Sex-Ed K-12
One of my earliest memories is tugging at my mom’s dress while she was talking with someone in the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t see who it was from where I stood but I knew she was telling them bad things about my dad, like how he knocked her up twice before 20, then again when my brother and sister were, like, in the third grade or something, and it was my turn to grow in her tummy.
I was still holding onto her dress when she suddenly snapped back, “What?” And I gulped all the air in the room but wouldn’t let go of the scrunched fabric in my fist. Not until she morphed into a mommy again and said, “Oh, hi sweetie” — then, in her tired mirror-voice — “I was gonna have an abortion but he wouldn’t give me the money.” And I grinned ear to ear ‘cuz I liked that she looked me in the eye, which almost never happened.
It was all the mirror’s fault, or maybe mine. I wasn’t a good girl. I ran errands for her for smokes and things, and done the dishes standing on a kitchen chair to reach the sink, and sometimes helped her think. But when she wanted me to promise that I’d always take care of her, I screamed my head off and pressed my fists tight against my ears so I wouldn’t hear nothing.
Thing is, I’d already promised not to tell how my dad was screwing my sister in the bed across from me. We shared a room, my sister and me. She said he couldn’t help it on account that she looked like a barbie or a movie star, unlike fat fugly me. She said it was the woman condition, quid pro quo something — I was little, I didn’t understand. When she got bigger she turned tricks ‘cuz she said she might as well get paid for it.
But I think my brother banged her for free after my dad disappeared. My brother didn’t make me promise nothing but he made me watch him drown kittens out back in the galvanized washtub. He wasn’t angry with the whimpering things, it was just business to him. Killing ain’t hard. I once climbed up a tree and stole a naked baby bird from its nest. I wanted to keep it for a pet but it died the same day. Another time I flicked a caterpillar off a tree leaf it was munching for dinner, then watched it die on the long trek (long for a caterpillar) back to the tree.
I think my sister got her start in business with our senile next-door neighbor. She said he gave her money so I went to his house to get some for me, too, but he just stuck sandpapery fingers under my shirt — that was before I wore a bra — and planted his tongue down my throat so I almost choked to death. He rubbed a hard thing against my belly and grunted and peed his pants.
When I told my sister, she first laughed, then snapped, “Grow up,” like she was my mom. I stomped my feet and yelled, “You’re still a kid, you don’t get to tell me what to do.” She puffed smoke in my face and cupped her tits and gyrated her shoulders and said, “Ya think?” So I told her she was still a kid ‘cuz she had young skin, and I didn’t care if she wanted to dress up like a slut in Mom’s red sequin dress and stilettos, and pretend to the mirror she’s inspecting new wrinkles, and bitch like the witch (what she called Mom) about our lying cheating dad, how he’s never home ‘cuz he gets tighter pussy in the city after he knocked her up and plonked her in this godforsaken town in the middle of the desert with only dust swirls and tumbleweeds instead of shops and theaters and sidewalk cafes —
And my sister slapped me real hard and said I was really really bad. I burst out crying and she screamed at me, “I’m outta here, good luck getting any when you grow up — ”
And then she moved to Greensview like everybody else and for a while there it was just Mom and me. Then Mom hooked up with a new beau with an old face, like really old skin. He was also gone a lot of the time, but my mom liked him ‘cuz he paid the bills, and I liked him ‘cuz he didn’t say I was too young to date.
When I was in junior high I went out with this popular boy. I wasn’t into him but the girls all said he looked like a rock star with his tall spiky hair, which supposedly made up for his pocked face and bulging eyes. He took me to a park bench behind some dead shrubs and busted streetlights and gave me a hickey on my neck and black-and-blue fingerprints on my tits. I shrieked and jumped to my feet when he squeezed my tits, and he was like, “Whoa, where the fuck you think you’re going.” I ignored him and ran home, and he went and told his friends, and they all laughed and jacked off together over the stories he made up about me. After that everyone in town said I was a slut and everyone I dated expected to get laid.
I had this one boyfriend in high school who didn’t know about my reputation. Maybe ‘cuz he was from the wrong side of the tracks and didn’t hang out with the same crowd. But he still wanted to get laid, like, all the time. I agreed ‘cuz it didn’t matter what I said, we still ended up doing it. His mom was always home with a gaggle of kids — each looking like they had a different dad — so we had to screw in the scraggly woods around town and it was always my butt scraping on the prickly weeds and the tiny sharp rocks. I couldn’t break it off with him ‘cuz he slapped me around and promised he’d kill me if I left him, so I went out with him for a few months until — um, I can’t remember. Something happened and he quit coming around.
He wasn’t my first. That milestone belonged to my stepdad’s nephew (or somehow related), who was older, at least 23, and from Greensview. He came by the house the weekend before I started high school, but the grownups were out, so I made him coffee and we shared a rolled smoke. I got behind him on his big black bike and we rode down Main Street, laughing and spewing noisy farts at the stupid hicks in town. He took me to his place in the city and introduced me to his cock, and we shook hands — his cock and me. I couldn’t believe the size of that thing, not just ‘cuz there was no way it would fit inside me, I also didn’t understand how guys walk around with such a thing in their pants. Some of his friends wandered in before I could sort it out, and I looked down there on all of them but they all knew how to hide it, even dudes in tight jeans. After they left he said, “I’ll pop your cherry for you if you like,” and I said, “Okay.”
I wanted to stay with him, but he said I had to finish school and took me back home. I quit paying attention in class and spent, like, every minute of every day fantasizing about love. The teachers were all happy to leave me alone except my ninth-grade math teacher who had me stay after school to “go over numbers.” He also made me promise like my dad not to say nothing ‘cuz even though he was stooped like a hunchback and hairy like a monkey front and back, he still had a wife and kids. His other thing was that I was underage. He was totally freaked out about that. But when I told him that I popped my cherry already, it was like his permission slip — he gave me money for a bus and told me to meet him in Greensview. He booked us into a rooming house, and we took a vibrating elevator to a dingy room on the fourth floor with a narrow metal bed that fit us only in layers — he on top of me.
After he came he asked if it felt good. I didn’t want to say I felt like a chicken cutlet getting pounded between him and the old bedsprings — the mat on the bed was real skimpy — so I said yeah, great (whatever), so he took it as an invite to do it again, and again. He was the only dude I been with who wanted it more than once. All this extra credit made me sore down there, but I got a passing grade in math.
The next year I flunked math along with everything else. I couldn’t even keep track of my flings. I told the school counselor I’d killed them all, and now there were these dead people in my head with a huge grudge, hissing and screeching like the teeny-weeny singers inside my brother’s broken boombox. They made such a racket , I couldn’t listen in class. The school counselor shook his head, then promised I wasn’t gonna amount to nothing and kicked me out. So I called my step-cousin — the guy that busted my cherry — and asked if I could crash at his place. He said naw ‘cuz he had a girlfriend (someone more his age), but if I wanted to move to the city, he could fix me up with a job at a friend’s hotel bar.
His friend — a big fellow — was barking orders at the kitchen staff and only paused to snarl at me with his big fat lips when I showed up for the job. He then led me to a small storage area off the kitchen with dishes and napkins on metal shelves and cleaning supplies in the corner and a long narrow crate against the wall, which he pointed to and said I should lie down. Next I knew he was straddling my head and pumping his cock down my throat and squinting hard at my mouth, like I was a dish he needed to inspect. I forgot to breathe and almost drowned in his jizz.
When we surfaced back in the kitchen, his wife slinked by — another barbie lookalike. She grimaced at my chunky thighs and shook her head at her husband, but he still gave me the job. I just had to promise to be friendly with him, and optionally the customers.
I had nowhere to stay in Greensview that night, so I thumbed a ride back home with a semi. After a few miles, the driver pulled into some godforsaken dirt road and wanted whatever he wanted. I told him my brother was a big fat scary biker and was gonna come after him (actually he was a skinny runt and I had no idea where he was at). Then just in case the trucker dude didn’t get the message, I said I was a runaway from the loony bin and folks were looking for me. He screwed up his eyes at that, reached around me to open the passenger door and pushed me out. I hurt my knee when I hit the ground and he trucked off, spitting dust and gravel on top of me. I’d have killed him, too, but I never saw him again.
I limped back to the highway, made it, like, middle of the night in the middle of nowhere with no traffic and only a pissing of moonlight. Couple cars zoomed by between long stretches of nothing until a sad, rattling hatchback stopped for me. The driver looked about as gray and gaunt as his car. He was gonna drop me off on the bypass outside the town, so I agreed to fuck him in return for a small detour. It was a cramped prickly affair in the backseat but he only lasted a couple of pokes.
At least I had a job, maybe two, if you count my new side hustle, to be friendly with the customers at the bar. One of the first ones I got friendly with was this skinny dude with a clogged-up voice. He was from Singapore so I served him a Singapore sling he didn’t order. He agreed to pay for it so I wouldn’t get in trouble with the bartender and I agreed to come to his hotel room after my shift. We both got undressed — he had less body hair than me — but we didn’t fuck. I plonked myself down on the bed like a beached whale (what boys in town called girls that weren’t slutty enough for them) and waited for him to do his thing. Maybe he liked slutty better, or maybe he got off on telling me what a wonderful thing sex can be. He talked and talked about sex and how he was going back home the next day to his wife and kids.
Another customer was a marine or some kinda soldier with a fishy smell. He was gonna ship out the next day, which was why, he said, it was my patriotic duty to cheer him up. He sneaked me into his base and took me inside a large machine shed with all kinds of tools and parked military vehicles. He musta put something in my drink ‘cuz I got down there on my stomach between two trucks, pretending to be a lookout with my hands cupped like binoculars around my eyes.
I was peering into the privates of the vehicles across the way when he fell on my back, shoved my face into an oil smear on the concrete floor and rammed me real hard up the ass. He was freaking out the whole time about how he was gonna bust his nuts, and afterward said I was a real trooper and thanked me for my service and laughed. I didn’t think it was funny. I was afraid to take a dump for, like, a week after that. Heard a few months later that he blew up on an IED, so I crossed him off my list.
One day on break I told this other waitress that I’d had it with men. We were sharing a smoke outside, shooting the shit, and she invited me to her place after work. She only had wine on hand so that’s what we drank. I wasn’t through my first glass when she stuck her head between my legs and got to licking my clit. I didn’t wiggle or groan like they do in the movies, I was busy quarreling with the dead people in my head. So she came up for air and asked like the good server that she was what she could do for me. I jumped up and said, “You can leave me the hell alone — to start.”
I changed my mind when I hit the street, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back, so I dropped in on my sister and asked her to do me. That was before she was dead. She told me she didn’t want to piss off her girlfriend and I told her they were both whores. She kicked me out even though it was God’s honest truth.
Then there was this gangly horse-faced customer in a dark wool suit who talked like he was rolling a hot boiled potato inside his mouth. He kept patting his face with a bright white napkin and offered to buy me dinner someplace with better AC. I said sure, I wasn’t gonna turn down free food. The boss man had cracked down on us sampling dishes in the kitchen. Not his problem we couldn’t afford to eat with what he paid.
My new friend took me to a fancy restaurant and told me over dinner that he was from across the pond. I was like, whatever. There was nothing green in Greensview and nothing like a pond, unless he meant that dry crater in the center of town they called something-Lake. He had a pregnant wife back home and knocked me up, too, in his spiffy hotel room with its plush carpet and sparkling white bathroom.
It wasn’t until he crossed the pond in the opposite direction that I started puking all over the place — really inconvenient. My sister sent me to a clinic where, she said, they fix it for free for trash like me that ain’t got a man to cough up the dough. She’d had a few abortions herself on account of men not being able to lay their hands off her. I didn’t know hands had something to do with that.
The nurse at the clinic talked my ear off about personal responsibility and how I had to let them insert an IUD inside me if I wanted the other thing done. She gave me no choice so I agreed. The fucking IUD made me bleed and cramp for weeks on end, and when I went back to ask them to take it out, the same nurse gave me another lecture about sleeping around, and how I should know better seeing as I was no longer five. I said, “Dang straight, five-year olds can’t be floozies. My sister was at least 10 when she screwed my dad.”
Things got back to normal after that. I was having a blast in the big city while my peeps back home were getting knocked up and churning out babies and getting tied down. The girls that done things in the wrong order didn’t get to graduate and had to skip the prom. I decided, fuck it, I’m gonna go. What are they gonna do? Kick me out?
I got all dolled up and hitched a ride in an old pickup that pitched to one side on account the driver was so big, he filled more than half the cab and almost spilled out the window. Somewhere before my stop he veered off the road and said he had to make a quick stop at home. I wasn’t gonna go in with him but he promised to show me something I’d want to see. He led me through a side door into a sweltering basement apartment with a ratty carpet and pizza boxes and empty beer cans perched everywhere, and threw me on his open foldout bed and fell on top of me. I squealed over the size of him about to squash me into the sweaty sheets, so he reached for a handgun from the night table and jammed it down my throat. He didn’t want the landlord upstairs to hear he was boinking me.
After he finished, he rolled over and fell asleep and snored real loud. I borrowed his gun and shot him in the head, only way I figured to shut him up. The cops showed up while I was rummaging through his fridge. A lady cop in tight uniforms asked if the dead guy had raped me and I said, “I don’t think so. Other than the gun barrel in my mouth he wasn’t all that different from the other guys.” I guess it’s why they locked me up — me and the dead things skulking in my head.
I still fuck a couple of the guards if they get me stuff. Or if they don’t. Something they put in the food — I keep forgetting to quid pro quo. The teeny-weeny people in my head are as pissed off as ever, and it’s only the caterpillars and the nestlings and drowned kittens that agree to play with me. It’s like the sandstorms and the tumbleweeds and the growing cracks in the desert — got me thinking that the baby critters never had sex-ed and don’t know how to hold a grudge.
2016
