How I Ruined My Life, Part the First

First of all, let me start off by saying *I* ruined it. It wasn't my parents, or my ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, wasn't my friends, or some pusher or pimp. It wasn't my teachers, the police or my pastor, it wasn't some molesting stranger or my shitty roommate or anything like that. I ruined it myself and only I myself can be blamed for doing that. It wasn't the fucking government, the "administration," it wasn't a bureaucratic error or overblown typo. This is the true story of how I ruined my life.

I was born, and then I began to eat. This was my first mistake. After that, it was all downhill. If I had failed to take to the breast, or if I had refused nourishment and withered it would have been less expensive and a lot less trouble for everyone involved. The small disappointment of a defective babe would be far easier to fade than the cavalcade of minor errors, major missteps and waterfall of whoopsie-daisies that followed as I grew.

My second mistake was not running away from home when I was nine. I chickened out. I made several half-hearted attempts, most of which coincided with my mom's interest in church or some new-age thing she had just discovered. I also blew the chance to become a ward of the court, and to be placed in exciting, educational foster care.

Had I just pushed my father's rage a bit more, or ran around naked in the street or something, I could have been somebody. I ruined my childhood by playing in the garden hose, messing around in the creek catching crawdads and begging for riding lessons. I blew my chance at genius and greatness by doing Girl Scouts and liking Nancy Drew instead of danger and strangers on motorbikes.

When I was fourteen, I knew I was in trouble when I broke my brother's arm. The amount of psychotic rage contained within me could not be bounded by the tiny preadolescent bod, so I got fatter and these dramatic swellings happened all over the place. If someone had kidnapped and trained me to be a super-warrior in the summer of my thirteenth year, the world would be a better place.

That summer, I grew strange soft tits and steatopygous buttocks. The sex-parts grew so fast my skin stretched apart and it's never been the same. It was a mistake not to run away and become a child prostitute, I know that now. It was a mistake not to become a documented athiest/agnostic and to use this as a prybar to becoming an emancipated minor. I pussed out. I didn't have the guts to do anything more than give a few all too typical handjobs and blowjobs to geeky boys my own age I found over the internet.

I again chickened out in my teen years, when I was young enough but still nubile enough for an assortment of internet pedophile-paramours to spirit me away to another life. I know now if I had let Mr. Ott and his sleazy buddies meet me at the Wendy's in Tyson's Corner, I would have had a better time of it, with meeting new people, lots of exercise and healthy experimentation. Hell, I could have even come out of it with a cash settlement or the basis for a best-selling memoir. But I blew that opportunity, for sure. I grew up normal, unexploited, and bored.

When I was seventeen, I was 5'1" and I weighed 185 lbs. I never did anything like join a band, exercise (unless it was sex), protest for political reasons, learn computer programming, or make out with lesbian girls. I literally only got drunk one time during all of high school and I didn't like pot so much because it was too expensive. I had a job as a nanny and a neurotic, redheaded Jewish boyfriend who used me as a cover for his homosexuality; I think we did it all of five times in 2 years. When he went to college, I had a real boyfriend, Charlie Funk, and we immediately screwed each others brains out in every public park from Reston to Baileys Crossroads. Stupidly, I was on the pill.

I should have let Charlie Funk knock me up with punk rock triplets, or I should have gotten him to marry me. I really loved him, and his parents were insanely rich. It was foolish and a mistake to let him go. He was 6 foot 6 and really wild fun, with a great imagination. I should have gotten him to elope with me, and this hesitation ruined my life, I know now.

(Charlie Funk met this woman Monica, who won't allow him to see/speak to any of his old friends or women he dated, no matter how long ago they were involved. . . so my hesitation ruined Charlie's life, too, in this respect. Monica still calls my answering machine periodically to say mean and crazy things. I haven't seen Charlie in 8 years.)

But back in time again. . . I was seventeen, and never once tried cocaine, or heroin, or prostituted myself, never once. I turned eighteen without never having affiliated with eco-terrorists, vandals, addicts, gutter punks, phreakers, or committing a single fire or stink-bombing, without putting my capable hand to gang-related murder or assault. What a waste! I never once panhandled or huffed anything!

I foolishly graduated high school, and I was late to the graduation. They had ordered for me a XXXL graduation gown which hung on me like a horrible joke on all fatties. Like the drape for a van, like a nylon parachute. This graduation gown flowed out and over the auditorium seat and dragged on the floor when I walked. It was so big it had to be a cruel joke. Fuck you, Langley High School of McLean Virginia, no, I will not forgive you, fuck you. I wasted this opportunity for mayhem, editorial comment and all meaning-- I walked across the stage and didn't protest anything except I refused to shake my principal's hand. if I knew then what I know now, I would have set that fucking gown on fire, with me in it.

For a year after I graduated high school, I commenced trying to wreck and lay waste to my youth in earnest. I immediately enrolled in Community College, which killed my soul in a million small ways. I bought a 1976 Nova, which was the greatest car I ever owned. I got a job running a frame shop (shudder) and a night job delivering pizzas (healthful). I ate a whole medium pizza and drank 6 Cokes a night. I was a vegetarian and my brother was really my only friend. I did NOT get laid. I smoked a pack of Merits a day and a little pot, but nowhere near enough for me to stop bullshitting my youth away.

Part of the problem I had was I'd just take the first offer that came along-- for jobs, for sex, for the car, friends, everything. So I ended up with a baseline or below-averaged level everything. I had many, many arguments with the cops and rent-a-cops of Northern Virginia Community College-- mostly about my use of the studio. Had I been smarter, or at all conscious that I was ruining my life-- I would have spit in that cop's eye, and let him arrest me. After about a year of this, I applied to a third rate college outside of Philadelphia and moved there. For literally no reason. It was the first school to accept me, so I went for it. I was nineteen.

I moved into the first apartment that was available. I was from the suburbs, and couldn't walk anywhere because I was so fat and lazy. Part of the reason I dropped out of this third rate public college in Pennsylvania was that I was fat, lazy, and had taken an apartment too far away from school. So I pissed a thousand or two dollars away, and stopped going to class. A far more interesting way to ruin my life on the horizon: sleeping with older men from work!

At this point I was about 200 lbs, I wore size 39 pants and a 44 bra. I was big, ugly and fat. I dyed my short hair black and I smoked a pack of Merits a day. I drank wine from the box, Coors light at the bar, and did not smoke any pot or do any drugs. I was a fucking loser. I had applied to a number of jobs at the local malls (Concord and Christiana Malls of charming Delaware) and of course I took the first one that accepted me, because I was trying to ruin my fucking life evidently.

When you're nineteen or twenty, older men (read 30+) will bone you, because you are an idiot and they are 30. It doesn't matter what you look like, because these guys are older and know you're young and tender and untainted by the STD's. I know now I should have robbed each of these assholes for their CD collections, musical instruments, cars and safes full of money, in that order. One guy, I actually had the key to his house. . . I blew that chance to make something of myself by simply sliding the key under his door one day and moving away, instead of going in and turning all the faucets on and having at the valuables. I regret this choice to this day. One of those assholes had a signed Warhol sketch. I. . I. . wasted my life.

After an enormous hiatus of idiocy, working in retail, eating everything except animals and their delicious excretions, smoking cigarettes, never reading, writing or making art, I had this terrible attack: I felt like I was ruining my life. I felt it. I made a world class U-turn on new year's eve. . . I quit my job, I quit my stupid secret older boyfriends, and I moved back home with my parents. If you want to know, I actually liked that song that came out about sunscreen being really really important. This is how much of a fucking loser I was.


part the second continues in a moment.