Pull My Finger
by: Shannon Michele Johnston
april 2000

I AIN'T RACIST!

     I was going to write about the racist thing, and you know what, I can't really pull that off and remain objective about it since I think all blacks have the "poor black me" attitude and so many white people are just ignorant morons, so instead I decided not to go with the racist thing and decided to focus on my heritage, those certifiably psychopathic, drunken Irish people. Yeah, those are the ones.
     My first brush with an Irish person was when I was born, because tucked somewhere in the man that fathered me were his deadly Irish genes. My mom, the Italian she was, who by the way, didn't take any shit off of anyone, should have known better than to put a gun to her head by marrying an Irish man, well at least mixing the two volatile gene types and having children. And it didn't occur to me until like, adulthood, that I was destined to a deadly gene pool. An open sewer pond that should have been rootered out and sealed up with haste before demonic sewer creatures could crawl out of it.
     My earliest memory of the marital "culture clash" was one that echoed throughout the house one night as I was lying in bed. I could hear my mom yelling and my father cussing and then the huge aluminum sugar canister flying through the air which hit the refrigerator and then...silence...followed by the sound of the vacuum cleaner.
     One of the things I think that could have led up to this tumultuous relationship could have been the twenty-four year difference between them, but I am more apt to think of it as the Irish/Italian combination considering I have seen perfectly good marriages between the age gapped, and the combination is very much like ammonia and bleach...very fucking toxic.
     My mother dished up as a daily staple, platters of disrespect and strong-willed rebellion, offering it to us upon which, we seemed to feed ravenously. I decided early on I would never marry an Italian nor an Irish person. Especially after giving careful consideration to my siblings in all of their life choices and the type of people they turned out to be. So, as sort of a research project I set out looking for the genetic type that would make the perfect mate.
     I dated a Chinese guy in High School, but all he wanted to do was smoke out of a fucking pipe all the time. My next boyfriend was Irish, but I had no plan to marry and/or have children so the dating was perfectly safe. He drank too much and had no ambition. In college another Irish crept onto the scene, a very docile, nerdy type. Didn't smoke pot, drank socially only, liked to hike, hunt and fish, but had this huge problem distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
     And then I met my first husband, a, um, and I say this in a whisper, German. Witty, fun-loving, intellectual, gorgeous, adventurous, attentive, sensitive, great in the sack, tall, muscular, and, um, (I didn't find this out til later) gay!
     When our marriage ended with him leaving to go live with his boyfriend I added German people to the list of those to hate.
     I looked a couple of times at those men of the Spanish descent, but decided as a group they really lack a lot of things, with the most obvious being common decency. Besides, I couldn't quite stomach the idea of actually, um, touching one.
     So I moved around full circle and began dating another Irish guy, ever notice they kind of infiltrate our society, you just can't get away from them. I really liked him a lot, full blooded sonofabitch, tall, blonde with flaming green eyes, gorgeous as hell with enough hair on his body to weave two Indian blankets. And guess what? He smoked constantly from a pipe, he had no ambition, he liked to hike, hunt and fish and would steal whatever wasn't nailed down. He also had a problem distinguishing between reality and fantasy. He was sensitive, great in the sack, and I, as sure as fuck, wasn't about to hang around to find out if he was gay.
     In the end, I married a Scot/Irish mixed up leprochaun thing that turned out to be such a fucking Jew. It's unreal.

Shannon Michele Johnston

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