Gentle Tweeter,
Not to boast, but no adult mind could ever be as depraved, as perverted as that of an innocent eleven-year-old virgin. Before one absorbs the boring facts about reproductive anatomy, while still free of tact and mechanical knowledge, children can envision sexual goings-on with sea urchins… zebras… flamingos.
As a predead girl I dreamed of giving birth to babies with wings. I would seduce a porpoise and our offspring would swim across oceans. Puberty enticed me with the possibility that my own children could roar with the huge heads of lions or run on hoofed feet. Why no one had done this before, who knew? I couldn’t wait.
Inspired by my stuffed menagerie, my diary grew fat with such carnal hijinks. Needless to say these adventures, they were all fictional. I’d only invented them and carefully put pen to paper in meticulous handwriting for my mother’s inevitable consumption. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I daubed hallucinogenic jellyfish toxin on my exposed woo-woo….”
In response to CanuckAIDSemily, yes, I could’ve started a blog, but my plan would be effective only if my parents believed I was hiding the details of my sordid vices. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “Mother must never know, but today I sipped the most divine absinthe using a dried monkey dingus as a drinking straw….” I’d shelved the imaginative diary among the Regency potboilers on my crammed bookshelves, and not a week after my initial entry my parents began their hostile spying.
Not that they announced their campaign. I merely guessed as much because, apropos of nothing, during breakfast conversation my mother mentioned that sucking on monkey ding-dings was an excellent high-risk practice for contracting HIV.
“Really?” I asked, nibbling my toast, secretly thrilled to know she’d taken my bait. “Does that go for all monkey ding-dings?” I licked the butter from my stubby fingertips, asking, “Does that include the Saimiri sciureus?”
My father sputtered his coffee. “The what?”
“The adorable squirrel monkey,” I said. My eyelashes fluttered. A coquettish blush suffused my cheeks.
My father said, “Why do you ask?”
And in response I shrugged. “No reason.” At that age I was so obsessed with monkeys that I wanted to marry one. College would come first, of course, but after I graduated with my degree in comparative postmodern marginalized gender studies I wanted to become mommy to a cuddly monkey baby.
My parents exchanged pained looks.
“What about the enticingly thick ding-ding of the Callithrix pygmaea?” I asked. I spread the buttered fingers of one hand and counted them off as if remembering past trysts. “The pygmy marmoset?”
My mother gave a long sigh and asked my father, “Antonio?”
one eyebrow arched as if to demand, What went on at the Tiergarten, mister? They were both loath to impose restrictions on my behavior, but clearly some acts needed to be declared off-limits. Nevertheless, after all the free-love ideology they’d thrown at me, the most they could counsel was that I engage only in safer-sex practices, no matter what the species. Smiling wanly, my mom asked, “Would you like a Xanax, sweetheart?”
“What about…,” I asked, pretending anxiety, “Chloropithecus aethiops?” Indeed, my father had taken me to the Berlin Zoo the previous month, and the outing had made for an excellent research opportunity.
The curdled expression semidistorting my mom’s Botox-saturated features was the exact one she made at the Oscars when Tom Cruise was given a Lifetime Achievement Award, just moments before she leaned over and upchucked into Goldie Hawn’s A-list swag bag, ruining a small fortune in pricey chocolates and Gucci sunglasses.
At best they could gift me with a multispecies set of variously sized disposable condoms and deliver a lecture about demanding respect from my simian sex partners.
From that point I knew they would never fess up to reading my diary. However, now that I was exposed as an eleven-year-old sexual sociopath they would always be forced to read it. They couldn’t risk not reading my diary, and through my calculated faux-confessions I could manipulate them. They were my slaves.
“Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I sucked mind-altering lungfuls of Maui Wowie through a bong filled with bubbling, lukewarm elephant semen….” It saddens me, in retrospect, how easily my parents accepted the reality of my wanton bestiality. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I ingested LSD and gave loving hand jobs to a herd of wildebeests….”
Yes, on paper I was a libertine. However, secret repressed snob that I truly was, while my mom and dad imagined me in sticky twosomes and threesomes with donkeys and capuchin monkeys, I was in fact nestled in some dirty laundry hamper, reading historical romances by Clare Darcy. Most of my childhood consisted of this sort of double-entry behavioral accounting.
“Dear Diary, what a hangover!” I wrote. “Please remind me to never mainline stale hyena urine with a dirty needle ever again! I was awake all night, standing over my sleeping parents with a Wusthof butcher knife in one hand. Had either of them stirred I’m certain I would’ve hacked them both to bloody ribbons….”
Me? In hindsight I’d made the same strategic mistake Charles Manson made. I should’ve quit while I was just a garden-variety animal-sex-and-drug addict, but, no, I had to escalate my status to potential knife-wielding psycho…. Small wonder that it was shortly after that particular diary entry that my folks sent my eleven-year-old sexually incorrigible self packing to tedious upstate.
DECEMBER 21, 8:47 A.M. EST
A Prelude to My Exile
Gentle Tweeter,
I wasn’t always a great, fat pudding of a child. As an eleven-year-old I was rail thin. A mere sylph of a girl, with a body-mass index that hovered just above all my major organs failing. Yes, I’d once been a willowy pint-size ballerina with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and as such I gave good value. My job was to serve as the child equivalent of arm candy, proof of my mother’s fertility and my father’s glorious genetic legacy, smiling beside my parents in paparazzi photographs.
And then they sent me to live upstate. The distant memory curdles in my brain.
Upstate. Tedious upstate. It’s one of the few places my parents don’t own a home. Picture a million-billion wounded trees weeping drops of maple syrup into the snow, and—voilà—you have upstate. Envision a billion-billion ticks infected with Lyme disease and waiting to bite you.
And not to speak in unkind generalities, but using my mom’s laptop, the eleven-year-old me found a satellite photo of the location. Seen in its entirety, upstate is exactly the same mottled green-on-green as army surplus camouflage. From outer space I could trace the line of State Route Whatever forging a vital transportation link between nowhere and nowhere. I read the names of towns, looking for anyplace famous, and the truth hit me…. There on the map was Woodstock.
Woodstock, NY. Vile Woodstock. Forgive me for what I’m about to admit. For my part I shudder to broach the topic, but my parents first met at Woodstock ’99, where everyone rioted over the price of pizza and bottled water in the center of those thousand noxious acres of overpopulated mud. My mom was just a naked farm girl encased in sweat and patchouli. My dad was a pale, naked dropout from MIT with long greasy dreadlocks, who’d shaved off his pubic hair to look more like the Buddha. Neither of them owned a single pair of shoes.
They fell into a puddle and did the Hot Nasty. His wiener got mud in her woo-woo and she got a UTI, and they got married.