Confessions of a Recovering Slut (8 page)

“Yeah, right,” says Honnie as Snoop Dogg’s “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” blares from the drug dealer’s house next door
(. . . With a fat dick for your motherfuckin’ mouth!
).

“This is the first place a white supremacist would want to live,” she finishes wryly.

Honnie and her family aren’t Klan members, they’re artists, and they bought a house eight blocks away from me for the same reason I bought mine in Capitol View not long ago, because this neighborhood is the last bastion of affordable homes so close to the city. You can buy a house here with a mortgage for less than what you’d pay for a facial package at a day spa. They got a good house, too, better than mine, even. It has four fireplaces, original molding, hardwood floors, and an in-law suite for Bren, who makes her own soap. I just think that says a lot about a person. She gives me homemade soap almost every time I come to visit, and it’s not because I smell.

The house they bought was for sale back when I was looking for a house here, but I passed on it because there was a crack house across the street, a drug dealer next door, and it was separated by only one street from Metropolitan Parkway, a crime-ridden corridor that has lately also become known for child prostitution. So from the beginning, Honnie and Todd picked a risky street even by Capitol View standards, but still, the entire house cost less than what a law partner would spend on a luxury car. Bummer about those addicts and all, but hey, when was the last time you saw a wrap-around porch at that price?

So Honnie and Todd bypassed the houses on the better streets because this house had high ceilings, those fabulous tiled fireplaces and, oh my God, that
kitchen
. You could host a seminar in that kitchen. My own kitchen counter is so small it couldn’t support a card game, but theirs is bigger than the width of my entire bathroom. So Honnie and Todd bought the place, jumped on it. After that, I guess the first bad sign would have been the dead dog.

But Honnie did not take that as an omen. If the dead dog was a message from the drug dealers in the neighborhood, she surmised, then they would have thrown it on her doorstep and not just on her front yard. But looking back, you have to admit that having a dead dog tossed in your yard the day you move in is a bad sign. Then there was the crack house across the street.

“You cannot imagine the hassle it is to have a crack house on your block,” Honnie tells me. But I think I can relate. I don’t have a crack house on my block, but eight houses away from mine is the intersection known as “Crack Corner,” where dealers congregate to make themselves available to addicts. They are constantly wandering into traffic, too, and I almost ran one down, which is how I got my nickname in the neighborhood. “Bleachy-haired honky bitch!” they’ve yelled at me since.

So I think I can relate, but I’m wrong. For example, Honnie tells me she was driving to work one morning and looked over to see a whore giving blow jobs to three men standing in line along the side of the crack house. So Honnie is right, I can’t even imagine that. I didn’t even know it was possible to give head to three men at once. Would you have to be like a performing seal, tooting on horns or something? What?

“Yeah, like that,” Honnie says dryly. “What a great way to start the day.” I didn’t know if she meant her having to look at it or the whore having to do it, but I figured either was bad so I didn’t press. I was there to sit vigil with her on her porch, so the dealer and drug addicts would know there was some neighborhood solidarity behind this kind couple and their mother. We actually had shifts. Mine was up when I saw Victoria walking up the path, her gait uneven and assisted by her cane. Victoria lives in the apartment complex on Metropolitan Parkway where, a few years ago, police found the bodies of a bridegroom and his best man on the day of their wedding ceremony. The two had come to partake in the strip joints along the Metropolitan Parkway corridor as part of a bachelor-party excursion and ended up dead. There are plenty of very bad people who live in that apartment complex, and plenty of good people, too.

Victoria ambles up to Honnie’s porch and gives Honnie a hug. “Don’t you worry,” she tells us. “Ain’t nobody gonna hurt nobody while I’m here.”

M
y LAYOVER HOTEL
,
it turns out, is only three blocks away from Sunset Boulevard, and the Whiskey-a-Go-Go is
right there
. The reason I’m bothered by this is that it took me three trips to figure it out.

I mean, the Hollywood I remember, barely, used to be seedy and dangerous. There would be no way you could stay at a fancy hotel three blocks away from Sunset with signs in the windows that read, “Please be respectful of our neighbors by keeping noise to a minimum.” There would be no way you could be here three times and three blocks away from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go and not
know
it. You would have to be blind.

Historically, or in my personal history anyway, the Whisky-a-Go-Go is beyond riotous, beyond big. It’s supposed to be surrounded by heroin addicts and other unwashed flotsam. There should
not
be a place to get a good cappuccino within walking distance. There should
not
be a swanky cafe with cloth-covered tables and a hostess podium on the sidewalk next door. But then again, I should not be here on business, either. Go figure.

But back to the Whiskey, it should be sort of sinister, I swear. You should be scared when you stand in line there, hoping to get a glimpse of some screeching urchin with grommets embedded in his head while you hop around in the crowd like a crushed pogo in a puddle of what you’re hoping isn’t someone else’s piss.

I was there exactly once, when I was sixteen and lived in a suburb of Los Angeles called Torrance that seemed to be an entire solar system away from Sunset Boulevard. It seriously seemed like we had to cross the continental divide to reach Hollywood, when in fact Torrance is just couple of freeway stops south, but to me it was the distance between my tepid existence and the mysterious frontier of all that is cool and bitchin’. To me it was galaxies away.

I would not have gone at all if not for the practical blindness that befell my parents during their divorce. It was as if giant cracks formed in their awareness, cracks through which I willingly fell. My mother had moved out of our apartment and then booted my Dad’s ass out a few months later because she was tired of paying his rent. My sister and I stayed there alone, as my mother was loath to break her half-year lease on her place across town at the singles complex. So for that period between my father’s moving out and my mother’s neglecting to move back in, my little sister and I lived by ourselves with nothing but our own teenage brains to keep us in line. You can imagine the success of that situation.

Enter my best friend Kathy, who drove me to Hollywood at midnight in a Pinto completely void of headlights. I mean there were literally none, and even the encasements that would have housed them were gone, with nothing left but some fray-tipped colored wires dangling as if the Pinto’s eyes had been plucked out in Oedipal fury. Kathy’s family was experiencing something she considered similar to my own situation. Her recently divorced mother had begun seriously dating a Coast Guard employee, and Kathy’s habit was to revolt so heinously in their presence that they were more grateful she was gone than worried where she’d be.

Sunset Boulevard was appropriately packed with prostitutes and crazy people back then, each flinching reflexively as Kathy and I drew near in our lightless Pinto. I’m guessing they’d had few positive experiences that involved a car approaching with its headlights out. But we were not looking for trouble, we were looking for a parking space.

At the Whiskey we danced until we physically damaged ourselves and those around us. To this day I don’t know if I got into a fight that night or if all that punching and hair pulling was just part of the normal punk reverie. At one point a girl had a hold of my hair like it was the handle to my head, but I didn’t take it personally, figuring it was my fault for wearing a ponytail to a punk-rock venue.

We’d been unsuccessful in our search for a parking space, so Kathy had pulled onto the lawn of an apartment complex nearby and that’s where we’d left her car for the night. It could very well have been one of these residences right here across from my little boutique hotel, one of the places for whose benefit I am asked to keep quiet. Today this neighborhood is downright upscale. No wonder I didn’t recognize it.

But for a second there last night, stopped at a light on the corner of Sunset and San Vincente, it came back to me. I caught a flicker of the fashionable crustiness this place used to encase. I saw the two of us, Kathy and I, lost in the cracks, slicing through the night in complete darkness on our way to a place galaxies away. You’d be surprised at the distance you can cover in a car with its eyes gouged out, and the things you can get away with when people can’t see you coming. That was us, careening through life like we had no idea we were blind.

Y
OU CAHHOT FATHOM
the crap I’m about to get from everyone for the following confession, so here it is. It turns out, after all that cocky posturing on my part, all that bloviating about how I am officially a member of the human-tripod league due to the Y chromosome growing in my gut, all that waving around of a sonogram picture that was supposed to have been
proof
that the linebacker in my belly is, indeed, a boy—not to mention the goddam
amnio
results, which are
error free
—after all of that it turns out I
don’t have a penis after all!

Jesus God! I should have known. I mean, I was itching to
braid hair
, and that’s not like me at all. But I kept getting mental pictures of plastic barrettes and ribbons, and glittery little butterfly clips or whatever. I swear, this kid was headed for a hairdo so encrusted with cutesy little gadgets I could’ve used her head as a reflector to flag for help from the bottom of a well. So I was getting definite girl vibes from this baby all along. But a future mother’s instinct isn’t based in science like all those tests they put me through—tests in which bespectacled people poked at me like aliens inspecting an abducted bovine right before the farmer finds it dead in the field with its asshole missing—those tests are
scientific
.

So of course I believed them when they told me the results. But I should clarify myself here: the results were, in fact, accurate, but
science
doesn’t take into consideration the human fallacy factor, and in this case that factor consisted of a nurse who was pregnant herself,
with a boy
. Evidently, at the precise moment in which she was telling me the sex of my future child, her brain burped out “boy” instead of “girl,” thereby reducing these 100 percent sure-fire tests to a bunch of blathering snake-oil hokums that have all the accuracy of a blindfolded rooster pecking out winners on a racing form. Next time I might as well let my psychic friend Sherrie Cash rub bloody rabbit bladders on my belly, or whatever it is she does to determine the sex of the baby before it’s born.

It’s not like I’m picky about the gender of my baby. I had all those tests performed because I wanted to make sure the baby wasn’t packing a basket of extra chromosomes or something, what with me being a hundred years old and my ovaries covered in cobwebs and all. Finding out the baby’s sex was supposed to be a side perk. It was three months before they discovered their mistake.
Three months
. Three months of me calling the kid “Maxwell” and fighting with my friends over my decision not to circumcise.

And God! Was I cocky on the “clip” debate. Even though I was amazed at how hung up men could be on what other people’s penises should look like, what really pissed me off were women! Women who felt compelled to impose on me their disgust over the unpruned. “It’s gross,” they’d squeal, as if they’d ever be in a position to have sex with my son. You know, I still say that not one of these girls, regardless of all that preening, would pass up a bout of bestial fornication because of an intact foreskin. So drop the irritating chastity act, okay?

But I digress. The point is this: when Michael used to tell me, “You have a lot to say for someone with no penis,”
he was right
. I hate that he was right. Before, when he said this to me, I’d point to my sonogram to prove him wrong. But sonograms are like dental X-rays, you just look at where the doctor is pointing and think you see what is supposed to be there. In this case there was nothing there.
It was a shadow
. But don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I’m having a girl. I hardly miss my penis at all, and now that everything’s straightened out I can get back on track with my original maternal vibe, and that is to raise a daughter with plenty of balls.

T
HANK GOD CAR ACCIDENTS
are behind me. Fourteen is enough, I tell you, whereas thirteen definitely was not. I remember when I’d had my thirteenth and thought, “Christ, I know I won’t leave it at that,” and right away I was worried, because I know me. I am so superstitious I even consider being superstitious to be bad luck.

For example, when I used to play tournament tennis as a kid, and I found myself losing the match (as I always did), I’d start throwing pieces of myself away. Seriously, I’d go to the back fence to collect the ball and toss my bracelet through the chain link, or necklace, or macrame belt, or
whatever
. Once I even took off my socks, tossed them. They all became evil talismans as the game wore on. They were black holes sucking all the luck out of me, and they had to be purged. Even my tennis shoes became cursed. When I tried to finish a match barefoot the club manager finally intervened.

I never won a match. I didn’t even win a
concession
match, which were sort of side matches that tournament officials threw together to give all the losers of the real match something to do until the end of the event. Since none of my offerings to the angry tennis God were sufficient to garner me a single trophy, I concluded it was the superstitions themselves that were bad luck, so every time it even crept into my head that, for example, Ah ha! It’s my wicked sweatband that’s making me lose, I’d cringe like I was bracing for a blow, because right there I’d gone and blown it by being superstitious. So, you know, it all went inward. My own brain became the evil talisman.