My Childhood

 

My bizarre childhood mirrors that of a gypsy child traveling in a carnival freak show. At most times I was the freak, but in reality my father owned a traveling reptile exhibit. Now, you should understand that reptile exhibits attract a very strange variety of people. You see, for some reason normal people aren't all that interested in alligators, cobras, rattle-snakes, pythons, and boa-constrictors.

Feeding large pythons and boa-constrictors is no easy task. They consume a lot
of food and it can get quite expensive. My father devised a lot of clever methods to obtain cheap or free food for the snakes. One was to go around to "cock fights" and collect the dead chickens or roosters or whatever they were when the fighting was over. He collected this bloody mess in large black Hefty sacks.

The second method was to go to the place where they trained Greyhound racing dogs. They train these dogs by turning loose wild jackrabbits and the dogs chase them down and kill them. Again, my father would romp around in the field and collect the bloody dead animals.

When he was really desperate, he would load the family up in the van and drive around to places where people were giving away kittens to "good homes." He would have my brother and I pretend that we were to be the lucky recipients of the charming kittens. We in fact did not like kittens at all. Once the victims were home, they were malleted to death and put into the freezer graveyard with the other bloody creatures.

The smaller snakes were a bit easier, we simply raised rats and mice to feed them. We are talking thousands and thousands of these guys over my entire childhood. My brother and I were made to take care of these colonies by giving them water, feeding them, and malleting them to death when they became overpopulated. Then, of course, they went to the frozen wasteland.

Feeding the rats and mice became such a problem in itself that my father devised a scheme for collecting trash from behind the grocery stores. He had a schedule of when each store would dump its bread and other bakery items. He would have my brother and I stand on the loading dock while he tossed tons ofrubbish out at us to load up in the van. What fun this was.

The rats were housed in a cage at the far reaches of our yard so as the smell would only bother the neighbors, and not us (my father always hated the neighbors). The stench of rat urine was overwhelming as was the smell of the rotting wood that supported the wire mesh. My brother and I (mostly me) were required to scoop up the droppings that fell throught and spread them out in our garden. We also had to water the garden and pick the tomatos that grew in the fresh animal feces.

We were a catholic family. Not that this really matters, but it helps pain the overall picture. I was a nice little altar boy, and yes I wore the cassock that seems to be so erotic to priests. I think I looked pretty good at it. My mom is trying to find a picture of me in one so you can enjoy it as well!!!

We had a big swimming pool in the back yard growing up. My father loved to leave the pump turned off so that it would collect algae and trash so that he could intimidate me on weekends by making me spend the entire day cleaning it out. On very few occasions, we would have friends from school over to swim with us, but it always turned out as a disaster when my father would yell and curse the other boys for 'splashing water out of the pool.' This was odd because all of our water was stolen as he had bypassed the meter system illegally at the street, he just loved to yell at people.

We had ducks for a short period of time until one day they flew out and landed in the pool tearing the liner apart. Enough of the water drained out that the pump/filter was unable to function. Eventually my father lied to the insurance company about what had happened and they paid to renovate the pool. In the meantime, however he decided to use the pool as housing for Alligator Snapping Turtles, three of them - HUGH (like 4 feet across).

One day he thought it would be humorous to force me to wade out into the pool with a 14' Burmese Python wrapped around my shoulder, braving the snapping turtles (which could not be seen because the pool was so green with algae), so that he could take pictures of me. I think that is about the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, and I will never EVER forget it. He got the pictures, and I guess he got his jollies out of the whole thing, at my expense.

It wasn't all bad. From time to time my father would be out of town for work, snake trading, and picking up runaway children, etc... When he was gone, my Mom would try to compensate by taking my brother and I to the beach, the park, mall, etc. All of the things my father would not allow. "We had a pool in the yard, why in the hell would we go to the beach" he would say.

Did I mention our vacations? We were a nudist family, meaning we liked to run around naked. I still do actually. This was one of the things that I didn't mind so much, we got to go to some really neat places and were able to do normal kid things like swimming, boating, etc. The people were kind of odd though, but I didn't pay much attention to them.

My mom finally left my father when I was 16. It was high time too. We both needed our sanity restored. Unfortunately, my mom immediately hooked up with another asshole, but I was old enough to ignore him. That is pretty much when I started drinking and doing drugs and staying out all the time. Once I was gone for three days and scared the crap out of everyone cause they thought I was dead.

When I was 17, I was sick and tired of my life, the drinking and smoking pot , and the redneck trash of Alabama. For some reason I thought it would straighten my life out if I joined the Navy, and so I did. All this time, I was denying the fact that I was gay. Somehow, I hoped that the military would 'cure' me. After two years of that, my drinking was worse, and I was hornier than ever to have sex with another guy. I started seeing a naval shrink, and he finally declared there was nothing wrong with being gay and that I would probably be happier if I was out of the military and went about my life.

So that's exactly what I did. I was discharged from the Navy when I was 19. I set about meeting other gay people, going to clubs, pride fairs, circuit parties, and traveling as much as possible. I met more decent people in my first couple of years of being 'out' than I had my entire life put together. I have very little trouble with self-esteem or drugs & alcohol these days, and my life is just as good as I can imagine it being!!!

This is the story of my childhood. As I continue to remember more of the past, and refine my writing skills, I will be updating, adding, and revising this section, so please visit often.