Confessions of a Recovering Slut by Hollis Gillespie Read Free Book Online

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