And Now It Can Be Told

       


          I’m 22, always hot to get Jeanne alone, and having a blast in North Carolina being her carpenter’s assistant. She had a swagger I loved, and real chops when it came to building stuff. God, I was so into her.


          The town where we lived, Burgaw, was full of good old boy rednecks and poor country folks but most everyone treated us like family.

          It was because Jeanne loved honky tonks and roadhouses and she could hang with the boys, plus we made no pretenses of being straight so they were intrigued.  Until they found out we weren’t into doing them. By then it was too late and they liked us anyway.

       But there were dark clouds on the horizon on the job site. George, our foreman, got furious when Captain Jack dragged a broken down trailer onto the lot and told us to use it or else.


        To get back at Jack, George ordered a crane and put the trailer up on top of the first floor of this mansion Jack had half built, then he walled it in with cinderblocks so there was no un-doing. I think the trailer came from a prison chain gang; it smelled like puke and man-pee, and it was caving in here and there. But Jack got what he wanted.

        George had already been wooing the Widow Bowen, a German lady from town who idolized him and had a bunch of money, so he proposed and quit the same day. It was an elegant and well-timed “fuck you” to a guy who deserved it, but it left Jeanne and me to take on the fall out.

         And the fall out came the very next weekend. We lived up a dirt road from Jack and from time to time his bulldog would get loose and trot down to fight with our pit bull, Halo.

      That Saturday at five in the morning we heard the dogs fighting outside. Jeanne grabbed Jack’s dog and brought it inside. She called Jack who mumbled something and hung up.

       Five minutes later he was pounding on the door, yelling, “Give me my Goddamned dog!”
       Jeanne foolishly opened the door with her hands full of bull dog and this fat bald prick punched her! Wham---knocked her right off her feet while I stood on the stairs in shock. Then he grabbed the dog and slammed the door behind him as he left.


      That was the beginning of the end of my experience in Burgaw. Shortly after that, I packed it in and came back home. My girlfriend followed in a few months.


     But five years later I dropped a dime on old Jack as payback. I heard he got Alzheimers in the federal pen and ended his days a drooling idiot. When they arrested him on the deck of his yacht he said, “I bet it was those fucking dykes.”

        No, just one, Jackie.

        Moral of the story: Don’t mess with me and mine.

 (See also: Rude security guards, Republican pages, lawyers who live on my street and the deaf/half blind.)

Outed by Kin

          When I was 19, I went to this Gay & Lesbian Expo downtown at the Wolfson campus. I got lost and started going the wrong way down a one way street off Flagler. Then a cop on a horse clomped up to help, but when he looked in the Gremlin, he saw a big roach on the end of this multicolored feather clip in the ashtray.

          He said, “What’s that?”
          I sat there with my mouth hanging open.
         Then he said, “OK, hand it over.” So I did.


         I told him I was going to the campus.  He dropped the roach onto the asphalt, made the horse’s hoof scuff it, then gave me good directions on where to park. He even gave back the roach clip I’d won at the Youth Fair.

       At the end of the day there was a group on the list called, “Lesbians, Etc.” It looked interesting so I signed up along with 55 others.


          One person after another talked about how there’s nothing to do for lesbians in Miami except for a couple of bars owned by gangsters. At the end we all decided to send around a phone sheet for anyone who wanted to have a regular weekly meeting.

        It was how this group called “ The Friday Night Women’s Group” got started. We met at different women’s houses every week, and at I met Jeanne at one of the meetings. It was an instant attraction when she lit a wood match off her boot heel to give light my Winston while we sat around a bonfire.


         I fell for Jeanne because she was hot, but then it deepened after we’d been together a few years and I got to know her on more levels. Then it was love/hate.  Or love/confusion... She had a way of refusing to see the dark clouds of chaos looming overhead and thought if she ignored them hard enough they would go away, magically.   She taught me that most bad situations almost never get to Worst Case Scenario but I also took away this lesson:  ignoring a problem makes it all more likely to flare up like a hemorrhoid.

        When we first got together, I was drunk with love. So drunk I let the world slide and unofficially moved into her place leaving my sister/ roommate Ann hanging.

       I came back to the apartment for the first time in days from U.M. one afternoon.  Some poor bastard had all his stuff on the curb, it looked like.   Clothes, boxes of books, the works. I laughed when I saw it. Then I went upstairs and saw my key didn’t fit the door. Shit! That must’ve been my stuff in the trash!

      I called Dad in a panic and said, “Ann went crazy! She changed the locks on our door and threw away everything I own!” and Dad said, “Come on over to the house, Janie. We’ll talk about it.”

       I drove over with my curb-rescued things and we sat down in the den. He said, “Ann tells me you’re in a homa-sexual affair or something with some old gal. What’s this about?”

     I was blindsided. I said, “Her name is Jeanne and she’s not some old gal. I love her.” We’d only been together a little while, but I really did love her already. I was pretty sure.

     Dad said, “Well, who is she? What does she do? Does she have any education”

      I said, “She manages a hardware store. And she’s a carpenter.”

      He said, “Are you thinking of dropping out of college?”

      I said no. It didn’t even occur to me. Then for a split second I thought he was going to tell me I was done with school since I could never afford U.M on my own.

        He said, “Good. It seems like one of you ought to have an education.”

        Then he told me that all he ever wanted as a father is for his kids to be happy. He told me he loved me. He also said he didn’t think it was a natural lifestyle. Also, he could understand women being together, but not men.

         He told me not to bring “that woman” around the house because he “didn’t want the girls exposed to it, they’re too young.” He said I shouldn’t say anything to my grandparents, either, but they lived in Georgia so that was no issue.

          As for the problem with Ann, it turns out I forgot/ blew off my half of the rent that month, went AWOL and worst of all, came one day and got the dining room table that had been Mom’s for my new girlfriend’s place without even asking. So that’s why she was pissed.

        We talked it out, I hauled her table back and pretty soon Jeanne was welcomed into my father’s house because his wife really liked her and insisted.   Dad never stopped calling her “that gal” but he was always cordial, if not friendly, with her for the next five years we were together.

         Looking back, it was a real gentle  coming-out. It was like wrapping a loose tooth in string then tying the string to a door knob and slamming the door shut. Not a real shock because everyone knew that tooth was coming out and not tense since it happened before I could worry and brood on it.

         I’m incredibly lucky to have the kind of father who would react so calmly and with that kind of grace.   It wasn’t perfect acceptance, but he’s come around even more in the thirty years since, and there was never any doubt he loves me.

Burying Becky

         

In second grade, the class gerbil had babies. There were five of them so the teacher sent home permission slips to see who might take one home. Seven of us signed on, and even though Mom wasn’t crazy about rodents, she said I could have one.



          It turned out 14 of us wanted the five that were there, and so we put names in a hat and I got to pick first. And it was me! The very first baby gerbil was mine. I had a cage with a wheel and an upside down water bottle for him, with cedar shavings to play in and hamster food.


        I took my gerbil home the very first night and when we came back the next morning to class, the mother gerbil had eaten all the rest of the babies. That’s what the teacher told us, and the other kids cried and generally flipped out about it, but that’s nature for you.


       No one’s parents got called, no grief counselors, nothing. It was just one of those “oh, well” situations kids were expected to roll with back then. If it happened today there’d be some hell of an outcry. Lawsuits. Channel 7’s Help Me Howard. It’d be an ongoing drama, but not in 1967 when I was seven.


        I named my gerbil Becky after my best friend, Becky Hayes, and she was very gentle with her bites. I gave her a lot of love and care in return. She wasn’t a cuddler, but I loved her. We all did.


        But after two years she died.
        The day she died, I felt it hard because I hadn’t gone through anything dying before. But the pain was tempered by the fact that she never really warmed up to humans, me included. I was always wary of her, too, because I knew what she was capable of doing.

       I mean, the moms eat the babies.

       I brought her into Mom and Dad’s bedroom the morning she turned up stiff. There was no thinking, “There’s something wrong with the gerbil.” I knew the score.


       Mom saw it in my hand and said, “Uh-oh. Bill?”

       Then Daddy said, “Come here, doll.” He kind of poked her, then he took her from me and looked at her teeth, for some reason. He said, “Welp. Yep. She’s gone.” Then he looked at me and back at the gerbil then back at me. I started getting borderline weepy, where the tears hang there but don’t come down.

          Becky got lost in the house  the week before and Ann said, “What if she gets into the baby food? Or my shoes? Or eats rat poison? These are all things rodents do, Janie, so you’d better find it.”

       Dad said, “Well, you better tell Laura to look out for her. If she doesn’t know it’s a pet she’s liable to throw it in the chili and feed it to y‘all for lunch..” Laura was our maid from Phenix City, across the Alabama line.

       Richard said, “I think I saw her do that last week.”

       We found her by following the trail of turds that led behind the refrigerator, but I was afraid she had eaten poison while she was loose. There’s no way Mom would leave poison around with all those children and toddlers, but kids worry like that.


       So it was guilt tears, too. Just then, Dad got teary eyed, too, and said, “She was a fine gerbil and a faithful pet. She served with honor. I guess we need to give her a decent funeral.” I nodded and then Mom and Dad each gave me hugs and Ann handed me aluminum foil, a plastic baggy and a paper towel wad.


         Then Ann said, “God would probably want you to do all that stuff on the back porch. Because it’s Sunday.” Mom agreed so I put Becky’s body in a watch box out back. After breakfast and KP chores, we got the casket and went by station wagon to Rigdon Field where Rich played Little League.


          It was me, Dad and Nancy in the funeral procession. We went into the woods behind the snack stand to find a peaceful place.

          Mom gave us cut lilies from her garden and Mrs. Cox gave us two red roses with the thorns broken off; one for each year Becky lived with us. We got a cross made out of popsicle sticks and glue from Ann and Mom. And at the gravesite Dad said the speech about how there is a season, turn, turn, turn. And more about how we stand before our maker and Becky could be proud.


         Then Dad brought out a folding GI spade shaped like a snake’s head and dug a hole in the muddy clay. We buried her there and we all said things we liked about her. Then we sang “Amazing Grace” but just the first part. No sense over-doing it.



        On the way back, we went to Circle Grocery and Dad got me five Big Buddy bubble gum whips. Each one was a full foot long. Laid end to end they were taller than me.

No wonder I always suspected I was his favorite.

Barney's Vagina

          It's my nephew Ben's third birthday and he's wild about barney the purple dinosaur and huge construction trucks.  I got him a dump truck and what's more,   we rented a Barney costume for the big party at his house later that afternoon.

      The costume was big with a huge, football-style helmet for his big purple head.  There were a lot of parts to that simple looking outfit, and no instructions.  I got into the thing, stepped into the special barney boots and put on the special barney gloves.   The last part of the costume was a nasty looking yellowed bed pillow.  The weather was hot so I decided to let my own flab do overtime and leave the bed pillow stuffing in the bottom of the costume box.

    When we got the pictures back, there I was as Barney.  And it turned out the pillow was a vital part of the appeal and without it I was sporting a big slit that looked for all the world like Barney with a vagina!

Random Quotes from My Friend Sam

Here are recent quotes from my friend Sam, age 5:


“My sister is in Chicago. Mommy left her there.  Or Kentucky.”   Sam is an only child.

“I have to do all the work. I make the bed, clean the house, do the wash and make the food.
Me: Wow.
Sam: Yeah. I had to make her breakfast today.
Me: “What did you make?
Sam: Tuna sandwich.


: “Janie, I’m scared. Rex is going to get killed and then what will happen to him? And who’s going to help the people? With their grenades?"    ...While playing an online Star Wars game.

"Burgaw": Native American for "Mud Hole"

       

 In August 1981,  I'd gotten my degree from U.M and took off with my lover to Burgaw to learn how to be a carpenter.  I was 21.

           North Carolina was a revelation. Every morning we dressed in old jeans, t-shirts and steel-toe boots and took ourselves to the Burgaw Diner for breakfast in a light blue ’59 Chevy truck. We smoked up on the way and ordered a working man’s meal, then it was time to get to work. Serious work.


            I learned to build a house from the foundation up by doing it. We dug a footer by hand, filled it with concrete we mixed ourselves, and started framing up the walls. While I was hammering 8 penny nails into those, Jeanne was building the trusses and jousts for the roof. We hired a cement company to pour the floor foundation, then waded out in the middle with floats to smooth out the wet mud. I learned to use a buzz saw, run a chalk line, survey a site and more. Day by day I watched the project take shape, and at night we showered, ate dinner, tackled the aches and pains with sex therapy and slept like Rip Van Winkle.

           My hands roughened up, my skin got browned by the sun, I laughed a lot and worked harder than I ever have. There were no hard hats small enough for my bean sized head so we had to get one from a toy store, but I wore it with as much pride as any Brooklyn construction mook.

           As for the boss, Captain Jack, we hardly saw him but when he made a rare appearance, it tended to start out grand and end up shitty. This was on account of the fact that Jack was, in many ways, a douche.

           Once he invited us to join his crew on for a fishing tournament. We got on his fishing yacht and thirty minutes in, I turned green and got sea sick for the next nine hours. Jeanne did better, and won a one thousand dollar prize for catching the smallest king mackerel!   But Jack took the cash, of course.

          Another time he took us to Cape Hatteras to go hang gliding. Turns out we were only invited so we could fetch the thousand pound hang-gliders at the bottom and wrestle them back up the hill for the next round.

         But Jack was seldom around, and on the weekends, we rested. There was nothing to do in town, and the closest movie theater was 40 minutes away in Wilmington so going was a major deal. There was no McDonalds, no TV except for grainy Andy Griffin re-runs, and no other dykes anywhere to be found. If we wanted fun, we had to make it ourselves.

          I fell into the incredible power and beauty of the outdoors. We had a Zodiac inflatable boat and a Johnson 9.5 engine and we’d take to the Cape Fear River for hours.

          I read the entire works of Faulkner while floating down the river, page by confusing page, and once I locked eyes with a wild panther swimming near the banks. He never took his eyes off me as he grabbed a low branch with his front claws and hoisted his whole body up onto a low tree limb. After he slinked away, I realized I’d been holding my breath; he was magnificent and seeing him was a gift.

How I Got Separated from the Love of My Life

        

 

"...I worked for these two clowns...one looked like Popeye and the one who sucker-punched my girlfriend looked like Ernest Hemmingway..."

 Here’s how I got separated from the love of my life, which turned out to be Miami.

          I was finished with my undergrad degree, but now it was time to decide what to do, work-wise. My degree in English sharpened my critical thinking skills to a fine edge and I was critically thinking there were no jobs out there.  I had a vague idea about wanting to teach in a women's prison eventually.

          But not yet.

          Enter Captain George from Islamorada. He was one of Jeanne’s oldest, best friends and years before he’d saved her from certain destruction by hauling her out of a bad spiral, teaching her to sail, enlisting her in the volunteer fire department and getting her out of the small town gossip machine that can grind up young dykes in little towns. He looked and talked a lot like Pop-Eye the Sailorman, cap, pipe and all.

         Now it was ten years later and he had a new job working for another captain in a tiny town in Burgaw, North Carolina. This other guy, Captain Jack, came back to the place where he grew up and was setting up a boatyard on the Cape Fear River.

         Jack was financing it with bales he smuggled on hollowed out sailboat hulls built at this very same boat yard, but we didn’t know that at first. I started to figure it out on our first payday when were handed bundles of cash wrapped in aluminum foil and doled out of an Igloo cooler.

            We’d gone up to Burgaw before graduation and I loved it. George had a beautiful woodworking shop on the first floor of this building he’d designed and constructed. From the outside it looked like a barn, but the inside was outfitted with a 2nd floor home that amazed me. Huge windows showcased the forest outside and the river flowed right by the back dock.

          I fell in love with North Carolina and when George offered us jobs, we talked it over and decided to go for it.

       Jeanne made it conditional. First, we’d need for it to be known that we weren’t doing any smuggling under any circumstances. We were there to build and work on sailboats, only. Next, we came as a set. They had to take us both even though I’d never been on a sailboat and hadn’t hammered anything since I was eleven.

       Jack, the boss, was burly and gravel-voiced and looked a little like Hemingway. The story gradually emerged that he’d spent his forties in a federal prison because he was caught off the Keys with a boatload of Jamaican marijuana. He’d kept quiet about the financers and after he was paroled, they bank-rolled him again.

        I never trusted him, and it turns out I was right not to.

Too Late; This One Was Already Recruited

     

My brother Richard was just a few years older, but our social lives didn’t really intersect until we moved to Miami and I got a best friend who was stacked.   Rich hung out with a group of guys from around the neighborhood who liked having her around.  I came with the deal, so it was a time in my life when we went places together a lot.


       It was 1977 and I was 17. This betty crocker clone named Anita Bryant was on a campaign to root out gays from school system employees and public service workers. She was a celebrity because she sang a jingle on TV for Florida orange juice and she was hateful in the Name of the Lord.

       We talked about the issue in 4th period journalism and every night I read about it in the paper and on TV news, but I’d never heard my brother talk about it. We were riding in his car with me in back and Dennis riding shotgun, on our way to Peacock Park to play Frisbee when we passed a gay bar on the corner.

          Richard said, “A bunch of dumb asses from Palmetto’s football team went over to pick a fight with the gays in that bar. They thought it would be real easy because they’re sissies. But when they started the shit, the gay guys chased them out with whips and chains.” He thumped on the steering wheel with his palm, “Whips and chains!”

           I said, “You don’t see anything wrong with being gay?”

           He said, “No, I don’t care as long as they don’t try anything on me.”

          I said, “With that mug, I’m thinking you don’t need to worry.”

         He said, “Back at you, slim.”

         That was a couple of years before I, too, became a gay, but I knew he wouldn’t turn his back on me. Richard was a real good guy in those pre-grown days, and he turned into an amazing man.

A 38 Caliber Gun and a Mirror So You Never Have to Turn Your Back on the Little Thugs

          

          My first adult professional job was teaching high school English in an inner city school in Miami, and Principal Freddie hired me.  .

          I went to the interview and told them I’d be willing to take over the debate team but I didn’t know anything about competitive forensics. I bragged about my sister being a state champion on her high school debate team as if I could pick it up by breathing the same air.  Then Principal Freddie, this boozy old former Dolphin, slurred,

             "Thass’ OK, young lady. It’s easy! They win awards and what not. Plus, there’s a two thousand dollar extra bonus and what not. You’ll learn it.  Ain’t a thing to it and you know, you’ll see…” then he leaned way back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head and looked like he might be falling asleep.

          He rallied and went on, “…these chirren will teach you. They win trophies and what not!  Coach! Get this lady some paperwork to sign!”

           At last.  A real adult career-style job was just what I’d worked toward, but panic set in.   I knew nothing about debate, needed to brush up on English rules about gerunds and dangling participles,  and when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw a kid  pretending to be an adult.  That's before I knew the secret:  all adults feel that way some time or another.

         Plus, I was nervous about the teaching gear they’d given me. Namely, none. No textbooks to scan, no literature lists to start reading.  Marta's boyfriend Mark said,  "The only gear you'll need for that school  is a .38 caliber gun and a mirror so you never have to turn your backs on those little thugs."

         I called to see what I’d be teaching and Principal Freddie put me on speakerphone.  It sounded like a party in the background.

         He said,  “What are you teaching?  What are you teaching!? That all depends.  What department are you in?

          I said, “English. And debate.”

          He said, “Then you’ll be teaching English and debate, I guess.   They’re still working it all out.  Anyway, I was fixin’ to call you.   You want to teach newspaper, too?   There’s a fourteen hundred dollar stipend and what not.   And the chirrun' are good.  Goooood chirrun’. Yes, Lord.”

            I said, “Well...ummm...OK, sure. Yes ”

           “Good!   Now who is this?”

"Give me one of them dicks on a stick..."

         
      Every summer as a kid, we spent time at The Lake. Growing up it was paradise; we hung with the cousins, fished off our dock, hunted weird bugs and stuff in the woods, grilled out every night, and even though there was on-again/off-again plumbing, we scratched chigger bites non-stop and the temp hovered around 104, I’d count the days until we could go.
 


           Until I turned 16. That was the year I decided I’d rather work than get stuck with the family at the lake. Work was the only thing that got you off the hook from the annual family pilgrimage but the vacation the year before was a scorched earth experience with non-stop squabbling, no toilet and very little to do.  Back then, in 1976, teens could actually get summer jobs.

            So I got a job at a dive called Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. It was up on U.S. 1 at the shopping strip on top of Marlin, walking distance from our place on Bel Aire Drive.  The plan was to work until the family split for Georgia and the lake, then bag the work thing and flounce around with strange older guys who owned vans.

             I meant to be more of a slacker, but I’m my father’s daughter and hyper to boot, so I turned out to be the best worker there.  It says more about the other numbskulls on the staff, really.

             After a while, the chance to bolt presented itself when Crazy Katy invited me to see Blue Oyster Cult in her MG Midget convertible at the Sport-a-Torium.  Berneatha, the manager, told me no, so when I took out the trash, I just kept going.  Turns out it was a dead night and half the workers got sent home so she never brought it up.

          A few days later, a guy came in with his aunt.  We were selling corn dogs, and when it was his turn to order he said, “Yeah, and gimme one of them dicks on a stick.”  I turned to the microphone and said, “…and one dick on a stick, two hushpuppies….” and so on.  Berneatha waddled out and fired me on the spot!       

        Finally. 
       
       But when I came Thursday to give her my uniform and get the last check she said, “Go get dressed. What are you standing around with your face hanging out for?” So I sucked it up and went back to work.

           Only a better job at the Dairy Queen saved me from a teen career in fried food planks.

Early Brush with a Perv

 

Early Brush with a Perv

 

          Nancy and I are at Bull Creek, a construction site with woods and this great stream to play around. I’m eight and she’s five.

         Over near a clearing there’s a Triumph Spitfire and I love those; I’ve got a Matchbox car back at home just like it. On the bumper is an Infantry Airborne sticker like the one on my dad’s work fatigues so I knew whoever drives it is a good guy.  He’s sitting on a log when we come around the corner, and I say, “Hi.” He’s a grown up but not old, with a buzz cut, Levis and a white t-shirt and he's looking at a magazine in his lap.

           He says hi and we start talking. Nancy is picking out pretty rocks on the creek bank.
           He says, “You live around here?”
            I babble on like kids do. Yeah. Not too far.
           He says, “Look. Have you ever seen anything like this?” and shows me a picture in his magazine. It’s two naked guys, one black and one white, lying down with their hands on each others penises. Penii?
          I lie, “Oh, lots of times!”
          He says, “They’re making each other feel real good, huh?”
          I say, “My sister is just little and she’s not allowed to see stuff like this. And she’s coming, so…”

        Nancy walks over and he hides the magazine. She says, “Are you an army man? My daddy’s an army man.”
        He says, “Well, I got to be going,” and I say, “Us, too. Bye!” and we start home.
      
         We walk home and I’m feeling tingly, nasty and not sure what to do with what just happened so I say nothing to Nancy.  We eat dinner, do chores and then I go find Ann in her bedroom. She’s twelve and smart. I say, “I got a secret but you got to swear you won’t tell Mom. O.K?   Swear?”   She’s never kept one of my secrets in her life.
        She says, “I swear. What is it?”
        I tell her and her eyes get all wide and she yells, “Mom!” and runs off to tell. I haul ass downstairs and Mom is starting to say, “Oh, my God, oh, my God” over and she’s pacing around in a circle.  She sits me down and gets extra calm but Ann is in the background wailing like she’s stabbed and the whole thing is confusing.

          Mom says, “What did he look like, Janie?” and “Did he try to lift up your skirt?”
          I say, “I had on shorts.”
         “Did he touch you? What about Nancy? Was he making strange sounds? What about his car? What did he say, exactly?”
       
        I say all I know and now I’m quiet because it’s serious business and she’s calling her best friends, Liza Cox and Sarah Beard and I hear her say, “You need to come over later.” On a school night!   We’re supposed to be in bed when they come, except Ann, who gets to stay up later.

       Dad is in Viet Nam, some place so far away that he goes to sleep when we wake up; a whole world away.  I hear, I think, Mom crying and those cooing sounds coming from her friends, the ones you use to calm, soothe. The next day, Mom seems quiet, and I feel so bad and hope she’s normal again by the time school gets out. She is, so we don't talk about it again.


      But that weekend, Mom takes me to Miller’s Department Store and buys me a 10 inch Bowie knife with a sheath and loop to wear on my belt in plain sight. She says it’s a present from Daddy and I almost never take it off from then on.

      I’m the only armed eight year old in the neighborhood, but no one ever messes with me again.

"You 'Et Yet?"

        Growing up, we eat well. Mom goes shopping and brings home 40 bags of groceries and we all automatically troop out to bring them in.  Even the smallest one;  if you’re old enough to walk, you’re old enough to tote groceries.
       We have minute steak, Salisbury steak, pizza, roast and fried chicken. Spaghetti, tacos but not really Chinese. Side orders are potato chunks boiled and salted, or beans, Jell-O, Velveeta slices. We had biscuits with dinner at night, batches of Dad’s scrambled eggs and ate lots of cold cut sandwiches on weekends and it always felt like there was plenty.

          But I’m a picky eater and always was.
     
         The summer Ann turns nine she learns to make tuna casserole with crushed potato chips as a key ingredient. From then on we usually have one in the fridge and Jesus, the smell of tuna makes me want to hurl, even now. Rich likes peanut butter and syrup on waffles; this also makes me gag. But Dad’s sauerkraut is the worst; as Richard Pryor said, “The funk knocked me to my knees!”

          I ate none of it.

          The rule around the house is if you put it on your plate or bowl  you’re going to eat it, by God. And no special dispensation for soggy cereal. Otherwise, nobody pushed.


          Once puberty hit and I had unlimited access to fast food, that was my main diet whenever possible. My friends and I would come to our house and go through snack food like locusts, until the parental units locked down the good stuff. The summer Ann worked at the East Perrine McDonalds lives on in infamy---half a billion served to us and our friends, alone!

        At college in Georgia, Grandmama, Papa and the fat grannies at the campus dining hall fed me until I hit the freshman fourteen and started jiggling around. Two years later I switched to U.M., moved into a shared place with a sister and assorted friends, and starved on a diet of Co-’cola, ham biscuits from Hardees and fruit Dad gave me from his lunch whenever I went by his office. Sometimes I found sacks of chicken and turkey potpies and TV dinners stacked near our apartment door, compliments of Big Bill.

           Junior year I add a daily lunch at Ruben the Cuban’s diner on the corner of Chapman Field and U.S. 1 because Jeanne works at the hardware store and it’s a chance to spend an hour with her.

         She says, “You’ve got a teenage palate, Jane.  All you like to eat are hamburgers and fries.  It’s time to grow up, appetite-wise.”  She introduced me to cauliflower, broccoli and steamed shrimp which I tried to eat without peeling the first time I tried.  Jeanne took pride in cooking and she only used the freshest food around but paradoxically, she also introduced me to the vilest road food; microwave burritos.

       I try raw oysters only because I lose a bet.  Aphrodisiac my ass.  More like snot on the half shell. Jeanne knocks back oysters with Tabasco;   I use Triaminic since that’s how I wash my own snot down when I have a cold. 

        Bobbi and I ate cheap because we were starving grad students. Luckily she was over employed because I was underemployed and on her staff.   We ate chicken leg quarters, chops, and vegetables like asparagus and artichoke hearts.  She also ate stuff I’d never seen before like canned corn beef hash.   But our preference was meat and potatoes with diner type fare like meatloaf and pot roast.

      Judi and I went through all-you-care to eat buffet lines like Sherman through Atlanta. She also exposed me to Jewish food which is mostly disgusting except for latkes. Gefilte fish is not something that I will put in my mouth again, ever, but we ate well and often because I could taste food then on account of not being a smoke stack.

        Irma was almost as good as Marta at stretching food dollars and she’d whip up big wads of fluffy rice that came from a 20 lb sack. Almost everything she cooked started out dry and in massive bags; beans, rice, spicy corn meal from San Salvador. She taught me to love papusas at this dive called El Alacytl on Calle Ocho but she also loved milkshakes with tropical fruits I never heard of. She was a grocery store snob, though, and walked out if she thought one was dirty or cluttered or old.


       I like lobster but I eat a lot of chicken. I like t-bone steak but I eat a lot of ground beef. I eat a lot of white products like sugar, flour and salt and a lot of brown products like Coca-Cola, bacon and fried chicken legs.

      The red part of my diet is ribs or ketchup; the green is lima beans or salad and the white is Wonder bread. Fruits take up the rest of the spectrum and I spend a lot of my take home pay on junk food instead of getting an organized menu and eating at home. It’s all a cycle. I get sick of eating restaurant food and no one makes southern cooking so I have to cook.


        Then I remember how much I love home-cooked meals, especially Jane-cooked. I know my way around a spatula when it comes to making what I like.

Ice Cream Truck

   

 I’m eight and the ice cream truck drives me out of my mind. It’s a frenzy; we’re all in on it, we slam into high gear and haul ass inside for coins. We don’t know why we’re crazy for the idea. We just are.


     On this day, all the bigger kids with bikes ride off to find the ice cream truck. It’s 90 degrees in the shade and I’m wearing flip flops and sitting on the curb, waiting, waiting.  I want a rainbow sherbet push-up but hell, I’ll settle for a Dixie cup of kool-aid. I’ve got nothing. I’m glad I’ve got mosquito bites on my shins so I can scratch them when I’m bored. Like now.

    I think to myself, “This is supposed to be the best time of my life? I don’t think so.” Even as a kid I take the long view.

Scratch

         Scratch is a dog Dad brings home from a kennel far away when I'm five.  He's a fox terrier and openly homosexual. He's white with brown spots here and there and a giant dot on his butt.  I love to put baby powder on his rear and try to make him wear pants.

       He always naps with half his body in the sunbeam at the curtained glass door.  The other half hangs out in the back, so it's an easy access point. God, I love this queenie little dog who sleeps with his paws crossed all dainty.  And he never snaps at any of us, no matter what we do to him.

    OK, me.  No matter what I do to him. 
    
      I pour the 7-Up in his water bowl because water bores me so I figure he probably feels the same.  That's why I water the house plants with it, too.  Scratch loves it, but the plants don't, and Mom wonders why the dog keeps getting fatter and the wandering jews keep dying.

 

That Time I Almost Died

      So I'm ten and there's this tree on our side of the fence and its branches straddled our neighbor's yard.  I built a tree fort and one Saturday grabbed some frozen pizza Mom made and headed up there.  That's the day I almost died. 

                      That One Time When I Was 10 & Broke My Spleen
     

    Looking back, there were two omens.  It was the only time Mom didn't say, "Be careful, Janie."  And I saw Frank Dunford, who was kind of an enemy of mine by then, smoking behind his tool shed, watching me while I climbed up there.  Did he loosen the nails on my fort?  I've always wondered.

    Somehow the floor wiggled and or I sat wrong and then, SLAM!  I hit the ground like the coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, full frontal.  Splat.

    It was only around 10 or 12 feet down, but it knocked the wind out of me and it was hard to breathe.  I passed out for a little, then woke up to see my dad jump over the fence in one fluid move like a champ.  Even though he was a soldier, I never thought of him as real macho and it surprised me, even while lying there.  I was thinking, "Wow, Dad.  I'm impressed."

       Next we're at Martin Army Hospital in Ft. Benning.  There's this Army doctor with a strong accent, Isreali I think, but no one knew what was wrong.  My belly kept getting bigger and harder and I was hurting worse but after a few days I felt better and they turned me loose to go home. 

      Back home, I waited a day then asked Mom if I could go to my best friend, Becky's, house.  She said maybe later which meant no, so I waited until nobody was paying attention and went anyway  I didn't feel real hot halfway there so she gave me her bike to ride back home.  I got home, passed out in the bathroom and it was back to the hospital.

        At the hospital, it was a nightmare.  They tried to cram a long clear tube up my nose and down my throat to my stomach but I fought so hard they finally had to knock me all the way out. 

     As I'm waiting for the anesthesia to kick all the way in, Dad and Mom came to my bed and Dad said, "Janie, baby you need to get an operation to see what's wrong.  But you can have anything you want to play with when you wake up, OK?"

   I said, "Anything?"
   And he said it again.  "Anything."
   So I said, "Daddy I want...I want...a motorized go-cart."  Then I fell asleep.

      When I came to, it turns out I'd ruptured my spleen and it was leaking and bad.  They hacked it out and sopped it up, but for all that, I never did get that motorized go-cart.  Just a zipper scar up and down my front, a Jane West action figure set and a giant stuffed St. Bernard doll. 

     And that zipper scar?  Never once kept me out of a bikini, even to this day!  And I'm an old old broad.

 

Walking to the Store

   

 All my life I've walked to the store.  Always.  When I was little and we lived in Georgia, I went to the Oakland Park Shopping Center and my favorite stores were the Piggly Wiggly, an ice cream shop, a five and dime store and the pharmacy where the comic book rack lived.

   My mom trusted me to go places as long as there was a sister or two along and she even let me walk to Miller's Department Store the August I was nine so I could buy some t-shirts.  I picked one out and it was my favorite all summer and fall.

    I was buying french fries at the Piggly Wiggly when two hippies came by.  I know they were hippies because they had long hair and one of them had a fringe jacket.

    One of the guys smirked at me and said, "Right on!"  I only figured out why years later.  My t-shirt had Cheech & Chong's Big Bamboo rolling papers on the front.

My First Penis

    

           I was a tough little tomboy at seven when I first saw the neighbor's dick.  The name of the person attached to it was Frank Dunford and he lived in the house on the other side of our back fence.  He was ten and had a buzz cut and a block shaped head.  Much later in life I saw this politician with the exact same head, but who cares?  It's not germane to the story.


      So we were up in his treehouse while everyone was busy with Thanksgiving and he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend.  Sure.  Then he unzipped his jeans and plopped it out.  It was white and looked like a mealy worm. It was cold up there, so it wasn't much bigger than one.

     He didn't have any pubes yet, but he could make it jump with no hands like a puppet which I liked.  It was Frank's dick trick, as it were.  He pled and wheedled and wanted me to suck on it or at least put it in my mouth, but that wasn't about to happen.  We also practiced kissing on the lips and he held my hand. 

      We were sitting in his front yard with his arm around my shoulder and his gang came rumbling by and one of them said,

     "Hey, Frank.  Is that your girlfriend?" 

    That's when that asshole, Frank, said, "No!"  I looked at him and thought to myself, "That's the last time you'll ever get me near your zipper, son."  And it was.

    A week later, I'm lying in bed feeling all kinds of guilt when it's time to go to sleep.  It had something to do with fooling around with Frank, and him denying me in front of others, and knowing I'd been doing something nasty and wrong but fun and thrilling at the same time. 

     I was crying in my room about it and Mom came in.  She didn't turn on the light but she sat on the edge of the bed and said,

     "What's wrong, Janie?  Why are you crying?"
      I said, "I was doing nasty things with Frank Dunford."
     She said, "What nasty things?"
      I said, "I kissed him.  And played with his thing."
    She said, "All boys and girls want to know about each other like that.  It's natural, O.K, and you're not in trouble.  You can tell Mama anything, you know that?"

Then she said, "But maybe Frank Dunford is a little too old to play with.  Let's say 'Now I lay me' and get some rest."