My Dad was married twice.
Each marriage lasted one year.
He says he’ll never get married again.
He and his girlfriend Sis have been together
for what, ten years?
She’s still married to Billy McNabb
My Dad has had a whole slew of interesting relationships
I was around to witness most of them,
though I never did meet the lady he picked up on Greyhound,
the family says she was a real piece of work,
and not in a good way.
I’ll tell you a little something about the rest of them…
My mother:
My mother was the first woman my Dad was ever with
My Dad kept a journal,
at 21 years old, he wrote:
Met a nice girl named Darlene.
I invited her to my campsite and she’s been here ever since.
Both of them were quick to the draw,
my Dad proposed and my mother got pregnant.
Actually it was the other way around.
Thereafter she couldn’t keep it in her pants so it didn’t work out
She’d decorated the house in a dutch theme with little windmills
and wooden shoes and everything but then she left one day and
I overheard someone say she was out “jumping trains”
A few years later my Dad met Suzanne.
Suzanne was a real independent woman,
nothing like my mother.
She had a house and a son my age.
Suzanne had a beautiful olive complexion and a nice ass.
She went to church.
She made sure I took baths.
She towel dried my hair once,
put me in a clean pair of her stretch pants. They were gray.
Things were just wonderful until she met someone else.
My Dad was man enough to attend their wedding,
where I was the flower girl.
I cried but my Dad assured me they had always
been friends more than anything else.
I thought those must’ve been her words, not his.
I’d seen him in her bed after all.
I remember she kept a cookie jar up on the counter,
it was shaped like a strawberry.
Sure enough it always had cookies or candy in it.
Suzanne was a good woman.
My Dad had a girlfriend whose name I will not disclose.
She was the laziest sonofabitch you’ve ever met,
but she raised a ruckus in bed.
She had ropes tied to the frame of her bed,
Her kids showed them to me one time.
She was big into romance novels, erotic movies, and paganism
She claimed that the song “Pretty Woman” was written for her
I doubt it.
Cher.
Cher was a heroine addict from out of town,
that’s about all I remember about her.
She spent a lot of time nodding off on the couch
Lisa,
Marriage #2
Lisa is a main character in my memoir.
My family liked to call her the “Wicked Witch of the West”
behind my Dad’s back
She’s dead now, rest her soul,
freak accident involving a heavy entertainment center.
My Dad’s current girlfriend, Sis,
was a god-send
She’ll talk your ear off in her thick southern accent
She’s from Louisiana, a true lowlander;
born and raised in a floating shack on the bayou.
Sis cares.
Sis loves.
But Sis is one crazy mother%^&er.
Lisa was in it for the money, if you can imagine that.
My mother took and took and took love, trying to
fill up all that empty space inside of her.
She couldn’t give any back.
Sis is a good woman and I’m glad she’s around.
Her real name is Lillian, but don’t tell her I told you that.
Sometimes she talks in the third person and calls herself “Sissy”:
Sissy got yo’ back
All my Dad ever wanted was for a woman to stay
When he’s with a woman,
he only has eyes for her
He still goes to see Pretty Woman sometimes
but not for the reason you’re thinking.
She pays him cash for doing her yard work.
TERAH RACHELLE VAN DUSEN 