Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (6 page)

Dan and I spent weeks during recess figuring out the most diabolical ways for each and every one of our classmates to buy the farm. The killer wound up being—who else?—our mild-mannered substitute teacher.

It was Mrs. Plunkett in the gymnasium with the rope. And the ax. And the butcher’s knife. And anything else she could find.

I also wrote a series of short stories for that allegedly-high I.Q. class of mine, in which I brought to life an ominously smiling Blob that would assimilate all my gifted classmates. They may have been bright with puzzles, but in my stories, they never seemed to catch on that the giant red mass with the “have a nice day!” grin was a supernatural killing machine. Just because it was wearing a bonnet, that didn’t mean it was a harmless old lady.

The Blob was created when a classmate named Mark was experimenting with “red food coloring, salt, vinegar, alcohol, and distilled vinegar” (lesson learned: never mix vinegars). Once he’d transformed into The Blob, he killed off one of my greatest academic rivals, Melissa W., and then went on to consume two cool girls, Patty and Michelle, who were inseparable friends in class.

“After a three-week search, they found their thrashed carcasses in several trees near Central School, where the R.E.A.C.H room was.”

Again, I actually
liked
these people in real life.

The story was short, if not sweet, but ended with a laugh. I was the sole survivor, so it was up to me to change The Blob back into Mark, which I did:

“The first thing Mark said was, ‘Strange, I seem to have the distinct taste of jeans in my mouth.’”

However you slice it—usually through a cheerleader’s thorax—there seemed to be a literary need to kill off students wherever they existed around me. The Blob was supposed to have been created out of the body of a classmate, but it’s probably meaningful that I was myself a rather gelatinous pre-adolescent as I wrote the tale.

The kids in my class thought the stories were hilarious, and so did my teachers. Today, I would be referred to the police. Certainly, I would have spent time with a school shrink instead of praised for my unabashed creativity. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with me in my own class after re-reading this stuff.

My juvenile writing career in full swing, I did not shy away from non-fiction topics. I always felt my hometown was hopelessly conservative, and yet I got the maximum points possible for a junior-high report I did in 1983 (I was fourteen) called “Herpes: Danger In Disguise” for my honors biology class. Disguise? I think herpes is always out in the open, and if my health teacher Mr. Coggins had thought of that title a little harder he might’ve realized I could have been suggesting that the “disguise” was a big, juicy, suckable, fuckable penis.

The report, which I unsurprisingly still have, is typed and has hand-drawn illustrations, including one of a big ol’ dong that resembles an adder, and comes with a flexi-disc (which I got from where???) with “Straight Talk About Herpes” for men on one side and for women on the other. I cover “condoms, spermicides, and diaphragms” as minimally effective preventatives. I even mention that herpes may be linked to “another form of cancer, Kaposi’s Syndrome.” I remember reading about “gay cancer” during my research, which was not encouraging for a gay kid already worried about how exactly penises and butts worked in conjunction with one another, and who was still fibbing about wanting to date unavailable girls from rival schools in his own journal. I wasn’t keeping a diary, I was keeping a lie-ary.

You would think I’d have grown out of writing all those violent and increasingly sex-obsessed stories, but instead, I just got better at it, churning out twist-ending stories all through high school—the one with a woman dancing on the grave of the 100-year-old controlling man in her life ends with a revelation that she’s his 116-year-old mother; the one featuring a teen boy at a peer’s funeral ends with the revelation that it’s his funeral and he’s a ghost; the one about the passionate couple feuding over money ends with the revelation that in killing her cheapskate husband, the wife has set in motion her own death. I couldn’t get enough of stomach-dropping regret, murder most foul, and the cold inescapability of fate.

And yet I turned out okay. Or am I just…a danger in disguise?

Even though I did become known for writing stories, my only taste of
real
local stardom came in a slightly different arena, one informed by my predilection for lists.

You see, I was a spelling bee champ.

I’d always gotten As in English and had always had an aptitude for spelling. I remember as early as first grade realizing that learning to spell in English was not a guarantee merely by memorizing rules. Some words were utterly unique and would only be correctly spelled if you knew and had seen them already. A voracious reader of both age-appropriate (
Old Yeller
, Where
the Red Fern Grows, Choose Your Own Adventure
) and age-inappropriate (
Princess Daisy, Celebrity, Hollywood Wives, Penthouse Forum
) fare, I had a leg up on my classmates for that very reason—I had been exposed to far more words than any of them. I knew pudendum and coitus and clitoris as well as compound words and cases where I did
not
come before E except after C. “Schlockmeister,” anyone?

That first year I competed, fourth grade, I did well—foreshadowing my future career as a butt pirate, the words “inches” and “caboose” had come into play—but the hands-down winner was Melissa W., whom I would later kill off in my notorious seventh-grade snuff fiction. Melissa was a super cute, ultra-preppy (it was 1979 and Izod was as ubiquitous as disco) blonde with an intimidating intelligence whom I loved teasing. I thought I had a crush on her, but I think I was just very aroused by competition—and still am.

I was Top 10, but I’d lost on the word “argument,” something
else
that tends to turn me on. Arguing, not losing.

In fifth grade, I wanted to win so much I could T-A-S-T-E it. The way I saw it, the key to success in a spelling bee was to understand for sure the word you’ve been given. My weird bachelor teacher, whom I suspected was a H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L and who looked like my sister’s
Wizard of Oz
Cowardly Lion doll without its pelt, had already given me a valuable new lesson on the dangers of homonyms. Standing at his desk along with a few classmates, including one who’d told me his dad had claimed to have been anally raped with peach pits by the nuns who taught him as a kid, I swelled with pride when my male-spinster teacher announced that he and I were obviously on a seafood diet. I assumed he thought I looked like I was thinning out, but I wasn’t sure what diet he meant. I certainly wasn’t trying to—

“We
see
food, and we
eat
it!” he finished, and everyone laughed.

H-U-M-I-L-I-A-T-I-O-N

That teacher later died in a car crash, but I swear there was no connection between that and my morbid short stories.

The day of the bee, I was focused as I entered Springview’s multi-purpose room. No one speaks of multi-purpose rooms anymore. I’d spent every spare moment practicing every word in the guide with my mom. I don’t think I missed any in practice, and I learned a few words no fifth-grader should ever have to use, and that no adult you’ll ever meet has used once in his or her life. I’d put on my velour V-neck and combed my hair, summoned the same poker face I’d used the one time I’d donned a polyester tracksuit and gone for a public jog in my neighborhood (I got
fatcalled
), and joined my classmates on the risers. Then, we began to spell.

I don’t remember every detail, but when a fat kid like me was given the word “mayonnaise,” I couldn’t help but wonder if another speller would cry F-A-V-O-R-I-T-I-S-M. After successfully looking disinterested in words like “flaccid” and “dickcissel,” I won the whole goddamn thing—it was official, I was Springview’s best speller.

Almost immediately, I had great clout, not to mention a bona fide trophy. One of my classmates, a towheaded jock cutie whose penis had occasionally crossed my mind, prepared for me a note written in calligraphy—the only way to go in 1980 when you wanted to say it with pizzazz—offering me “congradulations.” Rank amateur.

But my cocky reign ended when I went to the next level and squared off against all the other schools in my area, finding out that there was someone even more threatening than Melissa W.—Kim F.. Like Shelley Long’s character “Diane” on
Cheers
, she had a supremely annoying way of being right most of the time. She was probably as smart as Marilyn vos Savant,
Parade
’s genius-I.Q. columnist who, it should be noted, used her Hawking-esque mental powers to land a job as a
Parade
columnist.

Kim F. was not messing around, and she beat me and everyone else almost offhandedly. Most gallingly, I went down on the word “feudal,” which I hadn’t asked for in a sentence. Turns out I was hearing “futile”—my fifth-grade teacher’s homonym jab hadn’t sunk in.

Sixth grade was another good but not perfect year for me. I again won for Springview, but went to the Genesee Intermediate School District Spelling Contest only to get shot down. Our liaison (a word that never failed to come up) was Miss Glenowyn Jones, a lady whose first name probably pushed her in the direction of spelling-bee facilitation. We had to spell twelve words—“kerosene,” “barbecue,” “hallelujah,” “chandelier,” “carnivorous,” “kaleidoscope,” “bacteriology,” “blasphemy,” “ventriloquism,” “colonel,” “girken,” and “ukulele,” and Kim F. only missed two. It’s worth noting that “fluorescent” was misspelled on the practice list we’d been given, but I got no extra credit for noticing.

Finally, seventh grade was my last chance to truly kick vocabularies and take nametags—it was the final year in which my school sent kids to the district, so I absolutely had to win. 1982 was going to be my year, just like it was for A Flock of Seagulls. In my memory, the whole thing was like
The Hunger Games
, in that it involved competitive districts and I was invariably hungry throughout.

I breezed through my school-wide bee, but was again outclassed by Kim F., who effortlessly spelled shit like “dirndl” and, as personally upsetting as it was to hear the skinny girl win on this, “obesity.”

had stumbled over “prestigious,” which too many people pronounce their own way, if you ask me. “Pres-TEE-jus,” “pres-TIDGE-ee-yus”…make up your mind.

The only bright spot was that I did come in second, so that meant both Kim F. and I would represent our district in the County Spelling Bee—one step away from State, and then Nationals. The County Spelling Bee was a B-F-D. I put on my best “Charlie Brown” sweater with a collared shirt under and forbade my mom from being in the audience, deciding I’d be too nervous with her watching. Instead, my grandparents drove me to and from in their C-A-D-I-L-L-A-C.

The first round, made up of 300 kids from 20 districts, was brutal—we were intentionally given easy words early on, but one incautious girl had transposed two letters in “tornado,” going down in flames immediately. She stifled sobs as she sat in the elimination area, clearly well aware of how to properly spell the word that had spelled defeat for her. I imagined Kim F. feeding off of this psychically, but I couldn’t let her win again. This bee was mine.

I won for the seventh grade on the relatively easy one-two punch of “coefficient” and “embarrass.” Embarrass? Embarrassingly easy. Along the way, Kim F. had unexpectedly choked, so it was up to me. Finally, a word came up that nobody could spell, and that nobody really understood. It sounded like “nonsked” and was defined as an unscheduled flight. Each kid tried defiantly to spell it one of two ways, as if repeating the mistakes of others would somehow work the third or fourth time: “nonskid” or “nonsched.” When it came to me, everyone else had failed, so I decided to just spell it like it sounded—success! Whoever made up that nonsense word had just handed me a chance to take the gold.

The final word? “Heathen.”

There is no God. I won it easily.

Of course, all the stress gave me a massive migraine, so though the local paper was coming to interview me at school the next day, my mom had written a letter asking the school to release me right after my press opportunity. No autographs, please.

I held it together for my interview, and even avoided throwing up when I was told that the school would not send me on to the next level due to budgetary constraints. My spelling-bee fame was set, if stunted—I was undefeated, but would never compete again.