Some of this rampant incompleteness was the result of poor financial planning. (When we did years later my dad unfortunately forgot to clip its long nails and the poor canary accidentally lobotomized itself in the middle of the night.) Even our birdcage featured fake birds because we hadn’t gotten around to getting the real thing yet. And until the fire that destroyed our house and made us trailer park trash for seven months, our kitchen was constantly under “eventual renovation.” The entire residence was perpetually half-complete, like some suburban nod to Gene Wilder’s office at the end of Willy Wonka. A bathroom had some of the original plumbing blueprints sticking out from under the plaster on the wall. One room was ironically deemed the “Empty Room” because it was full of everything that couldn’t be tossed into the garage, the basement, the attic or the other “Empty Room.” (It was also called the “Dark Room” because it had never been properly wired for electricity.) My parents’ bedroom remains unfinished to this day. Those sections of the house not overrun by vegetation appeared to be forgotten entirely in mid-construction. One such houseplant-named “Marcello” because it was bought shortly after my brother was born-had already grown to a remarkably unreasonable size and assumed a position near the front door like Audrey II waiting to devour unsuspecting Jehovah’s Witnesses. Anyway, they’re 19 and naked and it’ll be a blast!”Įven back then our house seemed an unusual choice for photo spread, unless the planned theme was “Rainforest with Central Air.” That’s because thanks to my mother’s love of nature and unrestrained green thumb our home had slowly transformed over the years into a three-dimensional Henri Rousseau painting, with hundreds of the aforementioned “kmms” almost choking out all available space. Actually, they may want to start first thing in the morning so you might want to make them pancakes, too. Being who he is, my dad almost certainly never asked, “Isilda, would you mind if a magazine dedicated to female beauty used our house for a pictorial?” Instead he more likely said, “Hey, Isilda! Guess who’s coming to dinner! Well, maybe lunch and dinner, depending on how long of a shoot it is. I don’t believe he ever thought far enough to consider it a matter for deliberate and delicate discussion. To this day I have no real idea how my dad convinced my mom this was a good idea, given that despite her forays into penis cozy stitching she really did not care for pornography at all. One such connection begat another which begat another which eventually led to Penthouse wanting to do a photo spread of two young women baring it all in our very home. And he had made crucial corporate connections courtesy of our regular family trips to the adult entertainment business expo. Sales of his “Footsieball” and “Cockamania” shirts, as well as some and tee featuring a midget popping out of a hinged breast, were quite brisk. His signature “Original Orgy Shirt” had received considerable attention and awards from both the design and degenerate communities. I needed one grand gesture, one ultimate plan, that would make everything right and let me live in a world in which I didn’t sit alone in the front seat of the bus with burnt sienna and red-orange/orange-red smears on the back of my neck from the crayons the other kids threw at me.īy 1978 my father’s pornography business was picking up steam. I had to change course quick or by September I would be the laughingstock of not just the popular kids but also the nerds, the burnouts and even that student who liked to scream at his hand. By the summer of 1978-between fifth and sixth grades-I had finally fallen off the first rung of the social ladder and was flat on my ass in the “cha,” which in my little brother’s increasingly Seussian dialect meant either “dirt” or “cookie,” depending on what he was putting in his mouth at the time. It was a dream that I effectively blew my first day in seventh grade when I went out to the junior high school backyard after lunch and immediately burst into tears upon realizing there were no swing sets, slides or non-smoking 12-year-olds.īut I simply couldn’t wait for that inevitable failure. (What girl doesn’t want to play with fire a little?) Or I could finally be a nice, normal kid who didn’t have to wait eight hours to pee because he was too scared to use the school bathrooms. Or I could be the brooding yet sexy loner who was just too hot to handle. I had survived years of public torment and personal isolation in elementary school secure in the belief that when I entered junior high I could effectively reinvent myself to a whole new crop of classmates. If you haven’t done so, please read Part One.
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