by Shane Dawson
Me: So are you nervous to make out?!?!!!! [nervous laugh]
Lisa: Not really.
Me: Me neither!!!! [nervous laugh that ends with a small amount of pee]
It was off to a great start. So as we made our way to the front yard where we were going to kiss, I started to panic. Not only was this going to be my first kiss but it was going to be my first kiss on camera! What if I bit her? Or puked? Or swallowed her tongue? Hey, it could happen. The director yelled “action” and the time had come. She looked up at me and I looked down at her and she went in for the kiss. All I remember is thinking how much her lips felt like bologna with mayonnaise smeared on it. And that was a good thing. CUT!
Me: That wasn’t so bad!
Lisa: Thanks?
Me: How did it feel?
Lisa: What?
Me: Like . . . did it feel good?
Lisa: You wear a lot of ChapStick.
SCORE! This was going great. We did a few more takes and then it was over. Afterward I went back home and my Canadian roommate was sitting on the bed waiting for me with a remote in one hand and a can of low-fat Reddi-wip in the other. She was ready to please me. As I sat on the bed I looked at her and initiated the most uncomfortable conversation imaginable.
Me: We should kiss.
Canadian: Ok!
Me: Cool. Let’s do it.
Canadian: Great.
We looked at each other in silence for about thirty seconds.
Canadian: So . . . when are you going to do it?
Me: I have to do it??
Canadian: You’re the guy.
Me: But today Lisa did it!
Canadian: Wait . . . how many girls have you kissed?
Me: Um . . . are we counting relatives?
Canadian: Did you have your first kiss today?
Me: Maybe.
Canadian: Wow . . . that’s so sweet. And a little sad. But mostly sweet.
Me: Want to be my second?
Canadian: Sure! Thank God I’m not your first. That’s too much pressure.
Me: What do you mean?
Canadian: You never forget your first kiss. You always think about what your life would have been like if you had stayed with them. It’s a lot of pressure. It’s like a first crush. You never get over it.
It was at that moment I started overthinking everything I had experienced that day. Was Lisa the one? Should I have whisked her off her feet and made her my wife? Should I run to her house and kiss her in the rain? Then I remembered that she was an actress who had no interest in dating a twenty-one-year-old virgin and I was sitting on a bed with a willing Canadian with a season’s worth of Hoarders in her hand. So I went in for the kiss. And I stopped right before I hit her lips.
Canadian: What?
Me: I don’t know what to do.
Canadian: Kiss me.
Me: I know that! I just mean like . . . how?
Canadian: Put your lips up against mine. Not that hard.
I reached into my pocket and applied lots of ChapStick.
Canadian: Rub that off.
Me: Huh?
Canadian: No girl wants the guy to have glossier lips than her. It’s creepy.
Thanks a lot, Seventeen magazine! I made my way back to her lips. And stopped again.
Me: Wait. Can I start somewhere else?
Canadian: We are DEFINITELY not there yet, dude.
Me: No, not that. I want to start far away and then make my way to your lips.
So I started kissing her hand and slowly made my way up her arm. I got to her shoulder and then went up her neck. As I made my way up to her face she was trembling. This was the most romantic thing you could ever dream of, except I had NO idea it was romantic. I was just trying to calm my nerves and delay the inevitable. I finally got to her lips, and we had a pretty long kiss. As I pulled away she looked at me like I was some player who knew exactly what I was doing. In reality I knew about as much as that can of low-fat Reddi-wip in her hand. I was just lucky I guess.
We ended up dating for the next year. It wasn’t the best relationship, but it was what we both needed at the time. We were both lonely and wanted someone to talk to. It was more of a friendship with some kissing thrown in. Kind of like the relationship I’d had with my grandma but more culturally acceptable. Our breakup broke the record for the most mutual parting of ways in history. Here’s the text-message conversation:
Me: Hey . . . should we break up?
Canadian: Ya probably.
Me: Ok.
Canadian: Did you watch Hoarders last night?
Me: Ya! I can’t believe that woman ate her dead dog thinking it was jerky.
Canadian: I know! Crazy!
Me: Well . . . goodbye I guess.
Canadian: Do we have to unfollow each other on Twitter? I’d rather still follow you. You have funny tweets.
Me: No way. I never unfollow anyone. That’s so tacky.
Canadian: Agreed.
And that was it. I still follow her on Twitter to this day and every once in a while we fave each other’s tweets. I usually only fave them if it’s something about Canada. The day after we broke up I got an email from Lisa asking if I wanted to hang out. It was super random and felt like a scene in a terrible romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl and Jon Hamm. Except Lisa’s not a notorious cunt, and I have a slightly-below-average-sized penis. We ended up going to dinner and having a really great talk about relationships and life in general. She had just gotten out of a long one and I had just gotten out of an . . . immature one? We talked for hours but this time I wasn’t just interested in her homeland, I was interested in her. I wanted to know all about her childhood, her family, her way of thinking about the world. It was like there was this gift in front of me and all I wanted to do was unwrap it and see what was inside. If it was as beautiful as the outside, there was no way I was going to regift it.
We stayed up till four a.m. It was one of the most magical nights I had ever had. It was even more magical than the night I watched Titanic three times in a row while cuddling with my mom.
Me: Well, I should probably go. You gotta get to bed.
Lisa: Ya . . . thanks for tonight. I needed this.
Me: Me too. Night.
I started to walk out the door and then I stopped myself. I wasn’t going to be the pussy I had been a year ago. I was a man, and I knew what I wanted. I turned around, took her in my arms, and kissed her passionately. Sparks flew and hearts exploded. As we pulled away she looked at me and smiled.
Lisa: You aren’t wearing as much ChapStick.
Me: I only put one coat on today.
Lisa: Thanks.
And to this day we are still kissing each other with the same amount of passion. It’s been more than three years, and I still feel like there’s more to unwrap. Every day I get a glimpse of what’s inside. I hope it never ends.
THE ORIGINAL CATFISH
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Becky “Bolt” Fulford has been drawing all her life, constantly studying other artists and trying different techniques. She left school on her sixteenth birthday and is always looking for work in creative fields. She grew up in Grand Bay, Alabama, and moved to Texas at the age of eleven. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @bolt_tothestage.
BING. New AOL Instant Messenger message. I ran over to my old Dell laptop and pried it open. This was 2002 and Dell was the shit, so no judgment. I opened up my AIM and there it was, a picture of a flaccid ninth-grade boy’s penis with the text “So baby, U like?” under it. I slammed my Dell shut and locked my bedroom door. What had I done?
Flashback to one week earlier. I had just started high school and very quickly realized that I wasn’t the cool kid. I wasn’t even the nerdy kid. I was the invisible kid. I can’t tell you the amount of times a group of students would literal
ly crash right through me in the hallway like they were an eighteen-wheeler truck and I was a bag of old McDonald’s someone threw out the window. You would think that being morbidly obese would make me easier to see, but it somehow acted as a cloak of invisibility. My blubber must have had some kind of magical power. If there had been a sad version of the X-Men I would have been Magneto and all the special-ed kids with superior upper-body strength would have been my students.
Me being undetectable to the human eye made it particularly difficult when our teacher would divide us into groups for class assignments. Usually I wasn’t even picked last; I was literally forgotten. I had a teacher ask me once if I was there to check on the air conditioner. So during the first week of school we had a project in social studies class. Our teacher wanted us to pick groups and form our own “societies.” After my teacher asked if I was the janitor and I told her I was fourteen, she had me join a group of surfer kids who had a collective IQ of ten and a collective STD score of everything. I tried to make conversation with one of them.
Me: So, you watch American Idol?
Surfer Kid: Aren’t you the cafeteria lady?
It was going great. I sank into my chair and prayed that there would be a natural disaster that would kill everyone in my school except for me. That didn’t happen, so I just stared at the clock until it was time to leave. That night I went home and decided to do a little research on my group mates to see how I could get along with them. Maybe we had similar interests? Maybe they were closet homosexuals with a fat fetish? It was worth looking into. I logged on to MySpace and began my hunt. My only friends at the time were Tom and Pauly Shore, so I was pretty sure we didn’t have any mutual friends. I went to each of their pages and stalked the shit out of it. During my investigation I began to realize something about these surfer kids that I had secretly suspected all along: they were horrible. Every picture they posted was of them shirtless and every comment they shared was a version of: “UR SO FUCKING HOT FUCK ME.” Clearly we had nothing in common. The only person who had ever wanted to fuck me was a homeless lady who used to stand outside of Ralphs and tell me I had a “sad face that she wanted to sit on.” I kept looking at their pages and started not only questioning how people could be so vapid but also questioning whether God exists. It was a really dark few hours.
The next day I went back to class and sat in my group once again, waiting for some kind of fatal natural disaster. I tried to strike up another conversation, and this time it lasted longer than ten seconds. Unfortunately it wasn’t a friendly chat about the weather. It was a tear-inducing indictment against childhood obesity. You know, typical fourteen-year-old banter.
Me: So, what did you guys do last night?
Surfer Kid 1: Got high with my uncle and tried to get his dog drunk.
Me: Fun. What about you?
Surfer Kid 2: Fucked some chick I met on AIM.
Me: You guys have sex?
They all looked at me with dumb in their eyes and emptiness in their heads.
Me: Oh. Cool. Sometimes I think about sex. Then I get scared and pray about it.
Surfer Kid 3: I went to the gym. Almost fucked a girl there but she was a dyke or something.
Me: You go to the gym? Are you allowed at the gym? Isn’t that for grown-ups and handicapped people?
Surfer Kid 3: Anybody can go to the gym.
Surfer Kid 1: Maybe you should.
The two other surfer kids let out a collective “oooooooooh.”
Me: I’m fat. I get it.
Surfer Kid 1: You’re like obese though. I saw an episode of Dr. Phil where he talked about how all the kids now are getting obese and they are going to die before graduation or some shit.
Surfer Kid 2: Damn, dog, those statistics are scary.
Me: Let’s go back to not talking. That was less traumatizing.
Surfer Kid 1: Then my mom said that fat people get fat because they are lazy and hate themselves. Also that they secretly want to die so they are killing themselves slowly with food.
Surfer Kid 3: Shit. That’s crazy. Fat people are sad. Is it bad that sometimes I don’t even consider fat people to be people? Like, I think of them as animals or robots or something. Know what I mean?
Me: I’m right here.
Surfer Kid 1: Do you want to die?
Me: At this moment, yes. More than anything in the world.
Surfer Kid 1: I don’t wanna sound like an asshole, bro, but you should stop being so fat. It’s sad and you are gonna make our school look bad. ’Cause Dr. Phil said that the fattest school in America is in California and they are making them all do extra homework and stuff to make up for it.
Me: That literally makes no sense.
Surfer Kid 1: Neither does your lifestyle.
The surfer group stared at me with hate in their eyes. I broke down and started crying like a little bitch. But can you blame me? They had basically just told me to kill myself and that I was a robot or something. I told the teacher I had an emergency and had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t question me. That’s one plus about being a fat kid in school. Nobody questions the necessity of a trip to the bathroom. They just assume your ass is in a constant state of explosion.
I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in the stall. I cried for a good ten minutes and then took a shit. There’s nothing more depressing than crying while you are smelling your own shit. It’s almost as depressing as eating sandwich rolls at a funeral reception. Whoever thought a funeral reception was a good idea needs to be shot. I sat on that toilet for a good thirty minutes trying to wrap my brain around what had just happened. How could those guys be such assholes? How could I have let myself show so much weakness and not stand up to them? Why is Dr. Phil talking about other people being fat? So many questions. Next, I did what any teenager does when faced with adversity: I planned my revenge.
That night I logged back on to MySpace. How could I use their interests against them? What did they like to do? Well, from our chat that day I’d discovered that they loved drugs, animal abuse, and hooking up with girls from AIM. Then it hit me like an eighteen-wheeler through a school hallway: I could pretend to be a girl on AIM and ruin their lives.
I didn’t have an AOL Instant Messenger account because the only people I talked to on a daily basis were my mom and my cat, so this technology was useless to me. So to get the plan rolling I had to sign up for AIM under a fake name and with a fake picture. I decided to go with Carol. I know. Carol kinda sounds like the name of an old drunk, but I always thought there was something sexy about it. Maybe because that homeless lady outside of Ralphs was named Carol. Anyways, my next step was to find a picture, so I went to Google Images and typed in ”high school girl whore slut.” Surprisingly this led to pages and pages of options. I decided to go with a simple girl with extremely large nipples. Classy and tasteful. I created her profile and started filling in all the blanks.
FAVORITE MOVIE: Fucking
FAVORITE BOOK: How to do fucking
FAVORITE SONG: Sing while you fuck me
FAVORITE ANIMAL: I fucked a dog once
FAVORITE QUOTE: “I fucked a dog once” —Carol
I was ready. The perfect girl . . . for these idiots. So I decided to start with Surfer Kid 1 since he was the guy who started the obesity debate. I went to his profile and saw his screen name was typed up in his bio, which read like an obituary for his brain.
ABOUT SURFER KID 1:
Hey, sup. I like hooka, hardcore rap, and getting head. I also like reading blogs about 9/11 conspiracies. Somethin aint right ya’ll. Buildings don’t just fall down like that. Hit me up on AIM: Ilikenipplerings
So I sent my first AIM message to Ilikenipplerings.
CAROLisWET: Hey.
Two minutes later, shit started going down.
Ilikenipplerings: Sup. Who dis?
CAROLisWET: Carol. I�
��m wet.
Ilikenipplerings: What?
CAROLisWET: I said, I’m wet.
Ilikenipplerings: Like . . . sweating?
For a guy who seemed to be all about vagina, he sure had no fucking idea how one worked.
CAROLisWET: You like boobs?
Ilikenipplerings: Ya.
CAROLisWET: Wanna see my boobs?
Ilikenipplerings: Really?
CAROLisWET: Mhmmm
Ilikenipplerings: Ya. Ok. Let me just make sure my mom’s not home.
Yikes. If Carol were real that would have really dried her up.
Ilikenipplerings: K. She’s not here. My little sister is but she’s in the other room watching TV.
CAROLisWET: Sounds hot.
Ilikenipplerings: Ya. I guess.
CAROLisWET: So, you wanna see my boobs?
Ilikenipplerings: Ya.
CAROLisWET: You ever had sex b4?
Ilikenipplerings: Ya. Like every day pretty much. One time I did it in a Wendy’s bathroom.
CAROLisWET: Hot. Did you eat a frostee afterwards?
Ilikenipplerings: I wanted to but I couldn’t afford that AND my bus ride.
CAROLisWET: I like a man who’s responsible with money.
Ilikenipplerings: Ya. I keep it all in a jar with my name on it. It’s pretty pimp.
CAROLisWET: How about you show me something first.
Ilikenipplerings: . . . . . . . . . . Huh?
Ok, I know what you’re thinking: this is disturbing. Trust me, I know. But I was a fat kid scorned and I was ready to GO THERE with no regrets. My plan was to get the most unflattering picture of this kid’s dick and print out hundreds of them and post them around school the next day. It was a genius plan. Except for the fact that I would get expelled for doing that and possibly go to prison for child porn, but I didn’t think that far ahead.
CAROLisWET: I want to see your thing.
Ilikenipplerings: My thing?
