Confessions of a Recovering Slut (5 page)

M
Y GERMAN TUTOR TELLS
me I speak her language like a Turkish construction worker, so when I misconjugate a pronoun she slaps the coffee table with her hand and shouts, “You are a Turkey!” Regardless of her opinion, though, I’m still a foreign-language interpreter for the airline where I work. So on the plane I’m known as the “speaker” flight attendant. I don’t mind because it makes me feel important and I get to boss people around.

For instance, just the other day, a man refused to properly stow his carry-on bag. You know, it’s very important to make sure everything’s in its place before we back away from the gate. It’s not okay to put your boombox on your lap or your baby in the overhead bin. No. Everything has to be just right before we can announce to the captain that the cabin is secure and we can get going. That’s the important part, isn’t it? To
get going
.

But this flight wasn’t going anywhere. We couldn’t leave until this man seated in the back of the plane secured his carry-on luggage. Some of the other flight attendants thought he was acting suspiciously because he seemed so reluctant to surrender his baggage. So I was summoned. I was the “language interpreter” after all, and therefore automatically dispatched to deal with stuff like this.

Upon first glance I thought right away I’d have trouble communicating with this particular passenger. He might have been Middle Eastern, or maybe Italian, neither of which is a region where I know the language. His body was wedged in his coach-class seat like a big ball of softened cheese, and a spiky-haired mole the size of a sea urchin grew out of his ear. He was probably sixty, and his breath hung so heavily in the cabin you could actually
feel
it on you.

On his lap was a big black bag. I tried German. I tried Spanish. I tried English. Those were all the languages I knew and still I couldn’t convey to him that he needed to give up his bag to be stowed before we could back away from the gate. But the passenger’s German was even more indecipherable than my own, and the only English word he knew was “you.” Somehow, though, I understood there was something inside the bag he needed with him right then, so through charades I convinced him he could take out the things he needed, and we could store the rest in the bin above him, and that way we could get going. So I watched him rifle through the bag’s contents and retrieve one item: it was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph.

He thrust the picture at me, smiling and shouting the only English word he knew. “You,” he roared. “You, you, you.”

I took the picture and looked at it. It showed a slim, handsome young man in a cavalier pose, looking up as if he were caught in the act of laughing at an off-color joke. It looked like a publicity still from the fifties, except his hair was a little too long and lustrous. Maybe he was a young king.

“You,” the passenger said again, indicating the photograph. I told him I didn’t understand what he wanted. He took the picture out of my hands, pointed to it and then to himself. “You, you, you,” he said again, and then he laughed. For the first time I really looked at the passenger’s face, his cauliflower-shaped face, and suddenly I understood. The picture was of himself when he was young. He had gotten his pronouns mixed up, and when he said “you” he thought he was referring to himself.

The man’s eyes looked back at me and sparkled like dark stars through crinkled sockets. He pointed to the picture. He pointed to me. He pointed to himself.

“You,” he said, his finger aiming proudly at his chest.

“Me,” I corrected him softly.

Me, I thought to myself. Then I took his baggage and secured it properly.

K
EIGER CAN’T DRIVE WITH
me behind the wheel without losing a few years off his life, he says, and Grant and Lary agree, which really pisses me off. I am a perfectly fine driver. I mean, between the four of us, I am not the one who dropped the dishwasher in the middle of the freeway. I’m not naming names, mind you, or even admitting that anything actually happened, but I will tell you that the guilty party has a smile that belongs on a big voodoo doll and the dishwasher was mine.

Not that I ever saw it. I just got a call one morning from evil voodoo mouth man, who was at that moment perusing a bunch of expensive appliances from the fire sale of a failed dot.com enterprise. “Seriously, it’s never even been used,” he said of the dishwasher. “Not that you’d ever use it, either. I’ve seen your kitchen. That did it, of course.

“You retard, I would so use it, and not just to store bags of cat litter like you do in yours.” I swear, I do not even know why Lary (oops, I said his name)
cares
about kitchen appliances. To hear him go on that day you’d think he cooks a turkey supper every Sunday, when in fact the only thing he has to eat in his house is half a bag of pistachios and half a dozen chocolate Easter eggs. It used to be a full bag and a full dozen, but goddam, a girl has got to eat when she’s pretending to care for his cat while he’s away, doesn’t she?

So here Lary was getting me all excited about a new dishwasher when I already had one that worked perfectly fine. It was scarred and leaked a little bit, but it did it’s job and I was fine with that. It just wasn’t shiny and plated in nickel or whatever the new one promised. In fact, it was so beat up from the former owner of the house that I figured he must have had parties in which he invited homeless people to come over and hit it with their shopping carts. There were pieces missing from it, too, like the silverware basket, which I’d replaced with a plastic salad strainer that worked fine. It wasn’t all that quiet when it ran, either; in fact the sound was so loud that houseguests had once mistaken it for a helicopter SWAT team. Also, each cycle seemed to take twenty years and all the glasses came out afterward coated in some kind of calcified film. All the same, though, I would never have thought to replace it if Lary hadn’t called and got me all convinced that a new dishwasher would change my life. “All right,” I told him. “Get it for me and I’ll pay you back.”

Two entire days went by before I called him to politely inquire as to its whereabouts. “Where the hell is my goddamn dishwasher, you booger-eating loser?” I shrieked at him. I’d just spent the last forty-eight hours entertaining dishwasher fantasies in which I wore pedal-pushers, served appetizers from a tray, and accepted everyone’s compliments on how sparkly all my barware was. Plus, I’d just seen a commercial for that same brand dishwasher that demonstrated its abilities, the best being that it could disintegrate an entire three-layer birthday cake with one cycle.

“I lost it,” he said, and he sounded
serious
. I mean, normally he’d have any number of bizarre reasons at the ready for flaking on me. For instance, he once forgot to feed my dog and told me it was because he was forced to copulate with aliens to save the world. It just wasn’t like Lary to not put any effort into lying to me. “Really, where is it?” I asked.

“Really, I lost it,” he kept telling me. “It fell off the back of my truck.”

“No, really.”

“Really.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously.”

There was a full fifteen minutes of this before I finally believed him, at which point, of course, I had to detonate. ‘What the
hell
do you mean
it fell off your truck?
What kind of extra-chromosome bottom-feeding fool loses a dishwasher?” I ranted, the whole while slowly coming to grips with the fact that I was now stuck with my original dented-ass dishwasher that sounds like a leaf blower and doesn’t disintegrate birthday cakes, and somehow that just made my life a lot less enjoyable all of a sudden.

Here I was, starting to envision something new and different that offers all kinds of added excitement to my life, and then it gets pulled out from under me like a bad parlor trick, and suddenly my otherwise perfectly fine life up to then seems like a total turd pellet. It took me awhile, as I put my grit-covered glasses away in the cupboard, to re-appreciate my rusty wreck dishwasher with all its improvised parts. In the end the thing still works perfectly fine. Everything does. As with anything, pieces will always break and be replaced. None of us ever leave here whole, or not outwardly anyway. Everywhere you look are the patched up and put together, not new, but not uninteresting nonetheless. In the end, the very last thing it does is make life less enjoyable, and I am perfectly fine with that.

B
ILL WAS NOT
at all very sympathetic about my tapeworm. He was too busy bitching about how prostitution was the only way to make money in Costa Rica. Seeing as how he was five hundred years old with bad eyes and
gout
(whatever that is), I had to tell him straight out that I doubted he could get much for his body, especially since there were so many pretty whores in Quepos for him to compete with, and most of them hanging out right there at his
pensione
bar.

He rolled his big, bad eyes and wondered again how I could be my mother’s daughter. When he met my mother, he was living in his car. They met at a dusty auction house in Chula Vista, California, where they’d haggled over a box of mostly broken stuff. In the end my mother outbid him.

“Good fight,” he said, his cigarette hanging loosely from his lips like a little snapped appendage. “I’ll buy half off you, whaddaya say?” My mother refused his offer, but they became best friends nonetheless. He was a decade younger, tall, big-eyed, and always about to burst into knee-slapping laughter. I personally think my mother had a crush on him. The fact that he lived in his car would have been in keeping with her tastes, I believe. She was not all that picky about people she had crushes on.

Bill had always insisted he was my stepfather, and I would not have put it past him to marry my mother on a platonic basis for whatever benefit they’d both receive, but my mother never mentioned it. They began selling the junk they’d acquired at these run-down auction houses at the local swap meet on Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego. My mother had just been laid off from her job as a weapons designer and, rather than rally and find another position in the same industry like she normally did, she went into business with Bill instead.

As my mother’s best friend, alleged second husband, and professed stepfather to me, he’d accepted the yoke of parental badgering from her at her passing. “You kids are like little liposuction tubes, you just
suck
. You suck everything out of everything. Suck, suck,
suck
. If your mother saw you now she’d die all over again.”

At that time I was sucking on my second margarita. We drink a lot when we’re around Bill, my sister and I, and to be around him these days we usually have to go through some South American jungle. Cheryl is his favorite, and she would be my favorite, too, if I were Bill. He likes people who don’t hide their flaws, people who couldn’t even if they wanted to. Cheryl is a former chain-smoking cocktail waitress living in Las Vegas, and I remember when she heard the news that her new uniform would include fishnets and a G-string.

“I’m gonna stuff my big, beautiful, size-12 ass in that G-string, whaddaya think about that?” she laughed. I’ve tried to visit her at work to see her in uniform, but that hotel is so huge I’d have better odds at running into old college chums at the airport, plus I heard the MGM has since included a cute peplum skirt as an option in the uniform, and the G-string is no longer mandatory.

So it was Cheryl who insisted I go see Bill, because “he’s about ready to die, I swear, Holly. He probably has less than a year to live. He’s got that gout, and it’s really acting up.”

“What the hell is gout?”

“I don’t know,” she said, exasperated, “he just has it.”

So I went to Costa Rica to go see him, which was a huge gesture on my part because I hate that place. Already I’d been bitten by a dog, cut by rusty things, and
hit by a car
. I was just walking along the side of the road and a car pulled up and the next thing I knew I was rolling around on its hood, which is really embarrassing. I should have just gone home, but instead I took a bus to see Bill and sleep in his garage, which, until the week before, had been flooded. It cost ten dollars a night for a nice room in Quepos, but Bill had dried out his garage for me, and who can argue with hospitality like that?

“I think I breathed in a bunch of tapeworm eggs while I slept last night,” I said. The mold smell in Bills garage was so thick I’m probably still, to this day, growing mushrooms in my lungs.

“Suck, suck,
suck
,” said Bill as he poured me another shot. He didn’t look near dead to me. His eyes might have been big and bad, but they were the clearest blue eyes you ever saw, and he still smoked like a living chimney without coughing up organs or anything. I, on the other hand, was stiff and sore and wrapped in dirty Band-Aids like a decrepit mummy. God! I wailed inwardly, hanging my head. Why am I here?

I was there because Bill had proven to be a good friend to my mother, and therefore he was family to me. When she got sick he held her hand, fetched her prescriptions, and bitched about how the medical industry conspired to keep the cure to cancer under wraps so doctors could make more money. Bill doesn’t die, his practice is to build new life. That’s what he always does. Damn if he didn’t up and make his fifth fortune after my mother died, and with that he opened that bar in Costa Rica. Now he’s sitting here heartsick, with tourism practically at a halt, complaining that every cent is quickly getting sucked out of his life.

I half thought I could talk him into coming home with me, because if Bill did end up dying, I didn’t want him to die in the jungle, but having been there and having seen him I know he will not die for awhile. “Stop complaining, you codger,” I cough. “You’re gonna outlive me, especially now that I have this tapeworm.”

Bill beamed like a proud parent and then embraced me warmly. “A tapeworm,” he sighed, “maybe you’ll drop some of this weight.”