Paradise Lost
had Bose speakers! Not that Willie needed Bose, but I’m deaf in my left ear and they’re loud. So there we were. Me and Pam. On the road again. For about a day.
Now I’m old so forgive me if my timeline gets scrambled. That and I lie some. Not as much as I used to, but at seventy-two you don’t have that much to lie about. You’ve already been caught in most things you pulled and nobody believes anything you say anyway.
But as near as I can figure, Jackie showed up long about that time. Well, she got dropped off by her dad. She’d turned up pregnant up in Detroit and he’d deposited her in Dallas with relatives. She was too high octane for them, and they politely threw her out. So he brought her down to Austin and left her in our driveway. Ok. Two seats, three people. Well, three and a half if you count the fetus. Anyway, there was no room in the trunk so you do the math.
And that began our descent into hell. Jackie had no plans for the future except to crap out that baby and get back to Detroit. Well, the baby came and she stayed. And stayed, and stayed. She was a cute kid after she lost her “baby fat,” if you get into flat chested chicks with several drug habits. I thought those things were supposed to fill up with milk after you had a baby!
Pam fell in love with the baby. I’m not gonna tell you all the particulars about how Jackie married my son, just know he was in prison, and she found a preacher and did! This gave the baby a last name and Jackie two babysitters. After that my son found the glory hole and Jackie manufactured one genuine Texan after another every ten months or so. She had found at least one thing she could do well. I know you will question my “ten month” spacing but she arrived in 2007 and left in 2011 with five on the ground and one in the oven . . . and never did grow no tits!
We lived on an Arnold Palmer golf course in Georgetown Texas. Wanna know how you can discover all your long lost relatives? Buy a house on an Arnold Palmer golf course in Georgetown Texas! Then you gotta buy two more to accommodate the influx. And remember we started in Killeen, where I’m at right now, and had one house. That makes four. How many of you people own four houses? Then add in one in Utah and another in Tennessee and a trailer in Youngsport Texas and you begin to understand the true meaning of “family!”
And our family was a bunch of shits! Ungrateful entitled shits! Shits beyond all shitiness with a cherry on top. But, back to the story.
We had Jackie and my son living in the Killeen house when he took it upon himself to start cooking meth in the garage. For all the meth he cooked he never could manage to pay the water bill and after Jackie went across the street with a five gallon bucket to borrow water from the city judge the Child Protective Services, affectionately known as the CPS, jumped straight up her ass and took the kids. Well, as you can probably guess, I’m not short for words and after one meeting with the department they decided I shouldn’t be around the grandkids no mo’.
Pam adopted the kids! So I’m living over in one of our rent houses on Levi Street with my meth chef son, sneaking over to see Pam and hiding in the bushes whenever the “department” came around. And you wonder why I ended up in California! And, as a side note I gave the Mercedes to Pam when I flew out.
California? Oh, don’t get me started. Family? My other son and his wife? More shits. So, I become a drunk. And I was a good ‘un. My favorite drink was Jim Beam mixed with teeth and gums. Straight from the bottle if nobody was looking. In a Red Solo Cup if they were. And I’d go out to Occatillo Wells and talk to the wind. After enough whiskey it would talk back. According to some biographers I developed as a writer right about then. As if any biographer ever wrote anything about me! But if they ever did it only proves that they are as crazy as I was sitting out there in the desert talking to Gila Monsters.
Eventually I returned to Texas. Family threw my drunk ass out. But believe it or not, I was developing as a writer. I mean not world class or anything like that, but Facebook level. And I even began writing for a radio station. Then I began to get offers. Nothing great. No money, but I could lie and tell everyone I was a famous writer. How famous depending upon how much whiskey I’d had that day. The grandkids? Screw them. They hated me. I’d grown detached. The perfect CPS case. Apparently “I” was the problem and “they” fixed it.
By and by I did begin to miss the little bastards. And I mean that literally. Jackie wasn’t exactly celibate! The father (s) of all the tribe was whoever she met behind HEB last. I’m not saying she was a whore. She was a slut. Whores charge! But I did miss the kids. What you burn in your crazy mind. They hated me and in time I grew to hate them. Not all the time. Sometimes I was asleep. But the had all started to school and you just thought the CPS came around before. I don’t even wanna talk about it.
So now I’m seventy-two and looking for the meaning of life. There ain’t no meaning of life. Hemingway found his meaning of life in that closet in Idaho. I think he sold more books after he pulled the trigger than he ever did during his life. No, I’m not considering suicide. I’m chicken shit. But I am planning my arrangements for after.
I want to be cremated. Then I want to be pulverized into a fine powder, mixed with talcum and snuck into the dressing room of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Deal with it!
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