5th Birthday

“How old are you, Jr.?” everyone keeps asking.

Four. Why does everybody keep asking that?!!! I’ve been four for a long time! I know that when a birthday comes around for a little boy, everybody asks him how old he is, but WHY do they ask that?!!!!

I’m four. Four four four four four. I must have said that a million times today!!!

Today is May 21. What I don’t know is the year. It’s 1980, but nobody ever taught me the year, so I don’t have any idea that it’s the start of a new decade.

Right now, I am outside. The others, and all their parents who came to my birthday party, are in the house. I can hear them having fun. They wanted to sit on balloons and pop them. That scares me, so I felt stupid and left. No self-respecting boy of my age (four, you know?!!!) is afraid of something stupid like popping balloons. Why am I?

Look at the cars. I wish I had something to do. I am walking along, just looking at each car.

Here comes my Aunt Trisha. She talks too much!

“You want to come in and play [such-and-such game]?” she asks.

I don’t care.

“You don’t CARE?! It’s YOUR PARTY!!!!”

She leaves me outside. Why doesn’t anyone else come outside to see where I am or what I am doing? Don’t any of them care about me? Is Trisha the only one who cares where I am or what I’m doing?

I don’t know how to label what I feel. When I am in there with the other kids, I feel like I’m no fun at all. I feel like they look at me and think the same thing Daddy and Mary Helen think. Awe, look at the stupid, ugly kid!

Mama’s friends tell me I’m handsome, but then they follow it up with, “You look just like your Daddy.”

Oh, I do? I thought you JUST SAID I’m handsome! He’s not handsome! He is what the Devil looks like!

Memaw just told me the same thing the other day. She said I look like Daddy. I said, “I don’t wanna look like HIM!”

That’s what I tell everybody. I DON’T want to look like HIM! He’s mean, and mean people are ugly. Nice people, like Mama, are pretty. Daddy is right about one thing. I should have been born a girl. At least if I was a girl, I could be pretty like Mama. But I’m an ugly boy. Ugly and stupid. No good for anything. Nobody likes me. Nobody misses me when I’m not around. See? They’re in there having fun at MY BIRTHDAY PARTY, and I’m not even in there!!!!

Happy Birthday to me. Yeah, right.

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24 years later……

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First of all, I was NOT four. I had just been so used to saying that I was four that I didn’t realize I was turning another age. I had asked Mama to make me a strawberry cake with pink frosting, and she did. I wonder, now, if she wondered about that. I wonder if it hurt her somehow that her SON wanted a PINK cake. But hurt or not, she always did what she knew would make me happy. She still does. I got my pink cake, and I loved it.

I always felt so left out by other people, though. It always seemed like my Mama was the only person who liked me or wanted me. Well, Memaw, too. I thought Mary Helen hated me. I adored Johnny, but he was always so much his own person that he NEVER depended on anyone except himself. That way, he is just like MH. Why am I different?

Oddly enough, something just dawned on me a little while ago. I was thinking of writing a short anecdote about something that happened when I was one. I don’t remember it, of course, but Mama has told me about it. Daddy drove a green 18-wheeler at that time. One day, as I was outside with Mama for one reason or another, a green moving van passed the house, and off I ran, down the sidewalk, yelling “Da da da da da da da da!” What is my favorite color? Green! Mama also wrote that down in my baby book.

She wrote in that thing religiously, too. I was quite touched when I really sat down and read through it as a teenager. She reported that I was a cheerful, loving baby who loved to laugh and make people laugh. She said everyone seemed to love being around me. She also kept tabs on how my relationship with Daddy was, and how it ultimately deteriorated.

Apparently, there was some kind of hero worship for the first three years of my life. I’d give anything to know what changed that, but nobody can seem to pinpoint it, exactly. Mama noted, through my third, fourth, and fifth years how I shied away from Daddy. How it bothered her that I seemed so terrified of my own father. What happened?

I remember telling people I hated Daddy. I remember the many nights I lay awake, plotting to kill him. Not fantasizing, PLOTTING. I thought about many ways to do it. You know what always stopped me from acting on it? I would always imagine having done it and then how I would tell Mama what I had done. How could I face her after killing the man I always knew she loved so very much? How?!!!!

It hurts me so much that I let so much bitterness and resentment build up inside of me over our years together. That last year. That last blessed year. Yes, we fought, but it was so much better for us. I finally got tired of being afraid of him, and I decided that it was time to stand up to him. Imagine MY surprise when he LIKED IT!!!!

All that wasted time…..all the times I had said, “I wish he was dead.”

Now, where is my Daddy? In a fucking grave. Sometimes I feel like throwing my arms into the air – fists tightly clenched, throwing back my head, and yelling, “GODDAMNIT!!!!!!!!!” Sometimes, I still do it. Even now, fourteen years later.