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.

excerpt, Raised By White Trash -Vacation

What I did on my Summer vacation.


This year on vacation me and my family went camping all over the place. We hit a deer but it was dead already. We saw a bunch of neat things. We saw Devils Tower that was in that alien movie. And we saw Mountain Rushmore with the president heads made out of rock. One park I forgot the name of had geysers that smelled like someone always farted. My sister and me both got hit in the face we teased her and said she looked like a monster. My parents were mad a lot but they did not get hurt. It was fun but most of the time it was boring. And it was hot.

The End


When I turned the essay in to the teacher for grading I remember thinking how brilliant I thought it was. It was succinct and yet touched on the important high points of the assignment while still engaging the reader in personal and family dramas. But now, laying in the cabin wondering where it had all gone wrong, I remembered the vacation more clearly. There were things, situations really, that I left out.

It had been decided, with no kid input, that our vacation that year would be a two week road trip to see the great American West and all of its treasures. It's hard to think of an adult, especially a parent, holding on to adolescent dreams but I think my stepfather chose this trip because he always wanted to be a cowboy. I came to this conclusion because nearly every book he owned had a picture of a cowboy on it.

Maybe it wasn’t a fair assumption since I didn’t assume my mother wanted to be the woman pictured on the cover of her books. Books which always included a shirtless, or nearly shirtless, well muscled man. I also didn’t assume my stepfather wanted to be like the book he had hidden in the master bathroom. That book cover had a line drawing of a woman lying on a bed wearing nothing but fish net stocking and severely pointed high heels. Her legs were splayed wide open and a scribble of lines made up her cartoon vagina was aimed at a man standing at the door wearing a suit and holding a pipe. I didn’t assume he wanted to be either the man in the suit or the naked lady but in my defense he did have a lot more cowboy books.

It was also decided without any kid input that we would drive to our various destinationsBy driving, my stepfather explained, we would see things up close like the early settlers did. He wasn’t fooling me, I knew he had a fear of flying so driving was really the only way we would get there. The family car was a Lincoln Mercury Marquis and after a case of beer and a welding torch it was retrofitted with a trailer hitch. Now our lemon yellow car could pull a grass green Apache brand pop up camper. Together the car and camper were forty feet of bright colorful vacation madness.

The Apache is only a part time camper and even when it’s a camper it’s more of a tent on wheels. When folded up for travel it was about the height of a three mattresses. A hand crank was used to slowly unfold it raising the roof accordion style to a height of about seven feet. Double beds would slide out at either end and would be suspended about four feet above the ground by two thin aluminum poles. This meant the beds were basically hovering over open ground. I found this unnerving. If the camper should over balance in the middle of the night it would send me rolling out into a campground in nothing but my white, three to a pack, fly front briefs from JCPenneys. Which, at the time, was the white trash sleeping attire of choice.

For days before we left on the trip my mother and I would spend hours packing and unpacking the camper making sure things fit in both the open and closed positions. “Do you think the bath towels should go here near the door so we can get to them faster” I would ask “Or do you think they’d do better under dining room seats where there’s more room?”

For some reason this activity gave me some sort of deep satisfaction. There was just something fun about choosing what would go in the camper and making sure it all fit in the hidden storage spaces and closets. Then watching the camper get cranked back down to it's compressed position a tight and tidy box. Everything nice neat and orderly. It was my favorite part of the vacation and we hadn't even left home yet.

When The first morning of the trip finally made it we were hauled out of bed at four a.m. since, for some reason, four a.m. was the ultimate time to begin a vacation. My eight year old brother Bubba and my six year old sister Becky and I were piled into the back seat with our pillows, several books and as many last minute toys as we could carry. The seat belts were tucked into the seat cushions safely out of the way and optimizing our comfort and then we were off.

It was explained to that the first day was meant to be a travel day and, according to the handwritten itinerary, no real points of interest were scheduled. We started out looking to all the world like a group of people that enjoyed each others company. If of course there was anybody up at that ungodly hour to see us.

We napped, read our books, played games and listened to the radio. Spirits where high and there was still a sense of adventure in the air. For those first few hours the family was held in some sort of alien and otherworldly harmony. We were the picture perfect family like you would see on TV or in a magazine advertisement. We would remember that earliest part of our vacation for years to come and whisper about it at holidays. Because for the first time, if only for a few hours, we all got along.

_______


It was a good fifteen hours after we started when dusk found us. We were in rural Iowa or Nebraska, I don’t remember exactly but truthfully from the car window they look alike. It was a travel day and we had followed those instructions. The part of the itinerary that said nothing interesting was going to be seen that first day would turn out to be false.

The windows had been rolled down so we could enjoy the cooling summer breezes and so we could to air out the car after a hot day of sweaty kids in the back seat. A smell, though bad, was just getting a good start. I was sitting next to the window and held my hand flat to catch the wind like an airplane wing. The landscape had changed from acres of corn and beans to thick woods on either side of the road. Oncoming traffic was sparse and not everyone had their their headlights on yet.

Though it wasn’t completely dark yet my stepdad decided it was close enough to nightfall to open his first can of beer of the evening. The rule being he could only drive his family and pull the camper while drinking if it was already dark outside. The lack of sunlight somehow made drunk driving safer.

It was Bubba who broke the mood. From the opposite window he yelled "hey look at that truck! it's so cool"

The truck in question was directly in front of us was a regular pick-up truck like we saw every day but it had the sort of giant oversized wheels typically seen on the back of farm tractors. It was so far up off the ground that a little step had to be added under the drivers side for access.

"What's so cool about it?" our stepfather asked "you can't load anything into the back. You can't tow anything with it". This was supposed to sound like practicality but it was more likely annoyance at not being able to pass the monster truck. In his opinion it had been going too slow for the past hour and was forcing him to break his beer rule.

I had observed over the years that anyone on the road driving slower than we were was referred to, by my stepfather, as a “slow assed, bastard” and was told, through the closed window, that he was “driving like an old lady”. On the other hand, anyone that passed us on the highway was referred to as a “Crazy assed bastard” and we were going to “Let HIM get the ticket”. The speeder could avoid the title of Crazy assed if he had a gun rack in the back window of his vehicle. Then he was a “good ole boy having a good time”. Regardless of road conditions or speed limits only we were going the perfect speed at any given moment.

As it turns out there really is a practical benefit to being so high up off the ground in that part of the country. The driver of the truck proved exactly how practical when he successfully straddled a thoroughly bloated deer carcass that was laying in the middle of our side of the highway.

A Lincoln Mercury Marquis has at best twelve inches of clearance between its underside and the the surface it’s driving on. A Lincoln Mercury Marquis packed with five people, and towing a camper has about eight to ten inches of clearance. An adult deer carcass, bloated from at least one day in a hundred degree weather, extends up from the ground roughly two feet. This height that changes significantly when it's run over by the previously mentioned Lincoln Mercury Marquis.

There is no good way to describe how foul the smell of Summer warmed venison smeared under fifteen feet of flesh searing American steel is. It escapes me how to convey the effect fermented intestines coating a tow bar and chains has on the senses. The scent quickly went past assaulting our physical senses and went after our very souls.

Since the smell seemed to be everywhere outside it seemed like a good idea to roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioner. But conditioned air has to come from somewhere. Instead of clean breathable air we were blasted with the undiluted smell and, this time, it was accompanied by a cloud of short fine brown hairs. In a matter of seconds we went from happily bored to fighting nausea with coating of deer hair sticking to our sweat damp skin.

The closest car wash was probably only five miles away but time can be deceiving when you're trying not to vomiting . Being in the front seat and directly in front of the air vents our mother blocked most of the deer hair with her face. She was so nauseated and frustrated that she started to cry. Not full on sobbing, though, just silent tears running down her face leaving clean streaks in her brand new five o’clock shadow.

Gagging, we evacuated the car before it came to a complete stop in the concrete bay. While my stepfather, with his shirt pulled up over his nose like a gas mask, tried to power wash the chunks of rotted tissue that was seared to the bottom of the car and camper. Bubba and I found a water hose meant for filling up radiators and rinsed off our faces. Mom and Becky went to the bathroom at the adjoining gas station to clean up. To sound like we weren’t bothered by the incident Bubba and I waited until they got back and suggested that, maybe, we could find a place that serves deer meat hamburgers. This started Becky gagging and this made us smile .

Ironically, several years later, my stepdad would take a job with the state of Missouri and his tasks would include moving deer carcasses off the highway and burying them on the side of the road so others could avoid this exact fate.

After the fourth or fifth washing it was only a short ride to our first campground. I don't remember the ceremonial first cranking of the camper but I remember the smell had lessened a little but had definitely not gone away. It was too hot to keep the windows closed but the smell was too strong to leave them open. It was a miserable night. We were sick, sore from lack of movement and sunburned on one side. All sense of hope and adventure had fled us and it was only the first day.

School Days, excerpt.

School Days

I still remember my first day of organized education. I remember putting on the brand new jeans bought for the occasion. Blue jeans were not yet pre-washed, pre-stressed or made with the idea that the person purchasing them may want to be comfortable while wearing them. For weeks, and sometimes months, the new denim had all the form fitting flexibility of aluminum siding. A pants leg might bend a little when you took a step but would soon snap back into its original perfect tube shape with an audible pop.

Walking was difficult but not impossible. The same couldn’t be said for sitting down. Your options were to risk leg cramps trying to force a horizontal crease at the back of your legs or to just accept the fact that you were going to sit there with your legs sticking out in front of you like a cheap plastic baby doll. The kind sold in pharmacies or in grocery stores on the same aisle as the light bulbs.

For a good hour or so, that first morning, I stood on the edge of the bathtub and admired myself in the bathroom mirror. Turning my head from side to side so I could admire my hair that slicked down with some form of hair grease and parted on the side. From the neck up I looked like a Republican. From the waist down I looked like a blue version of the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. From the waist up I sported a brand new white tee shirt and looked like a farmer or maybe a plumber on his first day at a new job.

For my first day of school my mother drove me in our forest green station wagon with the feaux wood paneling on the side. In order to make the occasion that much more special I got to sit up front. The outside of the school was the mandatory maroon brick that was required on all government buildings but it had been freshly painted in large squares of bright red, yellow. The yard in front of the school had just been cut for the first time since the beginning of the previous summer. The long cut grasses hadn’t been raked up but were, instead, just left in random clumps like a scarecrow murder scene.

What I remember most clearly that day was the look of excited anticipation on my mothers face as she got rid of me for the day. She didn’t have a job at that time so it was obvious to me she was going to start having a secret exciting life with my younger brother and sister now that I was out of the way. My siblings and I all knew that, if we left the room, that was when the party started.

Seeing that momentary look of hope, that micro-second of relieved anticipation that flitted across my mothers face made me think of the bad guy that finally has our hero trapped. This made me suspicious. Maybe I should rethink this school thing. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as fun as I was lead to believe by the adults. Adults were known to be tricky. Maybe preschool was like going to the babysitter or worse, the dentis. Maybe the whole concept of school was a plot to get me out of the house so they could have fun at home without me. My mood shifted severely and a pinpoint of fear stabbed at the back of my head. But I didn’t cry. I wasn’t about to let her see me cry.

The glass doors at the front of the school were big and too heavy for me to open on my own. Weren’t doors like this supposed to open by themselves like they did at the grocery store? This place was cheap, I thought to myself. Once inside the door construction paper signs screaming “Welcome” and “Preschoolers right this way” lead us to my new classroom. The room was decorated with a kaleidoscope explosion of bright colors. To add contrast to the decorations the cinder block walls had been freshly painted a pale sickly yellow that would be best described as old mustard stain or diseased toenail. Florescent bulbs finished the effect by making all of the colors super naturally bright. Like an acid trip. I was lucky I never had to go to preschool with a hangover.

The decor seemed even more alien to me because our house had been decorated with avocado green shag carpet, burnt orange drapes and black leather furniture. If there had been a decorator consulted, and that decorator had chosen a theme, it would have been titled Blackened Tertiary Hell. A bright color in home usually the result of a food fight or spilled blood.

As shocking to my brain as all the bright colors were, even more shocking was the organization. I was used to a vague concept of organization at home. I was often yelled out to put my toys in my room, for example, but once my belongings were past the threshold of my no further effort was expected.

Here at school, though, the concept of being organized was taken to an a nearly militant level. Books, toys and school supplies were stacked neatly in a grid of cubby holes at kid accessible levels. It seemed impractical to me not to have everything spread out on the floor like I did at home. My system made for easy access and probably saved a lot of time. Two dozen miniature desks were also in a grid, the perfect little rows exactly the same distance apart facing a much larger adult sized desk perfectly centered in the room. I don't know why tidy symmetry irritated me so much, but it annoyed me at a visceral level. I was nearly overwhelmed with the urge to add a little chaos, mess it up, make it look, you know, more natural.

There were twenty four children in my class and each of them was accompanied but at least one parent and in a few cases both parents and a grandparent. This was the largest group of people I ever found myself a part of. My first crowd. This was going to be great I told myself. All of these other kids were my age and were just like me. For a brief moment I convinced that I was with my people, that I had found a place I would finally fit in .

Then I looked around at the faces of my future classmates. Both boys and girls had tears and snot running down their faces, the ones that weren’t crying were jumping around like crazed little monkeys, over stimulated and begging to play with all the toys and still others just had blank looks on their faces like shell shocked soldiers. I rolled my eyes realizing that I had nothing in common with these little idiots. School was going to be just like home. Oh well, I sighed to myself, At least there are better toys here.

By four years old I was thoroughly jaded and an unearned sense of superiority was already a deeply entrenched part of my psyche. To add to my Ass-Holier-Than-Thou attitude was the fact that I already knew much of the preschool curriculum. To me this meant that anybody who didn’t know his colors or alphabet yet was just dumb and deserving of my indignant stares.

One morning, in an attempt to get us all better acquainted with the alphabet, the class was givien an exercise working on the letter "I".We had each been given a sheet of paper with the outlines of the letter in both capital and lower case. Surrounding the letter was an Indian, an ice cream cone, an igloo and a few other I-words for us to color. I considered myself already well acquainted with the letter “I” and found the assignment beneath me, and so, didn't bother applying myself. Instead I just took my indigo crayon and scribbled on each of the objects, so it would appear I had forth an effort but was just uncoordinated. My hope was to finish early so I could get first in line for the toy shelves.

Sitting to my right was a toe headed boy named Brick and, one chair down from him to his right was Brett, another toe head who looked almost exactly like him. Although twins were very common around town Brick and Brett weren’t brothers. They were the also common inbred cousins. Brick looked over at my paper then elbowed his twin cousin for back up. "You're terrible at coloring, you can't even stay in the lines", he said.

"Well, you're both Idiots and you should just color in each other" I replied, stretching out the "I" sound in idiot to show I was staying in the them of the letter I. My cleverness was wasted on those inbred children of the corn and they just stared at me, breathing through their mouths, while I laughed at my own genius.

I made it through preschool and when Fall came I returned to the same school with the exact same twenty four kids from the year before. It was pretty much the same routine except for a few minor changes. For one thing the teacher was slightly different, the classroom was one door past our old room and, because the school day was slightly longer, halfway through the day we got a break for a mandatory nap.

I rarely ever slept during naptime, instead I would lie there on my blue plastic exercise mat and watch the other kids drift off to sleep one by one. I would fantasize that the oxygen was slowly being sucked out of the room and, one by one, they were all being asphyxiated. If that fantasy started to feel old I would switch it up and imagine we had all been tragically lost in Alaska on our way to the North Pole. Caught in a severe snowstorm we had been forced to hide in a cave where one by one we would drift into sleep and freeze to death.

The freezing to death image came from one of the many stories I read from our second hand collection of Readers Digest condensed books. I never really wished the other children ill but I had to occupy my mind somehow. It wasn’t personal.

As part of our Kindergarten curriculum were taught to read using a system of letters called the Initial Teaching Alphabet or ITA. It is basically an altered alphabet where the vowels are subjected to hideous science fiction style experiments. Genes are spliced and a new letter was made that was supposedly easier for young brains to recognize.

For example, the letters A and E were fused together like Siamese twins and the new creature represented the long A sound in a word. When we were introduced this A and E abomination the character was shown dressed in a robe with a halo and little white wings. This new letter was named “angel A”. The idea was we would memorize the Angel A and the sound the two letters made and later we could separate that letter into two normal letters and banish the E to the end of the word. There was no cable TV yet so I didn’t know to point out that surgically separating conjoined letters like that ran a high risk of one of them dieing in post op.
The ITA system came with a library of books with inane titles like A Muskrat Is A Muskrat and it was no time before I had read them all. With all forms of entertainment available to me exhausted I had no choice but to look to my fellow classmates and finally admit I would have to actually talk to them.

Once I started to talk to the other kids a floodgate opened up and words poured out. I was like an addict and once I got that first hit of human interaction I couldn’t stop.

During lunch I would shove the last bit of food in my mouth as fast as I could after forgetting to eat during the assigned time. When a class assignment got in the way of a conversation I simply stopped doing my schoolwork. This eventually affected my grades. My gold stars were soon replaced with the phrase “Talks way to much” The fact that my teacher spelled the word “too” with only one “o" took some of the sting out of the comment.

Eventually the teacher had had enough of saying my name followed by "please be quiet" and my mother was called in for a conference. She was told I was being disruptive, that I wasn’t doing my work and that I was way behind the rest of the class. I might have to be held back.

Anger is a much easier emotion to feel than say embarrassment or maternal concern so my mother decided to be angry about the whole conference situation. I wasn’t sure who the target of her anger was. She could have been mad at me because she knew I wasn’t really mentally handicapped and could already read. She could have also been mad at my teacher because she was the professional and should have been able to spot a lazy smartass kid. Or maybe it was because, at this point, mom was a twenty-two year old widow/newlywed with three children under the age of five with no good mood altering drugs at her disposal.

The meeting was held after all the other kids left for the day. I was instructed to sit in the hallway so I couldn’t hear what was being said about me and my academic future. After an hour in kid time, but what was probably only five minutes in grown up time, I was called into the room. My fuming and red faces mother grabbed up a newspaper from the teachers desk and handed to me.

“Read this” she commanded. And I did.

After about fourty-five seconds she amended her command “Out loud”. And I did. It seems a man named Nixon was in trouble for doing something to a water gate.

“Ok Ok” my teacher gave in and I was sent back out to sit in the hallway. They could have let me take the newspaper with me. I never did find out what happened to that Nixon guy or what a Watergate was. I assumed it was some kind of dam.

After a few more minutes of muffled indignant yelling we went home. I was grounded from watching television and told I would have to present all homework to my mother every evening to prove it was being done. A week a letter came informing my parents that I would be scheduled to take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. A popular standardized test designed to determine if the taker could read, write and do math as well as anyone in Iowa. I didn’t care what it was for because it seemed very unfair to me that I had to take a test none of my classmates had to.

On the day of the test I was put in a room next to the teachers lounge, by myself with two sheets of paper and two number two pencils. The pencils were particularly interesting to me since, up until that day, I'd always used giant Big Chief pencils as big around as hot dogs when I needed to write.

It turns out that taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was a pivotal point in how I approached the rest of my education and how I viewed the people around me. I did extremely well on the reading portion of the test scoring higher than a typical high school senior . A high school senior from Iowa anyway. The scores in the other parts of the test were considered above average but were nothing spectacular.

The test scores were supposed to be a secret between my parents and the school. I only found out after another bad report card made it home.

“You are too smart to be doing this bad in school!” she yelled. “ Why aren’t you doing your work? That test you took said you’re smarter than the rest of them kids! Why don’t you act like it?”

“Smarter?” I thought, “Than the rest of them kids...”. It should have been obvious to my mother that one does not tell a child with my personality that he is smarter than everyone else and, worse, that he should act like it. Because that’s exactly what I did.

Acting like I was smarter than all of the other kids came very naturally to me but did not included performing academically like I was smarter. Since I had already proven I could ace a test I didn’t even study for it made sense to me that I could do well on any test without studying. My, now superior, mind also concluded that homework was probably not really necessary either so why should I even bother lugging it home? The result if my new attitude was a yet another bad grade card only this time it came with an extended breakdown I was expected to explain.

“Oh that zero?” I would say “that wasn’t really meant for me. It was for homework meant for the other kids”.

My perception of myself had changed dramatically. I no longer considered myself different because I was weird and from a white trash family. Now I was different because of the burden of my superior intellect. It wasn’t easy being around average people all the time and nobody seemed to understand. This must be how Superman feels I would tell myself while being punished for yet another failing grade.

The standardized testing produced by the good people of Iowa had turned me into an intolerable and arrogant little bastard and I hadn’t even started the first grade. Imagine my potential!

February 27, 2011

We had a fun day in Atlanta yesterday. The weather was warm without being hot and, though the locals warn that it was only temporary, we headed out to play tourist for the day. Signs have been been popping up around town advertising the Fernbank Natural History Museum and its mythical beasts exhibit. I knew we risked the exhibit being nothing more than a televangelist with a bible pointing at a dinosaur and yelling “Fake, it’s a myth”, but I was willing to risk it.

Our trip involved two MARTA trains and a mile walk through Inman and Candler Parks. Two of Atlanta’s neighborhoods with unique personalities. The weather held and eventually we rounded a corner to see the dinosaur statuary in the front of the museum. This is when Reed started humming the theme music from the movie Jurassic Park and didn’t stop for at least an hour.

It turned out that the mythical creatures exhibit was legitimate. Dragons, unicorn, topless mermaids and even bigfoot were recreated with explanations as to how people may have come to believe they were real. The reasoning was sound, found bones became dragons for example, except for the explanation for the origin of Bigfoot which, as everybody knows, always involves homemade moonshine and a huntin’t trip.

The permanent exhibit is what I’ve come to expect from a modern Natural History Museum. Enter the building and soon you’ll be in a large atrium in the presence of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton hanging from the ceiling. He will be posed to either look like he’s about to eat you or about to eat the skeleton of what is supposed to have been his prey. In the case of the Fernbank the resident T-rex is attacking an impressive Brachiosaurus. Pterodactil skeletons also hung in the upper reaches of the of the atrium like unfinished model airplanes.

Past the giant dinosaurs are glass cases with examples of the local fauna. The animals are stuffed, mounted and arranged to represent what a peaceful day in their lives would have looked like. The expressions on their faces are all calm and serene when I expect them to look surprised that they’re about to be shot and put in a museum.

Somewhere past the animals is usually an exhibit of the people who lived in the area before it was “discovered” and cleansed of their presence. The Ferbank delivered and, because this is Atlanta, the part of history between happily making pottery and weaving cloth from local plants and not being here was left out. Maybe it was too hard to display Native Americans that didn’t look surprised that they’re about to be shot.

On the way out we, of course, went to the gift shop. I’ve found that Museum gift shops can sometimes be a good place to find unique gifts. A metal replica of an otter skull made into a bottle opener, a coffee cup in the style of native pottery or the paws of various swamp animals with hardware added so they can be made into coat hooks are good examples.

This shop tended toward the more mundane. Plastic replicas of animals that could have easy been bought at the mall and books that were obviously aimed at the guests visiting from out of state and meant to purvey local color. The book “Grits, Grits, Grits” for example and “What’d I Kill” which was a guide to the carcasses that litter the hiways of The South.

Getting Mobile 2

Getting Mobile, part two #excerpt

I wrecked the car on a Friday. Saturday morning my stepdad stuck his head in my bedroom, partially woke me and asked me through my half awake daze a question with the words “go” and “with” in them. I automatically responded “no” in that asshole teenager way I seemed to have perfected with almost no practice. In a few minutes I was asleep again.

What was he thinking anyway, I wondered through that medium dream-state that happens once someone has disturbed you, I never wanted to go anywhere with them. Ever. Especially not when I was sleeping. It was Saturday. What did he say anyway? Something about “going with them” and “looking” and.. CAR. “We’re going to look at cars for you, do you want to go with us?” That’s what he had said. They’re buying me a car I realized and shot up in bed now fully awake. Crap!

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted a car I just didn’t want a car that he would buy for me. We didn’t have the same taste in anything and the only thing we ever agreed on was that I shouldn’t handle a firearm around him anymore. Even that meeting of the minds only happened after I shot him in the face with a twelve gauge shotgun. Allegedly.

This, I decided, was how my stepfather would get even with me for wrecking the car. A recurring topic of conversation amongst him and his friends was the reminiscing about their first cars. The theme was always how great it had been, how much they lived the car and the fact that they wished they’d never gotten rid of their first car. I was already making plans to get rid of my first car and I wasn’t even sure what it was going to be. I paced my room and made myself sick worrying that this important milestone in my life was going to suck.

Like a lot of times when you let yourself get worked up it’s not about the solid information you have in front of you but about the grey and malleable information you don’t have. A good strong and creative brain can fill in the blank spots on any situation and turn it into something horrible and completely unlivable. I had such a brain.

I had convinced myself that there would be terrible retribution for my car accident but I came to this conclusion with missing information. What I didn’t know was that my stepfather had completely totaled his brother’s nineteen sixty three convertible Chevy Impala. Even better, he wrecked it on the way home from taking his test for his driver’s license. I lasted almost three months before I had an accident. He didn’t even make it one day!

The other important bit of information I didn’t know was that my stepdad loved cars. A few old cars had cycled through our driveway over the years and if I had paid attention I should have recognized this. First a Volkswagon Thing with a rotted convertible top then a chunky Chevrolet from the fifties or sixties was delivered to the house by tow truck and pushed into the garage where it remained for a few years until the oxidized paint was covered in greasy kid’s handprints and it was pushed back out of the garage and whisked away by a tow truck. I thought of these cars like I did the piles of junk building up in our basement, meaning I thought they were OK to play with but don’t get attached since they could disappear tomorrow. Or, I assumed, we had junk cars because we just couldn’t afford anything any better.

Looking for a used car was real fun to him. Looking for a used car without me along was even more fun to him so it was a win/win situation. I was upset that I didn’t go with him but, to be fair, he had given me a chance. Asking me while I was asleep and then darting out the door when he got the answer he wanted was a dirty trick. A dirty trick I thought I had invented. I didn’t feel like I had the right to be too mad about that after using the same technique on my mom the day before.

By two in the afternoon I had exhausted my brain with visions of what car he was picking out for me for punishment or just because of his own bad taste. I had it mentally narrowed down to a two toned Pinto station wagon missing its muffler and a clear plastic garbage bag in place of the drivers side window and an ancient pick-up truck its bed rusted away and the remaining frame and body painted with yellow house paint, the brush strokes allowing the original blue paint and rust spots to show through in uneven stripes. This wasn’t totally my imagination since I’d seen these same two cars around town for years.

When my Stepdad and his, sometimes drinking buddy sometimes hunting buddy, showed up all he said said was “Come on we found you a new car”.

“New?!” I said, a little excited. I heard the word and reacted before logic kicked in.

“New to you” laughed the redneck friend who went by the initials BG and was always looking for a place to spit tobacco juice. I had assumed my mother had gone with him so there had been a little hope that she would be there to temper his decision a little bit. But I was wrong. It was a full on redneck shopping trip.

We didn’t talk much on the way but this wasn’t unusual. Our relationship had developed into that of cordial but distant neighbors that didn’t have much in common except a property line. It was for the best anyway. The sick feeling over what I was about to see had my ears buzzing and my guts fighting to stay in place.

I don’t know how far we went before turned off the highway onto gravel, then off gravel onto a dirt road with deep ruts and mud puddles, then onto a road half grown over with grass.

“Well there it is” He said indicating a car half obscured by tall weeds beside a rather large farm house. The house and the car I learned had belonged to a man that had died around five years before. The seller was the son of the deceased who, in his words “had to do everything because his lazy bitch sister was out tramping around with every hippy in town”

“Dad bought this car brand new then retired so he didn’t drive it much” He was half talking me and half talking to my stepdad not knowing who had the final decision.

My stepfather picked up the sales pitch. “It only has fifty five thousand miles on it. There’s a little rust on the rear driver’s quarter panel and a little bit on the bumper. Three sixty V8 engine with…” I tuned him out like I usually did. I didn’t know about car specs and didn’t care about any of that sort of thing.

“What year is it?” I asked in what I thought was a neutral tone.

“Nineteen Sixty Four” one of them answered.

My face must have been unreadable because the seller jumped in the driver’s seat, started it and drove it around to the front of the house to give us a better look. It was the right thing to do. Away from the house and out of the weeds we could see the car in its full twenty feet. The paint was faded and the color of cheap turquoise Indian jewelry. Towards the rear rear of the car, written in chrome cursive letters, was Custom 500.

“Go ahead get in” the seller coaxed.

I did and once inside the sun showed through the windows and struck a dashboard full of chrome covered buttons and gadgets. The resulting reflection on the interior gave the same effect as a disco ball. The front seat was as big as a couch and had a bounce to it from the heavy duty springs.

The steering wheel was the biggest I had ever seen in a car. It was big enough to steer a boat. No not a boat. A yacht. The center of the steering wheel was a mirrored half circle the size of the steering wheels I was used to. It was the horn. I tested it and the sound that came out of the dual horns under the hood was louder than any ordinary car and harmonized. It was like hearing a freight train about to hit a semi truck.

“So, think it’ll work” My stepdad asked. He had a smarmy smile on his face. That bastard was proud of himself.

I almost said ‘no’ just so he didn’t win at whatever contest I had made up in my head, but I was in love. “yeah, it’ll work” I answered trying not to pee on my new seats from the excitement.

“Think you can drive it home?”

I said “Yes”. I said “yes” instead of “of course I can drive it home. It’s just a car! how hard can it be!” Afterall I had just wrecked a car the day before.

He paid the seller five hundred dollars and I followed him back to roads I recognized. From there he sped off toward home.

On the way home I learned a few things about cars. I learned about power steering and more precisely how hard it is to steer a car that doesn’t have power steering. I learned about power brakes and that without the power part you have to stand up on the brake pedal to get slow down three tons of steel. I learned about brake pads and more precisely what happens to brake pads that have sat for five years without being used.

Once I was nearly exhausted from steering, braking and the fear of not doing either in time. I learned what happens to tires that sit too long. They don’t hold air. I had already learned how to change a tire but I hadn’t yet learned to check and make sure the spare tire, or the snow tires, aren’t already flat before putting them on the car.

Four flat tires aside I was in love with my first car. Over the next year I would replace the brakes, the tires, the generator, the upholstery and parts of the engine that haven’t been on a car since nineteen seventy. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care that the paint was flat and faded, I didn’t care that it was older than I was, I didn’t even care that it was the same car Andy Griffith drove as the Sheriff of Mayberry.

The only thing that bothered me, that niggled away in the back of my mind when I wasn’t paying attention, was that it was my stepfather that had chosen the perfect car for me. Could we be more alike than I ever considered? A deep visceral asshole part of me wanted to reject the car just because he was the one who chose it.

Instead, I convinced myself that we liked the car for different reasons. He liked the big American made engine while I liked big comfortable seats, he liked the classic design while I liked the fact that nobody in town had a car even close to mine, he liked that it was a reminder of his childhood and I liked that it was an antique.

Our uninterested neighbor relationship changed to an uneasy partnership that, eventually, grew into something more like car owner and trusted mechanic. My role in this new situation meant I got to drive my friends around in the car, smuggle alcohol in it, get laid in it, get laid on it and show it off at school next to the fifty three Chevy owned by the mayor’s daughter and Edsel driven by the weird senior boy that looked and dressed like Harry Truman.

For my stepfather’s part I allowed him to do any of the many repairs that cropped up on a twenty year old car.

It wasn’t wrecking my mother’s car that changed me that Summer it was having my own wheels, my own freedom and, finally, my method of escape. From that point on fights with my parents would end with me thinking “I could just leave ya know. I can get in my car and just get the fuck out of here” but then I would cool off and think about it. I didn’t have enough money and didn’t have any place to go so I ended up staying. Still, for the first time that I could remember, I felt like if I stayed it was my decision.

Getting Mobile/Summer of change excerpt

Getting Mobile.

“We’re not going to just give you a car” was a speech my parents liked to give. The words would pop up spontaneously regardless of whatever the current conversation happened to be. It didn’t seem to make sense when it would start either. We could be at the grocery store picking cereal and out of nowhere my mother would say “You’re going to have to get a job and pay for it yourself or you‘re not going to appreciate it”. The first time that happened I was left staring at a box of Cocoa Munchies wondering if it was really worth getting a job for. By the time I was ten years old I knew instantly they were back to discussing my car ownership. These random outbursts lasted up until the day before they bought me a car.

Our house in the Missouri suburbs was at least a mile from anything that looked like a business and, though I had a paper route of over a dozen house and the odd baby sitting job, there was no way I could afford to buy a vehicle. I was stuck because to get a real job I would need a car and to get a car I would need a real job.

I presented my dilemma to my mother and stepfather and with the situation spelled out they had to agree we needed a different solution. That solution being I could borrow the family car. A huge yellow Mercury any old lady would be proud to see driving. My mom was working a night job so it was decided if there were any problems with scheduling we would just handle it somehow.

It was a solution but not one I liked. Not the one where I was handed the keys to a new Mustang Convertible. The family car was like driving a boat. In the seventies it would have been considered a high end luxury car but this was the eighties. Times had changed. And I was sixteen. I didn’t want to drive that grandma car everywhere! I had an image I was trying to create.
What made it worse was I couldn’t just ask for the keys and run off for the occasional errand. Before getting the car I had to beg for the keys, justify my trip and then sit through a speech about seatbelts and speed. The speech always ended with the condescending statement from my mother of “Don’t wreck my car”. This always pissed me off. I was a good driver. No, I was a great driver. I was sixteen.

Getting a crappy teenager job turned out to be pretty easy and and had one in a week. To celebrate my first day in the great world of fast food I offered to go get lunch for me and my siblings.

“Mom, can I use the car to go to McDonalds? I have to feed Bubba and Becky” I whispered through her closed bedroom door. I didn’t want to wake her but getting what you wanted was a little easier when she wasn’t totally in charge of her senses. She told me to come in.

“Here’s my purse, take out some money, come right back” She was asleep again before I sat her purse back down on her dresser. If she was ever awake.

It was a gorgeous day. The sun was shining but it wasn’t the oppressive Missouri heat that could melt cassette tapes on a front seat. I cranked up the air conditioner to insure my comfort and rolled down all the windows to insure full visability. I changed the radio station from the old time twangy country music my family favored to a station playing Flock of Seagulls.

It was one of those moments in life when mentally step back and take stock in your life. I had a real job I was starting that evening. I was at the beginning of adulthood and the rest of the world was starting to see it. I was given more responsibility and was trusted more at home. A smile came across my face when I realized Mom didn’t even say “don’t wreck my car” this time, in that way she always did.

Then I wrecked the car.

I was making what could only be referred to as a long curving left turn when I made impact. The Jeep in front of me was stopped trying to make its own left turn and I didn’t see it in time. My life didn’t flash before my eyes but french fries did.

When I did see the stopped vehicle in front of me two things happened. I slammed on the breaks and, like every mother I’d ever seen in the same situation, some deep seeded visceral response kicked in and I threw out my right arm to protect the precious cargo riding in the seat beside me. Not a child in this case but two large back from McDonalds. The impact my arm on the bag made it explode forward in a storm of fries and nuggets.

In slow motion the lemon yellow hood of the family car exploded up to completely block the windshield. Then, In a moment of extreme clarity, I noticed the yellow exterior against yellow interior while yellowish fries and nuggets rained down in front of me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to fear bodily injury for myself or for the people in front of me. I didn’t worry about what would happen when I got home. The only thought going through my mind at that stretched out split second was that the world had all become some shade of yellow. There was an art term for that and I mouthed the word “monochrome” like a curse word.

I wasn’t hurt and the people in the vehicle I hit were fine. The police came and I had the car towed to the closest lot and a passing neighbor gave me a ride home. In all of the excitement I still had the presence of mind to grab what was left of the undamaged lunch and, in a moment of charity, even took the time to scoop some french fries off the floor and seat of the car for my brother Bubba.

Some psychic message woke my mother before I got home so I didn’t have a break before she yelled at me for arriving home without the car. “Your father is going to kill you”. The timing didn’t seem right to correct her on the fact he wasn’t really my father so I let it slide that time. Not that she would have heard me anyway since she was still yelling “I can’t believe you wrecked my car!” she started crying then. It probably wasn’t a good time to remind her that she didn’t specifically tell me NOT to wreck her car before I left this time so I let her off the hook on that one too.

When my stepfather got home from work he walked into the house to see mom and me sitting on the couch, red-eyed and scared of what we were sure was his coming wrath. With the only other two drivers besides himself in front of him and no car in the driveway the situation should have been obvious but he still asked. “Where’s the car?”.

“We wrecked the car!” my mom blurted out through tears.

Well that was weird, I thought. Did she think he could be convinced that more than one person could wreck a car? She was throwing herself on a grenade for me. Trying to save me from the anger explosion she expected. Sort of. She still said “we” so it wouldn’t be all her fault.

Not fooled my stepfather asked. “Who wrecked the car?”

“I wrecked the car”. I braced myself almost daring the fight that was to come. But never did.

“Where is it?” He said with a sigh setting down his lunchbox.

I told him where I had it towed and we rode out in his truck to retrieve it. It looked terrible but it turns out the car was still drivable after a little pounding, the application of a crowbar and a little rope. I drove his truck home wondering about his uncharacteristic calm. The stress of anticipation and speculation about his unexpected behavior was almost worse than an explosion. Was there going to be some retribution at a higher level I’d never seen before?

This was what was going through my head as I go ready for my first day at my new job.

excerpt. Summer of Change Part 1

In the Summer of1982 three things happened in my life that transformed me into a different person. The first was meeting Jody Cordova. Jody had been arrested her freshman year for drug possession and was whisked away from our small town and into the legal system. I didn’t see this happen but when I asked around I found out she sold the “bad drugs” which in small town lingo means “not marijuana”. There may have even been needles involved.

“You should have seen her when the cops came and arrested her right out of gym class” Yolanda Zigler was telling me with the glee that only comes from having witnessed really really good gossip “She punched one of the cops and tried to run but she’s so fat they caught in like three steps and knocked her down. They had to use two sets of handcuffs on her because they couldn’t get her hands together behind her back! Because she was so fat”

“Wait a minute” I stopped her “I’m talking about Jody Cordova. That girl over there smoking in the bushes” I pointed toward the bad kids to a girl at least six feet tall with a thick layer of base make up two shades darker than the rest of her skin. Her heavy eyes were painted with, not one, but two shades of blue eye shadow. Her solid helmet of heavily feathered and heavily sprayed hair sat on top of a frame that couldn’t have been weighed more than one hundred pounds.

“That’s her” Yolanda said. “She lost weight”. Yolanda, who could be described as pudgy if not exactly fat, got a funny look on her face as if something unpleasant had occurred to her and then simply walked off.

Within a few days I found myself next to Jody again. I don’t remember if it was while waiting in a line or on a bench in the cafeteria but I took the opportunity to get a really good look at her. I was looking for some evidence that this was the same girl that was so fat she needed two sets of handcuffs but I didn’t find anything. She was pretty, though. Pretty but not gorgeous. Something about her big hair and the way her make up was applied made her look like a new prostitute or maybe she looked like a mannequin in a consignment store. This can’t be the same person, I thought. Could it?

“What are you staring at, faggot?” Her voice was deep and husky and pitched in such a way to convince whoever she was talking to that she had a sharp weapon hidden somewhere on her person. I suddenly had no problem believing she’d been to prison.

I ignored the fact that she called me Faggot. Most of the school had heard a rumor that I beat up a football player from our rival school. A rumor I started. This stopped most teasing from classmates. The fear of getting beaten up was bad enough but the fear of getting beaten up by a faggot was worse. Jody hadn’t heard the rumor and it probably wouldn‘t have stopped her from stabbing me even if she had.

“Someone told me you used to be fat” I blurted out with not a trace of tact.

“So?” She pulled out her vented hairbrush and started to fix a hairdo that hadn’t moved since right before she left home.

“So how did you lose all the weight?” I asked. I must have sounded like I sincerely wanted to know because, although she didn’t stop brushing, she answered me.

“Drugs” She was so blunt with her answer I didn’t take her at face value.

“Oh, you mean like Maxi-trim?” I asked her, thinking back to the caffeine based over the counter diet pills I had tried and failed at.

In the same matter of fact way that she used while brushing her hair she answered “No, speeders, cocaine, heroin... you name it” She switched sides of her hair making sure the part was severe and the back of her head had enough volume to look like a well rounded ass “But no pot, pot will make you fat.”

I don’t know what visceral knee jerk reaction kicked in but I suddenly took on my superior air and said “You know that stuff will kill you”.

“I know that’s what I was trying to do but now I’m thin and people like me.”

For a split second I had the urge to tell her that wanting to have sex with someone wasn’t the same as liking them. I wanted to tell her that people would like her even if she wasn’t thin. I wanted to tell her that it’s the inner person that makes friends and that beauty was only skin deep. But I knew it wasn’t true. I had struggled with my weight for a few years at that point and I knew how cruel people could be to someone too fat to chase them down and kick their ass.

Instead I asked “Was it worth it?”

“Yes, and I would do it again”. The phrase fell out her mouth like it had been practiced or, at least, repeated several times. Like maybe to a parole officer or court appointed psychiatrist trying to convince her to love herself for who she was without the the use of pharmaceuticals.

This changed my life and the following Summer because I decided that anything was worth it to be thin again. To be the person people wanted to be around just for the way I looked. I was ready to do absolutely anything to make it happen. No matter what it took. “That’s right”, I told myself, “anything”.

Like as is so often the case my unbridled “anything” very quickly acquired some restrictions. I didn’t know how to get cocaine and was too afraid of needles for heroin. Of course if I couldn’t find cocaine how could I find heroin? There were pills for sale in the backs of magazines for truck drivers and to stay awake but I assumed they were the same thing as the over the counter diet pills I’d taken before and all they did was make me eat faster.

In the end I resorted to losing weight the old fashioned way. I started a regimen of heavy exercise, I avoided fat and salt and drank only water. After one week and one pound it occurred to me that if losing weight was really this easy then everyone would be doing it. I needed to up go that extra mile to get results so I started vomiting up everything I ate. Maybe it wasn’t showing the dedication Jody had shown when shooting up heroin and popping speed like they were jelly beans but it worked and was surprisingly easy.

I’m not a medical professional and would never recommend street drugs or bulimia for weight loss. but if you’re going to have days full of vomitting there are a few rules of thumb to follow.

First. If you’re going to binge know where you’ll purge.

You don’t want to accidently end up with a medium pizza and a pitcher of soda starting to bloat your midsection just to find there’s no place to return your lunch to the environment. The toilet is always the best and logical choice but garbage cans, planters, large drink cups and sinks will all work in a pinch. If you end up purging into a sink try to pick one with a garbage disposal.

Second. What goes in must come out. Liquids.

Drink a lot of fluids with your meals. It doesn’t matter what those fluids are and you can develop your own favorites but I always found dairy based drinks would sour while sodas would cause a burning sensation. Water always seemed like a waste of time since it already had no calories and you could drink that anyway.

What goes in must come out. Solids.

Chew your food. for some reason the tube in your throat coming back up isn’t as wide as the tube going down. Fast food and Italian food are perfect for bulimia since, for the most part, they taste the same coming up as they did going down. That’s handy to know if you’re going through morning sickness too.

Third. Antacid. In bulk.

Once your body gets the signal that there’s food coming it dumps the necessary acids into your stomach to dissolve and digest whatever you’ve consumed. Not finding any food there the acid turns on you and starts to digesting your stomach and throat. I was buying white chalky antacid tablets in bulk and hiding them everywhere. I don’t know why I hid them. If anyone found them they would probably just assume my mother was a terrible cook.

Fourth. Vomit breath.

Like alcohol breath or smokers breath vomit breath is almost impossible to cover up. After trying gargles and multiple toothbrushings throughout the day I switched tactics and, when I could, chewed a piece of raw onion or something equally as obnoxious. The hope was that anybody that smelled something bad would assume it was something I ate and not something I ate and threw up.

Fifth. Don’t get caught.

I was very careful. It’s a little bit ok to be seen huddled over a public toilet when there’s alcohol involved but being seen doing the same in the Pizza Caboose just after noon on a Tuesday is going to send someone for a doctor.

Getting caught usually only means one thing. Intervention. In which case a well meaning counselor or doctor who never lost a modeling job because of extra weight or never had his mother comment that your boobs are getting bigger than hers will tell you it’s not worth the risk to your health. Even worse, the same people who teased you when you put on the weight will tell you they love you just the way you are.

I guess nobody in my immediate family ever looked at me often enough to see the lbs melt off. By the end of the Summer I was down thirty five pounds and two pants sizes. I looked good and had a great deal of confidence. People treat you different when you look good. Or when you think you look good. Every day was a happier day when I didn’t struggle with jeans or wonder what people were thinking about my ass when I walked past.

To this day I haven‘t noticed any negative side effects of that Summer of extreme weight loss. I’ve since read about people losing teeth and hair and developing permanent damage to their esophagus and stomachs but I must have quit before it got that bad.

I never got caught and I never told anyone my weight loss secrets so nobody had the opportunity to ask me if risking my health was worth it to look good for a little while but I’m sure, like Jody or anyone who has gone through plastic surgery, I would have answered “it was”.