I was born with the mark of my mother’s sin on my face.

That’s what my grandmother used to say, anyway. Of course, by the time I was four I’d figured out that Grandma was pure unadulterated batshit crazy, which helped me not to take anything she said too personally. Honestly, when you grow up in a small Arkansas town the disfigured bastard product of an incestuous scandal, a whackjob grandmother who kind of hates you is the least of your problems. Besides, that mark of sin was probably the only thing that kept me alive after Grandma kicked Mom out. Our local river—full of dark bends—was normally a pretty good place to lose just about anything you didn’t want. But every once in a while the evidence would turn back up downstream, and let’s face it—a town our size just doesn’t produce that many ugly blotchy kids a year. The fact that I’d have made an instantly recognizable infant corpse may well be the only thing that kept me out of the drink.

See, Grandma made fudge. Ran a little mail order business right out of our kitchen. In Grandma’s world, fudge was a virtue, like honesty or charity. Fudgeliness next to Godliness. Anything that led to selling fudge was good. Anything that got in the way was bad. So when her lech of a brother knocked up her idiot of a daughter, Grandma didn’t waste time wondering if she shared any portion of the blame. All she knew was that a pregnant teenager scared customers away, and an ugly bastard child just reminded the customers of the pregnant teenager. So, Grandma kept it simple; she blamed my mom, and she blamed me, and then she pretty much called it a day. And made more fudge.

Depending on how folksy a doctor is, he’ll tell you that my birthmark is called a nevus flammeus, a port-wine stain, or “what Gorbachev got on his head, but girl, you got it on yo’ face.” Among the girls I went to school with, it’s just called “not cute,” as in, “I don’t want to be mean, y’all, but that thing in her face is just not cute.” Medically speaking, it’s not caused by your mother screwing your uncle. Whether or not it’s caused by God’s retribution is anyone’s guess. Personally, I think laying the smackdown for the whole thing on my face is pretty random, and any God who’d do it is kind of a dick. But then, I wasn’t exactly a star at Sunday school.

Needless to say, I had a few obstacles between me and a storybook childhood. I was the worst thing a Southern girl can be: not pretty. I was also the second worst thing, not from a “nice” family, and the third worst thing, not willing to eat anyone’s shit. A shrink might say I alienated people so that they couldn’t reject me first. I say any shrink that didn’t grow up in my town with my face can shut it. If people were going to call me a bad seed, I was gonna oblige. I dressed in black. I listened to death metal. I kept offering to tell folks’ futures by reading chicken bones. I even found earrings that were made from rats’ feet. I wore six pairs. In one ear.

I read a lot, too. Not for enjoyment, mind you—just to feel intellectually superior. Orwell, Tolstoy, and Rand seemed to be the best at intimidating the everloving shit out of people, so they were my “favorites,” but I was willing to try anything with an angry dead Russian on the cover. My taste in literature didn’t do much to improve my attitude. Orwell scared me, Rand pissed me off, and the dead Russians left me with a permanent raging headache from age twelve on. All in all, I was a delight to be around.

By the time I was sixteen, things had gone from bad to assfucking awful. In addition to my many other social problems, someone had started a rumor in eighth grade that I was easy, and soon the poems on the bathroom wall about my face, my mom, and my allegiance with Satan were joined by poems about my many venereal diseases. I kept telling myself I could handle it, but I also kept finding myself smiling at the thought of finding an AK47 and nice breezy rooftop. I figured maybe it was time to get the hell outta Dodge.

Oh, and there was another complication: I’d managed to get myself pregnant. And I really didn’t want to be, which was an issue because Arkansas is one of the genius fucking states with a parental consent law. You’d think the state that spawned Bill Clinton would be a little less uptight about sex, but apparently he gets to have the fun for all the rest of us. Jesus. The only thing worse than living in the South and hating country music is hating country music and being an actual living breathing country song yourself. I was mortified. Plus, obviously, getting knocked up at sixteen was not exactly going to do wonders to reverse my existing reputation.

The irony was that I wasn’t easy at all. I was in love, or thought I was. I had, against all odds, found myself a decent, sweet boy, who laughed at my jokes and loaned me books I actually enjoyed reading. His name was Bubba Slotsky, and he was the first and last person I ever met who proved it was possible to be both Jewish and white trash. We ran into each other on the bottom rung of the social ladder, and despite my best efforts, he liked me for me.

The only thing wrong with Bubba was that he came from a giant, dirt poor family with a sick mom, and he was too good of a guy to leave them in the lurch. And believe me, love fades fast when it means staying in Bumfuck Arkansas and having Bubba Slotsky’s welfare baby. I kissed Bubba goodbye and started counting out my bus fare. I had plenty; I’d been saving up for my getaway since I was nine. Between my slave wages from the fudge trade, telling fortunes in the school boiler room, and traveling across state lines every month or so to sell my plasma, I managed to save up enough for a ticket to the anywhere-but-here of my choice.

I picked LA. I had two basic primal needs, to not be pregnant anymore and to not be ugly anymore, and LA had to have more free clinics and plastic surgeons per capita than any city in the world. Plus, I figured they had enough freaks there that I could blend in until I got my two primal needs taken care of.

This is probably where you’re expecting the story to take a tragic turn, with me ending up a pregnant crack whore who sells her molars for extra cash. Turns out, though, all that time tossing chicken bones was well spent. I got a job right away on a psychic hotline. The job was simple. People call—usually desperate people. You keep ‘em on the line, dangling a mystical solution to all their crap problems. The longer you string ‘em, the bigger your paycheck. I was a perfect fit. I’d spent so long resenting my lot in life that I had no functioning guilt mechanism; the only thing the woes of the less fortunate made me feel was better about myself. I kept ‘em on the line for as long as my voice held out, and I didn’t care one bit. I cleaned up.

So, I was feeling all right about life for once. I had enough money for my rent and for my impending appointment at the not-quite-free clinic. I lived in a neighborhood where nobody noticed a giant blood-red stain on a person’s face, because they wouldn’t have blinked at a person covered head-to-toe in actual blood. And I was close enough to the beach to go jogging there, which I was doing, feeling pretty pleased with myself, when I saw him.

He had just stepped out of the ocean. He was tall, lanky, and pale. He had the long black hair and beard sported by the world’s best Manson groupies. And he was naked. Really, truly, buck-nekkid naked. Already, I was intrigued. Remember, despite my reputation as a raging whore, the only dick I’d seen was Slotsky dick. But there was more. This was no run of the mill naked guy. This naked guy…had a swastika tattooed on his ass.

What. The. Fuck?

You might think Nazi asses were a dime a dozen to a girl from Arkansas. But me, I stood there with my mouth gaping open like a catfish trying to do trig. Then he glanced my way, and I panicked. I did something I’d never done before while jogging; I stopped and stretched.

While I was fucking around with my hamstrings, I stole glances at my new naked Nazi. I thought maybe he was homeless, because who bathes in the Pacific by choice? But then I figured depending on logic to ferret out the actions of a guy with a swastika on his ass might be like depending on a drunk to lead you out of a cornfield—i.e, unreliable. I mean, forget why a swastika. Why the ass? Usually, when you have a symbol of your chosen ideology permanently placed on your body, you wanna put it someplace where folks are likely to see it. And skinny-dipping tendencies aside, the ass is just not the body part that offers maximum views.

I thought about asking him, but then I thought maybe striking up a conversations with a guy with an ass swastika and a Manson ‘do might not be safe. I thought about telling him that the only person who’d been decent to me in my whole life had been a beautiful dirty Jewish boy. Then I thought about taking him as my lover—seducing him, fucking his brains out, and then informing him that he’d just spent the last hour poking his dick into the head of Bubba Slotsky’s bastard Jew baby. But again, having finally moved out of the seventh circle of hell in life, I was reluctant to pursue action that might get me killed. I took a picture of him with my new camera phone, typing in the text, “If I am found murdered, this naked Nazi killed me.”

I thought maybe it was a prison tattoo. My knowledge of prison was pretty much confined to the one time I watched “Oz” during the weekend we got free HBO, but it seemed like the kind of place a person might pick up an ass swastika. (Unlike, say, church.) And then my naked Nazi caught my eye. And he didn’t look evil. He didn’t look scary. He didn’t look like he hated my or any other Jew baby. He looked sad.

Deeply, profoundly sad. Stained-glass-window-of-Jesus-on-the-cross-sad. And I thought, I don’t know any more about this man from his ass swastika than he does about me from the mark of sin on my face. Maybe that tattoo is something that was done to him. Maybe it’s something he chose a long time ago and regrets. Maybe he chose it because it’s an ancient Indian symbol that represents life, and he wanted to have a nice, life-affirming ass. Or, sure, maybe if he knew what sort of kid I was carrying inside of me, he’d gut me like a fish. Hard to say, really.

Maybe we all have marks on us, somewhere, and only the one wearing the mark can really know what it means.

As I was wrapping up my big philosophical moment, my naked Nazi broke our stare. He put on his clothes, and he walked away. I kept stretching, waiting for a little more wisdom to hit, but apparently, I was tapped. I jogged home and logged on to the psychic hotline for a few hours, letting the chicken bones do the talking for people with problems bigger than mine.

My mark of sin's gone now. It’d be poetic to say I still feel it sometimes, like an amputated limb, but it’d also be a lie. Sometimes I have a dream that I do something really horrible, like run over a Gypsy, and it comes back. But I always wake up, and there the new me is in the mirror—clear skinned and flatbellied, with nothing to hold me back. No mark, no bastard Bubba baby, nothing. I still work on the psychic hotline. Still don’t feel much for the poor saps that call. I did get a cat, though. I named him Slotsky, just for old time’s sake.

For a while, every time I’d go jogging, I’d keep an eye out for my naked Nazi. It's not like I had a plan or anything. I just kind of kept looking, just in case. And then one day, I found him. At the Greek diner, of all places. I was sitting at the counter, eating my gyro plate, when I overheard some jackass explaining to Stavros that, no offense, but everybody should stick with their own kind, and having a Greek place next to McGillicuddy’s Pub was unnatural. I turned my head to look—mostly to see if Stavros was gonna stab the guy—and lo and behold, there was my Nazi. Not naked. Not sad. Just running his yap, sounding like a moron.

Turns out, he was a moron. Not particularly mean-spirited or evil. Just really, really stupid. And lazy. ‘Cause, you know, blaming everything that’s wrong on everyone that’s different saves a lot of time, and takes a lot less effort than, say, getting off your stupid tattooed ass and getting a job. Oh, and his name was Wayne. Wayne the dumb, lazy, ass Nazi.

Naturally, I fucked him.

I fucked him 'cause when you're 16, you don't really know any other way to have power over a man. And 'cause it made me feel good to make him think I liked him while the whole time I was laughing at him in my head. But, mostly I fucked him so I could clean out his wallet and leave a note in it that said, “Dear Wayne: Your dick has just gone where only Jew dick has gone before. And the Jew dick was bigger.”

I felt pretty good after that. For a dumb, lazy, ass Nazi, Wayne had a lot of cash on him. And I knew he wouldn’t call the cops on me ‘cause I’d put a little mention on the back of the note that I was 16 and he could go to jail if anyone ever found out that he’d fucked me. So, all in all, it worked out pretty well. Sure, it’d make a more dramatic story if Wayne did turn out to be a violent maniac, and he tracked me down and exacted a horrible and bloody Nazi revenge. But, as my grandma used to say, this ain’t no After School Special.

So, yeah, I had to fuck a Nazi moron, but I came out three hundred bucks ahead and got to win one for Bubba along the way. Plus, I used Wayne’s money to get veneers—those super white Chiclet teeth like the movie stars have—and I gotta tell ya, I’m pretty hot now.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s a happy ending right there.