Confessions of a Recovering Slut (10 page)

I
COULDN’T SLEEP LAST NIGHT
because, among other things, I was kept awake by the thought of what a bad mother I’ll probably make. And by the way, am I going to give birth to this baby out my
ass
? Because that’s where I’m gaining all my weight. Is this normal? I feel like a walking trash bag full of pig fat. My future kid will be ashamed of me when I drop her off at kindergarten. Not only that, the sonograms keep showing a critter with a huge head.

And do they make cribs you can suspend from the ceiling? Because my house has reached maximum crap capacity now that I don’t throw everything away anymore. Not only that, since I painted this whole place before I knew the fumes could be harmful, I’m scared that now my baby will be born inside out or something, with organs flopping off it like fleshy little saddlebags. If that happens, Lary says, at least we can sell it for parts. “You would probably get more for it that way than if you sold it all in one piece,” he says.

I’ve learned that sometimes Lary is not the person to go to when I’m anxious, so notice how I haven’t been calling him a lot lately. I guess he’s afraid I’m gonna storm his house with my big-headed baby and lactate on him or something. Like I would
ever
bring a baby to Lary’s house, especially a big-headed baby, because he lives in an alleyway with tools and torches strewn about, and he might as well have a sign above the door that reads “Lary’s lair of sharp edges and fire.”

But keeping my kid from Lary’s place is about the extent of my maternal instincts. Looking back at my own childhood I’m surprised I survived. My mother made
bombs
, for chrissakes. As a missile scientist you would think she’d experiment beyond our two family food groups—Hawaiian Punch and Halloween candy—but no, so by the time I was ten I had such a permanent sugar buzz I could register on the Richter scale. And my father was an alcoholic trailer salesman who liked to drive drunk with me in the front seat. Once he ran over a lady’s foot, but that’s because she deserved it, he said. For family entertainment we used to cruise through the cemetery and watch the deer eat flowers off of fresh graves.

I grew up thinking all this was normal.

This is not normal. But still, at family gatherings we used to laugh so hard it felt like our lungs would collapse. In the end, I think the only thing my parents really did wrong was not live long. Once, when I was studying literature in England at Oxford, my mother sent me a letter saying how proud she was. Of me. The letter was long and full of things I need to hear right now, but I was really young and thought my mother was as invincible as I was, and I used to have this bad habit of throwing everything away. So the letter is gone, and another reason I can’t sleep at night is because I stay awake trying to recall everything it said. I think if I concentrate hard enough I can hear my mother’s voice, and sometimes I do. She talks about my resolve, my determination, my ability to conquer things, and she says something else that wasn’t in the letter; advice good enough to pass onto my child. She says, “Don’t throw everything away.”

L
ARY IS MAKING A LIST
of his fears. “What the hell for?” I ask. “So I can do ’em all,” he says, and I have to laugh at that. God knows Lary has no fears that are easily faceable. Like he has no fear of skydiving or death or snakes or Satan or any other basic fright that strikes ice into the hearts of normal people. His biggest fear is living in a duplex on Chipmunk Lane in Lilburn, Georgia. His biggest fear is being surrounded by mid-income soccer moms who will insist he clean all the decayed auto parts off his driveway and who will call the police when he puts an old refrigerator in his front yard with a sign that says, “Great Playhouse.”

“What’re you gonna do? Move to a suburban cul-de-sac?” I ask.

“A fear is something that has a possibility of happening,” he jibbers, backpedaling. “I don’t care what happens or how good looking the girl is, I’ll never wake up on Chipmunk Lane.”

We are at the Local, and Keiger won’t front him a free dinner, even though I personally told Lary it was on the house. “Order anything you want,” I said magnanimously, because lately I’ve taken to telling customers there that their tab is on the house, even though I don’t own the place or have any right to give anything away. Keiger does own it, though, and it pleases me to see him swoop in after me and make people pay anyway. Before he bought this bar, Keiger parked cars for a living, and he’s said he has a fear of ending up back there again. So to help him out I offer to ease his way into bankruptcy, because I think it’s important to face your fears, but so far Keiger is not on board with this. He keeps making people pay anyway.

I personally have a fear of ending up in a trailer on a homestead in the middle of some dismal expanse of land. Like Keiger and his fear, I have experienced mine and don’t want to go back. For a long period after my parents divorced, I lived with my mother in a trailer two miles north of the Tijuana border, and I still haven’t decided if it was as bad as you might think. There was a clubhouse, for example, and monthly “mixers,” during which the trailer-park residents mingled over coffee and home-baked cinnamon cake. There were a lot of old people with missing limbs living there, too, and they seemed eager for company.

Our trailer itself wasn’t so bad, either. There was carpeting on the floor and blankets on the beds. But the front door was about as substantial as one you’d find on a kitchen cupboard in a real house, and every step you took in the place made it shake like a boxcar, a constant and unwelcome testimony to its impermanence.

I remember there was a collective effort on the part of the trailer owners to pretty up their lots. Most of the trailers had permanent-ish porches that were fashioned to provide access to the front door as though you were walking up to a real home as opposed to one on wheels, and the wheels themselves were often hidden by lattice fencing surrounding the underside of the trailer. But in my eyes all these efforts couldn’t belie that this place was little more than a shantytown.

The black widow didn’t help, either. I don’t have a fear of spiders in general, just poisonous ones in particular, and it seriously did not help that a big black widow lived in the storage shed in back of my mother’s trailer. I was constantly needing to get into that shed, too, because that is where most of my important stuff ended up, stuff like the one-eyed snake I won at a carnival when I was seven. There was not a lot of room in my mother’s trailer for these treasured items, so they were all relegated to the shed and guarded by the black widow, which lived at knee level just inside the door.

My practice was to simply open the door of the shed and sit there, wailing and pointing at it, which one day caused my heavy-set neighbor, Tillie, to shout at me. She was sitting in her wheelchair on her porch one day as I did this. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she hollered.

I told her about the poisonous spider and how, even if I stuck my hand in the shed on the whole other side away from the black widow, I might snag a piece of the web, therefore triggering the spider to somehow careen up onto my head and bite me on my brain.

Tillie had just had her legs amputated due to diabetes, and their bandaged stumps stuck out from beneath her large body like two big broken broomsticks. “Goddammit, girl, you’ve got feet, right? I ain’t got feet, but you do, right? Well, then, look at your foot and then look at the spider. Your foot is bigger, isn’t it? You’re a lot bigger. Now just stomp on that damn spider and shut the hell up.”

So I did as she said. I stomped on it, and to this day I continue to take Tillie’s advice any time I can. It was sage wisdom, after all. In the end, we are all bigger than our fears. We should all just stomp on them and shut the hell up.

I
T’S TOO BAD
testicles are such an easy target. Really. And they always seem to be hanging there at table-corner height, which just makes them cumbersome. But to have them shot off, that right there is the motherfuck of all motherfucks, if you ask me, even though you could argue I have none of my own anymore—balls, that is.

That police deputy did, though, poor guy. He and his partner were just doing their job in my neighborhood, visiting from their own district, serving what they considered to be a low-risk warrant on Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a Muslim cleric who is supposed to be a pillar of our community, and for some reason Al-Amin pulled out an assault rifle and shot them both. Then while they lay there in the street wounded, Al-Amin slowly approached one and shot his balls off, three bullets to the groin, which killed him fairly efficiently, while the other deputy watched, horrified.

The next day I knew something was up in my neighborhood the second I turned the corner past the crack dealers and saw immediately that our regular contingent of whores were nowhere to be seen, especially Pox Face, who was probably the most visible hooker we had. That was not her actual name, just one I’d given her. I’ve only seen her through my car window, and she was so ugly I wondered whether the reason she was so reliably on the street was because she had a hard time getting any business, an assumption backed by her lack of shoes.

Pox Face used to wear an old pair of riding boots I’d picked up at a thrift store as part of a failed Halloween costume a few years back. I was going to be an old-fashioned stewardess, and the closest thing I could find to the kind of go-go boots they used to wear back in the good old days—back when Pucci designed the uniforms and everybody belted shots in the cockpit—were these lame riding boots. So I bought them, figuring I could paint them white, but thankfully ditched the idea. The boots, though, stayed with me until I moved to Capitol View.

It is the practice of me and my neighbors to leave useable items we no longer want on top of the lid of our trash containers the day trash is to be collected, seeing as how there are so many needy people in the neighborhood, and it takes probably ten minutes, tops, before the item is picked up and disbursed among the miscreants who populate this place. Those boots, though, must have stayed out there for hours. I was really surprised. I thought they’d go fast, even though they’re a size ten. Finally they got picked up by Pox Face, and she wore them until she lost them, because crack whores lose everything eventually Every little thing.

But none of the whores were visible the morning after Al-Amin shot the balls off that deputy. What I did see, though, were police cars. I never saw so many police cars on Dill Avenue. The crack dealers were there, too. You can’t let a little cop killing get in the way of commerce, I guess.

Al-Amin is on the run right now, that’s why the police are canvassing our neighborhood. They believe he has a lot of supporters here, and he does. The Muslim population in our neighborhood is collectively aghast. They are insisting Al-Amin is innocent, a bastion of our community, and crediting him with having cleaned up the West End where we live. “He swept this place up,” they insist. If he is persecuted and put to death, they say, our neighborhood will be sentenced to death as well.

Now I’m not black and I’m not Muslim—not that I know of anyway, because the truth is both of my parents died before I started caring about heritage, thus making it hard for me to harangue them for information—but I am a resident of the community Al-Amin is credited with cleaning up, and I can tell you truthfully the man sucks as a housekeeper. First of all, leaving dead policemen lying around with their balls shot off is damn fucking messy. But besides that even, I have never once seen Al-Amin come by with his big broom to sweep up the dealers on Crack Corner down the street from my house, or to sweep up the pimps who peddle child prostitutes on Metropolitan Parkway, or even to help Honnie and Todd, who have been terrorized and shot at by the drug dealer next door since soon after they moved in. A lot of people in the neighborhood came forth to help them, to sit on their porch with them and hold vigil with them in a show of support. None of them were assault-rifle toting pillars, granted, but they did what they could. Where was Al-Amin then?

Maybe he was busy. I guess it takes time to stockpile weapons and plan a botched double cop killing, where you blast the balls off of one and leave the other lying there, looking at you, able to perfectly describe you plus the car you were driving. I guess it takes time to take stock in yourself, see that you have no balls, that you are just as nutless as the man you left dead in the street, then to run away and hide behind the faded faith of your neighbors.

I
AM NOT DEAD
,
though there are ants in my bed, which blows my theory—I always thought you had to be dead before ants tried to eat you. I thought there was some kind of insect protocol when it came to insects and humans. Surely they don’t eat you
alive
, do they? Don’t forensic scientists use insect-feeding patterns as evidence to determine time of death?

I wouldn’t be wondering this if I didn’t live in a goddam peat bog. I swear, there must be a complete cosmic funnel through which all the spiders, ants, moths, and billion-legged robo-bugs in the world are sucked, and then there is my house, right under the butt end of the funnel, getting continuously crapped upon.

You’d think
walls
would make a difference, but they don’t. I had better protection when I was living in a tent, even though I never really lived in one except for that week I went whitewater rafting in Colorado. My little sister lived in a tent, though, actually
lived
there with her husband Eddie. She said it was nice, with interior tent walls that divided it into separate rooms.

When I think of my sister’s tent I think of Richard Burton in
Cleopatra
, when his army made “camp” before going into battle. Only Richard Burton’s tent was like a mansion, with massive candelabras and gilded doorframes.
Doorframes
, in a
tent
. There weren’t even doors, but there were red velvet drapes tied to the side with gold-tasseled cord. His bed, though, is what really cracked me up. It was an ornate, four-poster colossus, with about fifty pillows. That was a stupid-ass way to portray a Roman about to go into battle, but back when my sister told me she was living in a tent, I liked to think of the one Richard Burton had. “It’s nice,” she told me, and I really wanted to believe her.