The next day before science class I explained to my teacher what had happened, and when the bell rang she turned to my sixth-grade class and told them I had something to say. I got up and read my prepared statement, which opened with something like this: “To my classmates and to the science community, I have committed an act of fraud. I falsified my data, and in doing so, have taken a process that is important to the development of the human race and disgraced it.” After that it went on for a few more lines, but no one, including myself, had any idea what in the hell I was talking about. In between sentences, I glanced out at thirty sixth-graders staring blankly at me. After I was done reading my statement, I sat down. The teacher thanked me, said a few words about cheating, and then we moved on.
When I got home that night, my dad asked me how it went. I told him I had read the apology and that the teacher had thanked me.
“I’m sorry I had to be so hard on you, but I don’t want people thinking you’re a lying sack of shit. You ain’t. You’re a quality human being. Now go to your room, you’re grounded.”
On Respecting Privacy
“Get the fuck outta here, I’m doing stuff.”
On Showing Fear
“When it’s asshole-tightening time, that’s when you see what people are made of. Or at least what their asshole is made of.”
On Hypothetical Questions
“No. There’s no scenario where I’d eat a human being, so you can stop making them up and asking me, understood? Jesus, is this how you spend your day, just coming up with this shit?”
On Friendliness
“Listen, I know you hate playing with that chubby kid because his mom’s a loudmouth, but it’s not that kid’s fault his mom’s a bitch. Try to be nice to him.”
On Fair Play
“Cheating’s not easy. You probably think it is, but it ain’t. I bet you’d suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately.”
On Leaving My Toys Around the House
“Goddamn it, I just sat on your goddamned truck guy. . . . Optimus Prime? I don’t give a shit what it’s called, keep it away from where I like to put my ass.”
On Child Safety
“Don’t touch that knife. YOU never need to be holding a knife. . . . I don’t give a shit, learn how to butter stuff with a spoon.”
On Slumber Parties
“There’s chips in the cabinet and ice cream in the freezer. Stay away from knives and fire. Okay, I’ve done my part. I’m going to bed.”
On Sharing
“I’m sorry, but if your brother doesn’t want you to play with his shit, then you can’t play with it. It’s his shit. If he wants to be an asshole and not share, then that’s his right. You always have the right to be an asshole—you just shouldn’t use that right very often.”
“Let’s just shut the fuck up and eat.”
Both of my parents grew up poor—my mom, in an underprivileged Italian community on the outskirts of Los Angeles (her mother and father both passed away before she turned fifteen, at which point she and her five siblings were split up between a few different relatives); and my dad, on a farm in Kentucky, where he and his family worked as sharecroppers until he was fourteen and his dad bought the farm.
“When I had an earache, my mom would piss in my ear to kill the pain,” my dad once told me in an effort to illustrate the depths of his family’s poverty.
“That just seems weird, Dad. Not something poor people do.”
“Yeah, maybe that was a bad example,” he said after thinking about it for a moment.
Regardless, my parents never missed an opportunity to remind me and my brothers that we had it good. “You prance around on your fucking skateboards and bikes like you’re the goddamned Queen of England,” he used to tell us when we spent our weekends goofing off with friends and neglecting our chores.
Sometimes my parents worried that my brothers and I had it too easy; that we’d grow up not understanding the value of a dollar, or how it feels to struggle. Even before my mom attended law school and began working in poverty law, she spent a lot of her free time volunteering in the poor communities of San Diego. She worked with parents on welfare and with homeless families, organizing afterschool programs or helping them become self-sufficient to get off welfare. Anytime I complained about anything, she’d invoke those families.
“Why aren’t you eating your pasta?” she asked me one night over dinner when I was ten years old.
“It’s got peas in it,” I replied.
“So pick out the peas.”
“Well, you know I don’t like peas, but you put peas in it anyway. Why do you do that?” I whined.
