Confessions of a Recovering Slut (6 page)

J
ESUS GOD
,
I do not have a tapeworm after all. What I have, according to the majority of these eleven drugstore pregnancy tests, is a much more permanent problem. I keep going back to the store to buy more tests because sometimes the pink line isn’t all that dark, and I think it might need to be darker for it to be real. On one there was no pink line at all, but that was just the one. On the other ten there were definitely pink lines in varying degrees of darkness, and ten-to-one are odds you just can’t ignore.

A week later the doctor confirmed the drugstore diagnosis, so ain’t life full of surprises.

Like it was just last Sunday we noticed that the Local finally put tables on their patio, and what a refreshing change it was to spend a sunny afternoon on a restaurant terrace drinking margaritas and watching the crack whores and homeless shuffle by rather than sitting at the requisite Virginia Highland coffeehouse watching the parade of soccer moms pushing jog strollers. We did see one mom at the Local, though. She was tattooed and tiny, and we wondered how she pushed out that infant without having to cut herself in half. The first thing she did after sitting down was take the milk bucket out of her bra and feed the baby.

“You see?” I said, “That’s why I’d make a bad mother.”

“Why?” asked Grant.

“I’m afraid I’d forget to feed it or something, and I’d come home one day and it would be dead on a bed of shredded newspaper like a neglected hamster.”

Grant was speechless. Another surprise. “Girl,” he repeated, “you got issues.”

He’s right. For example, rather than accept the possibility that I had no biological clock, I worried my clock was just not ticking loud enough for me to hear and the day would come in the future when the alarm would go off and I’d turn into some kind of maternal sperm junkie, suddenly desperate, wearing my uterus on my sleeve, hoping someone would inseminate me before cobwebs covered my ovaries.

Which brings me to the whole childbirth bloodbath itself. Jesus, when my niece was born you’d have thought my sister was giving birth to a full-grown grizzly bear! I never saw so much blood and gore and . . .
growling
. I know I personally couldn’t go through that without an IV bag of drugs as big as the baby itself. In fact, I’d like to start the epidural retroactively from the date of conception.

If I can just figure out when that was. Seriously, I’m so paranoid I can hardly have sex without wearing an entire scuba suit. So my theory is this: one night my uterus had an out-of-body experience while I was sleeping and latched itself onto the nearest man, who was probably right there in my bed, like a big fertile squid. That’s the only way I can explain it, other than all that acrobatic sex—but the
armor
, I tell you, was in place! It’s just that there must have been this minuscule, tiny,
microscopic
hole big enough for my entire future to fit through, that’s all.

Lary did not shoot me, as he always benevolently offers to do when he sees me suffering. What he did, along with Grant and Daniel, was excitedly volunteer to be my bodyguard through the pro-life gauntlet on the way to the abortion clinic. “I could bring a pitcher of martinis,” offered Grant. “It would be like a tailgate party!”

“Goddammit,” I shrieked. I can’t believe these three are planning my abortion like a trip to the beach. And Grant’s martinis suck, by the way. He’s on his Body Ecology diet again and he adds unsweetened cranberry juice to the vodka and his martinis always end up tasting like tart smegma. Not only that, since when was it just
assumed
I’d flush the sprogette?

“What am I, so fucking selfish that I can’t fit this kid in my life?” I laughed, acting all brave, but really I was so scared that later I just sat in my room shaking, I mean
shaking
, like a drug addict overdue for a fix.

After my first obstetrics appointment I paid my toll to the parking attendant, who rose the restraining arm to allow my car through, but instead of driving away I simply laid my forehead on my steering wheel and sobbed so hard it felt like major organs were leaking out of my eye sockets. The attendant let me stay there until I finished, then handed me a tissue volunteered from a woman in one of the four cars waiting patiently behind me. “Everything will be all right,” she said, not knowing what was wrong to begin with. “I know,” I said, and thanked her. I drove away marveling at how I could hold up four cars and not one of them honked. Wow, I thought, life really is full of surprises.

I
’VE BEEN TOLD
by trained professionals that my house is about to be sucked into the butthole to hell. Pretty much.

“See that right there?” one of them said, indicating a darkened border along the base of my foundation. “That there is moisture.”

Evidently moisture is like flesh-eating bacteria to a house, and whenever it rains on my house, which it has done a lot lately, the water just sorta pools around its foundation, potentially rotting it right out from under me, causing the whole structure, over time, to kind of cave in on itself and ultimately disappear like that place in the movie
Poltergeist
, I’m guessing, but minus the maggots.

Instead there’s mold. I wouldn’t even have noticed it if one of the professionals hadn’t shined a flashlight on it and pointed it out. “It’s not even
fuzzy
yet,” I told him. He looked at me like a neurologist might if he’d shown me an X-ray of my own personal brain tumor and I’d said, “That little thing? What’s the big deal?”

In short, it’s a big deal. Mold grows, and left on its own under a house it can thrive faster than a class-action lawsuit, releasing
spores
and things, which you
inhale
. So discovering even the tiniest little molecular bit of this stuff clinging to the foundation under your house is cause for panic, like finding anthrax in an air-conditioning vent.

So I had to call in the A-team, which for me is my contractor friend Art and his one employee, a bald, muscular, coffee-loving Lithuanian named Lucas. I hate to bother them because they are usually so busy building mansions and whatnot, and I always feel like my fix-it chores are so petty in comparison, like asking Michelangelo to paint the porch, but I don’t want the UPS guy looking through my window and calling 911 because I’m on the floor with foam spilling from my nostrils that is much too green to be boogers.

“Well, since you put it that way,” Art said, and he came right over. He brushed aside all the zillion-dollar estimates from the local foundation-repair mafia and said, “All these problems amount to one thing: You need to manage your flow.”

So he and Lucas set about building a network of gutters and drains that allowed the rain to flow away from my house, rather than settle in my basement like a teeming pool of poison. God, this is
great!
I thought. I’m not absorbing the problem, I’m
deflecting
it.

It’s the same philosophy they taught me in a self-defense class I took years ago: if someone is coming at you with a weapon, don’t just crouch there and stave yourself to absorb the blow,
deflect
the damn thing. So when the instructor came at me with his rubber knife and pretended to attempt to stab me—moving with the speed of a deep-sea diver—I, without fail, deflected the blade right into his thigh muscle. I was just as good with the rubber gun, too.

“All you need to worry about is this little hole right here,” the instructor said, pointing to the tip of the fake gun’s barrel. “Just make sure it isn’t pointed at you and you’ll be fine.” Then we’d spend the next fifteen minutes practicing the maneuvers we were taught, which amounted to deflecting the assailant’s gun-holding hand to ensure the little hole wasn’t pointed at our vital parts, so that if the assailant pulled the trigger before we could wrest the weapon from him, the bullet would hit one of our irrelevant parts, or, better, a bystander. “Manage the flow,” our instructor told us.

“I
love
this,” I told Grant while talking on my cell phone in my car. “That’s how I’m gonna live my life from now on. I’m just gonna stay put and deflect stuff. I’m not gonna absorb anything. I’m just gonna manage the flow.”

Grant is an expert at flow management. He once gave a party where he served only bread and wine, but had it all strategically situated in attractive settings throughout his art-laden house to instigate a flow pattern among guests that was conducive to lively conversation. (“Have you tried the multigrain? It’s over there by the chair covered in crack lighters.”)

“I know flow,” Grant said, or at least that’s what I think he said, because just then a Honda pulled in front of me and I had to brake so hard I could smell the rubber worn off my tires from the friction. The other driver stopped, too, but he hardly looked sorry at all. In fact, he almost looked like he thought it was
my
fault.

“That fucking prick, who the goddam fuck does he think he is? He’s lucky I didn’t crash into his ass and sue the shit out of him and the shit-eating idiots who insure him, can you fucking believe that? I cannot goddam
fucking
believe that cock-wagging asshole did not even
apologize!
Jesus goddam fucking
Christ!
” I hollered, the profanities flowing from me like water from a firehose, spewing and fuming until . . . what the hell was
that
now? What the goddam hell was that sound in my ear?

It took me a few moments before I realized it was coming through my cell phone head set. It was Grant, laughing. “Bitch,” he said, “you don’t deflect. You absorb. You are a
sponge
.”

T
HE FORTUNE COOKIE SAID
,
“You will die cold and alone,” and I’m glad I’m not the one who opened it. In fact, by the time it’s opened Lary will be long gone, which kind of sucks all the fun out of stuffing false fortunes into cookies at Chinese restaurants, if you ask me.

“Don’t you want to see their reaction?” I asked.

“Nah,” Lary said. “I can envision it.”

I figure if you’re just going to
envision
the result of an elaborate prank, then you might as well envision the whole thing from start to finish. It’s a lot easier than actually going to the restaurant, perusing their bowl of fortune cookies to pick out the ones whose real fortunes can be plucked from inside without disturbing their exterior, meticulously sliding the false fortunes inside, then covertly returning the tainted cookies back to the hostess stand.

“At the very least,” I said, “you should keep the cookies and give them to your friends. You could make them open them right there.”

“You want one?”

“Not the one that says I’ll die cold and alone.”

“You don’t get to pick your fortune,” Lary chided.

Christ, look who’s talking, the big Fortune Fucker Upper, swapping real fortunes for fake ones, messing with the order in the universe, laughing in the face of Satan or any other fill-in-the-blank karma-related crap we get fed from birth. My own fate changed completely when I met Lary, who, at the time, was attending the wedding of his ex-girlfriend Mary Jane, a wonderful girl he was a fool to let slip away. At the time I was on my way to being a normal person whose lot in life was to sit around burdened by a big sack of broken dreams like everybody else. But such are the dubious comforts of false fortune.

Lary spent many an hour with me barside at the original Vortex, talking me out of trying to fit in. He is nothing if not benevolent, you have to give him that. For example, he realizes that if he doesn’t let the women in his life slip away they’ll have him as the prize for their efforts, and he figures, rightly, that they deserve better. Besides, they don’t slip very far. To this day Lary remains devoted to Mary Jane and her family. But that doesn’t mean he won’t die cold and alone, in fact I think he’s determined to. I think that might be why he created all those false fortunes—so he won’t be alone in dying cold and alone.

But right now Lary is cold but not alone, hence he’s in the process of alienating all his friends to fix that. He won’t answer our calls and still won’t forgive me for giving up alcohol. If I called him right now he’d look at the display on his cell phone and ignore it. Sometimes I call him using Grant’s phone, because Grant is one of the few people whose phone calls Lary will take, not that that’s a good thing, because Grant is trying to talk Lary into moving to Mexico to live on a boat.

“Jesus God!” I bitched at Lary over Grant’s phone. “Don’t buy a boat. You’d be buried in barnacles the first month!”

But even as I said that I realized Lary
is
a barnacle. He’s got that crusty exterior, with hair the color of hay; he’s a salty dog that somehow ended up living in a dilapidated warehouse in Atlanta. He bought the place for nothing a decade ago, now it’s worth a fortune that’s all his if he sold it, which he easily could. He’s talking about moving to Isla Mujeres, an island in the Caribbean off the coast of Mexico. In fact, Isla Mujeres is where Grant once retired, having promised never to return to the dregs of normal society. That retirement lasted about five minutes before he was back ass-deep in the dregs, but Grant returns to the island every chance he gets, and the way he talks about the place makes us all long to go.

So that’s where I am right now. I’ve my own shit to sift through, obviously, and I wanted desperately to be alone to do it. Grant recommended a $35-a-night hotel, “with cold cold air-conditioning in the room and hot hot water in the shower,” which, now that I’m here, makes me wonder what he was comparing it to. I mean, the air conditioning is cold, sure, if you compared it to the breath of a dying person, and the shower water is hot if you compared it to refrigerated urine samples. “So fuck you,” I e-mail Grant, but I can almost hear him laughing. He knows it’s just the dregs talking, having clung to me from home, and he knows they will drop away soon enough.

And they did. I feel better now, and not in small part because I’m surrounded by such simple beauty. I spent yesterday alone but not cold, lying at a languid angle to the remarkably calm ocean, the horizon a parfait of blue hues, the air warming me like a womb. Suddenly a sense of gratitude washed over me like the ocean itself. I was thinking about my fortunes. There are so many, false and otherwise. From now on I’ll be better, I promise, at distinguishing the two.