her the great mess that is my fife at the moment, so we could sit in the middle of it all and laugh again.

T
HANK GOD FOR GAY MEN
,
otherwise the burden would fall fully on us women to gratify the insatiable male need for sweaty buffalo sex, and I personally don’t have the time anymore. I mean it’s not like I’m still in college, which was back before all the really good-looking guys my age figured out they were gay. I was immersed in my pastime of being a blazing four-star slut—or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what I was, because it’s all a fog and I’m basing this on the rumors I spread about myself. But still, if classmates saw me today they’d be damn disappointed. “What
happened
to you?” they’d ask, and in response I’d have to wave them away from the corner where I’d probably be crouching with dried cake batter in my hair or something. “Go away,” I’d groan. “I’m
tired
.”

Then they’d go away but their question wouldn’t. What
happened
to me? How did my appetites get all turned around? I’d chalk it up to oncoming maturity, but Grant is older than me and his sex life runs at a constant hummingbird pace. I get exhausted just hearing him talk. And Lary, who’s older than both of us, has women situated all over the world, the latest being a Bulgarian blackjack dealer he occasionally hooks up with in the Bahamas. Her accent is really heavy, so he doesn’t always understand her, but he’s almost certain that soon after they met he heard her tell him, “Fuck me until my ears bleed,” which did much to endear his feelings for her.

“How romantic,” I tell him over the phone. He’s in Vail for the holidays, humping who knows what all. “By the way,” I add, “your cat is dead.”

If I continue at this tempo I figure it’s just a matter of time before I turn into one of those drunken old cupcakes who hurl themselves at bartenders while they’re working because bartenders are trapped back there like zoo specimens, only worse because they’re obligated to talk to you in order to get tips. So I better snap out of this, because my theory is that it all evens out in the end. Like you might think you have no sex drive now, but in fact it’s always there, building up day after day, and unless you keep your engine oiled you’re gonna end up hit by this big rocket of horniness when you’re sixty or something, and then you’ll have no choice but to troll your daughter’s boyfriends like those lecherous old acid vats you see on daytime talk shows.

I don’t want to be like that, a horny old hardened hunk of lard asking neighborhood high school boys to help me with hard-to-reach zippers and such.
Yuk
. But that rocket can’t help but accumulate if this keeps up, because it never fails that when my head hits the pillow at night I think to myself, “Damn, I forgot to have acrobatic sex with someone today. Better do it tomorrow.” Then tomorrow comes and I waste it feeding my friends’ pets while
they’re
off having sex somewhere exotic. It’s not even like I want to hear about it when they come home all flushed and eager to brag. I just wave them away. “If you need me I’ll be in the corner with a bowl of cake batter,” I say. Really, what happened to me?

It would be cool if I could talk to my mother about this, because until she died I thought she was the epitome of sexual needlessness. She was a Birkenstock-wearing businesswoman who slept in a separate room from my father for half a decade before divorcing him after twenty-five years of marriage, and she seemed completely happy just to have her life to herself for once; her trailer near the beach in southern California, her kids in college, her occasional Friday excursions to Tijuana with her coworkers. Practically manless, she seemed so content to me. Then years later I was rifling through her effects and found a collection of rough drafts for a personal ad she’d placed in the paper. “Do you like walking barefoot in the grass? Holding hands under a tree? Watching the sunset from a hillside?” they read. The appeals were so achingly sweet, and dripping with romance and longing I’d never known her to feel.

So I guess she got hit by a different kind of rocket, and here I’d never even seen her go on a date, which makes me worry that no one responded to her ad. But I can’t bear to leave it at that. I have to hope that maybe someone did respond, and she kept it secret from us, and she got to wiggle her toes in a meadow while holding his hand after all. I have to hope that she found what she was looking for, even fleetingly, and that she didn’t spend a single second sitting around alone, clutching an unanswered personal ad, asking herself, “What
happened
to me?”

I
F YOU WERE A CONVICTED
child-molesting masturbator, I suppose you would need to live somewhere, I was just hoping it wouldn’t be on my actual damn street. I was hoping, in my small world, all convicted child molesters could live in prison, maybe, perhaps bricked up inside a jailhouse toilet or something, not
four blocks away
from my front door. That’s practically ejaculation distance, according to Grant. Lary says I should shoot the pervert in the head and drag his body onto my property to feign an intrusion, but that’s Lary’s answer to everything. He is always wanting to shoot people and drag their bodies onto his property.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just lure them inside, then shoot them?” I ask.

“I’m not alluring,” he answers.

Besides, Lary wants to leave a big blood trail for the police to ignore. Ever since Lary shot at that burglar escaping down the street years ago, and the police told him not to miss next time, he has been itching to test the boundaries of their complacence. In fact, he’s been looking into the Georgia Bureau of Investigation sex-offender web page himself lately to see if any perverts are living on his own street within comfortable dragging distance, and I’m sure there are. But this is all sport to Lary, as he doesn’t have a kid.

I, on the other hand (and fantastically enough), do. I thought the severed human head in a plastic sack the police found on my street was bad enough. But no, there are also the arsonist drug dealers, the whores (alive and dead), the flying bullets, and now this child molester. These facts aren’t
related
to each other in any way; I just wanted to illustrate that it’s hard to shake the portensions you feel when you become a parent while living in a neighborhood littered with body parts
and
perverts.

Surprisingly, though, I’ve weathered it all, plus the occasional homeless crack addict knocking on my door for a handout, but still I worried almost every day that a good rain would uncover the rest of the severed head’s body parts somewhere within crawling distance of my kid, and I discovered that my bedroom had a boarded up fireplace within the wall, as well, which is a good place to conceal a corpse if you ask me, so I kept imagining I saw seepage through the plaster.

Today there are still plenty of homeless people around, but at least the crack factor has been dissipated a little, though 4
A.M.
is still crack-whore happy hour here. I know this because once I drove Milly to Children’s Hospital in the middle of the night due to a fever I thought was hot as lava, and our neighborhood was boiling with whores at this time, along with addicts and dealers and other dregs of the trade. And then there is that child molester.

Lary has driven by his house a few times. So have Grant and Daniel, if for no other reason than it’s hard not to when you’re coming to visit me. They’re ready to pounce, they say, in case they catch the guy masturbating on a school bus or whatever. At this point, though, all they can do is watch, but at least watching is something.

In the meantime I’m so overcome with a general fear that I can do nothing but simply lie beside my sleeping girl and beg for forgiveness, because often I anguish over the groundless notion that there’s some kind of karmic roll-over policy, and that Milly will be made to suffer for my past apathies. And God knows I should have been a better person. I should have been a better daughter, sister, friend, whatever. I should have not stolen milk money from my first-grade classmates, I should have not taunted the neighborhood senile lady when I was ten, I should have—oh, God—I should have not deserted my father the night he died. If I had only done or not done these things, maybe we wouldn’t be living down the street from a convicted child-molesting masturbator right now, I would not be worrying about my little toddly woddly girl and how to keep her from the frosty, random fingers of evil that wrest up from the earth and lurk there, ready to rip your heart out from your ribs when, hey, they don’t have to go to the trouble after all. Because there your heart is, all bundled up and teetering around
outside
of you, all big-eyed and vanilla-smelling and dough-bellied, with tiny ears like intricate seashells you could stare at all day. There your heart is, smiling and laughing and waving at you from a distance, ready to be plucked like a little button mushroom. All you can do is watch, but at least watching is something.

G
IANT MICHAEL IS IMPLEMENTING
a no-idiot policy at the Vortex and I seriously don’t know how he gets away with it. For one, the Vortex is a goddam bar. I myself have been an idiot in there many a time, the most recent being that time when he first introduced me to the perfect mojito, and then later Red Bull and vodka, which is like liquid crack if you ask me. Why would a friend do that to you? I actually ended up at a fetish nightclub, the Chamber, that night. Here I’d been living in Atlanta for almost the entire life of an Olsen twin, and I had managed to avoid the Chamber all that time. Then that night after being an idiot at the Vortex, I end up at the Chamber in my white work blouse watching burlesque and so wired on Red Bull I could probably set off car alarms across the street if I was concentrating (which I wasn’t). “If you discriminated against idiots,” I tell Giant Michael, “you’d hardly have any business.”

“On behalf of my customers, I’m offended by that,” he says, which makes me laugh, because Giant Michael isn’t offended by anything. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Lary and I used to hang out at the original Vortex on West Peachtree a hundred years ago, and we would make it our mission to offend everyone around us, and since the place was so small and Michael is so giant, he was always around us. “Juice me up, booze jockey,” I’d demand, thrusting my empty glass at him. He’s totally like emotional marble. He’s one of my oldest friends and the closest I’ve ever seen him get to actual angry was today with this whole anti-idiot campaign. He was damn near riled up, blaming everything on the yuppie onslaught of Midtown due to the recent outbreak of condo complexes all around. To Michael’s credit, Midtown really does look like a beehive lately, but that’s something any normal restaurant owner would be ecstatic about. Not Giant Michael. When I walked in, he was perusing a list of new T-shirt slogans he recently approved for his waitstaff. Among them are: “Your Village Called. Their Idiot Is Missing” and “Don’t Make Me Throw You Outta Here.”

“We just got a letter from a guy who brought his kids in here and told us he was outraged by the porn we have pinned to the walls,” he exclaims with a sweep of his arm. “Porn? Do you see any porn in here?”

Well, I personally wouldn’t classify it as porn, but among the immense clutter of vintage signage, toys, motorcycle parts, skeletons, and other oddities attached to the ceiling and walls, there is an autographed picture or two of strippers with pasties on their tits. “That’s not porn,” he insists, almost riling up again. In the foyer he has just, that day, mounted a collection of framed commandments for customers to follow, basically banning “tight asses, moochers, whiners, oblivious parents, idiots, and drunken idiots” from the premises.

“Aren’t you afraid of pissing people off?” I ask.

“What are they gonna do? Come up to me and tell me they’re an idiot and they resent the discrimination?” he says, and I have to think about that, because, though I wouldn’t want to represent all of idiotkind, I am nonetheless sensitive to my idiot side. I must like to take it out for walks occasionally, because I have done some pretty stupid things, believe me, many of them in bars. I tell them all to Michael, like how, in college during my fake I.D. stage, I was kinda famous for getting drunk and passing out in restaurant bathroom stalls.