Family portrait where I am wearing the Mofo shirt and smoking a fake cigarette.
Proof positive that I don't make this stuff up.

When I was nine years old, I was in fourth grade and I liked to laugh. My parents knew of my affection for chuckles and chortles, and would occasionally take me to see the magician-slash-comedy stylings of Penn and Teller. Now, although the performance wasn't necessarily sexual in nature, it was most certainly intended for adults and not nine-year-old little girls. My favorite part of the act was called Mofo the Psychic Gorilla. Mofo was a giant box, covered with flashing LED lights and glittering wires, and topped with a giant gorilla head. Mofo would do poorly constructed mind-reading tricks which served to impress no one in the audience except for me and perhaps my little brother.

After the show my parents offered to buy me a shirt that said across the front "MOFO" and in smaller letters "the psychic gorilla." The shirt had white lettering on teal--which I have since decided is my most flattering color?and I wore it proudly. I never understood why my parents would stand in the doorway snickering as I marched out the house, flaunting my prized t-shirt. To school, to softball practice, to play at my Mormon friend Tiffany's house, I wore that mofo everywhere.

Then, one holiday season, my parents, knowing of my fondness for the primate genus, gave me a present of a large stuffed gorilla. I sat on the couch, surrounded by my loving family, debating what to name my new furry confidant. "How about ?Mofo??" one of my doting parents suggested. I mulled over the proposal and quickly acquiesced. What, pray tell, would be a better name for my new pet gorilla than Mofo?

Soon after, my class had a show and tell day. It was a day where we could all bring our new presents to class and show off to our peers. When my turn finally arrived, I marched up to the front of the class wearing my Mofo shirt and proudly displayed my stuffed gorilla that I had dressed as a clown for the occasion. "His name is Mofo," I boasted.

That day at recess, Tony roughly pulled me away from my tetherball game. Tony was the enormous, abrasive boy who sat in the back of the class, wearing dirty t-shirts and sticking his tongue out suggestively at all the girls. Tony was from the wrong side of the tracks, and I had never before had occasion to talk to him.

"Dude, do you even know what Mofo means?" Tony asked me, leering in the way that only a nine year old boy can.

"It?s a name, stupid." I glared at him angrily, but inside I started to feel uncomfortable. I knew that Tony?s command of language far outstripped mine?he was the one who had gotten suspended for telling a girl that her mother was a "snowblower"?a word that not even the teachers knew the meaning of, other than it was most certainly a bad word. I worried that perhaps this Tony character knew something that I didn?t.

My fears, it quickly emerged, were warranted. Mofo, it seems, was an abbreviation for motherfucker, and something that as it turns out, my stuffed gorilla most certainly was not.

I spent the rest of the day with my arms crossed over my flat chest hiding the sordid word, my cheeks burning with shame. For not only had my parents forsaken me, I realized, but Tony the fat kid had finally proven, once and for all, that he was the smart one.