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warm until your mother gets back,” licking his chapped and cracked lips like a desert lizard flicking fly paper off his tongue.
    He was tugging me toward him with a python grip around the nape of my neck, when in a fit of adolescent rage, fear, and repulsion fueled by the obnoxious proximity of his Pabst Blue Ribbon breath, I picked up a beer bottle and cracked him over the head, sending him reeling backward into the cheap plasterboard “entertainment center” which collapsed under his considerable weight, causing the stolen TV and dozens of eight-track tapes to clunk down upon his pea-brained nugget, spewing forth an acid rain of cigarette ash and bong water all over his dirty white wife beater which strained to contain his bowling ball—shaped blubber belly. I barreled out into the street screaming and laughing like a lunatic, running straight into my mother’s arms, who took one look at me and screamed, “I can’t trust you alone for five minutes!” as she ran into the house leaking a thin spittle of chow mein and egg drop soup up the sidewalk.
    Heat wave hit Wayne County like a blister on a burn. And “Say hello to your daddy for me” was all she said the next afternoon as she banged on the fucked-up Impala’s horn and threw me out the passenger door after luring me in for what I thought was going to be a picnic at Lake Wobegone, 120 miles south of the state line.
    Last I saw of her.
    My father was another story. He was never out of earshot. I was always at his side. Couldn’t leave his sight. I became crutch, clutch, concubine. Maid, muse, wet nurse. Baby. Mommy. Girlfriend. Life support and ultimately death harbinger. Daddy knows best. How hateful little girls can be.
    I never called him “Daddy,” but it’s still a word forever warped by everything he wasn’t, a word that still rankles. Five letters and two simple syllables that instantly produce a nauseating metallic swell of the tongue, a blistering of the lips, a scraping razor burn akin to an esophageal Pap smear. A violent urge to regurgitate.
    My father, that decrepit septic tank of treachery, that filter of perversity and lechery, a psychotic buffoon whose insidiously sadistic rituals polluted forever his every cancer-soaked brain cell, staining his fingers, toes, and tongue with a golden nicotine glow which seemed to swell and grow with every unfiltered cigarette he sucked down in an endless surrender to his own death, and to his daily massacre of whatever elegant morsel of humanity was left over inside me after the repeated soul rape of my mother’s revolving-bedroom-door amours.
    The weekend ritual. My father’s specialty. A typical Friday night free-for-all where whatever was left of his pickled brains was further pummeled by booze into the brick wall of his own obliteration. Him and his asshole buddies. A permanent bender. Three out of seven days. For years on end. The memory still lingers.
    One night during a marathon Black Jack match, I called Freddie Matolla “a fat-fuck huckster” and told him to keep his filthy hands to himself. The bloated chimp had one hand up my short plaid skirt and a blistered thumb hitched under my panty line ready to yank them aside.
    My asshole father butted in under his breath with the threat that if I wanted a place to sleep that night, I show some respect, play sweetmeat, swallow it down, and let it slide. No harm in a little snuggle. Go on and give Uncle Freddie a smooch. No one had to tell me that what starts with a kiss usually ends with a fisting.
    I told them both to fuck off and got my right ear boxed with a rubber plunger. It rang like Sunday school church bells for two days after. But I was always getting cracked in the head. Enough times to occasionally crumple into contusion, usually for saying something I wasn’t supposed to, or NOT doing something I was supposed to, or for skulking the South Side Slopes, prowling the streets for a