Talk to Jay Passer on the Fictionville blog
San Francisco 1965. I left the womb for a better life outside Mom. Never mind the two miscarriages preceding my birth. Leave that business to the psychics. I have my own brand of horoscope and the configuration of the stars has nothing to do with it. But my mother. Lying there legs spread, 5th pregnancy and quaking with horror. Can you blame her? After my brother and sister arrived she kept up with the pace, but alas, the next 2 were stillborn, and she had to carry the last of the lost ones to term, knowing it was dead weeks before delivery. It. It was a she. It was the 1960's and smoking was fashionable and so was drinking. The old man smoked regularly and drank on business trips and never planned for nor wanted another needy mouth. The old man playing poker in some anonymous hotel room with the boys. Cigars. . . Pale, slimy hands. . . Loose money. And yet another hospital. San Francisco, Divisidero St., Mt. Zion, the old wing. Heavens
called to witness. Late August, the romance of summer on the wane. I was born writhing, screaming, illiterate; I didn't quit screaming for two years. When it was over my mother wept and my father, dealt a bad hand, stubs out his cigar-butt and said shit, this must not be my lucky day. The fog rolled in over the Avenues, outer Richmond, inner Sunset woven of dense gray fog breathed by the Pacific. Mom looks up, sees her folks standing there witness to this new audacity. The anniversary of their wedding, this day of my birth. For a moment everyone is happy, a new baby boy, correct amount of fingers and toes. This is how I left the womb. By the hands of the very same doctor who 26 years previous grasped my own mother's slick newborn infancy, brought her out gasping for air for life for wonder for curiosity for speculation for dismay for embarrassment for disappointment for subtlety for choice. . .
For freedom. Were it not for my mother, where would be mine?