I remember it well. It was 1960 and I was five years old. My mom woke us up early and told me and my 6-year-old brother Mike to take a bath. I remember thinking “ two baths in one week, what in the hell did I do wrong to deserve this torture?” So being the typical hygienically consciences 5 and 6 year old American boys that we were, we closed the door and did the appropriate inch and a half depth tub filling and sat on the edge of the tub kicking and splashing our feet in the water for a while.
We had gotten just the right amount of water on the floor to make it convincing that we actually took a bath and was about to put our heads under the sink and get our hair wet to fake a full bath tub emersion when she opened the bathroom door and caught us pink butted. “Get in the tub” she yelled and it scared the hell out of both of us. Mom never yelled and we were too busy faking a bath and playing piss sward fights in the tub to see that she had all ready gotten her church cloths on.
I thought it was odd because we hadn’t gone to church in years (which was only a few months but to a five year old, a couple of months seems like years) and when we did go it was either in the early afternoon or after The Ed Sullivan show on Sunday nights. This early morning church stuff was bullshit.
My brother Mike and I had to drain the inch and a half of water we had filled in the bathtub because it was full of pee from our last pee sward fight. We were busted and actually had to take a real live bath with soap and everything. That should have been an omen about how my life was just about to change forever. I was just too young and full of fun to realize that that piss sward fight would probably be my last and every Sunday morning it meant I would have to take real baths with real soap and only pee in the bath water like normal 5 year old boys after I was fully emerged in it.
It didn’t seem all that bad. I knew my mom was going to play the chase the naked little kids around the house game with us as she tried to dry us off with our Superman capes she so mistakenly called bath towels. After our record breaking three minute bath we dawned our capes and began to run out of the bathroom onto the cold tile hallway floor that we slid our naked little butts on and pretended to be flying until we crashed into the bedroom door at the end of the hallway. Naked little kid butts make excellent sliding surfaces especially when they have a mixture of dirty bath water and a little ninja sward piss lubricant all over them. Its better than turtle wax and it’s free as pee. After twenty or thirty times of sliding down the hall on our butts, your butt gets tile burns and the fun goes away. But the feeling of flying naked down a hallway will stick with you forever. To a five year old, it’s worth the burnt red butt.
Like clockwork mom began to chase us around trying to dry us off with our Superman capes. This time it was a little different. She didn’t want to play. She actually wanted to dry us off . “What the hell” I thought. I really did think “what the hell” because that is what my dad said every time he couldn’t figure something out. She not only dried us off but stuffed us in these stupid little pair of black pants, an ugly itchy gray sweater, and tight ass shiny black shoes she had bought at the store a few days before (I actually still have a picture of me in the god dammed sweater in my baby book, I begin to itch every time I look at it). That was it. That was the day we went left instead of right and drove to a new church. It didn’t even look like our old church. It looked like the broken down old building the kid down the street went to, to get his newspapers for his paper route.
That was the day I came into the truth. I was unknowingly and unwillingly stuffed into ugly itchy new clothes, smelling of diluted down little boy piss and tile burns on my little red butt. To top it off, I was forced to sit for two hours and not move a muscle. Telling a five year old with a flaming red butt to sit still for two hours and not move a muscle is like telling a three-week-old puppy to sit in the middle of the room for two hours and not piss on the carpet because it will displease god. My little ass was on fire, my entire body was itching and I had just entered a twenty-two year sentence in cult hell. Its name was the kingdom hall of Jehovah’s witnesses. I left it when I was 28 years old and never went back to even to take a peek, twenty some years later, my ass still burns just thinking about it.
Dave
