Literary Fiction / Memoir
Release Date: October 1, 2022
Publisher: Mapleton Press
A young girl in a small southern town in the 80’s enlists the help of an unlikely group of friends and family to help her survive an unconventional, sometimes abusive childhood...
Often left in the care of a paranoid schizophrenic uncle who lives downstairs and a psychotic uncle upstairs, the narrator stacks up a few heartbreaking observations. When her mother abandons her in favor of her addictions, the girl goes to live with her grandmother but finds happiness cut short when her grandmother dies. Her uncle believes the voices in his head have trapped his mother in a basement across town and as he slowly looses grip on reality, he also looses his ability to take care of her. Taken to a Group Home to live until a case worker can find her a place to go, her mom’s ex shows up and is forced to make a choice.
Praise for Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond:
One child's vulnerability and resilience to forces beyond her control make a raw and colorful splash in this tenderhearted memoir.
-RECOMMENDED by the US Review
"Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond is highly recommended for fiction
readers looking for coming-of-age and family narratives that are anything
but ordinary and predictable. Its lively tone packs a punch."
- D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review
... I have to tell you that as I enjoyed this great book, I realized no 9 year old could have the thoughts or quick comebacks that Cotton does. Any kid that had to go through what Cotton did would become old way before their time. But in truth, this is mostly a story of Cotton telling about her life but living in the moment. Does that sound nuts? Well, whatever the technique, it worked. It made a story so very poignant that it touched my heart. Lis-Anna Langston created a character you will fall in love with and a book you'll be sad is over when you turn the last page.
- Our Town Book Reviews
Lis-Anna-Langston kindly used a "blurb" of my previous review above. I had to paste the whole review below because I want you to find out what a MUST read this is...
kathy - Our Town Book Reviews...
I can’t say enough about this book. I laughed and then I cried and then I laughed again. This is a story about the life of a young girl. A girl who has good times and bad times. One who has a no-show dad and a mother who either has a man on her arm, a needle stuck in her arm, or a joint in her hand. Yet somehow, Cotton manages to look at things in a way so honest that you have to laugh.
If you live Cotton’s life, your mother is upset because you have an imaginary dog named Diggy. To get your mind off a “fake” dog, she buys you something normal kids play with... a huge dollhouse that you don’t want. When you start to play with the people who “live” there, she wants to know who you are talking to. When you tell her it’s the rubber people in the dollhouse, she says it’s creepy. Life is just unfair where Cotton lives.
I have to tell you that as I enjoyed this great book, I realized no 9 year old could have the thoughts or quick comebacks that Cotton does. Any kid that had to go through what Cotton did would become old way before their time. But in truth, this is mostly a story of Cotton telling about her life but living in the moment. Does that sound nuts? Well, whatever the technique, it worked. It made a story so very poignant that it touched my heart. Lis-Anna Langston created a character you will fall in love with and a book you’ll be sad is over when you turn the last page.
See an excerpt of Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond below...
About the Author
Lis Anna-Langston was raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books. She attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation and went on to study Literature at Webster University. Her two novels, Gobbledy and Tupelo Honey have won the Parents’ Choice Gold, Moonbeam Book Award, Independent Press Award, Benjamin Franklin Book Award and NYC Big Book Awards. Twice nominated for the Pushcart award and Finalist in the Brighthorse Book Prize, William Faulkner Fiction Contest and Thomas Wolfe Fiction Award, her work has been published in The Literary Review, Emerson Review, The Merrimack Review, Emrys Journal, The MacGuffin, Sand Hill Review and dozens of other literary journals. She draws badly, sings loudly, loves ketchup, starry skies & stories with happy aliens.
You can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air.
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Prologue
Bringing You Up to Speed
When my uncle Thurman started boiling
frogs alive in big soup pots on the kitchen stove everyone turned a blind eye.
When he pulled the tail off a rabbit while it was alive, he retold the story as
something funny. It wasn’t. The problems didn’t stop there. Something in my
family’s blood told them they were bad. Misfits woven together with a sanity of
the sheerest design. As I grew older, I began to realize by natural deduction
that something was wrong or that nothing had ever been right.
In my family, as far back as I can
tell, there was no such thing as communication, only secrets. Big, nasty
secrets that hid in the closet with the bogeyman and a layer of dust. All of
the real players in the drama are dead now, or at least the ones who could tell
us what everyone was trying so hard to get away from. Even so, in moments of
contemplation I realize some-times people are crushed to dust under the burden
of their lives and my family was no exception.
There would be no warm, fuzzy
evenings around a din-ner table for me because by the time I entered this world
Grand Daddy was dying. Death waited patiently for him on the second floor of
our big, turn-of-the-century house. A hospital bed and morphine drip were
installed so he could pass his final days in the comfort of a room wallpapered
with hundreds of blue ships sailing to god knows where. He died with his
clothes still in plastic, tucked in drawers.
This elusive grandfather figure
fascinated me, as did the fact that we lived side by side a dead man, as if he
were coming home any minute to hang up his coat and rest after a long jour-ney
into death.
Later, I said living that close to
death was too much for a family like mine. It was the crack in the teapot, the
leak in the dam, and finally the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cancer
that killed him ate away at something inside of my fam-ily until it mutated and
grew into a victim, a paranoid schizo-phrenic, and a psychotic. A man I never
knew was the thread that wove those misfits together, and when he was gone,
those seams finally ripped under pressure.
But not right away. Before Grand
Daddy drove that Buick up to the Pearly Gates my mom was busy trying to find
herself by running off to Burning Man to be free and smoke dope.
The only thing she found was her way
back home, to a chorus of “I told you so,” dragging her teenage boyfriend from
Georgia as if she’d hooked him on a weekend fishing trip. They were white
middle-class kids who thought their revolution was unique.
“Revolution, my ass,” my grandmother
said. “They don’t want to start a revolution. They just want to be able to
smoke dope out on the front porch without anyone telling them not to.”
As I was becoming a glimmer in
someone’s eyes my parents ran wild. Or at least they imagined themselves
running wild. They were the product of a semi-revolution. Two high school
dropouts hell-bent on freedom, chained to the mother of conformity, toting that
hippie bible that reads just like anything else—we like you if you’re just like
us.
No one talks about my conception. My
great point of origin. Were there showers of kisses, or
random-high-only-semi-good sex that you can’t remember clearly later? Were
there grunts or pants or sighs? Was anyone performing that night who hadn’t
been chemically altered besides me? Perhaps no one knows, and if by some stroke
of luck they do remember, I assure you, no one told the truth. My mother made a
hobby out of feigning ignorance when asked to discuss pertinent is-sues. I have
never met my father.
So, from thus I was conceived. Seven
pounds, three ounces, on a hot summer night. I wasn’t really social in those
days, even though it was the beginning of disco and all. Not many expectations
were placed on me just yet. My mother moved us out of the house and in with her
new junkie/hippie boyfriend, who said the nicest things when he wasn’t high.
Then we moved again and then, again. Grand Daddy’s illness surfaced. It killed
him quick and from what I can tell, things began to change.
The family history hit an all-time
high of hush-hush. In that room dying of lung cancer, wasting away, he begged
for morphine. He said his mother came to see him every night, the same mother
dead for years. He talked about how she brought him angel’s wings and tiny
drops she put on his tongue, making his words spin. With a smile, he recalled
how she spoon-fed him hot broth while they talked about his childhood. He
forgot the extreme poverty that sucked up his early years. Blood came up every
time he coughed, choking him, and he didn’t mention that ramshackle of a house
where he grew up. His fingers were bones. He talked openly to the angel of
mercy standing in the doorway.
He hallucinated, saw his death,
called out, failing, fad-ing, fighting, and ultimately losing, because I don’t
think he ever really thought he was going to win. He died in the middle of the
night without a word to anyone.
A few years later I learned how to
talk and thus deduce certain things from my environment. The first clue
something was wrong with my family was that Preston Brown wasn’t al-lowed to
play at my grandmother’s house when I stayed over on weekends. The second was
that in my own home my mother and her new boyfriend Dave, decided that
financially it would be better if they were dealing drugs.
Around that time my crazy uncle Thurman
left my grandmother’s house one night and reappeared the next morn-ing, wet,
with human scratch marks all over his face and arms. Caked with dried blood,
and torn clothes, claiming to remem-ber nothing from the night before except
that he’d heard voices. He plodded upstairs and slept for twenty hours. When
news of a murder unfolded on the radio, my family met it with the same
tight-lipped resistance they greeted everything else. I was too young to
understand the consequences of murder, but I won-dered who those voices were,
and why they always told him to kill people.
I couldn’t recall a single moment
when I felt affection for Uncle Thurman. I never curled up in his lap and felt
safe or reached up to hold his hand before crossing the street. I learned you
don’t cross the street with psychotics— you cross the street to get away from
them.
Psycho Uncle hung out with a bunch of
dudes who thought he was a big fat ass from what I could tell, but they were
nice to him for the same reason everyone was nice to him, which was that you
didn’t have to spend more than five seconds with him to figure out he was a few
marbles short of a game. And he had weed. When you’re certifiably crazy, you
have to possess something that lures people in, and for Uncle Thurman weed was
his saving grace.
My Uncle Stan lived downstairs and
wasn’t so bad. He didn’t like Thurman. Stan was a good paranoid schizophrenic.
He refused to take baths because he said it made his skin rot off If someone
finally laid down the law, he would plop down in the big claw-footed tub, and
sit perfectly still, staring straight ahead until my grandmother sent me to
tell him to get out. He lumbered out like a big old bear muttering about how
baths put him in a neurotic delirium.
I loved Stan the way other little
kids loved cartoon characters. Even at the age of six, I knew you weren’t
supposed to admit to liking Spam. Not Stan. He thudded into the kitchen wearing
big boxer shorts from the Dollar General Store and ate an entire can, sitting
alone at the kitchen table, lost in his own mind instead of the morning paper.
He drank soda pop like someone said there was going to be a shortage. He
consumed about a bazillion cans of Campbell’s soup, and when we later tried to
change brands on him, he politely told us that the other manufacturers put
poison in their soup, and while we may be fooled, he wasn’t. If you pushed the
issue with him, he would also, very politely but with a tone that suggested he
meant it, tell you to go to hell.
But Stan was different from the rest,
and if I laughed long enough and hard enough then eventually, he’d laugh with
me. Aside from the fact that occasionally he’d slice his arm open with a
kitchen knife, or that he thought the people who lived next door were shooting
his brain with an x-ray gun that made him hear voices, or that periodically
he’d refuse to pee in the toilet for reasons that escape me now, he lived in
his own world and what a world it was. Every once in a while, I’d burst in on
him and catch him dry humping a pillow with all of his clothes on. He didn’t
care. Why would he? Everyone had the same urges, did some of the same things,
but they cloaked theirs in secrecy and claimed superiority. Not Stan. As far as
I knew, he was the only 40-year-old virgin high on Thorazine in the whole
neighborhood. And he was great. He liked to go to the zoo and eat candy bars
and fried chicken and take rides in the car every Sunday.
Aside from the fact that he was a
little weird, Stan proved to be about as harmless as Bambi. The rest of my family
should have been so lucky.
But I’m getting ahead of myself . . .
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