to this day, i can't eat armadillo
I was a cocky Catholic boychik of only a dozen years, obsessed with pornography, the Rolling Stones, and fat neckties. But despite my transgressive, hookey-playing ways, I was also my grade school's spelling-bee champion. For months I had prepared for the County Finals, boning up on such insurmountable verbal Godzillas as "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "syzygy." I knew I had the mad skills ... and the moxie ... to take it all the way to the Nationals, where, if I won, maybe someone would arrange a private audience for me with Linda Blair.
Standing onstage in a cavernous theater on a cool Saturday morning, I easily dispatched the first word the judges tossed at me. Then, after grilling my mostly Hindic competitors, the judges asked me to spell "armadillo."
I laughed inwardly. Piece o' cake. In my arrogant haste, I spelled it quickly. Too quickly ... I slurred the two 'L's together, and the judges thought I had only said one 'L.' I saw them shaking their heads "no," and to my horror, I was asked to leave the stage.
This unjust defeat, kind jimgoad.netsters, marked the grandest tragedy of my burgeoning adolescence. And it placed a chip on my shoulder which I carry to this day. Quite a chip, that chip.
If I ever see an armadillo scuttling across the highway, be assured that I'll press the accelerator and get myself some Instant Justice.
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My four-page article about sexually abusive nuns is in the current (September?!?) issue of Hustler.
