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

her.” I followed his gaze, which rested on a tiny, ancient woman sleeping in a chair on the other side of a screen door, her dark skin withered like pressed autumn leaves, her body comfortably sunk into itself like a stack of warming dough. Her hands were folded in her lap like two tiny pet cats. We sat silently looking at the lovely little mummy for a few moments as the weak light from her shack illuminated her silhouette. “She is Jesus,” Grant gasped, and we all agreed. This is exactly how Grant Henry found Sister Louisa, sitting there sleeping on the side of the road.

My Penis
    I CAN’T BELIEVE how picky men are about penises. You’d think they were women. And women, I swear, really aren’t that picky. As long as it functions we figure it’s a perfectly good penis, whether it’s the size of a totem pole or not, and if a girl tells you any different she’s pulling that fake-chaste, I’ve-only-been-with-one-other-man-and-that-was-against-my-will crap that we all master in order to make you feel great about your own pocket-packin’ status, which, I swear to God , is fine. We love it. Really. Whether it looks like it’s been carved out of marble or not. Which brings me to my real point: circumcision, and the lack thereof.
    You might wonder what business circumcision is of mine, since some people have argued that I have no penis of my own. But knocked up like I am, and freshly informed that the linebacker in my belly is, in fact, a boy, I say I’m gaining ground. On the sonogram last month—and we got a fuzzy view when the baby interrupted his break dance to bend over and moon us from behind—I saw it there plainly onscreen, kinda, in all it’s tiny, adorable glory: my penis.
    Until now I never knew I wanted one. But now that I have one I’m very protective of it, and it seems to me that the last thing any self-respecting penis-possessing person would want is to have someone come near their crotch with a scalpel, even if that person is wearing a surgical mask with a tank of anesthetic strapped to his back. I mean, please, stitches are involved, and a human-error factor, down there . I thought I would get some support on this stance from a few of my fellow tripods—I mean, they were born with their penises—but surprisingly I’ve been abandoned by my guy camp on this.
    I voiced my hesitation to my genetic counselor, putting it this way, “Can you give me a good, sound, medical reason to perform circumcision—which is surgery , right?—on my son?” To which she answered, simply, “No.” But they didn’t think a person sitting behind an actual desk in an actual office inside an actual hospital was qualified as an authority on the “snip” debate, so instead they turned to their own pathetic company to back themselves up.
    In classic gang-up mode, they first tried the archaic hygiene defense, and I don’t want to go into detail, but the word “cheese” was bandied about. But please, maybe back before we had showers and soap and loofahs , and people routinely washed off in pig troughs, and men wore boxers made out of tobacco leaves, maybe then the hygiene argument had some merit. So hygiene explains why the pruning practice got started, but not why we kept it up.
    I was especially surprised that Lary pounded the pro-snip line. Lary, who, even though he lives in an alleyway, still has a shower bigger than my kitchen, and has collected enough soap and oils and conditioner and scented enemas and stuff that his whole body could be covered by a big foreskin and he’d still be the cleanest, best-smelling man I know. And he’s not even gay.
    In all, their argument for circumcision amounts to the need for better washcloth access. This is a reason for surgery? God! Why not cut the lips off your face for better toothbrush access? Because, sure, it would work, but what’s wrong with leaving your lips where they are and just parting them when it’s time to scrub the hidden bits, if you know what I mean? So