Hollis Gillespie

Dead Wrong

Hollis Gillespie — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 19:22:00 GMT

That’s it. My friend Lynn is dead. Probably. And it’s my fault. I didn’t pick up the phone. That is how it always starts, isn’t it? With the missed call from the friend in distress, in this case due to a car with a dead battery compounded by a forgotten cell phone. Then the other friend (me) not picking up. Then the accepting of a ride from a stranger, and then, boom! Dead. Found under a freeway overpass, the victim of a string of easily avoided unfortunate events.

At this point it should be said that I have a freakishly simple phone number, thereby making it easy to remember. So it goes without saying that whenever a friend is having car trouble, that friend will (a) have forgotten her cell phone, because Murphy’s Law dictates that whenever you leave your cell at home, you may as well just pull over, because your car is about to break down, and (b) call me.

I was right here, at my computer, and my phone was right here too, next to it. When the call came, I stared at the strange number and debated picking up. A number I don’t recognize usually means somebody wants something from me that I am loath to provide. Like maybe a local restaurant wants me to be a guest bartender. Or worse, someone wants me to write her biography. I guess it’s because I’ve written my own to some success, and people feel I now need more material. The other day the cashier at Kroger told me, “I got your next book for you.” Ultimately I declined writing it for her, but only after I listened to her tell it.

So this was going through my head while I stared at the strange local number. I let it go to voicemail, then hit play. The second I heard Lynn’s frantic voice, I called back and was sent to the answering service of the waxing salon next door to Lynn’s new office. Immediate panic ensued. Because, believe me, I’ve watched enough real-life forensic crime reenactments on the Investigation Discovery Channel to know that this is how it always begins, with the missed phone call. And before you know it, the police are picking apart the crime scene and the victim’s remorseful friend (me) is on camera, blubbering, “I should’ve picked up the phone.”

Because Lynn always picks up for me. I remember once when my flight home was so delayed that it didn’t land until after midnight. The taxi line outside baggage claim was packed like a protest rally, so I bypassed that and went straight to the MARTA station. Fools! I thought. I’ll just intercept a cab from a stop farther up.

Ha! Unfortunate Event number one: getting on MARTA in the middle of the night. Almost immediately I realized my mistake. I was eyed by my tatty fellow passengers like a juicy morsel, ripe for the picking. So I got out at Five Points, which led to Unfortunate Event number two: finding yourself alone on a street in Downtown Atlanta in the middle of the night. Junkies and bums closed in on me like hyenas sniffing a wounded warthog. When I wasn’t calling to plead with the cab dispatcher, I was dialing every friend I knew. The only one who picked up was Lynn, but she lived in Baton Rouge at the time, so there wasn’t much she could do except provide a reliable witness should I need to scream out the identifying characteristics of my eventual attacker.

But the miscreants never closed ranks. I’m certain it’s because Lynn stayed with me on the phone until the cab appeared forty-five entire minutes later. Looking back I was stupefied at how easy it was to find myself in that situation, vulnerable and exposed. That’s all it takes: the stepping onto the train, the stepping off of the train. Such small gestures get us into these situations, yet small ones can get us out of them as well—such as talking to a friend for forty-five minutes, in the middle of the night, until the cab comes.

Today, unable to reach Lynn by calling her back, I jumped into my car and began a search of nearby streets. Eventually she left me a message that she’d made it home and was fine. So, phew, not all missed calls lead to a corpse on a slab in the coroner’s office. I could have saved myself a solid half hour of panic if I’d gotten Lynn’s message right away. Unfortunately I was unable to pick up when she called, because I was too busy being on the side of the road, changing my flat tire, having left my cell phone at home.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Some Parents Have to Stand Out

Hollis Gillespie — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:00 GMT

My daughter says I am not allowed to whistle, but I do it anyway. I can almost see her point, though. When I whistle, it’s loud. I can hail a cab from a whole block away. I learned to do it in sixth grade, the same grade Mae is in now. It started when the new school bus driver went down the wrong block prior to picking us up one morning. We could see her from a distance, but she did not see us. To alert her to our location, the new kid in school put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle that could make your eardrums bleed. It was the single coolest thing I’d seen in my life, including the time in fourth grade when Tom Mulligan caught a cat with his bare arms when it fell from a tree after being pushed off the top branch by another boy.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Anyway, the new boy, whose name was Tim Derby, taught me to whistle like a ballpark umpire. The process involved the tips of two fingers, and how you have to put them in your mouth in order to bend the end of your tongue back and blow. It could be any two fingers. They don’t even have to be on the same hand. I prefer the thumb and middle finger of my right hand, though I can do it with my left as well. It takes a lot of practice, and a lot of spit goes flying around at first, but then you get the hang of it and hardly any spit at all is involved. I perfected it through dedication and practice. My older sister also tried to learn, but she did not have the drive that I did.

I’d actually shown an affinity for whistling from a young age. By the time I was seven, I could whistle "A Boy Named Sue" and "Folsom Prison Blues," my father’s favorite songs. He would whistle them himself, really loud, when he walked home wearing his lurid Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts from the bar every night. Never on his way there, just on his way home. I’m the same way about airplane Jetways. I can’t walk down one without whistling "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," another tune my dad taught me. I never whistle on my way up, just on my way down. This embarrasses my daughter too. But nothing embarrasses her quite like the two-fingered, ear-piercing whistle that seems to set me apart from the other parents on the soccer field or in the auditorium. "Mom, don’t whistle," she implores before setting off to take the field or the podium or any other public, pride-swelling endeavor that I am about to witness. "Honey," I always say bemusedly, hugging her closely, "of course I’m going to whistle."

I do it because I know what it’s like to have a parent who embarrasses you. Take my father’s Bermuda shorts, for example. They were fashioned from fabric covered in cartoon beer cans and pretzels. He did not just wear them to the bar and back, he wore them to my eighth-grade graduation. I could see him from the stage as I accepted the rolled piece of butcher paper that would serve as my stunt diploma until my real one came in the mail. There he was, standing out like a bright hobo amid an arena of monochromatic midlevel management types. I was not just embarrassed; I was mortified. Why can’t I have a dad who just has a job? I thought. Or at least a decent pair of pants?

When I remember it today, though, I see it differently. He may not have been all that employed, but he was there, in the audience, and not only did he have on the shorts, but the Hawaiian shirt as well—the one made of old bar cloth covered in blue gardenias—and on top of that he was drunk, but just slightly. You wouldn’t think these factors could roll into a wonderful memory. But today, all these years later, every other face in that audience has faded away. Now there is just the one: my father’s five o’clock–shadowed face, beaming, full of love and pride. Today, looking back, remembering the man who did not live long enough even to attend my high school graduation—with all his imperfections, his weaknesses, his inability to muster affection from his surly adolescent daughter, today I look back and realize he could have shown up shirtless with pasties on his nipples for all I cared. Today I am grateful for the memory. So when my daughter says I am not allowed to stand out among the other parents, even if it’s just to whistle like a longshoreman, this is why I do it anyway. This is why I whistle.

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

All in the Family Tree

Hollis Gillespie — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Relatives are new to me. I went through most of my life oblivious to their existence. I do remember once, when I was four, meeting an older cousin named Kelly, who impressed me because she could crap in the woods like a bear. She also liked to dress up in her big sister’s white slip and call herself Jesus, then strangle me until I blacked out. Later, when Kelly wasn’t looking, I hit her in the head with a lamp made of antlers, which—and perhaps this is a coincidence—is my final childhood memory of ever interacting with a relative outside my immediate family.

And I was happy to keep it that way—until recently, when I realized that I don’t know, really, where I come from. I mean, yes, I was born in California, where my family moved around like fugitives until I broke free and came to Atlanta, where I stopped swapping addresses so frequently and settled down, for the first time, to begin living a second year in the same residence. A large part of my reason for moving here was due to a college friend whose parents were super-Southern. I remember his mother asked me, “Where are your people from?” I always loved how she put that. I told her I had no idea. “Maybe we’re related, then!” she exclaimed. “That sure would put pepper in the chicken pot, wouldn’t it?” She laughed. Years later, when the opportunity came to relocate here, I took it because I must have thought Atlanta was the land of awesome parents. Then, years after that, I became one myself, and there I was, a surfer girl raising a Southern child.

Not long ago, on a whim, I traced my heritage online and saw that my grandfather, whom I’d never met and who’d died at forty-nine, was born in Wadley, Georgia. In fact, there is a whole passel—now that I realize I am super-Southern, I feel like using words like "passel"—of my people from tiny little Wadley. My great-grandfather before him was born there as well, and then—get this—in 1881 he studied for a time in Atlanta and lived on West Peachtree Street, hardly a mile from where I live today.

I’ll stop here because this is usually when my friends start yawning so big they can catch fish with their faces. I don’t blame their attention for drifting. Relatives are nothing new to most people. So I always tell my friends, "Stop me if this gets boring," and they do, because who cares that I found a picture of my great-great-grandmother online and thought, for a second, that I was looking at my little sister in one of those "Old Tyme" photographs? Who cares that I traced my ancestry, certain I would not be able to look up my lineage past last week, and learned that not only do I have roots, but that I somehow managed, blindly, and after living and traveling all over the world, to replant myself right back on top of them. Who cares, I mean, but me and my people.

My chain-smoking sister, who moved in with me last year and now my cats all smell like tobacco because she keeps kissing them, is one year younger than our father was upon his premature death decades ago. She is always joking that I should be nice to her since she has just one year left to live. But look, I showed her, one of our great-grandfathers lived to be ninety, so it’s not hereditary, all this early death in our immediate family. There could be plenty of time yet before I have to start being nice to her. Since then she has cut her habit to half a pack a day, probably because if she’s gonna live to be ninety, she doesn’t want to do it attached to portable oxygen tanks.

Anyway, when I was younger I was happy to be untethered from cousins and uncles and such, assuming there was a good reason we all were estranged—I mean, other than the antler lamp incident. It never occurred to me that I should look for them, maybe find out what that reason is. When I learned about Wadley, I quickly looked it up and there it was, such a dear little dot on the map, the answer to where my people are from. I have been to many places—I traversed this entire state in a former job as a Southeast stringer for a travel-book publisher—but I have never been to Wadley, Georgia. From the satellite view of it on Google Earth, it doesn’t look like it’s changed much since my people lived there. I figure I’m headed out there soon, because it sure would put pepper in the chicken pot—wouldn’t it?—if they still did.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

No Word for That

Hollis Gillespie — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Evidently donkey is a delicacy in Shanghai. This is according to the translation of the menu at the fancy Chinese restaurant we stumbled into after getting ripped off by the cab driver.

“Maybe they mean some other kind of meat,” my girl suggested, “and it just got lost in translation.”

“I doubt it,” I said, “because the next item down is ‘braised dog.’ So, you know, it makes sense that if a restaurant serves dog, it would also serve donkey.”

“How does that make sense?” she said.

Let me just stop here and explain that Mae is eleven. When she was a small child, she accepted everything. Like the time she was two and fell asleep on an international flight and woke up in line at immigration. She yawned, looked around, and said, “Wow, this is a big airplane,” and it occurred to me that she thought we were still onboard, and that this massive reception area was another section of the aircraft. And why wouldn’t she think this? She did not recall disembarking. It made perfect sense to her. When I myself was a small kid, and my family moved around like carnival barkers, it did not occur to me that packing boxes had a function outside of being furniture. I mean, feet were propped on them, dinners were eaten off them, my mother even occasionally covered their tops with doilies. I’ll never forget the day I opened one and discovered it full of newspaper-wrapped knickknacks. I thought I’d found a secret treasure trove.

This oddly broad sense of acceptance is also why small children are more adept at learning new languages than adults. Computer language is a great example. There is a reason why a three-year-old can literally, within moments, decipher an iPad while an adult may, months later, have cracked barely a fraction of the app functions. It’s because computer language is an intuitive communication, and as we mature we tend to compartmentalize our experience and lose that intuition. In short, we stop automatically accepting things.

But that’s not to say the ability is lost forever. Picasso, for one, spent decades training himself until finally his art expressed the same childlike exuberance it had before he began training himself. And art is nothing if not a form of communication.

Years ago I came to Atlanta as a foreign-language interpreter, and I remember a client once communicating to me the Swiss equivalent of “you can bet on it,” the idiom Americans use to convey a sure thing. “We say, ‘You can take poison on it,’” he explained, and he did not have to elaborate. It meant that whatever fact you are imparting is so precise and true that you could swallow poison and this thing, this certainty, would be there to rescue you before the poison took effect. I had reached a point where stuff like this made perfect sense to me.

But now I am the mother of an eleven-year-old. She has begun to compartmentalize her experiences, and donkeys and dogs don’t fit in the box in her head where she keeps the food. As her mother, it’s important to me that she accept that some people eat donkeys, if for no reason other than to refuse it if it’s ever offered to her.

“‘Donkey’ and ‘dog’ are translated correctly,” I explained, but on the other hand there was a pattern when considering the actual mistakes on the menu. “Fried Chicken Bones in Savory Sauce,” for example, probably did not mean you got a bowl of bones. The same could be said of “Seared Bones of Lamb.”

“Here the word ‘bones’ probably means ‘legs,’” I explained. She nodded her head like I had said something sage, even though I was not translating Chinese but rather interpreting an English translation of Chinese. But still, the first step in learning any new language is the simple recognition of patterns. Isn’t that the way with almost anything? When Mae was little, she used to think our puppy’s name was “Cookie, no!,” for example, a perfectly sensible deduction based on the pattern put before her. There were no boxes in her head. And even though I know the boxes are bound to form, I still want Mae’s to be big enough, and for them to stay open but not too open. And speaking of compartments, I know that, realistically, the day will come when I won’t be there for her, but I personally do not possess a compartment for that. In my head it is impossible for me to be anything but so precise and true that if she swallowed something bad, I would be there to rescue her before the poison took effect.

“Let’s order the donkey!” Mae exclaimed.

I closed the menu, looked at the waiter, and told him, in a manner that was unmistakable in any language, “No donkey.”

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

The Morning After

Hollis Gillespie — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I find it ironic that two of my best friends each own popular Atlanta bars within aerobic stumbling distance of my front door. Years ago I would have foamed at the mouth to be in a position that allows me to freeload booze with such abandon. I would have bounded out my door gleefully every damn day, I tell you, and descended on these places with my own personal copies of the keys I would have insisted they make for me. But those days are over, eradicated by a morning years ago when things changed.

I remember it fairly clearly, considering. I’d been partying the night before at the Vortex, owned by my first bar-owning best friend Michael Benoit, and I was accompanied by Grant Henry, who is now my second bar-owning best friend and who, for some reason, felt the occasion called for us to forgo glasses altogether and just allow Michael to pour the hooch directly down our gullets.

Back then my favorite drink used to be something called a Smith & Wesson, which consisted of equal parts lighter fluid, cola, cream, plutonium, potatoes, and frog pieces, pretty much. Michael needed protective goggles to mix it, and when he wasn’t pouring it directly into my piehole, he’d serve it to me over ice “in a big glass with a big straw,” which, for some reason, were details upon which I always insisted.

That night, the one before the morning when things changed, Michael told me he knew why I always wanted the big straw. “It’s because you like to chew on it while you write,” he said. This took me aback, because I hadn’t realized I did that. “Yep, you sit right there,” Michael said, indicating a particular seat at the bar, “you chew on your straw, and you write in your notebook.”

The next morning I woke up with a hangover so severe that I swear I could see my liver lying next to me, breathing rapidly and wearing an extremely angry expression. The hangover was epic, like a milestone that delineates your life into segments. For example, four years post–Epic Hangover, I sold my first book, and about five years pre–Epic Hangover was when I’d met Michael in the first place.

And I was the one who introduced Michael to Grant, although neither will likely give me credit for it. I suspect the reason is because their friendship has ballooned so huge they want to attribute its genesis to something more monumental, like maybe Moses and the burning bush. Recently, when Grant quit his job in order to open his own bar, he did so under the assurances of a prospective partner who then dumped him like a toxic turd soon after Grant burned all the bridges necessary for him to take this big step. It was Michael who helped Grant proceed on his own, partner-free. Under Michael’s tutelage, Grant created Sister Louisa’s Church of the Living Room & Ping Pong Emporium, a bar that is so popular it often draws crowds big enough to be seen with the naked eye from other galaxies.

This year Michael’s bar will celebrate its twentieth anniversary, while Grant’s bar will celebrate its second. I will probably make a point to be there on both occasions, even though I no longer frequent bars in general. There was that Epic Hangover, see, the one where I awoke fully clothed with evidence that my bra had been soaked in red wine while the rest of my outfit was perfectly stain-free. I do not remember how that happened. I do remember, though, that Michael asked me what the hell it was that I was constantly jotting down in my notebooks, and my answer was the first time I ever voiced in public my aspiration to be an author. I also remember that in response, Michael looked at me levelly and asked, “What’s stopping you?”

The next morning, the morning of the Epic Hangover, I lay in bed, the room spinning, my angry liver flopping on the floor like a trout. I guess there comes a point like this in all our lives when we can choose to keep walking a path even though we clearly see what is waiting to meet us at the end of it, or we can take a slight turn. All I know is that this particular morning, the morning of the Epic Hangover, Michael’s words kept ringing in my ears—“What’s stopping you?” Nothing is stopping me, I thought, and with that I could feel it, the slight turn. And that was the morning when things changed.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Just Encased

Hollis Gillespie — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Among all the useless crap I can no longer live without, I now reluctantly count the iPhone 4. The realization came to me as the salesperson at Best Buy pitched me accessories while ringing up my “free” upgrade from the long-obsolete iPhone 3. “And you absolutely must have a cell phone case,” she told me, “because your new phone is all glass.”

“Wait. Stop!” I said, because I thought my iPhone 3 was flimsy enough, but it at least had that plastic backing that appeared to consist of recycled eighties black-lacquered bedroom sets. I didn’t want to trade it in for one that would shatter like an antique teacup. “Put that phone back and please bring me the one that is made of real material.”

“All the new iPhones are made of glass,” the salesperson replied. “You really need to buy a protective cover, because if this phone breaks, it will cost $800 to replace.” At that I had to clutch my chest and stumble back a bit. This thing cost 800 damn dollars? And it doesn’t even come with, like, an exterior?

“You could always keep your old one,” the salesperson quipped, as though I wouldn’t seriously love to keep my old iPhone, the one made out of melted bowling balls, in comparison to this thing made from laboratory test tubes and butterfly bones. But I have this here eleven-year-old daughter who, just last year at the start of middle school, was entrusted with her own cell phone, which she promptly lost like a Happy Meal toy. As punishment she went cell phone–free for as long as I could stand her to, because it turns out that the most agonizing moments in the history of forever are contained in the thirty minutes it takes for your girl to slowly meander the eleven blocks home from her new school every day. When she had her own cell phone, that half hour was bearable, because I could incessantly text her with, “Are you okay?” and “I need to know you’re okay,” and she would respond with calming missives like, “I’m okay,” and “Still okay Mom,” and “MOM I SWEAR I AM OK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

But then one day she lost her cell phone along the trail, like a big, expensive bread crumb, and the ensuing plan—probably playing into her hands the whole time—was for her to inherit my old iPhone, which in turn I would replace with the upgraded yet easily shattered model. And so I wouldn’t have to spend that half hour stuck against my front window anymore, breathing like a small bird.

I wonder how this happened. When I grew up, my only option to communicate with my mother while she was at work was to actually pick up a handset the size of a barbell and dial her secretary, who would then get up on her cankles and track down my mother to come respond. Other than that, my mother spent the day blissfully ignorant of my activities. I could have been looking for lost puppies with a parade of pedophiles for all I thought she knew. But parents today have cell phones, which are pretty close to having a telepathic connection to our kids, thank God, and it just seems unnecessarily cruel to have that connection made of glass.

“I’m telling you, you need the protective cover,” the saleswoman kept on. Lord God, I thought as I forked over the money, you would think that as technology matured they’d figure out a way to make it stronger. But no, they make it more breakable. It should not surprise me. For a long while, I thought things would harden as they got older, but the opposite is true. Take the time my mother was alerted by old-fashioned phone to rush to the hospital where I lay in traction after a dirt bike accident. I must have looked a lot worse off than I was, because I saw how she sank to her knees at the sight of me; how she shrugged off the doctor as he tried to help her up. She thought I was asleep, but I saw. Though it surprised me at first, today it all makes sense. Now I know why she always seemed so tough when she knew I was watching. It’s because she had a protective cover. We acquire them as we mature into the upgraded yet easily shattered models of ourselves. That day in the hospital, she gathered herself when she realized I could see her, and today, on occasion, I can still hear her incessant questions in my ear afterward, popping up out of nowhere sometimes, as through a telepathic connection. “Are you okay?” she whispers. “I need to know you’re okay.”

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Excess Baggage

Hollis Gillespie — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:00:00 GMT

The other day I was at the Atlanta airport and saw two Eastern Europeans lumbering down the concourse, laden with a suitcase that looked like they just got up that morning and decided to put a handle on their house. Then, of course, when the airline deemed the suitcase too heavy, the two tourists plunked down on the linoleum, unzipped it, and pulled out the things they could live without: a curling iron, a used George Foreman grill wrapped in cellophane, a big bag of what looked like wine openers, jars of jam, etc. With a flourish, they handed these to the person who had driven them to the airport. “This valuable bounty is for you to keep now,” they probably said in their tongue to this person, who hardly waited for them to turn their heads before gingerly placing all the items next to the waste bin on the way back to her car.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

As the tourists toddled away with their carry-on sacks hanging from them like big bladders, I figured there’d be more moments of generous flourish before they reached their final destination, more divesting. It made me think about what the world would be like if globe-hopping were not so easy; if it entailed more than simply getting on the plane, putting on your sleep mask, taking your sleep medication, putting on your sleep earphones, sinking into all this "padding," until the next time you open your eyes and, voila!, you’re in a whole other hemisphere, where you’ll no doubt bound off the plane with all your baggage and idiocy intact.

If you were faced with the task of traveling along the face of the earth, as opposed to taking giant hops above it, physical objects would not be the only unnecessary things you’d have to divest. For example, how can you possibly retain certain prejudices of a particular country if you are in the middle of its people and dependent on them to get you through it? You’d have to be accepting, or at least understanding, of your environment to reach your destination. Take terrorism. If a terrorist had a mind to do harm to a culture located on the other side of the planet, and in order to get there he had to undertake a journey that took perhaps months—over mountains, through rivers, across oceans, by elephant, horseback, and foot—who’s to say that by the time he reached his destination he would not have divested his hate somewhere along the way? Who’s to say he would not have decided his hate was an unnecessary thing?

Because how could anyone survive such a journey while clinging to such uselessness? Consider the "Titanic." I’ve always been fascinated with the fact that a bigger percentage of men traveling second-class perished on the "Titanic" than those in lowly steerage. The reason? Because the former were more sequestered from the reality of their situation. They thought, in the middle of their opulent padding from the elements, that they had time to go to their cabins and gather their things. They were wrong. Those in steerage, though, they had no such padding. They were served by their proximity to the elements.

I should have had this in mind when my sister told me she was moving to Nicaragua. She drove there from Las Vegas. I kid you not. She just got in her car and pointed it south. I didn’t hear from her for a month, and girded myself for the news that she’d been slaughtered by a voodoo religious sect like that missing college kid who’d partied in Matamoros in the eighties and whose brain was later found in a cauldron. But she made it, which was only slightly better news, because before she’d left she’d made me promise that once she got there, I’d fly down with the rest of her stuff. When I arrived, my bags bursting with her kitchen appliances and other luxuries that would have bogged down her own trip, I was surprised to see that she’d acquired a fluency in Spanish and a keen force field to the crowd of pathetic panhandlers who followed me everywhere, clutching. “They want the stuff in those suitcases,” she laughed. Then she glided ahead of me, melding seamlessly into the culture.

“Excuse me,” I shouted after her. “I need help with these bags!” That must have been a cue of sorts, because immediately I was besieged by grabby locals, and suddenly my load was a lot lighter. Soon I was able to catch up to my sister and hang on to the tail end of her tank top. From that point I was able to move freely through the crowd, clutching close to me all the things that were really necessary, having been divested of all those that really weren’t.

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

King-Sized

Hollis Gillespie — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:01:00 GMT

I have a huge king-sized bed that was a parting gift from a prior relationship. It was an odd choice for a boyfriend to make when breaking up with me, I know, but I don’t really fault him. It was actually presented as a birthday gift, and it simply happened that my birthday fell really close to the termination date of our relationship. When you are breaking up with someone, it’s hard to avoid special dates and holidays. Every calendar month except March and August has a holiday on it—if you are to include fairly fake holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day—and even the month of March sometimes has Easter, and August is always back-to-school month. So there really isn’t a good month to break up with someone if you are hoping to avoid special occasions.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

I remember one spectacular holiday breakup from years past, during which my boyfriend moved me out of our Midtown apartment on Easter Sunday while gibbering about how he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t come with him to dinner at his parents’ house and pretend nothing was wrong. I remember that, to help him move my things, he’d enlisted his little brother, a young man who was dating a single mother a few years his senior at the time. Before our breakup—and probably a subconscious catalyst for it—I remember that in conversations my boyfriend never referred to this woman, his brother’s girlfriend, by her name, but simply as The Mother. So in the end it was my proposal that the two of us break up, but not one I’d hoped he’d accept.

When I made the suggestion, I was destroyed by the elation on his face. I’d just lost my last parent, and with a shattered family of my own, I’d always thought I could simply walk into his ready-made one, with parents and pets and nieces and things, all a lively network of tributaries emanating from a crowded home up in Dunwoody. I longed to be part of it like a cold hobo outside a nice clubhouse. I wanted in, and I thought I had to be invited by a member or something. But he kept the door closed and stayed on the other side.

The other day I actually saw him in a crowded cafe and tried to avoid him—partly because I am past the point of feeling obligated to exchange niceties with former intimates and partly because I actually literally looked like a hobo that day, with every year of the past two decades since we’d seen each other branded and visible on my tough ass, I thought. But then he noticed me and sought me out, and it turned out that it was surprisingly nice to talk to him. Still, I kept recalling the look on his face at having received the parting gift I gave him, the gift of a guilt-free breakup. Even after all these years, it’s wince-worthy to encounter someone who was so happy to be rid of you. But an odd resolve had descended on me then, and no breakup since, or even divorce, has hurt so bad. You can’t measure a person’s significance in your life by how hurt you were when they left it. His parting gift—the strengthening of my resolve—helped me get through the others.

And now I have this giant bed. It is bigger than my bathroom. It is bigger than my car. It is almost bigger than my bedroom. When I first received it years ago, not knowing that it would be a parting gift, I had plenty of inventive visions on how it would be occupied, because surely it was not given to me so I could sleep in it alone. My heart was open again, ready to let things in. But life never works out the way you think. Or maybe it always does. Because once you open your heart, you have no idea how much you can fit in there. Today that bed is always crowded, a nocturnal home to a small herd of curled-up cats, one stretched-out street mutt, a niece and one or two sisters either passing through or here to stay, plus an adolescent daughter who sleeps as peacefully as a rotating helicopter blade. We are parents and pets and nieces and things, all in a crowded home at the heart of a lively network of tributaries. Every single one of these warm bodies has a bed of their own, but mine is the biggest. Mine fits us all.

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

In My Own Defense

Hollis Gillespie — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Evidently I was dressed wrong for a shooting. But then that is why I was there, because Michael had made it apparent that I know nothing about guns.

“What’s with the beret?” he laughed.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

I thought berets and guns went well together. Patty Hearst wore one in the iconic photo of her robbing the bank, Che Guevara wore one on that iconic T-shirt of him looking all iconic, and Faye Dunaway wore one in Bonnie and Clyde.

“It’s not just the beret,” Michael said, indicating, like, my shoes, a pair of perfectly good peep-toe ballet flats. “Too dainty. You should wear something more rugged at a shooting range.”

Really? Because recently, when I started freaking out about being attacked, I always thought that if the occasion came when I had to shoot someone in self-defense, I’d be wearing stuff I normally wear, minus the beret. People don’t get attacked in their sleep while wearing combat boots and motorcycle jackets, even though that’s exactly what Michael wears every minute of every day—which, come to think of it, is probably the reason people never attack Michael. Plus, he is six foot seven and he owns eight guns.

But I’m not Michael and I doubt I’ll ever own a gun, so I was wearing exactly what I would probably be wearing (minus the beret) if anyone ever attacked me, the odds of which, according to statistics, are dismally high. Right now as I write this, there are news reports of a sexual predator attacking women in their sleep in Buckhead. So my goal is not to get my own gun, but to know what to do with the gun once I disarm my assailant, see?

“I don’t see,” said Michael.

A few days earlier we were sitting in the Vortex in Midtown when Michael whipped out his own revolver, opened the cylinder, and unloaded all the bullets right there on the bar. We probably would have been arrested if not for the fact that Michael actually owns the place. He demonstrated how all the barrels were empty and aimed the gun at the bottles behind the bar and clicked the trigger. After giving me his “always treat a gun with respect; never aim it at a person you don’t intend to shoot, even if it’s not loaded” spiel, he said, “Go ahead. You try.”

I tried. The trigger clicked. It was a big click. Click. Click. Wow, I thought, here I am holding a gun in public and pretending to shoot up bottles behind a bar. Click. There goes the tequila. Click. There goes the Frangelico.

Later at the shooting range, almost all of the 5 billion bullets I fired went in the general direction of the target. Michael wanted me to demonstrate how I’d disarm my assailant in the event of an attack. “Pretend I’m the thug,” he said, brandishing a fake gun. So I demonstrated the technique I learned on YouTube, which involves a lightning-fast grab-and-jab, followed up by some heavy swatting. The gun did not exactly end up in my hands, but it certainly ended up out of his. “I’ll need to hold on tighter,” he said, and it made me wonder if you can take the measure of a person by what they choose to hold on to tightly.

My fear of being attacked commenced with the installation of cable in my home. One of my new favorite programs is Snapped on Oxygen, which almost invariably details a real-life wife’s unsuccessful attempt to get away with having made her husband real dead. Watching this, I’m stupefied. How could she do this to the father of her kids? And for what? Money? Is that really what’s worth holding on to tightly? I was reminded of news footage I’d seen as a girl, which detailed the 1980 fire at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Eighty-five people died, many of whom could have lived if they hadn’t gone back to their rooms to collect their bags. A mass of them were found in an elevator bay, still clutching the luggage they’d refused to let go of, having wasted precious time packing before attempting their escape.

So really, over time, it occurred to me that it matters—what we choose to hold on to and what we let go. I don’t want to hold on to my own gun; I want other people, the people who snap, I want them to let go of theirs. At the range I kept shooting at the target silhouettes, even when the bullets were spent, because I liked the sound of the click. Click. Click.

“I think something snapped in you,” Michael said.

No, something clicked in me. There’s a difference.

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Tapping Out

Hollis Gillespie — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Now that I look back, it seems appropriate that my alleged stepfather would croak in a casino. For one, Bill never did anything you’d expect, even though he’d often tell you exactly what to expect. Like how he was going to drop everything and move to Central America, when here he was a successful shop owner in the U.S. after having gone through all the trouble of pilfering my Social Security number in order to open a business account. If he had not gone ahead and died, I might have killed him myself.

My mother met Bill in the eighties over a box of broken ceramic beagles at an auction house in Chula Vista and immediately became his best friend. He was a large man with a gambling habit, a mustache like Groucho Marx, giant blue thyroid eyes, and a case of gout exacerbated by the fact that he lived in his car. The car part, he assured everyone, was only because he was a fugitive from bureaucracy, given how the government was drugging us with the water system and that’s why he always carried his own purifier, and yes, he’d drink his own urine if he had to.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

And Bill had plans. Big plans. Soon Bill would partner with my mother to open “one of the largest antique dealerships on the block,” and granted, it was a block of pretty big antique dealerships. To open the store, they had amassed literal trash bags of cash by hocking stuff like those broken bobblehead beagles out of the back of Bill’s car at swap meets. I used to get up in the middle of the night on weekends to help them set up their booth. Looking back I realize this is one of the reasons I moved to Atlanta, because I could see Bill’s big plans would continue to entail a lot of heavy lifting on my part. By then they’d bought a used van to haul their wares. It was covered in dents like a tossed army tank, and when I borrowed it to load my meager belongings into the airline’s cargo bin, I backed into a barrier and added a tiny fresh dent amid the miasma. It did not occur to me anyone would notice. I was wrong. Bill chastised me about that dent literally until the day he died.

And as I said, he died in a casino, which was surprising even though he always told me to expect it. For one thing, Bill eventually did move to Costa Rica like he always said he would. When I visited him there, the locals kept referring to me as his stepdaughter. I struggled with that at first, vehemently correcting people at every turn, but in time I figured some things you just can’t fight.

So when Bill got cancer, I thought the last place he’d head would be back to the States, given his certainty that the American government gave him the cancer in the first place. But damn if he didn’t call me from a hotel room in San Diego one day after having sought treatment at a facility nearby. He explained he had to check himself out after the nurse attempted to murder him. I am 100 percent absolutely almost certain this probably happened. I immediately flew to San Diego and tried to bring him back to Atlanta with me, but he had plans. Big plans.

He was on his way to Mexico, he said, to the same clinic he took my mother before she passed, where they performed holistic remedies that were controversial in the States. He assured me he’d be fine, though he did not look at all fine. “You can start to worry if you see me headed for a casino,” he laughed. I did not laugh. He always joked about wanting to die in a casino. Then he assured me he was not on his way to a casino, because I knew that if he were, it would be the same as a sick animal returning to its lair.

When I left him, he did not look like he had the strength to change his pajamas, let alone change his mind and map a course to a casino on the outskirts of Palm Springs. “You still owe me for that dent,” he said. I reached into my purse to pull out some money, but he stopped me. “Save it for the next time we see each other.” He smiled, his eyes still big and blue. That was the trick, you see. I could still see him in there, the old Bill, the cantankerous, maddening, crusty old acid vat that I would have personally pinned down with my sobbing body if I had known what he had mapped out for his last days. I wanted to be with him in the end, like he was for my mother, but evidently Bill had other plans. Big plans.

Hollis Gillespie is one of our editorial contributors.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her