Chapter 1: The Early Years

This story has been very difficult for me to recite because this tells of my own life. I left home at eighteen and joined the service to get away from an abusive family life. I wandered in and out of real life for several years before I found something good. I found a woman that although most people would say was not a beauty, she turned into my salvation. She stood by me in thick and thin, like the vows say, 'in sickness and in health, for better or worse, till death do us part.' That was us. I'm an old man now looking back on my life and seeing that even in hindsight I had a good life, probably better than some, maybe worse than others, but I have to think it was a good life for me and my soul mate, Kathy.

Let me start out by giving you my name, well the name; I am going to us to describe my life. The story you are about to read is true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent, namely me. My name is James Lawrence Stickler. I was the first-born child of Frederick Giles Stickler and Mildred Mae Wright. I was born on September 10^th, 1943, in a small town in western New York, and yes I was conceived about a year after the December 7^th attack on Pearl Harbor; the 'day that will live in infamy' according to our president at the time, FDR. Today I am willing to bet that nine out of ten children from age five to adults aged forty don't know what that day meant. Just like VE Day, VJ Day, and probably any of a dozen more dates like D-Day that I had to learn in school. They meant something to us kids born during the war years. A lot of the kids didn't have a father after the war, just like a lot of parents no longer had young men in their family either.

Somewhere between 22 and 25 million military men across the globe were killed, and another 40 to 52 million civilians were wiped from the face of the earth. Approximately, 2.5% of the world's population at that time was killed during that war that lasted from 1937 to 1945. Compared to other wars it was horrendous. My maternal grandfather fought in WW-I; my father and uncle fought in WW-II, and another uncle went to Korea, and they all returned different from when they left. I went to Southeast Asia during my time in the military, and I came back unlike I left too. I think any young man that is forced into war, comes home different. When the troops came returned stateside in 1945, they were treated as conquering heroes. When the troops came back from the Korean War in 1953, they were treated as returning heroes. However, when we were dragged into the Vietnam Conflict (1955 – 1975), and the troops started coming home from that place; they were treated like shit, we were labeled baby killers, and we were spat upon, hit with rolled-up papers and signs and in some cases bats and sticks. We were called all kinds of names; probably, the worst was traitors and baby killers. Those scars, both mental and physical are still carried today by most of the young men and women who came home from that war. Excuse me, it was not a congressional or publicly declared war so it was labeled a conflict, but it was war regardless. I'll probably get more into that time of my life later. You will have to excuse an old man with my rambling; it happens when you get old.

[Let me interrupt here and say that this story took me almost eight months to get all of it. It was a lot of time with seeing my friend slowly slip away from an older semi-hale man into the wasted flesh that occupied the hospital bed in his spare room at his death. There were a lot of false starts and hours that I just sat by his bedside waiting for him to wake up and go on with his narrative. However, I stayed because he was my friend. BR]

Okay, my early childhood. I lived with my maternal grandparents, and my mother until my father returned in 1945. My grandmother and mother were volunteer fire fighters. There is a picture of the three of us somewhere. My grandfather helped the war effort with his job by making ammo and other items as needed. I never really knew what he made, as it was all hush-hush. I remember living in several different places until I was about five. We then moved into a two-story house where my father's mother, Maude, and my Uncle Bill lived downstairs and our family lived upstairs. This was the Broadhead house and was where shortly after we moved in my mother turned up pregnant with my sister Maxine. We lived there about five years. I met and ran around with several of the kids on our street, and I guess I was about eight or nine when two things happened that kind of changed my life, or maybe it was just two things I remember clearly of my early life, other than the discipline.

First, was that we were running around in a vacant lot on our street playing cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, I don't remember which, when the flapping sole of my shoe caught on a downed branch, and I fell face first on the ground. I ended up cutting my palm about two inches on a piece of broken glass. I ran to the house of my friend Johnny Allred, and his mother cleaned out the cut which was about a half inch deep and grabbed a pronged hair clip and closed my cut palm and wrapped a piece of gauze around it and called my mom. She rushed down to the house, grabbed me, and scolded me all the way to the hospital about six blocks away. Yeah, we walked the whole way because my dad was working and had our only car. Mom grabbed my arm, held it up in the air, and dragged me down the block yelling and screaming at me for the stupid thing I had done. I'm pretty sure she was swatting my ass a few times too, but a parent could get away with that kind of treatment then; it was called 'disciplining a child', not child abuse.

I had come home from elementary school, (RR Rogers Elementary) and changed into my play clothes, which meant my old shoes with the right sole hanging almost completely off and a large hole in the under sole. It was big enough you could see maybe an inch round part of my sock through the hole. I couldn't wear my school shoes, because they had to last me all through the school year. Hey, I'm not saying we were poor, but we didn't have a lot of clothes; we got new clothes either right before school started or before Thanksgiving, and they had to last us until summer when school let out for that year. What lasted the year became play clothes until we totally outgrew them. Anyway, I ended up getting butterfly clamps on my palm and wrapped again just like Marge Allred wrapped it before. These butterfly clamps were very similar to a hair clip of today, but instead of plastic teeth, they were made of aluminum and had teeth almost like a fine-tooth comb, but the teeth were staggered and meshed with each other to hold the hair in place when styling. Well, the hospital ones were very similar, but were smaller in size, made of stainless steel and had much finer teeth and a different angle, so they would hold the skin together and was better than stitches because they wouldn't leave as big a scar. Today I can't tell you which hand it was on. There is no scar at all.

The second thing that was of note was when Johnny Allred and I were fishing for bullheads, or more commonly known as catfish. They are tough skinned, and you need a pair of pliers to skin them, but they are good eating. I should mention that for as long as I can remember until I left home, we always added to our larder by fishing and hunting. When we moved closer to the lake, we would have sunfish, carp, northern pike and muskellunge or muskie. We also ate rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, bob white, quail, turkey, woodchuck, deer, and just about any other animal we could trap or hunt.

Anyway, Johnny and I were fishing along the river that ran through the middle of town. We were about nine or maybe coming up on ten. The Chadakoin River had several dams and weirs left over from when most of the town's power for the furniture factories came from the water wheels along the river. The river was pretty fast-moving and therefore, could be used to provide power for all the belt-driven machines. We no longer had the need for water wheels, but the dams, locks and weirs were still in the river. Johnny hooked something big and was trying to pull it in when he slipped on a muddy spot and went into the river. I tried to reach my pole down to him, but the current took him and pulled him away from shore. I almost panicked, hey who am I kidding; I did panic, and I ran to the nearest business. It was a barber shop on the street about a hundred yards from the river edge. I ran in there and said my friend was drowning and being swept over to the big dam. There were probably four guys there talking, and they took off running after me because their first words were 'Where?" I said, "Follow me!" and we all ran to the river.

One of the men saved Johnny, but I got a whipping and couldn't sit for a week. Why? I couldn't tell you because I never knew why, I was not once told. For the longest time, I thought it was because it wasn't me, and I should have drowned. Well, that is how I felt.

My next major event in my life was when my cousin, John, who was a year older than me, went hunting with a friend, and he shot him as they were climbing through a fence. This happened after we had moved to our new place that was not that far from the lake. They both had 22s; the gun dropped, and my cousin tried to grab it and hit the trigger and shot the other kid in the head. I was probably only eleven or twelve, and I didn't know the other kid. I remember that my cousin came into town to live with us for a while. It was probably only a month, but it really hit him hard.

Then when I was around twelve, I discovered my dad's porn stash and thought it was kind of curious. I'll get to the strange part in a minute. The next year I had sex with my cousin John's younger sister Susan. She was a year younger than I was and had a boyfriend who was three years older than her. He introduced her to sex the year before and during summer vacation that year, he had to be gone with his parents on vacation. Since my Aunt Gloria didn't work, except on the farm, my sister and I went to live with them during the summers. We played in the haymow and had built a fort out of the bales. One hot afternoon Susan and I were alone up there, and she asked me if I knew about girls. I had already learned that they were very different from boys, and what the differences were and how to have some fun. Well, it looked like fun from my dad's porn stash. He had several nudist books and a couple of 8mm movies and a whole bunch of pictures. That is when I found out that my parents were swingers. I saw pictures of both my parents naked with other people, so I could pretty much figure from them that they had a weird marriage.

Back to Susan, she took her clothes off and wanted me to finger her and be on top and put my wiener inside her. Hey, I'm no dummy, so I said sure and stripped off and fingered her hole and then stuck my four-inch dick in her and moved in and out. I even came, although it seemed to be clear and not milky as I had seen in some of the pictures my dad had. We had fun for about a week and a half until Susan's boyfriend Jason came back from vacation. Then I had to find a new outlet for my sexual urges.

Until we moved again just before my fifteenth birthday, not much happened. I tried some guy on guy with a friend, Craig Holder, but nothing serious; we were young, and experimenting since we couldn't get any girls interested in us. I think we tried out each other's ass maybe three times. We both had much younger sisters, but didn't want to get into that due to our parent's wrath and the age of our sisters. The rest of the time I just jacked off. Vaseline was my friend for quite some time then. Well, there was the time my cousin and I stump broke a calf, but that was only once. The calf was only about four days old and wouldn't stand still unless it was feeding from its mother. Hey, don't condemn me unless you have led a perfect and moral life.

During my time at this house on Fluvanna Avenue, I remember that we had an apple tree and several lilac bushes around a sunken garden area next to our house. At one time or another for infractions of god knows what rules, I was spanked or beaten with lilac switches or apple tree branches for bothering my sister or just anything I did wrong. My dad was the major disciplinarian of the family, there were a lot of 'wait until your father gets home' but my mother slapped me too, so it wasn't always my dad.

One incident I remember my dad used an old razor strop to beat me with. This time my sister was jumping on my bed and fell and cut her cheek open on the window sill. Man I really couldn't sit for days after that one. Another time we were eating supper, and I had gotten a 'D' in some subject; I really don't remember which one, probably English. Dad had the newspaper next to his plate, and he rolled the paper up and hit the side of my face on my left ear. I was deaf in that ear for over a month, but I never went to a doctor about it. I mean, how could I, my parents would have to take me and pay the doctor, right? Well, it didn't happen, so I suffered the result.

Chapter 2 »