My mother was a well-known prostitute back in her prime, but she quit when she found out she was pregnant with me. I hold her in extremely high regard and I believe she sets the standard for mothers everywhere. The only thing she was reluctant to give me was information about my father – a topic she absolutely refused to comment on. As a high-profile hooker, she had been rolling with quite a few influential people – and for a long time I fantasized myself a child of an oil merchant or a Fortune 500 CEO who would drive by our flat one day in his Porsche and take us away for a fancy meal or weekend or something before dumping us back where we belonged because from a young age I’ve been a realist and I knew that it was impossible for any sane rich person to care about the poor. When I was in middle school, and just starting to learn about sex, my mother suddenly became very comfortable with nudity around the house, and she would often strut around our flat wearing nothing but a pair of socks. I think this is because she had some suspicions that I was a closeted homosexual (as a devout Christian she obviously viewed this as an unnatural abomination) and so she tried very hard to invoke some sort of interest for the female body in me (which is a very noble, self-sacrificing act). But the first time I saw her in the nude I was so stricken with fear that I sprung a boner (which always happens when I become terrified) and collapsed on the floor, where I began to convulse. At the time my social studies class was covering a unit on the Holocaust, and in a bit of zealous interest (which is rare for me) I had researched quite a bit on the Fuhrer – and read a few articles on how he was not, in fact, dead, but was instead gallivanting all over America (where he had successfully escaped to). Thus when I saw his iconic moustache branded on my mothers crotch my little mind broke. After all, Higgins sounds remarkably like an Anglicized bastardization of Hitler, so it did not take much more evidence to convince myself that he had fathered me. It took me many years of therapy and counseling to rid myself of my panic attacks, and this was not helped by the fact that my mother never told me I was wrong in my conviction.