Kelissa's Education

by Jonah Howell

Written by Jonah Howell, read by Cassidy Grady on 12/17/23.

Original confession: My confession is I’m curious about the satisfaction we get from viewing primal acts yet they are considered taboo

This is the diary of a young woman named Kelissa, which I found in the archives of the Huey P. Long Special Collections Library at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette in 2017. I’m pretty sure she left it there as a joke. On its cover she wrote the title, “My Education.” Please forgive her obscenity.

My Education

by Kelissa

My daddy’s name is Bud, short for Boudreaux. Most folks around my hometown called him Uncle Bud ‘cause he couldn’t distinguish between family and not-family. When I write about him I want to put a big ‘h’ in ‘him,’ although I know for damn sure he ain’t God.

Now—before I really start, lemme be abstract for a second: The thing about moralist fuckheads is that they want you to fail. What I mean is when some bitch says they value generosity, equality, justice, and good will, they value those things for show and showmanship. If you actually possess these virtues, you will thereby infuriate such moralist fuckheads. Think, as always, of our Dear Lord Jesus: He was too committed to His values, so they nailed Him up. 

This is all to say: That same moralist fuckhead desire for failure turned my hometown against my daddy, Bud. Why, you ask? Well.

Now daddy was the smartest man in our town, which, I can tell y’all because no one there can read, is called Des Allemands, Louisiana. This little swamp-stain of nothing nowhere is populated mostly by catfish. In addition to the catfish there are 2000 Baptists and 2000 corncobs stuffed way too damn far up their respective assholes. So daddy homeschooled me from ninth grade on. 

Yes, daddy took over my schooling when I was fourteen but he started my real education way back before. No, don’t believe the news. He didn’t assault me or nothing. I’ll give you the story. I remember I was six and we walked along Bayou Des Allemands ‘mid the Catfish Festival in June and he took me to the docks where fishermen had just come to shore to weigh their catches and daddy pointed to an old fisher, skin like a leather bag from long days on the water. The greybeard weighed his fish heavy as a wasted day, and he saw the figure on the scale, and he took the fish by the cheek, chucked it back out in the water, and stomped away cursing. Distracted by the man’s acting out I hadn’t noticed daddy’s laugh. By the time I unhooked my eyes from the old fisher daddy’d flopped on the wet grass and now he rolled back and forth, crying laughing. I couldn’t help myself: I let loose the biggest sheep-bleat of a belly-laugh my tiny body could bellow, and we rolled around in that leaky summer grass.

At supper that night daddy asked me, “Who do you think had the better day, that mad old fisher or us?” I grinned. He said, “Well, there’s your lesson: Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

He never defined what he meant by “small stuff” but when he’d said it enough times I figured, with the right perspective, everything is small stuff. So I studied daddy’s laugh and I forgot how to sweat.

When I reached high school, we finished out my normal education in a year homeschooling. Then daddy started teaching me what he called social studies. Not in the usual sense but in the sense that we’d walk around town looking at everybody and what they were doing and daddy taught me to laugh at all of them.

Of course we couldn’t stop there. I spent just my sophomore year learning to laugh. Junior year we progressed to what daddy called economics—that is, how to stop laughing when you need to. So I started shadowing daddy at work.

Daddy was a veterinarian, the only one in Des Allemands and by far the best within a hundred miles. With his infectious laughter he built hard strong friendships with both the animals and those who brought them to him, and just as often as he had their caretakers to our house for supper he went to visit the animals themselves. He swore they talked with him. “And other things,” he told me. “We don’t just talk.”

Now listen: Here my story, for many of you, might turn sour. Down here at least it is taboo for parents to educate their children on sexuality. My daddy, though, was and is more enlightened and progressive than that tradition, regardless what those motherfuckers said who ran him out of town.

So after my social and economic education had finished, daddy sat me down at the kitchen table after supper and said, “Daughter mine, you’re seventeen. It’s high time we had The Talk.” His cracked and craggèd face broke into a grin and I laughed. He clarified, “Yeah, obviously you know about sex. But there are some absurd illusions that still persist even in those with much more sexual experience than you. Of course, you know the first illusion I want to do away with.”

“That laughing is opposite to the erotic,” I said. He beamed, “Exactly. Some cretans claim that sexual pleasure is entirely selfish. That, to put it gentle, sans lagniappe, is fucking ridiculous. Imagine, what would you be without the people you’ve known, or without me? Even God gotta be a threesome. Exactly as laughing is the most erotic thing to those with the right mind, clear communication is necessary if you want to have decent sex. And trust me,” daddy winked, “you do.”

So then, true to the pattern of my earlier lessons, daddy joined theory to praxis. No, he did not just fuck me right then for “education’s sake.” No. He is a gentleman so he invited me to go with him that night on a visit. He was well aware that such a thing would cause nothing but disgust in most people, and he made sure that I really wanted to go. I dismissed his caution with a laugh. The woman he would visit was someone he’d fucked a good plenty times now, and he swore she’d have no compunctions about me watching.

In the car on the way to this meeting—oh boy, good God Almighty in Heaven with His Son sitting on top of his His right hand, I had never seen daddy so excited. He salivated so hard on the way to this woman that every “l” he pronounced ended with a thick sucking sound out the sides of his mouth, every “t” and “d” tapped a loud click, and his “s”es and “z”s barely slunk out, near-drowned, buzzing with sublime pussy’s imagined rhizome of futurities. Daddy gushed to me about this amazing lady, “A tighter, warmer cunt I ain’t never sunk into in all my born days. Snow,” he told me sheepishly, “her name is Snow.”

Daddy and I met Snow at the edge of her fields: It was one of them eighty-degree January nights, and they would have considered it a crying shame to waste such warmth indoors. We jumped the low wood fence onto Snow’s pasture, and there she was, just as beautiful as he’d told me, with the thickest, curliest hair our Savior God ever gave a woman, a pair of deep brown eyes, and breasts like I had never seen on a person. Daddy had caught himself a catch. I asked him again if she was okay with me being there. “Of course, honey,” he said. “I’ve asked her over and over, and she has responded with nothing but loving affirmation, if a bit sheepish.” He laughed. He took down his pants and pranced to her side.

Daddy proved his genius when he offered to show me in practice what he had described in theory: How should a woman know what to ask from a man if she hasn’t seen the best a man can do? He couldn’t have been more tender, couldn’t have anticipated Snow’s desires more skillfully. When he touched her he felt every rhythm in her body, I could tell, and he touched even the least of these like an author arranges words in a novel. If hearts could dilate like eyes dilate when you go to the eye doctor and get them drops, my little heart woulda burst.

I knew at once that daddy and Snow had built their love over a long period of intimacy. His hands ran in patterns over her back like an alchemist might draw sigils from a boudoir grimoire, brushing sweeps and tapered lines from some pink-tinted Renaissance odalisque, the Song of Solomon painted in fingerprints and glints of purest prurience, punctuated with pinpoint kisses, pecks, enjambment in nuzzles. 

Which is to say: He burst up in her from behind, still strummin’ on her bean with one hand while the other held her heaving hocks tight to him, and he thrusted with mounting animal force as their cries and bleats rose in unison. I remember it so vivid, the sight of my dad’s rippling ass-muscles as he pushed up in on his woman, his love, Snow.

She came first: She screamed so loud it tore the air over the wet field. Daddy sped up, whacking her snow-white, wooly ass. In the name of Jehovah, almighty God of the Twelve Tribes of Judah, I’m sure I could have received no better instruction in the creation of art by watching Michelangelo himself. My daddy, though, man of principle that he is, laughed himself silly the whole way, from starting-block ‘til his saintly Peter manned the pearly gates of orgasm.

Suddenly, Snow erupted: She threw back her head and let loose a mighty bleat, and daddy went stiff. With both hands he grabbed clumps of her wool, and, pulling her on his dick with all his might, he gushed hot jets of sperm in her as she convulsed from hair to hoof. Then he walked around to kiss her before she, exhausted, trotted off to chew some grass and to sleep, and he, no less exhausted, trudged back toward me to get his pants on.

His arm around me, he led me back to the truck, sighing as he whispered her name, “Snow...Snow, Snow; Snow...Snow: Snow.” I laughed and hugged his neck, and we rode home in silence, each too thoroughly satisfied to have any need for words.

Thus, on the eighteenth anniversary of my birth, my education was finished: I had learned the basics, then laughter, then restraint, and finally, sexuality, in which they all mingle and join. 

Eventually, on some later rendezvous, somebody caught him with Snow, and his reputation was straight-through ruined, for no good reason of course, and he was run out of Des Allemands, Louisiana by pitchforks and torches; but, as he chuckled to me over the phone from the front porch of his new Alabama farmhouse, he had saved enough money to be able to afford some scandal. “Do not think, though, daughter mine,” he hurried to correct himself, “that this situation implies that the lessons I have given you are only for the rich. If anything, the less-privileged are braver for enacting the life of laughter, and those accustomed to suffering are capable of carrying my ideas much further than I can. Again and always, Kelissa, remember Jesus, ultimate master of laughter and of restraint.”

by Jonah Howell, 12/17/23