I gotta go.
Did you go to Mass this week?
No.
You know it’s Ash Wednesday?
Really? I just thought people suddenly decided to start putting cigarettes out on their foreheads.
That’s not funny.
Yes it is.
Don’t you put that in your book.
Okay—I won’t. See you on Easter, Ma.
Okay. Thanks for calling, honey. I love you and I’m so proud of you, honey.
CLICK.
(Note—Blighyarding [my spelling]. This one I looked up everywhere once again—INCLUDING World Wide Goddam Words. I could have Googled Galaxy Wide Words and Infinity Wide Words. It absolutely does not exist outside of my mom, my Aunt Bridie and my Aunt Margaret. So my mom and only the two sisters who followed her here to America somehow came up with a term that—as far as I can tell—refers to causing trouble. So we can assume that blighyarding means cursing, pretending to eat horrible overboiled food when in fact you are feeding it to the dog under the table—because even my mom’s cats wouldn’t eat the stuff—and other minor crimes committed inside or around the house. Vicious blighyarding would seem to mean egging other people’s houses and windshields [especially in the winter when the eggs would splatter and freeze], breaking streetlights with rocks, stealing priests’ wallets, drinking the holy wine, five-finger discounting booze and baseball cards and making fun of the Mass DURING Mass and ridiculing the nuns and priests behind their backs. In general—just being a wiseass and a troublemaker. I guess I should be proud of the fact that my brother Johnny, my cousins Jerry and Noreen and the New York cousins Terrence and Denis were so off the charts that they had to invent a word to describe our behavior. Anyways—back to why I didn’t end up overdosing on heroin when I was fifteen years old.)
I didn’t go from a high school production of the musical Mame right out to Hollywood to become a giant kid star because of two key words: my parents. I didn’t overdose on blow or smack or a combination of both before I was old enough to vote because my stupid mom wouldn’t let me.
I was allowed to go hang out with older kids and a nun every night after school for several months and sing and dance and ogle. That’s right—I said ogle. Let me explain:
1. When I walked into the hallway outside the room where the audition was—even though I was only eleven—I remember a bevy of beautiful girls—high school girls (translation: they had tits)—who were NOT dressed in their school uniforms but in tight jeans and tops. Man.
2. When I was auditioning—once inside the room—I looked up to realize all eyes were on me. And when I say all eyes—I should say all female eyes—since the room was jampacked full of the girls from the hallway. All staring at moi. And moi liked it. Girls girls girls. Lips hair hips asses ankles nipples—you name it.
Long story short I got the part of Patrick Dennis—Auntie Mame’s nephew—and got my first laugh ever onstage on opening night when I made my entrance and said my line (which wasn’t supposed to be funny) and the audience went crazy. When I came offstage, the nun grabbed me and said “No wonder! Zip up your fly!” And something clicked in my head. Every night after that—right before I made my entrance—I made sure to unzip my fly. I got one big laugh when I walked out and another big laugh when I pretended to realize and nervously zipped it up.
What I remember about rehearsals for that play was watching all the high school boys being COMMANDED by the nun to grab the girls by the ass and hold them up in the air—grab the girls around the waist and hold them tight—grab the girls grab the girls. These guys were not only allowed to touch these girls all over their bodies—it was completely and totally allowed. PLUS backstage when there were furious costume changes going on, every once in awhile you’d get to see a girl slip right out of one dress and then climb into another—which meant UNDERWEAR! VAGINA OUTLINES IN PANTIES! GLIMPSES OF TITS! NIPPLE SLIPS! I made many mental notes about all of these things and shared them with all my guy friends—by the time we hit high school every guy I knew was volunteering to be in the fall musical the spring musical and every single fashion and/or dance show in between. It was a perfectly legal chance for an ass grab or a tit rub or a combination of both. Not to mention the occasional free-floating chick undressing and redressing right there in front of you.
When I was doing Mame all kindsa high school girls paid attention to me—they hugged me, kissed me, tweaked my cheek, laughed at my jokes—I was surrounded by girls with big tits, small tits, round asses, tight asses—blue eyes, brown eyes—you name it. I even ended up going to the senior prom that year because one of the girls had a boyfriend who was over in Vietnam and she took me instead of another guy. I went to a couple of parties after the prom and got an eyeful of guys french kissing and feeling girls up—funny how I can still remember that almost minute by minute, tongue after tongue and stroke by stroke but I can’t make my way through a Hail Mary anymore.
But the reason I bring this up now is to illustrate the fact that kids should be FORCED to stay kids as long as they can.
I saw booze and tits and cigarettes and tongues and other things I wanted to sip, savor, lick, grab and smoke that night and if my mom had let me drop out of school I would’ve been chasing them 24/7. As it came to be I was smoking and drinking beer within a couple of years anyways but I was also doing my homework and washing dishes in a diner after school and on weekends and hoping desperately to somehow get into college.
My mom always kept our feet nailed hard and fast to the ground. She told us no when we wanted to hear yes and my dad was right there to back her up.
You should not be making money off of your kids, your kids should not be leaving school to act or dance or traipse up and down the runway stages of beauty pageants.
They should be coloring and running and crying and sleeping and feeling safe and warm and fuzzy and all the other things we all know to be what’s right for them.
INCLUDING learning how to lose.
AND how to deal with bullies.
You will hear mom after mom and father after father say but she/he WANTS to be in the movies/in a band/on a stage. Hey—join the fucking club. It’s all kid code for I don’t wanna go to school. I wanna dance and sing and hang around with famous people—who the fuck doesn’t? If I could have been singing with The Dave Clark Five on The Ed Sullivan Show instead of getting slapped by frustrated lesbians dressed up in religious gear when I was ten I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. Shit—I’d do it with Cyndi Lauper on VH1 right now.
You choose to be a mom it means you choose to be at home. You choose to be a dad and mom is staying at home? You choose to work and make the money to pay for what mom needs to feed, clothe and shelter the kids. You choose either job? You better pay attention to what the kids do say dream wish puke piss fart think et al.
You don’t want the kids watching certain things on TV—watch your kids while they watch TV. I know—SpongeBob’s good but most of the other shows really suck and you wanna watch The Big Game/Your Show/ anything that’s not a kid show. Tough shit. Don’t call the Parents Half-Baked Godforsaken TV Council group so they can legislate shows like Rescue Me and The Sopranos out of existence—change the fucking channel. WE are not in charge of raising your kids THE NANNY is not in charge of raising your kids THE PRESIDENT WHO GOT A BLOW JOB is not in charge of raising your kids BARRY BONDS is not in charge of raising your kids JANET JACKSON’S LEFT NIPPLE is not in charge of raising your kids—YOU ARE. You wonder why kids have such low self-esteem? Because they have spent enough time around their parents to realize that mommy hates herself and daddy hates her and they both hate each other and it’s everyone else’s goddam fault.
Ask yourself an honest question: why the fuck did you have the kids in the first place?
Famed Rolling Stone magazine and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz had her first child at age fifty-one after sticking a turkey baster full of donated semen between her legs because she and her lesbian lover decided they finally wanted kids. Leibovit
z claimed the reason it took her so long to consider being a mom was because she “forgot to have children.”
Wow.
She forgot to have children.
She didn’t forget to travel the world for five decades photographing the rich and the famous.
She didn’t forget to put out giant, gorgeous coffee table-sized books full to overflowing with her incredible celebrity portraits.
She didn’t forget to become the photo editor for Vanity Fair—the magazine for which she shot the controversial cover featuring Demi Moore naked and pregnant in 1991.
She set-dressed, supervised the body makeup for and ultimately captured the beauty of the fully expressed female body in its ultimate state of motherhood and still—somehow—she didn’t think it might be nice to have a kid of her own.
Not for another goddam decade.
Sorry, Annie.
I ain’t buyin’ it.
I think you are a genius with a camera in hand—and I’m sure that as I write this I am forfeiting what little chance I ever had of getting my picture taken by you—but you didn’t forget to have a family. You just decided—like a lot of women—that you wanted to do what you wanted to do. A lot. For a really long time.
Then—once you did all the fun stuff—you wanted a kid.
And once you wanted that kid—Mother Nature and the natural course of sexual events and the kid’s own best interests should be tossed aside in favor of your “Things To Do At 51” birthday party Post-it note.
Having a kid at forty is considered a dangerous proposition by every available medical expert. After forty it becomes a roll of the baby dice. But fifty? That not only desperately increases the health risk to mother AND child, but also the chances they will both be wearing diapers at exactly the same time.
The reasons nature wants a woman to have her children between the ages of twenty and thirty-five are absolute and incredibly logical:
So the mom remains clear of mind and strong of body.
So your breast milk is full of the nutrients the baby needs to build its necessary immune system.
So when the kid graduates from high school you can be in the audience with a digital camera and a tear in your eye instead of sucking on an oxygen mask from your high-end Stephen Hawking-designed wheelchair.
You have kids when you are young because their lives become your life. That’s what a mom is meant to do. You don’t have kids because your life is almost over and there’s nothing to watch on TV and you’ve shot all the imaginable cover ideas with every single celebrity still alive.
To make matters worse—four years later? Annie Leibovitz decided to have MORE kids. Twins. When she was fifty-five years old. Only this time with the help of some fertility drugs.
And a surrogate mother.
I guess Annie forgot she had a vagina.
CHAPTER 9
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE WELCOME-IN UTERO
This business of surrogate parenthood reached its peak for me when I turned on The Today Show one morning to see Lisa and Brian Switzer. They had tried for eight years to get pregnant—many, many times. No luck.
When that didn’t work—they tried fertility drugs. Many many times. Ninety thousand dollars’ worth. Still no luck.
They reached the point where the final doctor they saw said to Lisa—no doubt in the nicest way possible—“your uterus is just not up to the task.”
Ouch.
So they then approached Brian’s sister and she agreed to carry their baby to term—until she was hit by a drunk driver and suffered back injuries that didn’t paralyze her but left her unable to physically deal with a pregnancy.
Once again—if there was no bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all, right?
Wrong. Here is where I would pose this question—what does God have to do? Write you a personal note? Hit your tits with lightning? Set your dick on fire?
Maybe He just doesn’t want you to have a child.
Do the Switzers get that message? No. Do they reconsider what God’s plan for them might be? Adoption? Working with special-needs kids? Helping Augusten Burroughs’s weird blabbermouth brother?
No no no no.
They deem it must be time to Rent-A-Vadge.
But not even an American vadge.
Apparently a uterus in the United States of America—just like everything else here—costs more to rent. So the Switzers have outsourced a uterus in India.
I believe this is the point at which buying a Chinese baby starts to serve its purpose. There may be as many as a billion kids over there waiting to be delivered to the wide streets of America and renamed from Wang Chung to Colleen or Ida or Louisiana Switzer—as difficult as it may be to grow up different even in the confines of your own house, it’s gotta be better than your parents basically purchasing a pussy from overseas just because it’s cheaper.
I mean—you may not look like your adoptive parents but at least you’re already here on earth.
But then again—this is America. Where we get whatever we want whenever we want it. And if it’s not here to be got? Let’s buy it from one of those immigrants overseas who we don’t want living inside this country’s confines. Basically—we don’t want your kids coming here—unless we get to buy them.
And this is all a legal process that somehow fits within the confines of our Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson is not only rolling over in his grave right now, he wants to donate some semen.
American Vadge. Good name for a band.
As is Wang Chung.
Lisa Switzer may have been unable to have a baby even if she had started out trying when she was eighteen years old. And you have to give her credit for not stopping in her quest to be a mom. But passing the sperm of her puffy white husband Brian through an egg implanted in an Indian woman has all the potential of producing another kid who looks “different.”
Different from its parents when it’s dropped off at school.
Puffy? Maybe. White? Probably not.
The bullies and the mean girls and everyone else in between will be lining up to make fun.
And America is already full to popping with kids who don’t like the way they look and moms who freak out because they are so concerned about it.
CHAPTER 10
SELF-ESTEEM THIS
Let’s face it—kids in Africa and many other piss-poor places are concerned with one thing and one thing only—are flies food? But here in America—the land of plenty—it’s all about looks. Kids here get inundated with reasons to hate themselves—skin too dark, nose too big, legs too thin. Magazines, TV, more magazines, more TV—even on the Internet—kids are shown how not beautiful they are and how easy it will be to fix that problem. And moms buy right into it.
Get this through your thick skull—it’s okay to hate yourself. Your nose your legs your ass your tits etcetera etcetera. Chicks—moms in this case—seem to think that hating parts of your own body or the way your voice sounds or the way in which you run or dance or sing or whatever is a sign that they have somehow been robbed at birth and therefore have a God-given birthright to have it fixed or somehow praised into the positive by other chicks who will tell them and their kids how perfect they are. Bullshit.
There has always been an unwritten rule among men and boys—nicknames are applied by everyone other than yourself. Women don’t understand this. Women call each other by their first names—Ellen and Annie and Steph. Guys call each other by their last names almost from the moment they meet. Then—after they start hanging out—nicknames get invented. In a woman’s world, if there are two Ellens in the same group of friends or co-workers—they refer to each as redheaded Ellen or Ellen Insert Last Name Here. Among men—redheaded Ellen would become Red or Carrot Top, shortened to CT or Carrot. Or she’d be Redbush. Or Helen Reddy. Forever. You know the much maligned freaky-looking redheaded prop comic called Carrot Top? That ain’t a stage name. He got that moniker in the school yard five seconds after his parents dropped him off on th
e first day of kindergarten. (If you think Mick Jagger would not have been called Niggerlips if he had gone to grade school in America, you just ain’t living in the real world.)
And to break it down even further—among men any physical inability or shortcoming would eventually—on the ice or the playing field or in the workplace—be part of the nickname process. A guy who can’t run very fast becomes Pokey or Fatass or Snail. Or the opposite—Speedy or Bullet or Jackrabbit (if his given name is Jack). The unfortunate guy with glasses gets the classic Four Eyes or Xray or Ray Charles (Ray for short). A guy with no left leg becomes Righty.
A buddy of mine knew a kid whose brother was sent to Vietnam in the sixties and only a couple of days after landing there was killed in the line of duty. When the news reached home this kid’s reaction was to shake his head no over and over again. For days afterward he walked around shaking his head no. After a few weeks it appeared he was going to do this forever. One day he was walking down the other side of the block—lost in his own thoughts and shaking his head no over and over and over again. That was it. He was nicknamed No No Johnson and even after he got over the loss of his brother and stopped shaking his head he was still called No No. Picking up teams for street hockey? I’ll take No No. Going down the railroad tracks to drink beer and smoke cigarettes? Go tell No No. Heading to the beach for a weekend trip—who’s driving? No No’s got his dad’s car. The guy is now in his forties and STILL answers to that nickname at barbecues and golf outings and pickup hockey games.
Why We Suck Page 14