It's been a strange week... After a rousing moose hunt with the local wolfpack, I returned to my fortress only to be hounded by yet another series of visions. Contrasting with the usual course of things, neither elves nor laser cannons featured prominently in these revelations. There wasn't even some infra-dimensional spectre involved. It was just... normal! Almost depressingly so.
I am trying to make sense of these visions. I'm filing them under The Children and Grandchildren of Whores and Thieves. Perhaps a coherent narrative shall emerge from these initial encounters...
Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather was born in 1941 to a gas station owner and his wife. His dad went off to fight in World War II – and never came home. His mother raised him by herself, sold the gas station and worked as a waitress to supplement her widow's pension.
Nicki Baindbridge's grandfather was one of the first latch-key kids. He was allowed to do as he pleased.
He fell in love with cars, guns and pin-up girls; not necessarily in that order. He started off wanting to become a mechanic when his friends started getting involved with biker gangs. He joined up too, and consigned the next decade-and-a-half of his life to drinking, riding, gambling, thieving and fighting.
Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother had a different story. She grew up in various post-war, middle-class neighbourhoods. She was born in 1947 to a career army officer and his wife. This army officer knew little enough of honour, and was constantly cheating on his woman. He also started sexually abusing his daughter when she turned twelve.
At sixteen, Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother ran away. Shortly thereafter, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
She found life on the streets hard and miserable. She became a drug addict and a prostitute long before it was rewarding or fashionable to do so. She traveled around, tried to survive, subjected herself to abuse at the hands of other men like her father. In 1965 she found work at a stripclub. Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather also worked at that stripclub as a bouncer.
Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather's interest in her grandmother began and ended with her grandmother's willingness to have sex with him. Since Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother never thought a man would love her for any other reason, she found their relationship amicable. In fact because he never beat her (even if he never stayed faithful to her), she pretty much fell inhead over heals for him. He was also tough and well-connected. He kept bruises off her body, and she provided what his body craved. It was the most stable relationship either of them had ever been in.
This lasted until June, 1966, when Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother became pregnant with Nick Bainbridge's mother. Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather left her for the next diesel-fuelled wind that blew through. Her grandmother lost her job and had to move into public housing, go to public health clinics, and survive off public handouts. Roe v. Wade was still six years away, and it happened that Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother lived in a state that had kept abortion illegal. She resented having to stand in line with the niggers and hillbillies. She was brimming with spite by the time her child was born.
The first phrase Nicki Bainbridge's mother learned to say was "I hate you."
A contrary sense of duty, ingrained in her from a military childhood, pushed Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother away from giving her daughter up for adoption. It also forced her to put in the minimalist effort in providing for her, emotionally or materially. Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather sent the occasional child support check, but it was never enough. He drifted in and out of his daughter's life until 1973, when Roe v. Wade passed, his daughter was six years old, and he found Jesus and got married. He settled down on the other side of town from where Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother lived, and tried to do his best to make amends for decade after decade of lawless living. Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother didn't appreciate his visits much.
It worked out then that soon enough Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather had a child with his wife, and then another, and another, and another. This allowed Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother to ignore the man who fathered her child, and instead subject her daughter to a string of abusive boyfriends and malevolent would-be father figures as she tried to make ends meet. She was a waitress, a hair-stylist, a grocery bagger, a baby-sitter, and, on occasions, a drug dealer. Sometimes she worked all these occupations at once, leaving her daughter in the hands of neighbours or her sleazy boyfriends while putting in nearly one-hundred hour weeks.
Nicki Bainbridge's mother learned her life's lessons well. She lost her virginity at age eleven, took up drinking and smoking by age twelve. She was a veritable alcoholic by the time she was thirteen, and shortly thereafter became pregnant. She didn't know who the father was. No one was surprised.
Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother urged her child to get an abortion. Nicki Bainbridge's grandfather, staunch evangelical that he had become, intervened and promised that if his eldest daughter kept her baby, he would raise the child and pay for Nicki Bainbridge to go to college. Nicki Bainbridge's mother never liked her mother that much. Spite was more involved in her logic than her father's promises.
Melissa Nicole "Nicki" Bainbridge was born at 3:48 PM on Wednesday, October 28, 1981. Her grandfather and step-grandmother raised her along with their four other children, three daughters born in 1974, 1976 and 1977, and a son born in early 1980. He provided well enough, though it was a notably blue-collar household, despite Nicki's grandfather's success. Since coming to Christ in the early seventies, he had taken a job as a mechanic and ultimately managed to buy the shop he worked at, as well as the gas station it was connected to. He supplemented the family's income with regualar speaking engagements where he shared his testimony and voiced support for the Christian Coalition. His wife stayed home with the children, like a good wife should.
Nicki Bainbridge's mother sobered up after her child was born, and left her mother to go live mostly with friends and extended family. She graduated high school to everyone's amazement, and her father made good on his pledge to pay for her schooling. She became a nurse. In 1991, Nicki went to live with her mother for the first time. She wanted to become a dancer and a movie star. Her mother told her she could be anything she wanted to be.
Nicki Bainbridge moved to Los Angeles to be what her mother said she could be. That same year, Nicki Bainbridge's grandmother fired a pistol into the back of her mouth.
Nicki Bainbridge missed the funeral.
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