I Always Wanted A Sweet Ride
My childhood dream has yet to be fulfilled

Every lil being with labial folds desires a pony. Or so I hear. Not me.
Even then I realized that stallions crap out piles both larger and smellier than my teenage foster brothers after Taco Tuesday. Horses devour too much of something I baled every summer that itched my wrists into pus-infected tubers.
Nope. I didn’t want a horse or a pony or any creature whose gummy hair was stiff enough to make a violin sing. Besides, they could bust your thigh with a swift kick and their pitchfork-sized teeth usually dismember half of your fingers along with the apple or carrot.
And, anyway, they weren’t nearly as fast as the thing I desired.
Did I dream of cuddling my own cheetah? Having my butt cheeks vibrated into chunks of muscular steel on the backend of a Harley? Housing a biplane behind my lakeside mansion? Nah.
“You’re Ken today!” my sister ordered, thrusting the only male Barbie we had at my nose. He stunk of engine oil and turpentine. “And he needs a bath because he’s been out in the shed fixing the lawnmower for us!”
You would think moving Ken’s naked, straight legs, and twisting his muscled torso might be fun. He was, after all, a sought-out commodity amongst our sex-crazed Barbies who only knew at that time about heterosexual nooky.
It wasn’t – even if he had a polymer-bulge-cum-schlong that was much in demand. In our world of mainly female characters, testosterone trumped nothing. Ken did what he was told. And, other than bumping plastic nasties, he rarely got to do anything amusing.
All he ever really wanted to do was play chauffeur in our hummer-like doll vehicle, but the Barbies all drove themselves. His driving dream mirrored mine — one that would be achievable when I was old enough to boast a license and insurance payments.
But, nope. He was mostly just a sex slave.
“There!” I shouted, watching the vehicle pass by us as we waited near the car for our mom to exit the pharmacy. “That’s the model I want right there!”
Zooming by was a BMW 325i convertible. The driver, hair tucked into an Audrey Hepburn-like headscarf, waved back at us. She was almost as hot as the car.
“I know, I know,” sighed my sister. “But yours will be a different color!”
“Yep,” I squirmed beside the station wagon’s wood paneling, arching in bizarre ways to watch the tailpipe vanish into the distance. “Mine will be pink! Hot pink! And my license plate will say ‘Sassy’!”
My first vehicle was a barf-colored Dodge Neon. Next up was my pride and joy of a black Volkswagen Jetta, followed by a few kid-toting, goldfish-cracker-littered minivans. Now, I drive a Kia van — the exact same shade as my shattered dreams.
But I’m not dead. There’s still hope. Maybe Ken will drive up in a hot pink Beamer and we’ll laugh all the way to the Department of Motor Vehicles to pick up my personalized plates.
Sassy. Well, almost as sassy as stallions.
©Jennifer J. McDougall 2022
Thank you Nikki Waterson for inspiring me with your article “I Always Wanted A Pony When I Was Little”.
