That was when I learned I would never forget the sound of a stuffed rabbit screaming.
The Big Race
When I turned fourteen, my parents enrolled me in the swim team after school so I couldn’t sit at home every evening, watching old horror movies and writing morbid poems about dead rabbits.
Why they chose swimming, I had no idea. I hated swimming because my breasts were already developing beyond a C cup, and they were constantly getting in my way as I tried to perform the strokes.
As the weeks of practice went by though, I slowly began to learn how to move my body gracefully in the water, and it seemed to embrace me in return. The pool became the one place where I could let my thoughts go. No one cared what I said to the water when my head was beneath it. I came to love the water much like Claude, and I thought it loved me back.
For the first time in my life, I started to excel at something. I began winning races. My parents offered up their praise and talked about my success at the dining room table instead of my sister’s accomplishments.
At the end of the summer, there was the championship race. I was the favorite to win the breaststroke, but they didn’t tell me I was going to be racing against a long-limbed girl named Betty Snow.
Betty was beautiful in a way I had never seen before, and the sight of her bare legs gave me goose bumps. There was a curious dreamy feeling blooming inside me that I had only felt for boys before.
Unfortunately, she was in the lane next to me for our race. As we dove into the water, I found I couldn’t tear my gaze away from her, so I was keeping pace with her. The water seemed to sense my distraction, and it made it that much harder to swim. I decided I was only going to have one more look at her when suddenly the wall of the pool was in front of me. The race was over. I had lost to Betty Snow.
I’ll never forget that moment when I looked over to my team, realizing I had just lost the championship for them. You should have seen the look they gave me in return because they knew I hadn’t swum my best.
After that day, my parents no longer mentioned my achievements at the dining room table. To my sister’s relief, she was once more the shining star.
The Middle Finger
When I was sixteen, I tried to find a job to make some extra pocket money, but the only thing I could find was babysitting some kids who no one else wanted to babysit because they were little monsters. What made it worse was that their father brought them things like ancient jungle gyms from the junk yard where he worked. Their yard looked like a set from a Tim Burton movie.
The worst monstrosity in the back yard was the rotating teeter-totter. I thought it reminded me of a giant rotating spider that spun around, and I despised it the moment I saw it. The kids thought it was the best thing their father had ever brought them.
In an effort to get them to go to bed, I promised to push them around on it one more time when my finger slipped into the middle gear. It felt funny for a moment and then I pulled it out. The top of my finger was dangling off, hanging on by a tiny bit of skin, the bone exposed.
Thankfully, amongst the horrifying screams of the kids, I had the presence of mind to flip the top of my finger back over the bone before I passed out.
A neighbor heard the commotion and called my parents. I woke up to my parents taking me to the emergency room. In the examination room, I sat with my father, waiting for a doctor, my finger soaking in a pan of lukewarm water. It painfully throbbed every so often to remind me it wasn’t a bad dream.
The nurse had asked me to take off my top. I wasn’t sure why I needed to sit there in my bra, but I obeyed, trying to avoid my father’s embarrassed gaze. Once I had grown beyond a C cup, my mother had gone into complete denial about the size of my breasts. I was pouring over the top of my bra like a movie star on the red carpet.
To my delight, my doctor wasn’t some old man. He was young and tall, dark and handsome. I don’t know what came over me, but suddenly my posture changed. As he examined my wounded finger, I felt gooseflesh rise up along my arms from his touch. I hadn’t felt this since Betty Snow.
To my surprise, I realized he was stealing glances at my breasts. This was wonderful. A gorgeous doctor was actually checking me out. I felt like a real woman for the first time.
I leaned forward so he could see more of my cleavage.
Suddenly, my father cleared his throat and left the examination room.
I couldn’t believe I was alone with my doctor. All sorts of sexy scenarios started playing in my head. I wanted to give him a kiss he would remember for the rest of his life when the examination room curtain suddenly opened.
There stood my father with an ancient doctor beside him. Before I could open my mouth to protest, the younger doctor was asked to leave and the older doctor took over. I stared daggers at my father as the older doctor examined my finger. Couldn’t he see this old coot was wearing huge coke bottle glasses?
A week later when the bandages came off, we learned he had sewn the tip of my finger back on crooked. I wanted to tell my father this was his fault, but he gave me a look that said if I hadn’t flirted with the young doctor, this wouldn’t have happened.
The Sweater
For the next two years, I tried not to feel self-conscious about my crooked finger, but it was hard. I blamed it for my not having any goose bumps since Claude, Betty or the young doctor. Who would want a deformed girl like me?
Meanwhile my sister was the dating princess. She had no problems keeping a steady stream of boyfriends who adored her.
Finally, in my senior year, I came across some possible goose bump material. I was developing a crush on a boy named Ben and I was almost sure he liked me back. He was sweet and sincere, and he had the nicest smile. Every day, we met in between classes to talk about horror movies, which he loved as much as I did.
One weekend, he asked me to go to the movies with him, but I wasn’t sure if he was asking me as a date or a friend. I was too afraid to ask him, but I decided if I wore something sexy, it might just give him the motivation to let me know if he was interested in me beyond being pals.
The problem was that I didn’t own anything sexy. I mostly wore shapeless black clothes, like a badly dressed Goth girl. On the other hand, my sister owned an entire girly wardrobe encompassing the entire spectrum of the rainbow.
Therefore, I decided to borrow my sister’s favorite lucky pink sweater without asking her. I knew she would have said no, because she secretly hated me ever since Claude.
That evening as I wore her sweater, I felt as if I was wrapped in a fluffy pink dream. It hugged my every curve, and it revealed more than ample skin. Ben couldn’t take his eyes off me. He didn’t even look at the screen when the movie started, and he had been waiting for this movie to open for months.
It didn’t take him long to turn my head toward him to kiss me. His warm, sweet mouth lingered on mine. Immediately, I started kissing him back, my body flushing with a sudden heat. Taking his hands in mine, I pushed them toward my breasts. I hadn’t felt this aggressive since I leaned toward the young doctor.
Before I knew it, he had slipped his hands under the back of my sister’s sweater, fumbling with my bra hooks, trying to get access to my bare breasts, but there wasn’t a lot of room because everything was so tight.
Suddenly, he gave up on getting it undone and slid his hands around the front, going right under the underwire to my bare skin. The room swooned. I closed my eyes as he squeezed my breasts.
“Oh, Claude,” I said.
Abruptly, he stopped. My eyes flew open. He was looking at me in horror. I had called him “Claude”. How could I ever explain to him who Claude was?
We sat in silence for the rest of the movie, and he didn’t even say goodbye to me when he dropped me off at home. I wore my coat until I got upstairs, and then I hid the sweater in the rear of our closet, my sister already asleep in her bed.
The next morning, I woke to her rummaging in the closet. She said she needed her favorite lucky sweat
er because she had an important job interview, and if she got this job, she could move out, find her own apartment and start her new life.
I cringed. Why did she need this sweater today? It was badly stretched out because of Ben’s fumbling, and I was going to take it to the dry cleaners to see if they could fix it. The moment I heard her suck in her breath, I knew she had found it. I couldn’t see the wrath on her face because I was under the covers as she pummelled me with her fists.
That afternoon, I heard her in the kitchen with our mom. She was crying. Without her lucky sweater, she didn’t have the confidence she needed to win the interview. She didn’t get the job. She wasn’t moving out. She blamed me for ruining her new life.
The String of Unfortunate Jobs
After I graduated high school, I knew I didn’t want to end up working at Denny’s restaurant like my sister and living at home. Thank goodness, I lucked out finding a job as a receptionist at a tattoo parlor and I made enough money to rent a little studio apartment.
It wasn’t a bad job, mostly making appointments, keeping the lobby organized, and giving after care instructions to the recently tattooed. Big Mike was the owner. He was strictly appointment only, while his two apprentices did the walk-ins.
Big Mike was not only called “big” because he was one of the owners, but because he was a tall, barrel-chested man with an intense, unapologetic personality. He came across as gruff and intimidating, but it was only because he was a perfectionist.
His girlfriend treated me with indifference usually reserved for office temps. She was tall, blond, and stacked, but there was something rough around the edges and there was a rumor her breasts were fake. I’d even heard she worked as a stripper. She was a silent partner in the tattoo studio, and she and Big Mike had a volatile on and off again relationship.
After a couple months of working there and withstanding his outbursts, Big Mike started to act as if I was maybe going to become a permanent part of the studio. He asked me if I was ever going to get any tattoo work done myself. All my money was going into rent, so he suggested we stay after work one night; he would tattoo me for free, a perk of the job.
Right away, I knew what I wanted from the moment I saw it. It was a piece of artwork of a grey-shaded rabbit, and I wanted Claude’s name beneath it.
We stayed after work on a Friday night. I had decided I wanted it on my upper arm, but my shirtsleeve was too tight to roll up. Big Mike told me to take off my shirt. He’d seen a million breasts before. It was no big deal to sit there in my bra while I got my tattoo. I waited for him to stare at my cleavage like the young doctor had, but he was intently focused on tattooing the outline of the rabbit on my arm.
Quickly, I realized getting tattooed hurt a lot more than I had imagined. Here I was telling customers it would be no more painful than a bee sting or an intense scratch, but it really stung.
Big Mike finished the lettering of Claude’s name and he was halfway through the shading when he said he needed a smoke break. I got up to look at in the mirror when suddenly he was behind me. I thought he was going to look at my arm in the mirror when he spun me around and kissed me.
This was no kiss like from a boy like Ben. This was a kiss from a real man, and it made my toes curl. Alarms sounded off in my brain, but the intensity of his mouth on mine drowned it out.
I kissed him back, with all those years of pent up passion. Grappling each other’s bodies, we stumbled. He pushed me back against the mirror, and started to kiss the side of my neck, his hand coming up to squeeze my breast from beneath.
“God, they are real,” he moaned.
I started to reach around to undo my bra when I heard a distant screaming. For a second, I flashed on the other screams I had heard in my life, Claude, my sister as she pummelled me with her fists and then I realized it was coming from the front door of the studio.
Big Mike’s girlfriend was standing there, screaming at us, fumbling with her keys. The moment she got the door open, I thought Big Mike might actually defend me, but she pulled out a knife from her designer purse and came after him. I ran out of there, my belongings trailing in my hand, my tattoo half finished, never to return.
The Vibrator
After the tattoo studio incident, I found it hard to find another good paying job without a reference. I had to take two crap jobs, and even then, I still wasn’t making enough money to pay the rent on my studio. My parents wouldn’t let me move back home because my sister was still there, but they said my great-aunt was looking for a live-in caretaker.
Therefore, I quit my two crap jobs and I moved in with her to take care of her.
Within a week, I realized living with her made me feel as if I was under house arrest. She constantly wanted to know what I was doing, and she had hundreds of poodle statues, which I had to dust every day. On top of that, she kept the house freezing cold, and it was a huge undertaking just to keep track of all her prescriptions at all the pharmacies around town.
Time had not been kind to her. She seemed like a man in drag with her sunken chest, bad wigs, knobby knees and smoker’s voice. She was completely addicted to steak, cigarettes, lime green Jell-O, her daily pill cocktail and her TV reality shows.
Constantly, she harped at me to cut my hair short and to get a manicure. According to her, a young woman my age should not have long hair and hangnails, but with my deformed finger, who would want to manicure me?
One afternoon, I was so frustrated with the living arrangements that I picked up a personal massager at one of the drug stores. I needed to find some relief somewhere.
Upon arriving home, I discovered a note from her saying that she had gone to a friend’s house to watch the finale of one of her reality shows. Jackpot! I finally got some time alone. I ripped open the personal massager, only to find it didn’t come with batteries, nor did I find any in the junk drawer. I did the only thing I could. I raided her TV remote, thinking I could replace them when I was finished.
In the privacy of my bedroom, I gave myself a rocking orgasm, fantasizing about Big Mike coming to rescue me, fucking the shit out of me and finishing my tattoo.
After the glow of my orgasm finally faded, I padded into the kitchen wearing my dressing gown to make some popcorn. This had to be the best evening I had had in weeks.
Just as I was settling down with a novel, a diet cola and bowl of the popcorn, the front door opened. In walked my great-aunt, looking more harried than I had ever seen her before. She told me she had a fight with her friend who had asked her to leave and now she was missing the crucial moment on her TV show.
Grabbing the remote, she tried to change the television to the right channel. It wasn’t working. She slapped it on her hand. I froze. I hadn’t replaced the batteries yet. Immediately, she started freaking out.
Attacking the front of the television, her gnarled fingers grazing the tiny buttons that no one had ever used before, she vainly tried to change the channel. I leapt up, ready to run to my bedroom to get the batteries when suddenly, she fell to the ground.
I ran to her side. She was clutching her chest. Her eyes were rolling back in her head.
“The batteries are in my vibrator,” I cried. “I can get them.”
“Call 911,” she gasped.
At the hospital, the doctors said she was going to be fine. She didn’t have a heart attack. It was a panic attack, but by the look in her eyes, I knew I had lost my home.
Toby
After sending my great-aunt to the hospital, I decided I was never going to let my libido ruin my life again. I lived in my car for a few weeks before I landed a job at a little auto parts factory. The place was a shit hole, but it gave me enough money to rent a room at a weekly rate motel in the dingy side of town.
My life would have been completely horrible if I hadn’t finally met someone a few months later. His name was Toby and in some ways, he reminded me of Ben. He was sweet and sincere, and he had the nicest smile. I had met him when I was trying to land a part time weekend
job at a bookstore, and he mistook my second hand designer suit as my usual attire. I didn’t get the job, but he did take my phone number.
Toby had fifteen years on me. He was a little overweight, a little bald, and he liked pastel-colored polo shirts and khaki pants. Clearly, he wasn’t my usual type, but I thought I could really go places with him. He called me several times a week, sent me flowers, and he took me out to dinner every Saturday night. He wasn’t all about getting into my pants either. The most he had done so far was hold my hand, call me sweetheart and give me a dry kiss on the cheek.
I told myself I was relieved that he never noticed my crooked middle finger. I didn’t have to explain what happened. It was a good sign that I never felt the need to share the stories about the dire consequences of my libido. Why would a decent man like him what to hear those gory details?
Quite simply, he said he liked me. He promised me things. He used the word “we”.
Most of all, he didn’t creep me out like my neighbor who I liked to call The Mechanic. This man was in his early thirties and he sat outside his apartment door, wearing no shirt, while he smoked endless cigarettes every evening. The owner of the building said he worked at a nearby garage.
The Mechanic had one of those intense vibes, as if he had seen and done everything, and nothing would catch him off guard. There was nothing sweet or sincere about him. He was probably disturbed, judging by the intense look in his dark eyes and his willingness to engage in heated discussions with our other neighbors.
Once when he was taking his garbage to the dumpsters, he had spotted me dancing in my underwear in my apartment through my front window when I forgot to close the curtains. After that, I hadn’t been able to look in his direction for days.
One evening, Toby was supposed to take me to an expensive dinner at a new restaurant. I was all dressed up in a twin set and skirt that I had bought at a thrift store. Except for a loose button and a tiny stain, they were practically new. I colored in the scratches on my black pumps with a magic marker and I sat on the sofa to wait for him.
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