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

included a few from editors with interesting assignments, and before I knew it, I was working again. It’s the story of my life: I keep meaning to permanently fall off the face of the earth, but I just can’t get around to it.

    Isla Mujeres



Gay Man Loves Woman
    I love big lesbians. I’d be one myself if it weren’t for the fact that I’m not gay—not that I don’t try to fake it occasionally. I French kissed my incredibly hot friend Mary at a raucous bachelorette party almost two years ago. “Look at me, I’m gay !” I gleefully told Grant.
    “You are not gay,” said Grant, who was also drunk. To illustrate his point he grabbed Mary and planted a passionate kiss on her himself, his big slippery lips flopping over her face like two wet tentacles. “There, I just tongued her whole head, that doesn’t make me straight.”
    “Get your hands off my girlfriend,” I slurred, but Mary, who is straight, had already wandered off and was making out with Kevin, himself a hunky morsel whom Grant and I had both agreed would make a nice human chew toy. Watching them I had a wistful thought. If I were a real lesbian, just think of all the guys I could turn on!
    Right there is why fake lesbians like me probably piss the hell out of real ones, because surely the last thing on a real lesbian’s list of priorities is to get a guy off. But pretending there’s some possible chick-on-chick action in the wings has always been a straight girl’s reliable standby to get a guy’s attention…and if that doesn’t work then he’s probably gay.
    I thought Lary was gay when I first met him. His face was a little too chiseled, his hair a little too blond, and his waist a little too thin not to spell f-l-a-m-e-r. As my friend Jim Hackler says, “If his waist is under thirty-four, but he is not, then he’s probably gay.” But then I visited Lary’s home, basically a renovated alleyway boasting little more than a bed and art supplies surrounding a bog of live mosquito larvae, and I determined that a gay man would rather rip out his own eyes with a rusty fondue fork than spend one night in that place. I myself stayed there once while Lary was on vacation, and his mattress felt like it was stuffed with bags of open switchblades. It almost renewed my suspicions that he might be gay, since his furnishings were obviously a ploy to ensure women wouldn’t overstay their welcome, but since then he’s upgraded the place to the point where it’s almost comfortable, and I hear the spiders have all been corralled into one corner.
    Now Grant, even though he was an “acting” straight man when I met him, wasn’t fooling anybody. I saw a video of the wedding reception that followed his second marriage, shot only a short time before we became friends, and I had to lie down because I was laughing so hard. In the video, he had impeccable curly hair cut in an asymmetrical flip, two-toned shoes, and he breezed through the crowd with his hips swinging like saloon doors, offering appetizers from a plate. “What a fucking fairy! ” I squealed, pointing at the screen. “I don’t know how this is possible, but you were more gay when you were straight! ”
    In the video his daughter twirled in the foyer of the reception area, watching the hem of her velvet dress balloon outward at her knees. She looked like a perfect little buttercup, and she had Grant’ssmile—such a big smile for a little girl. But she’s not little anymore. She’s the reason Grant returned from Mexico.
    As I said, Grant had waited until the day after his daughter graduated from high school before he made his early retirement on that island. He had spent the afternoons sleeping on a hammock overlooking the bright blue ocean, which was more like a big turquoise pond, really, with tiny warm waves that lapped at his toes like a litter of liquid puppies. It was perfect, that ocean and that life, and its succession of caramel-colored young Latin lovers. No man on earth could have