I was born on June 11, 1970, to Mr. and Mrs.
[parents]. The Mrs. of the couple was originally named [my mother].
I think my mother and father loved each other very much, but they did not
have a very happy marriage (or at least not as far as I could see).
I don’t subscribe to the point of view that their problems are any of my
business, and I don’t intend to talk about the things they told me about
each other. I could write another book for that. For reasons
that had very little to do with me they divorced when I was six years old.
They fought constantly over, among other things, custody of their only
child. I was an unhappy young boy.
I spent a lot of time with all of my grandparents
when I was little. Dad’s parents were named John Samuel and Wilma
Brown. Mom's parents were Kenneth Earl and Irene (no relation to
Wilma). They all showed me a lot of love.
I found John Samuel dead one early morning
in 1976. He was always awake by the time I got up and made my bed.
That morning when I got to the living room he was nowhere to be seen. I
went to his bedroom and found him sitting up in a chair by his bed.
He wasn’t moving. I thought he was asleep. He had oxygen tubes
coming out of his nose, but I didn’t know what that was all about.
It was the day after Thanksgiving. He had heart failure in the middle
of the night. He was very kind to me. For years after that
I still searched crowds for his face. I missed him and I wanted to
see him again.
A leather easy chair sat in front of the television
in the living room. My grandfather Day always sat in it. I
would sneak up on him when he was in it. After he died if I approached
the chair from the back I got the most intense feeling he was sitting in
it, that if I walked around to the front of it I would see him smiling
at me. The chair was haunted by his ghost, as was the rest of the
house.
My grandmother Wilma became even meaner and
crazier than she had been before he died. I heard she poisoned him.
Wilma was filled with hate for everyone in the world but my father and
I, and sometimes she hated us too. My grandmother and I were very
close (at least one of my parents gave her babysitting duties). In
a lot of ways that hurt me. I picked up a habit of losing my temper
and speaking ill of people. Those were two of her most distinctive
traits.
The custody battle between my parents did
wonders for my feeling of self worth. I didn’t know what to tell
the crazy people in my family when they asked me whom I loved the most.
The answer was I didn’t love anyone the most. None of them wanted
to hear that. I remember both my mother and my father weeping because
they couldn’t understand how I could want to be with the other one.
I wound up living with both of them at different times. I went to
five schools before the eighth grade as a result of hopping between residences
and joining the gifted and talented program.
Both my mother and father remarried.
My mom got married to a strict, religious man named [my buddy]. Her
marriage has lasted more than twenty years and still goes on. He
had a daughter named Victoria Lynn, who I love as though she were my real
sister. My father married a woman named Beth Smith. They had
a child named Brendan, but their marriage didn’t last.
I couldn’t stand either one of my stepparents
when I was young. My stepfather was a disciplinarian. My stepmother
was the wicked witch of the west. When I got older the motives behind
their actions didn’t seem so wrong anymore. I lost the ability to
hate them. I realized that most of the things that [my buddy] had
done he did out of love. Beth married my father, a man who was incredibly
difficult to get along with. Of course I still think she married
him out of greed.
My father had a son by his first wife.
Her name was Harriet. The child’s name was Warren. I never
knew him until my father died. The circumstances under which I came
to know him couldn’t have been more difficult. Louisiana had a law
called forced-heirship. Since my father died without a will the law
dictated that his estate had to be divided equally between his heirs.
Warren really wanted a place to live. When the succession was settled
he had legal ownership in one of the houses. I couldn’t deny his
right to move in. I thought I didn’t like him, but that was because
I didn’t even know him. After he moved into my father’s house I stayed
away from him for about a year. Then we spent some time together.
When we began smoking weed together we became friends. He has his
share of problems, like everyone else, but he isn’t a bad person.
He did a lot of things to help Susan and I. He and I partied together
a lot, but that’s not why I like him. I like him because he’s my
brother.
When I was eight years old my grandmother
Wilma moved from Sherwood Forest to Highland Road, on the south side of
L.S.U. There was an extensive tract of swamp, marsh and woods behind
the house. The whole area is inside the city limits, but because
of the flooding it was never developed. I hunted squirrel in those
woods on a regular basis. Staying in the house influenced my life
greatly, precisely because I used it as a base of operations for numerous
successful hunts. If I had not been able to do that I would never
have developed a predator mentality, and many other things would have happened
differently.
I got a small dog named Bojangles when I was
four years old. Bo was my only friend when my parents were still
together and we lived downtown. He was only about ten inches high,
but he would never bow down before another dog. I loved my dog, and
he loved me. Often I was the only person he would come for.
He roamed free downtown until Wilma got her house on Highland Road.
Then my dad decided he would be better off where he could run around in
the woods. We were worried the dogcatcher might get him downtown,
and we refused to limit his freedom. So he lived a happy life on
the south side of campus.
One day Wilma and I were down in the woods
hunting when a large German shepherd came charging out of the brush straight
at me, snarling and snapping. Wilma shot its hindquarters with the
shotgun she was carrying. A few seconds later the neighbor from two
doors down came running up. Neither one of us had recognized it as
his dog, but I doubt it would have made any difference to Wilma if she
had. He had five or six dogs. He was nineteen years old and
still lived in the house with his mother. He was very angry with
my grandmother. They argued. She threatened to shoot him too.
The dog survived, but the damage had been done.
Bojangles disappeared. A few days later
I was sitting on my bed when my dad came in to tell me something. “My dog
is dead, isn’t he?” I asked him.
“Yes, son, I’m sorry. Somebody shot
him,” he said as he gave me a very sad look.
I wept for hours. I could not be comforted.
Bo had been my best friend, my only friend, for nearly ten years.
When the sorrow passed I was filled with nothing but a cold, calculating
hatred. As great as my love was for Bojangles so was my hatred for
the person who had killed him. There was never any question in my
mind that I had to avenge the death of my dog. I had done absolutely
nothing to deserve the pain that had been inflicted on me. My dog
had been killed out of retaliation for something my grandmother had done,
and that dog hadn’t even died. I would be damned if I would let that
slide. I was not the average twelve-year-old.
I slipped into a laboratory in the L.S.U.
Life Sciences Building and stole a whole bottle full of strychnine.
I secretly thawed a package of ground meat I found in Wilma’s freezer.
Then I made six lethal meatballs. I went two doors down at dawn and
fed each of the dogs their poison surprise. They all died.
Maybe I should feel some remorse for what I did, but I don’t. The
Bible says “an eye for an eye,” but I don’t see it that way. If you
kill my best friend, even a dog, then six of yours have to go. If
someone had killed one of my loved ones I would have blown up their car,
burned down their house and cut their fucking heart out in front of their
family. It is good that no one ever killed one of my loved ones.
I was not an average boy. I would have done the deed and waited for
the police to arrive. I am a gangster when it comes to love.