Fat yellow teeth
Fat.
Yellow teeth, sour breath, bleeding gums.
Giant narrow skull, greasy hair, dandruff.
Fat white pimples on my cheeks, fat black heads on my eyelids.
Sagging gut and man boobs.
Wiry black hair and pimples on my shoulders.
Greasy pit hair.
Bloated, hairy, dirty, pale ass.
Micro-penis and double urethra.
Fat white legs and pimples on my drooping knees.
That was me. All at once. 12 years old.
A monster.
Don't believe me?
I was born with sagittal synostosis. That meant my head had to grow long and narrow to fit my brain. And every inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria living on it.
I could feel every single one of them.
Believe me now? You should.
It's why I did what I did.
My uncle Michael took me on a kill-run down to Port Sulphur to tell me I was going to summer camp. He was a veterinarian who specialized in killing pets. I thought I was just going to watch him kill a dog.
We had fun for a while. We stopped in Thibodaux and he bought me a box of Oreos and a Barq's root-beer.
"You should lay off that shit. They used to stuff those things with lard," he said as we walked back to his truck.
"I like them."
"It's better to be skinny and ugly than fat and ugly, you understand what I'm saying?"
"That I'm ugly?"
"Skinny people live better. Get in the truck..."
We listened to some Boston 8-tracks on the drive. He told me a dirty joke about a vagina with teeth, which I didn't understand, but I laughed anyway, because he was laughing.
Then we parked next to a black slag heap and across from a shuttered wooden house sinking on one side. I watched him grab his tackle box out of the back of his truck.
"What's wrong with the dog?"
"Doesn't matter. Get out. I'm gonna need your help..."
My uncle Michael had that pre-cancer smoker's growl that made him sound like he was pissed off, even if he wasn't. So I got out of the truck and everything smelled like rotten eggs...
When we were crossing the road, I saw a little girl watching us from the porch of the next house. It looked like she had a full set of teeth growing out of her forehead and a bone sticking out of her right calf. My uncle Michael laughed when he saw how scared I was.
"Welcome to in-bred city."
"How do people live like that?"
"If that's what you want to call it."
He grabbed my arm and dragged me to a little chain fence.
"What's wrong with the dog?"
"Worms in its brain."
"How did the worms get in its brain?"
"Shit for food."
He opened the fence, and we dodged the milky piles of dog shit in the yard. He knocked on the door and an obese woman in a green silk night-gown answered. She smelled like cigarettes and piss. She had a caramel-colored drink in her hand.
"I'm Doctor Mike. I'm on call for-"
"Come on in, my honey. Guffy's in the next room..."
