Why Your Boyhood Pain Never Works out the Way You Plan

I’ll never forget the event that lead to my eventual disappearance.  I came home from my math tutor and found my hamster caught in a glue trap in the bathroom behind the toilet. He was a big fluffy hamster, his fur was all matted down into the glue.  He had been suffering from wet tail for some time so he was kind of greasy. My dad said he got out of his cage and somehow found himself in the glue trap. We never had a problem with mice or had glue traps before.  My dad always hated that hamster.  I held in my tears when he put him outside in the snow and said a cat will come by and eat his shrieking corpse and it would get the cleanest death a filthy rodent could ever hope for.

I ran away from home that spring and lived with the neighbor’s cousins in Wisconsin.  I probably could have run away to the corner because they never looked for me.  I only returned home once to see if my baby brother was still alive. He would have been 8 years old.  I didn’t even know what they named him.  I came to find my father had been replaced by a long haired drug addled mystical hippy wearing red running shorts and a couple of nipples.   The baby was now a boy named Fritzy, and my mother was a very large obese shadow of her former self.  I found out that my mother thought my father had killed me which is why she never bothered looking for me.  She asked me to pick her up some cigarettes and a bottle of orange Gatorade.  That was the last time she would see me and that was the last time I would allow anyone to call me Reggie McGee. I bought her cigarettes and Gatorade,  I smoked those cigarettes all the way to the Canadian border.  I pissed in that empty gatorade bottle and tossed it out the window with my past

Photo by Ninithedreamer