Why Not?

(the Official Unauthorized Autobiography of an Orthodox Nonconformist)

By Grayhaire

I was conceived during a drunken, fear-fueled fuck frenzy the night before my father was sworn into the United States Navy as an Avenger of Pearl Harbor.  While my father was in boot camp, he received a missive from Mom, informing him of the new lifeform created by her sperm-ravaged ovum. As soon as he got home from boot camp, he did the honorable thing and made an honest woman of the teenaged girl. It was either honor, or the fear of being prosecuted for statutory rape by the State of Louisiana.

I'm fairly certain that it was an honorable deed, because my father was, by southern standards, an honorable man. He believed in God and Country and Apple Pie and all that crap. He was a serious, practical, Southern Baptist farm boy who left the country to to learn a trade, and was working as a machinist at a munitions plant in Shreveport when the Japs bombed the shit out of the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. He met Mom the following day, and I will never understand why she decided to have sex with him. Maybe it was one of those instances in which opposites attract. She was a pleasantly plump Irish-Catholic Cajun city girl with Raven hair, deep, dark brown eyes and a impish sense of humor. 

I have to confess my prejudices here. My father and I have never liked each other, and that is probably as much my fault as his. I readily admit to a lifelong, and unfortunately unrequieted Oedipus Complex. I was madly in love with my mother. There was never any thought of killing my father. I just prefered to be where he wasn't.
I don't remember our first meeting, but Mom and her sisters have told the story so many times, that it has become memory-like.

I  was around two years old when a skinny, red headed sailor appeared at the door of Grand Pa O'Donnell's shotgun house. Mom squealled, rushed to the door, and gave the stranger a long, passionate kiss. That did not make me happy.

"Gor-don," she said, enunciating each syllable. "This is your daddy."

"No," I said, running to the knickknack shelves in the far corner of the parlor, and snatching up a tinted black and white photograph of a red headed sailor. "This is my daddy!"

********

My first vivid memory was of a mystical experience. The second was of a sexual experience that would have been mystical if it hadn't been so frightening.

The memory always comes back to me as a flashback, and begins with a brilliant flash of light. I was sitting in my sandbox in Grand Pa O'Donnell's yard, pushing a pewter battleship through the sand sea, when a shadow glided over me and the sand at the same time that I heard the swoosh swoosh of wings overhead. I looked up and saw the Raven flying toward Grand Pa's toolshed at the edge of his Victory Garden. The shadowbird  flew below him on the grass until he came to the toolshed. He flew up the back wall of the shed, over the roof, and joined the Raven in the air.
It was the first time that I realized that everything was connected. I squealled with the delight of discovery, and the kitchen door slammed open. I turned and saw Mom rushing out of the house toward me. Another shadow drifted over. I looked up and saw a little white, fluffy cloud.

"Mommy, look!" I laughed, pointing at the cloud. "Mommy look!" the toolshed. Mommy, look!" the house. "Mommy, look!" the big black Plymouth. 

She couldn't understand what I was trying to say. Mom only understood that her Baby wasn't hurt -- that her baby was happy -- and she hugged me tightly and buried my face between those beautiful breasts. It seemed that everything in the universe was connected with Mom's tits.

The second vivid memory is of my first sexual experience.

It must have been in the summer of 1946, a few months before my fourth birthday. Mom and Dad were in Chicago, looking for a place to live. Dad had gotten a job as a machinist for Nabisco. 

My cousin Kathleen and I were in Grand Pa's tool shed. She was three weeks younger than I. She was a slender, delicate thing with blond hair, pale blue eyes and alabaster skin. I was slightly pudgy, with red hair and brown eyes (My father's hair, my mother's eyes). Sunshine filtered through a knothole, spotlighting Kathleen's thing -- except that she didn't have a thing. There was a deep cleft where her thing should have been. She had told me that she would show me her thing if i showed her mine. I showed her mine, and was greatly disappointed when she dropped her panties and raised her dress. Her thing, if you wanted to call it a thing, looked like Uncle Braxton's chin.

She reached out and took my little tallywacker between her thumb and forefinger and tugged lightly on it, making it stiffen and tingle. Kathleen giggled.

I reached out and tentatively touched the top of the cleft. I slid my forefinger up and down the slit, gradually going deeper and deeper until I found a warm, moist hole. I had forced nearly half of my finger further into the cozy hole when I was blinded by the glaring sun. Instantly, a huge silhouette covered the sun and snatched me up by my right arm. It was Uncle Hasting, Kathleen's father. He dragged me toward the house. I tried to pull up my brown shorts, but my cotton briefs stopped them.

Suddenly, he threw me down in the middle of the parlor. Grand Pa, Grand Ma and my four aunts sat around the room, staring at me as I scrambled up and got my briefs and pants up. I couldn't understand everything that he was saying, but I caught the drift. I was a child with a big curiousity and a tiny vocabulary. I understood that I was an evil, nasty creature who had defiled his angelic daughter. I couldn't look up at the adults, I stared at the dark blue flowered rug, wishing I could crawl under it an die (except that I don't think that I had an awareness of death at the time).

I looked to Kathleen for help, and she peered at me fearfully from behind her daddy's khaiki army pants. Even at that young age, I knew that there was no use in telling the grown-ups that it was her idea.

"That's enough, Hasting," Grand Pa O'Donnell snapped.

"But ..."

"Enough, I said. Leave The Boy alone. I'll take care of this." He stood, took my hand, and led me out to his big, black 1936 Plymouth. We got in the car and he drove silently for a while, rolling Bull Durham tobacco into a cigarette one handed. He put the cigarette into his mouth, lit it, then ruffled my hair. "Don't worry, My Boy, everything's going to be just fine. Don't you worry about a thing."

Grand Pa took me to a drug store in downtown Shreveport and bought me a chocolate soda, and seemed to be proud of me. We sat at the little round wooden table with wrought iron legs. He ruffled my hair again as I brought the soda straw to my lips. I noticed an unusual scent, and quickly realized that it came from my finger. I sniffed it, and Grand Pa chuckled, "You're going to be all right, My Boy."

Grand Pa had six daughters and no sons. I as his first grandchild and I was a boy. He rarely called me by my name. He always called me, "My Boy." He was the King of his castle, and I was his prince. 

The toolshed incident was never mentioned or even aluded to after that. Kathleen and I were never alone together after that.

I was treated like royalty in the O'Donnell household, and Mom practically worshiped the ground I walked on, but I was nothing special in the Haire Clan. Dad had six brothers, and most of them produced male offspring. Dad usually treated me like the village idiot.






