DixyCrat by DixyCrat
My dad's name is DixyCrat(56 years old), my name is DixyCrat(28yo), my son is named DixyCrat(1).
(3)
My oldest memory is being stuck in a cold room, unable to get out or get anyone to listen, beating my head bloody red against brown wood paneling in hopes of being released by my dad. My next memory is of lying on a hill, about three years old, looking at the cheerleaders practicing on a brown field. My near pubescent friend told me he liked looking at them. He told me to pull down my pants and play with myself. It didn't seem odd to me, I was trained to be subordinate; it was enjoyable.
Gean Crat was an abusive man, a drunk and a lecher. After having her third child in three years Loretta, my nana, left my grandpa and brought my father and his two younger brothers with her. When my dad was about three years old, Nana had a boyfriend. He didn’t drink and treated her well. He presented the Good News to a three year old DixyCrat and he and his two year old brother both accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior. I wonder, of course, what a three year old has to repent of.
My third oldest memory is of a round red building in a lightly wooded piece of land where I played with the same boy. I like to think I turned him down, but I also remember leaving with tears in my eyes, my pants unbuttoned, lying to my uncle Larry about why they were unbuttoned and not playing with that boy again.
The human mind is astounding. It is said that when someone comes to the Lord the Holy Spirit, the part of God that Jesus left behind to guide people, comes to dwell within that person. My dad remembers this occurring, like a tongue of flame mingling with his essence. His religion was built on a conception of my two favorite denominations that no scholar would find rational. He took the once-saved-always-saved teaching of the Baptists and used it as license. He took the “You will be filled with the Holy Spirit if you are saved” from the Pentecostals and used his experience of speaking in tongues to take daily respite in the encouraging fact that he was once saved.
Sometimes I think the boy offered a sexual act between us after another self-stimulation session, I turned him down, went away, and later my mother found brown on my underwear because I was too young to wipe my butt well. Other times reflect on this and think the evidence supports my having been unwontedly penetrated. I think that it may have been this encounter that has driven me to a lifelong desire to repress my hedonistic tendencies. I think that it was this incident that lead to my constantly poor rectal hygiene as a child: I never liked having anything near my anus. I hated the constant stink of tobacco and marijuana on my clothes as I grew up, even if it did cover up the skid mark scent.
As my dad aged, the oldest of three brothers learned to lead. They were poor and hungry and protective ends often justified violent means. He would send his brothers to steal bits of food from the local merchants, leaving his brothers to get in trouble if caught. He would rise victorious in fights, even when all three would gang up on him, but would only beat them down as much as was needed to maintain subordination. The Holy Spirit resided in him, but compromises are part of the human condition. “Man was not made for the law, but law for man”, my dad often quoted the Bible sans context.
(7)
My nana had no husband when my dad was seven. She had driven away the man that led my dad to Christ with her drinking and suicidal tendencies. A hillbilly woman, Loretta knew to leave her high school class when after moving to Chicago and a girl with “shit brown” skin was allowed into the class. That she was given to strong drink and friendly conversation, a combination that made her a talented life-long bartender, though my dad reports she would “get off’a work, stinking like she was bathed in gasoline, vomit and set on fire”
My dad entered the trailer drunk and red faced. He had not found a job since we had moved to South Texas a year before. I think when his paycheck bounced at his previous job as an electrical engineer he fell into a deep depression. The trailer was, as was every place we lived, cluttered with twice worn clothing, brown cigarette butts and the sweat aroma of two days worth of vegetable decay and putrid meat left to stand on the dining room table. My newly minted little brother was in the play pen and at seven I was left to tend to him and my five year old brother. Our friend from down the block was visiting and playing with my brother Daniel in the back room.
With no one to look after her children while she worked, Loretta would leave the three of them in the car. It would be dangerous if they got out, so she modified their behavior as necessary to feel assured of their subordination. The time he spent sitting under the brown ‘bar’ light was miserable. The misery came in two parts. First, for a child of seven, eight hours is the same percent of his life as 24hours is to a 21 year old. But more importantly, he was miserable because Loretta was a ‘lonely’ young woman in need of money and to anticipate her new ‘boyfriend’ that evening was to anticipate potential evisceration.
"What the fuck is going on? Is someone else here...", my dad said. I explained that Mom had gone to work and that I had a friend in the back playing with Daniel. "What's he doing, sucking his cock?" I was taken aback, I had not considered the idea and in retrospect I doubt it; despite this, my friend was ordered to leave immediately. "What the fuck is this, a dime in Matthew's play pen! He could have fucking choked to death on this, how the fuck did this get in there!"
Dark brown shades over a table lamp, rattan furniture and two out of three of Loretta’s ‘boyfriends’ sitting on the couch. My dad was the oldest; he took it when it came so he could protect his two younger brothers. He told me that he wished these guys would leave them and his mother alone. In the story he recounted to me, while he was drunk and I was seven, Loretta was in the bedroom with one boyfriend when little Dixy was forced to perform oral sex on the other men.
I don't remember all of what happened after that. I know that Daniel and I took it about the same. I had been spanked before, but this was something different. My shirt was torn off of me and as I was beaten the belt whipped around my back and scored my belly. The impact threw me to the ground. Again I was whipped, across the back and around to my front. Later I remember I could see that the blood drawn from my stomach had turned the flesh first moist red and then crisp brown; It was then, despite my young age, that I decided to put an end to the influence of intoxicants in my family's life. From then on I would sometimes clandestinely dump beer or throw away cigarettes. I would later find out that my mother knew of these behaviors, but felt shamed by them and never told father. When my mom found out about the beating she told us to keep our shirts tucked in and not to tell anyone, I wanted to be a good boy and do what my mom told me to, so I never did.
(18)
In my eighteenth year of life, we had moved from cinder block government subsidized housing to our new home. It was a good estate, dark red bricks interspersed with brown, laid out west to east there was the kitchen, family room, living room, bathroom, two bedrooms and then the master bedroom. My dad was diagnosed as terminally ill and the social security disability office had come through with back-payments after years of lawsuits. They paid a lump-sum of $80,000. With part of it my dad fulfilled the marital promise of buying a home that he had made about the time I was conceived some 18 years earlier.
Since moving to our new home things had not gone as well as I might have hoped. Burdened with a great deal of money my parents went from partying once every few months to partying every day. Partying, as I learned when I was 12, is what coke addicts call it when they do their drugs. From that time forward I had known my job was to take care of my younger brothers.
A shit kicker is a young good ol' boy. My dad reports that at the age of 18 he "wasn't some stupid chicken foot warring, pot smoking hippy". He was a shit kicker, a deep thinking, ornery cowboy. "Those Commie pink-o faggots had one good point" he said "they didn't believe in treating people different just because of their skin... I fucking hate racism". Until the age of 12 he grew up in west Helena Arkansas, the most racist city in the nation then and today. "Sure I drank beer, but I never smoked, and I sure as hell didn't do any of that hippy bullshit". After having moved to South Texas he would sometimes get drunk and bring his brothers across the border to Mexico.
My 12 year old brother was failing scholastically, picked on because he stunk and never had clean clothing. My autistic 8 year old brother seemed not to mind the cleanliness of the house, until a pipe that started leaking behind a wall in the kitchen was never attended to. Eventually it soaked the family room floor and kept him from playing Nintendo. My 5 year old brother took to this all in stride, to a 5 year old, almost everything is normal. ‘This all’ ignores the time he started crying uncontrollably, in a way I would consider more an adult nervous breakdown than a tantrum, when he picked up a cup he thought had Kool-aid, took a drink, only to find it full of roaches.
The maggots that grew in the water stagnating in the kitchen had driven my parents to cook in their bedroom using an electric griddle. I don't remember when the roaches went from night-creatures to festering in the corners of our walls. But I do remember thinking that, after a time, you get used to smashing the little brown bugs with your hands. It was comical, too, to watch the cute brown creatures paratroop from my parents ceiling onto the hot plate.
Across the Mexican border is a place called Boys’ Town. This is not the refuge for wayward boys you may have seen in a movie starring Spencer Tracey. It is a collection of inexpensive brown prostitutes that cater to a debauched clientele. I have a hard time reporting on what I have heard, but it suffices to say that the place is more disturbing than anything I've written here. This is where, just after Roy's 16th year of life had ended, my dad brought his second brother to get his ‘cherry popped’. Despite his wrongheaded notions, my dad has always done his best to look after his family.
As the roaches festered I understood that my dad had a drug problem; I begged him to stop. I knew that what little money I made was to be given to 'help the family'. A drug-addict will spend bill money on drugs so he can plead poverty when the bills role around. I knew that my youngest brother had come from a drug-induced orgy from years past, which was of course why he had brown skin, eyes, and hair, unlike the rest of us. But these disparate bits of information, even the squalor that I lived in, did not ring in my mind as something that demanded intervention. That is, not until my dad showed me the flesh of his thigh, where much had been eaten away by cockroaches, leaving brown scabbed over sores.
When Loretta's drunkenness and mean temper became too much for her second husband, he divorced her. A lifetime of guilt, debauchery and underlying depression brought her to the brink. Just a few months previous my 17 year old dad had talked things over with his mom and she had agreed that the suicide attempts were behind them. But here he was again, 18 years old, with his mother, a liar, doped up on downers and booze laying passed out in a fetid Rorschach test of bright red blood and dark red feces. He got her to the hospital in time to save her, but it was too late for him. The austere realization dwelled in his mind that he was failing to protect his family and failing to do God’s Will. Something had to be done.
In the moment I processed my dad's moist red and crisp browned flesh I knew that no child should live like this. I thought to myself, "There are state agencies that can fix this problem". I was impelled by both my conscience and Christ himself dwelling in me to do something. But that was inconvenient and despite my faithful lip service, I was much less subordinate to Christ than I was to my fear. Later that day, angry with myself, I started an argument with my dad. I told him that if he did not fix the living conditions in the house I was going to call the police. “Bullshit” he knew me.
Still angry I told him I needed to go to the store so as to feed the kids. The red key ring was buried under the rubble of slovenliness on his brown bedside table. While I was bending over to grab it the crazy old man doused me with the contents of a tacky liquid and cigarette butt filled crystal ashtray. The brown and black grunge had an effervescent quality that was more sharp than the general scent the mold, maggot and roach infested house was emanating. I felt rage for myriad reasons and I knew I was big and strong now; I moved to kill the druggy son of a bitch, he noticed this and stood on his bed. I lunged for his feet. He on hit me on the back of the head with the weighty ashtray. I lost consciousness. I ultimately realized I could do nothing to help protect my family unless I became a drug free refuge for them. So I moved out.
(21)
In 1976, sitting off the coast of Vladivostok the red headed 21 year old DixyCrat sat at the fire control technician’s station with his hand on the end of the world and revenge in his heart. The central military port for the Russian navy in the Pacific, Vladivostok, had a population of over five hundred thousand civilians. It didn’t seem that targeting missiles, each with multiple nuclear warheads, on civilians was a moral dilemma for the top brass. Particularly so given the three not targeted at the Russians, just in case they took over one of our cities. Drills are common on a nuclear fast attack sub. Drill, drill, drill was the motto, most likely so that, when the time came to end the world, those aboard would be subordinate and treat it like little more than another drill.
Wondering why my dad had chosen drugs over me I resolved to learn firsthand about what was so great. My first experience taking drugs was taking Psilocybin mushrooms at 21. I had been curious about the effects of hallucinogens sense my dad told me of having been a ‘head’. The dried brown and blue mushrooms smelled wretched as I slowly masticated it. One hour in I was disturbed that nothing had happened yet. At two hours in I thought my $80 was ripped off. At three hours in I could not stop laughing, lamps can be very funny. After that, I realized that hallucinogens are not about seeing funny hallucinations; they are about the change they create in your perspective.
When a man crosses over the equator for the first time aboard a submarine there is hazing ritual that takes place. The much of the feces and food waste from the ship is dumped out and the nascent sailors are forced to crawl naked through the muck. My dad had been put through this only a few weeks after being onboard. After this he was given his ‘dolphins’ a pin indicating his place as a submariner. I only wish this was all being a submariner had given him.
My friend Bryan was sober, to help see me through the trip. I had explained to him my total understanding of everything, such as the emotional state of the individual that decided to make lighters red. Bryan decided that we should drive through the city. With the top down we sat in his Mustang and I realized that the sky was blue. For many years I had devoted my mind and affect to the scientific and rational understanding of things; the blue sky had always been emotionally obscured by the physics behind the color shift. Now, though, with the demonic voice of Dave Mustaine speaking directly to me through the radio, I could see the sky was blue, beautiful and that was all I needed. I wish my future drug experiences were so positive.
My dad was never one for smoking, until one day someone stuck a cigarette in his mouth, he puffed, and was instantly addicted. He continued on, only smoking and drinking, until one day he was given some marijuana. He thought, at first, it was Turkish tobacco, very harsh. When he was told what it was he said “I don’t see what you guys are talking about” then he stood up. He realized that it wasn’t so bad and concluded that the change in cognitive perspective was worth exploration.
My next drug experience was with MDMA, generally called ‘exstasy’. Unlike many, I didn't take it for the body high, the feeling of physical euphoria approximating an orgasm lasting about three hours. I took it because I had read that it was helpful for people with post traumatic stress in trying to confront and deal with their issues. It made me feel free to tell my friends about the time I spent in the roach house and the troubles I had faced growing up. The problem is that the massive release of serotonin leads to oxidization of the serotonin emitters. Part of my brain that creates a feeling of happiness has died, and, after having “rolled” on exstasy, I will never again be able to feel as happy as I did before.
My dad sat attentive as the first part of the drill came down: target the Red’s city. All but three of the nuclear weapons targeted the sea port, barracks and church. The second part of the drill came down: flood the tubes. This was not common during a nuclear launch drill, but all the same ‘orders were followed’. The third order came down, “red day seven”. The chief of the boat read aloud, this was not a drill. The captain of the boat and first officer retrieved their launch keys. “red day seven”, the chief read the second confirmation, the officers put their keys into the launch panel and turned them. “Red day seven” the final confirmation code was read out loud; in disbelief the officers re-read the code themselves. On their order my dad opened the launch tubes and brought the knife switch to half way.
In my post-role depression, the aftermath of taking exstasy, I did something that lacked wisdom. I obtained some peyote, cut the little white and brown tuffs from the cactus and consumed battery acid flavored, hard-gelatin flesh. After the mescaline took effect I started to lose contact with reality. Depressed and alone I ran my chef's knife across my wrists, not enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt. After that I looked in the mirror and smiled. A few seconds later the mirror image smiled back, with a grin so large it could not come from a human. I ran from what I knew was a demon and cowered under my living room table for hours.
As the ginger man sat there, he wondered "Am I going to send so many women and children to hell?" He wasn't sure if he was willing to move his hand a few inches to the left and end the world. He was an incredibly smart man, only the brightest can make it through nuclear sub training school and only the best of those are given the job of fire control technician. He reasoned within himself that we would never launch first. If we were launching then it was only because they had tested the will of the US to respond. “Those sons of bitches had already killed our mothers and brothers”. His hand sweaty, he held tight on the lever arm, preparing for the final command, he considered that this may be the most un-christian thing any human could do. “Fuck that... fire!” he thought, and the fire of hell itself would be brought to these godless bastards. Just then, the order came down, “abort abort abort”; three hands were on the launch switch in an instant and slowly the lever was put back into pre-launch position. My dad was often given to drugs after his brush with the end of the world.
The last time I confused my mind with substances, I did so with a second consumption of peyote. According to the conversation I had with the fabric of reality during that trip, I am not supposed to tell anyone what I learned; I am also never to take such substances again. For months afterwards, when I would see a spot on the wall move I would pray it was a roach. For nearly a year after my last trip my mind was fried and I had a hard time interacting with humans, I was convinced I had been forsaken for my sin.
(23)
My dad came to consider his intoxicant usage as a matter not of being a hippy, but being a ‘head’. His intent in taking hallucinogens was to gain insight into the mind, and gain greater insight into reality. He took some LSD at the age of twenty three. The LSD was supposed to make ‘time go backwards’. In reality he had a trip that lasted over eighteen hours and for months afterwards every square inch of his body felt asthough cut with an X-Acto knife.
At about twenty three I lied about the spelling of my name. I had been pulled over by a young Hispanic officer for a minor traffic violation. Previous to this I knew of a warrant for my arrest. The warrant was not due to my own wrong doing but rather my father’s writing of bad checks. Having a rather unique Anglo name in a highly Hispanic society I was afraid that I might not be able to convince the police that I was not the ‘DixyCrat’ they were looking for.
“What is your name” the officer said, I replied “dIxy crAt”. He ran the name, came back with nothing, “thank God for my grandma’s illiteracy!” I thought, but the officer had to ask: “Is this how you spell your name”, to which my friend hungry Frank replied “OH, no that’s not how you spell it is it?” and proceeded to spell it properly. Shortly thereafter, sitting behind a plexiglass panel, hands choked for blood, I prayed. “Good Lord, I know I’m going to jail, but if you could please just make Frank come with me”. A few moments later Frank was arrested as well, he too has a dad with the same name and likes the convenience of free money afforded by check writing.
Suffering the slices of skin, one square rubbing against another, he did the only rational thing possible, he tried to end the pain. Instead of killing himself, my dad killed the pain with drugs. After much experimentation he found that dissociatives were the only cure for the pain. Taking such substances has two distinct outcomes. First, the psyche, separated from the body, the mind can swim in the clouds of potential reality free of the concerns of the flesh. Much as the king of the moon may, from time to time, do. At the same time, though, the prefrontal cortex suffers lacerations. The part of the brain that allows for empathy is scored, leaving behind a human-creature lacking sensitivity to others.
As I entered jail a sense of peace fell over me. I realized that I had little control over my reality and that I was best off simply accepting what was happening. Twenty four hours after having been arrested I was final processed into my county jail pod. Twenty seven other persons were in there with me. Due to transfer’s ad inopportune moments, I had not eaten in the past day. When the body fasts two things occur. First, time slows, every moment and everything becomes important. Second, the body eats at its reserves, releasing toxins that have built up over the years. For me, the most recent toxins to have built up consisted of mescaline and MDMA.
That night, as I lay in my bunk, I felt the presence of God on me. The love of everyone and everything was hovering over me, pressing down like a cat stealing the breath from an infant. As I praised God more and more eventually I could take no more and begged the Lord to share this with everyone and in that instant the pressure left me. I was then given an option.
From time to time my dad would go ‘partying’ off base and return late. Santiago is a beautiful land with a wonderful climate and a very high security base. As his drug use went on he became more brazen. Eventually my dad lost his position on a submarine after an MP found a stash of marijuana on the dashboard of his car. Soon thereafter he met my mother, chose not to reenlist, but instead to move in with her family.
There is a set of bible verses that tells the story of a man that escapes from jail. Despite the death-penalty for the guards if the man escapes, he simply walks out of the jail. I was given the chance to leave my captivity. As the intersession into reality came upon me, I was only able to process the encounter in the abstract. Like a flow of water made of light, coming from a central source, reality is the blossom fed by this light. The angel offered to illuminate a reality in which I was freed, but said I would grow more if I chose to stay in my situation. I chose to stay. Half an hour later someone came to retrieve me. I was told I had been released but that I had paper work to fill out. As I filled out the paper work they found yet another weren’t for my dad’s arrest and, again, I was returned to my pod. I had an amazing time, praising God for every bight of food made each mouth full of sandy waffle taste better than any food I had ever eaten.
(27)
I am in my mother’s womb, as is my son in his mother’s womb. We have been gestating for approximately nine months. It has been a warm and secure time for the both of us. When music was played we would both dance in utero. We enjoy our time swimming about in a warm bath of amniotic fluid. As the walls of our world start crushing in on us we fight this eviction into the unknown with everything we have.
Late in October, both at the age of 27, my dad and I arrived at the hospital. He and I rushed our respective wives in and demanded that we not be separated from our wives, despite the insistence of the nurses. Our first child was on the way and we were not going to miss a moment of it. Over fifteen hours later we both were still waiting, wishing our wives didn't have to suffer as they did, hoping for this all to end with our wife safe and new child. Some nine months earlier we and our wives had decided that, since we were going to be married in about three months anyway, we could get an early start on the big family we wanted.
The second stage of labor starts; soon the doctors notice that there is something wrong. The labor is taking longer than it should. Our heart rate is dropping; it is too late for a c-section. The doctors cut an episiotomy. Bright red blood and dark brown feces runs across our emerging heads, wiped away quickly by clean soap scented rags. The doctor rotates us and soon, without further complication, start to emerge from our mother's womb.
There, with our sons in our arms, we looked at the life my dad and I had just witnessed enter biological autonomy. We felt a love that goes beyond my wordsmithing abilities. We had the realization that, no matter what we had suffered, no matter the trauma created by our parents, no matter how hard life had been for us, our parents must have loved us just the same as we loved our sons right then. We resolved that every bit of our being, every bit of the love we had in our hearts, was going to be focused on this child. Our parents had done their human best and failed, but for this DixyCrat we were going to be different; we were going to do everything in our power to give this little one the life that we wish our own parents had been able to give us.
"Come at me BRO"
