Boring blog for authors

20,000 books

I was reading an author blog today and the writer made the statement that, after a traditional printing of a book, the most expensive part is editing. My experience is otherwise.

Several years ago I worked for a non-profit organization that promoted a cancer treatment that involved, among other things, coffee up the butt (but that's not the story). The founder of the organization forever looking for income streams decided to write a book a out her experiences with the therapy and it was my job to make it happen.

The professional editing and formatting for the 300 page book cost $3,500. The cover art and design, including photography was $500 (a steal and probably not a good amount to go by). Printing for the book in hardcover was $2.10 per book. But here's the catch. That $2.10 price point was for a minimum run of 20,000 copies. At the time a Print On Demand book would have been about $9 and the quality of covers and print is not what they are today for POD options.

The math works out to be $46,000 out of pocket, up-front expenses. This isn't counting what I was paid which, I assure you, was minimal. Months went by and we get notified that the book printing will be finished in two weeks and I was asked what I'd like them to do with them. Crap. How much space does that many books take? The printer recommended some shipping companies and I looked around on my own. Cost for delivery $1,800. Oh, you want help unloading the truck? $500. Storage unit. $150 a month. By the way, 20,000 books take up a HUGE amount of space. Think two car garage.

The books were delivered on wooden palettes for easy movement with a forklift... which I did not have. The books had to be moved by hand-truck (2 @$40). Several of the books were damaged in the process of getting them from printer A to storage unit B but the printer through in a few hundred extra copies ahead of time to cover for this eventuality. At the shutting of the storage door the total cost is up to $48,500 before a single book is sold. Not counting what I was paid.. which seemed like a lot less.

The book was set to retail at $25.00 so the margin is there to still be profitable and if you have the funds and a hand-truck (I can't over stress the value of a hand-truck) this may be the way to go for you. I'm merely stating some of the expense involved.

It was another month after the delivery date when sales started coming through the website. The Author/Executive Director decided she'd like a palette of the books at her home to make it easier for her to sign her books for buyers. No problem. Hire movers and a truck we can do it in an afternoon. When she realized I wasn't going to offer up the shock absorbers of my own vehicle in sacrifice it was decided that, as long as we were paying movers, two palettes of books was better. Roughly 400 books. Movers cost $300 including truck.

Books are heavy. Think about it, they're as solid and dense as the tree trunks they came from. This translated into the Author/Exec Dir. not wanting to carry her signed books to the office to be shipped. It also translated into bringing someone in to move books from the straining and bowed hardwood floors of her home office to the main office. $300 for the movers including truck.

The book had no agent (conspiracy!) so there wasn't much chance getting them into bookstores. The idea was this stack of 20,000 books would be sold through the company website and back of room sales. That equals a lot of shipping, a lot of packing materials and a person dedicated to doing that shipping (not me but someone equally underpaid).

The lecture circuit went like this. Speaking engagement in Toledo. Ship 100 books to Toledo. If the there were books left over (there are always books leftover) those are shipped back. It wasn't unusual to spend a total of $100 to ship, out and back, The tough part was finding someone in Toledo to accept and store the shipment. Usually the hotel hosting the event was fine with this, however, larger book shipments and less amiable staff would sometimes make us get a room to store the boxes. Sometimes the hotel was paid by the convention organizer and didn't effect our bottom line.

The shipping and re-shipping of books is hard on the covers and we lose a few. At least at full price. Books are not being sold at discounted prices. Meanwhile back in CA the books at the storage unit are safe and sound ticking away $150 a month. In the shipping department of the home office the mice find the books delicious.

Mice only like parts of books. Corners, covers... a little off the bindings. I could see sacrificing a book to the wildlife but not a small part of over thirty books. As a result fewer books were stored at the office meaning more trips to the storage unit for the poor, in-house, shipping guy.

The out of pocket now is above $50,000 making the break even point after the sale of 2,000 books at full price... plus shipping.. plus storage.

The books that cost us $2.10 to print was now costing closer to $6.00 and that amount was going up every month with loss, damage and storage. Years later the niche market for these books is probably about saturated and, from what I hear from former co-workers, there are still quite a few palettes left (though they've been moved to the Authors garage so no storage is paid).

This all started in 1997 and a LOT of things have changed in the industry. In retrospect I would have advised holding out for an agent and a more traditional publishing route. As you can see the printing and editing were just a small portion of the expense taken on by a traditional publisher.

Prank

It was that advertisement that started it. It was listed on the back page of a comic book between the always present X-ray specs and the ads for Grow Your Own Sea Monkeys. There, in large bright red letters, was the call to action for lonely kids. Amaze Your Friends!
Normally I didn’t fall for such cheap theatrics but for some reason I was having a weak moment. Maybe I did need to add some amazing new abilities to my personality, I thought to myself. That way, when I finally got some friends, I could amaze them.
The advertisement was a black and white illustration depicting tendrils of smoke curling up from white gloved fingertips and another panel showed a cigarette that had been pushed, unharmed and in tact, through a quarter. “Learn Magic!” the ad persisted, “Everything you need to know to become a magician. Only two dollars!"
I was still a kid and hadn’t been burned by ordering products from magazines yet. I was just learning how to translate such an advertisement. First of all, “Only two dollars” meant two dollars was the first part of the financial equation. After you added the seventy five cents for tax and an additional two dollars and fifty cents for shipping and handling the end price was more than double. Five dollars and twenty five cents. Roughly the amount of money I made delivering newspapers for two weeks.
The money wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t much to spend it on way out in our broken suburb. The problem was getting the money to them. Check or Money Order only. I didn’t have a checking account and had no idea what a money order could be. I could try to get my parents to write a check on my behalf but I knew from trying to buy the Magical Sea Monkey Castle that it wasn’t going to work.
“It’s just a waste of your money,” My mother would say if I asked her.
“But it’s my money to waste,” I would remind her loud enough to be heard but not so loud as to get a smack in the face. It never worked. After the first such argument, when I didn’t get to buy what I wanted to with my own money, I started to hide my money from her. I wasn’t worried she would take it from me but that she would try to censor what I would use it for.
The solution was to go over mom’s head altogether. Grandma. Not only did Grandma outrank mom and was happy to write a check for me but she even gave me the stamp and the envelope. For free!
Four to six weeks later I found out another mistranslation from the ad. “Everything you need to know to do magic,” did not mean, “everything you need to do magic.” The instruction kit was little more than twelve pages of poorly mimeographed pages describing the easiest tricks followed by a good thirty or forty pages of catalog that would conveniently sell you the rest of the items needed to amaze your friends.
Two months later the only magic trick I had learned was the quarter from the ear trick and how to make five dollars and twenty five cents disappear. The fact that I became really good at the trick did nothing to cover the fact that it was just a lame trick. Needless to say friends weren’t amazed by a trick their grandfathers and uncles had been pulling on them since they were three years old. Worse yet, I didn’t let them keep the quarters like their relatives did.
Since magic obviously wasn’t going to work to find me friends I turned to my old stand by, pranks. At that age pranks were mostly harmless and played on people too weak or too smart to fight back. The social impact of playing a prank on someone was to establish a type of twisted mental dominance on the prankee. This social behavior only makes perfect sense while you’re still in grade school.
I had plenty of practical experience with pranks at home. In a family where adulthood is reached four to five years after your first child is born, teasing, bullying and dirty tricks are a huge part of the culture. My mother would leave the individually wrapped cheese slices still individually wrapped in plastic on my stepdad’s sandwiches after an argument. My Stepfather would retaliate by tying knots in my mothers panty hose. The pranks would then escalate to cookies made with salt instead of sugar, hidden car keys and holes cut into underpants with pinking shears.
My brother Bubba and I tended to stick to more basic tactics that usually involved scaring the shit out of someone. A favorite scare would be one of us hiding behind our sister, Becky’s, rather large stuffed animal collection. It wasn’t a large number of animals but the animals themselves were large enough to conceal a twelve year old boy. We would alternate jumping from behind them and screaming or making them fly at her and screaming the minute she turned on her bedroom light.
If we were brave enough to face total darkness one of us would wait under the steps leading to the basement. When an unsuspecting sibling would come down the stairs, to do laundry usually, we would grab the back of their ankles through the stairs. The screaming dance that resulted was hysterical as long as you put aside the possibility of someone plummeting to the smooth concrete floor below. The only possible cushioning being soiled underwear and jeans from Sears.
Parents weren’t immune from being pranked by us either. My first opportunity to get my mother came one evening at a grocery store. I don’t remember how old I was but I was young enough to run around the filthy grocery store alone and barefoot while she shopped. The floor wax rubs off and gets on you when you’re barefoot. If you get enough wax and dried fruit on the bottom of your feet you can pretend to ice skate down the aisles.
During one really long Olympic quality slide I noticed a toy mouse on the floor made from real fur. It must have fallen out of the pet toy display. This was perfect. The hierarchy of mom scaring was snake, mouse then human blood on one of her children. I had a mouse now. Second place. Not bad.
I grabbed it up and skated up and down the aisles until I found mom pondering a can of pork and beans.
I tip-toed up behind her as quietly as possible. The only noise I made was the light tapping of a pistachio shell stuck to left foot and the slight squish of a rotted grape from between my right toes. Behind my back in my right hand was my mouse. At about two feet away I had already discarded the idea of a mouse toss and decided on a simple placement maneuver. I would put it in the shopping cart where she would see it. I was almost shaking at how great of a prank this was going to be.
She would yell in public and I would laugh and laugh before I finally stepped in to saved her. Hell, she might even jump up on a chair or something if she can find one. Like in a cartoon.

I got closer. My body was tense and I was trying not to laugh.
Then it moved.
The mouse was alive. I would like to say I stay composed but the truth is I screamed like a girl in a drive-in slasher movie and threw my little accomplice down. My mother, still contemplating beans and thinking she was alone in the grocery except for her dirty kid jumped and did some of her own screaming. The can of beans hit the floor just missing taking off one of her toes.
“What the hell is wrong with you!” she yelled at me. Too scared to worry about the volume of her voice.
“I... I... I saw a mouse and I thought it was a toy and... and... and I was going to scare you... then it moved in my hand!” I was starting to sob now. Scared and embarrassed.
In a rush of motherly affection my mother started laughing. Not just simple laughter but the heavy duty laughter that caused one to double over and experience actual pain.
This is the vivid memory of my first prank. My mother and I both debilitated by tears, her from laughing and me from the shame, in the canned bean aisle of a dirty grocery store.
Somewhere in the shadows a mouse lay dying.

A'memember That Time?

“A’member that time you locked me outside in the snow in my underwear?”

“They chain me up in the basement and leave me there all day.” and, if it didn’t get the response he wanted or expected Bubba would add, “without food.” I once heard my little brother tell a perfect stranger this at the town roller skating rink. He was trying to work this motherly looking lady into enough pity she would buy him potato chips from the snack bar.

“And what did you do to deserve that?” she asked him. I guess she assumed that families who chained up their children in basements didn’t take them roller skating afterward. Bubba’s story was too ridiculous to be believed and she was teasing him about it. I laughed and skated off. The story really was true though, sort of, but it only happened once. He made it sound like an every day occurrence. Like shackles were part of our basement’s floor plan.

What really happened was part of a sort of game we made up. Bubba had been “arrested” for some crime against the family and was to be locked up in the basement. I was the arresting officer so I led him downstairs while he halfheartedly pretended to struggle. He couldn’t even pretend to struggle very much because we still had to navigate the stairs. He was in his underwear because.. well because he was always in his underwear.

The chain involved was huge and had links as thick as sausages and was sturdy enough to hoist an elephant out of a pit. I hadn’t planned on any large animal removal but wanted to be prepared in case the occasion showed itself. As handy as a chain that big would be for large animals it’s terrible for restraining skinny little White Trash boys. The links are too big to make any sort of knot and there’s no good way to secure it. So in the end I had to just sort of drape it over Bubba and wind it around the hollow aluminum table leg of a broken ping pong table.

As I went back up the stairs he knew he could easily escape the chain. I also knew he couldn’t get upstairs unless I let him. I stationed myself at the door to the basement. There was no lock so I held on to the knob and wedged my foot at the bottom of the door waiting for him to try to rejoin us among the free and the warm. Bubba knew this trick because I had used it before. He had a different plan this time.

Even though there was two or three inches of snow on the ground he bolted out of the side door of the basement in nothing but a pair of sagging gym socks and his equally sagging underpants. Under normal conditions his underwear would be referred to as white but in contrast to the snow and his Winter whitened skin they looked a more grayish yellow. Like a blond past her prime.

His plan to get back upstairs via the quick dash in the snow to the back door wasn’t a bad one but he miscalculated a few of the details. The most important being that I was at the basement door which was opposite the back door not even a yard away. He forgot, too, that the back door had windows so I could see him coming. The back door also had a lock. I didn’t even have to use any physical effort to keep him out anymore.

I don’t know what my dumb little brother was thinking exactly Maybe he thought he could outrun me around the house or maybe he had the misguided impression that our sister Becky was on his side. Either way he tried to make it to the front door. He found it locked. His only option left was to repeatedly ring the doorbell.

“Whooooo iiiiiis it?” I asked.

“Let me in,” he said. Then pretended to cry. I don’t know why he bothered. He cried all the time, both real and fake, and I never cared. Why would I care now?

“I’m sooooorrrry, but we don’t know anyone named ‘let me in’ and we can’t let strangers in the house, I yelled back to him,“It’s not safe”. This wasn’t a real house rule per se, we were openly encouraged to let anyone in the house that wanted in, salesmen, neighbors, knife wielding child rapists. It didn’t matter to our parents as long as we didn’t make them stand outside on the porch. That would be rude. I must have heard about dangerous strangers on TV or at school or someplace else that thought kids couldn’t fend for themselves.

That’s when Bubba switched from the doorbell to banging on the door. “Come o o o on,” he whined.

“Go to the neighbors and get the key,” Becky suggested.

Two neighbors had keys to our house. One was across the street and the other was two doors down. He must have thought about it because he stopped pounding the door a minute to calculate the distance. Then he must have remembered he was in his underwear and started in again with the pounding this time adding kicks with his wet socks.

“I’m calling the police!” he yelled

“No, I’m calling the police!” I yelled back, “Some crazy nekkid kid is trying to break in to my house! Help Police!”

“Let me in!”

“Help, help, nekkid man tryin’ to get us!”

Becky, knowing this wouldn’t end well, sat on the sofa and laughed. Choosing, in this instance,not to take sides.

Giving up on the front door Bubba ran to the back again and proceeded to beat and kick at the still locked back door. Did he think I unlocked the door when I walked away? He didn’t think much of my defensive skills.

I had grown bored and had decided to watch television raising the volume so I could hear it over the beating the back door was taking when eventually the noise stopped.

“He stopped.” Becky said, noticing the silence before I did.

“Oh, he’s probably dead.” I assured her.

“Or he went to get a key,” She guessed.

“Or he remembered the basement door is still unlocked.” I suggested.

I few moments later, pink and shivering from either the cold or anger, Bubba comes walking through the living room and in the most casual tone I could I asked, “Hey Bubba, where have you been?”

“I’m telling mom you tried to kill me! I almost froze to death.” He pretended to cry but couldn’t pull up any tears.

“Oh you say I’m trying to kill you all the time. Nobody even cares anymore,” I told him. “You’re like the little boy who cried wolf,” then, to make his life a little more confusing, “except that boy really did freeze to death.”

It was true that yelling, “They’re trying to kill me,” didn’t hold the sway it used to. Either it was repeated too often or our parents were starting to warm up to the idea. Either way, I barely got in trouble whenever he made the claim. I might get in trouble this time, though. Not for risking his life but because he kicked a hole in the back door before he realized he could have gotten back in the house any time he wanted.

“But I wasn’t even outside! How could I have kicked the door in?” I yelled at my mom in my defense. I thought it was a good one.

“You locked him out there! What if the neighbors saw?” Our mom yelled back. Not “what if he had frozen to death or cut open an artery trying to break back in”.

If Bubba, or any of us for that matter, froze solid in the backyard like an unlucky arctic explorer in dirty underpants it wouldn’t have mattered to our mother as long as the people living around us didn’t find out and think we were White Trash.

“I didn’t lock him out there anyway. The basement door was always unlocked. He went out there on his own. Can I help it if he likes to run around outside naked? Is it my fault he wasn’t brought up any better?” That was too far. I overplayed my hand and got my ass beat.

Bubba was punished too but not as severely. Not because he was deemed any less at fault for the hole he kicked in the door but because he just stood there shivering looking as much as he could like a victim. Everyone involved knew he was faking it. But fake shivering was better than fake crying so I guess he deserved some recognition for the effort.

Excerpt from Bubbacide, Raised By White Trash by Steven Berger

Available electronically on the Nook, Kindle, Itunes. Hard copy on Amazon.com

Saggy Pants Law

Saggy Pants laws.

Another town in Georgia has passed a Saggy Pants Law. A law that fines people for wearing pants sagging more than three inches below the belt line. I’ve read the articles and have seen the interviews online and the common denominator is old rednecks saying, “it’s just offensive”.

I like this.

As a matter of fact I’ve come up with a list of offensive fashion statements I want outlawed. I’ve been tolerant of these garments for years but now that the tide has finally turned and we can send people to jail if we don’t like what they’re wearing, or how they’re wearing it, I’m ready to speak up.

Any blouse showing back breasts.
That’s right I said it. Stand out in front of the Baptist church on a Sunday morning and you will see hundreds of pairs of B and C cups on the backs of parishioners. Though formed by back fat they’re pushed up by bra straps like muffins and sometimes, depending on the cut of the blouse or dress, even have cleavage. $50 fine per breast!

Crocs.
These shoes were a joke to get even with someone and now they’re all over the place. Hard rubber in neon colors are too ridiculous to be seen in public. $50 fine first offense, $100 fine if you force children to wear them, $150 fine for high heeled crocs. (yeah, they’re real)

The Utili-kilt
Not just for fat gay men and comic book conventions any more. If you want to wear a skirt, wear a skirt. Adding “utili” doesn’t make it more masculine. $50 fine if you’re wearing underwear, $100 fine if you’re going commando.

Fat Man Mid Drift
More offensive than a fit muscular man with his underwear showing is a fat ass with his beer gut showing. $20 per inch of gut showing. $100 if you have man breasts and don’t wear a shirt at all.
Ed Hardy
No explanation needed. $100, combined with orange spray on tan $150

Price Tags
Did you steal that blouse? Are you going to try to take that hat back to the store tomorrow? $25 fine.

Ugly or Old People Kissing.
Ok it’s not a fashion statement but I don’t want to see ugly people showing affection. “It offends me” $200.

I don’t know if any of these laws will be enacted along with the Saggy Pants Laws but I’m hopeful. I’m also aware that these violations of peoples expression will probably, ironically, end up with a city getting its pants sued off.


Steve Berger
Author of Raised By White Trash.

The damaging effects of motivation.

At some point, probably in the eighties, a collection of people came together and decided to brainwash the masses into an unthinking stupor. The tools used were short quirky soundbites of mock advice and the masses liked it. People were instructed to Take The Road Less Traveled but weren’t warned that the reason that particular road was less traveled was because of the monsters, the washed out bridges, the poisonous insects and the crack heads waiting in the shadows to rob you.
College students were told to do what they love and the money would follow. Sadly the job markets for chronic masturbators and video game players were filled to capacity with people willing to do those jobs for free. It was a plumber accepting my check for fourteen thousand dollars and smelling of raw sewage that told me there’s more money in doing what other people hate. But that slogan doesn’t look good on a book cover or a bumper sticker.
The people who have their heads filled with useless, and sometimes dangerous, motivational quotes are also armed to confront anyone with any small amount of common sense. The people with a brain who actually question such inane statements as, “Fake it 'til you make it,” are to be referred to as “negative” or, lately, “haters”.
Never was this example more evident than after a business talk I gave in San Diego. As the meeting wrapped up I looked outside and the building cloud banks and made the statement, “It looks like it’s going to rain”. The response from one of the participants was immediate, “Stop being so negative!” she yelled. Literally. She yelled at me for making an observation about the weather. Her brain had been so washed that she was unable to see any statement that may not work in her delusioned favor as anything but “negative”.
I was shocked but calm when I explained that there was something between a positive and negative statement. A neutral statement. A statement of observation, opinion or fact. She refused to accept my explanation. This woman was under the sway of a pyramid scheme guru who had warned her to disregard all statements not positive. She had been convinced that this was the key that rich and happy people had discovered and that she just needed to believe in it. She even gave evidence in the form of stories of people that went from poverty to driving BMW’s and living in mansions while sitting in the pool accepting paychecks earned by passive income.
It was months before her guru was finally arrested. It was a year when a book came out from some of his underlings explaining how they were lied to and stolen from. But that wasn’t until later. At that moment I had been confronted by someone desperately convinced that I was a negative person. There was no saving this woman yet. So I did the only thing I could do. I left her standing there in the negative rain.

Fifth Guest

Fifth Guest.

I don’t know if fewer restaurants are taking reservations or if I’ve come to a point in my life where I can’t plan ahead far enough to make a reservation. Or maybe I no longer frequent eateries of that standard. Regardless of why, I now find myself on wait-lists a few times a week. How long I’m willing to wait depends on a few factors. If it’s just me and my boyfriend the maximum is about thirty minutes before we toddle off to find some place less popular.
If, however, we have conned other people into eating dinner with us then we’re willing to wait a little while longer portraying ourselves as a laid back and patient couple willing to go along with whatever the world has to offer. Sometimes I’m even able to convince myself that we are that couple. Unless, of course, there are five of us.
Once you pass the magic number of four the wait changes significantly. Now, instead of one table of people leaving to make room for you, it often takes two tables of people to leave at about the same time then a rearranging of furniture.
Nobody is happy about this arrangement not even the hostess. “How many?” she’ll ask with a smile. But when you tell her “five” the smile fades. You can see in her eyes she wants to tell you exactly how inconvenient that is. That she’ll have to save an empty table and hope that a second one opens up in the near vicinity. She will have to fight off the complaints of serving staff that have one table sitting empty during prime tip collecting times and of patrons wondering why they have to wait in a lobby when there are obviously seats available.
If I haven’t managed my food intake very well that day and I’m hungry it is about the thirty minute mark when I start to evaluate how close I really am to these people. Or specifically one of these people. The fifth one. The one that is making me wait by his mere presence. I never liked him anyway and if left right now I wouldn’t even care. If there is another couple in our odd group of five then it’s probably their fault. They’ve invited some friend of theirs I never liked. They should take their friend and go find their own table.
Of course sometimes our single friend invites a couple. Who does this anyway? Just invite people to dinner because you like them. If that couple left we could get a seat fast.
Maybe we could break up the couple. Is it too late to start a rumor of infidelity? The short guy is probably insecure I can go after him. I realize the one left to have dinner with us will be upset but at least we’ll be sitting down during the crying.
If an hour goes by and we’re still waiting I start considering breaking up my own relationship. Yes, I do love my partner but we’ve had a good run. Besides, it has been an hour. Really who could blame me? I could also just pick a fight and go home. Leave in a manufactured rage and stop by someplace to eat on the way. Some place with a drive through.
I guess the easiest way to avoid this situation is to stop being so damned friendly. Fewer friends means the chance of us having an even number goes up. As the hostess seats us I make a mental note to be less personable.

30 jobs in 30 years

30 jobs in 30 years

Call it A.D.D call it an interest in exploring new horizons or call it a hard time keeping a job but I’ve had over 30 jobs over the last 30 years. I’ve learned a lot about several different industries, management styles have run into a lot of crazy characters.
Here’s the list...


Newspaper route
Kid model
Babysitter/dog watcher
Black Market candy/liquor sales
Librarian
Fast food restaurant (Dairy Queen, Pizza Hut, Dominoes)
Non-fast food (Brown Derby, Casa Amigo, TGI Fridays)
Engraver
Pet Sales
Aquarium maintenance
Ice Cream scooper
Private Investigator
Roofer
Ballroom Dance Teacher/competitor
Cruise Ship Group Escort
Massage Therapist
Candle Manufacturer
Artist/sculptor
Coffee enema consultant (Gerson Institute)
Travel Agent
Real Estate Agent
Computer trainer
Business Networking Trainer
Stand-up comedian
Substitute school teacher
Concierge in a retirement home
Property Manager
Flight Attendant
Waker Upper for a narcoleptic
Author

Found on the ground

Found on the ground.

I’ve always found some cool stuff on the ground. So much so I’ve decided to make that a topic of an essay in my upcoming book. Today, for example, I found coins from Mexico, Denmark and Spain on the streets of Atlanta. They were just laying there like they had been spilled from a piggy bank or discarded by a thief who realized he couldn’t spend them.
I’ve kept a tally of what what I’ve found. A gold necklace, cash, and, strangely, high number of shoes (the shoes I leave behind in case the owner comes back to find them). I think the most fascinating thing I’ve found is a huge “marital aid” roughly the size of a paper towel tube complete with remote control.
I didn’t pick up the dildo but it was in my regular walking path and, after a sleepless night wondering how it could have found itself on the side of the hiway, I wanted to see it again. It was gone when I came back. It wasn’t a well walked road so I’m guessing it was carried off by a near-sighted coyote.

I don't have writer's block... really

I've always thought that writer's block referred to not knowing what to write about or not coming up with anything unique. I must not be alone in that thought because every few weeks someone says to me, "Oh you're a writer? I have a story. You write it and we'll split the money". I smile and say "ok" to their faces but "Screw You" in my head. The only reason I agree to it is because these people obviously aren't motivated and won't bother me again anyway.

I've never been at a loss for words. My block comes in the form of too much choice and the gremlins of life that pop and act more important. Like today. Should I write that short fantasy I have outlined about the dwarf and his wife for a contest or should I start on the sequel to the book that I just finished? Oh wait.. is it laundry day? I better check my sales again for the fifth time today... I should dust.. I need new shoes. Oh I know.. I can post a blog...

The amazing journey to getting published

It's not amazing.. it's a tedious and annoying process. It doesn't help that I'm doing all of this in a time when the publishing industry changes nearly every day. Every opinion or suggestion on how to get things done properly has an expiration date and too often the author doesn't bother to date his statement.

That being said... I really feel a sense of accomplishment with this first book being available for sale. Electronically for now but my proofs of the hard copy are due to be here next week. It's about time. I'm so tired of looking at this work. Every time I see the title or any of the content I look at it like a husband I want to kill. "Oh.. you again.. go away".

I'll have to get over that since the idea is to do readings of my own work in front of people that give me money. I have a lot of practice saying the same thing over and over and over so maybe it will be something I'll just get used to. It will be nice to have a rotating audience that isn't sick of my stories yet. Unlike at home.

Bubbacide Part 2 Raised By White Trash

“Amember that time you locked me outside in the snow in my underwear?”

“They chain me up in the basement and leave me there all day”, and if it didn’t get the response he wanted or expected he would add, “without food”. I once heard Bubba tell a perfect stranger this at the town roller skating rink. He was trying to work this motherly looking lady into enough pity she would buy him potato chips from the snack bar.

“And what did you do to deserve that?”, she asked him. She assumed that families who chained up their children in basements didn’t take them roller skating afterwards. Bubba’s story was too ridiculous to be believed and she was teasing him about it. I laughed and skated off. The story really was true though, sort of, but it only happened once. He made it sound like an every day occurrence. Like shackles were part of our basement’s floor plan.

What really happened was part of a sort of game we made up. Bubba had been “arrested” for some crime against the family and was to be locked up in the basement. I was the arresting officer so I lead him downstairs while he half heartedly pretended to struggle. He couldn’t even pretend to struggle very much because we still had to navigate the stairs. He was in his underwear because.. well because he was always in his underwear.

The chain involved was huge and had links as thick as sausages and was sturdy enough to hoist an elephant out of a pit. I hadn’t planned on any large animal removal but wanted to be prepared in case the occasion showed itself. As handy as a chain that big would be for large animals it’s terrible for restraining skinny little White Trash boys. The links are too big to make any sort of knot and there’s no good way to secure it. So in the end I had to just sort of drape it over Bubba and wind it around the hollow aluminum table leg of a ping pong table.

As I went back up the stairs he knew he could get out. I knew he could get out. But I also knew he couldn’t get upstairs unless I let him. I stationed myself at the door to the basement. There was no lock so I held on to the knob and wedged my foot at the bottom of the door waiting for him to try to rejoin us among the free and the warm. Bubba knew this trick because I had used it before. He had a different plan this time.

Though there was snow on the ground he bolted out of the side door of the garage in nothing but a pair of sagging athletic socks and his equally sagging underpants. Under normal conditions his underwear would be referred to as white but in contrast to the snow and his Winter whitened skin they looked a more greyish yellow. Like a blond past her prime.

His plan to get back upstairs via the quick dash in the snow to the back door wasn’t a bad one but he miscalculated a few of the details. One being that I was at the basement door which was opposite the back door not even a yard away. He forgot, too, that the back door had windows so I could see him coming. The back door also had a lock. I didn’t even have to use any physical effort to keep him out anymore.

I don’t know what he was thinking exact.y Maybe he thought he could outrun me around the house or maybe he had the misguided impression that our sister Becky was on his side. Either way he tried to make it to the front door to get in that way. He found it locked. His only option left was to repeatedly ring the doorbell.

“Whooooo iiiiiis it?”, I asked in my best mocking tone.

“Let me in”, he said. Then pretended to cry. I don’t know why he bothered. He cried all the time, both real and fake, and I never cared. Why would I care now?

“I’m sorry, but we don’t know anyone named 'let me in’ and we can’t let strangers in the house”, I yelled back to him,“It’s not safe”. This wasn’t a real house rule per se, we were openly encouraged to let anyone in the house that wanted in, salesmen, neighbors, knife wielding child rapists. It didn’t matter to our parents as long as we didn’t make them stand outside on the porch. That would be rude. I must have heard about dangerous strangers on TV or at school or someplace else that thought kids couldn’t find for themselves, and it fit the situation.

That’s when Bubba switched from the doorbell to banging on the door. “Come o o o on”, he whined.

“Go to the neighbors and get the key”, Becky suggested.

Two neighbors had keys to our house. One was across the street and the other was two doors down. He must have thought about it because he stopped pounding the door a minute to calculate the distance. Then he must have remembered he was in his underwear and started in again with the pounding this time adding kicks with his wet socks.

“I’m calling the police!”, he yelled

“No, I’m calling the police!”, I yelled back, “Some crazy nekkid kid is trying to break in to my house! Help Police!”

“Let me in!”

“Help, help, nekkid man tryin’ to get us!”

Becky, knowing this wouldn’t end well, sat on the sofa and laughed. Choosing, in this instance,not to take sides.

Giving up on the front door Bubba ran to the back again and proceeded to beat and kick at the still locked back door. Did he think I unlocked the door when I walked away? He didn’t think much of my defensive skills.

I had grown bored and had decided to watch television raising the volume so I could hear it over the beating the back door was taking when eventually the noise stopped.

“He stopped”, Becky said, noticing the silence before I did.

“He’s probably dead”, I assured her.

“Or he went to get a key” She guessed.

“Or he remembered the basement door is still unlocked”, I suggested.

I few moments later, pink and shivering from either the cold or anger, Bubba comes walking through the living room and in the most casual tone I could I asked, “Hey Bubba, where have you been?”

“I’m telling mom you tried to kill me! I almost froze to death”. He pretended to cry but couldn’t pull up any tears.

“Oh you say I’m trying to kill you all the time. Nobody even cares anymore”, I told him. “You’re like the little boy who cried wolf”, then, to make his life a little more confusing, “except he really did freeze to death.”

It was true that yelling, “They’re trying to kill me”, didn’t hold the sway it used to. Either it was said too often or our parents were starting to warm up to the idea. Either way, I barely got in trouble whenever he made the claim. I might get in trouble this time, though. Not for risking his life but because he kicked a hole in the back door before he realized he could have gotten back in any time he wanted.

“But I wasn’t even outside! How could I have kicked the door in?” I yelled at my mom in my defense. I thought it was a good one.

“You locked him out there! What if the neighbors saw?”, Our mom yelled back. Not what if he had frozen to death or cut open an artery trying to break back in.

If Bubba, or any of us for that matter, froze solid in the backyard like an unlucky arctic explorer in dirty underpants it wouldn’t have mattered to our mother as long as the people living around us didn’t find out and think we were white trash.

“I didn’t lock him out there anyway. The basement door was always unlocked. He went out there on his own. Can I help it if he likes to run around outside naked? Is it my fault he wasn’t brought up any better?”. I overplayed my hand and got my ass beat.

Bubba was punished too but not as severely. Not because he was deemed any less at fault but because he just stood there shivering looking as much as he could like a victim. Everyone involved knew he was faking it. But fake shivering was better than fake crying so I guess he deserved some recognition for the effort.

Bubbacide Part 1 Raised By White Trash

For the record I never put any conscious effort into trying to kill my brother. I will admit there were times I would, sometimes with the aid of our sister Becky, tease him a little. But only a little. I will also admit that I was really really good at it but that’s all it was, teasing. Something everyone does to their little brother if they have one. Right?

For example, as children my sister and I had Bubba completely convinced that we had another brother before him. The deception didn‘t take much skill really. I just, out of the blue one day, said, “We had another brother once”, and he bought it. Other Brother became a recurring theme whenever we teased Bubba, which we did whenever we found ourselves bored of feeling like life was too quiet.

Like a campfire ghost story Other Brother always died horrible deaths and his body was buried or hidden in a variety of places around the country. If we were driving down a back road in Missouri and we were all getting along I would turn to Becky and say, “Hey,does this look familiar to you?”.

Without skipping a beat or changing the direction she was looking she’d reply, “This is where we buried our Other Brother”. At this point our mother would hear us and step in to stop us but would inadvertently help us out.

“You two stop telling him that! He already gets nightmares!”.

We’d be quiet for a few minutes then whisper, “See, she’s mad that we told you … because you’re next”.

Ideas for how to wage this psychological warfare popped up everywhere. One year we had a classmate that had been born with only one arm. It was explained to everyone in the fourth grade that birth defects happened to a lot of people for no reason. To me this meant birth defects could be anywhere. So I started looking for them everywhere. I was successful from time to time, a missing limb here, a hare lip there, but not enough to make me totally satisfied. To compensate I came up with the idea of convincing Bubba, that he had been born with defects.

I decided missing body parts were too difficult to plan for. Bubba was dumb but he could probably tell if he was missing a finger or a foot. I guess I could have told him he was missing something hidden, like a kidney or a spleen but missing internal organs isn’t as embarrassing.

So I went with and extra body part. At first I thought of telling him he had been born with a tail. I figured since he couldn’t see where any leftover surgical scar would have been it would have been an easy sale. But that was amateur stuff and I was better than that. Besides, something told me Bubba would have liked telling people he had been born with a tale.

“You know”, I said one afternoon in our bedroom, “I think I finally figured out why you you still need training wheels on your bike. You used to have a three legs when you were a baby and mom had to cut off the one in the middle leg with a steak knife so we wouldn’t have to buy a bunch of extra shoes. She probably missed some extra bones in your butt and they throw off your balance”

He digested the information for a moment then gave his standard reply, “Nuh Huh”. Then he thought about it before he ran off yelling through the house in the direction of the kitchen to confirm his “nuh huh” with our mother.

“Mom, did I have an extra leg you had to cut off with a steak knife because you didn’t want to buy shoes?”

This confused our mother. Partly because it was being yelled as fast as a five year old speak and at the top of his lung. Partly because she was cutting up a chicken for dinner and had just removed a leg. She thought the “cut off leg” was talking about was referring the chicken leg in her hand.

“What are you talking about?”, she asked?

“Steve said you cut off my leg with a steak knife when I was a baby because you wouldn’t buy shoes”. Bubba paraphrased poorly and this usually worked in my advantage.

Hearing my name, and being aware of the things I would say to Bubba in order to harass him, was as enough to snap my mother snap my mother out of her confusion.

“Get out of this kitchen and stop listening to him”, Coincidently she shoo’d him out of the kitchen with a knife. Not a steak knife, which would have been ideal, but that would have been too much to ask for.

He came back to our room where I had listened to the entire exchange. “Mom said not to listen to you”, he said in a “ha ha” sort of way.

“But she didn’t saaaaay she didn’t do it right?” I asked him making sure to stretch out the word “say” so he got the point.

“I’m not listening to you”, and he put his fingers in his hears chanting, “La La La” in the classic sound input aversion technique that all kids just know.

He grew bored of it soon enough and when I knew he could hear me again I said, “Well, you can probably still see the scar under your weiner where they cut your leg off. Go check”.

He sat on his bed a minute trying to pretend that he had successfully ignored me, but the temptation to find out was too much, and he ran into the bathroom to check for a scar.

Thanks to our full set of Encyclopedia Britannica sold to us by a door to door salesman I knew what Bubba would see when he peered down between his legs. The Perineal Raphe, a seam that runs from the anus, up the scrotum to the penis of every male mammal on Earth. It’s a leftover from fetal development and, best of all, it looks exactly like a really long scar made by a steak knife.

Bubba must of thought so too because from the bathroom I heard a scream. This made him the first person to scream while looking at his balls but probably not the last. I couldn’t see him but I pictured him clearly, jeans to his knees, bent over as far as he could, pulling on his scrotum, and screaming like a girl.

I evacuated the house knowing I would probably get the blame for him being so gullible. This was just like the time I got unfairly blamed when he didn’t duck when I threw that tiny rock that probably didn’t hurt him nearly as much as he pretended it did. Or when he didn’t get out of the way when I was on the riding lawn mower and ran over his toe, the little toe, not an important one. I was right, I got blamed and punishment later that evening was a somber lecture about how to treat a little brother. So, no punishment at all.

These stories of minor psychological warfare soon became part of the family lore and, as far as I know, are still being recounted around picnic tables and at restaurants where everything is fried. If any of my relatives ever said I was a terrible child or a bad seed because of my activities it was said through laughter and with more than a little pride.

These are not the stories that Bubba recites when he decides to make the case that his childhood was a series of attempts on his life. “I was lucky I growed up at all”. This would start start if there was a lull in a conversation at a family gathering. The immediate family, cousins, aunts, uncles etc, knew to ignore him or to just walk away. Great aunts and uncles or more distant cousins didn’t know they weren’t supposed to pay too close of attention to him if they ever wanted him to stop.
The stories aren’t told for entertainment value but are presented more like evidence is presented to judge and jury. If there is someone standing near by that may have been involved in his story in some way they’re called as a witness, “‘Member that time they tried to push me off the cliff?” or “‘Member that time they chained me up in the basement in my underwear?” . The stories were all true. He just told them in a way that made him look like the victim.

I haven’t been officially accused of anything but I will take a few moments to tell my side of some of his favorite stories. If Bubba disagrees with me then he’s free to write his own essay on the subject.

In the beginning life was pretty good for me. Yes, we were poor and on welfare. Yes, my father had just died leaving my mother a teenage widow. But what was most important, at least to me, was that I was an only child. Before Bubba was born I held the title of oldest child, oldest grandchild and the oldest great grandchild. I was a triple threat. If there was such a thing as a white trash throne I would have been the only obvious heir.

My time as heir apparent was short lived. A mere twenty months after I was born Bubba arrived to siphon off much of the attention that was due me. Though is real name is Darren Eugene I dubbed him Bubba. The women of my family thought it was cute that I was trying to say “brother” so it stuck. They didn’t realize that with him lying there, bald and drooling with nothing coming out of his mouth making any sense, he just looked like a ‘Bubba’.

I resented by my little brother from the beginning. I named him, I out ranked him and, though I didn’t bring him into this world, I could take him out. Then we could go back to the good days when I was the only child.

Tastee Freez excerpt from Raised By White Trash

I realized I finally had something to write under the “interesting facts” category on my family tree. Next to my grandmothers name I wrote, "Owned the Tastee Freez". The Tastee Freez was, for years, the only fast food restaurant in town. Actually, if you did the math, that one building made up a full twenty percent of all restaurants in a ten mile radius. This was as good as being a celebrity. Maybe better because there was ice cream involved. I wasn’t the only person to find that interesting because, over thirty years after she sold the place that fact that she had owned it was mentioned in her obituary after the list of her surviving relatives.

When I was younger my mother would sometimes work shifts at the Tastee Freez and, when things were slow and there was no babysitter available, my brother, sister and I would spend her entire shift there at the restaurant. We would start out sitting quietly at a table with coloring books or reading but eventually the massive amounts of sugar and caffeine from the sodas we drank nonstop would take it's toll and we would end up running around like the insanely hyper devil children we were.

If you’ve ever visited white trash parts of the country or are raised white trash yourself you have probably seen the kids we were then. Three loud and dirty kids. The two youngest shirtless regardless of gender and the oldest beating on them with glee and hope that one day he would finally have the strength to draw blood. The adult involved would be hiding or at least trying to hide. Eventually one of the kids, we took turns, would go crying to her about the behavior of his or her siblings, cried because of phantom hunger pains or cried because that was the only sensible alternative to boredom.

To help keep the noise down some we were fed small amounts of food every few minutes. A handful of french fries would be tossed on the table in our general direction like we were chickens out in a yard. To continue the illusion that we were being fed like we were birds the three of us would put our hands behind our backs and peck at the table to get our “worms”. Fried dill pickle slices were eaten like they were mini sandwiches and hamburgers that had been cut into thirds were measured against each other to make sure no one of us got more than the other. It was only fair.

The only thing that wasn’t tossed at us like we were livestock was our drinks. It was great fun for us to go behind the counter to make our own drinks and even more fun to play mixologist. Like a connoisseur trained in the soft drink arts I would ask my sister “Is your Coke not Spritey enough?” or “maybe your Root Beer would taste more like Dr Pepper if you just added a little bit of orange crush”. Of course the ultimate expression of the fountain culinary experience was a drink called the Suicide. This was a drink and a game. The recipe was easy. You put a little of each soda in your cup all the way down the line then repeat until your cup was full. If you didn’t throw-up, you won.

Bilby. Excerpt from Raised by White Trash.

Bilby

As important as it is to have good friends to turn to for companionship or support I believe, to the core of my soul, that it is equally important to have at least one good enemy. Maybe it’s even more important.

A friend is someone you can bitch to, and that’s important. But a good enemy gives you someone to bitch about. Without the bitching it can be hard to come up with something new to talk about with your friends. The right enemy in the right circumstance can even strengthen your friendships and even prolong a romance.

It's often said, usually by me, that a good relationship is based on two people liking the same things but a great relationship based on two people hating the same things. For example, if you both like, say, Dutch Paintings but one of you likes the paintings for their composition and subject matter but the other person likes them for the color pallet or painting style you can still hang your painting in the grand dining room but there will still be friction as to why it's there and why you both like it.

That’s not the case with shared hatred. With a shared hatred for someone one of you can see someone walking down the street and say, "I hate her shoes" the other person can respond in a disgusted voice, "Look at her tube top". You then declare,"she's a nasty slut that's probably going to end up in a trailer park with five kids from six different men". And then, of course, you can't argue with the statement of, "She's such a whore, I hope she gets hit by a truck".

Unlike with a work of art you don't have to agree on the specifics of why you hate this slut with the tube top and bad shoes. (oh yeah, she has bad shoes). Those slight differences of opinion somehow melt away when they are on the negative side of the spectrum. You're a united front against that tramp and and your relationship is more solid for it.

For me it's especially important to have a good enemy around to take the brunt of the excess of negative energy and dark thoughts that seem to multiply in my psyche like evil bunnies. If I don't have someone I don't like to direct this mental energy at then I end up directing it at someone I actually care about or related to.

Going to school in a small town means it's not unusual to see people that are best friends one year, become vicious enemies the next year, and then in high school they go to prom together. I had a few of those on again off again enemies, we all did, but I also found a really good full time enemy. Our relationship lasted for years. I can still remember the exact moment he came into my life and I knew he was the one.

It was third grade. Our class assignment was a short story with some sort of moral undertone to it. We were to read it then discuss the morality part as a class. Our first story was set in the late eighteen hundreds and was about a shopkeeper that finds himself being bullied by the illiterate wagon driver that delivered the products to his store. The wagon driver was physically abusive and, most importantly to the plot, stole from the shopkeeper on a regular basis. He did this by tapping into the whiskey barrels and drinking down a good portion of it. To put an end to the abuse and thieving the shopkeeper ordered a barrel of wood alcohol that looked exactly the same as the whiskey barrels except for the label. Since of course the wagon driver couldn't read he drank the wood alcohol and subsequently dropped dead.

To me the moral was obvious! If you're stupid and abusive someone will poison you and make it look like an accident. It's also a good lesson on not pissing off the people who touch your food before you do.The teacher was not content on my brilliant and concise assessment and decided she would ask the rest of the class one by one if they thought what the shopkeeper did was right or wrong. Most of us agreed that what he did was right and justified and that he didn't really kill the asshole wagon driver. It was more of an accidental suicide. Admittedly with a little help from our hero the shopkeeper.

One person did not agree. That person was my future nemesis, James Bilby.

Because our last names were alphabetically close we were seated next to each other. He had been writing or drawing or doing math problems, something lame, and hadn't bothered to look up during most of the discussion. When the teacher got to him he said "The shopkeeper is wrong because it's never ok to kill anyone".

Even at that age I had a prepared short list of situations of when it was ok to kill someone.

1. If someone kills your parents or someone in your family,
2. Someone is going to kill you
3. If you're in a war"

I'm still proud of how insightful I was at the time and still stand by convictions. However, the list of reasons that make it ok to kill someone has grown to include such things as:

4. Taking the parking space, that I pay for! two days in a row
5.Wearing a mullet unless you’re a lesbian or a NASCAR fan
6. Asking me why I'm single

*I've lightened up a little on the "killing someone in your family" rule.

James Bilby wouldn’t argue his reasoning. He just repeated what he said once and went back to the paper in front him. I got the feeling that the opinion wasn’t his at all but was given to him by someone else. Maybe I have a few opinions like that too but I make it a point not to agree with parents or authority figures.

I hadn’t thought much about James Bilby up until that point but now I hated him. It wasn’t just because he disagreed with me. There was just something about his arrogant confidence about something he was so obviously and completely wrong about that made me crazy.

That was also the first time I looked at James, I mean really looked at him. He wore jeans and a t-shirt like most of the rest of us but his t-shirt was more like the kind grown ups wore under long sleeve shirts. More like underwear. He was pasty white and shiny from a constant thin layer of oil or sweat. He had mousy blond hair that hung in exhausted curs. The top of his head looked like it belonged on an antique baby doll.

None of these attributes were his fault, of course, and there was no good reason to hate James but at some instinctual and visceral level, I did.


_______________


In the Fall our local schools held a parent teacher conference. This was an annual event that I always assumed my mother and stepfather would rather avoid. Being the thoughtful kid I was I made sure to destroy the note sent home alerting them to the time and date of the conference so they wouldn’t be bothered. I didn't count on my brother Bubba having the same notes sent home. To be fair he didn’t bother to give our mother the mimeographed notices but he didn’t bother taking them out of the pockets of his jeans either. To my bad luck laundry day fell before conference day and, in a fit of uncharacteristic parenting care, my parents decided we would all attend.

There's something surreal about an elementary classroom at night. The windows you normally looked out of all day are now dark. After night falls the scene changes from the playground, the trees and the occasional view of humping dogs to your own reflection looking back at you. The cheap institutional glass makes the room look as though it were melting around the edges. Kind of like those paintings from that guy whose name you can’t remember.

The overhead fluorescent bulbs didn’t produce enough light to penetrate the corners like sunlight could. The little curve of dirt left by a hasty mopping and the collections of hair and fuzz were now hidden in the shadows. This made our classroom look as clean as it did the first day of school.

Even our teacher looked different at night. She was wearing a dress with big puffy sleeves like a girl pirate costume. She wore two shades of blue eye shadow and wasn’t wearing her glasses . This didn’t seem fair to me somehow. It was like she was trying to make school look better than it actually was. Was she trying to fake people out? If I had been a little bit older I would have pretended not to know her for no other reason than to make the point that she didn’t always look this good. "Your voice sounds familiar”, I would say “ but, I’m sorry, I really can't place the face". I wasn't that quick yet so I just resented her puffy sleeves in silence.

When it became obvious that there was a line of parents and students to speak to the teacher my mother turned to me and said, “While we’re waiting why don’t you show us around?” She said this in a very sweet voice that I had never heard before. This startled me and I was a little suspicious of that voice coming out of a mouth that was usually reserved for yelling at me or someone directly related to me. I guess all of the grown up women decided to be fake this evening.

“But we’ll lose our place in line!”. I braced myself for a smack or that thing she did where she pinches the back of arm. I had been working on a counter move that involved screaming “Child Abuse someone call a cop!” at the top of my lungs and I wanted to test it out.

Instead she just put her hand on my shoulder in a very unnatural civilized manner and lead me out of line. This was staring to creep me out. Who was this lady?

Giving in to the realization that I wasn’t getting out of giving a tour I pointed to the desk closest to us and said “That’s my desk”. It was a beige on beige affair with a lightning bolt ‘S” carved in the corner. It was also four desks away from where I really sat.

“That’s not your desk” my stepdad said pointing out the name tags that had been attached to the fronts of the desks sometime after we left that afternoon and before we returned that evening. Sabotage.

“Ok that’s my desk” Fine, I would show them where I really sat but I wouldn’t show them the good stuff. Like the chair that Lori McMillen peed in the second week of class or the desk Matt Amick puked on and the janitor had to be called to put sawdust on it. They’d never know how to squeak the closet door so it sounded like a fart. That’s right. You can force me to show you my desk but Pee Chair and Puke Desk will always be a secret.

One wall had a list of the Book Worms and a worm with my name on it was one of the longest because of all the books I had read out of boredom and NOT because I cared my worm.

“Oh, that’s some other Steve” I said when asked about it. I’d be damned if was going to let them be proud of how many books I read.

They continued their way around the walls of the room coming to the crayon self portraits. Mine was missing. When asked I explained “Oh yeah. The teacher said mine wasn’t good enough and tore it up in front of my face”. In reality I didn’t like it and snatched it down earlier in the day. I wanted to look persecuted in case I needed evidence to get out of trouble later.

The last poster was the Math Stars poster. At first glance it looked like two of the names were a tie. One of those names was mine. My stepdad did everyone a service and counted the actual stars and and pointed out that the other kid had more.

“Who’s this James kid?” He asked, “He looks like he’s pretty good at math” .

“That’s fake” I countered

“So he cheated?” He said this with a little grin like I was lying.

“No. it’s a fake name. The teacher does that so people will try harder. Nobody real can ever be in first place”

“So you’re trying to tell me that your teacher made up some kid named James Bilby and gives him more stars than everybody else to make you all try harder?” He asked.

I got indignant” Are you trying to tell me that you keep asking me questions then you don’t believe me when I answer you?”

Mom stepped in to stop the argument from escalating. She wasn’t ready to go through a yelling match between two immature children. Even if she was married to one of them.

We made our way up to the front of the room for their turn with the teacher. While they were discussing my academic career I started noting the other families and my classmate’s parents. I was surprised at how old some of them were. Did some of these people bring their grandmothers? Were we supposed to bring ours? My confusion makes more sense when you take into account that when I was nine years old my mother was twenty four and my grandmother was not yet forty.

It didn't take long to realize it was more than the age of the adults that made my family different from the others. First of all, a lot of the kids looked like miniature versions of at least one of their parents. Puking Matt for example looked just like the man standing next to him who was, I guess, Puking Matt Sr.

I looked closer at my family and realized my kid brother looked a lot like my mother but I didn’t look like either one of them. I tucked that information away to help bolster my growing “Swapped at birth” theory.

Secondly, I noticed that in the other families everyone had the same last name. I could see how much more convenient that would be since there was often confusion regarding names at home. But then again it seemed to be a loss of personal individuality too.

When it was my moms turn to talk to the teacher I took my little brother Bubba and showed him where I sat and the contents of my desk. I was about to show him how well the sharp point of a compass could etch the fiberboard our desks when a shadow blotted out the fluorescent light. "Oh, is this your desk, Jimmy?". James was there with his parents. I went back to ignoring Bubba since this gave me the opportunity to pass unfair judgment on the family of my nemesis.

Even if they hadn't walked up to his desk I would have had no problem spotting James’ parents in a crowd. They were merely older shinier versions of James. His mother had the thin blond hair that was probably clean but looked dirty and his father was completely bald. They both had the small turned up noses I saw on James everyday. In my mind I dubbed them Porky and Petunia the talking pig couple from the Warner Brothers cartoons. Though technically a Petunia should be a brunette.

As it turns out my stepdad knew the James’ father and told us in the car later that his family owned and operated a large animal processing plant. The business wasn't large the animals they processed were. It was where people took a cow, a pig or a deer to be made into little freezer packets wrapped in white paper and marked with magic markers. Maybe, over the decades, the family grew to look like the animals they've been so intimate with for so long. This took on special significance when we were later forced to read Animal Farm by George Orwell.

When it was their turn to talk to our teacher Porky and Petunia Bilby had somehow gotten it into their minds that James needed special academic attention and argued with the teacher for advanced classes in mathematics. This was so they could advance his "spark of genius".

They actually said “Spark of genius". He couldn’t be a genius I protested silently in my head. He only had three more math stars than I did! But, since nobody was willing to argue the point for me, I had to take the same math lessons as the rest of the dumb kids. Oh well. I didn’t like math that much anyway.

The week after the parent teacher conference James was given a fake stock portfolio to invest in and follow. Every day he would look at the Wall Street Journal and track his fake wealth. This segregated him from the rest of the class and added more to his assumed general weirdness. On the plus side, with him out of the way, my math stars took the lead. Not that I cared.

_____________


I didn't have James Bilby in class during the fourth grade but fifth grade had us sitting next to each other yet again. Our teacher, Ms. Sobanski, was sort of a cliche teacher type. Her hair was dyed a shade of black so unnatural it looked like she colored it in herself with a magic marker. She parted her hair on one side showing a severe gray line that were her permanent roots. The uncolored stripe drifted from left to right across her head but was never flattering.

I'm sure when she first became a school teacher Ms. Sobanski cared about her appearance and how her hair looked but by the time I was in her class she just thought didn't matter any more. Nobody paid attention to such things she told herself. Little did she know the gay kid in the second row did notice such things. He even wrote it down in a notebook for future reflection.

My school bus passed her house every day on the way to school and often times I'd see her walking to her car or coming home from school. Ms. Sobanski lived in a tiny row home so small that there was no room for more than one human inside.

She always wore dresses printed with tiny flowers on a background of what was either considered off white or really light yellow. I guess the best name for the color would be “smokers teeth”. She wore the exact same style of shoe in three different colors. They looked like blocks of wood covered with the material from old car seats and held together with rusting buckles. It looked like she was able to dress herself entirely with materials she found laying around an automobile grave yard.

As fascinating as I found her fashion sense and living situation I never really thought much else about Ms Sobanski. I hadn't even taken the time to make up a nasty nickname for her since she came with one already installed.

Our fifth grade classrooms were connected to each other by a short hallway that contained bathrooms and a little meeting room. One stormy morning the connecting teachers decided that, since we couldn't go outside, we would have a math competition between the two classes. The idea was to let us burn up some energy and blow off some steam education style.

Our class was very excited since we had James Bilby and the whole school knew he had been promoted to the title of fifth grade math genius. James, however, told the teacher that he didn't want to play with us because he “Didn't believe in competition”. How can anyone NOT believe in competition? It wasn’t like we were talking about ghosts or bigfoot. Competition was everywhere and it was obvious.

The teachers agreed that he shouldn’t have to participate and James Bibly retreated to his math corner. Our math ringer turned out to be a traitor and fled to his version of Canada so he could avoid the upcoming conflict. "Come on" I thought "you're nearly eleven years old. Be a man why don't ya"

The rules of the contest were simple. One student from each class would go to either side of the chalkboard and one of the teachers would read an algebra problem out loud. The first one to write the answer correctly would win a point for their class.

After half an hour it became obvious that the teams were too evenly matched and the score showed that neither side had a real advantage. Being tied most of the time was getting boring and the kids were getting restless.

To spice up the game the other teacher, Mrs. Baker, the teacher that I had hoped I would get, made the problems more complex. It was also decided that the person who won his or her round got to stay up at the board competing against the students This made for champions and a real competition. It also made me regret not having Mrs. Baker even more. This teacher knew how to appeal to my competitive side.

Before I could get called up to the board Marcus Johnson, a new kid that moved to town two years ago but would forever be known as a new kid, from the other team had taken out ten of my classmates. My side decided it was time to pull in our ringer even if it was against his will and started chanting "Bilby, Bilby ...” He ignored us as though he were deaf and continued to work on whatever work he had in front of him. It wasn't until Ms Sobanski walked over and leaned down to him and asked him to do it that he gave in and waddled up to the board. Marcus Johnson’s winning streak ended then and there and James’s started. James would refuse to admit it but it was obvious he liked winning.

In almost no time at all twenty-five students that were our competition fell under James’ mighty piece of chalk and his superior math ability. The other team pretty much gave up when a girl from my class, that always wore overalls and could do a back flip, named Stacy yells out "Make Steve go up against James". I thought "Steve Hedges is dumb and can’t stop picking his nose long enough to hold the chalk, he wont' last up there". But everyone knew that . No that's the not the Steve she meant. I looked around and they were all looking at me...even Nosepicker Steve Hedges.

Later, I asked Stacy why she did that. Why she wanted me up there competing against the fifth grade math genius. I was hoping to hear it was because she saw in me a “spark of genius” that nobody else did. Or that she believed in me and that only I could save the class. Of course it could have just as easily been that she had singled me out to fail in front of everyone. People with pigtails weren’t usually that mean.

Come to find out it was none of these things it was, she explained, "’Cause everyone knows you hate him". It wasn't the reason I thought but it was certainly one I could respect. It seems Stacy had an evil streak. I would have to adjust my opinion on girls with pigtails.

James’ strategy was to write out the problem as it was being read and start to do the problem in his head as he wrote it. My strategy was to let him write it out and guess the answer before he did. I had done some social math in my head and realized I couldn't really lose. After all, if I didn't get the problem solved before he did it was no big deal since everyone else up until now had lost too. Right? There was no shame in losing against a genius.

I walked up to the chalk board to the calls of “Get him Steve” and whispered versions of “kick his butt”. I didn’t fool myself into thinking I was loved. I knew I was just less disliked than the traitor.

I found the longest piece of chalk in the tray. James’ face was impassive as he waited for the problem to be read so I looked at him and smiled and said "Hi James!" and gave a little wave. The combined classes laughed. I could pretend it was a calculated gesture meant to unnerve him in the spirit of competition but really I was just being a dick.

Ms. Sobanski put us on our mark. “Ready?" We each lifted our chalk ready for the problem. I moved my feet apart in a pseudo karate stance. Ms. Sobanski slowly read the problem, James started to write out the numbers and letter. I guessed at the answer and scribbled it on the board.

I got it right. I had kicked his butt. The combined classes yelled in triumph! They weren't teams facing each other anymore. It was them, and me, against the smart kid. This is probably what it felt like to score the winning goal or shoot the winning basket. Two things I've yet to experience.

The losing math genius who had proclaimed not to be competitive turned red and stomped his foot and yelled to be heard over the crowd, "That's not fair he didn't show his work!". This was the first time any of us had ever seen him have any type of emotional outbreak. HA I thought, he was a fake. and now I had proof.

The teachers didn’t hear him over the cheers so he had to repeat, "That's not fair he didn't show his work".

The teachers looked at each other knowing they faced a mutiny if they gave a bad decision. I took their slow response as an opportunity. “Nobody said in the rules that we had to show our work and I couldn’t have cheated off of him since I got the answer before he did.” Looking back I should have said "WAY before he did" just to make the barb sink in a little bit more but I was too caught up in being technically right to think fast on my feet.

It was a very satisfying moment to see him there having a melt down because I had beaten him at what he thought he was best at. But, like most great moments of triumph, it didn't last long. I saw him standing there in his short sleeved collared shirt the color of stained teeth that he had started wearing sometime in the past year and khaki pants with white tennis shoes. His fat rolls stacked perfectly on top of each other like the cartoon spokesman used to sell tires. As he complained to the teacher wearing a flower print polyester dress and off white naugahyde shoes her fat rolls also stacked on top of each other like the wife of the cartoon spokesman used to sell tires and I knew I was in trouble. They looked so much like each other that I knew she would take his side.

"Ok let's do it again because it was close" Ms. Sobanski announced. The classes were in an uproar of "no fair" and "He lost!" came shouts from the classes. Again I knew they didn’t want to see me win they just wanted to see him lose.

My face somber since I didn't know if I could pull this lucky guess trick off again. I glanced over at James and made my face go from somber to the hint of a smile that didn't quite reach the rest of my eyes. A facial expression I picked up subconsciously from watching footage of Richard Nixon. “Ok, let's go". That smile flustered James even more than the one with the wave. I added it to the mental list for future reference.

Ms Sabanski read the problem this time, James wrote it down, I guessed. We both wrote the same answer at the same time. This guessing system was really working! My drive to annoy someone I thought of as my nemesis has surpassed my meager math skills. But this time it really was technically a tie. We were given another problem, James wrote it, I guessed it. Another tie. You could feel the tension mounting in the air. And since there were fifty kids in one classroom on a humid and rainy day you could smell the tension too. Everyone was silent in anticipation.

Another math problem, a longer and more complex one this time. James wrote it out as Ms. Sabanski read it. She paused, I guessed and wrote my answer. Then that ugly, poorly dressed , bad dye job, probably celibate bitch of a teacher added a second part to the problem. James didn't have an answer yet since he was still writing out the problem. I had already guessed, so I lost. It was obvious I had been set up so there were a lot of "you really won" and "She is such a cheater" in the halls and during class over the next week. I had the feeling I had won and lost at the same time. A unique feeling few people ever experience. When Al Gore won and lost the two thousand presidential election I sent him a note saying “I know how you feel”. I really did.

I never found out if James thought he deserved the win and Ms. Sabanski never said anything to me about it either. When asked, he would just say that he did it faster and would walk away if he could or just put on the deaf act he was so good at. He never defended himself and never fought back. This refusal to stand up for himself didn't sit well with our classmates.

I think fifth grade is when the cruel gene becomes activated. James was now everyones target not just mine. Nobody wanted to actually physically attack someone they knew wouldn't fight back but there was a general feeling of needing to get even with him, somehow. This need was causing a social pressure to build up and somebody had to do something to release it before there was an explosion.

The opportunity for petty revenge came a few days later when someone farted in the classroom. As the rest of the class giggled, pinched their noses and made makeshift surgical masks out of the necks of their t-shirts someone yelled "Bilby did it". True to character James said nothing to the accusation. He just sat there and let his silence confirm for everyone that he had done it. From that moment on James Bilby got the blame for every smell that wafted through the classroom regardless of it's origin.

_________

In our corner of the world the sixth grade was the start of middle school. This meant some big changes. The hundred or so students my age from my school would be forced to merge with the hundred or so other kids in the same grade from the more outlying rural schools. For the first time since First Grade we would see people our age we didn’t know already. It also meant we went from a format of the same classmates all day every day to new classmates every hour. The upside of this arrangement meant that long before you could get too attached or too mad at the person next to you the bell rang and five minutes later you were off to sit next to someone else.

The biggest change in middle school, and the one I feared most, was that we would have to change into different clothes for gym class. This meant seeing and being seen in my underwear. Worse we would be forced to shower afterwards. Together. Naked. With other boys. We were also expected to wear jockstraps. I had never seen or heard of a jockstrap before until we got our annual list of necessary school supplies.

I knew vaguely what a jockstrap was used for and reminded of a phrase I had heard in a dirty joke a few years back that referred to a bra as an over the shoulder boulder holder. I deduced that a jockstrap was a long strap that went over one shoulder down the body cupping my groin. I assumed it would be made of elastic some sort of adjustable buckles or clips. I imagined it looking like a half a pair of suspenders with a coffee cup attached.

Most of the first day of middle school was pretty exciting. The new kids and the kids I was used to ran around in confusion as they learned to navigate hallways. The school had been expanded over the years so the labyrinth of hallways didn’t always follow reason. Classroom 22 for example was next to room 201. If you were looking for room 23 it was at the end of the hall past room 223. It’s hard to say why the rooms weren’t renumbered to make sense. It probably just never occurred to the people who already know their way around to make it easier for anyone that wasn’t them.

After we found the right room we got to see which of our old friends from grade school would be in the same class. First Period I sat next to Angela Clayton, a former stalker of mine from our kindergarten days. Second period had Matt Dimeo on one side of me and some new kid from a different school on the other. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this idea of “new kids” but I had Matt on my side if things started to get bad.

In all the excitement I forgot how much I dreaded gym class. I also had yet to see my favorite enemy, James Bilby. Then came Fifth period and reminded me of both.

The first day of gym class wasn't a real class day. Instead, we sat around on the newly polished wooden floor and listened to a speech from our gym teacher. A break down of all the procedures, requirements and expectations. We would have to wear black or navy shorts, a white t shirt with our last name on it in black, white socks and rubber soled gym shoes. Failure to have these uniform components, we were told, would result in a reduction of points toward our grade.

Next the subject of athletic supporters came up. The previous week one appeared as if by magic on my bed. Once I opened the package I realized it was just underwear made by someone too lazy to sew the butt into it.

To our combined relief wearing a jockstrap wasn’t mandatory. This caused a few giggles through the class. Partly because we were just kids and partly because of the underlying tension of the impending shared nudity.

"What?" our gym teacher demanded flatly. "What's so funny? Listen an athletic supporter is important to protect from any injuries between here..." He put his hand level with the waistband of his sweatpants "and here." he continued indicating an imaginary line on his thighs about three quarters of the way up from his knee. Seems he could talk about it but couldn't actually indicate the exact area expected to be protected. This caused a little more laughter and he just stared like he didn't understand what we could be laughing at. Come on, I though. He had been a gym teacher for 15 years at this point. Of course he knew what was so funny. He was just being difficult.

“At the end of class”, he went on, “ you will all get completely undressed.” He put a weird emphasis on "Completely". Why did he have to say the word "completely" anyway? Were people wandering into the showers still wearing random items of clothing?

"After you're completely undressed" he continued" You'll wrap your towel around you and walk over to the shower" He mimed wrapping the towel around himself but not the walking. " Hang your towel on the wall and get wet then give me your number and I'll check you off the list as you're walking out". It seems actually getting clean wasn't mandatory. Just complete nudity and some dampness.

We were then assigned numbers and taken into the concrete and steel locker room to see the showers and get assigned our lockers. Brad Aarons was assigned the locker to my right and who else but James Bilby assigned to the locker on my left.

After the Great Fifth Grade Math Competition, when he only beat me by colluding with the teacher, James made sure to avoid anything that looked like a competition. At least he did when I was around to witness. It didn't matter to me since I could make up competitions and place him in them against his will and without his knowledge. Neither James or I would be considered athletic but as long as I was chosen for a team before he was I considered that a win. I couldn't run fast but I could run faster than he could so I won there too.


During a Spirit Week, an annual contest between the different grades, each of the three classes gained points for their team through student participation . James, of course, refused to participate. But when our points for a costume contest were being tallied I pointed out to the teacher that his beige short sleeved collared shirt and his cocoa brown polyester pants were exactly what the kitchen help at El Taco Via wore and should be counted as a costume. The teacher agreed and counted him as an active and spirited participant. His face turned red and he broke into a sweat. I guessed this was his version of a temper tantrum. I won again.

The second day of gym class was a full dress day. Nearly all of the boys decided not to worry about athletic supporters deciding an injury to the groin was a risk worth taking if we could avoid this funny looking garment. Everyone except for James. For some James thought his groin needed the extra support. While we were changing I saw out of the corner of my eye what looked like a slingshot made from some ancient flesh colored bra. It looked nothing like the bright white one I had stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer back home. I never confirmed it but I think it may have been a family heirloom. An heirloom passed down from unathletic father to unathletic son for generations, occasionally repaired with material from a grandmothers over the shoulder boulder holder.

I never liked gym class but that first one passed extremely fast and in no time we were back in the locker room for our first group shower. I wasn't blatant about it but I stole occasional glances at Bilby, his first name had been abandoned for gym class, as he got undressed. His name had been handwritten on his t-shirt with a magic marker and not the iron on letters most of us had gotten specially made at the mall. His towel was a faded blue and yellow floral print. One end of his towel had a tuber sewn in it indicating that it had also pulled duty as a curtain at some point. He had put his antique jockstrap on over a pair of formerly tighty whiteys that obviously hadn’t been completely tight or completely white in years. He was a mess.

When my sister was younger she successfully lobbied our parents for a Joey doll. Joey was the baby from the TV show All In the Family and was advertised as the first anatomically correct boy doll sold in the US. Christmas morning she unwrapped the doll and then immediately stripped it naked so we could see its penis. It was a shiny little lump of plastic about the size of the end of a little finger. We were kind of a let down that the dolls genitals weren't as authentic as advertised. Seeing James completely naked made me realize that the doll penis actually was authentic. For some people.

I hadn't thought of this as a competition until that point. But I won there, too.



My animosity toward James faded over the next few years and into high school. We still shared some of the same classes but I was too busy or too hungover to properly harass him. I was also getting the sneaking suspicion that he was gay. All the signs were there and in retrospect everyone I thought was gay in school was. Even the few who got married and had kids eventually came out of the closet even if it took them the next twenty years.

In the late nineties I went back to visit my family over a holiday. One of my uncles poached two deer and was proudly parading the dead animals around in the back of his truck showing off to his friends and family when he asked if I wanted to go with him to drop the carcasses off at Bilby Meat Processing. I was curious, so I went.

After Bambi’s mom and older sister were unloaded and carted off to a back door entrance I stood with my uncle while he chose how he wanted the venison packaged. Some parts would made into cutlets, some would be made into sausage and some of the parts of the animals the processing house could keep for resale.

It was a lengthy and macabre process and halfway through I asked the chubby girl helping us who was in charge of the place. “Well, if you ask me it's me but if you ask my husband it's him.” She laughed at her dumb joke. When I didn’t laugh back she added, “ Him and his dad own it."

"Is 'Him’ James?" I asked. Of course, it was.

“He’s working over to the other store in Missouri city if you want to go see him"

I didn't. Even though I hadn't seen James in over eleven years he still annoyed for some reason.

On the drive back to my parents house I thought about James and how much his life sucked. He was most likely a repressed homosexual and had married a piggy woman just like his mother. I knew through the grapevine that he had gotten a scholarship to a prestigious college in Maryland but was using his education to turn woodland creatures into sausage. This was the same job he would have had if he had dropped out of school in eighth grade. The guy was a genius and had his education paid for but never did anything with it.

It clicked for me then. James never fought for anything. Not even his life. He was like the poor shopkeeper from that story we had to read and discuss in the third grade. Except the shopkeeper took action and stopped life from stepping on him. James Bilby didn't take a stand. He didn’t find a way to make things better for himself. Instead he lived a life of least resistance subject to the more subtle bullies of the world that will keep your life subdued and uninteresting.

Of course, if James Bilby had taken some initiative and poisoned his oppressors like the shopkeeper in the story, I might not have made it here today.

The Real Kiss excerpt from Raised By White Trash

When dusk fell and the cool breezes fell over the neighborhood we completely abandoned the house we were fighting to get in all day. The new fight was to stay out as long as we could. After dark the furnace blasted wasteland that nearly killed us was replaced by a sort of wonderland.

On some nights we would race outside with our bikes to play in the clouds of mosquito poison billowing out of the back of government trucks. If we got close enough to the origin of the fog we were cycling blind. Like a moving game of hide and seek with the added bonus of airborne pesticides.

Nighttime was also when other kids, the kids with parents who wanted them to survive until adulthood, came out to play. If we were all on speaking terms we played games like regular non-poisonous hide and seek. We also played a game that involved us sitting around one of the other kids, who volunteered to be a corpse, two fingers under the volunteer while we attempted to levitate him. “Stiff as a board, light as a feather” we would chant. It never worked. Even though every one of us knew of a story about a time when it did work and the levitated kid floated away.

If the kids in the neighborhood were not on speaking terms then the games were replaced with pranks. We weren’t bad kids, really, but we were isolated and wanted to shake things up a bit. Our pranks involved things like taking all of the potted plants off of the Leverknight’s front porch and arranging them on the O’dell’s front porch.

Fishing boats would be moved to another part of a yard and dog houses turned turned on their sides. If we really didn’t like a particular neighbor, and this could happen for any number of reasons, real or imagined, and we were feeling particularly brave we would use an old 409 bottle to spray water on your porch light making the bulb explode.

The best Summer night in history happened in mid July 1979. It started off with me convincing two of the neighbor boys my age to have a wrestling match in their underwear. The first thing I did was to convince them to play Super Heroes then I casually mentioned that underwear looks a lot like what Batman and Superman wear. With the seemingly innocent question of “Who’s stronger anyway, Superman or Batman?”, the game turned into World Super Hero Wrestling.

Batman and Superman had been wrestling a good ten or fifteen minutes, putting, what I’m sure turned out to be confusing grass stains on their briefs, when a girl we didn’t know walked by. We were all surprised and froze to look at her. People we didn’t know ever walked by. Especially girls.

“Hi, I’m Lisa” She said in a throaty full voice. Then she smiled and Time stopped.

She was amazing. She looked like the women from my stepdad’s porn collection but with clothes... and standing upright. Until then I thought the women in those magazines were from a different planet. I had certainly never seen anyone around town with such perfect skin and curves like that. The women around town liked smoking and bowling. The women from Butter Buns and American Chick liked long walks on the beach. I had never seen a beach but I was pretty sure all that walking on one somehow made it difficult to keep their legs together when they sat down.

But I was wrong. Real people could have bodies like that. Lisa had a body like that! Her hair was black and shiny and reached to her waist. She could swirl it, flip it and send waves down to the tips when she spoke.

She was nice. She was seventeen. She was a succubus in cut off Sassoon jeans. She was a Goddess that sprung fully formed from the limestone gravel of our road. She was sex.

The boys in their underwear, Dwayne and Todd, couldn’t speak. They just stood there in their underwear staring. I had on clothes so I was able to introduce myself and suggest a game of spin the bottle. Statistics dictated that with three boys, one girl and one bottle one of the boys was going to get kissed by another boy. These were odds I could live with.

Dwayne and Todd put their pants on while Lisa and I searched fora bottle. We looked in the Miller’s trash. Mrs. Miller was a daytime alcoholic and drank wine so there were always good bottles in their trash. Lisa suggested we head toward her house. She wanted to play in her parents camper since the mosquitos were starting to bite here. She was too classy and sophisticated to ride a bike behind the mosquito poison truck and now she was paying the price.

In the camper we sat at the booth that made the dining table, me and Lisa on one side and the other boys opposite us. Being the girl we all agreed it was only polite to let Lisa spin first. The bottle spun and eventually slowed to a stop pointing at her. “I can’t believe I’m doing this” she laughed.

We couldn’t believe it either.

She spun again and this time when it stopped it was pointing at Dwayne. Lisa leaned over the table allowing her tee shirt to gap open in front and gave him an elongated kiss right on the lips. It was at this point I was afraid we might be in over our heads but I kept that fear to myself.

It was Dwayne’s turn to spin. The bottle opening stopped at Lisa. Interesting. “Did he do that on purpose”, I asked myself. Dwayne had an older brother and knew a few things through him that the rest of us didn’t. Can I do that on purpose? Bottle manipulation was a very useful skill to have.

Dwayne and Lisa kissed again. This time kissed lasted a little longer and Dwayne twisted his head back and forth like he was fastening a wing nut with his teeth.

Now it was Lisa’s turn again. She reached for the bottle she wound up ... did she just look at me? True to the name of the game the bottle spun. This time it stopped on me. Did she do that on purpose? I looked at the Dwayne and Todd. They were looking at each other. They thought so.

I wasn’t scared. I had kissed people before. I looked at her, leaned forward, closed my eyes, puckered up and waited for her lips to touch mine. They did it was the single greatest moment of my life.

For about twelve seconds.

Lisa‘s head pulled away and she opened her eyes, “You know what”, Lisa said with a little laugh “You guys don’t know how to kiss”.

What was she talking about. I already kissed a bunch of people and nobody ever complained. I didn’t know yet that people don’t complain about how you kiss in your presence. Nobody says to a lover, or potential lover “that was just awful” . They complain to their friends instead.

My heart was sinking as my ego shattered when she finished her statement. “So I’m going to teach you”.

The three of us were all glad we weren’t in our underwear at that point.

“First of all”, she started the lesson and grabbed my face “relax your face. You pucker up like someone is going to punch you”. She shook my head a little “relax” and when I didn’t she shook my head again, “relax”.

“Now, turn your head a little but come in slow. Make your lips firm but soft at the same time” She brought her finger up to my lips to test the firmness.” More firm, yes, like that, now soft, perfect, now firm”.

Her voice dropped then to a tone more lusty. More sultry. “When your lips touch rub them against each other a little. You can use your tongue a little bit” . The boys across the table gulped audibly as she leaned, slid her finger off my lips and brushed hers against mine. “like this”. Next her tongue brushed against my lip and our mouths connected... then.. she stopped. and leaned back slightly to continue the lesson.

“Now when you’re kissing someone think like you’re an electric cord and you want to put all that electricity through the other person’s body all they way down to their feet.”

She leaned back in and pressed her lips to mind and, I swear, I could feel the electricity. My hair stood up. That kiss started at my lips and coursed through me all the way to my toes. My kneecaps started to overheat before she finally pulled away. After a handful of minutes my eyes stopped looking up into my skull and I was able to focus on my instructor.

“How old are you guys anyway” she asked.

Todd was feeling cheated since he hadn’t had a chance to kiss anyone yet so jumped at the chance to tell her and maybe get a favor by being the youngest. “I’m eleven and they’re thirteen”.
Her smiled faded. and I saw the chances of getting another kiss going down with the edges of her mouth. “You guys are too young! Out. Out. You have to go” I was still in a daze and just followed the other two boys out of the camper and in the general direction of our homes.

Lisa graduated High School the next year and moved away. Dwayne and Todd told the story about that night in the camper and it wasn’t long before a simple kiss with one of them, over a table became a full on orgy involving both of them. Since I was the only person present who wasn’t going to lie about what really happened I was written out of the story completely.

As far as I could tell they were lucky they didn’t get the full brunt of that kiss. A lesser man, and I considered them lesser men, would have crumbled under the impact and spent a lifetime in her thrall hopeful and desperate to recreate the moment. Hell, just watching her kiss me haunted them for a good five years.

I walked home that night with new knowledge that changed me. I learned what a good kiss was. I learned how powerful a really good kiss could be. I learned that what is in your mind while you kiss someone can be conveyed through you and all the way to their toes.

I also learned I was one hundred percent gay. While Dwayne and Todd thought of nothing but getting back with Lisa all I could think of was taking my new found skills out on the road for a test drive.

I remain dedicated to the memory of Lisa and my first real kiss. Every time I hear “that was amazing” after making out with someone, I say a little “thank you” and hope that, wherever she is, Lisa is happy and making out with someone worthy of her skills and deserving of her significant talents.