Scratch

         Scratch is a dog Dad brings home from a kennel far away when I'm five.  He's a fox terrier and openly homosexual. He's white with brown spots here and there and a giant dot on his butt.  I love to put baby powder on his rear and try to make him wear pants.

       He always naps with half his body in the sunbeam at the curtained glass door.  The other half hangs out in the back, so it's an easy access point. God, I love this queenie little dog who sleeps with his paws crossed all dainty.  And he never snaps at any of us, no matter what we do to him.

    OK, me.  No matter what I do to him. 
    
      I pour the 7-Up in his water bowl because water bores me so I figure he probably feels the same.  That's why I water the house plants with it, too.  Scratch loves it, but the plants don't, and Mom wonders why the dog keeps getting fatter and the wandering jews keep dying.

 

That Time I Almost Died

      So I'm ten and there's this tree on our side of the fence and its branches straddled our neighbor's yard.  I built a tree fort and one Saturday grabbed some frozen pizza Mom made and headed up there.  That's the day I almost died. 

                      That One Time When I Was 10 & Broke My Spleen
     

    Looking back, there were two omens.  It was the only time Mom didn't say, "Be careful, Janie."  And I saw Frank Dunford, who was kind of an enemy of mine by then, smoking behind his tool shed, watching me while I climbed up there.  Did he loosen the nails on my fort?  I've always wondered.

    Somehow the floor wiggled and or I sat wrong and then, SLAM!  I hit the ground like the coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, full frontal.  Splat.

    It was only around 10 or 12 feet down, but it knocked the wind out of me and it was hard to breathe.  I passed out for a little, then woke up to see my dad jump over the fence in one fluid move like a champ.  Even though he was a soldier, I never thought of him as real macho and it surprised me, even while lying there.  I was thinking, "Wow, Dad.  I'm impressed."

       Next we're at Martin Army Hospital in Ft. Benning.  There's this Army doctor with a strong accent, Isreali I think, but no one knew what was wrong.  My belly kept getting bigger and harder and I was hurting worse but after a few days I felt better and they turned me loose to go home. 

      Back home, I waited a day then asked Mom if I could go to my best friend, Becky's, house.  She said maybe later which meant no, so I waited until nobody was paying attention and went anyway  I didn't feel real hot halfway there so she gave me her bike to ride back home.  I got home, passed out in the bathroom and it was back to the hospital.

        At the hospital, it was a nightmare.  They tried to cram a long clear tube up my nose and down my throat to my stomach but I fought so hard they finally had to knock me all the way out. 

     As I'm waiting for the anesthesia to kick all the way in, Dad and Mom came to my bed and Dad said, "Janie, baby you need to get an operation to see what's wrong.  But you can have anything you want to play with when you wake up, OK?"

   I said, "Anything?"
   And he said it again.  "Anything."
   So I said, "Daddy I want...I want...a motorized go-cart."  Then I fell asleep.

      When I came to, it turns out I'd ruptured my spleen and it was leaking and bad.  They hacked it out and sopped it up, but for all that, I never did get that motorized go-cart.  Just a zipper scar up and down my front, a Jane West action figure set and a giant stuffed St. Bernard doll. 

     And that zipper scar?  Never once kept me out of a bikini, even to this day!  And I'm an old old broad.

 

Walking to the Store

   

 All my life I've walked to the store.  Always.  When I was little and we lived in Georgia, I went to the Oakland Park Shopping Center and my favorite stores were the Piggly Wiggly, an ice cream shop, a five and dime store and the pharmacy where the comic book rack lived.

   My mom trusted me to go places as long as there was a sister or two along and she even let me walk to Miller's Department Store the August I was nine so I could buy some t-shirts.  I picked one out and it was my favorite all summer and fall.

    I was buying french fries at the Piggly Wiggly when two hippies came by.  I know they were hippies because they had long hair and one of them had a fringe jacket.

    One of the guys smirked at me and said, "Right on!"  I only figured out why years later.  My t-shirt had Cheech & Chong's Big Bamboo rolling papers on the front.

My First Penis

    

           I was a tough little tomboy at seven when I first saw the neighbor's dick.  The name of the person attached to it was Frank Dunford and he lived in the house on the other side of our back fence.  He was ten and had a buzz cut and a block shaped head.  Much later in life I saw this politician with the exact same head, but who cares?  It's not germane to the story.


      So we were up in his treehouse while everyone was busy with Thanksgiving and he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend.  Sure.  Then he unzipped his jeans and plopped it out.  It was white and looked like a mealy worm. It was cold up there, so it wasn't much bigger than one.

     He didn't have any pubes yet, but he could make it jump with no hands like a puppet which I liked.  It was Frank's dick trick, as it were.  He pled and wheedled and wanted me to suck on it or at least put it in my mouth, but that wasn't about to happen.  We also practiced kissing on the lips and he held my hand. 

      We were sitting in his front yard with his arm around my shoulder and his gang came rumbling by and one of them said,

     "Hey, Frank.  Is that your girlfriend?" 

    That's when that asshole, Frank, said, "No!"  I looked at him and thought to myself, "That's the last time you'll ever get me near your zipper, son."  And it was.

    A week later, I'm lying in bed feeling all kinds of guilt when it's time to go to sleep.  It had something to do with fooling around with Frank, and him denying me in front of others, and knowing I'd been doing something nasty and wrong but fun and thrilling at the same time. 

     I was crying in my room about it and Mom came in.  She didn't turn on the light but she sat on the edge of the bed and said,

     "What's wrong, Janie?  Why are you crying?"
      I said, "I was doing nasty things with Frank Dunford."
     She said, "What nasty things?"
      I said, "I kissed him.  And played with his thing."
    She said, "All boys and girls want to know about each other like that.  It's natural, O.K, and you're not in trouble.  You can tell Mama anything, you know that?"

Then she said, "But maybe Frank Dunford is a little too old to play with.  Let's say 'Now I lay me' and get some rest."