Semi-remembered stories

I'm forty two now, but even if you had asked me about my childhood when I was sixteen I wouldn't have been able to recall anything under the age of four. I've got some memories of kindergarten, but not at home. I've never remembered the violent or stressful times, which would have been most of the time. They've studied this too. That is how it goes. Children who undergo violence and stress, their brains don't develop the same as a child who doesn't. They say it changes one's DNA.

These first four years of my life I've never remembered anything. I used to repeat stories though. I'd even imagined them after hearing them, as if to make them my own. Pretending. Imagination is powerful stuff. Of course, I had my favorites. Some I would tell, and some I wouldn't.

They lived in Mexico, Missouri. He had a job at a steel factory. He ended up working there for decades. I've no idea what she was doing. I just know she dropped out of high school. Their parents had to of been helping them even though they created so much shame for the family. Of course they had to get married.

My brother and I are three years apart. I've been told he didn't learn to talk until he was four or so. They say I would tell people what he wanted or needed. I talked for him. My brother and I have distinctly different personalities. We've always handled things much differently. What was going on that my brother feared to talk?

There is the story about Barry beating me when I was two and a half for spilling his tool box in the basement of their house when there was water all over the floor. JoAnn let this one slip. For her to even bring it up means that he really went to town on me. Him being drunk means he didn't hold back. She was needing Barry to seem a monster to alleviate her of her own guilt and shame for ever even being with such a fuck. She played the same game as the grandparents; blame the other side.

You see, I'm piecing together the puzzle here on my own. This dude was maybe twenty years old, a factory worker in a small shit town, and a drunk already. He was drunk when he beat me for knocking over his tool box. The house most certainly was a rental, and there is no way their financial status was good. We all know how money stress makes for bad decisions in life. The shame he would of had. The terror of real life all around him. He obviously would have been taking it out on me and her. He obviously did.

I thought about it a lot. If he was insensitive enough to beat a two and a half year old baby what the fuck else was going on behind closed doors? It must have been enough to have me wanting to burn the place down at three years old. I'm old enough now to know that the shit people do behind closed doors is a hundred times worse than the shit they do out in the open. This is particularly true when it comes to typical Midwest white trash.

Barry and JoAnn eventually separated because one night, when driving to her parents' house, she fell asleep a few miles from their house at the wheel.  The car rolled several times through a ditch into a cornfield. Luckily this happened near the only farm house on that stretch of road. My little brother was thrown from the car, and I stayed in the back seat. All the blankets must have protected me from harm, and my brother too, somehow came out unscathed. Being tossed from the car must have saved his life. JoAnn was wrecked. The steering wheel and her got into a fight and the steering wheel won.

When people showed up, no one realized I was in the backseat of the car. Everyone was focused on JoAnn and my little brother. I still to this day cannot grow a proper beard because if I end up in a car for too long I pull it out. A thirty minute car ride can result in half my beard being gone. The anxiety is still too real. Obviously my body remembers what my conscious self does not. I've learned that when the conscious does not recognize reality the unconscious finds a way to tell the story. We'll talk about that concept a lot more as the story goes.

When Barry showed up at the hospital he went crazy on JoAnn, accusing her of trying to kill his kids. Drunk. She must of been making the drive in the first place to avoid his drunk ass. Some typical white trash shit. Somehow this was more than JoAnn could take, but that can't be. What was going on behind the scenes? What bullshit did these two have going on? No one knows. Neither of them had any idea what the fuck they were doing. Still to this day that is the case. Some day I'll unlock my body, and will know consciously, but until then I'm making safe bets.

I'm betting she already had another man in the wing. She always had other men in the wing. She was always sleeping around, so there is no reason to think it wasn't happening when she was younger. She was after all that little girl doing whatever she could to get a man to love her, which most certainly means spreading the legs. I'm not hating. I understand the plight. I'm just calling it for what it is. Since the dude had no self esteem, his wife sleeping around would have been absolutely maddening. No one would have said JoAnn was ugly. 

Then there is the story about me when I was threeish. After the car wreck. Grandma Ann told this story. She said I came to her house once, and had threatened to burn down the house so that my mommy would move back in with my daddy. I was probably fourteen or fifteen when she told me this. I remember asking myself, "Goddamn, was I just born fucking violent?" How does a three year old even come up with something like that?  What was going on around me that even made that an option for my three year old self? Hearing that story changed something in me, and while I do not remember being three, I've never forgotten that story.

There is a story of Barry giving me beer. Wanting to seem cool. I still love beer.

My left hand point finger looks different on the tip than my right. My grandfather made a toy box for my first birthday. I cherished this box for a long time in life. It was made of plywood, with the alphabet engraved across the top, and the year it was made. He carefully painted the grooves of the letters with different colors, and stained it nice like. It was a big box too. When I got too old to play with toys I kept clothes in it. Anyways, one day my brother closed the lid on my hand and I lost the tip of my finger. It's a permanent reminder of this time in my life. I eventually lost the box when I separated from the first wife. I left it with her son. Since I'll never have children, at the time that was as close to a son as I was going to get. He once upon a time called me dad after all.

She left Mexico Missouri after the wreck, and my life continued to become more of a wreck.