Read Online Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto - Free Book Online

wanted an easy out, and I figured that a baby would be a certain way to avoid the looming eternity of hellfire and brimstone I was sure was in store for me. Plus, so many other girls were having babies that it seemed normal. I started begging Anthony to knock me up. It is ironic that after spending so much time worrying I’d wind up pregnant, now that I was trying to make it happen, it just wouldn’t. It helped that Anthony flat-out refused—no sperm, nobaby. I think it must have been a real God spell that my mother put on me, if you want to know the truth. She never wanted us to wind up like her, saddled with so many babies, even as she kept having them. She wanted a different life for me, and she used her strange witchy ways to give me this one kind of protection, and it worked. Anthony didn’t knock me up, and I stayed gay inside; my secret.
    Meanwhile, we were doing shows with Room Fullove Thirteen because there just weren’t that many bands to ask to play. The same small group of people were in all the bands, mixing around into different combinations. Little Miss Muffet and Room Fullove Thirteen, Mrs. Garrett, and Space Kadets, who were also called Boy Pussy USA. Not to forget my future friends Jeri Beard and Kathy Mendonca’s band, Poopoo Icee. They had a second band, the Velvet 45s. And there were the Puget Sounds and the Hips. Every day was a different band, almost. Someone would get inspired by a new cool band name and voilà, a fresh ensemble would debut. It was so exciting, this whole music thing, and up until then everything in Arkansas had been so incredibly boring.
    It was Nathan who brought the whole scene together. Nathan is truly a magical person. He’s always been able to make things happen; he’s never bored. If he notices something being boring he fixes it really easily, and I felt that’s what he did with his hometown, Searcy.
    Searcy was still Arkansas, but it was a little bigger, a little cooler, with more pipelines to the outside world. Nathan was too cool. He wasn’t wearing baggy jeans and a wallet chain, he was watching John Waters films and wearing a polyester suit. Really, really cool.
    Our “audiences” were very small. Mostly we just played for each other, unless Room Fullove Thirteen were on the bill. They all had girlfriends who would stand at the front of the stage and sway and coo at them the whole time, and of course their ever-present manager-dad would be around. Once Mom came to listen to me sing. She was really into Little Miss Muffet and really sweet aboutmy voice. She hadn’t gotten to go to many of my things when I was a kid, choir and whatnot, so she tried to make up for it during my teen years.
    Just because I was trying my hand at singing for bands didn’t mean I’d abandoned the choir. I was such a choir nerd I’d been voted choir president! Bet you didn’t even know such a position existed. I’d shamelessly campaigned for the slot, and I’d gotten it, because in spite of everything I was well liked. I had a
Why not?
attitude about things that freed me up to go after stuff a more hesitant nerd—or even worse, a more popular kid—might avoid.

11
    As hard as it was to scrounge for music, desperately trying to hunt down what kids in other cities had easy access to, there was something special about that time. Each discovery was a treasure that could save your life, that made you more understandable to yourself. Every song was a message in a bottle cast into the ocean by someone just like you, in another land, who was waiting for you to join her, saying,
You’ll make it! You’ll make it!
I’m glad I came of age during that weird window before kids could download music on the Internet.
    When Jennifer came into my life it really changed everything. I met my chosen family through Jennifer. She introduced me to my bandmates and best friends: her boyfriend, Jeri, and Kathy and Nathan. Jennifer was the daughter of Jo Ann, the lady who had introduced my mother to Tom.