Confessions of a Recovering Slut (25 page)

Just ask the fake charity worker who collects money through car windows on a street corner near our house. She thrusts a white bucket with a bogus aid-organization logo on it through your window, and she’s figured out that if she appears to have a handicap, people can be a lot more forthcoming with the fork-outs. I’ve noticed that over the past few months she’s perfected an entire fake sign language, one she supplements by moving her lips in an exaggerated way without making any actual noise. So people assume she’s deaf and dole out the green. I never give her any money myself because I’ve seen her walk straight to the crack house with her bucket of coins, turning to wave at people who
call her name
, but other than that her new act is impressive.

There is another guy in our neighborhood who begs door to door, claiming he’s a veteran who needs milk for his newborn. That’s a double whammy, and I guess he figures he needs a double whammy in this neighborhood because we are not exactly a bunch of PTA parents here. I myself never trusted this man because newborns don’t drink cow’s milk, but Lary—crusty Lary, who once roared at me for fifteen solid minutes because I gave a handout to a homeless man in exchange for a free newspaper—helped him out anyway. A few days later he saw the same man loitering in front of the crack house around the corner, and the man tried to explain his presence there by saying he was ministering to sinners, but from Lary’s point of view the man didn’t appear to be ministering, he appeared to be participating, and Lary told him if he ever knocked on our doors again he would rip his heart out through his rib cage.

Thus hardened, I’ve been confining my acts of goodwill to cutting small checks to big corporate charities lately—except for the occasional bag of pecans the neighborhood boys sell. I hate pecans, but I usually buy a bag anyway because it reminds me of when I was a kid and had to sell cupcakes door to door to earn money. I remember a fat lady named Mrs. Freedle who lived up the street from us and who always bought half a tray. Always. That was a slam dunk fortune for us, and she’d let us hang out and pet all her cats, too, who were really fat as well. We used to laugh about it afterward, like how we could always count on her to cough over the money on account of her cravings for sweets.

But one day we knocked on her door and her grown daughter answered and told us Mrs. Freedle was in the hospital due to her really bad diabetes, which is a disease that prohibited her from eating sugar, she told us. So it turned out Mrs. Freedle never even ate our cupcakes after all, she was just buying them to promote our enterprise. After that I regretted having judged her by her appearance, figuring she was feasting on our cupcakes when really she was feeding them to her cats. When she came back from the hospital, she still paid for the cupcakes but insisted we give them away to someone who appeared to be hungry. So I always think of her when I pay the boys for a bag of pecans. “Give them to someone who looks hungry,” I say.

G
RANT STILL SAYS I SHOULD
fuck a fat black man. Today, for some reason, Grant once again thinks fucking a fat black man will solve everyone’s woes, and I didn’t even know I had woes. I thought I had everything kind of quasi-handled, so why would I need a man in my life?

“I didn’t say you need a man in your life,” says Grant, “I said you need a man in
you
.”

It’s the day after Grant’s 109th birthday, or so he says, and he thinks that makes him sage enough to dole out guidance. “You’re a fine one to give advice,” I tell him. “You’ve been gay for six entire years and last weekend was your first appearance at Gay Pride.”

I’ve even been to Gay Pride more often than Grant. Trapped in my heteroness, Gay Pride is like a droolfest for me with all its beautiful men, all these awesome physical morsels dancing about like chew toys on the end of a string. I usually go with Daniel and his brother Darell, who has recently gotten himself immensely buff—even his head is more muscular now. Leave it to a gay man to figure out how to improve muscle definition in his
forehead
. Maybe it’s all that oral sex.

Daniel’s boyfriend Mitch has nicknamed Darell “Slut,” and Darell doesn’t seem to mind. I wish everyone was that unfazed by the word. When I was thirteen, I hung out for a time with a genuine slut named Mary, who had an extra-long thumbnail she said she could use to steal extra cocaine when the mirror was passed to her. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, so she illustrated by bringing the inside of her thumbnail to her nostril and sniffing mightily. I still didn’t understand, but pretended I did.

Mary lived a few blocks away from me, and before my friends and I got to know her we knew
of
her. Everybody did. She was pleasant but sloppy looking, with a very developed body for a fourteen-year-old. She could have passed for eighteen, which evidently she did, because my father knew her from the neighborhood bar where he spent his days. My father told us that she picked up men at the bar and had sex with them in their cars in the parking lot.

“She’s a slut,” he’d say. Why my father expressed contempt, rather than concern, for a fourteen-year-old girl who fucked his friends in the parking lot of a bar escapes me.

Later, after my friends and I got to know Mary, she introduced me to Marlboro 100s (as opposed to the Marlboro regulars I’d been stealing from my father since I was nine) and Neil Young music. She was the first girl I met who was passionate about a particular music even though the singer, as she put it, “is so fucking ugly.” Up until that point I don’t think I knew ugly people could be talented.

Mary normally acted very self-assured and knowledgeable, but she was only fourteen after all, and we were even younger than her, so it was only a matter of time until her youth reared itself, her toughness wore off, and she began to goof around. Once, Mary peddled me around town on the handlebars of my bicycle. She wore a safari hat and I waved a tennis racket in the air, and we sang “Old MacDonald” at the top of our lungs. It was testimony to our immaturity that we thought this was the most fun to be had this side of piloting your own Apollo moon buggy, and we laughed so hard we almost turned our tonsils inside out.

As we rode toward my house, I asked Mary to slow down because I needed to use the bathroom. She asked to come inside, and, though it was the middle of the day and my father should have been at the bar, I could nonetheless see his car in the driveway, which meant he was home instead. I had to tell Mary she wasn’t allowed in my house, and asked her to wait for me outside on the sidewalk. “My father says you’re a slut,” I told her.

For some reason I didn’t think she’d be hurt by that, I thought she’d think it was cool. But Mary was very hurt by it; there was nothing I could say to make her feel better. She wouldn’t wait for me, and stormed away, confused and tearful.

She never spoke to me again, but years later I heard she got herself a girlfriend. “Who would’ve thought that trashy Mary was really a lesbian?” laughed some of the codgers who hung out at the bar with my father. Today, when I go to Gay Pride, I see a lot of women who could be her, and they seem happy. But to this day I feel sorry for what I said to my slut friend Mary, and especially ashamed for asking her to wait for me outside.

C
ALL ME A PUSSY
,
but dead children freak me out. First there was the one who was eighteen and I guess you can argue he wasn’t a child, but eighteen is pretty damn young to be beaten to death with a flashlight.

And I guess you can argue, as many did, that he really wasn’t beaten to death with a flashlight. Many argue that he would have died anyway, without the beating, on account of the drugs in his system, but I am of the mind that the beating didn’t help at all.

And so were a lot of my neighbors, who gathered together and set fire to the house a few doors down from mine, as setting fire to people’s houses seems to be the neighborly way of settling disputes in my neighborhood. The house was owned by the man blamed for the boy’s death. He is not the man who gave the boy the drugs or even the person who beat him with a flashlight, but he is the man who called the police when the boy was trespassing on his property. The police in turn chased the boy, tackled him, and then the said beating commenced. Coincidentally or not, the boy died right after that.

So I guess you could argue, as many did, that that dead kid doesn’t count, but that was my first dead kid and my first burned-down house since I’d moved into Capitol View a few months prior, so I personally counted him.

Then there was the next boy, who was in his early teens and you cannot possibly argue that he wasn’t a kid. He was shot and killed by yet another kid for cheating at dice. This happened right across the street from the house that burned, and should not be confused with the incident in which a two-year-old was shot in the parking lot of an apartment complex nearby. That bullet passed through that girl’s leg and killed her grandmother, who was holding her at the time. The girl and her grandmother were unintended targets (someone cheating at dice was the target) whereas in the cheating-at-dice case that happened a few doors down from mine, that target was reached.

There would be more burned houses and more dead children, like the teenager who was killed twelve days after my own child was born, shot at a MARTA stop by, police speculated, a jealous boyfriend. And let’s not forget the twelve-year-old who was shot in the chest that Halloween for throwing eggs in Phoenix Park, which was more in Lary’s neighborhood than mine, but Lary lives just three minutes away from me. Lary, though, is not all that freaked out by dead children, even that newborn that was found in a driveway up the way from him. Someone had bashed its head in, tied it up in a plastic sack, and tossed it onto a driveway.

“All I know is I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Lary swore.

He had come to my place to give me tips on how to bulletproof Milly’s room, a precaution I was starting to suspect would not matter. First, all I had in terms of materials were cookie sheets and cake pans, and Lary said they were not strong enough to stop a bullet, “but it would probably slow it down,” he said in a manner as close to comfortingly as his crusty barnacle ass could muster. But then he had to ruin that, even, by telling me a bullet doesn’t need a window to get inside.

“It could pass right through the wall,” he insisted. “Especially this wall,” he added, knocking on the new drywall that enclosed the former porch that now made up the nursery. So at that we went outside to assess any possible trajectories, especially from Crack Corner at the north end of the street, which is where a preponderance of the shootings had occurred. In the end we determined that the safest place for her bed was in front of the bureau right next to my own bed. That way, if a bullet passed through the wall to reach her it would also have to pass through my underwear drawer as well, which contained a bunch of bras with so much padding that a skydiver with a faulty parachute could land on them and live. There, I thought, it’s the best I could do.

But then I thought again. I read that the mother whose son was killed in the park near Lary had heard the shot the instant it happened. She ran to her son and reached him in time to hold his hand as he died. I’m sure she did the best she could have in the years that led up to that point, and I’m sure she tried hard to change whatever circumstances left her to live with her child in a place where kids were commonly killed; those changes just didn’t happen fast enough is all.

So I put the cake pans in the windows and was mindful of trajectory patterns from the corner where the other kids had been killed, but I also kept thinking about the mother who held her boy’s hand as he died, and how her changes didn’t happen fast enough. So I decided to start making some changes of my own, starting with a new mortgage lender, and you’d be surprised at how quick you can be when you’re trying to outrun a bullet on its way to an unintended target.

I
’M CURLED UP UNDER MY DESK AGAIN;
snarly-haired, gibbering, swatting at imaginary insects. I don’t even know what’s wrong. Maybe it’s about my job, for which I wear a uniform. I wear a uniform and a nametag and an apron. Sometimes I’m self-conscious about that. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll always be an apron-wearing, nametag-sporting bovine with hands all rough from lugging stuff. And then to make it worse I’ll get out my mental crystal ball and see myself at sixty, upper arms flapping like two turkey wattles, a face like a frying pan, and the nametag still there, the
apron
still there, setting quite a nice example for my daughter.

Jesus God, just ignore me. I’ll get over it. I’m operating at optimum stress capacity is all. I just put another house under contract, with a seemingly elephantine mortgage, and I’m petrified, but I’ve got Milly to think about. I didn’t go through this when I bought the house I presently occupy, because I paid maybe twenty dollars for this place. I remember thinking I could afford the mortgage even if I became confined to a wheelchair with a body like a ball of melted wax, working the controls with my tongue. What do I have to lose? I thought, and signed the papers.

Right beforehand I remember I’d gone to the New Orleans Jazz Festival, where I had occasion to dance on stage in my underwear and hang out for a time with two young heroin addicts, Ryan and Billy, who were on the faltering road to recovery. Ryan had been my waiter one morning and then greeted me later that day on the street, walking his bicycle beside me. “You’re alone again,” he said. “We’ll fix that.”

Soon we arrived at the place of his friend Billy, who had tattooed eyelids and was in the process of getting thrown out of his apartment. As we waited outside for Billy to gather his things, Ryan showed me the track marks on his arms, which were faint because it had been nine months since he’d shot up. “What drugs do you do?” he asked.

“None,” I replied.

“Lucky you,” he said, and meant it.

Billy emerged and was very gracious. “I’m sorry you have to see me like this,” he said, “but it’s very nice to meet you.” Everything he owned fit on the seat of his bike, which he walked beside Ryan and I. Billy had just been evicted at gunpoint because his roommate caught him with drugs in the apartment. “Did you do the drugs?” Ryan asked him.