Confessions of a Recovering Slut (24 page)

“It’s
perfect
,” Grant shrieked when Lary tried it on, and I must say I agreed, but Lary decided against it, saying he didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as an escaped convict. That surprised me, because I’d have thought he would have loved that tag. I swear, you think you know people.

I remember I tagged my brother-in-law, Eddie, for a loser the second I was sober enough to get a good look at him. That impression lasted for about eight years, roughly, even though he’d been cleaned up and productive for most of that time. He quit smoking, even, and had pretty much done just about everything else to wipe away the last remnants of dirt-clod to reveal the diamond underneath, but when I looked at him I still kept seeing the troubled person I’d tagged him as years ago, whereas my sister never saw that. She always saw the diamond inside.

Before they settled in Dayton, when Eddie had asked her to move with him from her familiar San Diego to the middle of the Arizona desert to build a spiritual retreat, my sister hardly hesitated. He called it Angel Ranch, and he had dreams of people coming in droves to commune with nature and meditate. When I heard their plans I laughed so hard I thought I’d shoot champagne out my nose. “Jesus God, are they gonna fall on their asses or what?” I snorted.

But damn if Eddie didn’t build that ranch, a series of rustic cabins surrounding a courtyard, with his bare hands. He dug a manmade pond, powered the entire compound with solar energy, and created a copper-accented sculpture garden on the property. I visited them there on occasion, and at sunset the statues sparkled against the barren desert ground from which they sprang, and if I were a spiritual person I might have meditated, but I was not.

Though a few droves came to commune with nature after all, Eddie’s dream didn’t last. Those two lost everything, even the Indian blankets on the bunks in the cabins surrounding the courtyard. They had to leave it all behind and drive away with hardly more than what their car could carry, passing under the decorative archway Eddie had carved as a gateway to the property. Eddie didn’t look back, but if he did he would have seen the copper-accented sculpture garden shimmering in the distance, glowing like a diamond in a sea of dirt clods, and I think that’s when I finally started to take my tag off of him.

But others remain. As of today, though, I will probably stop breaking into Lary’s house, and not just because he has finally given me a key, but because I’ve decided Lary simply is who he is and there’s no need to look further. “I can’t believe all I had to do to keep from getting tagged,” Lary said in the lobby that morning, “was sleep with a gay man.”

M
EXICO, I BELIEVE
,
is a bad place to be when you are half dead, and Bill is not even half dead. “I’m all the way dead,” he croaks.

He is not in Mexico either, not yet. But he is close. We both are. We’re in San Diego. I came here to visit Bill in the hospital, but since, according to Bill, they did what they could to kill him there, he checked his own lymphoma ass out before I got here, and after a bunch of panicked phone calls I found him in a hotel next to a freeway that leads to El Centro. When we used to live here with my mother, my little sister and I once took this freeway to drive to Mexicali, where we boarded a train to Mazatlan and partied like people who had their entire lives before them.

Today Bill has his entire life before him, there just might not be much of it left is all. He looks about as bad as I expected he would, not any worse, which is good. He is not in good spirits, but he’ll pretend he is, which is also good, because that means he has resolve. As I’m sure you can tell, I am not new to this.

I am not new to Mexico either. My mother checked into a Mexican cancer clinic as a last resort fourteen years ago, and to this day I can take you straight there. I’m proud of this because, believe me, that place is hard to navigate. You have to cross the border into Tijuana and follow the road signs to Rosarito Beach, but then you break left onto an obscure road that traverses a ravine, at the bottom of which are dozens of rusty mutilated cars with corpses probably decades old still trapped inside, then you take another left onto the second dirt road past the abandoned gateway to a once-ambitious but-never-built shopping mall, and right there, at the bottom of a cul-de-sac (if you can call it a cul-de-sac, because it’s really just a road that ended), is a big mirrored building where, for five hundred dollars a day, Haiti-trained doctors administer alternative cancer treatments not approved in the United States.

That place is full of people full of hope. If they don’t have that they might as well save their money and die with their pants around their ankles like Elvis. All except Bill, though, who is hopeless and always has been. Hope is not what keeps him alive. His crusty cantankerousness keeps him alive. His complaining about life keeps him alive.

“I’m all the way dead,” he complains again, hugging me but barely, he is so weak. He’s lying flat on his back, fully clothed in a freshly made bed. From what I hear he actually paid in advance for this room, whereas he paid the hospital for his thirty-day stay with a check, most likely from some phantom bank in Nicaragua, where he’s been living as a fugitive from mediocrity for the last few years.

“You crusty old bucket of barnacles, you’ve been threatening to die for damn decades. I ain’t fallin’ for it this time,” I tell him, and I think I mean it. Bill probably is not done yet, even though he is on his way to the clinic in Mexico on the road that ended. That place finished my mother, but that’s only because it was her last resort. Bill is far from his last resort. He can barely sit up, but his eyes are still clear and blue, even larger now because the rest of him has shrunk. He has no hope, mind you, but he has
plans
.

“In the hospital I bled to death a couple of times,” he’s telling me in normal tones, as if he were talking about a toilet overflow at the
pensione
he owns with my sister in Granada, “then I had a massive heart attack, which sucked. Those are pretty painful, you know. . . . ”

The problem, he continues, is not even the lymphoma. It’s his heart, which evidently is too weak to sustain a full blast of chemotherapy. So he is on his way to the Tijuana clinic to strengthen it so he can come back and live through conventional medicine. I suppose I’ll go with him, even though nothing scares me more than getting stuck in Mexico with a dead relative, and Bill is not really my relative, even though he’s family. He was my mother’s best friend when her life was leaving her like air from an old beach ball. He found that mirrored clinic at the end of the Mexican road, and he drove my mother’s used VW van down there with me next to him and my mother lying flat on her back in the bed of the van, too weak to sit up. Bill pointed out the landmarks as he went.

“You’re gonna need to know this,” he said. Mexico is famous for bad roads and bad road signage. I probably still have college friends stuck down there who, over a decade later, have not found their way back. “At the orange trailer you take a left, got that?” Bill continued. “Look for the gravel driveway with the big painted plaster Virgin Mary at the end. . . . ”

Thus I memorized the path to the place on the road that ended. Bill was right. I was gonna need to know this.

H
ONNIE AND TODD SOLD THEIR HOUSE
.
Or I should say Grant sold their house. It took a showman like Grant to move that property once all the real-estate agents in the neighborhood put the bad juju on it. It’s funny that the damn crack house across the street sold in a week, but it took months for Honnie and Todd’s house to sell, even though it was all painted and polished with potted plants on the porch and all the smoke damage in the basement relatively repaired.

The drug dealer next door, he is gone, too. He bashed all their windows in again, every single one, all the new windows they had replaced since the last time he bashed them all in. After that, though no one in the immediate vicinity who witnessed the act would file a formal report with the police, there was nonetheless such a show of support for Honnie and Todd by other neighbors that the police actually had to start at least appearing as if they were doing their job, especially since the mayor got involved and held a press conference right in Honnie’s living room.

The mayor is a shady son of a bitch himself, about a half a step ahead of being indicted for fraud on all kinds of counts, and let’s not forget the big controversy surrounding the Atlanta strip clubs, a number of which were claiming he extorted money from them to keep them in operation only to shut them down anyway. So maybe it’s because of this that he decided he needed some image enhancement. Whatever the reason, the mayor picked Honnie and Todd’s plight as a platform, and you should have seen that crack dealer’s face when the news vans pulled up and parked on his yard.

About a week later his house was raided by vice and they hauled his drug-dealing, dog-fighting ass off to jail along with his purple spandex-covered hellbitch of a girlfriend. It turns out they were living there on a low-income Section 8 allotment, which means the owner was receiving a government subsidy to supplement their rent. The owner of the house, of course, could not care less that his tenant was terrorizing the neighborhood, but the government is fairly averse to subsidizing drug dealers, or at least small-time drug dealers, and once the owner realized his monthly, taxpayer-funded lunch ticket was in jeopardy, he evicted their mean-hearted, arson asses onto the street.

The drug dealer and his girlfriend had to leave the neighborhood after they made bail, and they could not even wreak any farewell havoc, either, because all their drugs had been confiscated, so they had no product with which to barter collusion from the crack cronies, and without the crack cronies as ready witnesses to falsify police reports, he could no longer tell police he was threatened by anyone. This effectively took his biggest weapon away, which in turn neutralized his lesser weapons. So he left and took his passel of torn-up, dog-fought pit bulls with him.

Honnie’s family left next. We begged them to stay. Now that the drug dealer next door was gone, the neighborhood was almost nice. They even caught the cop killer Jamil Al-Amin. They found him hiding in a swamp down in Whitehall, Alabama, so it’s not like he’s lurking around with his assault rifle anymore, either. He’s in jail awaiting a capital murder case claiming, of course, that he was framed as part of a government conspiracy. But Honie and Todd had had enough of Capitol View. They wanted out, and who could blame them.

As soon as the last remnants of the drug dealer’s evicted belongings were sifted through and dispersed among the miscreants that remained behind, Honnie put a sign in her yard. Her house was the nicest house for sale in the neighborhood, and it should have sold in a nanosecond, but real-estate agents steered their customers away. Months went by before it fell to Grant to take over. Grant has twelve hundred titles up his ass: he’s a licensed social worker, a notary public, and a minister, among other things, and goddam if he doesn’t also have a real-estate license left over from about five hundred lives ago. He had about twelve minutes before that license expired, so he set to work and sold that house for them in a few weeks. He said if he can talk the pants off a straight man, he can talk someone into buying a fine house in a perfectly passable neighborhood now that the crack house and drug dealer are gone.

But he could not talk Honnie and Todd into staying. I hated to see them go. I really did. They had a yard sale soon beforehand, and I bought their vintage dinette set even though it would never fit into the tiny butler hutch I have for a dining room. They needed the money, though. Lord knows it’s expensive to put out fires and repair windows every five minutes. It’s expensive to be the examples the drug dealers are trying to set for what the rest of us in the neighborhood can expect if we try to resist them. It’s expensive to resist them anyway and fight for your right to live peacefully in your own home.

“It has taken its toll, believe me,” says Honnie. She handed me her brand new messenger bag I just bought for ten dollars, and it wasn’t until I got home I realized she had put inside it a dress of hers she had for sale, which I’d admired but couldn’t afford. I wish I had known she’d done that so I could have thanked her before she left. In fact, I wish I could have thanked her period. I wish we all could have thanked her and her family both.

O
UR CHRISTMAS TREE IS NAKED
from the waist down, which really shatters my confidence. It’s not that I care what the neighbors think, because all they see shining in our window is the tree’s glorious upper half, festooned in all our
outdoor
lights, no less. Grant insisted on that. No anemic little pin lights for him, because pin lights are for pussies. So our tree has lights as big as tortoise eggs, and bright enough to bleach your irises unless you squint. In fact, I’d advise against looking directly at our tree’s upper half at all unless it’s through a shaded windshield.

But the lower half, now that’s a different story. It started out decorated like the rest, but then we unleashed Milly, who took five minutes to pilfer every ornament she could reach. The ones I didn’t pull out of her mouth I pulled out from under her covers. They made a pretty pile in the middle of her mattress, all the colorful bulbs, like the hidden booty of a baby pirate. I can’t believe I almost let her keep them. I really did, but then I thought, what if they break? That would look pretty bad, right? My daughter sleeping on a bed of shattered glass.

We can’t have that. Think how it would look, me allowing my child to nap on a nest of broken ornaments. We can’t be busting me as a crappy mom in front of everybody like that. So I swept all the ornaments out of her reach, and as a consequence Milly shrieked so piercingly that lobsters in the middle of the ocean were probably signaled by her sound waves, but at least for the next five seconds or so I was certain I was exuding the appearance of a protective mother. At least there’s that, right? I mean, appearances are important.