Category Archives: Mother/father

A Flying Dog

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In addition to not being able to afford it, we didn’t have air-conditioning as a point of pride.  True, we lived 40 miles inland, and it could get hot but it was dry heat, as we would say over and over, and not that wet stuff like back in SC where you never stopped feeling damp and you’d get heat rashes in odd places.

But we were sitting around in the front room sort of suffering through the heat together on a dreary Sunday afternoon.  The old lady was flopped on the sofa per usual reading the newspaper and the old man was sitting on this sitting place he had made that jutted out from around the fireplace firebox. The family dog, sitting right next to him on the cool brick, began to yip.  This unfortunate dog was a mix of Chihuahua and rat terrier; it was short haired and had a huge dick.

The old man told the fucking dog to shut up.  But it kept yipping at something out in the front yard or maybe up on the street.  That dog made us insane with its high pitched yipping.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the old man, looking straight ahead, take out his cigarette lighter, flip it open and ignite it right next to the yipping dog’s asshole.  There was a sort of pregnant pause as the nerves sent their messages to the dog’s brain.

Man, did that dog jump.  Arching out over the living room floor, it landed more on its chest than its front legs, slid on the hardwood floor and banged into the wall.

 Nobody said a word or blinked an eye.  The old lady looked over her newspaper, shook it out, and went back to reading.  The old man was dead pan.

“Man,” I said, “did you see that.  Did you see that arch!  I thought the damn thing was going to fly.”

 The old southern attitude towards animals is somewhat different than that of the civilized Californian.  My uncle likes to joke, “Want to see something funny?  Tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over a clothesline.  But if you want to see something really funny tie two cats tails together and throw them over a goat.”  And in Huck Finn, Twain records the bored town folk on a hot afternoon pouring gas on dogs and setting the afire.

 There’s was no TV back then so you had to make do with whatever entertainment material was at hand.

In Black and White

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 My mother sometimes gave me more information than I needed.  Or maybe it was my fault; my curiosity especially about my self is endless.  But, as I was informed, in April of 1944, my mother went to meet my father back in South Carolina so she could meet his parents.  They had not been married long and Granny’s house having but four rooms, the two sought privacy in the piney woods directly behind the house.

According to the author of Southern Ladies and Gentleman, young men and women in the South have long sought the privacy of the woods.  A true gentleman brings a coat, for the lady’s posteriors, and also a warm Coke, as a prophylactic douche.  I have long thought Coke would kill anything.  But that evening apparently my father brought the coat but no coke for I was conceived in those piney woods.

Those were happening times.  Peace was declared in May of 1945; the a-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, as I gestated in my mother’s womb.  In embryonic form, I could not say that was there yet but it bothers me to think that I may have been if only potentially on this earth while Adolph Hitler was still alive.  He killed himself on April 30, 1945.

Not that I believe there is any karmic connection between me and Hitler; but those times seem so long ago and to think there’s any connection between me and them is disconcerting.

Why back then everything was in black and white.

My Love Is My Weight

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My brothers to the South, who have put in the most time tending our Parental Units in their ongoing decay, wanted the brothers to the North to transport our mother to the memorial service for our defunct dad.  We were happy to do it but troubled because our mother has a game leg and weighs a good bit.  We didn’t know if we could get her in one of our cars or not.  We made various jokes about perhaps needing a hoist or a fork lift…

I should read the psychoanalyst who wrote about body armor.  Our mother has relatively little weight in the upper area and below the waist she expands enormously both to the sides and to the rear.  When she had the stroke that gave her the game leg, she was in a rest up place, hospital sort of place; and well, we wanted her to stay there while the rest of us gathered for a so-called holiday meeting at my parent’s house.  I swear I had talked the social worker into not letting her out.

 But there she was having manipulated the doctors some how and having roped my nephew in going to get her.  They had a Ford Bronco at that time, and my mother was suspended up there some distance from the ground.  We set up the wheelchair by the door and tried to lower her into it.  I will never forget the look of horror on my nephew’s face when for a second, as I tried to pry lose her game leg which had gotten stuck, her weigh shifted entirely to him.  But thank goodness we had placed the wheelchair well and wham she landed in it.

Later in the miserable evening, I am minding my own business when I hear, “Nick! Nick! Nick!”  My father is yelling for me for no apparent reason just like back in the good old days.  He is in the bathroom.  When I opened the door I see him more or less seated on the floor, his head sticking up above my mother’s buttocks which are pinning him to the floor.  Apparently, he had been trying to get her on the toilet and her weight had unfortunately shifted.  He is cursing up a storm, “Goddammotherfunckingsonofabitch,” over and over.

Fortunately my mother had some strength in her arms; correcting the situation wasn’t a matter of lifting all that dead weight but merely a matter of shifting it so it would tip in the other direction.  I applied myself directly to the naked expanse of her buttocks, her drawers having been previously dropped in anticipation of relieving herself.  I must say I had never seen her buttocks so up close and personal before.  Looking left and right all I could see it seemed was mountainous buttock.

 I succeeded in my effort.  She momentarily stood up and swung herself on the pot with a crash. I left with my father still on the floor cursing.

 A Kodak moment from hell, I suppose.

A History of Violence

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Recently and accidentally I got in contact on the web with a scholar in England who had written an article on the depiction of white trash in horror films.  I had noticed the connection myself.  I am fond of horror films and think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a masterpiece of its kind, featuring of course white trash cannibalizing people unfortunate enough to stop in their area.  We traded, the scholar and I, a few more academic and theoretical emails.  Then I wrote that, while of course the horror films exaggerate the violence of the white trash household, that violence did occur in such households.  I went on to describe the various attempted homicides that had occurred in my family.

 I never heard from the scholar again.  What did she think: that I was going to go across the Atlantic and cannibalize here.  Obviously, another dilettante academic who really has no idea what she is writing about.

 Note first: the homicides were “attempted,” none proved successful, as of yet.  One was even sort of an accident; Thad my brother killed my father he might have been tried for reckless endangerment, but that’s about it.  Throwing a screw driver in the direction of a person’s head in a moment of rage could suggest reckless endangerment.  But the screw driver missed and (twang!) stuck in the garage door next to my father’s head…just like in the movies.

 Another attempt was mostly just a threat.  My father was out front of the house trying to remove some side mirrors he had rented so that he could see around the trailer they had pulled on their vacation.  But he was having trouble getting them off and flying into a rage began to strike the mirrors with a two pound hammer quite vigorously.  When he began to strike the truck my mother went out and interposed her body between the truck and the hammer.  Whereupon, my father said, get out of the way bitch or I will kill you.  My mother must have believed it because she ran into the house and locked herself in my brother’s bedroom, so he might afford her protection if necessary.

 When my father turned demented, he became more overtly and publically violent.  He went around hitting people with his cane.  He hit my brother’s father-in-law with it.  My brother picked up my father and had him upon against the fence that separated the old man from a 30 foot fall onto rocks.  Perhaps this too constitutes an attempt.  In any case, my brother had to be restrained.

 So I was worried a bit about my mother.  Elders could I knew abuse each other, so I called to ask if she was afraid at all of my father’s behavior.  Oh no, she said, he is afraid of me and went on to tell of the time she had gotten a large kitchen knife, gone into the bedroom where he was napping and attempted to plunge the knife into his chest.  But at the last instant my father flung out his arm; the knife hit the arm bone and its tip broke off.  Another botched attempt, though penetration had been effected and there was a good deal of blood.  “Funny,” she said, “he wrapped up his arm and never said a word about it.”

 Apparently, according to my very unreliable mother, another brother who has spent more time tending to the elders’ needs that anybody, very recently attempted to kill her.  I didn’t ask about the details.  But it seemed to involve having been nearly strangulated by some band of material that is used to stabilize a person in his or her wheelchair but had in this instance gotten up around her neck somehow.

 I think this is an outright lie.

 I wonder has anybody ever killed anybody simply because that person annoyed one to death?

Bingo, Bango, Bongo

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My father was a racist.  He used the word “nigger” freely outside of the house.  Inside, my mother, the proper English woman, insisted on the word Negro.  But it never came out sounding like that.  It came out Nigra, sort of a combination of “nigger” and “Negro.” Or maybe it was just the accent.

When we made a visit back to SC when I was in high school, we stopped in Alabama somewhere for gas.  And my father said to the elderly black man there, “Fill her up, Uncle.”  The black man said, “I ain’t your uncle.”  He was angry, and I was surprised that my father just laughed.  Back in the community of Ora, I sat in the car watching him interact with one of the blacks who was a long time member of the community; he would send Christmas cards to all the white children in the area.  My father had bought a six pack of cokes to give to the elderly black man; and as the black man did his obsequious routine, I could see my father, in his gesture and his tone, swell up with self-importance.  I felt disgusted.

But my own experience suggests how easily one might become racist.  It was just in the air, like the “nigger piles” in the school yard.  Or in songs, the version of “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dina” that we sang ended with: “She’s my one black, two black, honest to goodness shoe black, chocolate to the bone.  You better leave her alone.” And in horrible phrases that stuck in my mind like lint: “nigger-rigged,” for example, to describe a repair poorly and hastily made.

As a child, if I wanted to socialize with kids my own age, I had to bike two miles to the nearest white boy.  But from the top of a tree near my house, I could see past the field, over the abandoned peach orchard to a house that had kids all around.  But they were black, and I knew without being told that I was not to go there.

My father forced me to work with him on a weekend scab jobs; he would sing the same song all day long.  Too frequently, he got stuck on: “Bingo, bango, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo…”  I think this song is racist; but it’s a bit more complicated than that.  It’s not just about blacks not wanting to be made into slaves; it’s also about “savages” not wanting to enter the world of civilization with all its misery.

I wonder if my father didn’t in some way identify with those who did not wish to leave the Congo.  Perhaps the South was for him the Congo, a backward part of the world and not civilization proper, so that in, a twisted and convoluted way, his racism was an expression of self-hate.

As a brick layer, he had to wait sometimes from a call from his boss to learn where he would work the next day.  He would call the boss to find out, but sometimes he could not get through.  He would slam down the phone; one evening he slammed it down over and over.  We all retreated to our rooms.  My mother pleaded with him to stop.  Finally, the boss called, and my father’s tone was as obsequious as could be, as if he had not been raging for two hours at how late he was having to stay up to hear where he would be going at 5 am the next day.

Being a “nigger,” in the vilest sense of the word, is not entirely a matter of skin color.

90% Mother

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Were I to quantify my mother’s identity I would say she was 90% mother and 10% other (wife, sister, relative, friend, house keeper, cook). Unfortunately, for her self-esteem, she lacked any nurturing capacities whatsoever.  She mothered as it were by remote control; in her later years, she did much reading on the subject of being a mother and so kept up to date by that means.  But given her nearly complete self-absorption she was unable to recognize her children’s’ feelings.  If one was sick, one had to tell her.  If one was upset, one had to go around sighing deeply or groaning.

She did of course observe us.  She noticed when we tracked dust onto the hard wood floors.  She noticed when I did not empty the catch in the sink after washing the dishes. She noticed when we did not pick up the dog poop on the back lawn or when we had not taken out the trash. She noticed especially our language.  She noticed if we had crap behind our ears.  She noticed when we did not observe proper table manners.

She kept a log of my first year of life on which she noted having noticed many things.  She noticed there that I was bowel trained before the age of one.  Several persons to whom I mentioned this considered it an abomination.  Why, one person said, a baby isn’t physically equipped to be bowel trained before the age of one.  Nonetheless I was.  When a child should or shouldn’t be bowel trained seems to be determined by the fad of the moment. And my mother is on record as having found the experience of feeding me at one end as I pooped at the other “disgusting.”

Also her breasts caked making nursing a very painful experience.  Mostly I was bottle fed and since she got most of her nurturing tips from reading she actually tried to feed me by the clock.  I consider this practice an abomination; a form of torture inflicted by the so-called parent upon the infant.  People so readily give up their simple human sense when some bug of an idea gets into their empty heads. How could a parent let a child wail in its crib at night, knowing the child was crying because it was hungry, and not feed the child because it was “not the right time?”  Would a human being do this to his dog?

But my mother had no extended family; no one to help or counsel her.  Her husband was off in the Army somewhere washing out as a pilot.  And her Aunt Kitty had died sometime during the months of her pregnancy with me.    So her breasts were caked, she was alone and in need herself, and I was jaundiced and starving to death.  No wonder she experienced me as “needy.”