4. Wellspring

From Whence I Came

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. ― James Baldwin

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My father, David, was born to parents, Nelson, a two bit saxophone player for the Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Band, and Christine, a romance writer for pulp magazines. His birth was just a few months after the stock market crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression. Nelson felt ill-equipped to raise a son on a musician’s salary, so, when David was just two days old, he committed suicide. David used say that Nelson’s method of killing himself was appropriate for a Scorpio, his astrological birth sign, because Nelson had used a hose connected to his car’s tailpipe to poison himself with carbon monoxide — in effect he killed himself with his own tail, just like a scorpion.

Christine, in turn, felt ill-equipped to raise a son without a husband. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. She asked her parents to raise her son so she could be free to have fun. For years, David thought Christine was actually his sister.