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

the sight of a penis the size of a ham shank. Our typical reaction would be to calmly excuse ourselves, go to the bathroom, and climb out the window. I’m pretty sure of that.
    Most women don’t want to feel like they’ve been trampled on by buffalo after having sex. Afterward a lot of us would just like to be able to walk away from the experience with…well, we’d just like to be able to walk.



Bona Fide Fag Status
    For years Daniel, Grant, and I have lusted after the same hot bicycle cop in Virginia-Highland. Maybe you’ve seen him, the one with tan arms like carved marble emerging from his short-sleeved uniform. At first sight of him, Grant practically soared out of his seat and stuck himself to the window of the coffeehouse like a wet piece of putty. And he wasn’t even really gay yet (well, of course he was always gay, but at that time he was trapped way in the back of the closet behind an ex-wife, a present wife, a daughter, and a dog named Ellie May). It wasn’t just a closet for Grant, it was a cocoon—but when that cop walked by, Grant didn’t just come out, he flew out and flapped around the room on opal-colored wings. He was free! After that, the only time his feet touched the ground was to get his toenails painted by that poor Korean girl on Ponce de Leon Avenue. (I say “poor” because you should see Grant’s feet, they’re hooves .)
    I had known Grant before he wore his bona fide fag status likethe feathered headdress that it is, but not for that long. His heteroness only overlapped with our friendship by a couple months, and during that time our relationship had been as chaste as kindergarten paste. It wasn’t until later, when Grant had finally gotten in touch with his inner impishness, that I’d occasionally have to call him and ask, “Was that your tongue in my mouth last night?” Grant’s tongue is in everyone’s mouth these days—it’s practically his signature handshake. Somehow his roguery is always forgivable. Once he came back from Barcelona and, in front of almost all our friends, handed me a bunch of bestiality porn he bought at a Spanish yard sale and bellowed, “When I saw this I thought Hollis !”
    Grant was always sort of quasisafe as a man, what danger there was not being the sexual kind, not really, not to me anyway. He has carried me home blotto drunk a couple times, and despite the free rein that gave him, the worst thing he ever did was raid my kitchen and eat all the leftover packs of airplane peanuts I’d planned to hand out at Halloween that year. So imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me a few days ago to say he was furious at me for forgetting that we once slept together.
    “Oh, c’mon!” I have to scream. “We never slept together!”
    This is embarrassing for a couple reasons. Grant and I had been communicating via mutual friends’ e-mail because he is trying to be retired again, this time on a tiny island off the coast of Cancún called Isla Mujeres. Grant’s e-mails reach me fine, but for some reason I can’t get through to him from my address, so I have to write him from other people’s computers,and sometimes he replies along the same route. So our communication is basically a big party line among all our friends.

    Isla Mujeres
    I was at a loss when Lary then asked casually, like this would be no big deal if it were true, if Grant and I had ever slept together.
    “ Hell no! Where the hell did that come from? Hell no! What in hell are you asking me that for? Me and Grant? Hell no!! ”
    It turns out Grant had made some comment from Mexico, between singing the praises of “manly Mexican marine meat” and the tastiness of dead scorpions soaked in tequila, that might have been misconstrued (maybe if you had eaten a basket of those marinated scorpions or something) to imply that Grant and I have a history that’s more than platonic. And maybe we do. I miss him so much that sometimes I sit around and just wail like a sick sea cow. I can’t tell