Free Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

reason.” At that age I was so obsessed with monkeys that I wanted to marry one. College would come first, of course, but after I graduated with my degree in comparative postmodern marginalized gender studies I wanted to become mommy to a cuddly monkey baby.
    My parents exchanged pained looks.
    “What about the enticingly thick ding-ding of the
Callithrix pygmaea
?” I asked. I spread the buttered fingers of one hand and counted them off as if remembering past trysts. “The pygmy marmoset?”
    My mother gave a long sigh and asked my father, “Antonio?”
    one eyebrow arched as if to demand,
What went on at the Tiergarten, mister?
They were both loath to impose restrictions on my behavior, but clearly some acts needed to be declared off-limits. Nevertheless, after all the free-love ideology they’d thrown at me, the most they could counsel was that I engage only in safer-sex practices, no matter what the species. Smiling wanly, my mom asked, “Would you like a Xanax, sweetheart?”
    “What about …,” I asked, pretending anxiety, “
Chloropithecus aethiops
?” Indeed, my father had taken me to the Berlin Zoo the previous month, and the outing had made for an excellent research opportunity.
    The curdled expression semidistorting my mom’s Botox-saturated features was the exact one she made at the Oscars when Tom Cruise was given a Lifetime Achievement Award, just moments before she leaned over and upchucked into Goldie Hawn’s A-list swag bag, ruining a small fortune in pricey chocolates and Gucci sunglasses.
    At best they could gift me with a multispecies set of variously sized disposable condoms and deliver a lecture about demanding respect from my simian sex partners.
    From that point I knew they would never fess up to reading my diary. However, now that I was exposed as an eleven-year-old sexual sociopath they would always be
forced
to read it. They couldn’t risk
not
reading my diary, and through my calculated faux-confessions I could manipulate them. They were my slaves.
    “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I sucked mind-altering lungfuls of Maui Wowie through a bong filled with bubbling, lukewarm elephant semen.…” It saddens me, in retrospect,how easily my parents accepted the reality of my wanton bestiality. “Dear Diary,” I’d write, “today I ingested LSD and gave loving hand jobs to a herd of wildebeests.…”
    Yes, on paper I was a libertine. However, secret repressed snob that I truly was, while my mom and dad imagined me in sticky twosomes and threesomes with donkeys and capuchin monkeys, I was in fact nestled in some dirty laundry hamper, reading historical romances by Clare Darcy. Most of my childhood consisted of this sort of double-entry behavioral accounting.
    “Dear Diary, what a hangover!” I wrote. “Please remind me to never mainline stale hyena urine with a dirty needle ever again! I was awake all night, standing over my sleeping parents with a Wusthof butcher knife in one hand. Had either of them stirred I’m certain I would’ve hacked them both to bloody ribbons.…”
    Me? In hindsight I’d made the same strategic mistake Charles Manson made. I should’ve quit while I was just a garden-variety animal-sex-and-drug addict, but, no, I had to escalate my status to potential knife-wielding psycho.… Small wonder that it was shortly after that particular diary entry that my folks sent my eleven-year-old sexually incorrigible self packing to tedious upstate.

DECEMBER 21, 8:47 A . M . EST
A Prelude to My Exile
Posted by [email protected]
    Gentle Tweeter,
    I wasn’t always a great, fat pudding of a child. As an eleven-year-old I was rail thin. A mere sylph of a girl, with a body-mass index that hovered just above all my major organs failing. Yes, I’d once been a willowy pint-size ballerina with the metabolism of a hummingbird, and as such I gave good value. My job was to serve as the child equivalent of arm candy, proof of my mother’s fertility and my