Dear Mothers of the Contributors and Potential Contributors to
Lime Tea:
Calm down. Relax. Take a Xanax, have a cocktail, crack open a beer, maybe smoke
some of that high-grade, hydroponically-grown marijuana you get from that 19-year
old kid who cleans pools two days a week and drives an Escalade. Get a massage,
go to the chiropractor for a spinal realignment, get a full-body seaweed wrap
at Aveda, or call up that shrink in Beverly Hills (you know the one; Dr. Everything-Be-All-Right)
for some one-on-one counseling. Refill the aromatherapy potpourri bowl, put
some cucumber slices on your eyes, and lie down in a darkened room/tanning bed/hyperbaric
sleep chamber. Do whatever you have to do-- only please, please, cut my poor
contributors some slack.
It's not easy running a precious little online magazine. (It's also not easy
raising six kids on an IHOP waitress's salary. Not that I have to do that; I
just put it in to show I have some perspective.) There are server bills to pay,
tedious computer issues to deal with, mailing lists to mismanage. And don't
even get me started on the chronic shortages of paper clips, Scotch tape, honey-mustard
pretzel nuggets, Swiss cake rolls, and the thousand other things we need to
put out just one week's worth of the magazine you are theoretically so proud
to see your son or daughter's fine work published in.
But all these logistical challenges dwindle to insignificance
compared to the one thing that, more than any other, makes cranking out the
quality product you see here week after week so difficult, challenging, arduous,
burdensome, galling, no picnic, and fraught with peril. That thing, O mother
of a writer, is you.
Yes, you. See, one of the things about Lime Tea that
separates it from other magazines (aside from the Swiss cake roll thing) is
that, to the extent that we specialize in any one kind of story at all, we specialize
in the personal essay. The personal essay is just that, personal. Typically,
the author relates some experience or set of circumstances that befell him or
her personally.
It's easy to get our contributors to commit to this kind of
story: not everyone sees themselves as capable of writing a work of fiction,
but just about anyone can tell the story of something interesting that happened
to them. And often, truth is, if not stranger than fiction, at least richer,
more unusual, and more entertaining. To put it another way: you can't make this
stuff up. I know dozens of people who have great stories-- incredibly bizarre,
cool, hilarious, or otherwise noteworthy experiences that I would absolutely
love to get into the pages of Lime Tea.
But I can't. And it's all your fault.
Don't believe me? It happens all the time. Let's say I'm hovering near a hosted
bar at some cocktail party and I overhear some witty, engaging soul regaling
all in attendance with the story of how he wangled his way backstage at a Whitesnake
concert, snorted cocaine with Tawny Kitaen, and later went cruising around Bozeman,
Montana in a rented limousine with David Coverdale looking for hookers, eventually
spending the night in a Motel 6 by the airport getting free blowjobs and watching
pay-per-view pornos on a coin-operated vibrating bed.
Now, that's a pretty goddamned good story. Let's further say, for the sake of
argument, that I know this person is capable of constructing a coherent sentence,
and they've already indicated their willingness to write for the magazine. So,
a done deal, right?
Wrong. I will never get to publish this story, because as soon as I ask the
writer to write it up, he will say the words that might as well be this publication's
unofficial motto: "I would, but I don't want my Mom to read it. She'd freak
out."
That's it. Two billion internet users want to read this story,
but one Mom is going to make sure that they never do. "All The News That's
Fit To Print"? More like "All The Stories It's Okay For My Mom To
Read." Which is about 20% of them, tops. And for what? To preserve the
polite fiction in your mind that your 35-year-old son or daughter is a virgin
who's never touched anything stronger than sarsaparilla.
Well, I'm not going to put up with it. I'm outing the entire
contributors list: Everyone who has ever written for Lime Tea, even
the ones who have never been married, has had sex. That's right, Mom,
sex, the old down-and-dirty, mogambo, the juicy, trim, ass, tail, the beast
with two backs and no face. We've done it backwards and forwards, in twos, threes,
and fives, with members of the opposite sex or the same sex, in dirty sleeping
bags and airplane bathrooms. Satan probably hovered invisibly in the corner
as we did these things, cackling with glee over the acquisition of our once-pure
souls, but there's nothing we can do about it now.
And that's not all. We've also taken drugs. That's right, drugs:
we've Just Said Yes to an astonishing variety of uppers, downers, opiates, hallucinogens,
inhalants, and abusable over-the-counter cold remedies. We've smoked weed, snorted
coke, and shot smack. We've done speed, LSD (liquid, blotter, and windowpane),
ecstasy, GHB, PCP, MDA, STP, animal tranquilizers, psychedelic mushrooms, datura,
salvia, psychoactive doses of nutmeg, and God knows what else. Some of us have
probably licked toads in South America in pursuit of a buzz.
And we've done dangerous things, too. Things you don't know about, things that
would make your hair curl: hopping freights, driving drunk, getting into cars
with strangers (sometimes strangers with drugs, some of whom we subsequently
had sex with-- hat trick!) We've jumped off bridges into water of unknown depth,
and gone swimming less than an hour after eating. We have run with scissors,
we have read in bad light, and we've cleaned firearms without first making sure
that the magazine was ejected and the breech was clear. Some of us have then
used these firearms in drunken William-Tell-type feats of high-drama marksmanship.
We've performed oral sex without the use of a dental dam (see above) and drunk
straight from the tap in Mexico.
In short, we are adults, and we've done adult things. Some of these things were
stupid, some of them were dangerous, and some of them you'd probably prefer
not to think about just because it's icky to think about stuff like that. But
we did these things, and yet we live. So calm down.
If, indeed, it is you who needs to calm down. Because you know
what, O Moms of us? I think you know that we did all those things. I think you've
known it all along. If, as my contributors all seem to believe, you really can't
handle knowing all this stuff, then I say to you again, calm down. But I don't
think that's the case. I think you can handle it just fine. That's right, Moms,
you can see it coming, just like you always could: I'm about to suckerpunch
your kids. Sit back and enjoy it.
See, up till now those kids have been reading this thinking
it's all about you. But we both know it's not. If you want to know who this
is really about, cast your mind back to the priceless expression on
your child's face the last time you began a sentence with, "Well, when
your father and I have sex..."
Pretty hilarious, eh? Like watching them bite into a ball of
tinfoil. The fact is, you can deal with knowing what your kids are up to a lot
better than they can deal with having you know. You've been able to
deal with it ever since you found that stroke book or vibrator in their room
and didn't say anything. It's their problem, not yours.
So, contributors and potential contributors, what do you think
of that? Tuning in expecting me to trash your moms-- you ought to be ashamed
of yourselves. It's not your mom with whom I have a bone to pick. It's you,
the adult child who thinks his or her mom "can't deal." Well, hear
me now and believe me later: real writers don't worry about what their Mom is
going to think.
Do you think Philip Roth would have been able to write Portnoy's
Complaint, a book most famous for its account of the protagonist's masturbating
with raw liver, if he'd been worrying about what his Mom thought? Could Faulkner
have written Sanctuary, whose main character is sodomized with a corn
cob, if he'd been thinking about what his mother might think of a son who could
have such ideas? Hardly. In fact, Faulkner once said he'd kill his
own mother for the sake of his craft. All I'm asking is that you tell her about
that one time with the Ben-Wa balls.
Admit it; your mom is fine. If there's anyone in this equation
who can't deal, it's you. So wake up, Mr. or Ms. Must-Protect-My-Mom's-Delicate-Sensibilities.
I've got news for you: your mom knows you masturbate. Yes, she does. Worse,
she doesn't really care. In short, just tell the goddamned Whitesnake
story and let your mom go to hell her own way. She got by long before you
came along; she'll get by after you're gone-- which will be pretty soon if you
keep it up with the William Tell thing. I mean, fun's fun, but Jesus.
Marty Smith is the Editor of Lime Tea. He's
really hoping his Mom doesn't get around to reading this.
