When I was in the Navy I lived, in squalid splendor, with a young woman and her three year old son, TJ. TJ was as adorable as he was insane and underdeveloped, though he did pretty well considering the miserable existence he had to endure. We lived in a run down trailer, parked in the asshole of Florida, that served as a sort of opium den for white trash and sailors like myself. He would be conveniently parked in a spare room by his mother most nights while the rest of the little shack served as a laboratory in which the limits of decadence were earnestly explored. Often enough he would become excited by the noise and wander out into the vortex, becoming an interesting attraction and plaything, an interactive new twist to whatever dimension of reality the party had tumbled into.
     One summer I took a few weeks of leave and the three of us made a journey to Santa Rosa, Ca, to visit my parents. That TJ was not a normal child was immediately obvious to my parents, who lived in a quiet and sober reality, but his strangeness was endearing for the most part. One evening we were having dinner at Mary's Pizza and my mother noticed that TJ had taken an intense interest in a cute little girl, roughly his age, a few tables away from us. "Who is that TJ?" my mother asked, "Do you want to meet that little girl?" TJ gazed into my mothers eyes and said in his breathy, faltering dialect, "I want to get her, and cut her up, so she will be mine!" I was the only one who laughed.