Editor’s note: Beginning today and then launching off into a beautiful infinity of future Thursdays, Austinist is truly blessed to be touched by the muse-filled writings of local author, legend, and all-around storm of awesomeness Spike Gillespie! Don’t act like you’ve never read her work before. She knows you. Seriously.

The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

Last August, at an afterparty for a little show I put on, I met a guy standing in front of the cheese tray.

“Nice show,” he said. “I’m Warren.”

“You look familiar,” I said.

“I’ve slept with half the town,” he answered casually.

“Me, too!” I said. “Have we slept together?”

“Maybe we should do that,” he said, “Complete the circle.”

I haven’t really slept with half of Austin—it's probably closer to a third, unless you count sleeping-with a by-proxy affair, the old one-degree of separation being close enough to count. In which case, pre-Warren, I’d slept with the whole of Austin at least twice and, post-Warren (because, of course, after an exchange like that, we hopped into bed almost immediately), well then, I’ve now slept with the whole of Austin several times over.

But really, that’s not why I’m so darn popular.

So how did I, Spike Gillespie, come to know every freakin’ person in this town?

I moved here in the fall of ‘91, with eighteen boxes (sixteen full of books I would later sell off at Half-Price Books to buy beer and pay the utilities bills) and a ten month-old. I had precisely one friend in Austin then and we lived at The Avenel, this hellhole motel-style complex near campus with a sign that looked like an ad for a cross between a water theme park and a heavy metal band.

Baby Daddy moved down a month later, meaning, if you include the kid, I then had three friends, two of whom understood the English language. I was fucking miserable. I hated this city. I didn’t get it. I saw Slacker at Dobie—the movie had just come out—and it did not resonate at all. I grew irrational and contemplated returning to my personal hell, St. Louis, from whence I came.

But by January ’92, I accidentally scored three jobs, which got me out of the crappy apartment and forced me to meet people other than the rich, disaffected UT students who paid me to write term papers for them.

My workplaces included: the Austin Chronicle (I did a little freelancing), Esther’s Follies (a chance to immerse myself into the dysfunctional world of entertainers as I mixed them drinks and cleaned up after them), and the Magnolia Café on South Congress.

Talk about a Triangle of Social Networking. Through these jobs I got to meet everyone from the performers I interviewed for the paper to the Round Rock set bussing in to see the Follies to anyone who ever ate since no one lives here without going to The Mag at least once.

And then, when Baby Daddy went away, I did, in fact, ramp up my social networking via the horizontal office space aka my lumpy, used mattress (only god knowing where it had been and what had occurred upon it prior to my acquisition of the thing).

Mini reporting jobs gave way to regular essays in the Chron, in which I detailed subtle little things like my alcoholism, my cyclical depression, my dying colony of guinea pigs, and things dentists did to me that involved donning latex but never involved sensations of pleasure.

A few people came to know my name courtesy of these scribblings and so the invitations began. Rarely in possession of sitter money, and besides I wanted my kid to see the world, I’d drag him along to parties where he, cutest child on the planet, would provide ice breaking for me, the accidental loudmouth who, deep down, carried a shy streak fifty miles wide.

And so it came to pass that, like that old Faberge shampoo commercial with Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett, I met two friends, and they introduced me to two friends and so on.

Meanwhile, Esther’s moved me to their comedy club, The Velveeta Room, where I started as a barker on the street, urging drunken revelers to step inside for Open Mic Night’s assortment of dick and fart routines. I clawed my way to cocktail waitress and then, before I knew it, was managing the joint, giving me regular access to the dark and neurotic inner workings of the local comic mind.

I crossed paths with the Slam Poets in ’93 when Wammo introduced Slam Poetry to the city at the High Time Tea Bar and Brain Gym, back when it was on Congress. I walked away with an award for “Cheesiest Poem” that night, for a pun-laden ode to food. This led to years of Slamming at the Electric Lounge, where the kid had his own skanky chair to nap on while his mother spewed poems about masturbating with a talking Barney doll hoping for the fifty dollar prize at the end of the night to pay for groceries (and, okay, more beer.)

In scoring a connect with Wammo, I made other connections like Guy Forsyth and Genevieve Van Cleve, the former with whom I flirted relentlessly and the latter of whom became my roommate and introduced me to Molly Ivins.

Molly became my friend and mentor and I became a regular at her monthly Final Friday parties. Which is how I came to know every (liberal) politician and lawyer in Austin.

The more I put myself out there, the more people recognized me. I feigned not having a fat head about this, but really, I’m a writer, which has an “e” in it, the very same letter that begins the word “ego.” My britches grew a little snug. I began writing for Texas Monthly, opening the door wider still. I bedded the director of a TV show about Austin. He had friends, too. More friends for me.

Sometimes—rarely—the Statesman ran my stuff and included my picture. This begat on-the-street recognition. It also led to a most humbling exchange at the old Whole Foods when I asked the customer service guy where I might locate cheesecloth.

“You look familiar,” he said.

I, figuring he’d seen my picture in the paper, said with false humility, “I must’ve waited on you at the Magnolia Café.”

“That’s it! You brought me pancakes!”

And so I learned that it was not my writing, my party girl lifestyle, or even my over-compensatory loudmouth that made me memorable. No, the one thing that most connected me was my ability to fling hash.

Somewhere in my sixteen years here, I married twice, each time briefly. Husband one was not good for growing connections. Husband two, a much older hippie and ‘70’s drug dealer, was a better source of growing the circle, and suddenly I knew every old hippie who ever muttered, “I remember seeing Willie and Janis at the Armadillo World Headquarters!”

Then came Warren, right when I thought I really did know everyone, but he proved me wrong. A Burner with ties to burlesque, he broadened my horizon to include sexy old-school strippers and the folks who put together Flipside. Okay, now I did know everyone.

My son, now seventeen, grew up witnessing the exchanges between strangers and me, the cashiers who saw my name on my credit card and said, “I know you!” He was and remains decidedly underwhelmed by these interactions.

Once I asked, “Do you mind that a lot of people know me?” I grew up in the shadow of far too may siblings. I know it can be a pain in the ass to forge your own identity when a relative is better known.

“I like the free concert tickets,” he said, “but I hate going to buy milk with you.”

Still, he’s managed to find his own way, playing in a popular band that gigs out in clubs, co-producing a show on KOOP where, as I used to, he now interviews bands. And also as I used to, he works at a popular South Congress shop, Farm to Market, where he is busy meeting the five people he missed meeting when he was little.

One day, we were at El Chilito and a dude comes walking up with that, “I know you,” look in his eyes. I waited for him to tell me he’d heard me on KUT or read all my books.

Instead, he looked at my kid. “I know you!” he said. “You’re Henry, from the band Max and Henry!”

My son, far more humility coursing through his veins than I have in mine, looked at the ground with an Aw Shucks look and just said, “Yeah.”

Last night, I caught Laura Freeman’s “Luna Tart Died of a Broken Heart,” at the Blue Theater, part of Frontera Fest’s long fringe. I’ve known the incredible Laura for years. I tried to remember when we met. I hadn’t slept with her or written a term paper for her or even served her pancakes.

I couldn’t remember. Which made her like so many other people in this town who just sort of showed up in my life. I can’t always remember how they got there, but I know them all, every freakin’ one.

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Spike Gillespie puts on The Dick Monologues and blogs for LaunchPad Coworking and at her MySpace page. She knows who you are.