My Infernal Family

REMINGTON GRAVES

You like your family? Do they like you? Do they know the real you? Mine didn’t even want the chance to. My father was a rolling stone and the mom was a sultry siren. From what I understand, they both were madly in love with each other initially. They couldn’t keep their paws off themselves. Of course, they were young, and at that age the biological imperative had its Facehugger tentacles so tight around their skull, they thought it cinematic romance.

Adrian senior, the devilishly and charming man, was a sphinx; he was cold and calculated…handsome and stylishly detached. The few times I saw him I couldn’t help notice waitresses, passerbys, women in Peter Pan hats behind counters of hamburger joints jocking his Johnson, digging his drone. He would smile softly and suddenly there were muffled sounds of squirting.

Rosa was the mother. She was built like the beautiful bad bitches in old noir films– alluring, dangerous and promising a proper pounding. Her hair was cropped short, and she had light brown-honey eyes with cheek bones for days. The Neanderthals would bring the noise as they fell from three-story windows, crawled atop each other, and whistled like cartoon wolves as their ties would point straight at her big behind as she purposely waved it on as a torturous “good-bye.”

Little junior was jubilant in his oblivious gestures whilst the world juggled skulls and gyrated in the void. I never felt that I had been dealt a bum hand, that others were lucky, that the circus I was born into was a certain sinking sentence. A tiny child, curly raven-black hair and machiavellian like my old man, I observed, unknowingly studying the human race. With crippling curiosity I beheld their behavior. At the age of seven I was philosophizing, drawing, writing, playing my cousin’s forbidden guitar. And by an old water well beneath a cold December moon, I understood…I was alone. Alone with everybody.

Brownsville, Texas was the place of my birth and at the age of five we went to visit our grandmother in Mexico. We stayed with her for a few years or so until mother had better things to do leaving me and my two sisters in her care. That only lasted a short time for Grandmother had little patience for her daughter’s bullshit and threw us out.

“I will be right back, don’t go anywhere. Stay right here, you hear me? And look at me…damn it,” she said watery-eyed, “look at me…you’re gonna be all right. You hear me?”

The convenience store owner would finally say, “Where is your mother? Wasn’t she just here with you?”

“She’s gone,” I would say raising my shoulders feigning surprise.

“And now what?”

“Beats me,” I would respond with half a smile trying to make the guy feel a little better about it all. Being homeless at eight in a Third World country was quite the venture.

I was used to her pulling that. After a few times, it was the same old song. Of course, the father far away, left behind a somber symphony as well. May they rest in peace in whatever Heaven of Hell they have created for themselves.

Under a bridge, at a park, behind a store, It didn’t matter to me where I ended up, I was a ghost. I would wander back to grandma’s neighborhood to visit but she would pretend she wasn’t home when I knocked at her door. I guess she thought I must have wanted to move back in. I ended up staying with an aunt eventually and that lasted about five years. Her husband would smack me around from time to time and she would deliberately address or avoid me with disdain.

And so it went–the infinite pest, from one relative to the next. Dealing with me until I hit the street, once again, before I hit sixteen. Hitchhiked to California. Palm trees, blonde girls, beaches, and marvelous people they call movie stars. I knew it was the place for me.

They must have known finding my romanticized drawings of an angel falling from grace, the black clothes I would change into at school, the incessant reading…I was becoming the rebel without a pause.

“He doesn’t miss his own mother. He doesn’t miss his Dad or his sisters…something’s wrong with that boy. He says he doesn’t need people to be happy but he can appreciate them. Says he doesn’t believe in the new definition of love. That mahogany isn’t natural. What in the world does wood have anything to do with anything?!”

Here I am at the age of thirty-nine.. now a polyamorous, vegan, sober, greysexual Satanist- I almost gag at all the labels. I have finally found my place in the cosmos–enthroned upon the stars, with other gods–other Satanists. People who understand me. Folks who don’t want to change anything about me. Like-minded individuals who champion logic, individuality, science, the arts, undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit… They understand I walk to a different drum beat, as they do. And although we don’t all get along, or hardly see each other, they are, in some way, more family than my family ever was.

Too bad you didn’t get to know me, Dad.

I’m sorry for your loss, Mom.

If it wasn’t for you both coming together and giving me life, I wouldn’t be here now atop a Remington Rand hammering away at the keys.

You missed out, but I love you anyway.

Not because I have to, but because I choose to.

∞