Happy Birthday to...Me
By Jimmy Palmieri

Every year, around the same time a day comes that I try to lay low on. It is a day that I wish I could sleep through and just make believe it didn’t exist. No it isn’t tax day. No it isn’t my annual visit to the proctologist for those horrible male exams that I hate. It is my birthday. When I was little, birthdays were so much fun at my house. They meant huge piles of gifts, (I was an extremely indulged child), big parties, cake and friends.

Nowadays it becomes another day to worry about another wrinkle. I actually wake up tense, as though there is supposed to be some huge difference between this day and the previous. I usually try to make believe it isn’t happening, but when you are Italian this is nearly impossible.

My phone starts ringing at the crack of noon. My family is all in New York, and they all call one at a time, bellowing birthday wishes into the phone, singing birthday songs and saying how much they love me. Fine. Good. I love all of you too. I just don’t love the fact that I am so far from being twenty-three again, that I have pots and pans older than my young and nubile metrosexual neighbor.

I don’t remember exactly when I started to hate birthdays, but I am sure it was at the end of my twenties. I had always heard, as an early out and proud gay screamer, that thirty was over the hill. When I hit thirty, I started to lie. I lied about my age, about my year of high school graduation, about my parent’s age, and about what songs I remembered as a kid.

I had to keep files over the years, to remember my newfound history. The frightening thing was, that I would make my parents practice my lies, just in case I brought home a new paramour, such that they wouldn’t be responsible for me getting caught. It got to a point that I would actually have to ask my mom just how old I really was.
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