I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

I grew up in a single-parent household with three older brothers and one middle sister. I was the youngest. That meant I got hand-me-downs and had to fight for scraps. Dad did his best to care for us, but half the time he was stoned out of his mind when he wasn’t working nights at the car assembly plant in our fabulous town. Mom was a faint memory of lavender and breast milk. My sister left town at eighteen and my brothers followed in Dad’s footsteps once they got their high school diplomas—barely. Of all the men in the family, I got the brains, not the brawn. So I took that, mostly survived the bullying and fag-bashing of my teen years—a few hospital visits, and a reconstructed jaw were the highlights—and made it out of there as soon as possible after earning my own diploma. College had been a nightmare of wannabes screwing their way through four years of pseudo-study, and I couldn’t get laid if my life depended on it. That might have been because I was an introvert, skinny, still had really bad acne, and was barely five-feet-five inches tall. No one gave me the time of day, and my old-school Goth look didn’t win me any favors. So I focused on my grades, m*********d to fantasies (and sounds) of my hot roommate Roger Whitmore who f****d anything male that moved, and graduated magna c*m laude. As I had given the speech at the ceremony—it had taken me an hour and lots of breathing exercises to get over my stage fright—I’d looked out over the crowd of my peers, most of whom were bored stiff and couldn’t wait for the day to be over so they could get on with their oh-so-important lives. No one from my family had come to see me walk the stage, though I’d invited them. It hurt, but I pushed it down and finished my ten-minute spiel, ignored the polite applause from the crowd, and sat behind the podium. My only real friends during that time had been my college professors, most of whom, I thought, felt sorry for me. Whatever. After surviving my education years, I moved to the big city and into a tiny apartment, thinking I would finally have the freedom to come into my own, live as I wanted, and find my joy. I was Mary Tyler Moore, bitches! Or Ally McBeal’s dancing baby. Well, that joie de vivre fizzled out quickly.