Let's Pretend This Never Happened (3 page)

You’re welcome, English teachers. You totally owe me.

Wait. Hang on. It just occurred to me that if English teachers assigned this book as required reading, that means that the school district just had to buy a ton of my books, so technically I owe you one, English teachers. Except that now that I think about it, my tax dollars paid for those books, so technically I’m kind of paying for people to read my own book, and now I don’t know whether to be mad or not. This footnote just turned into a goddamn word problem.

You know what? Fuck it. Just send me half of the malt liquor you get from your students and we’ll call it even.

Also, is this the longest footnote in the history of ever? Answer: Probably.

My Childhood: David Copperfield Meets
Guns & Ammo
Magazine

I’ve managed to pinpoint several key differences between my childhood and that of pretty much everyone else in the entire fucking world. I call these points,
“Eleven Things Most People Have Never Experienced or Could Have Even Possibly Imagined, but That Totally Happened to Me, Because Apparently I Did Something Awful in a Former Life That I’m Still Being Punished For.”

#1. Most people have never stood inside a dead animal,
unless you count that time when Luke Skywalker crawled inside that tauntaun to keep from freezing to death, which I don’t, because
Star Wars
is not a documentary. If you’re easily grossed out, I recommend skipping this entire section and going straight to chapter five. Or maybe getting another book that’s less disturbing than this one. Like one about kittens. Or genocide.

Still there? Good for you! Let’s continue. I remember as a kid watching the Cosby family prepare dinner on TV and thinking how odd it was that no one was covered in blood, because
this
was a typical night in our house: My father, an avid bow hunter, would lumber inside the house with a deer slung over his shoulder. He’d fling it across the dining room table, and then
my parents would dissect it and pull out all the useful parts, like some sort of terrible piñata. It was disgusting, but it was the only life I knew, so I assumed that everyone else was just like us.

The only thing that seemed weird about it to me was that I was the only person in the whole house who gagged at the smell of the deer blood. My parents tried to convince me that blood doesn’t have a smell, but they are fucking liars. Also they told me that milk
does
have a smell, and that’s ridiculous, and I’m shocked that their lies have spread so far. Milk doesn’t have a smell. Blood does. And I think I’m so sensitive to the smell of a dead deer because of the time when I accidentally walked inside one.

I was about nine years old and I was playing chase with my sister while my father was cleaning a deer.

I’m going to interrupt here for a small educational explanation about what it means to “clean a deer”:

“Cleaning a deer” for people who are sensitive members of PETA

You get some warm water and tearless shampoo and gently massage the deer. (Lather, rinse, but don’t repeat, even though the bottle says to, because that’s just a ploy to sell more shampoo.) Blow-dry on low heat and hot-glue a bow to his forehead. Send him back to the woods to meet a nice Jewish doe. Go to the next chapter.

“Cleaning a deer” for curious, nonjudgmental readers who really want to know how it’s done (and who aren’t PETA members who are just pretending to be curious, nonjudgmental readers, but who really want to throw blood on me at book signings)

Cleaning a deer consists of tying up the arms and legs of the deer to a clothesline-like contraption, making it look as if the dead deer is a cheerleader doing the “Give me an X!” move. Then you slice open the stomach, and all the stuff you don’t want falls out. Like the genitals. And the poop rope.

“Cleaning a deer” for people who clean deer all the time

I know, right?
Can you believe there are people who don’t know this shit?
Weird.
These are probably the same people who call the poop rope “the intestines.”
We all know it’s a poop rope, people
. Saying it in French doesn’t make it any less disgusting.

Anyway, my dad had just finished cleaning the deer when I made a recklessly fast, ninja-like U-turn to avoid getting tagged by my sister, and that’s when I ran. Right. The fuck. Inside of the deer. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and I stood there, kind of paralyzed and not ninja-like at all. The best way I can describe it is that it was kind of like I was wearing a deer sweater. Sometimes people laugh at that, but it’s not an amused laugh. It’s more of an involuntary nervous giggle of
what-the-fuck
ness. Probably because you aren’t supposed to wear deer for sweaters. You’re not supposed to throw up inside them either, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

I’d like to think that my father threw that deer away, because I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to eat food you’ve worn
or
vomited into, but while he was hosing me off he was also hosing off the deer, so my guess is that he applied some sort of a fucked-up Grizzly Adams version of the five-second rule. (Food on the floor is still edible as long as you pick it up within five seconds. Unless it’s peanut butter; then the five-second rule is null. Or if it’s something like dry toast, the five-second rule is extended to, like, a week and a half, because really, what’s going to get on dry toast?
Nothing
, that’s what. God, I could write a whole book on the five-second rule. That should totally be the follow-up book to this one:
The Five Second Rule As It Applies to Various Foodstuffs
. Brilliant. But now I’ve forgotten what I was writing about. Oh, yeah, throwing up inside a deer sweater. Right.) And that’s why I still suspect that my dad took home the horribly defiled deer sweater to eat. Except
I
didn’t eat it, because after that the smell of blood made me gag, and to this day I can’t eat any meat that I’ve seen or smelled
raw, which my husband complains about all the time, but until
he’s
worn a deer sweater he can just shut the hell up. He says it’s all in my mind, but it’s totally not, and I’ve even offered to take some sort of blind smell test, like they did in the Pepsi challenge, where he holds bowls of blood up to my nose so that I can prove that I can smell blood, but he won’t do it. Probably because he’s kind of anal about our bowls. He wouldn’t even let me use one for throwing up in when I was sick. He was all, “
Vomit bowl?
Who uses a vomit bowl?!” and I was all, “
I
use a vomit bowl.
Everyone
uses a vomit bowl. You keep it near you in case you can’t make it to the toilet,” and he was all, “
No
, you use a trash can,” and I was like, “You sick fuck.
I’m not throwing up in a trash can.
That’s totally barbaric.” Then he yelled, “That’s what normal people do!” and I screamed,
“That’s how civilization breaks down!”
And then I refused to speak to him for the rest of the day, because he made me yell at him while I was vomity. Did you notice how I just skipped right to having a husband even though this paragraph is supposed to be about my childhood?
My God,
this is going to be a terrible book. But both stories have to do with blood and vomit, so that’s kind of impressive, in a way that’s really less “impressive” and more just kind of “sad” and “disturbing.”

#2.
(On the list of
“Things Most People Have Never Experienced or Could Have Even Possibly Imagined but That Totally Happened to Me,”
in case you’ve forgotten what we were talking about because number one was way too long and needs to be edited or possibly burned.)
Most people don’t have poisonous tap water in their house.
Most people
don’t get letters from the government telling them not to drink their poisonous tap water because dangerous radon has leaked into their well. In fact,
most people
don’t get their poisonous tap water from a well at all.

Concerned relatives would question my mother about the risks of my sister and me being exposed to all that radon, but she waved them off,
saying, “Oh, they couldn’t swallow it even if they
wanted
to. They’d throw it up immediately. It’s
that
toxic. So, you know,
no worries.
” Then she’d send us off to brush our teeth with it and bathe in it. My mom was a big proponent of the
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”
theory, almost to the point where she seemed to be
daring
the world to kill us. This theory worked well for my sister, who has never been sick a day in her life, and is one of those Amazonian women who could squat in a field to have a baby and then pick the baby up and keep on hoeing, except also the field would be on fire, and she’d be all, “Fuck you, fire!” and walk through it like that scary robot in
The Terminator
. And also her baby would be fire-resistant, and would be karate-chopping the flames like a tiny badass. I’ve tried to have this same level of pioneer toughness, but every couple of months I have a total breakdown or catch some kind of weird disease that only animals get. Like the time I got human parvo, which totally exists
and is no fucking picnic.
Or the time when I was brushing my hair and heard a pop in my neck, and I could barely even breathe it hurt so much. Then I drove myself to work and I almost passed out from a combination of the pain and the not-breathing, and when I got there I hurt so much I couldn’t even move my mouth to talk, so I wrote, “I HAVE BROKEN MY NECK,” on a Post-it, and my bewildered office mate drove me to the hospital. Turns out I’d herniated a disc, and the doctor gave me a pamphlet on domestic abuse and kept asking me whether someone was hurting me at home, because apparently most people don’t herniate their discs simply from brushing their hair too hard. I prefer to think that most people just don’t brush their hair as enthusiastically as I do.

#3. Most people have running water.
I mean, we
mostly
had running water, except when we didn’t, which was often. As my sister and I would always say to each other, “You know, you never really appreciate your poisonous well water until it’s gone.” In the summer the water would occasionally stop for no reason whatsoever, and in the winter the pipes
would freeze, and we’d be forced to fill up pots of water from our cistern, and then warm the icy water on the stove to bathe in. It’s even
less
glamorous than it sounds. I once pointed out to my mother that the water from the cistern was slightly brown, and that it didn’t really seem like the cleanest way to wash your hair, but she sighed at me in disappointment, saying, “It’s pronounced ‘
beige
.’” As if the pronunciation somehow made it fancier.

“Okay,”
I capitulated grudgingly, “the cistern water seems slightly more
beige
than the water from the tap,” but my mom just shrugged it off, because apparently she didn’t trust water she couldn’t see.

#4. Most people don’t have a cistern
or even know what a cistern is.
Some of them
say
that they have a cistern, and then they politely add that the word is actually pronounced
“sister,”
and then I just nod, because I really don’t want to have to explain that a cistern is actually an enormous metal can that catches rainwater, sort of like an aboveground well for people who can’t actually afford a well. But no one wants to explain that, because
honestly? Who’s going to admit they can’t afford a well?
Not me, obviously, because we
had
a well. One that was filled with poisonous radon.

The back of this photo says, “1975—Jenny & her chickens. A dog killed them not long afterward.” Funny, I feel fine.

#5. Most people don’t have live raccoons in the house.
My dad was always rescuing animals, and by “rescuing animals” I mean “killing the mother, and then discovering she had babies, and bringing the babies
home to raise them in the bathtub.” Once, he brought home eight newborn raccoons in a bucket for us to raise. When the orphaned raccoons were little, my mom sewed tiny Jams for them to wear (because this was the eighties, and Jams were quite popular then), and they were adorable, but then the raccoons got big enough to climb out of the bathtub and pretty much destroyed the entire house. Raccoons are totally OCD and they are driven to wash everything that they see, which you’d think would make them smell better, but it doesn’t, because they smell all musky and vaguely sour, like one-night stands.