Somehow I knew more about Marvel than any of them. He didn’t agree that I walk with him, not really, so I kind of followed him and a few of his friends each morning until they accepted me and my knowledge of mama-purchased Avengers and X-men. He laughed a lot, was bigger than I was and probably about four years older. I chose a slightly older boy named Jerry.

Looking back, it feels like my mother held my hand every morning from kindergarten all the way to third grade and I am certain I was the only kid being walked to school every day by his mother, and when I asked when I would be able to walk to school on my own, she said “If you make a few friends, you can walk with them.” Friends, uh-oh, not easy, hmmm but here goes. I was so used to being at the babysitters and watching other people cry at funerals on television, that it seemed only a natural act for me to also cry as she pulled me away from the babysitter and television off to the annoying world of books, paste, playgrounds and girls who said things like “Thomas Ellis, you would be cute if you combed your eyebrows!” The learning from the opposite sex had begun, hell, I didn’t even know eyebrows were hair until then. I cried and cried and cried all the way to school on my first day. Thomas, like a little Jeanette, gifted her vision-mother and firstborn son, Libra and Scorpio (on the cusp of Libra and Scorpio), respectively.

By five years old, I’d seen her laugh, scream and cry, and each time-no matter the emotion-I felt as if I was seeing an advanced screening of myself. That woman was my mother, Jeanette Ellis, and although I had a son’s crush on her long hair, I was more in love with her eyes, which always seemed to be the exact maker-replicas of mine whenever I looked into them. I would comb her hair downward with a black, wooden brush, and with my other hand, pretend I was sculpting it into a black waterfall. I was five years old and liked to sit on the edge of the bed in late evening, after dinner, mostly when my father wasn’t around or had fallen asleep from work, band practice, or boxing. The last time I combed a woman’s hair was in 1968.

Inkslinger jeans