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

say you can find God at the top. But for now, I have to go to a tiny island off the coast of Cancún to find God. He’ll be as brown as an overroasted peanut, with a new tattoo on his arm and hibiscus behind his ear. He’ll throw his big head back and laugh. “Welcome to heaven,” he’ll say.



I Don’t Swallow
    I’d been in Isla Mujeres for five days, and I was starting to turn into one of those human barnacles whose only goal is to make my own hats and go barefoot year round. I wanted to lie on the beach with a bottomless margarita in my hand, communicating only by scratching into the sand important messages like “Extra pineapple, please,” with no concern more dire than my diminishing supply of ointment.
    I’ve worked hard to acquire this ability to blow off responsibility. I was really bad at it in the beginning: bringing my laptop along and spending four bucks a minute to return phone calls. But eventually I came around to sleeping until noon like Grant and the rest of the island expatriates, and converging at sunset for tropical cocktails at the tiki bar, with my body the color of old boat planks and wearing whatever had stuck to me from the floor when I rolled out of bed that day. And I would think to myself, God! Life isn’t passing me by! This is the life! Why work? Why suffocate yourself with your safety net? Why bear the flapping big albatross of petty obligations? Why freak out over a bunch of crap you can’t help? “Bartender, another margarita, please!”
    It was a bummer that they expected you to pay for those drinks—with money, not the fistful of soggy flotsam you pulled out of your pocket. I suppose I could formalize this life by moving to Isla Mujeres and getting a job, but my only island-type talent is sitting at the bar and begging for scraps at the bottom of the blender every time the bartender mixed a pitcher of piña coladas.
    I couldn’t go into island retail, because I’d already pissed off all the shop owners by being a bitchy tourist. “Excuse me,” I once said to the clerk at a Cancún T-shirt shop called “T-shirt World” (or whatever), “but do you sell T-shirts here? I mean, I know you have T-shirts here, but I was wondering if you sell them, since I’ve been standing here for a good forty-five seconds and you haven’t waited on me. So I thought maybe this was a T-shirt museum or something, and all these T-shirts are just on display rather than actually for sale. Am I wrong?” So you see how I can’t exactly go back to these places and beg for work.

    At Isla Mujeres
    But I did catch what passed as a performance at one of the island’s finer hotels. It was a fire-eating guy in a loincloth. Well, he didn’t actually eat fire, he just spit it out. Well, he didn’t actually spit it out, he just sort of held a torch to his lips and spit lighter fluid into it, which caused a cloud of flames to seemingly burst forth from his face.
    The important part is not his technique, but the fact that I was certain I could master it. This could be my ticket to a lifetime of island bliss. Imagine, I don’t have to swallow the fire, just spit it out. I can do that! Spitting, rather than swallowing, has always been my forte. The downside to life as a fire eater is not insurmountable. Forexample, I’ve never been that attached to my eyebrows, and eyelashes are replaceable (heard of Max Factor?). And I’m already so sunburned my face looks like an old car seat, so what further harm could occur by immersing it in flames every Friday night? And with all the booze I’ve been swilling lately, a mouthful of lighter fluid would feel downright familiar! I can leave Atlanta, stop frying my soul, and move to the Caribbean and start frying my flesh. Who said happiness comes at a high price?
    That was my mind-set when my plane landed back at Hartsfield after my trip. My plan was to go home, stuff my cats in a sack, and head straight back to the airport. But then I checked my messages, which