I had a dream the other day. I walked upon a huge pool. There was not house, no buildings. Just a pool with diving platforms. At one end it said 18 ft at the other it said 4ft. I looked down at the bottom of the pool at the deep end and marveled at the amount of the water and wondered to myself. Who has to pay for all this? I dived in to the deep end and swam all the way to the bottom. I turned around and pushed off racing to the top hoping to reach the top before my lungs exploded. About 4 feet from the top my lungs were burning. There was a moment of panic that I wasn’t going to make it to the top. I couldn’t breath! I needed air. Then there was a second or two of quiet resignation. I thought “What will the owners think when they find my bloated waterlogged body floating dead in their pool. That was soon replaced with relief when I broke the surface and gasped a breath of chlorine filled air.
I looked across the surface of the water catching my breath. I enjoyed the contrast of the heat from the sun on my face and the cool water surrounding the rest of me. I looked towards the shallow end and noticed two kids there. A boy and a girl they were obviously brother and sister, in their late teens. I started to swim towards them. And as I got closer to them, I woke up. My arm was raised in the air, and by the look of my bed, I had been swimming… in bed.
Growing up, I had a plan for my life. I was going to go to college and become a(n) architect/firefighter/scientist/singer/actor/astronaut. After that I would get married and have 2 kids, a boy and a girl. I would build a two story Santa Fe style house. In the back yard would be a diving pool. The top story of the house would not be connected to the rest of the house. You would have to go outside to access it. The patio that surrounds the house will be a little garden spot where I would grow vegetables and fruit for the family.
The room on top would be for my writing. I would write the next Great American Novel when I wasn’t being a(n) architect/firefighter/scientist/singer/actor/astronaut. I would grow old in that house. The kids would grow and become parents on their own and bring the grandkids over on the weekends. We would watch them when the kids needed time alone. I would die happy…
Dreams are like that. You can do whatever you want, be whomever you want, go anywhere you want. The problem with dreams is that reality isn’t as accommodating.
“What’s a bassen?”, she asked.
I don’t know her that well, though we have been forced to travel together for work. Meeka seems nice enough, but for the most part she has been quiet up until now.
“Basin. It is pronounced basin”, I reply because I always love helping people learn. “It is anything bowl shaped that holds water, like a sink or a toilet or a shallow depression of land.” I added the last part to explain why she kept seeing signs for this basin or that basin as we drove north of Phoenix. We had just passed Bloody Basin, named because the red color of the dirt and rocks that dominates the area.
She went quiet again as if contemplating the new information I had told her.
She looked out of the window for a while and I turned up the music. MJ sat in the back seat. She couldn’t hear anything we said up front so was content to listen to her own music.
Meeka kept looking out the window and mumbled something I didn’t hear.
“Sorry,” I said, turning down the radio, “I missed that.”
“I feel sorry for those guys”, Meeka said.
“Which guys?”, I wondered, looking in the mirrors wondering what I had missed.
“The guys who had to plant all those cactuses”, Meek said with pride.
I looked out across the vast desert that surrounded us, looking at forests of saguaros, chollas and prickly pear cactus.
“You do know that those are there because of nature, don’t you?”, I asked half in jest, not really sure if she was serious.
“No, cactus don’t occur naturally in Arizona”, She replied.
“No, they grow here naturally”, I said, trying my best to keep my voice from betraying my real feelings.
“No, they don’t!”, she retorted defiantly, “Why do you have to plant them in your yard if they grow naturally!”. She folded her arms together and stuck out her lip as if to say the matter was closed.
I went silent. There was no use arguing with her. But it is really bothered me. We are employing a person who does not realize that plants grow on their own. And now I am in a car with her for two hours. And she is the navigator.
I turned the radio up, way up.
I know where we are going. At least most of the way there.
The car is silent for a long time. She may have said something, but I keep looking over and she is pouting. Oh, well. Not my problem.
We reach Mayer and suddenly there is excitement in the seat next to me. “CARS!” she almost screamed!
To me, we had passed about 100 thousand cars since this trip had began, but I just assumed she had found a sign for the movie “Cars” and didn’t dare ask her though every atom of my being was dying to ask her.
We drove on towards our destination. There was not much else said from her side, except the odd pronouncement that “They have that in California” to describe various things along the road.
The others in our caravan decided that we needed to stop for breakfast so we made arrangements to stop at Cracker Barrel. I am not fond of Cracker Barrel. A restaurant store combo, the food is mediocre and the store products match. I don’t know why people still go here other than for the decor that appears to have been stolen from the Beverly Hillbillies mountain home. At breakfast, Meeka orders water and asks for more free biscuits.
“We saw where they filmed Cars”, Meeka says out of the blue.
I look at the others and none of them seem surprised at this announcement. So I keep cutting up my eggs and dipping my toast into the 
thick yellow yolk. And begin talking to the person to my right about anything just to keep my mind off the conversation that is going on in Meeka’s head. I sneak a peak and she is smiling as she pours syrup over her biscuit. She pulls out her phone and starts showing pictures. Of the car she has identified as a character named Mater. It is an old red truck. I look at the others and they are avoiding my gaze. What the hell? Am I the only sane one?
I am hoping that someone else will, at the end of the meal, decide to trade places with her. Not my luck. Back on the road, I program my phone with the address of our destination to ensure that we make it not having to rely on Meeka’s reading skills. I am now beginning to question every aspect of the trip.
“Thumb Butt”, she says, “Why would anyone name a street, Thumb butt.”
“Butte, I say, it is Thumb Butte”, I replied, almost tired of this game.
“Oh, you would think I would know that since I live on Lone Butte Road”, she says without a hint of irony.
I avoid her the rest of the day.
At dinner, she asks for water and then fills up on chips and salsa.
She gets a phone call, and starts recounting her day. I ignore her conversation after she tells the caller “Yeah, we went by Bloody Basin on the way up, but I didn’t see a bloody sink on the side of the road”
Be afraid. They are out there. And they have them in California too…
I spent the nation’s birthday sitting around the house doing nothing. I have a good excuse; it is hot. Saturday my thermometer registered 122. After a summer storm moved in, it dropped to a mild 116. Don’t start complaining about how hot it is were you are. I have a cousin who no matter how hot it is here, it is always a degree or two hotter there. Like there is much of a difference between 116 and 118, anything over 107 is hot.
And before you start saying “But it is a dry heat”, remember, so is the Sun.
The thing is that, I don’t remember it being this hot growing up. Maybe kids are too busy to notice or they are just better equipped to deal with the heat but I never remember complaining about it being too hot to go outside. Too cold maybe, but never too hot.
The truth of the matter is that there is no reason to go outside and watch fireworks. I have YouTube and PBS if I want to watch fireworks. I can tell you exactly when I lost all interest in the Fourth of July. It was 1976, the Bicentennial. The country was crazy over the 200th Birthday and my family was no different. We flew flags all over the yard. We collected any coin or currency that had anything to do with the Declaration of Independence. Classes in school were all about American History. Even math ( If you have 13 stars and 13 stripes how many do you have?).
This was East Texas and while all of Texas has a patriotic streak, East Texans are almost militant about their love of God, Texas, Country and Family, in that order. The whole town was plastered with red, white and blue. Stop signs got a blue border so they could be red, white and blue. Signs were marked with an official bicentennial symbol though they all looked different so I am never sure who was passing out the seals. Who decides which cheese is the official cheese of America?
Wonder Bread also got involved. At the bottom, and I do mean the bottom of every bag there was a sticker of the founding fathers. “Collect them all!” it said. There were 4 to a pack and I think that I ate a million sandwiches that year just to get them all. I promptly forgot all about them after the Fifth of July.
And there in lies the rub. After months and months of building up to a Fourth of July celebration, the actual events for Hutchenson County was on July 5th. I was to perform in a square dance show with Becky Thatcher at the Hutchenson County Fourth of July Celebration and it turns out that it was really on the Fifth of July. To me it was like having Christmas on December 26th. What the fuck people! This is supposedly the celebration of the creation of the greatest country on the planet and you all can’t even have the party on the right day? What are you trying to do, throw a surprise party for the nation? Get with it already!
So we went, but Becky and I didn’t get to perform. She stood there in her gingham dress and I in my white shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots sweating up a storm for hours listening to politicians and preachers eating up our time. We stood so long it became dark and they told us to run off and find our families. It was a different time, and place. We were told to watch out for stranger danger, but pushed off into a crowd of people twice our side and told to find our parents. Yes that worked. It helped when they all began to sit down on blankets and quilts they brought. I found Mom, Dad and Sis sitting on one of my sheets. Soon Sis ran off and then Mom and Dad wondered off and left me in a sea of people.
As the fireworks started I watched the beautiful lights and listened to loud explosions, but then something caught my eye. After every explosion you could see where the smoke trail traveled from the point of explosion to the ground. And the magic was lost for me. It was just a rocket. It was a pretty simple concept. Shoot a bomb in the sky and explode it. There was nothing special about it. Then I noticed something else.
Every single person there was staring at the sky and as if in unison, would ooh or ahh depending on the intensity. It was as if they had the same mind, body and soul. It was a rhythm that I could not feel. I was there in a sea of people riding on rafts made of cloth and they were mesmerized by the stars falling from the sky and all I could think was that it was just a light with a loud noise.
I sat there alone, just looking at people around me. One or two seemed like me, but the rest were entranced. I stood up to see where my family had gone to. I grabbed the sheet and went to the parking lot to find the car. I crawled in and went to sleep.
On the ride home, I heard my parents talking about how tuckered out I must have been. I didn’t know how to tell them I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t have the words to tell them what I had witnessed.
I have seen fireworks since then, but every time, I watch the people instead of the display. I watch the crowd to watch the miracle of the lights, because it is not in the sky, it is in the hearts of the people watching.
Sitting here in a hotel in Prescott, Arizona, I think about weird coincidences life brings me. I am writing stories about my youth attending Sky-Y-Camp and here I am not 10 miles from the place. Brought here unexpectedly for work, I have forgone the nightly ritual of debriefing the crazy bitches so that I can have some alone time.
I am here with 4 of them. Brina, is my partner in crime. I usually take out of town trips with her. MJ is PunkAss’ baby momma. Mika is annoyingly dimwitted. Chris is depressingly homophobic, every word out of her mouth is “That’s gay”. After days of being with them, I need a little time to myself.
I haven’t visited Sky-Y-Camp not because I am afraid it won’t live up to the memories, but because it seems a little creepy having an old guy look around a kids camp.
Sky-Y camp had four values; caring, honesty, respect and responsibility. All of our events were driven by these values, though I can’t tell you what an egg toss has to with any of them. Didn’t seem we were caring much for the baby chickens as the eggs exploded all over the campers. The mantra was posted all over the place. The bathrooms, the showers, the lunch room, the cabins, it was inescapable. And still it was lost on many who attended the camp.
Victor was one of those rare breeds, dark-skinned, mixed race with beautiful blue-green eyes and red hair, all the girls, no matter the race 
went gaga for him. Tall and not particularly great looking the blue-green eyes sucked you in. He was also very charming, while not particularly bright, he constantly ranked high in classes because he charmed the smart girls into doing his homework. He wasn’t a bad guy, we had hung out a couple of times we just didn’t have the same interests.
Victor was dating Arlene. Through the years, Arlene was the good girl, she was always at the top of the class and involved in this or that club. Or so I thought. Sometime during the 5th grade she snapped and tried to poison the teacher. She was expelled from school and didn’t come back until the middle of the 6th grade. Part of her punishment was to stand before the whole class and explain what she had done and why she had done it. Embarrassing for her and for us, it was really the first time that people realized that there consequences to our actions and punishment could be a bitch. She immediately hooked up with Victor after coming back.
Arlene really wasn’t Victor’s type. He usually went for the skinny White or Hispanic girls. Arlene was a big black beautiful young woman. When she came back she came with an attitude. Arlene came back and changed from being a good girl to being a total raving bitch. Didn’t seem that the punishment was taken to heart. She started dressing slutty, with low cut dress and very short skirts. More than once she was sent to the nurse’s office to “borrow” from lost and found. She would come back dressed head to foot in a full length sweater, and if she even hinted at opening it, she was sent to the principals office.
I had no quarrels with either of them until the last day of Sky-Y Camp.
We were hiking up a hill when out of no-where Victor starts talking to Martin. I didn’t hear the first of it, but I knew he was picking on Martin, everyone picked on Martin. Half the size of the biggest guys in our class, he was an easy target for all. I have an inflated sense of justice when it comes to the underdog. This would not be the first time I stood up for Martin, nor would it be the last.
“Leave him alone”, I said to Victor, giving him the best Don’t-fuck-with-the-little-one look.
“What? I just asked him if he had ever had pussy around the neck.”, Victor replied, “What about you, Rick? Ever got some.” Arlene giggled on his arm.
I had no idea what “pussy around the neck” was. I wasn’t a virgin, but still I blushed. I had that problem until I was 16 or so, where I would blush all over. To some it was endearing, to others a source of hilarity to me it was embarrassingly out of my control. I hated it. I looked at him said “A gentleman never tells”. Even to me it sounded lame, but I had nothing to share with these people. I had no reason to impress them. Arlene and Victor walked off laughing.
Arlene and Victor stayed together for a couple of years. I would hear rumors about them but didn’t have any direct contact with either of them until after high school. I was downtown and riding the shuttle about taking care of some business when Arlene got on. I recognized her immediately. I hoped she wouldn’t see me or she wouldn’t recognize me. Luck was not on my side and she immediately sat in front of me and we exchanged pleasantries. I hoped that was end of it and it was for a few minutes when she turned around and started asking me questions about religion. I was taken aback. I wasn’t sure how to answer her questions. I answered the best I could, but she was never satisfied with my answers. Some how I felt like she was trying to brain wash me. Not being particularly fond of organized religion even then, I took the offensive.
“How’s Victor?” , I asked knowing full well that she had sinned with the boy and would not be able to continue talking about Jesus with me. I was wrong.
“The Devil took him home.”, she replied and without missing a beat started telling me what was wrong with the Catholic Church.
“Wait, what do you mean the Devil took him home?’, I asked incredulous that someone I knew had died.
“You know, he passed away, God rest his soul”, she answered, pulling out a Bible that had obviously been over used, “He died of the gay disease, they burned his body and salted the earth where they scattered the ashes”, she spit a little after saying it. I thought how weird it was for a Born Again Christian to perform such a pagan ritual.
She continued on about Christ, and how she wished she could save everyone or some such. But I was thinking about Victor. He was the second person I knew died of AIDS but he was my age. “You should get tested”, I said without much thought to what she was saying. “You should get tested, I said again over her protests, “It is a sexually transmitted disease, and it isn’t only gays who get it” and then I pulled the cord to tell the driver I wanted to get off. She was rambling on about gays deserving to die for their sins. I looked at her square in the eye as I got up to leave and said loudly “Get tested. Even Christians die from this. Jesus doesn’t protect them when they have sex with someone who is infected”.
She was yelling at me as I got off the shuttle, but I paid her no mind. I had said what I had to say and she had given me something to think about. I had walked off the bus well away from my destination just to make a point and I would end up walking 5 blocks in the blistering heat to make a point. Ever the martyr, it was worth it.
I have never seen Arlene again, nor do I want to. None of my childhood friends speak of her, so she may be still with us or gone. I make no assumptions about her, I only hope that she took my advice to get tested better than I took her advice to find Jesus.
At some point, my best friend Pud and I grew apart. I think it was when he stopped going to school in the 8th grade and took up staying at home and sleeping all day. Something he did for the next 10 years. I don’t remember at what point in my life, Eddie took his place. All I know is that it was a step up.
Ever see someone who is so pretty that your eyes hurt to look at them? That was Eddie. Eddie lived 8 houses down the street from me with his older brother Tom, younger sister Kim and mother Karen. Eddie’s parents were divorced but he never saw his father.His sister had a major crush on me but I could not return the affection because mine was on her brother. His mother could not stand me but then she couldn’t stand her own son. Eddie spent more time at my house that he did at his own. When we did go over to Eddie’s house, there was his mother ready to yell at him about some perceived infraction. I think it was because Eddie got all the good looks in the family. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, beautiful dark eyes, his siblings were the exact opposite.
Eddie was a shy sort, before he met me. after. not so much. In the sixth grade, I went out for the student council president and cajoled Eddie into running too. There were 6 open slots and there were 8 candidates. Eddie and I tied. There was a vote off and Eddie and I tied again. Instead of voting a 3rd time, the teacher made us co-Presidents.
We both went out for safety patrol and were assigned to the same team. We manned the crosswalk. That was the way our lives went. Until Sky-Y camp.
There were 6 cabins for the boys of various sizes. The girls were on the other side of the camp in what could only be described as dormitories. One large building with rooms on each side of a hallway with beds down the sides of the walls, it reminded me of those old movies of mental institutions. It was also where the nurse was stationed there.
Eddie and I had planned to bunk together. Just like home, I would get the bottom bunk and he would get the top bunk. We had it all planned. What we didn’t plan for was we didn’t have any say. The teachers chose for us. I was in cabin 6, the one farthest away from everything right on the edge of the forest. Eddie was in Cabin 3. I was not happy. Cabin 6 was all the geeks, dweebs, nerds and spazes. There was the Ginger kid, the kid with glasses, the fat kid, the ones with braces that covered his entire head like something out of sci-fi movie, the strange oriental kid that no one talked to but should have. It was a menagerie of bad kid movie stereotypes. And I was right in the middle of them and my best friend was in Cabin 3 with all the cool kids. All the cabins had a sponsor. The sponsor was a teacher or parent who lived in the cabins with the boys and took care of them. Cabin 6 didn’t have one. We were left alone. No guidance at all.
In hindsight, I understand why they did this. We were the group that the teachers didn’t worry about. We were the ones that took care of ourselves, we never caused problems, we were the “good” kids. Nurse Cammie was our unofficial sponsor. She would come in every night smelling of menthol cigarettes. Here raspy voice telling us all good night was welcome lullaby to those of us who, this was our first time away from home. But why was Eddie in Cabin 3? He wasn’t a threat. He was good kid. What kid who loved Bananas Magazine so much that he formed a fan club with his best friend couldn’t be bad… Could he?
The answer came on day 3.
We woke up early in the morning and headed to the shower. I dreaded the shower. The shower was outside There were 4 walls with shower heads coming off the wall every 2 feet. In the middle of the room was another bunch of shower heads coming out of it in a constant stream of ice cold water. There is enough trauma showering with your classmates, now imagine doing it outside with no roof. Add ice cold water, and boys of various stages of puberty, not a pretty sight. I always wanted to be first in, and first out. Get it done before you had to endure the taunts about being too hairy or about shrinkage. There were usually 2 or 3 other shy guys in there, no one threatening, but on this day there was no one. I showered, dressed and started back to the cabin, when I noticed all the kids gathered in the ramada where we ate dinner. They were talking about something. As I got closer they were talking about Eddie and Patrick, their parents had come to pick them up. The stories flew. They had been caught in the shower jacking off or they were caught in the girls’ dorms peeking or they had been out after dark. Something was serious, because Eddie’s mom had gotten off her lazy butt and driven all the way up to pick him up. I saw her car, his sister and brother were in the car and Eddie was standing beside it with his head down in shame.
Patrick’s parents were already packing him up and driving away. I ran up to Eddie and asked him what was wrong, without a word he turned around and got in the car and kept his head down, I just looked in the window and asked him what was wrong. That was when his Mom came up. She looked me straight in the eye and told me “Don’t bother coming around, he is going to be grounded for 3 months if I don’t send him to live with his father.”
After he left, I was sad. Me and my new band of rejects went back to our cabin. Everyone rehashed everything but no one really knew what 
happened and the teachers weren’t saying anything to us. I knew that it wasn’t anything sexual with Patrick because Eddie was the biggest homophobe ever. He refused to listen to Chicago because one of the band members put his arm around the others in a picture. The girls all loved him. Any of the sluttier girls would have shown him anything he asked. I couldn’t believe all the rumors and I was getting pissed off.
The day dragged on. We went on a hike and the most exciting thing we found was some bear tracks until one of the teachers admitted he had been creating the paw marks to make the trip interesting. That night we used the telescope to view Jupiter and then were sent to bed. When Cammie came in to say goodnight, I was standing on the porch staring out into the darkness. She put her arm around me and dragged me back inside. She said in what I think she considered a whisper, if you have any pot, get rid of it before the morning. I looked at her dumb struck. I knew what pot was. Hell I could tell you where the dealers were in the neighborhood, but it wasn’t something I had ever felt like trying so I just looked at her shocked. She patted me on the butt and sent me scurrying to my bed.
I lay awake wondering if that was what Eddie and Patrick had been sent home for. I woke up late the next morning. Mr. Avery was at our door and telling us all to get out. We lined up on the porch and watched through the window as if in a bad prison movie he bulled our cabin apart. tossing bedding and clothes all around. Of course he didn’t find anything, but he made a show of looking. I think it gave him a thrill to bully kids. He walked out, told us to clean it up and moved across to the compound to the girls’s dorms. I remember him being a dick, but a couple of years later, he would leave under less than optimal conditions when he had an affair with another teacher and his wife caught them.
Time heals all wounds, and when you are a kid and in a fun setting, things move in triple time. I soon forgot about Eddie and whatever sent him home. Camp continued, events were held, and he missed it all.
What Eddie’s mom had said was true. He was grounded for 3 months and got another month added to it when he ran away from home and came to my house. The original grounding was for pot. He had stolen some from his uncle and Patrick and he had snuck away from the cabin late at night to smoke it. Patrick was sent to a Catholic school and grew up to be a police officer. Eddie battled drug addiction all his life. We remained friends until freshman year of high school, when he found a group of friends who liked the same things he did. I moved to JP as my best friend and didn’t look back.
I was thinking of Eddie the other day, wondering what his life was like, does he still do drugs? I did a web search and found him. I might call him up one day, but there isn’t really any reason. I have my memories of the good looking kid who was my friend. I don’t need to know what bad he has done.
Next up: Victor
Ever want something so much that you think you are going to explode if you don’t get it? Sky Y Camp was like that.
In elementary school, each class after the third grade held a fund raiser to go to Sky Y Camp in the sixth grade. We usually sold bricks of rainbow colored popcorn. While they were supposed to be like popcorn balls, a sweetened sticky treat of rolled popcorn, they usually ended up feeling and tasting more like cinder block. I think the school bought the year supply at the beginning of each year because by the end of the year the popcorn was pretty hard. I heard one parent actually built an addition to their house using our product.
From an early age, you are indoctrinated in the joys that are Sky Y Camp. The horse riding on the trails, the dinners out of doors, sleeping
in a cabin, swimming in the lake, and playing in the streams, hiking mountain trails, interacting with wildlife and most importantly the Sky Y Camp Olympics. The teachers and the students reveled us with tales from the past trips and the memories that were made there. Most importantly it was a full week in the mountains away from school and our families.
The truth was that the horse riding was in a corral, on a contraption that made it walk only in circles. There was an actual rut dug two feet down below grade. The horse was so old that was on a respirator. It had to stop every 5 minutes to take a nap. I think the horse knew it was digging his own grave, just a few more feet it would tell itself and it could rest. Not surprisingly the girls all stood in line day and night for a chance to ride the pony. Some of them may still be standing there waiting for all I know.
The dinners out doors was on the exact same trays we used at school and the meals were made by the exact same cafeteria ladies that worked at school. The streams had dried up for the summer and the lake was a pond that was choked with algae. Dead fish floated on the surface, I was sure that was were the lunch ladies were getting our fish sticks. The swimming pool provided was above ground and could hold no more that 10 people at a time. As for the wildlife, when you put 90 children in the middle of a forest it is usually enough to make parents run away let alone wildlife. Sky Y, was nothing like what had been described to us. I was not sure if they had actually lied to us to play a cruel joke, or if the place had just been run down.
Our School was on a track system. You went to school for 9 weeks and then you were off for 3 weeks. There were 4 tracks A through D. When C was off, A, B, and D were going to school. The only time all 4 tracks were off at the same time was Christmas, the only time all 4 tracks were in session was the week of Sky Y Camp. It was supposed to be a time for us to be together one last time before we moved on to various Junior High Schools. As bad as it was, that trip to Sky Y Camp was the foundation to some of my fondest memories.
Up Next: Eddie
I was in Tucson again this past week so I have catching up to do. Try as I might, I could not think of a good story to tell, until I went over and visited Kate’s Blog “Hot Dishing“.
For some reason, my Dad has a real problem with people who pass gas. Growing up, if you let one rip, he would make you stand in the bathroom for 5 minutes. His theory was that if you were going to do it, you should go outside or to the bathroom. I could never make it to the bathroom or outside and would up in the purgatory of the bathroom. I never understood what the purpose of standing in the bathroom was. If I had already farted, what was the purpose of the bathroom? Dad hated farts so much, we were not allowed to have whoopee cushions in the house nor were we allowed to let air out of a balloon because they sounded like a fart. We were not allowed to discuss them nor were we allowed to laugh at them. And god forbid if you let one loose in the car. He would pull over and make you get out of the car. He would then open all the doors and windows and air out the car. It didn’t matter if it was 110 degrees or 30, you got out of the car. This made for some painful car rides home from Mexican food restaurants.
But these same rules did not apply to Dad. For some reason, not only did his farts not stink, they were also silent, at least to him. You 
never ever pointed out that he had farted. If you did, it lead to a lecture about respecting your father and mother and a story about Noah and getting drunk. How this related to passing gas, still escapes me today. And it was hard not to notice his farts. They were they extremely and painfully smelly. The Department of Environmental Quality once tested our house for a SuperFund Clean Up site after a night of mustard greens. They said the neighbors 3 doors down and two streets over had complained. And because he was always trying to hold it in, the came out in almost a whistle. You knew they were coming because the neighborhood dogs would hear the high pitch tweet before the rest of us. Then it would be 5 minutes of someone letting air out of a tire and trying to stop the hole up with a whistle. It was a horror to witness, because you could not even acknowledge that it had happened.
Once, we were having a huge dinner party with some of Dad’s business partners. Mom had warned my sister and I to be on our best behavior. There being 10 years between Sis and I, we often fought simply to show each other how much we loved each other but somehow this was lost on my parents. The first sign that something was wrong was my sister’s Lhaso Apso started howling. We both looked up to see dad standing with a knife and fork in his hand. The look on his face, was one of horror mixed with surprise as he half walked have ran to the nearest bathroom knife and fork in hand. The bathroom he went to shared a wall with dining room. I looked at my sister and she looked at me and suddenly the chandelier above us started to sway as Dad let the biggest fart I have ever heard, and this was through a solid wall.
I looked at Sis, and then quickly down at my plate as we heard the exhaust fan turned on and something being sprayed. A few minutes later, dad walks out smelling suspiciously like mom’s hair spray. No one said a word. Dad came back out, without his knife and fork and I wondered what he did with them, because I never wanted to use them again. Mom got him a new set and dinner went on as if nothing had happened.
I wish.
When Mom got up to go get the new silverware for Dad, I made mistake of looking up at my sister. She looked at me at the exact same time. Because the hair spray Dad had sprayed to cover up his deed was tickling our noses, we were both rubbing them at the same time. I blame Sis for what happened next, she smiled at me. The fucking bitch smiled at me. That was all that I needed. Years of fart related laughs that were bottled up inside me came spewing out. I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. I tried but I looked at Dad and the look on his face and I just couldn’t handle it any more. I laughed so hard I was crying, and then I farted. Yes, I did. I farted long and loud. Sis, watching me lose control, started laughing too. Dad stood up and ordered us to our rooms, but we were already up and running away from the table.
I was grounded for a week. Dad said I had embarrassed him and talked about bears eating little kids for making fun of a bald man. I did not know what that meant, but never again, did I hold in a fart or a laugh about a fart.
I am sorry that Kate could not pass gas in her situation, it is against the rules for girls to pass gas at any time. It is time to change the rules. Girls, if you have to let one rip, just give us a heads up and we will try not to laugh too hard.
For some reason, I am a slow learner in some things. People usually pass milestones in their life way before me. Take driving for example, when everyone else was worried about getting a license at 16, I was too busy going to school or work to take driver’s ed. The one time that Mom did take me out for a drive, she actually screamed in fear at one point and demanded that I pull the car over and made me get out. I swear there was a wet spot on her pants. She refused to take me out again.
Dad took me out and spent the first 2 hours telling me how to check the car for safety and explaining how a car works. We went for a drive around the block. At one point he actually scrunched up into the fetal position. I got us home and parked in the driveway and Dad sat in the care for what seemed like forever, until Mom went out and got him.
Next came a family friend. He brought his tractor over, expecting that it would be safer. He did not like the fact that it cost him $100 dollars to get it out of the ditch.
Even JP refused to teach me to drive after that.
It wasn’t until I was 19 and I actually paid someone to teach me to drive, did I get my license. I never had problems with the written portion of the test, it was the actual driving that stopped me from my license. I was worried about the driving test. On the day of the test, my tester was a tall youngish guy, who looked extremely bored. He got into the car. I told him that he had to buckle up, hoping that this would give me bonus points, he simply looked at me and told me to drive. I pulled up to the parking lot exit and waited for further instructions. He told me to turn right, and another right and go straight for two lights and make another right. I went to the end of the street and stopped. Not because there was a stop sign or a light, but because he hadn’t given me further instructions. He told me to make another right and pull into the convenience store on the corner and park. I did what he said. He got out of the car ran inside and got a soda, came back out and told me to go back to the testing station that was right next door. I pulled in and parked by the testing door. He wrote something on his clipboard and handed me the paper. 100%. I had my license and I never even had to parallel park. Woo Hoo!
I was also late in learning to ride a bike. I was 12 or so. My parents refused to buy me a bike until I learned to ride a bike but I didn’t have a 
bike to ride so how could I learn. Enter Pud. Pud had a normal bike. Blue with a boy frame, he kept it in cherry condition, taking it apart and putting it together again with a fresh coat of paint every 3 months or so. When ever we would go on our trips, he would ride his bike and pull me along behind him on a skateboard. This got tiring for both of us. Thankfully we found Big Bertha in his backyard.
Big Bertha was a rust colored 1940′s Schwinn girl’s bike. I never have understood why a boy’s bike has a bar right where his nuts will land, but a girl has a curved frame. And no one questions this shit? After a century of making bikes, why hasn’t someone stopped this?
Pud worked for a week straight fixing that bike. He stripped it down and painted the frame, took all the gears apart and re-packed the bearings. It looked pretty sweet by the time he was done. But still fell apart if you looked at it wrong. He gave it to me to learn to ride. At first he was patient with me. He ran along the side of me all the way down the street until I had some semblance of balance and then he started riding his bike with me. The first time he let go of me I ran into an irrigation pipe.
After more than my fair share of crashes, he gave up. He started by just pushing the bike form behind and then letting go. When I crashed into a parked car, he threw up his hands and gave up. It pissed me off to see him yelling at me. So I got on the bike and peddled as hard as I could directly at him. He jumped out of the way, but I kept going. Instead of telling me that it was about speed and balance, he had been trying to show me. Once I figured out the basic principles of bike riding, the rest was easy.
My parents wouldn’t buy me a bike until that Christmas, and then they only gave me a Rain Check because the store was sold out. I was so disappointed. Mom saw the look on my face, and asked me what was wrong. I told her the truth, “I can’t ride a piece of paper”. This pissed her off and yet another Christmas was ruined.
When we did pick it up weeks later, it was a sweet ride. Full on motor cross kit. As soon as we got it home, dad took it to his workshop and did some modifications, effectively making it one of the plainest bikes you have ever seen. And of course the motorcross kit was no longer a part of it. Dad didn’t want me getting any ideas about popping wheelies or riding off road. If he only knew. The first day out and about, I was in a vacant field jumping ramps and generally trying to kill myself.
I rode everywhere until I was 19. But I can’t say that I was an expert bike rider. During High School, I ran into the same telephone pole more than once. Okay, it was 5 times. I crashed into a car and went over the hood. I fell into an irrigation canal on my way to college. I chopped up a snake in the wheel of my bike spraying snake bits everywhere.
I miss the days when a bike ride was just a way to spend the day. Ride where you want for no reason at all. Now, when I drive, I know where I am going and why. Too much to do, to have some unplanned adventures.
Let me make sure I make it clear, that there are no harder working people in the world than my parents. I don’t remember a time where Dad didn’t have a job and for much of my life Mom had two jobs. Sis went to work when she was 16 and I got my first real job at 14. I have to make it clear, because all this working never stopped my parents from looking for the easy money. There was always some scheme to make an extra buck.
Growing up in Arizona, with a mine shaft around every corner this usually meant we went looking for gold, silver and other valuables. Our
family vacations were always about “camping” and involved some sort of treasure hunt. We had metal detectors, gold panning equipment, and mineral testing chemicals always available in the back of Dad’s jeep. Dad would listen to the guys on the construction site talk about where they were looking for gold and then go 20 miles upstream from them. It was all very scientific. We would spend large amounts of time looking for where water came out of the ground and then start panning down stream. Or if there was some disturbed rock on the side of the road, we would stop and pull out the metal detector. The most we ever found was some bottle caps and tin cans.
Dad also would go to the library and research area mines. While he focused on The Lost Dutchman Mine, he would often come and tell us about mines near the house. As luck would have it, one was very close to the house. The Headless Horse Mine.
About the time I learned to ride a bike, there was 2 or 3 murders where the bodies had been dropped into mine shafts. This gave me and Pud the idea that we could be like Encyclopedia Brown and go solve the old mystery of The Headless Horse Mine, though I am sure I was the only one geeky enough to know who Encyclopedia Brown was, I was always looking for some reason to form a club or a gang to be cool. Sadly after the Banana’s Fan Club Disaster of 1980, I gave it up and decided I was not meant to be a part of any group or club. This belief was proven to me in the Great Columbia House Fiasco of 1982. Truly who wants to receive Mayan Fertility Chants as their monthly selection? No more clubs for me.
But this was before I was burned one too many times. Pud and I didn’t really want to go alone, so we asked Pud’s older brother Konk if he would go with us. He said yes, as long as we brought his friend Jerry along. We agreed and set out on our great adventure. The mine is only 3 miles from our houses, but in the middle of summer, even kids are not stupid enough to do that in the middle of the day. We got up before dawn, with back packs full of food, water, candles and flashlights. We didn’t know what we would find, but we were looking for something, each of us looking for something different. I was looking for adventure.
We rode started our journey before the sun came up, gathering our bikes up from their hiding places the night before so as not to wake our parents as we were sure they would find some reason to keep 4 boys from visiting a mine shaft. Parents are like that. They always see the danger, never the adventure.
When we got to the base of the mountain, we really weren’t sure where the mine was. All we knew was that it was at the end of Old Telegraph Road and we had run out of road. So we continued on, riding an old dirt trail. I was on my new motor cross bike and Jerry was stuck on a 1930′s Schwinn. I loved that Schwinn as it had taught me to ride, but I knew that Jerry’s testicles were getting beat to hell on all those rocks and pot holes. I really didn’t feel bad for him because I hated him and any pain he got, he deserved. He was the trouble maker of the group, and that often led us into getting into trouble. The first time I got drunk was because he had spiked my drink. Mom was so mad, that she called the cops on him and had to be held back from beating the crap out of him when he was led away. Another time, he stole our dog, shaved it and then put shoe polish on him so that he could say it was his dog. For some reason, he forgot to take the collar off of him.
Old Telegraph Road was found by accident. An old wooden sign, tipped over in the desert pointed the way. We followed the road and came to the mine. The site of the mine wasn’t what I had anticipated. In the cartoons, there is a big opening and it is supported by wood beams. This was a small hole in the ground that you had to crawl into. you could see that it opened up once you got in but at this point, I wasn’t worried about getting in it was how would we get out.
Jerry, didn’t care. He grabbed the flashlight and scuttled in like a cockroach under a cabinet. He was gone before anyone could say anything. You could hear his voice echoing off the walls. I have expected a bunch of bats to fly out. He was encouraging us to come in. Konk went fist and then Pud and I was last, with my candle in hand. As I poked my head through I saw the outlines of someone’s shoes standing right in front of me. I looked up and there was Jerry, with his dick in hand trying is damnedest to pee on my head. I scooted back out and decided spelunking was not for me. I sat down on rock to the raucous laughter of Jerry. I cold hear Pud cussing him out for being an ass, and he soon followed me out of the cave.
He told me that it went back about 20 feet and it was filled with candles, beer cans and condoms but no bodies or gold.
We were looking around the outside when suddenly there was a blood curdling scream and the sounds of a scuffle and then it was silent. Pud and I looked at each other and scrambled to get a look inside. but before we cold look inside Jerry’s head poked out with a big knot and some blood on it. He wasn’t awake. Konk yelled for us to pull him out. Pud grabbed one side and I grabbed the other and we pulled him out. Konk followed after.
We learned that the flashlight had given out, and in an attempt to restart it, Jerry had flailed his arms about and screamed. He tripped on a rock or something and landed on something that made him scream again. He jumped up in part of the cave that had low clearance and run towards the light at the entrance and bumped his head. Hard.
While we were trying to figure out how to make one of those things to drag behind our bikes when Jerry sat straight up, covered in dirt and blood. He didn’t say a word when we asked him if he was alright. He got on that Schwinn and he was off riding. We ran to our bikes and took off after him. The ride home was uneventful. We stopped at one of the ditches to jump in and cool off and clean the dust off, Jerry stayed away from us running his hands over the large goose egg on his head.
We never really talked about it once we got home. Jerry went to his house, I went to Pud and Konk’s. Jerry came back in a couple of weeks. Telling the story, he would always bring up that he had almost peed on me, but when I mentioned that he was the one who had screamed like a girl and gotten so scared he had knocked himself out, for some reason, he couldn’t remember that part of the story.
My Next Book Will Be a Best Seller
I am having the hardest time coming up with blog entries. I think about it all day long. A penny on the ground and I start thinking about the time I found $100 bill on the ground in front of post office. I turned it in to the post master and never heard back from them. I wasn’t expecting a “Thank you” or anything, I just wonder if they didn’t split that money up or throw a pizza party for the whole crew. And then I kick myself because I know they spent it on strippers and booze, and that could have been me!
I read the newspaper to get ideas, but I just get pissed off. Every politician is more worried about making sure his party is in power than making it right by the citizens. It is just crazy anymore and I am too fervent about it to write a coherent sentence. So I don’t. I blame this shit on that fucker Clinton. I swear I am going to be one of those old guys that screams “Damn you kids, Get off of my lawn!” and bores them with stories about “Back in my day, Presidents changed the world WHILE they were getting blow jobs.” Yeah, I can so see that.
I asked PA what I should write about, and he said, “Don’t, come play a game with me” so now I am stuck in this stupid pirates game that must run for hours before you can advance. I hate it, and it takes up way too much of my time.
And when I am not working my two jobs, I sit around waiting for doomsday to come. Yep, I am on the 2012 bad wagon. Well not so much as being on the bandwagon as hoping like hell it happens. I am serious about this. I hope that a giant space hedgehog shits out a pellet and then sends it hurtling towards Earth crashing into the planet with such force it will be torn apart. Why? Because we are so fucking stupid. As a species, we worry about the stupidest things, and when important things are “someone elses’ problem”. We are so good at this, I mean so really good at this that we make up shit to worry about. Like why the Mayan calendar ends in 2012.
Instead of thinking of a logical reason for the calendar ending, people want to believe that it is the end of the world. My cousin, Terry, came over and actually asked me if she should be worried about 2012, like I am an expert on world destroying hedgehogs or something. Being the nice person I am, I said no, not at all, because she would be one of the first to be killed. This did not sit well with her.
But it got me to thinking, there are a lot of stupid people in the world. Some of them I am not related to. And some of them even have money. So I am formulating a plan to take over the world using this newest doomsday scenario. First I am going to write a book about the current political crisis, droughts, earthquakes and illegal aliens being caused by gay space aliens who visited the Mayans, Incans and Aztecs. These illegal Gay Space Aliens taught these ancient civilizations everything they know including decorating. These Gay Space Aliens who also happen to be illegal, by the way, are going to return next year to take over the world and turn us all into zombie slaves so they can steal all of our resources.
I will then sell the book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble for a few dollars. Not much, just enough so I can buy some remote land somewhere far away from people with plenty of caves. I will then write a follow up book to my first book with an equally successful book about how I now where there is one place on the whole planet where the Aliens cannot see with their superior technology. I will then let people believe that I am only choosing the “special” people to go with me to my new home. I will have application process where they will fill out a ton of paperwork which will never be read. Only those crazy enough to file an appeal will be read. I will then give them an interview. At the interview, I will ask them the same questions over again before denying them. It is at that point, they will be so desperate they will give me all their money to move in with me. After I get paid, I will give them a little cave on the land I bought, and let them live their life in peace. Away from me, who will now live in a house surrounded by a moat filled with alligators.
Why? Because I am nice to stupid people who can’t imagine why the Mayan’s stopped making their calendar at 5000 years. I can.
Here, let me help you. You are a Mayan astronomer and you are making a calendar. So you start doing the calculations about how the universe runs and you do this with pebbles and sticks because there are no fucking super computers to do it for you. Then you have to record this shit by carving it in stone because there is no paper…. At a certain point in your life, when you are old and grey, and you have made a calendar for the next 5000 years, you have to stop and say, “This is a good place to end the calendar”.
That or they got so busy yelling “Damn you kids, Get off of my Mayan Temple! Back in my day, Priests changed the world WHILE they were cutting your hearts out.”