#1. The DJ

The list starts before I even considered having sex. Before I even really knew what it t was. When I was still leaping up to get a glass of water if any mention of kissing came on while I was watching TV with my parents. Of course boys were forefront in my mind. I noticed them constantly, smelled them as they walked past me in the hall and scribbled furiously in my journal about which boys I liked the best. My fantasy world consisted of equal parts GoneWith the Wind, Sweet Valley High, and key parts of the movie Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Oh and what a fantasy world it was.

I was not an attractive teenager. I was in no way a popular kid. I was a country kid. From the age of seven to the age twelve I grew so fast that my mother gave up trying to keep me in clothes that fit. For those five years I remained a constant 70 pounds. And then puberty hit. Think Martha Dumptruck from Heathers. That was me. 5’8” tall with glasses and frizzy blonde hair, and size 11 feet. I towered above all my classmates and most of my teachers. I constantly had my nose in a book and I tried my hardest to make every other person look stupid. I was a mean, fat, giant of a girl. It is no wonder I earned the nickname Einstein. Actually, it is a wonder I even mattered enough to warrant a nickname, but in Small Town America, there was a limited amount of kids to torture, so I took my share.

I went through most of junior high friendless, but by the end of eighth grade I had wormed my way into a small knot of friends. They were the “bad girls”, meaning their hair was bigger, their make up was thicker, they listened to Poison, not Journey, and it was highly likely they would make out with you in the back hallway during the dance.

The bad girls were fickle friends.

The one who had been your BFF the week before may very well be your worst enemy by the next Monday morning. During an especially long run of BFF’ness with a girl named T. we started a game of calling the local radio station and requesting songs.

“Hi. (giggle giggle giggle) Can you play Don’t Close Your Eyes by Kix? (giggle giggle)”

We would flirt with the DJ’s and tell them we were eighteen year old Canadians visiting for the summer. We were older, hotter, and much more experienced than our fourteen year old selves. We would giggle giggle giggle and then hang up and call back half an hour later when the DJ played our song.

“And this one goes out to the smokin’ hot Canadians staying all alone on the lake tonight. Let’s hope they close their eyes sometimes.”

It was fun. It was dangerous. We lived in an incredibly small town. How could these boys, just graduated from our very own high school, not realize that we were just geeky little fourteen year old girls?

And then I started talking to just one DJ. The DJ. His voice was deep and sexy and I would make mix tapes of his intros and commercials. Especially dear were the ones where he mentioned the not real me. His girlfriend. He dedicated songs to me. We talked every night from midnight until six am. Whispered dreams at three am under a New Kids on the Block comforter. I became a completely different person from midnight until six am. I was beautiful. I was older. I had been places. As the weeks went by it became harder and harder to come up with reasons why I couldn’t meet The DJ. I had to move back to Canada. My Grandmother was evil and locked me in my room. I had an abusive boyfriend. A kid. I wasn’t eighteen. I was twenty-five. I was a model. I cut pictures out of Seventeen magazine and sent them to the DJ claiming they were me. The pictures were never of the same model, they just had to be blonde, and the DJ just didn’t get it, or he just didn’t want to let go of the fantasy. I thought everyday from six am until midnight how to end this fantasy without making me look bad, without losing my fake boyfriend, without getting in trouble. I thought that if I came up with the perfect out, he would realize that Martha Dumptruck was the love of his life.

The “phonelationship” continued all summer, and I, as Martha Dumptruck, would go and visit the DJ at his second job during the day. I would walk into the video arcade and bring him presents from her. He would ask me questions about her, my half-sister, and I would answer. He would be sitting at the Centipede game with a cut-out magazine picture of some nameless model. His girlfriend. My great big stinking lie.

So incredibly painful.

It even continued after I entered high school in the fall and The DJ was transferred to another radio station on the other side of the state. Every night from midnight to six I would curl around the phone and melt into my fantasy world with him. We planned our wedding, we named our children, I became well-versed in the craft of phone sex. If I had the courage to relay this story to any of the other men on the list, they would thank The DJ for the whispered coachings I absorbed late at night above my parents bedroom.

And then suddenly without warning, approximately one month later, Canadian me stopped calling the DJ. The DJ would call Martha Dumptruck frantic and panicked (of course he never had Canadian me’s phone number)

“Where is she? What did I do? Is she ok?”

“I dunno,” I replied sullenly.

Did I suddenly have a moral awakening? Did I realize just how insane this all was? How fantasy is not real life and this boy would never love a Martha Dumptruck? Oh lord no. My parents received a phone bill for over 100 hours of phone calls to The DJ and I was summarily grounded. The reason she stopped calling him? My phone was removed from my room until I paid off the INCREDIBLE sum of $300. I had never even seen that much money.

Ah, but the poor DJ. Stewing away on the other side of the state, thinking his super hot model girlfriend had found another man. Perhaps her Grandmother had killed her. Perhaps the abusive boyfriend had put her in the hospital. He couldn’t handle the not knowing, and finally, after almost a year of a fantasy relationship with a girl he had never met, he started doing some research. This is back in the day before Google searches and internet people searches. I can only imagine it took him some serious time and money to put the whole puzzle together.

It was not long after that he showed up at my front door early one Saturday morning. My mother walked in my room and told me I had a visitor. To this day, almost twenty years later, I remember exactly what I was wearing—because it was just that awful. Red sweat pants. Hole in the crotch. Stains on the ass. Red K-Mart sweater. Unravelling at the neck. Too big. All red. All messy. I was a tomato with zits and a horrible case of frizzy bedhead.

Sitting in the living room-with my parents!-was The DJ. Looking exhausted and beaten. My mother was chain smoking and chewing her nails. Never a good sign. I instantly wondered how long he had been there and what he had told them. He politely asked my parents if I could go for a car ride with him and for one brief fluttering moment in my delusional Sweet Valley High mind I thought he had come to tell me he loved me and not her. It was a very very brief moment.

We went to his car parked out front. I had seen the black Camaro around town and always imagined sitting in it next to him, everyone in town jealous of my super hot boyfriend. He had a spice air freshener and the car was immaculate. Sometimes when I am shopping and I come across those displays of tree air fresheners, I crack open a spice flavored one and take a whiff. It takes me right back to one of the most uncomfortable moments in my life.

We sat in silence for a few very long moments before he turned to me, gripped my chin in his giant right hand, looked directly at me (SWOON) and said, “You are fucking insane. How could one pitiful little girl be responsible for all of this?”

The effect of those words is something I hope I never have to experience in my life again.

“I hope someday when you are grown up, some man rips your heart out of your body, and I hope it hurts just one iota as much as this.”

And Martha Dumptruck just sat there. Absorbing the curse of The DJ. Never once thinking it would come true many times over. Waiting for the end. She did not cry. She did not apologize. She waited until he said, “Just kidding darling, lets French kiss!”

Which he did not. He told me to get the fuck out of his car and to never ever try and call him again or he would call the cops.

Aw. Love.

I got out of the car, walked into the house, past my staring parents, up the carpeted steps, down the carpeted hallway, and climbed into my bed, where I stayed for the next three days. I cried and I moaned and my mother brought me food, and never once said anything about the truth of the matter. I plotted and plotzed and tried to figure out a way to make it all better, and in the end I just gave up. I sent the DJ back all of his letters and pictures, and I never talked to him again.

So begins the Diary of The Transcontinental Whore.

Number one. The DJ. I consider him the most embarrassing of my list. I have never told anyone the entire truth about my year of lies, and I probably never will. Look at your list. Who is your most embarrassing? The one that you have not told anyone about. I want to know. Please feel free to respond here, or to transcontinentalwhore@gmail.com