Free The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club by Laurie Notaro Page B

actually be such a terrific advantage.
    I guess I took it well. I didn’t set anything on fire, practice any voodoo, or listen to sad songs. No, this time I just sat at the bar and drank, sneering and growling at all of the men except my friend Dave.
    “How’s it going?” he asked.
    “Well, I got the Speech today,” I said.
    “Oh no. Not the Speech,” he said. “Did he use the ‘F’ word?”
    I nodded.
    “Oh God.” Dave sighed. “The ‘F’ word is low. Low down.”
    “Yep,” I said. “
Friends.
He said, ‘We’re just Friends.’ ”
    I don’t understand the Speech and how men learned about it. Was it a part of boys’ eighth-grade PE class, did the gym teacher make them say it to one another over and over in the showers so they would be good at it?
    “Okay, now how does it go?”
    “It goes, ‘You’re a cool girl, and I like hanging out with you, but I’m not ready to make a—um, that big word—commitment to one person, and I think we need to be . . . we need to be . . .’ ”
    “Man, this is the most important part! The ‘F’ word, man! The ‘F’ word!”
    “Oh, yeah! You tell the chick you want to be Friends! But you don’t mean it, do you?”
    “No. A chick won’t let you nail her if she knows she’s not even a Friend.”
    Or maybe the Speech is some kind of computer chip that gets implanted in every baby boy’s dingle as soon as he’s born.
    “There are things running around out there with uteruses, son. You’re going to need this.”
    Could it be a hormonal gift package with an added feature thing, where women get PMS with estrogen, and men get the Speech with testosterone? I don’t understand it.
    I do understand one thing. I am pissed off at God for making me heterosexual, and I swore that the next time I heard the Speech, I was going to fix that. I have enough Friends, so I’m going to try really hard this time to be a lesbian. The only problem with this is that all men are fascinated by lesbians, lesbians are delicacies to men, and once they find out you are one, they want you back again.
    But maybe it’s just my destiny to remain alone, eating single-people food like Soup for One, collecting Precious Moments figurines, and thinking that my dog can talk back to me. Oh, God. With any luck, I’ll wind up living in a trailer park as a bitter, celibate alcoholic with a heart full of hate. I’d much rather be alone and make myself miserable than give someone else the pleasure. I’ll die a graceful and glowing death when my cigarette plunges into the shag carpet as I pass out after my final date with Jack Daniel’s, who will be resting very comfortably and very drained on the pillow of the empty side of the bed.

Moral Sex
    My nana was getting aggravated.
    I couldn’t blame her. She was stuck in a hospital room with an inflamed gallbladder while her pain medication was lolling about on a nurse’s cart somewhere in the hallway. To make matters worse, we were minutes away from watching President Bill Clinton’s apology for diddling Monica Lewinsky, and the coverage clogged every channel.
    “I don’t understand all of the fuss,” Nana said, shaking her head at the TV. “There wasn’t this much news when Frank Sinatra died, and he was much more important to this country. He was a real American.”
    Sitting in a chair next to the bed was Nana’s sister, Aunt Ida, an exact duplicate of Nana, right down to their four-foot-ten height, their wavy light-brown hair, and their tan Easy Spirit shoes, and she wasn’t pleased about the lack of television viewing choices, either.
    Personally, I was more concerned with keeping Nana’s ID bracelet on her wrist, lest we discover three years from now that we brought the wrong Nana home from the hospital and then have to share custody with another family. The day before, just to be safe, I pulled a bobby pin from her hair and scratched the letters N-A-N-A into the polish of four fingernails on her right hand after she got a pain shot