 |
| Near Puke, some nasty stuff here. |
My sister and Brandy laughed and made fun of me, I pretended to need to go inside for something and cried. I wanted so badly to be cool and for them to like me and nothing seemed to work.
Near Beer Makes Me Puke
My sister and Brandy laughed and made fun of me, I pretended to need to go inside for something and cried. I wanted so badly to be cool and for them to like me and nothing seemed to work.
We Build a Fort.
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| The tree fort had more to do with my education than anything else in my childhood |
The best part about our new property was a couple really great fort building trees. There was an old Siberian Elm that had been bent to the ground on one side when it was young so the main trunk and that branch formed two ready made walls. We added two others and a roof out of pieces of scrap lumber and we were on our way.
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| 16 Penny nailed it! |
My mom and dad were hands-off parents and we spent hours and hours building our forts to new heights. Instead of spending our allowance on candy every week we started buying nails. 16 penny was the most common. If we found ourselves flush with cash, say five dollars in birthday money, we would splurge and buy some glue coated nails we called “sinkers”. I am not sure that was their proper name.
We built a higher platform for observation and a high-rise tower that had four levels made of old doors that were offset front to back to allow an access hole to the next level if you crawled across the length of the door. The project took several years to get this large and in that time my father had never come back to see what we had created. When he did, he was concerned about how unsafe it was. Many of the levels were sparsely built and twelve feet off the ground. He made us tear it most of the way down, leaving only the ground floors and our one elevated platform.
I hated him for making us do that.
Moving Across Town
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| We were once again putting the mobile in the mobile home |
Josh Begins a Crusade to Find the Aliens that Killed His Cat
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| This was the only cat killing alien I had ever heard of |
To combat this new menace he formed up a gang of kids, rounded up weapons and bikes for everyone so they could go out on patrol. I am a skeptic by nature and usually don't try ruin anyone's harmless fun but even as a six-year-old I had strong doubts about the supernatural origins of the feline murders.
I think that the Alien Killers gang was the end of our friendship. He had crossed over one of those lines in life where zealotry either inspires fierce loyalty or eye rolling. I just couldn't play along.
The Pitfalls of Friendship - Josh is Used for Atari
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| Yeah, when you have graphics and game-play like this you make sacrifices |
One night I worked out the perfect plan, I would sleep over at Josh's house and we would play until he went to sleep and I would outlast him. I would have unfettered access to the games, all I had to do is stay up all night. We played late into the night and everything seemed to be going to plan until his mom came out and told us it was too damn late to be playing video games. She took the controllers and told us we couldn't have them until morning.
With the games stolen away Josh went right to sleep because 'Pitfall!" was old news to him.
With the games stolen away Josh went right to sleep because 'Pitfall!" was old news to him.
I rested fitfully from midnight until five thinking of missed hours of digital dangers. That is when I figured that the controllers had paid their debt to society and should be free. I woke Josh up and told him to go ask his mom for the controllers back. My reasoning being that it was technically, morning. He went and knocked on her door to ask and she yelled something sweary and told him that on Saturday morning started after nine. He came back to end of the hall where I was waiting and told me we would have to wait.
We had been dealt a blow, there was no denying that, but for great rewards one must sometimes make great sacrifices. I convinced Josh that his mom just didn't want to get up and give us the controllers. She hadn't specifically said we couldn't have them. He went back opened her door, crept into the room and found the controllers. That is when the trap closed, she woke up for the second time, at the crack of dawn, on her day off, and unleashed a fury on Josh - slaps, kicks and hair pulling. He was screaming and crying, trying to escape while she brought down hell on him.
I couldn't help but think I was partly responsible for the suffering he was enduring so in a show of solidarity I ducked out and ran back home.
To be honest, I did feel bad, I was a little sulky that I didn't get to play more games.
We had been dealt a blow, there was no denying that, but for great rewards one must sometimes make great sacrifices. I convinced Josh that his mom just didn't want to get up and give us the controllers. She hadn't specifically said we couldn't have them. He went back opened her door, crept into the room and found the controllers. That is when the trap closed, she woke up for the second time, at the crack of dawn, on her day off, and unleashed a fury on Josh - slaps, kicks and hair pulling. He was screaming and crying, trying to escape while she brought down hell on him.
I couldn't help but think I was partly responsible for the suffering he was enduring so in a show of solidarity I ducked out and ran back home.
To be honest, I did feel bad, I was a little sulky that I didn't get to play more games.
I Bash My Head. . .Again.
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| We called these goose eggs, the doctor called them hematomas - tomato, tah-ma-tah |
My go-to outside activity was riding up and down the s-shaped road of the trailer park. We were too poor for every kid in the family to have their own bike. When my mother won a cheetah themed bike in a grocery store raffle I was the happiest I could ever remember being. I was so proud of having a new beautiful object of desire that other kids would covet. I washed and cleaned that bike any chance I got and rode it with wild abandon. It was a true and pure good thing in my life.
I never told her what I had been doing when I bashed my head. It seemed like the facts in the case might just cloud her judgment about who was at fault in this tragic accident.
We Mistreat the Mentally Handicapped
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| The famous Richard wagon train. |
When we were not doing our best to survive the trailer park we often visited Other Mother and Papa and my Down's syndrome uncle Richard that lived with them.
Richard was the perfect uncle for any kid. He would give piggy back rides for hours, push us high on the swings or spin us so fast on the merry-go-round we would either fall off or puke. He had a train of four wagons that he had wired together into a train. We would start out around the block with five or six kids in the wagons, but as all the neighborhood kids would see him pulling the train they would run and jump on. Soon he would have twenty or more kids riding on the wagons as he pulled them around the block and back home.
Richard always had several combs and pens in his pockets. We were little turds so we would grab one out of his pockets and run away to pretend to flush them down the toilet. He would get super mad and yell at us mispronouncing our names because of his speech impediment.
He would say, “Napon, now son, give me back my comb.”
I would laugh and say, “Who is Napon, Richard? I'm NaTHan.”
My brother and I remember these names so fondly that many times we have used his mispronunciations of our names as email addresses, screen names and terms of endearment. Napon and Mapoo forever.
Even with our immature teasing he has enjoyed being an uncle so much that he demands to be called 'Uncle' or 'The Uncle' and is agitated when others try and usurp the title no matter how legitimate they think their claim is. There is only one true 'Uncle' indivisible and eternal. He spends much of his time reminding people that he is their Uncle even if he has no biological claim to the title.
Living at home with his mom and dad with limited social opportunities he loved using the phone and would call us several times each day so much so that he monopolized the phone and we missed many calls. My dad instated a One-Call-A-Day rule that we took great joy in enforcing by yelling, “One call a day Richard!” and then slamming the phone down. He would be mad and want an apology or to 'speak at our momma'. We would yell, “One call a day” again and hang the phone back up.
We are Way Out of Our League and the Girl Bully.
In the spring one year my mom bought Matt and I butterfly nets from a local fair. As well as Mason jars with special lids to keep bugs in and holes in the lids to keep bug alive. We loved going out and catching different types of bugs and filling up our jars. We were catching bugs one afternoon when a hardcore little bully girl yelled at us and told us to bring our nets over to her. We tried the old standby nerd tactic and first line of defense, we pretended not to hear her.
She cut through our clever defensive ruse with her classic bully tactic of the insult/threat, “Are you guys retarded or what? Bring me those nets.”
We capitulated and sulked over to what could only be certain death for us and destruction for our nets. She took my net and whipped it back and forth through the air making it whistle. Then she did the unexpected and gave it back to me. She told me she would like a net like that. We showed her the bugs we had caught. While we were showing off and beginning to feel like we might just get off this time a couple of kids came up to see what we were doing.
The bully, Rhonda, recognized one of the kids as a lackey who had fallen behind on his tribute and decided to give him a little reminder tune-up beat down. She grabbed my net, and grabbed the kid by the shirt and rammed the net down over his head. She started yelling at him and asking why he never brought her no Diet Pepsi from his mom like she had told him. He told her if he stole a Diet Pepsi from his mom, she would kick his ass.
Rhonda decided to show him exactly whom he should most fear an ass kicking from, and punched him as hard as she could right through my poor innocent net. Her assault ripped the netting from the support ring and her victim was bleeding all over it. He tried to pull back and away and she used the ring of the net to pull him in close to her. She told him he better get her some Diet Pepsi or she would kill him. He was released and Rhonda gave me back the bloody pieces of my net. I did not complain.
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| Despite all evidence to the contrary, my brother and I were not gay we just liked pretty things. |
She went right on to class until she was called out into the hall by the vice principal to talk about why she had smashed an innocent kid into his locker. Their argument got so heated that all the teachers and students looked out to see what was going on. The vice principal tried to grab her and she kicked him hard in the crotch and she ran out as he writhed on the floor. I don't think I ever saw Rhonda again.
Mary Gets Run Over by a Pink Cadillac.
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| Not the hit and run and lay low machine those ladies were hoping for |
Before we moved out of the trailer park there were four kids in our family. My older sister Christy, Me, Matt and finally, Mary. When Mary was two years old she got ran over by a pink Cadillac in the trailer park.
Matt, our friend Josh and I had run across the road ahead of a car that was coming down the street. We yelled at her to stay on her side, but at the last minute she ran across the road and was struck by the front bumper and thrown to the side of the road. We ran over and picked her up and brushed the gravel from her face. The car stopped about thirty feet up the road and the woman that was driving opened her door and looked back and asked if the girl was okay. We said she looked like she was hurt bad. The lady asked if Mary was alive an we said yes, so she got in the car and drove away.
We took Mary home and she was taken to the hospital, she was bruised and cut but not seriously injured. The police came and talked to me about the ladies that had hit her. I told them that they had been driving a pink convertible Cadillac, not a great hit-and-run vehicle. The police looked up all the pink Cadillacs in the area and had them picked up in an hour and they went to jail. People in the trailer park were so upset that a child had been run over that they organized an effort to get speed bumps installed. Those speed bumps are still there. Still, slowing down crazy ladies in convertible pink Cadillacs, I hope.
The Lord Takes One Home.
One other vivid memory of going to church in that building was that once in a meeting we were singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. From across the room people went silent and it spread until everyone was silent. People started to stand up and look to see what was wrong when a lady yelled for someone to call an ambulance. An older man had died during the song and it took a while for everyone to figure that out. An ambulance was called and everyone milled around talking while they came and picked him up and took him away.
I have decided that is how I want to go, in some public manner which scars children for their entire life.
Shame on Me I Guess
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| I really should have seen it coming |
The Lock Me on the Roof Game
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| This is not safe |
On Sundays we would go to church at the chapel that was a few blocks from our house. I remember when I was six thinking my Sunday school teacher was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had one big smooth hair sprayed curl made from her bangs while the rest of her hair was pulled back tight to her skull in a pony tail. I loved the neatness of it and how pretty and nice she looked.
The chapel where we went to church was an old building that was added onto many times and some windows in the older sections overlooked newer parts of the building. Once my friend Jordan talked me into climbing out on the flat roof of an add-on building through the window while the teacher was out of the room. When she came back in she told him to close the window. He didn't want to get in trouble so he panicked, closed and locked it and didn't tell her I was out on the roof. They left the class a few moments later so no one heard me knocking on the window to be let in and off the roof. After twenty minutes or so they noticed I was not with the group and came looking for me. They found me wailing outside on the roof. Jordan never told them where I was.
Beer Runs, and Popsicle Millionaires
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| Who knew something as nasty as beer could fiance some of these magnificent suckers? |
Because the Super-Quick would let minors buy beer if we had a an adults I.D. Josh and I parlayed that into a little side business. That business made us Popsicle millionaires. We, two six-year-olds, would go door-to-door and ask the residents if we could go buy them beer or cigarettes. There was a small fee, of course. A few people a day would give us some money and we would run down, buy a six pack or whatever they needed. With our fee, we would buy two huge freezer pops that looked like Otter Pops just twice as large and completely unmarked. On good days we would be able to get five or six of those knock-off Popsicles and live like trailer park kings.
Some Super-Quick Racism
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| This is not him but this was what it looked like. |
When my allowance was not being used for window reparations the best thing to do with it was to run to the Super-Quick and buy candy with it. The store was one block from our house and was run by an Indian family. They had thick accents and had learned English from the British so we thought the way they talked was the funniest thing we had ever heard. My friends and I would mock their speech for a while after every trip into their store.
The Super-Quick had a tall homemade sign that would blow down in the wind about twice a year. Whenever that happened one of the neighborhood kids would run around and tell all the other kids. We would run down and watch as they tried to dislodge the sign from whatever it had fallen into this time.
We'll Call it a Draw.
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| Well, poop. |
I am not good at throwing. Not good at 'hucking' stuff in the parlance of my youth. In the small town of my youth, throwing power and accuracy accounted for about 90% of your popularity. Even though I knew I was helpless in throwing contests of distance or accuracy I would engage in them, hoping, as children sometimes do, that somehow without my conscious awareness I had gotten good at throwing and I would blow the other kids away. That never happened.
My friend Jordan and his brother Kyle came over with their parents and we decided to have a rock throwing contest while the adult sat inside and talked. Our contest was to see who could throw the rock the farthest across the road and into the recently vacated mobile home spot beyond. Kyle and Jordan were both able to throw their rocks consistently to the far end of the lot. To compete with their power I decided to get a run at it and give my next throw some real sauce. Unfortunately, I gave up quite a bit of accuracy in exchange for my unbridled power and threw the rock at about a forty-five degree angle from where I had intended. It went right through the back window of a trailer. Seconds later a man popped his head up through the broken window and started yelling at us. As it happened, he worked graveyards and was sleeping in preparation to going into work later that night when glass showered down on his face.
When his head pop up we ran behind the cars in my driveway and tried our best to hide. The guy came over and told on us and I confessed to my crime. My dad made me get a piece of cardboard, some tape and a tape measure to go over and temporarily fix the window and measure it for some new glass. I was so embarrassed throughout the whole process I wished I could just run away and hide. I had received a dollar a week for an allowance and until the 14 dollars for the replacement pane was paid I got none. 14 weeks is an eternity when you are six.
I Discover a Friend Wierder then Myself.
My friend Doug and his family were odd even by the standards of trailer park folk. His dad was a police officer in town and he had an older sister and two older brothers. His older sister was two years older than us and had that insufferable affect of older sisters who sigh in condescension at little brothers and proclaim them to be 'so immature'. We hated her and would try to bother her whenever we could. She would tell us how we didn't understand what was cool because we were only in first grade and she was in third.
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| Perfect for making all sorts of martial weapons. |
Doug was my best friend for a couple of years until he moved when his dad got a better paying job in a bigger city. He came back to visit once after we had moved out of the trailer park and across town. I was twelve and Doug and his family seemed tragically nerdy and the visit was a stilted reunion between people who knew each other in a previous life and now find themselves with less in common than strangers.
I Start a Shelter for Runaways Under My Trailer.
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| Isn't this better than living at home? The sad part is, for some kids it probably was. |
I didn't have many resources so I took a piece of skirting off of our mobile home and cleaned out a spot underneath. It was pretty nice, about two and a half feet of clearance, a piece of black plastic sheeting for a floor and plenty of spider webs. So like I said, nice. I outfitted the space with a few old blankets and a lamp which ran off of an extension cord.
I don't remember anyone actually using my runaway shelter but my friend Doug and I hung out down there a couple times with some older boys. There is a simple pleasure for children in having a place apart from the adult world. A place they can stake a claim to the governance and regulation of the place. Even if it, or maybe especially if, it is on only old blankets under a mobile home.
We Try Group Sex and are Not Impressed.
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| Blanket forts are cool so the plan sounded not half bad. |
The Cheetah Bike
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| Just imagine if the pads were not lost. This Bike>Mona Lisa. |
When I was learning
to ride a bike I used my dad's 26” tall monster. To get on it I had to
stand on the porch of our mobile home and push off to get enough
momentum to keep my balance. I didn't the leg length from crotch to peddle so I had to shift from one side of the bike
to the other to push the peddles using my knee to hold onto the center bar. When I was coasting downhill or had
enough speed I would jump up on the seat and enjoy the ride until I
had to go back to work hop peddling.
Dismounting consisted of
slowing down as much as I could and then jumping free.
I think we all know what I had, go-faster stripes on top of go-faster stripes dipped in nitro and rolled in cool. I would have loved any bike but this was my passion.
One day at the park it was stolen. I was ruined, in a panic I looked everywhere hoping I misplaced it but the fact was it was gone. I was heartbroken and crying, walking home when I passed the house of a kid who a known thief. There on the side of the house was my cheetah bike. The kid and his dad were about 20 feet away in the back yard. even though I am a coward by nature I ran over to my bike, turned it back towards the road and took off. The kid's dad yelled at me to come back and that he was going to call the cops but I put on the speed and was gone. I was terrified of having the cops called on me but I was certain that a kid named Billy didn't have a cheetah bike exactly like mine with a vanity plate that said Nate. I rode home and pulled back the siding on the back of our trailer and stashed the bike under there so if the cops or that kid's dad did come looking for it they could never find it.
The cops never came.
I Partake of Manly Vices, I am Not Impressed
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| No, sir. I would not like to see this woman naked. |
Put off by the rancid brew we started leafing through the pornography. To prepubescent boys it seemed a little pointless and gross. I remember only liking the cartoons, because they were cartoons. We, obviously didn't get the sexual jokes but at least it wasn't some naked girl. One of the older boys that was with us told us that these were not that good because they were just regular Playboy and that the really good stuff was in 'King Playboy'. This, it turned out, was not true. I remember being disgusted by the women's pubic hair and saying that if I ever grew hair on my private parts I would cut it off. I have not lived up to that commitment. We got bored pretty quick and went outside to play.
Men have weird taste in vices.
The Wheeled and Unwheeled Clash.
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| Footings and Foundations? Screw those rich pricks, it is dirt clodding time! |
No only thing we hated more than bullies were the kids who lived just across the street from the trailer park. They lived in normal un-wheeled houses, like millionaires, and the rubbed it in. We battled them at every opportunity. We employed rocks, sticks, snowballs, even fists if the need arose; and the need arose.
The outsiders would antagonize us with chants they repeated while marching back and forth. 'I'm not a Geester Gauseter any more,' they sang for hours as they marched on their side of the fence. I am not sure what that phrase meant but it kind of rhymed and had singsong play on our family name. It would drive us into a fury.
We pulled clumps of grass up by the roots with a sizable clod of dirt still attached and hurl the missile at them and the fight would begin. Unlike bully fights, these were good-natured affairs and hostilities would stop if someone got hurt or started to cry. Criers were still laughed at for crying, but that is enshrined in our childhood code and, unfortunately, unavoidable.
We just hated them for their lives of privilege in a home without wheels. In high school I actually got to be good friends with kids from both of the families we hated so much. By then my house didn't have axles any more, it was still a mobile home, my dad had just had the axles removed.
Legal Action is Threatened and Comeuppance Comes Up.
Before we even got home Mikey's mom had seen what I did with my chain to her poor baby's face and had called my mom threatening to sue us for what I had done to her boy. I was terrified and didn't appreciate the irony of the boys-will-be-boys rationalizer losing her mind when her son got some medicine. The good news was after that Mikey and Jose never bothered us again. Except for the odd threat they left us alone. Bullies it turned out hate getting hit in the face with a chain.
Four years later I heard that Shane had died of Leukemia when he was 13, and I was actually glad. I am not glad anymore. He was just as trapped as we were and we could have all used a way out.
When we were in high school Mikey went on to take one of the worst beatings I have ever seen in my life. It was on the lawn just outside the bus stop at my high school while we were waiting to go home. He was a senior when I was a sophomore and that day he finally pushed a kid too far. The kid was a real cool and nice farm boy that Mikey kept pushing and pushing, until all hell broke loose. The farm boy beat him until he was bleeding from his ears, mouth, nose and chin. He was well beaten but too angry to stop and he kept crawling and stumbling back for a little more. It was so brutal, that no matter how much personal animosity I had for him left over from the trailer park, I actually felt sorry for him. I heard that he dropped out before he finished his senior year and died of a drug overdose in his early twenties. I am not sure if that is true.
Jose still lives in Santaquin and has a couple of kids. Deena is a mother of six, 3 of hers and 3 of her husband's. A waitress that aspires to be an artist. She sent a portfolio of her work to an agency in New York but the work was destroyed in the September 11th attacks.
A Strategy to Defeat Evil - Evil Wins
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| My brother and I prepare for conflict |
A few weeks after the first playground melee Mikey, Jose and their friend Shane were riding on their bikes in the playground trying to run kids over. We saw our chance to go on the offensive. I yelled at them to knock it off and ran behind a large tree. When they rode passed I jumped out and I hit Mikey in the face with the chain as hard as I could. That cut his face making him roll off of his bike. Ha ha sucker, bleed.
My brother ran around and stuck his stick in Jose's spokes, a classic anti-bike move, and brought him down as well. This is where our plan started going wrong. The bullies were hurt but not bad enough to knock them out of the fight. About the right amount to enrage them though, so that was nice. We tried to run away but they were a few years older than us and Shane caught us quickly. Mikey had picked up the chain, wrapped it around my neck, pinned me against a tree and tried to pick me up off of the ground with it. Jose had tackled Matt and was punching him, only an old lady coming outside to yell at the boys saved us and we limped home.
Not a decisive victory but at least smack apiece for those jerks.
We Get Beat and so Does Our Guide
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| Trailer Park Pro-Tip; Not worth a beating, just walk away when bullies are about. |
One of my neighbors, a girl named Deena, was a few years older then me and she took us under her wing. When we first moved in she took us with her down to the trailer park playground to play. My brother and I ran and got in line with several other kids to use the slide. We had not played with other kids on playgrounds much and didn't know the rules of line protocol. We would slide down and loop right back around to the front of the line. One of the bullies grabbed me by the arm and told me to get to the back of the line because I was a 'butter'. He meant some one who butts in line.
My brother and I had never heard the term and thought he was calling us the dairy product. That was the funniest thing that we had ever heard. We said that he was syrup, and pancakes, and toast, which was a brilliant riff on his non-sequitur insult. He had the bully's stunted sense of humor and threw us down in the gravel and started punching us. Deena tried to rescue us by pushing Mikey off but that just got Jose involved they both grabbed her. They threw her down in the gravel and stomped the back of her head until the rocks were stuck in her skin and she was bleeding from her nose. We all got up lurching and crying our way back home. Deena had to go to the hospital to get the rocks picked out of her face.
All in all not a great trip to the playground.
Making Light of Child Abuse
Besides the eccentric residents in the trailer park.there was a definite darker element as well. The family that lived on the corner down from us had two daughters about my age who were abused. Their mother was a drug addict who lived in the trailer with her mom, the girls and a couple of vicious dogs. The rumor was that those dogs had bit a thief's leg clean off, and ate it. That was probably not true but they looked capable so we would give them wide berth.
When the mother went out to party she would leave the girls home unsupervised. The girls both swore, smoked and drank by the time I met them when they were six and eight years old. When their grandmother moved out their mother had a string of different rough looking boyfriends who would live there. The girls started having black eyes and bruises all over their bodies. Which the other kids noticed and teased them about.
One time the eight-year-old girl told us that she and her sister had dog collars put on and then chained to the wall in the living room. They said it was so they would not go anywhere while there mom went to a party. In the strange horrific naiveté of youth we thought the image of being chained up like a dog was about the funniest thing that we had ever heard. We teased the younger sister about it any time we saw her and call her 'Sonya the dog'. We also come up with pranks to play on those girls like mixing mud water in a cup and trying to get them to drink it by telling them it was hot chocolate.
The girls were taken into foster care later that year and I have no idea what happened to them after that.
I don't know when the horror of the situation became clear in my mind. Now thinking about there situation and how we piled on makes me physically sick and sad. It makes me wonder why no one was doing anything about it.
I Learn the Art of the Munge.
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| So. . . Uhm. . .do you have any of those. . .Uhm. delicious creme filled sponge cakes? |
Trailer parks are a different world. There is an eclectic blend of young poor couples stopping through on their way up. Some middle-aged people with various physical or mental illnesses getting by in housing they can afford. A few immigrants trying to get a foothold and make a better life for themselves and their children. Then there are the criminals, drug addicts and alcoholics or a mixture of several of these in a family.
When my sister was seven and I was five there was a young couple that lived on the other end of the road from us. They were the most wonderful people, they had lots of little cockapoo puppies that we adored. My sister loved them so much that when they moved they gave us a feisty little cockapoo named Lady for us to keep. She loved that dog so much that she has owned a cockapoo for most of her life and has named many of them 'Lady'.
Besides having awesome dogs they would invite us over to do arts and crafts projects like making bead necklaces and painting. They also had treats, a rarity at our house and in their living room I had my first Twinkie. I was hooked after my first taste, and every time we went to their house I would have Twinkies on the brain. I would try with all the subtle stratagems that a 5-year-old possesses to steer the conversation toward snaking. Maybe in the direction of Twinkies or just general musing about whether there were any Twinkies in the house.
Sometimes there were, and life was good, extra good.
My First Hippy and My Shamefully Bad Friendship.
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| Behold the grandeur, If this is not the home for a mulleted kid I don't know where is. |
Shortly after the accident we moved to a small town to live in the trailer park there. The trailer park was shaped like the letter 'S' and we were right at the top second from the end. We were moving the trailer in and I remember it being sunny and yellow. There was sparse vegetation, just limestone dirt all around. A little boy from next door came over to talk with us and ask if we would like to play. He was the first boy I had ever seen in my whole life that had long hair. I hid behind my dad as he uncoupled the trailer from the truck and asked the kid his name.
He said, “Josh”.
That blew my mind because he did look like a boy but he had long luxuriant blond hair. I asked him strait out, “Josh, are you a boy or a girl?”
He said, “A boy”
I said, “That's good, 'cause then we can be friends.'
He asked, “How many horny toads have you ever caught?”
I said, “None ever.”
He was dumbstruck, “What? like never-ever?”
That is how Josh and I became friends. We were good friends until a few years later I discovered that other kids thought he was scroungy and not cool. So, I threw him under the bus and ignored him. Which I still regret. We have met few time since as adults and we hit it off fine but he knows and I know I ditched him when it wasn't cool to be his friend. I think people who miss their childhood romanticize it and forgot how bad it is.
Kids are Bastards and the Rise of the Misanthrope.
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| Just look at the hate in their little faces, like wolves, NAZI wolves of emotional pain |
I went to school for a few week before I had a complete nervous breakdown. I walked out to recess and sat on the single step outside our classroom. I snapped inside and didn't move or speak for hours until my mom came, picked me up and and carried me to the car. She took my home and let me sit by myself in a room we used for storage and cry. I didn't go back to school that whole year.
For my education I read books. I especially loved our out dated set of World Book encyclopedias my mom had purchased from a thrift store. I was an insomniac so I would stay up all night and read for hours and hours. I would spend the rest of my time playing fighting games with my little brother. Ninjas, karate, Robin Hood, He-Man and G.I. Joe; we played all the classics. I never went back to school that year or the next, and I was happy for it.
How I Got My Facial Scar.
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| Pure Evil - Made entirely of broken dreams and hate. |
I was no two-year-old baby and felt like I should have the same rights as my older 'big-girl' sister. My dad compromised and let me sit on the pony by myself but made the pony stand still while I rode it like a kinda big boy. I held tight to the pony's mane and enjoyed the thrill of sitting on a real pony. My siblings fed the ducks and geese in the next paddock knock-off brand cheese puffs and stale bread. The pony took a few slow steps forward and bent down to pick up a cheese puff. I held his mane which pulled be over his head and into a stick on an old rotten bush. The stick went in my mouth and shattered on my jawbone sending splinters through my face from the inside. It did not tickle.
My dad scooped me up and my mom held me in the front seat of the car as they rushed me to the hospital. They removed the stick but they didn't realize that there we so many splinters and they sent me home to rest. The splinters became infected and it took ten months of antibiotics, pain killers, and exploratory surgeries to get them out.
There were almost daily visits to an ear-nose and throat doctor. My ENT doctor was a sweet man who was as gentle as he could be and took a genuine interest in me. He called me 'Nate the Great', which I loved. I was so infected that for a while he wanted to check up on me several times a week to make sure I didn't get dangerously sick. He even saw me on Christmas morning and brought me a Play-Doh extruding machine. My family could not afford the huge medical expense so he worked for free many times and then forgave much of our debt to him. For years after I was better he would call and and see how I was doing.
Human beings don't come much better than that not much better at all.
Bike Cart and Head Trauma
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| My Sister and I in '82, I am the boy. |
My most vivid memory about that house was a plywood bike cart that my dad built. It was about four foot square with little benches to sit on and some rails to keep us in. It could hold all three of the kids and our dog. My dad or mom would hook up the cart to their bike and tow us to the park across town or to visit my Other Mother and Papa. It was amazing.
The other really vivid memory from living there was falling out of our Volkswagen van. We had a mailbox on the road side of the property several hundred feet from our trailer. It was the best treat of all to reach out and grab the mail from the box and we had to set up a turn system to make it fair. When it was my turn my mom had parked a little too far from the box and as I reached I overbalanced and fell out of the van window and strait onto my head. My head hit a rock and split wide open so I was rushed to the hospital to get some stitches The ordeal left a scar which is still visible on my hair line. This was not the last time I would require medical attention to my head for an accident at this house.
The other really vivid memory from living there was falling out of our Volkswagen van. We had a mailbox on the road side of the property several hundred feet from our trailer. It was the best treat of all to reach out and grab the mail from the box and we had to set up a turn system to make it fair. When it was my turn my mom had parked a little too far from the box and as I reached I overbalanced and fell out of the van window and strait onto my head. My head hit a rock and split wide open so I was rushed to the hospital to get some stitches The ordeal left a scar which is still visible on my hair line. This was not the last time I would require medical attention to my head for an accident at this house.
Rich Gum Chewers
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| Allegedly Gum, Allegedly Fun |
On top of the hill to the East of our house were some of the richest people in town at the time. My sister, always the enterprising one, would often take me up the hill for a little game we liked to call 'beg for candy, treats and gum'. We didn't call it that but that is what it would be called if it was named literally based on what we did.
We must have been good at it too because I remember getting candy and specifically pink sugary bubble gum several times. There was a lady who thought it was hilarious to give us gum and then ask us to blow bubbles with it which usually ended with us spitting the gum out onto the ground as we tried to inflate it. Not given to waste we would pick it up, dust it off and pop it back in. After several failed attempts her husband took pity on us. He showed me how to stretch the gum flat over my lips and blow an external bubble.
This was a sticky slobbery way to blow a bubble but for those of us that were four and lacked any lingual-labial dexterity it was a little victory. After I learned the trick I would show anyone I could how to do it which usually made people laugh which made me self-conscious. My mom said they were laughing because I was cute but that didn't soothe my performance anxiety and I never demonstrated the face bubble in public again. Those laughter louts were only cheating themselves, it was a great bubble. A great bubble.
Moving to the Right Side of the Tracks
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| That's a cool cat right there |
Later on we moved up the road, still in a trailer but now we were living on my dad's boss's property just a hundred feet or so from the train tracks. The train ran by often taking coal to the steel mill just up the road. It would shake our plates and windows every time it would rumble past. The yard featured bare dirt around the house so when it rained it got really muddy.
On One such day my sister and I decided to play Indians in the mud. We thought playing Indians meant taking off all of our clothes and painting ourselves in filth and hollering while using our hands to ululate our voices. It was really fun until my dad cleaned us off with the ice cold hose before we could go inside and take warm baths. I remember how cold and miserable it was to be sprayed off on the porch and have since never played naked in the mud, just in case.
We also had a hutch where we kept some rabbits that my dad was raising for meat. One day the mamma doe went crazy for some reason, maybe from sickness. She ate all her babies and then killed herself trying to chew through the wire on her cage. It was horrific carnage and that is the first time I saw anything die and I was really sad.
Our trailer home was in a field at the bottom of a steep hill and one day in the summer my dad laid out a tarp on the side of the hill and ran a hose down it to make a water slide. It was too fast and too dangerous and it was really fun and there was not enough of a landing so you would usually slide right off the end into the mud-puddle. We got to slide until my mom ruined our fun by getting stung by a wasp and making a big deal of it.
Ow! ow! ow! Fun times over just because there is a swarm of enraged yellow jackets stinging me; selfish.
On One such day my sister and I decided to play Indians in the mud. We thought playing Indians meant taking off all of our clothes and painting ourselves in filth and hollering while using our hands to ululate our voices. It was really fun until my dad cleaned us off with the ice cold hose before we could go inside and take warm baths. I remember how cold and miserable it was to be sprayed off on the porch and have since never played naked in the mud, just in case.
We also had a hutch where we kept some rabbits that my dad was raising for meat. One day the mamma doe went crazy for some reason, maybe from sickness. She ate all her babies and then killed herself trying to chew through the wire on her cage. It was horrific carnage and that is the first time I saw anything die and I was really sad.
Our trailer home was in a field at the bottom of a steep hill and one day in the summer my dad laid out a tarp on the side of the hill and ran a hose down it to make a water slide. It was too fast and too dangerous and it was really fun and there was not enough of a landing so you would usually slide right off the end into the mud-puddle. We got to slide until my mom ruined our fun by getting stung by a wasp and making a big deal of it.
Ow! ow! ow! Fun times over just because there is a swarm of enraged yellow jackets stinging me; selfish.
Teaching Me How to Swear Part II
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| The Grandmother Of All Swears |
I told you about that rough spoon justice to put in context the fact that by the time I was eight-years-old I had heard the full pantheon of swear words, curses, insults, and vulgarities including the great big grand daddy of them all, the 'F' word, from Other Mother's sainted lips.
The swears were almost always in reference to my grandfather, who went by Papa. He was a mellow dude who was kind to everyone but had a vicious passive aggressive streak that could really wear on a body. I first heard her use the 'F' word as an adjective modifying 'dumb idiot' while she tore into my Papa. She thought I was asleep on the couch so she had dropped her usual demure southern lady act. I was scared by their fighting so I pretended to be asleep. I was not really sure what it meant. You know what? Now that I consider it, I am still not quite sure what it means in that context, as a verb sure, just not as an adjective. I could just tell by her tone of voice and the pure visceral hate dripping off of it that it was probably a word that would get me more spoon time then 'stupid' if I were to use it.
Horse talk indeed, madam spoon-smack thyself.
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