Blowguns and Golf Clubs: Part I

"Pain" isn't an accurate or fair description of the feeling of getting hit in the testicles. So many sensations are being downloaded into your nervous system that it's seemingly impossible to sort them all out. Words become difficult to annunciate and one can usually only allow merely a primal, gutteral exclamation from below the diaphragm.

"UGH!!! AUGH!!!"

It took only a fraction of a second for Donny to execute the attack in two fluid motions. A searing pain tore through my testicles and lower abdomen. The bamboo shaft of the old golf club came straight up between my legs, dividing my balls, followed quickly by the head of the wooden driver being pulled back, smashing the front of my coin purse and pathetic kid-weiner.

Nausea.

"Donny, you fucker!!!" I shrieked.

I shouldn't have said that. Granted, I'd heard my father use that word frequently as both a noun and adjective, but I knew my mom was in the very room above us and the subfloor of these cheap townhouses held no sound attenuation.

I chased after him, one hand cradling my now swollen bits, wielding the tennis racket above my head. He managed to elude me in that cramped basement due to my handicap, but I wouldn't forgive him until the day I was sure I could procreate.

That is my first memory of Donny.

We grew up a block apart in the same townhouse complex, yet we were from two different worlds. To say Donny had a difficult upbringing would be an insult to the obvious. Diane, his overbearing, horribly ignorant mother, spoke with a Tenessee drawl and prison vocabulary. Fair skinned like her children, her weathered face was accented by her clownishly large eyeglass frames. She aimed to please her husband, mostly to avoid a swollen lip, but kept the quarters squared away nonetheless. She would wake her sons up at 5 am, "screaming" being her favorite alarm, everyday of the week and insist they did household chores before school, a leather belt being her insurance they would completed to satisfaction.

Sancho, his violent, alcoholic step father, was 100% backwoods hillbilly. Picture Dwight Yoakum's character "Doyle Hargraves" in "Slingblade" for a spot on reference...right down to the ponytail and low-angry voice. I could never figure out, even when I was young, why Diane would marry a man like that. She often had to gather the boys and deceive or elude Sancho in the middle of the night; stealing off to the safe haven of the local motel or our apartment. Sancho loved his whiskey and had a propensity to load his Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and threaten to kill Diane and the kids when he had a head full.

A small fistful of miscreant siblings with a myriad of their own issues rounded out the family tree; each crammed into their own menial allotment of apartment living. Donny's older brother, Orson, was beaten almost daily for shitting his pants; a condition his stepfather was convinced was due to his insolence and disrespect for his ill-received paternal figure.. It wasn't until he hit his teens that they discovered Orson was epileptic and experienced frequent micro-seizures that accounted for his incontinence. Ray-Ray, the 3rd son from Diane's first marriage, had a minor speech impediment from putting his incisors through his tongue and lip, courtesy of a jungle gym mishap. Little Chris, or "Crispy" as we referred to him for his overly-sunburned ears, was no more than 3 yet allowed to freely roam the complex. Diane would occasionally notice Crispy's absence from their unit at various times of the day, drive around the block to find him sound asleep, his fair skin and blonde hair no match for the summer sun, on the front seat of his motorized mini-jeep.

Donny's bucolic life was marked by tragedy and hardship, a theme that would continue until the day he died.

(...to be continued)