I said goodbye to PawPaw and crawled into my dad’s truck. I was anxious to show him my award from school for having drawn the best art in Baton Rouge for my age. It had been all over the news, but he didn’t have a TV. Even if he did, it’s unlikely he would have been awake at 7AM for the Buckskin Bill Black show that I watched with Paw Paw before school. But I wanted him to know that I had been on television and was famous, just like Big Daddy had been so much lately.

“I missed wrestling in the junior olympics because I overslept,” is what I told most friends later that summer. It was true, in a way. I never told Coach what happened, because he didn’t ask; he never asked about anything that happened in the past, only what I was doing today for tomorrow. But when Mrs. Abrams asked if I were okay – she didn’t ask what had happened to my face – I told her all of what had happened that day. I was transparent, like she had taught me to be.

I woke up and felt the back of my head. The ringworm was still there, so I got up and walked to the mop closet and rubbed fungicide on the raised bump without taking time to look at it. I was feeling impatient and was too hungry to think clearly, so I dodged traffic and crossed Government Boulevard and entered a conveneince store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, cheap booze, and sugary snacks.

I’ve always found it difficult to write a memoir of my Partin family. Most of what I’ve written is publicly available, but few people outside of the FBI have put together pieces of the puzzle about my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin. You may already know about him, even if you don’t recall his name.