Badass

I recently left the following comment on this blog:

 

I had a similar experience once. I was a very late bloomer: I always say I had an “awkward phase” from the years 0-22. Basically, I looked like a huge nerd, even though I was totally cool–people just had to get past the braces and long, pasty horseface. I pulled out a cigarette one night as a group of us new dorm friends were walking to a Blues club, and a girl stopped in her tracks and said, “YOU smoke?? You just don’t look like the type!” I understood what she meant: You look like a dork who’s never done a thing wrong. My response: “Yeah, and I’ve had sex, too!” That shut her up. I know it’s a completely different circumstance, but I can get this. People can be so stupid! We’re all judgmental by nature, but come on–keep your stupid judgments to yourself!! Rock on; I love this blog.

 

It’s been 17 years since I was asked if I smoke. Since then, I’ve totally morphed (with the help of a shitload of makeup and a horrible dye job that I keep up religiously—or once every three months) into looking as much on the outside as the trashy skank I am on the inside.  But just in case I’m ever again mistaken for a dork (alright, dammit, in case anyone ever calls me on it again), here are a few of the badass things I can tell people I’ve done in my life:

 

1.)     I cheated on a boyfriend.

 

This one was hard to believe, especially if you knew me back then, during the time of the aforementioned braces and pasty horseface.  People wondered how I could get one guy, let alone two—and they were both actually really good looking. 

 

My best friend and I were talking about this just the other night over some drinks.  I said something like, “I was so ugly, but I’ve always had this fun personality, honed from years of overcoming this face.  So I was able to pull plenty of good-looking guys.”

 

I’m not the type to say things like this in order to garner sympathy—really, I’m not.  But I do feel like my asshole best friend could have tempered her nodding just a little bit.  She was agreeing so furiously that I thought her stupidass bobble head would fall off.  Skank.

 

I remember once, my main boyfriend got into a fight with some guy who’d called me—what was it?—oh, an obnoxious bitch.  I hate to say it now, 15 years later, but it’s time to come clean:  Um, he was right.  But my boyf wasn’t having any of it.  He grabbed the guy, threw him up against the wall, and punched him in the face.

 

People began to gather around like they always do to watch a good fight. But their mouths were agape with confusion and disbelief as they drank in the sight of me and then looked toward my boyfriend, busy punching away.  I would say that their thoughts were so loud that you could almost hear them, but I’m pretty sure someone in the room actually said this out loud:  “That really good-looking guy is fighting to defend the honor of the horse in the hooded sweatshirt and socked sandals?  Holy shit, now I’ve seen it all.”

 

And don’t worry—I learned my lesson. Even sweet guys can only take so much.  He found out I was cheating and dumped me, but only after my mistress (who was also a guy, but I find it much cooler to call him my mistress) got sick of being my mistress and did the same. 

 

Being dumped twice in the same few days is NOT good for a horseface’s self-esteem.  I walked around with a hangdog expression for months, and people (especially my older sister) could not stop taking the opportunity to ask things like, “Why the long face?”

 

Assholes.

 

2.)     I stole $5 from the top of someone’s refrigerator to pay for a pack of ciggies.

 

Wait, no, that was actually my best friend’s boyfriend, and it was my $5 that was taken from the top of the refrigerator.

 

I did piss on his toothbrush to get him back, though.  Problem was, he didn’t use a toothbrush.  Ciggies weren’t his only addiction, and the meth had claimed all but three of his teeth.

 

I guess the joke was on me.

 

3.)     I scratched BITCH on the hood of some high school girl’s car.

 

Oh, no…wait again.  That was actually done to me.

 

Believe it or not, my peeps, despite the snark that I put off on this blog, I’m actually a really nice person, and I always have been.  I had no enemies in high school, so this one had us all scratching our heads…until Dad got home from work and informed us that it had our mother’s name written all over it.  (Although I’m not sure where there would’ve been room; the culprit made sure to pen the sweet nothing in humongous letters that stretched from the windshield wipers to the grill—Mom must have hired a professional.)

 

Come to find out, Mom had, in fact, been mad at Dad for dating again just after the divorce, so she had one of her really classy friends from her new job at the factory send him a message via key on the black station wagon.  Too bad it was the car that Dad let me use to drive myself and my three younger siblings to school. But how would Mom have known that?  She’d moved out two years prior.

 

It’s a fun family story.  We keep it alive for the sole purpose of embarrassing a very repentant Mom by retelling it every Christmas when Mom and Dad get together with all of us kids and have some wine.  (I’m her favorite daughter; she felt awful when she found out they’d keyed the wrong car; she’d also been hoping for a more manly word like assface, but I guess you get what you pay for.)

 

Even after all these years, I still wake up early every Christmas, eyes shining with excitement, and look in the driveway to see what fun phrase Mom’s friends came up with this year.  But it never seems to happen. Maybe she’s actually growing up.  (TEAR)

 

4.)    I let a roommate wearing an awful dress out of the apartment without telling her to change.

 

I knew the damned dress was ugly.  Had she been alive, Helen Keller would have been able to tell that the damned dress was ugly. 

 

But I was trying to be nice.

 

When we got to the comedy club, all of our mutual friends began giving me death stares.  I had no clue what I’d done until one of them pulled me aside.

 

“You stupid, stupid girl,” she hissed, inches away from my face.  “She looks terrible!  That dress is enough of an eyesore to keep all of the guys away from us all night—nobody’s going to want to be seen with a group of girls who hangs out with someone who would wear a dress like that!”

 

I blinked.  “Did you just say eyesore?”

 

In the end, the dress ended up working in our favor:  The jokes that we made about it were something to bond over with the guys who’d been brave enough to be seen in the vicinity of it.

 

Now I just tell people when they look like shit, but that seems to piss them off, too.

 

I tell you, my peeps, you just can’t win sometimes.

 

5.)     I manhandled a pile of dog poop.

 

Really?  Because you’ve never had a few too many beers on a girls’ night in college and mistaken a small pile of dog poop for a hamburger and brought it to your lips, ready to take a bite?

 

Oh, you haven’t?  Really?  Riiiiiiiight.

 

Anyway, I figured it out right before I actually took a bite, and I ran, shrieking, to the kitchen sink to fling it in.  When I tell this story (because isn’t it a story you’d tell often, too?), people always ask why the hell I threw a semi-steaming pile of dog poop into the kitchen sink instead of flushing it down the toilet.

 

I don’t know how to answer that.  The sink just seemed logical.  I think that in my beer-hazed brain, I couldn’t let go of the idea “hamburger” that had lodged into my brain, even though I was at least partly aware that what I was holding in my hand was a pile of dog crap.

 

So kitchen sink it was.  It’s where I used to throw all of my raw meat…and dog shit.

 

I’m so excited I got a chance to share with all three of my readers just how badass I can really be.  Remind me to tell you all about my badass sunshine tattoo…holy shit, I’m not allowed to say “badass” and “sunshine tattoo” in the same sentence, am I?

 

Dammit.

 

I do believe I can make a monthly installment out of this subject.  Except I’ll probably change the title to “Dumbass.”  It seems to fit a bit better than “Badass,” wouldn’t you agree?