Read Online Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris - Free Book Online Page A

pussy in so long, I’d throw stones at it.”
    My brother’s voice, like my own, is high-pitched and girlish. Telephone solicitors frequently ask to speak to our husbands
     or request that we put our mommies on the line. The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother’s is a
     more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with marble-mouthed, deep-country work crews and his abiding
     love of hard-core rap music. He talks so fast that even his friends have a hard time understanding him. It’s like listening
     to a foreigner and deciphering only shit, motherfucker, bitch, and the single phrase You can’t kill the Rooster.
    “The Rooster” is what Paul calls himself when he’s feeling threatened. Asked how he came up with that name, he says only,
     “Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can’t kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up sometimes,
     but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”
    It often seems that my brother and I were raised in two completely different households. He’s eleven years younger than I
     am, and by the time he reached high school, the rest of us had all left home. When I was young, we weren’t allowed to say
     “shut up,” but once the Rooster hit puberty it had become acceptable to shout, “Shut your motherfucking hole.” The drug laws
     had changed as well. “No smoking pot “ became “no smoking pot in the house,” before it finally petered out to “please don’t
     smoke any more pot in the living room.”
    My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering
     she has hatched a completely different species. “I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,” she once said, arranging
     a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the dining-room table. “It’s nontraditional, but
     that’s the Rooster’s way. He’s a free spirit, and we’re lucky to have him.”
    Like most everyone else in our suburban neighborhood, we were raised to meet a certain standard. My father expected me to
     attend an Ivy League university, where I’d make straight A’s, play football, and spend my off-hours strumming guitar with
     the student jazz combo. My inability to throw a football was exceeded only by my inability to master the guitar.
My grades
were average at best, and eventually I learned to live with my father’s disappointment. Fortunately there were six of us
     children, and it was easy to get lost in the crowd. My sisters and I managed to sneak beneath the wire of his expectations,
     but we worried about my brother, who was seen as the family’s last hope.
    From the age of ten, Paul was being dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and tiny, clip-on rep ties. He endured trumpet lessons,
     soccer camp, church-sponsored basketball tournaments, and after-school sessions with well-meaning tutors who would politely
     change the subject when asked about the Rooster’s chances of getting into Yale or Princeton. Fast and well-coordinated, Paul
     enjoyed sports but not enough to take them seriously. School failed to interest him on any level, and the neighbors were greatly
     relieved when he finally retired his trumpet. His response to our father’s impossible and endless demands has, over time,
     become something of a mantra. Short and sweet, repeated at a fever pitch, it goes simply, “Fuck it,” or on one of his more
     articulate days, “Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”
    My brother politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family, his father included, as either “bitch”
     or “motherfucker.” Friends are appalled at the way he speaks to his only remaining parent. The two of them once visited my
     sister Amy and me in New York City, and we celebrated with a dinner party. When my father complained about his