“Dad, are you going to tell me about Uncle Terry or not?”

“Am I- what do you think I’ve just been saying?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well, sit down and shut up and I’ll tell you a story.”

This was it. Time for Dad to open up and spill his version of the Dean family chronicles, his version that was contrary to the mythologizing gossip of the nation. So he started to talk. He talked and talked nonstop until eight in the morning, and if he was breathing underneath all those words, I couldn’t see it or hear it but I sure could smell it. When he’d finished, I felt as though I’d traveled through my father’s head and come out somehow diminished, just slightly less sure of my identity than when I went in. I think, to do justice to his unstoppable monologue, it’d be better if you heard it in his own words- the words he bequeathed me which have become my own, the words I’ve never forgotten. That way you get to know two people for the price of one. That way you can hear it as I did, only partially as a chronicle of Terry Dean, but predominantly as a story of my father’s unusual childhood of illness, near-death experiences, mystical visions, ostracism, and misanthropy, followed closely by an adolescence of dereliction, fame, violence, pain, and death.

Anyway, you know how it is. Every family has a story like this one.

Deadlock

I’ve been asked the same question again and again. Everyone wants to know the same thing: What was Terry Dean like as a child? They expect tales of kiddy violence and corruption in the heart of an infant. They imagine a miniature criminal crawling around the playpen perpetrating acts of immorality between feedings. Ridiculous! Was Hitler goose-stepping all the way to his mother’s breast? OK, it’s true, there were signs if you chose to read into them.