Confessions of a Recovering Slut (9 page)

So, at thirteen car wrecks, I was doubly cursed, because (1) it’s impossible to avoid thinking that’s a bad number to stand on, and (2) it really is a bad number to stand on. So I knew there was another wreck coming to me, and knowledge like that makes things uncomfortable, believe me.

I’d started having the wrecks at eighteen, and I don’t even count the time my engine blew up as a wreck, or even as my fault, for that matter. When my sister Cheryl gave me her gold 1969 VW bug, she said these exact words, “The oil light is broken, that’s why it keeps blinking.” Even so, looking back I must say I was impressed that the car ran like that for about a month before the engine block finally cracked like a cantaloupe rind.

So of course I rebuilt it. The car went from being free to costing me five hundred dollars—or costing my mother that amount, anyway. She paid it out of guilt for having freshly left my father, who had a job selling used cars. That is how my sister got her hardly driven Toyota Celica, hence the VW bug hand-me-down.

After the divorce, my mother moved us to San Diego, and I intermittently made the two-hour commute to visit my father until two years later when he died. That last commute was when the car wrecks started—two in one day, mind you. First I was rear-ended on the freeway outside of San Clemente as I slowed for construction work, but the damage wasn’t debilitating so we continued on. Then a lady
backed into
me at a stop light right outside my father’s car lot, where my little sister Kim and I were headed to pick up my father’s effects along with the proceeds from a modest life-insurance policy.

At eighteen, I was right to worry this was the beginning of something big. The first thing I did with the life-insurance check was buy a used 1974 Datsun 240Z, and the first thing I did with that was wreck it. So of course I rebuilt. Wreck. Repeat. Wreck. Repeat, until nine years later at number fourteen, which had been a 1963 Beetle, cherry in color and condition. But at fourteen I knew I was finished. “That’s enough,” I said to myself as I watched the tow truck drag away the shredded mess my car had become. I didn’t even bother to rebuild it. There just comes a point when the damage around you matches the damage you feel inside, and you’re finished with wrecking things.

Back when I’d gone with my sister to the car lot to pick up my father’s stuff, his boss met us at the door. He looked to be, maybe, half my father’s age. I realized then that, by the time my father had gotten this job, it had been nine years since he’d had one, and nine months after that my mother had left him.

At that point she packed us up and left him there with nothing but his new job selling cars, but at least he could drive a different model every day to help take his mind off the rubble his marriage had become. At least there was that, right?

“Can I interest you in a used car?” our father’s boss cracked as he directed me to my dad’s desk. Then he saw my face. “Bad joke,” he muttered, disappearing only to lurk as car salesmen do sometimes, like oil seeping into sand. My parents had been married longer than the life of my father’s boss, I realized then. Wreck. Repeat. Wreck. Repeat. Wreck. Repeat, until twenty-five years later, when the damage around them matched the damage they felt inside, and they didn’t bother to rebuild.

L
ARY SAYS I’M LUCKY
my body is not buried in a hole in his basement right now. If he’d hesitated at all before shooting at me that one time, he might have aimed better and actually hit me and I’d be dead right now “in a big way,” he says. But because he didn’t hesitate,
at all
, and just grabbed the gun and shot at me in one fluid motion, the bullet harmlessly ricocheted off a rock and landed in a plant bed.

“That is why you’re alive today,” he says, “because I didn’t hesitate.”

“That is crap,” I say. Not only do I think he should have hesitated a little, I still strongly believe he should not have shot at me at all, even though I was breaking into his house at the time. He has since given me a new key.

You’d think that, since I’m good at breaking into cars, I’d have a natural talent for houses, too, but I don’t. In fact, if ever I need to break into a house I just call Lary, and he shows up in a truck. I don’t even know how he does it (maybe I should take notes); all I know is that, with him there, what was once locked is now not. He doesn’t seem to have any special tools that I can see. He just tells me to wait outside the front door, and soon he is opening it from the other side for me. “How did you get in?” I ask.

“It was easy,” is all he says.

He once helped me break into Daniel’s place because I ran out of margarita mix, and tequila, too, and while I was there I might as well take that melon liqueur, and . . . oh, what the hell, why lug it all back across the hall to my place when I can mix it all right here in Daniel’s vintage Osterizer? He won’t mind. A few months prior he and Grant broke into my place and ate all the chocolate reindeer out of the Christmas baskets I used to make for my supervisors back when I thought kissing ass mattered in my business, and a few months before that they broke in while I was actually there, sleeping off a bender. They littered my whole house with condom wrappers and then the next morning tried to tell me that I stumbled home in a drunken stupor and pulled a train on a bunch of Mexican busboys.

So I don’t want to dig a hole for myself here, but what good is a friend if you can’t break into his damn house? Lary’s been my friend longer than anyone practically, and half the fun of having friends is invading their territory. Up until Lary shot at me I was routinely plundering through his personal stuff looking for nude self-Polaroids he might use to solicit sex on the Internet or something. I swear, I could not believe that man wasn’t hiding something, I even looked under the tarps in his backyard, but all I found were a couple of car carcasses and a litter of thin, feral kittens.

“If you didn’t change your locks, I wouldn’t have needed to break in,” I remind him, which is true. Up until then I’d had my own personal key to Lary’s door, which he had personally given me. Then he just up and changed his locks one day, which I think is very inconsiderate, and then to shoot at me for doing what I had no choice but to do? That is downright rude.

“What’s rude is I almost had to bury you in my basement,” Lary bitches. “Think of the hole I almost had to dig!”

I was ten the first time I broke into a house—with my older sister, who was in middle school and therefore more attuned to the criminal mind. She had somehow procured the key to the house of a twelve-year-old boy named Tyler, with whom we were both in love. He had curly dark hair past his shoulder blades and wore low-slung jeans anchored by a belt buckle in the shape of a big metal skull with a snake all wound up in the eye sockets.

My sister Cheryl didn’t know that I was also in love with Tyler; I kept that part secret because I was afraid she wouldn’t let me help her break into his house if she knew, and I was absolutely atwitter with anticipation. I swear, I think I even talked myself into believing I would find rough drafts of love letters written to me, all aching with longing and revealing a sensitivity very advanced for an adolescent. I even had him lusting after the curve of my neck in those letters, I think, wanting to engulf my clavicle with kisses and whatnot.

This is all due to the fact that I’d stolen romance novels from my mother’s bedside and read in secret the travails of many an Edwardian beauty. In these books, the heroine always very romantically fell in love with her first lover, who was very ardent, tender, and vulnerable for a rapist. The curve of her neck always seemed to be the thing that sent the nobleman masquerading as a commoner into the throes of mad passion, crumbling the façade of his blue-blooded upbringing and releasing the beast within. After that they’d inevitably become awash in an unfathomable ocean of desire, with yearning breasts bursting and a big throbbing python of love.

Stuff like this is irresistible to a ten-year-old, and I was always thrusting my neck out at Tyler, wondering how he could resist the yearning breasts bursting beneath my tank top. When I heard my sister planned to break into his house I stuck to her like putty until she agreed I could come. We picked Saturday in broad daylight to pull it off. I wore garden gloves to mask my fingerprints, which was unnecessary, because I was soon sent to the kitchen for look-out duty while my sister alone got to wallow in Tyler’s stuff.

I was quite bored in the kitchen until I opened a drawer located under the wall-mounted telephone and found a deck of pornographic playing cards. The queen of hearts held particular interest for me, since she literally had a throbbing python of love in every orifice, plus one in each fist.
Jesus God
, I thought,
she’s all plugged up
.

She did not look like she was awash in an unfathomable ocean of desire. She just looked incredibly uncomfortable. Just then my sister emerged from Tyler’s bedroom, and in her hand she gripped his big belt buckle. She planned to treasure it for the rest of her life, she said, wadded up in her pajama top as she slept, even. But when we got home, I stole that belt buckle back from her and buried it behind a briar bush in our backyard. It was quite an effort to dig that hole, too, I tell you, because I had to make it big enough to fit all my mother’s romance novels as well.

I
DID NOT START THE RUMOR
that Grant and Matt slept together.
Grant
started that rumor. I swear, according to him, he and Matt have practically been stuck together like sucker fish since 1997, barring that prison stint Matt had to complete a couple of years ago owing to all those banks he robbed in his early twenties.

Anyway, it’s not
my
fault Matt’s now all in love with someone else and has some answering to do. I hear she is very pretty, Matt’s new love, but then Grant’s the one who told me that. I believe him, though, because Matt himself is very pretty and it just seems appropriate to bookend him with the same. Sometimes I can just look at Matt for whole minutes on end and wonder how someone with eyes as big and blue as two planet Plutos right there on his face—and that
face
, Michelangelo could not have carved such a beautiful face—how someone with a face like that could fuck Grant and rob banks, not that he did both at the same time or either at all (though the bank robbing is actually documented by a formal confession). And that’s not even counting the addictions.

“I have a very addictive personality,” Matt told me once. He was sitting across from me in a booth at the Local, his face just as sweet as Easter candy. His proclamation surprised me. This “addictive personality” was news. “Does Matt really have an addictive personality?” I asked Grant later.

“Well, there was the heroin,” he said, “and the sex, and, you know, the bank robbing,” he continued, “so, yeah.”

Heroin
? Where the hell did that come from? I swear, you think you know somebody . . . and then sometimes you do know somebody, but you just don’t want to know everything. For example, when I was seventeen I ended up sleeping with a heroin addict who was every bit as beautiful as Matt. His name was Scott, and he was a surfer boy who graduated from my high school before I started my freshman year, but all the students still talked about him like he was still around.

He wasn’t, not in any sense. Not then, anyway. I met him through my sister, who dated his roommate, and I don’t know why Scott set his sights on me when there were so many walking bikini stuffers he could ball, why he centered in on this awkward high-school kid with hardly any friends, but I think maybe my youthful incorruptibility might have been a factor. There is just something about a new book that makes you want to flip through the pages and bend the bindings back, isn’t there?

Anyway, that must have been something he couldn’t stand to not destroy, the newness of me, because he always acted kind of crazed when I was around, like I was an overly frosted birthday cake and him there with his finger just out of reach. To my dubious credit I kept myself out there for years before I finally let him reach me. By then he was recovering from his addiction, as well as a hellacious, half-year-long bout of hepatitis, and my sister had moved on to another boyfriend, a fry cook at the coffee shop where she waitressed. I don’t even remember how it happened, how one day I was incorruptible and the next I was not; the memory has been banished from my brain like bad bacteria. I just know it had something to do with love.

Not love for Scott, hell no. I was stupid in love with another boy, who made use of me until my usefulness turned into burden, I suppose. He was the bag boy at the local grocer down the street from my house, and I craved him like I was suffocating and his breath was my only salvation. I swear if it were up to my mindset at the time, I would still, to this day, be spending every afternoon the same, waiting by the window in front of my house to see him drive by after his shift in his flawlessly preserved 1963 red VW Bug. Sometimes he was coming to get me and other times he just passed me by. It was there, in front of my house in the front seat of that Bug, that this boy informed me of the burden I’d become, and afterward he had to physically pull me out of the passenger side as I clung to him, unwilling to let go of my jones. “I’ll change,” I begged, but he was already gone.

From there Scott plucked me up like a berry from a bush. It was that easy. I allowed him to corrupt me in many imaginative ways, all the while hoping the bag boy would intervene. But when Scott started shooting up again, he did not try to take me there, I have to give him that. He hid it from me until I found him in my bathroom one night, the needle already in his arm. Maybe he was hoping I’d intervene, too, I don’t know. It’s funny with addictive personalities, because they don’t just want what they can take, they want what they can’t reach as well. So it’s not surprising to remember how long Scott stayed in my life in all, with both of us wanting something we couldn’t reach.