Today Donovan was wearing dark blue shorts with a black T-shirt featuring an image of a skeleton crucified against a stone pentacle, serpents and roses binding his limbs to the star’s points. He seemed in slightly better spirits than the day before, but still appeared a bit haggard and weary.
“Sleeping well?” I asked him.
“So so. No dreams last night.”
Perhaps in an effort to escape reality, Donovan greatly enjoyed the time he spent dreaming. From the ones he’d described to me, he was powerful in his dreams, with numerous supernatural abilities. People would sometimes call on him to save them...but he had a nasty habit of occasionally turning on them the way he had whatever enemy he’d been up against. He used to dream he was being pursued by all sorts of enigmatic entities: Gangsters, the KKK, ghosts, Nazis, the military had all tried to snuff him out, but he’d managed to elude them all. His weakness in his dreams was laughter. If he laughed, he couldn’t fly. Once he learned this, he overcame it and never laughed in his dreams again. It was
strange because during his wakeful life, he could often come across as
quite funny.
“What would you like to have dreamed about?”
I saw him smile, though he kept his gaze downcast. “Whatever,” he mumbled vaguely. “I used to control them, but that’s really no fun. It’s better to become aware you’re someplace unfamiliar, then deal with it.” There was a calendar on the wall behind him depicting scenes from the Civil War. He turned toward it and sighed. “I’ll be having Halloween anxiety dreams soon. It used to be school anxiety dreams every year. I hated them. I had no business wasting good dream time on being in school during summer vacation.” He slouched and crossed his legs, bouncing his elevated foot in a peppy manner. “Soon I’ll start dreaming that Halloween’s here and I’m not prepared for it. I’ll be scrambling to
throw together a costume and find candy to hand out. I’ll be trying to decorate for a party with the guests due at seven and it’s already six-thirty.”
“I know you enjoy Halloween, but not school. Why do you think the dreams
changed from something you didn’t care for to something you love?”
He shrugged. “Guess you’ve got to have anxiety about something.”
Donovan was not his real name. He had begun school in the fifth state he’d moved to. While his parents had never actually been rich per se, they had always tried to live as if they were, throwing extravagant parties in their magazine-perfect homes, traveling frequently, dining out at elegant restaurants, and generally living beyond their means in an effort to promote themselves as something better than what they really were. Donovan was never included in this lavish, faux lifestyle, perhaps because they often just couldn’t afford to make him a part of it. He watched his mother dress in fine jewelry and fabrics and his father throw his credit card around to entertain others, but he himself was usually fed macaroni & cheese, then put to bed early, or otherwise ignored. When it was time to send him to school, it was decided he should attend a private school and be classmates with the children of lawyers and doctors. Obviously, he was not going to fit in.
“In nursery school, we would play circus with this trunk full of costumes and props, and I was always one of the tigers. There were only three tiger costumes. One day the teacher decided I was being the tiger too much and made me choose another character. I was a pissed off clown.”
I chuckled and he grinned a little.
“I still love wearing costumes. I took second place at a Halloween costume contest at school one year. That was in private school. I was a black cat. The kid who won was a gumball machine. Nobody liked him, though. For some reason, they liked trying to lump he and I together, so both of us winning prizes was just another way to connect us.”
“Why didn’t anybody like him?”
“He was strange. Way strange. He was almost twice as tall as any of the rest of us with these really thick glasses. He slouched and kept his head down all the time. He really tried to stay by himself and not bother anyone, but then he’d do really weird things, like catch flies and pull their wings off and let them crawl around on his desk before he
ate them. He liked to coat his hands with glue, let it dry, then peel off the whole pieces like sheets of skin and eat that too.”
“Why didn’t they like you?”
“How should I know? I mean, I know now I was kinda wild when I got to school. I think maybe I wanted to make up for all the years worth of fun I never had because I’d spent so much time alone. I tried to make friends with almost everyone in my class, but only two fat kids would regularly let me play with them and hang out with them. I was fat, too. With trifocals. I got picked on all the time ‘cause I was fat and wore
glasses. I used to deny I was fat...that’s pretty stupid. But the two
guys I hung out with were fatter, so sometimes I’d turn on them and tease them over it, but they were both bigger than me height wise too, and they’d gang up on me and beat me up.
“So I started trying to pick fights with the other kids, too. If I thought I could win, I’d go smack one in the back of the head, then be waiting when they turned around. I usually didn’t win. I usually wound up in the principal’s office.”
“You didn’t know how to fight.”
“No. I never had brothers or sisters or anyone to play fight with as a kid. The other kids would beat me up all they wanted, and I’d just keep trying to fight back or go run off somewhere. If I tried to beat someone up, they told on me, and before long, even if I’d just been defending myself, I would always get the blame.”
“Did you ever hurt anyone badly?” I asked him.
“Heck, no. I never wanted to. I just wanted to play rough. I liked the
excitement. I’d never wrestled another kid before...just that girl I’d play indoor football with when I was little. She never told on me, and I’d never told on her. We’d get bruised, then take a break or just move onto something else. It was all new territory for me. Some of the boys liked to hide, then throw rocks or sticks at each other or the girls, or
scare each other by pushing someone way too high on the swings and knocking it screwy while it was in the air. I never intentionally tried to frighten or hurt anyone. I’d never seen such cruelty in children before.”
“Were you ever hurt badly or frightened?”
“I was never physically hurt badly,” he admitted. “My feelings got hurt when I’d find out that the fight I’d been in that got broken up by a teacher might’ve ended much worse for me had she not intervened. Some of the boys tried to throw bricks at me and would take swings at me with tree limbs. Maybe they saw I was softer than them, and therefore an easy target. I don’t know. That was always scary. Most of the black eyes and fat lips I got were from my mom.”
I asked him, “Did you pick on the girls, too?”
“I tried to fight with a few, but they were never really into it. They mostly played boring, stupid things like hopscotch, or would make weed flowers into bracelets and stuff. Mostly they wanted nothing to do with me. They didn’t trust me either because I’d tried to fight with them before or because the other boys were so mean to them, they assumed we all were like that. The prettiest girl was very nasty in person. She was very stuck up, but I had a crush on her. Me and one of my fat friends liked to sit with her best friend sometimes at the lunch table. She was a little redhead, and not pretty, but she could be rather nice
sometimes. She liked to peek under the table while we unzipped our pants and pulled our penises out to show her quickly. She’d trade parts of her
lunch for glimpses.”
“How old were you then?”
He considered. “First grade? Second? Not very old. We knew it was naughty, but we never touched her, and we never got caught. I think it was her idea to begin with, if I remember correctly. Her friend, the stuck-up girl, was everyone’s favorite. A fat, ugly redheaded guy kissed her one day while we were all in church. It really pissed her off. The rest of us were all jealous, but I think it made her personality even nastier because she’d been embarrassed by it. The last time I saw her was junior high, and she was a total cold-hearted bitch. Maybe she had
problems at home or something. I’m glad I never got that close to her.”
“Were there any other girls you liked or played with?”
“There was this brainy girl. Very pretty, actually, but in a plain way.
She wanted to be a scientist. I could talk to her, but I didn’t too often because she hung around the fly-eating guy or let him hang around her for protection from the other boys, I think. We’d have to hand Valentines out to the whole class each year so no one would feel left out...but I only got a few from the two fat boys and that was it. I got a book on crafts from my mom when I went into Boy Scouts, and there was a section on making things from paper, so this one year, trying to make
friends as always, I made every kid in class a Valentine that had to do with what I knew of them, and I made a paper microscope for the smart girl. It had holes cut in it so when you looked in, there was enough light to see the words, ‘Be my Valentine’ at the bottom. Every kid got a personalized Valentine from me, but hers had taken the most effort, so everyone teased me and said I had a crush on her. I was mean to her
after that. I knew if the other kids linked us, they’d pick on her more
cruelly, and I couldn’t let that happen to her. I never had a crush on her, but I couldn’t let her get beat up over me, so I turned mean to her. It hurt her feelings, but at least it saved her face.”
“Did you ever attempt to pursue the girl you had a crush on?”
“No. She hated me. She’d get the other boys to seek me out and beat me up. She was only nice to her own closest friends. Even the teachers liked her and would kiss her sometimes on the cheek and tell her how pretty she was in front of the whole class.”
“How did your teachers treat you?”
“A few shook my hand. They were always disappointed in me. They were always telling me they knew I could do better in class, that I didn’t have to get sent to the principal’s office all the time. They tolerated me.”
“It sounds like they saw potential in you.”
Donovan shrugged, smirking slightly. “It was there, obviously, but like I said, I was wild.”
“What else did you do that was wild?”
“I got in trouble for taking two library books out of the school library
once. My class only got one a week per kid, but I knew I could tear through books like toilet paper, and I wanted to read more. I got caught and was humiliated in front of the whole class. I was the first kid to start accepting responsibility for my actions. One day our fourth grade teacher was mad ‘cause we were all laughing and talking and paying no attention to her, so she yelled, ‘Who’s talking? Who’s doing it? I want to know right now!’. We always just sat there quietly when things like
that happened, but this one day I stood right up beside my desk. She saw me do it. I was right in front of her. But, obviously I hadn’t been talking to myself. No one else stood. It even got quieter. She seemed not to see me anymore and kept sweeping her eyes across the rest of the kids’ faces. She finally turned and started the lesson back up again. She never acknowledged me and I sat again. After that, I always admitted when I’d been talking or laughing, but still no one else ever would.”
This was intriguing. “What did the other kids think?”
“It was more fodder to use against me, but I started turning the tables on them, too. I’d get in a fight or call some kid a name and he’d start off to go tell on me, and I’d join him. I’d say, ‘Yup, that’s what I did or said all right. I’m gonna tell on me, too!’ And the kid would always stop and just stand there, confused. I’d try to beg them to go with me while I told on myself, but they’d get the creeps or something and turn the other way and avoid me instead. It was a beautiful ploy. Worked every time. I toned down my wildness then in case some other kid decided to try the same tricks on me.”
“You were a clever child.”
“I’ve always been ahead of my time,” he mumbled, smiling to himself a little. “Actually, I matured faster than my peers in that sense. I started to be able to see that my behavior was wrong, and so was theirs. It was senseless. Why did we fight so much? Why hate the fat kids and the smart kids and the girls and the kids who wore glasses? Why pick on them? Weren’t we all in the same boat?”
“How old were you when you started to realize this?”
“Fifth grade. It made school seem worse to me. I started to realize I was in a class with a bunch of apelike bullies. They were leaving me alone for the most part, but the hatred of me was still there and even the two fat boys stopped hanging around with me. I was really beginning to evolve into something different from the rest of them and no one seemed to know what to make of it. I couldn’t go on after that. I had to
cry in my Mom’s office to make her see how bad I hated school and didn’t want to go back another year. She finally transferred me to public school. She was divorced then, and we only had her income, so I think the break from tuition and uniforms was really a big help to her.
“In private school, we were always under the assumption that kids in public schools were stupid and carried knives and stuff. When I started going to the school down the street, I was very quiet, very reserved, afraid of getting stabbed. They all thought I was rich because I came from a private school, so they assumed I was being snobby. I was actually afraid of them. It turns out they weren’t stupid at all, but they were taught at...at lower levels than we had been. We’d had phonics class and reading programs and language in elementary school. These kids could barely read and knew no languages other than what they’d heard in their own homes. It seemed very unfair to me. I stayed to myself because
I didn’t know if I could trust anyone, and a few kids tried to make friends with me, which was a first, but they seemed as hesitant as I was. Soon after I’d transferred, I got called to the principal’s office. I couldn’t believe everything bad was starting to happen to me all over again. I had no idea what I’d even done. She was a heavy woman with stiff sprayed hair and too much makeup. She wore cowboy boots and a
cowboy hat and fringed jacket. She was nothing like Sister Anne had been. Turned out my school records had been sent over a whole month after I’d transferred, and she was ecstatic to learn what an advanced student I was. I thought she was making a mistake. I was just an average student. My IQ scores and overall grades showed otherwise. I had just begun sixth grade with a college freshman reading and comprehension level. I got switched to all advanced classes. I didn’t like that--it showed I was different from the other kids and I didn’t want to stand out.
“We were having a mini spelling bee in English class one day. It was my turn to spell something, and I didn’t hear the word the teacher had given me, so I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and all the kids broke up into laughter and started mimicking me. Now I was getting singled out for being fat, wearing glasses, being smart, and being polite! For years I’d been odd kid out because I wasn’t refined enough, wasn’t good enough on so many levels, and suddenly I was too good! It was terrible. I needed to find a happy medium, so I slowly started acting wild again, trying to roughhouse on the playground and trying to learn to cuss so I’d fit
in... It just made the teachers angry at me. Mom was happy ‘cause for the first time ever, I was a straight A student...only because the class was a good two years behind where I’d left off at private school.”
“You mentioned being a Scout. How was that going?”
He snorted. “It was all too brief. Our leader had a nervous breakdown and the pack was disbanded. It was lame anyway. We wanted to go hiking and camping and learn to use knives, but all we did was make stamps from potatoes and learn how to write checks and listen to stupid songs the older scouts taught us whenever they visited. It was just a social thing for the kids and the same cliques formed and the same pettiness
prevailed.”
I shrugged. “Tell me about high school.”
“Junior high was different. It started okay because only some of the kids from the public school were there and a few of the kids from private school showed up since they’d have to go hundreds of miles away to the nearest private high school, so a few kids knew me or remembered me, but there were so many new kids that for awhile everyone was
bewildered while the new cliques were forming. As usual, I was lumped in with the losers, and sometimes even they refused to let me eat lunch with them. Lunch was the worst. You could sit anywhere--it wasn’t divided up by classes anymore. I’d take a book and try to lose myself in it so I wouldn’t have to interact with anybody else. Sometimes the other kids would yell at me that I was sitting in “their” seats, or they’d just plunk down all around me, then treat me like crap. They’d surround me like I wasn’t there, then intentionally throw trash and food at me, or hit me with their trays as they moved around, or spit on me.”
“For no reason?”
“The reason was, I kept to myself. I was a loser. I was still fat with
glasses and still smart. I didn’t even have to know the kids...they knew me from watching me walk with my head down through the halls, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone. They’d seen me. I stood out simply trying not to. They saw me sit alone at lunch and stand off to the side while waiting for school to open in the mornings.”
I said, “It’s seems hard to believe you’d be singled out for mistreatment for no apparent reason.”
Donovan snarled, “Don’t you remember school? Wasn’t there always some kid you picked on just because everyone else did? I picked on that tall fly-eating kid in elementary school and I don’t think he ever did a negative thing to me besides gross me out if I happened to be watching him. I wasn’t the only kid the others picked on. There were quite a few losers. I never saw them do anything that would merit them getting singled out for torment. Many of them were very nice and quiet and sensitive-”
“Like you?”
“I wasn’t so nice then. I was only sensitive to myself. I just wanted to
avoid conflict at all costs. School was bad enough without violence added in. But these other kids...these other losers...there were fat kids and kids who still retained some childish innocence about them...there was the pretty girl whose cousin was a nerd, there were nerds, the girl who wore big glasses and was sick all the time, the
really huge fat and tall kid, the kid who could send a stream of spit halfway across a room. They weren’t athletes. No cheerleaders. No bullies. They didn’t attend with an already built in group of friends to hang out with. We were all fairly bright, clean, most of us average looking, and all wishing for something a little better. I could say I
was getting back what I deserved for all the fights I tried to start and got into back in elementary school, but life really doesn’t work that efficiently.
“Seventh grade was when I got diagnosed with COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I couldn’t breathe in gym class. We’d run track and I’d be gasping and my face would turn purple. The other kids just thought it was because I was fat. I turned in the doctor’s note, but my gym teachers still wrote me up for failing to bring gym clothes to class and failure to participate. I was failing gym and it wasn’t even my fault! Nobody likes a boy who’s not at least a little bit athletic...who won’t even try. The other kids would wait for me in the locker room, then surround me and taunt me and poke me in the gut or throw my own books at me. I finally mentioned it to my art teacher, and he got me out
of there. I became his assistant, helping him now and then as he organized art supplies and stuff, but mostly using the time to do my own art. The only time the other kids were ever really nice to me was when they wanted me to draw something for them. I never knew that for the rest of my life, people would only ever be nice to me so long as I could provide them with something. I hate people.”
“All people?” I asked him.
Donovan looked down and shrugged. “Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I just want to shake some sense into everybody. God forbid we all just take each other at face value and adapt to each other’s ways... Everyone wants
everyone else to behave exactly the same way that they do.”
“You, too?”
“Sure. I’m not exempt from the human race or its frailties...but I’d sure like to be. School was terrible. I couldn’t walk down a hall without some kid trying to slam a door in my face or swing a locker door open into my kneecap or slap the back of my knee with a ruler or just knock me aside. I used to cry, wondering what I had ever done to deserve such punishment. Not in school...you never wanted to cry at school. It would get you beaten. I didn’t even cry when I sprained my ankle trying to play softball and even tried to keep playing.”
“This was before you were diagnosed with COPD?”
“No. After. I was diagnosed in seventh grade and had a note...but in eighth grade they said I’d need a new note to get me out of gym. I had my new art teacher get me out again. In ninth grade it was the same. Each year, they’d try to force me to run and take gym until an art teacher took pity on me. I’d take a few months of gym every year, breathless, purple, and wheezing, unable to convince my mom I needed a
new note every year-”
“It’s incurable,” I noted.
“What do gym teachers know? A cheerleader could break her nail and not
have to play volleyball that day, but I have an incurable disease and they were always trying to fail me for it! Had I not been an artist...God knows how things would have gone for me.”
“Your mother was unsympathetic?”
“Is,” he corrected me. “Always. She was drinking every night. She’d come home around three in the morning and try to beat me over something stupid, then pass out on the floor. I’d be late to school a lot because she was still out cold from the night before and I couldn’t drive yet and didn’t even own a bicycle. Some nights I’d be with her, curled up in an empty booth in a bar that should have closed hours before, while she and her friends kept pestering the bartender to make them stupid drinks they’d seen recipes for in magazines. I usually never got any homework done. She’d say we were going out to dinner...but it was always at a
place with a bar. Some days I missed school entirely because she never
regained consciousness ‘til sometime that afternoon.”
“When was this going on?”
“Elementary school through junior high. I started walking to school when I went to senior high. I was always in trouble for being late or not showing up at all. It wasn’t my fault then, but you can’t just blurt out that your parent is an alcoholic. It’s why I don’t drink and don’t like bars now. I spent a significant chunk of my childhood in bars. One I liked had tables with video games in them and a wall with built in
bookcases. I’d sit at the table and learn anatomy or botany or something. She’d have gone through a whole bottle of rum, and would be so drunk she wouldn’t even know they’d switched her to straight tap water. I can’t recall how many times we were almost killed while she was driving us home. Almost went off a bridge...driving up on curbs toward telephone poles. Sometimes we‘d stay the night at a cheap nearby hotel.
I missed quite a bit of school.”
“And she’d beat you when she was drunk?”
“She’d try. She’d lose her balance and hit the floor and I’d leave her there all night. Or she’d move in slow motion. It was weird. She did her best hitting while sober.”
I had to ask him, “And why didn’t you defend yourself?”
“Because you don’t hit a woman. No matter what. That’s what I’d always
been...stupidly taught. You especially never hit your mother. I’d stand there and she’d grab me by the hair and drag me through the house to show me something I’d allegedly done wrong. Sometimes I had no idea what she was screaming about, but she’d belt me across the face or claw my face or neck or back. I told you I had fat lips and black eyes. Almost every one of my elementary school photos shows me with a black eye and/or fat lip. They mainly came from her. Sometimes they came from
neighborhood kids who beat me up, or from accidents...but almost every
photo from school shows me with one of her souvenirs.”
“You didn’t always know what you had done wrong?”
“I didn’t realize ‘til much later that she’d have a bad day at work, then come home and take it out on me. Somebody cut her off on the way home and she’d take it out on me. Got passed up for a raise? Go home and beat the kid! If I did something wrong, I’d do anything I could to hide it or lie about it just so she wouldn’t go off like Mount Vesuvius. I lived in constant fear of her. I was eighteen the first time she ever struck me and I didn’t flinch. Nobody at school knew this was going
on...well some of the losers had a little knowledge of it, but not to
what degree.”
The combination of violence in school and at home had caused Donovan to
withdraw even further from society and his peers, causing him to start
fostering a very suspicious, almost paranoid nature. I said, “You had no
close friends in school.”
“Hell, no. I tried to make friends with a few of the losers, but that only lead to people linking us and beating up one for something the other had done. It was better to be alone than band together and ensure everyone got hurt. I turned mean toward the ones who were getting too close-”
“To protect them.”
“Yes. To protect me, too.”
“No girlfriend?”
He winced. “’course not... There were a couple of pretty girls...but nobody wanted to be linked with me. Beautiful black-haired girl in high school. Funny, smart. I wanted her so bad...just be friends with her if
nothing else, to let her see I could be funny, too. To have somebody to talk to...” He sighed heavily. “I got one of the loser kids to pass notes to her for me, but she finally said I could reveal who I was or should just quit bothering her. I stopped sending her notes. I saw her years later...she looked hard, was a lot more quiet. She was a bartender. A pretty quiet, reserved bartender. I don’t know what happened to her sense of humor. I kinda felt bad for her, but was also glad we’d never hooked up. She’d lost so much...
“Mostly, the girls would sometimes tease me in class. They’d glance over
their shoulders at me with dreamy looking eyes and mouth the words, ‘I
love you,’ then look at their friends and giggle to be mean. They’d pass me notes with hearts drawn on them, but inside would be some terrible insult or something. One mean girl kept trying to hold my hand if she came across me in the halls between classes. She’d make catcalls like I was some hunk, and when people turned to see what she was making such a fuss about, the laughter would be terrible.”
“But, you’re funny. Why didn’t you use your sense of humor to get noticed?”
“At that point, I didn’t want to be noticed. In elementary school, I’d hang out at bars at night with my mom, so most of the jokes I knew involved tits or fucking or racist slurs. I tried pulling a few practical jokes, but people just thought I was stupid or had lost my marbles because it didn’t fit in with their perceptions of me. Some of
the losers knew I was funny. They also thought I was capricious because I could sit with them and make them laugh and draw them pictures and tell dirty jokes one day, then avoid them like plague the next. I had to avoid them to protect them sometimes. Sometimes it was just hard to admit I was nothing but a loser myself.”
“Donovan...what is a loser?”
“A loser’s just anybody who doesn’t fit in. In school, anyway. In life, it’s more like someone without any desire to improve themselves or their situation in life. Or it’s someone who wants better things, but only for themself, often at the expense of someone else’s feelings or rights.”
“Are you a loser, Donovan?”
“No. I just don’t fit in anywhere. I never have. I’m in better shape now than I used to be, I got contact lenses, I work out and try to eat right. I’ve been trying to better myself and maybe lead by example for
years. I just don’t fit in.”
“If you went back to school right now...say for a reunion or something,
would your peers still ostracize you?”
“I doubt it. I’ve seen a lot of them. They look ten years older than they are, they’ve put on pounds of weight, some of them now have glasses. I think most of them have finally matured enough not to single me out to be picked on anymore.”
“How do you know that?”
“Things started changing, finally, in senior year. The kids started coming out of their self-created shiny little shells. They’d all existed in some kind of imaginative worlds where they were all perfect and only their best friends could connect with them, and something happened that allowed them to see that we were all in the same boat after all, all of us about to go off and start real life in some way, some of us working together, some of us never seeing each other again. Already a couple of kids were dead. A couple had given birth. Some were in jail. Some had
jobs. The cheerleaders and the jocks started talking to me like I was one of them...asking me what kind of music I liked, what movies I watched. I was suspicious of them. Nobody’s nice unless they want something. I answered them, but didn’t really open up because I didn’t know what they wanted from me.”
“What do you think they wanted?”
“I think...they wanted ideas on what to do and how to live. Where do we go from here? Who do we hang out with now? They replaced cheerleading practice with hanging out at the mall or partying. I never hung out at the mall. I never understood the point of it. You buy things, maybe grab something to eat, you come home. Why linger? I think they were still trying to keep old ties and cliques going. I think they were still
clinging to their childhood notions of social life while preparing to delve into the more guarded, less wild adult world. They never saw me out anywhere. I didn’t hang out with anybody. I never hurt anybody either. I never fought anyone in high school. They were curious enough to finally approach me with eyes that sought similarities instead of differences. They’d been through enough life to start seeing that they could go beyond childhood instincts to cling to what’s familiar and start exploring all that’s strange and exotic. How should I know what they were thinking? It was strange to see them start changing into more understanding and forgiving people. Not all of them, but many. It was weird.”
“It must have been similar to how people saw you change back in elementary school when you stopped fighting and started taking
responsibility for your own actions.”
Donovan smiled slightly and inhaled deeply, adjusting his position in the chair. “Yeah. Well. I told you I was always a little bit ahead of my time.”
The fortunate inherit riches, prestige, positive notoriety. Those not so lucky bear legacies filled with poverty, infamy or, worse yet, the unhinged insanity and murderous urges of their ancestors.
