On JACKRABBIT

January 7th
Hanged again. Fuck this game.

On JACKRABBIT
Memoirs – Part I
Dear reader, I was not always the man you see handsomely displayed on the dust jacket of this book. If you flip to that photo, you’ll see a man in a violet valeur cape tied above the sternum, a cigarette holder tightly wedged between 30 foot teeth, with facial hair that looks like it was drawn on with a calligraphy pen, a top hat precariously perched on his head like a medieval tenement, his eyes burning red like smouldering embers at the bottom of black pits. Even my name, proudly emblazoned on the cover of this memoir, is not the moniker I was given when I was born.
When I was born, I was named Georges St. Pierre Beaulieu Clemenceau IV, in the Louisiana Bayou. But because of my unusual physical features, I was known as Jackrabbit. My shins were twice as long as my thighs, which were twice as long as my torso, and my knees were bulbous fists, looking like bloated, pus engorged cysts. My arms were normal sized. My hair was a brown mop of curls like Terry Fox, and I was always wearing green short shorts with bright yellow piping. My parents were taken away from me when I was four years old by a mysterious mist. I survived by selling raw hot dog wieners at the state fair, calling them “Bayou Treats”. I could only attend school on days when the tide was low enough for me to cross the Bog. I taught myself to read using three issues of Playboy from 1959.
When I reached the age of 12 puberty struck with the urgency of a careening cement truck. I grew a full beard in one day, and lost my virginity to the daughter of the owner of the Riverboat Gambler, a local saloon. She was blind in one eye and had seven fingers on one hand, which she would run through my overgrown chest hair. I refused to shave and by the age of 13 I looked like a young Rasputin and took to wearing black robes. I changed my name from Jackrabbit to Jack Rabbit. I was accepted with a full scholarship to Constabulary University in Salem, Oregon, but deferred my acceptance for two years in order to finish a Popsicle stick art project that I gave to Gwendolyn, a local girl that I had fallen in love with.
She asked me why I was wearing robes when it was 120 degrees out. She said she missed the old Jackrabbit, and that if I was trying to hide my unusual shins and knees, I should show them proudly, for they were given me by our Lord our God. She thought the popsicle art piece was an oil refinery, but I had intended it to be a sewage treatment plant, after the treatment plant where we had first met, hiding from a gang of marauding toughs who were posing as racists but were really just homophobes.
I flinched when she misidentified the piece, and walked to the train station without speaking to her. I boarded the 10:23 train to Salem, Oregon, and never saw Louisiana again.