44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,17
perma-chub.
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1 Just for the record, sometimes when I feel bad about calling the father of my children a motherfucker, I remember that he is a motherfucker—as in, he is literally fucked by a mother, approximately once a week, while he lies there and fantasizes about his Google stock splitting. Then I don’t feel so bad.
2 That’s a gross exaggeration. I don’t really have OCD. People with OCD have actual reasons for the things they do, like the irrational belief that they will contract herpes of the eyeball if they don’t flip each and every light switch fourteen and a half times before they leave the house. There is nothing in the entire American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that describes my shit. I have three degrees in psychology, and I still don’t know what’s wrong with me, other than the fact that I’m a bad psychologist, obviously.
Lady and the Tramp
September 7
Dear Journal,
I’ve been thinking about my list of target behaviors again, and I’ve realized that my need for a nickname goes back to my parents. Doesn’t everything? Growing up, they never called me by any of my actual names. Instead, I was always Pumpkin or Cookie or Scooter or Doll Baby or Angel or—my mom’s personal favorite—Bee-Bee. (She meant it like baby, but since my initials were BB, it just stuck.)
So, by the infallible laws of classical conditioning, I grew to associate love with nicknames. Even now, decades later, throw a sweetheart or honey my way, and I’ll instantly assume, This person must love and adore me!
Stupid brain.
Although I’ve obviously grown attached to BB, my favorite moniker by far was the one my next serious boyfriend, Harley, gave me—Lady. I was sixteen, and it just sounded so grown-up and sexy. It wasn’t generic, like baby, nor did it sound like something my parents might coo into the phone when they picked it up after ten o’clock, knowing good and goddamn well that I was talking to a boy.
Lady was statuesque. Strong. Feminine. Classy.
I was, in reality, none of those things.
When I met Harley, I had braces, weighed ninety-five pounds—including my steel-toed combat boots—and had a mostly shaved head. A charitable classmate introduced me to him after I’d been cheated on, humiliated, and repeatedly screamed at in front of the whole school by Knight.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Knight, the angry skinhead guy, turned out to be a shitty boyfriend? No way! Fuck, I did not see that coming!
Yeah, well, as it turned out, tidal waves eventually recede. And when they do, everything that was momentarily upended and twirled about is left smashed and soiled, miles from where it began.
As notorious and well known as Knight was, Harley James was a legend. He was the original Peach State High School bad boy. No one had ever actually seen him since he’d dropped out while my crew was still in middle school, but rumor had it that he’d been squatting in an abandoned house in Atlanta with a band of gutter punks or otherwise engaged in some form of romanticized vagrantism. I now know that such a lifestyle is actually referred to as homelessness or how people contract scabies and trauma histories, but at the time, Harley James was a punk-rock god and thus the perfect rebound.
A girl in my social studies class gave me his number after seeing how distraught I was over my very public and very scary now-everyone-thinks-I-might-wind-up-butchered-and-mounted-to-the-hood-of-Knight’s-truck-like-some-fucked-up-pirateship-figurehead breakup.
Unbeknownst to me, Knight had started taking those Mark McGwire steroids a few months earlier and had morphed into the goddamn Incredible Hulk. Only, unlike Bruce Banner, he stayed giant and irrational all the time. Yeah, picture an already blood-thirsty Romper Stomper-looking motherfucker and then add fifty pounds of muscles and rabies. He was terrifying. And after the spectacular drama that ensued at Trevor Walcott’s Halloween party, I was in need of a new boyfriend, stat.
I saw my life flash before my eyes that night. I’d developed a serious crush on Trevor, the new kid at school who’d been allowed to throw a massive Halloween party by his single mother. She was trying to make up for leaving his father and moving Trevor to a new school in the middle of the year by contributing to the delinquency of a shit-ton of teenagers. Trevor was smoldering hot in a guyliner, black hair, black fingernails, bedroom-plastered-with-The Crow-and-Nine Inch Nails-posters, takes-lithium-for-depression-and-cutting-behaviors, mysterious kind of way.
I had every intention of fucking the shit out of him at his party that