TOO HOT TO HANDLE

(excerpt from RETARDED BEYOND REDEMPTION)

When I was in seventh grade I attended Goddard Junior High School in Midland, Texas. My rich bitch classmates had names like Katie and Kelly and Tiffany and Mallory. Their mothers dressed them in the hottest Eighties fashions. They wore ESPRIT and Benetton shirts and GUESS jeans. They wore James Avery jewelry and Swatches. They wore bows in their perfect hair. I wanted to be a rich bitch. I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be a cheerleader.

My Gemini mother had filled my head with stories of her glory days as a cheerleader at Seymour High School in the Sixties. Go Panthers GO! Her mother, my maternal grandmother (Meme, a Libra, The Queen of Texas) was a cheerleader at Seymour High School in the Fifties. Go Panthers GO! I thought if I could be a cheerleader like my mother and grandmother I would have a perfect fucking life. I’d be adored, popular, invited to all the hot shit Eighties parties. I’d have a boyfriend who loved me so much he’d buy me a homecoming mum and a James Avery promise ring. He would slow dance with me at the school dances to Bon Jovi and Def Leppard ballads. I could not imagine a more excellent life.

So when I was thirteen years old I “tried out for cheerleader” (auditioned) in the Goddard Junior High gymnasium. I was scrawny with short black hair and braces on my crooked teeth. I couldn’t even do a cartwheel, much less a back flip. But I stood there before my peers small and shaky and oh so brave. “Ready. Okay!" That’s how I started my cheer. “Too hot to handle! There’s absolutely no doubt!” That’s the only part of the cheer I remember. It was a common cheer. I did one or two cheers per the audition process. After my pathetic performance there was perfunctory applause. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Katie Fletcher, a cute blonde, was head cheerleader. Kelly Roach was also a cheerleader. Heidi (can’t recall her last name) was another Goddard Rockets cheerleader. Once, years after I’d graduated from high school, I saw Katie Fletcher in an airport. I remember thinking, “My god. How far you have fallen.” She was an ordinary overweight woman with a couple of kids. But she seemed happy enough so good for her. No one can be a cute blonde cheerleader forever, inspiring envy in lesser girls and lust or something similar in boys with names like Chad and Heath.

My cheerleader dreams never came true. Most of my Texan American dreams never came true. I’m sitting here in San Pedro Belize writing and making music with a clay mask on my face watching the country of my birth implode on YouTube. Today is Halloween. I’ve got candy. Las Vegas is flooding. There was a shooting in a SPIRIT store in San Francisco. The usual noise. What’s the frequency, Kenneth? I’m sure I do not know. I don’t count. Consult someone who does.