Family-of-origin confabulations: the obese mother, the abusive stepfather, and the timepiece phobia

texture · UNDATED (childhood/adolescence, Fall River MA; claimed)

• When: UNDATED (Lenz's childhood and adolescence, Fall River MA; recounted coke-high on the 11 Nov walk and in the scene-116 monologue)
• What: Per Lenz's own (coke-fueled, self-aggrandizing, largely fabricated) tellings to Bruce Green: his mother, Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorced Data Processor of unspeakable obesity, died — in a Greyhound-bus-lavatory catastrophe on a torn-up Route 24, ending wedged bare-backsided in the potty window, then via a Seven-Figure suit reclining into fatal peach-cobbler gluttony (the scene-116 tall tale). His phobic fear of timepieces (and his need to know the time to the second) he traces to a stepfather, an Amtrak train conductor who made little Randy wind and polish his pocketwatch daily on pain of a beating with a rolled-up copy of Track and Flange. Lenz's mother's laugh "had sounded like she was being eaten alive." Load-bearing not as fact but as the private mythology feeding his compulsions.