Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Happy Holidays everyone. Well, I know you are all wondering what sort of things you'll be saying about me tomorrow and Christmas Day in my absence. Never fear, Rumor Control is here with the best maybe true, maybe false fun fax about Rosie Griffeth. If this is your first time coming across a Rumor Control post, you'll want to bring yourself up to speed with Rumor Control and Rumor Control, Too. Feel free to scroll down to the good parts if you are in a hurry.

Complicated explanation in a nutshell, this is my random post in which I give you a dozen rumors to spread around about yours truly. Some are true. Some are false. Some are half-true, half-false.

The Rumor Control Dozen:

1. As you all know, I was born with a tail. While I now think of it as that "special", "fun" part of me, believe it or not, I did have my awkward moments as a teenager. Kids can be so cruel. Anyway, there was this boy I had a big crush on--I had a crush on his sister too, which in hindsight was typically bent for me--but anyway, he asked me out on a date and I was so thrilled. I must have spent an hour with the Tooth Pik shining my braces up. I found out later he only went out with me on a dare to find out if it was true. The tail thing. He got his answer while we parked at the beach that night. He never called me again, but his sister sure was interested in me after that.

2. I cut down a Christmas tree with a chainsaw. Indoors. A fully decorated Christmas tree. With lights. I wore my big boots. And I stomped on all the glass balls making a shiny carpet of green, red and gold slivers of glass. I was about to take my boots off and walk through the shards when I was interrupted.

3. One of my lovers was a bisexual surgical assistant with a name like Christmas. Noel. Every thing about him smelled like Betadyne. He either wore green scrubs or black leather and rode a motorcycle. He kidnapped me one day, took me out in a boat and sabotaged the engine. I had to lie, promising I'd see him again, to get him to fix the boat and take me back to shore. I got a really bad sunburn that day. There were sharks.

4. I played rugby. I was a prop. Rugby players eat their dead. I liked mine with a bit of salsa.

5. Nobody knows I'm a heterosexual.

6. This is really private and embarrassing. Anyway, you know I had this really bad series of surgeries back in 1997. It was really grim and I was in the hospital for six months. They removed my sternum. Obviously, it makes a mess of your chest when they do this--everything gets cut up and--well--it took some pretty radical plastic surgery to put me back together and make me look normal, with clothes on anyway. Well, somehow, all of my nerve endings to my nipples got reversed. Basically, everything that touches my left--I feel on the right and vice versa. Like I said, it's really private and embarrassing--but sort of cool and fun too. My extra two nipples aren't a problem--just the main ones.

7. I've eaten balut before. It's a bit soupy and eggy. Mmmmm, balut. Hot sauce.

8. I've had reams of bad lesbian love poetry aimed at me, which explains my aversion to poetry. One called me an "omnipotent angle".

9. My best friends and I ended up in a strip bar/brothel in a port city. It was chock full of Greek sailors. We were afraid to leave because we thought it would be impolite to do so without first having a beer or something. Anyway, we were really looking for a gay bar for our gay friend who was with us and sort of appalled by all the exotically clad women who kept approaching him. I guess they thought we wanted to watch or something. We asked the sailors if they knew where a gay bar was. And you know what? They knew exactly where one was. Who would have thought a bunch of rough and ready, macho sailors would know where a gay bar was? We were so surprised.

10. I singlehandedly caused 3 pub brawls while I lived in the UK and was banned from the pub. Permanently.

11. Nobody knows I'm extraspecialomnisexualexpyaladocious. But isn't it great they have words to describe everything these days?

12. Okay, this is really embarrassing too. But it's not like something I remember or anything. Just one of those little physical abnormalities they correct in infancy you never remember. Perhaps it's because of the tail, but I was born with another really rare medical condition called vagina dentata. Yeah, it's pretty much like it sounds. But they were just baby teeth and they pulled them shortly after I was born. This boyfriend of mine had a friend who had this fear of women with my condition. We explained to him that the teeth were removed and I was for all practical purposes vagina no dentata, but he'd just run screaming from the room every time he saw me. It was awkward. But the cool thing is, my mom saved the teeth. I had them made into a necklace and earrings and they are quite the conversation piece. People are always asking me what they are and boy are they surprised when I tell them they are vagina teeth.

Click here to read Rumor Control: Chapter 1

The one blessing about Friend Scott being gone is that I no longer am made privy to the silly gossip and rumors circulated about me. And believe me, they are always ridiculous. One thing about the Appalachian culture in my area is their liquid interpretation of the concept of truth.

Case in point: two late elderly twin sisters that I've written about in the past lived with their 100-year old mother up here. Someone started a "fun" rumor that the girls were sewing money into the quilts they made. The fact was, they were using newsprint to stiffen the backings as they sewed. Sure, it's fun to roll eyes big and whisper about a fortune being sewed into quilts--the sort of tale you'd tell on a cold night next to the wood stove. Well, it wasn't so funny when the 80-year old twins and their 100-year old mother were nearly beaten to death, the mother dying shortly thereafter and one of the girls losing their eyesight--their quilts stolen and no doubt destroyed all because of that rumor.

So. I'm visiting my friend yesterday and I took her the print copy of The Angler that one of my stories appears in. It just arrived in the post and I wanted to share it with someone--naturally being excited. She gives me a funny look. It's the look I remember my mother giving me when I'd done something and lied about it.

"You know," she says. "You could tell me if they paid you a thousand dollars for one of these stories and I wouldn't tell anyone."

I'm flabbergasted. I start laughing uproariously and say, "If they gave me a thousand dollars for one of these stories, you wouldn't be able to shut me up!"

She's not buying the truth, not one lick of it. The look lengthens. "I'm just saying, if you asked me not to say anything, I wouldn't." Serious as a church.

And honestly, I'm hurt because this is the friend I would run straight to and tell such news, if it were remotely possible or true. And I already trust her to keep my confidences--though I don't think I've ever had any.

Not her fault--but what it tells me is that there is a malicious rumor spreading around the mountain that I'm making gobs of money from selling flash fiction stories at 1000 bucks a pop. Never mind that I've ridden out the dog days of August with a busted AC unit I have no money to repair, can only afford one tank of gas per month, am unable to afford to pay someone to do my yard for me while I've been sick--or get the lawnmower repaired. Never mind there is absolutely no evidence that I live in anything other than the austere poverty I've always lived. It's, unfortunately, the sort of rumor that gets people killed up here.

Which means...it's time for another installment of Rumor Control!

This is the feature of the blog where I offer up a dozen juicy tidbits about myself that may or may not be true. You are welcome to speculate on what is truth or lie and locals trolling the blog are welcome to spread any of these rumors about me about the mountain freely.

Here we go...

1. As many of you know, if you've been following the blog for a while, I was born with a tail. I like to think of it as something that sets me apart--special. If I really , really like you--it wags.

2. I once brought the entire National Venezuelan Men's Volleyball Team home with me one night and had my way with them. The language barrier turned out to be not such a big deal after all.

3. My skirt fell completely off in the middle of a job interview. As luck would have it, I decided to wear underwear that day.

4. My mother spent a gang of time sheepshead fishing when she was pregnant with me and I ended up being "marked" by a sheepshead. You can't see them, but I've got black and white strips all around my middle--just like a sheepshead. I also had little hard nubby teeth like one when I was born, but they fell out.

5. I'm not really a woman.

6. You were all wrong, bamboozled, completely fooled. Friend Scott and I always were an item. He's not gay, never was and just made all that stuff up to protect my honor. Then y'all went and burnt his house down. Bet you feel stupid now.

7. I woke up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve to find my girlfriend standing over me with a butcher knife. Said I'd been too "nice" to her and now she had to kill me.

8. I once played backgammon with a mysterious man in a dark bar off a foggy street. He was beautiful and sinister in an androgynous way--like a manga villain with a sad past that made him evil--yet strangely hot. Longish dark blond hair and eyes like abysses. I won two out of three. He told me he'd see me again, one more time in this life. I was only eighteen, but I knew what he meant. I knew him. He was Death.

9. I burned down a barrier island all by my lonesome. No one found out.

10. If you stroke me in the middle of my chest, you can hypnotize me--just like a chicken. Honest.

11. I snorted cocaine with James Coburn.

12. I don't have a sternum. See, they had to remove it when I was in the hospital. To get a discount on my half a million dollar medical bill for that six months, I agreed to be part of a teaching experiment. They replaced my sternum with a piece of special medical plexiglass that allowed students to look into my chest cavity --like a little window. It's still there. I have to clean it off with Windex now and again. It still works just fine. Kinda gross though.

Some things in this post are completely true. Some are completely false.

Really, I was quite happy being completely unaware of what sort of garbage was circulating about me on the mountain. But, of course, since I met Friend Scott, I am privy to all of that nonsense whether I want to be or not. See, Friend Scott hears all the dirt—and there is lots of it. When people run out of real things to talk about here, they make stuff up. And you always know who originated the nonsense. Spreading gossip here is sort of like holding up the convenience store in your own small hometown when you went to high school with the cashier.

Cop: So, did you recognize the thief?

Cashier: Hell, yes! Joe Bob took me to the prom. His Momma goes to church with my Momma. You can probably find him over at Nat’s Market about now. He always eats lunch there about this time….

Doesn’t matter how many pairs of pantyhose you put over your head if you are wearing your letter jacket.

So, anyway, someone with limited understanding of exactly how Google Maps works is saying that I went to the courthouse to get aerial photographs of everyone’s house. In some alternate universe, this is supposed to help me sell my own house.

That’s just silly. Everyone knows you only do that when you buy a house and why waste gas when you can hop on the bird right from your home computer and get pictures from space? Sure, it may take a little time to call your buddy at the Pentagon and pull everyone’s FBI file and check all their aliases against the sexual offender database—but that’s ancient history now. I did all that six years ago.

Second to malicious gossip is most likely--boring gossip.

So—I’m going to offer some juicy tidbits about myself that may or may not be true. Spread at your own peril.

1. I was born with a tail and it makes finding clothes to fit difficult. That’s why I wear black turtlenecks and sweatpants so much. I won't lie to you--it does tend to chafe a bit.
2. I was born with a tail but they removed it and I keep it next to my bed in a jar.
3. When I was a teenager, my friends and I would go out in a boat at night shark fishing. We’d chum the water and then go swimming on a dare.
4. I kissed Superman and he kissed me back.
5. When they took my appendix out they found an eyeball and mouth attached to it. The appendix had burst and the little mouth was frozen in a scream. They said I’d eaten my twin in the womb.
6. I once scrinched a squirrel with my teeth.
7. I have four nipples. The extra two are lots smaller than the main ones.
8. I was chased by a gator and outran it.
9. I kept my own last name when I got married. His last name was Posey--can you blame me?
10. I dated a Mafia hit man. We’ve kept in touch. He’s a really nice guy except for the killing thing.
11. I was abducted by aliens once and they gave me a special name. What that is, I can’t tell you. Okay, I could, but they planted a chip that turns me into a relentless killing machine if I do.
12. I’m going to Dog Heaven. God told me this in a vision when he explained why "dog" is "God" spelled backwards.