History

Lex was born to Brian and Siobhan McTavish in Ponca City, Oklahoma in 1975. While the town wasn’t a dust bowl, it was barely a town. Brian worked for the oil company and Siobhan stayed home like all proper wives did. While Lex had an older sister, she had run off with
those damned hippies before he was born and Lex has never spoken to her. If she ever made amends with his parents, he was long gone and never knew. He was raised, for the most part, like an only child. His father was strict, and while his mother often did what she could to protect him, that just meant trouble for both of them. The beating was harder on Lex for being a
mamma’s boy and Siobhan received verbal abuse for making
their boy queer.
Foolishly, Lex thought it would be better as he got older. The world might be starting to change – styles, permissiveness, acceptance… but Ponca City was not the world. It was right in the center of the bible belt and Brian could care less if
those freaks on the tv were wearing make-up, his boy wasn’t going to. His slight physical stature alone led to beatings. His unusual nature led to more beatings. Experimentation with eyeliner and lipgloss led to severe beatings. Lex knew – getting beat up at school meant getting beat up at home. If his father didn’t think he deserved the beating, he’d only take a beating for losing the fight – in order to
teach him how to be a man. If his father thought he’d deserved the beating in the first place, then Lex took it twice. Once for punishment, then a second to teach him not to be such a loser.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Lex gave up – but Lex gave up. He stopped fighting with his father about his hair and kept it short. He stuck to jeans and black t-shirts, he dropped the make-up, he ditched a lot of class, and he withdrew into himself. It reduced his beatings from three to two – it was seldom his fault anymore. In truth, he was just biding his time – spending the time meant for classwork writing prose in his notebook and counting the days until his eighteenth birthday.