From The Desk of My Dad

Barbara Ann Marie Lorio. It wasn’t intentional that I married a woman who has the same first, middle and confirmation name as my first wife. Not at all. I guess when you think about it, it wasn’t intentional that I’m named after my father and my son is named after me. I like to think of these things as serendipitious coincides that I had a spefiic influence and control over. And when your two wives have the same name, there's a certain emotional getting over of the first one I didn't have to do. When I was a boy I had several cats with the same name. One would die, and get a new one and give it the same name. Replacment pussy.
Some people might argue that we, my father and I, wanted little spitting images of ourselves. But when it was abundantly clear that my little spitting image was more interested in Sonny and Cher for the Bob Mackie gowns and lively banter and witty repartee and not Cher’s ass, I pretty much gave up on molding him in my likeness and turned to my daughter, immediately shoving a ball and mitt into her eager little hands. Goddam it, I was going to a baseball game that my son was going to play at even if that son was my daughter. And shit, she’s my best friend. Even if she hasn’t talked to me since I got married to Barbara 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I like to tell myself that it’s not because of me that the family has fallen apart since the divorce, because it’s absolutely not. I never once expected my daughter to rifle through the desktop on the computer we shared when we all lived at her mother’s house. I never expected her to find that email from Barbara 2: Electric Boogaloo about that blow job – which by the way was euphemistic and a metaphor for something and not actually what any of you might think it is. Sometimes when somebody writes at three o’clock in the morning in an IM that they want to tickle your balls with a feather and blow you retarded, they don’t necessary mean it. And Barbara 2 is not a bar cow cuntrag that my daughter has often called her, but quite a lovely thrice married woman who vaguely resembles George Washington, when her hair goes gray and Captain Caveman when she colors it, who may or may not know her siblings because and these are her words not mine – "My father fucked all of the immigrant factory works he employed." Except the guys. Her father didn’t fuck guys.
That’s left to my son. Who, did I mentioned took the buns out of his foot long Princess Leah and gave her a fabulous cut and color right before the one dinner party I had with some of the guys from the firehouse, back in the 1978? I use fag speak like "fabulous" because I support my son’s gayness. Well lets just say we never had another one of those parties and let’s also just say that no one bought the lie that my wife tried to float that my son was my daughter who was just a little bit butch. She was mortified by the kids early predilection for all things fag. Imagine me still being married to wife one, with her feet planted firmly in the soil of delusion – which blossomed wild and ravenously the longer we stayed married and the more my son cranked his Madonna collection and spent hours in front of that TV switching from Designing Women and The Golden Girls. Funny shows, but even I felt like sucking a dick after an hour or two. The kid was drawing large silhouetted pants suits for Delta Burke. And my wife ignored this. Ignored it!
That was the problem with our marriage, I was the realistic one and my kid’s mother, she was the one out there. I mean really out there. I, on the other had was able to recognize, through my dry heaves, that the men calling my house asking for my son were probably one of the many smooth Asian, puerto rican or black men (because they just couldn't white, could they?) he was having group sex with and probably getting infected with all kids of sexually transmitted diseases. But I also realized, that it was more than likely a passing phase and once the right woman came along, he’d rejoin the ranks of heterosexuality and make his father proud. And maybe he’d finally get over my asking him to begin going by his middle name, for some, you know, autonomy. I mean look at the freak David Bowie’s kid. He named him Zowie Bowie. And now he goes by Randolph. Randolph Bowie. Or Matlida. With a half a fag father like David Bowie, a boy can be given a girls name and it’s okay. Fruits. So Tom the 3rd shouldn’t feel bad by going by another name. The time’s run out on the family name. The pride in it is gone. I tell this to Barbara 2 and she feels there doesn’t need to be two living Tom Lorios. It’s just weird. She agrees.