It's the Fourth of July and I am soaking wet. No, this is not going to be a dirty blog (at least this one isn't, I swear). My father and I have spent most of the day kneeling out in the dirt that we pass off as a front yard, trying to install a new sprinkler system. My dad and stepmom have now gone off to a veteran's day celebration an hour and a half away and my-ex-but-not-quite is coming over with his best friend, Brandon.
Now, just to start this off, I have known this guy since I was a sophmore in high school. When, in a fit of drama that would have given 90210 a run for their money, I broke down crying on a picnic table behind the cafeteria because the guy that I thought I would give my virginity to broke up with me, he came to find me. We dated when I was a Junior (mostly, I'll admit, to make the afforementioned-ex jealous) well into my Senior year. He was the first guy to get to third base with me, and I was the first girl that he had gotten to any bases with, and we talked about marriage....a laughabale thought now. Halfway through my Senior year, under the excuse that I was stressed and overworked between my Physics and Trig classes, studying for ACTs, my after-school job, and applying to colleges, we broke up, and I started dating another guy not even a month later. In my freshman year of college, during the weeks right before Christmas vacation, we started talking again via Facebook- ah dating in the age when your next potential girlfriend is just a mouseclick away; it makes me think of how those mail order brides must feel. Things escalated and, in the matter that most girls do, I began to overlook all of the flaws that had lead us to break up (he was an alcoholic. He smoked pot and often showed up to my high school reeking of marijuana. He'd been in trouble with the law. He was dealing pot and pills. He was a wanna-be badass, the type that grated on my nerves and thought that I was overemotional) and started dwelling on the good (he'd never, in two years, tried to do anything that I was uncomfortable with. He'd already met my father and my dad hadn't threatened to shoot him. He knew all of my little quirks and habits. We liked the same bands. And, strangest of all, he still liked me despite how I dumped him.) We started texting back and forth and decided see each other again and hang out.
Now, if you've read my previous posts, you know that my parents didn't let me "date", so "hanging out" equated to "hey, it's a Friday night, you don't have work tomorrow and I don't have to be up for classes, so why don't you come over?" It was cold and rainy when I met him in the yard outside of my house. He was a vision in a black leather motorcycle jacket. We tangoed through the throngs of cats choking the house, and finally got upstairs to my room. There was little talking, other than "oh, I really missed you" (me) and "wow, you're even more beautiful than I thought". After a bit, clothes started to come off....mostly mine, and mostly with him sitting there with the slack-jawed glazed-eyed expression of a guy who hasn't gotten any (either ever or in a really long time) who can't believe his luck.
So, flash forward an hour: he's fulfilled, I'm fulfilled (or at least doing a very damn good impression of it) , we're spooning on my bed and I'm quickly blacking out. Everything seems great until....."Oh, shit!" I flash back to twenty minutes ago, when my stepmom called me downstairs to take care of something and I felt something slippery on my leg. Reaching up, I pulled the condom out of my (as Brandon later called them) "no-no parts" and then, once I'd gotten back upstairs and about been attacked by Zach as soon as I got the door closed, forgotten all about the condom that I'd thrown in the kitchen garbage can. But, with his arms around me- yes, I know that sounds like some stupid pre-feminism romance novel, but you know what? bite me- I forgot about it....until about four days later when, after missing a period, I called him freaking out. Now, if you've never had this conversation with a boyfriend or girlfriend, let me tell you how it goes.
Me: (cold, scared, and trying to not cry) Baby....
Him: (excited and a little bit surprised) Hey, Babygirl! What's up? I"m sorry, I'm kinda in the car with my dad right now.....we're at a site but it's raining so I'm trying to eat something.
Me: Oh, tell your dad hey for me....
Him: (mumbling to his dad who yells "Hey, Layne! Hope to see you around the house sometime soon!") So, what's wrong, babygirl?
Me: Well....do you remember the other night when we.....(blushing- I'm notoriously dirty mouthed and raunchy over text and in person when I'm, shall we say, "in the mood", but over the phone is SUCH a different story) you know.....
Him: (grinning so hard that I can almost hear it over the phone) Ohhh, yeah. It was great, wasn't it babygirl?
Me: Yeah....well, about that....um....I think that I might, possibly, maybe be pregnant.
Him: WHAT?!?!?!
Me: Well....the condom....kinda slipped off.
Him: Oh....shit....well....um....listen, can we talk about this later? You know, maybe I could come over later and we could talk about it? Or you could take the pill?
Me: Uh, it's been four days. It doesn't work after three.
Him: Oh, well, I gotta go but we'll talk about this later. Ok?
So, three days later he texts me saying he's on his way to my house. We're at the house, laying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, talking in that faux-serious way that teenagers do when they think that they're pregnant and are trying to be so mature about the situation, when his friend Mike calls him. Now, my relationship with all of Zach's friend's has always been a bit....shall we say, odd? When I get on the phone with Zach and he's with his friends, he won't act like any normal guy and just say he'll call me back later. Oh, no, he passes the phone around to all of his friends and gives them the chance to talk to them. This is how I met Mike, who we often refer to by his surname. He fell in love automatically with my accent which, as he said, made him just turned on just by listening to me. We talked when Zach and I were on the phone, but no other time, and in the two years that I had dated Zach, I'd never met Mike.
Half an hour later, Zach and Mike roared up in his car and I meant the scariest looking guy that I think I have ever meant. At 5'3 and 140 lbs, I'm not easily intimidated, though I probably should be. But Mike, at 6'5 and well over 200 lbs (I'm sure) was intimidating, especially in a leather jacket and black aviator sunglasses.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
And you thought that YOUR high school was nuts?
When I was a senior in high school, all of our sadistic English teachers decided that it wasn’t enough punishment to have all of the Freshmen, Sophomore, and Senior classes struggle through Shakespeare, now we would have a full day dedicated to the plays. The premise was simple enough, even fun in theory- but what is fun in theory is hardly ever fun in practice. Everyone had to dress up in period costumes, bring a period food, and either put together a period game or be involved with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays. And just in case this sounds like fun, just picture this: hundreds of teenagers dressed in dark and/or heavy costumes (dresses for the girls and tights for the guys) walking around a football field (aka, no shade) between ten A.M. and two P.M. on the hottest day of the year in the South. Believe me, after about an hour it was not pretty at all.
I think that, personally, the funniest part of this was my father’s role in all of it. Me and my three friends were playing the three witches (and the queen of the witches) of Macbeth. The day before, my father took me to Party City and loaded up on a wig, witch’s hat, false nose, teeth blackner, and makeup. The next morning, he woke me up at about three in the morning to fix my makeup- and did it perfectly. The man had more fun dressing me up and doing my makeup then I did.
There were sixty five people in my graduating class. Yes, that’s right, sixty five. It was a very small church of Christ school, which meant that if you didn’t go to “their” church, you were going to hell. If you listened to anything but church music, you were going to hell. If you were the least bit different you were a freak and would be ostracized. Most of the people in that school had been in the school since pre-K and, therefore, most of the cliques were established by first grade. We were required to go to Chapel every day for half an hour. And unless we had “separate Chapel” (as in boys and girls were in separate buildings. And we think that the rules for women in the Middle East are strict?) women were not allowed to speak in Chapel. At least twice a month, all of the boys and girls were hauled into separate buildings to be told how sex (called your “first kiss” because God forbid that we say that dirty word) before marriage was horrible.
Even though everywhere else in the U.S., boys and girls are actually encouraged to interact, in school it was frowned upon. In our chapels boys and girls were separated on the bleachers- the big privilege that came with being a Senior was that all of the Seniors could sit together. Boys and girls. In the middle of the bleachers. But, despite the best efforts of most of the teachers and staff at the schook, we were all just bundles of hormones walking around waiting until the weekend when we could explode. (And sometimes not even waiting until the weekend. Sometimes it was just waiting until lunch when we could sneak out to somebody’s car or waiting until after school when we could go hide in all of the nooks and crannies of the school, or in one of the classrooms that were left unlocked.) Since I hung out with all of the guys (despite the fact that I was a virgin) I was automatically a whore, which ironically I was called by the girls who spent their weekends with their hands or mouths around their boyfriend’s dicks.
Luckily for me, I had a group of best friends that were like my family: four sisters, a father, and a baby brother. Unluckily for me, by the time that we graduated our family ties were so muddied up that I don’t think any of us knew how we were really related. My best friend (and sister) O’Phylia married my father Justin, who wanted me to date his best friend (and brother) Chris. My best friend (and brother) Greg, had a huge crush on me throughout high school and, after I graduated, we ended up dating for a while, which made me wonder if he was my boyfriend or my brother. Do you feel like you’re in Kentucky yet? My “other mother” was the housekeeper (what would be called the janitor in any other school) called Ms. Darlene. She took care of us, gave us all advice, and made sure that we knew that we were beautiful and special, and that any boy that hurt us was going to have to answer to her. I will never forget the time that I was dating an upperclassman, a guy who was a year older than me named Ben. One day we were walking down the hall, holding hands (which we only got to do because the teachers, in my opinion, thought that I was good for him and I would keep him on the right track. And, of course, because they were pretty sure that he wasn’t getting any.) when Ms. Darlene called him over to where she was and told him that he’d better take good care of me because I was her little girl and he’d have to answer to her if he didn’t. Is it any surprise that we broke up not even two weeks after that?
There’s an old joke that has to do with the crazy best friends; the one thing is that nobody knew how crazy my best friends were. They were the ones that were smoking weed and reading out of the Anarchist Cookbook at thirteen. My parents used to joke that my friends were the crackheads that were making pipe bombs in their bedrooms. Well, yeah. That’s mainly why they were my friends: so that when they got pissed off and decided to blow up the entire school, I would be the one that they would call and tell not to come. The part that might just be even more sad than the fact that these people were the ones that I was hanging out with voluntarily (and not just because I felt sorry for them or wanted them to do my homework for me or something. Hell, I didn’t feel sorry for them and I could do my own damn homework, thank you very much.) but the fact that I also voluntarily dated them! Yes, I dated these people, the ones that everyone at the school was scared of. And, you know what? They were the most fun boyfriends that I ever had.
One of my boyfriends was named Zach, and he was probably the only one that I ever met that had a family that was as strange, if not stranger, than mine. His mother was an overweight blonde with boobs the size of beach balls and a strange obsession with Chihuahuas. His dad was an overweight alcoholic who was actually really funny. Zach was the one that I credit with teaching me how to make a flamethrower out of a can of Axe and a lighter (yes, we had very very strange lessons after school.) and who made me laugh until I cried half of the time. But, somehow, I got the idea that the boy wasn’t that smart. One day, there was a hurricane and tornado warning out on the entire area of Mobile county. My best friend O’Phylia and I were sitting inside of the building, like sane people would do, while Zach ran around out in the rain, eventually slipping and falling in the mud, having to walk around with his school pants wet from the crotch down and his ass solid brown from the mud.
The first job that I ever had, when I was sixteen, was working at my high school’s daycare. No, I wasn’t taking care of the whiney, sniveling brats that I eventually graduated with- I was taking care of the brats who would graduated in ten to fifteen. If I ever really loved kids before this, then I wouldn’t after.
It wasn’t a very hard job, which is why they payed me less than minimum wage- one reason why it wasn’t a huge deal when my father stole every damn cent from me.
You can tell a lot about the way our future generations are going to be from how they are at a really young age. The little girl who hides in the corner of the playground, kissing all the little boys and regularly lifts up her skirt because (as she announces “I got pretty new panties”) will probably end up as the school whore. I could also tell during this time that I will be a terrible parent as I would regularly start cracking up when this happened and end up sitting on the ground while the other tow teachers admonished her. Then there was the little boy who was always in trouble for something, the one who always started fights and had a seat reserved in the principal’s office. Mine was probably my favorite of all the kids. He was a little troublemaker who made me feel like I was going to have a heartattack at seventeen, like the time that he walked up to me with red running all the way down his arm. I freaked out, looking everywhere for the huge gash that would have elicited the massive amounts of blood, until I notice him laughing and holding up a Crayola marker that he had broken. It was like a new game-hey kids, let’s play Who Can Give Ms. Layne a Heart Attack First!
I think that, personally, the funniest part of this was my father’s role in all of it. Me and my three friends were playing the three witches (and the queen of the witches) of Macbeth. The day before, my father took me to Party City and loaded up on a wig, witch’s hat, false nose, teeth blackner, and makeup. The next morning, he woke me up at about three in the morning to fix my makeup- and did it perfectly. The man had more fun dressing me up and doing my makeup then I did.
There were sixty five people in my graduating class. Yes, that’s right, sixty five. It was a very small church of Christ school, which meant that if you didn’t go to “their” church, you were going to hell. If you listened to anything but church music, you were going to hell. If you were the least bit different you were a freak and would be ostracized. Most of the people in that school had been in the school since pre-K and, therefore, most of the cliques were established by first grade. We were required to go to Chapel every day for half an hour. And unless we had “separate Chapel” (as in boys and girls were in separate buildings. And we think that the rules for women in the Middle East are strict?) women were not allowed to speak in Chapel. At least twice a month, all of the boys and girls were hauled into separate buildings to be told how sex (called your “first kiss” because God forbid that we say that dirty word) before marriage was horrible.
Even though everywhere else in the U.S., boys and girls are actually encouraged to interact, in school it was frowned upon. In our chapels boys and girls were separated on the bleachers- the big privilege that came with being a Senior was that all of the Seniors could sit together. Boys and girls. In the middle of the bleachers. But, despite the best efforts of most of the teachers and staff at the schook, we were all just bundles of hormones walking around waiting until the weekend when we could explode. (And sometimes not even waiting until the weekend. Sometimes it was just waiting until lunch when we could sneak out to somebody’s car or waiting until after school when we could go hide in all of the nooks and crannies of the school, or in one of the classrooms that were left unlocked.) Since I hung out with all of the guys (despite the fact that I was a virgin) I was automatically a whore, which ironically I was called by the girls who spent their weekends with their hands or mouths around their boyfriend’s dicks.
Luckily for me, I had a group of best friends that were like my family: four sisters, a father, and a baby brother. Unluckily for me, by the time that we graduated our family ties were so muddied up that I don’t think any of us knew how we were really related. My best friend (and sister) O’Phylia married my father Justin, who wanted me to date his best friend (and brother) Chris. My best friend (and brother) Greg, had a huge crush on me throughout high school and, after I graduated, we ended up dating for a while, which made me wonder if he was my boyfriend or my brother. Do you feel like you’re in Kentucky yet? My “other mother” was the housekeeper (what would be called the janitor in any other school) called Ms. Darlene. She took care of us, gave us all advice, and made sure that we knew that we were beautiful and special, and that any boy that hurt us was going to have to answer to her. I will never forget the time that I was dating an upperclassman, a guy who was a year older than me named Ben. One day we were walking down the hall, holding hands (which we only got to do because the teachers, in my opinion, thought that I was good for him and I would keep him on the right track. And, of course, because they were pretty sure that he wasn’t getting any.) when Ms. Darlene called him over to where she was and told him that he’d better take good care of me because I was her little girl and he’d have to answer to her if he didn’t. Is it any surprise that we broke up not even two weeks after that?
There’s an old joke that has to do with the crazy best friends; the one thing is that nobody knew how crazy my best friends were. They were the ones that were smoking weed and reading out of the Anarchist Cookbook at thirteen. My parents used to joke that my friends were the crackheads that were making pipe bombs in their bedrooms. Well, yeah. That’s mainly why they were my friends: so that when they got pissed off and decided to blow up the entire school, I would be the one that they would call and tell not to come. The part that might just be even more sad than the fact that these people were the ones that I was hanging out with voluntarily (and not just because I felt sorry for them or wanted them to do my homework for me or something. Hell, I didn’t feel sorry for them and I could do my own damn homework, thank you very much.) but the fact that I also voluntarily dated them! Yes, I dated these people, the ones that everyone at the school was scared of. And, you know what? They were the most fun boyfriends that I ever had.
One of my boyfriends was named Zach, and he was probably the only one that I ever met that had a family that was as strange, if not stranger, than mine. His mother was an overweight blonde with boobs the size of beach balls and a strange obsession with Chihuahuas. His dad was an overweight alcoholic who was actually really funny. Zach was the one that I credit with teaching me how to make a flamethrower out of a can of Axe and a lighter (yes, we had very very strange lessons after school.) and who made me laugh until I cried half of the time. But, somehow, I got the idea that the boy wasn’t that smart. One day, there was a hurricane and tornado warning out on the entire area of Mobile county. My best friend O’Phylia and I were sitting inside of the building, like sane people would do, while Zach ran around out in the rain, eventually slipping and falling in the mud, having to walk around with his school pants wet from the crotch down and his ass solid brown from the mud.
The first job that I ever had, when I was sixteen, was working at my high school’s daycare. No, I wasn’t taking care of the whiney, sniveling brats that I eventually graduated with- I was taking care of the brats who would graduated in ten to fifteen. If I ever really loved kids before this, then I wouldn’t after.
It wasn’t a very hard job, which is why they payed me less than minimum wage- one reason why it wasn’t a huge deal when my father stole every damn cent from me.
You can tell a lot about the way our future generations are going to be from how they are at a really young age. The little girl who hides in the corner of the playground, kissing all the little boys and regularly lifts up her skirt because (as she announces “I got pretty new panties”) will probably end up as the school whore. I could also tell during this time that I will be a terrible parent as I would regularly start cracking up when this happened and end up sitting on the ground while the other tow teachers admonished her. Then there was the little boy who was always in trouble for something, the one who always started fights and had a seat reserved in the principal’s office. Mine was probably my favorite of all the kids. He was a little troublemaker who made me feel like I was going to have a heartattack at seventeen, like the time that he walked up to me with red running all the way down his arm. I freaked out, looking everywhere for the huge gash that would have elicited the massive amounts of blood, until I notice him laughing and holding up a Crayola marker that he had broken. It was like a new game-hey kids, let’s play Who Can Give Ms. Layne a Heart Attack First!
My Mommy Dearest (both of them)
Now there’s no real way to describe well the level of work/chores that my parents put me through. If you’ve ever heard the Weird Al song “Amish Paradise”- you know you listen to it, don’t even lie- you know, “At four-thirty in the morning I’m milking cows” sounds about right. Sometimes it was just easier to stay awake because it was like an alarm had been implanted in my father and stepmother’s heads- if I laid down, even for a second at night, it was like they had sped up time and, poof, all of a sudden it was time to get up. I was probably one of the only kids in my graduating class who didn’t look at you funny and ask what you were talking about when you described a sunrise.
I guess if there had been any reasoning behind the chores that I was assigned it would have been different, but with the house in the condition that it was in (and it was in terrible condition- I have seen and heard of houses that had been demolished for less than the condition that house was in) there was absolutely no point. Besides that there was no rhyme or reason behind the chores that I was given- at one point they had me wash the walls with a scrubbie sponge. Have you ever seen those movies about the Army where the Privates get into trouble and have to wash the floor with a toothbrush? My parents must have seen that and gone “Hey! That’s a great idea!”
There is one thing that I think should be common sense to everyone: be nice to your family because, when they are old and sick in the hospital on life support, you don’t want them “accidently” pulling the plug. Be assured that when either my father or my stepmother are in the hospital on life support, no one will allow me into the room with them. They won’t allow my brother in either, come to think of it.
For as long as I lived with them, I was always the whore of the school. Lesley and John would take away my phone, read my text messages, listen to my voicemails, read my emails and go into my facebook and myspace accounts, and anything that could be taken in the slightest crude way often was. Prime example was one time that I was at South Alabama for college. I’d met a guy a couple of years older than my named Gabe. He was the typical weird, pasty kid that was a bit of a nerd and didn’t really know how to interact with girls- in other words, the type that I always seem to attract. We would always joke and talk and hang out. He showed me his comic strips and I gave him smart-ass comments to use in them. He was working on a corny comic strip for which he needed a girl who could fake a French accent. Even though I had a terrible fake accent (it’s like Pepe LePuew meets Scarlett O’Hara and had a love child “Parle voux Frances, yall!”) I was about the only girl that he knew and was willing to do the voice because it sounded like fun. One day he texted me, asking if I wanted to come over to his house to do the comic strip because it would be quiet with his parent’s not at home. Can’t you see how badly that could be interpreted by someone who always had sex and on the brain and yet wasn’t getting any?
My mother says that I should have the best constitution of anyone in the entire planet because of all of the shit that was in the air. My stepmother would cook for my father’s men (since he was a Lt. in the Mobile Sherriff’s Office) for all of the holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, huge trays of corn casserole, turkey, stuffing, cornbread, all of the stuff that you would expect of a holiday dinner. Now, since they were both on crack and didn’t eat at all in the last year and a half that I remembered, the fridge (that they kept locked, which will be discussed later) was fully stocked. For the next three or four decades. So, of course, there was no room for the huge aluminum catering trays of food that was left after all of my father’s men had eaten all that they could. So, not knowing where else to put these trays (and not thinking that maybe smaller containers would be a good idea) Lesley would keep them in the laundry room. I guess that she thought that since it was always ten or fifteen degrees colder in there than it was in the rest of the house, that the food would be ok. What she didn’t get was that this was food that had eggs, and milk, and meat in it. And, as if this was not bad enough, she would have me eat it until it was gone. Looking back now, I’m surprised that I didn’t get sick.
At nineteen, I have given myself a diagnoses as ADD, since both my mother and father are ADD. My father, though, was worse at it than my mother was. We commonly refer to it as the “blinky lights”, the small things that make you go off on a tangent and never come back to what you were originally doing. My father was horrible at it. The summer that I turned eighteen, he decided that he was going to be the next Lance Armstrong. He bought himself the bike shorts, (which he did not look good in) the helmet, the socks, the shoes, the special bike that had pegs instead of pedals. He got a subscription to “Biker’s Weekly” and started one of his weird diets of protein powder and Muscle Milk. When I was a freshman in college, he went on a running jag, wearing the running shorts and no shirt, the “gorilla feet” shoes (that were for “barefoot running”) and all of the accoutrements.
This leads me to the assumption that my father was also a druggie. When I was a freshman in college, he started losing weight. I’m not talking about one or two pounds a week to look good “normal” dieting, I’m talking losing fifteen pounds in a week and looking like a refugee from a Nazi concentration camp dieting. He thought that he looked good; I thought that he looked gross and wouldn’t walk around the house with really short shorts the rode up his ass and down his hips and no shirt. This was like crack head skinny. This was like Nikki Sixx at his worst skinny. The summer that I was nineteen, he broke his toe running in his barefoot Gorilla feet. He came home limping and shrugged off the suggestion that he go to a doctor. For the next three or four days, he stayed hopped up on my Lortab that was left over from my wisdom teeth surgery (which I had when I was sixteen and he took away because he thought that I was going to become a druggie), laying in bed, incoherent, reading a book and staring at the pretty lights on the ceiling.
My father and stepmother were obsessed with appearance. For years, I struggled with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that causes you to starve yourself. This started after my kind, loving father who made a comment that a dress that I had bought for a school dance, being “a little bit tight” and that I might “want to watch it”. They got me a gym membership at thirteen, after they pulled me out of ballet classes, and made me go at least twice or three times a week. When he was going to the gym, he would work out, pulling three and four hundred pounds of weights to do “reps”. He would run five and six and seven miles a day. He would bike two or three times as much. He counted calories and went on all kinds of weird diets, he was, at one time or another, on the Atkins diet, a vegetarian, and a vegan. And it wasn’t just that he wanted to lose weight, it was that he wanted everyone else to lose weight, too. He was continuously on my ass about calories, asking if I knew how many calories were in something that I was eating. When I was a Junior in high school, he and Lesley decided that I had no self-control and they had to lock up all of the food in the house to help “control me”. This, of course, led to a battle between the three of us to see who could and would actually give me food. Lesley got incredibly pissed at this, but I knew that she was one of the two that wouldn’t give me food if I asked for it, so I began to ask just John for it. I can’t say that I hate John alone for this, though, because my paternal grandmother was the exact same way as he was. Anne, a licensed social worker who had worked for DHR for many years until she retired in the eighties, would keep a fully stocked freezer and pantry every time that the family came to visit. She would keep the gallon sized ice creams in the freezer, buy a four or five layer chocolate cake, have three or four huge bottles of Coke in the fridge, and always had five or six hundred packs of barbque. I swear, if there was ever a natural disaster that wiped out most of Alabama and somehow kept the small town of Ozark in tact, her house was where everyone within a thirty or fourty mile radius should go; they wouldn’t run out of food for at least four months. The only downfall of that plan would be that they would be forced to pray before every meal, to sing devotional songs every night, and have long in-depth talks about “feelings” and “emotions” every day that would make them cry, whether they wanted to or not. I swear, I think that the woman would have stomped on your feet or hands in a heartbeat if she wanted you to cry while she was talking to you. She must have put the kids of many, many Kleenex employees through college with all the tissues that she bought.
When I was a freshman in college, my father went off to the FBI Academy in Quantico, thus leaving my stepmother, the psycho, in charge. This woman, I am sure, is certifiable. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I saw the movie “Mommy Dearest”. Let’s just say that Lesley could have given them pointers. I am convinced that she was a masochist, getting off on the pain that she inflicted on me. She made me go to the gym every night, often for hours at a time, not letting me get off of the treadmill until I had gone a certain distance (like “Oh, you have to run five miles”. Excuse me, I’m not on crack like the two of you are.) One night, I was at school and had missed the bus. It was raining and she, being the benign wonderful ruler that she was (kind of like Hitler was a “kind, benign ruler”) she agreed to come pick me up. I ran out to the car in a pair of jeans that I had gone to school in wet that morning and a pair of Vans and was taken to the gym to run five miles….dressed in said jeans and Vans. One night, after I forgot a pair of tennis shoes at school, she made me wear a pair that were two sizes too small to the gym. My father, trying to help, let me borrow a pair of his shoes, but Lesley made me take them off since they “weren’t mine and I should show more respect for other people’s property” and wear the other pair. By the end of the night, as I was limping out to the car, I realized that the shoes were so small they had literally rubbed blisters in the back of my feet so badly that they had bled. Then, after we got home, not only did she not let me go inside to change into another pair of shoes, but she made me stay outside, in the fourty degree weather, raking up leaves because garbage day was the next day.
The last two years that I lived with them were my “rebellious” years. I snuck out of the house and snuck boys in, I did half of my chores, blowing the other half off because, honestly, how were they going to notice? I woke up when they told me to, sometimes, and then went back to sleep whenever they had gone to work. I bought my own food half the time because they didn’t buy me what I needed, or locked it up leaving me to starve until six or seven at night when they got home. I bought books that I wanted to read and planned midnight excursions out to the beach with my boyfriend. I wrote papers on what I wanted to write them on, and started smoking and drinking.
I guess if there had been any reasoning behind the chores that I was assigned it would have been different, but with the house in the condition that it was in (and it was in terrible condition- I have seen and heard of houses that had been demolished for less than the condition that house was in) there was absolutely no point. Besides that there was no rhyme or reason behind the chores that I was given- at one point they had me wash the walls with a scrubbie sponge. Have you ever seen those movies about the Army where the Privates get into trouble and have to wash the floor with a toothbrush? My parents must have seen that and gone “Hey! That’s a great idea!”
There is one thing that I think should be common sense to everyone: be nice to your family because, when they are old and sick in the hospital on life support, you don’t want them “accidently” pulling the plug. Be assured that when either my father or my stepmother are in the hospital on life support, no one will allow me into the room with them. They won’t allow my brother in either, come to think of it.
For as long as I lived with them, I was always the whore of the school. Lesley and John would take away my phone, read my text messages, listen to my voicemails, read my emails and go into my facebook and myspace accounts, and anything that could be taken in the slightest crude way often was. Prime example was one time that I was at South Alabama for college. I’d met a guy a couple of years older than my named Gabe. He was the typical weird, pasty kid that was a bit of a nerd and didn’t really know how to interact with girls- in other words, the type that I always seem to attract. We would always joke and talk and hang out. He showed me his comic strips and I gave him smart-ass comments to use in them. He was working on a corny comic strip for which he needed a girl who could fake a French accent. Even though I had a terrible fake accent (it’s like Pepe LePuew meets Scarlett O’Hara and had a love child “Parle voux Frances, yall!”) I was about the only girl that he knew and was willing to do the voice because it sounded like fun. One day he texted me, asking if I wanted to come over to his house to do the comic strip because it would be quiet with his parent’s not at home. Can’t you see how badly that could be interpreted by someone who always had sex and on the brain and yet wasn’t getting any?
My mother says that I should have the best constitution of anyone in the entire planet because of all of the shit that was in the air. My stepmother would cook for my father’s men (since he was a Lt. in the Mobile Sherriff’s Office) for all of the holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, huge trays of corn casserole, turkey, stuffing, cornbread, all of the stuff that you would expect of a holiday dinner. Now, since they were both on crack and didn’t eat at all in the last year and a half that I remembered, the fridge (that they kept locked, which will be discussed later) was fully stocked. For the next three or four decades. So, of course, there was no room for the huge aluminum catering trays of food that was left after all of my father’s men had eaten all that they could. So, not knowing where else to put these trays (and not thinking that maybe smaller containers would be a good idea) Lesley would keep them in the laundry room. I guess that she thought that since it was always ten or fifteen degrees colder in there than it was in the rest of the house, that the food would be ok. What she didn’t get was that this was food that had eggs, and milk, and meat in it. And, as if this was not bad enough, she would have me eat it until it was gone. Looking back now, I’m surprised that I didn’t get sick.
At nineteen, I have given myself a diagnoses as ADD, since both my mother and father are ADD. My father, though, was worse at it than my mother was. We commonly refer to it as the “blinky lights”, the small things that make you go off on a tangent and never come back to what you were originally doing. My father was horrible at it. The summer that I turned eighteen, he decided that he was going to be the next Lance Armstrong. He bought himself the bike shorts, (which he did not look good in) the helmet, the socks, the shoes, the special bike that had pegs instead of pedals. He got a subscription to “Biker’s Weekly” and started one of his weird diets of protein powder and Muscle Milk. When I was a freshman in college, he went on a running jag, wearing the running shorts and no shirt, the “gorilla feet” shoes (that were for “barefoot running”) and all of the accoutrements.
This leads me to the assumption that my father was also a druggie. When I was a freshman in college, he started losing weight. I’m not talking about one or two pounds a week to look good “normal” dieting, I’m talking losing fifteen pounds in a week and looking like a refugee from a Nazi concentration camp dieting. He thought that he looked good; I thought that he looked gross and wouldn’t walk around the house with really short shorts the rode up his ass and down his hips and no shirt. This was like crack head skinny. This was like Nikki Sixx at his worst skinny. The summer that I was nineteen, he broke his toe running in his barefoot Gorilla feet. He came home limping and shrugged off the suggestion that he go to a doctor. For the next three or four days, he stayed hopped up on my Lortab that was left over from my wisdom teeth surgery (which I had when I was sixteen and he took away because he thought that I was going to become a druggie), laying in bed, incoherent, reading a book and staring at the pretty lights on the ceiling.
My father and stepmother were obsessed with appearance. For years, I struggled with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that causes you to starve yourself. This started after my kind, loving father who made a comment that a dress that I had bought for a school dance, being “a little bit tight” and that I might “want to watch it”. They got me a gym membership at thirteen, after they pulled me out of ballet classes, and made me go at least twice or three times a week. When he was going to the gym, he would work out, pulling three and four hundred pounds of weights to do “reps”. He would run five and six and seven miles a day. He would bike two or three times as much. He counted calories and went on all kinds of weird diets, he was, at one time or another, on the Atkins diet, a vegetarian, and a vegan. And it wasn’t just that he wanted to lose weight, it was that he wanted everyone else to lose weight, too. He was continuously on my ass about calories, asking if I knew how many calories were in something that I was eating. When I was a Junior in high school, he and Lesley decided that I had no self-control and they had to lock up all of the food in the house to help “control me”. This, of course, led to a battle between the three of us to see who could and would actually give me food. Lesley got incredibly pissed at this, but I knew that she was one of the two that wouldn’t give me food if I asked for it, so I began to ask just John for it. I can’t say that I hate John alone for this, though, because my paternal grandmother was the exact same way as he was. Anne, a licensed social worker who had worked for DHR for many years until she retired in the eighties, would keep a fully stocked freezer and pantry every time that the family came to visit. She would keep the gallon sized ice creams in the freezer, buy a four or five layer chocolate cake, have three or four huge bottles of Coke in the fridge, and always had five or six hundred packs of barbque. I swear, if there was ever a natural disaster that wiped out most of Alabama and somehow kept the small town of Ozark in tact, her house was where everyone within a thirty or fourty mile radius should go; they wouldn’t run out of food for at least four months. The only downfall of that plan would be that they would be forced to pray before every meal, to sing devotional songs every night, and have long in-depth talks about “feelings” and “emotions” every day that would make them cry, whether they wanted to or not. I swear, I think that the woman would have stomped on your feet or hands in a heartbeat if she wanted you to cry while she was talking to you. She must have put the kids of many, many Kleenex employees through college with all the tissues that she bought.
When I was a freshman in college, my father went off to the FBI Academy in Quantico, thus leaving my stepmother, the psycho, in charge. This woman, I am sure, is certifiable. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I saw the movie “Mommy Dearest”. Let’s just say that Lesley could have given them pointers. I am convinced that she was a masochist, getting off on the pain that she inflicted on me. She made me go to the gym every night, often for hours at a time, not letting me get off of the treadmill until I had gone a certain distance (like “Oh, you have to run five miles”. Excuse me, I’m not on crack like the two of you are.) One night, I was at school and had missed the bus. It was raining and she, being the benign wonderful ruler that she was (kind of like Hitler was a “kind, benign ruler”) she agreed to come pick me up. I ran out to the car in a pair of jeans that I had gone to school in wet that morning and a pair of Vans and was taken to the gym to run five miles….dressed in said jeans and Vans. One night, after I forgot a pair of tennis shoes at school, she made me wear a pair that were two sizes too small to the gym. My father, trying to help, let me borrow a pair of his shoes, but Lesley made me take them off since they “weren’t mine and I should show more respect for other people’s property” and wear the other pair. By the end of the night, as I was limping out to the car, I realized that the shoes were so small they had literally rubbed blisters in the back of my feet so badly that they had bled. Then, after we got home, not only did she not let me go inside to change into another pair of shoes, but she made me stay outside, in the fourty degree weather, raking up leaves because garbage day was the next day.
The last two years that I lived with them were my “rebellious” years. I snuck out of the house and snuck boys in, I did half of my chores, blowing the other half off because, honestly, how were they going to notice? I woke up when they told me to, sometimes, and then went back to sleep whenever they had gone to work. I bought my own food half the time because they didn’t buy me what I needed, or locked it up leaving me to starve until six or seven at night when they got home. I bought books that I wanted to read and planned midnight excursions out to the beach with my boyfriend. I wrote papers on what I wanted to write them on, and started smoking and drinking.
Here a cat, there a cat, everywhere a cat-cat
My stepmother and father were both hoarders, which is Latin for “crazy person who has to have ten million of everything, plus a maid to take care of it all because they can’t be bothered to” in my opinion. Unfortunately, they hoarded cats. Yes, you heard right, cats. And, to be perfectly honest, these cats scared me. My father, a sheriff, would bring them home from evictions that he did of houses and apartments and it was my job to feed them, make sure that they had water, and clean their litter boxes. Every. Single. Day. Now, if you wonder what that made the house smell like, let me give you a little hint: the next time you go to the grocery store, go into the house cleaning aisle and find a bottle of ammonia. Then put it right up into your nose. And if you’re wondering what the house looked like….if you’ve ever seen the movie Gremlins, with the cute fuzzy animals that ended up having cocoons, that’s kind of what it looked like every time that they got sick and hacked up a hairball.
It was my responsibility to take care of the cats. I had to empty the litter boxes every. Single. Day. Now, a note to all of the bodybuilders out there: if you are ever really, really hard up to go work out, just go to my parent’s house. They’ll have you hauling fourty pound boxes of cat litter and twenty pound bags of food at least twice a week. At least it was good cardio. And speaking of a workout- another good workout in that house happened every time that you went to get anything to eat. If you got a box out of the pantry to get food out of, or a container of leftovers out of the fridge, you had to be quick. It was like what they called the “washing machine” when I was in middle school; there was a certain method to how to do it so that you didn’t end up with your food all over the floor. You also got very limber in that house; especially when you had your back turned and one of the cats decided to go all Japanese kamakazi pilot on you, jumping on your back and holding on for dear life. This is why I think that cat’s are much smarter than humans give them credit for: the cats always knew exactly where to jump on your back so that you couldn’t reach them. Like that one spot on your back that you can never quite reach to scratch, that’s exactly where they would jump and hang on to. And then, to make it even worse, while you’re writhing around in pain due to the ten razor-sharp fingernails that are making a permanent tattoo in the skin around your spine, all of the other cats would gather around and starting screaming! It’s like they all got together one time and decided, “Hey, let’s take down the humans and we can rule this house! Today, the house, tomorrow, the world!” It’s like they all decided together that they hated us and wanted us dead, and probably with good reason. All of the cats had inbred so much that by the time that I left, they were starting to look like a bunch of Virginian hillbillies (or Kentucky ones for that matter). There were the cats that had perpetual ear infections, the ones that always had runny eyes or noses, and the ones that were just totally fucked up in the head. We had one, that we called Toes, that John delicately called our “retarded” cat. Poor Toes, he would get into the corner right between where the back door and the wall were and just turn in circles. He would circle and circle and circle. It was like one of those Roomba robot house cleaners that hits the wall, backs up, hits the wall again, backs up again, until you get up and turn it another way. And, the poor guy, my father would sit there and laugh at him long after my OCD had kicked in and I had picked him up, moving him just so that I wouldn’t have to sit there and watch him circle and circle the same place over and over.
One year, my parents got the idea that someone had called DHR on them and they were going to have their house investigated. So, the two brilliant, college-educated adults that were legally in charge of taking care of me decided that they were going to take about three-quarters of the cats (so that we’d only have one hundred instead of three or four hundred) to a farm outside of town and let the cats go free. Keep in mind that these are cats that have never been outside of a house (albeit a horribly disgusting run-down house) in their short lives and many of them, from years and years of inbreeding, had defects- blindness, constant stuffy noses, if they had been children they would have been the “special needs” kids that get set apart from the rest of the class. So, the two adults who had been put in charge of my welfare backed my brother’s car into the garage and made a chain: my stepmother ran in and grabbed two or three cats, then handed them to my father, who ran them out to my brother, who stuffed them into the back of the car. By the time they were done it was like a clown car: the entire back and most of the front seat were piled with cats: brown cats, black cats, red cats, blonde cats, short cats, tall cats, fat cats, thin cats. Here a cat, there a cat, everywhere a cat-cat. (Sorry, just had a Dr. Seuss moment there).
The cats in the house were also, as strange as it seems, segregated cats. Yes, we had Jim Crow laws in the house. And people say that parents in the South aren’t teaching their kids about their heritage. There were the cats that were only allowed to be in the kitchen. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in the rest of the house. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in John and Lesley’s room. Even though this didn’t keep the cats from continuously getting pregnant (what can I say, they were whore cats), it was rigidly enforced and would cause both of them to go into absolute conniption fits if one of the “kitchen cats” got out into the rest of the house or vice versa. However, someone should have taught Lesley about the facts of life (for all animals, not just humans) horny girl plus horny boy equals babies.
When I was in the eigth grade, my father went on a home improvement jag. He ripped up all of the carpet in the downstairs of the house, and ripped up the linoleum in the kitchen. After piling all of the living room and dining room furniture into the dining room, he tiled the hallway and the living room before he gave up. For the next five years that I lived there, the kitchen floor was solid concrete. Then, about two weeks before I graduated from high school, he went on another home-improvement jag in the kitchen, tearing out the baseboards and the chair rail, to redo them. Replacing all of the doors (during which I was stationed about three feet behind him with a water bottle to keep all of the cats that were supposed to be kitchen cats away from all of the cats that were the “rest of the house” cats.)
One weekend, my father came home on another of his excursions with “the blinky lights”- he was going to run the four day marathon called Memphis to Mobile, a run for St. Jude’s Children Hospital where the participants literally ran the entire way from Memphis, TN. to Mobile, AL. I thought that he was crazy but shrugged it off, realizing that I could leave on Friday night, while Lesley was asleep, and sleep most of the day Saturday, while she was busy working on the welcome back celebration that would take place on Sunday. So, on Friday night I showered, dressed, and laid on my bed reading until it was time to leave. I crawled out of the front window without a hitch, and ran down the street to where I agreed to meet my boyfriend, Donald, half an hour from then. Realizing that I had left my watch on the porch outside of the window, I walked back, only to find that the screen that I put back into place when I crawled out of the window had been pushed out by one of the cats. There were cats everywhere! Desperately, I tried to herd them all back into the house, but most of these cats had been left alone for so long (because, realistically, how much time in the day did any of us have to give all three hundred of the cats in that house? Answer: not very much.) that they just ran when I tried herding them. I tried everything: running at them, my face contorted like a Halloween mask to try scaring them back toward the window, crouching down coaxing them with a pathetic “here, kittykittykitty”, running up behind them and grabbing them (not a smart idea, if you ever want to try it. All that you will get from that is some deep scratches). I managed to get all back into the house except one, but didn’t give it much thought. Honestly, I thought that the cats were much better out in the wild then they would be in the house where they were literally humping to death. So, without another thought, I went to the beach with my boyfriend, staying out all night. The next day, things were going dandy- well, as dandy as things could go in that house, which generally meant that my ass wasn’t burning from the PVC pipe, that I wasn’t in the kitchen doing exercises that could put an Army recruit to shame, and my eardrums weren’t ringing from being screamed at for five hours straight. That is (insert dramatic music here) It happened. Lesley was leaving to go downtown to start setting up the welcome-back ceremony that would be held the next morning. The good thing was that she was leaving for a few hours, so I could take a nap since I’d been out until about five that morning and had gotten up at eight. The bad thing was that she slammed back into the house all of five minutes after she had left, demanding why there was a cat sitting on the front porch. My answer? “Well, maybe he needed some fresh air.” For some reason, she didn’t find it that funny, and had me running up and down through the drainage ditch that ran behind the house for at least three hours looking for where the cat had gone. As if that didn’t make me look enough like a psycho, she had me out there after dark with a flashlight, walking the ditch and calling the cat’s name.
It was my responsibility to take care of the cats. I had to empty the litter boxes every. Single. Day. Now, a note to all of the bodybuilders out there: if you are ever really, really hard up to go work out, just go to my parent’s house. They’ll have you hauling fourty pound boxes of cat litter and twenty pound bags of food at least twice a week. At least it was good cardio. And speaking of a workout- another good workout in that house happened every time that you went to get anything to eat. If you got a box out of the pantry to get food out of, or a container of leftovers out of the fridge, you had to be quick. It was like what they called the “washing machine” when I was in middle school; there was a certain method to how to do it so that you didn’t end up with your food all over the floor. You also got very limber in that house; especially when you had your back turned and one of the cats decided to go all Japanese kamakazi pilot on you, jumping on your back and holding on for dear life. This is why I think that cat’s are much smarter than humans give them credit for: the cats always knew exactly where to jump on your back so that you couldn’t reach them. Like that one spot on your back that you can never quite reach to scratch, that’s exactly where they would jump and hang on to. And then, to make it even worse, while you’re writhing around in pain due to the ten razor-sharp fingernails that are making a permanent tattoo in the skin around your spine, all of the other cats would gather around and starting screaming! It’s like they all got together one time and decided, “Hey, let’s take down the humans and we can rule this house! Today, the house, tomorrow, the world!” It’s like they all decided together that they hated us and wanted us dead, and probably with good reason. All of the cats had inbred so much that by the time that I left, they were starting to look like a bunch of Virginian hillbillies (or Kentucky ones for that matter). There were the cats that had perpetual ear infections, the ones that always had runny eyes or noses, and the ones that were just totally fucked up in the head. We had one, that we called Toes, that John delicately called our “retarded” cat. Poor Toes, he would get into the corner right between where the back door and the wall were and just turn in circles. He would circle and circle and circle. It was like one of those Roomba robot house cleaners that hits the wall, backs up, hits the wall again, backs up again, until you get up and turn it another way. And, the poor guy, my father would sit there and laugh at him long after my OCD had kicked in and I had picked him up, moving him just so that I wouldn’t have to sit there and watch him circle and circle the same place over and over.
One year, my parents got the idea that someone had called DHR on them and they were going to have their house investigated. So, the two brilliant, college-educated adults that were legally in charge of taking care of me decided that they were going to take about three-quarters of the cats (so that we’d only have one hundred instead of three or four hundred) to a farm outside of town and let the cats go free. Keep in mind that these are cats that have never been outside of a house (albeit a horribly disgusting run-down house) in their short lives and many of them, from years and years of inbreeding, had defects- blindness, constant stuffy noses, if they had been children they would have been the “special needs” kids that get set apart from the rest of the class. So, the two adults who had been put in charge of my welfare backed my brother’s car into the garage and made a chain: my stepmother ran in and grabbed two or three cats, then handed them to my father, who ran them out to my brother, who stuffed them into the back of the car. By the time they were done it was like a clown car: the entire back and most of the front seat were piled with cats: brown cats, black cats, red cats, blonde cats, short cats, tall cats, fat cats, thin cats. Here a cat, there a cat, everywhere a cat-cat. (Sorry, just had a Dr. Seuss moment there).
The cats in the house were also, as strange as it seems, segregated cats. Yes, we had Jim Crow laws in the house. And people say that parents in the South aren’t teaching their kids about their heritage. There were the cats that were only allowed to be in the kitchen. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in the rest of the house. Then there were the cats that were only allowed to be in John and Lesley’s room. Even though this didn’t keep the cats from continuously getting pregnant (what can I say, they were whore cats), it was rigidly enforced and would cause both of them to go into absolute conniption fits if one of the “kitchen cats” got out into the rest of the house or vice versa. However, someone should have taught Lesley about the facts of life (for all animals, not just humans) horny girl plus horny boy equals babies.
When I was in the eigth grade, my father went on a home improvement jag. He ripped up all of the carpet in the downstairs of the house, and ripped up the linoleum in the kitchen. After piling all of the living room and dining room furniture into the dining room, he tiled the hallway and the living room before he gave up. For the next five years that I lived there, the kitchen floor was solid concrete. Then, about two weeks before I graduated from high school, he went on another home-improvement jag in the kitchen, tearing out the baseboards and the chair rail, to redo them. Replacing all of the doors (during which I was stationed about three feet behind him with a water bottle to keep all of the cats that were supposed to be kitchen cats away from all of the cats that were the “rest of the house” cats.)
One weekend, my father came home on another of his excursions with “the blinky lights”- he was going to run the four day marathon called Memphis to Mobile, a run for St. Jude’s Children Hospital where the participants literally ran the entire way from Memphis, TN. to Mobile, AL. I thought that he was crazy but shrugged it off, realizing that I could leave on Friday night, while Lesley was asleep, and sleep most of the day Saturday, while she was busy working on the welcome back celebration that would take place on Sunday. So, on Friday night I showered, dressed, and laid on my bed reading until it was time to leave. I crawled out of the front window without a hitch, and ran down the street to where I agreed to meet my boyfriend, Donald, half an hour from then. Realizing that I had left my watch on the porch outside of the window, I walked back, only to find that the screen that I put back into place when I crawled out of the window had been pushed out by one of the cats. There were cats everywhere! Desperately, I tried to herd them all back into the house, but most of these cats had been left alone for so long (because, realistically, how much time in the day did any of us have to give all three hundred of the cats in that house? Answer: not very much.) that they just ran when I tried herding them. I tried everything: running at them, my face contorted like a Halloween mask to try scaring them back toward the window, crouching down coaxing them with a pathetic “here, kittykittykitty”, running up behind them and grabbing them (not a smart idea, if you ever want to try it. All that you will get from that is some deep scratches). I managed to get all back into the house except one, but didn’t give it much thought. Honestly, I thought that the cats were much better out in the wild then they would be in the house where they were literally humping to death. So, without another thought, I went to the beach with my boyfriend, staying out all night. The next day, things were going dandy- well, as dandy as things could go in that house, which generally meant that my ass wasn’t burning from the PVC pipe, that I wasn’t in the kitchen doing exercises that could put an Army recruit to shame, and my eardrums weren’t ringing from being screamed at for five hours straight. That is (insert dramatic music here) It happened. Lesley was leaving to go downtown to start setting up the welcome-back ceremony that would be held the next morning. The good thing was that she was leaving for a few hours, so I could take a nap since I’d been out until about five that morning and had gotten up at eight. The bad thing was that she slammed back into the house all of five minutes after she had left, demanding why there was a cat sitting on the front porch. My answer? “Well, maybe he needed some fresh air.” For some reason, she didn’t find it that funny, and had me running up and down through the drainage ditch that ran behind the house for at least three hours looking for where the cat had gone. As if that didn’t make me look enough like a psycho, she had me out there after dark with a flashlight, walking the ditch and calling the cat’s name.
Sex and other forbidden things
When I was growing up with my father and stepmother, herefore referred to as Sicko and Nutcase, were….how do I put this nicely? Psycho. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or normal clothes like any teenager would wear (like tank tops and low-rise jeans. Or even heels that didn’t look like they came from some little old ladies garage sale for that matter) or have a cell phone that could call someone that wasn’t programmed into one of its three major buttons until I was almost eighteen. And I didn’t have a driver’s permit until I was almost twenty. It was like being a Amish, without that grace period at sixteen when you can go off and do whatever you wanted to with no repricusions. When I turned thirteen, my brother offered to buy me condoms. For the next five years it was a constant refrain “Layne, do you need condoms? Do you need condoms? I’ll get them for you if you want me to! Do you need condoms?” well, seeing as how I never had the time or the freedom to kiss a boy, let alone sleep with one, I didn’t need them until I was almost eighteen. Then, after I had been sleeping with the guy for about two weeks and my father had found the condoms in my room and taken them away from me (like that’s really going to keep me from having sex? That would just keep me from having protected sex) , I asked my brother for them. His response? “Who’s the motherfucker? I’ll kill him!”
The one bad thing about dating in a small school is that it’s so incestuous. Everyone that you would ever date has dated or kissed or fooled around with someone who you know, go to class with, or are friends with. You look at that girl who is in your Gym class much differently when you know that she got caught giving your boyfriend a blowjob one day- no matter the fact that it was in seventh grade. My friends and I , luckily, generally didn’t have the same taste. My friend Amanda and I were the only ones that really liked the same kind of guys: scruffy rocker guys who had some brains to them. Unfortunately, that was all that it took.
At John and Lesley’s house, there was no such thing as “dating”. My brother, as he did many other things as well, screwed that up for me- and people say that God has no sense of humor? He made my brother the oldest and me the youngest- and, come to think about it, screwed it up for himself as well. He didn’t date officially until he was fifteen or sixteen. I can remember him shimmying out of the window in his room down to the top of the tool chest that was maybe six or seven feet under his window. Tom Cruise look out, we’ve got someone who is actually more nuts than you are- scary, right? For the entire time that I was in high school, I didn’t date, or if I did, I waited until I was with my mom for the weekend and then went out on dates. In college, though, it was a completely different story.
‘Twas three nights after Christmas and all through the house, you could hear John’s muscles and bones creaking and threatening to break as he did his nightly workouts, and Lesley’s screeching (the woman had one volume: loud. There was no happy or sad, no angry or excited. There was just loud.) After having my best friend Donald come over to the house with alcohol (and don’t say that Mike’s Hard Lemonade is a bitch drink. It got me through many a rough night at that house. And it made everything really funny after a few.) and a copy of The Godfather, I was ready to get out of the house. So I came up with a brilliant plan: I would climb out of one of the windows that were on the front of the house. Now, this sounds like a really stupid idea until you realize the layout of the house and the insanity that was my parents. Since John and Lesley’s room had been overrun by cats many, many years before, they had taken to sleeping in the kitchen on two glorified park benches that they covered with a comforter and covers. (As if this would make the reality that much better.) So, just walking out of the back door was out. In addition to this, since cat’s urine is as corrosive as acid, and since the cat’s had pissed on everything in the entire damn house for at least ten or eleven years before this, the front door would not open. Or close. No, I’m not shitting you. I’m dead serious. So, the front door was out. Now most kids would just crawl out of their bedroom windows, but I’m five foot three, the windows were about eight feet above the ground without anything to grab onto on the way down. No, I’m not that stupid. So about all that was left was to just crawl out of the front window. Let me just tell you that Donald was a gentleman: he held open the window for me to both crawl out and in. I’ll also tell you that it takes a man who really loves you to help you do that at least half a dozen times because, no matter how much you love the girl, that is NOT a flattering angle. And it's already hard enough to do that, but I was wearing three inch heels. Can you say flexible? (Even though, that might have come in handy when I decided that I wanted to be a hooker and had to spin around that pole in those six inch heels; I was just three inches away from that!)
Don’t get me wrong, I probably had more guys that I dated in college than in most of high school. And, no, it wasn’t just because I would actually sleep with them in college. The only problem was that I would sneak them into the house (before I learned the joys of sneaking out of the house) which looked like a disaster area by this time. Most of them, since John and Lesley slept in the kitchen, ended up jumping off of the roof that lead from the front of the house to a huge oak in the front yard. (And you wonder the things that boys will do for a piece of ass? Put that at the top of the list as probably one of the stupider things that they would do.) One time, John came home while my current boyfriend, Donald was in the house and stormed upstairs, demanding that I give him back my phone (yes, you heard right, he demanded that I give him my phone.) Donald hid in the closet, staring at the door while my father tore my room apart, miraculously not opening the closet door. And, might I say, god bless the nerdy boys that are so hopelessly devoted that they will sit in their girlfriend’s closet for three hours while her police officer father tears up her room just outside of the door.
Of course, if the guys didn’t jump out of the window, the fun was always trying to get them out of the house. But, by the time that I left, I had a system in place that was foolproof (my proof of this? The fact that I didn’t ever get caught sneaking out or sneaking boys into the house until I was in my second year of college when my boyfriend was a total idiot and my father was on crack and up at all hours of the night.) I would keep them in my room, which was upstairs with the door that I kept locked if I was inside of it, until I heard John and Lesley go into their room to get ready. Then it was an odd tango down the stairs, keeping out of the way of all of the cats, and an even odder one through the living room where all of the furniture from both the living and dining rooms were piled. After that, generally it was cake.
The one bad thing about dating in a small school is that it’s so incestuous. Everyone that you would ever date has dated or kissed or fooled around with someone who you know, go to class with, or are friends with. You look at that girl who is in your Gym class much differently when you know that she got caught giving your boyfriend a blowjob one day- no matter the fact that it was in seventh grade. My friends and I , luckily, generally didn’t have the same taste. My friend Amanda and I were the only ones that really liked the same kind of guys: scruffy rocker guys who had some brains to them. Unfortunately, that was all that it took.
At John and Lesley’s house, there was no such thing as “dating”. My brother, as he did many other things as well, screwed that up for me- and people say that God has no sense of humor? He made my brother the oldest and me the youngest- and, come to think about it, screwed it up for himself as well. He didn’t date officially until he was fifteen or sixteen. I can remember him shimmying out of the window in his room down to the top of the tool chest that was maybe six or seven feet under his window. Tom Cruise look out, we’ve got someone who is actually more nuts than you are- scary, right? For the entire time that I was in high school, I didn’t date, or if I did, I waited until I was with my mom for the weekend and then went out on dates. In college, though, it was a completely different story.
‘Twas three nights after Christmas and all through the house, you could hear John’s muscles and bones creaking and threatening to break as he did his nightly workouts, and Lesley’s screeching (the woman had one volume: loud. There was no happy or sad, no angry or excited. There was just loud.) After having my best friend Donald come over to the house with alcohol (and don’t say that Mike’s Hard Lemonade is a bitch drink. It got me through many a rough night at that house. And it made everything really funny after a few.) and a copy of The Godfather, I was ready to get out of the house. So I came up with a brilliant plan: I would climb out of one of the windows that were on the front of the house. Now, this sounds like a really stupid idea until you realize the layout of the house and the insanity that was my parents. Since John and Lesley’s room had been overrun by cats many, many years before, they had taken to sleeping in the kitchen on two glorified park benches that they covered with a comforter and covers. (As if this would make the reality that much better.) So, just walking out of the back door was out. In addition to this, since cat’s urine is as corrosive as acid, and since the cat’s had pissed on everything in the entire damn house for at least ten or eleven years before this, the front door would not open. Or close. No, I’m not shitting you. I’m dead serious. So, the front door was out. Now most kids would just crawl out of their bedroom windows, but I’m five foot three, the windows were about eight feet above the ground without anything to grab onto on the way down. No, I’m not that stupid. So about all that was left was to just crawl out of the front window. Let me just tell you that Donald was a gentleman: he held open the window for me to both crawl out and in. I’ll also tell you that it takes a man who really loves you to help you do that at least half a dozen times because, no matter how much you love the girl, that is NOT a flattering angle. And it's already hard enough to do that, but I was wearing three inch heels. Can you say flexible? (Even though, that might have come in handy when I decided that I wanted to be a hooker and had to spin around that pole in those six inch heels; I was just three inches away from that!)
Don’t get me wrong, I probably had more guys that I dated in college than in most of high school. And, no, it wasn’t just because I would actually sleep with them in college. The only problem was that I would sneak them into the house (before I learned the joys of sneaking out of the house) which looked like a disaster area by this time. Most of them, since John and Lesley slept in the kitchen, ended up jumping off of the roof that lead from the front of the house to a huge oak in the front yard. (And you wonder the things that boys will do for a piece of ass? Put that at the top of the list as probably one of the stupider things that they would do.) One time, John came home while my current boyfriend, Donald was in the house and stormed upstairs, demanding that I give him back my phone (yes, you heard right, he demanded that I give him my phone.) Donald hid in the closet, staring at the door while my father tore my room apart, miraculously not opening the closet door. And, might I say, god bless the nerdy boys that are so hopelessly devoted that they will sit in their girlfriend’s closet for three hours while her police officer father tears up her room just outside of the door.
Of course, if the guys didn’t jump out of the window, the fun was always trying to get them out of the house. But, by the time that I left, I had a system in place that was foolproof (my proof of this? The fact that I didn’t ever get caught sneaking out or sneaking boys into the house until I was in my second year of college when my boyfriend was a total idiot and my father was on crack and up at all hours of the night.) I would keep them in my room, which was upstairs with the door that I kept locked if I was inside of it, until I heard John and Lesley go into their room to get ready. Then it was an odd tango down the stairs, keeping out of the way of all of the cats, and an even odder one through the living room where all of the furniture from both the living and dining rooms were piled. After that, generally it was cake.
"I don't want to come out of the closet, I'll stay in here with my Member's Only jacket"
Now, my family has got to be one of the strangest families on the planet. Lots of people say this, but not many people truly understand the insanity that is my family. When I was a kid, I knew that something was weird. Most parents take their kids to Disney World to meet Mickey Mouse- my mother took me to a car show to meet a famous porn star. Ron Jeremy, to be exact. My brother is a bipolar alcoholic who lives in the middle of voodoo land, my mother is an overweight southern woman who studies “sex and old people” and who, in my fondest memories, gardened in her string bikini. My father is a raging homosexual who refuses to come out of the closet and gets off beating his children. My stepmother is an OCD hoarder with a house full of cats. And my stepdad? Well, he’s probably one of the most sane in the entire family- which, is really saying something.
My mom told me the other day that my grandfather, an older Southern gentleman who runs his own glass company and refuses to retire because then he would actually have to give the company over to his pot head son, told her that he only asks for three things from his family: beauty, brains, and thinness. My mom fits into one of those categories. My grandmother only fit into two when she was younger, and let me tell you it wasn’t the first two. But, of course, this runs in that side of the family. As my grandfather said one day “Riley Anne [my oldest cousin on that side, who is three years younger than I am] is not concerned with academics.” When they went to New Orleans, she bought postcards to send to the family. She wrote them, that wasn’t the problem, the problem was that she took the postcard and wrote all the way across the back.
My father. Oh, my father. What could I say about him? Well, how many people have ever seen videos of Freddie Mercury and screamed “GAY!!!!!” at the TV set? That would describe my father very well. When I was younger, I thought that it was funny that he got a leather jacket and leather chaps when he bought a motorcycle. I even thought that it was hilarious when he did the YMCA dance in the middle of a very crowded Cracker Barrel. Now, the thought of it both makes me cringe and makes me wonder how in the hell I didn’t see that he was a raging homosexual before. The man played the bagpipes for God sake! What else could be more gay? You’re blowing into a penis while you pump something, wearing a skirt and a big fluffy hat! He was also obsessed with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. I remember that one of his favorite shows when I was growing up was Batman. Again, two men, who live alone in their mansion, and run around wearing spandex. It’s like pro-wrestling- you don’t wonder if they are gay, you just wonder when they’re coming out of the closet. Another of his favorites was the TV show iCarly, which, in case you’re a normal adult and have never heard of it- is a TV show about a preteen girl who lives in an apartment building with her older brother and two best friends, who she records a web show with. The two girls are skinny and run around in short shorts and short dresses with what are commonly referred to as hooker boots.
My brother is a true Irish man: he loves his alcohol but can’t handle it for shit. There are only three types of drunks in the world: there are the happy drunks (who keep falling all over everybody in the bar and slurring out “I love you, mans”); the funny drunks (who end up giving you good pictures to show them while they’re hung over the next morning and hold over their head for blackmail); then there are the mean drunks (the ones that sit at the kitchen table with a phonebook and a bottle of whisky and call up every person- both real and imagined- that has ever done them wrong.) My brother was the latter two. When he gets drunk, he gets crazy and belligerent and you can be assured of three things that will happen before the night is over: he will get somebody pissed off; he will be picked up by the cops; and he will either have a new piercing or a new tattoo. He’s one of the only people I’ve ever heard of that should have been going to AA meetings at five. When he was four he started drinking, walking around the empty tables at a Mardi Gras ball to drink out of everybody’s glasses. He’s also one of those raging gays that will never come out of the closet. For goodness’ sake, the boy is still in denial that Elton John and George Michaels are gay, he’s staying tucked in the closet with his day-glo tights and wigs, his strap-ons and hooker heels for the rest of his life. (In fact, my mother and I called him on National Coming Out Day and asked him if he had anything to share with us. He answered, and I quote “No, I like it here in the closet with my dayglo tights and Member’s Only jacket.) And he’ll be happy there since it’s a big closet, and there’s enough room for all of his friends who refuse to admit that they’re gay as well, to sit around, get high and experiment, then tell themselves the next day that it was just something that they did while they were stoned out of their minds and didn’t have any control over themselves.
My mom told me the other day that my grandfather, an older Southern gentleman who runs his own glass company and refuses to retire because then he would actually have to give the company over to his pot head son, told her that he only asks for three things from his family: beauty, brains, and thinness. My mom fits into one of those categories. My grandmother only fit into two when she was younger, and let me tell you it wasn’t the first two. But, of course, this runs in that side of the family. As my grandfather said one day “Riley Anne [my oldest cousin on that side, who is three years younger than I am] is not concerned with academics.” When they went to New Orleans, she bought postcards to send to the family. She wrote them, that wasn’t the problem, the problem was that she took the postcard and wrote all the way across the back.
My father. Oh, my father. What could I say about him? Well, how many people have ever seen videos of Freddie Mercury and screamed “GAY!!!!!” at the TV set? That would describe my father very well. When I was younger, I thought that it was funny that he got a leather jacket and leather chaps when he bought a motorcycle. I even thought that it was hilarious when he did the YMCA dance in the middle of a very crowded Cracker Barrel. Now, the thought of it both makes me cringe and makes me wonder how in the hell I didn’t see that he was a raging homosexual before. The man played the bagpipes for God sake! What else could be more gay? You’re blowing into a penis while you pump something, wearing a skirt and a big fluffy hat! He was also obsessed with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. I remember that one of his favorite shows when I was growing up was Batman. Again, two men, who live alone in their mansion, and run around wearing spandex. It’s like pro-wrestling- you don’t wonder if they are gay, you just wonder when they’re coming out of the closet. Another of his favorites was the TV show iCarly, which, in case you’re a normal adult and have never heard of it- is a TV show about a preteen girl who lives in an apartment building with her older brother and two best friends, who she records a web show with. The two girls are skinny and run around in short shorts and short dresses with what are commonly referred to as hooker boots.
My brother is a true Irish man: he loves his alcohol but can’t handle it for shit. There are only three types of drunks in the world: there are the happy drunks (who keep falling all over everybody in the bar and slurring out “I love you, mans”); the funny drunks (who end up giving you good pictures to show them while they’re hung over the next morning and hold over their head for blackmail); then there are the mean drunks (the ones that sit at the kitchen table with a phonebook and a bottle of whisky and call up every person- both real and imagined- that has ever done them wrong.) My brother was the latter two. When he gets drunk, he gets crazy and belligerent and you can be assured of three things that will happen before the night is over: he will get somebody pissed off; he will be picked up by the cops; and he will either have a new piercing or a new tattoo. He’s one of the only people I’ve ever heard of that should have been going to AA meetings at five. When he was four he started drinking, walking around the empty tables at a Mardi Gras ball to drink out of everybody’s glasses. He’s also one of those raging gays that will never come out of the closet. For goodness’ sake, the boy is still in denial that Elton John and George Michaels are gay, he’s staying tucked in the closet with his day-glo tights and wigs, his strap-ons and hooker heels for the rest of his life. (In fact, my mother and I called him on National Coming Out Day and asked him if he had anything to share with us. He answered, and I quote “No, I like it here in the closet with my dayglo tights and Member’s Only jacket.) And he’ll be happy there since it’s a big closet, and there’s enough room for all of his friends who refuse to admit that they’re gay as well, to sit around, get high and experiment, then tell themselves the next day that it was just something that they did while they were stoned out of their minds and didn’t have any control over themselves.
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