Read Online Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood by Hollis Gillespie - Free Book Online Page A

and dreams had become, but as the years passed, that anger hardened into a calcified weight that simply hung there in our house, hidden in the constant blanket of cigarette smoke over our heads.
    I used to wait until the middle of the night to escape. After my parents fell asleep, I’d sneak out and run barefoot through our neighbor’s vast front lawn. When it was warm I’d unbutton my flannel shirt and just run in the quiet night, back and forth under the moonlight, with my shirt flapping behind me like a little cape, my face hardly able to contain my utter joy.
    Then, one morning, my father awoke, rheumy-eyed and shaking. “I saw you in the grass last night,” he said angrily. I was immediately terrified, certain he’d mete out his usual punishment, which was to clout me across the ass with the lid of a tin flour canister we kept in the kitchen, but instead he stopped and just stood there. Through the smoke of his cigarette I saw his face suddenly fall as if broken by the weight of all his mistakes, all the steps he took or was too timid to take. But these had nonetheless led him here, to this messy house, confronting an errant child he’d watched gallop barefoot under a full moon in the middle of the night. Looking back, I wish I had taken his whiskered, tortured face in my hands, but I didn’t. Instead, I am left with the memory of how he stopped and shook his head, and ran his twitching fingers through his thinning hair. I remember his eyes, his booze-addled eyes, suddenly beseeching for something just outside his reach.
    “I saw you,” he said again, softly, “and you were flying.”



Big Dix
    I once spent five days in Vienna as part of my job, and the whole time I had the flu, so I was hostage to a hotel room with a TV that offered only two English-speaking channels, one of which was a pay-per-view porno station. It featured a movie about marauding sex zombies who appeared to be the victims of a horny hypnotist. They ran around rutting everything in sight, until everyone just melded together into a hump of grunting flesh that was stuck together like an undulating, sweaty M. C. Escher painting.
    At least I think that’s what it was about. The plot was a little unclear, because I could only watch three minutes at a time before the film was automatically charged to my room. Seeing as how the American dollar is so valueless in Europe that people are using it to stuff up peepholes in pay toilets these days, I figured the U.S. currency equivalent of one in-room porn film fest roughly matched the price of a healthy human kidney on the black market.
    So because of my reluctance to fork over the dough, it became more of a porn peep show, really, but it got me to thinking: Do men really think women want to have sex with a penis the size of a sewage pipe? Do they think we look at someone who could pass for a human tripod and actually say to ourselves, “Oh, wow, won’t it be fun to rearrange my inner organs with that thing?!?” Do they think we just can’t wait to get our hands on some guy with a penis so huge he would need a blood transfusion if he got aroused?
    Judging from this movie (and, I’m sorry, I’m not going to watch eighty more to back up my theory), where the men who sprouted fleshy telephone poles from their pants looked like they were having a great time and the women looked like they were getting clubbed to death, my answer would be: I guess so.
    I bet it’s because of the average hetero male mentality when it comes to breasts, in which boobs big enough to be seen with the naked eye from passing aircraft are a real treat, that men never believe us when we say size doesn’t matter. But think of it this way: During sex, breasts are basically there to provide something to play with. If that were the only purpose of penises, maybe the colossal-equals-boffo theory would apply. But here’s a reminder: Penises have to fit somewhere. Remember? So, average man, the average woman doesn’t salivate at