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

sorry, I don’t buy the Big Snip ritual just to save my son a nanosecond in the shower every day, which brought the Clip Club down to their last defense: conformity.
    “The other boys will make fun of him in the locker room,” said Giant Michael, who, I would like to point out, has shirked conformity his entire life and become a successful restaurant owner and all-around cool hep cat because of it. But Michael was tired of me, and tired of defending circumcision, and made the mistake of trying to end the discussion by pointing out I sure had a lot to say for someone with no penis. But he was wrong, and this time I had the sonogram printout to prove it.

A Bad Sign
    E VEN BEFORE SHE got shot at, I told my neighbor Honnie that if a bullet ever came through my window I’d be out of this place faster than my feet could carry me, and even then I’d assumed the bullet would have been by accident, that someone would have shot at someone else and my window just got in the way.
    “I swear,” I said to Honnie, “I’d be gone. You’d see my legs spinning underneath me like a cartoon character.”
    I don’t remember what Honnie said next, but I wish I did, because in the end the bullet didn’t go through my window, it went through hers. And it was no accident. Someone stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, aimed a gun at her living room and pulled the trigger. Three times. The bullets ripped through the curtains and chipped the tile on one of the fireplaces inside the home Honnie shares with her husband, Todd, and her mother, Bren.
    “They didn’t make much noise when they came through,” Bren said sweetly of the bullets. “You’d think it would be louder than that.”
    If you want loud, you should have heard the girl who threatened Bren’s life earlier that day. The police didn’t think the incident merited the filing of a formal complaint, even though, when they arrived at the scene, the girl was still standing there screaming at Bren in front of her house. She was a little thing, the screaming girl, but God what a volcanic bitch she could be. According to her shrieks, Honnie’s house was going to be blown up or burned down or both. The girl didn’t even live in the crack house that started all this ruckus, the crack house in Capitol View that Honnie and her family were helping to close down. But the girl’s boyfriend lived there so she felt it was her mission to go door-to-door on a campaign to convince people Honnie and her family were part of the Klan.
    “Yeah, right,” says Honnie as Snoop Dogg’s “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” blares from the drug dealer’s house next door (. . . With a fat dick for your motherfuckin’ mouth! ).
    “This is the first place a white supremacist would want to live,” she finishes wryly.
    Honnie and her family aren’t Klan members, they’re artists, and they bought a house eight blocks away from me for the same reason I bought mine in Capitol View not long ago, because this neighborhood is the last bastion of affordable homes so close to the city. You can buy a house here with a mortgage for less than what you’d pay for a facial package at a day spa. They got a good house, too, better than mine, even. It has four fireplaces, original molding, hardwood floors, and an in-law suite for Bren, who makes her own soap. I just think that says a lot about a person. She gives me homemade soap almost every time I come to visit, and it’s not because I smell.
    The house they bought was for sale back when I was looking for a house here, but I passed on it because there was a crack house across the street, a drug dealer next door, and it was separated by only one street from Metropolitan Parkway, a crime-ridden corridor that has lately also become known for child prostitution. So from the beginning, Honnie and Todd picked a risky street even by Capitol View standards, but still, the entire house cost less than what a law partner would spend on a luxury