A: I grew up with wonderful childhood friends in Chicago and St. Louis and was particularly close with both of my younger sisters. Still, I never had a Celeste, never had a singular best friend for more than a couple of years. For a portion of high school I even considered myself best friends with gorgeous twins who dropped every guy’s jaw within miles, but we lost touch when we left for university.  

I suppose the friendship Celeste and Lisa share is in many ways what young women desire, something steadfast, unconditional, protective. Exactly what I could have used to get me through that gauntlet of growing up female. I read the novel Lonesome Dove years ago and keep a tattered copy of it on my bookshelf. Maybe Lisa and Celeste are my Gus and Call, loyal to the end.  

Q: You’ve had a fascinating background – from modeling to contortionism to gutter cleaning – was it all a path to writing?  Are there specific experiences or people from those other vocations that made their way into Pretty Little Dirty? 

A: I’m a big believer in at least one cliché: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That is, if you’re able to see a particular event or experience for just that, for an opportunity to learn and grow, you can come out better for it. A lot of what I’ve done for work, for money, hasn’t been glamorous, some of it downright bizarre, and much of it physically or psychically taxing, but I wouldn’t take any of it back. And I do collect images and experiences compulsively. I’m sure admitting to that makes my friends and family wince; I should say, though, that I’m a believer in “real fiction.” I work very hard not to write thinly disguised nonfiction, especially where my characters are concerned. There’s one small exception in Pretty Little Dirty, but I’m not telling who that is! Even that characterization is many degrees of separation away from the actual person still walking this earth.  

Besides, the relaying of my true life experiences comes across like bad fiction. Most strangers laugh at me when they learn I’m a former trapeze artist and contortionist who’s chauffeured famous people, suffered two primary malfunctions the two times I’ve ever parachuted, and recently bungeed from the world’s highest jump in South Africa. Never mind swimming with penguins and watching baboons attack in the wild. My real-life stories sound absurd.  

Nonetheless, an insider’s view into protected or private circles can be valuable for writing. I’ll likely try my hand one more time at the world of circus, something I know a lot about. I had a novel at auction the week of 9/11 about a down-and-out circus troupe touring the deep South. Needless to say, it went the way of the towers. Even I didn’t want to read something so seemingly light-hearted at the time. I learned plenty: patience, fortitude, perseverance, and a true understanding about the loss of others. I’m very lucky.  

Q: Which writers would you say you either admire in general or have taken cues from?   

A: Lately I’ve read some amazing fiction. The Canadian author Charlotte Gill’s Ladykiller and Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love come to mind. As far as influences go, I’ve always loved Lorrie Moore’s work. I’ve never stopped admiring John Updike, Cormack McCarthy, Junot Diaz, Katherine Dunn, Michael Winter, ZZ Packer, Michael Ondaatje, Donna Tartt, Louise Erdrich, Bobbie Ann Mason. I think I could go on for pages. Contemporary North American fiction is alive and well, in my opinion. Recently I had the opportunity to meet a talented memoirist, Koren Zailckas, and of course nobody can keep a straight face reading David Sedaris.  

Q: Is there a story behind the title itself? 

A: A short one: I owe the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My title’s a letter off from their “Pretty Little Ditty.” I didn’t have a title for probably a year as I wrote, and kept searching LA hardcore bands’ lyrics until I happened upon the Peppers’. I wanted the novel to carry a touch more weight than a “ditty,” and believed that it might be a good idea to include the word “dirty” as a disclaimer. That’s a joke. Sex in novels is good, don’t you think? Maybe dirty as in “not nice” is better. 

Q: Given the story’s hometown/personal location for you, how did you pick where in Kansas City to set it?  So much of it is real – The Nelson-Atkins, the names of places – is there a “sculpture house” or anything like it?  Why Kansas City? 

A: The Kansas City Art Institute is a, ah, unique place for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Walt Disney actually did attend. I finished my undergrad degree there. Talented students and faculty, actually. They’re part of what made it such a unique place for me. As well, I didn’t want to set the novel in St. Louis where I spent the years of my life that some of the novel covers of Celeste’s and Lisa’s. I didn’t want any of my family or old friends worrying, trying to find where I’d dissed them.  

I know of no “sculpture house” in Kansas City, but there used to be a sort of creepy house near the lakefront in Milwaukee with a weedy yard full of sculptures. The fictional sculpture house is, in my mind’s eye, similar to this amazing house near KCAI that my very clever sister Meg managed to finagle for four of us college kids. Minus the sculptures. It was a huge three stories, made of stone, and had a tennis court in the back yard. Completely renovated. Guests were fascinated by the fact that we had to punch in an alarm code when we came home from a night of carousing. A roommate and I used to sunbathe topless near the net of the tennis court till we figured out that half of the neighborhood could see us from upper windows on the backside of the block.  

Q: You have returned to your home of New Orleans after fleeing from the floods with your husband.  It’s a city that is rich with beautiful settings and quirkier personalities and, frankly, now it has a whole new story to tell. Would you ever considering writing either nonfiction about your own experience or setting another novel there? One imagines Celeste would be right at home in New Orleans! 

A: Celeste would have taken to New Orleans, no question. Actually, the novel I’m at work on now takes place here, the year before Katrina. 

Q: Let’s talk about Pretty Little Dirty and the punk rock/rock concerts.  Is this the kind of music you listen to?  How did you decide to break up the chapters with such vivid vignettes and why?   

A: The hardcore punk world is something I know about, but the novel is in no way autobiographical. I made the mistake of hooking up with a guy from southern California when I was young and saw plenty. I still have a soft spot for some of the old school stuff, though, especially the band X, but no, I don’t regularly listen to hardcore anymore. The vignettes, those intercalary sections that utilize the second person “you,” were tough to write, but I wanted the reader to have an understanding, at the beginning, of where the story might end up. More importantly, I really didn’t want to prolong that portion of the novel in a chronological way. I needed the vignettes to do most of the talking for me so that when the reader arrived at that point in the narrative, I’d not need to explain or elaborate much at all. The dividers would have—sadly?—done it for me all along. Too, I chose the second person so that the reader would wonder who the “you” actually was. It’s a novel, ultimately, about a loving friendship and its turning points, a questioning of where things irreversibly changed, who led and who followed; I wanted the readers to decide for themselves.  Q: How would you describe the largely supporting male characters in Pretty Little Dirty?  Are they colored by our narrator’s own early experiences with immature boys and absentee fathers? A: I’ve asked a few people as to whether or not they believed Hank to be one-dimensional. Happily, nobody’s thought him to be reprehensible yet. He’s complicated, and makes plenty of errors in judgment, but he isn’t a monster in my mind. Same goes for Ess, the dummy. At the end of the day, I couldn’t have either Lisa or Celeste love a man (emotionally) any more than they loved each other.  Q: When you first start reading, you see the beautiful friend and the plain friend and think, “Ah, I know how this is going to work.”  However, it’s not long into the narrative before that traditional girl dynamic is made more complicated.  Was that something you were conscious of as you wrote? A: I kept handy a few books for reference the year and a half that it took me to write Pretty Little Dirty: a book of Greek mythology, The Great Gatsby, and a couple others. Along with a Sally Mann photograph of her beautiful prepubescent daughter that hung on the wall above my computer, the myth of Cupid and Psyche is actually the inspiration for the novel. The original is told from the handmaiden’s perspective, Psyche’s servant’s vantage point, but I wanted to examine a similar relationship that morphed into something very different. What happens when the power balance changes, when roles reverse?  Q: If Celeste were our narrator instead of Lisa, would she tell the same story? For example, what would she make of her own family, her first sexual adventures? A: It’d still be a story about a friendship, about love. Celeste is often more generous than Lisa, so she’d actually tell it differently, but I think it’d follow a similar tack.   Q: You teach at The University of New Orleans. If you had to give your students one piece of advice about writing, what would it be and why? A: No author ever made it by just talking about writing. You have to write. All the time. With discipline. If I’m allowed a second, I’d say that many young writers become masters of the craft these days, but too few remember heart. Fiction without heart is next to worthless. Give your readers something to care about. Q: What are you working on now?    A: Another novel, tentatively titled L’Enfant Terrible, a sort of New Orleans Peyton Place complicated by locale, racism, and disloyalty. I’m enjoying the days when I manage more than a few pages, and the hours speed by.    

EXCERPT

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art presented its pillared façade not far from our high school. Across the street from the museum sat a collection of converted old mansions and full-frontal contemporary buildings that comprised the Kansas City Art Institute. Walt Disney was said to have attended the Institute long ago but hadn’t graduated. The reason as to why he’d dropped out was not entirely clear, but the two overriding rumors seemed to center around his purported homosexuality and/or his taking a bunch of acid and drawing cartoon characters for all of his assigned projects—talking mice and the like.

Celeste and I had grown bored of hanging out at her pool all day, lying around in the sun. Reading or discussing guys only went so far. And the usual parties had become exactly that—the usual parties.

As good kids might want to do, we went looking for some clean diversion. Actually, we went looking for new guys, guys we didn’t know. I’m not sure whose idea it was to check out the neighborhood around the museum and the art school, but that’s where we set out to forage, to find some older, better, arty guys, guys who cared about more than sports, possibly an older European visitortype exchange kind of guy. We set out in short shorts and bikini tops, all the better for shopping the numerous balconies of the adjacent apartment buildings, student housing, and campus dormitories.

Slogging through the July heat on our first excursion out, flipflops slapping, we encountered no new guys. The sun beat down mercilessly, and we frowned and squinted. (Sunglasses would have left terrible raccoon-eye tans.) We understood quickly that we were idiots, roaming the melting blacktop streets and ant-frying sidewalks in the middle of the day. Where were the guys? We surmised that the interesting European ones with whom we would try out our French had to be in some air-conditioned location. Some life-drawing class—god, to get a naked guy for a model!—or some restaurant, or some wood-paneled room at the Nelson-Atkins Museum proper. But you couldn’t get into the museum showing so much skin, so we hoofed it back to the Diamond house, cursing the fact that neither Celeste’s parents nor my dad would loan or buy us a car.

We changed into jeans and faded summer Izods, and returned to the museum to pay our student dollar. Inside, the central atrium rose for stories. The cool of the stone and concrete and the air all around us made Celeste’s arms pebble with gooseflesh. I shivered and let my eyes adjust. Suits of armor flanked the halls leading to the galleries. Egyptian pottery rested inside tomblike glass cases. From the right came the distinct sounds of dining, of cutlery noise and genteel conversation and ice in glasses. We followed the smells of real ingredients wafting our way.

Past an archway an enormous room appeared, and this second tree-decorated atrium swarmed with people eating lunch. The patrons all had “the look,” paint-splattered and rumpled or moneyed and tweeded. The patrons wore their superior aesthetics on their sleeves. At least that’s what their plated chicken breast and new asparagus seemed to say: The painters didn’t paint houses and the tweeds didn’t hunt foxes. They didn’t need to bother with real work. Well, they didn’t have to work a regular schedule, at any rate, as many a painter had to buy gesso and canvas and many an original trophy wife had to get on the horse at some point.

Busers, the bus people—drones, we would soon learn to call them—picked up dishes and refilled tea and looked down their young noses at the diners. One female bus person sprouted blue tufts of hair from her temples like horns. Another guy had hair the color of blood, fresh-sprung, thick and scary. A tall, thin, graceful, adept, smiling, Chinese-looking person of completely indecipherable sex bused the tables, too, his or her chin-length hair a shiny, flirty curtain.

Celeste and I had found our venue. “Do you have any money?” she asked.

I dug in my jeans pocket as I surveyed the room. I didn’t feel uneasy. I saw no one I knew, but lots of people I’d like to. I loved the sensation of the place immediately and wondered why it’d taken us so long to get there. “Yeah. Twenty . . . two, three, twentyeight dollars.”

“Let’s eat something,” Celeste said, heading toward the incomparably chic cafeteria line. Waiting and watching a really handsome scooping-serving guy with five (five!) little silver ring earrings and short hair so severely short that without the earrings you would have thought he was in the military, I was suddenly reminded of Christmas trees. The workers fought their bland uniforms with color and shine and glitter. These people, I realized, feeling clever, were their own pieces of art.

In short order, Celeste and I got to know the servers. We infiltrated the staff deftly by tipping atypically well for a couple of high school–looking girls and—well, fuck it, fine, I admit it—eating at the art museum nearly every weekday for the rest of the summer.

Celeste had the sense to have us stop wearing upper-body insignia. No more Polos or Izods. Plain or bizarre T-shirts replaced our preppy shirts, and we opted for the oldest jeans in our dressers. Thread by thread we unwove perfectly good blue-jean knees—you couldn’t have the holes looking like you’d just made them. I can only imagine how neon-bright our want had been those first few weeks, how baldly we had been courting attention. I’m embarrassed just to think about the deliberateness of our plan, the extra mascara, the switch of shoes, the attempts at “unusual” hair without actual cutting or dyeing.

There was a core of seven Kansas City Art Institute students who worked regularly at the Nelson-Atkins dining room. Surely by the time the troops broke down and decided to include Celeste and me, it had become a matter of pity, or more likely a matter of fuckability, a five-syllable system by which every visible human was rated. Celeste and I did rate high on the fuckability scale.

It was Brooklyn who bridged the gap. Formerly Brooke, Brooklyn was a server with a black-dyed, spiked weed patch of hair. (All of the crew could be immediately identified by hair alone.) Brooklyn was in the process of becoming a man, although she still happened to be in the money-saving stages for counseling and surgery and airfare.

Taking her time to water us and compliment some something of our beings—always startlingly observant and frighteningly honest compliments along the lines of “Your thighs look very strong” or “Your eyebrows are perfectly raw” or “You wouldn’t need to wear a bra if you didn’t want to”—Brooklyn trotted out the other busers one by one, instructing them to wipe or snatch or refill at our table.

“Drone Mack Truck,” Brooklyn said as the guy with the bloodred hair lazily ran a drippy rag over our glass tabletop.

“Drone Pia Stream,” Brooklyn barked when an itty-bitty blonde minced by. “Come here.” Pia did as she was told. “These tasty young women would like to meet us. Pia, Lisa, Lisa, Pia.”

“Hello,” I said as casually as I could.

Pia just looked at Brooklyn.

“Say ‘hello’ back, you bitch,” Brooklyn said lowly.

“Hello,” Pia tinkled, her voice light and sugared. We would come to learn she sprinkled and sprayed when told and that she was a slave of sorts, belonging exclusively to Brooklyn.

“Pia, Celeste, Celeste, Pia.”

Again, Pia looked only to Brooklyn. We hadn’t put anything together yet, and Pia’s behavior confused Celeste, I could tell, as much as it did me. “Say ‘hello’!” Brooklyn pushed.

“Hello,” Pia said nicely again.

“Go away,” Brooklyn instructed.

We met all seven within two lunches. Brooklyn had held the position at the art museum restaurant the longest, making her the head drone, or boss of the busers. We met Drone Blue Rose, the girl with blue hair thorns at her temples, and Drone Ing, the truly genderless Chinese person whose drone name, when directed toward another drone, indicated wishy-washiness, as in, “Stop Inging and make up your fucking mind.” We met the drone who made us drool, the very handsome and pierced Drone Ess—”Like the letter, but spelled E-S-S.”

The spelling information, evidently, proved you to be an insider. Ess was often asked what the S stood for, being the singer in his own band. He would tell each and every inquirer something different. An ongoing, underground argument revolved around whether S stood for Satan, See More, or Saliva. Ess apparently was not necessarily always creative and had repeated his top suggestions for the capital letter more than a few times. Celeste and I decided, dopily, that the nonexistent S stood for Sexy.

We also met the seventh, Drone Gigantus Khan, said to have a huge cock hanging between his scrawny, pale legs. Gigantus Khan spoke in a put-on British accent, having visited London with his family for a summer when he was eight. He claimed to have been greatly influenced by the dialect because he had been in the pivotal formative year of his youth, and thus simply couldn’t help it.

Nobody particularly liked Gigantus Khan. He was retained as a sort of sideshow ringer, one that was put up against the freaky keepers of other tribes at hardcore shows when needed. A secret weapon, albeit with a shitty British accent. The runt with the gigantic wanker. “Shall I free my willy?” he used to ask. Years later when the movie came out, I laughed out loud at the ridiculous title.

All too soon, however, Celeste and I had to return to Country Club Plaza High School, just two weeks after the drones themselves had returned to KCAI and largely disappeared from the restaurant at the art museum.

Still, the museum itself intrigued us more than a bit, and even after the busing staff changed its weekday face, we continued to visit for both the food and the art. I loved the primitive pieces for what I could imagine, for the hands through which the pottery and fertility figures must have passed, for the strange worlds I would have loved to experience for more than just an hour or two. Celeste, on the other hand, seemed drawn to the classical paintings, like a butterfly to hollyhock. But then I could sculpt; she could draw. Perhaps our predilections made a little sense.

Junior year, year of the PSATs, ultimately took Celeste and me deep into the realms of test anxiety, precalculus cramming, and vocabulary quizzes, and so our summer fling with the unusual faded into the past, a crated donation in storage. We would revisit before the year was over, but by the outset of our second junior quarter, we just didn’t have time for artistic drones.

In February that fated year, when every brown, ice-coated lawn crunched underfoot, when the bitter prairie wind came stalking to kill everything it could with its cold breath, when granular snow hard as grit scratched at every exposed surface, my mother, Janice Joy, froze.

We remaining three stalwart Smiths were used to her turns for the worse, turn after turn, but this was The One. What happened was that word got out. I always figured the leak came from my younger brother, David, being what younger brothers always are with a family secret: just plain bad. Unfortunately my usual mean dismissal of my mother may have had something to do with it as well. I complained about my mother to Celeste without paying much attention to the classmates around us who might have been listening in. I jabbed at Janice Joy in the cafeteria, whining about how my mother uselessly took up space. In the halls I bitched about how her room stank. Whatever cruel fastball I could smack Janice Joy’s way as Celeste and I played indoor tennis in gym class, I did. I know now that I used my mother to redirect the pressure of too much homework and the slow-cooker temperatures of a college-prep high school, of adolescence, of having a goddess of a best friend, but it’s hard not to feel guilty. I might have been responsible, too.

After The One, Janice Joy went away. The rest of us put her away. I try, try, try not to feel guilty. Engaging in guilt, like worry, doesn’t do a damn bit of good, you know?

I had a boyfriend a few months after my daughter was born who told me about his dog that he had to put down because it licked and chewed itself into being put down. The dog had these hot spots, my boyfriend said. It licked first at some invisible something in its coat, then chewed away the hair, and then chewed at its own skin, and then licked and chewed away at these noncancerous, non-flea-ridden, nonallergic spots till its flesh bled, bled and wept and oozed and bled, and the dog made more spots, and made the spots bigger, and if a spot was over a bone, it gnawed down to its own bone. The boyfriend was a decent man who didn’t abuse the dog, I don’t think. The dog licked and chewed because it hurt, and it hurt because it licked and chewed. But the crux lies with the initial nibble, doesn’t it? Starting a new hot spot, giving in to the desire to begin another time.

The same goes for guilt and worry. So, I try not to worry. And I try not to feel guilty about my mother. What can ever be undone? I can’t take back what I said about her. But it’s hard knowing how contemptible I was, how horrible I was behind her back. And right to her face. I swear I understand that poor, sick dog better than I do a lot of people.

So, somehow word got out that our mother was one of the undead. The murmuring bothered me at school, sure, tugged at my teenage guts to deny what I heard, to fight for her, but I knew the time was as right as any to get rid of my nearly literal closet ghost. Her outing had come. And so I decided to unite with the persecutors in attitude if not action. A small part of me relished the name-calling of the person whom I most despised, the person whose love I never felt. I had wanted a real mother so badly. . . . I joined the mad masses, at least in spirit, to bring forth the creature, to call the monster by her name and be rid of her for good.

After days of my feeling the burbling undercurrent, two boys from my brother David’s class got loud about Janice Joy, late during fifth-period lunch. Wanda, Celeste, and I were flicking a triangular paper football over finger goalposts and drilling one another on the week’s worth of irregular French verbs. One of the boys, a cocky little jerk who wore his Docksiders with the heels purposely broken and flattened, said from the neighboring table, laughing, “Well, the Smith mother is retarded.”

A second boy, one with bangs and slitty eyes, laughed and looked our way. “Naw. She can’t talk at all. That makes her a mute, you retard.” Both of them laughed and slapped their table till the first boy knocked over his half-empty soda can.

Celeste stopped conjugating, caught our paper football, and held it in her hands, staring pointedly at the boys.

“You are way wrong,” Docksiders said. “Mutes don’t shit their pants!” They both laughed again, fake and loud as hell, purposely knocking around their lunch garbage. Cheese puffs sprinkled across our table.

Celeste flicked the football at Docksiders. It caught him square in the forehead. “You are so wrong,” Celeste said. Unhesitatingly. Of course.

He looked at Celeste and blinked. “That’s not what I heard,” he said.

“She’s not sick is what I heard,” the slitty-eyed boy said. “She’s a lunatic.” He retrieved our football from the puddle of spilled Coke and flicked it back to us. Wanda grabbed it out of the air.

“Bull,” Celeste told him.

Celeste was sticking up for me again, and I had the odd urge to tell her not to, so instead I said to the boy, “Yeah, she is craaazy. So what?” I jerked my chin up an inch.

“She—” And then the boy stopped. “Cool,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” I said, paused, then added, “She uses the toilet.” I wanted to tack on, But she doesn’t flush, but didn’t. As if she’d read my mind, she let me have it: Celeste’s kick under the table left a bruise.

That night, sometime after eleven o’clock, the show began on the front lawn of our house. I was asleep, but evidently for their extremely short production, the cast wore pajamas and paper bags over their heads à la The Gong Show’s Unknown Comic. That’s what our father said to the police. The screeching of car tires woke David and me up. “It was just a dark car down the street,” he told the uniformed team sitting properly in our living room after midnight. “A shiny car. Like it’d had a washing recently.”

The boys evidently drove off right after my father opened the front door and turned on the outdoor lights. I can picture him, rushing out into the frozen dark, trying to make sense of what was happening. The last boy had to light two matches. The first that he tossed toward the lawn went out in the air. But with the second match, the lighter fluid took. And the words the boys had spelled out flamed to life. The words that clearly only my mother could read from the second floor.

I’d love to know why my father didn’t resod. I think sometimes about asking him still. How expensive could it have been? It was ridiculous, terrible. Instead, he just reseeded over the burned black letters in spring. The words grew brighter green than the rest of the lawn until August of the next year. The verdant letters, kill the freak! they read. The exclamation mark dribbled away in splotches toward the direction of the getaway car, across the corner of the Nielsons’ yard. Dad reseeded the Nielsons’ dribble marks too.

Poof. Janice Joy saw it all, and afterward failed to rise for anything. Not for anything. My brother, David, spent the night at a friend’s house, and I made sure to sleep over at the Diamonds’ the day the expensive people my father had hired took my mother to the home, so early in the morning that none of the neighbors were witness to the occasion. The expensive people had practice in such transfers, and they evidently moved Janice Joy without incident.

The look that surely crossed my father’s face must have been one of . . . one of what? I couldn’t have guessed what his features must have given up as his wife plodded down the front walk, never looking back. It’s the one bit of information he ever gave us: “She never looked back.”

She, on the other hand, I imagined clearly, stood at the window staring at the fiery letters with amazement that night, the slight heat of her palms leaving no mark on the panes. She watched and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Her excuse had finally come. Her excuse to pee the bed and refuse to eat the regular crumbs and not to make the insane effort to rise again had finally come. She’d been delivered. As her husband made his futile dashing way down the street after the getaway car, her heavy and grateful sigh left a mist on the pane. She drew a heart in her own breath and pierced it with an arrow. I swear I thought I could picture her doing it.

The casting out of my mother took some work to get over, if I must be honest. Her undoing couldn’t have come at a worse time in terms of my psychological maturation. When alone, I slept fitfully. I bit my toenails while I studied at night. My brother caught me once and threatened to tell everyone that I pretended to be a monkey in my room when nobody saw. I picked at anything: my nose, a scab, my scalp, the tiny hairs on the back of my arms with my teeth. I brimmed with restlessness. I felt like I could stick my finger in a socket and make my ears light up for all the pent-up energy I had.

The Diamonds added another couple of suppers to the preexisting schedule, allowing my father to get in some much-needed one-on-one bonding with his unruly teenage son. Celeste and I cooked most every night at her house, and I spent the night at least twice a week. They made me think it was my idea. A couple years later, during one of our long-distance telephone conversations, Celeste let me know that my father and her parents had hammered out a sort of intervention for me. I’d had no idea I’d needed any such thing or that plans were put into effect behind my back.

I realize now what a fool I had to have been, becoming the ass that I did, but I felt free! Crazy free! I’m sure I hurt horribly, but all I remember is being daring, being adventurous, being willing to try anything once. Or twice. Free, free, free!