Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Older Than Twitter
Being a nineties kid was an experience in and of itself. Every single generation can claim that their upbringing was unique, different, the ultimate challenge. Older generations remember walking up and down hills both ways to school sans shoes (I'm too lazy for that shit and would've remained illiterate for sure). They remember the good ol' days when they ate sticks of lard for dinner. Back then all it took was a handpicked willow branch to knock a kid in line. Screw childhood trauma. It wasn't even a thing. You weren't gay or autistic or different in any measurable way. Everyone had Barbie parts and babies were dropped by storks.
Older generations are wrong about having run the toughest gauntlet. Because being a child of the 1990s was, in fact, the experience of all experiences. Babies of the eighties turned kids in the nineties are the true survivors. Think about it like this: We were raised by folks who doped hard while listening to crap like Cheap Trick and Journey. Our own parents were brought up by one of the most rigid of generations. In turn, they refused to do things like cook or clean or even really discipline. We were the first generation to eat every single meal beneath the trans-fat-saturated golden arches of McDonald's. We played the shit out of Oregon Trail and died of diphtheria while our pregnant cows were trapped under broken wagon axles. We hacked away at our eyebrows on the instruction of heroes like Gwen Stefani and shook our asses to "Achy Breaky Heart" and "Macarena." From the wise advice of popular musicians, we knew to absolutely not go chasing waterfalls and to be suspicious of the comingled scent of sex and candy. By 1999 we knew to watch for scrubs, and under no circumstances would we be giving them our number. Understanding that many of us could never dream of being as goddamned cool as Lauryn Hill, we settled for homemade, slapdash basement choreography to Ace of Base's hits instead.
If you were a kid of the nineties, any sound resembling a velociraptor was enough to make you shit Frisbees. No one looked through your Halloween candy for drugs because no self-respecting person would waste perfectly good cocaine on kids. Those of us in states with bottle deposits recycled not because we cared about Earth but because every single dime dropped in your piggy bank inched you that much closer to the sweet BMX bike you'd been drooling over. Yearbook signing was the time of year when you found out if anyone was in love with you, and your favorite school lunch consisted of a square piece of pizza, a watery mess of fruit cocktail, and canned corn. If the hairnet-wearing cafeteria gals were feeling particularly frisky, the same meal might also feature a block of brownie (that, suspiciously enough, tasted exactly like the aforementioned entree).
My generation was allowed to play Donkey Kong until our thumbs were permanently crooked and our eyes bled. Sans chaperones, we ran around arcades and reserved games with a quarter steadied on the console. We chugged Surge soda even though the rumor in 1998 was that the stuff got banned and eventually discontinued solely based on its ability to make kids' hearts explode. We ate enough Pop Rocks, Hostess cupcakes, and Zotz to ensure prediabetes before hitting puberty (which came years early from all the hormones injected into our kids meals). An entire dinner could consist solely of the gelatinous goo of Cheez Whiz. Little Debbie may as well have been my auntie, because I was raised on her oversugared boxed delicacies. Nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes better than a Christmas Tree Cake chased by a swig of orange Fanta. Fight me on this.
In the nineties, there were no bedtimes to speak of. So long as when the streetlights flickered on your bike could be found in a heap on the front lawn, you were golden.
Police didn't care about seat belts, and pregnant women were prescribed small glasses of wine in the mornings to cure nausea. Parents hotboxed us in cars while they chain-smoked Pall Malls and threatened to "turn this fucking car around" at every stoplight.
It's a scientific fact that if your mom and pop weren't drunk driving on a Saturday, you weren't going anywhere. Whichever parent wobbled the least got behind the wheel of the station wagon and sideways squinted until you got home. If you wanted to go to goddamned Blockbuster, it was with the understanding that you very well might pay for the new release of 3 Ninjas Kick Back with your life. That's how weekends went.
When we weren't watching Steve Urkel on TGIF (which we had waited for all week), we were using homemade nunchakus to look as much like Michelangelo as possible. We saw toothless meth heads get tackled on bootlegged cable to the soundtrack of "Bad Boys," had crushes on Randy from Home Improvement and Topanga from Boy Meets World (some of us on both simultaneously). Our parents thought they were actual friends with the cast of Friends and our moms all wore Jennifer Aniston's haircut in a rainbow of shades.
Don't even get me started on how I continue to suffer from very real night terrors from the scene in My Girl where Thomas J. lay in the kid-sized coffin while Vada screamed for his glasses. That was fucking brutal, and I was never the same after seeing it. The 1990s were full of such trauma. We just didn't know the word "trauma" yet, so it wasn't a thing worth worrying over.
It was a confusing time in history.
As a 1990s kid, once you could ride a bike without training wheels, you gained access to the entire universe. There were no rules about traveling distance or supervision when you were on your self-powered vehicle. The possibilities were endless. What did you say? You want to get your favorite kind of slushy, but they only sell them two towns over? Get on your goddamned bike and pedal your heart out. You are mere miles away from the icy deliciousness of Mountain Dew mixed with Wild Cherry.
A common problem for our generation of youth was the blatant lawlessness of it all. Without rules, without guidance, we got into some real scrapes. Sure, it was wonderful to be free to roam and play until the fireflies started twinkling, but some life lessons were hard-earned. If you ask many of my peers, they can recount tales of skirmishes that today would likely end up with some soft jail time for the involved parties. Perhaps a bit more supervision could've lessened the number of sessions many of us now spend hashing shit out with therapists.
So yeah, being granted full access to independence wasn't without problems. No one knew where I was, and trust me, I was everywhere I shouldn't have been. My two younger brothers and I often tumbled with a set of ginger twins named Tom and Jerry (I shit you not). We didn't know which brother went with which name, but we did know that they were both fucking lethal. Luckily(?), I was one of the stockiest kids in the white-trash town we grew up in and a tyrannizer in my own right. Both Tom and Jerry and their asshole third rider, Phillip Filby, suffered my wrath more than once. The game was simple: whichever kid was still standing at the top of the sewage drainage ditch at the end of the fight, no matter the blackened eyes or dripping blood, was the victor.
Despite the dirt on my Umbro shorts, I was generally that kid.
My empire of bullying supremacy stood until a local sixth grader, the known overlord of the middle school and two grades my senior, heard of my reign. Unwilling to be outdone by a villainous little girl, he waited for me after school one day. Not giving a shit about my new-to-me hand-me-down-from-older-cousins pineapple culottes, he knocked me off my bike into the gravel parking lot. FFF (a moniker that stood for "Feral Fucking Frankie," gifted to him by local kids) then straddled me and allowed every pound of his weight to settle atop my nine-year-old body.
Feeling my ribs squeeze under his mighty bulk, I thrashed and yelped and dug my heels into the dirt until a bored-looking teacher pulled him off me.
Though I still kicked plenty of ass after that day, I was forever humbled. I continued throwing Phillip Filby into puddles of raw sewage, but he and I both knew after my encounter with FFF that I had been vanquished. The future wins that left my foes dripping in human feces were bittersweet at best. Once folks have seen you scream bloody murder for your mama beneath the beefy legs of a freckled ruffian, it's incredibly difficult to ever reestablish alpha status.
Childhood was death defying but fun. With few constraints over where my mind or body was allowed to roam, I, along with many of my generation, owned the universe. We rode skateboards, played pixelated video games, and threw dirt and curse words to our hearts' content. We were nineties kids, and we didn't have to give a shit.
Y2K was coming and there was a good chance we wouldn't survive it. We lived hard and fast.
The factor that made us true outliers was that we were the first wave of kids to have the internet at our fingertips. First, it wasn't there-we played with sticks and GI Joes-and then, all of a sudden, BAM!: fucking internet access. The whine of dial-up connecting changed the world as we knew it forever. Our parents had no earthly idea of the web's evils and capabilities, and we were allowed to roam AIM without supervision. I still swear as an adult that there is nothing in the entire world more exciting than the trilling notification of a message received from your best online friend from Lithuania.
Nothing says "please come decapitate me" like announcing that you're a thirteen-year-old girl home alone in a foreign chat room to bring the creeps (who figured out the evils of the internet far ahead of our naïve guardians) running.
With the insatiable thirst of a generation used to manually recording music with a tape deck and perfect timing, we reveled in using Napster and LimeWire to download and infect family computers with both terrible music and debilitating viruses. If one was fortunate enough to have siblings, one always had someone else to blame for the incapacitating malware. We had the luck of parents still not knowing shit about computers, thereby making it impossible to determine the true culprit, on our side.
The internet really didn’t become a thing until the early 1990s. I mean, I’m sure it was out there for rich people on their rich-people yachts or whatever, but it hadn’t yet graced the South’s lower echelon of motley citizens, such as myself. It wasn’t widely mainstream until 1999 (Wikipedia says, so it must be fact).
My mother, a registered nurse at a local hospital where she was professionally required to take care of all patients, even KKK members (think rural Arkansas), lugged our first computer into our house at the beginning of my freshman year of high school.
My brothers and I stared in awe as our mom, about as tech-savvy as an 1840s farmhand, squinted at the instruction manual and plugged in cords and cables. It took a fair number of tears and swearing, but at long last, when she depressed the front-facing button, the power light flashed green.
Let me tell you, the giant, humming box was fucking glorious. I had seen computers at school but had never, ever thought our family would own one. But suddenly, it was there, in all its plastic glory, settled on a secondhand desk in our living room.
The first time I heard the droning hum of dial-up in my own house, my heart swelled like the Grinch's during the part where he decides to save Christmas.
The world was officially at my fingertips.
As one of the first millennials (the generation is defined as those born between 1981 and 1996; I was born in 1982), I am a fluid mix of that generation and the one before (Gen X). My early-eighties peers and I have been dubbed "elder millennials" by a bunch of dickbags who have no idea what it feels like to start receiving AARP membership offers in the mail. My younger millennial brethren consider me an antiquated dinosaur in desperate need of makeup tips and a daily multivitamin. But once members of the cohort before mine find out I am a loathed millennial, I am shunned as a self-entitled jobless jagoff, which hardly seems fair, because I have a job and I try to keep my self-entitled-ness in check (which is precisely why I'm writing a book all about myself).
I am the voice of a fucked-up (but hilarious) generation.
Enjoy my rant.
Chapter Two
Her Village
I grew up in a quaint cottage in the countryside. It had sleepy English ivy slithering up the sides and a small courtyard in the back reminiscent of a secret garden found in an identically named movie from my childhood. Outside could be heard the soft lilt of twittering birds and the occasional nibble of a rabbit that lucked into a bit of clover. When I threw open the clapboard shutters to sing over the morning dew, a chorus of nature's most beautiful creatures echoed my gay melody.
Kidding.
I was raised in a series of trailers and dilapidated rental houses. Some were nicer than others but none of them had goddamned creeping ivy unless you count the thatches of poison oak that had inspired many a scrotal rash on my younger brothers. In lieu of a mystical garden, we had skinny dog runs that didn't dare grow grass.
My family moved a lot but never to anywhere exotic enough to brag about in new school cafeterias during auditions with prospective elementary friends. Not even a third grader is impressed to hear that you lived in eastern Oregon or that you've done a stint in Ogden, Utah.
Before I was eighteen, I had lived in twenty houses. Unbelievably, not a single one of them was a mansion. With little money and plenty of landlords ready with eviction notices for overdue rent, we relocated on the regular. In my youngest years we flitted here and there in the Midwest, generally keeping near both sets of grandparents. Later, though, we wandered all over, including several moves following my parents' divorce. By the time I was fourteen, when my mom told us to pack again, I agreed but told her it would be my last time. The cardboard boxes, which were worn thin from overuse, were loaded into yet another beaten cargo truck and we went south. When we landed in Arkansas I registered for school, unpacked my trinkets, and announced that I was finished with address changes. Like the spot or not, I was home.
