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2004-10-26 -

When I was growing up my brother Bam Bam got married and he was only eighteen. His wife was what the older folks call a live wire. I was only seven but she tried to turn me into an eighteen year old too. She put concealer all over my face like the seven layer powder cake that was sinking into her own face. I thought I looked pretty good and at least six months older. We walked to some stores and I swear I could�ve picked up a nice man or even a gang of them. She told me that my brother slept with a gun, but I forget if she said it was loaded.

The next year my mother got me a black leotard and green courderoys which I wore a lot, especially when she took me out of public school and into Catholic school. We wore plaid green red and black skirts there, and white shirts that buttoned up and sucked really bad. I kept claiming that I lost the skirts, and the nuns would tell me to just wear green pants until I could get another one. Ok, but it might take me a few months. All the girls were pissed at me because they had to wear the wretched skirts. I didn�t care because I was pissed at my parents for sending me to St. Raphael�s school in the first place with a bunch of angry sisters and a class full of repressed clone kids. My parents always told me to be an individual. I wrote them countless letters explaining why Catholic school was bad for my psyche and swore to my mother that nope, I would not thank her for this one day.

Saint Raphael�s worked out better when I met Mary Ellen who was troubled, and Erica who was even more deeply troubled. We had mandatory church every week at the school, which is where I met Mary Ellen. I had just been given three Hail Marys to say as penance for lying to one of my brothers and she had just been checked for and confirmed that she had head lice but you couldn�t tell. Later, she kept referring to my house as a mansion, but I told her it wasn�t mine it was my parents� house, and my father was now dead and we were on food stamps so what did it matter. Erica was always alone hanging on the monkey bars until she met me. Her parents had rated X cable so I slept at her house a lot. They had wind up sex dolls and Mother Jones magazines in their basement, which had a lot of racy articles about feminism and hitchhikers� hands getting chopped off. Eventually I settled into the school and actually made the cheerleading squad in 4th grade, but as luck would have it, Bam Bam got into trouble with the law that year and my parents yanked me out of school before the first pom pom hit the air. We moved an hour away. I wrote new protest letters. Careful what you ask for, you might get it, but much later.

When Bam Bam got out of prison, he and his wife were far from wed. His girlfriend was more of a straightforward Italian girl with a mouthful of cursing arrows to shoot at people. I stayed with them one night at my brother�s friend�s place in the Bronx, and when he went out, she let me stay up with her on the pull out couch to watch Denise Williams perform �Let�s Hear it For the Boy� on SNL. I was nodding out a little until Bam Bam�s friends came home with their trampish girlfriends. I woke up and stared at the closed door behind which my brother�s friend Chicken Man was making his lady friend laugh in foreign ways. The other guy�s name was The Razor who I assumed was doing the same thing with his female. I told Bam Bam�s girlfriend it was ok with me if we lowered the t.v.
After 45 minutes, she fell asleep and I was on night watch, waiting for the doors to open so I could know the secret of being a woman. When door #1 finally opened, Chicken Man�s girl was still laughing while he took out a can of shaving cream and wrote his new nickname, THE SHOOTIST in huge letters on the walls in the hallway . I wanted to congratulate him, but if I was wrong about what the new name meant, I might have to explain, so I just smiled knowingly in the dark. I thought how much nicer it would be to initiate into manhood, than into womanhood.

�Let�s hear it for the boy, let�s give the boy a hand...�

My brother got home and yelled at his girlfriend for letting me witness the spectacle.

�I told you to keep that kind of shit away from my little sister.�

�Sorry, I fell asleep. Jesus!�

�Yeah and it was funny Bam B ��

�My sister doesn�t need to be seeing this kind of shit.�

�But it�s ok, I liked it.�

I might as well have said I was The Shootist, he didn�t hear me. I peeked over at the wall and saw the shaving cream sliding down the wall. I wish they would�ve given me a little more credit, I could�ve given him a much better name, not to mention a big thank you for the heads up on what I could expect in the coming years.

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