Engine

DISCLAIMER: The events, characters and entities depicted in this journal are fictional. Any resemblance or similarity to actual events, entities or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter One: Birth

In the mid 1970s a child was born on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. This was a monumental event for several people. The sex of the child was unknown until birth (that’s how people did it in the 70s) so there were two names picked out for the oncoming child. If boy: Erik. If girl: Alisha. The child was a boy so forget about the name Alisha insofar as you can, knowing that the boy may have been named that. The boy, of course, won’t forget this detail. There were baby-girl dresses in the closet at home waiting for him if he had emerged as a female. The dresses were yellow and blue, purple and green, brown and turquoise, and whatever else was popular at the time. Instead, Erik was dressed in almost exclusively blue. Navy Blue coincidentally became his favorite color from his infancy onward.

The child was born in a military hospital. These places were known for their cold sterility and nearly absolute void of emotional warmth. The child’s mother, Gabrielle, was particularly upset by her surroundings. Gabrielle had spent over 40 hours in labor in this place while her husband was drinking in a nearby bar. She suspected that he was smoking with his friends in celebration of the birth. Cigars, at least. This upset her not on principal but because she was jonesing hard for nicotine having been a regular smoker for the past decade or so, from the time she was a younger woman until now, in the military hospital bed. She had gone 40 hours without a cigarette, in labor, and was not very happy to put it mildly.

Of course, smoking was not reviled at the time. She also didn’t always necessarily use a seatbelt when she was driving an automobile. This was the 1970s and Gabrielle went with the flow. She was from a dirt-poor town, literally the daughter of a coal miner, a raven-haired beauty in her youth, popular among her peers in the days of disco. So of course she smoked cigarettes. From the womb, Erik listened to a lot of ABBA. Being encased in a warm sac of fluid, dosed with nicotine, and exposed to the rhythm of disco, he began to dance. Nobody can be sure how the prenatal nicotine withdrawal affected him.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.