I Never Wanted A Whore for a Daughter
I was a poison potent enough to offend both man and God.
I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen after Daddy caught me with a dick in my mouth.
But before that, me and him watched storms.
Drawn to the black clouds, we sat on the front porch, fat rain drops splashing against our legs, halfway wishing the thunder would transform into a hurricane. Inside, Mama migrated to the center of the home, crouched in a bathtub.
“You see that cloud, that real ugly one?” Daddy said. “I’m gonna paint that son of a bitch.”
Storms informed Daddy’s art.
Before us, in the front yard, the velvety leaves of the magnolia whipped in the wind. Suddenly, a crack issued from the great tree, and with a crash the magnolia dropped a branch, scattering leaves into the yard. Daddy hopped to his feet and ran to the wreckage. I joined him at his side.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “There’s a baby squirrel in there.”
In the pounding rain, half-hidden beneath the leaves, a tiny creature padded the ground with its paws. Around it, its mother scampered, panicked.
When the storm died down, Daddy and I went out to check on the baby, and found it still searching, eyes sealed shut and tail as thin as a cat’s. “He’s too big for his mama to carry him back to the nest,” Daddy remarked, judging the size of the baby in his hand, searching the tree for the mother who’d given up.
“Lord Jesus,” Mama sighed when Daddy brought the squirrel into our home.
While Daddy left to purchase kitten formula and a tiny bottle with which to feed our new pet, I cradled the infant on my chest. If I held him long enough, I pondered, perhaps the first time he opened his eyes, he would see me. I wanted that—wanted this baby to open his eyes and see the whole world in me. By the time Daddy returned home, I’d decided on a name.
“I’ve named him Gabriel,” I announced.
“That ain’t no name for a squirrel,” Daddy said, Marlboro balanced on his bottom lip. He took one hammer-flattened finger and scratched the animal beneath his soft chin.
“His name is Fred.”
I don’t remember my brothers getting in trouble for sex. Both of them were certainly active, my mother catching Michael on the receiving end of a blowjob in the basement one summer day; Jason chased relentlessly by school girls, indulging as he pleased. Nonetheless, I can’t recall a single screaming match or crying jag that stemmed from my brothers’ rendezvous.
The warning the world gave my brothers was this: Don’t you dare get that girl pregnant.
The warning the world gave me was this: Don’t you dare be a whore.
The dick in my mouth wasn’t my first sexual transgression.
Months earlier, Mama had caught me with a hickey on my neck after a supposed girls’ slumber party. She demanded of me, cigarette in her trembling hand, “was it everything you expected?”
“Yes,” I lied.
And he wasn’t even the first.
Before that, I’d lost my virginity to a neighborhood boy no older than me, a kid high on Christianity of the hand-waving, crying-in-church variety. Like me, he was physically precocious: a child wielding an adult’s body. We weren’t ready for ourselves, much less each other. Nonetheless, I noticed the way he watched me. Felt his eyes travel across my body.
So this is power.
I set out to abuse it.
Each bus ride to and from school, I’d cross and uncross my legs, hypnotizing him with a spell I didn’t understand, inciting within him a longing he couldn’t name. He French-kissed me at the bus stop, leaving crumbs from a PopTart on my chin. So this is love. Later, we went on a bike ride through the woods together, taking a break on a sunny patch to fumble with each other’s bodies.
Although I couldn’t imagine anything larger than a pinky inside me—and trust me, I’d tried—I nonetheless wanted this. Wanted to be grown. Wanted to be a woman. Wanted the stakes in my life to exceed tears shed over a Barbie or a heart wrapped up in a squirrel. When he fingered the button on my jeans, I welcomed the opportunity. Yet as before me he knelt, pants around his knees, I couldn’t comprehend his body—otherworldly, a stranger. Different than the flat part between Ken’s legs. Different than the drawings on the bathroom wall. Alive. Animal. I opened my knees to accept this foreigner.
I don’t remember the pain of this, my first penetration—a lack of physical suffering for which I’ve felt forever guilty.
What I do remember: the clear blue sky above me, the buzz of a mosquito in my ear. My hair pinned beneath his hand. He thrust once, twice, thrice, and four, and then leapt from me as if stung by a wasp. Turning his back to me, he shuddered into the leaves.
As I puzzled over whether this actually counted—how many seconds does it take to make sex?—he dropped his head into his hands and sunk down upon a tree stump. He curled into himself, wrapping his arms around his legs. I wanted those arms wrapped around me.
From within the fortress he’d built of his body, I heard a hiccup. A sob. Weeping.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I’ve betrayed my earthly father,” he answered, “and I’ve betrayed my heavenly father, as well.”
I’d shuddered nothing into the leaves. Of course, no girl had any such right. But what about his arms around me afterward? Did I stand to gain nothing from this dance in the dirt?
Instead, I was a poison potent enough to offend both man and God.
“Get on your bike,” I spat. “We’re going home.”
When I was five, my mama gave me my first diary. That year, I would begin a chronicle of my youth that would stretch into adulthood that had at the heart of every entry my obsessions with a revolving door of boys, the greatest goal of my life, gaining their favor.
As grade school turned into junior high, Mama taught me how to achieve beauty.
Taking me in the bathroom, sitting me on the counter, pulling my shirt over my head, she’d inform me that my breasts, while small, would have a nice shape—and my eyes—dark serious pools of mahogany—would cast spells. “It’s in the blood,” Mama told me, a black magic charm, a natural born legacy. As puberty rounded the corner, turning the flat plains of my body into a fraught territory of mountains and caves that terrified and thrilled us both, Mama trained me on how best to weaponize my assets.
“What’s that boy you like, the one from Forest Hills?” she asked, as she plucked hairs from my brows, tears popping into my eyes. “You’ll get his attention now.”
At thirteen, my latest obsession was a prominent member of the Danville gentry, a boy whose pedigree deemed him desirable by the tastemakers of John M. Langston Junior High. I wonder now—when those kids’ parents purchased their nice homes along the tree-lined streets well out of the view of Evil Land’s smokestacks, did they understand the extent of what they were buying for their children?
I hated my folks for moving us to the county. Our phone number revealed our lesser station. Anybody giving out digits beginning in 822- had good reason to be ashamed.
“Can you at least put me in dance?” I begged Mama, knowing full well that all the best-liked girls in Danville attended Martha Folke’s Dance Academy.
“Absolutely not.”
Dance was for the good families—
And we hated the good families.
However, after my Forest Hills crush held my hand in the hallway at school, my stock began to rise. I started receiving invitations to birthday parties I’d never known existed. It felt good to belong. I would do whatever it took to solidify my new station.
And so, as I knelt before that boy on that fateful afternoon, I was determined to secure his continuing admiration.
But suddenly, the bedroom door slammed open.
And there—stood Daddy.
That face that had smiled so sweetly upon an orphaned squirrel, those eyes that had danced with pride at my artistic strivings—now closed into one hard line. There were no words, only disgust.
Palpable.
His little girl?
No.
That was the moment I lost him.
I scrambled to my feet—but there was no hiding what I’d done.
Daddy lunged into my room and grabbed my boyfriend by the shoulders. He dragged him down the stairs and kicked him square in the ass out the door.
I loved this boy whose dick I’d been sucking. I was sucking his dick for love. Of all the boys who’d touched me in my thirteenth year, only this one had the bravery to call me his, only this one was willing to hold the hand of a nobody from the 822. As from my bedroom window, I watched my father drive that boy from our home back to the good neighborhood, my heart dropped. I’ll never see him again. They’ll take him away from me. I fancied us a modern Romeo and Juliet, with a vast and forbidden love whose forced dissolution would lead us both to death.
But it only led one of us to death.
“Don’t you dare get that girl pregnant,” my boyfriend’s mother warned him when my daddy arrived with her son. She took away his phone privileges for a week.
At home, I found a different type of punishment awaiting me.
“You were giving him a blowjob, weren’t you?” Mama flicked her cigarette hard, ash landing on the floor, every inch of her furious.
“You will never see him again. You will never have another boyfriend again. You will never leave your room again. You will never be happy again.”
I knew I’d taken it too far. Yet I didn’t know where to stop. I didn’t know where the good seduction ended, the stuff that got you loved—and the bad seduction began, the stuff that got you hated. Why did we pluck my eyebrows if not for this success?
“You’re crying?” she asked. “Good. You should be crying.”
And then—Daddy reentered our home.
I looked to him. This man who plastered my name across walls. This man who spoke to the birds. This beloved daddy who unbeknownst to any of us had only three years left to live. I looked to him to intervene.
And he—looked away.
“I never wanted a whore for a daughter,” he said, as he walked back out our door.
I rummaged in the kitchen cabinets until I found a bottle of sleeping pills.
I poured myself a large glass of Mama’s sweet tea.
I sat on my bed and emptied the pills into my palm, munching mouthfuls like candy.
Next, I penned a garbled suicide note that pleaded for absolution from everybody from Jesus, to my parents, to Fred the squirrel.
Most of what happens next is fuzzy. I wrote my boyfriend’s initials across my stomach. I painted my face—blue eye shadow, red lipstick, streaks of pink across my cheeks. Too much. Too much of everything. I am too much of everything and I am the only girl in the world sucking dick.
And then: the weight of sleep upon me, a blanket by the fire on a snowy day, irresistible. Sinking in. How easy it is to die.
Sometime afterward, Mama rushed into my room. She would later say she was compelled by a magical force to scale the stairs with a speed not her own, to pop the lock with a strength not hers. When she threw the door open at last and found me lifeless on the bed with a suicide letter by my side, she bellowed, long and low, David!
As the ambulance sped through my neighborhood, a friend of mine followed along. She arrived at my home to find me strapped to a board, head lolling, carried on the shoulders of men in uniform.
“Is she going to be okay?” she asked a paramedic.
“No,” he replied, loading me in.
My daddy stood on the steps, this friend would later tell me, frozen and silent, my suicide note folded in his hand. When she asked him what had happened, he could only answer,
“She’s sick. She’s sick.”
Hours later I awoke, strapped to a hospital bed, lurching black sludge all over Granny Audrey’s dress as she waited by my bedside for signs of life.
“I have to pee!” I yelled between fits of vomiting.
“That’s been taken care of,” a nurse advised me.
I had been catheterized.
My stomach had been pumped.
I had been strapped down.
I lived.
I survived.
What humiliation.
I was locked in the psych ward for a week, making paper flowers and drawing hand turkeys and smoking cigarettes handed out by orderlies. I asked Jesus to save me from what awaited when I returned home—the wrath of my parents, the prying eyes of my peers, the fall from the esteem I’d so briefly enjoyed. What boy would ever hold my hand in the hallway now?
When I returned home, Mama wouldn’t look at me. Daddy stopped writing my name. But they never stopped attending my brothers’ baseball games. Why was I alone so wholly untouchable? I never asked. I was learning the order of things.
At school, the Algebra teacher advised my classmates to refrain from indulging me. “This is attention-seeking behavior,” she warned. In the hallway, boys elbowed one another when I passed, laughing. The girls drove their eyes to the floor. “Mother says you can’t come to our house anymore.”
I had only wanted to belong, but instead I had turned myself invisible.
I decided then: I will turn this scarlet letter into a rifle on my shoulder.
And listen—I was devoted. I won’t beg for love. I don’t need my daddy. I don’t need my mama. I don’t need a friend, not a single one. All those years practicing tragedy had prepared me for this moment. I’ll be your whore. I’ll be your whore in vibrant colors all across this shitty town. Pour into me everything you hate about you. I accept it. I want it. I know now who I am.
As soon as it was legal, I hit the strip club stage.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, Too Pretty To Be Good.
I was inspired to share this story of my own by the raw and beautiful storytelling over at
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