FFXIAH Linkshell Ni

Back into the time machine everyone, we are off again to the smurf house... the year is 1988.... toot toot!

On many occasions, we raided jock parties and stole several kegs of their beer but sometimes we got lazy, pooled our meager resources together and bought one of our own. Either way it always turned into a party. Somehow tapping the keg lit a beacon in the night sky that could only be seen by "underage" kids and they would all gather at our house.

On one such weekend night in particular I had been drinking beer steadily all day from a pitcher and lost track of how much I had. I was staggering around making idle conversation with my friends and not paying any attention to the other guests.

One of the high school girls seemed to recognize me and tried to start a conversation but it was late and I couldn't focus on any particular thought longer than ten or fifteen seconds. I think I said something like "oh hey, how's it goin"... Maybe she wanted to pretend she knew someone that lived there to avoid being thrown out. I don't know. Maybe I knew her and wasn't able to recall. Either way I was polite and pretended I recognized her... and then I locked myself in my room to avoid getting messed with and promptly passed out.

The next day she was still there with a couple of her friends and they needed rides home. She was still trying to talk to me as if I was someone she hadn't seen in a long time... I was too hungover to make any sense of it, what happened? how long have you been back home? all this sort of thing...

We get to her place and there on her wall is a picture... of ME, dressed in an army uniform. It was like looking in a mirror. I had never been in the army, my old pops had talked me out of joining with my buddies after high school to travel the world, meet interesting people and then kill them (full metal jacket).

Slowly I realized I had my very own doppelganger.... and the girl realized I wasn't her boyfriend abruptly returned from a war with apparent amnesia... I was his evil twin she hadn't even known existed. And suddenly she realizes she was alone in her house with a complete stranger.

It's not everyday you find out there is someone that looks exactly like you walking around one town over.

I explained to the girl the extraordinary chain of events that had lead to our meeting... I had been put up for adoption at birth. For all I know that guy, her boyfriend, was my brother, maybe even my twin. The resemblance, which fooled a girl that knew one of us intimately, was too close for coincidence... and she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

I told her to let it go.. but she opened pandora's box anyway and went and asked her boyfriend's mother...

Through tears of pain and loss came the story of a young woman who was forced by her husband to put up their second child for adoption... He wanted her to have an abortion, but she convinced him to let the child live....

Later in the story...She went on to eventually have three more kids with this *** but they lived the next twenty some odd years with this dark secret. They never told their kids, they never talked about it, they never admitted it to anyone. The girl found me and told me the story...

So now the boyfriend's mom was eager to meet me... she confessed to her children, she signed the release which would enable her son to retrieve his original birth certificate.... but he never did...
He never came home.

So eventually the girl tracked me down... what happened? Did I go get my birth certificate? Was her boyfriend's mom my mother? She was eager to know the end of the story...

It's hard to explain. Danny Devito did a pretty good job in the movie Twins. All orphans dream their real parents are rich and famous, that it was all a big mistake... But the reality I have always known was that probably wasn't the case. My parents were probably not Hugh Heffner and Bambi Bembenek, but probably poor and desperate everyday people, perhaps dependent on drugs and/or alcohol. I'm sure they have their own problems and they don't really need mine... any more than I need theirs.

She didn't understand why I don't want to know who my real parents really are. I tried to explain to my sister, who was also adopted, that once you find out who they are it eliminates everyone they could have been. Who they really are is a reality that is probably stark and grim and you are better off not knowing.

As it turned out my sister was undeterred by my grim warnings, she found her birth mother, a depressed alcoholic with a mountain of personal and economic problems that my sister was unable to deal with. My sister eventually moved out of state to get away from the whole mess, a black hole of despair and regret was trying to suck her down into it.

Anywho.... The suspense was killing the girl, she couldn't understand why a hair's breath from the truth I turned my back on the whole thing.

You don't understand, I told her, at the end of that story the boy kills the father that forced his mother to give him up and suffer in silence for twenty years. The father that made the boy a *** would pay the ultimate price for all the things the boy had to go through growing up, simply because his father couldn't be bothered with another child at the time. Believe me when I tell you, everyone is better off if the story doesn't end that way... with me as the long lost son.

She still didn't understand....

I don't know what she told the woman. I never spoke to the girl again. Maybe, her real son came home and they all lived happily ever after.... the end!

yeah, that sounds much better... now if you'll excuse me it's time for my real dad and I to go drink martinis and splash around in the grotto...