The Porn Star's Daughter

She taught me how to put on make-up

That was about it

The running joke

Is always—

Oh, what did your Mama teach you?

And nowadays I just groan

But sometimes I answer the question honestly

Just to show ‘em I don’t care

‘She taught me how to put on make-up’

And then I just keep

Cleaning tables

My mother is in her fifties now

And I’ve asked her a couple of times

If she regrets it

Doing the movies

And she always says ‘No’

And why should she?

Honestly, she made a lot of money

Like, so much money

She still has some of it

She always tries to get me

To take some

But I don’t like feeling

Like I owe her anything

Not because she’d hold it over me

But because I don’t feel right

Taking money she earned

And, yeah, maybe the way she earned it

Weirds me out a little bit too

My mom comes to the restaurant sometimes

And she still turns heads

The guys turn their heads

Because she’s so gorgeous

And the women turn their heads

To see who the hell

Their guys

Are looking at

I just keep cleaning tables

One time Mama was visiting me

And this guy in Section 3

Grabbed my ass

I saw Mama go to stab him

With a fork

But I just shot her a look

And she put the fork down

And went back

To drinking her coffee

Guys like that

Aren’t worth

Getting in trouble for

I know that, but Mama never learned

She thought every guy was trouble

And she stabbed more than a few of them

Which is why I lived in eight different places

Before I turned fourteen

The day before I was supposed to start ninth grade

Mama and I moved into this big empty house

In the Valley

With deep, red carpets

Like the kind in Hitchcock movies

And windows with shutters and squares of glass

Oh, I just thought

We were the richest people on earth

That night, Mama went off to work

And she didn’t come home

For three days

The woman she hired to clean the house

Got me up for school

And made me breakfast

Waited for me until I got home

And said my Mama would probably be back soon

I didn’t believe her

But then on the third day
I came home

And Mama was in bed

Taking a nap

Like she’d just went out for a jog

I remember crawling into bed with her

And trying to shut my eyes tight enough

To block out the late afternoon California sun

Cutting through the shutters

And the squares of glass

Maybe Mama was worried

That I’d ask her

Not to go back to work

But I knew better than that

Sometimes if you want to live

In a big empty house

On the nice side of town

Where there are already books

In the bookshelves

And where nice women named Sheila

Make you breakfast in the morning

And wash your clothes

You gotta go to work

And sometimes work

Sticks around

A little longer

Than you’d like it to

The next day I went to school

And when the teacher asked me

What I wanted to be when I grew up

I said—‘A waitress’

She said, ‘Oh, is that what your mother does?’

And I said, ‘Yeah—

--Something like that’