Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  “Fuck you Grandma!” I exclaimed.

  As if it were pierced by the falling blade of a guillotine, the room, abruptly, became deathly quiet. The air became as thick as Jell-O—or whatever else it is that Bill Cosby serves you—and time turned to slow motion with everyone dodging each other’s silent thoughts and stares like Neo in The Matrix. Fearing that a laugh could die of loneliness, my cousins bolted out of the room, fighting their tears. Moments after, like dominos on the fall, the adults lost control, and the room erupted in laughter. To her credit, the old lady didn’t slap the snot out of me. She just ignored it and kept making those wieners. As I stared at the back of my grandma’s head and basked in the glory of the cackles I heard around me and in the next room, I had an epiphany. The kind of epiphany that only a distracted three-year-old can have. I decided that I wanted a hamster. Oh yeah … also, swearing is FUNNY. Sure, Grandma was obviously disappointed in me but I was three and I had no idea what I was saying but my cousins thought I was the coolest kid that still crapped their pants. From then on, cursing just came naturally to and out of me.

  I wasn’t the only badass in our family, come to think of it. Despite our commitment to God and Grandma, there was a rebellious streak in my clan. My dad is a straightlaced stand-up guy but loves to tell a dirty joke, like, “What do an easy woman and a good bar have in common? Liquor in the front and poker in the back!” I didn’t say they were good. I just said they were dirty. It doesn’t matter. He always makes me laugh. (Except when he’s whistling Nazareth songs while we’re at the grocery store. That’s just embarrassing.) My mom is a smart and kindhearted woman who doesn’t take kindly to being taken advantage of. Case in point, when I was fairly young, I remember she got fed up with the never-ending stream of “gimme, gimme, gimme” from the Catholic church we attended and told us we didn’t have to go anymore if we didn’t want to. Um, we didn’t and therefore did not. It’s not that she didn’t have faith; far from it. It’s just that she didn’t feel the need to pay for the privilege, especially while she and my dad were struggling to make ends meet. Flash-forward twenty-five years, I took my mom on a trip to Rome, and while we strolled through the Vatican, she blurted out, “This stuff is all bullshit.” I was both stunned and in awe. I waited for the thunderbolt to strike us down, but it never happened. My mom considers herself a “recovering Catholic.” She believes in God but is still recovering from the associated mindfuckery.

  Turns out, even “Fuck-You-Grandma” had a secret naughty side. When I was in grade school, my cousin Sito and I rummaged through her extensive book collection and found what some might consider the textbook for sex: the original 1972 version of The Joy of Sex. You know, the one where all the explicit pictures are hand-drawn sketches and everyone was so hairy it was like you had stumbled across a book called Where’s Beaver? and, guess what, Beaver was everywhere. We’d turn on Scooby-Doo, and while I’d be making ramen noodles or grilled cheese, he’d sit at her legendary pink kitchen table and read it out loud like passages from the Bible. I’d sporadically glance over his shoulder to look at the dirty illustrations of the lady and her shaggy lover, described perfectly by one reviewer as “a werewolf with a hangover.” Looking back, it’s hilarious that this book, where every erection looked like it came from Chewbacca’s personal dick pic collection, taught me half of the stuff I know about the birds and bees. From how to have sex on a motorcycle—while it’s moving (cue Kim and Kanye, or the sexier version with Seth Rogen and James Franco)—to invaluable advice, such as, “Vibrators are no substitute for a penis” and “Never fool around sexually with vacuum cleaners.” I will say that it’s interesting that today I do have a thing for guys with long hair and/or beards. Is it possible that the Neanderthal humping his way through The Joy of Sex was the original mold for all future men who tickled my loins? Hmm …

  “Well, I just like a good ol’ fuck. I mean that’s my favorite word. I mean … that sounded awful!

  — Simon Pegg

  I also got some of my sex education from my Uncle Kevin. Wait, that came out wrong. But he would appreciate the joke because Uncle Kevin has a really fucked-up sense of humor. Actually, it was more Aunt Barbie with an assist from Uncle Kevin. We used to have family movie nights at my aunt’s house when I was pretty young. She had HBO and nobody else did yet, or no one had figured out how to steal it. Back then, in between the wall-to-wall airings of Eddie and the Cruisers and Grease 2, HBO would throw on what I like to call “classics with a cock-shot.” Movies that were there to titillate, but had enough going for them to be called cinematic art instead of soft-core porn, like American Gigolo or Two Moon Junction. Apparently, not much has changed in the last thirty years in HBO’s programming model. Anyway, when the movies would get a little dicey, my uncle Kevin would try to save me from being exiled to another room by my mother. “It’s fine,” he’d say. “Connie, let her watch.” I was always getting kicked out just when the movies would start getting good. Like the time they booted me during the movie Against All Odds because Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward were having some seriously sweaty sex in Mexico. “Okay, punkin’ pot, time for bed!” my dad said abruptly as their tan naked bodies writhed on the beach. But, eventually, I wore them down with a three-pronged, foolproof strategy:

  1. Pretending to have fallen asleep in front of the TV.

  2. My perpetual need for glasses of water after being sent to bed.

  3. My insatiable need for yet another bedtime story.

  They were putty in my hands. Eventually, it just got easier to let me stay and watch. As a result, I also got to watch a lot of “age-inappropriate” TV shows, including legendary and lecherous British comedian Benny Hill. Hill was sexist, disgusting, and vile; a dirty old man chasing scantily clad women around, trying to grab their boobs and bums. I had no business watching it then, and there’s no way it would get past the PC-police today. At the time I hated Benny Hill, but funnily enough, I basically grew up to be a dirty old man. A dirty old man trapped inside a Barbie doll body.

  On the outside, I’ve always looked sweet and innocent. The truth is that it’s an elaborate disguise I wear. At heart I’m a wannabe Goth girl, a little dark and a lot of weird. But it doesn’t come from a place of angst. I’m not pissed off at the world, I’m not on some half-assed pseudo-existential mind trip, I’m actually a happy person. I think it’s just part of my DNA. I’m a lot like my crazy great-aunt, Betty. She had super pale skin, like me, long pointy fingernails and jet-black dyed hair. She looked like actress Yvonne De Carlo. I always wanted to dye my hair black, but my mom wouldn’t let me. Aunt Betty was bawdy and liked to drink and swear. Sound familiar?

  It wasn’t just genes; there were environmental factors that helped create my weirdness. My mom collected medieval things like unicorns, but they weren’t the sissy My Pretty Pony kind and no, this has nothing to do with the swingers’ community … get your head out of the gutter. She was into some dark shit, like medieval beasties. Now, before you start comparing my mom with your neighbor who has a Hello Kitty gnome collection, please keep in mind that unicorns are mystical creatures and the national animal of Scotland. This is some serious fucking shit. She also collected ancient leather-bound books about dragons and graveyard headstone etchings. She was Game of Thrones chic before Game of Thrones! There was always a cornucopia of intriguing curiosities around our house. Thanks to my mom’s influence, I, myself, have a collection of gargoyles.

  My mom also delighted in reading me the most twisted Grimms’ fairy tales, which I loved, and teaching me to sing along to songs like “The Hearse Song.” You know how it goes, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…” We’d have so much fun together. Funnily enough, the only time I ever got creeped out was the one time she left me home alone for twenty minutes while she went to the store and put Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the TV. That’s right, the kid’s film. Don’t ask me to explain why or how but for some reason the Child Catcher scared the ever-living shit out of me. Saying he could “smell th
e children,” with his big nose, top hat, and greasy black hair. (Which, by the way, I would find attractive now.) I ran around the house in sheer terror, closing every curtain, locking every window, and hiding in a closet until my mom came home. In a strange way, there really is nothing like a children’s fairy tale to really fuck you up. Even thinking about that fucker’s face now I still get the ickies in my creep-out parts. I recently forced myself to watch Shitty Chitty utilizing the Ludovico Technique from Stanley Kubrick’s classic film A Clockwork Orange, with the fucking specula and everything, and it still freaked me out.

  That’s the only movie that’s ever really scared me. And here’s why. Good old Uncle Kevin got me hooked on horror with one little white lie that I’ve now adopted as an absolute truth: that I was named after the Stephen King book/movie Carrie. In addition to pervy comedy shows, he used to let me watch classic scary movies, like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, and The Exorcist, which has my all-time favorite line from the infamous head-spinning scene: “Did you see what she did? Your cunting daughter!” In the original Friday the 13th, there was a scene where the killer drives an arrow right through Kevin Bacon’s throat. Instead of covering my eyes, Uncle Kevin slowed the video down, rewound it back and forth, over and over again, and explained to me how they did it in intricate detail. When we were done, that VHS tape had the wear and tear of a teenager’s porn collection. His crash course on the intricacies of horror special effects was so profoundly impactful on my personal growth, it was as if I’d just read a treatise on The Ascent of Man. From then on I was obsessed with gore, and to this day, I just really get off on blood. The more disgusting, the better. One of my all-time favorite movies is that old sexy classic The Human Centipede, in which a German doctor surgically connects three kidnapped tourists ass-to-mouth. Need I say more?

  The things I’m drawn to are really odd, and sometimes disturbing. I’ve always had the kind of penchant for the bizarre that Hugh Grant seemed to have for street hookers. I remember highlighting all the bad stuff in the Bible and composing haunting soliloquies in my diary. If you didn’t know me, walked into my room, opened up any of my books, and saw the stuff I underlined or scribbled in my journal, you’d think, This person is obviously going to kill somebody. It helped earn me the nickname “Basement Creeper” in high school by the select few that knew. Which is why it makes perfect sense that I’m obsessed with vampires and have seen the movie The Lost Boys over two hundred times. Now, I’m not saying that classic vampire films weren’t the shit because they were. But when you’re a teenage girl looking for a make-believe romance with a fictional undead character, Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee just weren’t cutting it! Anyone still reaching for a moist towelette after an all-night Twilight marathon can attest to that. I needed the hot, hot heat that Joel Schumacher’s snackable sex-boys, I mean Lost Boys, provided. I loved that they looked like male models but were evil bloodthirsty killers on the inside. They were a beautiful mystery that could never be solved. The very definition of emotional crack for a teenager.

  I remember the very first time I was lured into the vampire’s den never to return again. One lazy Sunday afternoon, I was lying on my bed, petting my five-foot iguana, Bela (named after Bela Lugosi), and reading the liner notes from Sting’s first album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. I found myself enthralled in the backstory behind the song “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” It was inspired by a vampire named Louis in the book Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice. I was so captivated that I went to the library and checked it out … for eternity. Louis couldn’t help his lust and hunger for bloodsucking but felt bad about it afterward. He had a conscience, and it alienated him from the other vampires. At its heart, the book was about loneliness and alienation. Something I could relate to.

  2

  A TALE OF TWO TITTIES

  What girls do to each other is beyond description. No Chinese torture comes close.

  — Piece by Piece, Tori Amos

  My breasts have been a blessing and a curse both professionally and personally. I’ve been hired because of them and I’ve been fired because of them. I’ve been ogled by men and criticized by women; been told to push them out and admonished to cover them up. Along the way, I’ve learned that people have a lot of very strong opinions about bewbs regardless of whether they have them or not. And, believe me, I’ve heard ’em all! To be perfectly honest, I don’t really get the fascination. I mean, I sorta get it … but you’d think that, at some point in time, they would lose their luster and not be such a big deal. Think about it. Every woman has had them since the beginning of time, so you’d think that, eventually, they’d become old hat, right? Turns out, that’s not the case. So I couldn’t write a book about myself and not include a chapter about my boobs. Not because I want to flaunt them or because I want to draw attention to them (God knows “Bonnie & Clyde” do that just fine on their own) but because “the girls” have played such a pivotal role in my personal journey. Not a role I necessarily wanted them to play, mind you, but one that, unfortunately, turned an undeniable fact of life into an inescapable torture chamber.

  You see, I was bullied mercilessly all throughout middle school and high school. If you can imagine what it must have been like for Andy Dufresne to dodge the sisters in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, then you’d have a pretty good idea of what those years of my life were like. It was an endless barrage of humiliation, anxiety, and fear with nowhere to turn for help, no one to talk to, and nowhere to hide. Long before “bullying” became a cause célèbre and “slut shaming” was recognized for the abomination that it is, an untold number of girls, including myself, suffered in silence.

  It’s been a long and tough row to hoe with “the twins,” but I’m happy to say that I’m finally completely comfortable and at peace with them. But to get to where I’m at now, I had to overcome multiple waves of internal turmoil and external conflicts related to my breasts. I spent years ricocheting back and forth between confusion and shame before ultimately finding my way to comfort and pride.

  I honestly don’t know how I would have made it through those years without my cousin JoJo. She was my best friend, my only real friend. We were pretty much joined at the hip because nothing forges an indestructible bond the way two girls dancing like fools to the mystical acoustic alchemy of Johnny Clegg & Savuka’s “Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World” and Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Peek-a-Boo” over and over and over again, for months on end, can. Plus, we looked like twins, had the same perverse sense of humor, and loved the same things, but always in a complimentary manner. Take My Own Private Idaho, for example. It was a film we both loved to consume in order to de-stress. We’d pop that shit like a couple of pill junkies on a Saturday night quaalude bender. But neither of us ever got all aggro and grabbed a kitchen knife because I only wanted Keanu Reeves and she only had eyes for River Phoenix. It was always like that with us: effortless. I remember she was going through some personal shit back then, too, so we found solace in each other. There were days when JoJo’s kindness was the only shelter I could find from the raging storm that lie ahead. Some things you never forget. Unbreakable were the ties that bound us.

  I was eleven years old when it started and, of course, I handled this crisis of confusion with all the great skill and aptitude of any eleven-year-old. That’s right; I hid it from the world and turned in on myself as I slowly wandered into teenage isolation. I am still astonished by the capacity we girls have to feel shame and carry the great weight of it over mountains of despair. Looking back, I wish I had known that what I was about to experience would have a profoundly beautiful impact on the person I was to become. During that time, I wish I knew that life is a series of ups and downs and that the journey is the thing. But, unfortunately, all of that was lost on me as I was distracted by the dread of wearing the super maxi pads that my mom had bought a giant box of and placed on my bed. I mean come on, Mom! What the fuck?! The gift of womanhood did not come with a return receipt.<
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  My class, from fifth through eighth grade, had twenty-five girls and only five boys. You’d think with that ratio it would be a girl-power summit and I’d be a total girl’s girl, right? Wrong! It was quite the opposite. Just like the various teen-girl cliques that comprise the fan base of boy bands draw lines of demarcation between themselves at concerts as if they were waging a holy war in the Middle East, I found myself isolated in a clique of one … and, on top of that, I was wearing the wrong shoes (if you’re a girl, you know exactly what I mean). I was stranded on my own personal island and surrounded by a group of mean girls that would follow me around and harass me.