Moodswing - A decent whore

First, I want to make it clear that I wasn’t shocked to learn that Becky was fucking our boss. Everybody was fucking everybody at that place. My own roommate, Melissa, was fucking the manager, a big Hawaiian guy named Richard who occasionally referred, very vaguely, to a wife and kids in some faraway place.

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I never got that straight and always thought Richard fabricated his family to serve as a Teflon buffer to keep chicks from sticking to him. Still, he was a hundred years old (or 35 at least) and heavy with a face like a pail of paste, and even though I knew Melissa was about as picky about her prospects as a salmon during spawning season, it still disgusted me that she balled this guy, often while sober, even, and often while wearing lingerie she borrowed from me without asking.

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A few years later, while working at another restaurant, Richard once showed up in my section, and I was all set to pretend like I’d never met him if not for the fact that he apologized to me, in front of his dinner companion, for ripping the crotch out of my pink satin camisole set.

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But back to the Pacific Beach Café. I myself was fucking the assistant sous chef, as well as dating — but not fucking — the bartender. It just goes to show that when it comes to being a decent whore, I am pretty bad at it. If I had the mentality of a get-ahead kind of whore like Melissa, I would have been sleeping with the bartender, whose brother was the other owner of the place.

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Anyway, I cannot say I was shocked that Becky was fucking the boss. It’s just that I was surprised. She was unlike the rest of us. She was kind of quiet, for one, and didn’t ever get drunk and pass out in the parking lot. Once, she came to work with her right arm bandaged because she’d been hit by a car. It happened while she was riding her bike, and she just got up, brushed herself off, assured the driver she was fine and went on her way.

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“Are you kidding?” I shrieked. “You should have sued the ever-lovin’ shit out of that person!” She just shrugged me off, saying something about how she didn’t want that “coming back to her.” She didn’t tell me expressly that she believed in God, but it was evident she believed in something — something that promulgated her being a good person. I shook my head in bewilderment. My mother was an atheist and, for the large part of growing up, I was not allowed to go to church.

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Jesus, talk about your opposites — here Becky was, all beautiful and too nice to sue the person who hit her with his car, yet she was fucking Cromwell, the owner of the restaurant where she worked, a man who built his whole empire from the proceeds of a lawsuit involving a car accident. Years earlier, he’d been just walking down the street, he told me once, and someone went and ran him down.

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“Lucky you,” I told him. “Not really,” he said. “No, really,” I countered. I mean, sure, he walked with a limp sometimes, but boo-fucking-hoo. It’s a small price to pay for the fact that this paltry suffering was rewarded with seed money that germinated into a popular beachfront restaurant. Not only that, but he was a smallish gimp who got to surround himself with beautiful women, some of whom actually slept with him. He was married, five hundred years old (or at least 40), smelly, hairy, psoriasis flecked, and he forbade his waitresses to wear bras, for chrissakes. He was such a sea urchin, seriously, that when he was telling me his story about being hit by a car, I could have sworn he was trying to weasel a sympathy fuck out of me.

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Becky was a different story, though. She should not have been fucked, and I mean that in every sense. She wasn’t that much older than me, yet she had a kid who was being raised by relatives. She was different from Melissa, the manager-humping hag who deserved the loathing we heaped upon her. Melissa got people fired, for God’s sake. When Richard stopped firing people for her, she started fucking Cromwell, and the first thing Cromwell did after that was fire Becky!

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At that I culminated all the knowledge I’d acquired about bad bosses, which is basically this: They’ll very easily (probably more easily) fire the people they’re fucking. So I started in on Cromwell, making him think he had a chance of getting that sympathy grind out of me if not for the fact that I suffered paralyzing sexual dysfunction due to Melissa’s presence in the workplace. Sure enough, Melissa’s skank ass was soon canned like a truckload of ptomaine-infested tuna.

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Cromwell got Richard to do it. I’m told that Melissa was screaming like a fishwife over that. I should have been there to see it, too, but I didn’t show up for my shift that day. Later, Cromwell called expecting sexual recompense, but I kept remembering Becky on the day she was fired, how she sat in the parking lot in her relic of a Celica and cried, her forehead resting on her steering wheel. Unlike me, Becky was a decent whore. So I let the messages pile up, because unlike Melissa, I don’t usually fuck people unless they deserve it.

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Hollis Gillespie is 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.”