Read Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From a Bad Neighborhood for Free Online Page B

might not be that old after all—it could just be the aging effects of the sun. It ages you, doesn’t it? And the nakedness. The nakedness probably didn’t help.
    I remember being naked in public only once. Notice I say “remember,” because Lary swears six years ago he practically had to tackle me to keep me from stripping on the streets in Prague, which makes no sense at all to me. I remember nothing like that happening that night, though I do remember Lary trying to convince a gay Czech street hustler that I was a pre-op transsexual, telling him I’d be happy to drop my pants to prove it. I don’t remember this striptease he claimed I performed, though the next morning I did notice that the spaghetti straps on my blouse were ripped. But that could have happened a number of ways, like during the drunken “hump dance” I did on the bar with some circus performers.
    I’ve been naked in public before, just not always knowingly. In college I once went dancing with a handsome frat boy, and I wore black lace stockings under a dress of airy material that buttoned down the entire length of my back. I remember noticing all these people watching me as I shimmied on the dance floor, and here I thought it must be because I looked so damn hot. I discovered later, though, that my groping date had earlier undone almost all the buttons down my back. So the whole time these people were not watching me because I looked so damn hot, they were staring at me because my tatty ass was hanging out the back of my dress. It took me an entire decade to stop dying of embarrassment over that.
    But there is more than one kind of nakedness, because that is nothing compared to the state of nakedness I was suffering when I met Lary. Back when I first moved to Atlanta, when I was lonely and worked at a clique-afflicted coffeehouse because I had no better way to waste my time, I could not possibly have been more miserable, and I don’t think I had a single damn friend except Lary. I’d met him months earlier at the wedding of his ex-girlfriend, a lovely person he was a fool to let slip away, but if Lary is not foolish he is not himself. Thank God. We bonded like a broken teacup, Lary andI, all the freaky shards of our damaged personalities fitting together to form the bride of Frankenstein, but by that time Lary had already grown the crab shell he likes to keep around his heart.
    I was a different story; I was all out there. I was fresh from just having lost everything: my last parent, my live-in boyfriend, my home, my youthful incorruptibility, the last remnant of my ragged optimism, and my ability to keep it all inside and covered up. God, I was as shattered as a wrecked windshield and just as transparent, and I wore it like the opposite of a bulletproof vest, wide open and just too much to conceal. My state of wretchedness leaked out of me for everyone to see.
    I swear, it was like the ass of my emotions was always hanging out. I was a shipwreck; fascinating from a distance but you wouldn’t want to be in one. I hadn’t built the emotional damn yet, didn’t even know how, and about four minutes into a conversation with me people would literally begin to back away from the flood.



The Perfect Father
    Like I’ve always said, there are advantages to being the daughter of an alcoholic trailer salesman. For example, I learned how to make the perfect Bloody Mary before I turned ten. My father didn’t teach me—he favored beer, as evidenced by his favorite hat fashioned from flattened Budweiser cans bound together by blue yarn. No, it was a bartender named Kitty who taught me. “Angel,” she’d say as she lined up the various canisters needed to concoct the drink, “this here is the perfect Bloody Mary.”
    Kitty worked at the Thin Lizzy in Costa Mesa, where my father hung out. Kitty had the cackle laugh of a chain-smoker and bleached hair that was teased into a beehive helmet. She shot the breeze with my father while I drank Shirley