Free Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star by Rich Merritt Page A

trimmers flying through the air in my direction. I froze as they hit the ground, but bounced up, continuing their assault. I felt an intense pain course through my body as the metal blade hit my upper lip. I screamed and started running. I ran around to the front of our grandparents’ house, across the front of our house and back to the rear of our own house. I was moaning and wailing and blood was spurting out of my face. I thought I was going to die.
    Momma came running out of the house to tend to me and Daddy gave Jimmy a pretty fierce spanking. Luckily, the cut wasn’t that bad, although I have a scar above my upper lip today. At the time we were angry with Jimmy, but now the only remark anyone makes is, “Boy, you sure were stupid to dare Jimmy to do something like that!”
    Another time I hit him in the face with a horseshoe and he hit me in the back with a brick. Jimmy shot one of our cousins with a BB gun. Twice before he was even four years old he managed to put our dad’s Falcon into neutral, release the emergency brake, and roll the car down the hill toward the river. Both times the car stopped in the garden before going further down the hill into the water.
    In our mother’s eyes, we were about as opposite as we could be. We both loved her we just demonstrated it different ways. I showed mine by wanting to please her most of the time. Sometimes, though, the resentment I felt for our mutual reliance on each other would come to the surface. The smarter I got, the dumber she seemed. Her grammar wasn’t very good and her accent was thick. At some point, our roles reversed and I started correcting her grammar. This hurt her. And yet, I’d do it anyway.
     
    I’m sure Momma had a lot of pent-up rage. Animals were never allowed inside the house. She had grown up on a dairy farm and Momma had milked cows at 4:30 a.m. and gathered eggs from underneath the chickens, sticking her little hands in chicken shit every morning of her childhood. For a woman who spent her childhood on a farm, the thought of letting a filthy animal—and to her all animals were filthy—into the house was absurd. Only crazy city folks and white trash allowed such things.
    We had outdoor cats as pets. We spent hard-earned money on cat food. My job every night was to fill the cat food bowl and set it outside for the cat. Momma noticed the cat getting skinny but saw that I was doing my duty every night. After careful surveillance, she learned the cause.
    A stray dog was sneaking onto our property and eating the cat’s food. In her mind she also thought the beast also might be disease-ridden and bite one of her children. She did what she felt necessary. She grabbed a shotgun and shot the dog. The image of my hypersensitive Momma firing a gun at a defenseless animal startled me and stayed with me. Today, when I tell this story, my friends stare at me in disbelief. I know it seems shocking and cruel. I’ve come to look at it this way: my mother didn’t have control of the people in her life. She didn’t have control over the still-limited role women were allowed to play in the South. She didn’t have control of her appetite. This was a way of her exercising some power.
    I like to think she only shot at the dog. I don’t know if she actually hit the dog or not. I never saw the dog again, but maybe it had learned its lesson and stayed away from the Merritt’s from then on. It did show a side of my mother that she couldn’t often express. When she absolutely felt the need to get her way, when something was intruding on the way she felt her life should be going, when she was up against the wall, she’d find a way of dealing with it. I learned my lesson.
    Don’t fuck with Momma.
     
    I was nine when I found out I would be getting a baby brother or sister. Momma and Daddy had always wanted a daughter. I had the feeling that they had wanted Jimmy to be a girl. Momma’s fascination with my hair undoubtedly stemmed from her desire for a daughter