Just a kid

The days would be short and cold in October, like romance. My mother would send me out into the biting dusk with a shopping list, written on a folded piece of paper, in her cursive script. Her golden face and dark eyes playing against the fiery leaves, dropping to the ground...dead. And those sweet cakes she'd bake for no other reason than she'd wanted a cake...:
          The winters chill pushing those dead leaves, further and further into the crevices. The Christmas smell coming out of the heater vents on the first cold day of the year. The Peanuts specials, championing spirituality and cool jazz to a new generation. The crispy windblown autumn leaves, my Halloween feet never trample. The city is ripe with perverts, who want to stick their dicks in me. I watch the trick or treaters from an upstairs window. Plastic fangs in my mouth.  "I vant to dlink your blood... Hello?"
          My mother, the spaghetti pie and Salisbury steak Monarch. I can picture her, walking down the filthy downtown streets after work. Walking toward the 1974 Gremlin that she drove. Driving home with nothing to look forward to, except cooking dinner for her ungrateful family, a few hours of fitful sleep, and repeating it all a million future days coming.
          In those early years my father would come home from work drunk. Or else he'd come home and get drunk, on cheap beer, or Ripple. Sitting at the kitchen table and reading a comic book, until the pain went away for a while.

          My father is drinking beer, he stares at me with bloody eyes, he is a young policeman, today he touched a rotting corpse, and it burst open in his hands. He must support his family. He looks at me with bloody eyes.
          The house is full of werewolves, his two German Shepherds, hairy scary knife edged monsters, teeth like a prison rape. My grandfather comes by to walk them. He takes me into the darkness and hands me the leashes. I can hear his laughter as they drag me down the alley.
          Being so young, he could be an affectionate father. Being a drunk, he could be a violently unpredictable man. I never learned to tell which one would be walking through the door. I never even realized that he was a drunk until years later, when he called me and admitted to his alcoholism. He apologized for his rotten behavior in general. I never knew. I thought he was just crazy.
          As I went through my teenage years I made an effort (out of an instinct for self-preservation) to convince him that I was crazier than he was. Not that he was ever impressed, except for maybe one time.
          In 1975 the family bought a Doberman to go along with the German Shepherds. The dog's name was 'Queenie", and she was good for about 9 years. Around the tenth year, she started losing control of her bowels. I was designated clean-up man, and before long I had lost my patience. Scrubbing diarrhea out of carpeting can do that to you. I complained about the situation, till my father got pissed off at me. He walked back into his bedroom, and returned with his .38 service revolver.
          "If you hate the dog so fucking much, why don't you just shoot it?" He yells at me, and then walks away. This made me pretty angry. I guess he didn't think I had balls enough to do it, but I had a problem and he was offering me a solution. He came back down to the basement as I was aiming for the head. I'd put a couple of paper bags over her pointy noggin, to avoid having to clean up brains. I was depressing the trigger when he yelled out, "Hey boy! Have you lost your mind?" This from the man that handed me the gun. He took the pistol away, and stalked back upstairs. I took the bags off Queenie's head. She looked at me with a sick and stupid grin. I resumed cleaning up the shit.