Dear motherfucker,
I know I’m supposed to be all hatin’ myself the way you hated yourself and the way your momma and daddy hated theyselves before you, but I just ain’t feelin’ it. Not today. For I am one baaad mamma-jamma, hear me? Almost forty, and here I sit encircled by fabulous ringlets, loved by a fabulous woman, lucky enough to do something I love to put food in my mouth, lucky enough to have people in my life who believe in me, and goddamned determined to live my life just the way I want to love it, no dickin’ around. I know how you felt ’bout me was mostly ’cause of my daddy, ’cause my daddy loved my mama and my daddy and mama had a true love, no bullshit, and here you was some johnny-come-later-then-ya-think sniffin’ around my mama after Daddy passed on, and you know you only got her to go with you ’cause she was confused, right? If you’d a come around a bit later, after she got on her feet, there’d a been none of you draggin’ me through the trailer by my hair, yellin’ about how I was a cocksucker, lyin’ to Mama about how I was sellin’ your anacin as dope to the kids at school, lyin’ ’bout jus’ anythin’ to make sure you got to whup my ass at night. You jus’ loved to whup that ass, didn’t you? Maybe when you was grabbin’ me by the fatkid arm and smackin’ me with that leather strap you was really smacking my daddy in your head, ’cause I think maybe that’s who you really hated. You didn’t like me ’cause I was his son. So you thought maybe you could ruin me that way, whup me until getting’ whupped was all I knowed, so maybe I wouldn’t one day grow up to have some fine woman love me the way my mama loved my daddy, and so some low mean dickwad like you mught have a chance with her. But guess what, motherfucker: IT DIDN’T WORK. Nah, man, my daddy was too strong in me, his confidence and his courage were too big in me to let a little man like you whup me. Yeah, I had to fight every step of the way not to let the welts you whupped into me become all there was of me; at times it seemed all I was was a big scar, still red from your meanness. But I made it through, because that’s what any son of my daddy would do. So even though I get high sometimes and sometimes ain’t been as honorable to the women in my life as I should be, and sometimes I let people use me up and toss me out the car window, I still stand pretty goddamned tall, so FUCK YOU!
Love,
Lewis
