It’s true I’ve never ridden a mechanical bull, although in Texas in the 1980s, they were the official state animal, and everyone who didn’t arrive at the pinch-toed, penny-loafered private school in a Mercedes Driving-Miss-Daisy-chauffeured was required to arrive on bucking fiberglass bolted to lower-middle-class like a badly-welded Piggly Wiggly cart, squeaking and kicking one wheel back, petulant in the cereal aisle; the inanimate world not inanimate at all, but animated by money we didn’t have—you know this already; we were the ones in sandals at the Tandy ice-rink edge as people circled imported winter on delicate blades. So to get to that school with invisible gates, that school named Country Day, like a country club, where most kids had a smarter father-mother-older-brother, generational wealth making up for test scores (the future’s SAT scandals still in Fabergé embryo), I had to pin myself to a bull’s stiff electric back, clutch its horns like Kevin Costner clutched his floodlit dream in that movie: we could all reach anything! (though some of us rode to school in Oldsmobiles with one black door though the car was green): the slickness and danger just part of the fun, the long-horned capitalism: Reagan’s ride-a-bull-to school, as people maybe had on the frontier everyone pretended to be descended from, deep in the heart of our starry, clap-clap-clap state. How—you ask—did I ever slip through that school’s gateless gate if I didn’t know the secret: lean forward, grip your dominant hand hard, sit up straight—like most American rules, a little contradictory: straight and forward, and up and down, and if, it’s true, I was afraid, a counterfeit cowgirl, lassoless, loaferless, penniless (read: summer ranchless), though the Stockyard bulls in my barrio snorted hotly at their steakhouse futures; my family’s vegetarianism illegal too in 1980s Texas, where each child had to butcher a Longhorn like frog dissection in other (smaller) states. And how, you ask, in this world, did I not starve in a dust storm; not break my neck like a drunk in a honkytonk; not lose my mind like Letty in The Wind, that 1920s silent film where sand blows endlessly through slat walls of West Texas: wind so powerful it appears as rearing horses she can see above her in the sky? Did I say I didn’t—that I don’t some days feel cloud-kicked: fallen from something I never learned to ride?