Born on Welfare Day: The Shallowgenepool Story

I loved the big money challenge prompt, but have no chance of winning, so why not post for fun.

Prologue

Why do people write autobiographies? I mean, our lives begin and end pretty much the same way with just some minor variations. It all starts when the tub we’ve been soaking in (complete with room service) for 9 months suddenly starts to drain. As the last drop of amniotic fluid in the womb tub disappears, it signals the end of our tenure as mommy’s favorite parasite. Suddenly, we find our bodies being uncomfortably squeezed downwards and experience the feeling of our still soft skulls being compressed to just short of their maximum structural tolerances. Next, infant us find ourselves being evicted from the only world we’ve ever known kicking and screaming through an orifice that seems to be 3 sizes too small. Finally, we are forced into this harshly bright new world, weak, helpless and covered in blood, fluid, and our own waste. In death, we experience the universe’s sick sense of irony because in the process of dying we once again find ourselves weak, helpless, often toothless, and in an embarrassing case of deja-poo, our own waste.

So, if the beginning and the end of life are nearly identical in their messiness and excretions, maybe the universe is more interested in what lies between her banally similar mortal book ends. After all, that seems to be where the real action happens. It’s where we get free reign to for better or worse. become who we are. It is here where:

· We’re educated first by our parents and family, television, then by school, graffiti written on the inside doors of bathroom stalls, and finally by experience.

· We learn to love in all its depth and technicolor joy. We learn to hate too, but thankfully like cursive hand writing or a gag gift dildo, we don’t have to use it if we don’t want to.

· During the extended menage a trois featuring Nature, Nurture, and Human Folly we develop our own personality. It is here where our talents bloom and preferences develop.

· We gain independence and begin to provide for ourselves.

· We make money or if you go into social work, you witness people making money. Social workers have to treat their bank’s ATM machine like a slot machine. Hitting the jackpot means there’s enough in your account to put gas in the car.

· We might develop a sense of altruism and dedicate some time to helping others

· We fuck (hopefully well, often, and sans disease) and potentially reproduce.

· We get sick (hopefully not due to engaging in the immediately preceding activity) and we get better.

· We generally screw things up, act the fool, and hopefully when the dust settles and/or one gets released from parole, we learn our lessons and become better people because of our fuck ups.

Of course, one’s autobiography should encapsulate these and many other life defining events. However, who we become is largely influenced by our parents including the good, the bad, the criminal, and the totally fucking insane. Likewise, mommy and daddy were influenced by the life experiences and character of their parents, and so on for generations. So, as much as we want to be pure and unique individuals, we are in fact, just the latest genetic model in a series of heroes, villains, geniuses, idiots, and general fuck ups.

Writing my biography is problematic because the typical sources of family history are absent in my family. Most of my family members who’re still amongst the living either wouldn’t talk to me about the past or they’ve chemically lobotomized themselves with elicit substances to the point that their memories are completely unreliable. Besides, if I started asking questions they’d freak out because most of my relations have been subjected to the phrase, “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law” on frequent occasions, so they ain’t gonna say nothin. Sadly, written records providing accurate information on my family history would mostly consist of criminal court records and therefore offer little of value in terms of my wee life story. So, much of what I present is based on my best guess, stories I’ve been told, conversations (both sober and other), and what little detective work I’ve done over the years.

Please be advised. I will be using false names because those relatives I have that are still alive would consider my depictions of them as incriminating (criminal statutes of limitations not withstanding) and/or potential parole violations. So, in the words of the immortal Bon Scott, “The following is a true story. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.”

In order to fully understand the disaster that is Shallowgenepool it is necessary to go back far enough in the past to understand the circumstances and events that led up to this human catastrophy. For example, when investigating a trainwreck, the Department of Transportation will start at the train’s point of origin because the cause of the wreck might’ve taken place before the train left the station. So, if I am going to provide the reader with a good picture of the cluster fuck that would be my life, it is necessary to provide information about those who’re responsible for my existence. Of course, how they came to be who they were is also important in understanding what led two stupid, mentally ill, totally irresponsible, and selfish 19-year-old apprentice drug addicts to even contemplate being parents. Ultimately if the reader is to fully understand Shallowgenepool, it is important to understand a bit about his parents, “Dick” and “Laura.” Let’s start with, Laura, because well, it is. “Ladies first,” after all.

Mom-The Agates

My mom, Laura was born April, 26, 1955. She was the second child and second daughter of Amy Crooks and John Agate. The Agates and Crooks hailed from the cold, hard soil farm country of South Dakota and Minnesota. By all accounts, Grandma, Amy was a spunky, auburn-haired girl who enjoyed school. Unfortunately, her schooling stopped after the eighth grade because the Great Depression demanded that she helped raise her seven younger siblings while her parents fought to grow enough food to keep them all fed on their small farm. Otherwise, young Amy probably would have gone on to be the first in her family to get enough education to realize that pickled pig’s feet are as disgusting (she was a big fan) as they sound and bib overalls were fine for work, but a bit too tacky to wear all the time.

Grandpa John was described to me as being moody, showed little interest in oral hygiene (he needed dentures before he turned 30 years old) and possessed the paternal instincts of a brick. By all reports, John was a pampered mama’s boy who as far as his mommy was concerned, pissed silver and shit gold. John also wasn’t afraid to play favorites with his children and made it clear that his first child, Mona was the prized child. All children after Mona were seen as an inconvenience to be tolerated and not nurtured. So, to rate John’s personality and decency on a 5 star scale, he’d score ½ star, shouldn’t have been allowed procreate.

Now, I’m not really sure what drew my grandparents away from the frigid Mid-West and all the way to Santa Clara County, California in the days before it became the Silicon Valley. My theory is that it was because there’s only so much polka music a person can take before you completely lose it, and that South Dakota and Minnesota are, freeze your wedding tackle off and lose your nipples to frostbite FUCKING COLD during the winter! In addition to much better weather and the blessed lack of polka music, the job prospects in California at the time were also decent and it was an affordable place to raise a family. Of course, this was decades before the Bay Area became the only place on Earth where it costs a million dollars to purchase an outhouse that’s been converted into a 1-bedroom condo. So within a couple of years of becoming Californians, a son Shepherd was added and a third daughter was on the way.

Now, from what snippets I’ve been able to glean through the years about Grandpa John, it seems that he was a man who’d developed a close friendship with Gambling. Though Gramps loved Gambling and spent every second he could with his expensive friend, he rarely crossed paths with Gambling’s beautiful, but fickle sister, Winning. Now, as much as John loved Gambling and tried to get into Winning’s knickers, he spent most of time (and paycheck) with Gambling’s ugly twin brother, Losing. Predictably, grandpa’s relationship with Gambling and Losing led him to seek out and find shady characters who were willing to let him lose his money and then loan him even more money to lose at a very high interest rate. Now, if the interest rates for these loans weren’t bad enough, the late fees were killer. Of course, it didn’t take long before grandpa was facing his creditor’s rather aggressive form of debt collection. Sadly, as is the case with so many of my family members, grandpa’s priorities were ass backwards. Consequentially, his wife and 3 children, (with another wee bairn on the way) simply couldn’t compete with his passion for pissing away what little money he had at a poker table.

In addition to being a very enthusiastic, but equally bad gambler, grandpa was a bit of a coward. This yellow streak made him a bit squeamish about the way his creditor’s obtained their late fees. So, instead of settling his tab or accepting his late fees like a man, grandpa parked under an overpass, ran a hose from the tailpipe of his car to the driver’s seat, rolled up the window, turned on the ignition, and let carbon-monoxide take him to the place where the loan sharks and thugs wouldn’t be able to find him. I’m sure to his selfish and terrified way of thinking, leaving a widow to raise 3 of his kiddos with one on the way seemed a small price to pay to avoid having his legs broken or being filled with .38 caliber holes by aggressive debt collectors.

So, Amy was left alone to raise her 4 children the best she could. Now, job prospects for single moms with only an eighth-grade education in the 1950s weren’t good, but she managed to keep herself, Mona, Laura, Shepherd, and Carol housed and fed. Unfortunately, this meant that Amy couldn’t be home to nurture her children’s moral development, self-worth, and growing sense of abandonment.

So according to all who knew her as a child, Laura, (mom) was so shy that she’d successfully managed to develop a phantom’s ability to be rarely seen and never heard. I’m told that her shyness and the resulting bullying that went with it would develop into a state of being almost agoraphobic by the time she was in middle school. I’m sure that the physical dumpiness that is a byproduct of prepubescence probably didn’t help. Unfortunately, few pictures of my mom from her childhood survive, but I’ve always kind of pictured her looking like Ichabod Crane in drag. Mom was described as being taller than many of her male classmates, thin, and had a hawkish nose that dominated her pale face.

As with all things, change came about and my mom and her sisters would shake off prepubescence and develop into shapely young ladies. Now, with a dead daddy and a mom who worked from dawn to dusk, the reader can probably guess that my mom, Mona, and Carol would develop a malignant case of daddy issues. How did the daddy issues manifest themselves? Well, male attention be it positive or negative of any kind became an all-encompassing need.

By the time my mom and her sisters reached their teens it was the 1970s, a time of change, war, and free love. Happy to represent the time, the Agate girls gave their love, freely, often, and largely indiscriminately. Of course, this was most advantageous to any male that so much as glanced in their direction. As a result of the Agate girl’s eagerness to please, they would become VERY popular with the male student body of their high school. I’ve often wondered if at some point, they didn’t have their phone number written on each and every door of the boy’s room stalls at Wilcox High School with the polite suggestion, “For a good time call Mona, Laura, and Carol at 408-248-3079.”

Of course, many called, and as promised, a good time was provided to almost all (weed, alcohol, and/or amphetamines and an appropriate back seat being the only requirements). I’ve also wondered if the good time directions inside those boy’s room stalls at Wilcox were ever framed for posterity. After all, such consistent and dedicated service deserves recognition of some sort. McDonalds has the, “Billions and Billions Served” statement beneath their restaurant signs, certainly my mom and aunts deserve to be honored for their attempt at competing with the huge number of customers the golden arches has served. Now don’t worry, I don’t think of my mom and aunts as sluts. I think of them as legends.

Somehow, my Mom, managed to graduate from high school in 1973 both child and sexually transmitted disease free. Mona and Carol, didn’t get past sophomore year without becoming a teen pregnancy statistic? Mona would drop out of high school when she became pregnant (arguably the ultimate sexually transmitted disease) at 15 years old and eventually pursue a full-time career as a heroin addict. Carol, not one to be outdone, would also drop out of high school, with bun baking in her 15-year-old Easy Bake (with emphasis on the “Easy”) oven. A late bloomer, Carol would some 12 years later pursue a degree at the school of hard knocks in being bat guano fucking crazy.

Dad-The Urbans

My Dad, let’s call him Dick because it’s close to his real name and even closer to his true nature, was a military brat who was born in South Carolina, but moved to his parent’s home state of Michigan at an early age. At first glance, there were a few glaring differences between my parent's background. Where the Agate’s were largely uneducated farmers of Irish-German ancestry, the Urbans were more worldly with a smattering of college educated types. In addition, the Urbans had more recently immigrated to the New World from Ireland and England. Sadly, relocating to the New World at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t allow the Urban family to escape the age-old bane of Irish Catholics everywhere, alcohol. In fact, any Urban who didn’t have at least a training wheel case of cirrhosis of the liver by the time they were in their late 20s often had their status as a legitimate Urban questioned.

Now, by all accounts, my paternal grandfather, “Ron” was a man who honored family tradition and as such, became a professional drummer like his father, and also like his father was well on his way to drinking himself into the grave by his early 30s.To hear it tell, Gramps was also a mean drunk and unfortunately for Dick, he made beating his oldest child a favorite pastime.

Ron’s wife, “Dora,” being of the more independent breed of woman wasn’t going to tolerate a drunken and abusive husband. So, Gram divorced Gramps (I’m sure her Catholic parents were just thrilled) and set about raising Dick, his brother and two sisters alone.

Dora, by nature was a bit of a rebel and it only increased as she found her freedom. If divorcing wasn’t a snub to her Irish Catholic upbringing and time in Catholic school, her embracing of militant atheism was an all-out banishment of her parent’s faith. Not done yet, Gram’s rebellion against all her parents held dear continued when she dropped her married name like someone would drop a used tissue found on the floor of a porn theater, went to college, and ensconced herself in the design department of Ford’s light truck division.

It all seems on track for a decent ending, right? This might’ve been the case if Dick wasn’t a violent, budding narcissist, with a deep appreciation for anything that’d get him hammered or stoned out of his gord. It was the late 1960’s so right in the sweet spot of, the “Make Love Not War” movement. Well, Dick proved to share his mom’s rebelliousness and went against the groovy grain. Oh, Dick was totally onboard for the “Make love,” directive and enthusiastically sought to keep little dick wet. He was equally happy to participate in the consumption of any and every illicit substance he could get ahold of. However, the “Not war” part didn’t sit too well, so he improvised and changed the peaceful portion to, “Beat the fuck out of anyone who doesn’t do what I want them to do.”

Well, as it turns out, Dick’s enthusiasm for drugs didn’t go unnoticed by the Ann Arbor authorities and eventually he was caught and charged with possession with intent to distribute. Apparently, the judge trying my dad’s case realized that dad would make for good cannon fodder in Viet Nam, so he was given an ultimatum, join the military of learn about the realities of prison romance. Of course, my dad enlisted. Unfortunately, the judge didn’t direct my dad towards a specific branch of the military, so my dad picked the Navy. The Vietnamese Army, being light on warships posed a minimal threat to our Navy, so my dad would be pretty much out of harm’s way on an aircraft carrier. As strange as it sounds, a judge can be thanked for my parent’s meeting. No wonder why I hate the criminal justice system.

For the record, I honestly don’t know exactly where or even how my parents met. They were divorced by the time I was 2 years old and by the time I was old enough to ask they pretty much had no desire to relive the days immediately prior to my genesis. From what I gather, it was a bar (both blissfully engaging in underage drinking I’m sure) during the winter of 1973. The only reason my Detroit raised dad was in California (a state he hates with a passion) at the time was the Navy had sent him to aircraft technical training school located at NAS Moffett Field in Sunnyvale.

Oh well, I guess the exact where and how doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the fact that the was a disaster of a magnitude comparable to the meeting of the Titanic and iceberg, Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii, or Godzilla and downtown Tokyo.

The long and short of it (in terms of dad’s manhood mom would argue the extremely short of it), my parents’ relationship was a one a 1-night stand that went a couple of months too long. Now, the details here get fuzzy because I was a fetus at the time and my mom wouldn’t remember, but apparently when she found out she was carrying the wee bairn, Shallowgenepool, she decided she wasn’t going to tell Dick. She’d just let him go off to Viet Nam and raise lil’ bastard me by herself. I guess she figured a guy that was going off to war and who wanted to be stoned all the time probably had a short life expectancy. She was probably right. I’m guessing that my dad’s homeostatic state of being perma-baked plus proximity to live munitions equaled Dick coming home in tiny little pieces.

Well, somehow ol’ Dick figured out mom was in the family way and lacking any common sense went and said something, to THE WRONG PEOPLE! Now, by the wrong people, I mean his very Irish-Catholic maternal grandparents. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about my Great-Móraí and Great-Granda, but what I do know is that my 4-foot 9 inch Great-Móraí wasn’t a force of nature, nature was a force of her and a person crossed her at their own peril. When she wasn’t being a baker of scones and committed member of her neighborhood, my Great-Móraí could be found walking to and from mass every day as would be her habit well into her 80s. Now, if Great-Móraí had one flaw, it was that she had a very established Napoleon complex. However, unlike Napoléon, she would’ve succeeded in the invasion of Russia because from what I have come to understand, compared to Great-Móraí, Napoleon was a wuss. So, upon hearing the news that her first great-grandchild was on the way my Great-Grandma did what any Irish-Catholic grandma would do. She told my dad to marry my mom because no wee grandchild of hers was gun’ be born out’n the holy sacrament of wedlock!

Of course, my mom and dad could’ve resisted Great-Móraí’s Irish-Catholic version of a shotgun wedding. In fact, most who knew my parents probably expected rebellion because, it was widely known that my dad had a reputation for being resistant to any form of authority. However, my dad was justifiably TERRIFIED of my Great-Morai, so a ring was bought, a wedding dress was let out to accommodate the little bump that was becoming wee little fetus me, and two people who would eventually come to hate each other so much they had to live on opposite sides of the continent from each other got hitched.

So, Uncle Sam didn’t allow for much of a honeymoon and not too long after the nuptials, my dad was headed to the South China Sea to be a part of the Viet Nam war’s last few months. This was probably for the best because not only does absence make the heart grow fonder, but it also prevents two people who’re about as compatible as battery acid and a rectal exam from getting to know each other better, thus preventing an even earlier marriage implosion.

ShallowGenepool’s Comes Into the World

Apparently, my mom’s pregnancy was a rough one. She struggled with high blood pressure which didn’t respond to the medication the doctor prescribed. Then again, mom was also advised to stop smoking too, but her relationship with Benson & Hedges and its smooth nicotine flavor was an old one and my mom was loathe to see any relationship end. This inability to end any relationship, no matter how unhealthy, would eventually become a source of great suffering for yours truly, but I digress. Anyway, if smoking harmed lil’ old me in-utero, my mom figured that she was young, and she could always have another kid, right? So, she went against doctor’s orders a bit. Besides, at least she’d quit doing drugs as soon as she found out she was pregnant (except weed, weed doesn’t count). Unfortunately for fetal me, the pregnancy discovery occurred just a few days after my mom dropped acid at an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert with my dad. Side note: I think the LSD exposure when I was just a wee blob of cells explains why I occasionally hear colors, taste sounds, and see smells.

Despite the difficulties, including a couple of trips to the hospital because her persistent high blood pressure caused her to pass out, my mom carried me to term. So, at 4:15 am on Thursday, August 1, 1974 within the OB/GYN wing of a military hospital in Mountain View (the hospital no longer exists) Shallowgenepool entered the world kicking and screaming. I’m told that the delivery was rough and the doctors were afraid they’d lose one or both of us. I’m really not sure if it was a good or a bad thing, but my dad couldn’t be present. At that time of my birth he was in South East Asia because there were peasants to bomb and bills to pay. I was named after him while he was away. Everybody sing!

….AND THE CATS AND THE CRADDLE AND THE SILVER SPOON……

Now, to most people being born on the first day of a month just meant that it’d be an easier birthday for others to remember. However, to a poor kid in the 1980’s the first day of the month was the one day where you might get a Happy Meal for dinner instead of grilled government cheese sandwiches and store brand tomato soup. This momentary access to fast food happened because the first day of the month was the day where welfare benefits and food stamps were distributed to the poor who relied on welfare for survival (the 15th was another day but for food stamps only if I remember right). It was the one day where the chance of eating was better than any other time and if the electricity had been turned off before the first of the month, it could be turned back on.

So, I’ve always looked at the day of my birth as a portent of things to come. It was as if the universe said:

“Unto the world is delivered a child who’ll travail on the dole all his young days. His raiment shalt be the best Goodwill renders unto them on their, 'Dollar a Bag Days.' He will partake of government cheese and 5 the gallon paint can of peanut butter that Ceasar giveth unto the poor. His sicknesses will go without care for Nyquil doth cost much and woe unto him who taketh cigarette money to use it for cold medicine. Let his father depart from him and duck court ordered child support to take up the mantle of Dead Beat Dad.”

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