Locked Doors

I was the first, born of innocence, lust and an itty bitty bikini. Or as my mother so elegantly said, it would have been a hell of a lot easier if she’d only gotten sand in her crack. But that night in late August of 1964 she got a hell of a lot more than a roasted weenie. By December she was married and five months after that, I burst into the world red faced and squalling and haven’t stopped since.
I think I was in second grade by the time I was able to figure the math and experienced my first epiphany. Suddenly everything made sense. The sly innuendo’s from grandpa and my grandmother’s palpable disapproval of my father. Dear God, my parents had sex before they were married!
For weeks I worried that I really was a bastard like grandma had said the previous year at Christmas. But a bastard was born out of wedlock. Technically speaking I was born in wedlock just put in the oven a little early. Not to mention the fact that the mere thought of my parents having SEX was nearly as repugnant to me as eating a slug. Needless to say I was tormented by doubt and images that simply didn’t belong in my eight year old head, until my mother sick of my moping and nail biting forced the confession out of me.
She was still relatively normal at this time so all it took was a few cookies, a glass of milk, and her hand, gentle as a spring breeze upon my hair to break the dam. It all poured out of my mouth like water from a storm drain and I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. When the last word dropped from my lips and my heart was empty and laid out before her like a bloody chicken ready for the pot I crossed my fingers and prayed to God that she’d deny it all. Perhaps reassure me with a few more of those cookies and a chocolate sweetened kiss. But my mother was nothing if not brutally honest.
“Well baby you got the right of it.” She’d said her eyes dreamy and filled with memories. “Your daddy sure was hot tamale back in those days. Oh but he had the most gorgeous black hair and big…”
“Mama, please, let’s not go there.”
“But honey you asked.”
“Not about that I didn’t”
“Well sure you did,” she replied. If you’re gonna ask a little bit you might as well know the whole story.”
Groaning I found myself curling up like a shrimp on my father’s cigarette scented chair, hoping against reason that this wouldn’t take long. My mother was a legendary storyteller in the neighborhood and usually I enjoyed her tales to the point of rapture. But this was simply too big, awkward and ugly.
And yet I made no effort to leave, or end the spell she was beginning to cast. Her shimmering blonde hair lit from behind by the setting California sun stole my breath. And her cool smooth hand on my summer warmed arm, and a belly full of milk and cookies was enough to ensnare me. She was a goddess and I loved her with a passion that tore at the core of my being.
So I sat entranced, bound by adoration and curiosity as she told her tale, a story of beer, surfer waves and illicit love on the beach while the Rolling Stones and The Beatles poured out of the little portable am radio she’d carried with her everywhere that summer.
As she talked I could hear the waves beating on the white sand to the rhythm of rock and roll, smell the driftwood fire and see my daddy as he had been then, lean, dark and full of mischief. His aquamarine eyes blazing over the fire pit with his low slung board shorts hanging from lean hips as he watched my mother hungrily. Not like now, his eyes gone grey and weak, looking back at a past none of us shared. His pants were still slung low but it had more to do with his well earned beer belly and missing butt than with his long lost muscularity.
But the dad of now disappeared when she spoke in her haunting smoky voice of those short lived halcyon days of youth and naïveté. Even at eight I could nearly envision them as they had been. Not quite for I still hadn’t lost all of my innocence, not yet anyway, it was wounded with some parts missing altogether but it still hadn’t been completely stolen.
That was yet to come and even Aunt Vi with her eyes of broken glass wouldn’t see it coming until too late.