Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess

Through the strangeness, the violence, the sex, I retain a weirdly positive attitude most of the time, undoubtedly rooted in fierce, if rather demented, denial. This is disastrously exacerbated by the whole Oedipal-Inner-Wacko experience of learning Mom is mine alone. Never mind the kidnapping Dad who keeps me from her most of the time. In my longing for her I concoct a fantasy that she has no connection with my brothers or my father. She is mine alone. I go back to these two words, mine alone, like a mantra as I rock back and forth. My expectations of the world are forever warped during the summer I am nine, in Texas, when I find out she is, as a matter of literal fact, mine, alone, when I learn of the other mother, the one in the loony bin that my brothers must now call their own. It's mind blowing and dangerous. It is, after all, the event that starts this saga… The event that leads inevitably to the bumping off of my Inner Child.

The power of this Revelation isn’t just about showing me that my deepest desires can actually come true, that Mom can be mine as I wish. No, this breathtaking fulfillment of my unspoken dreams infuses me with expectations of other miracles. Maybe I can escape my father too.

After discovering my personal connection to the magical side of the universe I begin to hope my father Adam will just go away.

Before Cairo, when I am about four, someone in New Mexico anonymously tries to shoot him through the sliding glass door leading to the backyard, leaving a bullet hole in a painting. The bullet misses his head, but just by inches. Magic. He might even be taken away. We never know who shoots at him. I have a vague memory of being told it has something to do with the C.I.A. but I don't think he is important enough for that. Not everything is a cloak and dagger story. Not everything is epic. I would love it if it is just that Adam is sleeping with someone else's wife and the guy gets drunk and comes after him, but that isn't the kind of life we live. Motives are never that clear.

He is a near-victim of a bullet in New Mexico several years before the universe drops the ownership of my mother into my lap. I vow the magic will work again. Once I am free of him I will work on my next secret wish - to become a fairy princess. But that's another story.