Sunday, February 19, 2017

Excerpts From A Memoir: Thrown To The Wolves ~ The Virgin Flip And The Thirteenth Floor




THE VIRGIN FLIP AND THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR

by

Anthonystjoseph


     So, in my young life, I was basically becoming the founder of the A.C.A. (Angry Children Anonymous).  It had been a long road with my flipping out origins that dated almost back to the beginning.  It all started with the infamous and notorious Auntie Connie.  Auntie Connie was still the usual life of the party and sometimes the death of it. 
     You should know, Auntie Connie was a woman who was fast and loose and especially loose if it was your money.  She generally came with a smile, a smirk, a Seagrams, and all kinds of f*cked up’ness.  It was the summer of my youth where two women played a role in basically finishing the touches and running me away from their whole side of the human race.  This time Auntie Connie came over to our apartment complex and decided to go swimming with yours truly and her own tag along bunch of kids that she usually carried around with her as decoys.  With her decoys, other folk’s kids, she could pretend to be human to unsuspecting innocent bystanders.  
     As a young boy, my mother was always telling her stories of this and stories of that.  One of her stories was of how great I was at swimming.  She would always exclaim, “When he was two years old he just jumped in the deep end of the swimming pool on his own and he’s been swimming ever since.”  This has always been one of her favorite things to brag about.  I’m not so sure that at the age of two I hadn't possibly decided that drowning myself might be better than the life ahead of me with her and her gang; I must have panicked and decided to swim to the edge and save myself.  I’m going to blame it on survival instinct and not good sense.  Good sense should have told me to just sink!  What can I say? It’s been pure hell at times. 
     Here’s how my first, as I like to call it, virgin flip out happened.  This is discounting all the vertical one-hundred-eighty-degree temper tantrum flop drops of course.  My infamous temper tantrum flop drops would basically entail me not getting my way and then hurling myself up into the air three feet and flopping to the ground and flailing all four of my limbs; I was a classic!  They would end with my mother standing over me saying, “You’re JUST like your father, you’re evil!  When you grow older, you’re not going to have any FRIENDS!”  At which point I would say, “I hate you!  I hate you!  I didn’t tell you to have ME!”  So, the first non-temper tantrum flip out happened while I was swimming with Auntie Connie and her brood of decoys.  I was enjoying my usual underwater escape, as in swimming for as long as I could under the water and rarely coming up for air.  I love the freedom and abandon that being enveloped by water gives you.  To me it’s almost like flying through the sky.  Anyway, so I’m swimming under water and my body and my lungs tell me it’s time for some air, some oxygen.  Now if you’ve ever swam under water then you know the feeling of when you need air; you need air!  You also tend to exhale when you come up for air.  Well at the very time that I decide to come up for air from the deep end and exhale, unbeknownst to me, Auntie Connie gets an idea.   She decides it would be fun to scissor me in between her humungous legs and hold me under the water.  I had just exhaled all my air so I, my body, and my lungs needed me to inhale at the scheduled time that I told my body I was going to do so.   All of a sudden, I felt the thighs of the big titty death demon clamp around my body and prevent the scheduled inhale of the life-giving source called oxygen.   I panicked and a ‘flipper’ was born, and I don’t mean a dolphin.  I FLIPPED OUT!  I and my body and my lungs had an innate understanding that my life was being threatened and that message was transferred to my brain and my brain transferred it to my actions which used my limbs to send a message.
     I proceeded to whale on the whale that was preventing me from reaching the source of life giving oxygen.  I beat her with my arms and fists to the point where she let me go in about two seconds.  I’m sure she was startled and surprised from her Seagrams influenced haze but it had to be done.  I got out of the pool panting and looked at her like she was a crazy person with green skin and one eye.  I could not believe how scared I was of dying and how she put that kind of fear in me while just smiling away and oblivious to how close to drowning me she was.  She was just someone that I wanted nothing to do with.  I was done with swimming when she was around.  Auntie Connie says she knew I was crazy when I was born.  Her favorite story about Anthonystjoseph is that when I was born they put me in her arms and I just kicked and screamed and she had to give me back to my mother.  I think that at that age I couldn’t spot a demon from a distance but I could certainly feel one on touch and believe me she was a demon in training.  These women in my life were proving to be more than I could tolerate.
     The other lovely version of the female persuasion that made an appearance in my life that summer was Mamie Sue!  Mamie Sue was a big heavy set black woman who was so mad at the world she only smiled at tragic occurrences.  Now Auntie Connie was a demon in training but Mamie Sue was a full-fledged card carrying member of the ‘Sisters of the Dark Cloud’ organization with her registration approved by the man who lives in the fire!  Mamie Sue had one of those faces that would be attractive if it wasn’t distorted with over accentuated features.  It was like the eyebrows were too perfect and too large and the teeth reminded me of what the big bad wolf’s mamas teeth would have looked like.  Mamie Sue was definitely a dark entity. 
     Mamie Sue came into my life because she was my mother’s boyfriend’s sister and she volunteered to keep me for a summer so my mother could get a break from the flip outs.  I also think my mom needed a break to develop a stronger relationship with her main man, ‘Jack Daniels’.  Mamie Sue would get her kicks by torturing me daily.  I didn’t even have a telephone number to call my mother and let her know about the daily torture sessions.  Some of the torture was too severe to mention without regression therapy that I’m not prepared to involve myself in.  I would sit in my room and hate and wish that I didn’t have to eat dinner because dinner was one of the cruelest and strangest parts of this diabolical summer at Mamie Sue’s house.  I would constantly be threatened with the beating of my life at the dinner table, as I start to cry even writing this now; apparently, I would scrape her silverware with my teeth when I ate.  She would look at me after every bite I took and grit her teeth while menacingly saying to me through her large demonic gritted teeth, “Boy if you scrape my fork with your teeth one more time I’m going to beat the shit out of you right here at this table.”  Her husband wouldn’t say anything and I believe that’s because while I was there his beatings were stalled.  I would actually try to wrap my lips around my teeth before I took each bite and watch her the whole time I was taking the bite to see if a scrape registered with her and I had to duck or try to run.
     The neighbor boys who lived next door to Mamie Sue decided to get in on the fun.  For some reason, they asked me about my mom’s house and our furniture.  They kept asking and asking and I finally, not even thinking it meant anything, told them about our apartment.  My mom had this red crush velvet chair that was my favorite so I mentioned that to them.  These boys, baby demons, later went to Mamie Sue and told her that I was saying that my mom’s furniture was nicer than hers.  Mamie Sue called me into the house after she was told this and in a very calm and villainous way told me the story.  She then informed me that my mother had sold all our belongings and that I was to recant that story and admit that all our belongings were sold.  I was to admit that we were paupers.  I seemed to be involved in some real-life Cinderella Opera but I was a boy.  I may have been scared but I was never a liar and never a coward to and for the truth.  The truth of the matter is that Mamie Sue was crazy and had to think of ways to earn demon points daily by torturing me for any reason she could think of.  She proceeded to cast her deceptive veil of calmness aside and jumped up from her couch where she was sitting and watching ‘The Young and the Restless’ and threw me to the ground in front of her friends.  She then stood on my back with one foot and retrieved a belt from somewhere and then beat me senseless until I admitted that my mother had sold everything and we had nothing and were penniless.  A true flipper was born.  I wanted to flip that woman off of me but she was too heavy.   Mamie Sue made all of that up for some reason and the previously mentioned ‘red crush velvet’ chair sat in my mother’s basement for years and then was given to me as an adult and I didn’t get rid of it until I was over forty years old.  I heard that Mamie Sue had eventually become a crack-head and was living on the streets of Los Angeles.  I guess her dark overlord had work for her to do on the streets.  Karma is a bitch!
     I was truly starting to wonder if my mother cared for me at all and what were her true motives as far as I was concerned.  My mother was always telling me such crazy stories that it was no wonder I believed a child could pull the nut out of a little girls’ vagina. 
     Even before I ever went to any school my mother always told me the story of the ‘thirteenth floor’.  My mother would say to me as a child, “When you were born, the nurse woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to come with her.  The nurse took me to the elevator and used a special key to unlock the ‘thirteenth floor’; she had to use a key because they don’t have floors called ‘thirteen’ in the hospital because it’s an unlucky number”.  She continued, “The nurse and I went onto the thirteenth floor and they had all these special babies in incubators that they didn’t want anybody to see.  They had a baby with an adult head and a baby’s body and another one with a baby’s head and an adult’s body.  They also had one that was just a ball that was covered in hair…”  My mother’s stories would go on and on and I would believe them as a child because she was my mother and why would she lie to me. 
     My mother also kept me informed of her best friend Yvonne’s nature.  Yvonne was my mother’s best friend in Los Angeles with whom we shared a townhome.  Later my mother told me that one time we were behind on our rent and Yvonne had begged and pleaded with the landlord to give us some extra time to pay to which the landlord said, “No”.  My mother explained to me that Yvonne had special abilities and decided that she was going to get back at the landlord.  My mom told me that Yvonne sat in a chair for three days and refused food and only drank beer.  While sitting in the chair, Yvonne drank the beer and rocked back and forth while chanting, “That woman will break her leg, that woman will break her leg”.  My mother told me that one week later the woman fell off her balcony into a glass table and broke her leg.  I cannot tell you if this story is true but I can tell you that I believed my mother at the time.  Yvonne would later in life be placed on Social Security for mental health issues since she suffered a hysterical pregnancy when her boyfriend left her and became pregnant for two years fully displaying the stomach of a woman nine-months pregnant with no fetus whatsoever in her stomach while telling the ex-boyfriend she was having his baby.  So, Yvonne did have a powerful mind, but that is all I can say on that subject involving Yvonne.
     At my young age I was still listening to my mother’s stories and consuming every one of them with my high IQ and my very good memory.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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