From womb to tomb, they say. Well, I couldn’t even get the womb part right. My mother, a French prostitute, had harbored a bad case of the jaundice while pregnant with me. And when I washed up from the shores of Placenta, that yellow-tinted anchor hit me full swing. I came sliding out of the birth canal yellow as a puddle of Mountain Dew. Just as symmetrically circular. Just as unhealthy (psychologically speaking). I learned to smile through the pain. I learned to smile through every conceivable human emotion. My youth was a troubled one.

And when the time came to make a living, I couldn’t find work. My facial expression being one of unwavering happiness, employers were reluctant to trust me. There was no place in the army for such a round, yellow face of cheerful disposition, either. To make ends meet, I bared my all for the Beginning Drawing class at the local university. One of the more talented students captured not only my physical likeness, but my soul in her portrait. “Have a nice day,” she labeled the drawing ironically. I was smitten. We fornicated. And then she sold her portrait to an American tradesman. I had gone to sleep that night an abnormally round, jaundice-afflicted, beaming anomaly, and I woke up the next morning a celebrity.

Now the face that I’d loathed seeing in mirrors—my own—was plastered all over shirts, pins and posters. And my lady-friend never did get the recognition she craved for her artwork. Her jealousy forced her to leave me. And I endured it all with a smile on my face. Let the record show, however, that I wasn’t smiling on the inside. And I won’t be smiling on the inside when I testify in court, either.

It seems that some of you think that celebrities are public property—do what you will with us, right? Wrong. I don’t appreciate being paraded on the Internet like some kind of a proud horse. I never volunteered to prostitute my face for the gratification of others. I never agreed to be an “icon” for your pathetic cyber-feelings. LOL? Go to hell. I never want to follow in the footsteps of my mother.