I Hate Everyone, Except You(14)
Start focusing on you, Fanny, your power, your value, the stuff that goes way deeper than designer jeans and the perfect shade of lipstick. But also on the perfect shade of lipstick if that makes you happy. Because you deserve to be happy. I am certain of little in this world, but I am certain about that.
I’ll bring this letter to its inevitable close now. Thank you for reading this far, and for watching. I’m still no closer to knowing whether What Not to Wear was an act of Fate, a brush with Destiny, a kick in the pants from the Universe, or just a lucky break. But it’s fascinating, isn’t it, that my request to be pointed in the “right direction” led you and me together in some small, I hope not insignificant, way. I still don’t know who you are, but I’m glad you’re out there.
Stay fabulous,
Clinton
MEMORIZING PORN
When Mr. Berry, our tenth-grade biology teacher, plopped a formaldehyde-soaked fetal pig on an aluminum tray at our shared lab station, Lisa and I looked at each other with sad eyes and morbid smiles. It looked like a small hairless dog with skin the color of lunch meat. “Oy. Look at that face,” Lisa said, channeling Jackie Mason. “It’s a face only a mother could love. I was hoping he’d become a doctor. Such a disappointment. You’re dead to me.” She fake-spat on the floor.
I burst out laughing. Her old-Jewish-man shtick always cracked me up.
Lisa had moved from a nearby town into my school district in the middle of seventh grade and, because her last name began with an H and mine with a K, she was placed in my homeroom. That’s tough, I remember thinking, making new friends in junior high. Because of my parents’ divorce, I had changed schools a few times over the past four years and hated it every time. Inevitably, I would vomit before my first day of school and occasionally sob afterward.
So I looked right at the new girl and smiled. She smiled back, but not in the self-conscious or defensively bitchy style of other girls her age. It was a look I hadn’t seen before, expressing a combination of boredom, mischief, and omnipotence. Somehow she seemed both above and below it all, like she knew this whole adolescence thing was pure bullshit but found it amusing anyway. We became best friends almost immediately and here we were three years later laying a guilt trip on an unborn pig.
“You’re worse than dead to me. You’re unkosher.”
Mr. Berry, clad in black elbow-length gloves that might have been elegant had they not been made of rubber, was doling out more to-be-dissected specimens. He turned his head back toward us and said, “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” It was his favorite expression. His Maine accent, much different from the Long Island ones we grew up among, made almost everything he said sound hilarious to us. Except that line. He was right, and we knew it.
“Let’s name him Abercrombie,” I whispered. For some reason I had become obsessed with a commercial for laundry detergent in which a dutiful mother attempts to save a grass-stained day by breaking out a jug of All. This delights her precocious children, who see this as an opportunity to familiarize their Labrador puppy with the alphabet. “Let’s teach Abercrombie how to spell!” one of them suggests, while the other glides the dog’s paw over the letters on the bottle. “A-L-L!”
Lisa agreed that the name suited him and over the course of the next week, we cut into Abercrombie with our scalpels, learning about various organs and systems, all the while pretending he was our own flesh and blood.
“Look at our baby’s intestines,” we would say. “So curly, like his mother’s.”
“Oh, his heart is smaller than I thought, just like his daddy’s.” And every day we would teach him a new word, moving his little pig foot along imaginary letters. On Monday: “Let’s teach Abercrombie how to spell! P-E-N-I-S.”
On Tuesday: “V-A-G-I-N-A.”
On Wednesday: “T-H-R-E-E-W-A-Y.”
On Thursday: “E-J-A-C-U-L-A-T-E.”
Lisa cut biology on Friday, which was disappointing. We were scheduled to dissect Abercrombie’s brain. And teach him to spell “anal beads.”
Skipping class had become a common occurrence for Lisa. Her mother had been battling breast cancer for a few years, and under the not-so-watchful eye of her father, Lisa was living a life apparently devoid of rules and goals. So Lisa became a little bit of a wild child before my eyes, which fascinated the hell out of me. My life was crammed so full of parentally imposed rules and self-imposed goals I could hardly breathe. I didn’t even know there was another way to live.
Sometimes I’d stop by Lisa’s house and stand in awe at the condition of her bedroom: clothes on the floor piled as high as the bed. Half-full mugs on her dresser with little circles of bluish-green mold floating like miniature galaxies in a coffee-beige cosmos. I might spot a month-old newspaper lying next to her pillow or a bikini top hanging from the doorknob in the middle of February.
If my room looked like this, I thought, Mike and Terri would each shit a ten-pound brick. The most nonnegotiable edict in our house was to never, ever, under any circumstances leave it without making your bed. When I would sassily ask what difference it made, Terri would say, “Because I might have someone over while you’re at school,” which of course made me wonder who was visiting my mother during the school day and why the hell was she showing them my bedroom? When I asked, she never answered. Was she showing the house to prospective buyers? (“This room is perfect for a teenage boy with an Olivia Newton-John obsession.”) Was she having an affair? (“I force my children to make their beds. Does that turn you on?”) Was she giving tours to Japanese sightseers? (“In America, we value . . . discipline.”) The whole thing seemed pretty illogical, but she wouldn’t budge.