Pseudo-Autobiographical Soliloquy

I was born on January 8, 1972. That makes me 51 at this moment in 2023. My mother was Cherie Ann Spencer, and a sophomore in high school. She passed in February of 2016. She had a tumor in her throat from smoking. Coincidentally it was her small size and smoking coupled with trying to hide her pregnancy (she barely showed even when i was coming out) that caused me to be born prematurely, i think in the second week of the third trimester, weighing about 4lbs 14 ounces. I stayed in an incubator for a week i think. 

I was born with a couple abnormalities, as a result of coming out in the  beginning of the third trimester. I didn't find all this out until my thirties. Before that time, i was just told it was cerebral palsy. BUt I was diagnosed way before there were accessible MRIs and things like we have now. I was born with an abnormal cleft in the right frontal-parietal region of the brain, referred to as a closed-lipped schizencephaly. I was also born with a smaller than average optic chiasm and optic nerve and without a septum pellucidum, a midbrain structure. All together its referred to as septo-optic dysplasia. I got off lucky though as it's not a raging case, nothing too severe. A few seizures here and there, and an associated schizophrenia diagnoses that didnt come on until much later in life, about age 45. I was also diagnosed with aspergers at one point. Both diagnosis seem valid to me. I'm also an epileptic with insulin dependent diabetes. I've also recent suffered some heart attacks and had congestive heart failure. They say my heart only has 15% of its capacity left. According to my doctor and google alike, that puts me on the short list where 90% expire within five years of that type of heart failure. As much as I hope to beat those odds, they're the impetus behind the creation of this website and subsequent pseudo-autobiography. I have a story to tell.

If I recall correctly, Mom skipped her Junior year in Centralia High School, Centralia, WA, and still managed to graduate with honors. My dad was Gary Wallace. He was adopted. He was class of 1972, so I guess that made him a Junior when I was conceived and a Senior when I was born. He had a twin brother, Larry Wallace. Both are now deceased. Gary died in about 1983 in a logging accident and Larry died, unknown to the rest of the world for two weeks, in 2018. Both were adopted. Through some research, I was able to locate some birth records that matched and they were from the Enboden family and adopted by Ray and Elna Wallace, my grandparents. From what I was told, Ray tried to get my mom to adopt me out to them, but Mom refused. 

Grandpa Ray Wallace was a well known cryptozoologist, I had heard him referred to as the father of Bigfoot. He was somehow involved in the Patterson bigfoot film (previous link goes to the film on YouTube and this is the Wikipedia link on the same subject) that you maybe have seen. Some have alleged that it was my grandmother in the bigfoot suit, but somehow I highly doubt that. Grandpa had said he was with him and had various tapes and even footprint castings of bigfoot in his shed. He used to tell me that bigfoot liked to play with nuggets of gold as marbles and that when i turned 18 he would take me to see the bigfoot out in  the Mt. St. Helens area and give them matches in exchange for said gold nuggets so they could cook their food. He also had bigfoot recordings that were turned in to country music and he was always giving those away. He was a voracious promoter of elephant garlic. He fully believed it would save the planet. He would sit in front of the grocery store giving it away, selling it and promoting it to anyone who would listen.My favorite things of him, however, were his UFO pictures. Polaroid photos of UFOs hovering just a few feet off the ground. Truly amazing stuff. Sadly, Grandpa passed in 2002, and Elna just a few years later. 

I seem to recall that it was my maternal grandparents that did the initial part of raising me. I certainly bonded with  them and they felt like parents. My mom felt like an older sister for the most part. My dad never was in the picture. I got to glance at him once, and that was when i was in about 2nd grade.  My mom had gotten married and I was subsequently adopted by her husband, Ramon Thomas Murray, Tom, as I called him. When I was three we had moved from Centralia to go start a life with the Murrays, or closer to them, in South Louisiana. I remember some of the drive pretty well, at least a couple incidents come to mind. The first was stopping and viewing a big meteor crater, or that what it seemed like, I thought it was in Oregon but it may have been in Nevada. My next memory was the big redwood tree that you used to be able to drive through in the Redwood National Forest, I got one of those little picture disks from there, a view finder of sorts, where you click and look into this fake binoculars that displayed the current photo and click by click you went through them. My other memory of the drive was going across the tarantula migration in west Texas. I remember seeing them on the road, flattened by car tires, just a huge maybe 40 second swatch of them as you drove through. I remember this because my mom freaked out, standing on her seat, afraid the spiders would catch onto the car and climb in, which thankfully none did. And that is also the story of how my arachnophobia got started.

So, we were living in South Louisiana, either Houma or Thibodeaux, and every winter we would fly back to Washington to visit my grandparents. And every time we did that, I would get to go see my paternal grandparents, the Wallaces, in Toledo, WA, travelling there from Bonney Lake, WA, so that my Mom could go visit her long time high school buddy Carol Hill. I would spend a few days hanging out with Ray, listening to his stories about Bigfoot and how we would go see them when i turned 18 (which never happened, sadly). On one such occasion, I was with Grandpa Ray and we were waiting in line to get a burger at the local burger joint. Beasleys, I think. It was right on main street there, across from the Short Stop gas station, although I don't know if it was called that then. It was right at the bottom of the high school hill (which, in 1974 Grandpa Ray had donated the land for them to build that high school). Now at this time Grandpa still had the free zoo there a few exits north of Toledo, they've long since removed his exit but it was about milepost 67. It was mostly farm animals like beefalo and the likes, but i recall they stayed fairly busy. But at this time we weren't there, we were waiting to order our burgers and grandpa said, "Now Kris, I want you to look over there, see that truck driving down the road there? That's your dad Gary driving" I recall him glancing over our way and he immediately looked down and averted his gaze so it did not meet ours. It still chokes me up to this day. All I ever wanted was to meet him. I  never got another chance as he was killed in a logging accident a few years later. Like I had mentioned, I think his passing was in 1983, I know i was in the summer between  my 7th and 8th grade years when I was was informed, presumably shortly after his passing.

I had many reasons for wanting to meet my real father. The biggest one, not that I needed a reason mind you, was that my dad at that time, Tom, was abusive. Mom had told him to quit beating me, so he quit in doing it when she could catch him. He instead was spanking me in my sleep, in bed at night after she was asleep. That was a trauma that lasted well in the second decade of the new millennia.  

Another event that I still recall was an issue with my dog. I saw dog walking through the yard when i was in kindergarden, so about age 6. I really wanted to adopt it and I was allowed to under the condition that I water and feed him regularly. If I failed in my responsibility, I was informed that the dog would be put to rest. At age 6 i really had no comprehension of what that meant and or entailed but I eagerly agreed. I named the dog "Flower" because that's just the type of guy I was. It didn't take long for me to forget. So therefore Tom rounded me and the dog up and we went out into the area behind my cousins house out in the cane fields, sugar cane, that is. It was an area I was familiar with because we had gone out there and hunted snakes and it was where I had been first introduced to quicksand. The actual walk there is vague but distinct is me having to tie the dog into a gunny sack and the feeling of the rifle in my shoulder as I was told to aim and shoot. I had been repeatedly reminded that this was all  the result of my behavior and I was warned this would happen. I, of course, was bawling. I named the dog Flower. I mean I wasn't macho by any stretch of the imagination. I had feelings but I was six and had forgotten and not been reminded to feed and water the dog. I recall the feeling of the gun as it recoiled into my shoulder. I'm not a fan of guns so I have no idea the size but I don't recall it being large, perhaps and quite possibly only a .22 caliber rifle. My dog yelped and howled when I shot him. Through my tears and bawling I was made to get closer and fire a second time. I don't recall exactly the result but i seem to recall Tom taking a few shots at him with a pistol just to be sure. I don't even think we buried the dog.

So, needless to say, I really wanted someone else to identify with. I had no dad. I called Tom, Tom and mom, Mom. There was no dad in my life. But he chose, instead, to look away when we saw him. I'll remember that feeling and that memory will stay with me forever. My grandparents had to call my mom for ideas because I spent the rest of that day sobbing. I remember my grandmother Elna tucking me in to  bed that night and staying to comfort me until I fell asleep.

My memories of my childhood are few far between after that era. I remember after school for a while I had a standard babysitter, day care. And I had babysitters. BUt before that iy was Grandma Boudreaux. That was while I was in grade school. Which was a parochial school. Catholic all the way. I remember the school didn't like the fact that my middle name was Wallace after my birth dad. So I had to register there as Kristopher Lee Murray. I don't remember the exact time frames of all those eras. I just recall for a while I had babysitters that would come to the house and one year I had a daycare I would go to, and for a few years, like before third grade, it was Mrs, I mean, Grandma Boudreaux. I recall one time I shit my pants on the bus, so I decided instead of going home I would walk to my mom's work. I got lost, so  I went randomly to people's houses until I found someone to open the door and I don't know how i found my mom's work, I must have known the name of the place, i believe it was Dr Tenny's Dentistry or something. Somehow that worked. Golly I think anymore these days that stunt would have gotten my mom thrown in jail. But this was the 70s.

I recall three times there were what I would call Rapey situations. Not really but close enough. The neighbor at that time, there was like 10 black kids who lived in the one house, and I believe my friend was Vaughn. I don't recall exactly because they called me Honkey,  I therefore did not consider his first name that important. I had two other friends not too far away who were white, and poor just like us. One was Dukes. He was cool, he was prolly my best friend. I recall I only slept the night at his house once. And no more. I pissed the bed. Part of the issue with not having a septum pellucidum is that I don't get reliable signals about hunger and temperature or thirst or bladder, things like that. So I wet the bed a few times. Getting beat in my sleep prolly didn't help with that either. One of those times was Dukes bed. Oops. But we were great friends. His mom's boobs were the first ones I ever saw. I entered his house once without knocking. His mom walking around without a shirt on and her boobs hanging out. Good stuff. I had one friend at the private school. See the public schools were among the worst in the nation. So no one wanted me going there, plus I would have been basically Token White Guy. They already just called me Honkey. So I had one good friend from Catholic school.  I forget his name, but we were pretty close. Their family had more money than we did, a bona fide middle class family. I recall going there quite a  few times during my childhood. Good times, I wish I could recall his name. I know he lived sorta close to Mrs Boudreaux. Closer than we did. I had one other white friend close to home and I forget his name but he lived on the same block, as did Dukes. This was all in Thibodeaux.

Anyway, those three times. Once was Vaughn's old brother. he cornered me and told him I should suck his dick, as he pulled it out. I ran away. I remember thinking I can't tell Tom or he'll get shot. We didn't need that. One time, at a house near the grocery store, I got shot by a kid with a bb gun. I had told my dad and he went over there and grabbed that gun and shot the kid back. I recall as we were driving away I was told not to go that way to the grocery store, a Win-Dixie. I think the kid's dad was yelling at us as we drove away. But yea I didn't want the neighbor shot so I didn't tell. The second time was na old man, a couple blocks away, he cornered me and asked that I follow him to the shed. I did and he pulled down his pants and told me since his wife wouldn't play with it he had $20 if I did. I ran away from that one as well. The third and final time I had that sort of situation in Louisiana, was when my cousin took me into the bathroom and showed me how to play with myself. Kind of a jerk move. I think he went on to placing 4th in the Olympics for track and was the guy that introduced me to pot. But that was when I was in the 6th grade many years later. At this point we had just got together in the bathroom and he went over the penis basics. I'm sure it was a common thing but kind of a erk move. I mean don't get me wrong one summer there was  a cute girl hat moved in next door and we played doctor. But we were the same age, that was different. This was an older kid, my cousin, telling me I had to do something.