Dictators tell stories about their youths

Dictators remember things

Irrespective of that time the real story stars round the time I was a little girl. It’s easy to forget as a man of seventy five years that you were once a little girl who carried around a blanket and had favorite dolls and other dolls that you occasionally called fat and locked away in a closet as some sort of obscure punishment. “It’s Ramadan” I used to yell to them through the slats in the door. You see, I wasn’t really the best sort of little girl, so I suppose that it’s in the interest of the world at large that I am now an old man.

That summer when I was round five or seven or so. The switch grass and horsetail had taken over the driveway. Other little girls would come by to play games of hop scotch with me, and I’d let them talk to those dolls of mine that had behaved and hadn’t been out whoring around the night before. I was the most popular of all the little girls because I was ruthless. I’d cheat at games of hop scotch, pull hair, send other little girls home crying, and I’d threaten them on the way home. “You tell anyone, and I’ll take care of it.”

I think even then I might have already been a seventy seven year old man trapped in a little girl’s body. It’s hard to remember. The dolls and I would sit in a circle and talk about the boys we had crushes on, and if one of them mentioned that they were kind of in love with one of the boys that I liked then I’d burn them with a match, to give you an idea of what sort of little girl I was.

My mother and father both worked. My father worked at a saw mill. He sawed old growth forest trees in half and made pieces of furniture out of them for half of what they were worth. Women used to protest outside of my father’s office, and I remember burning one of them when I was very small, and mom and I had gone over to pick him up from work. I waited until no one was paying attention, and lit something against the back of her calf, and I remember her screaming. That’s when I knew I was a witch of some kind because I didn’t have any matches, and I figured out pretty quickly that I’d better keep it a secret. People generally think witches are close personal friends of the devil, but I’ve only seen him a time or two in my life. Once he stopped me on the street in the North Beach of San Francisco and asked for some change to go watch a peep show. By that point in time I was a confident young woman, or maybe I was already becoming a man. The second time I saw him was in a grocery store, he was buying a package of cheap white sugar. I didn’t ask. It’s the devil’s own damn business if he wants to make cookies.

My mother was a school teacher. She taught kids who had all sorts of disorders, who pissed and shat themselves, and drew in crayon all over the wall. And even as a young girl I’d go into her classroom and help her repaint the walls because I knew that it was a good deed, and I considered all the bad things that I planned on doing if I was going to make something of myself, and I painted even more expertly.

Those afternoons were warm, and my mother would be sitting at her old particle board desk grading papers with a pair of bifocals hanging off the bridge of her nose. I think she just wore them for show. I suppose it’s this one in particular that you’re probably after. It’s the one that is sort of the genesis story.