Confessions of a Recovering Slut (29 page)

After he left, the lady apologized for wanting to keep the jacket, and even offered to help me find me another one that might look just as good, or maybe a white crocheted vest such as the one she just found, which was long and something Bea Arthur would have worn on
Maude
. But I was happy with the dress just as it was, and happy too that the matching jacket wasn’t wasted on someone who didn’t appreciate it, and that is when the lady saved my soul.

“I feel there’s a reason God gave us each a piece of a matching set today,” she began, “so I just have to ask, have you given your heart to Jesus?”

Before I go any further, let me just say that, when I was a kid, I used to be frightened by fervor. When we lived in Melbourne, Florida, my mother often threatened to forsake her atheism just so she could have me carted to a Christian boot camp called “The Seed,” where unruly kids were deposited for months at a stretch, during which time their surliness was somehow psychologically beaten out of them. Even the coolest of kids came out vapid faced with fervor. Even slutty Wendy, who had curly mermaid hair to her waist and used to wear her jeans so low and loose that you could practically see her pubes when she thrust her hand in her front pocket for a pack of cigarettes, even she came out with her hair cut off and her collar buttoned up.

That was a surprise, let me tell you. None of us thought Wendy would give up her surliness. It had us all petrified that The Seed had some special power that could suck all the fun out of people. Afterward, Wendy always sat alone at the front of the school bus, where the rest of us stared at her with the curiosity of aliens itching to probe a bovine. She tried to save a few souls, mine included, asking us if we’d given our hearts to Jesus. I said I had, which is kind of true, because when I was seven I’d been allowed to attend church with a friend, and I’d approached the podium when the preacher called forth sinners from the audience. I asked Jesus into my heart then, though I was unconvinced he’d hang around for long.

When I told Wendy that, she asked if I’d sit beside her, so I did. The whole time she tried to resave my soul, and I got the feeling it was less for my sake than for hers, like she was worried she’d be the only one on the bus going to heaven. After that I was a little less afraid of fervor, because I could see in Wendy’s eyes that I was mistaking fervor for something else. The lady at American Thrift had eyes like that, and I figured if saving my soul saved her from a few more moments of loneliness then I was happy to give it up for a bit.

God, was Grant pissed. “Where is that bitch?” he kept saying, like he was gonna chase her down and get her to give it back. I had to laugh. “You’re going to hell alone,” I taunted him, knowing full well that if anyone can make a heaven of hell, it’s Grant. He spotted the lady walking out the door, but I held him back and off she walked with my soul, just one piece of a matching set, snagged like a vintage jacket right out from under Grant’s nose.

I
THOUGHT BEGGING WAS
behind me. For example, there’s that particular panhandler who has staked out the freeway on-ramp where I used to live. He shuffles around, dragging tatters behind him and sporting a ragged cardboard sign that says, “Hungry. Homeless. Help Me. God Bless.” The words are scratched out weakly, like those you’d find on the underside of a coffin lid of somebody buried alive. In fact, the beggar very much reminds me of a mummy, not the kind preserved with meticulous ceremony, but the kind you find in peat bogs by accident thousands of years after they died there, snake bitten.

“He’s a superb specimen,” I say to myself in a scientist’s accent every time the beggar limps near to peer into my car window. His remaining teeth are the color of old mustard, his eyes are vacuous, his stature is bent, defeated, and his skin is stretched across his bones like dried hide. He truly looks like he’s rotting right before my eyes.

It’s a great act, and I’d fall for it if I hadn’t seen the other side of him. When a cop car pulls up, the cultivated deadness in the beggar’s demeanor disappears at once. In fact, he brightens like a birthday candle as he beats a hasty escape, darting between the cars with the agility of a basketball player. Oh, so that’s what this is, I realized when I first saw him do that, all this begging is just his
gig
.

Some people are good at it, I guess. Not me. I tried panhandling as a child, after accidentally hitting pay dirt one day while loitering at a department store with my sisters. Earlier that morning we’d discovered a mud pool inside a massive concrete pipe abandoned by city workers, and we’d played waist deep in it all day, and I suppose we looked so pathetic that a woman felt compelled to compensate us for it, bestowing a dollar in my palm like the touch of a wand.

This is
great
, I glowed, figuring I’d found my life’s vocation. So for the next few days I moped pitifully about in public places, projecting, in my mind, such a convincing image of sadness and deprivation that more money would surely fly at me from people’s wallets like foam from a can of shaken Shasta. I tried to exude the weight of the ages on my tiny shoulders, and audibly sighed so often I got dizzy from hyperventilation. None of this garnered a single additional dime, though, so eventually I had to go back to selling cupcakes door to door.

So you’d think that lesson would have seared itself into my psyche after that, but remarkably that wasn’t the last time I’d fail at begging. Later there’d be that boy in high school I’d foolishly fall in love with, the one who moved to Australia. I placed the future of my minuscule universe on the cusp of his upturned mouth, hoping to attach myself to the fleeting coattails of all of his hopes and dreams, of which he had many.

But sadly I’d been relegated to part of the small-time trap he ached to escape, so he drove me home one night and, fairly unceremoniously, proceeded to dump me like a load of toxic waste. I
begged
him, with heaving sobs, to take me with him, but my groveling only strengthened his resolve, as it should have, I suppose. I don’t remember if he had to physically pull me out of his car or what, but looking back at my absence of dignity, I don’t see how else I would have left. So he must have pulled me out, yes, and then pulled away. In every sense pulled away. Watching him leave, one lucid thought bubbled to my brain as I stood on the curbside blubbering: “I bet the begging,” I berated myself sardonically, “was a real turn-on.”

So like I said, I thought begging was behind me. I would rather die than beg, I’ve thought lots of times in the past decade. But lately that conviction has begun to crumble, mostly because of what I’ve read lately. Take the deputy who was shot by Al-Amin, the cop-killing Muslim cleric who is now serving life without possibility of parole. I read the deputy begged Al-Amin to let him live. He lay there on the asphalt, begging for his life. I think of that and realize my own arrogance.
Rather die than beg?
If it were me, with my life in someone else’s palm, put there by evil or other circumstances, teetering on being dismissed with one gassy-assed breath from my abductor, it would take me less than a second to assess the lovely shit basket that has become my life—the struggles, the failings, the loves both lost and found, the dreams both broken and not so broken, the tiny toehold of happiness I’ve finally managed to carve out for myself. It would take me less than a second, I tell you, and I would be begging.

L
UCKY YATES AND ANNA ARE DATING
.
Each other
. After all the blustering they both did about how they’d grown a sturdy layer of rust around their emotions, how they were never again gonna get tricked into the yawning butthole of bad love by letting that layer soften a little, they both crumbled like stale coffee cake the second they had some alone-time together. Ha! How’s that for conviction?

“We made out for, like, ninety minutes in my car,” Anna said, not even a little ashamed.

“Bitch, you two were supposed to be my comrades in crusty solitude,” I laugh. I’d introduced them awhile ago, after listening to them both blather about newfound backbone due to their respective freshly failed relationships, and how this was supposed to serve as a force field against future sentimental involvement of any kind. They each sounded about as convincing as a recovering alcoholic hanging out at Hooters on free-beer night, so I thought they’d get along.

On the other hand, of course, if they end up hating each other I deny any responsibility. Just like I deny any responsibility for unleashing Lary into the world. Lary would have been here regardless. I swear I did not create him. He came out demented the minute he was born, an event I don’t think even involved an actual mammal—just magma, maybe, coming from a crack in the earth’s core. I figure this is the reason for his famous fascination with Cheez Whiz. Maybe it reminds him of the primordial ooze from which he first crawled.

“Did you know they sell Cheez Whiz by the gallon?” he asked me the other day, and damn if he did not have a
gallon
of Cheez Whiz sitting right there on the bar stool next to him. Cheez Whiz of that mass doesn’t come in a plastic jug like you might think, but a metal drum similar to the kind they use for commercial solvents. He says he stole it from the Omni Hotel, off the set of a cooking show hosted by Emeril Lagasse, who “was really hungover,” according to Lary. I have a hard time believing a famous chef would need an industrial drum of Cheez Whiz, but then maybe he kept it around for the curiosity factor, because the sight of it really is a little mesmerizing. Cheez Whiz is like earwax, and not just in the obvious sense, but because you’re only accustomed to encountering it in tiny amounts.

Lary has looked into making his own, and swears the process is a heralded scientific achievement. “I always thought it would be like Superman squeezing coal into a diamond, but it’s not,” he says excitedly. “It’s a subatomic reaction. It’s what the Iraqis were working on before we invaded.”

I swear I thought he was gonna start sleeping with that stuff, so I was surprised to hear he’d offered it to Grant to augment the appetizer buffet at his upcoming Sister Louisa art exhibit, titled “The Third Coming.” Everyone will be there: me, Lucky Yates, Anna, Lary, Daniel, and the rest of the psycho circus—which reminds me, Grant better step up on the grub. The last Sister Louisa art exhibit I attended featured cheese puffs, cut-up Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and bad wine in a box, which Grant himself hauled around and squirted into people’s cups. Amazingly, he still wonders why all his potted plants were dead within a week.

But this time Grant promises the drum of Cheez Whiz is just for display. He probably won’t even open it. “Besides,” he sniffs, “this is not about feeding your body, it’s about feeding your
brain
.”

I would laugh if not for the fact that, amazingly, people really do tend to derive emotional nourishment from Sister Louisa’s trailer-vangelical wisdom, which is painted on societal discards, such as the cracked mirror graced with the statement,
Celebrate the flaw
.

I love looking in that mirror. I don’t just see me, but the entire carnival that comprises my friends and family. We are all flawed in the most fabulous ways.

Take Lary, who seriously cannot recall how a complicated network of scaffolding came to be erected in his kitchen, or how that truck bed ended up on the roof of his house. “I just know it was harder to get down than it was to get up,” is all he offers. Or Daniel, who spends his days at a mental hospital, not as a patient but as a care provider who teaches art to troubled children every day, a process that will suck the human faith out of anyone else. But somehow he manages to emerge with most of himself in tow, the pieces having been left behind with the hope of future retrieval. Then there is Lucky Yates and Anna, two emotional refugees whose hearts were used as total toilet paper in the past, but who nonetheless decided to test their toes in the same tub again. Christ, you have got to commend them for that, right? However it turns out, at least they were brave enough to try. At least there is that to say about all of us. Rather than turn away, we decide to look into the mirror, see past the cracks, and celebrate the flaws.

T
HIS PAGE IS DEDICATED TO
the people who believed in me, because if not for them, I might just be living in Lary’s truck right now, which still does not even have a front seat.

First, I want to thank my mother and father for not being perfect. In fact, if I were magically granted just one minute with them again, I’d tell them I love the person (and the mother) those imperfections caused me to become.

Then there is the rest of my family (which is by far not isolated to people who share my parents); my sister Kim and her husband Eddie, my other sister Cheryl, my brother Jim and his wife Cindy, my alleged stepfather Bill (who is also allegedly dead), and, of course, Daniel Troppy, Grant Henry, and Lary Blodgett, with a special thanks to the dear Daniel Keiger, who, among the many reasons he earned my gratitude, flat out refused to hire me as a bartender.

My daughter deserves my ultimate appreciation, as there is no greater catapult for self-improvement than the simple adoration bestowed on you from your child’s eyes, and the need to live up to it. Also, I want to emphasize that my daughter is not fatherless. On the contrary, she is very much loved and cared for in this regard.

Also, I owe an ocean of gratitude to my editors at
Creative Loafing:
Suzanne Van Atten, Jim Stawniak, Ken Edelstein, and Doug Monroe, as well as the staff and other writers there for producing a paper that surrounds my column with such quality. I also want to thank (again!) Patrick Best, Steve Hedberg, and Rebecca Burns, who were all there at the very beginning when my column was just an ember, fanning it so it wouldn’t die out. Damn am I grateful to them for that.

And thank God for Jay Leno, Jolie Ancel, Michele Conklin, Mike Henry, Jill Hannity, Judith Regan, Cassie Jones, Tammi Guthrie, Neal Boortz, and my producer at NPR’s
All Things Considered
, Sarah Sarasohn.