The
Curse of Frankenstein
by
Steven Hunley
In fifty-seven when I was ten my ‘other’ family took
us to the drive-in movie and we saw the first color Frankenstein movie. I say
‘other’ because I had two families at the time. Long before I was old enough to
remember, I had been one of Solomon’s babies, divided up. I lived with one set of parents and on
alternate weekends, visited the ‘other’.
It was a bad setup, and if I’d had my way, the judge
in all his wisdom, should have been shot or forced to read 1 Kings 3:16-28 ,
write it on the board, and made to wear pink, a much less serious color than
his usual somber robes, to mark his twisted sense of humor.
The effect was that I felt comfortable with one set
of parents and not with the ‘other’. As far as I was concerned, one knew me and
the other one didn’t. While with the
‘other’ I either felt I was on display, or worse, separated or cut off. After
I’d gone to college and learned five years of English lit and sophistication I
referred to it as the Sylvia Path or ‘bell-jar’ effect.
From two to eighteen I was ‘the boy with two lives’
and didn’t much care for one of them. After eighteen, I abandoned the ‘other’
one, and by twenty-two the set I loved and lived with had abandoned me. My
mother took the lifeboat, or I should say deathboat, of Cancer, and in her way
steered clear of me, and my dad jumped on the leaky boat of cerebral hemorrhage
for his bloody way out, leaving me, a wreck of unconsciousness, slowly
sinking inch by inch into the depths of forgetfulness as icy and numbing as the
North Atlantic.
I mean to say that fortunately or unfortunately, by
that time I’d discovered Valium, and as a result, don’t remember one second of
either of their funerals. I’ve never done public death well. I’ve never taken
notes and memorized what polite thing to say, or how to feel. You’re never much
good at consoling, when you’re an expert at loss. You’re just not made of the
right material.
I should have scrounged a dog-eared a set of Cliff’s
notes on death and dying, or boned up on Elizabeth Kubler Ross, but it’s too
late, and goodbye to all that for now.
©Steven Hunley 2013
To be continued….
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