As we crossed our new state line, Mom read the names aloud from her map: Bridgeport, Saugatuck, Trumbull. All the Connecticut towns along I-95 had the poetic assonance of being punched in the gut. And although the map assured us that the ocean was somewhere close by, it was never visible above the sea of grimy tailpipes and towering black-tipped smokestacks that nested in the endless tangles of electrical relay stations. Abandoned brick factories with smashed, toothless windows loomed over empty, trash-filled lots. Mom’s knuckles grew whiter and whiter around the thin, hard steering wheel.
Soon she would learn that the natives of Corrupticut were a greatly pissed-off people, biologically ill equipped to get into heaven, should Jesus happen to drop in unannounced. Soon, she would grow to accept that the snow never melted, the prices were sky-high, and the jackass stealing her parking space at the A&P was her next-door neighbor.
When we’d first arrived, I was too young for school, so I spent a lot of time watching Mom from the backseat as she drove around Gridlockington from errand to errand.
“Time to drive to Armpiton,” she’d say with mock cheer before loading me in the car. The New England peddled in Christmas cards was apparently for suckers. But it was the salespeople who truly broke her. After making a withdrawal from a teller at the Connecticut Bank of Assholes, or maybe buying a bra from the clearance rack at Condescending Bitches boutique, Mom would retreat to the car and sniff over the steering wheel, dabbing her eyes with a crumpled Kleenex.
“How can they treat people like that?” she’d say aloud, to no one. “How?”
“Um, did you get me a lollipop?” I’d ask, at home among my people.
She pulled a green one out of her cash envelope, handed it back to me, and turned the ignition.
“Fairfield County,” she growled.
I fingered the wrapper, my eyes wide. It was the closest thing to a cuss word I’d ever heard her say.
It wasn’t just Mom who took it hard. The tougher side of Connect-a-cut quickly sawed off the last nub of innocence belonging to my twelve-year-old brother. He walked to his new school, which was just around the block from our new house, and promptly ran home screaming before lunch. Booth Valley Elementary, probably named for John Wilkes Booth, shone like a beacon to all offspring of the tired, poor, and yearning to be in organized crime. Big bro’s endearing Midwestern twang and Ozarks T-shirt, and also Mom’s insistence that he continue to play a wussy violin, put my beloved big bro at the top of their list for a mock whacking. Death threats were put on our family cat, and my parents were forced to sign away Dad’s newly acquired salary hike. All three of us kids were going to Heritage Christian Academy.
Oh, goody, I thought at the time. Parochial kindergarten was the perfect place to start amassing my fan base. And after school I could spend my free time carrying out the Heritage Christian mandate: Save. More. Souls.
Since our new neighborhood was kind of bad, I had a lot of shaming to do. And by bad, I mean they clearly weren’t as Christian as us. We had lots of Frankies and Ralphies and Johnnys, who liked to throw my metal tricycle, with me still on it, into the curb in front of our house. More than a few pieces fell off. Johnny towered over me.
“Say, ‘Kiss my grits,’” he commanded.
“Kiss my grits,” I echoed, wondering if this was how sinners made friends with Christians. A kind of ritual hazing, to make themselves feel worthy. My brother stood motionless in the background as the crew of kids snickered. No sudden movements, he was thinking, and we’ll all stay alive.
“No!” Johnny barked at me, “say it in here!” He spit a wad into the gutter near our feet. I looked down through the grate at my reflection in the murky water.
“Kiss my grits,” I called, starting to like these strange heathens more and more.
“Now. Spit,” Johnny told me.
I did, and wiped a long string of saliva from my chin.
“Know what your new name is?”
“Am I Flo?” I asked excitedly, because Alice was one of my favorite shows.
“No. You’re Puke. We’ll call you L’il Puke.”
Satisfied, Johnny returned to bullying my brother. I dragged my busted bike up the driveway, handlebars in one hand and wheels in the other, brimming with indignation. Dear Jesus, what exactly was going on here? How could I possibly save these boys? No one wanted to hear the Good News from a messenger known as Li’l Puke. Please. Hope they liked going to hell.
One day we came back from church, which we attended a minimum of three times a week, to find eggs smashed against the back side of our house.
“Buncha punks,” Mom said in a low voice, surveying the damage. “That Johnny.”
The trajectory of the shells pointed to Johnny Moretti’s house next door. Johnny’s dad had a fleet of broken down Cadillacs hidden in his window-high weeds. He’d been living there since long before we came along and must have been pleased when they bulldozed his backyard to put in our quaint two-story Tudor. To show his appreciation, he kept a pack of bipolar Dobermans pointed toward our house, choking on the ends of their chains, legs quivering, and tendrils of pink foam swinging from their muzzles. For Mom, it was one more reason to want her money back. And her old life.
While she made phone calls to get a ten-foot-high privacy fence built, I prayed for Christ to protect us with His giant disembodied hand, roughly the size of our backyard, for Johnny’s dad to mow his lawn, and for God to save all kittens from the mafia.
In the meantime, I would spend more time indoors with the TV.
When I was seven we had had only four channels, but it was enough. Guiding Light, which of course was about us since it was based in a town called Springfield (Missouri, duh), helped fill in most of the blanks left by the Bible. Most of the time I could figure out whose side God would be on. But when it came to sleeping together—bare shoulders rolling in satin sheets, whispers about Jack finding out—it was still anyone’s guess.
“He won’t find out,” she’d promise her lover, as the camera zoomed in for another sticky kiss. My older sister, Kate, who was ten, rolled and flopped with me on the carpet in front of the TV, screaming, “Turn around! He’s right there! He’s in the doorway, duh!”
Then our eyes glazed over as blue liquid was poured into maxipads, over and over and over. I feel secure thanks to Kotex, said the lanky blonde, smiling as she leaked and soaked up more Windex than ever before. She was the same woman whose elusive freshness got her lost in the meadow. She tap-danced over the scent of her Downy sheets and was finally rendered retarded by the crispetty crunch of her potato chips, the shocked whites of her eyes still burning on the screen after the fade to black.
Next was Little House on the Prairie: lean, honest, hard-workin’ Midwestern pioneers with healthy bosoms, muslin dresses, and wholesome pies cooling in the windows of sturdy log cabins. More moral victories in an hour than one could count. Pa Ingalls flashed Ma that gorgeous smile as he hitched a team of horses, sweating through his unbuttoned shirt.
“God’ll provide, darlin’,” he’d always say. “Don’t you worry yer pretty head.”
Occasionally, while fixing the roof or building a barn or saving the town, Michael Landon would break a rib and have to go shirtless, his sublime tan pecs wrapped in gauze. Kate and I stared at his body, openmouthed. But the lily-white Ingalls daughters, unfazed by his comparative swarthiness, huddled ’round Pa in their bedclothes and nightcaps, smiling as he played the fiddle by firelight. Pa always fingered the strings all wrong, out of sync with the dubbed lullaby. But it made us love him more somehow.
“We’ll always have each other,” Laura Ingalls said as the camera panned away through the window.
“Oh corny corny corn,” my sister sang, doing a handstand against the couch.
I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but if ever there was a quintessential word for Little House on the Prairie, corny was it. From Laura’s bucktoothed smile to the town shucking contest, this was the embodiment of pure unadulterated corn. Cor
n that completed me.
But by far the best part was that the TV writers could always be counted on to come up with tantalizing plotlines that the real Laura Ingalls Wilder would never have put in her book. Like the episode about the girl whose boobs got too big for Walnut Grove.
“Bind yourself good, child,” croaked her old man, alluding to her ample breasts, which were clearly making all the children in the schoolhouse insane. “Tighter, girl!” he warned, wiping drops of sweat from his long red nose.
The girl went into her room with a roll of gauze that Doc Baker had probably given her and began binding up her tits over an old-timey undershirt. Meanwhile, the townie boys peered in her bedroom window, hoping to catch a glimpse of that rack. She was usually so good about keeping the shades drawn, but conveniently not today. Good times!
If it were me, I daydreamed, if I were lucky enough to have boys peeking in my window trying to see my tits, I wouldn’t bind them up so quickly. I’d strip down totally nude and bend over real slow to pick up my Bible. Then I’d pause to study Leviticus with my splayed buttocks resting directly against the window, or maybe my bare chest, crisscrossed like an ammo belt, with my ginormous nipples popping through. I’d probably have to just lie there, innocently pondering what to do as the boys busted in one after the other to take turns feeling me up.
Unfortunately, no one was looking in my window. I ached with jealousy.
Someday they will, I promised myself. Someday.
Meanwhile, back in Walnut Grove, this girl’s simmering mammaries had every innocent Christian man and woman in town trying to think of something else. They were doing a pretty good job, until the writers of Little House on the Prairie dropped a bomb on them, in the form of a mask-wearing sexual predator who crept predictably through the woods. As our well-endowed teen strolled through the meadow picking flowers, he snuck out, put a gloved hand over her mouth, and pulled her into the brush. Later, she stumbled home to confess to her even creepier old man.
“He grabbed me,” she sobbed. “He held me down, and he… he…!” Da da da DA DA. The background orchestra became deafening, to remind us it was best to be vague and quietly picture what had happened.
“No one must know of your shame,” her father growled. My imagination exploded. I knew what had happened. I knew. He had forced her to sleep with him, only this time in the bushes instead of under lavender satin sheets. And with a clown mask on. I didn’t know what this meant, but it was very exciting and I wanted to try it.
After the commercial break, during which Kate trotted to the kitchen for snacks, the girl was already pregnant.
“IT’S BACK ON!” I screamed.
She ran back in with her hand in a box of Trix. “What did I miss?”
“He grabbed her,” I explained. “He held her down, then he… Da da do DA DA DA!” I played the loaded crescendo on my air violin. “And now she’s PREGNANT!”
I dug feverishly into the box of cereal and shoved a handful in my mouth, hopping up and down. Fruity cereal somehow maximized all the pleasure.
We stared, mesmerized, as Pa cornered his son Albert. He was the last male seen with Ms. Tightly Bound Jugs. They’d been carving their names in the old oak tree.
“Did you?” Pa asked his son. “Albert… did you…?” His chin was quivering.
“Look, his chin is quivering,” Kate said.
“I know!”
“Pa… no… I never!” cried Albert, running out the door. Then, when it seemed like the weepy background orchestra couldn’t possibly climax any further, the pregnant girl tumbled down a ladder in the barn and perished without a squeak. The rapist was shot with no notable ramifications, other than a whole lotta satisfaction, and Pa and Albert were again robust, innocent, and socially well adjusted.
But I was utterly ruined, left to ponder the majestic adventure and sweeping tragedy of Big Boobs.
Once the credits rolled, anything in our house that was remotely breast shaped—oranges, tennis balls, decorative ashtrays—spent some time under my shirt. I’d cat-walk back and forth, trying to decide the right proportion for my future body. Best in show always went to Mom’s plastic L’eggs panty hose cups, cracked in half and stuck under a cardigan. For the chance at lopsided torpedoes like those, oh, there were no words. The Holy Grail.
But since my prepubescent chest remained devoid of drama, I made a mask out of a paper plate and pretended to be Catwoman.
I ran outside and into the neighborhood, lurking in the trees, hissing at imaginary demons, leading an army of invisible cat people with my intrepidness and raw power. But I’d lift the plate up off my face long enough to tell passing kids about God’s love, how Jesusdiedfortheirsins, and to ask if they wanted to go to church with me, which usually frightened their mothers.
So I turned my attentions to Ricky, the little boy who lived across the street. He was manageable. He was probably named Rick until he moved to Connecticut, where by law all boys’ names must become adjectives. You could tell by looking he was going to end up browning on Satan’s rotisserie. Ricky and his little brother Marty didn’t wear uniforms or go to Heritage Christian like we did. Plus: they swore. And peed everywhere. Anywhere, anytime, and with amazing distance.
“Have you asked Jesus into your heart?” I asked him one day. I was standing in his backyard, looking up at him as he climbed into his tree house.
“Have I what?” he said, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “No.”
I followed behind him, in short shorts and a halter top that showed off my pale distended belly. Just to show him my after-hours, non–Heritage Christian body.
“Do you go to church?”
“On Easter,” he said, hoisting up onto the plywood platform. “And Christmas.”
“You only go then?” Ricky’s soul: sullied by years of poor attendance, like the blackened lungs of his chain-smoking dad.
“Yeah. But my dad doesn’t have to go, just me and my mom. And Marty.” Then predictably, Ricky reached for his fly and whipped out his small fleshy penis so he could pee on me. Again.
“Wanna bet I can squirt that bird in the eye? The one at the top of the streetlamp?”
While I tried to make this compute, his dad tossed a smoldering butt in the grass a few yards away and Ricky spot-drowned it without looking twice. I dropped off the ladder to feign covering my eyes.
“Ew! Did you get any on me?”
“Want me to?” He wiggled his hips and the yellow stream arced over my head.
I screamed, running out of range. “Stop it!”
“But I’m not done,” he told me, filling up an empty soda can at the top of the platform.
I was getting tired of playing the shocked onlooker. Why did Ricky get to have all the fun? It was time to get mine. So I marched to a pile of cut logs a little ways back and dragged a line through the dirt with my toe.
“Hey!” I hollered. “This is the girls’ bathroom. And you can’t come in!”
I crouched down out of sight in the buggy mulch, wondering if I dared.
It’s okay, I thought. I told him not to look, now the rest is out of my hands. Right, Jesus?
I slipped my hands inside the elastic of my shorts just as Ricky’s footfalls crunched the leaves.
“Ricky!” I startled, looking up. “You can’t come in!”
“Go ahead.” He grinned, craning his neck to watch. “I’m not looking.”
“Oh,” I said, catching his drift. “You promise?”
“I promise,” he said, lowering his voice, crouching down closer. “Do it. I won’t tell.”
And just like that, I was totally and completely hooked.
Relieving myself outdoors with sinners in my neighborhood became more than a slippery slope; it was a luscious avalanche of sin that swept me into the world of glorious, off-color role playing. As soon as I got home from school, I switched personalities. I stuffed my shorts with grass and leaves, so I made a crinkly sound when I walked, and headed across the street. I fou
nd Ricky as usual, peeing upside down from his rope swing.
“Noah’s son Ham saw his dad’s wiener,” I told him half-heartedly, “and God had to kill the whole town for it. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Isn’t it time to use the girls’ bathroom?” he asked.
“First you have to remove my diaper,” I replied coyly, patting my overstuffed crotch.
Ricky zipped up, grabbed a plastic sword that was lying on the ground, and forced me onto the family picnic table like a sacrifice, where I told him I was giving birth to the Christ child and needed to be tied up and cut open. Ricky found some twine and then got to sawing.
“Hey!” Ricky’s mom shouted through her kitchen window. “God damn it! What are you kids doing?”
“Mrs. Dunner?” I sat up, grass and leaves spilling out of my unbuttoned shorts. “God said in Matthew 5, verse 34, ‘Swear not at all.’”
“Oh, yeah?” she said, dragging on a Virginia Slim. “Was there a verse in there that said, ‘Tramp ye my boys, not at all’? Now get off my new table and play nice.”
The next day I was back, with little ripped up pieces of paper in hand.
“Tickets to the strip show,” I whispered. “In the basement. At my house.”
I didn’t want it to come to this, but sometimes, y’know what, the devil just takes over, makes us do really really fun things we hate. Sad but true. The way it worked was, you just sort of escorted the little miniature Jesus out of your heart—like maybe into a waiting room near your intestines—and focused on the Bible verses that promised God would forgive anything if you prayed hard enough. Anything. That was a direct quote, pretty much. You just had to remember to pray later, much later, after the dirty deed was already done dirt cheap.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 2