My Mom had some mental issues. Ok, that doesn't quite cover it. She was paranoid schizophrenic. She was also on more drugs than the roof of a pharmacy. She had about 17 different doctors, half of them mental doctors and about half were other specialists, between them she was prescribed the entire pharmacopeia. Redundant?? sure but I'm making a point here and it bares repeating.

When I was a toddler my Dad left us. Every month she invented a new reason why he left her. The most bizarre one she told was my dad was a Jewish CIA alien astronaut lizard creature and was now living in the alternate universe in her left big toe. When she was having one of her rare lucid moments she was either holding an orgy or arranging for my practical sexual education or both, more often than not, both simultaneously.

Amazingly, she actually functioned, hallucinations and all. Sure, some of her hobbies were illegal, but she managed to earn a living (as an artist) and paid her bills and fed me and made sure I went to school and got good grades and that was pretty much all the government expected out of her as a citizen so what was going on between her ears never entered into the equation as far as the authorities were concerned.

I don't remember when I got my first blow-job. I was too young to remember. I remember my Mom would sit next to my bed in her grandmother's rocking chair and spin the most delightfully imaginative yarns, her own version of fairy tails, often erotic in nature while one of her friends, sometimes a guy, sometimes a girl, sometimes more than one, would lick me all over and finish with an excruciatingly pleasant blow job.

For my 7th birthday, my mom hired a 12 year old hooker to take my virginity. When I was 12 I got my Mom's best friend pregnant. She was 37 at the time. When I turned 13 Mom decided she wanted a daughter and not a son. Lucky for her I was kind of feminine looking with long hair so I spent a year as April.

My Mom had an odd assortment of friends, many of whom participated in raising me. How she met some of them I never found out. At 10 I had an Ivey League math professor tutoring me in math. At 11 a friend of Andy Warhol gave me art lessons. I was given civics lessons from a congressman. A famous author tutored me in English. I spent my 13th summer in Paris living with a department curator of the Louvre. My 14th summer I spent in Provincetown pretending to be 18 and learning to be a drag queen.

I spent my 15th summer in Hawaii as a houseboy to an extremely famous movie star with a penchant for young feminine boys. I have three dresses she wore in three films she starred in that she made me wear for her while she sucked my "clitoris."

When I was 17 Mom gave me an orgy as a graduation gift. A former child star licked my ass while I fucked her boyfriend in the ass.

I never knew my childhood was unusual until I got to the university and discovered how mundane my classmate's lives had been.

Years later at my Mom's funeral a friend of mine was consoling me telling me how hard my life must have been. Sure, my mom held detailed conversations with an entourage of imaginary friends. Sure she was convinced we had three moons and the Earth was an inside-out sphere. Sure she thought she was the reincarnated and once was "the whore of Babylon" whatever that meant. And yes, to most people, what happened to me every day of my childhood constituted child abuse in many ways, but I would change nothing. I had the absolute best childhood anyone could every hope for and my Mom was the absolute best mother ever and I would change nothing about her save one thing, that she might have lived a few more decades.