Let me go ahead and cut to the chase. This isn’t some Oedipus complex bullshit. Unlike that psychoanalytical crap, I never learned to identify with my step-father. I never got past the stage of wanting to kill him. To cut out his heart and stomp it into the dirt right there while my mother watched.

I just wanted my freedom back. My independence. Yeah, and maybe a little of my mother’s attention. But that shitbag husband of hers took it all from me.

The one she knew for only two weeks.

The one in the biker gang.

The one who had a swastika tattoo on his forearm, who hated niggers and subscribed to the Klan newsletter.

That guy.

The one she wanted me to call “Dad”.

The one who knew what was best for me and kept me prisoner in my own room from the time I was ten into my mid-teens — the good years, where your social skills determine what kind of person you’ll be the rest of your life.

Look at me now, Mom.

Look at me.

It seems like an eternity ago. It’s amazing what you can let slide when you put enough distance between yourself and the thing that proved to be the bane of your existence. How it doesn’t seem so traumatizing when it’s no longer a threat.

How you can look back and almost laugh.

Almost.

It starts out you’re the only child to a single mother. You move from place to place frequently, never bonding with anyone long enough to become friends. You learn to enjoy your own company and entertain yourself and thereby grow wary of people you’re not familiar with. You grow wary of people altogether. When your mother introduces you to anyone, you hide behind her legs, terrified. They start to call you Mama’s boy. Some think you must be spoiled, pampered. A brat.

But you are still curious about things. Like a normal kid is curious about things. You get the desire to explore and feel the drive to conquer the unknown, like the nether regions of your neighborhood.

A drainage ditch that runs a 100 yards beneath an interstate.

The train trestle that expands a hundred feet over a fifty foot drop to the man-made lake below.

The bull that guards the farm at the back of your neighborhood that you tease and race to the fence before it can impale you.

You move about with a wide breadth of independence, because your mother works two jobs and most of your supervision comes from a babysitter who’s more concerned with the telephone, smoking pot with friends or her boyfriend’s dick than whatever it is you’re doing. So you learn basic survival instincts on your own.

In other words, you grow up fast.

The only male influence in your life is the many marines your mother brings home in hopes of finding you a father, because yours left when you were two, after he did two tours on the front lines in Viet Nam and came back all freaked out from killing people.

I like to think it was lots of people.

Women. Children.

People that didn’t mean a fucking thing.

I have a picture of me and him sitting on a couch when he came back. He’s leaning toward me with his arms folded. Making sure to not touch me. A smirk on his face. Like he’s real excited to be there. His eyes are open but they are dead. He’s staring emotionless at the camera. Through the camera. Into that void. That thousand yard stare thing.

Then he was gone.

So now you need a father. This goes on for eight years. A sense of failure, loneliness eventually consumes the mother. She works every night in a dive of a bar. Meeting all kinds of people. The one’s that don’t mean a fucking thing. And two weeks later you’re spending the next six years under the thumb of an iron-fisted, bipolar despot.

Bye bye freedom.

So long independence.

And nothing.

Is ever the same.

Again.