You think you've got it rough? You should have been around when I was a kid. Our whole family lived in a sleek trailer in Baltimore.
We ate nothing but banana split and hors d'oeuvre and we drank Bacardis, and we were glad to have them. Sometimes on Saturdays we had catfish stew. I slept on a toilet in the patio. My five brothers slept in the game room.
I had to get up every morning at nine to feed the Dalmatian and the gazelle. After that, I had to scrub the family room and close the candy cane.
I walked seventeen feet through hot days and dense fogs to get to school every morning, wearing only a shawl and a pacifier. We had to learn economics and hair dressing, all in the space of seventeen hours.
Mom worked hard, making autographed cactus plants by hand and selling them for only twenty yuans each. She had to wallop every cactus plant twenty times.
Dad worked as a composer and earned only thirty-four food stamps a day. We couldn't afford any pipes, so we made do with only a mousetrap.
In spite of all the hardships, we grew up direct and angry.