To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him

After years of trying to fight it, I’ve decided that I want to look cheap. Blonde highlights, big earrings, red lipstick, too-tight skirts with cellulite rolling out underneath—that’s what I’ve had set my heart on and what I’ve come back to after all these years. There’s no use pretending to be any better by buying clothes from stores where the sales clerks shame me, by resisting the urges when glittery, not-gold displays catch my magpie eyes.

I’m a cheap slut, if that means what I think it does. I don’t ask for diamonds before I have sex with you for free. You don’t have to buy the cow—you’re getting the milk for free. (But I’m not a cow, no matter how much I hear it when I put on that skirt.)

And you ask me why I wanna look like all the other women you’ve known (even while you wonder what the hell I’m doing with you in the first place). And then you realize anew what you’ve known all along: all women are whores, and the best you can hope for is to save up enough money to own one who will only be a whore for you. And, actually, you haven’t spent any money on me at all, so I must be even worse than the whore that you know all women to be.

So what’s left for me to do? I’m damned if I do and lonely if I don’t, right? So I’ll be damned.

Bring on the cheap stuff. Glitter on my eyes, silver on my toes. Hard nipples through a tight t-shirt. My hair like I just dragged myself out of your bed and walked down the humid street to see who else was out there—not with the blank face of “I can’t hear you whistling at my body parts” but with the head-toss and smirk of, “Don’t be whistling, buddy, unless you’re sure you can last a night with me.”

Spend the dollar on gasoline and treat yourself to me. I’m a cheap piece of meat. Heat me up tonight. I’m cheap like sugar and food coloring—I’m the big Barbie birthday cake you buy a little girl when you can’t afford to send her to college. Cut me up, eat me up, forget about it. I’m cheap like paper—a golden piñata shining in the sun. Fill my holes with your sweet stuff, hombre. Smack me around a little. Then go on your way. Give another man a chance to use his stick. Pull me down from the sky and tear me apart. Take everything I had inside, then smash it into the ground.