Read Starf*cker: a Meme-oir for Free Online

now be probably every bit as old as the wraith-like figures that were then seated all around under blankets and with blank faces once she had escorted us into what passed for a rec room. I stood there in my economy-sized jersey in the stultifying stuffiness of that room, grateful that the jersey was perforated so my skin could breathe even if I couldn’t. Holes in your shirt are a big plus if you’re prone to sweating at an age when most of your peers don’t even need to shower every day. Or every week. I imagine the pronounced cowlick on the right side of my head must’ve looked like some wayward spit curl on a dancehall girl waiting to be chosen for a ten-cent dance.
    “I think you’ll talk with Martha,” the nurse who’d greeted us told me, a name I’d forgotten until this very minute that it fell on me to type it. I recall being told that Martha was in her nineties and not very communicative. She had thinning white hair, a matching white face, and stared a hole through me as I was seated on a footstool in front of her like a great big present she didn’t want. I began babbling—my name, my age, the fact that I went to school practically outside her window.
    What else could we possibly have in common, outside being sedentary to the point of bedsores?
    She didn’t budge. She sat there watching me and listening, or at least hearing. The look on her face wasn’t anger or bitterness or even despair, but past that and into an impatience, a conviction that life, which may have once been a pleasure but had at some point become a curse, should move on already. With no one else listening to me—my escort had vanished—and with my young classmates engaged in lively conversations with people old enough to have been besties with their distant ancestors, I became determined to get some kind of a response from Martha. I was supposed to be The Brain, so how could I not think of something that would work?
    In the way we’ve all experienced, when speaking with someone who’s a reluctant conversationalist, I got exasperated, gave up on trying to say things smoothly and finally just blurted something out, anything .
    “I like ice cream,” I said. “Chocolate is my favorite. What’s yours?” My obesity had trumped my intelligence.
    There was a long pause, then she pursed her lips, gave up, and murmured, “Vanilla.”
    I was thrilled. I’d made contact, even if she’d felt the need to come back at me with the opposite of what I’d said. It was like inventing a time machine that worked. But socially speaking, it was also evidence that I could talk to people I didn’t think I wanted to, a valuable skill to possess in this life.
    In some ways, though she wasn’t a celebrity, Martha was my first interview, and knowing that anyone in the world—even someone fairly eager to leave it—would be willing to answer simple questions about themselves, to express opinions on things like ice cream, would also serve me well once I became the founding editor of a teen magazine decades later.
    Then Martha nodded toward me like I was a cow she was deciding not to buy and said, “Shouldn’t eat too much ice cream, though—fat enough as it is.”
    Correction: My first hostile interview.
    But it’s okay. As scarring as it was in that moment, hearing something unexpected and potentially insulting was good practice for when I’d have to interview charmers like Avril Lavigne later on (“I’m not punk and never said I was.”), Clay Aiken (“I think my year on American Idol was more about talent. ”), or Jacob Underwood from the ultimate prefab boy band O-Town (“We aren’t a boy band.”).
    And as a recently certified smart guy, I sensed Martha hadn’t meant to insult me, in the same way my own great-grandmother hadn’t meant to insult my entire family when we met up with her in Missouri, where forty years ago #BlackLivesForSureDidntMatter. We’d arrived at her home after a sweltering car trip around the country that I think