I realize this is long..and unfinished, but if you Read through it...feedback would be great! Dont be kind to spare my feelings....
Names are Changed to protect the NOT so innocent
When I Die May I Please Have Chocolate Cake?
Chapter 1
My birth. Not having a choice whose belly I came out of was probably like any other. What happened after is very unique. June sixth of 1970. One short of being the devil with an extra seven thrown in that date to make up for the two sixes. I have always thought of my life like that. Just enough to redeem me but never enough to flourish.
There is a saying in Texas that goes something like this. ?Bless her Heart?. This is when you have just finished ripping a person to shreds, if you say these magic words, ?Bless her heart,? no matter how vile, debased mean or untrue your comments may be, as long as you follow it with ?Bless her heart?, the speaker is allowed to keep their pompous biased and more often than not, self righteous opinion and at the same time allows the speaker to have clean hands and a clean conscience. It is an unspoken code of gossip. It is also known as BHH. So with that said. My mother, ?bless her heart?, (You know something juicy is coming now!), had me in a state I am not familiar with. Michigan to be exact. I do not claim it since I still have to spell check when I write the name. I was born two months early in a day and age when you did not survive if that was the case. I was the exception. Two to three months in an incubator, not to be held loved or touched. Too small for shit. The seven kicked in and I lived. I became the survivor even before I was to be on this planet.
Not yet a year and I have pneumonia, pneumonia, phnemonia and did I mention cancer? Yes after one month of staring at my glasslike walls, living in my cell, I was let out to get cut open. One appendix, one ovary, and a slather of baby glue later, I was back in my cell. I guess there was not much to for me to complain about. I was living on stolen time, existing where one should not be existing. So with small lungs, a wish and a prayer, my mother and this I really mean, ?Bless her,? took me to where I could exist. New Mexico. Not to be confused with New York, New Hampshire, New England, or Old Mexico, Nothing that mysterious. An Island without water, a dry haven, red dessert, high mountains; at whatever stage in my life I picture it, this is home. When all around me is hell, I love that red earth. I just feel connected with it.
My mother, BHH, I think took her torment of raising four kids alone out on my hair. See she is white. So white she can?t cook. So to have a mixed race child and no idea how hair grease works should be a crime. It is absolutely double six sinful to sit a child on a chair and circle it armed with Friskers. Circle, snip. This clicking would continue until either she got tired or thought that no matter where my actual head was positioned within the circumference of hair, as long as the tumbleweed hairdo was round, it was OK.
It was really great when she would sew me an off centered collar onto a shirt covered with every kind of pastel animal God ever made just in time for picture day. Hair going one way and collar another I would take off for school armed with whatever creation my mother could fit into a Bonanza bag for lunch. Now my mother, BHH, liked CO-ops. Cheap, healthy, and tasted like SHIT. Now, I did not know better, so I would stare at the Mexican kids? peanut butter and jelly tortilla roll ups and be so jealous. Surely someday they would want to trade for my pita bread, sprouts, and whole wheat meat pockets slathered in homemade sour cream as a commodity. Unflavored, puffed and dehydrated garbanzo beans surely had to be worth something? I was so happy for the years we got food tickets. You know the punch hole tickets that told everyone you were dirt poor? The Mexican kids didn?t care seeing they were just as poor, and we all stared at the elite club of wonder bread kids. They really had it made. Real potato chips, not those hard ass tortilla strips my mom made out of last nights Masa Herena. (Homemade corn meal chips.) They actually had Big Red sodas and, oh my, the real Jiffy peanut butter. Not the almond paste that we got from the commodities line.
Speaking of commodities, now as embarrassing as it is to be poor; I really would like to get my hands on a block of commodity cheese. That is the one thing the government did right, processed cheese. Yummy! It is a seven that offset all the sixes compiled by eating stale assed tortilla strips covered with cinnamon and sugar. Like I am supposed to believe it was a Star Crunch? Imagine the conversations at lunch? I?ll trade you a homemade cold egg tortilla topped with green chili so hot that you can?t let it touch your lips as it goes down for that old pancake. That was the life.
Above all else, going to school sure beat climbing into the back of Safeway or Farmers market trash bins. There were the trips my mom and her best friend Agnes would take where we piled into the wood paneled, pop up seat in the back station wagon with plastic seats so hot they would give you the closest waxing. Try to sit on one of those seats after a good noontime temperature of 100 degrees, and then try to get your legs of the seat in one piece. That is an experiment in pain.
Anyhow, to get it all in the picture, Agnes was white. Funny how we raided ?trash? bins together. Get the picture? Agnes had open heart surgery and one of my fondest childhood memories is of seeing Agnes?s pubic hairs to her sternum scar. I really can?t say if she had boobs or not. The scar was so huge that it overloaded my sensors for a long time. Agnes had kids. How many I do not know, I only remember Linda. Linda smelled so bad it could straighten my afro. She was a senses shock. The stench blew your mind so quickly that you could not even think of a way to tease her. Linda, BHH, we found out years later had swallowed a bottle cap off of an old fashioned soda and somehow got it sent up from her throat to her nasal passages. There it stayed, sliming and smelling. Impacting into her head until one day she dove into a swimming pool and the rush of pressure and water shot out what everyone thought was her brain. Right on top of the water. OOH gross! The smell left but not from my memories. I swear sometimes I fart and look around for Linda. The horror of it all is quite traumatic.
Well here we go in ?the Beast? our station wagon and proceed behind the market where my mother and Agnes made up this great game of ?afro basketball.? This entailed throwing the undersized child into the trash bin to get all the cheese. Green, old, it did not matter. I was to grab all the yuck veggies too. Oh and soda cans. The skinny afro kid got back into the devils wagon and when the Beast got to our destination, an old two roomed stucco house, we would cut all the green off the cheese. No matter how you sliced it I still tasted the green on my cheese. It is no wonder that now that I am grown and have enough money to buy the fancy cheeses, I still stick to the stinky ones like Sharp cheddar and Swiss. You know the real tart ones. The veggies for the ?rabbits? our neighbor owned would mysteriously appear in the form of a salad or a delightful autumn stew that night.
On that note, talk about mystery foods? As you can tell we did not waste. So if we as a group of kids did not act like we liked supper and get the torture hour done with, we could have the good housekeeping promise that we would see that meal for another week disguised as cereal or casserole, enchiladas, etc. Sometimes it came in the form of a shake. MMMMHHH!! Yummy collard greens with day old bread mixed with milk and brown bananas. See, just like Poor Richards the soda shop downtown. So basically seeing my mom cooked badly we were forced to run the gauntlet every night at dinnertime. Sometimes it was a game of Russian roulette. Either way you were going to eat it. You just had to decide if it was slow and painful or quick and sick.
Being the youngest of the four of the seven kids, (I will explain later), I got to hang around the old folks a lot. This is where I would learn all about every body ailment known to man. Boils, infections, cuts, surgeries, rashes and oh, lets not forget the female yuckies! To this day I cannot bear it when my mother starts to give me a cure. I just get the creeps as soon as she starts to talk about it. AAAAGGGGHHHH! I just can?t stand most bodily functions; especially on an old woman. It scares me to death that my vagina just might loose its elasticity and fall out while I am in the bath. See what I mean? This does happen. Talk about too much information.
Anyhow I went to school and got a New Mexico education. Whoo Hoo!! Talk about a dumb ass. See in my first grade year I constantly was in the doghouse. I mean literally in the doghouse outside my teachers class. You had to get into it and stick your head out of the doorway. Child abuse but I did not know better. You were sent to the doghouse for talking, doodling, and holding your pencil incorrect for the one hundredth time. Needless to say I became the class dog! Yep, with the shaved poodle ass haircut to go with my new crooked collar and a doghouse. One could read in the doghouse so I did a lot of that. Reading became my main tool of getting back into that glass bubble I got so used to in my infancy. I read until my glasses needed a new prescription. Oh I forgot to mention my afro, pastel colored crooked collar, perfect for doghouse wear came equipped with glasses. Thick nearsighted bottle caps; Yeah buddy Vogue had nothing on me. And Linda could not swallow them!
Reading took me places I could not yet conceive of. Places such as Europe, Mars, you name it, I was there. This was definitely seven material. I loved to read so much that I won the class contest. One hundred and ninety one books in a year. I got beat out by a girl who ate Wonder bread and turned in a book after the deadline. I think it had something to do with my mother and the prize. It was demonized. So the official winner got to take home the Devils Spanish cross that had yarn wrapped around all of its points in every color. I got the extra special prize of a Hallmark sack that had a picture of the big headed dead baby dolls, Precious Moments. My teacher even burnt the edges to make it look so cool. I was a winner.
Why I did not get the demon cross? My mom was one of Jehovah?s Witnesses. Yeah, I know, not only am I one half black, a girl, not even an attractive one, I wear glasses, have no father, a fondness for doghouses, I now have God and a set of calluses on my knuckles from knocking on so many God, BHH, doors. This religion was my phase two for getting back into that glass bubble. I stayed so close to the Lord that I swear they were going to squeeze those two sixes out of me.
So here I go every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday to the Kingdom Hall. Four hours of door knocking on Saturday and a grand total of ninety hours a month preaching Gods? word via these attractive brochures. Before I went to school I had been giving speeches, talks, in this school called the Theocratic Ministry School for at least a year prior. The parts I did consisted of five minutes of me talking to an older woman about God. Now, it did not matter how appropriate the subject because the subject was all predetermined. You found out what point you were working on out of this little book. You presented the material in the manner requested.
Here it is, I have a ?talk? tonight. I am working on volume and pausing correctly. That is one of your first items on your list to becoming a well rounded speaker. I am about five or six years old and tonight I am going to teach an older woman that I have encountered while doing ?field service?, (AKA door knocking) about fornication and keeping the marriage bed clean. Yeah, no joke here, this is serious business because I want her to live forever on a paradise earth. In five minutes I had read three scriptures, overcome her objections, placed two sets of magazines, this months and last months and obtained the proper payment. I believe it was fifteen cents back then. I also had started a Bible study. Yuppa, that was me, Ms. Fornication expert at five years of age. I think the afro really sold her. How could she not convert with such a child with fashion sense? Everyone applauded. I sure could preach.
I did so well that I got to go see one of my favorite families the Browns. I swear they were the only black people in town and I loved them. With only around ten kids running around plus our four, it was a blast. We would go to the back room and get our groove on with all the Motown forty fives. The bump, the stroll, anything that wasn?t too loose would do. We had to make sure the words were appropriate to Godlike actions you know!
At the Browns I could fit in. No matter how big my hair got I could be assured it would never be as nappy as my friend Laura?s, nor as big as her little brothers naps. His hair was so big he kept a pick in it just like Soul Train. Sister Brown could cook too. No tofu from that dinner table. Oh, how I loved her food. I got to eat all I wanted too! If we went to their house on a Sunday though I thought I would die for they watched sports all afternoon. Brother Brown would kick back in his recliner and go to sleep but if you tried to change the channel, he was immediately not asleep. Big No No. My friends and I would be convinced by the snores that he was out and just as we got to the knob, he was assuring us he was just resting his eyes. He was listening to the TV. I have always wondered why anyone would waste a TV on sports all day.
My mom would go to the extremes when it came to keeping ?the world? out of our lives. The world was everyone who was not one of Jehovah?s Witnesses and was not going to get eternal life right here on this very planet. So worldly influences were out and with that went any hopes I had of us getting a TV. I sure did love it on Saturday morning when I would be going ?door to door? with my mom and a carload of people and my mom would find a ?sheep?. A sheep is someone who has sheep like personalities and is willing to let God lead them. Or at least let my mom talk for a long time. It also is a very good possibility that they were very bad at hiding or their kids ratted them out and they were forced to talk to the Bible thumpers. This meant I could peak carefully and see the TV through the screen door. Yes!! I had won the jackpot. If it was a really good ?call?, I could actually see Scooby Do, the demonized show. It had ghost, demons, witches, spirit-ism and mystery. I had to act like I did not like the demon show and every once in a while read a scripture my mom would have me look up. Thus I became very adept at multi-asking. One eye on the TV, one on the Bible, one on all the roaches that were running around on this sheep like person?s floor and one on the cake made with real sugar, (REAL SUGAR) that this sheep was offering me. I was such a shy girl that I was afraid to take it and I turned her down on her cake offer. Till this day at thirty three years of age I still kick myself for being too shy to take that chocolate cake. No amount of my mom?s whole wheat, egg substitute, and old banana bread cake could ever replace the image in my head of that sinful downright fornicating good cake.
Well back to school. There I had to be a JW (Jehovah?s Witness) also. It was a way of life. I can still come up with a presentation to place a Watchtower or Awake in about 2 second flat. I would go to my ?territory? (this is the place you find sheep like people in) and if I was quiet enough I could get out of the doghouse. It never failed that I would just get out of that blasted doghouse and back to the class and ?Oh Hell, double sixes, someone would have a birthday. Double damn it, once again I would have to speak up and say how I did not celebrate birthdays and ask to be excused to go to the library or doghouse, take your pick. I wasn?t eating any of that birthday cake. It was the food of the Devils celebration. To eat of it would mean that I had celebrated a birthday. Only three birthdays are mentioned in the Bible and at two of them people were beheaded and I think at the other one there must have been fornication because I could not have one. Seeing that the only birthdays mentioned in the Bible had bad outcomes, well then birthdays must be bad. Besides Jesus said it was better on the day of a man?s death, blah, blah. So when I die ?CAN I PLEASE HAVE CHOCOLATE CAKE?? With real chocolate not that carob stuff?
Chapter 2
At school I would work my territory. Every book report, paper, demonstration and science fair I had was another opportunity to preach, ?The Word.? As a child growing up in this strange religious world I had that glass bubble air tight. I convinced myself that I really did not miss all the holidays. I really had no clue how annoying all this preaching was either. Grown up now with the bubble gone I actually just have to laugh. It is better than the alternative. One time in about 3 rd grade I gave a report on the atrocities of abortion. I actually gave in detail the steps that an abortion doctor went through to get rid of an unborn fetus. I was completely oblivious to the fact this was inappropriate material for a third grader to cover with the class. I bet those poor children were traumatized for quite some time.
Kids at school, especially the Spanish boys or the American Indian kids were so mean. They gave me names to thank me for my presentation and preaching. So add these onto the names I got for my infamous hair and I now had all the identities I needed when I played out the roles of all the books I had read. Sparkplug, Tumbleweed, Boo Decki, Lil? Boo, Deckus, Dexter, Short Stuff, Fuzzball, Q-Tip, and then my new names, Stupid, Four Eyes, Dummy, Pendejo plus some very colorful ones that I dare not repeat then I for sure would loose my everlasting life. I settled on Decki and still to this day, my family and friends call me Decki.
You know I couldn?t even scare the kids with the threat of Hell. As a Jehovah?s Witness kid I was and am still, (my version of a drug tracer) convinced that hell does not exist. ?Surely no father could punish his children that he loves by burning them forever.?
Did I tell you that I had two friends? They were Vangie and ?The Beaver.? They were two daughters of a Bible Studies of my mother?s. Their mother was in an abusive marriage to an alcoholic and they were quite fun to hang around with. They lived about ten miles or so out of town. They also had at least one older brother and sister that I can remember. Most people when they say the phrase, ?Back in the day,? do not have memories such as mine going on. You know the good old days when I would defend ?The Beave? over her humongous Chicklet gum sized teeth. We all had no toys so to speak of so we would take off in the morning and find amazing made up games to play with dirt. None of the three of us were aware that we were girls. Our moms would dress us and as soon as we were out of sight and deep in the desert off came our shirts. Why not all of the other Mexicans did it? I had a perpetual tan line only where my shorts were. Shoes were not an option. Why wear them when you could have calluses as thick as tire tread on the bottom of your feet? With Mother Nature?s protection on our feet, we pursued the good old days. We would gather giant tumbleweeds and make huge forts out of them, scrape patterns in the desert sand with little ridges in them to replicate rooms. I had read a lot of National Geographic magazines where they displayed ruins with half toppled walls, and I was convinced that older civilizations did not know how to finish walls and surely never had ceilings. Our half sized dirt houses were very intricate. We even piled rocks around the dirt scrapings to make our walls. The forts were a bear though. See tumbleweeds have prickles on them. They are dry and sharp. When we piled them onto walls we would just shred our unprotected skin. Aides and Hepatitis were unheard of so we would gather huge spit wads in our mouths and plop them onto our cuts, rub it in, and lick it off. Then we would stockpile arsenal. This is violence in the form of mesquite beans. Mesquite beans are serious weapons. They are long beans that harden and dry out in the desert sun. They are equipped with very sharp points on the end. When launched out of a tomboy?s hand they become rockets, missiles, bombs and knives. I really feel that Mexico?s army has let a huge stockpile of weapons go to waste. Think of the possibilities of them taking over Texas with all of those mesquite beans! If they would pay attention to this nasty little weapon they could quit the drug running business. Mesquite beans are not only a good source of pain when embedded into your topless, over dry, fort building skin, they also are very functional when you get hungry. When they turn a creamy color with tinges of red from the raw purplish green looking beans, then they are ripe. Lying out in the sun dries them out and a really smart outlaw could eat on them for years. You have to chew the meat off the seeds and they are very sweet. Much better than the fake sugar my mother was always plopping into our whole wheat seven grain cereal. Oh, did I forget to tell you her favorite topping for this, seven different shades of a cow?s snack, was wheat germ? This was always followed by a glass of tomato juice with stinky brewers yeast mixed in it. That juice was to help us children swallow the ten vitamins you were served as a side garnish.
So the mesquite beans were divine. My mom could make jelly despite being deficient in most Betty Crocker skills. She made jelly out of those beans along with cactus prickles and plums. Now that was good, a real seven on my tummy scale.
All desert warriors must put their shirts back on and go home at some point and receive their double sixes of the day. Baths and de-ticking, and seeing I played with Vangie and ?The Beave? all day I usually had to be de-loused also. Pure grossness I say now, but living in the dessert with my untamed friends was something I am glad I experienced. Besides sooner more so than later my mom was going to circle my head with the ?Evil Friskers,? and most all the bugs would plummet to their deaths, clutching to their follicle and shaft as they screamed their way to the mud tiled floor. This I am sure of had to make the bugs very sad. One day they are hitching a ride on my head which to them must have resembled a day at Disneyland. With all those curls and kinks, my head was a tilt? o? whirl full throttle. Slip and Slides, curly shoots and all of this attached to the largest air bag this world has ever seen. Even the climate was always good due to the protective glass bubble that encased my head, ?the airbag.?
Chapter 3
Back to church, preaching, school, gathering more nicknames and saving more sheep. About that time my mom found us a M A N. (?Oh my GOD Becky!?) He was from Arkansas and he had his own school bus that he lived in. Talk about this kid?s dream world! Here was someone weirder than us. That school bus made him ?In like Flynn!? With a name as catchy as Lydia the Tattooed Lady, my new step dad, Dewey Dingledorf, the child molester was in our lives. This tall Herman Munster looking man affected our lives in ways I cannot even remember. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder the doctor called it. PTSD, my own personal little acronym, not to be confused with PMS, but the effect can be similar producing crazy wild eyed behavior that hits you like a Sumo wrestler wearing a thong. Blammo, and what the HELL was that about?
Dewey and his electric school bus taught me a lot. Like how to stay perfectly still and not question anything that came from someone five times your size. I learned that if you are tied up with hands and feet connected behind my back by a belt, adult men found it humorous if not even down right exotic. If I did not play along in the game the duration of torture was much shorter. Don?t wiggle, don?t squirm. If I took a dot or scuff on the wall and stared at it long enough, I could transport myself off into a story I had read. Usually this was a Nancy Drew mystery where the girl was daring and stopped the crooks. Or even better yet a ?Little House on the Prairie? book. Many a days I was Laura with the bouncing braids. She had hand packed lunches just like me. I also learned that when adults are fighting you had better run for cover. A tree in our back yard provided a perfect spot to climb up into and rock myself while banging the back of my head against the hard bark covered surface. Usually if done enough I could get the pain at such a level that it was almost like self hypnotizing. That was the best because then I could daydream again of being Laura Ingalls and Manly Wilder would meet me at the feed store dock and be the one with his arms around me, rocking me into a calm state. My glass bubble became bullet proof glass.
About that time I started throwing temper tantrums. The best I have ever seen yet to this day, full scale screaming, head banging, arms flailing, kicking and biting myself fits of undiluted anger. I had found my control factor. My way of letting my mom know there was something really wrong without actually uttering an intelligent word. My mom not knowing my new language decided to take the advice of some Bible thumping Bitch by throwing water on me. Now as I am older I cannot handle water being spilt on me by surprise. I really loose my mind at these times which makes for some embarrassing moments when perhaps a friend or husband is just trying to start a water fight. I end up loosing my mind and spoiling the day.
My mother, being as godly as she was, only lost her cool a couple of times about this. I clearly remember an incident involving my grandma?s cast iron skillet and a pair of scissors that wanted to embed themselves in my step dad?s chest. My brother saw how useful these tools were and jumped up and saved my Friskers from being mucked up by my mothers rage. Not to mention probably saving my mother from prison and allowing Herman Munster to continue his sick little secret games. My scissors also were able to complete their duty by cutting my off-center fashionable hairdo for another ten years.
Eventually my mother got sick of the treatment and left the monster. She said she did not like the way he intimidated me; if she only had known the rest of the story. Really it took him lying to her about smoking to end the marriage. Jehovah?s Witnesses following under God?s law do not divorce for most any other reason except for adultery. Here comes in another ?Good Old Day? story.
Staking out an old trailer in our station wagon, ?The Beast,? waiting for him to slip up so my mom could be scripturally free, became one of our new family games Catching the buzzard in the act was not an easy game and it ended up they separated over him smoking. Smoking now is a sin I utilize to the full extent of the law when I am stressed, but their divorce finally became official in God?s eyes when a friend of my mothers deduced he was cheating on his wife who was not around anymore.
My mom was now free, so we moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico which brings up a chapter all of its own. I had moved nearly ten times in my young life and I was not even that many years in age yet. With that episode under our belt, forward we went. A traveling testament to mobile homes, my mother was an icon now in cultural and religious freedom.
Chapter 4
Let me take a step backwards at this time and let you get a better understanding of our family tree. It really does not fork that much only in a few places does it turn into a bramble bush.
This is truly a ?Bless Her Heart? moment. See my mother has been married five times none of those being to my father. Her first husband was the love of her life. He was a handsome farm boy and from what I can tell was pretty typical. You know gambling problems, embezzling and a cruel knack for taking my mother for granted. From this marriage came my oldest sister, a beautiful curly headed German child. From the pictures it looks as if she really had a good start in life. She had a pet cow and lots of frilly dresses. My mother had been a Baptist at that time and it was alright for her to divorce this man for being a crook. He died a year or so later of cancer. Little did my sister know her life was about to change. My mother then married a Middle Eastern man from India. For security and secrecy?s sake I will call him Joe. His middle name is a family tradition so all of his kids inherited it. It only has about 23 letters in it and sounds as crazy as Supercalafragiklisticespialidoshish. Top it of with a last name as crazy as Doe. So he seemed an upright person after all he had custody of his two boys, Bill and Bob. My mother I don?t think knew he had played dirty and had their mother committed to an insane asylum in order to get possession of his children. HELLO! Red Alert, Red Alert! Moms run, PLEASE? Dad blasts it if she did not go and marry again. My middle sister got the creative name of Ene?ma Supercalafragiklisticespialidoshish Doe. Imagine all the wise cracks that left a girl open to. How my mother allowed her bouncy dark haired girl to be named that God awful name eludes me. So that brings the international child team of my mothers to a count of five at this point. So now we have three children who for three months out of the year are the same age and if we skip down about five years you will find my sister and our adopted brother who are the same age for all except three months out of the year. Whoa, where did that kid squeeze in? Let me tell you about my brother a real miracle. I am not being sarcastic now, or humorous. His becoming my brother is truly an act of pure love. For all the times I joke and say BHH about my mother, I have to stand up then bow low to show some heartfelt appreciation for a true act of unselfishness. See Joe was a busy little Indian and the year he made my sister with a douche bags name, he also got a married woman pregnant, along with her sister and two other women, if I get the story straight. This produced my older brother. His biological mother would not or could not keep him and my mother asked her husband Joe to get that baby for her. She could not see doing away with a child who was her baby?s sibling. She adopted him legally and raised him with love. I have never seen the appeal of Little Joe but somehow he pulled all these women?s cord and produced a whole damn tribe of his own. My mother, of course, divorced him, and get this, she raised all the kids for about a year alone with no help and under the threat that he was going to come and take them all. Eventually he came for the two oldest boys and broke my selfless mother?s heart. So when I came along I was raised with two sisters and one brother. Before I was born though, my mother married a man that hardly any one of the kids remembers. This was followed by a quick divorce. Not on my moms part but on his families part. The family did not want their dirty secret about their son screwing all the farm animals out. Really, pig and chicken love! I really wish my mom had left that detail out but it does make my story far more interesting.
So after all that drama along comes me. My mother dated an African American man who later became a preacher. I think the real attraction was with his friend though the gas station attendant. (Later I found out he owned it.) This would be my MIA father. Many a times I have tried to locate him but he has such a common name that the hunt has ended with no results. About the time mother got pregnant with me she found a haven and a cleaner path than she was on with Jehovah?s Witnesses. I was born and I think that should bring you up to speed with my whacked out family.
By the way, my mother?s Indian Husband had another son after my brother and I claim him too. He is younger than me and I am quite proud of how he turned out in spite of his parents. I wish to show my respect for him by leaving his story for him to tell.
There we were, a German mom, two Indians and a huge afro-headed child all driving around the world with our crazy mom.
Chapter 5
You do know she is crazy by now don?t you? She even has the papers to prove it. My oldest sister bailed and stayed in Deming, New Mexico. She had found her nook and wanted off of this trip of insanity. T. or C. here we come! We lived near my recently ex-step dads relatives. Or at least I think it was his stepsister or something like that. Who knows, seeing he was from the imbed state on the map. Kathy was her name and I loved her. Talk about a loud, voluptuous blond. She was a perfect mix of Wynonna Judd and Marilyn Monroe. I still can recall her singing Blondie?s ?Heart of Glass? with all of the passion of a real rock and roll sex kitten. My cousins gave me more laughter than I could hardly explain. They were so mean. So very highly mean. There idea of a good time was playing blind man?s bluff with me. They added their own twist. See instead of hiding after they turned me around and around while blindfolded, they would push me down the stairs. Loads of fun this game was. They also teamed up with this family that had four boys. Yes four. So in addition to my cousins from hell, I also got Satan?s Minions. Now these boys made both of my sixes look weak compared to the six of those demon children. These gifts from the Devil actually cut the cord off of an old iron. Now what could they do with that but be forced by their lord, Satan, to place it upon my leg to see if it jumped. Suddenly I had a new purpose for a year there. I was a human guinea pig. Afro headed lab rat. Any shred of femininity I had going for me, which was not much, was completely pushed aside. One good thing about my cousins was the trip to their house down the street. There was a lady who had a real live pomegranate tree or bush, whatever it is called; she had one right in the middle of the desert. This woman?s house was also the local bus stop for the school bus and I was the only kid who got on the bus at this stop. That tree was all for me. That was a very nice bargaining tool that helped me bribe my cousins into being nice at times. There is nothing like a nice pomegranate to keep them from beating the crap out of me for a couple of hours. A cheap shot on my part but it worked. In fact as a woman now, I find pomegranates are always a great bargaining tool.
What was to become a pattern that I never understood about my mother was the knack for having me live with other families. I do not know if it was stress, finances, or maybe I was just a pain in the ass. I don?t know the reasons but I lived with different people for time periods of my life. One such family was in T. or C. There was an elderly couple who made me feel like I was the queen of the world. The husband was blind and the wife was the perfect grandma. Every morning there was an old fashioned bathtub up on legs filled to the top with warm water just for me. No sharing bath water, a full country breakfast and all of the penny candy I could hold in my belly. I also got to watch T.V. before school with lots of Mr. Rodgers. His neighborhood was a lot like living with that elderly couple. The husband had a train set. There was a whole state in miniatures in his basement. It was all mine to play with, His sight was bad so he did not mind how badly I messed things up as long as I was having fun. He also started teaching me Braille. I was getting pretty good at it when my mom called and let all of us kids know she had landed a job and would be sending for us soon. We were going to Santa Fe. What would it hold for me? I heard years later that there had been a couple living in Truth or Consequences at the same time that had been serial rapist and killers. What a trip, hearing there was a real weirdo in that place filled with such good memories.
Chapter 5
My mom had landed a job at the state penitentiary. She was a records keeper. She had been working for about two weeks when us children decided to question the sensibility of her new career. We called her up and asked her about it. As she was proceeding to tell us about how safe it was to work at the prison we had her turn on the TV. Two miles away was her new job all ablaze. Yep, one of the worst prison riots was happening to my moms new job. Talk about my mothers luck. Never the less we still moved there. Now it wasn?t weird enough that my mom worked at the prison, she had to move us onto the prison grounds. There was some housing between the outer fence and the inner atrium of the prison. One half of the housing was cinderblock houses where the warden and such higher ups lived and the other half was trailers that lowly clerks and guards, etc. lived. It wasn?t that bad, free lunches hand delivered to us each day by the food van from the prison. Real live female prisoners brought it to us. Tell you what that soy wasn?t half bad. It is amazing how many ways they could prepare it.
Most of my days consisted of scheming ways to kill my middle sister with a plastic butter knife and tapping the antennas on snails or tomato worms so that I could watch them retract. Yes, that was a strange phase in my life. I had another friend that was also a boy while I lived there and he was bad news. He had this dugout under his trailer that he used to stash pornography and cigarettes. I could only have been about eight or nine at the time so I really ate up any news of how I was supposed to look when i was older. This boy liked to show me how cool he was by smoking, and one day while we were walking in a field of dry desert weeds he lit up. Well that hurt my Bible based conscience and I yelled at him and slapped it out of his hand. That was a BIG mistake. The dry desert brush lit up and in a big straight from TV scene we were running. The whole field outside the prison was on fire and was going to incinerate us. The wind picked up that flame and by the time the firefighters got it under control it had burned several miles worth of weeds. Talk about scared. I ran straight under his house and there I stayed until my mom came to get me. Surrounded by naked women and cigarette stubs I waited for the world to end. Surprisingly it did not. My mom barely said anything at all when I blubbered out how sorry I was and stammered about the sins of smoking and porn. I guess she understood how hurtful these things had been; after all they ended her marriage. The funny thing is I found out later the boy had not stopped at what I call ?burning down the house.? He ended up going on to larger crimes and had a stay at Springer, a school for boys who were too young to go to prison. .....That is all I have. Need some inspiration to finish or burn it........