The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club

by Laurie Notaro

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Wrap & Roll and the Disappearance of Nikki’s Keys

  The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club and the Art of Being Dumb

  Ashes to Ashes, Bones to Dust, My Mother Always Said Underwear Is a Must

  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  Suckers

  It Smells Like Doody Here

  A Morsel from the Garden of Eden

  The Useless Black Bra and the Stinkin’-Drunk Twelve-Step Program

  The Little Guy

  Run from the Border

  The Night They Drove Ole Laurie Down

  This Is a Public Service Announcement

  Going Courtin’

  The Speech

  Moral Sex

  Men Are Stupid and I Rock! (Ode to Dorothy Parker)

  Survival of the Fittest—Well, Kind Of

  Extreme Clean Sports

  Amy’s Mom, the Fairy, and the Hedge Clippers

  Make Me Laugh, Clown

  How I Can Relive the Horror of High School for $103

  In Bell-Bottoms and Boots, You Can Go Home Again

  Open Wide

  Dead in a Box

  How Much It Costs for a Room of One’s Own

  For the Birds

  Waiting for the Bug Man

  I Have a Note from My Mom . . .

  Good Food

  On the Road

  Are You the Petersens?

  Revenge of the Bra Girl

  A Hole in One

  Waking Angela Up

  Angela’s Revenge

  All Smut and Perverts

  The Candy Apple Freak Show

  More Bread, Please

  Nothing but a Smile

  Special Thanks

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  To Pop Pop, Douglas Hopkins, and Dick Vonier,

  the best heroes a girl could have,

  and Corbett Upton, who only seldomly complains

  about playing the straight man

  Wrap & Roll

  and the Disappearance

  of Nikki’s Keys

  Nikki’s keys were gone.

  Just gone.

  “I don’t understand,” I said emphatically. “You had them yesterday.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she replied. “But somewhere in between being drunk yesterday and sober today, my keys vanished.”

  “And you’re going to make me help you look for them, I suppose.”

  “No, you’re going to gladly help me look for them because you’re my friend and you also owe me forty dollars,” she said.

  Let me explain right now that Nikki does not do things in a small way, she never has. Take a simple thing like losing your keys. The last time she lost them, not only couldn’t she drive anywhere, but she had also locked every door in the car for the first time in her life. This created a problem because she had left her roommate’s dry cleaning in the trunk. And that created a problem because the dry cleaning consisted of every military uniform that he possessed. And that created another problem because he needed to be at the airport in two hours, since he was flying out on an Army mission overseas. And that created yet another problem, because he couldn’t show up in civilian clothes at the Army place because he said they would immediately shoot him in the head or give him a dishonorable discharge, because the Army doesn’t fire people, they just kill them or ruin their lives forever. And we still had yet another problem on our hands, and that was that Nikki was the only ride he had to the airport.

  So, because Nikki lost her keys, someone was either going to die or spend the rest of his ruined life working at the only job he could get, which would probably be working at a record store or managing a record store. But the story actually didn’t turn out too sad. After spending seventy-five dollars on a locksmith to get into the trunk, we found Nikki’s keys, leisurely placed right smack on top of an arsenal of khaki-green uniforms.

  And if the reconnaissance of Nikki’s keys had a seventy-five-dollar price tag, there was a terrifying chance my forty-dollar loan might get called in, which was bad. Especially since it was most likely being deposited at that very moment in the bank account of our favorite bar.

  “Please don’t tell me that you were messing around with the trunk this time, or that your kid is sitting in the backseat with all of the windows rolled up, or that you left something of mine, like my CDs, on the front seat,” I said as beads of worry were rolling down my forehead.

  “I knew you’d help me! I just have to change into something yucky so I don’t get dirty,” she said before bounding up the stairs.

  Whatever, I thought as I shook my head, and figured I’d get a head start by rifling through the cushions of the couch. I found a lighter right away, which I pocketed. Then I found thirty-seven cents, which I also pocketed, and a hairy LifeSaver that I left for the next couch-cushion bandit.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” she said as she came down the stairs, wearing the T-shirt with my caricature and name on the back that was made up during my days at Arizona State University’s State Press Magazine.

  “I thought you said you were going to put on something ‘yucky,’ ” I said immediately. “That’s my shirt. It’s got my face on it. And my name. That’s yucky? To you that’s yucky?”

  “I didn’t mean yucky yucky, just, you know, yucky,” she answered.

  “So I’m not yucky yucky, I’m just plain yucky?” I snapped. “What would make it yucky yucky? Maybe if I had signed it or given it to you as a gift?”

  “Yeah. No, I mean, it’s my favorite shirt. I love this shirt,” she explained.

  “Well, I’m just sorry that it’s so ‘yucky.’ I should have given you the ones we made out of the silk from those endangered worms.”

  She smiled. “Okay, I have to get my stick, and then we can go and look for my keys,” she said.

  “What do we need a stick for?” I asked. “We can break the car window with a rock.”

  “No, the stick isn’t to break the window, it’s to poke at the trash.”

  “We’re poking at trash? Why are we poking at trash?” I asked.

  “I think my keys are in the bottom of the trash bag that I took out yesterday.”

  “Let me get this straight: So you’re wearing my shirt while we dig through other people’s waste?”

  “Right. See, if I thought it was yucky yucky, I’d wear it if the toilet overflowed.”

  Nikki found the stick—actually a broom handle—and we journeyed to the Dumpster, which is about as big as my house and smells worse. We climbed up the side and looked down into it, down into all of Nikki’s trash as well as the trash of forty of her neighbors. That day, it was 114 degrees out, and the stench of the garbage was visible in stink lines that waved before my face in wiggly patterns, like in cartoons. Nikki started stabbing the trash with the stick, trying to find her own bag that was conveniently located at the very bottom.

  Things were flying and falling everywhere—kitty litter and kitty turds, rotten vegetables and old food, used Kleenexes, and lots of dead things. Everybody in Nikki’s complex is on birth control pills, I found out. All of a sudden, a bag Nikki had poked broke open, and then this little white thing rolled right in the center of my visual zone.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAHH!” I screamed.

  “What?” Nikki asked as she started to turn toward me.

  “Don’t look!” I said as I blocked her view, knowing that she has a weak stomach and gets queasy when I talk about picking noses or when I mention anything whatsoever about poo, so I knew she would get sick if she saw what I saw, which was a white, naked, and, at some point, used tampon applic
ator.

  Jesus, I thought to whomever it had belonged to, didn’t your mother ever teach you about those things? I mean, Christ Almighty, as soon as my mother suspected that my ovaries were beginning to percolate, she sat me down in the only private room in the house—which was her bathroom—broke out a roll of toilet paper and a maxi pad, and taught me how to wrap & roll. Three wraps over the middle and three wraps over the side. Roll & wrap, it’s the polite thing. Even I could figure it out at the age of eight. And, for added protection, you could stick God’s little bundle in a plastic baggie, so when the dogs got loose in the house they wouldn’t find it and tear it apart, as our dogs, Ginger and Brandy, loved to do. Immediately following the hands-on demonstration, I got the “Not-So-Fresh-Feeling” speech, after which I ran to my room and sobbed for an hour because Barbie didn’t have an outfit that came with a tiny maxi pad, tampon, or Summer’s Eve.

  Well, we found Nikki’s trash bag, but, of course, the keys weren’t in it. In fact, as of this moment, Nikki lost her keys three weeks ago, and we still haven’t found them. Who knows where they are?

  Maybe, somehow, in the weird way that things work in Nikki’s World, maybe someone wrapped Nikki’s keys three times over the middle and three times over the side, and some hungry dog just ate them.

  The Idiot Girls’

  Action-Adventure Club

  and the Art of

  Being Dumb

  My friend Joel made an interesting point the other night.

  “I’m happy that I’m one of the Dumb Ones,” he informed me. “I like it better that way.”

  “Really?” I said. “Why?”

  “Well, because there’s stuff that I know about, and there’s more stuff that I don’t know about, which makes it less stuff that I have to worry about in the Big Picture,” he answered.

  He went on to explain further that his brother, Jeff, and our other friend, Jamie, were in the Smart Group, since they graduated from college and make more than $4.25 an hour. He also mentioned that from simply being around Jamie and Jeff, he could pick up pieces of intelligent information, which he calls “stories”—as in, say, who the vice president of the United States is or how to successfully pass a drug test. He, in turn, tells these stories to the people that he works with, who are also in the Dumb Group, and this makes Joel look Smart.

  “I see,” I replied. “So this makes you seem Smart, but you can still live an easier life as a Dumb One.”

  “Yep,” he said. “See? I’m glad I was in retarded math in high school.”

  Then came the Question.

  “Okay,” I started. “If Jeff and Jamie are in the Smart Group, and you’re in the Dumb Group, which one am I in?”

  “Well,” he sighed, “you’re in the Dumb Group, too.”

  “Oh” was all I could say.

  “But only because you’re too cool to be in the Smart Group,” he quickly added.

  It was a nice save, I’ll admit, but he was right. I had a feeling that I was in the Dumb Group, but I was never sure. And here I had it, on the opinion of an expert Dumb Person.

  I should have known that, however, since I am a bona fide member of the Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, which includes me and my friend Nikki and many of our other friends, including Krysti and Kate, all of whom are office-holding members.

  I, of course, am the current elected president.

  Hopefully, you’ll recall that Nikki lost the keys to her car, and we couldn’t find them. In fact, we never found them. Her car is still parked outside her apartment in the same forty-five-degree angle in which she parked it five weeks ago, only now it has two flat tires and has become a homestead of sorts to a band of feral cats and a crow.

  Unfortunately for me, the story does not end there. Two weeks ago, while standing at her front door with a pint of whiskey surging through my bloodstream, she informed me that she had now lost her house key. It was okay, though, she slurred; we could still get in the house because her roommate had a crowbar in the trunk of her car, the keys to which Nikki hadn’t lost yet.

  I found out that night that being smashed does other things to me besides making me believe that I am thin, attractive, and have a Motown-quality singing voice. It also makes me limber as a wrinkled prostitute, because I scaled a six-foot wall to Nikki’s backyard in seconds flat, though the next day I woke up with so many bruises on my inner thighs that I thought I’d wrestled a gynecologist.

  Booze can also give you superhuman strength, too, and I saw that with my own eyes, as Nikki took the crowbar to the back door. With one pry, the door flew open, and part of the metal door jamb rocketed fifteen feet up into the night air. We were in the house. We smiled. We thought we were Smart.

  Then we realized that the frame was so badly bent and so many pieces of it were missing that the door was rendered unlockable. Now we realized that we were Dumb, especially when our friend Mike came over and laughed at us because we had tried to disillusion potential burglars by making our own lock with a piece of rope and some tape and it fell off the door when he touched it.

  I’ve been Dumb tons of other times, too, like when I tried to spite the postman by leaving all of the junk mail in the mailbox because I was just sick and tired of throwing it away. I left it there for four weeks until he finally took it back, and I had won. I was Smart. Then he quit delivering mail to me and left me a nasty note declaring my house a vacant residence. Then I was Dumb.

  I was at the bar and spotted an incredibly cute boy with long, blond hair across the room. I smiled, and he smiled back. I started acting cute, sucking in my stomach and sending him alluring looks, and he kept staring at me. I was being Smart. I moved to the middle of the room, kept on acting cute, messing with my hair and stuff, and moved in even closer. I was pretty close—like, on the bar stool next to him—when I realized that he knew exactly all the girl things I was doing, because “he” was a girl himself. And she was prettier than me. Then I was Dumb.

  I was Very Dumb when my ex-boyfriend, the Super Demon Brad, broke up with me. He didn’t actually break up with me, however; the Super Demon Brad simply intended to move out of the state with his gauze-wearing, cornrow-haired ex-girlfriend, Dog Girl, without telling me. I found this out when I went to his apartment one day, and he was packing all of his stuff into a piece-of-shit hippie van with purple curtains. Purple curtains! It was then that he told me that he felt his true direction in life was to follow the Grateful Dead. Dog Girl had bought a van, sewed up the curtains, and he was leaving. And he did.

  I was Dumb when I didn’t fish out the fork I had in my purse, and I was Dumber when I didn’t stab him and her in the throat with it. Instead, I thought I was being Smart by turning around and walking away without saying a word, though he kept on insisting that I should hit him. If I had the chance now, I’d rip his teeth out with my bare hands and weave them into Dog Girl’s braids. Instead, I hopped on a plane the next morning to Portland, Oregon, where my runner-up boyfriend picked me up at the airport.

  Anyway, because I am Dumb, and an Idiot Girl, not only do I have memories of the stupid things I’ve done, I also have pictures, since that’s what happens when a Dumb One gets control of a camera. During a recent Idiot Girls Adventure in which myself, Nikki, and Idiot Girls’ Club treasurer, Kate, drove up north to Flagstaff to check out the Nude Olympics, I brought along a camera to pictorialize the fine event. When we finally got up north, however, we couldn’t find any naked people, even though there were apparently hundreds of them strutting around.

  We took a wrong turn and got lost on some backwoods dirt road that we kept driving on until someone said they had to pee. We stopped the car, found a couple of used tissues, and headed off into the woods. That was when one of the other two Idiots decided that this was something we needed photographs of, and we weren’t even drunk. Now, thanks to the trigger-happy finger of one very avid photographer, there are several items of evidence in existence that show me in various stages of talking to a man about a horse, pulling down
my pants, wiping—and then hurriedly pulling up my pants when I realized that someone was watching me. It’s okay though, when I got the pictures I really didn’t mind. Whoever took the pictures was too Dumb to realize that they were too far away, and all you can really see is something that looks like Bigfoot playing with his private parts, even though Bigfoot has been Smart enough not to let someone snap an image of him peeing in the dirt.

  All I could do was laugh. After all, that’s what the Dumb Ones do best.

  Ashes to Ashes,

  Bones to Dust,

  My Mother Always Said

  Underwear Is a Must

  The box sat on the kitchen counter, wrapped in green foil Christmas paper. I knew it was for me. I was at my mother’s house and no one in my family was speaking to me because I showed up an hour late for my birthday dinner and they were mad since they knew it was the one time that they couldn’t start eating without me.

  I shook the box and instantly knew what it was, although I hoped I was wrong. It was related to my “condition.”

  I’m too young and not mature enough to have this condition, I’ll tell you that right now. I’m not ready for it, it has sharply bitten a chunk out of my social life, and it’s going to stick around for the rest of my natural existence, I’m sure. For those of you do-gooder, nosy, can’t-mind-your-own-damn-business types who are already flipping through the white pages searching for the telephone number to Child Protective Services, rest easy. I’m not pregnant. I’m just crippled by agonizing back pain.

  My spine is slowly, though not quietly, turning to dust, and I can’t believe it. I always figured it would be my lungs that jumped ship first, followed a foot behind by my liver. It made me happy to picture myself in an iron lung or an oxygen tent, turning up my artificial voice box to full blast and screaming at the nurses to get me a cigarette, goddamnit! My dreams have burst like an artery in my head—where is the justice in this? I just never pictured myself zooming around the aisles of Fry’s liquor warehouse in a motorized Rascal with a metal basket on the front, asking a clerk to toss me the jumbo Tampax variety pack because it’s on the top shelf and I can’t reach it. And can you get a DUI while operating an electric wheelchair?