Childhood
One might argue that it’s rather obvious my childhood never ended. I wouldn’t dispute that argument. Here, however, I’ll write a little about the years 1-16.
I was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1962. My father was a sports reporter for the local paper. My mother had worked in a doctor’s office in some office capacity. Between the time I was two and half and five, we moved three times. That took its toll on my mother.
My parents split a few months before my sixth birthday. I remember being very upset when my mother told me my dad wasn’t coming back. Hysterical might be a better word for it. My relationship with Mom was rocky pretty much from that point forward. For some reason I blamed her for the divorce.
I was a shy kid. Strangely, after I got to know my schoolmates, I tended to be a ring-leader, at least up until high school. I had some discipline problems in school, but nothing too serious. Mostly just cutting up. Me and gang of other eighty graders started hanging Playboy centerfolds up in an old man’s class. He doubled as some sort of fundamentalist preacher and it really freaked him out. That, and stealing his paddles, sawing them into hundreds of pieces, and returning them to him in a box was about as bad as it got for me pre-dope.
I liked sports and was a decent athlete, pre-puberty. I didn’t grow much, or all at one time, so especially by high school, I was little. My father thinks I had some sort of little man’s complex, but I don’t think so. Somehow I don’t really notice that sort of thing and am always surprised by photos of me with my taller buds.
My mom remarried when I was in the third grade. He cursed me a few weeks or months after the honeymoon. I never liked him after that. For some crazy reason he wanted to be called “Dad” and I hated that because I had a dad and I saw him several times a year. Once he and my mother broached the subject of “Dad” adopting my sister and me. I freaked out. He really wasn’t a bad man. And I never gave him much of a chance.
My father was my childhood hero. He is a fun-loving, gregarious sort who always has lots of friends and is always doing something with them. That was in stark contrast to my mother and step-father, who pretty much never did anything. Dad was fun. Mom wasn’t. That’s never changed. I’ve always felt conflicted about who I was, or who I was more like, because of their extreme differences.
I was something of a loner even as a child. I was definitely scared of girls when I was a kid. I had a terrible crush on this cute little girl in fourth and fifth grade, and I never even spoke to her. (I knew she liked me to but I couldn’t find the courage to approach her.)
My mother worked up until I was in the sixth grade so second through fifth grades I had to go to daycare. I was ashamed of that for some reason and didn’t want the other kids to know. Of course they did when the daycare bus pulled up in front of school. Today I can’t imagine why that bothered me so, unless it was because I was the only one having to do so, at least as far as I knew.
I also think I was a little ashamed that my parents were divorced but I can’t swear to that . I do know it bothered me. I deeply resented having to live with my mother and never failed to let her know that I was splitting for my father’s just as soon as it was legally possible. I never did find out when that was, but I made the break when I was 15 after ninth grade.
After moving to Memphis and my fathers I got disillusioned. Dad, of course, wasn’t anywhere near as wonderful as I thought he was. He was also a big-time bullshitter. When I was 16, a few months before launching my substance abuse career, Dad was gassing me and my new best bud Jack up about how he could build us a top-shelf bass boat in a few weeks right out in our garage. When Jack and I were walking out of the house just after that gem, Jack said “The son-of-a-bitch doesn’t even own a decent hammer and he could build a boat, Right!” It was one of those moments, a flash of insight if you will, where the scales fell from my eyes and I realized, consciously, that Dad lied all the time. I viewed him with varying degrees of contempt for many years after that.
