My Memoirs

CHAPTER THREE: 1980-1982

During my first and second grade years the biggest change from kindergarten was the bus, which was a melting pot of young poor kids thrown together with…older poor kids. With an idea that made so much sense in the days of disco and good ol’ awkward race relations, for some reason our school deemed it okay to have us 6 and 7 years olds spend about an hour and a half each day locked inside a rolling tube of yellow metal wherein the adult to verging hostile high school dropout ratio was 1 to 88. Sweet! And of course you can guess what kind of overachieving bunch of late-teens these dudes were. These weren’t kids looking for the shuttle bus to the Glee Club. I saw my first knife there, my first gun, my first porno (reel to reel! extra bush!) Watching the cops get on the bus to drag off a guy for fighting his girlfriend seemed so normal at the time…well, actually that one still does. Hey, these days I WISH I had a girlfriend who was calling the cops on me!!!!

The bus was probably 75% black and 25% white, and the respective duties were made clear from the beginning: the black guys would be spending the year beating the shit out of your metal lunch box that you had taken hours to carefully choose the weekend before school began as well as try to get you to say cuss words without realizing it so you’d repeat them at home in front of your parents, and the white guys would, day after day, create perfectly-to-scale pencil drawings of trucks. On a bus going 60 mph on country backroads. There would be two versions of each truck: hood closed, hood open. The closed hood one obviously took much less time; most of the creativity was spent on how many flames to paint on the side. One flame, two flames, take your pick. There was ZERO mulling over the make of the truck – each and every dude knew EXACTLY in which camp they stood, be it Chevy, Dodge, Ford, whatever. And the reason was always the exact same: “that’s daddy’s truck.” Once a family was a Dodge family that was it: Dodge to the grave. Dodge could start putting out trucks that came with extra dicks to suck in the glovebox, and these guys would stubbornly cling to the truck love they were born into.

A side note: I grew up with some of the roughest, hard-scrabbled rednecks there ever was. These dudes would work in a broiling metal grain bin in the middle of July, wrestle a few cows for laughs and spend their evenings driving their pickups off cliffs so they’d be destroyed and hafta put them back together again, and yet they referred to their fathers as “daddy.” Which was always weird to me. Tough guys don’t refer to their father as “daddy;” little girls do!!! It’d be like:

(hay and blood and sweat matting down flannel shirt, Pall Mall dangling from bottom lip as the crusty plates on his face shifted and crinkled in the sun)
“Hey yall, there’s a sparkplug buried in my head. Could one of yall run along and go git (PHUMP! Flannel shirt/Levis replaced by Easter bonnet/gingham jumper while clutching handbag) Deedy?”

Yeesh. Still makes me shiver to this day when a grown man calls his pop “Daddy.”

But, much like a mortician dealing with a body to be seen in an open casket, the rednecks knew that the most important part of the whole damn thing was drawing the engine under the hood perfectly. Shit was amazing - to me it looked like a bowl of spaghetti with a slide projector in the middle, but I promise you that if the guy who had originally designed that particular engine saw the drawing, he’d recognize it. And the piece de resistance of course would be the ceremonial Passing Around of the Engine Drawing. Try and see if you can pick out which comment is mine as the drawing gets passed around.

“Hmm.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm.”
"You fellas excited about the Royal Wedding this weekend?”
“Hmm.”

My usual seat was with my best friend Mark Braxton and his older brother Wendell. Jesus, it’s hard to imagine a time when you could sit in one of those seats three across, isn’t it? Today I couldn’t fit my last three fucking Kam Sing deliveries in one of those seats. Ah well. Wendell was in high school when Mark and I were in first grade, so that meant that since we sat with him every day he had to make our lives hell. Wendell was also a really nice guy and none too bright, so unfortunately for him the best thing he could come up with throughout the entire year was to sit on the aisle end of the seat and then refuse to let us out until we were the last ones. Ooooooohhh Wendell, you’re scaring us!!! Dirk Young is in the back inventing reverse racial discrimination and this is the best Wendell can come up with.

Our bus driver was Mrs. Hickman, a sweet old black lady who weighed about 200 pounds and said maybe 4 words in the 8 years we were “together.” Her main jobs seemed to be 1) get the cops (in the early days), 2) have a small bag of candy for us each Halloween and 3) dump the sawdust-like stuff onto the puke every day after someone would puke in the aisle. Anything else, we were on our own.

It was also during these years that we got our dog, Gladys. I came up with the name – Gladys being, of course, Elvis Presley’s mother. Though I think I actually named it after a neighbor’s dog who had recently died. I guess there was something inside of me that wanted the sexy, Victoria’s Secret-esque name of “Gladys” to live on. A few years later I found myself in high school with a girl named Gladys who had the unfortunately ironic last name of “Harder.” As in “not if Gladys is here.” Yeesh.

Gladys also had two brothers who were named, get this, Frank and Fred. Right out of backwoods central casting, right? “Frank & Fred” rings out as “Goofus & Gallant” except that it would be named “Goofus & His Even Bigger, Dumber Lummox of a Brother Who Accidentally Kills Puppies with His Knuckles While Shuffling Down the Road Apiece, Wondering if Squirrels Can Read, and If they Can, How Come He Never Sees Them in School?” I mean, they were duuuuuuuuumb. And of course I’m scared to look them up online, terrified I will be met with the phrase “…Google founders Frank and Fred Harder today made an announcement that…”

Anyways, one Sunday night my Dad and I were home watching whatever the Disney Movie of the Week was; my Mom and brother were out taking the trash to the dump. That’s what constituted a big night out back then.

“Wanna go with your mother to the dump?”
“ Lemme grab my i.d.”
“Don’t forget the glo-sticks.”

The movie just happened to be some flick about some dude who finds a dog to love. I have no idea what the title was; let’s just for the sake of the story call it “Star Jones’ Wedding Video.” So we’re watching it and I get all worked up, wanting a dog of my own, and my Dad, having briefly taken a break from his favorite pastime of wondering if his son could legally drop out of the 5th grade and join the Army, is actually getting his heartstrings pulled a bit by this thing, when my Mom and brother come walking in. Right away you could tell something was weird, they were giving each other knowing looks and doing the ol’ “so……” a lot. So either they had just knocked off a liquor store, or come up with the idea for Witness and were trying to keep it to themselves before they got an agent. So then I started blathering about the movie and how all I ever wanted in the world was a dog of my own, and my Dad was musing “well, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if one day the boys got a dog…” when my Mother gave my brother the “go ahead” signal, and my brother sprinted outside to the car and came back with…a loaded gun.

No no, he came back in with a dog!!!! A Chesapeake Bay retriever puppy that they had found at the dump and felt sorry for. Unreal – I had spent two hours wishing for something, and it actually happened. Unlike my prom night 9 years later. Grrrr.

Gladys slept at the food of my bed every night, and was the pretty typical Southern country dog of her day – followed you around all day, lazed in the hot sun, believed in unlimited gun ownership, etc etc. You may in fact read about her sex life here.

One Sunday dinner my mother made a country ham as well as the usual roast beef or chicken - I don’t know why, I guess she was thinking “the boys should really eat more meat. Maybe I’ll ease them into it with a 12-lb ham. Hey, I should invent a diet where people only eat meat…call it the Fatkins Diet!” Somehow the ham made it through the meal virtually untouched – I vaguely remember our family having a rousing discussion on the possible ramifications of the upcoming Jupiter Effect; my brother believing the gravitational effect of the other planets on the Earth's crust may be minimal even at their closest approach, and me patting myself on the back the rest of the meal for coming up with claiming my brother was a victim of The Stupider Effect…which got no laughs, but showed an early proclivity for being able to perform in front of different kinds of meats. Anyway, a little while later my brother and I were outside, kinda bored looking for something to do. I suggested we work on developing a tv channel that plays music videos all day, and my brother was wondering how much of the ham Gladys could eat if we gave it to her. I quickly ditched the tv idea and my brother and I snuck into the kitchen, grabbed the ham and took it outside behind the shed and called Gladys over. She walked over “hiya, fellas!”, started sniffing the ham and then of course got down to chowing. My brother and I stood there watching as she ate. And ate. And ate. This little bitch (calm down - bitch means female dog!) ate the whoooooooole thing. Incredible. This would be the single most exciting event in my life until a few years later when I had my first menage a mois (congratulations Catherine Bach!) She polished off the ham (Gladys, not Catherine…that was later), staggered away from the bone, and plopped herself about three feet away in the shade. Looking miserable. Seems like a dog who had gotten the neighborhood’s first slow clap standing ovation would be a little happier, but she looked miserable. After shaking our heads in wonder and inventing the fist-bump to celebrate, my brother and I walked back across the yard to sit on the back steps and talk about what we had just seen. Which went something like this:

“Man. She ate the whole thing!”
“Gee whiz…you see her eat the whole ham?”
“Yeah! The whole ham!”
“Man.”
“Don’t you think the advertising for a demographic consisting of teens and pre-teens with disposable income as the recession lifts would be through the roof on a channel that plays music videos all the time?”
“Dude. We agreed to focus on Gladys and the ham.”
“God, you’re so right, sorry!!”

As Gladys lay there moaning and groaning, her innards surely cursing her out, it occurred to one of us that boy, wouldn’t it be funny to mess with her by calling her to come over to us? My brother and I didn’t spend our childhood being cruel to animals, I saved that for my college girlfriend, but this was an idea we could not let ourselves pass up and we found ourselves excitedly shouting at Gladys to come to us, shouting and clapping. This poor bitch (female dog, remember!!!!) sloooooooooowly creaked herself up, her legs about to splinter like popsicle sticks holding up a block of concrete. She looked at us with that “I can’t believe you little shit bastards are doing this to me” and started to heave forward. She took one step and WOOMP! WOOMP! Her belly, which looked as if someone had slit her fur and inserted a watermelon before sewing it up, swayed back and forth, lightly scraping the short blades of grass below her. After two or three steps she said “eff this” and collapsed back to the ground. Throughout the next few days she looked like a balloon with a slow leak as she slowly got back to her normal self again. Brutal.

As I mentioned before, it was also because of Gladys that I learned the facts of life. As the months went on we knew that Gladys was growing large with her pups, but we had no idea what to do. Every day she’d drag herself up into my bed, curl herself up, and wait. Which is what we did.

One day our buddy Trav was over, and we were playing “Red Rover!” which was kid-ese for “run over here so the two of us can beat the shit out of you.” A game I would find years later to be named “fucking.” And by “one day” I mean, of all days, my birthday. After working up a sweat we came inside to get some Kool-Aid (surprise – it wasn’t until I was 11 years old that I noticed “You know what…nobody else has a permanent colored stain above their upper lip…” It was a different color every day; I looked like a gay Hitler), and while taking a break I saw Gladys laying on my bed, kinda tucked under a blanket. “Hey hey hey!” I yelled, jumping on the bed to rub her ridiculously pregnant belly. What I saw still haunts me to this day, and may be the reason that I myself have decided not to have a baby of my own. Well, plus nobody will have sex with me. Anyway, my outstretched hand and my eyes were met by 7 or 8 squirming sacs of what turned out later to be cute, frisky, furry puppies; tho at the time all I saw was “squirming sacs”, and immediately threw up. Which nobody would even notice in a few minutes when they came running in after my girlie shrieks; my pitch informing them that I had either found a suitcase of money or was being eaten by a shark.

I honestly don’t remember anything that happened next; I was woozy with witnessing the miracle of birth on, of all days, my own birthday. Somehow Gladys and her pups got whisked away, and next thing I know my friends and I were heading to that evening’s Richmond Braves game to cap off my birthday. Even as an adult, the only thing better than going to the ballpark and watching a game is going to the ballpark and stuffing yourself silly with crappy ballpark food, right? Hot dogs, ice cream, cheese fries, whatever they’re selling you wanna get your little grubby mitts on. We get inside the stadium and we start looking around for the hot dog guy and then my mother pulls the number one all-time move that horrifies kids and loudly announces “oh no kids don’t worry about it, I brought food from home!”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, Goooooooooooooooooooooooddddddddd, we come to the ballpark and we gotta eat food that we eat at HOME? Am I being punished?!?!?!? My mother pulls out some container she has somehow snuck through security (outside food was not allowed in) and before you know it, instead of sucking down stadium dogs and popcorn and 100% pure syrup-Cokes, we’re holding paper plates with roast chicken, green beans and WHITE BREAD WITH BUTTER. Oh my god. And of course my mother was so pleased at herself, she thought we’d be thrilled – she had managed to save herself about $3.19. Which to a kid who’s surrounded by other kids who are eating blackcherry ice cream out of miniature plastic batting helmets means exactly nothing. Of course if anyone from the stadium had noticed the group of 10 kids chowing down on a small version of Sunday dinner, we would’ve been kicked out and my mother would’ve been fined, but I guess to my mother it was worth the risk. Looking back now I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me to wave down an usher, point out the horrifying meal my mother was subjecting us to; obviously he would’ve thrown her in a prison cell underneath the stadium for the rest of the game and, feeling awful for us, supply us with as many free dogs and nachos as out little guts would hold. Maybe even in the dugout. But I didn’t, so we all sat there depressed, shoving our plastic green beans around while our mother marveled at all the other parents letting their “spoiled little-shit kids eat all that expensive crap.” Sigh.

The game having gotten into the last inning, my mother decides it’s time to go home so she can beat the traffic outta the parking lot. To a kid, “traffic” means “nothing.” But the Braves were down by three runs, it was the last inning, I don’t remember us putting up too much of a fight. Our mothers’ cars were parked behind the right field fence, and after we had run ahead and started clowning around waiting for my mother and friend’s mother to get there, my brother found a crack in the fence big enough to look through. “What’s happening?! we asked him – knowing the sounds of baseball as well as we did, we could tell by the crowd in the time we had left our seats and arrived by the car the Braves had done SOMETHING with their bats; although we certainly felt three runs was too great a deficit to make up in only one inning.

“The Braves got the bases loaded,” he announced. We scrambled to the crack, each of us trying to peer through to witness our Braves trying to come back for a win. Even though we were 500 feet away we could see that Brook Jacoby, a veritable Paul Bunyan, was at the plate. In the bottom of the ninth. Down by three. With the bases loaded.

“Boys! Let’s go, get in the caaaaaaaaah,” my mother yelled at us. We screeched and pleaded, explaining to her the situation. This was when I learned that to a mother trying to get her kids in the car to beat traffic to get home, “In the bottom of the ninth. Down by three. With the bases loaded” means “nothing.” Jacoby’s at-bat was being drawn out by foul balls and a pitching change, and we all were finally physically dragged into the cars and were helpless to know the ending, as we started leaving the parking lot. We were almost out on the main street to get on the highway when we all heard the unmistakable sound of about 20,000 people screaming, losing their minds. My brother and I were speechless…had we…there’s no way, there’s no WAY we coulda missed a…no no, certainly we didn’t miss a game-winning home run?!?!?!?! When we started panicking my mother explained that no no, everybody was cheering cause the game was over and they all could then go home. My brother spit out that he thought we had missed a game-winning homer, to which my mother replied “see, aren’t you glad we left early?”

Mothers and baseball. Don’t mix.

The next morning my brother and I rushed to the sports page. Brook Jacoby. Game-winning grand slam. And, just so God would be clear as to how much he hated me, the ball went out over the right field fence…where we had been standing, beside our car.

Sigh. Happy birthday, me. Well, at least I had a bunch of puppies to give away.

We only had Gladys for about 18 months before she got milk disease and died. I remember coming home from school and seeing that she had died, and my brother and I started digging the hole on our side of the dirt road that cut between us and the field behind our house. It was the beginning of September, about 100 degrees, and the dirt was cracked and dried out from the heat so that it was like trying to dig through concrete. Choking on dust and burning from the sun I finally flung the shovel to the ground, fell to my knees and shook my fist at the sky “Hear me now, God!!! It is hell to be poor!!!” Actually, I think that was from A Day No Pigs Would Die, but I feel like something dramatic and emotional is more appropriate than the silence that was in the air the day we laid our only dog into the ground. Seems like any young boy’s dog deserves that much.

We never got another dog.

There was pretty much nothing remarkable about my scholastic career going on at this time…first through third grade was a blur of 70's-styled open classrooms, orange carpets and Troll book orders. Until 4th grade of course, when I was introduced to my new homeroom teach: Mr. Futchko. Futchko stood out like a sore thumb in my southern town – being from Philly, his accent was as whack as my own mother’s Boston one. “Gweggowy! Get ovah here!!”) And he would actually be the first male teacher any of us had, which immediately made him seem meaner. Unfortunate, at best.

My own baseball career kicked off in 1980, with my being drafted by the Tigers. And by “drafted by the Tigers” I mean “my older brother was a Tiger, so they had to take me.” #2 overall pick! (cue Jordan comparisons.) My whole Little League career is much too long to fit into one chapter here, but I do have fond memories of the beginning of it. There was a real Rockwellian sense to the league when I started – there were only four teams, everybody knew each other, everybody’s mother worked the concession stand, I always feel like somebody’s watching me. I will now pause while awaiting the laughs once you realize what the last part of that sentence alludes to. My first year was also the first year we all got baseball pants; before, everybody’d be out there in their Toughskins.

As much as I knew about baseball (or, looking back, as much as I THOUGHT I knew), before Little League my baseball life had primarily consisted of playing catch with my older brother. We’d go outside and throw the ball back and forth to each other until I, fed up with the broiling heat and gnats engulfing my head, would “accidentally” throw the ball over my brother’s head and into the corn field behind him. Now, my brother is still one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But over the years, I pulled the ol’ “whoops!” trick maybe, oh, 19,000 times…and EVERY time my brother would spin around like a dog that sees a pork chop flying over it’s head and sprint after the ball…while I walked back inside the house. Oh, every single time I would get my ass beat once he got the ball and came back inside; but at least I was back inside in the air conditioning. Prolly watching reruns of “Family.” Cough. The other game we came up with during those years was a game that involved a crushed Coke can as a “ball.” We’d play behind the shed, wherein one of us would pitch the can and the other would try to hit it over the shed for a home run. Hits the roof it’s a triple, over a certain line a double etc etc. Needless to say, after about 18 seconds the “ball” is basically a shredded disc of aluminum. You know what wins in a battle between shredded metal and human skin? Needless to say our hands would be shredded and bloodied almost immediately; also probably needless to say at this point is that of course it wouldn’t stop us from playing for another 3 hours. Though I did have to give up my idea for salt mittens.

In a move that would foreshadow the first time I got a girl alone in a car years later, I spent the first 3 weeks of practice with the Tigers having no idea where third base was. I’m not kidding – I’d round first base, sprint to second and then turn on the jets to…left field. I’d slow down once I came upon the left fielder, who would of course be standing there wondering why this idiot was running at him. Then I’d stand there, as if on a base, ready to take off, while the next batter was at the plate. Base hit, I’d take off for home. It never occurred to me that you know what…this base seems to be over twice as far away from the other bases. And is in the grass. And there’s no actual, you know, BASE anywhere nearby. And on the the way to home plate, I do seem to pass a base. But what’s really funny is it wasn’t til about three weeks of this that somebody finally spoke up and pointed out my mistake. I wouldn’t expect my brother to, as I’m sure he was amused by his little brother looking like an idiot. But I do feel like the left fielder could’ve spoken up during any one of those long, awkward at-bats while I was standing next to him all alone in a field. Or, you know…THE COACH might’ve said something. But hey, at what he was getting paid, maybe he just didn’t wanna get involved.

Of course there’s only one reason any of us were even playing Little League: McDonald’s. Remember when going to McDonald’s was a seemingly once-in-a-millenium treat? A trip to Mickey D’s was like going to Disney Land, but ironically with more adult-sized mice. Anyway, the folklore that was handed down from the previous generation was that if you won a game, you’d get to go to McDonald’s afterwards. If you were leading around the 4th inning or so, the rumors would be circling in the air that so and so’s mother had promised McDonalds if we held on to the lead, and all of a sudden you’d start busting your ass as if you were playing for your mortgage. Looking back I don’t even really know why we cared so much; it certainly wasn’t the food – all I can remember from any post-game celebration is the old apple pies that were made out of apples and the Sun, and the orange soda. They’d break out the 5-gallon keg of orange soda and it was like a fraternity rush party – we’re doing upside down tap hits, we’re spraying the stuff on each other, we’re slipping a roofie into the catcher’s sister’s drink, it was a scene man. I don’t remember burgers or fries, just oceans of orange soda that I’m sure kept us up for about three weeks afterwards. I think for some reason McDonald's made a huge surplus of orange soda in about 1974, and, realizing there will never be enough black people to drink it all up, decided to unload it on Little Leaguers until the shit ran out.

School buses, Little League and a dog. Not too bad.

NEXT UP: 1983-1985