Contest | Non-Fiction | Embarrassment (April 2007)

[Icarus]

For the past two months, we've given y'all a lot of free rein for the non-fiction contest. So this month we've decided to narrow the focus again; but there shouldn't be any shortage of entries because everyone has...

an embarrassing moment to tell us about! Unless, I suppose, you just don't want to tell us, but what would be the fun in that? So don't be shy, don't hold back and make us laugh!

Word limit is 1,000 and submissions are due by 11:59 p.m. on April 24th. Good luck!

[piperdawn]

Do we post it here? Also, how do we put a disclaimer on it so as not to corrupt the youngsters?

Anyway, here it is. I hope this is the right spot and that I've done my disclaimer correctly.



Is It Hot In Here, Or Is It Just Me?

I was 21, newly-single, and headed out with the girls. I had spent all day getting $1,000.00 worth of some other woman’s hair sewn into mine, and the effect was stunning. I was on fire.

I had no idea that I would literally be on fire later that night.

The night had started out as every other weekend night. Now that I had broken up with Mark, my single friends (Tig and Robin) and I were hitting every nightclub within a 50 mile radius. Every Friday and Saturday we would stand in Tig’s cramped bathroom and elbow each other out of the way to pluck, powder, tweeze, and perfume ourselves. If any of us had been an asthmatic her bathroom would have been a dangerous place. Marlboro Lights with crimson-kissed tips burnt in threes and fours in the ashtray and aerosol hairspray occupied more molecules in the air than oxygen. We were deadly seriously about getting every inch of ourselves to look just right, ozone layer and lungs be damned.

When this particular Friday came around, I was especially keyed up. I had previously had my shoulder length hair cut short and hated it. It was one of those spontaneous post break-up decisions I had made and immediately regretted afterward—almost as much as I had regretted cheating on Mark and getting dumped. I couldn’t fix what I had done to Mark and the relationship and I was humiliated over it. The hair, however, I could do something about. Earlier that day the girls and I went to a hair salon that bought hair from women desperate enough to sell it. They then turned around and sewed it into other girls’ hair that were vain enough to buy it. My unflattering bob had been replaced with a waist-sweeping cascade of caramel and honey tresses, courtesy of some poor third world woman. I was ecstatic.

After hours of preening, Tig, Robin, and I squeezed ourselves into stretchy spandex dresses that barely covered our privates. Britney Spears would have felt right at home in our entourage that night. We crowded into my Camaro in a cloud of hairspray, perfume, and all things combustible, and hit the hottest night club in town.

The three of us walked through the door and picked a spot at the bar. My ex-boyfriend’s friends watched, open-mouthed, as I chatted up some handsome guy. I bent over to light my cigarette from his lighter. As I stood back up and sensuously blew smoke at my new friend, he promptly started swatting me in the face and head with his jacket. What the hell?! I thought. I stumbled backwards and tripped over a stool as Tig and Robin came running up to me and started tearing my extensions out by the handfuls. What in the hell is happening? I thought, trying to keep my crotch covered and my hair intact. I looked up at my two best friends for an explanation and as I did I could smell the awful smell of burning hair. The realization that my extensions had been in flames moments before hit me as I looked down and saw fistfuls of hair lying about me, making me look like a crazed lunatic who had just pulled her own hair out. As I thought about how this was the fastest I had ever wasted so much money, I looked up to see Mark standing there, shaking his head, with a new girlfriend on his arm.

Oh, I was definitely hot that night. I was smoking.

The End

[Velva]

October 1985
“…but you let Dena rip up one cigarette for every one you smoked. She’s at college now, and she asked me to keep an eye on you and make sure you didn’t smoke too much.” I whined.
Craig and I were sitting in the park across the street from our high school arguing about his smoking… again.
“That was Dena. You, however, are not my girlfriend. You don’t have the right to tell me smoking is bad until you’ve tried it yourself.”
“Fine. Gimme.”
“Oh no, Velva. You can’t just pretend to smoke it. You have to really smoke it. Take it into your lungs and everything.”
“OK. I’ll do it. But if I get through the whole thing and I still hate smoking you have to let me shred one cigarette for every one you smoke.”
“Deal. We’ll do it at breakfast.”
“OK. My P.E. teacher didn’t notice that I’ve been gone 9 times this quarter, so I still have a few cuts left.”
“Ray and James are coming with us.”
“Cool.”
The four of us left before the beginning of first period and drove to our favorite diner for biscuits and gravy (Craig), and some form of eggs (me, James and Ray)
“OK Velva, you ready?” Craig had a glint of mischief in his eye as he prepared to light the cigarette.
“No. Give it to me anyway.”
5 minutes later:
Must focus on smoking. God! How does he smoke a pack of these things every day? This is really gross.
“How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
OK, new plan. Must focus on not barfing. Eating some of my breakfast might help. Ewww! Nope. That doesn’t help at all.
“You OK over there Velva?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Ummm Craig?” James had been casting concerned looks my direction for about five minutes.
“Yeah James?”
“Velva’s turning green.”
“What? Velva? Omigod! Give me that!”
“But I’ve only smoked half of it…” I said.
“Give me the cigarette. I’ll finish it for you. You win. Smoking is disgusting and you can dissect a cigarette every time I smoke one in front of you.”
“I don’t feel so good…”
“You don’t look so good. Drink some water.”
“OK.”
“Remind me never to dare you…”
“OK”

[gary_wagner]

I had only minutes before I had to be naked among my peers and was feeling physically sick by the thought. We were running a lap on the cinder covered track and I seriously considered falling and ripping my knee open on those sharp shards of power-plant coal residue just so I wouldn’t have to encounter my first high-school mandatory public shower.

I was raised in an extremely prudish and strict evangelical household. Our church still regarded swimming with the opposite sex as a sin of massive immorality. I blame some of my nudity fear on the church, some of it was simply the natural reaction of a thirteen-year-old boy.

I know that my aversion to exposing myself to strangers went back as far as when I was three years old in the hospital for a tonsillectomy. I remember lying on a stainless steel table with a firm grip on both sides of my underwear and refusing to allow the nurse to remove them. Nurses still wore the little starched white nurse hats and white uniforms back then. To this day I have a clear image of her trying to convince me that she needed to take my little fruit-of-the-looms off when I knew that they were working on my throat – not anything to do with items beneath my underwear. It wasn’t until I was an adult that my mother told me that she pulled the nurse aside and made arrangements to leave my underwear on until they put me under the anesthesia and then make sure they put them back on before I woke up.

Back in those days, high school began with ninth grade – not tenth as most schools today. We also didn’t have anything called middle school then, we had “junior high school” which was seventh and eighth grade. We took showers after gym class in elementary school. I had gotten used to the public nudity and it didn’t seem to be that big of a deal. A room fool of naked eight-year-olds don’t even realize they are naked after a few minutes. We took showers in junior high also, and those boys who experienced puberty first were the oddballs (excuse the pun – I couldn’t help myself). I can’t remember a single word ever said about the obvious difference in some of those boys, but I did see a lot of looks that were quickly averted if the hairy boys caught someone staring at their crotch.

By the eighth grade, more and more of my classmates were becoming men and we remaining boys were soon to become the minority. I had to assume that the scales had tipped during the final semester of eighth grade, because I became sick with infectious mononucleosis, missed seven weeks of school, and was excused from gym class for the rest of the year because I was too weak to endure it.

I was convinced that since I had last been naked in a room full of my peers that I alone had remained puberty-deprived and that I would be the laughing-stock hairless wonder among a group of fur covered, bearded, deep voiced men. I thought of almost nothing else since arriving at school that morning, carrying my gym bag containing my official maroon shorts with Mishawaka Caveman stenciled in white, and my equally official tee shirt with the picture of our school mascot, a fighting caveman, brandishing a club.

My newly acquired jock strap was not in that canvas duffle. My mother actually took it out of the box and held it up to me in the store before declaring, “No, we’d better get the extra small – this one is way too big for you.” If it was physically possible to turn to liquid and secretly flow beneath the door and run away when outside I would have done it at that moment. It doesn’t matter if she was referring to the fact that I was less than five feet tall and weighed about seventy pounds, buying an extra small jock strap is a scarring event. Why do they even make an extra small? Couldn’t they label them something like, regular, big, extra large, and way to go, dude?

No, the jock strap wasn’t in there because I already put it on at home under my briefs. I wasn’t completely sure how the thing went on and wasn’t about to be fumbling with in for the first time in the locker room. I wouldn’t even have had one if it wasn’t on the list of required gym class clothing. There seemed to be too many straps and it took me a few minutes to understand it. I was glad that I already had it on, because several of the boys in this, our first gym class of high school, struggled with theirs and they were the butt end of jokes about it (I just can’t help myself with the puns).

Class was over and I just clenched my jaw and stripped down like those around me. I didn’t want to look down at anyone, but there is no way to avoid it in a group naked situation. I knew not to stare, because glances might be natural but open stares would get your butt kicked. In trying to keep my eyes up and yet darting around sizing up the competition, I was relieved to find out that I was not the lone boy alongside the fully bloomed men. There were a handful of us who hadn’t caught the puberty train yet. By either a fluke or subconscious compulsion, we all ended up together in a clump. The hairiest boy in the crowd pointed at us, said, “Looky at the little boy weenies”, and the post-pubescent joined in at laughing at us. That was the end of it though. A quick little chuckle and it was never mentioned again. Sure we were embarrassed but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I, and probably all the other late-bloomer feared it would be.