Let's Pretend This Never Happened (10 page)

There are no known pictures of me with my arm stuck up a cow’s vagina, but my parents own tons of pictures of my sister dressed as poultry. I don’t think I need to tell you who the favorite in my family was.

ADDENDUM:
When I first wrote this chapter I realized that people would have a hard time believing it, so I looked up my former high school principal and sent him this (abridged) e-mail, which really only proves that I shouldn’t be allowed to use e-mail after I’ve been drinking:

. . . I’ve been thinking of writing about artificial cow insemination, but the problem is that my memory sucks and I can’t remember all the details. Probably because I blocked it out. Or because of all the drugs I did in college.

This is how I remember it: Shoulder-length glove and a turkey baster up the cow’s vagina. I would have sworn this is how we did it, but I know the preferred method nowadays is to do it rectovaginally. Am I misremembering? Because I’m fairly sure I’d remember if I had my arm up a cow’s rectum. Then again, I’m having to ask my high school principal the details of getting a cow pregnant, so obviously my memory is not entirely reliable.

Do any pictures of this still exist? I realize this is probably the weirdest request you’ve ever received from a former student, and I apologize for that.

I also apologize for sending you an e-mail with the word “rectovaginal” in it. I can assure you I never saw that coming either.

Hugs,
Jenny

Immediately after sending the e-mail I realized how inappropriate it was, and so I called Lisa and said, “So, I may have just sent our high school principal an e-mail with the word
‘rectovaginal’
in it,” and she was all,
“Who is this?”
and I was like, “No.
Seriously
. That. Just. Happened.” And after
she stopped banging her head on her desk she pointed out that I had learned nothing from her advice, and she agreed that I should probably call his secretary to ask her to delete the e-mail from his account before he opened it. It was too late, though, because he’d immediately opened it and replied to it, and seemed entirely unfazed. Also, he assured me that practically
no one
was doing it rectovaginally back in the early nineties, which is totally true on so many levels. He also looked for photographs, but never found any, probably because no one ever takes pictures of underage girls with their arms up cow vaginas. Most likely because those pictures are more likely to end up in evidence lockers than in books about golden childhood memories.

1.
Editor’s note: No. That’s not even
close
to the weirdest thing about getting a cow pregnant in high school.

Draw Me a Fucking Dog

DISCLAIMER:
My agent and editor don’t love this chapter, because it’s about me doing drugs (poorly) and it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the book, but I pointed out that druggies will totally relate to it, and nondruggies will feel smugly self-satisfied with their life choices when they read it, so I’m basically hitting all the demographics. But then they said that it’s just too rambling and confusing to be a real chapter. They may have a point. This is why this chapter isn’t a real chapter at all. It’s a bonus story that you can skip so you can feel like you accomplished more today. Or you can underline parts and write notes to yourself in all the margins so people in the subway think you’re either really smart for reading a textbook on the subway, or just rich enough to use hardback books as Post-its. You aren’t allowed to judge this chapter, though, because it’s not a real chapter. As a Post-it note, however, it is pretty fucking impressive.

Special note to any teenage children I may one day have: Anyone who does drugs is a moron. Don’t do drugs. They will kill you and make your boobies fall off. It happened to your aunt Rebecca, and that’s why you’ve never heard of her. But we keep her boobies in a box to remember her terrible lesson, and if I ever even smell pot on you I will put them on you while you are sleeping, and you will wake up with a dead woman’s boobies on your forehead. Now, skip to the next chapter, because I’m about to start writing about having sex with your father.

PREFACE:
There isn’t really a preface. I just wanted to see how many paragraphs I could fit in before actually starting a chapter.

PREFACE ADDENDUM:
Four. The answer is four.

I was eighteen the first time I did acid. And it was awesome. And horrible. And also I was kind of an idiot, because I’d managed to unintentionally wait until one week after I could legally be charged as an adult for drug possession.

My friend Jim had been doing acid since he was fifteen, and I was captivated with his stories of LSD experimentation, including his recent drug-induced epiphany that the one thing that brought all of mankind together was our common possession of nipples. “I mean . . . we
all
have them, right?” he asked me feverishly. “And what
possible
reason is there for men to possess these useless body parts unless it’s an undeniable sign that men and woman are all
one
in this giant, cosmic soup that we call the universe?! Men and women . . .
we’re all the same!
It’s all relative!” He’d called his epiphany “The Theory of Relativity,” until someone pointed out that that already existed, and so he grudgingly changed it to “
Jim’s
Theory of Relativity.” At the time I thought it was brilliant, but at the time I was also drunk.

I was both terrified and fascinated by the idea that there was a whole world known only to acid users, and I was completely intrigued by the accompanying drug lingo that Jim so naturally bandied about. I longed to “have a connection” in the drug trade, and I felt that the only way I’d be able to use this phrase in good faith would be to sleep with a pharmacist or to meet someone who occasionally sold speed. The latter seemed easier and less likely to end with VD. And also I didn’t know any pharmacists.

Jim once told me about the time he was waiting at his house for some friends to pick him up so they could drop acid together. He decided to get a head start and took three hits while his mom was watching TV in the other room. Unfortunately, his friends had
also
decided to take acid a little early and found themselves completely high and driving to Jim’s house, which would have been extremely stupid and dangerous except that they were actually sitting at the dining room table just
thinking
that they were in the car, so it was less dangerous and more just really stupid. And they stayed at that table for the next four hours, because none of them were willing to get out of the car, since no one knew where the brakes were. It was basically the longest car ride in the world that didn’t actually involve a car. Meanwhile, Jim began doodling on a phone book in his bedroom, and he’d just finished drawing a little stick figure when the little stick figure dude came to life and said, “Dude. Draw me a fucking dog.”

This is when Jim realized the drugs had kicked in, and when Jim’s mom walked in a bit later and an enormous eagle flew past her and landed on his bed. Jim told me that the stick figure started screaming, but Jim ignored him, because he
was
high, but not so high that he didn’t realize that talking to a drawing on a phone book would probably look suspicious.

Jim noticed that his mom was staring at him warily, but at this point he was so high that he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked
her
a question that she hadn’t answered, or if she’d asked
him
a question that he hadn’t answered, but he thought it would be weirder to follow up whatever question he might have asked her with another question, especially since he
couldn’t remember the question he hadn’t actually asked her in the first place. So basically they just sat there having this really awkward staring contest. Then the stick figure pointed out that if the eagle was not a hallucination his mom would know he was on drugs, because what kind of guy would be all,
“Oh, it’s perfectly normal to have this eagle here”
? Jim laughed nervously and tried to give his mom a look that he hoped said something like “Wow. The world is a weird place when eagles may or may not land on your bed, right?”

But in reality it must have said something closer to
“Holy shit, I’m fucking high,”
because the next day Jim’s mom sent him to the local psychiatric/rehab center, which helped him find God and introduced him to narcotics far more addictive than any drugs he could have found on the street. When he came back he was all about lithium and Jesus, and when I mentioned that I really just wanted to try LSD, he rolled his eyes at me as if he were some sort of wine connoisseur and I’d just asked the best way to unscrew a bottle of Strawberry Hill. Druggies can be surprisingly judgmental. It’s pretty much the only social circle where the same people you just witnessed shooting horse tranquilizers up one another’s butts will actually look down at you for not being as cool as them. Unless maybe there’s some sort of horse-enema-fetish social circle, which I’m not sure exists. Hold on, let me check the Internet.

Ohholyshit.
Do
not
look that up, y’all.

Luckily, though, when you run with drug crowds you eventually run into the perfect dealer, and for me it was Travis. He was a long-haired blond guy in his late twenties who lived at home with his parents. He always seemed to know someone with drugs but seldom ever actually had any himself, which makes him not really a dealer at all, but whenever my friends and I needed pot we called him, because he was the closest thing we had. He was more like the middleman who protected us from the “real dealers,” who we imagined were large,
angry black men with pierced ears and pagers, who would probably make fun of us.
To death.
Also, in my mind the angry black men were all badasses and they all carried switchblades that had names like “Charlie Firecracker.” (I didn’t actually know any black people at the time, which I probably don’t even need to clarify here based on this paragraph alone.)

A guy I knew had a house on the outskirts of town and offered to host a small LSD party for me and several other people in our group who’d never done acid before either. So we called Travis and asked him to bring over enough acid for six of us that night. Travis arrived and told us the drugs were on their way, and about fifteen minutes later a pizza delivery car pulled up. The delivery guy came to the door with a mushroom pizza and an uncut sheet of acid. The delivery guy was in his late teens, about two feet shorter than me, and very, very white, but he
did
have a piercing and a pager (which was very impressive, because this was still back in the early nineties, although probably the pager was just used for pizza orders). His name was Jacob. Travis told me later that anyone could buy acid from Jacob if they knew the “secret code” to use when you called the pizza place. At the time I thought it was probably something all cloak-and-dagger, like “One pepperoni pizza, hold the crust,” or “A large cheesy bread
and the bird flies at midnight
,” but in reality it was probably just “And tell Jacob to bring some acid,” because honestly neither of them was very imaginative.

Jacob sold Travis the acid for four dollars a hit, and then Travis turned around and sold it to us for five dollars a hit, which was awkward and also a poor profit margin. We each took a hit and Travis said that for another ten bucks he’d stay and babysit us to make sure we didn’t cut our own hands off. This wasn’t something I was actually worried about at all until he mentioned it, but now that the thought was implanted in our heads I became convinced that we would all cut our hands off as soon as he left, so I handed him a ten. Travis cautioned us that if we thought the house cats next door were sending us threatening messages, they probably weren’t. And he warned us not to stare at the sun because we’d go blind (which
might have been great advice if it hadn’t been ten o’clock at night). “Ride the beast . . . don’t let the beast ride you,” our wise sage advised us.

Secretly, I was worried that the acid wouldn’t affect me at all. I’d smoked pot before, but I’d never actually felt the full, dizzying pleasure that
High Times
magazine promised. I developed all of the side effects with few of the benefits. While my friends sprawled out on papasan chairs, overwhelmed by the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange,” I ate an entire box of Nilla Wafers and became paranoid that the neighbors were calling the cops.
“Schmorange!”
I’d yell, while compulsively spraying air freshener to dampen the smell. “Schmorange rhymes with orange!
Now will someone please fucking help me push this refrigerator in front of the door?!
”