Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood (31 page)

When
I was seven I had a crush on Satan. Not that I knew who he was, I just based everything on his picture. In the illustrated children’s Bible I remember one picture in particular, in which Jesus had just pushed Satan off a cliff, and Satan is sailing down through the air, a trail of red robes billowing behind him. He looked only slightly irritated at the inconvenience. He had hair as black as octopus ink, styled like Lyle Waggoner’s, an impeccably groomed beard, and a deep sunburn. ’Course that cloven hoof was kind of a downer, but hey, other than that I thought he was hot.

When my mother came home from work that day I told her I wanted to marry Satan when I grew up. She looked at me gravely, then said, “Kid, whatever you do, don’t get married.”

My affection for Satan soon fizzled (he’s too possessive). Then came a very brief period during which we were allowed to go to church, my two sisters and I, minus any money for the collection
tray. We were all under ten, and I suppose my parents thought it was a good way to get us out of the house for a day. A church bus came by and collected the neighborhood kids every Sunday, and we sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on the way. Once there, every day, I approached the stage when the preacher called forth sinners from the audience who wanted their souls saved.

One day a lady usher stopped me in the aisle as I made my weekly pilgrimage. “You were saved last week, sweetie, and the week before that,” she said, leading me back to my seat, “…and the week before that.”

With my mother in 1989—a month later she was diagnosed with terminal cancer

“But it didn’t take,” I protested as she walked away, her knee-highs sagging around her ankles.

The preacher called my mother to complain about my behavior, and it was this, combined with the fact that we were actually starting to recite some of the stuff we learned in church (like how, after you’re dead and buried, devils take an elevator up to the underside of your coffin and kidnap you if you don’t tithe properly) that prompted my mother to call a stop to churchgoing. The bus still pulled up outside our apartment building every Sunday and honked, but my mother waved it away. The driver always waited a few minutes before leaving, as if performing a sad little vigil for three tiny lost souls. I worried briefly that I would go to Hell, but my mother said what she always said when I worried about that. “What bigger Hell is there than a heaven full of people like that?” my mother asked, indicating the departing bus. “Your soul, by the way, is fine.”

My mother never wavered from her stance on religion. She
would throw herself between her children and any aggressively approaching Jesus freaks during family outings along the esplanade. “Stay back!” she’d hiss, stopping them in their tracks, their propaganda moistening in their palms. They stayed back. As opposed to “the afterlife,” she believed in
the only life
, as in, “This is the only life you get, don’t wreck it.” She died young, her life considerably less wrecked than it could have been. Before cancer caused her to lapse into a coma, she told me her biggest regret in life was writing “bicycle” on her Christmas list as a little girl, knowing her parents grievously could not afford to give her one. When Christmas came and went with no bicycle, she continued to write “bicycle” at the end of her mother’s grocery list every week for months. “I wish I hadn’t done that,” she said with soft penitence, her eyes round and sad, and then she was unconscious.

I laid down next to her on the bed and stroked her blistered head. “I love you, Mom,” I said repeatedly, “and your soul, by the way, is fine.”

I
don’t know where to begin when it comes to whom I can blame for this book, so I guess I have to start in order of their appearance. First, my parents were the kind of wonderful, just-this-side of insane lunatics who were utterly unable to hide their fears from me, which works out better for impressionable children than you might think. My two sisters, Cheryl and Kim, and my brother, Jim, were the perfect colleagues with which to wade through the days, gathering around me like little life jackets when it seemed imminent I’d sink any minute, then, with the exception of Kim, beating the crap out of me when they figured I could handle it. Later, my friend Jeff Bertram had a bigger hand in honing my sense of humor than he might think, plus I fell in love with his parents, who are from Atlanta, making it seem like some kind of Land of Functional Families to me, which is why I moved there after college. There I met Lary Blodgett, at the wedding of his lovely ex-girlfriend Mary Jane, who that day married another man.

Then I met Jill Hannity. I placed a call to her when she was an editor at
Creative Loafing
to inquire about working for free as an intern, but instead she insisted on assessing some of my manuscripts. Upon doing so she assigned me a cover story, which paid actual American dollars. After that she became one of the best friends I ever had.

Then Jill left the
Loaf
to move to New York to have beautiful babies and continue to be the wife of the now famous, rock-hot TV commentator Sean Hannity (note to Sean: If this book makes me rich, I promise I won’t bogey the reefer so much). So I left that paper as well and started writing a column (for free) for a gutsy start-up called
Poets, Artists & Madmen
, published by Patrick Best and Steve Hedberg. By that time I’d acquired two more zimwads to round out my makeshift family: Daniel Troppy and Grant Henry. We were all like a gaggle of hermit crabs without shells, flopping around trying to find ourselves.

Instead we found each other, and that’s just as good, I guess. Lary was in there too, but Lary had never been lost. Then four years later
Creative Loafing
, which had grown into one of the biggest alternative papers in the nation under the auspices of managing editor Ken Edelstein, picked up my column after
Poets, Artists & Madmen
lived the last flashes of its brilliant life. They welcomed me back like a craggy uncle who had no choice but to take in an unruly orphan. I can’t help but love the hell out of them for it.

But I will truly get crapped on by the Karma gods if I don’t also thank the following people: Liz Lapidus, Josh Levs, Sara Sarasohn, Doug Monroe, Rebecca Burns, Judith Regan, Kathy Jett, Laura Geraci, Cassie Jones, Jim Hackler, Michael Alvear, Polly Sheppard, Sam Johnson, Randy Osbourne, Michael Benoit (who hides his pride in me by claiming all the credit for my success), Teresia Mosher, Jan Hickel, Lynn Lamousin, Lisa Hamilton, Corinne Lynch, Thomas Meagher, Suzanne Van Atten, Nena Halford, Jim Llewellyn, Bob Steed, and, most importantly, the readers of my column
first in
Poets
and then in
Creative Loafing
. Seriously, if not for these people I’d probably be living in an abandoned truck right now.

One more thing, I can’t possibly close without copping to the fact that I’m heavily influenced by P. J. O’Rourke, Dave Barry (who answered the one-and-only fan letter I ever wrote in my life, like, right away), David Sedaris, William Geist, Carl Hiaasen, and Georgie Anne Geyer. I hope I’ve adulterated my material enough with my own perspective to keep it from being immediately apparent that I rip the hell off out of these people, and I wanna thank them for being so goddamn great at what they do.

Lastly, Judith Regan and Jill Hannity bear double mention, because if it were up to my mojo alone I’d still be working for free, but because of these girls I can now trade in all my thrift-store stuff and buy…well, better thrift-store stuff. Thank you both for looking out for me.

OK, I think that’s it. Did I mention my column readers? They rock. And my NPR
All Things Considered
producer Sara Sarasohn? Good. That’s it, then…just about…wait, there was a sandbox monitor in my second-grade class named Mrs. Morris who sat me down one day because she could tell I was tortured over the fact that I didn’t fit in with my suburban classmates. She stood over me with arms akimbo, and, indicating my classmates with a thrust of her chin, said, “You don’t need them.” At first all I could do was smell the menthol tobacco smoke on her breath, but then her words sunk in and my brain just lifted above everything like a helium balloon on a broken string. Suddenly, for that moment, I was free.

I still get that feeling. Sometimes, when I look around and realize there’s a big sandbox around me, I’ll hear Mrs. Morris’s words, and suddenly I’m soaring. You gotta thank a person for giving you a gift like that.

Hollis Gillespie
is a regular commentator on NPR’S
All Things Considered
and the award-winning writer of “Mood Swing,” a column published in
Creative Loafing
, Atlanta’s major alternative weekly. She is also the author of
Confessions of a Recovering Slut
. A flight attendant and language specialist for a major airline, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her five-year-old daughter.

www.hollisgillespie.com

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Photography credits: pages i, 1, 73 courtesy of Michelle Hogan; page ii courtesy of Ron MacDonald; pages iii (top), 3, 8, 80, 158 courtesy of Lary Blodgett; pages iii (bottom), v, 4, 5, 6, 22, 50, 67, 70, 74, 79 (top and bottom), 84, 104, 107, 135, 138, 139, 162, 165, 195, 198, 199, 217, 232, 236, 241, 275 courtesy of Hollis Gillespie; pages 119, 120, 121, 155 courtesy of Daniel Troppy; page 172 courtesy of Kimberly Kislig.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2004 by ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

BLEACHY-HAIRED HONKY BITCH
. Copyright © 2004 by Hollis Gillespie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED
2005

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Gillespie, Hollis.

Bleachy-haired honky bitch : tales from a bad neighborhood / Hollis Gillespie.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-056198-X

1. Gillespie, Hollis. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN4874.G385A3 2004

070.92—dc22

[B]

2003049503

ISBN: 0-06-056199-8 (pbk.)

EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780062352026

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