Alisa: A Story of Race, Sex, Class, and Shame

LABOR DAY 1996: Tug… Tug… Tingle… Tingle… I lay on my bed and “pulled the pud” as they say… For the 6 th time that Labor Day… Late summer afternoon light pierced the periphery of my shade. Noon o’clock and I had already climaxed five times (ten times a day was nothing for a young buck/cuck like me!) The next morning, I would start the first day of my Sophomore year and so I made sure to make the masturbatory most of my idle idylls. School meant six hours a day of not jerking off – the horror! (though, on the other hand, the sluttish girls who walked through the pheromone-saturated hallways were the best source of fantasy fodder.) A wave of fresh anxiety coursed through my body. I shook my left leg, twirled my right hand, and rolled my head back and forth against the pillow (as if I were the little girl from “The Exorcist” – “your mother sucks cocks in Hell!”) Oh, the first day of school… (scarier, in many ways, than shaking my tush on the catwalk!) Stomach-churn, stomac...

JULY 1996: “I don’t like those queers, but they’ve been good for ya’. Before them you were just sitting in your room like a piece of fungus growing on the wall. You need structure, you need activity. Just like your sister with soccer and violin. Doesn’t mean I like those queers.”             Mother did not hate Jahn and Mark because they were gay.             “They’re arrogant queers. They act like you’re a nobody if you’re not a model.”             But weren’t most non-models nothing but nobodies? (Sorry for the quadruple negative.) I didn’t respect the blue-haired 60-year-old night clerk at WaWa, a duct-tape-wallpaper-person (though for all I knew she worked there to pay for her dying husband’s palliative care.)             Most ordinary people seemed bovine ...

JUNE 1996:             Anais’ burgundy lips pulled from the Marlboro Red (a manly cigarette for such a delicate girl.)             Anais – a decadent name. Decadent even before I knew it was the name of Henry Miller’s most famous lover. Henry Miller was hot yet gaudy stuff as a writer, but he was also a proto-decadent. He should have rejected a bohemian lifestyle and stayed home with his wife and child (he could have written in his spare time.) Few sins are more egregious than the conscious embrace of la boheme (who doesn’t like hot showers and private shits?)             She pulled again.             I wanted, needed, and deserved a cigarette (after all, I had just worked hard and hard work always deserves a reward.) But what would dad do if he smelled cigare...