Dancing in My Underwear

By Koelen

An audacious anthology including twisted tales of Disney defiling, twin murder, studying abroad, 13 car accidents, transgender love affairs, Hitler's assassination, barely avoiding arrest, and pigeon adoption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631923715

Book preview

BOYS

BIRTH

The day my mother shat me out into this cruel world, I knew I was going to be something fucking great. Sure, I was just a small, frail, ferret-looking thing when I was scooped up out of her Samantha, but I swear there was a look in my eye of sheer omnipotence the second I breathed my first breath. Little did anyone know that I was a survivor. I was a champion. And I hadn’t even lived for a minute.

My conception and the nine-and-a-half months of pregnancy leading up to and including the big day is an intriguing tale of love and deception, MURDER, malice, and mayhem! Indeed, my birth is a dramedy of accidents, misplaced babies, rejected pregnancies, and a hospital bill longer than my bungee-stretched umbilical cord.

In the beginning:

Have you ever stopped to wonder when you were conceived? I know our parents getting it on ’80’s porn style on their parent’s couch is not something we all want to digest. I braved the research, and this is what I concluded as to approximately when my father’s sperm reached my mother’s egg:

My mother was given a due date for my grand entrée of April 1, and this excited her knowing we’d be born in the same month, as her birthday is April 25. But I was late. Just like I’m casually late for everything in my life today. I’m so late to events and things so often that I think my last will and testament should say that my body needs to arrive late to the funeral, just so I go out the same way I lived. Like Liz Taylor did for her own funeral. Before she died, she willed her body to arrive tardy to her own funeral exemplifying the way she had lived her entire life: always late, but worth the wait.

Knowing my real birthday is actually April 16 and that, inevitably, I was two weeks late, I could deduce approximately when I was conceived based on the initial April 1 verdict. And what did I come up with? That I was conceived the first weekend in July: the 4th of July weekend. Talk about some fireworks! And I say fireworks not like some Katy Perry song, but because that is truly where my story would begin: at my conception.

My mom had my sister three-and-a-half years prior to me, so she knew at least how to anticipate the agonies and the overall side effects of pregnancy. But my gestation was different.

My mum has repeatedly said that being pregnant with me was enough to make her never want to get pregnant EVER again! (And then two-and-ahalf years after me, out pops my baby brother. You’d think she’d have learned, by then, where babies come from.) She said there was hardly ever any morning sickness while she was pregnant because nothing EVER tasted good. She just never ate as much as she wanted to/needed to and an underlining feeling of hunger resided within her almost the entire forty-plus weeks. (I obviously was a Hollywood fetus, keeping slim and trim through anorexia!) My mother also hardly ever slept through the nine-and-a-half months she was pregnant with me, and this drove each of us to the edge of murder.

My mother spent more than forty-one hours in labor. That’s two days of huffing and puffing without any houses coming down and no baby being squirted out. I know that if it were me, I woulda Nurse Jackie’d it and been pumped so full of morphine so fast before I spent two days with my feet in stirrups and my asshole stretched wider than Kirstie Alley’s. But not my mother. Oh no. Her body rejected the pregnancy three times before distributing me into the harsh reality that was 1982. I was birthed two weeks tardy and without an excuse. Or maybe I did have one.

Later the doctors would explain to my mother that her blood type is O positive. I, however, being the prodigal son, have type A positive. The doctors believe that our misaligned blood might have been one of the few factors that contributed to my mother’s complicated pregnancy. On top of the blood confusions, and despite being carried to full term and beyond, I was born a tiny baby. My mother once said it looked like I had been delivered in an African village by some back-alley voodoo doctor—that’s how small I looked.

That and the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck four times might have also added complications to the pregnancy at hand! The doctor scooped me up out of my mother and upon seeing the cord lassoed around my gullet, he immediately freaked out, but only for a second. He realized almost immediately that I wasn’t being choked and that the cord was in fact loosely wrapped frice around my neck. Therefore, he did not immediately cut the cord; he simply unraveled it from around my bloody head and then cut it.

After that, two strange things happened: First, I laughed. Typically doctors put a child over their knee or tap the baby’s bottoms to get them to cry to help them with their first few breaths of oxygen. Not me. That doctor unwrapped my human-mom noose from around my neck, and I burst out laughing in his face. He didn’t have to swat me to get me to breathe, because I took care of that myself, and then mocked him with a newborn giggle.

The doctor noticed the second odd thing when he fully stretched out the umbilical cord’s death grip. Normal mom-to-baby-tubes are thirty to thirty-six inches long. Mine was eighty-six inches long.

Velly Intellesting, a cartoon doctor might say. Interesting, indeed.

What did all this mean? The laughing, the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, its extra-long length, my being born skinnier than Twiggy in a tube top, and the extended, complicated pregnancy? What did all of this mean? Why so much drama with one birth?

This is what the doctors henceforth concluded, based on the facts at hand:

I had had a twin. My twin had died off during the pregnancy at some point. And I was the only one to survive.

I offed my twin in a Darwinian, fetal homicide to take my rightful place in the world and claim the egg for myself, so that at least one of us would defiantly survive! That’s right, folks: The man who at seventeen once ran over a wild field rabbit in his Geo Prism in the late ’90’s, and then called 911 to see if they could send a bunny ambulance to save it, had committed murder before he was even born! I had snuffed the light outta my twin’s candle before I was even negative minutes old!

Things got weirder on the day of my birth. Because I was born in the ‘80’s in St. Louis, I wasn’t necessarily exposed to the best medical technology available; however, the doctors did make a fascinating discovery as a result of my birth. Typically, umbilical cords can be used as vein transplants in places like one’s arms or legs. In my case, my umbilical cord was nearly three times as long. According to the doctors, they were able to save and harvest my feeding tube and use it as a vein transplant in three different patients’ legs!

Out of the death of my unborn twin came light: My/our umbilical cord saved the legs of three people from being amputated and they were able to continue to use their stubs as a result of my extra-long umbilical cord-age! That transplant, to me, is still amazing, despite all of today’s medical marvels and current breakthroughs.

Of course my mother, being the catty woman she is, didn’t find it amazing when she got her über-inflated hospital tab. When she asked about getting a discount on the bill due to her baby’s miracle salvage, the nurse at the front desk just laughed. Very much in the same way I laughed in the doctor’s face when I was born. The irony.

When babies are born, they are given a numeric identifying wrist-band that coincides with a wristband on the mother so that there are no baby mishaps or misidentified infants.

One very traumatic thing happened to me whilst in the hospital shortly after my birth. My mother asked the nurse if she could hold me. I was currently being kept warm like an unhatched goose egg in the little baby incubator/monitoring room, so the head nurse paged one of the other nurses to get me. My mother waited patiently with the first nurse for me to arrive when the second nurse came into the room holding a baby in her arms. My mother smiled at her, but the nurse took one look at my mother and then another look down at the baby in her arms and said:

Oh!

My mother was puzzled. Oh? she asked the nurse who had looked at her dumbfounded.

Oh. Um, this...this is not your baby. The second nurse muttered, looking at the head nurse at my mother’s side with fear and anxiety.

Like a Catholic Mother Superior, the head nurse didn’t react, she just calmly looked at her colleague and said:

What do you mean, that isn’t her baby? I read you off the wristband numbers. Didn’t they match?

The baby-cradling nurse said, Oh the numbers matched all right. But the baby doesn’t.

What do you mean? my mother interjected sharply, sitting up in her bed. What do you mean they don’t match?

The nurse holding the baby looked down at the package she was holding in her arms, and then again at my mother and moved in to give my mom a closer look.

She said, "Well, unless somehow you gave birth to a black baby GIRL, then this is not your baby!"

Sure enough, my mother took one look at that little Nubian princess and just laughed. After all she’d been through with my pregnancy and birth, what else could she do? She just laughed. What’s one more mistaken baby identity log to add to the shit fire?! I was brought in to see my mom shortly and the nurses had lil’ Beyoncé and my bracelet’s switched. Apparently, a stillborn birthed in between myself and the little girl had made a mess out of the whole wrist-band number situation.

So that’s the story of my birth. The crazy roller coaster that it was. There you have it. I was born bad, but through persistent efforts on the part of my mother, father, stepmother, and myself during the course of my childhood and early adulthood, I did end up developing into a (somewhat) well rounded person. They say babies are born without sin, and I think in a weird way, my sin of offing my twin was inadvertently meant to be.

The Christians believe that once a baby is baptized, she or he is given a clean slate, is deemed sinless, and able to be taken into the hands of God if she or he should die. The funny thing is, I would still call 911 today if I ran over an animal on the road with my car. I could never hurt anyone. I even hate the sight of my own blood, so I obviously could never fathom killing anyone or anything.

In a naturalistic way, my birth was my own baptism and cleansing. My brother/sister/unborn twin gave up his or her life so that I could be born. My birth gave an aspect of life back into three different strangers--who were previously, completely unaffiliated with my birth or mother whatsoever.

Now, I’m not saying that I am some sort of messiah or prodigy or that I was born perfect. Nor am I saying I am even destined to do important shit. Nor does this mean that my crazy birth should be looked at in any other light than just being another crazy birth.

What I do know is things DO happen for a reason. I survived and I am here to tell the tale today. Despite how absurd it may feel like at the time, life does happen for a reason, no matter how mysterious it appears to be. Who knows? Maybe I am destined for greatness. Or maybe I’m just along for the ride.

THEME PARK THEOLOGY

Iwas never meant to work in a theme park. Ever.

I got my first job the summer after I turned sixteen. I was working at Six Flags Over Mid-America, located just outside of the city of St. Louis, in the games department of the amusement park. This meant I was basically the circus carny who lured customers in and got people to play the games. It was also me who decided whether or not your hand crossed the line when trying to toss an engorged softball the size of an ostrich egg into an eight gallon milk jug that didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually fitting into the opening. It was a shitty job that was spent working outside in the sticky, humid, Missourah heat of the summer, with little shade.

These reasons — and my terrible hourly wage — led me to take little joy in what I was actually doing for work. I only found solace during my lunch breaks when I was away from my job and able to eat and relax. I especially loved going to the fried chicken shack down the hill. (I’m a former fat kid from Missouri, and we just LERV us some fried anything!). I loved the food there so much that I started going to the chicken resto every day. Inevitably, this would be my downfall.

I ate that sweet, Southern-fried, cardiac arrest-inducing, chicken deliciousness so often that I soon became friends with the staff that worked there. It’s been too many years (and I smoked all but some of my memories away in college) to remember the name of the chick who worked there that I got along with most, but homegirl would always hook me up with free fried chicken that was headed for the garbage, due to it being too many hours old.

You see, she didn’t see any sense in letting expired chicken be thrown away and since I was an employee of the park, neither did I. So I gladly accepted her countless days of chicken offerings. I was probably accepting free fried chicken once or twice a week! I began to plan my breaks later in the day to guarantee that it would be late enough for the kitchen to have designated the chicken as expired, yet early enough before they’d thrown it away.

One day I was called in by the theme park’s loss prevention task force to inquire about a fellow co-worker of mine when some money had gone missing. I reported to them that I didn’t know anything about it, which was true. At the end of asking me a series of questions, they asked if I had ever received anything free from anyone within the park. I thought about it for a second, then I openly admitted to the fried chicken addiction and my constant reward of free pollo from my girl at the chicken shack, thinking nothing of it.

The net result of this admission, of course, was that I was fired from Six Flags soon after because I had STOLEN from the company. All over some expired fried chicken!

* * *

Years and many shitty part-time jobs later, I had moved to Orange County in Southern California. Though I didn’t like the conservatism/whiteness of the Orange Curtain (as The OC is often called by LA hippie-libbers), I did know that there was one place a person/performer like me could truly be accepted: DISNEYLAND!

One spring when I was working as a server in a restaurant, a friend persuaded me to go to a dance audition for characters at Disneyland. I said, Why not? and went with him. But I dance worse than a white boy in clogs, so I was immediately cut in the first round of the audition sequence and went home thinking my brush with Disney had been all it was going to be.

Not three weeks later and completely out of the blue, I got a call from the entertainment division at Disneyland asking me if I would like to fill the role of a character on the parade route. She said it would be acting and dancing and that I was going to be one of the stars of the parade! I accepted the job right then and there.

I was really ecstatic to have received the gig and went forward with all the basic Disney training, which I must say slightly resembled Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth program. Some even called it Mousechewitz. Our rigorous, dayson- end training was teaching us to smile and always give the illusion to park guests that everything was OK and happy and MAGICAL at Disneyland.

Magical. Even if Mickey Mouse had been gunned down in the town square by a terrorist, militant Ratatouille. Or even if Minnie Mouse had been gang raped in Small World by Jiminy Cricket, Peter Pan’s peter, and Pluto’s tongue whilst Tweety Bird Tweeted about it on Twitter...we were still supposed to sit back and pretend that everything was just fine and MAGICAL!

Basically, if shit went down at Disneyland, no one was supposed to know about it. The kids and parents that came as guests to the park were supposed to leave doped up on happiness and complacent disillusionment. That was the main emphasis at the school of Disney: always keep everyone HAPPY.

After I had completed my training, one of the show managers met with me and told me that we would have three rehearsals before our first parade. I received a paper assigning me my character. There on the list, I saw my name and then saw that next to it was the name Turk. I was like: What the fuck is a Turk? It sounded like someone from a country barking up the tree to become part of the European Union that has a better chance of becoming the fifty-first American state!

So I Googled-it and realized Turk was Tarzan’s best friend in Disney’s Tarzan. Awesome! I get to be a lead, I thought. Then I watched that terrible, ode-to-Phil Collins, piece of shit film and realized being cast as Turk was NOT that cool. First of all, Turk is a gorilla and a fat one at that. How the hell were they gonna transform me into a gorilla? I’m a five-foot-six Arian!

It’s also somewhat implied in Tarzan that Turk is a boy gorilla, yet Turk was voiced by Rosie O’Donnell in the film and has a big, hot-pink bow in his/ its hair. Not cute. So I was playing a 250-pound androgynous primate with a pink bow in its mane. Great.

What I originally failed to see the first time on that paper was a name underneath the name Turk. A name any Disney aficionado should know:

SIMBA

I had also been cast as Simba! Before that terrible trilogy of Toy Story tenacity, most Disney queens remember The Lion King as being the highest grossing Disney movie of all time. Elton John tinkering out the tunes for it. With James Earl Jones, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Whoopi Goldberg, and a slew of other celebs’ voices, we had a Disney masterpiece on our hands. One for the books.

I knew that being Simba would at least be more glamorous than the lesbian monkey, Turk, due in part to the popularity and prestige that The Lion King brought with itself. Inevitably, however, I did have to succumb to wearing the thirty-pound, all-black, furred gorilla suit that was Turk most of my days working there. Southern California had an unusually hot summer that year, and it was very reminiscent of my days sweating my balls off in St. Louis at my first chicken-robbing job.

But it was still money. I had turned twenty-one that spring, and my job at Disney dancing down the parade route like Curious George’s sixty-sevenyear-old, cat-hoarding Aunt Tippie allowed me to buy plenty of alcohol, so life seemed OK at the time.

The few days a week I was Simba were always a nice bonus. The parade I was featured in had all the stars of all the big Disney movies. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Tarzan, Cinderella, etc. And at the end of the parade, as the finale, was the biggest character in all of Disney-lore: Mickey Mouse. Mickey sitting up there all twacked out on his big, blue, cloud-castle-Q-tip float with Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Goofy, and Pluto was a sight to see. A grand finale to a so-so parade.

With such a monstrosity of an ending, you needed a good float to introduce the finale of the parade so that the audience knew the end was coming. What float could carry this burden of being the lead-up to the finish? Why, the most successful Disney movie ever: The Lion King float, of course!

There I/Simba sat on a golden throne with a huge sun bursting behind me also in gold. Well, gold spray paint: Magic at Disney is costly in a recession! There I/Simba sat on my/its gilded throne proceeded by flamingos, giraffes, and a hippo dancing in front of the float. It was great because, even though the parade in its entirety sucked ass and was twenty-five minutes too long, the kids still got to see a good finale. And isn’t that what we all want out of seeing a show? A good climax and resolution?

I don’t remember a lot of my other experiences there, because of how much we were all drinking and partying all the time that summer. But I’ll always remember the night before my last day working for Disney forever.

A few friends and I had driven from Orange County to West Hollywood for a night of binge drinking, dancing, and hunting, if you will. We were young, hung, and ready for some fun! That night in particular included some pre-partying at my house in Whittier and then making roadies with fruit-flavored vodka to take with us to the clubs. So basically by the time we got to the clubhouse, we were bombed.

Our steadfast rule was simple: