One of my earliest memories is of running around my yard; I must have just turned four. The sun was really bright and it was that brisk warm sun/cold breeze thing that happens in the spring in the Midwest. The dog, as usual, was tied up next to her little house. She was a pretty nice, average dog from what I can remember. Sort of honey-colored and looked somewhat like a labrador. Unfortunately for her, I was your typical unnice kid. The ground was beginning to dry out from the previous winter’s snow, and I looked down and saw a patch of dirt that cracked when it dried. I picked up one of the dirt clods, testing its weight in my grimy hand. I threw the clod up into the air- POW! it exploded when it hit the ground. Very exciting. Would the same thing happen if I threw the dirt at the dog?

POW! “YOWP!” said Heidi the dog, and ran for cover in her house. I continued to pelt the roof of her doghouse with the clods. I picked up a particularly large one and aimed it. I released, and suddenly, the wind changed. The dust from the exploding clod flew back toward me and got in my left eye.

Oh, pain! I couldn’t even see. My eyes watered until I started crying from the stinging. I rubbed and rubbed, trying to make the pain go away. Finally, I ran into our teeny trailer where my grandma was chain-smoking and watching her soaps, as usual. When I came in and showed her my eye she put on her Very Serious Face, which wasn’t that much different from her Usual Serious Face.

“Oh, gurl,” she said in her Southern drawl, tsk-ing and shaking her head. “You shouldnta rubbed it. Now Ahm gonna have to take you to the doctor.”

My memory skips the car ride there. All I know next is that two nurses were holding me down in a chair (they were taking no chances since I had punched a nurse a few months before for the crime of attempting to draw blood). The doctor was leaning over me saying, “Now, Asshole, you’ve scratched your eye from rubbing it. I’m going to put these drops in your eye and it’s going to sting.”

The drops hurt worse than the dirt. I struggled against the two nurses and cried. I had to open my injured eye to let the drops in, and once they were in I saw colors like when you press against your eyes too hard. Then the doctor stuck on a bandage that was like a giant Band-Aid for eyes. He said one more thing before beating it out of the room: “You’ll have to keep your eye shut for two weeks.”

So there I was, with a giant eye patch- a four-year-old pirate. I remember being scolded on the way home by my grandma, who was convinced that the entire world was dangerous and unsanitary. I think she was glad when she could prove her point about this, no matter whose expense it was at. “Ah guess you’ll think twice before throwin any more dirt around, gurl.”

There was a cold snap again, which was typical for that time of year in Michigan, and the tiny cyclops was kept indoors. My grandma spread some newspapers on the kitchen floor so I could blow bubbles over them. I stood in one place and listened while she descibed what happened to someone on the phone. “And she has to wear an ahh-patch for two weeks.”

To this day I am an A+ winker with my left eye.

It all started when I got Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction. There I was, thirteen years old (and highly impressionable of course), out in the middle of what might has well have been BF Egypt, and I got my hands on a Jane’s Addiction album. There was Perry Ferrell on the inside of the tape case, with a ring through the middle of his nose. Holy shit. I was familiar with body piercings because I had been fortunate enough to befriend a nineteen-year-old Bohemian who managed to get out of Tiny Town, Illinois and lived to come back and tell the tale. He showed me his nipple ring on request one day. “See,” he said. “My nipple’s always hard now.” Whoa. But, I had never seen anyone with a ring like Perry’s. That was it for me- I knew that I also had to punch holes into my body as soon as possible.

I had a couple of flirtations with nostril piercings, but when I turned sixteen I decided to get done up by a professional. I went to the only tattoo shop in town that also boasted body piercing via the blinking neon sign in the dusty front window. I came alone, and unsure of what to pay for such a service, I brought forty bucks. I walked in and saw the proprietor sitting in a swivel chair watching daytime television. I remember it was playing Oprah before she went respectable.

“Hello.”

He grunted at me and said, “What can I do for ya, girlie?” He was probably in his late thirties and grizzled like those bikers who have seen some really hard living. Tattoos covered his hands and crawled up his arms until they disappeared up his short sleeves. “I would like to get my nipple pierced.” This made him put down the fried chicken he was gnawing on and take more of an interest.

“Which one?” I hadn’t thought about that.

“The…left one. How much do you charge?”

“Twenty-five,” he said, and exhaled a large plume of smoke. He walked to the sink and gave his hands a washing that seemed like a mere formality. Then he got out a piercing gun.

*Sound of needle being ripped off the hi-fi*

I know, I know, this is bad. This is where sane people turn and walk out. I had never seen a true piercing shop and I didn’t know that it was supposed to be done with a needle under more sanitary conditions, to say the least. What can I say? I was only sixteen.

“Hold still,” he said. I have had dozens of piecings and I now know the difference between good and bad piercers. The good ones talk you through the whole process, count you down, and tell you to exhale as the needle goes in. The not-so-good ones say, “hold still.”

*KA-CHUNK!*

“MAA-OWWW!!”

Suddenly, I had a gold stud through my nipple that was designed to be in someone’s ear. Yikes.

“Now, you’re going to want to put a hoop in that in about twenty-four hours. Good luck.”

I showed my boyfriend later that night, who had managed to escape to the big cities of Pittsburgh and Jacksonville, Florida at one time.

“Oh, Asshole,” he said, shaking his head sadly. Didn’t you know you’re supposed to have it done with a needle? You better be careful. You’re going to end up with a cauliflowered nipple. I saw it in a magazine once.”

I didn’t stop there, though. I knew I needed more holes…I wasn’t going to be content until I could be used like a sieve. I didn’t realize til later that my experience should have showed my I had enough holes in my head already.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this old friend of mine, who I let slip through my fingers because of my thickheaded stubbornness. I will always think about her now, because her birthday is the same as my daughter’s, October 9th. I concentrated really hard, and willed my daughter to be born on her due date, which was October 1st, or ANY day except the 9th- but she just wouldn’t do it. She waited so long she actually lost weight in utero, and was a skinny little newborn Spud. But I digress; I was talking about my friend.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was a teenaged hoodlum. At the beginning of my senior year, my friend turned eighteen, and her drug-dealing boyfriend gave her a three-foot bong that she was eager to break in with me. While the other kids were off having burgers for lunch, my friend and I were having big lungfuls of smoke, chased by Doritos and whatever else we could find in her car.

The first day we planned to use the bong was crisp and cool, a pleasant fall day in Illinois. I was slightly nervous because I had never used a bong before- I was afraid I would splash water on my pants or otherwise make an ass of myself. My friend also told me that with a bong you take in larger amounts of smoke and can become more intoxicated, which also made me wonder if I would be able to make it back for sixth period.

“It’s fun, you’ll like it,” she reassured me as we were leaving school. Then we ran into a good friend of mine, Jeff, who was with a theater nerd that I had slept with once the previous winter. It was a classic case of “good phone sex, bad real sex” and I had been working like mad to avoid him since then. He was constantly hinting to my friends that he was completely stunned that I had stopped calling him. I had given up having sex with guys at my school since I tended to intimidate them with my take-no-prisoners attitude about sex which led to…performance issues…once we both had our clothes off. Plus, it took me a couple of tries to determine that 16 year-old guys have NO IDEA what they’re doing in the first place, and I was too impatient to be anyone’s trainer.

Anyway, both of the guys wanted to come along and my friend said she was glad to have them with us, without so much as glancing at me first. I was happy to have Jeff come with us, anyway. I was kind of uncomfortable around the other fellow because he was a walking reminder of what an Asshole I was.

Off we went to the park; my friend sparked up the bong in her car and we began passing it around. We were at a vantage point so we could see if anyone was coming down the long entrance road. No one was around; my friend and I had a tacit agreement to make sure there were never any little kids playing nearby when we got high at parks.

I was immediately floored and completely baked.

“Fuck, I’ll never make it back to sixth period now.” We sat around chatting idly and giggling until it was time to go. I got edgier and edgier because of the guilt and awkwardness that I was feeling about the guy I had one-night stand-ed until I got downright paranoid. He was being so nice and charming; I really should have given him some explanation, I thought.

My friend asked me to step out of the backseat so she could wedge the bong back under the seat. As I stood up, I was laughing really hard. I’ve always had a weak bladder; I HATED being tickled too much when I was a little kid because I would wet my pants. It was the same with just laughing. I tried to stop laughing, and I just couldn’t until…

My God, did I just wet my pants? It certainly felt like I did. Everything suddenly felt warm and wet and I was so dizzy from being high I sat down in the car seat and didn’t say a word. My heart raced and I thought of a million things that would happen if they all found out. My two close friends would be cool about it, and wouldn’t tell anyone. But the other guy…he had all the reasons in the world to tell the entire school what had happened.

The ride back to school was fairly short, but it felt like it took about three years. Everyone else chit-chatted and my friend kept glancing at me in her rearview.

“Are you okay, Asshole?” she asked, cocking the mirror so she could see my whole face. “You look really pale.”

The guys in the car turned to look at me as well. I gave her a stiff little nod and went back to slumping in the corner and looking out the window. They resumed their conversations, and I was completely convinced that they all KNEW that I had wet my pants, and were just trying to act like they didn’t know, because they were trying to make me feel comfortable. I hated them for this, somehow.

We got out of my friend’s car and I made a beeline for mine. I had to get home because of course I couldn’t walk around at school with wet pants.

“I’m goin home, see ya later,” I mumbled to my friend, who watched me walk away with a puzzled look on her face.

“Okay…see you tomorrow.”

I felt floaty, paralyzed almost. My fingertips tingled. The drive home was even closer than the park (about a mile), and was through quiet neighborhoods so I wasn’t worried about driving it. I was never so glad to be home. Without even taking my pants or my coat off, I collapsed on the couch and feel into a deep but brief sleep that always came on when I had one of my little paranoiac fits.

When I awoke, I felt completely normal, but a little bit fuzzy. I remembered what had happened and I took off my pants. I had only been asleep for about twenty minutes, so they should have still been wet, but were bone dry. I had imagined the whole thing.

This type of paranoia only happened to me a couple of times, and was triggered by some other stress present in the situation. Obviously, the guy’s presence set me off on some other little thing. And later on I had to explain to my friends what happened because my silence made them wonder what the heck was wrong with me.

Nowadays, I usually stick to beer, which tends to only make me fat and silly.

This will come to no surprise to people who actually know me, but when I was a juvenile Spud I was a bully. A high-caliber, A+ dickhead. I was in a split class that was about one-third fifth graders and the rest fourth graders. I was one of the elite fifth graders. I remember the first day of school that year; I was sitting in my class with all of my friends that I had been in class with since I still had trouble pulling up my pants by myself.

Suddenly, an announcement came over the intercom: “Would the following students please collect their belongings and report to the office…” Nine of us got up and went, dutifully gathering our freshly sharpened pencils and uncolored-with Crayolas. A few kids in my group were quite nervous. Personally, I was very accustomed to being called to the office- relaxed, even- but these other kids? They were the nerds, the grinds, that kids who were very quiet in class and drew pictures of castles or were reading Dickens at the age of ten. There must be some mistake, I thought.

When we got to the office the principal was waiting for us by his secretary’s desk.

“Welcome back to school, kids,” He smiled broadly at all of us, possibly to calm the nerds down, some of whom were beginning to twitch a little. “This year, we’re going to try a little experiment. And you get to be the first ones to test out our New Program.” He waited for the impact of this marvelous news to sink in. “You have been chosen, out of all the other fifth graders, to be in an accelerated class. This means you will have more responsibility and freedom than the other fifth graders.”

Oh dear. I didn’t like the sound of this. Did my Mom know what was going on here? Would I be allowed to place a phone call? He led us down the hall…to the fourth grade wing. We all exchanged worried glances. Finally, I spoke up.

“Mr. Griffiths,” I blurted. “Did we get held back?” He stopped our procession and turned to look at me.

“No, Asshole, this isn’t a punishment. This is a reward. But you will be having recess with the K through fourths.” If that wasn’t a punishment, I don’t know what was. We were supposed to be with the older kids! How unfair!

Finally, he marched us into our class room where about twenty fourth graders sat, frowning at us. We were put on our side of the class, next to the too-hot radiators and our “reward” began. Since we were stuck in the “little-kid lunch” (as we called it), we didn’t have much of a chance to socialize with kids of our caste. When we saw them before and after school, they whispered and pointed at us. We always stood together, in a tight sullen clump of stigmatized nerdiness. None of the other kids ever seemed to believe that we were in an accelerated class; the prevailing rumor was that we had been forced to repeat the fourth grade.

We were all bitter about this arranged isolation and acted out in various ways. I was just on the cusp of puberty and had begun to notice boys. The only two boys in our tiny fifth grade class were bonafide freaks. So that left the fourth grade boys- and a few of them were very cute. My friend and I were torn because in grade school obtaining a boyfriend beneath your grade was on par with interspecies dating in the real world- it just isn’t done. So we had crushes that we couldn’t act on, and in proper little-boy fashion the boys behaved as if we were lepers.

What else could we do but begin to bully them? We had dangerous levels of hormones that had just begun to kick around, so we had to keep interacting with them somehow… My first thought was that I would grab them and try to kiss them, but they were always too fast for me. This almost-grabbing led to accidental scratching, which led to intentional scratching. Both my friend and I had really strong nails that grew quickly. As the boys would whiz past us we would lash out at them, occasionally making contact with an arm or hand. Sometimes we even drew blood. I’m sure they didn’t like it, but they never really tried to get completely away from us. For some unknown reason, they also never narced us out- I guess that was a macho little boy thing.

Before we got bored with the game and moved on to something else, I remember sitting at home watching MTV (circa Adam Curry) while sharpening my nails to lethal points with a nail file.

Later I got mine (every bully does). And even later after that, in high school I began sticking up for the runty little freshmen geeks. They began to revere me as their evil and unpredictable protectress who would get in the face of black footballers twice her size and growl, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, you meathead corndog dickface.” The footballers were always so stunned that the little nerds had time to get away, and the bullies were so taken aback they would just shake their heads and mutter something about not wanting to hit a girl.

That was bullshit. They just knew I could take ’em.

Last night, I made my Thanksgiving specialty, which involves marinading red grapes in red wine overnight (or longer), draining them, and then coating them in white sugar. Yum! Of course, I never buy good wine to do this, only big jugs of five dollar swill (Carlos Rossi, to be exact). After drowning the grapes in the wine and sealing up the bag I realized I had half a jug left. Mr. Husband and I had already split a bottle of wine earlier, and at this point ol Carlos was looking pretty tasty.

Well, I learned my lesson last night. When I woke up my ass hurt and when I went to go pee there was a ferret in the bathtub. Never again, heh heh. (At least not this week.)

Which is what I said last time, probably about five or six years ago. This happened right around Thanksgiving too. My friend and I went in on some “Paisano” and began drinking it out of the jug at his place, like we were some kind of pirates or something. Once we finished, my friend and I decided to take a stroll around, which always sounds like a great idea when you’re at a certain level of trashed.

Since I lived on the edge of downtown, we quickly ended up at Seattle Center. I, being relatively new to town, didn’t realize than the Center closed at a certain time. To me, it just looked like a big fun park.

“C’mon,” my friend said. “I’ll show you some cool stuff.” He took my hand and we ran to a large statue, which I haven’t been able to find in all the times I’ve been there since.

“I don’t feel very well,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I made my way behind the statue and subjected my friend to the unpleasant sound of someone who’s had too much to drink. Cheap wine splattered everywhere, and it is fortunate that I had a predeliction for wearing black clothes at the time. When I re-emerged from behind the statue I was feeling much better, even though my hand was bleeding again. I had cut it earlier at his apartment when I tried to make a ring out of the empty wine jug’s handle.

We wandered around stuporously a little while longer until we came upon an area that was undergoing construction.

“Cool, a ladder!”

“Yeah…” I was tired at this point, though still in a cheerful mood. I didn’t see what the big deal about the ladder was. My friend walked over to it and picked up one end. It was one of those heavy duty fluorescent orange jobs that probably extends to forty feet or more.

“Well, come on!” I dutifully walked over and picked up the other end that still rested on the ground. “Here we go!”

We set off at a brisk march, singing songs from “Man of La Mancha,” a passion we discovered we had in common shortly after we met a couple of months earlier. We were having a marvelous time (though I didn’t know where we were going), until we had a flashlight stuck in both of our faces.

“Where are you two going?” A couple of chubby, middle-aged security guards stood in front of us, exuding all of the borrowed authority they could muster and looking very pleased to have something to do.

I was petrified; for all of my fighting and trouble-causing, I had thus far been lucky enough to avoid scrapes with the cops. And to my seventeen-year-old self, these guys looked authentic enough to me. My friend, sensing that I was frozen, became our spokesman.

“We’re just out taking a walk!” he replied to the rent-a-cops.

“Is that your ladder, there?”

“Yes it is. We’re just on our way home.”

“Your ladder, huh? Looks like it says ‘property of Seattle Center’ on it to me.”

“Heh heh.” My friend was remarkably jovial and cool about this situation, I thought.

“Why don’t you to put the ladder down.” We did so and left it balanced upright on its side. One of the guards began talking into his little radio while the other one kept his eye on us. My friend stepped in front of me, and looked into my eyes. He was so close I could feel his breath on my face; he spoke quietly to me so the guards couldn’t hear him.

“Okay. Take my hand.” I nodded and extended my little paw which had gone cold with fear. He took it and held it tightly. “Now, I’m going to count to three.” I was so intoxicated I was having trouble seeing where this was going, but I put all of my faith into him because I was grateful that one of us had a plan. “And when I count to three, we will run far away from here. Okay?” I nodded. What a great plan.

We were off. I was glad I had recently quit smoking, because we must’ve run about a mile to get away from the guards, the ladder, and Seattle Center.

“You better run!” one of the guards called out behind us.

“They’re on their way!” The one with the radio said, meaning the real police. I could hear them laughing as we disappeared into the dark.

I fell in to bed that night, sober and relieved. I vowed not to follow my friend blindly like that anymore. However, though he got us into that mess, to his credit he also got us out of it safely.

Once, for a short period of time, I was an evictor. (or is that evictress?)

This was an offshoot of a landscape/apartment maintenance job I had after I graduated from high school. Occasionally, as part of the job at the apartments the supervisor would round us up from all over the grounds and we would drop our weed buckets, stop planting flowers, or stop fiddling with the sprinkler heads and heed the call of “Eviction!”

We would all hop into the back of the bossman’s pickup and he would drive us over to whichever apartment needed to be gutted. There were usually four or five of us, and we would walk in, armed with industrial size plastic bags.

A couple of months after I started, the apartment manager approached my friend and I about some sidework. He asked us if we wanted to do some “off property” evictions when there were slow days at the apartments.

“We could use some more girls on our team, heh heh,” my manager said and winked ominously. My friend declined-she had done a couple evictions on the property with me and decided that she didn’t like turning a person’s entire physical life out onto the front lawn of an apartment building. I asked her later what she thought he meant by wanting “more girls on the team.” She was older than me (21 to my 17) and I respected her opinion.

“Oh, well, women evictors are probably less likely to get into fights when you take all of the people’s stuff out of their house.”

“Hmmmm.”

I thought about it for a day or so and then decided I could use the extra cash that “off-props” would bring. My first job was in a skeezy apartment building downtown. We climbed out of the beat-up van and stood around waiting for orders while our supervisor went to see if the occupant was in the apartment, and what the situation was. As I went into the apartment, the first thing I noticed was how…pink… it was. Almost everything in it was very gamine and revolved around the theme of love of one kind or another. In the middle of the apartment stood the soon-to-be- former occupant, sobbing into a cel phone. Her voice was frantic, but her face was surprisingly emotionless.

“Daddy, they’re here right now! Can you pick me up, please? All my stuff’s going to be out front.” A pause ensued in which I could here a male voice rumbling from the other end. She continued, “Well, can you have Tim come over then, please? I have NO-WHERE-TO-GO!” She stomped her tiny foot for emphasis on the last four syllables.

I broke off my blatant staring at this point and got to work, stuffing her personal possessions into bags willy-nilly while the men carried out heavier pieces of furniture. It was on odd collection of possessions- the bookshelves were full of sex manuals and the apartment was covered in frills and lacy drapes. There were magnets of nude people on the fridge and nude sculptures on the end tables. The whole effect was pretty untasteful and giving me the creeps- it reminded me of Toulouse-Lautrec’s whorehouse paintings, as decorated by someone with a KMart budget.

Attached to a light switch was a miniature rubbery green penis. I found out later, after I nabbed it, that it glowed in the dark. This was the only eviction job I ever stole something from, and I’m not sure why I did it-perhaps I wanted a souvenir from this weird environment.

After we got all of the woman’s belongings out on the lawn my supervisor locked her out and we were on our way. I watched her through the small back window of the van as she stood on the front lawn idly kicking at pebbles and calling the fourth or fifth person to see if they could come get her. I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time she’d been evicted.

On the way back my supervisor mentioned that he heard from the big boss that she was a stripper.

“Looks like she brings her work home, huh?” he said, and everyone had a big laugh but me.

I was nine; the girl who lived in the house catty-corner to me was using me to obtain access to my stepfather’s rather large collection of pornographic magazines.

My parents were out; I was jumping on their bed while my friend eagerly flipped through a recent copy of Penthouse.

“Wow, lookit this one! Handcuffs!”

“Mmmm-hmmm.” I had seen them all several times and at this point found porn rather passe’. I was much more interested in teaching myself how to write in ancient Celtic runes and in mixing every non-toxic liquid in the house together, a game which my friend and I called “Mad Scientist”. Nothing mad or scientific ever happened, really. The only tangible result I can remember is my Mom finding one of my concoctions under the bathroom sink in a butter tub and going, “What the hell is this?” *sniffs* “Baby powder? And…shampoo?” *dirty look at me* “Gaaad, Asshole, no wonder we have to go to KMart once a week.”

My porno-perusing friend thought she was an expert on everything. Granted, she was the indisputed flip-flop and cart wheel expert on our block. She was the one who taught me how to roll up the cuffs of my jeans in that ohso cool late-80s, blood-constricting way. But there were areas in which her knowledge was lacking. After she ran out of magazines that had been added to the collection since the last time she came over, she was ready to fill me in on some facts she felt I needed to know.

“I know what sex is.”

“Yeah, so do I.” Mom had inflicted The Talk on me a few months prior when she noticed I was developing mosquito bumps. It came complete with a hand-drawn diagram of a woman’s uterus and accompanying accessories that I thought looked like a cow’s head. My friend went on, undaunted.

“It’s when a boy sticks his thingie into a girl’s body.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well do you know how girls get pregnant?” This part was kind of fuzzy… what had Mom said again?

“Ummm…I can’t remember.”

“Boys make girls pregnant by jumping up and down on them until they pee inside the girl’s thingie.”

Yah! That didn’t sound right. I told myself I was never going to do anything like that. I promised myself I would look it up after she left in our family’s medical encyclopedia.

I saw a penny on the ground today, and I had an overwhelming urge to pick it up in spite of the fact that I was holding my daughter and three bags of groceries. When I was younger, my arms were usually swinging freely at my sides. I would pick up every penny I saw, look around, and discretely shove it in my mouth before anyone caught me. Copper deliciousness! I was always under the impression that copper was a trace element in the human body, but for some reason, whenever I saw a stray coin on the ground my mouth would start to water uncontrollably until I picked it up and ate it.

How many coins have I eaten over the years? Countless. Hundreds of dollars worth. My stepfather used to yell at me for stealing money off of his dresser because he thought I was spending it on candy. Hah! Many people have asked me over the years why I have eaten money when I could have spent it. I can’t answer this, but for the satisfaction it brought me I can say it was worth EVERY penny.

Plus, it wasn’t just money- it was all kinds of things- buttons, small keys, screws, paperclips, my sister’s little plastic toys, on and on. These are just the solid things. There was also the dirt, school paste (my teacher would stand over me until I was done using it), pineapple rinds, cloth, floor- licking, and crumpled up bits of tape (Scotch and duct) that I would munch in ecstasy. When I was 16 I went through a short phase of swallowing ladybugs whole. I would tell people it was for good luck, but really I would just see one crawling on a leaf and I would just start to drool…

One of my record store jobs was excruciatingly dull. There would be slow times when you would even run out of tedious cleaning and straightening chores, so we would often get up to hijinks with the security tags. It was considered very hilarious to slap them on someone’s back before they left for the day, so the security guard would have to search them when they set off the door alarm. One day, we somehow got started on the security tags again. Someone brought up the notion of things you could hide the tags in so they wouldn’t set off the alarm. What was too dense for the sensor to get through?

Finally we settled on an experiment, and I was to be the lab rat. It was a smallish tag, about an inch by a half-inch and it resembled a stick of gum but thicker. I was to swallow the tag and walk through the doors to see if the alarm would go off while it was in my body. My reward was a bottle of juice my co-workers chipped in on to wash the tag down with.

It was a pretty sizable piece of metal and plastic to swallow whole. I had a lot of practice at this point, so it wasn’t too hard to get down. I chased it with my fruit juice and walked throught the front doors of the store.

Nothing! How disappointing.

I know what you’re thinking- all this stuff that went in to my body, it all comes out, right? Well- that’s the weird thing. I have never again seen anything that’s I’ve eaten. Not that I’ve looked too closely, though. I just keep up on my tetanus shots and hope for the best…

Everywhere I turn lately I am reminded of what a dick I used to be. Then I say to my accusers, “But, hey, I’m much nicer now, right?” And lately said accusers have been ROLLING THEIR EYES. There’s a lesson in this, but fuck if I care.

Because everyone has been so happy to remind me of tales of my former state of Dicktitude (or my former Dicktatorship, heh heh- I’ll bet no one’s thought of that one before.) I have decided to beat everyone to the punch and recount an old favorite that my relations love to dredge up whenever it needs to be reestablished that I am, always have been, and always will be, an Asshole.

My sister has always been a good student. A regular Polly Perfect one might say. By the time she was five she was completely outshining me academically, which is really bad considering I was in the 10th grade. One year, I believe she was about seven, she was required to participate in the science fair. As usual, she prepared for it weeks in advance and her little bean sprout-growth project was coming along swimmingly.

I was glad to have escaped into high school; at this point science projects became optional. When they were required I would take the informational sheet every year, and guiltily tuck it away into a folder or shove it under my bed. I knew myself well enough to know I wasn’t even going to start thinking about a project idea until the weekend before it was due. My project was always the half-assed one sitting in isolation at the edge of the row of tables everyone else’s was proudly diplayed upon. Other kids were hoping for trophies; I was hoping for invisibility so I could go home and get back to devouring Stephen King novels and setting things on fire in the backyard as soon as possible.

I remembered all of this whenever I saw my little sister dilligently cutting and pasting at the kitchen table, and flipping through a large-print copy of Fun ‘n’ Easy Science Projects For Kiddies Under Twelve. The little sprouts sat on the window sill week after week, taunting me.

“Don’t you realize all of this science fair stuff is meaningless? You are wasting your time. If you lived in France they’d have you reading Sartre by now.”

She was undaunted. “I’m gonna win a ribbon!”

“The token reward of a ribbon is a training device to make you want to gladly assimilate into a capitalist society.”

“I made the honor roll again!”

“Oh shut up.”

At this point in my high school “career” I was often out carrousing with my friends into the late hours of the night. Every night I would try to make it home by curfew and down a few glasses of water by the kitchen sink to try and avoid a hangover. I would stare at her sprouts and recall something I had learned along time ago when I was still paying attention in school. I remember a teacher putting celery into some blue water; a while later the celery turned blue from drinking up the water. Hmmm… what would happen if… well, one drop of blue food dye a night wouldn’t hurt anything, would it?

“AGGGH!” my sister screeched one weekend morning. “My plants are blue! My project is ruined!”

In my mind, it seems like she should have gotten extra points for having a project that was not only well-prepared and executed, but also with plants that were a highly festive shade of blue. She blubbered on the kitchen floor while my Mom dressed me down for extreme meddling with malicious intent. But, I still say my sister was always prone to overreacting.

The year I was ten was supposed to be THE BEST HALLOWEEN EVER. The neighbor promised he’d take his kids and a bunch of us trick-or-treating on a mini-hayride he’d rigged up for the occasion. It consisted of his John Deere lawn tractor (keep your fingers away from the moving parts, kiddies), which pulled a two-wheeled trailer that had a large flat board attached to it. This is what the twelve or so of us were to sit on.

As usual, I had refused to be Sleeping Beauty or a Ninja Turtle or some other flimsy costume that came in a box. Every year, from the 4th of July onward, I spent my spare time dreaming up the perfect costume. This year, it took me all the way up to my birthday (which is only ten days before Halloween) to figure it out. But I had it: I was going to be… a BAG OF GARBAGE! It was perfect. None of the other kids would do it. None of the other kids would even think of doing it.

I fetched a Hefty Sinch-Sac out of my Mom’s cabinet and went to work. I had a pair of yellow stirrup pants (remember those things?) and a yellow sweater that matched the drawstrings on my trashbag. I painted my face brown and cut holes in the bottom of the bag for my feet, and ones in the side for my arms. I stepped into the bag and cinched it up around my neck. Perfect! I was going to be a hit! My stepfather decided I looked too saggy to be a real garbage bag, and stuffed me full of crumpled newspaper for that “authentic” full-bag look. My Mom handed me my loot bucket, and I was on my way to meet the other kids in our street.

I didn’t grow up in a big city, so houses weren’t on top of each other like they are here and in other cities; they were spread out enough that it actually made sense to be pulled around on the little wagon my neighbor had rigged up.

I came out to find that most of the other kids were already waiting around for things to get started. The other kids stared as I walked up.

Girl who was always a princess: “What are you supposed to be?”

Ninja Turtle #1: “Yeah, you look like a garbage bag!”

Ninja Turtle #2: “You should have been a Ninja Turtle, then we could be all four of them!”

Me: “I’m a garbage bag! I did it all myself!”

*Blank looks*

The other kids quickly lost interest in me as the Princess’ dad started his lawn tractor. Before we could take off, though, a mini van quickly pulled up to our wagon, and all of its doors flew open. Out hopped a girl we went to school with, her little brother and their Mom, who rushed up to our driver.

“Glen, can you please take Kristie and Stevie too?” Her voice dropped here: “They don’t have anyone else to go with.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it, Denise. Of course they can come.”

“Thanks, Glen. Kristie, you call me from Mr. Johnson’s house when you’re all through, okay?” She glanced at Mr. Johnson to make sure he got the message too.

UGGH, dorky Kristie and her crybaby little brother, who was known to wet his pants several times a day. All of us kids glanced at each other, dreading the thought of spending time with kids who were so uncool. We were all so excited about our mini-hay ride, though, we soon forgot about her.

Mr. Johnson gave us a few quick rules; keep your feet up, wait til he stopped to jump off, and so on.

As we took off, we huddled together in the back, talking and giggling and generally excluding Kristie as much as possible. I remember wondering what her Mom was thinking. You just can’t force things like this.

It went on like this for a while, until we made a turn and went up the next street. As we finished the turn, the trailer went over an enormous bump. We all laughed and screamed, assuming it was part of the road. Suddenly, we heard a chilling scream and Mr. Johnson stopped the tractor with a jolt.

Against Mr. Johnson’s repeated cautions, Kristie had decided to dangle her feet off of the front of the wagon; her foot got caught and she was pulled under the heavy wheels. Not only did her little eight-year-old body have to bear the weight of the trailer, but also the full load of twelve kids.

At first, everything was confused. We got off the wagon, screaming, and some of us started crying. Mr. Johnson assessed the damage grimly. All I remember from those first few minutes was that blood streamed down the side of Kristie’s head and out of her ear; her arm dangled at her side uselessly and at an odd angle. Mr. Johnson picked her up gently and drove back on the tractor while he held her on his lap.

After a couple of minutes of discussion and speculation among us kids, we dispersed and went home. I found out the rest later. Kristie’s arm was broken in several places, and after she came back to school she wore a cast that reminded us all of that night for months to come. Her right ear was completely cauliflowered and had to be operated on a couple of times to coax it back into a shape that resembled an ear.

Other children at school continued to make fun of her after that, since she remained dorky. Those of us who were there that night left her alone; we weren’t nice to her, but we stopped poking at her.

Needless to say, that was the first and last neighborhood Halloween hayride.