“That’s right,” my mom said. Her newfound confidence was getting annoying.
“Well, maybe I don’t want to go. Maybe I’ll go live with Dad.”
“Okay, say hi to Lori for me.”
Shit. Mom is getting good.
Penny’s church was nothing like I had imagined. When we walked in, I began to wonder how all these people had the time to go shopping together. Every single person was dressed the same. Long skirts, button-up shirts, and the same color pants on the men. There was hair everywhere. Some wore it in buns, others let it drag on the floor. I figured they must all have pretty decent jobs if they were able to afford the shampoo it requires for the upkeep.
We filed into a pew and waited for things to start. I was already antsy—like I was alone in a foreign country and I didn’t speak the language. Things started off kind of normal. The preacher started talking, reading, talking. It was all par for the course. Just when I thought that it was going to be no big deal, things started to turn. The preacher asked people to come forward if they needed to be “saved” or if they wanted to renew their vow to God. Droves of people started making their way down the aisle. Suddenly they were crying, yelling, singing. Some people didn’t even make it to the front of the church. They just fell on their knees and started wailing. Their hands were in the air, reaching up to God. But they were mostly just flailing. My sister and I looked at each other in a mixture of horror, confusion, and humor. What is going on? I looked up to Penny thinking maybe she’d be ready to bail since clearly all of her church buddies had gone insane, but she just stared straight ahead and nodded. At one point I noticed a single tear run down her cheek. That was it—she had lost her mind. I gripped the pew and braced myself. I knew in my heart that the whole place was about to burst into flames, or I was about to be entered into a cult and never heard from again.
“Mom better at least be getting laid for this,” Jennifer whispered to me.
“EEW! Don’t say that!” I was horrified. For many years I was a big prude compared to my sister. That changed around the time I developed a taste for Wild Turkey.
Eventually things died down. The service came to an end and as far as I could tell nobody had passed away during all the drama. Penny led my sister and me out to her car, where the two of us waited patiently for an explanation. I had it all figured out: Outside of her appearance, Penny seemed pretty normal when she was watching us. There was no way that she brought us to this circus knowing that her friends were going to lose their shit. Obviously she couldn’t say anything in the church; they probably knew where she lived. She was just going through the motions, then when she got us in the car, she’d tell us that she’d never seen anything like that in her life and that she was so sorry that everyone at her church got possessed at the same time, especially on the night we had to go with her. “What a bunch of freaks!” she’d say, laughing.
Penny turned the engine on and looked at us in the rearview mirror. She gave us a knowing smile and asked, “Who wants ice cream?”
That night I waited up for my mom. I was usually in bed early; the anxious adult me hadn’t crept in yet to convince myself that six hours of sleep was plenty. As a kid I knew I needed my brain rest so that I could get straight A’s, go to college, and make a bunch of money so that I could get out of this town.
“What are you still doing up?” Mom asked.
“Couldn’t sleep. How was your night?”
“It was all right. How was yours?” she replied.
“Penny and the people who go to her church are bananas. You sent us to an insane asylum. If you ever have a date on a Wednesday night again, don’t. Night!”
With that I went off to bed.
Mom’s singles’ group seemed to be restoring some of her self-confidence and she decided she no longer wanted to work at a cafeteria. She started looking for a new job and quickly found one at a funeral home, where she became a secretary. She didn’t have to touch dead bodies, but it was still creepy. She would come home and make dinner and talk about how “busy” it was, which just meant that lots of people had died. My sister and I were not really into her work talk, and I think she took offense at it. I was really proud of her for getting a good job, and I was really glad she felt more security. But sorry—I was trying to eat.
For a while when we were living in Fayetteville we lived next door to two guys who were close in age to my sister and me. They became our best friends, and one had the honor of my first tongue kiss. His name was Kevin and I liked him so much that I named my first goldfish after him. He was super cute and he told funny stories. The neighbor, not the goldfish. The goldfish didn’t say much. I had found my true love, and I was only eight.
Kevin was really popular in school. He pretty much ran our elementary homeroom and all the girls liked him. I counted myself lucky to have tied down such a free spirit. It also worked out well that we were neighbors. He walked me home—well, his house was first, so he’d stop there, and I’d walk the next four houses alone. It was okay, though. My expectations were pretty low to begin with, so it seemed like he was doing a great job as my first boyfriend.
Although my love life was in great shape, there still weren’t any prospects panning out for my mom from the singles’ group. I felt kind of bad that I was eight years old and in love while my thirty-three-year-old mom was struggling to want to go on a second date.
During one of the busy afternoons at my mom’s work, a guy who made the flower deliveries for the funeral home struck up a conversation with her. He found her charming and sweet and wondered if she was available. She looked at the ring on his hand then shot him a disapproving look.
“No, not for me,” he said with a laugh. “My wife would kill me. But you should meet my friend Eric.”
When my mom met Eric, I was skeptical. Things were going smoothly. Jennifer and I had settled in as “latchkey kids” and Mom had stopped talking about dead bodies during supper. I wasn’t sure I wanted someone else in the mix. But he won me over fairly quickly; he was pretty easy to like. He used words like reckon and plumb (as in: “That house is plumb out in the middle of nowhere” and “I reckon we need to get some gas”). I’m still not sure what those words mean, but at the same time I am. No matter what was in his vocabulary, I could tell he was incredibly smart. He spewed out historical and political facts, but for a living he worked at Tyson Foods. He also knew a lot about geography, and I still can’t read a map. So I was impressed, and I had someone to help me with my homework.
My mom had a pretty bad overbite, and since she was falling in love she decided to have it fixed. That decision resulted in her mouth being wired shut for about six weeks, which was awesome. My mom really likes to talk, so this was the equivalent of taking brunch away from a gay man. The only word she could say clearly was shit, and she had to eat all her food through a straw. She’d make Jennifer and me nice dinners, then suck sadly on a green shake.
The best part of her not being able to talk was that she couldn’t tell us to do chores. She’d try, but we’d just say we couldn’t understand her and then erupt in giggles. The use of the word shit would then start flowing, I think preceded by you little but I couldn’t quite make it out. Eric was a real trouper through that whole thing. I think he just enjoyed the quiet.
When they decided to get married, it was announced that we’d have to move. We were living in Fayetteville and they wanted to buy a house together a few miles away in the small town of Farmington. Moving to Farmington meant we had to change schools.
My head exploded. What the hell are they thinking? My relationship with Kevin was really starting to flourish. Just the week before, he had apologized for not taking me to the Valentine’s Day dance. He finally agreed that it was weird that I went alone and that when I got there he ignored me. He was really sorry! How could I move away and go to a new school when we’d just worked through our first huge fight and were going to be stronger than ever? I was really starting to make some headway here, and for once I
’d stuck up for myself. I made him promise not to ignore me in public anymore. I even told him that if he did it one more time I wouldn’t allow him to ever walk me halfway home from school again.
Shortly after I got the news that my life was being dismantled, I walked up to Kevin’s house to tell him. I was envisioning his tears and heartache; it would be very dramatic. When I got close to his yard, I noticed that Kevin and his brother were throwing something around like a football, so I assumed it was a football. As I got closer I stopped in my tracks. The football was making a lot of noise. It was meowing. The football was a cat.
I ran to him in tears and demanded that he stop throwing the cat. He laughed and continued to torture the defenseless animal. I managed to step in the middle, which only made me become part of an involuntary game of keep-away. I’m not sure keep-away is ever voluntary; I just know that it’s really frustrating. After a while I managed to get the cat away and I ran with him in my arms to my house while shouting back over my shoulder that I was going to call the ASPCA on him. I was really impressed with myself for knowing what the ASPCA was. Eric had told me.
I ran home and tearfully told my mother the story. She looked at me with sad eyes and patted me on the head for saving the cat from those assholes. She didn’t say anything, not because she was speechless but because her mouth was still wired shut. We fed the cat some mystery meat dish that my mother had made the night before—she’s got a lot of great qualities, but cooking is not one of them, though many say the same about me—then dialed the number on his collar and returned him to his owners, who promised they would never use him as a football.
When I got to my room I noticed that Kevin, my goldfish, was floating at the top of his bowl. He was dead, and now to me so was the other Kevin. It all came full circle. I buried the goldfish in a little box and dramatically said goodbye to Kevin my first boyfriend and to Kevin the Goldfish. The next day I found out through Jennifer’s taunting that I could have just flushed the fish, which pissed me off further at Kevin the boyfriend for once again wasting my time, since I blamed him for the death of my beloved fish. Even though he had nothing to do with it.
I gave up on my fight to stay in Fayetteville at Happy Hollow Elementary. Since I had broken it off with Kevin, I had little reason to want to stay in that school district. Now I was the one ignoring him and it was really awkward for everyone in our homeroom. I was ready for a change. I had so many other things I wanted to do, places I wanted to see, and relationships I wanted to develop. It’s like when you’re in your thirties and you realize you haven’t done half of the things you always said you’d do … but you’re eight.
VOLUN-TEARS
I currently live in Los Angeles. I work on a late-night talk show and I do stand-up several weekends out of the year. I don’t have kids and thus far the only person I’ve felt really comfortable living with is myself. And sometimes I’m not a big fan of her, either.
I live what some might consider to be a pretty great life. Others probably think that it’s selfish, or that I’m missing something. It’s tough for me to say who is right and who is wrong. Because where I come from and where I am now are two very different places.
In Los Angeles, I often go to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with my friend Jackie at noon on Saturdays because we know that the firefighters from Station 19 are going to be there at that time for a coffee fix. They’re fun to look at. In Farmington, Arkansas, firefighters look different. They look like my family. Mostly because they are my family.
If your mother’s entire family was deeply involved in a volunteer fire department, you probably would have moved away from Arkansas, too. At one point my grandmother, Phyllis, was the fire chief, and she wasn’t even a lesbian. She just liked being in charge. Everyone else in my family, besides me, was a volunteer firefighter. It’s something they’re all very proud of. As a teenager who just wanted to get felt up, I found it all pretty annoying. As a semi-mature adult, I’m now proud to say my family saves lives. So maybe stop judging me now and let’s try and get along for the rest of the book.
Most of the other members of the Wedington Volunteer Fire Department (the name Farmington was already taken by the town’s professional fire department; we had to settle for naming ours after a street) served on the mysterious “board.” They had monthly meetings and if someone didn’t show up, my mom sure talked shit about them. I knew that being a volunteer meant you also had to have a real job, so I would suggest to her that some people were probably just too tired to make it to the meetings after a long day at work. My mom would argue back that those people probably should not volunteer to fight fires, then.
“Would you want to depend on someone who can’t even show up for a monthly meeting to save your house if it was burning down?” she’d ask me.
“I guess not.”
The whole thing was pretty cutthroat, and way too much of a commitment for me.
There were several side projects that the fire department had going in order to keep afloat, one being the fire department cookbook. As we got older, my sister, Jennifer, began to contribute recipes. I did not. Like I said, I’ve never been much of a cook. I cook for myself sometimes, but it doesn’t taste very good. It actually tastes pretty awful. I prefer to dine out. My family likes to make fun of me, indicating that being able to cook is part of what makes a woman a woman. I disagree. Getting my period makes me a woman. Cooking just makes me bored.
Most members would submit a recipe, and all these fabulous recipes were bound together in a flimsy little booklet with a yellow cover. I think they sold them for ten dollars, which was a huge rip-off. I can’t imagine how many people got the book home and realized that “Virginia’s Secret Creamy Mac and Cheese” was just fucking mac-and-cheese. I mean, the recipe actually included buying a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, then following instructions. That seemed like cheating to me.
My mother contributed her famous original recipe for “Kung Fu Pasta.” It was something I ate a lot growing up, and I’m not going to lie … it is delicious. It’s the one thing she made really well. It consists of spaghetti noodles, diced carrots, diced pork chop, and something green. The “Kung Fu” part came from the fact that she topped it off with soy sauce. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that it dawned on me the name of that pasta might be slightly offensive to people, like people who do kung fu.
There are some responsibilities while living under your parents’ roof that you just can’t get out of. For me, one of those things was the fire department’s pancake breakfast. It was held at 6 A.M. a few Saturdays a year. My mom keeps telling me now that it was only once a year, but I know she’s lying to try to make my childhood sound more fun.
When the breakfast rolled around, I’d be forced to get out of bed, put on a bright yellow T-shirt that said WEDINGTON VOLUNTEERS that was three sizes too big, and serve pancakes and sausage to everyone I knew. The only other thing I did as humiliating was work at Hardee’s, but at least that paid.
My best friend in high school was Lindsay. She played basketball and I was on drill team. We liked to do the same things, like drink Busch Light and smoke Marlboro 100’s. After first seeing the movie Thelma & Louise, she and I started drinking Wild Turkey. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis drank it while on the run from the cops for a crime they really shouldn’t have been in trouble for, and they seemed to enjoy it. Wild Turkey is 101 proof, which means its alcohol content is over 50 percent, which was more than triple my age when I developed a taste for it. I liked to chase it with Coke, then when I’d run out of Coke I’d drink it straight—just like Thelma and Louise did.
Discovering bourbon at fifteen didn’t do much to help my mood when I had to show up, work pancake duty, and deal with the annoying crowd. At the time I believed that the only people who should wake up that early to stand in line for food that’s made in mass quantities were homeless people. But I wasn’t dealing with people in need. I was just dealing with people who were overweight, cheap, or both. And I was us
ually hungover.
But before all that, it took me a while to fall in love again. I was still healing from having been duped by a man who was abusive to animals and I wasn’t about to let myself fall for another liar. Men obviously pulled you in with their charm and good looks, then one day, wham! You find out that it’s all been a lie and there you are on Maury Povich trying to warn other women of the signs that their man might be leading a double life. This is exactly what my mother must have felt like when my father left. I was really beginning to understand marriage, and I didn’t like what I saw.
Then I met Ricky Walden. We were in seventh grade together. He had a rattail haircut and he knew how to break-dance. Clearly he was really popular. We all gathered around him at recess while he spun around on his back and hit fake home runs with his fake baseball bat. He was amazing. I was attracted to bad boys. It wasn’t my fault.
I let Ricky finger me on a field trip. We were on the bus and it was dark. We had a blanket over us and I decided to let him go for it. Thus far the only person that had touched my vagina was me, so it was a big event to let him do so. Looking back, I can’t believe the teachers let us cover up with a giant blanket, but maybe they noticed I was a little uptight for a seventh grader and figured I could use the release. I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend, Lindsay, the next day at school. She’s going to die! I got fingered! This was huge.
The next day I didn’t have to tell anybody—everybody already knew. Apparently Ricky had taken the time out of his busy break-dancing schedule to let everyone know what he and I had done on the bus. What a nightmare. I had really only planned on telling Lindsay. I was a very private person, and I was terrified of being known as a slut before I was in high school.
Once I found out that everyone knew, Lindsay and I had an emergency meeting in the bathroom. I cried hysterically. She reminded me that almost everybody else had already been fingered, except the Baptists. She was pretty sure they had, too, but that they were less honest about it. The powwow lifted my spirits and I went through the rest of the day feeling pretty good, until I walked out to catch the bus and saw Ricky letting Jimmy Thompson smell his fingers. I waited until he saw me, then I dramatically raised my middle finger and stormed off. Giving him the finger felt like poetic justice.
Life As I Blow It Page 2
