Chapter Two.
I was born August 9,1945. Earlier that day America had obliterated Nagasaki, Japan with an atom bomb.
At 4:30pm Central Time I popped out in Denton, Texas.
The woman who would become my a.m. had been searching for a little girl to adopt since the death of her sister two years before.
The sister had been 20 years her senior and had served as her mentor and surrogate parent since their parent’s death in her teens, which coincided with the teens of this century.
The a.m. was born in 1895.
She had made the rounds of every reputable adoption agency in the state and a few others as well, I was told, and had had no success in finding a girl to name "Lettuce" and to train to take care of her the way her departed sister had done.
She had an attorney, Jack Johannes, who would go on to be the chief corporate lawyer for Frito Lay, conducting the search for her. One day he made a phone call that changed both our lives.
"I have some good news and some bad news", he might have said to her. "The good news is I've found a baby to adopt. The bad news is it's a boy!"
"A boy? I don't know anything about boys!" she would quote to me whenever she told me the story. "What am I going to do with a boy?"
Indeed.
After Johannes explained her hunting-for-a-baby days were limited by her being a single woman in her 50s in America in the ‘40s she agreed and the adoption process began.
Seems there had never been an adoption by an unwed female before and the presiding judge mentioned this to Johannes.
No slouch himself, he fired back an amazing bit of legal insight, "There's no precedent saying an unwed female of good reputation and sufficient means shall not be allowed to adopt."
Crumbling under such an astute argument, the judge allowed me to be the first child ever adopted by a single parent in the United States.
Lesson: In the United States, you don’t even have to grow up to become Precedent!
The papers were signed and the adoption was official some time around October or November of 1945.
But there was something about this new mother who celebrated her 50th birthday about the time the papers were signed: she was a product of the bygone Victorian Era.
She'd been catered to her entire life by a sister, twenty years her senior, who doubled as a mother; and she, flat out, missed the attention.
She told me on numerous occasions she just wanted somebody to grow up and love her and take care of her in her old age. She'd have a perfect trainee in a little girl and that's why she'd been so reluctant to accept me, a boy, into her life.
I’m still grateful she didn’t name me Jeeves.
But accept me she did...and then some.
I have vivid memories of being held to her breast to suckle. She had no milk of her own and she bragged about how she'd put Eagle Brand condensed milk on her nipples so I'd have something sweet to nurse on.
I have memories of her dangling her ample breasts around me, literally encircling my tiny head and body with them and dancing naked throughout the house.
She'd sing and coo at me as we went whirling around from room to room.
She lived alone! Who'd know?
The a.m. loved to wash my penis.
Every now and then, when I was between 5 and 10 or so, she'd come into the bathroom while I was taking a bath and inform me she wanted to make sure I was keeping clean. She'd sit outside the tub and have me stand near the edge while she got me good and erect and then she would wash me thoroughly...for quite awhile.
"Cleanliness is next to Godliness!" she'd always remind me.
Lesson: Religious training begins at home.
She'd explain how we should always take care of ourselves "down there" and that "it" must be kept clean at all times.
One of her favorite jokes was:
A young woman went to the doctor with a complaint. He examined her and told her she wasn't practicing good hygiene. She countered by telling him, "Every morning I start with my face and wash down as far as possible and every night I start at my feet and wash up as far as possible".
“Ah Ha”, the doctor exclaimed, "There's your problem. You're not washing 'possible'!"
She always wore a blue denim housedress that buttoned up the front for those ablutions. The lower buttons were always undone when she was through washing me. And I would still have an erection when I peed afterwards, forcing me to bend over slightly to hit the bowl with my stream.
Sometimes I'd complain about the slight stinging sensation and she'd assure me it was just the “soap in the little hole” and there was nothing to worry about. It just meant I was extra clean.
She'd also invite me to shower with her. She'd wash me and then she'd let me wash her vagina with my forearm, instructing me to draw it back and forth slowly between her legs.
I liked her long dangly labia minora. I liked to watch as they moved back and forth with my arm movements.
I was a kid. What did I know? This was the a.m. and she washed me, why shouldn't I wash her? I was making her feel good...and clean.
And I guess, close to God.
To this day I still like long women's lips.
Ah, but she had an evil side, too.
She used to beat me with the dogs' leashes. We had a cocker spaniel named Susan and a fox terrier mutt named Skipper. Skipper was my dog; the best dog a kid could have, too.
I don't remember when the beatings started but I remember that when she went for the leash I knew I was in for it. The beatings hurt but I don't think they ever did any real physical damage.
I don't think they made be behave any better, either.
When she'd get ready to beat me for some infraction, real or imagined, she'd run for the leash and I'd start to run the other direction.
"When I get that leash I'm going to beat you to within an inch of your life!” she'd shout.
At the sound of the leashes the dog's thought they were going for a walk and would get all excited.
I'd run from her while she, and the dogs, chased me. They thought it was a wonderfully fun game, yipping and barking and carrying on. But they never tried to catch me and were always sympathetic to my plight afterwards, comforting me, along with Gramma, as I stopped crying.
Our house on Walnut Hill Lane in Dallas was laid out so I could run through the kitchen and breakfast room into the front entry hall then make a u-turn through the living and dining rooms and back into the kitchen through the swinging service door: a circuitous route not unlike in the old cartoons where a chase takes place in a circle round a tree.
We had a big fireplace we never used in the living room and I'd duck into it and watch her storm past, ranting and raving: "You'd better come here! When I catch you it'll be worse. The more you make me chase you the more you'll regret it when I catch you!"
I was always amazed that it worked!
Lesson: Life imitates art.
I was no dummy. She was fifty years older than me. The more I ran her around the house the more tired she was when she caught me and, thus, the weaker the beating.
After she'd get out of sight I'd come out and make as if I'd been in another room: I knew I'd have to face the whipping sooner or later, anyway.
Once, after coming home from the circus with a toy souvenir whip (a stick with a string "popper" on the end like the horse trainers used), she got angry with me for breaking a beloved old abacus of hers I’d been playing with earlier in the day.
Instead of going for the leather leash, she grabbed that whip and beat me viciously with it while I dove into my bed and shielded myself with the blankets.
She kept beating me over and over with the wooden shaft and I remember getting stung in the eye by the popper on one blow.
She beat me so long and so hard that she broke it. It took me forever to stop crying and gasping for air that night. I had never cried that hard before and it terrified me.
I think it firmly planted in my mind what a hateful woman this was who would do that to me.
On the other hand, Gramma was always there trying to calm her down and getting her to temper her blows. And it was always Gramma, and Skipper, who were there with me afterwards.
I never told the a.m. how I felt and I never forgave her.
But I had time on my side.
I was growing.
One afternoon, when I was 11, I was playing in the mud of a garden we'd just dug. It was soft and muddy from the tilling and it felt good to sink up to mid calf in the muck, squeezing the goo between my toes.
For some reason, when she saw me she got furious. She grabbed me and hosed me off and sent me to my room where she came at me with the leash.
This time I just stood there and took the beating quietly, fending off the blows near my face with my arms; and when she was finished I calmly asked, "Are you through?".
It withered her and she never beat me again.
Lesson: Sometimes you just have to stand and take your lumps.
I have a lot of memories going all the way back.
As I’ve said, I can actually remember being in the womb, which might be the "tunnel" I associated with Elizabeth. I can remember the smell and taste that was in my nose and mouth, and the feel of its tightness: secure and warm. And the changing colors tinted red and orange and textures of light and dark. I don’t, however, recall sounds.
These memories are my own, unaided by outside influences, new age beliefs or emergent technologies.
Another is of me lying on the floor of the house we lived in on Woodlawn, in Dallas, the night "Gramma" came to stay with us permanently. I was under two.
Gramma was Emma Brown, a holocaust refugee whose son, Roger, a friend of the a.m.’s, was already living in America. He was a successful businessman and had a wife, Anita, and a son, Stuart, a year older than me.
The circumstances of how Gramma came to live with us rather than him and his family was never made clear to me.
She stayed on as our cook and the a.m.'s companion until I was 12.
At that time she went back to Germany for a few weeks’ vacation. During her absence the a.m. convinced me she was the root of all our disagreements and didn't I think she should be asked to move out of our house when she returned?
I didn't know what to say and, with more prodding from the a.m., I said it might be different.
In my mind I wasn't so sure.
I didn't always call her Gramma, though. Stuart naturally called her that and one day I started to and it stuck. Nobody minded, least of all she. Stuart protested she wasn't my real grandmother and I successfully argued that "Gramma" was her name...not her relationship to me. He was "Stuart". She was "Gramma".
He bought it.
Lesson: Learning to rationalize is essential.
About a year after her arrival we had a backyard talent show. The neighborhood kids came and sang and danced on a picnic table shoved up against the garage/servant's quarters behind the house. We even had a “servant” living there in those days: the current maid and her occasional boyfriends.
An outdoor light attached to the eave of the garage roof was our spotlight.
Naturally, I wanted to perform, too. Never mind I didn't know any songs and couldn't dance a lick but I got up on that stage anyway and winged-it.
I haven’t any idea what I did but I kept thinking the lighting was all wrong. I could feel its "heat" on my left ear; but, somehow, I instinctively knew it should be shining on my face from the front. I could "feel" its absence.
That night I knew I was going to be an entertainer when I grew up!
Lesson: If you want to be seen, you have to find your light!
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