Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Read online

  I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a childhood that was not like mine. I have no real frame of reference, but when I question strangers I’ve found that their childhood generally had much less blood in it, and also that strangers seem uncomfortable when you question them about their childhood. But really, what else are you going to talk about in line at the liquor store? Childhood trauma seems like the natural choice, since it’s the reason why most of us are in line there to begin with. I’ve found, though, that people are more likely to share their personal experiences if you go first, so that’s why I always keep an eleven-point list of what went wrong in my childhood to share with them. Also I usually crack open a bottle of tequila to share with them, because alcohol makes me less nervous, and also because I’m from the South, and in Texas we offer drinks to strangers even when we’re waiting in line at the liquor store. In Texas we call that “southern hospitality.” The people who own the liquor store call it “shoplifting.” Probably because they’re Yankees.

  I’m not allowed to go back to that liquor store.2

  1. “Fork” is not really the real secret word. There isn’t actually a secret word. Because this is a book, y’all. Not a fucking spy movie.

  2. Author’s note: My editor informs me that this doesn’t count as a chapter, because nothing relevant happens in it. I explained that that’s because this is really just an introduction to the next chapter and probably should be combined with the next chapter, but I separated it because I always find it’s nice to have short chapters that you can finish quickly so you can feel better about yourself. Plus, if your English teacher assigned you to read the first three chapters of this book you’ll already be finished with the first two, and in another ten minutes you can go watch movies about sexy, glittery vampires, or whatever the hell you kids are into nowadays. Also, you should thank your English teacher for assigning you this book, because she sounds badass. You should probably give her a bottle from the back of your parents’ liquor cabinet to thank her for having the balls to choose this book over The Red Badge of Courage. Something single-malt.

  You’re welcome, English teachers. You totally owe me.

  Wait. Hang on. It just occurred to me that if English teachers assigned this book as required reading, that means that the school district just had to buy a ton of my books, so technically I owe you one, English teachers. Except that now that I think about it, my tax dollars paid for those books, so technically I’m kind of paying for people to read my own book, and now I don’t know whether to be mad or not. This footnote just turned into a goddamn word problem.

  You know what? Fuck it. Just send me half of the malt liquor you get from your students and we’ll call it even.

  Also, is this the longest footnote in the history of ever? Answer: Probably.

  My Childhood: David Copperfield Meets Guns & Ammo Magazine

  I’ve managed to pinpoint several key differences between my childhood and that of pretty much everyone else in the entire fucking world. I call these points, “Eleven Things Most People Have Never Experienced or Could Have Even Possibly Imagined, but That Totally Happened to Me, Because Apparently I Did Something Awful in a Former Life That I’m Still Being Punished For.”

  #1. Most people have never stood inside a dead animal, unless you count that time when Luke Skywalker crawled inside that tauntaun to keep from freezing to death, which I don’t, because Star Wars is not a documentary. If you’re easily grossed out, I recommend skipping this entire section and going straight to chapter five. Or maybe getting another book that’s less disturbing than this one. Like one about kittens. Or genocide.

  Still there? Good for you! Let’s continue. I remember as a kid watching the Cosby family prepare dinner on TV and thinking how odd it was that no one was covered in blood, because this was a typical night in our house: My father, an avid bow hunter, would lumber inside the house with a deer slung over his shoulder. He’d fling it across the dining room table, and then my parents would dissect it and pull out all the useful parts, like some sort of terrible piñata. It was disgusting, but it was the only life I knew, so I assumed that everyone else was just like us.

  The only thing that seemed weird about it to me was that I was the only person in the whole house who gagged at the smell of the deer blood. My parents tried to convince me that blood doesn’t have a smell, but they are fucking liars. Also they told me that milk does have a smell, and that’s ridiculous, and I’m shocked that their lies have spread so far. Milk doesn’t have a smell. Blood does. And I think I’m so sensitive to the smell of a dead deer because of the time when I accidentally walked inside one.

  I was about nine years old and I was playing chase with my sister while my father was cleaning a deer.

  I’m going to interrupt here for a small educational explanation about what it means to “clean a deer”:

  “Cleaning a deer” for people who are sensitive members of PETA

  You get some warm water and tearless shampoo and gently massage the deer. (Lather, rinse, but don’t repeat, even though the bottle says to, because that’s just a ploy to sell more shampoo.) Blow-dry on low heat and hot-glue a bow to his forehead. Send him back to the woods to meet a nice Jewish doe. Go to the next chapter.

  “Cleaning a deer” for curious, nonjudgmental readers who really want to know how it’s done (and who aren’t PETA members who are just pretending to be curious, nonjudgmental readers, but who really want to throw blood on me at book signings)

  Cleaning a deer consists of tying up the arms and legs of the deer to a clothesline-like contraption, making it look as if the dead deer is a cheerleader doing the “Give me an X!” move. Then you slice open the stomach, and all the stuff you don’t want falls out. Like the genitals. And the poop rope.

  “Cleaning a deer” for people who clean deer all the time

  I know, right? Can you believe there are people who don’t know this shit? Weird. These are probably the same people who call the poop rope “the intestines.” We all know it’s a poop rope, people. Saying it in French doesn’t make it any less disgusting.

  Anyway, my dad had just finished cleaning the deer when I made a recklessly fast, ninja-like U-turn to avoid getting tagged by my sister, and that’s when I ran. Right. The fuck. Inside of the deer. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and I stood there, kind of paralyzed and not ninja-like at all. The best way I can describe it is that it was kind of like I was wearing a deer sweater. Sometimes people laugh at that, but it’s not an amused laugh. It’s more of an involuntary nervous giggle of what-the-fuckness. Probably because you aren’t supposed to wear deer for sweaters. You’re not supposed to throw up inside them either, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  I’d like to think that my father threw that deer away, because I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to eat food you’ve worn or vomited into, but while he was hosing me off he was also hosing off the deer, so my guess is that he applied some sort of a fucked-up Grizzly Adams version of the five-second rule. (Food on the floor is still edible as long as you pick it up within five seconds. Unless it’s peanut butter; then the five-second rule is null. Or if it’s something like dry toast, the five-second rule is extended to, like, a week and a half, because really, what’s going to get on dry toast? Nothing, that’s what. God, I could write a whole book on the five-second rule. That should totally be the follow-up book to this one: The Five Second Rule As It Applies to Various Foodstuffs. Brilliant. But now I’ve forgotten what I was writing about. Oh, yeah, throwing up inside a deer sweater. Right.) And that’s why I still suspect that my dad took home the horribly defiled deer sweater to eat. Except I didn’t eat it, because after that the smell of blood made me gag, and to this day I can’t eat any meat that I’ve seen or smelled raw, which my husband complains about all the time, but until he’s worn a deer sweater he can just shut the hell up. He says it’s all in my mind, but it’s totally not, and I’ve even offered to take some sort of blind smell test, li
ke they did in the Pepsi challenge, where he holds bowls of blood up to my nose so that I can prove that I can smell blood, but he won’t do it. Probably because he’s kind of anal about our bowls. He wouldn’t even let me use one for throwing up in when I was sick. He was all, “Vomit bowl? Who uses a vomit bowl?!” and I was all, “I use a vomit bowl. Everyone uses a vomit bowl. You keep it near you in case you can’t make it to the toilet,” and he was all, “No, you use a trash can,” and I was like, “You sick fuck. I’m not throwing up in a trash can. That’s totally barbaric.” Then he yelled, “That’s what normal people do!” and I screamed, “That’s how civilization breaks down!” And then I refused to speak to him for the rest of the day, because he made me yell at him while I was vomity. Did you notice how I just skipped right to having a husband even though this paragraph is supposed to be about my childhood? My God, this is going to be a terrible book. But both stories have to do with blood and vomit, so that’s kind of impressive, in a way that’s really less “impressive” and more just kind of “sad” and “disturbing.”

  #2. (On the list of “Things Most People Have Never Experienced or Could Have Even Possibly Imagined but That Totally Happened to Me,” in case you’ve forgotten what we were talking about because number one was way too long and needs to be edited or possibly burned.) Most people don’t have poisonous tap water in their house. Most people don’t get letters from the government telling them not to drink their poisonous tap water because dangerous radon has leaked into their well. In fact, most people don’t get their poisonous tap water from a well at all.

  Concerned relatives would question my mother about the risks of my sister and me being exposed to all that radon, but she waved them off, saying, “Oh, they couldn’t swallow it even if they wanted to. They’d throw it up immediately. It’s that toxic. So, you know, no worries.” Then she’d send us off to brush our teeth with it and bathe in it. My mom was a big proponent of the “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” theory, almost to the point where she seemed to be daring the world to kill us. This theory worked well for my sister, who has never been sick a day in her life, and is one of those Amazonian women who could squat in a field to have a baby and then pick the baby up and keep on hoeing, except also the field would be on fire, and she’d be all, “Fuck you, fire!” and walk through it like that scary robot in The Terminator. And also her baby would be fire-resistant, and would be karate-chopping the flames like a tiny badass. I’ve tried to have this same level of pioneer toughness, but every couple of months I have a total breakdown or catch some kind of weird disease that only animals get. Like the time I got human parvo, which totally exists and is no fucking picnic. Or the time when I was brushing my hair and heard a pop in my neck, and I could barely even breathe it hurt so much. Then I drove myself to work and I almost passed out from a combination of the pain and the not-breathing, and when I got there I hurt so much I couldn’t even move my mouth to talk, so I wrote, “I HAVE BROKEN MY NECK,” on a Post-it, and my bewildered office mate drove me to the hospital. Turns out I’d herniated a disc, and the doctor gave me a pamphlet on domestic abuse and kept asking me whether someone was hurting me at home, because apparently most people don’t herniate their discs simply from brushing their hair too hard. I prefer to think that most people just don’t brush their hair as enthusiastically as I do.

  #3. Most people have running water. I mean, we mostly had running water, except when we didn’t, which was often. As my sister and I would always say to each other, “You know, you never really appreciate your poisonous well water until it’s gone.” In the summer the water would occasionally stop for no reason whatsoever, and in the winter the pipes would freeze, and we’d be forced to fill up pots of water from our cistern, and then warm the icy water on the stove to bathe in. It’s even less glamorous than it sounds. I once pointed out to my mother that the water from the cistern was slightly brown, and that it didn’t really seem like the cleanest way to wash your hair, but she sighed at me in disappointment, saying, “It’s pronounced ‘beige.’” As if the pronunciation somehow made it fancier.

  “Okay,” I capitulated grudgingly, “the cistern water seems slightly more beige than the water from the tap,” but my mom just shrugged it off, because apparently she didn’t trust water she couldn’t see.

  #4. Most people don’t have a cistern or even know what a cistern is. Some of them say that they have a cistern, and then they politely add that the word is actually pronounced “sister,” and then I just nod, because I really don’t want to have to explain that a cistern is actually an enormous metal can that catches rainwater, sort of like an aboveground well for people who can’t actually afford a well. But no one wants to explain that, because honestly? Who’s going to admit they can’t afford a well? Not me, obviously, because we had a well. One that was filled with poisonous radon.

  The back of this photo says, “1975—Jenny & her chickens. A dog killed them not long afterward.” Funny, I feel fine.

  #5. Most people don’t have live raccoons in the house. My dad was always rescuing animals, and by “rescuing animals” I mean “killing the mother, and then discovering she had babies, and bringing the babies home to raise them in the bathtub.” Once, he brought home eight newborn raccoons in a bucket for us to raise. When the orphaned raccoons were little, my mom sewed tiny Jams for them to wear (because this was the eighties, and Jams were quite popular then), and they were adorable, but then the raccoons got big enough to climb out of the bathtub and pretty much destroyed the entire house. Raccoons are totally OCD and they are driven to wash everything that they see, which you’d think would make them smell better, but it doesn’t, because they smell all musky and vaguely sour, like one-night stands.

  Photographic proof of Rambo in his Jams. Also pictured: Teen Beat magazine with Kirk Cameron on the cover, records, and VHS tapes. It’s like the eighties threw up all over this raccoon. I couldn’t even make this shit up, people.

  When the raccoons were old enough, we returned them all to the woods, except for one raccoon that we kept as a pet. His name was Rambo, and he’d learned how to turn on the bathroom sink and would wash random things in it all the time, like it was his own private river. If I’d have been thinking I would have left some Woolite and my delicates by the sink for him to rinse out, but you never think to turn your pet raccoon into a tiny butler until it’s too late. Once, we came home to find Rambo in the sink, washing a tiny sliver of soap that had been a new bath-size bar that morning. He looked exhausted, and like he wanted someone to stop him and put him to bed, but when we tried to take away the last bit of soap he growled at us, and so we let him finish, because at that point I guess it was like a vendetta, if raccoons had vendettas. Sometimes when I’m working on an impossible project that I know I should just give up on and someone tries to take it away, I growl and scream, “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!” (which is both weird and inappropriate) but I think that that’s probably exactly how Rambo was feeling, with his soap sliver and puckered little fingers covered in radon water, and it makes me sad. But then I laugh, because it reminds me that right after the soap incident my mom insisted that Rambo needed to live outside in a chicken cage “to protect him from himself.” I had placed him on top of the cage to pet him when my little sister, Lisa, who was about seven then, whacked him in the nose (because she was kind of a dick at the time), and then Rambo flipped the fuck out, stood up on his hind legs, grimaced, and jumped directly onto my sister’s face. He grabbed on to her ears like he was some kinda horrible raccoon mask, and he was hissing and looking right into her eyes like, “I WILL BRING YOU DOWN, BITCH,” and my sister was screaming and flailing her arms and it was totally awesome.

  The next day my dad took Rambo to the farm, which I’d thought meant that he actually took him to my grandfather’s farm to live, but now that I think about it, it probably had less to do with going to a farm than buying one. And now I’m sad again. But then I think about the fact that my dad was probably pointing the gun at
Rambo, and Rambo was probably wearing his little Jams and was all, “Hi there, mister!” and my dad probably sighed defeatedly,1 saying something like “Aw, fuck. Just go on, then. Here’s ten dollars and some soap.” Because deep down my father is a total softy. Unless he’s inadvertently killing the mother of a bunch of baby raccoons. Then you’d better stand the fuck back, because you’re totally going to get blood on you.

  #6. Most people don’t go out into the woods to catch armadillos so that their father can race them professionally. Also, when you find one and pull it out by its tail, most girls’ fathers won’t scream out, “Mind the teeth! That one looks like a biter!” Probably because most fathers don’t love their daughters as much as my father loves me. Or maybe because they didn’t make their daughters pull live armadillos out of tree stumps. Hard to tell. Honestly, though, those girls are missing out, because there is nothing like seeing your father down on his hands and knees with five other grown men, screaming and slapping at the ground to scare their respective armadillos into crossing the finish line first. And when I say, “There’s nothing like it,” what I mean is, “Holy shit, these people are fucking insane.”

  Usually when I tell people my dad was a Texas armadillo racing champion, they assume I’m exaggerating, but then I pull out his silver armadillo championship ring (which is, of course, shaped like an armadillo), and then they’re all, “Crap on a crap cracker, you’re actually serious.” And then they usually leave quickly. The gold armadillo championship ring would be more impressive to show off, but we don’t have it anymore because my father traded it for a Victorian funeral carriage. And no, I’m not joking, because why the fuck would I joke about that? But I do have photographic proof: