C.J. Lanet

Doing prison time was an easy rump compared to surviving with an off the hook daughter and her recently minted husband. With his daughter a new beginning is what he wants instead of the years wasted on bad ideas and half-baked schemes that reduced his youth into a pile of old bones. His aim is to live honestly, injure no one and embrace his family as the core of his existence. He doesn’t know the dream is impossible. Annabelle at 36 years old spent her entire life being disappointed. Truth to her is a bottle of gin and what the crack between her legs can buy. She dupes a 21-year old bozo to marry her and together they exist in a one room flat with a used mattress and a beat-up, oil burning Ford in the yard.
With a stacked deck and expectations fitting a priest, Lazar is about to climb a mountain of slippery shit without his St. Christopher metal. After finding steady work, he settles in and attempts to makeover his daughter and himself, only to be frustrated at every turn. To make matters impossible, she’s pregnant, which panics her young husband. After being hounded with more demands than he could handle – like seeking employment and being a responsible father to his future child – he skips out. Lazar accepts partial blame and reluctantly locates the misfit after convolved disasters with pimps, drugs and unorthodox therapy that involve a crazy woman believing she’s a dog, and a Russian decoder.
In her eight-month she decides to have an abortion. Naturally, at that late stage no doctor or street quack would touch her. Terrified of having a kid, Annabelle plans to do it herself …
Bad luck follows her with the passion of a ruthless killer. The baby is misplaced by the hospital staff and in due course is dumped with the garbage into a local river, where a flock of seagulls attempt to dine on his merger flesh. A barking bog saves his life, except for one eye that is plucked out by a wayward bird. Once back in the hospital ...
At length, the mother recovers and a lawsuit garners two million dollars for the boy. Instantly, Annabelle becomes a wealthy woman of pleasure and pursues a gusto lifestyle of drink, song and young men. Through a series of tortuous calamities, the money evaporates, except for a used box of prophylactics…
During her escapades, little Jamie stays with his grandfather. In the course of rearing the boy, Lazar becomes a father and mother. For Lazar life is sweet, and he enjoys caring for him.
With Annabelle back home, Lazar does everything in his power to embrace and cultivate the family unit. A stay at home mother, or working girl, he doesn’t care as long as his daughter follows a simple rule of being accountable to her son…
At four years old Jamie asks questions about his father that forces Lazar to find the asshole. Jamie Sr. is located, but requires major rehabilitation. He has degenerated into a homosexual prostitute, heroin addict and owned by a sleazy character named Pippy Prime…
Conventional therapy is not working…
While Lazar devotes his energies to radical rehabilitation efforts, his daughter digresses into a gin sipper at the rate of two plastic bottles a day…
Lazar is able to introduce Jamie Sr. to his son, and corrals Annabelle to be a proper mother and devoted wife. At first the plan works, as the entire family becomes a supportive, loving unit, each caring for the welfare and happiness of the others. But below the surface Jamie Sr. has bitterness…
Annabelle is like a dried twig, drinks herself under the bus and abandons her son. With no money and an untimely back injury, Geezer is unable to remain gainfully employed. Disparate and with limited options… … Yet chance has dealt him a joker. He learns that the boy requires a major operation or can lose sight of his other eye, and be totally blind. Again, Geezer decides to commit another robbery, but this time they are caught.
… and the rest of the story.