Potty Snippets: A Living Memoir, 95% of Which Might Be True
Chapter One: On the Lam With Gram
Fuck it: I’ve decided to write a memoir online first, then publish it later when I have the time. Since I can’t decide on a proper title just yet, I’m calling this one Potty Snippets: A Living Memoir, 95% of Which Might Be True. Another title I have in mind is, Available Balance: -$19.59. It sorta describes my ancient attitude toward money, although I have since had a few come-to-HeyZeus! moments about it. Money, that is.
A dear friend of mine, Jo May, from Cape Town, South Africa told me years ago I should write this thing, so now I am. The outline so far is about 50 pages, typed, single-spaced, so this baby is gonna be a big one. And to think that a memoir is only supposed to encompass a relatively short and memorable period in a person’s life. Well, hell, every waking moment of my life has been memorable. I can’t recall a dull moment in there anywhere. Never.
Legend has it that I was kidnapped by my dad’s mom, an old country bitch with a temper like a snake that’d just swallowed a bushel of habaneros.
Maybe I should just shut up and get on with it. Oh, forget that! I should tell you this: I started writing the outline to this thing in late 2007, then came to the year 1981 and I stopped like an electron at zero Kelvin: I had fallen in deep deep love with Alexandra Quarles in 1981. When I wrote a little more about my seeing and meeting her for the first time back then, I immediately looked her up and sent her an email. Fast-forward: 18 months later, we married in Key West, on July 1, 2009.
Now I really need to get on with this. I’ll post at least one little snippet, or chapter, a week until I finish or just get tired of doing this. In case you’re not sure what comprises a snippet, here’s a metric: 400 words or less, something to snicker at during a fast potty break in the middle of a hellish day.
On the Lam with Gram
I was born in Laredo, Texas on Thanksgiving Day, 1959. Legend has it that I was kidnapped by my dad’s mom, an old country bitch with a temper like a snake that’d just swallowed a bushel of habaneros. Mean is a kind word for her. She hated my mom, and for good reason: my mom was beautiful, wild, exotic, intelligent, thinking, and just as nuts as my grandma. Grandma Garner wanted me to be raised all “proper” and not by some rabid she-wolf, so she kept me for a few weeks, whispering all sorts of backwoods southern mystical nothings (emphasis on nothing) into my ears each and every minute. Dunno how much of it stuck between my ears, but I do recall the thrill of being on the lam with Gram. At less than a year old, I was an outlaw on the run, hanging with Gram and the tumbleweeds. Damn sight better than being a Hell’s Angel.
Some weeks later, I was repatriated with my parents, pro’ly rescued by a highly seasoned Special Forces A team that had to shoot Gram between those lifeless, coal-black eyes. That’s the romantic side. The bare naked truth is that Gram turned me in to avoid a felony conviction and a long stretch in some dirt-floored prison in southern Nowhere USA. The real reason aside, I landed in Germany with my parents and lived for years on a lovely little farm in Wuschiem, a teeny-tiny village in central Germany, where the US military housed a billion dollars’ worth of ICBM missiles, all curiously aimed in the same direction—at Nikita Khrushchev’s head. I often wondered what Niki was aiming at our little farm. . . .
If you ever saw the movie Babe, then you saw my farm. We had pigs, chix, roosters, cows, eggs, potatoes, sauerkraut, milk and butter, all of which had legs of their own and I was the designated wrangler. Yup, I was trained at an early age to round up all the aforementioned critters for Opa and Oma, so Aunt Erna could cook the various meals of the day. I milked the cows and drank right off the tap—freshest drink in the known universe. I fed the chix and got chased around the farm by the three mean-ass patrolling roosters, all of whom reminded me of Gram.
