Let's Pretend This Never Happened (4 page)

Photographic proof of Rambo in his Jams. Also pictured:
Teen Beat
magazine with Kirk Cameron on the cover, records, and VHS tapes. It’s like the eighties threw up all over this raccoon. I couldn’t even make this shit up, people.

When the raccoons were old enough, we returned them all to the woods, except for one raccoon that we kept as a pet. His name was Rambo, and he’d learned how to turn on the bathroom sink and would wash random things in it all the time, like it was his own private river. If I’d have been thinking I would have left some Woolite and my delicates by the sink for him to rinse out, but you never think to turn your pet raccoon into a tiny butler until it’s too late. Once, we came home to find Rambo in the sink, washing a tiny sliver of soap that had been a new bath-size bar that morning. He looked exhausted, and like he wanted someone to stop him and put him to bed, but when we tried to take away the last bit of soap he growled at us, and so we let him finish, because at that point I guess it was like a vendetta, if raccoons had vendettas. Sometimes when I’m working
on an impossible project that I know I should just give up on and someone tries to take it away, I growl and scream, “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!” (which is both weird and inappropriate) but I think that that’s probably exactly how Rambo was feeling, with his soap sliver and puckered little fingers covered in radon water, and it makes me sad. But then I laugh, because it reminds me that right after the soap incident my mom insisted that Rambo needed to live outside in a chicken cage “to protect him from himself.” I had placed him on top of the cage to pet him when my little sister, Lisa, who was about seven then, whacked him in the nose (because she was kind of a dick at the time), and then Rambo
flipped the fuck out
, stood up on his hind legs, grimaced, and jumped directly onto my sister’s face. He grabbed on to her ears like he was some kinda horrible raccoon mask, and he was hissing and looking right into her eyes like, “I WILL BRING YOU DOWN, BITCH,” and my sister was screaming and flailing her arms
and it was totally awesome.

The next day my dad took Rambo to the farm, which I’d thought meant that he actually took him to my grandfather’s farm to live, but now that I think about it, it probably had less to do with
going
to a farm than
buying
one. And now I’m sad again. But then I think about the fact that my dad was probably pointing the gun at Rambo, and Rambo was probably wearing his little Jams and was all, “Hi there, mister!” and my dad probably sighed defeatedly,
¹
saying something like “Aw, fuck. Just go on, then. Here’s ten dollars and some soap.” Because deep down my father is a total softy. Unless he’s inadvertently killing the mother of a bunch of baby raccoons. Then you’d better stand the fuck back, because you’re totally going to get blood on you.

#6. Most people don’t go out into the woods to catch armadillos so that their father can race them professionally.
Also, when you find one and pull it out by its tail,
most
girls’ fathers won’t scream out,
“Mind the teeth! That one looks like a biter!”
Probably because most fathers don’t love their daughters as much as my father loves me. Or maybe because they didn’t make their daughters pull live armadillos out of tree stumps. Hard to tell. Honestly, though, those girls are missing out, because there is nothing like seeing your father down on his hands and knees with five other grown men, screaming and slapping at the ground to scare their respective armadillos into crossing the finish line first. And when I say, “There’s nothing like it,” what I mean is, “Holy shit,
these people are fucking insane.
”

Usually when I tell people my dad was a Texas armadillo racing champion, they assume I’m exaggerating, but then I pull out his silver armadillo championship ring (which is,
of course
, shaped like an armadillo), and then they’re all, “Crap on a crap cracker,
you’re actually serious
.” And then they usually leave quickly. The
gold
armadillo championship ring would be more impressive to show off, but we don’t have it anymore because my father traded it for a Victorian funeral carriage. And no, I’m not joking, because why the fuck would I joke about that? But I do have photographic proof:

Why, yes, that
is
the shining winner’s ring of the Armadillo Glitterati. Also pictured: My father during an unfortunate Magnum P.I. phase, confused spectators, unnamed armadillo.

#7. Most people don’t have a professional taxidermist for a father.
When I was little, my father used to sell guns and ammo at a sporting goods store, but I always told everyone he was an arms dealer, because it sounded more exciting. Eventually, though, he saved up enough money to quit his job and build a taxidermy shop next to our house (which was tiny and built out of asbestos back when people still thought that was a good thing). My dad built the taxidermy shop himself out of old wood from abandoned barns and did a remarkable job, fashioning it to look exactly like a Wild West saloon, complete with swinging doors and gaslights and a hitching post for horses. Then he hired a bunch of guys to work for him, many of whom looked to me as if they were fresh from prison or just about to go back in. I can’t help feeling sorry for the confused strangers who would wander into my father’s taxidermy shop, expecting to find a bar and a stiff drink, and who instead found several rough-looking men my father had hired, covered in blood and elbow deep in animal carcasses. I suspect, though, that the blood-covered taxidermists probably shared their personal flasks with the baffled stranger, because although they seemed slightly dangerous, they also were invariably good-hearted, and I’m fairly certain they recognized that anyone stumbling onto that kind of scene would probably need a strong drink even more than when they’d first set out looking for a bar to begin with.

#8. Most people don’t have their childhood pets eaten by homeless people.
When I was five, my dad won a duckling for me at the carnival. We named him Daffodil, and he lived in the backyard in an inflatable raft that we filled with water. He was awesome. Then he got too big to live comfortably in the raft, so we set him loose under the nearby town bridge so he could be with all the other ducks. We sang “Born Free,” and he seemed very happy as he waddled away. A month later the local news ran a story on the fact that all of the ducks in the river had gone missing
and had been eaten by homeless people living under the bridge. It was apparently a bad neighborhood for ducks. I stared, wide-eyed, at my mom as I stammered out,
“HOBOS. ATE. MY DAFFODIL.”
My mom stared back with a tightened jaw, wondering whether she should just lie to me, but instead she decided it was time to stop protecting me from real life, and sighed, saying, “It sounds nicer if you call them
‘transients,’
dear.” I nodded mechanically. I was traumatized, but my vocabulary was improving.

From the back of the photo: “Jenny & Daffodil. Later he was eaten by homeless people.”

#9. Most people don’t share a swimming pool with pigs.
We lived downwind from the (locally) famous Schwartzes’ pig farm, which is something some people might be embarrassed about, but these were “show pigs,” so yeah,
it was pretty fucking impressive
. When the wind was blowing from the west it would smell so strong that we’d have to close the windows, but that was less because of the pigs, and more because of the nearby rendering plant. In fact, the first time my husband caught a whiff he nearly gagged, and my mom nonchalantly said, “Oh, that? That’s just the rendering plant,” in the same way other people might say, “Oh, that’s just our gardener.” Then he gave me this look like
“What the fuck is a rendering plant?”
and I quietly explained that a rendering plant is a factory where they compost old flowers, because that sounds much more whimsical than, “It’s like a slaughterhouse, but way less classy.”

The Schwartzes had an enormous open-air cistern that they used to water the pigs, and on special occasions we’d get invited over to swim in the pig’s water. This is all true, people.

Right here is when people begin to say, “I don’t believe any of this,” and I have to show them pictures or get my mom on the phone to confirm it,
and then they get very quiet. Probably out of respect. Or possibly pity. This is why I always have to clarify that although my childhood
was
fucked up, it was also kind of awesome.

When you’re surrounded by other people who are just as poor as you are, life doesn’t seem all that weird. For instance, one of my friends grew up in a house with a dirt floor, and it’s hard to feel too bad about your tiny asbestos house when you have the privilege of owning carpet. Also, in my parents’ defense, I never really realized we were that poor, because my parents never said we couldn’t afford things, just that we didn’t need them. Things like ballet lessons. And ponies. And tap water that won’t kill you.

#10. Most people don’t file wild animals.
When I was about six my parents decided to raise chickens, but we couldn’t afford a real henhouse. Instead we put some filing cabinets in the garage, and opened the drawers like stair steps so the chickens could nest in them. Once, when I went out to gather the eggs, I stretched onto my tiptoes to reach into the top drawer and I felt what seemed like a misshapen egg, and that’s because
it was in the belly of a gigantic fucking rattlesnake that was attempting to swallow another one of the eggs
. This is when I ran screaming back into the house, and my mom grabbed a rifle from the gun cabinet, and (as the escaping snake writhed down the driveway) she shot it right in the lumpy part where the egg still was, and egg exploded everywhere like some sort of terrible fireworks display. We found out later that it was actually a bull snake just
pretending
to be a rattlesnake, and my mother felt a little bad about killing it, but pretending to be a rattlesnake in front of an armed mother is basically like waving a fake gun in front of a cop. Either way, you’re totally going to get shot. Also, whenever I read this paragraph to people who don’t live in the South, they get hung up on the fact that we had furniture devoted to just guns, but in rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires.

#11. Most people don’t have to devote an entire year of therapy to a single ten-minute episode from their childhood.
Three words: Stanley, the Magical Squirrel. Actually that’s four words, but I don’t think you’re supposed to count the word “the,” since it isn’t important enough to be capitalized. All of this will be fixed by my editor by the time you read this anyway, so really I could write anything here. Like, did you know that Angelina Jolie hates Jewish people? True story. (
Editor’s note: Angelina Jolie does not hate Jewish people at all, and this is a total fabrication. We apologize to Ms. Jolie and to the Jewish community.
)

I was going to write about Stanley the Magical Squirrel right here on number eleven, but it’s way too convoluted, so instead I made it into the whole next chapter, because I’m pretty sure when you sell a book you get paid by the chapter. I could be wrong about that, though, because I
am
often wrong. Except about the Angelina-Jolie-hating-Jews thing, which is probably totally true. (
No, that’s not true at all. Shut up, Jenny.—Ed.
)