Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  By the time I got to high school the small sanitarium of a middle school I attended had grown into a full-blown asylum where the lunatics had taken over. My expanded peer group had graduated to constantly calling me a “whore” because “slut” and “bitch” had become passé. I remember how they’d corner me in the back of the bus, scream horrible obscenities, and threaten me until I got home. There were days where I felt like I had entered a hot dog eating contest only to realize that I was the hot dog. The older we all got, the more hateful the girls became. Their sole purpose in life was to make my life a living hell, and it worked. I can look back on it now and try to think rationally, Oh, okay, those girls were just jealous. Of what, I’m not exactly sure. Although I could make a couple of guesses … my boobs?

  In many ways, my breasts are the essence of who I am. They are the accompanying musical score to every dramatic moment of my journey. They provide the accent with which my body speaks. No single person I have ever encountered has been able to avoid the allure of their divisive siren song. Homer would have been proud (Not Homer Simpson, you idiot). I have been desired, defined, denigrated, and dehumanized by them; the price I’ve paid for every D in my 32DDDDs. Ultimately, they took me from suffering in silence to finding a blessing in disguise and evolved from being “Satan’s love pillows” to “the twins of truth and beauty.” This is their story.

  My cha-chas will come up a bunch in this book, so let’s just kick it off right now. I had the distinct privilege of entering puberty when I was eleven years old and in the fifth grade. It didn’t sneak up on me all gentle in the night with the kiss of a fairy; it entered my life like a rigged game of three-card Monte, delivered with the sympathy of a carny street hustler. That’s right, it was the perfect trifecta of shit, and I was about to wear two bags of it on my chest. As if to foreshadow their role in my life, first out of the gate were my breasts. It was slightly unnerving at eleven years old but it was still manageable. But then they grew bigger and bigger and bigger than everyone else’s. At that point, they were terrifying!

  I think most girls hate their bodies when they’re growing up. We’re too skinny, too fat, too tall, too short, too muscular, too flat, or in my case, too busty. The truth is, when you’re young, nobody wants to be different. When you’re different, it gives the bullies something to aim at, and then all of the other kids who don’t want to get picked on pick on you to deflect attention. It’s horrible and I was already a target … and when I started to develop? It was a nonstop boob-a-thon of jokes. Why on earth would an eleven-year-old girl ever want boobs? It was like a cruel joke from up above. And it wasn’t the boys who teased me; it was the girls. I knew girls could be mean, but in the Catholic school I went to, they were downright vicious.

  “Hey, Carrie! Did two mosquitoes bite you in your sleep?”

  Or …

  “I’m thirsty for milk. Carrie, do you know anyone who might be carrying some extra milk? Moo!”

  Or …

  “Carrie, you’re my breast friend.”

  Looking back, the “breast friend” one makes me giggle, but at the time I was traumatized. Granted, I inherited my num-nums from my lovely mom, whose giant knockers are still, thankfully, pretty perfect and not like National Geographic titties at all. But at the time it felt like a blight from God. Then came sucker punches two and three as my body continued its sick betrayal: pubes and my period. It all just sort of happened, like a blowjob after prom!”What the fuck is going on?” I remember thinking. Aliens on my chest, hair that showed up overnight, and there’s blood everywhere. I didn’t even tell my mom I’d gotten my period; she figured it out one day doing the laundry.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked gingerly.

  “No!” I said like a brat, mortified that she would even ask me such a question.

  “Did you get your period?”

  “Ugggghhhhh, yessssss!”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No! Wait … One … How long does this last?”

  “Shouldn’t be more than seven days.”

  “Fine!” Then I stomped upstairs and slammed my bedroom door. I had actually become my own horror movie, but this time I was horrified.

  Funnily enough, I don’t really remember the day my rack got installed. They were just there all of a sudden, “like a bastard in a basket,” to quote Daniel Day-Lewis’s character in the movie There Will Be Blood (which, one could argue, could also be the name of this charming chapter in my life). I was always uncomfortable with them. I’d wear baggy clothes and try to hide them, but it didn’t work. I just looked like a pregnant teenager.

  The worst, the absolute worst, was the day my mom told me I had to go get a bra. My mom has the same caboodles that I have now. My sister also has big butterballs. We come from a long line of great Baileys Irish cream dispensers, so my mom was well versed on what to do and where to go. I remember walking into the department store as my mom grabbed a handful of bras and whisked me off to the dressing room. To say I was not prepared for what was about to happen is an understatement. I’ve never been a girly-girl, so I didn’t look forward to my first bra like a lot of girls did. I remember when my mom put the first one on me; it felt awful. I couldn’t breathe, it itched, it pinched my skin, I kept shrugging my shoulders like Rodney Dangerfield, and I told my mom, “I’m never wearing one of these.” Then my mom said something that totally ruined my day. Like someone had peed in my Cheerios. She said, “Carrie, starting today, you are going to wear a bra every day for the rest of your life.”

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”

  Hadn’t we become a more civilized society? Didn’t we graduate past squeezing women into a corset-like apparatus? I felt like a geisha except she wasn’t binding my feet, she was binding my breasts! It was terrible and to make it worse, as comfortable as my mom was with her Greta Garbos and wearing a bra, she was no expert when it came to finding the right size. We bought a bra that day, but every time I stretched or reached for something, the bra would come undone. That went over really well in school. To top it off, the bra was sooooo ugly. I mean UUUUHHHH-GLY!! We didn’t have much money back then, so we had to buy the bra that was in our price range. It looked like a wife-beater/half-shirt combo with a horrid blue flower that only had two petals on it. Not that a ton of people were seeing my bra when I was eleven, just the people who liked to ridicule me. The locker room was not a fun place.

  “Hey, Carrie, did your mom make your bra out of your dad’s old socks?”

  It didn’t even make sense and it still made me cry.

  A year later, my oompas were waaaaaaay bigger. Hooray, right? Nope. The teasing got worse. I did not want the attention and I did not want my pagodas. I remember my mom asking me once, “Are you ashamed of your body?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  I felt like a dog wearing a cone. I knew it was for my own benefit, but its constriction caused me to move about as gracefully as I would if I was in a full-body cast. It fucking sucked! In gym class I got in trouble for being squirmy. My shirt was too tight and I had this piece-of-shit bra on and my gym teacher was all, “Carrie, stop adjusting yourself!” Oh. My. God. She called me out in front of everybody, and now they’re all staring at me. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid. Fuck. My. Life. I ran and hid in the locker room for the rest of the period. She ended up apologizing later because she realized what she had done was traumatizing. But her apology made it even more awkward because the last thing I wanted to do was keep talking about my unwelcome guests.

  They were ruining everything! Not only did I get my bra snapped every thirty seconds, and not only did my new friends make me feel like a purple, three-legged baboon but they also ruined the only athletic thing that I took part in. Lord knows I’m not the most coordinated person in the world but the one thing I could do was run, and run fast. I know, I know, laugh it up. You’re picturing me running right now and envisioning two black eyes and a concussion. Back then, they weren’t n
early a big but they were still there, which made the girls laugh and the boys stare.

  Up until that point I was the fastest sprinter in school, boy or girl. But when my speed bags came ’round, I started getting made fun of. It became less about my dash and more about my flash. The track was situated such that we had to run by the windows of all the classrooms. I wish I could tell you that my experience was exactly like Bo Derek running on the beach in the movie 10 with everyone swooning at the sight of my bouncing bosoms, but in reality it was more like I had just farted on the treadmill at gym. It was so embarrassing. After suffering through a few of those humiliations, I literally stopped running in public for the next twenty-two years. Until 2014, when I ran two half-marathons for charity, which were amazing, but to be honest, I don’t know who was working harder, me or that beautiful aerodynamic piece of magic we call the “sports bra.”

  So is it possible the bullying could have had something to do with my gedoinkers? In fifth grade, the coolest girl in my class sat behind me, and the first time I wore my over-the-shoulder boulder holder, she tapped me on the shoulder and shouted, “Carrie’s wearing a bra!” Then later, in high school, some days when I’d walk into a room, another girl would announce, “Hey, everybody, the slut is here!” I hadn’t done anything at all to earn a reputation as a slut; it just came with the lady lumps. Like that free case of the herps my friend got after sleeping with an A-lister. It was mortifying and made me an outcast in every way.

  I was embarrassed and incredibly ashamed by it all. I wanted to escape the misery so badly, but I had no clue how to talk to my parents about it or what to tell them. They had worked so hard to afford the tuition and even lied about where we lived so I could attend these well-respected private Catholic schools, and I didn’t want to let them down. They were all I had, and I didn’t want to risk losing their love and faith in me. I was a teenager, for fuck’s sake, not Friedrich Nietzsche … this is all the brilliance I could muster at the time.

  Sadly, there was no Breakfast Club for me to attend where I could solve all my problems by bonding with four strangers over our mutual despair. Plus everything that would happen in my life that was remotely positive would always come with a price at school, like my brief stint in the fast-paced world of modeling in western New York. One of those wonderful shit sandwiches that caused me a lot of grief with the girls in school, but was ultimately very rewarding.

  I know what you’re thinking: You poor thing, you had to model to make ends meet. Sounds like something out of Zoolander (which in some ways was a frighteningly accurate portrayal of the modeling world, if you think about it). But the truth is, I’m not one that ever sought the spotlight. Not then and not when I started doing NGTV. I was always more comfortable in the background. Plus the reality was that at that point in my life I hated myself. I hated everything about myself. Junior high and high school were a struggle every day and in every way. I was awkward. I felt awkward. I looked awkward with my new body. I was super uncomfortable in my skin. I was always hiding myself in ridiculous clothes. If given the choice, I would have worn a kaftan or a muumuu every day … with combat boots, of course. And as much as you might be thinking that the modeling scene in Buffalo was the dick of the cat, I just couldn’t take it or myself seriously. I was sort of a sad mess, and it was a happy accident that became a wonderful distraction.

  Obviously, my mom and dad saw things differently, as moms and dads do. Thankfully for them, it was a way of building my self-confidence and giving me something I could do outside of school. With their plan set in motion, they casually introduced me to a friend of theirs who was a local modeling agent. She was a super-cool lady who really took a liking to me and wanted to put me in some classes. She thought I had potential and gave me some positive attention. After a while, I started to become open to what she had to say. I, of course, wasn’t emotionally in a place to do any of it and had not spent my childhood developing my pageant skills like Honey Boo Boo, so it still took more of a push to get me going. Fortunately, my dad, who was a jack-of-all-trades type, had done some modeling and thought it was harmless fun and my mom felt that it might help me find myself. So they both nudged me forward into doing it. In retrospect, I now realize that my parents always saw the swan in me when all I saw was the ugly duckling. I love you guys!

  As a kid, I’d had a little bit of practice being in front of the camera, appearing on TV shows with my dad a few times. Like the time I broke my arm and he had me come on so he could talk about children’s athletic injuries. But, at this point, I needed a little more help. So we signed me up for a crash course in how to be a model. I remember walking, posing, and practicing being a live mannequin in a store window (which was very popular at the time. Though mine looked more like Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz than Mr. Roboto). I had to learn how to do my own makeup, which I was as skilled at as I was styling my Mattel Barbie Head. You know, the one with the Sharpie eyeliner and a partial skinhead. Then, strangely enough, the unthinkable happened, and I landed some catalog work, runway shows, and a few print campaigns, including one for Fisher-Price toy boxes, and believe it or not, one where I dressed up as Barbie for Mattel. But let me be clear, I was no Kate Moss. I may not have been gracing the cover of Vogue, but when upstate New York needed a fresh new face for microwave pizza coupons or poodle sweaters at the local outlet store, they called Megan Kozlowski, and when Megan Kozlowski wasn’t available, I crushed it.

  In spite of the fact that I had become a professional “clothes hanger” working in the haute couture equivalent of Cleveland, my modeling experience was never about being all glamorous and feminine, or making enough money to treat myself to a sick new double-cassette ghetto blaster. It was about finding my identity and getting a level of confidence I think most girls don’t have at that age. At least, I didn’t. It was also a major lesson in humility because I got rejected a lot.

  One time, I went on a go-see (which is sophisticated modeling jargon for going somewhere and being seen for something) for the Valentine’s Day version of the Puffalumps, the hottest doll since the Monchhichi. I was very nervous and excited, as I was up against the hottest girl at the agency. She had modeled in Japan, so she was a big deal, and this whole thing could have been a game changer. It ultimately came down to just the two of us, and I literally lost it by a nose. They ended up picking her because her nose matched the male model’s nose better than mine. Because that, in a nutshell, is just how random show business is. I’m not going to lie, it sucked. I wanted to be on that box. I wanted them to pick my nose. I recall my dad softened the blow by getting me a Puffalump for Christmas, and in the card he said that I would always be his Puffalump. My dad always knew how to say the right dumb thing just when I needed it the most. At the end of the day, none of it really mattered. Modeling was something that was mine that existed outside of the miserable academic universe that I lived in, and no one could take it away from me. It was a sign of hope that everything did not begin and end in high school and that there was a life beyond it all. Plus, it was really fun, and it prepared me for the constant rejection you deal with in showbiz.

  I never flaunted the fact that I was modeling, so nobody ever said anything unkind about it—that I can remember—but it did bring me some unwanted attention. Like when my picture was on those pizza coupons that were delivered to everyone’s house in the newspaper. My health teacher thought she was being supportive when she held it up in front of the entire class and said, “Carrie, we have you on our refrigerator at home, and my son wants to know, how much are you by the slice?” Oh God!

  I ended up quitting modeling in my senior year, for various reasons. I felt better being in my own skin, but I was far from being sample size with these torpedoes on my chest, and it got frustrating getting turned down for jobs because of them. I wanted to focus my spare time on my then-boyfriend who was battling a serious illness, but that’s a story for another chapter. I missed the glamorous life, but as Sheila E. said, “Without love, it ain’t much
.”

  When I started high school, I was hoping a fresh start would clean the slate for me. Uh, not so much! Another area in which my zeppelins created problems for me with the girls was the obvious added attention it got me from the boys. And I mean the older boys. The smooth, cultured, and sophisticated sixteen-year-olds that young girls covet. The ones who know how to treat a lady. Not those fourteen-year-old “children” who are clueless in the ways of romance and are constantly going at it like a ten-year-old with a pogo stick. Strangely enough, I saw myself as Hatchet-Face from the Johnny Depp film Cry-Baby, but apparently, they saw me as more of a walking magic trick. Especially because I could peek out from behind my jumblies and say, “Now you see me! Now you don’t!” (I’m telling you that move kills at parties.) And girls picked up on that shit to such a degree that the boy drama reached medieval levels of preposterousness. They would immediately start spreading rumors about me being a slut. I have to admit, some of the stories I heard about myself were amazing. I wish I had had that much fun in high school!

  “It smelled like bananas and dick up there.”

  —Sean William Scott

  Believe it or not, on three occasions I literally handed over a guy I was dating to one of the mean girls who also liked him and had threatened to give me hell for the rest of my life if I didn’t go away. So I’d bow out and say to the guys, “So-and-so likes you. Maybe you should go out with her,” and like lambs to the slaughter, they did. It was the relationship equivalent of having your lunch money stolen by a bully. I lived in a world where a bunch of high school girls had invoked some sort of half-assed schoolyard Prima Nocta on any guy that I happened to like. They were, literally, taxing that ass. Honestly, you can’t make this shit up! From my perspective, I had to protect myself from any more harassment. The guys were absolutely not worth it. Not being beaten up was way more worth it to me.