The Hulk

Let's go crazy
Let's get nuts
Let's look for the purple banana
'Til they put us in the trucks.
— Prince

I saw my first naked penis because of Prince. And, yes, it was purple. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

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I started getting into Prince my junior year of high school. That was the first year I felt like a real teenager. I had spent much of my freshman and sophomore years in the hospital for what was diagnosed at the time as Crohn's disease. As I look back, I think much of the illness had to do with me being afraid of being a teenager, afraid of growing up, of growing into a woman's body. When the real symptoms started going away, I tried to recreate them with laxatives and make-believe. Being sick was safe. It kept me out of the normal tumult of high school life. It made me a pale angel, something the world couldn't touch. By the time I was sixteen, though, I was ready to have an identity other than "the sick girl"; I was ready to b...