Where I grew up, on Miami Beach (and yes, that’s the correct preposition—it’s an island)—actually on South Beach, which was, before it became fashionable after Miami Vice, a largely working-class slum, we didn’t divide ourselves by race (until I went to an integrated junior high school, everyone I knew was pretty much just a few shades of beige-y-white) or even religion or national origin. (In the absence of good television, people amuse themselves by dividing into groups that hate and kill one another; thus we can attribute the peace of the ‘90s entirely to My So-Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos.) (True story.) (And look what happened when they went off the air.) The people in my little subtropical slum divided by class, with those of us whose parents did manual labor thinking that the landlords’ kids were, you know, nicer than we were. As did they.

            As they were. For one thing, unlike my working-class coevals and me, they didn’t say “fuck.”

            I’m not going to go into a big song-and-dance (although I am at this moment wearing a top-hat and tails and carrying a cane) (but then, when am I not?) about social class. I suggest you read Paul Fussell’s book on the subject (called, aptly enough, Class), which will either have you shouting in outrage or gasping with astonished recognition, “Oh! So that’s what that’s all about!” We Americans have a Constitutional right—indeed a Constitutional duty—not to believe that classes exist. (It’s right there between the Amendments guaranteeing you a right to party—a right for which, apparently, you have to fight—and the right to brew beer in our garages.) (Oh, like you have the Constitution memorized.) But not believing in them doesn’t stop classes from existing, and there are tells, which you probably don’t even know you have, that give away which one you belong to. Do you pronounce “vase” vahz (rhymes with Oz) or vace (rhymes with “base”)? An ex-girlfriend’s dad, who has been a high-school principal in Boston for almost half a century, regarded the latter pronunciation as uncouth; the upper-middle-class kids I went to college with would have thought his pronunciation pretentious, and would have labeled him a middle-class striver (their worst insult).

            Because I did well in school—as a person of my class was not expected to—the middle-class kids considered me to be among their number—in the lower echelons, mind you, but of their ranks. Still, I couldn’t really ever be accepted by them, because of how I spoke; I mean, I knew a lot of words, but the word I knew best was “fuck.” As British sailors are reputed to be able to do, the residents—the working-class residents—of my neighborhood could use “fuck” as pretty much every part of speech: “Man, fuck that fucking fucker; he’s fucked.” As could I. As can I. As do I.

            I never stopped, but in my heart of hearts (which is right next to the hearts of palm in Whole Foods), I knew that it was just…bad—not nice—to use “fuck” as much as I did. It was, after all, a bad word. Sure, I loved George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television”—in fact, I’d memorized it in eighth grade—but I didn’t go to school with George Carlin; I went to school with those middle-class kids and I was ashamed. Just as I was when, right before marrying a product of that selfsame middle class (from a Chicago suburb, but bourgeois is bourgeois) (I’d learned that word too), I swore to her that I’d stop, cold-turkey, using the word “fuck.” I think that lasted like two days. The marriage, sadly, lasted a lot longer.

            It was only later, when I started being more of a whole person (actually, at 5’3” and 125 pounds, I’m still pretty much half a person) (better than half a horse, though) (not to bring up my glamorous career in vaudeville, you know, again), that I realized that the word “fuck” was an integral part of me, and not a part of which I needed to be ashamed. Just as I, in my twenties, wrote in a style that was not naturally my own—that micro-realist style that New Yorker writers, and those who wished to be New Yorker writers, were obliged to adopt—and got over that to evolve a style that actually suits me, I started also to accept that my speaking style required a judicious seasoning with “fuck”—not, you know, at a job interview or in church (on those infrequent nevers when I am in church), usually, but most of the rest of the time. And since my writing style had started to resemble my speaking style, it too followed suit.

            “Fuck” has power; it has that direct Anglo-Saxon strength that cuts through fog and bullshit (another awesome Anglo-Saxon word). How amazing that a word so old in the language—it goes back so far that the German word “vicken” is a cognate, and English split off from German a long time ago—could still make so many so uncomfortable. Is it the frankness of the word, the fact that it refers to an act that makes us, as inheritors of Victorian shame and hypocrisy, cringe a bit, even today, when technology has graced us with that source of limitless pornography, the Internet? (Apparently you can also do research and book flights and buy stuff on the Internet too. I must look into that.) Is it precisely because it has been designated our official bad word, the use of which is ipso facto offensive? Possibly, but I think there’s more to it, some kind of perfect-storm confluence of sound—the fricative, the schwa, the plosive—and sense that makes the very utterance of the word a deeply emotional gesture.

I’ve heard and am bored with all the objections to using “fuck.” “You know so many words; can’t you find another way to express yourself?” Um, fuck no? “You’re just saying that to shock!” Well, yeah. Is it working? “My kids might read this!” Fuck your kids. They can’t read anyway. (Though if there’s one word they can read, it’s probably “fuck.”) (Fuck: a force for literacy.) “Ah, fuck you.” Exactly! I have no answer for that one. Well done.

            Mind you, I don’t hate euphemistic substitutes for “fuck,” or anyway, not all of them. Hearing “frickin’” (or, for you Galactica fans, “frackin’”) spoken aloud or even written always make me chuckle a little. Euphemisms are the responses of writers and speakers who are constrained from using le mot juste. They are little bits of rebellion on the parts of those writers and speakers: “Well, I can’t say ‘fuck’ here, but hey, ‘Frick you,’ censors.” As my comedy hero, Krusty the Klown, so aptly puts it: “Comedy isn’t about dirty words. Comedy is about words that sound dirty.” I don’t even hate the euphemistic phrase “f-word.” I do despise with every fiber of my being the term the media seem to have bestowed on “fuck:” “the f-bomb.” Really? “Fuck” is a bomb? Huh? Then what are those things that actually, you know, explode and rend people limb from limb? Shall we rename them fucks? Bombs are bombs. “Fuck” is not. And oh, that article, “the.” There’s only one “f-bomb?” Clearly you haven’t taken in a Chris Rock concert recently. Or, you know, read my blog.

            I don’t use euphemisms, not when I have a choice. I drive a powerful car and keep it under control. (I totally meant to jump the median on the Dan Ryan, for the fun.) I have a powerful oven and have managed not to set myself on fire. (Thanks largely to my extensive collection of attractive flame-retardant clothing.) (Hey, I know asbestos is hazardous, but it makes a stylin’ three-piece suit.) Nor will I turn away from the power that a word like “fuck” gives prose, especially when, at core, it’s my heritage.

I’m not from your neighborhood.

            (Um, unless you come from South Beach in the ‘60s.)

(Man, way to fuck up a good closing rhetorical flourish.)