Introduction
The first person I ever killed was my own mother. I did it on the day I was born. You could say I came out a mean son of a bitch, but I never knew my mother so I have no idea if she was a bitch or not. The way Daddy carried on though, you could tell she must have been something special.
I guess it's fair to say that he hated me from day one. And I guess it's fair to say I didn't much like him either. He raised me anyhow. Though he wasn't very nice about it. Though, back then, most fathers weren't very nice. It just wasn't how they did things. I was born in 1933, which was about the worst year a person could have been born. Everybody was poor including Daddy and everybody was pissed, also including Daddy.
Daddy was a cotton farmer. That pissed him off too. In '37, the bank took his farm. That really pissed him off. By '41 the only place he could find work was the United States Army. So, at the age of 31, he enlisted and left me live to with his sister in Liberty, Missouri, ninety or so miles north of the family farm.
He died in 1943. Unlike a lot of proud sons, I never looked up the battle that took my soldier Daddy and I never told stories of how brave he was. He never wrote me one letter and I guess I never forgave him for that.
But boo hoo and cry your damn eyes out, right? Who gives a good damn about my dead father? I sure don't and the rest of his kin are all dead or never knew him. So no one's left to care.
In prison, where I spent 23 years of my life, they'd let you talk to a shrink sometimes. It was nice to have someone new to talk to but the shrinks would always ask me about my daddy.
I always wanted to talk about stock car racing though. I missed Junior Johnson. Shrinks don't care much for stock car racing and I, in turn, never cared much for shrinks. Though I can't say for sure that it was because of the car racing. But I am sure it played a part in me hating them head shrinkers.
Anyway, I ain't writing this book to complain a whole bunch about jail or about my daddy but the shrinks said that people in jail always got something in common and that the same can be said for people with dead mommies and daddies.
So maybe that's why I was so mean so much of my life.
I don't want you to feel sorry for me because that ain't why I'm writing this either. I imagine my reasons for writing this here will become plain in a few pages but as for right now, I'm just gonna say that life is hard with no mommy and a mean daddy but it's even harder with no mommy and no daddy.
Not that I'm making excuses.
"Never make excuses for anything you do in this world. If you screw up, you fix it; if you can't fix it, you ask for forgiveness; if there ain't no forgiveness then I'll see you in hell."
My daddy told me that. I sure look forward to seeing him when my time comes.
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