Confessions of a Recovering Slut (7 page)

K
NOCKED UP AS I AM
,
I’m afforded what is for me a rare view, which is that of being the only sober person at the party. But that’s life. At first, when I realized this would be my lot in life for, like, pretty much
ever
(I mean let’s face it, I can’t be a boozer with a baby on my hip, how unattractive is that?), I thought, “Jesus God, what’s left to live for?” I mean sure, there’s
food
, but that was only fun for the first three months, when I got to pretend the whole world was my personal trough. You should have seen my car; it was a rolling wasteland of crumpled fast-food packets from drive-through joints, the floorboards crusted with dried cola. So that period was neat while it lasted, but when my body reached walrus status, my appetite kicked out of overdrive and I woke up one day full for good, so now the glut fest is finished and I’m back to wondering why I should get out of bed in the morning.

Then I felt my baby’s first kick and it all came together. . . .

Yeah, right! Fooled you. The fact is I haven’t reached that special moment of repose just yet. You know,
the moment
, that special revelation in which momhood and other cosmic thresholds suddenly come together in one big Birkenstock earth/heaven harmony. If this revelation is real I hope it comes soon, because as it stands I’m still freaked about the fact that this thing I’m growing inside me has eyeballs (I mean, you know, hopefully) and is going to be, like,
looking
at me soon, if not already. I wonder if it can see my kidneys.

And I wonder why I keep thinking of my mother’s friend, Bitsy, a lovable fossil from Hollywood’s heydey who used to be Burgess Meredith’s personal clerk and who claims to, back in the fifties when she was a crimson-lipped bombshell, have had sex with both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, but not at the same time. When my mother met Bitsy (at work, where she designed weapons for the American government and Bitsy was her secretary), Bitsy’s glory days were long gone but she still boasted a head of hair like Lucille Ball. They became fast friends that first day, when, sensing my mother’s cigarette withdrawal, Bitsy tossed her a Salem and said, “What are you, a fuckin’ nun?” That was in Santa Monica in the mid-seventies.

In San Diego almost two decades later, my mother didn’t crave companionship like you would have expected of a dying person, but Bitsy was fiercely devoted to her nonetheless and tried constantly to contact her. “Tell Bitsy Mom can’t come to the phone,” I was instructed to shout from her bedside, and my brother would tell Bitsy my mother couldn’t come to the phone. “Have her call me when she feels better,” Bitsy pleaded in her craggy, tobacco-shredded voice.

But my mother never felt better. She died, as it so happens, in my arms. Bill was there, too, holding her hand. It’s not as romantic as it sounds. At the time I was helping her sit upright in bed because her breathing had become labored, and I didn’t expect her to die right then, but she did. Her last words, spoken about fifteen minutes earlier, were used to request a cigarette. There was no moment of repose in which she became serenely reconciled with her inescapable fate and gathered us about her bed to bestow words of wisdom. I remember nothing like that. I remember her fighting with the ferocity of a rottweiler to hang on to every last second of her life, even if it meant unimaginable pain and self-inflicted solitude to protect her good friend from her suffering.
That’s life
, and this woman didn’t want to lose any of it. Today, when I feel my baby kick—and I do, I wasn’t making that part up—that’s what I think:
that’s life
.

Back in my mother’s bedroom that day, after her breathing stopped, I gently placed her back on her pillow, and just then the phone rang. My brother peeked his head through the door. “It’s Bitsy,” he whispered.

Silence. “Tell Bitsy Mom can’t come to the phone,” I said.

G
RANT IS LOOKING
for Jesus on eBay, which is new. Normally he looks for Jesus in dumpsters, or under musty piles of old clothes at junk stores. Once he found a fabulous Jesus at a parking-lot flea market just south of Soddy Daisy with the forehead all bleeding from the pointy brambles and everything. Sometimes Grant doesn’t have to look at all. Sometimes people see all kinds of Jesus and call Grant to tell him where to go. Sometimes they even call
me
and tell
me
to tell Grant where to go. “I saw some great Jesus at the new Dollar Store on More-land,” a recent phone message said. “Don’t forget to tell Grant.”

This must mean Sister Louisa is back in full force. She must have come here in her 1974 copper-colored Ford Pinto and set up camp in Grant’s head again, because Lord knows there is room. Yes, she is back now, in a big way beehive and all.

“I found a
huge
paint-by-numbers of Jesus riding a donkey through Jerusalem,” Grant exclaims, but I keep looking at his head, because I can’t believe his hair doesn’t have a residue of some kind, like a film of space-age polymer left over from his latest beehive. I swear Grant’s hair is like a storm cloud, a roiling mass of curly hay that shoots out of his head like fibrous lightning. It takes two beauticians armed with eight cans of industrial lacquer to tame it into a mile-high hairball, and it’s a serious wonder the result isn’t permanent, but the whole thing really does just wash out at the end of the day.

“Bitch, did you not hear me say I found me a Jesus on a
donkey
?” he repeats, and I admit I’m impressed. My favorite Sister Louisa piece of all time depicted that very scene, with the donkey saying, “Who is this Jesus and why is he on my back?” It was sold years ago, back when Sister Louisa first started making her assemblages while living in the Airstream trailer of Grant’s imagination. It was a doublewide trailer. Did I not say there is a lot of room in Grant’s head?

I personally found my first Jesus in a thrift store in Costa Mesa when I was six. This Jesus had an imploring expression on his face and held out his hand like he was trying to coax a gun away from someone who just threatened suicide. I remember thinking, Who is this Jesus and what does he want me to put in his hand?

I found Jesus again in college, when an extremely horny follower of his named Jerry introduced us. Jesus and Jerry were buddies, I guess, because Jerry gave me his personal Bible and helped save my soul by convincing me to ask Jesus into my heart and shit—right there on my damn knees with Jerry’s sweaty palm on my head and his khaki-clad boner not half a foot from my face. Then Jesus went and told Jerry I wouldn’t “best represent” him as a wife, and Jerry dumped my barely saved self. He said he had to go where Jesus guided him. As I gave Jerry back his Bible, as he left me there, literally, on the side of the road, I remember thinking, Who is this Jesus and why is he guiding people down my pants?

Then Sister Louisa was born. Grant and Daniel and I had gone out in Grant’s truck to sift through garbage in the back streets of Tuscaloosa, and in the dusk we came upon an abandoned trailer, its back end crumpled like a discarded beer can. That night, as the sun buried itself burnt orange in the background, Grant stuck his hand through the window of that trailer to grab some old pots off a stovetop, and that is when we heard the voice.

“Who the hell there?” it boomed from inside the trailer. “I sayyed, who THE HELL there?”

Grant’s eyes popped out of his face like canned snakes, then he jumped behind the wheel of his truck and we peeled out of there like TV hooligans in a seventies crime drama.

Daniel and I were laughing so hard we thought we’d cough up our own shoes, because we’d just seen the great Grant Henry get caught burglarizing a homeless man living in an abandoned trailer. “Wanna check to see if there’s any pencils we can steal from blind beggars?” I teased him, but Grant was not listening to me. He had stopped all of a sudden, in a little mill village dotted with ramshackle shotgun shacks, and he was staring transfixed at a vision from his front window.

“Look at her,” he kept saying. “Just look at her.” I followed his gaze, which rested on a tiny, ancient woman sleeping in a chair on the other side of a screen door, her dark skin withered like pressed autumn leaves, her body comfortably sunk into itself like a stack of warming dough. Her hands were folded in her lap like two tiny pet cats. We sat silently looking at the lovely little mummy for a few moments as the weak light from her shack illuminated her silhouette. “She is Jesus,” Grant gasped, and we all agreed. This is exactly how Grant Henry found Sister Louisa, sitting there sleeping on the side of the road.

I
CAN’T BELIEVE
how picky men are about penises. You’d think they were women. And women, I swear, really aren’t that picky. As long as it functions we figure it’s a perfectly good penis, whether it’s the size of a totem pole or not, and if a girl tells you any different she’s pulling that fake-chaste, I’ve-only-been-with-one-other-man-and-that-was-against-my-will crap that we all master in order to make you feel great about your own pocket-packin’ status, which,
I swear to God
, is fine. We love it. Really. Whether it looks like it’s been carved out of marble or not. Which brings me to my real point: circumcision, and the lack thereof.

You might wonder what business circumcision is of mine, since some people have argued that I have no penis of my own. But knocked up like I am, and freshly informed that the linebacker in my belly is, in fact, a boy, I say I’m gaining ground. On the sonogram last month—and we got a fuzzy view when the baby interrupted his break dance to bend over and moon us from behind—I saw it there plainly onscreen, kinda, in all it’s tiny, adorable glory: my penis.

Until now I never knew I wanted one. But now that I have one I’m very protective of it, and it seems to me that the last thing any self-respecting penis-possessing person would want is to have someone come near their crotch with a scalpel, even if that person is wearing a surgical mask with a tank of anesthetic strapped to his back. I mean, please,
stitches
are involved, and a human-error factor,
down there
. I thought I would get some support on this stance from a few of my fellow tripods—I mean, they were
born
with their penises—but surprisingly I’ve been abandoned by my guy camp on this.

I voiced my hesitation to my genetic counselor, putting it this way, “Can you give me a good, sound, medical reason to perform circumcision—which is
surgery
, right?—on my son?” To which she answered, simply, “No.” But they didn’t think a person sitting behind an actual desk in an actual office inside an actual hospital was qualified as an authority on the “snip” debate, so instead they turned to their own pathetic company to back themselves up.

In classic gang-up mode, they first tried the archaic hygiene defense, and I don’t want to go into detail, but the word “cheese” was bandied about. But please, maybe back before we had showers and soap and
loofahs
, and people routinely washed off in pig troughs, and men wore boxers made out of tobacco leaves, maybe then the hygiene argument had some merit. So hygiene explains why the pruning practice got started, but not why we kept it up.

I was especially surprised that Lary pounded the pro-snip line. Lary, who, even though he lives in an alleyway, still has a shower bigger than my kitchen, and has collected enough soap and oils and conditioner and scented enemas and stuff that his whole body could be covered by a big foreskin and he’d still be the cleanest, best-smelling man I know. And he’s not even gay.

In all, their argument for circumcision amounts to the need for better washcloth access. This is a reason for surgery? God! Why not cut the lips off your face for better toothbrush access? Because, sure, it would work, but what’s wrong with leaving your lips where they are and just parting them when it’s time to scrub the hidden bits, if you know what I mean? So sorry, I don’t buy the Big Snip ritual just to save my son a nanosecond in the shower every day, which brought the Clip Club down to their last defense: conformity.

“The other boys will make fun of him in the locker room,” said Giant Michael, who, I would like to point out, has shirked conformity his entire life and become a successful restaurant owner and all-around cool hep cat because of it. But Michael was tired of me, and tired of defending circumcision, and made the mistake of trying to end the discussion by pointing out I sure had a lot to say for someone with no penis. But he was wrong, and this time I had the sonogram printout to prove it.

E
VEN BEFORE SHE
got shot at, I told my neighbor Honnie that if a bullet ever came through my window I’d be out of this place faster than my feet could carry me, and even then I’d assumed the bullet would have been by accident, that someone would have shot at someone else and my window just got in the way.

“I swear,” I said to Honnie, “I’d be gone. You’d see my legs spinning underneath me like a cartoon character.”

I don’t remember what Honnie said next, but I wish I did, because in the end the bullet didn’t go through my window, it went through hers. And it was no accident. Someone stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, aimed a gun at her living room and pulled the trigger. Three times. The bullets ripped through the curtains and chipped the tile on one of the fireplaces inside the home Honnie shares with her husband, Todd, and her mother, Bren.

“They didn’t make much noise when they came through,” Bren said sweetly of the bullets. “You’d think it would be louder than that.”

If you want loud, you should have heard the girl who threatened Bren’s life earlier that day. The police didn’t think the incident merited the filing of a formal complaint, even though, when they arrived at the scene, the girl was still standing there screaming at Bren in front of her house. She was a little thing, the screaming girl, but God what a volcanic bitch she could be. According to her shrieks, Honnie’s house was going to be blown up or burned down or both. The girl didn’t even live in the crack house that started all this ruckus, the crack house in Capitol View that Honnie and her family were helping to close down. But the girl’s boyfriend lived there so she felt it was her mission to go door-to-door on a campaign to convince people Honnie and her family were part of the Klan.