This song has no title.....

My earliest memories were of a single wide mobile home, snow, and a beautiful woman who helped me make the buffalo brown in the coloring book. Where this was exactly I have no idea. Next frame.....we are living in an upper-floor apartment, it must be winter, there is ice on the steps. I remember coming home crying because the teacher had threatened to spank me if I did not return the next day knowing how to write out my name. With my parent's help I manage to avoid the spanking. I must have skipped kindergarten.
There are other snippets of different places, different people, but the beautiful woman and my Dad were my earliest truth.
But then, the memories turn more confusing. Now I'm with my Mom and another man, with short blonde hair. We live near the coast, and when it rains, it pours. His parents live near one of those thousand odd lakes in Minnesota, and we drive all the way from Mississippi to visit for the summer. I loved it, although I couldn't understand going to bed with the sun still up and waking up in darkness. I came home from the hospital with pneumonia and they set up a miniature train on a big sheet of plywood next to my bed. One night, after some screaming and hollering, she passes thru my bedroom to get to the bathroom (I'm assuming this house had a less-than-optimum layout to it) and she turns to face me, as I peer out from under the covers, stark naked, and the most vivid picture of stark raving beauty is burned into my mind forever. Then she turns and slams the door behind her. Perhaps this was the night he gave her the ultimatum. I was not HIS child.
Later, she is kneeling in front of my, her face streaked with tears, telling me she wasn't my real mother, that my mother had given me to her, and would I like to go live with my Daddy for awhile. What she was telling me didn't make any real sense to my 6 year old mind, so I just told her, yes, as long as it wasn't for too long. She assured me it wouldn't be. Next, if I have my timeline right, I am living alone with my Dad, and I seem to spend allot of time with him at work at the Toddle House diner where he's now working as a short-order cook. He was in the Air Force, but apparently not now. I never see the beautifull woman, the one I'd always thought was my mother, again. Next I find myself living with a strange woman, a friend or relative of his, I imagine.....I dont remember a man there and she has a little girl of her own. I encounter another little boy there that would become a fast friend for many years, only in a different place.
Then, I discover the concept of betrayal at the ripe young age of seven. We are at the courthouse, and a man they tell me is my Grandfather is telling the judge that my Grandmother is back in Florida with a heart condition, and would not be able to care for a child like me. No mention is made of my real mother. And these are my Maternal Grandparents. After court is over, and having no real understanding of what has just transpired, we go outside, and there is my Grandmother sitting in a cadillac convertible with about five or six miniature poodles. I knew then something bad was happening and that people had lied. Then I am handed over to a fairly large (as in fucking fat) social worker called Mr. Necaise who takes me with him.
We are in his car driving north, deep into prehistoric 1960's era Mississippi. He says I'm going to be living with a new family for awhile. As we pass houses driving deeper and deeper into the countryside, I ask him, " Is that it?", Him saying, "No, not that one." The houses get less attractive as we continue to drive. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we arrive at an old wooden house with a tin roof, circa maybe 1940, with a huge oak tree standing over it. I am handed over to an elderly couple, in their sixties, a retired old redneck couple who gained free labor and some money from the state taking care of welfare kids. I was now a welfare kid. I was told to refer to these two as Grandad and Granma. I think it was that Christmas that my father came out with another man to visit me one last time. I worshiped this man. From my vantage point he was as tall as they come, tho later they would taunt me saying he was a pretty short man, maybe five seven at the most. Up to that point in my life he'd been the only constant I had known. It was the last time I ever saw or heard of the son of a bitch.
From age seven until about fourteen, when in 1969 Hurricane Camille visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast and removed allot of it, I became a lost child. I had lots of chores including feeding the cow and chickens (and tasked with raising the hog, until those bastards murdered my friend), pushing a plow in the garden, raking leaves, and my all time favorite job, endlessly chopping wood for the wood stove. The only other kids nearby I was either told not to associate with or didn't want to associate with me, being I was that "welfare" kid. Sometimes they would bring out another kid or two who would stay awhile, complicating my life, then leaving to return to normal lives. School was a bus ride miles away, until middle school, then it was hours away. No sports, no dances, none of that stuff, they wouldn't let me participate, I had work to do at home.
I did have one good friend, Leonard, who I would have to walk thru the woods and down a long dirt road to visit, until his mother chased me away, not wanting any of those "welfare" kids hanging around her place. The old couple had a large family of their own, lots of grandkids, and altho I was usually older than any of them, I was not allowed such things as learning to swim or anything that might damage the goods. I was a crate of oranges, they were responsible for taking care of me, not loving me. I read allot, and escaped to far away places in books. But I had a smart mouth. Mr Parker was my warden, as far as I was concerned, not my father. Soon, enraged often by my tendency to "sass back", he stopped swatting at me with this large wooden spoon he kept near his chair, and just started chucking bricks at me. When it became clear I was getting good at dodging those, he came after me with his bullwhip. I thought I could escape by climbing the oak tree out back and keeping out of his reach on the platform I had up there. He just laughed his evil laugh and laid that whip right across my back. Several times. I never forgot that.
Well, the hurricane swept thru, tore up the place pretty good, and in the midst of all the chaos and destruction, guess who was suddenly concerned about my welfare? After all those years, not having contacted me once, suddenly my grandparents were inquiring about me. I told my caseworker that as bad as my life was, I had no desire to see my grandparents. I remembered. Then, the old man up and died, and the Welfare department had to do something with me. I was 15 now.
First, they tried one of his grandsons and his family that I sort of liked. It didn't work tho. So they sent me, against my will, as usual, to live with my Grandparents in Florida. My Grandfather was chief engineer on a mississippi river tow boat, pushing barges up the river. That summer he took me with him all the way to Pittsburgh. Much of the trip was somewhat boring, but I enjoyed the hell out of it nonetheless. The crew was a pretty twisted group of perverts. Anyway, we came back home, and I was left with my crazy grandmother while he went on another run. This woman was crazy. By the time he got home, me and her were at each other's throats, and so that was the end of that. Then they put me with a new family, my first experience of being part of a real family. Ed treated me with respect, got me a job as a bag boy at the super market where he was employed as a butcher. They let me walk to the library or pet store totally on my own, all I had to tell them was when I'd be back. Being trusted and granted some sense of autonomy for the first time in my life was like.....heaven. The two younger brothers instantly adopted me as their older brother, and the older fox of a sister was truly nice to live with....talk about eye candy....not just her but her girlfriends. Life was good, for once in my life. I even joined the football team and survived it. But of course, when something is working, they just have to come in and fix it. Ed's parents and family lived in tennessee, right over the alabama border. They would take me with them when they drove up there on visits. But the welfare department told Ed that he had to inform them way ahead of time before he could take me out of state, and that pissed Ed off. So they took me away from my family. My new case worker, with a smile on his face, asked me how I'd like to go live in Father Flanagan's Boys Home, famously known as "Boys-town", outside of Omaha, Nebraska. Looks like they were desperate to find a place to dump me once and for all. I actually didn't know THAT much about the place, but it screamed ORPHANAGE to me and I had a real bad feeling about it. Didn't matter, it's not like I was actually being given a choice. Now I'm on a plane. To Omaha. I was still only sixteen.
Now, while I was still living with my Grandmother, she indoctrinated me well on the truth of my Mother, my REAL mother, and had me believing that it was HER fault that my life was the way it was. So, as you can imagine, not knowing much else, I had no love for this woman, and hadn't even gotten around to knowing how to feel about my Father yet. No one could tell me what happened to him. So shortly after I got settled into this insane asylum they jokingly called a "Boys Home", I received a letter from her, and a birthday card. The fact that I was now 16 and the card said happy fifteenth did not endear me to her.
So I wrote a fairly nasty reply, and got back to trying to survive my new holding pen. Let me tell you, there were NO orphans living there. I shared a cottage with 16 other kids who were sent there for drug dealing, car theft, burglary, and other boyish pranks. Our live-in counselor was an alcoholic, who would wonder the hallways in a drunken rage at night. I never turned my back on anyone, and just tried to keep as low a profile as possible. Then I got an idea. I might have been a "welfare" kid, but let me tell you, friends, I was a brilliant little fuck.
My mother was now living in Fairbanks, Alaska. She had lost track of me as well, and now that she knew were I was, tried desperately to regain some contact with her lost only child. As far as I was concerned, she was at least partially responsible for my fucked up life, but then I realized that she could be my ticket out of this loony bin and a shot at perhaps a normal life.
So, I began a letter writing campaign to my caseworker in Mississippi, since they still had legal guardianship of me, and my casework there at the gulag. I informed them in a most eloquent and logical sounding style that they had one of two choices.
They could put up with the headache of having to drag my underage ass back to Boystown time after time as I would escape every chance I got (there was no barbed wire, no fences, I was not a juvenile offender), or they could do us all a favor and release me to the custody of my Mother, whom I had every right in the world to spend the last two years of my childhood with. My Mother was DYING to have me returned to her, so she was a willing partner in my scheme. I wrote her and with crocodile regret told her I had been mean and that I was sorry and could I come live with her. LIttle bastard. Well, it worked, because although she had to pay for the ticket, I was on a 707 to Fairbanks, finally free of the system. My new "stepfather" was a cab driver and met me at the terminal, and this was my first encounter with COLD! FUCKING COLD! And DARK. It was easily 55 below zero when I arrived there.
Then my entire life changed. We dashed into the small house and there was this petite little woman who took one look at me, UP at me, and grabbed me in a hug, crying her eyeballs out. My heart just melted the second she touched me. Every shred of hatred they had installed in me vanished in that one encounter. THIS was my Mother, my real mother, and I was meeting her for the very first time. Later, as we talked, she told me the true story, of how when she left him, he kept me away from her in an effort to make her come back to him. When that didn't work, he just discarded me, and never told her where I was. And to top it all off, it seemed I had a humongous family all over the south, with not one blood relative stepping forward to tell her where I was or taking me in to care for me. She did try to track me down, but my grandparents wouldn't tell her where I was. This was not an evil woman. She was not mentally ill. Maybe in the end she might have not been able to give me a life much better than the one I had endured......but no one gave her the chance. No one else loved me the way she did. So, although my now "normal" life was not all that perfect, I DID finally feel whole again. And I continued on in my life, fighting for everything as I always had, winning some, losing some, crippled in some respects by a feeling of worthlessness that the system and my Father helped to instill in me, but overcoming it day by day, year by year. I'm sure that my Father would have his side of the story, but his actions and how they effected me speak for themselves. I sincerely hope he's either dead now or that we never cross paths, for I really don't want to have to deal with the shame of kicking the hell out of some seventy year old man. And I would, believe me. I would.
So how did Michael turn out? Well, he never did a day in juvenile or prison. He served four years in the U.S, Navy Submarine Service, and some in the reserves. He has a healthy work ethic, and is doing fairly well in his second marriage. He never beat his wife, or his dog, didn't become a racist or homophobe, and actually believes in quite a lot of old fashioned values. He never had any children, and I don't think you have to think hard as to why. But he does have a pair of twin girls, courtesy of his wife, who call him Dad. He's never become much of a success in life, at least employment wise, but has been grateful for and enjoys the simple things in life. He has a mind and he uses it, if only to rant and rave online in a blog. He has his issues, but truly thinks he is a good, kind human being, and if he had it all to do over again......hell.....bring it on....."We decide what is right, and what IS an illusion".