That's My Bix!

It is 1984 and I am thirteen years old. For my golden birthday, my mother informs me that her present to me is that she is taking me to my very first concert. Awesome, I think! My brain immediately swirls to concert footage on MTV, the kind showing Bruce Springsteen pulling Courteney Cox up to dance with him on stage. Or maybe it will be Cyndi Lauper? Or the Police? Or Lionel Richie? The bubble bursts: it’s the Beach Boys, with opening act America, who hadn’t had a hit since 1975. Awesome. It is still a concert. A concert! I am stoked.

My aunt and her friends are going too, which gives me hope, as they are ten years younger than my mom and ten years older than me. Still young enough to have some sense of coolness. I plot all week for what I’m going to wear. I pick out many potential outfits but finally end with a pair of brand new, blinding white Tretorns that I got for my birthday, a pair of white jeans and a red and white striped shirt. My mom’s boyfriend wouldn’t let me wear his straw panama (from actual Panama) hat, but otherwise, it is absolutely perfect.

The concert is held outside, at a fairgrounds, all day on a Saturday. The grounds are still soggy from a few soaking thunderstorms earlier in the week, but they’ve spread out straw on most places. Even still, there’s nowhere to sit without getting muddy, and no one has thought to bring a blanket. With my white pants, it’s not like you can just plop down on the ground, so I stand all day. Everything is ridiculously expensive and I am shocked by the simple fact of venue markups. A can of soda for $2.00 when they cost less than a quarter at the gas station? Insanity! I had felt like a mogul when I walked in with $8.00, but in the heat, it’s gone before the first act is off the stage. Luckily, my chaperones have realized that beer costs the same as soda, so they start just handing me dollars in return for my role as beer runner. Rural fairgrounds didn’t think twice about selling a kid beer for their parents, as long as they didn’t look like they were going to drink it themselves. It was a different time.

During one of my errands, I notice two guys looking at me. They both have facial hair and wear the ridiculous short cutoffs that you would imagine at a tractor pull. One isn’t wearing a shirt.

I smile, because it doesn’t occur to me to not, and collect my three Budweisers and a Mountain Dew, clutching them against my stomach for the walk back. One walks over to me.

Hey! What’s your name?

Weetabix.

Hey there Weetabix. I’m Carl and this here’s Beef. He’s made a bet with me and I’m hoping that you can help me out?

Everyone reading this right now is seeing red flags, but I am thirteen years and four days old and have always been the fat kid. I am accustomed to slipping in and out of crowds being totally invisible. I don’t have flags yet, not of any color. I don’t know what to do. I look through the throng of humanity gathered near the stage. My group is camped out near the front, primed for an excellent view when the headliners come out.

Sure! What can I do?

Well, Beef bet me $10 that I wouldn’t be able to lay you. So I thought thought I’d ask and maybe you’d be up for it? Maybe you and I could go back there, here he nods his head behind a row of blue plastic porta-potties and we can fuck and then I’ll split the money with you. How’bout that? Otherwise, I gotta pay that asshole $10. Wanna get laid?

The skin on my neck goes clammy in the hot sun. I utter no thanks and walk away, listening to the sound of Beef’s howling laughter. I don’t know what happened, but I sense that it was a mean joke. I am fat, so having sex with me is somehow easier, somehow a diversion for when you are bored, waiting for the headliners to show up. I climb back to the crowd over muddy berms, terrified that I will slip against the ground, fall into the dirt and they would see me down, like a Sunday night Mutual of Omaha pack of lions. They would see their opportunity and attack.

It occurs to me now that Carl probably had no idea that he was talking to a 13-year-old. After all, even at 13, I was already 5’7″ and was a 36C. Regardless, when I returned with the beers and my soda, I stood there mortified, completely and utterly embarrassed and told no one. My aunts and her friends were too cool and my mother, just clueless, utterly and completely clueless. I sat there in silence, listening to their inane drunken chatter. It was horrifying. I wanted to cry. Those men picked me because I was fat. I wondered if the women around me could sense, if the other men in the crowd were likewise looking for opportunities to have a riotous joke to tell their friends later.

When it is time for the next beer run, I don’t want to go, until my mother becomes annoyed and threatens to take me home. I already know that if I force her to leave the concert that I’ll be hearing about it for days, if not weeks.

Come with me! I beg anyone in our party, but they are enjoying the opening acts too much and don’t want to miss anything. I go back to the beer tent and Carl and Beef are still standing there, smoking and drinking. I try to slink past them, using the power of my mind to make myself invisible. It almost works. I have my quarry and am walking past them back to the group when Carl sees me and shouts Hey, did you change your mind? I say nothing and do not look at them. Come on, baby, how about $15? I can be real quick! He says and Beef laughs and mumbles something, jerking at his own crotch. Seeing no response, Carl shouts Fucking cunt! which every man in the vicinity hears and turns his head to watch, staring at me as I pass. Powers of invisibility failed.

I go back to my mom and ask to leave, just leave, please, come on, can’t we just go? But she doesn’t want to go anymore. She wants to stay, and cracks open another. Everyone around me is intoxicated. The air is thick with sweat and beer breath. Men are wrestling in the mud in the center of the crowd. I say that I’m going to the bathroom and then to look for a better place to stand. I weave my way up close to the front and stand against the barrier, right below the guitarist, staring at a roadie who stands there with his arms crossed. He’s the only one I can see who isn’t drunk and his presence makes me feel safe. I stay there for an hour, pressed by 10,000 people against a temporary fence, wanting more than anything to just go home and crawl into my bed.

In the middle of The Beach Boys, I return to my aunt and her friends, who tell me that my mother is calling the police because she thinks I’ve been kidnapped and that I’m probably going to be in major trouble. When she returns much later with a Rent-a-Cop, she grabs me by my arm and starts shouting at me for ditching them and being irresponsible.

It turns out that she’s not that mad, because when the security heard that she had lost her child, they assumed that my mother, who looked far younger than 35, had lost a little kid and immediately pulled her backstage, where some members of the Beach Boys came over to see what was happening, and were ready to stop the opening act and make an announcement that the crowd should be on the lookout for a little lost girl named Weetabix. She excitedly relays the story to my aunt and her friends while the Rent-A-Cop warns me that I shouldn’t go running off like that without telling her where I was going. Don’t I know what could happen? Maybe I wasn’t old enough to take to a concert anyway, she says, and that’s the end of it.

Later, on the ride home, the first time we’re alone, she asks why I’m being so quiet. She would have thought I would be more grateful. You know, she could have brought anyone to that concert, but she picked me.

I try to start telling her about the men, about what they said, but can’t say the words sex and don’t even know what the word cunt means, but I think it means something horrible, or maybe is a word for really fat. My throat is tight and I’m trying to choose my words carefully, knowing that the wrong step and I’ll lose control, burst into tears, show my weakness. By necessity, I am extremely vague. She finally repeats back to me, So, some guys said something to you that you didn’t like? Is that it? Weetabix, you’re used to this. People say bad things to me all the time. You don’t think I have to deal with assholes? You just have to not listen to them. You don’t run away half cocked and ruin everyone’s fun just because you let them ruin your day.

I want to tell her that this isn’t like the other bad things. This wasn’t like the schoolyard taunts. This wasn’t like being called fat. This wasn’t about Weetabix Germs or jokes about whales or Fat Albert. This was something entirely different. This was more like I was standing on a precipice, staring into something mesmerizing, the potential for something awful that was to come. One false step. I want to tell her about the mud, about the possibility of slipping, about being descended upon by lions. Instead, I focus on my feet, my brand new white Tretorns which are now caked with thick chocolatey mud, and say You just don’ understand.‚

She sighs and we drive home. I never talk about it again.

New Year’s Day finds me, as ever, feeling extraordinarily stingy and thrifty. I always spend too much on Christmas, but seriously, I cannot help it. I grew up poor (cue the black and white grainy footage and the goddamn violins already) and that messes with your head. My mother-in-law has the same illness and we totally get off (eeuww) on the same spendy thrills, so I don’t think this is exceptionally weird or anything, just a side effect, like scars from having scratched chicken pox (Metaphor breakdown alert! Unlike being poor, scratching a pock feels oh soooo fucking good at the time, damn it. The back of my neck is a mine field of scars because I would only allow myself the pleasure of scratching where the scars wouldn’t show). However, I woke up today with the inexorable need to wander the cluttered aisles of TJ Maxx and stare at clearanced crap and pseudo-antiques. It was with great regret, however, because I knew that I’d probably talk myself into buying shit and again, my credit card is whimpering in the corner, struggling under its balance. However, Esteban was game in that we could look for furniture for the mostly finished dining room cum den situation. We desperately need to fill that room, as Tilly has been claiming it as her own and has been slowly marking every inch of the cream carpet with strategic hairballs. She’s playing Battleship on the berber and quite frankly, it really sucks. And also, the yodeling must be stopped with something that absorbs what must be very satisfying echoes.

I must interject my own thoughts and tell you that I am so fucking sick of fake vanilla scent that the next time it is foisted upon me, I may just shit my own pants to create a fog of poo smell as a type of self defense mechanism. It works for octopi, it should work for me in TJ Fucking Maxx.

I ended up only buying a faux fur throw that looks a lot like a skinned Muppet but makes me laugh. Then we went to World Market and, due to the clearances, made it out of the store with a ton of random booty (mostly Esteban’s weird beers) for hardly anything, and I got some little teeny Tabasco sauce bottles for my new Mr. Bento, which was one of my gifts from Esteban.

I’m weirdly super excited about the Mr. Bento. It’s pretty perfect, because with my current role, I spend hours sitting at my desk attached to my phone headset and if I can manage to get away for lunch, it’s not until very late in the afternoon. And the refrigerators at work are always super packed and sometimes your food isn’t there when you go to get it. Thus, if it’s not one of the days where we have catered lunches, I usually go with a protein bar or make very bad choices from the vending machine and Mr. Bento purported to be a good solution to my problem. I went out on a special grocery shopping excursion to buy fresh fruits and veggies for the Bento and have been perusing Bento sites, looking for ideas and tips. I definitely did not also look on eBay for Hello Kitty bento supplies. No. Because that would be OCD or something.

Yesterday, I packed my little Bento for its first field test and while the combo of breakfast/lunch was visually pretty boring, I definitely learned that you can’t pack cucumbers and snow peas in the same container as hummus without some kind of barrier because Very Bad Things happen (some kind of hummus/pea slurry, I think) and also that sandwiches suck because you have to play Tetris with the pieces to get them to fit in the container (although I think I did pretty well) and also, I am not a fan of sandwiches, unless they involve peanut butter and jelly. However, having access to attractively packaged healthy stuff was pretty awesome and I actually ate it rather than just resorting to a cold package of Pop Tarts and a pack of peanuts or dashing out for bean burritos at Taco Bell because it’s close and fast. I hope I can sustain this, though, because I worry that the toting and washing of the pieces every night is going to suck. But that’s what normal people do, right?

So, to sum up, I’m either going to abandon the Mr. Bento in, like, two weeks, or I’m going to be sculpting Hello Kitty rice balls by mid-February.

Green Bay has almost as many churches as bars (slap that shit on a bumper sticker, because “Almost as many Churches as Bars” is motto gold) and they’re always having fundraiser meals and whatnot. I can’t imagine ever going to some random church’s Pancake and Porkies (which, as a child of 80’s cable, always made me think of entirely other Porkies) breakfast with the parish. But right now, on the main street near our house, there’s a sign that says “Prince of Peace Beef and Pork Jan 8”. I so want that to not be advertising for a meal but that there really is a Prince of Peace and also Beef and Pork. I know that Jesus was Jewish so he never got to eat bacon but maybe he’s down with it now that he’s making the rules? I don’t know, but this is why proper punctuation is next to godliness. And also, pork.

Speaking of meat, holy shit, I just realized that the Green Bay Minicon is in, like 24 days! Wow! We had to move up the dates this year because the awesome host hotel is completely booked by a private group for almost two months over our normal late winter time frame, so we either had to move it back and chance the fact that we’d have a soggy, rainy, muddy gross Minicon, or just move it up to the last weekend in January.

And of course, I’ve thought almost nothing about it since deciding on the specifics, which means that the sound you just heard was the sound of my head exploding.

By the way, if you’re interested, there’s still spots left in the Minicon, but I am hoping for a final count by Jan 10th so that we can purchase food and stuff. Everyone is welcome and flights are still very reasonable (although they’re going to start going up very soon).

To recap, here’s last year’s video:

And the one before that:

You can find out more information here and you see that everyone actually has even more fun than it would appear on film. And there are more boobies. Tits never make into the final cut.