Confessions of a Recovering Slut (3 page)

T
HE HEAD SURVIVED
but the body didn’t, and without a body it’s hard to have a bobble-headed Chihuahua on your dashboard. Otherwise you’ve just got this plastic dog head on a spike, kinda, which normally you wouldn’t think was such a tragedy, but it turns out I was really attached to the plastic Chihuahua.

“The head was supposed to go on the dashboard,” I lamented to Daniel, “on top of a
body
.”

I was gonna name the bobble-doll “Buford,” and I was gonna be like an old person in a motor home driving around pointing at things, stopping at bowling-alley bars for a beer and stuff. It was a sweet dream now dead because I failed to bring the bobble-headed Chihuahua safely back from Tijuana, which is where I bought it. So here I am with only the head, and the torso is still in the belly of the plane somewhere, lurking in the shadows like a miniature murder victim.

God, I do not need to be thinking about this right now, because it brings to mind the notorious missing torsos of my neighborhood. I know I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, the fact that the day before I closed on my house here in Capitol View the police found a severed human head in a sack on my street, but you have to admit the subject is pretty interesting. Especially when you factor in the detail that, strewn about, they later found six bags of other body parts all chopped up like Cobb salad. And here’s the kicker, the bags of body parts
didn’t match the bag of head parts
, and I don’t think they ever uncovered the missing pieces to match the found pieces, let alone who the pieces once belonged to, or for that matter—and probably most important—who was responsible for separating the pieces from their main parts to begin with. So by my count there are at least two torsos still out there, headless and/or limbless, waiting to be stumbled over in the dark.

That’s daunting, because stumbling in the dark is how I spend most of my life. Everything that’s ever happened to me has been a misinterpretation of what I
meant
to happen. For example, I bought this house as an investment, figuring I’d turn it over after a year like the rightful nightmare most investors are to in-town communities. But instead I’ve lost work due to airline industry cutbacks, and I’ve had to reside here since, biding time. The house has more than doubled in value, something else I stumbled into, because if it were up to me alone, faced daily as I am with the drug addicts, whores, and crack dealers, I would have left this neighborhood long before that happened.

At least I am not alone anymore. My friends Honnie and Todd have moved into the neighborhood, and other creative-but-poor people who probably never smoked crack or sucked dick to get crack or killed anybody are moving here as well. It’s a slow seepage, and it’s nice and all, but Honnie and Todd in particular aren’t faring well. They knew there was a crack house across the street when they moved in, but they didn’t know there was a dealer living right next door. I also have a crack dealer living across the street from me, but the only bother he causes is the occasional traffic jam, seeing as how he provides a drive-by service. Honnie and Todd’s drug-dealing neighbor, though, is very aggressive. He has already taken a baseball bat and smashed every single window in their house while they were out buying calk at Home Depot. There were plenty of witnesses, too, but all were too afraid to finger the guy to the police.

I go over there sometimes just to sit on their porch with them, so there will be a witness in case the drug dealer comes over with a bat again or something. But even if he did, the police would not be that helpful, not if their past lack of intervention is any indication. The gang fights and gunfights go on outside our doors all night. Occasionally I work an overnight flight and drive home in the early morning, which seems to be crack-whore happy hour in these parts, but at least there are fewer guns going off then. Three children have been killed in our neighborhood since I bought my house. Lary, who lives nearby, points out that one wasn’t really a kid, but a big teenager who was killed by the police in the process of committing a crime, so he doesn’t think that killing counts. I don’t see why it shouldn’t.

“Don’t you see?” I ask. “He was just a kid.”

He doesn’t see. I can’t believe he doesn’t see. “What I see,” he says, “is your mortgage, which is only four hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

I
’M AMAZED THEY LET
Lary on the plane. I always am, not just because he looks like a curly-headed crocodile—and all wide-eyed, too, like he’s half a second away from taking hostages—but because he was flying standby using one of my airline-employee buddy passes, and everybody knows traveling under those circumstances is iffy at best.

He was flying to Cancun, Mexico, but only to pass through on his way to Isla Mujeres, a tiny island off the coast, where he expects to wallow in margaritas and the saliva of young Mexican maidens. Grant was with him, with much the same agenda, though Grant doesn’t much care from what gender the saliva is generated. Grant cut off half his hair recently, which means his hairdo has been reduced to the size of your basic bushy shrub, as opposed to an entire tree, which always makes me think they’re gonna make him purchase an extra seat to accommodate his head mass, but the agents let him on the plane, too, fantastically. Even so, it doesn’t amaze me as much that Grant made it on the plane flying standby as the fact that there was Lary, sitting right there on the aircraft, passengerlike, as if all his nut-ball molecules were not eminating a visible aura at all.

Gosh, I’m almost proud. I remember the first time these freaks flew standby with me. We three plus Daniel were on our way to Prague, because Daniel had picked it out on a map of the world painted on the wall of a restaurant the week before, and we all had airline buddy passes provided by me or friends of mine, which meant we were just above deep-sea bottom feeders on the list of priority to get on the plane. I’d warned them that they needed to dress nice, as back then a jacket and tie were required for airline nonrevenue travel, and I was not at all confident they could pull it off. I know Daniel, for one, didn’t even own a tie, and the only suit jacket he had was made of blemished suede, which I myself had bought for a buck at a yard sale and had given him.

As for Lary, even though I was accustomed to his daily uniform of T-shirts stained with old egg yolks and whatnot, I’d remembered that the day I met him, which was outside a church minutes before his ex-girlfriend was about to marry another man, he’d been wearing what could pass for a presentable ensemble, with a tie that wasn’t really a tie but one of those black leather twisty things knotted in the middle by an ornate clasp, which made it look like he’d barely escaped a lynching at the hands of evil fairies. So I knew Lary was capable of passing muster as far as dress is concerned, I just worried about that look he has. Seriously, from the neck up he looks exactly like Einstein’s insane bastard son.

Grant was practically shaved bald back then, with none of the visible body piercings he has now, but until then all I’d ever seen him wear were faded overalls that were rolled at the cuffs and hung off him like loose hide on a diseased moose. It must have been a phase he went through, because today he is always downright dapper, even though it’s not always a given he’ll get on the plane when he flies standby on an airline buddy pass. Take the time when, even though he tried hard to keep the side of his head with all the metal impaled on it away from the gate agent, she spotted it anyway and wouldn’t let him board until Grant talked her into letting an actual aircraft mechanic show up with a toolbox to unpierce him.

But that day years ago when we left for Prague, the three of them knocked on my door in the morning before our flight, and I opened it to find quite a presentable passel of gents, I must say. We left for the airport not knowing whether we’d make it, but knowing if we didn’t we’d just choose a different route or destination, or both, it didn’t matter. They stood by with me that day and they have ever since.

Really, like anyone, there have been hundreds of people who provided passing blips on the lifelong radar of my acquaintance, like sugar through a kitchen colander they were, but for some reason these three are among the lumps that stuck with me and always will. They are like boogers that can’t quite be flicked free from the finger of my heart, because I have tried, believe me.

Over the years I have tried to run them off. Take the time I broke into Daniel’s house and stole all his tequila, or the time I broke into Lary’s house and stole all his hair products, or the time I broke into Grant’s house and didn’t steal anything, but I did rearrange all his furniture, which to him is worse. After that they hated me for exactly as long as it took for them to love me again, which was about five minutes. And vice versa. They’re not angels, either, believe me. Take the fax campaign Lary waged on me in my home eight years ago, page after page of just two words: “You Cunt!” But I forgave him and he me and eventually I stopped asking why these three wouldn’t leave like everyone else and simply started being thankful they were always there, standing by.

T
HIS PLACE IS SO
nice I normally could not afford it even if I back-charged for all those gratuitous blowjobs I gave in college, but here I am all bundled under the down comforter even though the weather is really mild outside. I’m on a layover at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville goddam Tennessee, and I have the
room service
menu in my hand, I swear. I’m gonna order something even though I’m secretly afraid that as I try to sneak out tomorrow I’ll get pounced on by the cordial people in the reception area, who will remind me, cordially, that I can’t leave until I fork over the five hundred dollars extra I owe for in-room chicken fingers complete with miniature bottles of individual catsup.

But when I checked in they did not ask me to hand over a credit card. They just gave me the goddam key! The handle is broken on my suitcase, and the bellhop carried it to my room cradled in his arms like a large child even though I kept telling him he could extend the other handle and just roll it along the floor. He declined politely, and then I realized those floors are part marble. My suitcase is as battered and jagged as a broken grocery cart, and it makes a shrill keening sound when you roll it. I’ve been deaf and blind to it lately, but nothing like interjecting your crap-ass suitcase in surroundings like this to trigger a miracle cure. I’d have been embarrassed if I was still the easily embarrassed type.

But thank God I’m not. I have skin as thick as nickels. At the airport our crew was met by a driver carrying a sign, and he was very officious until I actually—I am not kidding—
-fell out
of the van and landed flat-ass in the gutter. At the time I was totally out of uniform, wearing Grant’s tangerine swing coat, and damn if my heel didn’t catch in the cuff. It sent me sailing out of that car like a flapping, wild-eyed albatross. I hit the ground like a sack of cement. People came running from across the street to make sure I was all right. “I swear,” I laughed, “I’m fine.”

Hell, that was
nothing
. I have fallen down before, and I’ve stayed down, too, pinned there underneath all my own demons. I laid there and let my brain become my enemy. For example, by the time I’d started interviewing with the airlines after college, I’d already been very enthusiastically laid off from my two previous jobs, my most recent boss having helped me along my way by literally tossing my personal office equipment out the door as I frantically called my mother from a pay phone across the street.

She herself had just lost her job due to government cutbacks, and had traded in her Buick for an old VW van that she was using to haul stuff to the swap meet, where she’d lay out a plastic tarp and set out her secondhand wares. When she came to get me that day, she had emptied the van of most of those wares, which included a box of broken ceramic beagles, to make room for my dinosaur desktop computer and other office tackle that had survived the tossing. She was half finished packing up my stuff when she noticed me still sitting there on the curb, crying.

“Get your ass up,” she said to me, exasperated. “I said get it up.”

Normally she would have taken me for pie at a local coffee shop afterward, but she was broke herself, owing in no small part to the fact that I had used her American Express card to pay my rent the month before. The past half year had been a hard (and, for my mother, expensive) period of perspective adjustment for me regarding my mother’s transition from well-paid missile scientist to self-employed junk purveyor in partnership with her best friend Bill, and at that point it had almost, but not fully, settled in my head that I could no longer depend on her to supplement my meager-to-absent income as I pursued cool-sounding but low-paying pee-on positions at artsy magazines.

“What’s this?” I asked when we’d finished, indicating a metal-looking apparatus on her dashboard. “That’s my coin belt,” she said proudly as she put the van in gear and we left the curb. “Isn’t it neat?”

Coin belt? I thought, and at that I let go of my last toehold in denial regarding my mother’s situation. It had come down to coins for her, literally, and how many she could collect.

“Yes, it’s neat,” I agreed, and burst forth with a whole new set of sobs. She kept asking me if I was all right, and I said I was. The next week I began looking for less-glamorous jobs with paychecks that could cover my bills. Until I found one I got up at 5
A.M.
every weekend to help my mother set up her booth at the swap meet. It turned out there is little time for staying down when you’ve got boxes of broken ceramic beagles to sell.

“Are you all right?” the driver kept asking, all worried as he helped gather my fallen-ass self off the curb. “I really am,” I assured him. I mean, seriously, what good am I if I can’t get my ass up?

G
RANT HAS ALWAYS WANTED
a beehive hairdo, which is news to me. I mean, you think you know your friends and what they’ve always wanted, because always having wanted something is a pretty big part of your personality. But Grant had kept his beehive-hairdo desire kind of quiet until yesterday, when suddenly he ploughed through my front door talking about beehives like they’ve been on his mind since he was born.