Part IV: Spin – Special Delivery #7 (Chapter 78)
When
the pictures arrived from California, by regular mail, they showed a baby with
cauliflower ears, widely spaced eyes, and drooping eyelids.
On
the backs, Nana had written “John Michael Lawrence, Jr., 4 lbs., 5 oz., 17 in.,
Apr. 1st, 1964.”
For
years, no one talked about how odd Junior looked, and when he was three, he had
plastic surgery to correct some of the facial problems, but he still looked
odd, a vacant stare in his surgically correct blue eyes, exacerbated by the
marijuana Mother baked in his cookies because he was such a hyper kid.
As
an adult, I would learn about alcohol and its effects on fetal growth, but
those things weren’t known back then.
I
saw Johnny junior for the first and last time the year he turned four.
I
hardly knew Junior or Georgie, the brother who followed two years later, the
one who, somehow, escaped being deformed, but I hardly noticed.
I
was too busy getting to know the 60’s, the summer of ‘68, the year I graduated
from high school, the year I would spend on the streets of L.A., running around
with new friends whose parents knew Mother and Johnny, peripheral movie people
– wardrobe people, hairdressers, washed-up comics.
I
would meet my first lover then.
It would be the year of LSD, the last year I would see Johnny senior, my quasi-stepfather, alive.
