Moodswing - Beaten and scarred

One thing immediately apparent about Eddie is that you cannot possibly mistake him for a gay man, ever, not even if there was a dick in his ass at the time. For example, he’s been here in Atlanta for five days now, suffering a hellacious cold, and he refuses to let me bother to buy him tissues, preferring instead to scrape his face with paper towels. “I don’t need that tissue shit,” he explains. “My nose is made of rhino hide.”

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So you’ll understand why I laughed like a stoner when he expressed his concerns about being mistaken for a flamer when we borrowed Grant’s truck yesterday. Grant’s truck, “Fish Stick,” is a rusty orange road hazard with a marionette trophy for a hood ornament, batons in the gun rack and a license plate that reads “GAY 269.” Even so, when Eddie expressed his concern, I had to stop and catch my breath, bent over at the waist and everything, because I haven’t had such a yuck in months. “Eddie,” I finally wheezed, “the only way someone could confuse you with a gay man is if they’d been blind since birth.”

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It’s true. Eddie was born in South Africa to Swiss parents and had a childhood of the kind that affords him such fond memories as the time his mother got pissed on by a puma. He looks (and dresses) exactly like Crocodile Dundee, talks with the accent of a British expatriate and speaks several obscure languages of both “bush” and European varieties. He has camped in the Serengeti, communed with elephant herds and killed cobras in the course of daily chores. Even today, here in Atlanta, he never carries less than three knives at a time, one hardly smaller than a machete, and damn if they don’t reliably prove to be useful somehow or another. “Let me get that for you,” he recently told the worker at Lowe’s, who had trouble releasing the spout on a five-gallon bucket of antimildew treatment. Out came Eddie’s “small” knife, and in seconds he had that thing deftly hacked open like a hyena carcass. Now that’s a handy talent, although I wasn’t always so appreciative.

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It was years ago when Eddie met my little sister, Kim, in Zurich and claimed her with a fierce, caveman-like determination. At the time, my mother hated him and I did my best to do the same, though unlike my mother I was fortunate enough to outlive my own orneriness.

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In Zurich, Eddie fit in like a gorilla at a wedding reception; a walking wad of Y chromosomes in dingo boots and tooled leather among a society of indifferent pussies living rich off a country-wide commitment to staying uninvolved in anything but currency. Eddie can abide by almost anything but unkindness, so these conditions could not have been worse for him. It was just a matter of time before his soul began to atrophy like a limb on the wrong end of a tourniquet. When I met him, all I saw was a big drunk scarred from too many bar fights and bush wranglings. When my sister met Eddie, though, she saw something much different. In fact, maybe when he claimed her like an alpha male in a pride of lions, it was not out of determination but desperation, as life lines are funny things, often coming unexpectedly to those whose lives they are saving. Eddie married Kim five years later, and, having been redeemed himself, now makes a living redeeming others by counseling the drug-afflicted in Dayton.

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But today he is here in Atlanta, scraping and hammering and basically building a home where there hardly was one before. All of this because it turns out I am the reluctant owner of a duplex in Boulevard Heights, a slum-level property that has been sucking the life out of my eye sockets lately, what with all the upkeep and other issues it has, such as tenants who up and move out with no notice. I purchased the place for the benefit of my older sister, Cheryl — who swore she’d take just six months to sell the bar she’d bought in Nicaragua, relocate here, renovate the property and take over the payments — only she must be living by some ancient Inca moon calendar or something, because here it is two-and-a half-years later and I’ve hardly heard a single word from her. So I’m stuck with this place, a roach-infested shotgun shack with moldy walls, rotted flooring and carpet that was probably used to transport corpses in the past. Looking at the house recently made me want to simply fall over backward and bawl, as all I saw was something beaten and scarred beyond redemption. It all seemed so insurmountable, and its mounting debt made me feel like I’d just been crapped through the asshole of life. “If I was a house,” I thought when I saw it, “this would be me.”

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But Eddie saw something different. Of course, all my local friends are far too fed up with me, or just too generally useless, to help me renovate a whole house (Keiger, for one, showed up in a tangerine-colored cashmere sweater, gingerly sipping a cup of artisan coffee), so I could be trapped into thinking it’s fairly pathetic I had to import a family member from Dayton to help me out, but I’m not. From the start Eddie was unfazed. “Piece of cake,” he said, looking around at the roach droppings and rot, scraping his nose with a paper towel. “This is nothing,” he smiled, prying open a pail of plaster with his knife. And with that, Eddie, no longer beaten and scarred, set about redeeming the unredeemable.

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Hollis Gillespie is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”