It’s not the way I started out. There was every good reason that I might have grown up Mr. Anybody with a regular job, wife and three kids. From the moment my mother spewed me out (February 4, 1948) I was the world’s biggest goody-goody. Mr. Square. Straight and narrow. I led the most unsophisticated life in the world.
I was born Vincent Damon Furnier in a hospital they call the “Butcher’s Palace” in Detroit and I was lucky I made it out of there because a lot of people didn’t. They didn’t do such a bad job on me, except that I was born with eczema (which means I looked like a two-day-old pizza stepped on by football cleats), and infantile asthma. The asthma was hereditary, but I think the eczema was a sign, like the mark of Cain. My dad, Ether Moroni Furnier (a Mormon name), also had asthma. The Furniers brought these bad tubes with them all the way from France, where in some distant way I was related to General Lafayette (the French will all be delighted to know.)
My grandfather, Thurmond, and his wife, Birdie May, lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Thurmond was a telegraph operator for the railroad in his spare time. In his full time he was a minister and president of the Church of Jesus Christ, which he presided over for sixty-three years until his death in 1974. My dad had two older brothers, Lonson, and Vincent, affectionately known to the Detroit bar circuit as Lefty and Jocko, who were dedicated church members until they were teenagers. Then they bolted, went into the “real world” and made Thurmond angry as hell at them. By the time my dad was a teenager he was out of it, too.
My mother, Ella, was from Tennessee, from a family of hillbillies named McCart who were one-quarter full-blooded Sioux Indians. Her mother died when she was twelve years old, and she turned to the Pentacostal church for solace. But when it came time to go up to the alter and “speak in tongues” the spirit never came to her. It was a form of religious impotency, I guess. She met my dad in Detroit at the end of the war. My older sister Nickie was born in 1946, named after the man who introduced my parents. I was named after Uncle Vince and Damon Runyon.
The year I was born my parents scraped together a little money and rushed me off to Los Angeles where the weather would be better for asthma, but before I was a year old the earthquakes and Republicans sent us scurrying back to Detroit for cover. I was able to stick it out for two winters in Detroit before my bronchial tubes started to go and when I was three years old we went off again, this time to Phoenix.
Phoenix was just a little tourist town at the time. My dad always said that if you went there with any money it was your fault and if you left there with any money it was their fault. They sent us home penniless after a year or so, and we braved it out in Detroit again for five years.
Havenhurst Elementary School was a drag. Mrs. Hainey, my fifth grade teacher, tried to teach me how to write longhand and crippled two of my fingers permanently. I also had an aunt who taught in Havenhurst named Verdie McCart, but she was killed by her son, Howard the Ax Murderer. They found her one day with an ax down the middle of her skull and Howard still standing there watching her rot. Verdie also had a grandson my age who I played with. He made his dog deaf by screaming dirty words in its ears.
I fell in love for the first time in the third grade with a girl named Karen Love, and I sent her a love letter that said, “I know you’re not the most beautiful girl in the world and I’m the best you can do.”
We were poor. My dad could never make ends meet. He took any kind of work he could get, driving a cab or selling used cars. He was a terrible used-car salesman, because he couldn’t lie. He’d always to the customer just what was wrong with the car and how far back the odometer had been turned. One month he made four hundred dollars and we celebrated for a week. When I was eight years old got one Christmas gift, an eight-dollar tan sweater. I remember always sitting in the back seat of a turquoise Plymouth from 1952 only because they were demonstrators and we could buy them real cheap. They all smelled like the fleabag in Toledo.
We were content, I guess, but far from happy. We were floundering, and even as little kids my sister Nickie and I felt it. Life was grating, like the lubricant missing to make things smoother. I knew something was wrong because my parents fought constantly, and I knew the insensity of their arguements was caused by something much deeper than the lamp I had broken of the size of my father’s paychecks.
My dad started drinking then, not that he was an alcoholic, or my sister and I were even aware of it until he told us many years later. But he needed to “have a little glow on” to help meet people in the used-car lot and deal with problems. He felt his life was slipping, that everything around him was a little out of control. So he kept a flask inside his jacket pocket, and when no one was looking he snuck into the men’s room and would take a belt to steady his nerves.
I began to get mischievous around that time. My relationship with Nickie couldn’t have been more cutthroat. Never was there a brother who was as inventive and intent on torturing a sister. I’d sneak into my mother’s room and steal a dollar from her purse, spend half of it and put the change in Nickie’s drawer. Nickie always got the blame and they would punish her by making her stand by the back door, watching me taunt her in the back yard until one day in a fit of frustration she kicked through the glass panels. I locked myself in car trunks, and once when I was left was a neighbor, I crawled into her woodshed and terrorized her with knives until my mother came and hauled me away.
By the time I was nine years old we were really having a rough time of it. My father didn’t know what he wanted to do. The last five years had been torture for him and my mother. It always seemed like he was behind the eight ball, weighted down with one problem after another. His nipping at the bottle worried him. His brother Lonson would call each week from Los Angeles and beg us to come out there. My father had been trained as a design draftsman in the Navy, and Lonson was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where there was a job available for him. Lonson had even rejoined the church, and was very contented in Los Angeles. So Dad promised himself that he could try Los Angeles again, and if things began to work out, he would return to the church and dedicate himself to God.
For two weeks we sprawled on sofas and mattresses across the floor in Lonson’s living room. Finally Lonson took my father out to lunch with two men from the Jet Propulsion Lab. Dad came home and told us that Lonson had an expense account! Money that doesn’t cost anything! Lonson drank four martinis during lunch and the bill came to twenty-four dollars. We were awed, even more awed when Lonson’s friends gave my father a job the next day as a draftsman in research and development in the space program. The day he started working we began to commute to a local branch of the Church of Jesus Christ in San Fernando Valley.
Puberty was a very confusing time for me. I was startled into puberty because I had no warning it was coming. I had no premonition my bald little dick would suddenly sprout a garden of pubic hair and mysterious life-giving substance would emerge if the right buttons were pushed.
The winter of my eleventh year I found myself inexplicably drawn to advertisements in the back of the Ladies’ Home Journal that were headlined ENLARGE YOUR BREASTS. I’d get a very warm feeling when I looked at the before and after pictures and didn’t exactly know why. I wondered, What is happening to me?
It was around that time, in the yard of church, that a skinny little boy named Edward Satriano explained in very authoritative voice to a group guzzling lemonade that a woman had a auxiliary hole in her body about three inches below her navel, nestled in a thatch of hair. In order to reproduce a man would insert his penis and pee.
I was flabbergasted and terrified. First of all I didn’t see how that kind of stuff could be any fun at all. It didn’t give me the same sort of thrill I got from breast-enlarging advertisements. And more important, my things was broken! Everytime I got an erection my little boy’s pecker would swing up to a ninety-degree salute, and whenever I tried to push it down to a right angle, in practice for peeing into a woman, naturally it hurt like hell, and I couldn’t pee. I thought my life was over.