This is a story of the unwanted, the unknown. The man in the park... The man at the end of the bar... The man no one wants to think about. If you feel that ignorance is bliss; then stop reading this right now, and pick up your copy of Home and Garden. This man's story, his life, is not one of happiness. It's not a tale of over coming the odds, but one of despair. I write this as a kind of tribute, and farewell; to the loneliest soul I ever had the misfortune of knowing.

I never knew his full name, but Nathan really didn't need a name at all. No one really knew him. No one ever cared. He spent his first years in Anchorage, Alaska where he lived with his father. His father worked as a fisherman, and carried around with him the constant stench of rotting fish. He was a drinker and an abuser, but Nathan never understood the term abuse. To him it was just his father's way of punishing him for being a bad child. Although, for the rest of us, we know that whipping a child across the knee with a tow chain is not a proper form of discipline. Nathan would forever walk with a limp after that, but at least he knew not to ask his father for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch again. When Nathan was twelve he was sent to live with his mother in Elco Nevada after he was hospitalized for two weeks, and his father was sent to prison. His mother never remarried after

his father, but she seemed to date quite a bit. Every night there was a different man with her. Nathan would sit close to the TV and watch Leave It to Beaver. It was his favorite show. He had to sit close because he was partially deaf. This was due to a frying pan across the face; swelling his ear to the size of a grapefruit, and causing complete loss of hearing in that ear. Also he had a hard time hearing the TV over the screams and moans from the bedroom. The frying pan came from walking in one time; in attempt to protect mother from the bad men, but he couldn't make sense of what he saw. He just stood there frozen in the doorway starring at the naked bodies of his mother and two other men. One man shouted, "Get the hell outta here kid!" but Nathan couldn't move. Finally the other man pushed him the floor in the living room, and slammed the door. Nathan went back to watching Leave it to Beaver. The men left around the same time Ward Cleaver was lecturing the Beave on the importance of his history homework. His mom came out later, still in the nude, except a towel she held up to one eye. "You little shit! I told you to stay the fuck out of my bedroom!" She shouted. Nathan hid his face so not to see the streak of blood running down his mother's inner thigh. "Do you hear me?! Look at me when I talk to you!" Nathan curled his arms over his head. He knew what was coming. First the shouting... Then the pain. He knew the routine. That was when the frying pan was swung through the air, smashing his ear drum, "You're just a little bastard like your father" She said, and closed the bedroom door behind her, leaving him bleeding and crying on the floor in front of the TV. He watched the credits go by as the ringing in his head grew louder.

Two years later his mother would die after trying to give herself an abortion with Liquid Draino. That sent young Nathan to a boys home where he would live until his eighteenth birthday.