Progressive A-party-thied Foreword and Prologue

Foreword

The Game:

1. You are and always have been and are perpetually playing The Game.

2. You do not know you are playing until someone has told you thus.

3. Whenever you think about The Game, you lose The Game.

4. When you lose The Game, you must announce that you have lost The Game.

5. If someone doesn’t know about The Game, you must explain to them these rules.

Let it be resolved that you are either perpetually not winning The Game unless you are, otherwise, loosing The Game.

Prologue:

You know when you were a kid you used to fake sick to get attention or get out of school? I guess I’m a freak. I’d stay at school until 1am most nights in high school. I danced, did track, and power lifting, and signed up for classes like debate, AP environmental (club), and chorus which allowed for out of school things.

You name it; I feigned enough interest in it. I was out of the house. I had no reason to be in the house.

One time in yearbook we had to call the assistant principal (it was an ongoing joke that since she let me get away with dressing slutty at school that she had a crush on me; so calling her that late was mandated, no, royally decreed as a booty call) to unlock the gates for us so we could drive home at 3am because the janitors pooped in to warn us that we might trip the lasers that activated at 4am, which would to call the cops on all of us yearbookers.

Well, a more appropriate name was yearnewslitbookpapermag because the handful of us did all of the three said ignored literatures.

We were nuts and flocked together. Strippers hate their step-dad. Yearbookers hate their mom. Even our teacher did.

One half day, a day in which students classes are cut in half (from two hours to an hour for the classes we go to every other day and fifth hour, which we attend daily, from an hour to thirty minutes) for god knows what reason, so instead of being let out at 2:40 we are let out at 12:30. Of course, we never did and our amazing Katie, the Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook, who was not only the most beautiful red headed Irish-Cuban, but was so dedicated to her art that under her bead she had all the award winning yearbooks from the past decade from which she studied and critiqued to apply to our baby, Panthera. It’s not a baby-baby, I’m talking about the yearbook, you got to catch up with jargon created by exclusive groups.

Anyways, all of us, except for her, said fuck it for the day at about five p.m. because it was Friday and we weren’t in the mood to be the last kids in our high school to still be sober,  and she stayed. Mr. Allen had given her a copy of his classroom to lock up before she left; however, she decided happy hour was not until about three hours later, still sunny because it was that daylight savings time where you get an extra hour or so of light at the end of the day. She locked up and sat on the curb waiting for her mother to come pick her up. In the meantime, a red SUV drove up, passenger side to her. He stopped at her feet, leaned over to roll down the window and said, “Suck my dick,” “What,” she asked; hoping she was mistaken, “Suck. My. Dick.” With her books in her lap, she crab walked backwards away from him, not wanting to stand straight up and potentially be in arms reach. He leaned over again to flick the door handle open and gesturing her to come in. a few feet away, she stood up and ran inside. Luckily, Mr. Hubbard, a dean, was still on campus to remind her that this was a situation where you call the cops and they did, both making obscene hand gestures as she delivered her report to the operator on call.

That was when we decided that we are not allowed to leave school before midnight because no one expects there are kids at school that late who are capable of blow jobs.

Because of this, the police gave her access to this site filled with previous sex offenders and we made a mini yearbook from that. Giving superlatives to best not dressed, best toothy smile, best form of predatation, the ugliest were prom king and queen (even though we could not decipher some genders without their wrap sheet specifying thus) and we had made a special section for people we knew or knew of and a section for people that we wouldn’t mind predatoring us. Not all convicts are ugly. Don’t discriminate.

I had a collection of blank TLE’s, temporary learning elsewhere slips, which I copied and filled in as I pleased or I sold to other kids if they weren’t people I couldn’t accept money from (code for they weren’t my friends). As soon as I would get to class, I would tell the teacher I was leaving (they didn’t care because they knew I was going to get an A and/or pass the AP exam [they received a bonus for all the kids their test]) or if I even showed up at all; wherein I would use my money from selling TLE’s to pay off the person who took the attendance down to the main office to unerase my absence, and I’d go to Club 8119, the yearbook room.

Officer Doofy, I don’t know his real name or how his student name came to stick, would try to bust me and he would get so proud when he did. But he was just a rent-a-cop and I always had a TLE, which made him mad, but he smirked convincing himself that he really did catch me skipping and was doing me a favor to make himself feel better.

One time, my AP English and Debate teacher, Mrs. Mulligan or Mully as we nicknamed her, called the classroom while I was skipping the latter class, Mr. Allen was too busy teaching so he asked me to answer. As soon as I said “Hello, Mr. Allen’s roo—,” she said, “Halley, get back to class.” You see, because she was making no money off of me in debate, there I learned the difference between an extracurricular extended to a course and an elite, advanced course. That class was basically a study period in which all the other schools took seriously save for us. While they wrote proposals about the Kyoto Protocol and Declaration of Human Rights, filing out of buses dressed in court room attire, wheeling boxes stacked as tall as them filled with reference materials for debates, our class submitted proposals for why mustard is better than mayonnaise and why America should take over Australia (duh, we where topographically the same except they were upside down and we would be closer to China so we could get our crap cheaper).

Since I didn’t like waking up at 6am to listen to well dressed yak-backs (I know you have to remember that toy and if you don’t then its because we need to get more exports from China), I would go and be a jury member at youth court, wherein I would listen to cases about juvee’s stealing thongs and missing state curfew and sentence them with either an essay explaining why they are such awful people or volunteer work (p.s. one girl in yearbook convinced our school that it was considered volunteer work to stay after school for yearbook: community outreach) or attend some seminar. One time, I was sitting smack in the middle of all the cramped jury seats when the bailiff called out and lifted a calf high waste basket, “Ma’am, in the purple sweater—”

I aint to ma’am, I’m sixteen

“Please come up and spit out your gum.” I stood up, awkwardly looked around at the futile path of knees grazing the backs of seats, “I, um, am gonna swallow it.” I had interrupted his court room for a piece of gum or a far fetched sexual innuendo.

That’s probably when Mully stared stink-eying me.

The teacher for AP coloring, I mean AP environmental, Mrs. Drell, was as sweet as could be, but retarded as fuck, telling us that that capitol of Brazil was Sao Paulo and that Florida was a tundra. She should have been an elementary school teacher, all of them are endearing and under-educated. We colored animals to acquaint ourselves with the evolution of appearance and tangible mechanisms of defense, made diorama’s of various geographical climates to study what regions propagate different life forms, and watched CSI to learn deductive reasoning. It was basically a daily study hall, pictionary bowl, gossip catch-up class.

During tests, if she was in the classroom, a student would slide the answer key off her desk and pass it around, or if she stepped out for an hour long errand, one student would get up and read the answers aloud. Thus, no one passed the AP exam. However, we did have fun throwing pencils in the aisle and watching Mrs. Licata bend over, arse to me like a compass needle to north, revealing her granny-panties every time.

In the club we would go around to different parks and get fucked up in the forest of shrub-trees and she had us measure the rate of growth for different plants. She had enrolled us in this envirothon, where we presented data on a poster board like kids in science fairs, and we some how bullshitted our way to getting some ribbons and awards. I wish I could remember what we said or studied, but it must have been too lame to be worth remembering.

It's not our fault we are bad kids, its the government, I swear. Gee, Officer Krupky.

Because my mom never took me to school on time, I got sent to ISS, In School Suspension, a lot. The first time it happened I was like, “Do you know who I am? I run this shit,” and he was all like, “I don’t care take a seat and do some work until the end of the day,” so I started crying and saying some bullshit like, “My dog died and we had to bury him,” when really my mom and I don’t know shit about time management but know an ass-load of self-entitlement and not giving a fuck, and he was all, “Sit down,” and I was like, “Let me call the dean,” “No, do you want to go for another day,” “Well, I sure do hope we all get another day, I would hate for this to be my final hours on earth,” “Alright, you asked for it.” Then, I remembered I’d had all the deans phone numbers and I texted Mr. Hubbard who came and got me and fussed at the supervisor for putting me in here for no good reason and we went to his office until the end of first period and looked at pictures of funny cats and ugly babies on the internet.

That reminds me, later that year he was arrested for beating his girlfriend who was a teacher there.

Anyways.

If we wanted to get off campus or sneak into school late, there was a secret gate-door in the mental fencelike enclosure to keep all the hoodlums out of school, even though as I said they can get at you outside of the building’s enclosing. Sometimes it was locked, but luckily Club 8119 was adjacent to it and all we had to do was call another yearnewlitbookpapermagger to open it form the inside for us. It was also useful for us when we wanted to sneak off and walk across the street to McDonalds or Panera instead of eating cafeteria food, but mainly we used it for caffeine runs and coming back with crates of coffee and diet coke.

After two kids used the door to skip and the driver was speeding, wrapped his car around a tree and killing Caitlyn, the door was permanently locked. And if it wasn’t, I’m sure a veil of death would make your bones ache when walking through. A lot of black kids were pissed when her friends and family bought an ad for her and not for all the black kids that died that year. I mean, I felt bad, but we were a mini-business, if you give us money to do shit, we’re gonna publish your shit. I mean, I guess beyond being racist, it could be considered classist, but by that time the yearbook had been distributed and we weren’t going to recall them to make a new section and we were already exhausted from, one the yearbooks had arrived, sharpieing out the T of a thong some girl was wearing because we didn’t want to publish child porn (high schoolers are minors, duh).

For sports, since I didn’t have the aggression to get close to some sweaty girl for the sake of a ball nor the hand-eye coordination to hit or catch, I figured if I could dance four hours a night six days a week, I could run a 5K (which should take about the time to watch a sitcom without commercials), so I joined cross country and track both of which were small in numbers (because who’s stupid enough to only utilize the skill set of being able put one foot in front of the other, basically it’s competitive hokey pokey) and mediocre in talent so I was one of the best. we took every opportunity to take off our shirts because, one, it was fucking hot and, two, we were fucking hot.

Girls XC was basically cheerleader rejects (cheerjects, queerjects, Learjeacts) because what else could they do to keep in shape until the less popular basketball cheerleader tryouts. But track was cheerjectless because they played flag football that season and it was mostly the XC leftovers and people who joined to lose weight.

XC and track shared the same uniform and we had convinced the coach it was imperitive that we not only had a top with mesh circling us from the top of our ribs down, but also have a panther (our mascot) paw print (that would have been good alliteration if I didn’t use an interrupter, damnit, too late) on our butts. And before meets we would have to Band-Aid over all of our tattoos and pairings, which were not allowed for some reason like art and athletics can’t intersect, making us look like we had just emerged from Vietnam. 

Because one school didn’t have a track (private schools would never allocate money to academics, heaven forbid) and another school was renovating theirs, we shared ours with both the schools even though we were supposed to be rivals. So, whenever we would pass them we would let out a quiet little fart and because we had such toned asses our cheeks never flapped to make a sound.

On the subject of derrières, this is where the term LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation) implanted in us. To pass the time while running we would stare at the person in front of us’s kiester and kept cadence with it’s subtle jiggle and commenting, in a very Garrison Keeler-esque fashion, our observations:

It was a quiet day at track practice.

Meagan was buoyant through the autumnal

gravity’s hold on her posterior, showing no likeness

to any subset of a curdled milk, smelling of

opulent ethic and stamina, circumnavigating her pack

of peers like the leader of the Greek Stymphalian birds,

 gold rings like brass rings, us ignoring her

 mispronunciation of the state as Mass-a-two-shits…

We called our selves, in the elite groups, the group that lead, the Stymphalian birds, “The Fanny Packs” because we wore them on our runs the essentials of ailing our digressions. To Visiene our eyes and Listerine the botch we drank when we did “beach runs.” Our school was two miles from the beach, so when coach would assign us thus, we would run until we were out of sight and some friends would pick us up and drive us to the beach, party, get sandy enough to look like we went there, and drive us to where they picked us up. But when we actually did our runs, we would collect cones and road markers to reappropriate elsewhere in order to confuse the workers or plant the gas line flags where we had shit in the bushes and the water line flags where we took a piss.

Regardless of all our shenanigans, we took meets very seriously. Yes we continued to fart on command and one time I had a broken elbow (of which I was constantly teased for because of the lame reason, which I will not speak of now, and telling me I should have made up a different cause, like saving orphans from a crack house or surfing out to save a boated-over manatee), which I over-bandaged to look like I was more damaged than I was, and ran passed slow-pokes with pride to make sure they knew that a person a few cosmetic changes away from being Rick Allen could beat them.

In power lifting, a club that is a voluntary of extension of the gym class, weight lifting, I was one of two girls (and please don’t hate on me with your gender dynamics and assumptive society hoopla for assuming she referred to herself as a girl, this is a prologue not a essay you read to empower, I mean make yourself feel smarter). The class was basically a sleep hour for sports players to rest up before the big game/match/meet/etc. and work out whenever we felt like. I had the unofficial-made-up record for the calf lift, which I forget how many pounds it was, but it was all the forty-five pound weights (the heaviest we had) stacked as high as the machine could hold, and I had the made-up-made-up record for the stretch test, this wooden box with a measuring tape glued on top and you put your legs under it and leaned over to see where the tips of your fingers landed on the ruler, but my arms and torso were so long and my legs so short that my wrists could dangle off the block even with bent elbows.

I never went to any of the monthly meets because I told the coach that I was always on my lady-time and the other girl always said, “I have a headache,” but he would reply, trying to be funny and knowing she wasn’t going to go (what could he do, fail us in a club?), “It’s all in your head.”

The only thing I didn’t like about being one of the only girl, and don’t get me wrong it had it’s obvious perks, was that most of the guys had a contest to see who could grab my ass the most times in a practice. It’s not my fault that my mother’s ancestry is Spanish and we mixed blood with (ahem, raped) tribes where food was scarce and they had to evolve extra fat storages in their hindquarters.

In chorus I always sat with the flip floppers, Kristen and Lauren; named thus because our teacher would always switch us back and forth from descant, to soprano I to soprano II. Come to think of it, even though I was the youngest of the three by a few years, I was the only one who didn’t look like I was ten.

Kristen and I have stayed best friends and the summer after high school we dubbed the New Deal summer, because almost every party we went to people would come up to us and be like:

Hi, I’m AJ.

Hey, I’m JR.

Wassup? I’m AC.

  I’m DJ, and y’alls?

                                                Yo, PK.

                        Sup? I’m LJ.

            Lauren was one of those girls who could handle a dirty joke, but for the most part she never did anything that she wasn’t supposed to. She even had a pimple and never popped it and for weeks I would just stare at it, drying, greening, pussing, reddening, begging for air; it took all I had in me not to take a pair of tweezers and put that nasty thing out of it’s misery.

One time in chorus I almost fell asleep on my teacher's freezer, filled with cheesecakes we were selling for money to go to districts. You can go the website on the bottom of your page to purchase.

(beat)

Just kidding. We can't ship cheesecake, it would melt. Melt like an emo kid’s heart.

(beat)

Anyways, this girl who was a total troll doll walked in, while I was still laying on the freezer, and the bee-yatch said-

NARRATOR reveals her hands to the screen and they are covered in sock puppets. NARRATOR’S LEFT HAND to represent TROLL DOLL and NARRATOR’S RIGHT HAND to represent the girl.

NARRATOR’S RIGHT HAND

I'm going to tell on you for sleeping in class.

NARRATOR'S LEFT HAND

I am a bed wetter. So, I pissed on all of your desserts.

NARRATOR'S RIGHT HAND

Your disgusting.

NARRATOR'S left HAND

You're a sheep. Bahhhhh.

Okay back to writing.

After school we had an a capella group, which was the greatest thing ever until senior year our teacher got the god all in her and I quit because we only sang about our lord and savior. We got to compete with three songs over the years:

1.     Frobisher Bay: A song about a ship wreck, from the voice of a mate, in the Arctic Sea longing for his love.

2.     La Lluvia: A song mimicking the rain. All sounds were doos and dits and daas and woos.

3.     O Sapo: A traditional Brazilian folk song about a toad and a mushroom and a fire.

Once a year we would take two busses, the fun bus and the lame bus, to Disney Candlelight. Can you imagine? Three hours with hypereactive, socially awkward, teenagers? Didn’t think so. We’d arrive at about noon, goof off at Epcot  for a few hours, and that evening we’d rehearse a bunch of Christmas songs with all of the other schools, pretending the melting plastic candle with a light bulb was a phallus, the girls showing off by singing the guy parts as well as the high notes, and praying we weren’t at the edge of the riser and have to wear a wool white Mickey glove. We’d perform them at Epcot that night and Holly, a prim and proper lass, would always get sneezed on. [1]

But Disney’s not all bad. Granted my college peers despised their environmental degradation and corporate monopoly and their youth brainwashing. But Epcot invited Garrison Keeler to emcee their holiday candlelight vigil. I could barely concentrate because I kept hoping he would say

It was a quiet week at Lake Wobegon and when

they saw the star and rejoiced with great joy.

And because I have sang the descant of Hallelujah while staring at Mr. Keeler’s left ear I am able to make sexual advances towards Salmon Rushdie[2]

That night we would we would stay at the music themed resort with guitar shaped pool and music notes applied liberally to everything and wake up to a whole day to spend at the Magic Kingdom. It was magical. When they changed Mr. Toads Wild Ride into Winnie the Pooh, I was sad because I love both to death, but I was glad a bit because all my life I would sing the Heffalumps and Woozles song to my self and people thought I made them up. Well, since they got a role on the ride, people think I’m a notch less crazy. But it was guaranteed that at least one sucky thing would happen: a kid having an epileptic seizure waiting in line for Snow White (luckily, my friend Katie S.’s shoe saved his head from hitting the pink pavement), we’d get stuck on the Tomorrow Land express (in our car we had one person from each choral section and we decided to sing songs from Candlelight to entertain the other cars, in the pre-Jack Sparrow Pirates of the Carribe(e)an we had to hear and eternal loop of the intro-recording:

Ahoy, matees! Watch your steps and keep all your limbs inside the ship at all times.

¡Ahoy, aparea! Mire sus pasos y mantenga todos los miembros dentro del buque siempre.

Ahoy, matees! Watch your steps and keep all your limbs inside the ship at all times.

¡Ahoy, aparea! Mire sus pasos y mantenga todos los miembros dentro del buque siempre.

Ahoy, matees! Watch your steps and keep all your limbs inside the ship at all times.

¡Ahoy, aparea! Mire sus pasos y mantenga todos los miembros dentro del buque siempre.[3]

Needless to say that drove us bananas.

            One year this girl in chorus went literally buh-nanas. She stole handfuls of shit from every store and thought she could get away with it. Hello?! It’s fucking Disney. You can’t beat them. She stayed in our class and was quietly dissident yet embarrassed in the face of our teacher.

            Anyways.

            My freshman year I joined the school’s dance team in their prime year, but I quit because we sucked and got booed off the floor during our first pep rally; however, the crowd did take a liking to this group of masked boys dance performance, of who laid upside-down on their shoulder blades, legs in the air bent like a diamond, and flapping their knees in a very provocative manner with their genitals in the people in the front rows faces (including the special kids).

No masked grinders were identified for expulsion.

            The club went under and in the seceding years it was a step team. You know, the clapping and stomping routines like line dancing but in place.

            At the company level, I danced at Jupiter Dance Academy, this little tin shack at the summit of what hills we have here in Florida so every time I rained just a little, the parking lot was flooded. When I was like seven this guy didn’t realize that we could see out the tinted windows and he took it out (yes, that is a Seinfeld quote) and proceeded to pee with his dick in hand having to us.

 I was literally too big boned for a pas de deux, the epic dances where the guy ballerino tosses around the girl, and I was too unsymmetrical to look like a swan but instead a stumpy stork: short legs, long torso, big hands[4], extensive arms, large feet. When we would do measurements for our costumes, they would measure our torso and I was always the shortest girl in my size group. They’d line up the larges and I was like an overused crayon in a box of new ones. And because my feet were so big, the cartilage in my feet didn’t heal until three years after girls my age did, so I was the oldest kid the Pre-Point class, but out of shame, that year my teacher also let me simultaneously take Point I.

            Tap was my favorite but we only did white girl tap, never black people tap. Preppy and pretty, never bowlegged and jerky.

            One recital this girl, Holly, made a burn book writing my friend, Michaela, was anorexic and my cousin, Lynsey, was an Asian pig in her past life. So when she came running off stage for a quick change (when you have like two minutes or less to change costumes, hair, tights, shoes, make-up, etc.), I stuck my leg out and, well, tripped her. She had a bloody nose and missed her next performance all together. I put my people before dancing walruses. I should also note that because of quick changes, at any given moment in a dance recital there is a naked girl and we didn’t give a flying fuck.

            When I first stated dancing, when I was three, Jill ran the company and it was called Jill’s Dance Studio. She mostly only taught the upper lever classes so all I remember her for is being nice and goofy and, because all the younger kids liked to spy on the big kids, she always wore a headset while teaching over the blaring music. When she left, a lot of girls did also (including this one girl Toi who did a cameo in the movie Wild things and my dad was not-so-secretly gaga over), but she moved to New York and won a Tony for 1776.

The new owner, Debra, was a pill and a half, except when in the beginning of class to limber up we did the spaghetti dance, a dance where we all get in the middle of the class room pretending to be stiff sticks of pasta and as the pot boiled, we flailed around the room as if we were bubbling up and down in boiling water. I retrospect, that’s very Hansel and Gretel. Hmm. Anyhow, when we stretched or hurt ourselves, she would always yell, “Pain is beauty,” which is something you don’t really need to indoctrinate into youthful minds and they are splay-legged and knock-kneed trying to get our crotches on the floor doing splits. This dictum also applied one student, Meg, who was effortlessly long and lean with an Olympiad physique and never sweated in pain to become a principle dancer, when Debra, drunk at a cast party, unaware of Meg’s presence in the room stammered, “She’d go somewhere in dance if she was pretty.” Really? So if she actually had to agonize through dancing she’d have a prettier face? Ok. Like she was going into dancing as a career, born valedictorian and potential ruler of the world, sought after by all kinds of Ivy League schools since day care, and with wit and charm and self-deprecating humility and base sarcasm perpetually pouring out her asshole[5]. Seriously, if she was prom-queen pretty, then she’d probably evolve into some infinite gravity orb and create a nexus in the universe, ending life as we know it. It would be a teen movie meets sci-fi apocolyptica movie. ABC Family meets Discovery Channel.  

She was obsessed with purple and, with the jokes amiss, would always tell us, no matter how tiny our leotards were, if we were wearing purple, “You better watch you leotard, I just might steal it right off your back it’s pretty.”

In my sophomore year of high school my cousin, who was still dancing there, emailed me a link to her profile on the police website for domestic abuse and assault and battery. Apparently, her and her husband were going through a bitter divorce, she’d thrown all of his shit to the curb and changed the locks (even though the house was still in both their names) and created a moat from all of their cars (also, in both their names) surrounding the house. When he stepped onto their property one day, she ran out, hopped over one of the cars Miami 5-0 style, and, like a clock with it’s hands out of wacky, preceded to beat the shit out of him. Her mugs hot was beautifully painful.

Jill’s assistant was Nancy Hoar; I only type her last name because it was ironic that one of the kindest people ever would have that last name. I was in kiddy love with her son and she took us two on dates to McDonalds all the time, picking us up from school before we went to class. One year in tap, we did a number to the song “Is you is or is you aint my baby” and I got to play his baby and another year in jazz we did a number to “I got a crush on you” and guess who got to have a crush in him? When Jill left, so did they. I still got to see him in school but he eventually continued going to rich white kid grade schools, whereas I was gerrymandered into the opposite. The kind of schools that get on the news for gang violence and conception in the classroom.

Anyways.

When I started high school I had to quit because the cost of dancing was getting a bit out of hand.

Our annual bill was about a grand for costumes (the countess amounts of tulle and sequins and lace became the derivation of my fashion related fag-hagness) and forty bucks a leotard of which I usually had to buy nine a few extra through out the year of they got over used (black for master ballet, red for advanced ballet, indigo for master point, purple for advanced point, lilac for intermediate point, opal for pre-point, navy for masters lyrical, blue for advanced lyrical, periwinkle for intermediate lyrical, gray for any level jazz or character, forest green for any level tap, kids wore various shades of pink, and basically whatever leotard you were wearing already for acro because the teacher taught there once a week and had her own gymnastics studio and her self usually wore spandex, tie-dyed, bedazzled unitards with a scrunchied side-ponied 80s cut oversized shirts.

At least twice a year you had to buy shoes, a new set for recital and a new set for competition season: ballet slippers, point shoes (some times in different colors), point gels or wool, black and/or tan jazz slippers, black and/or tan character heels, black and/or tan tap shoes, black and/or tan character heels with taps, and black and/or tan lyrical shoes.

Tuition was $400 a month. Tights were lucky to live more that a few weeks. Between pink with or without the seem in the back, black, nude, and fishnets.

Then there were all the accessories to wear to look hip. No accessories for ballet and point (except for Lyara, a girl who had to eventually get breast reduction surgery because it was causing back pains and they let her wear a t-shirt over her leotard because she was always spilling out). Hair in a bun with a hairnet around it. No eye make up. No skirts. No bangs. Gel was your friend. No jewelry except for tiny studs for a month after you got your ears pierced. No exceptions (fuck your grandmothers jewelry, fuck your cross, fuck your star of David, fuck your friendship pendant). Point ribbons properly tied. All knots tucked in.

For the rest, body slimming jazz pants or shorts. No extreme colors. Leg warmers, maybe. Only nude or black ace bandages. No baggy shirts. Sport skirts considered.

In acro was when I’d whip out the rainbow tights, glittered leotard, and all kids of hot tranny mess. The other teachers didn’t get acro and only let her teach for the rent money for the space, always encouraging us that dance is and art and rolling around on mats was a waste, an insult to creativity. Pish posh. I loved it because I had tried gymnastics when I was younger, but I didn’t have the balance for the beam, the upper body strength for the uneven bars, the trust of the pommel horse, or the talent of floor routines. In acro we just learned and performed the basic floor stuff on a row of mats that velcroed together and, for the younger class, sacrificed Saturday morning cartoons to roll around.

Growing up I never knew my there’s and two’s. But I did know my yonder's and tu’s. There was a deaf girl in my preschool class who was sent from Brazil

to get her ears fixed. My mother was more than willing to take advantage:

“She teach you sign language.

You be tri-lingual. When she

grow up, she know Portuguese.

You write letters, you know

Portuguese. You be smart,

go on Wheel of Fortune.”

I was always more of a Guts fan, anyways. Or of game shows where they give you

clothes to wear while you play.

I came out a fairly light skinned baby with thick black hair.  By the time I was starting grade school, mom brought me into her hair salon and dyed me blond:

 “No one take us serious. You

lucky you not short or orange”

I didn’t have the lack of decency to tell her a lot of guys have a fetish for the petite girls that they can toss around or that all Disney child actors go out of their way to look orange via spray tan.

But don’t feel bad for her syntax just yet. She was a hairdresser

and she quickly picked up how to complain with New York transplants and high school prom queens. But I digress, my father never allowed me to bring a boy home, and let alone a black one. I went to prom alone my senior year because a boy I ran track with was the only person who’d asked me. Dad said:                       

“I just don’t get thems

rap music. All that talking

and not enough thinking.

That boy’d get you in trouble.”

Since then, I’d only wear hairstyles named after agricultural techniques and proper male nouns. I guess that’s why no one takes me seriously.

But I digress.

I’m an only child, so growing up my only friend was shaped like a box, which is more aesthetically pleasing than an asymmetrical teenager. TV, back then, showed less of the aforementioned people and also wore more clothing. Sometimes good, sometimes gross.

This lifestyle also led me to making up imaginary characters I wrote and lived with daily. Once, I submitted a script to Home Improvement (probably written on Lisa Frank stationary in scented pens) with a kissing scene between JTT and myself, of course.

 What’s the most cliché way to say all eyes were on me at all times? Fuck it. At birth my dad planted cacti outside of my window. I rarely snuck out. I’d carry tweezers to pick the needles out of my legs. What I needed was a ski suit, Gortex, that’s a Seinfeld reference. You could never get the sliver needles out. If pain is beauty, then my legs were spectacular.

My family’s Spanish and Southern, so we’re crazy with bad childhoods, making me the perfect candidate for writer/responsible nare-do-well (that’s not a paradox because I’m a multi-tasker).

Maybe according to sentence structure I should have briefly explained the 'get sick' first because I listed it first. I mean I was journalism major for a while and the opening sentence sets up everything. I was socially awkward and had no sense of time so that major kicked my ass the whole year that I did it.

Should I be cursing before the book even starts? On the first few pages? Odds are this will be the hundredth page because books have blank pages in the beginning that secretly numerated so page 1 is labeled page 10 or they have skipped-over pages with Romanized, archaic numbers[6].

I was an antibiotic baby. I had more things put in me than taken out of me by the time I got my first public school shot than any celebrity I can think of. We’d go to Mexico once a year, in the winter when cruise prices were low even though it never gets cold south of the Port of Miami. We’d stack up on antibiotics (and maybe a little pain pills and Viagra and Paxil[7]).  With them all stuffed in our suitcases, because after we emptied all the alcohol we’d snuck on we had more room for souvenirs, we walked though customs with ease. We were white enough to not look sketch yet mom and I were dark enough that we could pass as tourists who just laid out all day in the boat. And when Bush the younger enacted the while Homeland Securities bull shit, our last name was so Americana, so Eurocentric that the biggest xenophobe could never arise the slightest idea to racial profile.

When I got older I realized they were hypochondriacs but mom had control issues. By then I was immune to US antibiotics and later in life it would fuck shit up for me.

Then we got poor.

Because, for my mother, doing hair didn’t exactly pay the bills when your main demographic of clients are New York transplant Jews (and yes they were the ones who fucked up the election in 2000 when they didn’t bubble their votes right, thus contributing to the American lexicon the phrase pregnant chards and introducing the nation to that clown-face of an elections supervisor) who didn’t understand that tipping was compensation for listening to the ramblings of:

                                                            Mary cheats at canasta

            I think my pool boy is an illegal

                                                                                    It smells like bleach in here

Why do you always mess up my hair when you do exactly what I ask

I don’t like that gay boy at the front desk. That’s immoral.

she sought work in trying get rick quick schemes, dot-coming, day trading, trying to get a liquor license, and even took pictures of flowers at Home Depot and tried to sell them on EBay.

My dad was a leader of a labor union at the water plant (when I was a kid I was embarrassed about his job because I thought he dealt with septic tanks so if, and only if, someone asked me what he did for a living, I’d say he worked for the government) and when they banned unions, he was fired. Forced to work out of the county, starting at the bottom of the totem pole, new shitty health insurance, and instead of working nine to five he worked 11pm-6am.

When the IRS called my mom out for not claiming all her tips, things got hard. I mean it was like twenty grand in back taxes and interest. Dad started doing triple overtime and had to take calcium and Vitamin D supplements because he never saw the light of day.

He was, I believe, a closet socialist. Couldn’t go a day without saying he wished there was socialized Medicare.

But, when I actually needed to go to the doctor all I heard out of mom’s mouth was money.

Why does a cat scan cost a grand?

Why did I need to be in the ICU for two days?

            Couldn’t you have slept it off?

                                                            We’re not made of money, you know?

My mother could turn a hard core argument out of my hospital adventures. If I got too many second opinions I wasted money. If I got too many she called the docs liars. She didn’t ask how I felt. It'd take her a week to ask me what they did.

Dad had longer hair than me by the time I was seventeen teen. My hair was pretty long. I mean I’m a girl and that is what is socially accepted based on gender stereotypes. You know, before I got chemo, but more on that later. And in such a visual culture as long as you look the part, who is going to judge you? He wanted to name me Mitzy as a baby, but a Hispanic mother can be a bit stubborn. I could use that pen name. Oh who am I kidding! Who is going to respect a Hispanic female author unless they write about life at the pueblo or being abjected in a multi-cultured society? I mean two minorities that are considered an other! All I need to do now is announce I am queer and I might as well have duct tape over my mouth and my fingers cut off.

If I take on his white male name this book may get off of the shelf. Well, he wasn’t all white; he was a quarter Cherokee and in such a visual culture as long as you look the part, who is going to judge you?

He was the only person I could talk about the Weather Underground with. Not the black panthers. He was from Alabama. He’s not racist, I think, I was afraid to find out if he was or not. He’d let me stay up late and watch Bill Maher, if when I was too young to follow along, making fun of the conservatives, teasing Bill for being the frat king of the bleeding hearts, and eventually making a drinking game of throwing back every time the audience clapped for a really obvious statement.

I’ve never kissed him, but he may have kissed me as a baby. He still thinks I'm a virgin. I think it’s easier that way. It’s bad enough that the last name dies with me, but it could be worse for him to find out all the guys that could have potentially ended the Proctor legacy. Not that we had a pretentious legacy, but I can relate to the dominant need of a male wanting to keep something he furthers. I know, I know. Tolerance for gender differentiation is bad and change for egalitarianism equates into good.

The family dynamic was always, involuntarily, mom and dad v. me or mom and me v. him. Mom needed back up when she was mad at one of us and the other had to pretend to be in solidarity with her. This of course changed when I went to college and it was always them v. me, I mean, he had to live with her. He wanted me to go the community college up the street to not ruin the dynamic, as well as because that was how the college pre-paid was set up for. In defiance, my senior year I applied for like ten scholarships a day, carrying a folder of applications three inches thick wherever I went. I babysat every weekend and had two additional jobs over the summer because by law kids under eighteen could only work 20 hours for an employer. My last summer before university, I took two college courses from 8am-11, work across the street at the mall for a few hours, then across town as a busser, then I’d bathe in the sink, change into something scandalous, and a friend would pick me up so we could be out until god knows how late. Because my mom didn’t trust me with a drivers license, I didn’t get one until this summer because picking me up and driving me somewhere every few hours was beginning to take a toll.

I was raised by a family oriented grandmother so forgive me for stepping outside of queer politics for a second. She was the definition of neo-classical nuclear woman; without ever noticing her do it, she was always cooking and cleaning and showing the utmost respect, which as I got older and noticed, her agreeable demeanor was at times charmingly condescending. We were two of the same airheaded penny, not very useful but you’d miss us when we’re gone. Smart but oblivious, ever present but in our own world, flexible but suborn in a harmless way save for occasionally ourselves, and we’d always injure ourselves in the weirdest ways. She’d break her ribs because her boobs are too big, I’d forget to put the car in park and run my self over when I’d go to shut the gate.

But I digress, my cousin and I were first generation only children. Incest and remarrying was all the rage. I was always jealous of her. She’s the sorority, critically

acclaimed musical theater comedienne. And with a life dramatic enough for Lindsey Lohan to play her and mother played by Olivia Newton John in a Lifetime tell-all.  When all the boys would hunt her down after the shows, I would put my hands

in my pockets and coyly balancé my way toward her:

                I don’t want to kiss you, I just want

                                    to whisper in your mouth.”

Enough telling. I guess I’ll show you something. Or not. You bought, stole, or borrowed this thing. I’m sure it’s on the internet. I mean, I typed this originally in my email account because id rather the cookie be read by a masturbating CEO than the original file be read by someone I knew. I feel like I’m talking to you. This isn’t a novel. This is turning into a narrative. Bad author! Bad! I mean every life may be best written by themselves so don’t judge me. Even though that I am conscious that this is writing very naratively I want to try and fuck with you a little bit insomuch that since at the beginning of life we know the end, that we’ll die, and I don’t want the ending of this to be contained in the first pages. I want to feign some sort of organic flow.

            To end this while sounding like a pretentious fuck, I will close with a quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the Knight likes to repeatedly tell his listeners that even though I have been blabbering on for hours this is not the point of the story, but you have to assume it is eventually relevant in its frivolity later on.

Now cometh the point, and herkneth if yow leste…

…The grete effect, for which that I bygan.

[1] Kristen and I would go back to Epcot every year and fail at drinking around the world because we are retarded and always start with Mexico and get Margaritas instead of starting off slow with beer. And when it was time to watch the new gang of Candlelighters, we would always arrive as soon as the show was about to start and get shitty seats. So, when we started singing all the words to the songs, we figured out the people regulating seating took notice of the fact we were former musketeers and let us sit in the empty reserved seats. We got to watch Felicia Rashad and Neil Patrick Harris and Kirk Cameron and Abigail Breslin emcee over the years.

[2] You see, he came to my college and gave a lecture in front of my said literary, I’m-so-liberal peers on how he was in a movie where he dressed in a purple three piece suit with a whip in one hand and a handle of whisky in the other; he chained people, who referred to him as a terrorist, up and forced them to listen to him recite to the Satanic Verses. In the  Q&A portion I asked him to chain me up and read for me. He went for it and even said, “You could have asked him in private,” so I said, “It’s alright if the audience joined.” So, I told my current  poetry teacher what I did and she said she would give me extra-credit if a wrote a short about it so I did. He ramble— I rambles—He brambles and got a triple word score. I sang “you dirty whore” to the tune of Me and Mrs. Jones. Then we argued whether Counting Crows or Talking Heads and Amy Winehouse and Bob Dylan was the husband and the cheater with Billy Paul. We made and bet about who it was and we had to drive to Valdosta to get him Glamour Shots so I can paint him up as JonBenét Ramsey. And even though he’s balding, he’ll be blond, blue eye shadowed, and pink dots for blush. He’s JonBenét Ramsey. He’s JonBenét Ramsey, and every parent wants to do him, that lush. I took a break from being vegan so we could do Irish car bombs

and drink Baileys from a shoe. Because I’m Old Greg. Because I’m Old Greg, and I’d show my mangina from under my pink tu tu. So I guess it works. He’s a beauty queen and I have a down stairs mix up. He’s every pedophiles dream and did I mention I have a down stairs mix up.

[3] There was this Saturday Night Live skit with these two comedians and a rapper, T-Pain, who was from where I went to college, and the skit made fun of how rappers are always on a boat. So, one time when Kristen and I went to the Magic Kingdom we realized there are a lot of boats or boat-like vehicles there (Splash Mountain- canoe, Tom Sawyers Island- raft, Pirates of the Carribe(e)an- boat, Peter Pan- ship) and as soon as we got on we would sing, “I’m on a Boat.”

[4] Because of my big hands, I’m an efficient typist and I’ve only met two people who have a larger pinky than me. Big hands means long forearms and big feet, which allows me to reach high objects and have good balance.

[5] Later I learned, from doing research on her for this blub, via Facebook that she graduated from BU with all kinds of accolades and spent two years in the Peace Corp advising a Malian government agency, microfinance institution, village association, or NGO in support of income generating activities in her community.

Bitch.

[6] For a year, I majored in Journalism (which you can obviously tell by the fact that I am not utilizing reverse-pyramid format), until I remembered I’m a little too out of the box (get it, my only friend was a box and to watch it I had to outside of it). I’m funnier in real life, I think. I graduated with a degree and Creative Writing and Art History and after writing for a lot of the newspapers that went under, I can gladly say that either way I would still be working in restaurants because the school board is having a hard time funding prospective teachers like myself.

[7] Needless to say, if you aren’t on at least 100 mg of crazy pills, I think you are either a liar, in denial, drugged secretly by a loved one, don’t have access, haven’t learned the ways of being a thug, or on the religious right.

Oh no you di’nt?

Oh yes she di’id!

To all of those I listed, I laugh at you. You don’t know the wonders of the first Paxil high. Getting a good nights sleep off zanies (I hope I spelled that right, oral language is hard to write). Or even the withdrawal effects from your psychiatrist being to busy to see you so you go a week without clonazopan and feel like every bone got cast in lead. Or maybe you’re excuse is that you’re too depressed to leave your apartment or afraid to talk to another human being. Get up and get out.

Hallelujah! I’m a bum! Hallelujah! Bum, again!