With bragging rights as black sheep on all sides of my family, each branch expresses cracks, weighted by nuts. Never resting on our laurels, good folks, were the gold standard. My own pop blew his top on Easter Sunday, April 11, 1982 with a rifle blast before returning to his extended stay at the psych unit (a holiday vacation from his unplanned one) at Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, Kentucky. Fifty years earlier to the day in the same town, my mom's grandmother Vivian slid her discontented noggin into a 32 model gas oven like she'd threatened to do numerous times before (occasionally talkers DO jump or jumpers talk), leaving my stern and regimented grandpa Frank and his fragile little brother Bill, an eventual resident of the same funny farm as the lead in this slice-of-life (my dads girl cousin), motherless. Hell, maybe they knew each other (biblically, even). Weirder has happened experienced passengers like Vivian, Bill, and my paternal grandmothers captivating niece Elwanda, in this psychic damage insurance claim, all know first hand.

     Midsummer 1980 had me getting dumped on poor Aunt Dessie for two weeks. My parents were sick of the sight of their only brat on Summer break, so off to this kindly elderly relative my plump ass went.

     Pitifully easy to say who you should feel the worst for. An extinct class: silver haired, real clothes daily, prayer book cracked nightly, Baptist church attendant when the doors opened that could make ANY food or drink - even a damn lunch meat sandwich taste supernaturally exquisite type. A late sixty-odd widow, and lifelong resident of the teensy hamlet of Arlington (a burg making Mayberry look like Chicago, no lie), this unsuspecting sweetheart only thought she was ready for a home invasion by one meddling, swishy, sitcom TV addict (To that point, the fatter and mouthier the presented black lady, the better. Dad literally declared a moratorium on the race/gender/body type mix. Post-Easter '82, I sank asshole-to-elbow in Nell Carter, Mabel King, Marsha Warfield, and the piece de resistance, the Crown Jewel of Sapphires, Shirley Hemphill. My old man was doing cartwheels in his grave over me sitting a foot from the Curtis Mathis TV - the brand you've never heard of because it was garbage - getting the exact sassiness lessons he'd tried to cancel. That's why quitters never win, young'ins) junior food-Hoover shattering her serene Lawrence Welk Show one night and Bible study the other six lifestyle.

     Less worthy of your sympathy was a ten year old toting a passel of comic books from the Huck's gas station in neighboring Bardwell read clean through before pulling into a pea gravel drive to the humble house lacking cable TV (three networks- ABC, NBC and CBS - not even FOX or PBS, for you embryonic piss-ants reading this- you're what's wrong with everything today, BTW. If I wasn't in lock-down for trying to murder a dude I'd sit you down and set you straight), not one age-appropriate buddy, but around six hick-town zombie flick extras. Hoo-rah. Party night involved Coca-Colas (ice-cold glass bottles, bitches!) and Rook cards on a folding table in a living room decked out in seriously hot 1950's mid-century modern furniture as luscious as a wake up kiss from 2025 model Justin Bieber. Attending this throw-down were Mizz Margaret and Walter Lee from up the road (Methodists, but we like them anyway), who thought I was the stuff. My goldfish attention span aided in easing my delirium, but I guarantee you a day in and trying not to slip and break her damn neck on comics sprawled all over the carpet, the least of three evils - "Days of Our Lives" (heathen smut to the lady of the house) blaring on the set, half empty Cokes clogging the visual topography, and food requests every ten minutes surely the kindly dowager hostess experienced suppression to urges of rustling up a noose (or at least belting some whiskey after nigh seven decades abstaining) daily for two long weeks.

     Mee-Mee's (my dads mom - pron. "Mimmy") sister Dessie's boudoir also held dope furniture: a gorgeous dark lacquer four poster bed and a partnering dresser that was topped with vintage framed photos. This smiling dark-haired bombshell wearing a pearl necklace and an open, black top showcasing decolletage, but extremely classy, glowing in black and white was the showstopper. After doing my rounds multiple times each with a pit-stop at the pic, I did an ID check travelling under the assumption its subject wasn't around any longer, given they were a stranger. Dessie gave me her tender smile, replying "That's Elwanda".

     Can the balloon juice, lady - that ain't Elwanda. She's a person who comes to dinners with Gloria and Aunt Polly looking like she rolled in straight from the bed, has brown teeth off that cigarette she hot boxes even when she's eating, throws back coffee all day and night long, eyes bugged out like her big toe went under the rocker, doesn't say five words a day, and never learned to smile. Elwanda, my wide, white butt.

     Respecting my aged and humble aunt came, "Did you say Elwanda?", and she offered it was taken long ago. Checks out, Marple. The lack of Kodachrome and voodoo-curse-by-a-Disney-villain schtick saves me a call to the Yard.

     In my ten years, this was the first time wheels of this style were activated in my psyche - slowly, but new and present: I'd never had curiosity about another human's experiences before. It hadn't dawned on me that people could go from being one thing to an altogether other in our real revolving world. Question: What happened to the radiant person in the photo? Answer: Worse than I thought.

     My quiet-as-a-mouse's-fart cousin Gloria was three years my senior but stayed attired forty. She wore her hair in a set (think honky Afro for grannies) like Mee-Mee's and Aunt Polly's, and sported the latest in senior polyester fashions. Aesthetically, it's not hard to figure out that her grandparent raised her Elwanda was her actual mother. They lived in a single wide trailer with Renny, Polly's second husband, who seemed more like the lady's dad than mate. He looked like the toothless country cousin to a guy you'd see munching his dinner off a trash can lid. Love his old heart, this quiet impoverished gent never met a kid he wouldn't donate the quarters in his pocket to. Too, he had BO that could take down passing jets. Mee-Mee was appalled at this spousal selection. Dessie also, though not venomously, being a "if you cant say something nice"... type, simply turning her little blue-rinsed head the other direction when passing the polecat a piece of ham.

     Elwandas real dad was Lawrence Pirtle, whom my grandma cited as a dead ringer for Alfred Hitchcock, the reason she couldn't stomach the Master of Suspense. "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" was a nonstarter at a Mee-Mee's pad sleepover, even with him only appearing in the interstitials. She'd glare and hate-smoke at me for trying to sneak in an episode while she was (incessantly) yakking on the horn. Worth mentioning: in first grade, I hit her room, slapped on a wig, face full of makeup, perfume, and a cute blouse while modeling in the mirror. Following this mime Little League drag show, I took a trip to the shitter, scraped off the gunk, and downed about 9/10 of a bottle of those scrumptious St. Joseph orange kid aspirins. Then I enjoyed a bath, came out, and she was still in full-blab mode with her sidekick Mary she'd already talked to over lunch. A moron can see the patterns rippling from here, and naturally she'd be the one in my adulthood fucked up about them. Still, my favorite destination hands-down as a child for the unattended food options alone. I spent lots of weekends at Chez Juanita, parked in front of an enormous walnut-encased Magnavox. Said my dad's mom once of country/western chanteuse Barbara Mandrell, "somebody hit her in the ass with a songbook and she thought she could sing". Guess what motherfucker was parked in their salmon pink velour duster in the armchair not a year later soaking in "Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters" like it was the works of the Almighty every Saturday night at 7 PM central time on WSPD, the Paducah NBC affiliate with me laid in the floor right in up front, watching Babs and Louise put on the dog, the unfortunately talent-less but model-esque Arlene hold up her end of the variety show trinity with a cold mic, tambourine slapping her tall hip, and her big moment contrasted with her siblings playing an orchestra's worth of instruments always a twenty second drum solo delivered with a toothy smile from her gorgeous blonde made-for-prime-time head? Clue: she put the banana yellow corded phone down and shut her yap for that hour, except for commercials to ask if I was hungry. I'd say "no" every time, then when she'd hit the can, I'd bolt into the kitchen and shovel half a bag of Fig Newtons into my mouth. Still no clue why.

     Madame Mee-Mee wasn't a widow during all this. My Pa, George, was a traveling construction worker, which suited her fine. Not only keeping the phone company in business, either. Once, Dad made this dude pull his Cadillac over and yanked her out of the passenger seat in broad daylight, while she bawled like an infant in horror/embarrassment, falling into our backseat next to me and trying to act like everything was copacetic. I was enjoying bong hits in my twenties when I finally solved that one. George expired from a heart attack when I was six. My other grandfather, the previously mentioned Frank would say "was driven". He said the widow paraded around the funeral home asking "What's gonna happen to ME now?", sobbing nonstop. This woman was the baby of a poor clan in Nowhere, USA. To hear her tell it "Daddy run off and left Mamma with all us kids" the truth being the local barber was terrified he couldn't feed his brood through Winter, and got the idea to steal a cow. Unfortunately, his crime was uncovered, and the local punishment was hanging at that time, so into the night he fled. Baby Juanita was seen to by her older siblings including Polly, Dessie, plus Argie, Sytha, all of whom had left the home, plus two older and protective brothers. Everyone felt sorry for that baby girl, so not only did she never know the poverty the rest endured, but she was the only high school graduate in the bunch. Her dad made efforts to see her, but she refused to give him her attention, and shit-talked him until her last breath as a deadbeat dad.

     Mee-Mee was in a relationship with Stormin' Norman, a Kirby vacuum salesman, from 1981-1983. He looked like a scarecrow in a disheveled suit complete with a beige shirt which I could never decide if it began that color, all of which needed ironing, his face especially. According to her bestie, Sally Poole, the former owner of Sally's Mexican Shoppe, and divorced of Maynard Poole, from Poole Air Conditioning fame who she ran screaming from, literally, when he introduced her to his prosthetic penis implant that went erect with a device akin to a garage door opener he got without first discussing this procedure with her (Mom and I were obsessed with Sally. Later in life, she became a born-again Christian and prescription painkiller addict who would talk you to death doing what's Mom's sister Onetia called "Lor-Gabbin'". Thy-neighbor-loving Aunt Dessie could barely restrain her thinly veiled contempt for her) talking to my mother in a hand-to-the-side-mouth-hushed-tone, "Girl, she says he's good in the bed". Horrifically, I almost found out the hard way when I jimmied the lock with Mee-Mee not answering the door and me waltzing into her crib like I owned the joint. Luckily, I yelled out en route to the boudoir before I saw the un-un-seeable. All I got was Norman fumbling with his belt in an undershirt and Mee-Mee throwing a polyester top on and hustling a button job over her bra delivering a bullshit nap story. Those days, Mee-Mee was so busy being carted around to look at tops at K-Mart (preferred two to one over breathing by this lady), and lunching at any crap restaurant that offered meat, potatoes, grease, vegetables, and not a whisper of flavor that she neglected to call my dad for around six months or be around to respond to him. I still rated attention, but he seemed to have entered obsolescence, as she had a new driver. When he demonstrated a massive depression and had to enter a psychiatric hospital wing in the highly stigmatic 1980's, he insisted my mother not call his. Upon the horror of Easter, she lashed out at my mom for not contacting her when it all started. Mom never told her those details, and ignored Dad's plea that should anything happen to him "don't get stuck with my mom". Instead, she devoted an enormous amount of her time to this thankless person, picking up her groceries, medications, and anything else, only to endure bottomless stress in search of a thank you, and to be treated like the daughter she never had. I told my martyr mother this was moot repeatedly. I still felt horrible when I recognized her emptiness at Juanita's death in 2009.

     Mee-Mee and her sister Pauline (not sensible Dessie, we should note) had this bizarre habit of mispronouncing Gloria's name "Glow-ruh" which drove me straight up the walls. That insanely passive cousin of mine wouldn't debate it, and I had enough irritation with the Todd clan (the maiden name of Juanita, AKA Mee-Mee, where the middle name I answer to on the streets originates. In prison, I'm called "Batman" because sometimes I am played by actor Robert Pattinson). Juanita could shit on words with laser precision: for instance, Ravioli-O architect Chef Boy-Ar-Dee came out of her top hat "Chef Boy-Dee-Ay", Metzger's Meats of Paducah begat "Metzzer's", naive mispronounced "knave" ("Glow-ruh's problem is she's too damn knave, that's her problem" - actual quote), not to mention the lone member of the Hiett "Hite" family to pronounce the surname like the hotel endeavor. Dad swore she did it to piss off the world. Never will you hear me bash dear Polly though (except her driving: 25 mph no matter where or when and her refusal to let anyone leave the house after 7 due to her irrational fear of "dopers" whilst her eldest child Elwanda "Courtney Love" Pirtle threatened to torch the mobile home and surrounding field with a 3 AM in-bed cigarette and nod-off on a four decade dummy-dope pill bender without a trace of irony cited). My pops #1 most hated driver had enough on her plate with the single wide posse, and the armpit permeation therein (I wonder if she constantly craved heavily seasoned chili off those aromatics like I did after every visit?).

     Trying to squeeze Mee-Mee for the goods got me granules through years of banal, go-nowhere anecdotes that after sitting through I hold responsible for my burning love of painkillers (the names of these characters were fairly spectacular, though- "Cracker and Nan", "Chicken and Alma", brothers " Hugh-Ray and Whirley Jewel" to name a few). The first pay-dirt item to come across my desk was that in the early 1940's, as randomness would have it, a rep from Coca-Cola came through Arlington (?!), spotted the girl from the dresser, and wanted to put her on the company calendar. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue would be the contemporary equivalent of this honor. When Lawrence Pirtles excited offspring told him of this opportunity, his response was slaps and punches with the message that no daughter of his would be paraded in front of the continental US like a whore. I'm told this treatment was common to her mother and younger brother Jimmy as well (his son Neil had long blond hair resembling the singer of Cheap Trick, who walked me from Mee-Mee's once to the Minit Mart for a comic run where I think I developed a pre-gonad-drop "Roosevelt" crush on the teen. Expiring from carbon monoxide poisoning at 16 in a parked car with his girlfriend, I've always hoped he went out with a bang and not intentionally. You never can tell with this crowd).

     During another session with Lil' Dr. Batman, Juanita told me that when Polly and the kids were living with Lawrence's folks, Grandpa Pirtle took his rifle at the dinner table and evacuated his skull. Surely his wife's cooking wasnt THAT spicy. If you think you've heard the pinnacle, a week after that Grandma took to the front yard, splashed herself with accelerant, and set her body ablaze in view of the family, the result being the lone peacetime non-monk case of self-immolation to my awareness. I'd love to know the central angst mechanism in that house. I'm guessing more than some joker putting the last swig of milk in the carton back into the fridge (reminder: the author bears no blood kinship to the senior Pirtles. Clearly, that doesn't really matter...).

     Pauline absconded from Lawrence before she or the kids sustained permanent damage (it wasn't only her driving that was too slow), eventually hooking up with sharecropping deodorant-snubber Renny. As a very young lady Elwanda became disassociated, and took a sharp curve in her mental status. Pauline was encouraged to admit her to Western State Hospital in nearby Hopkinsville, where she became a long-term inpatient. Checking on his also residing wife, a visitor began a clandestine affair with Elwanda, abandoning her when he discovered she was carrying their baby. This further diminished her stability, and back with Polly she went on a regime of psychotropics, totally zombified like myself during my first five years of incarceration. A wild connective event occurred in late Fall of 1981...

     When Gloria was rounding 14, a father she never knew came to tiny Bardwell for her and Elwanda, overnight causing the girls drug-concreted mom to exit her stupor. She was smiling, shining, and appeared like a weathered version of the black and white angel. Standing in Mee-Mee's living room wearing a pretty violet sweater with bejeweled earrings to match, she hugged me. It was an earnest miracle.

     About a week passed before the other shoe dropped. The man (who reminded my younger person of a smoke-damaged version of a dinner jacket wearing singer like Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, or somebody else too grown up to give a rat's ass about) had abandoned Elwanda at a gas station and kidnapped Gloria. My cousin was the object of a manhunt. Two weeks later, she managed to slip his grasp and reach a house to call the authorities in Alabama. Thus, she returned to the trailer in the field.

     Back to being a 50 year old eighth grader she went. Elwanda returned to cigarettes, the bed, pills, and mortification. Mee-Mee's mantra every time conversation got the least bit heavy was "Let's talk about nice things", despite all the train wrecks she endured and incited. This was what strangled her sister's home, I'd wager my last ramen noodle (I'm a prison inmate - that's what we natives consider currency). This poor girl went back to school after being abducted, and nobody whose duty it was bothered getting answers about what she'd been through. Hell, none of us knew. I'm sure Juanita didn't either, too afraid to ask. I was a child, and as fucked as this is, not even bugged that it went down to begin with. Her mom hadn't talked to anybody in bygone eras. Two lookalikes - wavy brunettes with big brown eyes, Mediterranean complexions, and coquettish smiles that damned if I can tell you the origins of, suffering in speechlessness like two muted sirens in Middle America; passers-by cruising through those fields in the night stone deaf to their calls.

     Elwanda's little brother Jimmy had a charming wife Rose, mother to his two children (the late Neil, and his likable sister Lisa, a quite masculine gal who once told Mee-Mee that having a man in her life would "cramp her style", which tickled her to pieces. "Knave" Juanita naturally encouraged her, with assurance the right one hadn't arrived yet. I was all of 14 thinking "by the right one, you must mean Stephanie who works overnight at Colonial Gas and Food, rocks a pot-leaf belt buckle, and whose best quote was country crooner Ronnie Milsap could sing 'I Eat Shit For Breakfast' and it'd be beautiful"). Jim's bride was a nurse at the hospital in nearby Mayfield, latter day home to the massive tornado that besieged those overworked candle factory workers, casting a favorable nonpartisan national spotlight on responding Governor Andy Beshear. He was not present for his long-suffering sister or niece, it seemed, nor by extension was his satellite family. When it would come to pass that Gloria was largely to her own devices, she was seemingly without kin. Unfortunate, as a kind spirited male presence could have been balm to the situation. Perhaps the nightmares in the vintage Pirtle home where both grandparents took their lives gave them a bond of tortures he shuddered to revisit; Rose and children being a construct that kept his mind from terrors being in the orbit of the primary clan threatened to reawaken. He always did have a glum quality my upbeat, life-loving mom was put off by. She was a Rose fan who didn't understand the cement in that marriage. I do - Rose was a nurturer by trade. She had no use for a man who didn't need her, would be my guess.

     Brother Jim had a kind, charitable nature I can offer testimony to. At an Aunt Dessie dinner, he was going plumb loco with a Polaroid camera, tossing hand-shaken memories left and right onto the chrome and Formica table. I was hypnotized by the photo-on-demand showcase, and my old man's cousin took notice. He pulled his wallet out, produced sixty dollars (a lot of money then for our kind of folks), and told me to go out and get an Instamatic of my own. My dad, this single time, decided to NOT be a horse's ass, and told me to hug the man. In hindsight I believe he couldn't bring himself to reject this gift to me from a guy who lost his only boy. Jimmy proceeded Aunt Polly to the grave via heart attack in the early 1990s. I blew the majority of that 60 bucks (that's 10 million in 1980 money, children) on comics. My dad was unusually cool about my indulgence which was a rarity, and I wish I'd savored this more. Allowing himself to enjoy having a kid kicked in, I believe, something God knows I wish he'd taken more pleasure in. It's a shame he didn't enjoy simple pleasures and was so tormented, angry, and uptight. 32 years was all that sad and sick young fellow could muster.

     Gloria's senior year she took up with a hulking boy named Tommy, who had fiery hair with a disposition to match. I think he made her feel safe - it's staggering how regularly that impetus backfires. In no time, they were inseparable. Despite upset from the peanut gallery with even peacekeeping Aunt Dessie giving opposition to the loudmouthed brute, as my friend Tracy was fond of saying "He's an asshole, but he's her's, and she can't shit without him." He gave her a boy and a girl eventually. Finally she left him, echoing the circumstances Polly left the girl's grand-dad. Down the line, Gloria remarried, this time to an older fellow in her church, Barney, who was gaga for her.

     In 1995, Aunt Dessie obtained superstar eyesight via LASIK surgery, which she joyously declared a miracle. Two weeks later while carrying groceries up the back steps of her clapboard cottage, she tumbled down them, breaking her hip. This mishap left her non-ambulatory, and beyond anyone's scope of assistance. Mee-Mee was forced to put her older sister for rehab into a nursing home that would make any rational person thank Heaven they were born post 1969. Instantaneously, the famously pristine, robust, and grandmotherly figure experienced a 180 degree personality downturn. Refusing to brush or wash her hair, eat, bathe, or execute civil pleasantries, my mother and Juanita saw an end of things pulling near. I trekked via Greyhound bus (which ice-capsized on a back road causing a bugged-out Black homeless city woman to scramble into the woods of Bumfuckt, KY- and to think Hollywood can't come up with anything new) from Lexington to see her perk up for all of ten minutes. She expired within three weeks.

     Arlington's funeral home was packed for the service. The surviving Pirtles were there, naturally, including Gloria with Barney who were now aggressively hawking Shaklee products (I'd call them Amway ripoffs, but my doctor made me swear off oxymorons). Their boss on the pyramid from Louisville was with them, which smacked of oddness unless his effort was to make everyone else look like Halloween masks. In terms of attractiveness, I wouldn't sell my mama up the river for this individual, but her sisters would be fucked. He was extremely friendly to me and did the close-talking with personal questions bit I don't know if it was Shaklee or woo being pitched, but I'd fake one for a stab at the other. Into the service, a young minister talked about a long life lived well, and the victory therein. This was cause for celebration, after all, not a tragedy. My sentiments exactly, and as chief beneficiary I saw burdens lifting. I was feeling myself, with good things happening. Then, he brought up her Lemon Ice Box Pie which immediately registered in my minds eye that dish with the red handle, and I was dropped into the last rites for our little lady with that arched back who walked down, then up that big hill daily, always tried to practice what she preached by radiating loving kindness and gentility. All that I could do now was sob quietly into my selfish hands.

     Gloria eventually wound up dissolving her marriage because Barney accused her of having an affair after 15 years together. Running into my mother at Walmart in Paducah, she sheepishly spoke of his indictment, saying "He was probably right".

     Pauline expired not long past Dessie, and Elwanda was taken into the home of a parishioner couple who served up an edict: get up off that ass and go to work, sister. It came to pass that she became an employee of, then retired from the same Deena Lamp Factory of Arlington that Aunt Dessie and eldest sibling (and fucking nut-case that lived by the train tracks) Argie both drew pensions from. This adoptive pair exacted a time-honored therapy kindhearted Polly couldn't bring herself to do to her broken lamb.

     Betty Jane, my beautiful mother, was taken from me by a lung infection in 2023 while I was hours away behind razor wire, making for the most devastating period of my life. A year before the event she reported with incredulity Gloria was living with Elwanda. Decades of Olympic-level chain-smoking and she was still ticking. Mom and I wondered if being a drug piñata of mental anesthetics numbed her stress so well it prolonged her existence? Could be let's hear it for better living through chemistry, then. Maybe I'll take up housekeeping with those ladies someday. We can tell rough-assed stories over coffee and "coffin nails" until Hell wouldn't have it.

     I must insist on a double-wide, though.