Tim Speaks

See the not so funny thing is that Bettina spent the summer in Africa with my uncle who is slightly younger than me. We look just alike and people have always remarked upon it. But when she walked up to me on the street years later it was a completely surreal experience. I am much taller and much more muscle bound than he ever was. I had never met. Her. I'd seen an old dusty water logged photograph of her and she was instantly recognizable. She turned her little brown face up at me and immediately started complaining. That I hadn't said hello and she didn't like to be ignored even if it had been a decade since she last saw me. And what the hell was I doing in Philadelphia anyway, and how it was her city and she didn't want rude motherfuckers walking down Walnut Street and bumping into tourists. Never mind that she was walking down 57^th Street in New York City, Manhattan. She was on one of her famous shopping expeditions that Tom had always described with great derision. The truth is: Tom always hated this girl. And how I ended up married to her is beyond me. And now that it's over I couldn't be more pleased.

Did I mention she slept with his dad after they got married? She claimed she was tipsy and deserved a second chance and he fell for her excuses. Nobody in our family could ever figure out what she was doing to intoxicate us all. It just didn't make any damned sense. Then of course we met her parents and everything was much clearer then. Bad apples don't fall too far from their trees. Plus, of course, there were and always will be a few bad seeds on our side of the family.

Let's just say the holidays are always fun. And another thing: Tom was black. My cousin Tom was black. So how she thought she was running around the African continent with a half white man is a complete mystery to me. Basically, she's just fundamentally a stupid girl who's always had certain advantages called boob number one and boob number two.

Sometimes I used to admire the way she could wriggle out of certain hairy situations. Just by propping those puppies up on a bar or a dashboard or a fool's chest.in order to change his perspective on things to hers, she could change the course of a night gone bad.

She's dangerous. And when she's with her old boarding school friends forget it. Those upper crust snobs'll eat you out of house and home, spill wine on your grandma's rug and send you a bill for THEIR dry-cleaning because according to them and their fucking lawyer husbands, your couch was an unstable perch for their bitch wives. I kid you not. And worse yet they breeze through for a weekend or two and then you never see any of them again.