Starf*cker: a Meme-oir Read Online Free Page A

on Shamrock Lane, a picture of which in The Flint Journal twenty years later revealed it to be a burned-out shell of a crack house. Crack hadn’t even invented yet when we’d lived there—that’s progress.
    I guess we’d gotten out of there just in time, even if it had meant abandoning the brother-sister team who were both my neighbors and my naked playmates—we didn’t just play doctor, we played surgeon.
    In Flushing, we settled into a gigantic, two-story home, probably 100 years old, with a creepy attic perfect for our cat to use as a nursery for litter after litter of kittens (cool as hell, always on the prowl for toms, she was a gay man trapped in a female feline’s body), a creepy shed filled with antique farming equipment, and a creepy (to me) acre of land containing a garden, a patch of woods, and way too many garden snakes for a city boy to accept as anything other than a prelude to a re-enactment of the horror movie Sssssss , which features sexy Dirk Benedict being unwillingly transformed into a cobra.
    I was also unconvinced that the woods did not contain a Bigfoot. This was the ‘70s.
    So I spent all my time in my room when I wasn’t riding the bus to my new school, Elms Elementary, which sounds like the scene of a massacre in a slasher flick.
    These early days must have been trying for me. In kindergarten, my elderly teacher Mrs. Cummings archly noted on my report card:
    “Cannot tie his shoes yet or zip his coat.”
    I was a late bloomer. I was also wetting my bed, something I did for so long I will never forget the feeling of waking up in a warm swamp of my own sewage.
    Why couldn’t I tie my shoes? Why did my bladder betray me like that? I later suspected it was because I knew that boys couldn’t marry boys, but also knew that some boys—at least one of them—wanted to. Or maybe I wanted to at least engage in what the gossip rags called a “trial marriage” with a boy.
    I did eventually learn to zip and tie (the latter of which was accomplished on a massive wooden shoe; “How’s Matt doing?” Mrs. Cummings asked her teacher’s aid. “Matt did it!” came the reply. Then, taking away the thrill of accomplishment, “Finally.”) and also learned how not to wet the bed, but I was out of the frying pan and into the fire as far as Mrs. Cummings was concerned…the next marking period brought another barb on my report card in her perfect handwriting:
    “He’s a good student but is beginning to show off too much.”
    If I wasn’t bragging about being unable to zip myself or bragging about how many gallons of urine I could expel while dreaming we got an aboveground pool, I guess I must’ve been bragging about being the fattest kid ever.
    By first grade, I was so plump I think I was wearing clothes I could squeeze into now. My queeny, shrimpy sidekick—we were like a pre-pubescent, homosexual version of Laurel & Hardy, which if you think about it, is not the worst idea anyone ever had—frequently pointed out my girth as a means of controlling me. He never had a better opportunity than he did the day we were all weighed in class with the results yelled out for all to hear. Shit like that actually happened in the ‘70s…and you’re wondering why people over forty-five laugh warmly at horrific sayings like, “You can never be too rich or too thin”?
    My weight easily eclipsed that of the next fattest child, just as I easily eclipsed the sun if I stood near a window.
    My sidekick took to calling me by my weight. “You 65-pounder, you!” he would say as a conversation came to a close. He was actually much more clever than he sounds. He once told a teacher that Hamlet was an omelet made with ham. For a seven-year-old, he was a regular Noel Coward. Lohanthony’s got nothin’ on him.
    And yet in spite of what we could now call verbal abuse, I adored my sidekick, so much so that I was heartbroken to move away yet again in the third grade, after four years of palling around with the little