***
My dad had three talents. Three things in life that he was extremely good at. The one thing he was most accomplished in was drinking. He could drink his entire paycheck in one weekend. A paycheck it took him fourteen days to earn would be gone in less than forty eight hours.
Not exactly a skill to put on a resume. I don't imagine many employers are looking for that particular talent. But the oil fields of Louisiana hires their fair share of men with that talent.
The secondary skill was beating on women. In particular, my mother. Again, not a talent worth mentioning.
The tertiary talent, one that might have been commendable, enviable, was talking women into the back seat of his piece of shit Buick Riviera. That talent would have been enviable, except for how it impacted my mother.
Like many abused women, my mother suffered from the illusion that if she just loved my father a little more, if she just cleaned our home a little better, cooked his dinner a little better, he would change. Of course, that belief was doomed to failure.
No matter how hard my mother tried, Bert would still come home, reeking of booze and another woman and would slap my mother for asking what had happened to his paycheck.
"I'm one busting my God damned ass! I'm one sweating my fucking balls off! What I get for that, huh? Tell you want I get. God damned fucking whining bitch up my fucking ass wanting piece of my soul," he would scream and slap her again.
I asked my mother once why she put up with it. I asked her why she put up with living hand to mouth, living with the verbal, emotional and physical abuse. Why did she put up with a man that cheated on her, and did so flagrantly?
(I had to define 'flagrantly' to her.)
She looked at me as if I'd grown a second head. Then her face got hard and she slapped me. In a screaming tirade, she explained that she'd taken a vow to love my father and to stay with my father, 'in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse, 'til death do they part.' I didn't ask again.
The only man my father was afraid of was Big Bert, his father. Bert had learned his talents from the best. Every now and then, the two of them would go at it in the clam shell drive of our trailer park. Neither man would stop until one of them was out cold. Most of the time that would be Bert, Jr. Big Bert would wipe the blood from his face, spit on my father and call him a pussy.
The one time my father did win, it was a hard battle won. My father lost two teeth in that fight, had a broken cheekbone and a broken hand. But Big Bert never came around again.
Because of living hand to mouth, because of living off my mother's salary as a cashier at Adrien's Supermarket on West Congress Street, I went to school in the finest that Goodwill had to offer. And, because of constantly being in the top of my class, academically speaking, I was ignored by my peers.
Some kids were bullied, tormented without mercy, despite our school having a 'No Bullying' policy. In my sophomore year, two boys actually committed suicide because of the non-stop harassment.
I wasn't bullied; I'd inherited my father's build. I was six feet tall, and weighed one eighty. So, I wasn't bullied; I was ignored. I simply did not exist. That was fine with me; I did not suffer harassment, torment at the hands of my peers.
At the start of my senior year, on the day of my eighteenth birthday, God gave me a birthday present I would have never imagined. My dad had come in on the boat the day before, a Thursday. Cashing his paycheck, he proceeded to drink his paycheck away. At twelve minutes after one o'clock, Friday morning, my birthday, a man found his live-in girlfriend in the back seat of my father's Riviera, being rode hard and screaming in orgasm.
Two bullets into the skull of Bert and two in the face of the girlfriend, my mother received Bert's life insurance. She immediately ran out and bought herself a brand new Chevy Malibu and gave me Bert's Buick.
Before she could run out and buy herself any more shiny trinkets, I sat her down and showed her how, with careful management, she could live comfortably, month to month off of the interest, provided she continued to work at Adrien's. Because I'm male, thanks to years of conditioning from my father, my mother listened.
She also graciously gave me twenty five thousand dollars; ten percent of what she'd been awarded. She wanted me to just put it into a savings account, to go toward college. I showed her, on my calculator, that even with compounded interest, the most I'd have after a year of dormancy, my twenty five thousand would be twenty five thousand and sixty eight dollars and nineteen cents. Meanwhile, the bank would have my twenty five thousand at their disposal with which to enrich their coffers.
(Yes, I had to explain 'dormancy' and 'coffers' to her.)
We compromised. Half, twelve thousand five hundred would remain, dormant in a savings account. The other half, twelve thousand five hundred would be mine to strategize and invest, in an attempt to enrich my own coffers.
(She was proud of herself, using 'coffers' in a sentence.)
The Buick was truly a piece of shit. My father couldn't be bothered to care for his trailer, his wife, his son. Why would he bother taking care of his car? I immediately traded it in and used a thousand of my own money to buy a Saturn SW3. Yes, a station wagon. I was already unpopular; I was not attempting to impress any of my peers. It was good, reliable transportation. The AC worked, the windshield wipers worked, the radio worked, the electric windows went up and down.
The only other thing I did that had nothing to do with investments, dividends, profit margins, was I went to Wal-Mart and bought myself some decent clothes. Not fashionable by any stretch, just good quality, serviceable clothing. A three-pack of plain white tee shirts that were still white, and didn't have someone else's sweat stains under the arms. Some size eleven leather tennis shoes. Leather. Not vinyl. Size eleven, not ten and a half, even if they looked big, size eleven. Not size twelve, even if they looked small enough to fit me. Size eleven.
On the way out, there was a display rack by the check out. And I gave in and made an impulse purchase. There was a stack of Spirograph sets for ten ninety eight. I'd had one as a kid and had loved doing the circles, and the ovals, over and over, until there was a really cool pattern on the paper. I don't remember what happened to the Spirograph set I'd had; probably was deemed 'stupid' by my father and thrown out, just like everything else I had ever liked.
"How you doing?" an attractive African-American girl asked as she started ringing everything up. "Oh! I had me one them when I was a kid; loved doing that."
At home, I found a plank piece of paper and opened the toy. My mother still had a typewriter, so I used a piece of her typewriter paper and again lost myself in the simplicity of creating a pattern of loops and swirls that formed a rosette of red. The washing machine gave a 'brpp' to let me know the cycle had finished. I took my new tee shirts and my underwear and our towels out of the washer and put them into the dryer.
An idea came to me and I found a black ink pen. Putting the point down into the whole right next to the one I'd used for the red pen, I again maneuvered around the circle. It gave an interesting design.
When the dryer buzzed, I took out my new tee shirts, the towels, my underwear and my mother's panties and folded everything.
Putting the tee shirts onto my desk, next to the doodling I'd done, an idea came to me. I first turned one of the tee shirts inside out, then used a heavy textbook as an anchor. Positioning the circle onto the tee shirt, I saw I'd have to stretch the tee shirt quite taut. Unlike the paper, the material of the tee shirt tended to bunch up as the point of the pen travelled over it.
But, after a few attempts, I figured out how to make a pretty impressive pattern. I took the tee shirt, turned it right side out, and did several patters in various shapes, patterns, and colors all over the tee shirt. I even managed to get one sleeve with a long oblong black ink pattern.
The next day at school, Sandra King, one of the cheerleaders, noticed my shirt. She came over and asked me where I got it.
