Exit A [antikvár]

This boy is an American, bom on the third of July, 1972. While his mother spat and screamed through the life-endangering birth, his father and the orderlies and janitors lit illegal fireworks in the hos-pital parking lot. The men drank from botdes of bourbon and beer while leaning down to light Bottle Rockets and Flaming Marys and Wailing Jennys. His father supplied the armament and the devil's milk, and the matches, and most of the boisterous ranting and raving about God and Country and the Founding Fathers and the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock and the Salem witch trials and the Red Threat, that ungainly, bloody bear from the East. . The doctor held the boy upside down, and the safety of the womb became history. The room above the mother spun one hundred times, and she went under. No one found the father, not even the orderly sent to look. So they slapped the boy's bottom and placed him in a crib, where he waited for someone with his same blood to come to consciousness. His aunt Mirtha was the first to appear at the hospital, and after cursing the father s name, she picked up the boy and performed an auntly show for him, baby talk and ego stroking and burp and fart sounds. Because his aunt was present and cogent, and the nurses wanted to get down to the parade grounds for the base general's midnight fireworks display, they asked her to name the boy, and she did. This boy's name is Severin Boxx.