FORBIDDEN CROPS (For Tanner)

[Johntee]

Fully two months old,
how did I miss this S.G.
original only to find it with
Tanner's history attached.

[Tanner]

SG, My stepmother was a real hillbilly from Corbin, Kentucky who worked as a teenager at Colonel Sanders' first restaurant. My father had become an on and off again alcoholic after my birth mother's mental illness bankrupted him in the mid 50's. In 1963 I came back to live with them in a shack of a house - garbage and vermin everywhere - rotten food in the refrigerator et al after living with my thoracic surgeon uncle's family in Dallas and in Afghanistan for about 8 years. My stepmother had just married my father (he needed companionship) and she resented me living with them.

My father was caught in the middle; I helped him out at his upholstery and refinishing shop after school and on weekends. I became very depressed and withdrawn; my father once chased me around the small house with a broken beer bottle late at night; on another occasion in his shop without warning he punched me in the face and broke my glasses and almost damaged my eye. He had spent a bit of time 2 1/2 years in the Jackson State Penitentiary where he had become an excellent boxer. When he hit me, the force of the punch was so hard I swear I felt it about a foot behind my head. I should have called my relatives in Dallas to rescue me, but I didn't.

My high school was filled with second generation kids from the south (black and white) in a very poor neighbourhood with low academic standards. My main goal at school was not to get knifed by someone....and stay under the radar. We had kids in grade 12 thinking "it" was a verb, if you get my drift.

[Sister Greed]

Hi Tanner! I’m getting to your comment now. Thank you for your reply. It’s interesting that you can see me observing from outside myself. I can’t wait to read more about your mobile home era. Sister Greed.

[Tanner]

Your honesty is both poignant and brutal. You have the unique ability to step outside of yourself and observe yourself in a lovely and raw openness. The mobile home portrait hit too close to my last 2 years of high school living with my wicked stepmother and alcoholic father.

[Sister Greed]

It all started in the summertime

At my grandmother’s air conditioned

Cigarette-smoke filled mobile home

Refuge from the heat

And my incessantly fighting parents

But that summer in particular

When the women got dressed for swimming

And I looked up to see

My cousin Diedre’s boobies

The awe that I felt as I gazed openly

At their beauty

I knew I was different.




Ten years later

She’d hold me tightly

In between her legs

Arms wrapped joyfully around me

As we rode

That coaster

With her husband holding her

Safety

To be me

A theme later repeated

Hearts of Three