CHAPTER ONE

In which I explore my new surroundings

So there I was waking up in a little plastic casket in this hospital in Trippabad, Colorado, feeling like hell for having made a pig of myself on that sugar water.  And there stood my doctor looking at me through the glass with this glazed expression on his face, and I could hear him thinking how he’d rather be a sex-change doctor, but this was only 1956 and his time hadn’t come yet, but  today he is a famous sex-change doctor and still lives in Trippabad, Colorado.

Standing next to the doctor was a sunburned young man with wavy black hair, and his smile looked half proud but his eyes looked real scared, and I could hear him thinking, Is this what I really wanted, and, How am I going to pay for this new baby.  Then I was shocked to see a big black beast jump onto his back, and gouge its claws into his shoulders, and written all over my new Daddy’s prematurely wrinkled forehead was the guilt he felt for thinking such thoughts.  There was something vaguely familiar about this man so I peeked inside to look at his soul parts and there I learned the sad truth, that this man had been an evangelist and con man in his last life, and had made the ridiculous mistake of coming into his present existence to try and make up for it.  The black beast had killed him with alcohol in his last life and I could see that the beast would be with him throughout this life too, in the form of generalized guilt feelings forever looking for circumstances to lodge themselves in.  The black beast introduced herself to me, and said her name was Elsie.  She asked if I wanted to play and I, being a happy-go-lucky demon, told her to go suck on a bottle.

Then some nurses came in and hauled me out of that plastic casket and took me down the hall and into a room where they plopped me down on my new Mama’s stomach.  My new Mama hauled out a tit when she thought no one was looking, and I took one taste and said no thanks, this tastes like those doctor drugs, and it contains the by-products of the kind of brain chemicals that are produced when a woman thinks thoughts like, What am I going to do with another little boy in the house, I can’t figure out what to do with the man-boy I already have.  I looked inside at her soul parts and saw that she was the youngest of four sisters and had been raised by a single mother, a schoolteacher who had survived three alcoholic husbands.  Then hiding behind the other soul parts I saw a man who she wished very badly that she was spending her life with, and by Golly it was not my Daddy.

She kept on with the tit thing for a couple days, and I pretended to eat that stuff but no one was fooled, so finally they gave her a shot that dried her up and damned if I didn’t get stuck with sugar water and worse from then on out, until the time came when I was old enough to be force-fed from a jar of foul-tasting mush.

My new home was filled with two high-spirited little girls named Glenda and Mo, who found me almost infinitely entertaining and I could hear them thinking all the time how they wanted to get big like their Mama and have a little baby just like me.  I liked these new sisters and when they made their little noises and poked me and tried to carry me around the house when my Mama wasn’t looking, I responded by teasing them without mercy, making them giggle till they were told to put me down.  I never got tired of teasing my sisters, and always cried when it was time to go to sleep because I wanted to be around them all the time.

As mostly demon, it wasn’t long before I was jabbering and crawling around getting into all kinds of trouble.  It was my goal in life to make the bigsters laugh, because it sometimes kept my Daddy’s black beast out of the house.  But whenever I got too tired to make everybody laugh and act happy, the black beast would invariably come in the house and sit on my Daddy’s shoulders till he got this sad look in his eyes and this worried wrinkle on his forehead.  He never talked much, especially when the three women were jabbering around the dinner table.  For some reason when he was feeding his face the black beast always dug its claws in extra deep.

One of the first people I got to meet was the schoolmarm herself, whose name was Grandma Wrathburn.  The look on her face reminded me of the black beast Elsie who rode on my Daddy’s shoulders, and in fact Grandma Wrathburn rode him pretty hard herself.  I looked inside her and lo and behold, there was that same young man hiding in there behind all these alcoholics she’d kicked out of her house, a young man she had wholeheartedly approved for her daughter to marry, and here is what happened instead.

One day when my Mama-to-be was engaged to Mr. Right, this Mr. Right came to her feeling very confused and twisted up inside and said that he had to go off to war.  After the normal messy emotional outpouring that you might expect at a time like this, my Mama-to-be promised to wait for him to come back, and they would get married then.

But as time went on, my coed Mama-to-be let her young heart wander around and she wrote her soldier boy a letter informing him that she found it necessary to date other men till he came back, so he should hurry and come back before she had a chance to forget about him.

Then who should get back from the war first but my Daddy-to-be, and she sort of halfway liked him because she thought he looked like Tennessee Ernie Ford, and sometimes she liked the way he practically drooled on her like a baby and found it fascinating the way he brought out her maternal instinct.  One day she found herself in the hospital for her usual kidney illness, and my Daddy-to-be was in there talking his usual “I need you” line, and she was sort of halfway nodding in and out of a doctor-drug semi-hallucinatory condition, and my Daddy-to-be saw her sort of halfway nodding after he made some statement about the life he had all planned out for them together.  He got all excited and ran out of the hospital and went home and played with himself, then he called everybody he knew, and everybody my Mama-to-be knew, and told them they were gonna get married and have me and my siblings and have their own house and be real happy.

When my Mama-to-be got out of the hospital and found out she was engaged to someone who didn’t live in her heart like her soldier boy, she was overcome by a feeling of sadness and confusion and pity and she went on over to my Daddy-to-be’s apartment and made sure she got pregnant so she wouldn’t have to tell my Daddy-to-be to go away and leave her alone.  She had a little talk with herself in which she lied and said everything would be reasonably OK and you can’t always have what you want, and she made a pact with herself to do her best to be a good little wife and mother and keep her best wishes for herself hidden away from the rest of the world.

That is what me and my fellow siblings all sprouted out of.

So that is why I saw that soldier boy holed-up inside my Grandma Wrathburn like a long lost hope, because she knew trouble when she saw it, and she was so old and bitter that she was no longer fooled by any plans built around any stiff pecker.  She never forgave my Mama for not waiting for her soldier boy, and my Mama never forgave herself, and my Daddy is still jealous of that man who hid in my Mama’s heart and kept her from ever really giving a gnat’s ass for the kind of infatuation that my Daddy tried to bring into their marriage, which was the main kind of love that he had to offer, except for his guilty conscious which made him obnoxiously apologetic and eager to please: his obsessively hell-bent sense of being dutybound to the needs of others.

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