Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC Read Free

frequently had two black and blue ones. Thornton was as vicious a bully as you’d ever care to find. He was always big for his age, never tired of finding victims—me for choice—and, like Dad, always had an excuse. Mom knew damned well how disgusting the bastard was but she had that incredible ability found in so many minds like hers to simply ignore all the evidence in favor of her personal view of the world. And in her personal view of the world, Thornton Ainsley Gardenier could do no wrong. Thornton got straight As. Thornton’s goal was to be an academic just like Mom and Dad. Thornton was four years older than I was and firmly believed I needed a good kidney punch every day of my existence.
    You’d think I’d enjoy killing him but I really didn’t.
    Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, on the other hand, could do no right. Every kid at some point wants to please his mother but I gave up real young. Maybe it was trying and failing to get either parent to notice that I was being used as a punching bag by the apple of their eye on a daily basis. Maybe it was when I came home from kindergarten with a note that said I was “too advanced.” I was already reading at college level and doing algebra, and was making the other kids look bad. And my parents sat me down and told me I needed to be “socially appropriate.” God, Mom hated herself for that lecture in later years. I threw it in her face with every subsequent report card showing straight Cs.
    Yes, I got straight Cs, with very few exceptions, all the way through school. Got any idea how hard that is? When you’d taught yourself Aramaic at the age of nine? Getting straight As is easy. All you have to do is a little studying and get all the answers right. Graduating every single paper and test, precisely , so as to get exactly a C? Especially papers. You gotta be able to read your teacher’s mind to get a C on every single paper.
    But I was duly centered in my social peer group. Just like mommy said I should be. Fuck you, Mom, you monster-loving bitch.
    She forced me to take violin lessons. It turned out that it came naturally to me. I was a virtuoso. This would come in handy later on in life. When Mom was around, I played badly on purpose.
    There are lots of books and memoirs about the poor misunderstood smart kid surrounded by dumb people. I suppose I was one of those (as an IQ test later proved) but it was really more the “poor misunderstood kid who just wants to be normal.” I wanted to play football. “Too violent.” I got scolded and a three-day grounding for playing cops and robbers. “How dare I support the fascist prison state?” Then there was the time I brought home papers for JROTC and managed by the tiniest of straws to fail to give my mother a stroke. It was close. God it was sooo close. On the other hand, that attempt to kill my mother led to the best times of my life and a new family who finally understood me.
    The summer when I was twelve I rode my bike five miles to a barber’s on the other side of town ’cause I’d asked one kid, who was bitching about it, where he got his hair cut. The barber had been a soldier once, turned out he was airborne back in World War II, and had cut military hair for years at Fort Knox. I walked in with shiny blond hair down to my ass, still with some of my baby curls, and climbed into a chair.
    “Sir, I hate to use foul language. My mother is a fucking hippy bitch. And I am sick and tired of this God-damned hippy hair. Would you please cut it all off? I promise not to tell.”
    “Son,” he said, breaking out his clippers, “parents, as with children, are a cross we all must bear. But as long as she does not discover the source of your haircut, we have a deal. And it’s free.”
    When my mother came home from another of her damned committee meetings, which meant I had to scrounge as per usual, I was waiting by the door sporting a high and tight with my formerly ass-length hair in one hand.
    “Here!” I said,