If This, Then Happy

At the start of this semester I may have gobbed about how my creative writing teacher, McKnight, was da bee's knees. The greatest. EL JEFE. I also might have mentioned that if your fictional short story was good enough he would read it in class.

First piece I wrote...he TO' APART. to shreds. Fair enough though--twas a bit of rubbish. 

But my most recent attempt? He loved it! (and he read it in his smoky, slow-as-molasses voice in front of all my fellow story crafters)

Great week booster for a stressed out lank covered to his ears in dough and internship applications. 

So, so, so, I thought I'd also blast my little ditty out here. Nothing like a "Yes And" to up the ante from a room of 12 people to the InterWebz.

Click for the full story and disfrutaaaa!

If This, Then Happy

I am sitting at the top of Tootsie Falls, shivering my skinny white ass off. How was I supposed to know March would be so cold when I asked moms & pops for a Cedar Rapids Birthday Pass? I am 13 today...

My sister, Elise, is 11. I wish I had an older sibling so I would have someone to tell me all the things about growing up, someone whose shadow I could sneak behind in at Holy Cross Catholic School. Connor’s older brother, Alex, showed him The Talking Heads and The Who. Now Connor is cool  and all that jazz. Elise just cuts her Barbies’ hair all the time and spoils The Little Mermaid by quoting it wrong. I know it’s a whole new world, Elise, I introduced you to that Ariel bitch. I told mom to adopt a 16 year old boy and just let Elise sleep in the garage but I don’t think she took me seriously.

The chalky green fabric of my bathing suit goes just past my knees. Bathing suits above the knee are for faggots, Derek told me one time. He also told me that faggots have “girly” voices. Recently, mine has gotten pretty “girly” so Derek doesn’t hang out with me anymore. I tried talking to him on the Fun Sucker during recess one time about why he doesn’t come over for Kick the Can anymore but he was with some kids that live in our neighborhood and I think I embarrassed him.

The Fun Sucker is the name that we gave to the gated grass recess field. I don’t understand why we go to the grass field for recess because all it does is suck fun; it fun sucks. It has one soccer goal and we aren’t allowed to have any soccer balls because one kid, Mike McNalley, who has more hair on his hands than I have in my pits, punted three soccer balls over the fence in a blind rage and hit a man at St. Mary’s Retirement Home across the street. So, kids just graze around in cattle packs, looking for victims or ant hills or just picking boogers. It suckssss (fun). Mrs. Sparjello, our proctor, grazes too, reading one of her maroon-bound lady novels.

As I crouch here, water jetting it’s icy stream over my trembling, goosebump thighs, I think all about the last couple of months; the imaginary girlfriends, avoiding the high-ceiling locker rooms at all costs, the therapy sessions where Mr. Finer relentlessly probes me with ink blots as scalpels.

It’s stupid that I should always be worrying, right? I’m 13 for god’s sake. 13. I should be picking blueberries on the side of our big brick house. I should be drinking a warm Coke while I shove as many sour, tangy Warheads into my mouth as childly possible. I should be climbing old oaks that resemble the International Space Station where I hang out with space chimps. But, instead, the only words I can utter in my swollen, throbbing, worrisome mind are gay.gay.gay. The dirty word follows me everywhere. I hear kids whisper it behind my back or, worse, shout it at my face. I hear Mr. Finer murmur it to my guilt-stricken Catholic-Portugese shuffling mother. It haunts me. And although I am lucky to not have all the signs of a flaming homosexual (did I mention I am wearing a bathing suit below the knees), I am starting to realize that my “girly” voice is something I cannot hide.

As a result, instead of speaking, I now resort to a lot more head nods, many more “Mmm-hmms”, and a bajillion more hand signals. I am social awkwardness to a tee, the epitome.

So, at this point, people are getting antsy behind me in what has become the longest queue in Tootsie freakin Falls history. Way antsy. I don’t know why everyone’s so keen on free falling from 80 feet up when it’s Ant-Artic on this wonky, wooden tower. My sister, Elise, convinced me to tromp up those mossy, damp stairs for this? I know she doesn’t want to slide, I know  I don’t want to slide, I know none of these people want to slide. It’s just something you have to do at Cedar Rapids, everyone says. Like cattle, up the stairs, down the flume. Barf. Yack. Yammie.

People are starting to scream at me to go now and Elise is whining like the little trollop she is. Whatta trollop. I grip the warped, mustard edges of the plastic slide. I’m frightened I’ll fly forward when the slide sucks my body down it. Head first, bonk, bonk, bonkaroo. I can see the headline: “Girl-Boy Child Taken By Tootsie Falls, Maybe Homo, Definitely Lanky”. I scoot forward ever so gingerly, my numb, itchy ass bracing for the death fall.

I can be such a coward sometimes but, I think to myself as the water surges me forward, I could do anything if I didn’t have “gay” meeting me around every corner. If I wasn’t different. If I didn’t like differently, love differently. ANYTHING. With this surge of epiphany and empowerment I propel myself forward with a gush of water and air. I go airborne, it’s frightening, I am freezing, but for some reason I don’t have a single worry. I don’t worry because in my cerebral labyrinth of connections, cords, and synapses I make myself a sacred contract in that airborne instant. If I can just fly down this spout, if I can just be nice to my sister, if I can just go to church every Sunday, if I can just be daring, if I can just be honest, if I can just be the most respectable mother fucker this side of the Mississippi, my body will flush the gay out of my adolescent body like the toxin that it is. I can confront every one of life’s little zingers and it can flush it out, detox me, and I can go back to being happy again, go back to not constantly looking over my shoulder. Happy like the time before gay and straight were a black and white division. Happy before it mattered. Happy before lines and borders were drawn. If This, Then Happy.