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 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.