Lynn Bixenspan is Famous

I was convinced I was pregnant. Yes, I knew where babies came from. I had read a book about it in the backseat of my parents’ car when I was 5, OK?  My mom had intended to read it to me to explain her pregnancy, but I read it while she was driving. Plus, I had looked at a bunch of their porn, so I Totally Got It.

Around that age is when you start to develop Bodily Shame, but your relatives still think you’re a little kid whose nudity is asexual and irrelevant (if you’re lucky). I am still haunted by my grandmother toweling me off after a shower and yelling “Let me dry Your Area!” when I refused to open my legs. I had to explain that I wasn’t a baby and wanted to dry my own Area, OK? Then she got it. But even to a woman with 4 kids, it seems to be hard to remember what exactly a kid’s mind is like. There’s always that weird line, especially with smart, mature-seeming kids where you either forget they’re growing up or give them too much credit.

My mom thought it was totally OK to bust in on me taking a bath to wash off my 2-year-old brother. I was mortified - both because, well, I was naked and DIDN’T SHE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A BOY AND A GIRL WERE NAKED TOGETHER?! She was the one who had left the book in the backseat of the car! Later that night, I realized what must have happened.

My baby brother’s sperm had traveled through the bathwater and impregnated me with a Demon Child. I didn’t have a firm grasp on biology (clearly), but I knew enough about genetics to know that a child of siblings, especially a baby of a baby, was going to be deformed. And that the public shame and scorn were going to kill me. But I was determined to keep and love this Demon Child I felt kicking furiously in my stomach, even after a day of existence.

I could tell no one. They would all judge. And what would my mom say? Sure, it was her fault, but she’d be heartbroken. So I just wept at night into my pillow, for myself, for this monster child. How long did this go on? Months, in my memory. Days, even, maybe.

Until Jan came along.

Jan was a 5th-grader. A boy who probably suffered at the hands of the other boys because he was short, had a girl’s name, and long eyelashes (and looked kinda like a Fraggle). So he took it out on a bunch of 3rd-grade girls who were just trying to play kickball (I was staying active during my pregnancy). One fateful day at recess, Jan looked me in the eye, and punched me…..right in the stomach.

The stomach filled with baby.

I felt the child’s life drain out of me. I wept, both with sadness and relief. No more scorn of society, no more shame….but the child was lost.

I’m not sure how old I was when I figured out that that’s not actually how babies are made.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to live in a world where luv and making out happened only in some mystical universe filled with hazy feelings, where nothing ever smelled weird and Alice In Chains (Jar of Flies EP) played sexily in the background. And everything was chaste and pristine and ALSO NO TEEN SEX HAPPENED CAUSE THAT’S DANGEROUS.

And no one pooped. Well, at least no one pooped in that Magical Makeout World. Unicorns don’t poop. Layne Staley never pooped (fact).

Sure, the word poop was funny. It was, and probably still is, my one of my favorite words. But let’s get serious, guys. Actual poop is funny because IT IS REALLY PRETTY GROSS. And grossness had NO place in Makeout World.

As I got a little older and started spending more time in that World, with the people who lived there, it was inevitable that it was going to start getting a little less pure. You spend more time together, humanity and smells and imperfection start to creep in all Blob-like. But I still wanted to believe that if I were making out with someone, they probably didn’t shit. Or they did like sometimes, but only at one prescribed time per day in a perfect compact shit package, after which they used copious Baby Wipes, a bidet, and a delightful coconut ass scrub.

Senior year, I was at my boyfriend’s house. He kept totally wanting to go all the way, and I kept being all, NO WAY, DUDE. “But you don’t get it, once you do it, you’ll see…YOU WON’T EVER BE ABLE TO STOP.” OK, that sounds kinda terrifying. So after a vigorous session of him humping my bellybutton and me laying there in confusion, wondering if he knew what part of my body it was, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

And there it was.

Or, more accurately, there THEY were. Floating in the toilet, 2 small, round, perfect shitlettes. In HIS bathroom.

Was it possible? Was this shit out of the ass that had been so close to me just minutes before? My mind went into a frenzy. Could it have been his mom or stepdad’s shit? That was more likely, right? I mean, they were old, and more likely to be shitters. AND THEY WERE BOTH COPS. I hoped to God I was looking at cop shit. I can totally buy that cops shit a LOT.

So I flushed. I flushed, peed, tried to pretend nothing had ever happened. Went back into his bedroom and said not a word about it. Lived my life knowing that I may just have seen my first boyfriendshit.

Fast forward a whole bunch of years. I’m living on my own, in a studio. Sometimes, once in a while, I have gentleman callers over. Sometimes they spend the night, when it gets late and whatnot. So it’s inevitable that sometimes. Shits happen.

One morning I woke up and I heard Guy I Was Dating get up to go to the bathroom. He may have thought I was asleep. But I was wide awake to hear each and every pffftpffft plop plop plop, floff (wet poop) that popped and sang their way out of his asshole and into the toilet. I sat, mesmerized, thinking “he didn’t even turn the water on to hide the poop sounds.” Cause you know, that’s what I do when someone’s over. He did it with wild abandon. Or just half-asleep. When he crawled back into bed, I thought “He just shit. He just shit. But it’s OK. And I won’t say anything!” (I was really proud of this fact.)

Fast forward a year or so. I’m dating someone else. I go into the bathroom, and much to my shockchagrin, in a PTSD-inducing moment, I see…2 little round shitlettes, floating up out of the water. This time there was no doubt. This was no copshit. This is dudeImdating-shit. So many questions. Had it just floated back up post-flush? Had he even checked the bowl? Did he properly wipe his asshole?

And to make this moment even more critical, well. It was that time of the night where I knew What Was Expected to Happen when I got back out there. And sure, I had wanted it to happen. Did I still? Could I finally get past all my weirdness and immature teenage bodily function gross-outness to get close to someone who makes big ol’ doodys?

You know what? I did it.* I did it, and as I did, I thought to myself “You know what, Lynn? You’re finally an adult. I’m so proud of you.”

I really, sadly, sincerely thought this.

PS I poop, too.

*What is it?

I originally posted this on my now-defunct Blogspot blog in 2005, but THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW!

I like to think I’m pretty honest at this point in my life. Especially if you ask me a direct question. I may not go out of my way to break painful news to you, as I’ve realized that at some point in the past I used honesty as an excuse for bitchery. But I will tell you that your joke isn’t funny or confirm that, yes, your eyeballs were pecked out by crows in the middle of the night and replaced with giant marbles filled with googly eyes.
And I can’t participate in ongoing deceptions. I will never Punk you. Nor throw you a surprise birthday party. Good or bad, it ties my intestines in squirmy bows. I can’t even watch TV shows where the main character is in the dark about something the audience knows.
OK, so now that you know I’m a pretentious fuqtouch who lives up in a virginal tower of unabashed truth.
Here are some horrible lies I’ve told in the past.

1. In 2nd grade, I was desperate to be famous. Well, not so much desperate as… eagerly awaiting, with complete certainty of the eventual nature of this fact. I wasn’t quite yet dreaming of glamorous things like teendom. I was still too consumed with writing poetry about extremely relevant and universal topics like “Freedom”.
Excerpted from my postmortem collection of juvenalia:

(Selected stanzas from)
Freedom
by Lynn Bixenspan

In this land 
You can stand
Up
For what you believe in.
You might even win.

In this land
there will always be justice.
Whether the name is Mary
or Augustus.

It’s all clear
Very near
Never fear.

Freedom.

- - - 

I know. It’s pretty amazing that an 8-year-old was tackling this topic with such incisive … incision. Words that cut with the precision of a surgeon, right into the heart of a nation. That’s a metaphor. A simile uses “like” or “as”. Don’t confuse the two. Thanks.
OK, though, seriously, Augustus is clearly a Latino man. Mary is clearly an Anglo-Saxon woman. But here in America, they both receive the exact same treatment. That’s something to be proud of.
Proud enough to lie about in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.
My teacher announced that she was submitting it to the Martin Luther King Day Poetry Contest. Youths from all over America would vie for the prizes of up to $50.
I had no doubt in my mind that I would emerge victorious from this battle. I seriously had no concept in my mind of the prospect of defeat. I was the Smartest Kid in Lido Elementary School. And the Best Writer. I had my own 4th-grade language arts workbook. THAT I DID, UNSUPERVISED. This is no fuckaround. I was on some Doogie junk.
So, prematurely, I told my mom that I had won. Not a lie, just an early revelation. She was proud and happy, of course. 
The next day in school, over the loudspeaker, they announced the results. I was already preparing my clapped-at-face. No big deal. Just par for the course for the Smartest Kid in School.
“…1st place, Damian Marley, 5th grade. Congratulations!”
There had to be some mistake. 
Should I ask Mrs. Lieb what had happened? Maybe she forgot to send mine in.
No, I would just accept that there had been a mistake. 
And when my mom asked me later that day where she could read the poem, naturally I would say:
“The winning poems were published in 3-2-1- Contact Magazine.”
Why? Why add to the lie with something that could clearly be proven false?
I don’t know. Why did the guy on tonight’s edition of Crime Story lie and say that he had dropped his mail-order Russian bride off in Moscow when the airline records would clearly reveal that she HAD, in fact, come in to the US, which would then lead eventually to the police uncovering her body in a shallow grave on an Indian reservation 25 miles north of Seattle, with her bony hand sticking out of the dirt, as if crying out for help, clutching at one last hope?
The criminal mind is. diabolical.
I quickly ran to my room and hid every issue of 3-2-1 Contact Magazine deep into the disgusting moldy recesses of my closet.
She could never know I had lied. It would break her.