3 Things from my Childhood

Phoenix, Arizona

My parents had a friend named Wally who my brother and I called “Wally the Rat.” I think we called him this because he had a gray mustache that looked like whiskers. We’d taunt him with the nickname, and although he was a full grown man, he seemed genuinely upset by this, infuriated even.

“Wally the Rat! Wally the Rat!”

“Shut the hell up!”

My mom later said that we were perceptive, that he deserved the nickname. Maybe that’s why he got so upset by it.

He had a Pitbull named, “Damage” and once when he had a young woman sitting the dog while he was out of town, it ate her face off. I don’t think we were told anymore details than that, but I thought about this story so much that even now I can picture the cheap white tile of his bathroom all smeared glossy with her blood, her lying there, her face a skeleton’s face with a ragged edge. I imagined the dog attacking her, tackling her, biting big hunks out of her while she screamed. When I was a little older, maybe thirteen, my mom added the detail that the woman had OD’ed first. So, the dog ate her face after she was already dead, probably because she wasn’t feeding it anymore. Made me realize the dog was hardly any kind of villain, despite being a Pitbull named Damage.

My parents had another friend who was always in and out of prison. He was back in, I heard them saying, because he stabbed a dude in the butt. Forever, I was haunted by a question I didn’t dare ask: In the hole or the cheek? It’s a crucial question. The butt cheek is one of the best places to get stabbed, the butt hole one of the worst. I asked for clarity when I was older but nobody knew.

I was staying at a friend’s house, couldn’t have been any older than six, and when I woke up I asked her dad for a bowl of cereal. Looking back on it now, it’s pretty clear he was hungover. Huffing and puffing, he lumbered to the kitchen where he took down a box of Rice Crispies from the shelf and proceeded to REACH INTO it. Fistful after fistful, he filled a bowl for me before telling me the milk was in the fridge and collapsing back onto the couch. And I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve been getting the cereal out of the box wrong this whole time!”