I remember thinking, “Hey, queer! Get your queer hands off me!” But the doctor didn’t listen. He pulled me out the same.
“Welcome to the world,” the doctor said.
“Fuck off!” I said. I decided then and there that I was going to be a bad baby.
“Hold on, I have to cut that pesky umbilical cord.”
“Whatever.” I was pretty much fed up already, and my fucking day was just getting started. A nurse delivered me into the sweaty arms of my mother. She asked if she could hold something else instead, like maybe a hoagie. She was very hungry and not terribly interested in getting to know me as a person. Someone handed her a sandwich. The mustard dripped onto my face.
Dad asked the nurses how much longer this whole thing would be. He said he had things to do, but couldn’t seem to offer any details when pressed. “Just… things, honey! I have things I’d like to do today!”
“Oh, really?” Mom said. “Well, maybe I wanna do some things too! Did you ever think about that?” She was already handing me over to my father, who was so startled by the gesture I wound up on the floor. Nurses and doctors scrambled to pick me up. The doctor slapped my ass again.
“Hey, what gives?” I said. “I’m already breathing.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said.
They discharged us only ten minutes later, very much against protocol. But honestly we were all just kind of done with it.
THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS
Dad studied me in the rearview mirror, taking notice of my scowl. “Oh, you think we’re happy about this? You think we’re having fun?”
“You had more fun than I did.”
“Oh, you think so?” Dad said, incredulous. “With her?” He cocked his thumb in the direction of the bloated woman in the passenger seat. “No, it wasn’t fun at all. In fact it sucked, son. The whole thing just kind of sucked.”
“Cry me a river,” Mom said.
“I’m pretty sure I did,” Dad said. “And I don’t really remember much of it either. Frankly, I think I was molested.”
Mom said, “Oh, don’t flatter yourself, you buck-toothed loser.”
“I was drugged and molested…”
“Prove it,” Mom said. “In a court of law.”
“Mom?” I asked. “Am I gonna have buck teeth just like Dad?”
“No,” she said. “Your father’s condition isn’t genetic.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“I had a procedure,” Dad interjected. “Okay? Can we just leave it at that? Or do we all have to keep talking about my procedure?”
“I want out of this family!” I screamed. I reached my useless baby arm toward the handle of the door, to no avail. My chubby fingers didn’t come anywhere near it. And even if they had, what then?
Damn it, I thought. Damn these useless baby limbs!
Fortunately my Dad drove a convertible, and right then a hawk swooped down and snatched me out of the backseat. “Oh, thank God!” I thought as the world shrank below me. “Sweet release!”
Later the hawk dropped me in a dumpster. Fortunately the dumpster was right next to a diner, and I had a powerful need for flapjacks.
FUCKING DUMBASSES
“What’s eatin’ you?” the 1950’s style waitress with the bad makeup asked. I was presently sat on the countertop over a mug of hot joe, where they’d leaned my shitty body against a stack of phonebooks.
“Nothin’,” I said. “Just a lot of little things.”
“Life sucks,” the woman nodded.
“And then you die.”
Mom and Dad found me, somehow, about an hour later and three coffees deep. I swore like hell when I saw those two oblong-shaped heads of theirs bobbing out the window, and their idiot slack-jawed faces. That either one could dare think themselves worthy to be my parent was the most potent insult of all. I hated them, and I wanted them to know I hated them, and I took out my wiener and peed all over them, and cried like a baby, because I was a baby, so it was an acceptable thing to do.
I kicked and screamed all the way home. I did not eat my peas. At bath time I made no small talk. I held in my poops until the most inopportune moments. When I nursed upon my mother’s breast I made sure to keep my lips rigid and cold like a socket wrench. “To hell with your milk,” I said. To hell with all milk. I spit the foul stuff back upon her breast.
I caught my father’s disapproving eye and told him to shove it. “I’m a baby,” I said. “What are you gonna do, Dad? Hit a fucking baby?”
Dad punched my fucking lights out. I awoke three days later with a letter pinned to my soft baby forehead. It said, “Son, when you’re ready to behave like an adult, and drink your mother’s milk like a big boy, you can reach us at the Finley Motel. Sincerely, Mom and Dad.” The phone number was scrawled across the bottom of the page. For some reason they did not give me the number to either of their cell phones, which seemed like it would have been a lot more convenient.
I dialed the Finley. A more accursed establishment upon this diseased hell-scape there surely has never been. The moron at the counter, who I could only assume to be a brainless teenager, was brainless. Seriously, she sucked. “Yes, I’m sure I have the right name,” I shouted at her. “You clod.”
It took her eight minutes to find the room number in the system, which was ridiculous; there were only three rooms. She could have just walked outside and knocked. I told her this. She said she didn’t have any legs. “Why the hell don’t you have legs?” I said.
“I lost them,” she said.
“Where?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s why they’re lost.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But you’re still a moron. When I show up there later I’m going to spit on you.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Relax,” I said. “I’m a baby.”
And she said, “Oh.”
Somehow the dipshit managed to put the call through to my parents’ room. On the other end came a very groggy “Hello?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Is this Dad?”
“Who?”
“Are you my Dad?”
“Oh shit,” the man said. I could hear a sudden shuffling, the sounds of bottles and aluminum cans clattering across the floor. “Uh, yeah,” the voice came back, its volume uncertain. “I think so.” The man cleared his throat and hacked up something thick. I imagined him wiping the drool from his mouth as he stumbled through the words, “Hey, so you got my note. That’s, uh… uh, yeah, that’s cool.”
“Where is my mother?”
“Your Mom? She’s here.” A pause. “Uh, she was here, I mean. She left.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Like she left for breakfast or she left you for good and the marriage is over?”
“Uh, yeah, the second one.”
“You’re a fool. Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“Oh, what do you give a shit?” he slurred. “You didn’t like her milk anyway.”
“But I was ready to like her milk,” I said. “I was willing to like her milk. See, I actually took your letter to heart, Dad. But I guess you didn’t bank on that outcome.”
“Uh, no.”
“You never believed in me,” I said.
And the man said bleakly, “You’ve never given me a reason to.”
I wiped a single tear from my baby eye. I’ve never admitted that before, and I’ll never admit it again. “Fair enough,” I said into the phone. “But that doesn’t let you off the hook. You forswore your fatherly duties. By the laws of the State of Georgia I now have the right to challenge you to mortal combat.”
After a long silence his voice responded with a begrudging, “Okay.”
SHOWDOWN AT THE FINLEY MOTEL
I scheduled myself an Uber and put on my fedora and headed out to the curb. This took an inordinate amount of time, as I had just been born a few days ago and had yet to learn how to walk or crawl. Plus I still had that giant baby head thing where you can’t lift your head because your neck is a piece of shit. Fortunately, Dad was a champion skateboarder at some point, one of those X Games assholes. No, I don’t know which one. I rolled myself down the sidewalk on an old skateboard and told that Uber jerk to put me in the trunk. “I assume you don’t have a baby seat?” I said.
“I’m pretty sure this is against regulations,” the driver said. He was a rather oafish fellow wearing a neck brace and thin wire glasses. His stupid lips were puffy and wet. “But I don’t really know what the regulations are.” In the end the pudgy man had little choice but to accommodate me. He clumsily picked me up by the head like a boardwalk claw machine and set me down beside the spare tire. “You sure about this?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Which was technically true.
He closed the trunk.
About an hour of darkness later we arrived at the dreadful Finley Motel. The driver opened the trunk and the sudden bath of light hurt my shitty baby eyes. There was nothing left to do but prepare myself for battle.
“Excuse me, sir?” I said to the cabbie. “But my baby neck is bullshit. Do you think I might borrow your neck brace?”
“What for?” he said.
“I have to slay my father,” I told him. Without another word the nameless goon removed the brace from his neck and bestowed it to mine. (Somehow in the transference the brace became much smaller and happened to fit my neck perfectly.) “Thank you, my friend,” I said. “I shan’t soon forget you. Now throw me at the door.”
“Which door?”
“Room Two,” I said. So the oaf pulled me from the trunk and pitched me like a baseball. I thumped hard against the wooden door, which functioned as a knock. I lay there bleeding on the hot cement and waited. The curtains rippled in the window. I heard the chain on the door slide back.
The door opened, and Dad was there, naked as the day he was born, covered in grease. “Dad,” I said. “You haven’t shaved.”
“Listen,” he said, “do we have to do this right now? I’m really hung over.”
“Mercy is for the weak,” I said. “You taught me that.”
“Fine.” He smashed a bottle against the door jamb and came at me with the broken end– but my switchblade was ready. He tumbled through the door awkwardly, his shriveled manhood twitching pathetically with every step. It was immediately clear that he was still very drunk and possibly a little stoned. I used his momentary lapse of balance and my compact baby size to sever the tendon behind his right ankle. He went down like a bitch. He swung the bottle at my head, also like a bitch. Again my diminutive stature proved advantageous. He missed me by a mile and I brought my blade up into his nostril and sliced, like in that movie. Blood gushed everywhere. I thought I had him.
But the bastard was quick. Before I knew it he had me by the leg, spinning me around in the air like a lasso. Eventually he let go. My tiny baby body sailed through the air and landed with a smack many meters away on the parking lot asphalt. “Fuck!” I said. Already Dad hobbled toward me on his one good leg to finish the job. No time to get my bearings, I threw the switchblade at his dick. The blunt end hit the target and clattered to the floor. The man doubled over coughing, sick. Still he crawled toward me, dragging his injured leg. A slick trail of blood followed behind him. I rolled over onto my stomach and wrenched myself forward across the parking lot. It didn’t matter how long it took, and it took us quite a while. One way or another we were going to finish this.
By this point the police and several onlookers had arrived and started taking bets.
“My money’s on the piece of shit,” one cop said.
“Which one?” his buddy said. Everybody laughed. I told the crowd to fuck off. One of them kicked dirt at me. Actual dirt. I cursed at them, then grabbed my Dad by the balls. “I’ll rip your fucking cock off!” I screamed.
Then Dad grabbed me by mine. “I’ll rip YOUR fucking cock off!” he shouted.
“Fuck this!” I said, and I shoved my entire right baby arm up my father’s ass. That shut him up good, after he first let out a sound like Goofy on fire.
Several hours later we were pretty much spent. Our bruised and battered forms lay baking in the sun on the blistering asphalt, most of the crowd having thinned out due to massive boredom.
I said to my father, through panted breaths, “You ruined my life.”
“You ruined mine,” Dad said.
That was the last time I ever saw my father’s face… because he got plastic surgery, so it took me a while to track him down again, by which time I was the ripe age of ten, already a young man, and my father was twenty-four.
Pretty much the same thing as before happened, except now the old man was still hobbled from the tendon I severed and had to get around with a cane. So he hit me with his cane a lot. Looking back on our relationship I don’t think we ever really understood each other. I shot my father fifteen times in the chest. He was dead before he hit the refrigerator. However to this day I maintain that it was in fact a heart attack that killed my father, and have yet to see any proof otherwise. I was never tried for his murder, as this took place in Nevada.
Oh, and as for mother?
THAT’S a story…
For a different time…
(She became a lesbian.)