Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Page 6

  UPDATED AGAIN: My editor hates me and is apparently working in collusion with my therapist, because they both insist that I delve deeper into my high school years. Fine. I blame them for this whole chapter. Please be aware that you’ll probably have horrible flashbacks of high school when you read this. You can forward your therapy bills to my editor.

  Let’s start again. . . .

  Pretty much everyone hates high school. It’s a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. I’ve tried to block out the memory of my high school years, but no matter how hard you try to ignore it, it’s always with you, like an unwanted hitchhiker. Or herpes. I assume.

  Since I went to high school with all of the same kids who’d witnessed my peculiar childhood, I had already given up on the idea of becoming popular and perky, so instead I tried to reinvent myself with a Goth wardrobe, black lipstick, and a look that I hoped said, “You don’t want to get too close to me. I’ve got dark, terrible secrets.”

  Unfortunately, the mysterious persona I tried to adopt was met with a kind of confused (and mildly pitying) skepticism, since the kids in my class were all acutely aware of all my dark, terrible secrets. Which is really not how secrets work at all. These were the same kids who’d witnessed the Great Turkey Shit-off of 1983, and who all vividly remembered the time my father sent me to our fourth-grade Thanksgiving play wearing war paint and bloody buffalo hides instead of the customary construction-paper pilgrim hats the rest of my class had made in art class. These were the same classmates who owned yearbooks documenting my mother’s decade-long infatuation with handmade prairie dresses and sunbonnets, an obsession that led to my sister and me spending much of the early eighties looking like the lesbian love children of Laura Ingalls and Holly Hobbie. I suspect that Marilyn Manson would have had similar problems being taken seriously as “dark and foreboding” if everyone in the world had seen him dressed as Little Miss Hee Haw in second grade.

  1980: It was a look that screamed, “Ask me about becoming a sister wife.”

  My classmates refused to take me seriously, so I decided to pierce my own nose using a fishhook, but it hurt too much to get it all the way through, so I gave up and then it got infected. So instead I wore a clip-on earring. In my nose. To school. It was larger than my nostril and I almost suffocated. Still, it was the first nose ring ever worn at my high school, and I wore it with a rebellious pride past the principal, who I’d expected would lock himself in his office immediately to stop the Twisted Sisteresque riots that would surely ensue at any moment from all the anarchy unleashed by my nose ring. The principal noticed, but seemed more bemused than concerned, and seemed to be trying to suppress laughter as he pointed it out to the lunch lady, who was bewildered.

  And who was also my mother.

  And it was her clip-on.

  My mom sighed inwardly, shook her head, and went back to slicing Jell-O. Neither of us ever mentioned the incident (or wore that earring) again.

  1990: Just as ridiculous, except this time I was dressing myself. (Pro tip: Your faux-Victorian, emo self-portraits in graveyards will look slightly less stilted if you take off your Swatch watch first.)

  Having my mom as the cafeteria lady was a mixed blessing, because she’d let me hide in the school pantry if I was having a bad day, but whenever I’d pass the cafeteria I’d hear her stage-whisper, “Sweetie, stop slouching. You look so depressed,” and all the other kids would be all, “Nice hairnet, Elvira’s mom.”

  So, yeah, high school was pretty fucking awesome. And a lot of people tell me that everyone has terrible high school experiences, and that’s when I say, “Really? So the high point of your senior year was when you had your arm up a cow’s vagina?” Then they stop talking to me. Usually forever.

  My sister, Lisa, never seemed to have any problems fitting in, and distanced herself from me as best she could while still trying to convince me to join some school activities like everyone else. Lisa was in track, basketball, one-act plays, and had most recently been elected to be the high school mascot, a giant male bird named Wally. We were all quite proud of her, as the competition had been stiff, and she took her new role very seriously, practicing bird attack maneuvers in full costume in the living room. While we waited for our parents to get home from work I’d watch and give her pointers about her technique. “Try to shake your butt wing more,” I offered helpfully.

  “Tail feathers,” she clarified (with a surprising amount of condescension for someone wearing bird feet), her voice slightly muffled by the giant bird head on her shoulders. “They’re called tail feathers. And if we’re giving each other advice, maybe you could stop wearing black all the time? People think you’re weird.”

  “People think I’m weird because I wear a lot of black?” I asked. “You’re dressed as poultry.”

  Lisa shrugged indifferently. “That may be true, but I was elected to dress as poultry, and when I walk down the hall in my costume tomorrow, people will smile and high-five me. When you walk down the hall tomorrow, people will spit and avoid eye contact to keep you from putting voodoo curses on them.”

  “Okay, first of all, you can’t even get real high fives, because you don’t have hands. And secondly, I’d need to have someone’s hair or nail clippings to put a voodoo curse on them.”

  “THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT,” Lisa yelled, pausing her bird routine to cross her wings in frustration. “You shouldn’t even know how to do voodoo curses. It’s bizarre. WOULD IT KILL YOU TO JUST TRY TO BE NORMAL?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. . . . Could you repeat that last part?” I asked. “I can’t hear you through YOUR GIANT FUCKING BIRD HEAD.”

  Lisa huffily pulled the bird head off and seemed to be working up a lecture, but I really couldn’t stomach the thought of someone in a bird costume telling me I needed to be more focused on fitting in, so I locked myself in the bathroom. After a few minutes Lisa halfheartedly apologized through the bathroom door, probably because she realized that her hands were still covered in thick bird wings, and that I was the only person in the house who could help her unzip her costume if she needed to pee. Yes, it seemed cruel, but these are the risks you take when you choose popularity over opposable thumbs. It’s probably also why Big Bird is always so fucking nice to everyone. You kind of have to be nice if you know that you’re trapped in a costume, and that your bathroom breaks are at the mercy of people in the vicinity who own thumbs. Honestly, if we ever run out of straitjackets, we could just put crazy people in old mascot costumes. Plus, if they escape from their mental institutions they’ll be just as hindered as anyone in a straitjacket, but way less scary. And instead of shouting at terrified children at the bus stop, they’ll just look like charmingly bedraggled Muppets who are lost and need a bath. Everyone wins. Plus, I think I may have just solved the homeless problem. (Editor’s note: Nope. Not even remotely.)

  Even so, the words of my sister were still ringing in my ears the next day at school, and I decided to make an effort to fit in. And that’s how the peer pressure of a sibling in a bird costume led to me getting my arm stuck in a cow’s vagina. This is exactly why peer pressure is such a terrible thing. Frankly, this entire chapter could be an after-school special.

  The weirdest thing about my getting a cow pregnant when I was in high school is that I wasn’t even enrolled in that class.1 I’d taken most of my required classes in my first two years of high school, so I filled my last two years with easy electives. I enjoyed art, but I’d already taken the only three art classes my school offered, so my art teacher allowed me to make up a new one. I chose “Medieval Costume Design,” but I got bored after the first six weeks and switched it to “Sequins! The glitteriest buttons!” Then my art teacher pointed out that the school didn’t actually have a budget for sequins, and that I probably wasn’t ready for an advanced sequin class if I was under the impression that they were buttons, so
I just stopped going. Instead I was assigned to be an office aide, and I spent the noon hour manning the front desk of Mrs. Williamson, the temporary receptionist of the junior high next door, who spent her lunch hour drinking in her car. She was a nervous, divorced woman who always left incredibly raunchy novels in her top desk drawer, and who once told me that house cats will eat their owner within an hour of their owner’s death. She disappeared less than a month after I started (I suspected she’d been fired, but I admitted that it was possible she’d been eaten by her own cats) and had been replaced with an answering machine, so no one really seemed to care anymore whether I showed up or not. I’d taken to spending that hour crouched under Mrs. Williamson’s abandoned desk, reading whatever lascivious books she’d left behind, but I’d just finished her last book the day before (a V. C. Andrews novel with the really graphic parts underlined), so I was in no hurry to get to the junior high office. Instead I dallied in the ag barn, slowly packing away the power tools and arc welder.

  The ag teacher noticed that I seemed a bit shiftless, and offered to let me tag along and help with the animal husbandry class on their trip to the local stockyard. It was a small class of boys, all wearing tight Wranglers and cowboy boots, and (against my better judgment) I took a deep breath and said, “Why not?” as I nervously climbed onto the small bus. I looked like a Metallica roadie who had been won by Willie Nelson’s tour bus, but the guys did their best to make me feel at home, and seemed quietly impressed that I’d volunteer to come along for the trip. It wasn’t until we actually arrived at the stockyard that I realized we were there to learn about artificial cow insemination. The teacher suggested that I help him, since my arms were smaller and so “it would be less uncomfortable for the cow.” I wasn’t entirely sure what constituted “helping,” but it became clearer as he rolled a shoulder-length rubber glove up my arm. He slapped an open thermos of semen in my hand, and sucked it up into the turkey baster.

  This is probably the point when I should have just run, but there was something about the way he was staring at me that made me stop. It was the look of a man waiting for a girl to run screaming so he could have a good laugh at her expense. Or possibly it was the look of a man who wondered how he was going to explain to the lunch lady that he had to give her daughter all that semen, because she was the only one around who could fit in the arm condom. Hard to tell. But either way, it seemed as if he expected me to bolt, and I’ll be damned if I was going to be judged by a man who carried semen around in a thermos.

  And that’s how I ended up shoulder-deep in a cow’s vagina, squishing out the semen baster as a bunch of teenage boys looked on. It was the closest I’d ever come to doing porn. Suddenly the cow’s vagina tensed unexpectedly and I realized that my arm was stuck. I screamed involuntarily. The teacher panicked, thinking that the sudden contraction was an indication that the cow was going to sit down quickly, and told me to pull out my arm gently, because if the cow sat down it could break my arm. This was disconcerting, both because it sounded painful, and also because “I broke my arm in a cow’s vagina” is not something you ever want to have to explain to anyone. I yanked my arm out, and the cow looked back at me in disgust. And that’s when I realized that I no longer had the turkey baster.

  This is the point when I’d like to say that I gritted my teeth and said, “I’m going back in,” with the focused determination of Bruce Willis from that movie I can’t remember the name of. The one about Armageddon. (Editor’s note: Really? It’s called Armageddon.) But instead I took a deep breath, held my head up with what little dignity I could muster, slowly peeled off my glove, and walked away. No one called me back, probably because none of them could find an elegant way to say, “You left your turkey baster in that cow’s vagina.” Or possibly because they realized that the first one to speak up would probably be elected to take my place. I’m assuming someone went back in to retrieve the turkey baster (for the cow’s sake, at least), but I don’t know, because I didn’t stick around to see. Instead, I walked off and waited until the rest of the class finally showed up. I was braced for the teasing to begin, but it never did. The guys looked a bit pale and shaky, but laughed at one another as they made bovina jokes, and my ag teacher patted my back reassuringly as we got back on the bus.

  We returned to the school just as my sister was walking out of the gym from pep-rally practice. She was still dressed as Wally and was waving her tail feathers with panache. She saw me and slowed down to walk beside me toward the school, and as we walked in silence I realized that we could not have been a more awkward-looking couple. “What’s up?” she asked carefully. “You look weird.”

  “I took your advice about trying to fit in,” I said in a voice calmer than I would have suspected.

  “And?” she asked.

  “And I got my arm stuck in a cow’s vagina,” I replied, staring off into the distance.

  Lisa paused momentarily, and glanced at me with what I assumed was a look of disappointment. Or possibly shock. It was hard to tell when she had that bird head on. Then she walked on beside me, staring stoically into the surrounding cotton fields, as if a response to my statement could be found there. “Well,” she said, pausing to find the right words. “That’ll happen.” She said it with a quiet sense of dignity, as if a small, wise Morgan Freeman were inside the bird costume with her, feeding her lines.

  “I almost lost an arm,” I added conversationally, a slight hint of hysteria creeping into my voice. “I almost lost an arm inside a cow’s vagina.” It was a slight exaggeration, but at this point I was almost daring her to call me out, as I had begun to regard a fair amount of this as her fault.

  She nodded carefully, her beak bobbing up and down, seeming determined to keep up a normal conversational tone. “Inside the cow’s vagina, you say? Well, that’s just . . . that’s fascinating,” she said, in the same way someone might remark that the weather was about to turn cold, or that horses lack the ability to vomit. “So”—she paused—“it’s possible you might have misunderstood my advice.” I glared at her. “But still? These are the moments high school memories are made of, right?” She held up her wings and did what I’m assuming was her best version of jazz hands. “Yay for memories?” she said weakly, and somewhat apologetically.

  And then I punched her.

  But just in my head, because frankly, starting my day with my arm stuck in a cow’s vagina and ending it decking someone in a bird outfit was too much even for me.

  But in a way she was right . . . you should enjoy and appreciate your days in high school, because you will remember them the rest of your life. Like when you’re in prison, or you’re getting mugged at gunpoint, you can say to yourself, “Well, at least I’m not in high school.” High school is life’s way of giving you a record low to judge the rest of your life by. I know this because no matter how shitty it got, I could always look back and say, “At least I don’t have my arm stuck up a cow’s vagina.” In fact, that’s kind of become my life’s motto. It’s also what I say when I’m at a loss for words when talking to people who are grieving the loss of their grandparents. “Well, at least you don’t have your arm stuck up a cow’s vagina,” I murmur helpfully, while patting their arm consolingly. And it’s useful because it’s true, and also because it’s such a jarring sort of image that they immediately stop crying. Probably because they recognize it as one of the great truisms of life. Or maybe because most people don’t talk about getting arms stuck up cows’ vaginas during funerals. I don’t really know. I don’t get invited to many funerals.

  There are no known pictures of me with my arm stuck up a cow’s vagina, but my parents own tons of pictures of my sister dressed as poultry. I don’t think I need to tell you who the favorite in my family was.

  ADDENDUM: When I first wrote this chapter I realized that people would have a hard time believing it, so I looked up my former high school principal and sent him this (abridged) e-mail, which really only proves that I shouldn’t be allowed to use e-mail after I’
ve been drinking:

  . . . I’ve been thinking of writing about artificial cow insemination, but the problem is that my memory sucks and I can’t remember all the details. Probably because I blocked it out. Or because of all the drugs I did in college.

  This is how I remember it: Shoulder-length glove and a turkey baster up the cow’s vagina. I would have sworn this is how we did it, but I know the preferred method nowadays is to do it rectovaginally. Am I misremembering? Because I’m fairly sure I’d remember if I had my arm up a cow’s rectum. Then again, I’m having to ask my high school principal the details of getting a cow pregnant, so obviously my memory is not entirely reliable.

  Do any pictures of this still exist? I realize this is probably the weirdest request you’ve ever received from a former student, and I apologize for that.

  I also apologize for sending you an e-mail with the word “rectovaginal” in it. I can assure you I never saw that coming either.

  Hugs,

  Jenny

  Immediately after sending the e-mail I realized how inappropriate it was, and so I called Lisa and said, “So, I may have just sent our high school principal an e-mail with the word ‘rectovaginal’ in it,” and she was all, “Who is this?” and I was like, “No. Seriously. That. Just. Happened.” And after she stopped banging her head on her desk she pointed out that I had learned nothing from her advice, and she agreed that I should probably call his secretary to ask her to delete the e-mail from his account before he opened it. It was too late, though, because he’d immediately opened it and replied to it, and seemed entirely unfazed. Also, he assured me that practically no one was doing it rectovaginally back in the early nineties, which is totally true on so many levels. He also looked for photographs, but never found any, probably because no one ever takes pictures of underage girls with their arms up cow vaginas. Most likely because those pictures are more likely to end up in evidence lockers than in books about golden childhood memories.