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

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.

Flow Management
    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