Mad Dog is surrounded by girls.
They ask him how he got his name.
He says, “It’s not because I’m wild,
or a crazy, untamed boy,
but because fourteen years ago when I was two
I would bite anything I could catch hold of: my ma,
my brother, Doc Rice, even Reverend Bingham.
So my father named me Mad Dog.
And it stuck.”
When I go home
I ask my father if he knows Mad Dog’s
real name.
He looks at me like I’m talking in another language.
Ma could have told me.
December 1934