LITERARY - A CHILD CALLED IT

If you were to tally up the amount of time my eyes have spent looking at the cover of this book it would probably be something like 37 hours. Give or take. For over a decade this same pudgy, bowl-cut little face having his chin lifted by the same cloud-hand has stared me down from countless grocery store checkout counters and the "inspiration" shelves of countless bookstores—it even occupied a place of honor on the end table next to my grandma's sitting-chair, sandwiched between her dog-eared copy of Christine and completely untouched bible. But it wasn't until yesterday, when some girl fucking beaned me with a copy of the book from her apartment window while I was walking home, that I finally got around to reading it.

Good god, have you ever flipped through one of these things? It's essentially kiddie-rape porn for lonely old Christian ladies and Oprah-watchers who need some sort of moral vector to help deal with their titilation. The It-kid in this book never gets molested per se, but he does get stabbed, beaten, slammed against counter-tops, burned, starved, force-fed ammonia, force-fed rancid pork, force-fed his own puke, and force-fed baby shit in a four-page-long scene that reads like someone just took all the swears out of an old Peter Sotos piece. Honestly, I'm surprised anybody involved in power electronics even bothers to come up with their own lyrics when there's such an abundance of material like this, ripe for the taking. Here's the opening salvo from the shit passage (try reading it in the screechy Whitehouse voice):

"As soon as my dad and brothers left, she brought out one of my baby brother’s soiled diapers, knelt down beside me and in a soft voice said, ‚ÄòEat it.’ I looked straight ahead, avoiding her eyes. ‚ÄòNo way!’ I said to myself. Mother smacked me and slammed my face into the diaper and rubbed it from side to side, ‚ÄòI said eat it!’ she sneered. My nose struck first. A warm sensation oozed from my nostrils. I tried to stop the blood from escaping by breathing in. I snorted bits of defecation back up my nose with the blood. I threw my hands on the counter top and tried to pull myself out of her grip…"

A few cynics, like his brothers and grandmother, claim the author took some liberties with the actual abuse he took as a kid when writing the story, but I get the feeling they've just been force-fed a bowl of jealousy by his success. I mean, it's not like there's anything farfetched about a mother who—with no prior history of even being angry with her kids and evidently no provocation whatsoever—decides to wrench her son's arm out of the socket one evening, then somehow gets him held back in school despite the fact that he's the best student in the class, makes him wear the same shirt for four years, poisons him, runs a carving knife into his stomach, and makes him barf up everything he's eaten every day for two weeks save it in a bowl in the fridge and then eat it while the rest of his family is just like [shrug] whatcha going to do? Really, who'd just make that crap up?

LEROY GUMPTION

PS: I almost forgot about my favorite scene, when the mom tries to roast the kid naked on the stove because she "read an article about another woman who did it." Isn't that the most mom-like reason for abuse you've ever heard?