Okay, it’s like this. I got to wonderin’ how come nothin’ fucked up ever happens in my life. Nothing bad ever happens to me, really. Never broke my arm or nothin’. Things people told me would happen sooner or later . . . never happened. I started noticin’ how weird it was when I was around sixteen, and I thought maybe I just wasn’t askin’ for it, ya know? I was always a pretty good girl who’d been awful lucky. My last two years of high school, I started doin’ some pretty stupid shit. And I still never got hurt.

       I slept around without using condoms or nothin’, and I never got AIDS. Shit, I didn’t even get crabs. I went to all these parties and fucked all these people, and then I drank all this shit. All kinds of stuff like beer, and stuff they told me “didn’t mix.” And I still didn’t get sick. I couldn’t even get drunk! And I tried, man, I did. One time I drank eight beers or somethin’ like that, and nothin’ happened ’cept I pissed like a racehorse. And eight beers is a lot for a little girl like me. I started runnin’ with one of those crowds your mother warns you about, just ’cause I thought maybe they’d help me get some kicks, and they gave me drugs sometimes or let me smoke out with them, whatever. I did a shitload of drugs and I never ODed or got even high. I couldn’t understand it. Alla my friends talked about their trips or whatever, and I never saw trails or nothin’, no matter how many hard drugs I did. I thought maybe I just wasn’t livin’ dangerously enough.

       I tried crossin’ the highway at night, just to see if I could get high off the excitement, but nobody hit me or even came close. I went out with scary guys, but they never tried to kill me, or fuck me unless I asked ’em to. I skipped school and I never got caught, and I started stealing shit from stores. They never caught me either, stupid shits. One time I walked right out of Radio Shack with a boom box, and nothin’ happened! No alarms, no police followin’ me, nothin’. I picked fights with those scary homeless guys that looked like they might kick my ass if I looked at ’em. They never did nothin’ but spit at me or sometimes holler stupid things while they was drunk. I heard from one of the guys I was fucking that drivin’ drunk was a real thrill, and if I could get drunk I woulda tried it, but I couldn’t, so I went out with some of my girlfriends who were pretty fucked up. Nothin’ happened to us, we didn’t even get caught by the police. I was definitely “asking for it” and I didn’t know why I didn’t “get it.” I tried everything that was s’posta to be a thrill, and still nothin’ happened. It pissed me off, and I got really bored and annoyed at everything. Why was it that the worst thing that happened to me was a sunburn and this goddamn depression? I was totally down and I couldn’t drink or fuck it away.

       Then one day me and my girlfriends were fucking around with some pills, and they were talkin’ about which combos of what got you high. I bitched that what they said got you high didn’t work for me, and they just sneered at me and said I musta been taking Advil. So I took one of their bottles and dumped the whole damn thing in my mouth, swallowed everything, and told ’em if I didn’t get high now, I was sure I never would. Well, they said I wouldn’t get high, I’d get dead. They were all screaming and Christina was crying and they were prob’ly all high already, and so Mandy got on the phone to poison control and told ’em how many dozen of them pills I swallowed. They sent an ambulance and everything but wasn’t nothin’ wrong with me. They thought we was playing a prank on ’em when I didn’t die or get sick, but my friends saw me take those pills, and I remember doing it. Everybody said what did they know because they were high at the time, but that’s not the kinda thing that gets screwy when you’re high. So they say. You might forget the order of stuff but you don’t forget the stuff unless you’re really out there. I got really scared that I wasn’t dead. I mean, a fourth of what I took shoulda killed me. And I didn’t even get a stomachache. I wanted to be like the other kids and go joyriding and get drunk a lot and not remember what happened the night before. I wanted to see those trails. I wanted a hangover goddamn it!

       One day I was real depressed ’cause the sex I’d just had with one of my boyfriends had been totally meaningless for like the fourth time, and I cried in the bathroom for a while before I decided this was it, I couldn’t take it anymore. I just wanted to die, I didn’t like this world anymore. Anything would be better than this, even nothing at all. I got a razor blade and slashed my wrist with it. I felt a funny numb pain and something warm, and I made myself look at what I’d done. I thought about all my friends and how they would come to my funeral and cry, and I started crying too. I thought about how my mom would find me, with my blood all over the rug, layin’ on the ground. Except I wasn’t bleeding.

       At that point I decided some reality master was playing a sick joke on me. Or maybe I was finally hallucinating. I touched my wrist where I’d sliced it and there still wasn’t nothin’ there. This time I took the razor blade and watched it go across my wrist. It stung for a second, but still nothing happened. I couldn’t so much as scratch my own skin. It was a sharp blade too.

       I started screaming and I couldn’t stop. I felt like I was going crazy, and I probably was. I waited for my mom to come in and gather me in her arms and give me twenty dollars to go have a good time, like she always did. But Mom wasn’t home, she was out working. I ran out of the house and found myself on top of a six-story building, and I jumped off of it. Landed smack on my goddamn feet, didn’t even hurt. People had fallen half that and died! I sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and bit my fingernails in shock until I was practically eating my hand, and I thought about stuff. I came to this conclusion: I’m the daughter of God.

       This didn’t make much sense to me since I didn’t feel like no goddess. My mom wasn’t no virgin or nothin’. She’d done it with every Tom, Dick, Harry, Larry, Curly, and Moe, and she’d been doin’ it since she was thirteen. I didn’t even know who my daddy was . . . except maybe I did now. Mom called herself a “non-practicing virgin.” That was another thing, I wasn’t no religion or nothin’. I thought church was stupid and never said a real prayer in my life ’cept to pass a math test back when I still gave a shit about that stuff. I was a white middle-class nobody, and here I was being a goddess. What was the deal, anyway?

       It made sense to me though. I mean, I think God made a mistake with Jesus, if all that shit ever happened. Yeah, I went to church when I was little. Mom said it was all right to sin as long as you confessed it, and so I had to when I was little or she’d a whooped me. I thought confession was prob’ly a rule some dirty preacher made up ’cause he wanted to hear everybody’s filthy sex stories and beat off in the confession booth. I used to make them up before I actually had sex to confess about. Priest used to tell me to say Hail Marys for lying too. After I had sex I figured out why he could tell I wasn’t telling the truth.

       Anyway, in the Bible it’s like sayin’ shit about how Jesus was born of a virgin pure. Basically, God fucked a virgin. Why the hell would he do that? Wouldn’t that be a giveaway? He shoulda fucked someone who wouldn’t be surprised if they got knocked up, like my mom. Or maybe he was making some kinda point by gettin’ him some with a virgin. I never got the point. Maybe he did it to piss Joseph off. If I was Joe, I wouldn’t a believed Mary if she said she got pregnant by God himself. What kinda crack was he smoking? I wouldn’t believe it neither but here I am.

       They say Jesus was born without sin because only he with an Earthly father inherits the sin of “man.” So if I’m a goddess, I don’t have original sin either. Maybe that’s why I been tryin’ so hard to get me some sin. ’Cause the part of me that’s not from Heaven’s Gate really wants some. I’d a thought if I was a goddess maybe I wouldn’t want to do all that shit, but that ain’t the way it is. All being a goddess does for me is stops me from getting drunk, dammit!

       It sucks being a goddess, ’cause now I feel like I gotta do something, and it’s a lot more important than homework, or even finals. And I would give a shit about this. Except I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. That’s the bitch of the deal: Big Daddy up there don’t talk much. Shit, you’d think the old man would keep in touch, huh? Ain’t wrote me so much as a letter. Asshole. There’s got to be something, maybe I could be a superhero and stop bank robbers. But I don’t got a nifty supercomputer or anything to tell me where there’s crime or nothin’, and I don’t even got a car, much less a Batmobile. Plus, I look fuckin’ awful in spandex. Not that I’d want to fight crime anyway. That shit is lame. I don’t care if they rob banks. If they got the smarts to work out a system like that, more power to ’em. Besides, what would I do, go in there and say, “Naughty bank robber! You stop that right now or no bedtime snack!” It’s not like I have super powers or nothin’.

       That’s another thing. I can’t do any of those nifty things Jesus could do. I tried walking on water and I fell right through just like I shoulda. I tried turning it into wine too. Didn’t work, it stayed water. Not like I cared, since they’d get me the same amount of drunk. Can’t go forty days without food either. I get pretty hungry. And I ain’t tried risin’ from the dead yet . . . ’cause I couldn’t fucking kill myself.

       It’s like okay, holy father who art in heaven, why are you ignoring your daughter? You’re keeping me from dying so I can what? Fuck the rest of the guys in this city? How about a phone call once in a while, if you can’t manage a burning bush? And where’s my wings dammit? I wanna be an angel, it’d be cool. I could fly wherever I wanted and get the hell out of New York. But I might have to learn to play harp, and I was never any good at that musical shit.

       So, I’m thinkin’, maybe I do have goddess powers and I just don’t know how to use them yet. Nobody’s teaching me. Who knows, maybe I have to anoint the water with oil or something before I can walk on it, or maybe I can’t turn nothin’ into wine because I ain’t been nailed to a piece of wood yet. I sure hope that’s not what goddesses are supposed to do, ’cause I ain’t dying for nobody’s sins. If they want somebody to die for their sins they can do it their own damn self.

       Anyway, maybe I could find someone who knows what’s up to teach me. I asked some of my friends what they thought I should do, after I told them I was a goddess. They laughed at me because they thought I was joking. They didn’t give me any answers about what goddesses should do with their lives, they just argued with me about why I thought I was one. They thought I’d tripped once too often. I asked them didn’t they remember that I couldn’t trip at all? And that I’d taken four times the amount of pills I should have been able to? They got real quiet then and they don’t talk to me much no more. Some help they were. I guess I must have brothers and sisters. God’s gotta be gettin’ it on with mortal women all the time. Nobody notices now ’cause he got smart and started doing sluts and not virgins. Maybe I could find a god husband and we can have godlings together. Or maybe gods and goddesses can’t have kids, ’cept for the big man up there. Jesus didn’t have no kids, and it would explain why the hell I never got knocked up.

       Still, I gotta find some of these other brothers and sisters of mine. There’s gotta be something I’m supposed to be doing. Maybe I should put an ad in the Times. Or let someone watch me jump off a building again so I could get on TV. Except then God might get mad and let me go splat this time. I might do it to get on TV, if I had anything important to say besides, “Marilyn Manson rules.” Maybe I’ll wait until God decides to claim visitation rights to do anything real important. ’Til then, I got a few more people in this city left to fuck.

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