One time when I was about 6, I got my brand new sneakers muddy. My parents house was next to a dirt road with some woods on the other side. This dirt road always seemed to be wet and muddy. I remember I would always walk as near as I could to the puddles where it gets kind of soft and mucky. I always seemed to have a fascination with these deep, murky mud puddles. For some reason I enjoyed it, like I was tempting fate and getting as close as I could without actually stumbling into the mud. I don't know why my mom always insisted on dressing me in light pink clothes! But this was bad cuz I always came home dirty!

I got home after my walk and before I could even take off my shoes, my mother gasped so loudly and sharply that I thought someone died! She freaked the fuck out - not something I would expect from just a little dirt. She scolded me severely and marched me outside to the back yard. She forced me to sit on the back stoop, and told me that I better find a stick and get every bit of mud off my shoes before I even think about coming back in the house. She was so upset her voice was cracking. I had never seen her like that before. It scared me and I felt like I had really done something terrible. In the house she went and left me sitting there in shock, with my shoes next to me on the cement. I felt the tears well up inside me and the next thing I knew, I was sobbing. Sobs gave way to wails and I just sat there crying my eyes out, not knowing what to do, too upset to do anything. Finally, one of my neighbors noticed me and came over. "Are you okay?" called out a voice.

I looked up and saw this tall blonde 12 year old girl from down the street named Pleasure (no, I'm not kidding, that was really her name!) I explained through my tears that I was expected to get my shoes clean before I was allowed to come back in but that I didn't even know where to begin! We both looked at the shoes. The soles of the shoes had these rows of deep grooves in a chevron pattern. It seemed hopeless to me. "That's not that hard. Would you like me to help you?" she asked. "Sure. Thank you so much!" I said. She went and found a stick in the yard and we both got to work scraping the mud out of the dozens of tiny grooves.

By the time we were done, I wasn't crying anymore and it actually felt good to have met a friend. To this day I still can't help but wonder if getting in so much trouble had something to do with me developing a fetish around getting messy. I'm not sure, but I never forgot about how much trouble I got in and so from then on I was convinced that getting messy was a really bad thing and was forbidden, at least as long as I lived under my parents' roof.