Minor Gods

boy meets girl, marriage, children, the cycle of abuse continues.

   this is just the first few pages of something brewing. its time to tell the story and do a bit of bloodletting. more is to come soon.


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Minor Gods




Let me tell you the tale of bitterness and rage. How a man is born into a world of women who betray him and belittle him just as much as any other role reversal. This is a story of double standards, and how in the proper context, and when no one is looking, everyone is a goddamn hypocrite with the oh so best intentions but nevertheless a complete disappointment. When the mirror is held in their face they cannot look, because seeing themselves for who they truly are is scarier than all the things in the world that they are scared of.

It started with a child...

Jackson Reed was born to a young mother. In her day, what you did after high school was get married and have babies. She shacked up with some young stud who had a couple nice cars and smoked camel cigarettes. He drank beer, rode a motorcycle, and had the bone structure of a clydesdale horse. He was buxom blonde with blue eyes and he melted hearts with his coy silence. They fell into something that resembled love and had two kids. The first was Alyssa, and a year later came our boy Jackson.

Alyssa was the easy child. She was happy and healthy, the first born so her parents loved and doted after her. A lot can happen in a year unfortunately, and when Jacksons mother was pregnant with him she was depressed the entire time cause she knew that her marriage was in trouble. Jacksons father liked his beer a little too much which was a little too close for comfort. The drunken arguments had started and the seems that held their union together began to break. By the time Jackson was ready to be born, his mother was in a full blown depression.

Years later they would find out that the mood of the mother while the baby is in utero is transferred to the child and makes the child extremely susceptible to anxiety and depression. The baby was born what they termed a 'colicy baby'. The truth is, he was depressed.

We'll spare the boring details and cut to the chase. Jacksons parents divorced early in his life. After many times of attempt at reconciliation for the children, they ended up doing psychological damage to the children. They would get back together, have a huge blow out and break up again. After a few months the mother would get back together with the father and they would get a new apartment together and try to make it work. Jacksons earliest memories are of standing outside one of their many apartment buildings they would call home over the years with his father. They were on the ground level, outside of the building and looking up to the third floor balcony where they lived and watching as his mother was throwing everything in the apartment that was his fathers off of the balcony.

His father had a giant plastic beer bottle that stood about 3 feet tall with a coin slot in the top of it, and it was full to the top with change that his father had put in there over the years. He and his father were watching as his mother appeared, once again, to the edge of the balcony as the change jar was hoisted up onto the ledge and dropped over onto the ground below in front of them, breaking open the plastic beer bottle and scattering change everywhere.

The rest of the memories from Jacksons childhood get a little blurry from here on in, but most of it is peppered with trauma and insanity as a young mother tries to figure her life out being newly single, raising two children, and staying away from an alcoholic ex husband, but still trying to keep his kids in his life. It's the story of most middle class/poor families in the eighties, but somewhere along the line it takes a left at Albuquerque.

So Jackson and Alyssa saw their father on weekends when they went to stay with him in his s**t hole, one bedroom apartment with nothing to do for kids and nowhere to go. They tried to stay happy and continue on with life, but there was a lot of anger to deal with. Outbursts of anger would happen from time to time and bad things would be said about the other parent to the children. It was a very confusing and scary time for Jackson.

Alyssa had an independence that Jackson didn't. Jackson was born kinda gifted. Barely before he could even speak, Jackson was able to draw the things that he was seeing. After the usual scribbles of a child on a piece of paper, his parents started to notice that Jackson could actually draw the things that he was looking at in great detail. As Jackson got older the detail got deeper and deeper. They realized that they had an artist in the family. They encouraged his art and would buy him art supplies constantly. He was never without crayons, or colored pencils, or color books, or glue and construction paper. One year, on his birthday, Jackson got an 'art kit' with pencils, and sharpener, an eraser, and a pad of paper. Jackson was too excited about the possibilities of what to put on this blank canvas of his so he asked his mother what he should draw on the paper. She replied “Whatever your little heart desires.” Jackson didn't understand what that meant but he realized even at the age of 7 that he was being blown off. He became frustrated. All he wanted was his mother to help him come up with an idea of something to draw and she kept responding with that goddamn 'heart desires' line. The kid was 7, his heart desired ninja turtles and sugary breakfast cereal. He ran to his room with the kit, pissed off cause he couldn't think of anything. Here was all this glorious material and he was drawing a complete and utter blank. Jackson was showing signs of an anger problem forming. Jacksons father had a bad temper as well, and it seems our poor young Jackson was a chip off the ol' fucked up block.

Once when Jackson was six years old, during one of the reconciliation attempts of his parents, Jackson was sweating. It was a brutal summer that year in Central New York and Jackson was finding it hard to sleep in the heat. Jackson knew there were fans in the house but he was too young to lift them or even know how to plug one in. He was never allowed to do these things anyway, so Jackson went to his mothers room. His father wasn't living with them at the time, but he was over tonight and sleeping in his mothers bed. Jackson pushed open the door to see his parents laying on the bed, watching tv and he asked for a fan. His mother responded that Jackson should go back to bed. Jackson explained that he was finding it difficult to sleep cause he was hot. His mother said she was tired and she didn't want to get up and Jackson just needed to go back to bed. The boy became frustrated cause he was also tired but couldn't stay asleep cause his body kept waking up in overload from the heat. He became upset and started to whine, as children often do.
After many attempts at getting his way and being turned away he started to cry and stormed off. When he reached the stairs that led down to a landing and then continued to another set of stairs to his room a frustration overcame him and he started to scream that he was too hot and needed a fan. Jackson became overwhelmed with emotion and didn't even realized how hard or loud he was screaming. He also didn't realize that above his screaming could be heard the sounds of his fathers footsteps coming at him fast. Jackson breathed in for another scream but was met by white light suddenly in his eye balls and an impact smell as his fathers open hand smacked him across the face. Jackson flew backwards down the stairs and onto the landing, collapsing like a pile of blankets. The crying stopped instantly. Shocked, he stood up on the landing to see his father standing over him at the top of the stairs in his tighty whitey underwear, the smell of beer in the air, his father angrily said, “Get your a*s up and get the f**k back to bed.” He didn't even stop to see if his only son was ok after having been smacked backwards down a flight of stairs before he stomped back to the bed where his ex wife was, probably in the hopes of getting laid that night.
Jackson slowly went down the second set of stairs and crawled back into bed, thinking about how hard he had hit the landing, seeing the flash of light behind his eye lids as his father had just smacked him as hard as he could, and tried to get to sleep in this heat with no fan. He was no longer crying cause he wasn't frustrated anymore, now he was just afraid.

Author's Note

tread lightly, this one is semi-autobiographical.