November 29

One of my favorite memories from this time was a concert.  I had been to lots of Christian concerts over the years, but the vast majority of these were very sedate and very low-energy events.  I had never been to an honest-to-god rock concert.  Well, ok, there was this one time Deeanne and I had, for some reason, attended a Chicago concert but this was when the group was almost completely in the ‘classic rock’ phase.  My brother and his friends were all big Motley Crue fans.  Bobby had a big poster on his wall.  I liked some of their stuff but Vince Neil’s voice just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the group.  But I did like Whitesnake.  Their music was the soundtrack of my life at this stage.  So when my brother invited me to join him and his friends at the Motley Crue/Whitesnake concert at Reunion Arena in Dallas I did not hesitate.  September 25, 1987.  We caravanned to Dallas.  Jakey did not disappoint and celebrated old times by riding in the back of a pickup and mooning us and other traffic.  We were all high by the time we arrived.

Whitesnake opened, and they got the place rocking.  They were getting a lot of airplay at the time and by the time they finished their set I was thinking that they might have upstaged the main act!  I would go home happy no matter what.  And then the Crue got started.  They owned and used more of the stage, which gave them a bit of an advantage, plus they also had the nasty habits dancing which didn’t hurt at all.  And then that magical moment happened, the one where the crowd becomes a force that interacts with the band.  The lights went low, a rumbling sound began filling the arena, the unmistakeable sound of a motorcycle engine revving up.  The spotlights hit a giant inflatable motorcycle which was growing behind the stage, eventually towering over it.  And the band kicked into Girls, Girls, Girls and I was persuaded that maybe, just maybe, this Crue thing wasn’t so bad after all.

And then there was the break.  The band left the stage, but Tommy Lee stayed at his drums.  He was in some sort of crazy chair with straps and buckles as if he were going to take off.  He chugged an entire bottle of Jack Daniels, holding the bottle with one hand and thrashing the drums with his other hand and both feet.  The stage foled back away from him and his drum platform began to rise.  He was on some sort of pneumatic lift!  It raised him in the air until he was almost on top of the front rows.  He played a riff as the drums tilted to one side and stopped.  He riffed again as the platform tilted back to the other side.  He then took off on a powerful beat and the platform spun and then stopped with him upside down!  The crowd was going wild by then.  He proceeded to do some serious mother-fucking kick-ass drumming while the platform spun and I was won over.  The Crue just rocked, no doubt about it.

It was a great night, and since it was my first bonafide true rock concert I don’t think I will ever be able to top it.

At times I enjoyed solitude.  It was such a nice contrast to the almost constant arguing and the perceived pressure of being responsible for so many others.  But most of the time I enjoyed having someone else around.  And I truly hated to miss out on an opportunity to party, or to hang out with a hot chick.  So when Tammy knocked at the door after midnight on a work night, I groggily opened the door.  She showed me a small bag containing white powder.  I was sincerely pleased that she thought of me.  Perhaps it was a thank-you for the time she had spent sleeping over, or perhaps it was just the odd friendships that sharing drugs produces.  I stayed up all night that night, although I don’t remember how long she stayed over.  I was just glad she had thought of me.

But I never slept with her.  And it isn’t as if I didn’t want to have sex!  But I was in no hurry to get into a new relationship for once.  And for some reason I caught the attention of the neighbor in the apartment below me.  Her name was Beth and she had curly, slightly red hair and freckles.  She drove a blue Suzuki Samurai and one day asked me some questions about it.  I think it was making a noise and so the next thing you know I was under the car looking around.  I don’t remember finding anything significant but I probably offered up a few things she might need to have checked.  It didn’t matter.  Once again my naivety failed to notice that she just wanted an excuse to get to know me.  To repay me for looking at her car (since I was such a top-notch mechanic) she invited me for dinner that night.  It was a genuinely good meal, and her kid was nice as I recall.  After he went to bed we watch TV for awhile, and talked.  Shortly she went to her bedroom and a few minutes later she came back in a thin robe.  THAT is when I knew I was getting laid, not one minute before.  We did a lot of kissing and groping and then finally went to her bedroom.  That night ended a rather long drought and did a lot to restore both my confidence and my self-esteem.

I went by her place of work the next day and chatted for a bit and then she invited me over again.  This time was a bit different.  I think someone else was watching her kid so we talked and drank a bit and then she gave me a lap dance.  It wasn’t a strip-club kind of lap dance, but it was very sensual and wild.  I was appropriately mesmerized by her grinding on me and gyrating.  Then we made love.

And that was basically it.  I really didn’t expect anything to come of it, primarily because of my crappy job.  I wasn’t particularly good mating material.  But I completely and totally understood that I was just a bit of a fling for her, and I was fine with that.  The first time she brought someone else over I was, of course, a bit jealous.  I was jealous that I couldn’t have more.  But it was a brief envy exacerbated by proximity and the fact that I had nothing else to do but sit around and think most of the time.  Within six months my opinion of the whole episode had gelled in my mind and has never changed.  If I ever run into her again I will explain to her what I did not then, that her actions meant a lot more to me than she could have known.  I will always be thankful to her and hold her in high regard in my mind.  Whether she was acting out of pure lust or sympathy or just curiosity matters not.  I am grateful to her.

Paula was different.  I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just imagine her.  I have tried and tried and can never come up with how I met her.  Perhaps she was a friend of a friend, but I don’t remember hanging out with any other people while I was with her.  She wasn’t particularly churchy and neither was I at the time so it’s very unlikely we met at church or through some acquaintance there.  I remember hanging out at her house a few times, I remember her daughter Krystal.  And I remember she had a pink bass guitar.

One night we did a little jam session at someone’s house, a friend of hers.  It was in Lake Worth, oddly enough.  I played jazz riffs on the drums, and it was generally fun.
Paula was Native American, so maybe I met her through the guys I worked with but I couldn’t swear to it.  She would go to events and learn history and dances.  I thought it was pretty cool.

One night I accompanied her to some bar in some part of the Fort Worth area but I couldn’t tell you where.  It was a very typical bar, and she was known there.  It was country, and I was comfy being in a country bar.  I’m Texan, after all.  But I wasn’t a boot-scootin’ kind of guy so I was not in my element completely.  But that night it was all good, and I felt even better after the band spotted Paula and called her up for a song.  So she went up and did a fine rendition of something by Patsy Cline.  So now I was the dude with the chick that could sing.  It was a fun evening.

It may have been that night or some other night but as should be obvious by now the details have completely departed my mind about much of this period of time.  Paula was dropping me off at my apartment and we saw someone standing outside on the sidewalk.  It may have been Beth, it may have been Linda’s sister, I’m not sure.  But Paula seemed to think they were giving us looks so she decided to give them something to look at and pulled me over for a kiss.  I’m not sure whether it was based on sympathy or whether she just wanted an excuse, but I never got the impression she saw me as more than a friend.  Then again, there is my renowned naivety to take into consideration.  I will probably never know.

Speaking of Linda’s sister, her entrance on the scene marked the beginning of the end of this phase of my life.  She was separating or divorcing from her husband, James.  It seems that James was a nice enough guy but things just weren’t working out.  He was in the Air Force and was doing M.P. Work at Carswell Air Force Base on the south side of Lake Worth (both the lake and the city).  I met him once or twice when he came to visit his kids while they were all living with Linda.  Needless to say, this put a bit of a crimp in my brother’s sleepover schedule and I started seeing a lot more of him.  I liked Linda’s sister and made feeble attempts to get to know her better but I ended up being the friend not the lover.  I even babysat for her one night when she went on a date.  I didn’t really mind since her kids were just typical kids and I enjoyed playing with them, but it wasn’t a role I wanted to play on a long-term basis.  But the strange thing is that I actually ended up hitting it off pretty good with her ex, James.  He and I started hanging out together as we shared a common affinity for speed.  But James wasn’t just a snorter, he was a slammer.  The funny thing is that what I remember the most about my time with him is how much we sat around wishing we had some.

James lived on the western fringes of White Settlement in the ground floor of a little four-plex apartment building.  Perhaps one of the oddest memories I have of that time is this one night when we had both had just a bit of speed left.  Well, I say both but when it comes to speed users get very protective of their stashes.  So I can only speak for myself when I say that I didn’t get very wired this one night.  After any other friends and acquaintances had left James and I split the last of any remaining speed we had on us, and it wasn’t much.  He wanted to slam his, but he asked me to help him.  I had no clue what I was doing, but I was game.  So he did all the prep work and then tied off his arm, popped up a vein and I hit a vein and gave him a nice easy plunge.  He shuddered as the effect started hitting his system.

We talked about me doing the same, but I was generally against the concept.  He didn’t try to talk me into it, but we did discuss it for awhile.  Finally we came up with an acceptable alternative.  So we flushed the syringe with very hot water and I think we sterilized the needle with a match.  I then took a syringe full of liquid meth and squirted it into the back of my throat.  It was very nasty and bitter, and it absorbed quickly and made me happy.  Now that we were both wired we made the most of it by finding something to focus on.

It is the one thing I remember the most about speed.  I was very happy the first time I used speed while driving.  I drove from Georgetown back to Fort Worth and never once yawned or got tired or started falling asleep, which was a most definite first for me.  The act of driving was a focal point for my mind.  Other times I would grab a twelve-pack of Dr. Pepper, a few fruit pies, a crossword puzzle book and a carton of cigarettes and that would take me through the entire weekend, most of it spent on the couch.  But what James and I found to focus on that night was the promise of even more speed.

A couple of the people that had been at his house earlier that night were some true, serious thugs.  Not particularly smart, but dangerous.  Ex-cons, most certainly carrying weapons.  For reasons that I’ll never know they had supposedly stashed a bag of meth there at James’ apartment.  So we focused on where they might have hidden it.  We very systematically and thoroughly searched that apartment from top to bottom.  After the first time through, we talked again.  We reconsidered.  We started in on some less obvious choices.  We removed faceplates from light switches and wall plugs.  We checked the fireplace flue.  We pulled up loose corners of carpet, we pulled appliances out and looked behind and under them.  We literally left nothing unsearched.  We would touch base every now and then to avoid overlap and multiple searches of the same place, but we would forget if we had searched it yet or not so we did it again.  As we came down off the buzz the paranoia set in and we began to see unmarked police activity in every car that slowed down nearby.  Speed was like that.

Eventually the thugs returned and went straight to the fireplace, opened the flue and retrieved a large quantity of meth.  We couldn’t believe it as we had looked there several times during the night.  Or at least we thought we had.

Of course, since I thought of myself as one bad mo-fo I wanted to help these guys in their life of crime, especially if it would score me some speed.  I once attempted to abscond with some dealer tag license plates from work.  Unfortunately someone found them missing and we were all asked to look for them. I ‘found’ them in the trash barrel next to my work area and tried to pass it off as an innocent mistake.  I’m not sure they ever believed me.

The last time I spent the weekend at James’ apartment we had more friends and acquaintances than usual hanging around.  One guy actually had some speed, a monster bag full actually.  It was probably worth more than I knew.  In retrospect, I will guess that the street value was around five-thousand dollars worth.  But he wasn’t giving any away for free and I was basically broke so I just hung out hoping for handouts.  I believe I called up Debbie to see if she was in the market.

Debbie was the sister of one of my brother’s best friends.  The last time I had seen her was when I left for college and she was just a skinny little kid.  After I moved in with my brother I found her to be a very attractive young lady with long legs and luscious lips.  It was probably creepy to see me in action around her but I couldn’t help it, she was pretty hot.  We spent some time together off and on for awhile.  I hung out in her bedroom once while she was calling around to score some meth.  We almost drove my brother crazy one night when we were both wired and talking ninety miles an hour.  I thought it was hilarious.

So I thought of Debbie that night and she came over to James’ place.  My naivety again kicked in as she and her friend were invited into the back bedroom where business was being conducted.  I imagined a normal business transaction being conducted when it may have actually been more of a barter or exchange going on.  She didn’t stay long and I was left hanging out still.

At some point the thugs came by and then left again.  One of them was showing off a gun if I remember correctly.  Later that night we were sitting around doing not much of anything when the kitchen window disintegrated explosively and I looked over to see a shotgun barrel where the window used to be.  The voice behind it yelled for everyone to get down on the floor, so we all jumped up and ran for the back bedroom.  Someone opened the window only to find another shotgun and another person yelling for us to get down.  So we ran back to the hallway.  We somehow felt protected by a double layer of sheetrock.  I asked James about what weapons he had in the house.  I had seen his BDU’s and presumed he would also have at least a sidearm but no, he said he had nothing.  In hindsight that is probably a good thing.  Soon we realized that the person in the kitchen window was threatening to kill someone if we didn’t go unlock the front door.  As it turns out he had caught someone in the kitchen who was now lying on the floor right in front of him.  Somehow I ended up being the designated unlock-ee and I unlocked the door and we all got on the living room carpet face down.  We followed instructions and removed our shoes and pants and covered our heads with jackets or shirts.  I took the fact that they didn’t want us to see their faces as a good sign.  If they didn’t care about being identified it meant they probably didn’t expect us to live long enough to talk.  Besides, what were we going to do?  Call the police?

They walked around for awhile, occasionally running the barrel of a shotgun along our backs for emphasis, or perhaps just for kicks.  Finally they had several of us get into a small closet, one at a time.  We kept our shirts on so we couldn’t see.  One by one they pulled someone out and we could hear some shouting and what sounded like someone getting beat up.  Oddly enough I was calm the whole time.  I think that maybe I was reminded of my cub scout campout initiation.  I was skeptical that these guys were seriously hurting any one.  Besides, I really did not know anything, so I wasn’t going to be much use to any one.  One of my closet mates got a little freaked out at one point and we had to talk him down before he did something stupid.  But then it got quiet in the house.  We waited for what seemed like forever and then cautiously snuck out of the closet.  We heard an engine start and tires squealing down the road and we knew they were gone.

After we sorted our clothes out and got dressed again we pieced together the story.  The guy holding the large bag of speed had evidently attempted to flush it down the toilet.  I will presume that he thought these thugs with shotguns were undercover cops because I can think of no other good reason to flush the drugs.  But that is what these guys were after and fortunately it clogged up the toilet and they were able to reach up in there and retrieve it.  That’s what they were after so they left.  Everyone finally left, including myself.

Of course anger and bravado soon replaced fear, directly proportional to the amount of time that passed.  By the time I got back to my apartment I was ready for revenge.  I got my brother’s pistol-grip shotgun and put it in my car.  I half-expected the thugs to track us all down and attempt further robberies, but I never saw them again.  I suspect they are either dead or rotting in some prison cell.

You would think that this would scare me right out of this lifestyle, but it didn’t.  I kept partying until one Tuesday when I went in to work.  I had taken Monday off due to being way too sleep-deprived to function, and upon my arrival Tuesday I was called into the boss’ office.  They were going to basically bust me down to grease monkey private until I shaped up.  I said ok, and told them I needed to get my tools out of my car.  I got in the car and drove off and never looked back.

I spent a week or two half-heartedly looking for work, or at least thinking about it, and as I was broke I stayed pretty sober.  I finally had some time to think straight and I decided enough was enough.  I knew I could make more money than the crappy automall, three times as much or more.  I just needed to hit the temp agencies again.  But I also knew that it was time to become a more productive citizen in general, and perhaps get back in church.  I made a phone call and soon I was living with my parents again.  I spent a couple of weeks making phone calls and sleeping a lot.  I couldn’t stop napping.  My body was catching up.  I gained some weight too.  But I felt like the fog was clearing and I had half a plan to put my life back together.

A couple of weeks later I got bored and called James up.  I went to see him to see if I could at least score some speed, even just a bump.  I wanted to party and hang out.  He had a friend come over, supposedly with some speed, but I never saw any of it.  I ended up more bored than I was at my parents and left and never went back.

A week later my brother called.  James was dead.  The story was that he was at his parents’ house and got a bit out of control and attacked his mom.  I doubt that he was seriously physically hurting her, but to his ailing grandfather it might have appeared that way.  So his frail alzheimer’s riddled grandfather grabbed a shotgun and blew a hole in him.  This story seemed so implausible.  I had been at his mom’s house before and met them briefly.  I wasn’t buying it.  Paranoia still ruled a corner of my brain and I decided that he might have gone into some sort of witness protection program.  I didn’t even attend the funeral for fear of FBI types wandering around looking for known associates.  I had made it out and I was going to stay out.  I never looked back.

At this point in my life I literally turned a new leaf, but it was hard.  I had experienced life in the fast lane.  Loud rock, drugs, crazy people.  So it was a bit of a culture shock when I started going back to my dad’s church.

The people were even more small-minded and picky and insignificant than they had ever been, or at least from my perspective they were.  I was bored and perpetually horny.  Somehow getting back out into the work force and making decent money had renewed my interest in sex as well, at least to the level it had been before.  Hymns just did not do a damn thing for me.  But I was still a bit naive when it came to women, and I was definitely a bit on the desperate side, and that is how I came to start dating Bobbie.  When I tell people about it now it comes across as a bit sensational.  But at the time, I only learned about her gradually.  The fact that she was interested in me was obvious from the smile on her face and her body language.  That counted for a lot in my book.  A couple of dates is harmless, so we did that.  We both smoked so that was no big deal.  And she had an active libido.  What’s not to like?  I spent one night at her house.  After her teenage son went to bed she came out to the couch where I was supposedly sleeping.  She left to freshen up a bit and then returned in nothing but a t-shirt.  But since we were both in church we had the moral hangups to deal with.

Fortunately we weren’t virgins so some things just happened and we didn’t bother with asking or permission or forgiveness.  It just happened.  But what hooked me was when I first put my hand between her legs.  Moist isn’t the word.  More like dripping.  It was something I hadn’t experienced before and that always counted for something in my book.  And it turned me on like crazy.  Before the night was over I was in  bed with her.  The good news is that since I had been vasectomized I no longer had to worry about pregnancy.  The bad news is that to fill her with semen would have been over the ‘moral’ line, so we settled for some intercourse and then I finished up in the bathroom later.

Now the version I normally tell people doesn’t include all those details.  She is just the one I dated that was scatterbrained, a single mom, and on Lithium.  The rest is just filler.

November 28

The traffic at our apartment began to pick up slowly but surely.  I remember seeing people sitting on our couch and using the phone to arrange drug sales or purchases and wondering “Who is that?”  It just wasn’t that uncommon.  My brother had a large set of scales in his closet and was regularly weighing out twenty-five and fifty dollar bags of weed.  I would occasionally buy seventy-five dollars worth of speed, sell three-fourths of it for seventy-five and have my very own quarter-bag of speed left over for free!  When that happened I considered it to be the perfect way to start the weekend.  We were certainly never big-time, but you can’t have that many people in and out of your apartment without getting a bit of attention.

One particular weekend Linda’s brother Floyd, his friend Rene (a hispanic dude) and Claude were all over at our place for drugs and booze and cards.  Claude not only kept up with everyone but sometimes exceeded our intake, all the more amazing considering that he wasn’t quite four feet tall.  Claude was the first dwarf I had ever spent any significant time with.  It was very interesting just to talk and interact with him, but even more so to see him slam speedballs of speed and cocaine into his veins.  He and Floyd and especially Rene were hooked on that combination.  Considering his body size he shouldn’t have been able to take the same amount of drugs and alcohol as the rest of us, but he partied like the rest of us which is probably all that he really wanted; just to be like the rest of us.

I think it was that same weekend that word got back to us of an arrest.  Someone that had been hanging around a bit, someone that no one really knew that well, had supposedly been arrested by the White Settlement police not long after leaving our apartment.  Unfortunately he had at least a pound of marijuana under his front seat.  We were sure that he would squeal and send the police straight to us so we held off on parties for awhile.

Speaking of large quantities of marijuana, I am reminded of Mike, one of my brother’s old schoolmates.  Mike had spent some time muling money down to the border for some dealer.  He would have the money in his trunk, pull into a Del Rio motel and park the car then stay overnight.  The next morning he would get back in the car and drive back to Fort Worth.  The supplier would cross the border in the middle of the night, take the money, replace it with weed, and then go back to Mexico.  It was evidently an efficient system.  Mike was no longer making these runs, but he seemed to have a good supply source.  When we were hanging out in his living room and needed a joint he would just drag a thirty gallon trash bag out from under the couch.  It was full of dried leaves.  It was something akin to rolling your own from scratch.  That is when his drug mule stories went from the realm of possible to probable in my opinion.

Another potentially jumbled memory surrounds a particular band.  I remember partying at this guy’s house, and I’m pretty sure we knew him through Linda.  He was supposedly in this band.  But then when we actually saw the band I think my brother was with Gail, because he flashed her tits at them.  I think these were two separate incidents, but again the memory is fuzzy.  The location was a place that was the epitome of the term ‘dive joint.’  The bathrooms had holes in the walls, probably made by a body being shoved into said wall.  The floors were coated in urine.  An outhouse would have been cleaner.  There were a few foosball tables and very few chairs, and not a damn dime had ever been spent on paint or decor.  The name was Joe’s Garage in White Settlement, and it is memorable only because it was so shitty and also because Pantera used to play there.  I can truly say ‘I knew them back when.’

I got a phone call one day and was surprised to hear my now ex-wife on the other end of the line.  I was even more surprised to hear she was on her way to Fort Worth and wanted to know if I could hook her up with some speed.  I managed to scrounge some up and went to meet her and David at some motel on the south side of town.  They were nice, but it was a bit awkward.  Deeanne seemed bent on impressing me with both her familiarity with the drug and her utter lack of fear of needles.  This was quite a change for her.  She melted and filtered the speed into a syringe, and then skipped the whole “find a vein” step and startlingly plunged the needle into her upper forearm!  I might have jumped a little.  I didn’t stay long, but it was a friendly meeting.

Somewhere around that same timeframe I received a visit from my ex-father-in-law.  He had legal papers with him and he wanted me to sign.  The bottom line was that they had been taking care of our kids for awhile and were incurring a lot of expenses with little hope that either Deeanne or I would soon be showing any sign of responsibility.  They also wanted to get them covered on their health insurance policies and were unable to unless they were their own dependents.  Deeanne and I were both adrift and making little progress on any sort of promising jobs or careers.  They basically gave us an ultimatum.  We were to begin paying three hundred dollars a month in child support each or sign them over for a full legal adoption.  Frankly I don’t think I had that much money left each month after food and rent.  I was barely making more than minimum wage.  On top of that, what would I do if I regained custody?  Pay for their daycare?  Provide them a stable home by myself?  They had already experienced a year or more of the relatively stable and nurturing and well-funded lifestyle that my in-laws could provide.  It truly did not seem like it was in their best interest to fight to keep my technical status as legal guardian.  I thought of myself as a very bad parent, if not a bad person, and I gave in and gave up.  I signed.
At the time it felt like a Catch-22 situation – damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and I felt very, very damned.

November 27

Before we moved into the apartments Linda lived in I have one last blowout night with our house roommate, David.  His girlfriend, Denise, was out of town so we had a boys night out.  We stopped at 7-11 and I picked up a bottle of Mad Dog.  I think it was grape flavored.  We cruised up and down the Bowie loooking for chicks while I drank.  At one point I passed out drunk and when I woke up an hour or two later we were still driving around.  Eventually we stopped and talked to a couple of girls and followed them back to their apartment.  We played strip poker and some sort of drinking game.  All I can remember about myself is being very horny but very awkward.  I was totally inexperienced at the standard method of achieving casual sex.  So before too long David and one of the girls were fucking in the bedroom and me and the other girl were sitting half-naked on the couch.  Eventually we were all four on the bed together but the second girl was shy and unwilling so nothing much happened.  But at least it’s a fun story to tell.

After we got into the apartments Philip wasn’t around much.  I saw him usually at least once a day, and I would often spend a small amount of time with him at Linda’s apartment, usually involving a bit of weed.  Weekends I would get invited along for parties and such but there was no guarantee so I was regularly on my own.  I remember spending a lot of evenings alone, just listening to the radio, sitting in a chair, my legs propped up on the back of the couch, smoking cigarettes and drinking Dr. Pepper.  I left the balcony door open so I wouldn’t miss anything that might be going on around me and so I could blow the smoke out and get a bit of fresh air.  It was odd.  It was so different from the life I was used to.  No changing diapers, no wife to deal with.  Above all, it was peaceful.  It was also lonely at times, but I didn’t mind so much.

When I started working at the auto dealership I ended up in the car detailing/prep building.  Scott was cool and married.  The other three workers were brothers.  They were also pure native american.  One was a bit heavy, one was thin, the other was just big, as in taller and broad-shouldered.  For some reason they adopted me in a way.  The first week I worked there I went out for lunch with them.  On the way back they stopped by the side of the road in a sparsely inhabited commercial area and lit up some fire weed and passed it around.  So I smoked the peace pipe with my brothers and all was good.  The thin one liked speed as well as did Scott, but we rarely did any sort of business with each other.  Usually it was limited to Monday afternoon ‘bumps’ – a little bit to get you through the first day after a long sleepless weekend.  One afternoon we played basketball after work and at one point I attempted to make a move around one of them.  He planted a leg in my way and my thigh collided with his knee.  A portion of my leg went numb and I rolled around on the ground for awhile.  As hard as it is to believe that part of my thigh is still half-numb and tingly twenty years later.

Part of our job was to take cars over to the nearby car wash which was owned by the dealership.  I always cranked the radio up, especially if there was a good song on and the check-in person was a girl.  I think of that dealership every time I hear Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”  It was one of my favorite tunes to blare.

At some point I evidently mentioned something to the guys about this one girl who worked the cash register at the car wash, something about her being cute or some such.  I guess they were trying to hook me up or something because they told HER about this, and she and I ended up having a few awkward conversations.  One day I went with her and a friend to her apartment and spent a lunch hour there.  Nothing happened, but it was a bit thrilling, especially when I found out she was married.  But I got the impression things weren’t too good, or that maybe they were even separated.

One night we arranged for her to come over.  At this time Tammy was staying over as a roommate.  She was a friend of Linda’s and was in-between apartments and/or jobs.  I have often regretted not being more aggressive with her.  She was cute and had a very nice body.  Instead I just fantasized a lot.  She didn’t show overt interest in me so I never made a move.  So there I was with two women in an apartment.  Eventually she and I went to the bedroom and had sex.  At one point she asked me to do something and I wasn’t sure I heard her right so she repeated:  “Spank me!”  So I did.  I wasn’t really sure what sort of spanking was appropriate but I did my best and she seemed to enjoy it.  I was getting sex so I certainly wasn’t going to complain about it.

Later we were just lounging around in the living room with Tammy, watching TV and chatting, when I heard a strange noise outside.  We certainly weren’t in the classiest apartments in town but still it was unusual to hear any one yelling or making noise.  This person was doing both, banging on doors.  He was moving between doors on the first floor and asking for someone.  My new girlfriend said, “It’s my husband!”

And those are the words that no man wants to hear.  As it turns out she had told him she was going to a friend’s apartment.  He asked where, and she gave him a name and a building number.  I’m just glad she omitted the apartment number!  By the time he came to our door I had made sure it was locked, and just in case I made sure my brother’s Mossberg pistol-grip shotgun was loaded.  We were as quiet as church mice until he finally left.  I don’t think I even looked out to see what he looked like.  My luck he was built like a tank and covered in prison tattoos.  I don’t want to know.

I only saw her one more time after that.  She came to see me and brought one of her kids along.  As it so happens I was about to leave with my brother and a bunch of friends for an outing at the lake.  I really did not want to miss this event, and I wasn’t too keen on continuing the affair, so I basically blew her off and left.  For some reason my brother’s friends all found this highly amusing.  In retrospect, I can see the great humor in it.  At the time I was just tucking my tail between my legs.

On more than one occasion I came back from lunch rather stoned.  I would start work on a car and look around and every one I saw looked at me and laughed and acted like I was about to get busted by the boss.  They were just fucking with me which really is pretty fun to do when someone is totally chinese-eyed.  I remember one day hearing a honk and being startled out of a stoned coma.  I was sitting in a car.  The car was running.  The car was in the detail shop’s car wash.  I could see headlights behind me.  My heart started racing.  How long had I been in there?  I just knew it was one of the managers behind me.
As it turned out, it was just one of my co-workers again, fucking with me.  I gave them a lot of opportunities for such.

I developed a friendship with a guy across the hall from us.  As it turns out he was fond of the meth as well, and I occasionally bought some through him.  He got his from someone at the Texas State Technical Institute near Waco.  For a time it was a hotbed of meth lab activity, or so it was rumored.  I believed it.  One night me and my new buddy stayed up all night doing speed and talking.  We talked about his days in the navy and we talked about Christianity and the Bible.  If the buzz ever wore off or seemed to be waning you just pulled out your little baggy (and I do mean little) and sprinkled a bit on a smooth surface, preferably a mirror or glass or polished metal, and chop it up finely with a razor blade.  The finer the better.  Beyond that it was all ritual.  The way you separated it into lines was ritual.  The way you snorted it was both ritual and told others how familiar you were with the practice.  Only rookies breathed out and moved the powder around.  You could also tell the pros by their creativeness.  Rookies thought of mirror and razor blade and straw only.  Pros could use most any hard surface and any reasonably thin-edged stiff material for chopping (like a credit card).  Pros were also most creative regarding straws.  Those are rarely available and, most importantly, carrying around a straw, a small mirror and a razor blade basically advertised that you were a drug user.  I typically used either a rolled up dollar bill or part of a ball-point pen.  It was all about guiding the maximum amount of meth powder from the surface to your sinuses without losing any along the way.

There was also an art to judging the quality of the product.  The typical street stuff you could get cheap and easy was also the most unstable.  It absorbed moisture easily, sometimes had a pink tint to it, and was most likely made in small quantities in a bathtub.  This bathtub meth was most commonly referred to as ‘crank.’  It’s hard to explain, but you could taste the difference in the back of your throat, or perhaps it was the smell in the sinuses.  Crank also stung more.  Really nice meth stung less and had no particular smell once ingested.  As a show of bravado it was customary to shake your head and say something like “That was some good shit!” when you felt the burn of crank.  Either one worked just fine for me.

On more than one occasion I would go home with Linda for lunch and we would be joined by one of the new car salesmen.  He was a black dude and always had a TON of cocaine.  The first time I saw this in action there was a dinner plate full, all cut into lines, and there wasn’t room for one single extra line of coke.  The plate was full.  I had my share, but like I said I’m not a big fan of coke.

One day I was approached by one of the used car salesman about hooking him up with some.  I think Linda had referred him to me.  I made a call to Gary and he was holding so the salesman put me in his car and off we went!  It was during the work day.  I worried about what my boss would think but this guy said he would cover for me.  So we went and picked it up and as a bit of reward for my help I got some and also smoked some with him.  It was the first time I’d seen it done and it seemed simple enough.  Just get some foil, make a flat spot for the speed, roll up one end to help channel the smoke and then put a lighter under the foil right beneath the speed.  As soon as it started smoking you started sucking and turn off the lighter.  Rinse and repeat.  It worked ok for me but I decided I would stick with snorting.

November 26

Gary had some speed, and so did Linda.  Linda was a relative (cousin?) that my brother started dating.  She was almost my age.  She worked at an old-school car dealership named Jack Williams Automall and helped me to get a job there.  I was going to work in the prep shop where they checked in the new cars, installed a few things, and did detailing and clean-up after a sale.  Philip was spending most of his time with Linda while I was home with our roommate David and his girlfriend.  They drove me crazy because his girlfriend was pretty hot and I had to listen to them making LOUD love just one bedroom away on a regular basis.  The morning I was to start at the automall I looked out the window and noticed something was wrong.  David’s el Camino was across the street and the pimpmobile was nowhere in sight.

Towed!  Repossessed!  I couldn’t believe the timing.  I was a couple of weeks behind on payments and had been planning on calling them that day around lunch to tell them about my new job.  So I called Linda and she took me to work that day and later hooked me up with someone she knew who sold used cars.  I ended up in a used Toyota hatchback that was ugly but good for basic transportation.

Eventually we moved into the same apartment building that Linda lived in.  Then my brother brought his dog, Jock, from mom and dad’s house.  I think that damn thing was there about a month, and he wreaked havoc on the place.  Think Doberman-sized piles of dog shit on carpet.  Think shredded couch cushions.  He had spent most of his life hanging out in a back yard and was not prepared for an indoor apartment.  My brother eventually gave him up for ‘adoption’ to someone who gave him the structure and discipline that he needed.

Although I had added speed to my existing repertoire of coke and pot I didn’t really start doing it on a regular basis until we moved into those apartments.  At that point if I had money and a hook-up I had meth, simple as that.
I preferred speed for reasons that I considered to be practical.  Twenty-five dollars buys you a decent amount of pot but you really can’t do more than two joints before you get the munchies, eat until you hurt, and then pass out.  You have weed left, but you’re asleep.  What kind of party animal would that make?  I never really liked cocaine that much.  I’d get a slight buzz but it didn’t last and it made my throat numb which imitated post-nasal drip.  Not the most pleasant result and nothing I wanted to pay for.  But methamphetamine — well, twenty-five dollars would last me all weekend, and I wouldn’t sleep from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon.  I didn’t miss any opportunity for fun.  At least that is the way I saw it.  I always tried to keep enough money on hand for my weekend blitz.

But before we moved from Lake Worth to Linda’s apartment complex, I would be remiss if I left out Gail.  Gail was a stripper, and somehow my brother ended up dating her for a brief period.  She was petite with very nice surgically enhanced breasts.  I somehow ended up hanging out at her apartment on more than one occasion with her and a neighbor and my brother.  I had fun with her.  One time she and Paul (the neighbor) and some girl with Paul and myself all went to Lake Mineral Wells State Park to hike around.  It was my first time there.  It was beautiful.  At one point we took different routes back to the parking lot and I grabbed Gail’s hand and we took a shortcut up the side of a hill and won the race!  On another evening she took me to perhaps the crappiest little bar in all of Texas, at Jeterville.  The town consisted of Jeter’s gas station, Jeter’s liquor store and Jeter’s Bar, thus Jeterville.  She knew the guys in the band that was playing that night.  This was on the northern fringe of Fort Worth and attendance was rather sparse.  We got a table and enjoyed part of the first set and at the break they all came over to say hi.  Gail introduced me and told them I played drums.  In spite of my protests they insisted that I sit in on the next set.  So I did.

I had an absolute blast.  They were a standard classic rock band so we played Creedence Clearwater Revival and Eagles and lots of cool songs I was very familiar with.  I’ll always remember that night.

I will also always remember the night Gail got drunk.  We went through a Whataburger drive-through and she flashed the poor kid at the window.  He probably swallowed his retainer.  After I got her home I helped her inside, and then I helped her undress.  Again, I was the perfect gentleman and probably naive.  I have a feeling I could have made love to her if I had wanted, and I don’t think she was as drunk as she seemed, but she was dating my brother so I just tucked her naked body into bed and have regretted it ever since.

November 25

Once again my dad helped me pay off the Georgetown D.A. for all the hot checks, and added this to my tab.  I attended a hot check/felony/*repeat offender* class, which was similar to the one before.

When my parents went on a trip where they were out of town for the weekend (a rarity) my brother and I threw a party.  He bought some weed which we rolled for the occasion and several friends came over and we drank, laughed, got high and generally had a great time.  We cleaned up afterwards but weren’t thorough enough.  Upon their return dad found a beer cap stuck in a crack of the garage wall and mom found someone’s earring in their bedroom.  Philip managed to make up a cover story that was somehow convincing, although I’m not sure what he said.  We also did a lot of clubbing during that time.  I really liked this one place in the stockyards.  I was always on the dance floor when they cranked up the INXS.  I saw a bouncer break up a fight one night, moving out of the way to let him do his thing.  And on another night I saw someone getting the shit kicked out of himself in the alley.  I wasn’t about to go tackle the three guys standing there so I just kept walking to my car.    That was just the way it was.

In spite of the many thins I have written so far, most people who knew me through high school and college would tell you that I was very religious.  Each time I ‘renewed’ my faith and repented of my sinful ways I was very sincere.  My ‘sins’ remained mostly hidden so all that others would see was my very sincere religious side.  My brother had a group of friends who had known him since Kindergarten.  The first time I met them after the separation from Deeanne we sat in the back of someone’s pickup.  They would all laugh when I cussed, and nearly fell out of the pickup bed when I took a monster hit off the joint being passed around.  I was used to the new me, they weren’t.  That night still comes up when I see them.

One day I came home from my temp job and Philip met me at the door.  He was wild-eyed.  He told me dad had found my pot, but that he didn’t know about his stash and he begged me to just apologize and get it over with.  So we had a family meeting.  I was a bit miffed that dad had been snooping around, but even more so that he had flushed my pot down the toilet!  So I told him the truth:  I would respect his house and never bring pot there again, but I wouldn’t swear to never smoking pot again.  My brother visibly shrank when I said that.  He was so averse to confrontation, it was funny.  They never knew that he had an identical stash in the locked briefcase in the floor of his closet.  And I was the black sheep of the family!  Hilarious.

I still talked with Deeanne now and then on the phone but the conversations generally didn’t go well.  But eventually I went back to Georgetown to talk with her and to go see the kids.  They had been taken away from Deeanne when her parents had come over to visit and found the two boys a couple of blocks away from the trailer.  David was inside and stoned or something, and the baby girl was in her crib.  They called the sheriff and got temporary custody and took the kids to their home.  It was the last time those kids ever lived in a mobile home.

At some point I got on yet another bus and made the trip to Georgetown.  This was perhaps the best trip I ever had on a bus (not counting band trips).  The girl I sat next to was a bit careless with her purse and I saw a small set of scales in it.  The next thing you know I traded her some of my weed for a pill.  She eventually said something about me enjoying the pill later, and I said, “I already took it.”  She said, “That was valium!”  Oh well, I enjoyed the rest of the ride to Austin very much.

The trip I do remember taking to Georgetown was when I borrowed dad’s car, yet again.  I stayed at a motel near the trailer park.  Deeanne came over to visit me and we had an awkward conversation.  Eventually we sat on the bed and the next thing you know we were pulling off clothes and fucking like there was no tomorrow.  It was as if each of us was attempting to show the other what they were missing, or what new techniques they had learned.  It was crazy.  And it was ok in the end, but not mind-blowing sex.  It was just pretty hot compared to what we had been giving each other the last several years.  She eventually left and went back to the trailer with David.  Later on during that same visit we drove out to an abandoned retail development site, all parking lot and curbs and nothing else.  It was fairly remote, and again we talked and then she was scooting her seat back and I was on top of her, my knees on the floor.  Remember, this was a Mercury Capri here, not a luxury limo.  But we somehow managed to get another good fuck session in.  It was the last time anything like that ever happened.

During this same trip I went by Deeanne’s mom’s house to visit the kids.  Anna Marie didn’t particularly recognize me.  She was under a year old and had only known me for about six months so this wasn’t surprising.  But David was all over me.  We played with toys, I gave him his favorite ‘airplane’ ride, and generally had a good time.  I even tucked him in, and he asked me if I was staying for the night.  It was probably the hardest thing I have ever done, to say goodbye to him that night.  After I left I didn’t even make it to the next major intersection before I was stopped by a cop.  He inspected the contents of a paper bag I had with me (which contained snack food) and once again I was given the not-so-subtle hint that I was not welcome in this town any more.

I eventually received divorce papers to sign, and it was uncontested.  I let Deeanne keep the trailer and everything in it (and the debt), I got the clothes on my back.  It was over.

This is out of place chronologically, but the last time I was in that trailer was during the time I was staying in the apartment with no electricity.  Deeanne knew I was hot and somewhat miserable so she invited me to stay over while she and David took the kids somewhere.  I am thinking perhaps it was a movie.  So I did.  While they were gone I had the TV on but quickly got diverted.  I made a tape for Deeanne, songs which I thought might remind her of me and what we had.  It was a pathetic last-ditch effort when it was obvious things were over.  And then the phone rang.  I answered.  Hey, it was still technically my house, right?  It was Deeanne’s mom.  She was surprised to hear me on the phone, but I told her what was going on and she acted like she understood.  Within five minutes someone was knocking on the door, more like pounding.  I answered since it was the Georgetown police.  The kind officer used his nightstick to push me down into the nearest chair and pin me there.  He told me to stay put and not move a muscle while another officer began searching the house.  Evidently Deeanne’s mom thought I had killed them all and stashed the bodies, I’m not sure.  But the cops weren’t taking any chances.  They found nothing, of course, and Deeanne and David and the kids eventually showed back up.

While we were still living in Haltom City with my parents my brother and I spent a lot of time at Cliff and Tom’s house.  Cliff and Tom both had jobs.  Cliff worked with my brother at General Dynamics making fighter jets.  Tom was a welder.  But I will always remember them as some of the steadiest, hard-core potheads I have ever known.  I never went to their house when their bong, Earl, wasn’t being passed around.  Earl was a nice ceramic bong, so named because when you took a good hit off of it, all you could way was ‘Earl!’  We would get high, watch porn, and try to find someone who was really zoned out.  That person then  became the target for well-aimed lighters or any object that might get a nice bounce off of someone’s nuts.  Completely juvenile, but hilarious when you’re stoned out of your gourd.  And then we would almost always have to make a run to Taco Bell to satisfy the munchies.

I will always remember the halloween party we had there.  By this time I had acquired a vehicle from one of those used car lots that takes weekly payments.  It was an early 70’s light blue Lincoln Continental Mark VII with white leather interior.  I absolutely loved that car, but the first time any one saw it they instantly referred to it as a pimpmobile.  The name stuck.  So naturally I went to the halloween party as a pimp, complete with a fake fur coat and big chains and one of my dad’s old pork pie hats.  It was great fun all night.  It was the kind of party where someone stays the night and sleeps on the bathroom floor so that the toilet is convenient.  Fortunately that was not me.

Eventually my brother and I realized that living with my parents was cramping our party style so we shared rent on a house in Lake Worth.  It was back near our old stomping grounds so it was comfortable.  I think we found the house through word-of-mouth at General Dynamics.  It was next door to someone who I think also worked at G.D., Gary.  And that’s where I first encountered that wonderful powder of the gods, methamphetamine.

November 24

When I got to Austin I called Deeanne again.  But something was different, something had changed.  I could hear it in her voice.  She talked to me for awhile about what had transpired while I was gone this time.  I pieced it all together later but the basics went something like this.  First, she did some sort of fake half-hearted suicide attempt, the kind where what you are really saying is “I can’t handle this I need help.”  Take a couple of pills, call someone and tell them goodbye, etc.  This got her admitted to the nearby hospital.  But then she thought of the home answering machine and walked out of the hospital, across the street, around the fence and back to our mobile home and changed the message to make sure that I knew where she was.  The hospital took this as a sign of mental problems and decided to admit her to Shoal Creek in Austin.  Her mom protested to no avail.  She was there for a week or so as I gather, then went back home.  She said it really helped her and suggested that I give it a try.  So I did.

Shoal Creek wasn’t interested.  I wasn’t suicidal and didn’t seem to fit any of their profiles that would enable a stay.  So I called her and told her it didn’t work and that I was going to take a cab and would be there shortly.  And I did.  The cabbie was a bit hesitant since I told him that I would have to pay after I got to my destination which was about forty miles away.  But he gave me a ride any way.  I’m sure it is one that he remembers still.

When we finally pulled into the mobile home park and got to my trailer it was obvious that things weren’t going to go as planned.  There was the ambulance out front with lights flashing, and the police car with lights flashing.  I approached and an officer kindly suggested that I might want to wait in the back seat of his vehicle.  Which I did.  It turns out that Deeanne had attempted suicide again, although it was the usual take some pills, throw the rest down the drain, make sure someone noticed her, etc.  And there was her new boyfriend.  That was certainly a new wrinkle!  Evidently she couldn’t tell me this over the phone, or perhaps she preferred me to see the drama.  Regardless it was one big clusterfuck.  And her mom and dad were there with her dad supposedly walking around with a steak knife threatening to do me bodily harm.  And he was probably just crazy enough to do something like that.

Eventually Pam, our church friend, talked to me outside.  She had talked to Deeanne and explained to me that there was a boyfriend involved, and that Deeanne wasn’t sure if she still loved me.  I couldn’t say that I blamed her.  Evidently she had met David (the new man) in the ‘no sharp objects’ ward of Shoal Creek.  They utilized one of their first opportunities to go off-campus to shack up at a local hotel and get a good fuck session on.  Again, understandable in one sense.  But while I was certainly not operating on all cylinders Deeanne seemed determined to best me in the crazy competition.  Her new boyfriend, unlike her, had actually seriously attempted suicide.  He burned himself all over with a cigar and his dad found him on his knees in the yard, his head up inside a doghouse, a shotgun barrel in his mouth.  So it was becoming clear that I wasn’t just going to move back in this time, that maybe things were over.  My former church members helped me out by giving me a ride back down to Austin so I would have a place to stay.  Evidently none of their homes had a spare couch or bedroom so I was graciously escorted to the Salvation Army shelter.  I checked in and spent the night on a cot amongst a roomful of bums.  I had some time to think.  The next morning I ate plain oatmeal and drank black coffee and walked outside.  I never returned.

I decided to go back to Georgetown and see what sort of temporary work and/or sleeping arrangements I might be able to work out.  So I started walking.  I made it to I-35 and started walking north.  I had a general idea to head to Kip and Amber’s apartment.  As I walked I listened to a small radio I had picked up somewhere along the way.  For some reason every song I heard seemed to be speaking to me directly, especially on the Christian stations.  God (and my conscience) both chastised me and gave me some sort of hope for the future.  I was also trying my hand (and thumb) at hitch-hiking and eventually a car pulled over.  Well, I say ‘car’ but in reality it was one of those VW Thing’s painted with animal stripes, but I wasn’t going to complain.  I said I was headed to Georgetown and the driver said he was too!  Great.  So we got to Georgetown and he asked what part of town I was going to.  I told him the northwest side.  As it turns out, he was heading toward that part of town as well.  Fantastic!  At least I wasn’t putting him out too much.  As we got closer he asked which apartment complex and I attempted to describe it.  He thought it might be the same one he was going to, but we weren’t sure.  I just knew how to get there.  When he finally pulled into the parking lot it was the same building I was going to.  Before I could ask he looked up and waved to someone.  I looked up and saw Kip and Amber waving back.

I was stunned.

I guess even in my currently fucked up state of mind I still saw this as some sort of divine intervention.  In fact it had almost no bearing whatsoever on subsequent events, no significance at all.  If that is God’s idea of giving someone a sign then he’s a sadistic bastard.  But it does make for a great story to tell.
I didn’t stay long and eventually called Deeanne to see if we could sort something out, or if it was worth even trying.  For some strange reason she arranged for me to get into a nearby apartment.  Maybe she was hedging her bets with David, or maybe she just felt sorry for me, I’m not really sure.  It was summer and there was no electricity so I spent a lot of time smoking cigarettes on the very small balcony.  At night I lay on the bare carpet and smoked until I fell asleep.  I needed transportation for work so I walked around town looking for a bicycle.  The only one I found was broken and I soon gave up on the idea.  I walked to my trailer once or twice and tortured myself by imagining what might be going on inside.  I walked to 7-11 for fruit pies and/or sandwich material and soft drinks.

And then it got worse.

On one of my daily walks I was stopped by a police officer and asked to assume the position against the wall of the nearby bank.  I was downtown, on the square, on a major road.  The officer told me that someone had called me in as a suspicious character and that they stated that it looked like I was attempting to burglarize a hardware store.  It was about two in the afternoon on a Sunday.  I protested mainly because I couldn’t believe that the police would think someone would do something so stupid.  I guess I was offended that they thought I might be that stupid.  He asked where I was the night before.  I told him my apartment, except for a trip to the 7-11.  He said that he knew that.  He told me that any officer who saw me was calling it in.

Wow, look at me, a wanted man.  What a crappy situation.

At one other time, possibly before my undercover caper (the memory is fuzzy), I was taken into the police station for questioning.  One officer kept coming into the room, asking me a couple of questions, and then going back into the other room.  He asked about tattoos, I had none.  He asked me why my name kept coming back from the FBI computer as a person of interest.  Eventually it was claimed that it was a different person of the same name, but in retrospect I think they were just fucking with me.  But the message was starting to come through.  I wasn’t welcome in that town any more.

I finally gave up.  I called my parents in Haltom City and they paid for my bus ticket.  Did I mention how I hate buses?  They picked me up and took me home.  My younger brother was living there too, so I got the room my dad was using as a study and slept on a recliner that folded out into a single bed.  I wasn’t finished with Georgetown just yet, but a major chapter in my life was ending, that much was clear.

I took a few days just to get my head on straight and spent a lot of time doing nothing.  Soon I was making appointments and getting temp jobs using dad’s car.  It was the same Mercury Capri I had delivered pizza with back in Georgetown.  At least it had a working battery now.  But since I had a roof over my head and food in the refrigerator I wasn’t exactly desperate any more so I didn’t feel too bad about abandoning jobs that were of the mind-numbing variety.  Like sorting microfiche by hand.  Or boxing up computers on an assembly line.  I would be the world’s worst worker if forced to work the assembly line at an auto manufacturer, even with lenient union rules.  I’d be homeless if that was my only choice.

November 23

To offset my budget issues I relied partially on shoplifting.  I grabbed a carton of cigarettes from behind a counter at a grocery store, added a few fried pies and walked out the door.  I may not have been the stealthiest of thieves, but I was reasonably certain that I wasn’t spotted.  In fact, I might have been spotted on camera, because on a subsequent trip I spied a couple of people running to the back of the store.  There was a stairway there, leading to the upper level where there was a row of two-way glass the length of the store.  I figured someone was on to me, so I grabbed my usual assortment of snacks and calmly walked to the register and paid for them.  I then stopped shopping and shoplifting there altogether.

One particular night I was bored and attempted to find my tank driving buddies on base.  Unfortunately it was way too late at night and there were very few people out and about.  One of those people was the base Military Police, who asked me to pull over.  They were polite but firm and wanted to know what I was doing.  I explained.  I’m not sure they were convinced, and they asked me what I had on the back of my bike.  It was my pool cue.  They asked me to open it which I did, and then they asked me to leave the premises.  They were also kind enough to escort me.  But hey, at least it wasn’t boring…

I checked out of the hotel and rode up to Lake Worth.  Now that I was a free man I decided to touch base with old friends and classmates.  I called Gary and he met me at the McDonalds.  For some reason he wasn’t nearly as excited as I was about hanging out and basically encouraged me to go back to my wife.  What a party pooper!  So I made some phone calls and ended up talking to, well — let’s call her Dawn.  I’m not protecting her, I’m protecting my own dignity.  Somehow my memories of her and what she looked like were very off.  Perhaps I had her confused with someone else, I’m not sure.  But in one phone conversation I received fairly good assurances that I might get a bit of a threesome going, or some sort of sex.  So I went to her house and met her husband ‘Bill.’  She peeked in from another room, said hi, and went back to doing something in the kitchen.  I chatted with Bill a minute while my mind was working overtime to figure out how to make a hasty retreat.  Holy cow, and I do mean cow!  I wasn’t that desperate.  I told Bill I needed to secure a few things on my bike and did a jog, hopped on, strapped on the helmet, cranked it up and took off!  I laughed all the way down the street at my stupidity.

I somehow managed to get into my parents’ house and pilfer a credit card from my mom’s purse.  I bought one night at a very nice downtown hotel and called an old flame from school, Bethany.  We caught up briefly and I invited her up for some partying but she was unavailable.  So I ended up watching porn and jerking off.  Not exactly the high time I was expecting back in my hometown.  The next day I motored back to Killeen and on the way my bike ran out of gas.  Actually, it wasn’t out but the gas gauge was broken and I didn’t know anything about using the reserve fuel.  I finally retrieved some gas from a gas station and finished the trip.

At some point I had a brainstorm.  Maybe I should sign up for the military!  If there was anyone who could use a bit of regimented daily structure, it was me.  And it came with benefits and pay!  And housing assistance!  I thought about it some more, and chose the Navy.  My dad had served during the Korean War and I thought it would make him proud and give my family some stability.  Maybe we could patch things up after all.  Maybe I could be productive and stable and do something right for once.  Maybe.

I talked to a Navy recruiter who had me take the ASVAB test.  The results were (supposedly) that I qualified for any job I wanted to pursue except for Nuclear Sub Technician, since they had a lower age threshold.  I was scheduled to go to Dallas for a physical in a couple of days.  I went back to my favorite strip club and talked Victoria into joining me for a late breakfast.  I really enjoyed eating at Denny’s accompanied by a hot young woman wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a fluorescent purple wig.  Afterwards I asked if there was any chance of me staying the night on her couch as I was due for the physical the next day and had no place to stay and no money left.  I should have saved the money I had just spent because she declined.

I drove around for awhile trying to figure out a place to stay.  I ended up going back to Denny’s to hang out.  Then it occurred to me to call Deeanne and tell her what was going on, and maybe she would forgive me for being so stupid.  So I called and my dad answered the phone.  Evidently they had been called.  Between the two of them they assured me that I was wanted and forgiven, but they strongly urged me to let them come pick me up that very night.  They did not entertain the thought of me joining the military for even a moment.

In hindsight I should have ignored them and done the physical and signed up.  I have many times wondered how things would have turned out if I had done so.  But I gave in and they drove to Killeen and picked me up.  I rode home in the back seat with my wife and my new daughter.  Anna Marie was born while I had been gone.  This only further drove home the truth that had been building up in my mind.  I was reckless, shifty, irresponsible and generally a failure.  And can it possibly get much worse than running away from your family while your own child was being born?  I didn’t think so.

The repercussions were numerous.  I tried to explain and settle down and forgive and forget.  Our parents all tried to help.  Deeanne was much more subdued and willing to give up some of the control she exercised over my time and location.  This was actually the best way to help me deal with a general feeling of being trapped and pressured, but it was basically too little too late.  I started bowling a couple of times a week when I wasn’t working.  I started doing temp jobs in Austin again.  I found out that the Attorney General’s office had been about to hire me when I took off.  Great timing, as usual.  Deeanne got a job at a day care in Round Rock and kept the kids there with her.  It was really the perfect fit.  Any sort of career desire that she had was geared toward child care and education, and the kids weren’t out of sight.
I also had to take a couple of hot check classes.  I got the ‘hot check/felony’ class where I expected drill sergeants but it was just class time and mild counseling.  I think my dad paid the checks and fees off to the District Attorney and put it on my tab.  My tab seemed to be growing.

We also, as part of my penance, began attending Deeanne’s church, where she had grown up.  We put in a lot of work with child care and youth bible studies.  Why any one trusted me with that I’ll never know.

And then came that fateful day.  It was the last day I would ever live with my family again.  It was about six months after I had returned and things were going well.  I got a call from a temp agency to line me up with a job the next day.  I called Deeanne to tell her about it and she mentioned that she would be home within the hour.  As soon as I hung up, a thought popped into my head:

“If you’re going to go, you’d better do it now!”

Now most of us have experienced these random thoughts, such as thinking about swerving off the road and hitting a bridge support.  But most of us instantly realize how stupid such a thought is.  We don’t follow through.  But when that thought crossed my mind I panicked and was out of the house within ten minutes.  I drove straight to Killeen.  But Victoria wasn’t at the club and my tank buddies weren’t either.  It occurred to me to check on Robin.  Evidently he had left his family too and I thought he might be a kindred spirit.  And he was, to a certain extent.  I stayed with him in Georgetown a couple of days and met Kip and Amber and a few other assorted friends.  I participated in an interesting jam session at his house one night, attempting to pick out keyboard parts to some classic rock tunes.  I also went on a drug run but no one shared.

I needed money as usual so I used the key I had to let myself in to the church and look for valuables.  It was pitch black and I felt my way around the office looking for any sort of money but never found any.  I made my way to the auditorium and relieved them of all of their microphones, which I tucked into coat pockets and my boots.  I took them back to Robin’s house with plans to sell them to a pawn shop, but he eventually talked me into giving them to him — evidently he had musical plans, and he was about to take a trip to New Mexico, move there actually.  So I gave them up and I’m not sure if I ever got anything in return.

The next day I was somewhere in Georgetown, I honestly forget where, and was pulled over by the police and asked to come in for questioning.  I confessed what they already knew.  They said the church would not press charges if I helped them out, and I agreed.  They asked me to go back to Robin’s house and do some spying for them.  Evidently Robin was on their radar.  I did so, and when I reported back there wasn’t much to tell.  I didn’t find the microphones or cables, I didn’t see any drugs, no weapons.  They seemed to be satisfied and I was free to go.

The next day Robin was ready to leave.  I told him I had a car if he needed it.  We went back to my trailer and I either had the keys for it or found them in the house, I really don’t remember which.  He took the car and we went back to his house and loaded up his clothes and gear.  I think I was on the title, but I’m not sure.  As a matter of fact, it might have been in Deeanne’s name since her dad had bought it for her after one of my runaway episodes.  So off we went to New Mexico.  And here’s a strange one for you — not once on the whole trip did it ever occur to me that perhaps I should have kept the car for myself!  Not once!  I don’t think I was thinking to clearly during this time.

The only detail we talked about ahead of time was that the trip ended in Taos.  That’s all I knew.  It wasn’t long before he went on ahead since I was taking extra breaks and making more stops than he wanted to.  I probably stole gas from about half of the stations I used, if not more.  Eventually I approached the New Mexico border in the late afternoon.  As I neared Clovis a massive thunderhead rose up over the western horizon, a black and purple mass throwing lightning bolts everywhere.  I gave the throttle a little extra and pulled into a convenience store just in time to escape the storm’s wrath.  I got something to snack on and sat at a table to wait it out.  Eventually the weather cleared and I got back on the road, heading west.  Before I got out of town I was passed by Robin!  I was somehow ahead of him.  He pulled over and we talked and he told me which road he was taking.  He was going to drive through the night.  I think he had some meth but he claimed he didn’t and if he did he obviously wasn’t going to share.

Before long I was riding through the crisp New Mexican air and getting drowsy.  I started dodging things that weren’t in the road, like giant ice cream cones and clown punching bags.  I finally gave up in Tucumcari and pulled into a motel for the night.  In the morning I was broke and out of options.  I had remorse and decided to go back home and do whatever I could to fix things.  First I called my dad and talked to them about coming back home.  Then I called Deeanne and told her I wanted to do whatever it took to repair things, and I was truly sincere.  I rode my bike into Lubbock and called around and found a junk yard willing to buy the bike off of me.  They did so and gave me a ride to the bus station.  I had just enough money for the ticket to Austin.  While I was waiting for the bus to arrive a complete stranger asked if I wanted to split a joint with him.  I was amazed that someone would admit to a stranger that they were holding.  What if I was a cop?  I still thought of myself as a straight-laced guy and my hair certainly wasn’t down to my shoulders.  Maybe I looked worse than I knew.  Maybe my eyes were shifty.  Who knows.  So I got high and then got on the bus and slept most of the way to Austin.

November 22

I drove to a cheap motel in Austin for the night.  I began traveling around, with really no particular direction in mind.  I had not planned out my trip, so I had no cash.  I began writing checks on a checkbook from an old account that was no longer open.  I cashed a check at a grocery store after talking them into it.  I swear, I could have been a criminal mastermind if I had chosen that line of work.  I used the proceeds to buy a few things including a pair of boots.

I spent one night in San Antonio at a cheap hotel.  I walked around the streets for awhile.  It wasn’t a great part of town.  I remember seeing a couple of girls talking on the sidewalk and planned to say hi to one of them but as I approached I heard her voice.  It was a guy!  I was evidently in the gay bar district.  It was an eye opener.
I eventually worked my way north to Temple where I wrote a hot check for a .22 rifle and some ammo.  I honestly don’t remember why in the world I decided that I needed a rifle.  It’s not like my mind was working on all cylinders at this point.  I drove around with the loaded rifle on the seat next to me and decided to head to Killeen, home of Fort Hood.  I was stopped by a police officer, for speeding.  I managed to drape a coat over the rifle and actually got off with a warning.  Poor cop would have shit a brick if he had known what was going on.  I proceeded to drive around the perimeter of Killeen shooting at billboards, road signs and water towers…..while I was driving.  I attempted to rob an ATM machine by prying it open with an ice scraper.  I tried to break in to at least one automotive garage but no doors were open.  I found an unlocked newspaper rack and managed to liberate it from several dollars worth of quarters.  I was a regular one-man crime wave.

This is completely out of order, but I forgot one detail.  Some time after my first overnight runaway the mother-in-law conspired with my wife to encourage me to have a vasectomy.  We were very religious about birth control, as in we didn’t believe in it.  Even spermicide was somehow wrong in our eyes as it interfered with God’s will.  And I had never used a rubber so I’m sure the mother-in-law was envisioning being stuck with a houseful of kids.  That was actually rather insightful of her.  It somehow never occurred to us that a vasectomy was going to ‘interfere’ with God’s will a lot more than a condom would.  So I went under the knife.  It is performed with local anesthesia only.  The good doctor was all chatty, giving me a blow-by-blow of what he was doing.  I made the mistake of asking a question, so he hooked a finger under my vas deferens and pulled up a section to show me.  It looked like spaghetti and it felt like he was tugging on one of my kidneys.  I didn’t ask any more questions.
Two weeks later we found out Deeanne was pregnant.  When I left on this current trip she was nearing nine months.

Eventually I realized that it was going to be tough living this life of crime.  I sold my station wagon for cash and then bought a motorcycle.  This was purely a strategic move as it actually cleared up some cash to live off of.  I paid a week in advance at a local motel for a room with a jacuzzi.  I started hanging out at the local strip club.  My favorite dancer, the only one I really remember, was Victoria.  She was a latin beauty, with all the right curves in all the right places.  On top of that she actually talked to me, as opposed to just hitting me up for lap dances.  She showed me a kindness that she wasn’t required to and that I didn’t deserve.  I will always remember her for that.

When Victoria was dancing I loved to watch her move.  Don’t get me wrong, she had very beautiful breasts but I’m always more impressed with the ability to dance, both in time with the music and with grace and sensualness.  Victoria had all that.  One of my favorites was when she grooved to Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night.”  To this day when I hear the intro to that song I am transported back to that club watching Victoria strut to the front of the stage, whip her hair around, spin around the pole and captivate every pair of eyeballs in the joint.  One other song that reminds me of that place is Bon Jovi’s “Wanted, Dead or Alive.”  It was my song for awhile.  I was riding on a steel horse, albeit a crappy used one.

I also managed to befriend a group of tank jockeys from Fort Hood who were regulars.  They liked me so much, they introduced me to their favorite drink.  Someone bought me a round and when it was delivered I got the following instructions:  “OK, so as soon as we put it out, then you down it and chase it with the coke.  You ready?”  I didn’t understand the whole ‘put it out’ part until I saw someone bring out a lighter.  They lit my glass and a pretty blue flame danced.  They put it out with a coaster and I downed it all, spilling a little bit on my cheeks.  It was warm, but not hot on my lips.  But it burned my stomach so I chased it with the nearby rum and coke, which tasted like ice water.  A small celebration broke out and I felt like I had been inducted into a club of sorts.  A few minutes later I managed to make it to the bathroom and back without falling down and was rather proud of myself.  The last thing I remember was someone across the table looking at me over their sunglasses and giving me the “nighty-night” wave.  I smirked, and then I vaguely remember being helped into a vehicle.  I woke up later in my motel room.  They had evidently raided my pockets, figured out which motel I was at and driven me there, possibly tucking me in as well.  My pool cue and rifle were still there, and my motorcycle was in the parking lot.  What a great bunch of guys.

November 21

At some point we saw Keith Green in concert in Austin, Texas.  The building was normally used for wrestling events, and they actually reinforced the canvas (with plywood, I presume) and put the piano in the ring.  Keith used the rather obvious prop as an analogy to spiritual warfare. “And in this corner…”  We were probably visiting family in Georgetown, which was fairly frequently.  On one of the trips back to the Dallas/Fort Worth area were heard a news break on the radio.  A small plane had crashed near Lindale, Texas and it was believed that all on board were dead.  Deeanne and I looked at each other.  We knew.  Keith Green was no more.

We were stunned.  Our only source of information was news from Christian radio stations.  The plane was overloaded.  There was no other way to look at it.  What was difficult was figuring out why God had allowed such a thing to happen.  Keith was gone, two of his children were gone.  An entire family of seven was gone.  And the pilot was gone.  But never underestimate the ability of the true believer to find reinforcing answers, no matter how illogical or irrational, to the questions of life.  My personal favorite was the idea that perhaps Keith was about to fall into sin and that God had ‘taken him home’ to spare the rest of us from the tragic fallout of such.  Most answers that were proposed were some variation on the ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ line of thinking.  Of course this begs the question of why God allowed the lemon in the first place.

Within a week of his death we received our pre-ordered copy of his new album Songs for the Shepherd.  I cried as I listened.  We took off on a Saturday and drove to Lindale and found the Last Days Ministries headquarters.  We drove around and found a nearby church and found the gravesite.  It still had memorial wreaths from other ministries and organizations and the dirt was still a mound.  We ‘paid our respects’ and probably prayed asking God to make us more like Keith.  I wouldn’t see that gravesite again for ten years.

Back in Georgetown my video game-playing continually made me late to work and I got fired from the Texans’ War on Drugs job.  Frankly I worked so many jobs while I lived there I have lost track of the order.  While we lived in the first house we rented I worked at a cabinet shop in Austin and then set up shop with my own business there in Georgetown.  The business went under (no surprise there) and I then drove buses for the Round Rock school district and also threw newspapers for the Austin American-Statesman.  This schedule was very difficult for me as I was getting up by 2:30AM, throwing the papers then driving to Round Rock to drive the bus.  After the morning route I had plenty of time to get a nap at home but Deeanne always seemed to need my attention or need help with the kids around the house.  By the time I finished the afternoon bus route I was exhausted.  But I never made the 8:30pm bedtime I needed either.  This lasted for a couple of months and then I started waking up in the middle of my paper route, stopped at a stop sign or in front of a convenience store, being awakened by cops or other drivers wondering if I had died.  I ended up giving up both jobs and doing other work.   I also delivered pizzas for awhile and that was actually pretty good money!  Unfortunately that job ended with a bang, literally.

I was on the way to a delivery and cut through an empty grocery store parking lot.  As I entered the next road (at about thirty-five miles per hour) a parked tractor-trailer blocked my view.  I pulled out in front of a jacked-up Ford Bronco and saw the bumper at about eye level.  I screamed like a little girl.  Fortunately it hit me at an angle near the front tire so I didn’t take a direct hit but the window shattered and covered me in glass.  It was the end of the line for the Cavalier.  While in Georgetown I also put in some time working in fast food, both for Del Taco and Hardee’s.  During the Hardee’s job we were renting a house in another part of town, an older one.  Almost every day I would get in a car I borrowed from my dad and push it down the road, popping the clutch to start it.  I think the alternator or battery were dead for about six months.  I worked the breakfast shift.  I actually did fairly well in that job but the pay was bad.

We finally ended up ‘buying’ a used mobile home.  Actually I think my father in law bought it.  Work was sporadic.  We applied for and got on food stamps.  Things deteriorated at home.  I’m sure I was not living up to Deeanne’s childhood ideal of a knight in shining armor.  The arguments were more frequent and lasted longer, and she was a bit manic about it.  She later told me she had been diagnosed as bipolar and that doesn’t surprise me in the least.

On several occasions we took David and Jonathan down to the river and me and the boys would skip stones.  Well, ok – actually, I would skip stones, but no matter how I tried to show them the boys just enjoyed throwing rocks or handfuls of pebbles into the water.  It was free, they were completely absorbed in the task, it was very good entertainment value.  Plus Deeanne was generally free to sit and watch and that seemed to calm her.  It’s one good memory I have.

Another one was watching the boys play.  Jonathan was definitely a typical kid in this regard, but David had some of my tendencies.  He would rather line toys up into perfectly straight lines or geometric shapes.  Jonathan enjoyed scattering things.

OK, now for the not-so-good memories.  The typical argument between Deeanne and myself was very one-sided.  Once she got wound up she would go totally out of control.  Most of the time I refused to apologize when I didn’t think I had done anything wrong.  Even when I had to get up early for work she couldn’t stop and would even kick me out of bed to wake me up and continue the yelling, even at one or two in the morning.  And then when I broke down and apologized, like some torture victim who had been broken, she would cry and apologize and say it was all her fault.  Finally I had had enough.  One night I could see another all-nighter coming on and I didn’t want to face it, so the second her back was turned I ran out the door, jumped in the car and drove off.  I didn’t go far, just drove around town for awhile, maybe and hour and a half at most.  When I got back home she was crying and apologizing already.  Wrong move.  Now I knew how to short circuit the whole arguing thing!  If only it was so simple.

One other thing kicks in here.  In spite of my successful argument-ending technique I still felt guilty because who would be so irresponsible to leave their family, even for a short trip, without telling them where you were going?  It seemed like a bad thing to do, and I didn’t feel good about it.  But then there is the whole all or nothing, black or white fundamentalist mindset.  So the next time I left I stayed away all night, sleeping in my car.  And since I was being a bad person, I went all the way.  I had a couple of drinks at a strip club, which was a first for both sins.  I picked up some cherry flavored filtered cigars and smoked them.  I even stole a cell phone from a car dealership.

Well, ok, I wasn’t that good of a thief so I ended up with an empty demo model.  But I tried to pick up a prostitute and trade that in for her services.  Fortunately she wasn’t into charity.  I freshened up in the bathroom the next morning and went into work.  I called Deeanne from their and we talked on the phone and I told her I would come home that night, which I did.  I think that’s when we went to counseling.

After that we started seeing a counselor.  I don’t remember going to more than two sessions, and that was mainly because he wanted to talk about both of our issues, not just mine.  Deeanne got nervous about that and decided we were doing just fine.  I should have insisted.

The next time I left I actually planned it a bit.  I packed a suitcase and snuck out the back door and threw it over the fence.  I don’t remember for sure, but I assume she must have already been on a bit of a rant.  Either way, that enabled me to bolt for the car and have some things packed without having to walk through the whole trailer with a suitcase in my hand.  It might have given away my plans.  I drove out of the mobile home park, around the corner and picked up the suitcase and took off.  I hadn’t really planned things out very well but I was free and out of control.

November 20

We bought our first car that year, a Chevrolet Cavalier hatchback.  I loved that car!  It was very helpful for getting back and forth to Dallas Baptist that fall.  I also took turns driving the school bus and depositing the kids at the high school.  Unfortunately the buses were old and usually overcrowded.  One day I was unable to make a stop at a red light and I yelled at everyone to hang on and literally stood on the brake.  I was below ten mph when I hit the car in front of us so they weren’t injured but I got a nice ding on my driving record.

The job was not physically hard but it began to take a mental toll on us.  There were two phases to this during our time there.  In one phase we had some marital problems.  I don’t honestly remember the details of the problems (although it may have had to do with my own gaming addiction I don’t think porn was a big issue yet) but I do remember the manifestation.  My wife attempted to get my attention by pretending to be interested in one of the single male dorm parents.  One time she even called me from his apartment!  I’m pretty sure nothing happened there, but I couldn’t swear to it.  But it was definitely her modus operandi and wouldn’t be the last time she tried to get attention by acting out.

Eventually we started trying to have a baby and she had read a book about ovary cycles, etc. So there was a lot of sex based on schedule and temperature and not on spontaneity.  Finally she did get pregnant but a few months later had a miscarriage.  A few months after that she got pregnant again and as soon as the doctor confirmed it we decided that we should probably move on from this stressful job.  So we did.  When David was born in 1982 we were living in apartments in Benbrook.  DeeAnne was working at my dad’s church in the nursery and I was working at an insurance company doing plain data entry.

The insurance company was not large and was owned and run by a family.  Most of the relatives were employed.  My boss was, I think, married to one of these blood relatives.  Regardless, I was driving from one side of Fort Worth to the other every day and my time management skills have always been horrible, so it was really no surprise when I was late to the time clock on a fairly regular basis.  I was actually relieved when they finally fired me because I was so completely bored to tears by that job.

My next bold career move was to attempt to enter the sales field, so I started at the bottom by training to sell Kirby vacuum cleaners.  For probably six months I spent my days walking door to door attempting to generate leads.  We would walk neighborhoods and attempt to give away knife sets and free carpet cleanings in exchange for a vacuum cleaner demonstration.  Then in the afternoons, evenings and weekends I would go and DO the demonstrations.  I shampooed a LOT of carpets.  I sold a few vacuum cleaners, one of which was to my parents.  But it wasn’t enough.  Then I tried selling cancer and heart attack insurance policies.  That was also door to door, most often at businesses during the day, during business hours.  The results were similar.  I believe I also did some temp work during this time as a secretary/word processor but I’m a bit sketchy on the details.  Things were not looking good.

During our stay in Benbrook we attended a Baptist church there but never really got to know the people there very well.  We also visited my dad’s church now and then.  While we were still in Benbrook my video game habit kicked back in, usually at the nearby convenience store.  In addition I began some strange sexual fantasy habits.  It was basically just masturbation with a bit of exhibitionism thrown in.  No, I didn’t actually walk around with nothing but a rain coat on, but I did do a lot of standing in the dark looking out the window in an attempt to spy some nakedness in some neighboring apartment or house.  When I wasn’t doing that I was attempting to make out something naughty on the television, which wasn’t easy since we only had antennas and I was trying to pick up a porn channel bleeding over from a nearby cable feed.  And then there was always lingerie catalogs.  But the common denominator in all this was that it was an absolute secret from my wife.
Without going into too much detail, lust is considered a sin in most conservative Christian circles.  If you think your wife is hot, that’s OK but we call it love.  But if you have that same emotion toward some other woman then it is lust and it is bad!  Of course it is difficult to lust after your wife when she is pregnant or gaining weight, and besides – fantasies are just that, fantasies!  It is rare to fantasize about plump women with no makeup who require attention and romance.  But by taking a natural biological urge and assigning it to sin you create guilt, and guilt leads to concealment, and the next thing you know spouses are hiding parts of their lives from one another.  Take my word for it, this is not a good thing.

On top of struggling with basic urges and the tension created by religious guilt we were struggling with money and raising a child.  Even when Deeanne was working part time and I was working full time she would regularly wake me up in the middle of the night to tend to David.  I would groggily feed him and change his diaper and try to get him to go back to sleep.  I would often lose over an hour of sleep this way and not only did this cause me problems at work but it frustrated me in general.  It is difficult to reason with your wife in the middle of the night.  On several occasions I would take out my frustration on David.  While I have never considered myself capable of child abuse I can certainly empathize with those who have been guilty of ‘shaken baby syndrome.’  It really is not excusable, and yet I sometimes pushed my son’s head back into my shoulder rather forcibly when he obviously was not ready to sleep.  I remember walking him back and forth across his room while crying tears of frustration.  It is not a period of my life that I care to think about much.

In 1984 Deeanne’s mom convinced us that we might be better off living near her so she could help with the kids and perhaps I could find better work.  We rented a house in Georgetown and I did temporary work for the state agency that handled child protection.  Eventually I landed a full time job at an agency headed up by Ross Perot called Texans’ War On Drugs.  I was a secretary.

At first we attended the mainstream Baptist church where Deeanne had grown up and taught various classes and bible studies for youth and children.  But somewhere along the way we ran into some people going to an independent church that for some reason appealed to us and we joined them.  I eventually played drums and occasional piano for the worship team and Deeanne spent a lot of time with our son in the nursery.  She became pregnant again and was encouraged by a few of the women to do a more natural birth.  When the big day came she was given pitosin to help kick-start the contractions.  The doctor checked in and then went back across the parking lot to his office.  A nurse kept an eye on us.  At one point Deeanne felt like she had to go to the bathroom but nothing happened.  Then when she was on the way back to the bed she became a bit disoriented.  This got the nurse’s attention and we helped her back into bed.  The nurse checked her and found she was already dilated to four centimeters.  She put in a call to the doctor.  A few minutes later she checked again and she was dilated to seven centimeters.  She slapped the intercom on the wall and called any available doctor STAT and then proceeded to have me stand next to her while she delivered Jonathan.  I watched in awe, and then she laid him in my hands while she found a suction bulb, towels, etc.  Then other people came in and took over.  It was incredible.

Later I actually asked the doctor about a discount since he hadn’t actually performed the birth.  I don’t think he was amused, but I was serious.  No, we didn’t get any discount.

We moved to a rental house closer to the pastor and some other church members, the Harneys.  Robin and Pam were semi-sorta in charge of mentoring us spiritually.  I think they did actually pick up on some issues we might be having.  Actually, Pam did most of the discerning.  Robin was just there.  Robin was the absolute typical Jesus Freak hippie-era convert.  He tuned pianos and ran a business selling snow cones and ice cream from a truck for a living.  Pam…..well, as best I can tell Pam never worked.  It seems she always had one health problem or another keeping her down.  Her daughters did most of the housework.  At some point around this time there was another episode where Deeanne met Robin outside and later hinted that something might have happened.  It was just one more attempt at attention, which I was becoming rather immune to.  But by this time another pattern was setting up, the one where she would pitch a fit about something, we would argue, but then we showed up at church and pretended that nothing was wrong.  This was her way of dealing with things, but it wasn’t the way I was wired.  I was perfectly ready to go to church and grab someone and tell them we were arguing and needed help!  But no, the fact was that most of the yelling and craziness was coming from her so there was no reason to let other people know about this.  However, when the tables turned and she got worried about my occasional use of pornography that was a different matter.  The next thing I know we’re in the pastor’s office with two or three other people getting counseling.  Rather, I was getting counseling.  And being the confused naive twenty-four year old parent of two the contrast never dawned on me.

November 19

I don’t recall the details of what happened after that.  I think she may have come up for a visit to reassert her place in my life.  But it was the first time I was to experience her possessiveness.  It didn’t get any better from there.

Her parents had wanted her to go to one of the Baylor campuses, but she somehow managed to graduate from school a semester early and started classes at Dallas Baptist that spring semester.  Of course there was the usual dating and heavy petting/groping and plans and dreams, etc.  But being good little Christians we were fighting a losing war.  Our upbringing and Baptist beliefs told us to plan on only one thing, and that was to keep ourselves spiritually pure and virgin.  But this wasn’t the New Testament era, nor were we growing up in rural America of the 18th century.  There were no ever-present extended families to keep an eye on us, and it was not an arranged marriage.  And we had these hormones raging through our bodies.  Well, I know I did.  And here’s the rub.  A normal kid at this point would grab a condom.  But to do so would mean that we were acknowledging that we intended to sin!  So we did what all fundamentalist christian kids do, we played with fire and told ourselves that I could always pull out before something irreparable happened.  It’s a great way to ease your conscience, and it’s also a great way to get someone pregnant.  And that is when things started to get weird.

Not too long after that, DeeAnne told me that she thought she was pregnant.  But before that news really had a chance to sink in, she said that she had had a miscarriage in the bathroom.  I think she even showed me the box she had put the fetus in, but had it wrapped.  She privately buried it in the prayer garden behind the women’s dorm and later showed me the spot.  Now I was just your typical stupid testosterone-filled male with shit-for-brains and it never occurred to me that this might be a contrived situation.  I believed her, I had no reason not to!  And before you know it we were talking about marriage.  But I wanted to ‘know’ for sure that this was God’s will.  ‘God’s Will’ – that one concept has caused more introspective, soul-searching, navel-gazing trouble than possibly all other Christian concepts combined.  But in the end what people are really looking for is confirmation that what they want to do is OK with God.  So I did some Bible reading.

I no longer recall the details, but basically I looked for some particular word that I thought would be unusual and then I looked to see if I could find this word a certain number of times.  Basically I was looking for a spooky feeling, not unlike when a skilled palm reader seems to have gained some insight into your private life.  “Well, then it *must* be real!”  I got the confirmation I wanted and that’s how I knew it was God’s will to ask DeeAnne to marry me.  In addition, just in case I had made a mistake somehow, there was the additional general principle from Paul about it being better to marry than to burn (as in burn with lust) and believe me, I was burning all right.
Now, in hindsight this is possibly the absolute worst reason in the world to make this sort of commitment.  And yet I was perfectly calm and assured about it, and neither her parents or my own could cast enough doubt to dissuade either of us.  We were getting married.

So that is how a girl of eighteen in her first semester of college and a guy of twenty in his fourth semester of college became engaged.  I continued working on the school work-study program, but went full-time for the summer.  Deeanne went back to Georgetown to prepare and we were married in August before the fall semester started.  I truly do not remember who her bridesmaids were.  The best men consisted of my brother, my best friend Gary from high school and some guy from Dallas Baptist that I don’t think I have even *seen* since the wedding, much less talked to.  His girlfriend played the organ.  My grandparents came down from Iowa as well as my Aunt Norma.  The rehearsal and dinner went well, and the next day the wedding went off without a hitch.  Many people said it was one of the most beautiful weddings they had ever seen, and this was not because of lavish decorations or an unusually amazing facility but because we had performed our own wedding song.

We sang a song that was just becoming popular, Leon Patillo’s ‘Flesh Of My Flesh’ which is the perfect song to go with the impossibly optimistic and idealistic Christian concept that God has one and ONLY one person picked out for you, and you must find them and marry young and live with them forever.  Here is what we sang to each other, with my comments interspersed:

You are flesh of my flesh
Bone of my bone
There’s no one closer
You are flesh of my flesh
Bone of my bone
We are one

I do pledge my life to you
Forever and always
I will take good care of you
And shower you with praise

Others try and separate us
But they don’t have a chance
No one else can take your place
No not even one

(Now who are these others trying to separate us?  We are just getting married!)

CHORUS

I do give my life to you
Today and everyday
I will stand right by your side
Whatever comes our way

I have searched and searched for someone
Who’d make my dreams come true
Nowhere else on this earth
Is there anyone like you

(Yeah.  I’m 20, she’s 18 and we have lived in one state our entire lives and we’ve already searched the entire world and dated people everywhere.  What a load of horseshit!)

Instrumental

The storms of life can blow and blow
But they won’t knock me down
We’ll stand the test
The test of time
Cause we stand on Holy ground.
Chorus

Yeah, we’re so mature and experienced that we know exactly what life will send our way and are prepared to handle it.

In fact, that was completely untrue.  We had NO business even attempting to sing that song any more than we did proclaiming the vows we did.  All emotion, no common sense whatsoever.

So we moved back to Dallas and lived in an apartment in Oak Cliff.  It wasn’t a horrible area but gunshots weren’t totally unheard of.  We both went back to school but a month or two into the semester I was called into the business office manager’s office and informed that by working full time in the summer I had run through the work study allotment and they were out of money.  I was given a number to call at Republic Bank Dallas and went in for a typing test and an interview.  I applied for a check processing position which required 35 words per minute.  I had taken two years of typing in high school so I felt confident, but I was a bit surprised when my results came back at 83 words per minute!  The human resources person took one look at that and told me that I didn’t want check processing.  He flipped through a printout and set me up with an interview with the Federal Funds department.  On my first day my supervisor took me on a tour of the facility, including their main downtown lobby.  The second floor over the lobby was a u-shaped balcony, and the underside was covered in hammered 14K gold.  I was very impressed.  I rode the bus to work almost every day and occasionally took our used car (although parking was expensive).  My main job was to go downstairs to the main trading floor where the traders were making phone calls back and forth all over the world.  Banks are required to keep a certain percentage of their deposits on hand (in reserve) but each day the rest of the money is loaned out in one shape, form or fashion.  For last-minute adjustments banks often loan money back and forth to make sure they meet their minimum reserve numbers.  The trades were scribbled by hand on pieces of paper and tossed into baskets.  I would collect these and take them upstairs and add them up on a calculator and attach the printout tape.  It was not unusual for each one of these trades to be in the 1-5 million dollar range.  It was fairly exciting work, although perhaps a bit monotonous after awhile.  I also operated huge copiers and did whatever else they needed.  I tried to learn it all.

Unfortunately it was a full time job and I couldn’t attend school and work so DeeAnne stayed in class while I worked.  That next spring I don’t remember if DeeAnne was still in school but an opportunity came up from some friends that I think we had met through school.  A local Baptist children’s home had an opening for dorm parents.  The big attraction was that during the school year the kids were at school all day.  This allowed the dorm parents to attend college or seminary, and many of them did.  So you got paid full time while still going to school.  It seemed like a great plan since our school attendance was basically on hold at that time.  I remember my boss at the bank attempting to talk me out of it but I was convinced it was the right thing to do.

While we were still at the apartments there was one situation that came up.  I basically decided that I would confront DeeAnne’s dad about his past abusive behavior, as it was still affecting her.  But at some point she became convinced that I was going to do it so she made a confession.  Most of the worst things she had described hadn’t happened!  I was unsure at first.  I thought maybe she was just telling me this so I wouldn’t confront him.  But as time wore on I realized she was telling the truth.  I began to question other things she had told me.  How was I to know when she was telling the truth and when she was exaggerating in order to gain sympathy?  Well, the fact is that I would never know and it was to be a constant issue for our entire marriage.

One other issue that raised its head was my level of responsibility.  I was working a ‘real’ job that paid well and was married and trying to finish school, and just that level of pressure began to manifest itself in strange ways.  One of my main ways to blow off steam and ‘relax’ and probably obsess a little was video games.  No big deal nowadays, but back then it was costing me 25 to 50 cents a game PLUS hours of my time.  I would sneak in a game or two just about any time I went to the convenience store, which was any chance I could get.  It was not a good match for married life.  It causes many an argument.  But I didn’t stop for years.

So we finally moved to the east side of Dallas and lived in an old brick dorm.  We had the younger kids on our floor, all boys.  I still remember many of them to this day, especially Rodney, Son and Luis.  Most of them were from parents going through divorce or alcoholism or drug abuse or just plain abandonment.  Rodney was perhaps my favorite.  He was probably mildly retarded and it was unknown if this was due to abuse or heredity or what.  He had the hardest time just getting his shoes on the right feet.  We put a big R and L in the bottoms and this helped him a lot.  One morning I noticed that he had relapsed to the wrong feet again.  I chided him a bit since I knew he knew better.  When he took them off to switch them the problem was revealed.  The letters had worn off!  It was so sad.  He said funny things that made no sense some times and he had his own odd pronunciations of certain words that we could never break him of.  I repeat some of them to this day on a regular basis.

November 18

I had no car.  I somehow hooked up with a couple who were going to work there for the summer and hitched a ride.  We drove from Lake Worth up Hwy. 287 to Amarillo.  You can smell Amarillo about the time you can see it.  Lots of cattle stockyards.  Lots of cow shit.  Interesting aroma.  From Amarillo we took I-40 west and then turned off to travel through the foothills of the Rocky Mountain range to Glorieta.

The single volunteer staff all stayed in a dorm, with guys and gals wings.  My roommate was Tom, and we are still in touch via email to this day.  Tom was likeable but perhaps a bit socially awkward.  We had different assignments and different schedules so we didn’t spend a lot of time together, but did speak at night frequently.  Tom also had a car.

There were several of us working in the Auditorium crew, or the ‘Aud Squad’ as we dubbed ourselves.  There was John, and then there was little John.  Little John and I spent a lot of time in the elevator.  I’m not sure exactly why or how, but we became rather enchanted by it.  During our breaks (or sometimes while on-duty) we would go down to the basement, which was actually a storage area underneath the stage.  This allowed for a trap door in the stage floor for certain uses during plays, etc.  I suppose it would be usefull for a magician as well.  I’m not sure why the Baptists went to the expense of putting that feature in as I doubt it was ever used.  But in exploring the elevator and the nether regions of the Auditorium we also discovered one other very interesting feature of the elevator — there was a stop button.  It was useful when loading or unloading the elevator so you didn’t have to hold the doors open.  We also discovered something that is normally used only by elevator repairmen.  The next time you are in an elevator, look at the inside of the doors.  See if you can find a small hole, probably near the top of the door.  That hole is big enough to insert a rod or a large screwdriver, and if you do so and move it back and forth you will trip a release lever and the doors will slide open!  It was like magic to us.  And we put it to good use.

On more than one occasion little John and I would stop the elevator, let the other person out, keep the doors open, move the elevator down a bit and then stop the elevator.  The person outside could then crawl on top of the elevator.  This allowed us to explore the previously hidden and mysterious world of the elevator shaft.  The cables were interesting, the inside of the doors were interesting, but the main purpose was to take a piece of chalk and write on the walls and eventually the ceiling of the shaft.  I have always wanted to go back and see if our marks were still there.  Our poor boss, Fernando Perez, would probably have shit a brick if he knew what we were doing.

The late evening shifts did general cleanup after the meetings were over, the morning shifts did all the big jobs, buffing and sweeping the floors, setting up chairs, cleaning toilets and urinals.  It was mundane work, but it helped to take the edge off of it to consider the service aspect, how we were helping people all summer long to experience life-changing spiritual awakenings.  At least that’s what we told ourselves.

The weather was awesome.  I wore a sweater to work on most mornings as it was a bit chilly.  By ten o’clock it was usually warm enough to shed that and afternoons were almost perfect.  I remember watching the evening news in the common room in the middle of the staff dormitory and seeing that the north Texas area back home was in the middle of a record-setting heat wave.  The specific record broken was the number of consecutive days where the temperature reached one hundred or more — sixty-nine days from June to September, with the high being two days in a row in late June when the temperature hit 113.  In addition to this a series of squall line storms swept the midwest.  The final death toll attributed to this heat wave was 1,700.  I missed all of it.

I also missed my parents and my brother taking their brand new car on a summer vacation to Iowa.  I got a postcard.  But I didn’t really miss it that much, I was having a great time.

I was, of course, always on the lookout for love.  There were definitely any number of girls I would have liked to date, but our schedules made it difficult to intersect.  Instead, fate dealt me a hand that I was unable to see for what it was and unable to overcome.  And it started with a piano.

One of our first staff meetings was in a building which was used for many purposes during the year.  It was a small auditorium I guess.  But early on that summer I went looking for a piano and that building had one.  Unfortunately it was closed down and although the lights were all off I managed to find my way to the piano on the platform.  It was a baby grand as I recall.  I’m not sure how long I stayed there but I am pretty sure it was at least a couple of hours, feeling my way around the keyboard, playing and singing different things, and most likely working on some new sappy composition.  What I didn’t know was that at some time during my performance a couple came to the building.  I think they were looking for a piano as well.  The girl was DeeAnne, the guy was Dee.  They were a bit taken aback to enter and hear that the piano was occupied, even more so when they realized that the lights were off.  They moved on and I never knew they were there.

One night in the common room DeeAnne approached me and we talked about something deeply theological, the details of which completely escape me.  We had a mini-bible study but as usual I was unaware that the whole conversation was simply a ruse to get to know me.  I saw her again a few times, usually hanging out with her buddy Dee, but more often after he left and went back home.  The circumstances seemed a bit strange and I never got the details.  But after that she professed her interest in me and I was never able to resist a girl who liked me, unless she was just fat, ugly or weird.  DeeAnne was a bit overweight, but it didn’t take much for her to get outside her ideal weight considering that she was only four foot, ten inches.  She had an olive tint to her complexion and a sort of ‘porcelain doll’ look.  I’m sure I’m not describing her accurately, but that’s the best I can do.  She also had a fair amount of self-esteem issues hidden beneath the surface but I was young and naive and only saw the best in her.  She was very talented at the piano and had an excellent voice as well.

We spent a lot of time together, more and more as the summer wore on.  We would meet on a deck area above the common room and kiss and grope.  Her breast size was a definite plus in my eyes (and hands) and helped to offset any other issues I may have had with her body.  And then one night we borrowed Tom’s car and had a date.  I really don’t remember where we went.  Maybe to Santa Fe for a movie?  I don’t recall.  But when we got back the groping moved to the back seat and then a unique and perhaps defining moment occurred.  I don’t remember why, other than the fact that guys in this sort of situation usually become rather ‘blue-balled,’ but she gave me a blow job and then swallowed.  The good news was that we didn’t have to worry about cleanup.  The bad news was that it was so mind-blowingly amazing for me that I was utterly hooked.  All other factors one might normally consider in a relationship were overridden by what I considered to be a supreme act of self-sacrifice and commitment.  OK, perhaps I am exaggerating a bit but this event had a lasting impact on me, at least long enough for her to get her hooks in me.  That may sound a bit harsh at this point in the story, but in retrospect it is very accurate.

In fact she lived about four hours away from where I lived.  Georgetown, just north of Austin.  By the end of the summer our parents were both feeling a bit nervous about us as we were proclaiming our undying love to one another.  I seem to recall that somewhere in my brain there was at least a thought or two that things might not work out, perhaps a glint of objectivity.  But it was overwhelmed by the hormones and emotions.  It was not the first time, and definitely not the last time, that emotion completely overwhelmed logic and reason in my life.

There were three primary musicians in my life that summer, as far as music that I listened to goes.  One was the surprising discovery that Bob Dylan was now a Christian.  I later learned that part of what brought this about was some correspondence and conversation between him and Keith Green.  The cassette tape I picked up was Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming” which had been released the previous fall.  Unlike much of Christian Music this recording was performed by seasoned music pros and marked a change of heart for one of the premier icons of the rebellious 60’s generation.  And I just flat out liked the songs, the beats, the words.  It was good stuff.  It inspired me.  Another album was from the old southern gospel group The Imperials.  They had a new sound and Russ Taff’s lead vocals were awesome.  Probably not a bad song on the whole album, but I always think of New Mexico when I hear the Eagle Song.  Lots of synthesized strings and mellow goodness, smooth mellow vocals, and the lyrics “I stood and watched an eagle fly, spread his wings and soar across the sky, so gracefully he flew…”  Again, it was an almost perfect match for the majesty of the mountains.

And, of course, there was Keith Green.  I began collecting all of his recordings that I could, and a group of staffers went to see him when he did one of his rare concerts that summer in Albuquerque.  Unfortunately his zeal and passion was so intense that it suppressed all possible logical and rational thought and struck as an arrow to the heart, inflaming emotional responses like the best and worst of histories cult leaders and megalomaniacs.  His sincerity and desire to do the right thing was never in question, his belief that he was doing God’s bidding is a given.  But it set up a war within my soul, and probably within the souls of many other thousands of youth across the country.  He espoused the view that one was called to the mission field by default, and that only upon hearing a definitive opposing calling from the Lord should one do anything else.  Like anything theological one can argue both sides of the issue and find plenty of scripture to back up your position, but his message was compelling.  Of course most left the auditorium that day and never took any serious action toward becoming a missionary, but that doesn’t mean that the thought leaves the mind.  Instead it hangs around the periphery only to pop out with an occasional twang of guilt at appropriate opportunities.  Thus, the war within the soul.

At the end of this otherwise glorious summer Fernando threw a picnic for all of his Aud Squad staffers and we ate Mexican food that was authentica by a cold mountain stream.  Some had come prepared for a bit of swimming, but it was really to cold to enjoy any lounging.  We put six packs of soft drinks in the stream to chill them.  Once the eating began an interesting phenomenon occurred.  One by one each of us gringos began making strange noises accompanied by tears running down our faces.  It was the molé.  Fernando started laughing and scolding his wife for forgetting that she was preparing food for gringos!  I did the logical thing and grabbed a soft drink from the stream.  It was still warm and it just spread the spice around evenly so that my entire mouth, cheeks, palate, tongue and throat were now on fire.  Then I discovered the ultimate solution.  Plain flour tortillas.  Aaahhhhh, much better.
DeeAnne and I parted ways.  She went back to Georgetown, I went back to Lake Worth and then Dallas Baptist for the fall semester.

I spent a lot of time that semester on the phone with DeeAnne.  I remember one phone conversation in particular.  I think I was in the Resident Assistant’s apartment using his phone.  DeeAnne confessed to me that she had been occasionally abused as a child.  On top of the fact that she was adopted.  But when she mentioned a more recent incident I was infuriated at her father.  She claimed that he had been working on something at the kitchen table, some sort of household chore.  When she got home from school he was already upset that her mother had not already fixed dinner and yelled at her to do so.  And supposedly while she was doing so he got mad again and threw the hammer at her hitting her in the back.  Coming from a background where I rarely saw my parents angry at anything, not to mention fight, I could not comprehend this.  I literally cried that night and begged God to take her pain and give it to me.  That is how much I cared for her.  I was sincere if not completely realistic.

I also began at this time what was to be a love/hate affair with buses.  I took the bus from Dallas down to see her.  Unfortunately I did not get the express bus.  We stopped a lot.  It was crowded.  I was almost flat broke and people kept getting on the bus with boxes of fried chicken and it drove me crazy.  We were halfway to Houston before the driver took and exit and began a slow trek from I-45 back over to I-35.  DeeAnne and her mom were waiting for me at the bus station in Austin.  It was one of the longest rides of my life.  I got to meet her mom and dad and spent a couple of nights there.  DeeAnne did something that is in the grand tradition of lovers over the centuries and snuck down the hall to see me in the dark.  We did a little bit of kissing and groping but nothing more.  I was in her dad’s room since they normally did not sleep together.  It was another sign that things just weren’t all okey-dokey in her home life.

Later that fall we had a bit of a crisis.  There was some sort of event, a hayride I think, that a girl invited me too.  I’m not positive that this girl was that interested in me, but the fact that it caused a bit of conflict in my soul tells me that I was probably interested in her.  I mentioned it on the phone to DeeAnne (the invitation, not the interest) but she interpreted it as if I was breaking up with her.

November 17

Having grown up in Texas I never really noticed the humidity.  Larry did.  He would come home from his first class, take a shower, lie on the bed wearing just a pair of athletic shorts hoping for the air conditioner to cool him off.  Before bed he would shower again.  He really was not a fan of the humidity.  Larry saw a lot of my comings and goings and tended to perform as a mentor/older brother/conscience.  I was a bit upset with him on more than one occasion as he tended to shun me.  His chosen major of church administration was probably the perfect match for him.  He had a nice car and I don’t recall him ever having to work to pay his bills.

Me, on the other hand — I started working before my first class.  In my first fall and spring semesters I worked in the business office.  I typed deposit slips and took student payments and did data entry.  I also helped go through accounting printouts looking for discrepancies during audits.  My gung-ho attitude somehow translated into some sort of threat to the existing full-time workers, mostly ladies just a few years shy of retirement.  They actually talked to their boss who sat me down and asked me to be more sensitive when dealing with them.  Evidently I came across as condescending, as if I knew how to do their jobs better than they did.  Well, there’s only one way a kid barely out of adolescence could cause them to feel that way, and that is because it was true!  They were older and set in their ways and I’m sure the computers in the office intimidated them a bit.  I was destined for tech support and didn’t even know it.

The next spring the Baptist Student Union (BSU, as in “Don’t let the BSU B.S. You!”) sponsored a ‘missions’ trip and I went along.  We went to this odd little children’s home near Weatherford and helped them with some projects.  One or two days I helped paint fencing and gates with a silver galvanized paint.  The rest of the week we tore out walls in an old building that had most recently been used to store hay.  The walls were made of some sort of concrete stucco and were reinforced by a steel mesh.  The only way to remove them was to poke holes in them with a heavy metal bar and then break the concrete up with a sledgehammer.  After you had a nice pile of debris on the ground you then shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it down the hall to a truck.  We were given free meals in the kitchen and then most often just showered and passed out in the evenings.  We slept on the floor in a spare room in the main house, which looked like a very out-of-place castle.  At the end of the week we returned to the college campus but we all felt physically drained and spiritually charged.  We had really done something good.

That week really demonstrated something to me regarding my spiritual upbringing.  On one hand, church tended to be boring, but I never doubted the theology behind it.  This type of service was different.  It was productive, physical — and it felt good.  We didn’t just pray and send donations, we showed up and did something.  And it was a great example of the principle of sacrifice.  A very popular saying of Jesus was “Greater love hath no man, than that he lay his life down for a friend.”  By sacrificing something of yourself for another you were performing the greatest possible act of love.  This principle is a foundational bedrock of Christianity.  It is the method whereby the church gains so much work from volunteer members.  It is why members contribute so much to church coffers.  It is the underpinning of missionary work.  Self-sacrifice.  It goes way beyond being nice to others, being polite.  It is mandatory.
One of my roommates, my first I think, was Dan who was a psychology major.  I don’t think he was as religious as myself.  Plus he was older and quieter.

This is one reason I gravitated to the guy we shared a bathroom with, Mark.  Mark was raised a bit more on the edge of American religion I believe.  He had a relative who had a bit more Charismatic bent than I did, and we read some of her letters and recommended books and it wasn’t long before a superstitious paranoia took over.  Keep in mind, one of the reasons to go to college is to learn, and I was at a college which purported to teach one of all things spiritual, so I was doing that.  But I’m pretty sure that Dallas Baptist never taught a class on demons.  At one point I even wrote a scripture on the back of anything hanging on the wall as some sort of protective juju.  It was a strange mixture of theology.  On one hand you believed that the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in Acts were still here today! (Healing, miracles, prophecy, etc.)  On the other hand you also believed that demonic activity was alive and well and that they were out to possess as many bodies as possible.  This mentality causes one to live in fear while supposedly owning the most powerful force in the universe.  It is like holding a cross to the forehead of a vampire.  It doesn’t make the vampire any less scary!  You feel as if you are protecting the world from dark forces.  Only you know the secret.  Others are blind.

The psychological motivation behind this sort of belief system is strong.  It gives one a sense of power and importance on the inside, regardless of how plain and simple or perhaps pathetic your external life might be.  It also gives you lots of excuses for not actually doing anything to better yourself, what with constantly being attacked by demons and having to do a lot of reading in order to better defend one’s self.

I eventually got over this initial brush with charismania, but it wouldn’t be the last time I dabbled in it.

I believe it was some time in the spring semester when I was riding in a car with someone and first heard the words and music of Keith Green.  I asked them to turn the music up and heard Keith singing “To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice” with the uncompromising lyrics:

To obey is better than sacrifice.
I want more than Sunday and Wednesday nights,
Cause if you can’t come to me every day,
Then don’t bother coming at all.

As if the message and attraction couldn’t be any clearer, the album was named “No Compromise.”  This was an obvious appeal to fundamentalism, and it definitely appealed to me.  It was a ‘moth-to-the-flame’ attraction.  Keith railed against complacency and how religion had become compromised.  This came out in many of his early songs.  And not only was he a singer, but he had a ministry.  By the time I discovered Keith he was on his second album and the ministry headquarters had moved from California to Texas, less than two hours from the college I was attending.  I bought a cassette tape or two and practically wore them out.  I began receiving his Last Days Newsletter (later Magazine) and devoured each issue, each article.  I bought song books and began playing on the piano.  Once again I was tackling someone with downright virtuoso skills, both vocally and on the keyboard, but I was that drawn to him.

Over the next several years this mentality ruled my life.  I was zealous, uncompromising, condescending and a general pain in the neck.  Woe be unto any one within earshot if the conversation veered into religion.  Of course at the time I considered myself a very reasonable person who just happened to be initiated into something that most people were not.  I don’t think I made a total ass out of myself but even my dad didn’t pass muster when it came to my new spiritual guidelines.  Not even the local churches, including the huge First Baptist Dallas, could satisfy my hunger for uncompromising religion.  I usually just played and sang at a piano somewhere on Sunday mornings.  My relationship with Keith would not end well.

I got to see several great concerts while at Dallas Baptist.  David Meece came and played.  Yet another virtuoso pianist with a freakin’ four-octave vocal range.  I didn’t even bother picking up one of his song books.  He came through while I was dating Lisa and she hung around for a bit of ‘counseling’ although she never said what about.  Dogwood came through and I remember them because it was their last tour and Lisa Whelchel showed up with a friend.  We chatted briefly.  Amy Grant was a pretty big concert as well, but it might have actually been her first concert tour after her first album.  She was YOUNG and my roommate Larry had a crush on her, big-time.

One early bible study I attended sticks out in my mind from this time.  A church leader from First Baptist Dallas led it in the student union building, and there were less than ten of us in the room, mostly guys if I recall.  At some point one of the students, an odd guy I had done some painting with at one point, asked a question about the end of Mark where it mentions drinking poison and handling snakes.  The leader obviously wanted to dissuade this kid from these beliefs but the question was valid considering the fact that there was a big debate raging at the time regarding the inerrancy of scripture.  This man was one of the leading proponents of absolute inerrancy, but he quickly shot down the whole poison/snake issue by stating that the last part of the book of Mark wasn’t in our earliest texts and had obviously been added in at a later date and was therefore not strictly part of the canon!  I was floored.  If this was true, why were they still printing it in the Bible?  The leader in question was Paige Patterson.  He recently served two terms as the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as I write this he is the President of SouthWestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I was definitely not the best student in the world.  My first semester, between girls and goofing off and poor study habits, I was put on academic probation.  The next semester I fared a bit better but not by much.  That summer I applied for a position at a Baptist summer camp in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, Glorieta.

Overall it was a very memorable summer.  Pine trees everywhere, chilly mornings, warm afternoons.  The work was almost on a volunteer basis.  It was considered a form of mission work so we were paid below minimum wage but the room and board and meals were free.  I was assigned to the main auditorium and spent the entire summer moving chairs, vacuuming, buffing, sweeping and cleaning toilets.

November 16

I also took journalism in school, at least for awhile.  Our instructor, Steve, had a very wry humor and was good at design as well.  He created a couple of vicious looking school mascots, one of which adorned the new gym floor, the other was painted on the town water tower that stood next to the new Loop 820 that surrounded Fort Worth.  It was an excellent job considering the subject matter he had to work with, but I wonder what outsiders thought as they drove by and looked up and found themselves staring at a maniacal fanged bullfrog.  It was quite possibly the worst mascot in the world, but Steve did a fine job with it.

Putting the school newspaper together was interesting.  It didn’t take long to figure out that writing articles was the easy part, selling ad space took work!  Salli was in this class and we drove around doing ads together.  She was a natural.  Craig and Tommy were also in this class.  Craig could always make me laugh.  I hung out with Tommy now and then.  I seem to remember catching crawdads for the first time in a creek near his house.  And even in journalism there were UIL competitions.  I actually won something in the UIL headline writing one year.  Perhaps my creativity was fueled by alcohol, because that was the first year I got drunk.  I think it was also the first year I blacked out.  Craig and Tommy managed to sneak a fifth of some sort of whisky along on the trip.  Once we were in the room and unpacked they had to figure out how to hide the booze from prying eyes and hotel maids.  They found a grill over the air filter and stuck the bottle behind it.  That night we all made mixed drinks.  Keep in mind that up to this point in my life you could take the amount of alcoholic beverages I had consumed and put them in a small beer can.  But I really enjoyed the liquor.

Strangely enough my memory of that night and other’s memories differ a bit.  I recall everyone else being asleep and me still wandering the halls looking for classmates.  THEY recall me passing out in my underwear and inviting fellow students into the room to enjoy the spectacle.  Perhaps both happened and I woke up and wandered the halls at a later time.  Who knows.

Another friend from both church and band was Michelle.  She was of Italian descent as I recall, and although we never dated we shared a passion for Muppets.  When they finally came to the big screen with The Muppet Movie in 1979 Michelle and I went to see it together at the theater.  We were late and the theater was packed with moms and kids.  We ended up on the front row, middle.  Strangely enough, we laughed more than the kids did.

One band trip we did was a concert band competition in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  I ran into some of my old classmates from Big Lake and got to speak briefly with Minnie Cortez.  I think it was that point in time where I developed a crush on her.  I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind ever since.  I have this horrible feeling that she is plump and making tortillas in some Mexican restaurant in west Texas but there’s always hope, right?  While we were there we did the obligatory tour of the caverns and ended up stuck in the elevator for about an hour.  I believe I slid out the back door into a storage area but there was no way out, so I climbed back in.  Eventually we got the front doors open and I helped hoist everyone up a bit until we had all crawled out.  A highlight of the trip, obviously.

Dancing isn’t very big in Baptist circles.  As a matter of fact, it’s downright forbidden in most Southern Baptist churches.  This really never came up in our house until we moved to Lake Worth.  My first year there a school dance was held and I was not allowed to go.  I was later told that there was some sort of incident involving alcohol and kids being suspended so I felt a bit better.  I certainly didn’t want to get mixed up with that crowd.  But the result of this was that all of my dancing was restricted to my living room while watching Soul Train and American Bandstand.  I did not even attend my Junior or Senior proms, mostly due to that same reason.

The summer after I graduated I attended one final youth camp.  For some reason this one was different, and I felt convicted of my past rebellious attitude and vowed to straighten up and fly right.  And I did.  Our home was probably one of the calmest, quietest households in the area but there was still tension there.  But that summer was perfectly tranquil.  I moved onto the campus of Dallas Baptist University before the school year started to do some work and earn some money.  I helped paint the bench areas for the baseball team and other miscellaneous clean-up projects.

I started that fall semester on a full-blown mission to be a minister.  One of the faculty advisors actually loaded me up with eighteen credit hours which included Greek.  Before the first month was up I had dropped that one.  My study habits were horrible.  I spent too much time in the rec room playing video games or ping pong and in the music hall or student union building playing the piano.  And then Lisa happened.

Lisa was amazing for many reasons.  She was just beautiful.  Her body was flawless, she had wavy brunette hair and a mole near her lip.  Think Cindy Crawford.  She was my own age, yet she singled me out to help her with her biology homework.  Being a naive male I did not recognize this for the obvious ploy that it was and just thought of it as a tribute to my genius.  The transition from study partner to make-out partner did not take long.

I was carless yet managed to beg and borrow cars as I could.  We would go to the music hall and hide out until the doors were locked and then make out.  We made out in the parking lot and in cars.  One time I made love to her in the basement of the library, in a storage area with dirt floors.  I still picture her lying on a piece of plywood as we practiced the early withdrawal method of birth control.  One time we drove to a subdivision that was still under construction and parked in a driveway.  At one point we took pictures of each other completely naked.  I can’t tell you how much I wish I still had those pictures, for reasons that may or may not be obvious.  They would capture my one wild non-religious girlfriend from the days of my youth, they would capture me in my youth, and it wouldn’t hurt to be in control of any sort of blackmail opportunities.  Lisa eventually graduated to older students and I went through my usual period of emotional turmoil.

I invested my emotions heavily into any one I was dating.  My songwriting reflected this and was utterly cheesy and depressing.  But I recovered and the next girl I got involved with was Sandi.  Sandi wasn’t from Texas like Lisa, Sandi was from Rhode Island and had the accent to match.  She was into drama and was more religious.  Sandi had straight blond hair and a curvy body.  She and Stan and I hung out a lot for awhile.  Stan was a drama queen, and yes I mean it that way.  I always remember riding in the car together, all three of us, singing along to the Broadway play Annie.  Any song from that soundtrack takes me back to those days.  We would often drive to downtown Dallas to City Hall and play around on these odd modern bronze sculptures that resembled vertebra.  At some point Sandi and I became romantic.  I was now dating a senior.

For various reasons we did not publicize our relationship as the awkwardness of it was obvious to both of us.  For starters the campus had not only curfews but a PDA policy (Public Display of Affection).  In other words, no public hugging and kissing unless you were married.  Of course this only magnified the amount of PDA (P as in Private) that occurred.  Sandi had a particular taste and smell that I noticed.  I couldn’t tell you what it was, some mixture of perfume and hormones and sweat or perhaps diet, but I liked it.  We made out a lot, and she is one of the first girlfriends I specifically remember enjoying the touch of my hand.  One particular time we were on a stairway leading from the Drama department on the top floor of the library to the roof.  Her pants were undone and she was reclining and enjoying my attention very much.  But at some point one of us noticed that she was on her period.  I was not particularly put off by this and went for paper towels.  Sandi, on the other hand, was apoplectic.  She kept letting out these long sobs and seemed rather traumatized.  I suspect it has something to do with her childhood, or perhaps that is just how she verbalizes extreme embarrassment, but it definitely put a damper on things.  I think it also caused her to sense both the age difference and the impropriety of our affair.  I don’t recall details of the timing but I don’t think we dated much longer after that.

My roommate Larry was from the bone-dry desert climate of eastern New Mexico and truly suffered in the humidity of northern Texas.

November 15

I had a job throughout each summer, and I think during the school year too, part-time.  I worked at a Crystal’s Pizza Parlor and did a lot of food prep work and table bussing.  I’ve never been able to stand olives after all the olive-slicing I did there.

During my freshman year I ended up in an odd friendship with two girls, Cari and Terri.  Wilson dubbed us the ‘Mullett Trio’ (a spin of Terri’s last name).  The name stuck somehow and it has come up at reunions.  One of the classes we shared was history, and the teacher was Ms. O’Neill.  I don’t think I would be exaggerating to say that she was the overwhelming favorite of all the male students.  She was brunette, pretty and busty.  On top of that she would sit on her desk in a skirt and her bust often stretched her blouse allowing for glimpses of bra.  It was rumored that she had had an affair with one of the football players but I suspect this was spread only because it made each of us hopeful that our fantasies might actually have a chance of coming true.

I really don’t remember how it happened, but I somehow ended up joining the drama club and becoming a thespian (complete with initiation).  For the state’s interschool league  (UIL) competitions we did one-act plays.  The only one I remember being in for sure was The Wizard of Oz.  Yes, a novel and feature-length film condensed into a one-act play.  It was bizarre, and quite a challenge, but we somehow managed to pull it off.  As the wizard I got to do most of my lines from behind the ‘curtain’ until the end.  I especially remember the melting witch scene in which Diane managed to crumple and slide out from under her costume backwards through a curtain, then finally allowing the hat to fall.  Fairly dramatic considering our lack of special effects.

The other play was at the school.  Arsenic and Old Lace.  I played the villainous professor recently escaped from the prison for the criminally insane.  I kept my prop flask filled with Mr. Pibb.  The aforementioned Dale played the insane son who thought he was Teddy Roosevelt.  He did an excellent ‘CHARGE’ up the stairs.
I progressed in band and we did several great combination pieces for the various UIL competitions over the years, as well as solos.  One year we did a lot of work on one particularly tricky 7-piece percussion piece.  I played the marimba on at least part of it, and I had to learn to use FOUR mallets at once!  We spent many hours on this and had it down pretty darn good by the time the competition rolled around.  But the day we were to depart a major glitch developed.  One of our percussionists didn’t show.  I’m not sure if he was sick or had run away from home or what, but our hopes for this trip were dashed.  Fortunately our band director, Mr. Phelps, had a plan.  He made a phone call and we got on the bus.  We stopped by our missing member’s house for one last-ditch effort to talk him into the trip and then we picked up a replacement drummer.  I’ve forgotten his name, but he practiced the piece with us all the way down to Austin, a good four-hour drive.  We practiced on seats and plastic buckets.  I think we had a few run-throughs before the start of the judging session as well, and by golly we pulled it off!  We were very excited to get our I rating and the accompanying ribbons/medals.  Unfortunately our excitement didn’t last too long.

Some time in the next week or two we were each pulled out of class and questioned and instructed to bring our medals back to school.  As it turned out, the replacement student we had picked up was either too old or not in our school system.  Had I been older and/or a bit more observant I guess I would have known this, but I was fairly upset that we were being robbed of our medal for what seemed to be extenuating circumstances.  Mr. Phelps was also in trouble and I think suspended for this episode.  He did not return the next school year.  One reason this episode was so serious is that Lake Worth had been under suspension by the state for a couple of years for various financial and educational infractions.  It was under that cloud my entire tenure.

He was the longest-lasting director during my time at Lake Worth, and one of my favorites.  I believe he had a bit of a drinking problem, although I’m not sure if it was related to that incident or not.  I do remember one time when we were either leaving for or returning from a trip and some students helped him walk due to his being inebriated.  I will never forget the girls who helped that balding, chubby older man walk to his office, taking over and protecting him from discovery.  Their loyalty to him speaks volumes.

We had one interim director who had played in the one-o’clock lab band from the University of North Texas, a premier jazz ensemble.  He played bari sax as I recall.  He wasn’t with us long and I think this was partially due to landing a gig touring with Buddy Rich.  The last band director I remember was Pam Garmon.  She was great because she was a percussionist.  She had an 8-piece Ludwig Octoplus in her garage at home, and she shifted our ragged struggling band in the direction that most other schools were going, that of drum and bugle corps.  She had no budget to work with so we were stuck with our 1950’s era heavy wool band uniforms and the helmets were tall, rounded and furry.  They looked like something an 18th century Scottish soldier would wear.  The lining was vinyl and plastic and they were prone to cause heat strokes.

So we didn’t pull off much of a drum and bugle corp look but at least we started sounding like one.  She taught us a sequence of marching band cadences that I can still remember to this day.  They even had cowbell!  The first home game we used them as we were marching into the stands we were electrified.  After halftime the visiting band director even asked for a copy, to which Ms. Garmon replied “NO!”  We were cool.

My first year in marching band I played cymbals.  The next year I played bass drum.  It was, again, probably not a marching band bass drum, more like something reserved for concerts.  But, again, our budget required dual uses.  It was heavy and pressed the uniform into my gut which made me hot, as well as the exertion.  When we marched in parades this meant I also couldn’t see anything but the shoulders of the person in front of me, which is normally fine.  That is, until you were marching in the Stock Show Parade.  This parade was always in January.  The cold was challenging but you got over it in the percussion session as you warmed up.  Unfortunately as the bass drum player I couldn’t see where I was stepping, and trust me — you want to see where you are stepping when you are in a parade behind several hundred cows and horses!  It was a parade where the band shoes started off white and ended up green.  One legendary story involved a tuba player who dropped his mouthpiece in a cow pie, retrieved it, shook and wiped it off and kept playing.  I know that guy and I believe the story!

At the opposite end of the spectrum was the Buccaneer Days parade in Corpus Christi.  It was hot and muggy and our uniforms were a definite detriment.  We were near the end so we sat and stood in place for about ninety minutes before we got to start the inevitable stop-start-stop-start pace of the parade.  We were exhausted afterward.

One constant of band life was the bus.  Every away game, every parade, every UIL competition, every concert competition we were on a school bus.  Only on rare occasions did we have the luxury of a commercial bus.  The trip to an opposing school’s stadium was usually uneventful.  I was invariably called upon to say a prayer, which I almost always chafed at.  But the trip home was almost always dark and that meant it was great for groping.  I almost always dated one girl at a time, and usually for long periods, but there was one exception to this.  I honestly don’t remember her name, but I think it was Candy.  And I don’t remember where we were coming home from, but somehow she and I were talked into sharing the back seat and a blanket.  Candy was not the type of girl I would normally be dating.  She was worldly, she did not go to our church, we didn’t share any friends that I know of, but she was new in school and she had a lipstick that was carved into the shape of a dick.  What’s not to like?  So I spent most of the trip back to school kissing her and fingering her under the blanket.  When we got back to the band hall David, one of the instigators, gave me ‘the look’ and asked me how it went.  I was temporarily at a loss for words so I just thrust my fingers under his nose for a second.  He jerked back and a loud “Woah!” escaped his lips which made me laugh and laugh.  He was a few years older than me and I’d like to think I gained his respect as a man of the world.  He is the same David who lived a few houses down from us and gave me my first beer.  I have fond memories of him.

Regina was more than just a one-grope date.  I actually took her to some event as a date, I don’t remember if it was church or school.  She was cute and it didn’t hurt that she was busty.  On many occasions Cathy would tell Mr. Phelps that we were going to go organize the music and files in the storage room.  I’m sure he knew exactly what we were really going to do.  In fact Cathy and Ken (a.k.a. Speedy) and Regina and myself went to this room (which was under the gym bleachers) to kiss and grope to our heart’s content.  I remember thinking that Speedy and Cathy were doing more than us, but I don’t recall Regina ever grabbing my crotch and that’s probably why.  I do recall my hands exploring her breasts a lot.  I have to wonder what girls in this situation think.

My last and probably longest relationship in high school was Cynthia.  Cynthia was cute, thin, had a great laugh and big luscious lips and played the flute.  Her mom was the school secretary and wore cat-eye glasses and had very wide hips.  We spent many a bus trip together, and not always groping.  I do remember one trip where we went to this crappy little amusement park called Sandy Lake.  We spent part of the evening in a small treehouse/platform and another part on a trampoline.  If I recall correctly I tried to partially disrobe her on that trampoline.  And then the big event happened on a trip to Lake Charles for some band event.  On the bus, I think it was on the way there, she broke up with me.  Again, I was rather smothering and she was feeling the need to be free (and perhaps have friends other than myself).  What I will always remember was the way she had her friends help her let me down easy.  They encouraged me and actually used the line about how there are “other fish in the sea.”  I even remember that I bought into it for a bit.  I was rather distracted that trip and was horribly suspicious that she had another boyfriend already lined up (it’s a guy thing) but I did, in fact, live.  I must admit that I did gain some perverse amount of satisfaction at our first high school reunion.  Cynthia attended with her husband, my old friend Marty whom she married right out of school.  Unfortunately for Marty he was married to Maddie’s daughter because Cynthia’s thin almost bony hips were now as big if not bigger than her mom’s!

November 14

Yes, I skipped a day. Family in town, interruptions at lunch, etc. So sue me.

November 13

After we moved to Lake Worth we had them visit our church again.  The Cruse Family.  Their youngest son John could no longer sing the high notes on the song that used to highlight him, and the drummer was dating one daughter and the piano player was dating the oldest son.  Becky, the piano player, always did a part of a song while facing away from the keyboard.  It was a cute trick, and fairly impressive.  By this time the kids had a definite 70’s look.  I had at least one 8-track of theirs and later an album or two.

The complaint I always had throughout my high school days was this.  If evangelist-types wanted me to abandon rock for Christian music then I was going to need a Christian radio station that played the kind of music I liked.  Now that it is relatively easy to take your music with you everywhere I don’t think that argument would fly, but back then there was no guarantee that the used cars I was driving would have working cassette tape players.

After my junior high and early high school days I got into quite a pattern with dating.  Long, committed relationships where I devoted a lot of time and attention to the girl and eventually chased her off by almost smothering her, but only after nine months or so.  The first was Salli, who was cute as a bug, had a great smile and dark eyes to go with her jet black hair and dark brown skin.  Not only was she 2nd or 3rd generation Mexican American but she was Catholic.  I’m sure this caused no small amount of consternation to my parents but to their credit they never brought it up.  I had a few conversations with her regarding theology but she had been to class and I was unable to gain any sort of easy ground.  But more than that I was in love and didn’t push it out of respect.  I occasionally spent time at her house with her younger sister and brother, her older sister and parents.  I picked up some Spanish along the way but Salli wasn’t fluent.  She understood most of what she heard but was unable to explain how to speak it to someone else.  Her grandmother in Corpus Christi spoke no English whatsoever and Salli could barely communicate with her.

I was a generally chivalrous and nice person but that didn’t stop me from wanting and attempting to get sexual gratification.  One time I snuck out of the house and rode a bicycle to her house.  She nervously allowed me to crawl into her bedroom and we lay in bed for awhile but my kissing and groping was met with not only her general resistance but her nervousness at the fact that her dad was in the next room.  I eventually snuck back out and got home and we were never found out.  One night I took her home and stopped a few blocks from her house for a little necking on a road with no homes.  I seem to recall that we may have had some loose clothing but not much else going on when headlights appeared behind us.  We assumed it was a cop and started tucking things in.  I glanced in the side rearview mirror to see a hippy-looking man approaching the car with a large revolver hanging from his hand.  He was looking in the back seat and when he saw that we weren’t thugs or a rival gang he slipped the gun behind his back.  He knocked on my window and told us that they were expecting trouble and that this wasn’t a good place to hang out.  I agreed, and we left in short order.  Salli said that he was with the Bandidos, a well-known biker gang.  She said they had a house nearby.  The next time I was with her I asked her and she pointed it out.  There was an 8-ft. Chain-link fence surrounding the yard with a small gate at the bottom with an attached dog-run.  It appeared that the point was to force someone to crawl through to enter.  Spotlights faced outwards at the corners of the house.  The windows were covered.

Occasionally I would see a few of them drive through, usually shifting gears by hanging their left hand down to the transmission case and manually manipulating the shifter without using a clutch.  The more resourceful ones had installed levers and shifted at about thigh height.

Salli played clarinet in the band and at half-time of the homecoming game we went back to her house to change out of our uniforms.  She wore a dress, I had a corsage for her and we got in my car to go back to the stadium.  We drove by the Bandidos house and I noticed all the lights were on.  It was near the top of a hill so I accelerated to maintain normal speed.  Evidently this was a bad idea, because they were once again ‘expecting’ trouble and the sight of a large, dark green car accelerating up the hill was not a good sign.  That explains why I saw someone jump off of the back porch, crouch on one knee and level a shotgun at us.  He trailed us for just a second, Salli yelled, I floored it.  We took the next corner at almost full speed.  It’s good to have 455 cubic inches at your disposal.

Salli eventually broke up with me, and we talked about it for awhile.  I was upset, but not horribly surprised at the time, having sort of seen it coming.  But when I got home it was dark and ‘our’ song started playing on the radio.  “How Deep Is Your Love” by the BeeGees, and I cried like a baby.

November 12

…We hung out together a lot.  He emulated me in several ways, playing the piano, and the drums, picking up what he could, where he could, but I’m pretty sure he played something else in band (clarinet?  I can’t recall for sure).  We dated girls we met at summer camp, I think I even ‘stole’ one of his girlfriends at one time.  Many times in the days before we had our driver’s licenses we got Rene to drive us around in their AMC Pacer.  It was fairly roomy inside, but it was embarrassing even as a kid to be seen in one.

Gary and I were both music aficionados.  He preferred Styx and in fact turned out to be a big Styx fan over the years.  My tastes were much more diverse.  I think it was the summer between my junior and senior years that I mailed in a form to order ten albums for a total of ninety-nine cents.  I agreed to buy a few more over the next year or two.  It was a no-brainer for me.  My record collection at the time was pathetic, almost non-existent.  When my albums arrived I spent a couple of days just listening to them all.  I think I played them all once through before repeating.  It was a ‘best-of’ list from the hey-day of classic rock.  Chicago IX, their first Greatest Hits album.  25 or 6 to 4, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, Colour My World, Just You ‘N’ Me, SAturday in the Park, Feelin’ Stronger Every Day, Make Me Smile….every song was a big hit.  Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic, with the hits Toys in the Attic, Walk This Way, Sweet Emotion.  I also liked Uncle Salty and Big Ten Inch…Record.  Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, with My Life, Big Shot and Honesty and the title track which I enjoyed.  I liked the jazz angle in general.  I had one of Eddie Money’s early albums, but I can’t remember which one.  I’m guessing it was his debut.  I also had a couple of one-hit wonders, Billy Thorpe’s Children of the Sun and Sweet’s Love is like Oxygen.  I may have purchased those as singles though.  But all of those received scant play, or at least selective play, compared to what turned out to be the ‘big five’ of the albums I got that summer.

I was turned on to Rick Wakeman by Dale.  Dale was a senior when I was a freshman and he took me under his wing in a few areas.  For one, he was ‘first chair’ in the percussion section and played our new and funky quad-toms during parades and football games.  It was a bit odd to see him do this because he had some sort of problem with his ankles and they had required surgery at some point, involving pins and screws.  They had healed fine, but they were thin and as he began working out it made him a bit top-heavy.  But he took to working out like he did to drums and within a few years was competing in bodybuilding competitions.  He often took me to Carswell Air Force Base to work out in their gym.  This was my first opportunity to actually do weight lifting and I actually ended up developing my quads, lats, biceps and triceps to the point where I could actually tell looking in the mirror.  Dale drove this crazy Plymouth Arrow and was always playing Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery or Six Wives of Henry the Eighth by Rick Wakeman.  Rick also had done a themed album on Journey to the Center of the Earth that we listened to on Dale’s super-cool Quadrophonic stereo at his house.  So when I picked my albums I ended up choosing Rick’s No Earthly Connection.  The album cover had a strangely distorted artwork rendition of Rick in his typical concert garb and some very 70’s electronic looking stuff.  I opened it up and it contained a thing sheet of silver plastic.  I was instructed to roll this into a tube and tape it into place, and then stand the tube on its end right in the center of the cover.  Voila, a somewhat realistic properly-proportioned reflection of the cover art appeared!  It was just cool.  But so was the music.  Rick’s skill and creativity inspired me like no other in my piano playing.  I played that one over and over.  Just remember, every time you hear the wild, intense and fast Hammond B3  on Yes’ Roundabout……that’s Rick Wakeman.

Another big influence was Supertramp’s Even In the Quietest Moments.  The big hits were Give a Little Bit and From Now On but no song was under four minutes so it didn’t lend itself well to singles airplay.  But it was their first Gold album in the U.S.  But this was the era of the album-rock FM station and Fool’s Overture (at almost eleven minutes) and Even In the Quietest Moments at six and a half both got a fair amount of play.  To this day I can put on this CD (the album was discarded in a fundy frenzy moment, details to come) and listen at least once all the way through without feeling compelled to skip to the next song.  It was full of lyrics that seemed to mean something (something spiritual?  Political?  I knew not.) and anthemic big music to back up the words.

At some point I ended up with a Boston album.  I think it was the second one, but I couldn’t swear to it.  The sound, the energy, the drumming all pumped me up.  It is a rare Boston song that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy, and I admired Sib Hashian’s big fro look.

Dan Fogelberg’s album Nether Lands was another one that got a lot of play time.  It is packed with emotion, very evocative.  His vocals are like a strong whisper.  The lyrics, like Supertramp’s, seem to have deep and hidden meanings.  Thirty years after my first exposure I still get goose bumps from both the music and the words.  The title track instantly evokes the feeling of hiking along the top of a snow-covered ridge, even for someone like me who had never been there.

Off in the Nether Lands I heard the sound
Like the beating of heavenly wings
And deep in my brain I can hear a refrain
Of my soul as she rises and sings
Anthems to glory and anthems to love
And hymns filled with earthly delight
Like the songs that the darkness composes to worship the light

It’s one of the songs that can bring tears to your eyes, even though you may not know why.  It’s done that many times for me.

And finally, the one I’ve saved for last.  It isn’t quite as deep and introspective as Nether Lands, most of the songs are shorter and more readily playable commercially on the radio unlike Supertramp, but I did more air drumming and guitar and keyboard to this album than all the others.  When I first began building a CD collection this was one of my first purchases.  I consider it the best album of all time.  Steely Dan’s Aja.

It is mostly jazz fusion.  Black Cow sets the funky jazz tone, then Aja just runs with it.  It starts smooth and silky and ends with some of the hottest jazz/rock to ever be laid down on a piece of vinyl.  Deacon Blues reminds me of a smoky bar and is utterly listenable and singable.  The big commercial hit of the album is Peg.  Home at Last is solid all the way through and has some of the coolest piano chops you’ll ever hear.  I Got The News is just fun!  The piano is very syncopated and difficult to reproduce.  I love the beat.  And Josie – well, she’s the raw flame, the live wire, she prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire.  Another awesome groove on this tune.
In summary, there is not a song on this album that I have ever grown tired of.  Not a bad result for an album thirty years old.

The music that I enjoyed and listened to varied a bit over the years, but I think I can lay down some general rules.  First, it had to be creative and unique.  I rarely enjoyed formulaic pop crap.  I got over anything from the Osmonds and the Jackson 5 and such by the first time I was hearing Stevie Wonder and Who’s That Lady from the Isley Brothers.  This is also why I never got into country or old-time blues.  Right after we moved to Lake Worth I expanded my musical horizons as far as I could.  I remember hearing late-night jazz on some FM station which was my first encounter with Michael Frank’s Eggplant and Cat Stevens’ Was Dog A Doughnut.  Any time that Dog song played I would make my friends stop and listen.  Something about the sampled dog bark just got my attention.

I also listened to the burgeoning Jesus Music and Contemporary Christian stations when I could find one.  I used to have quite a collection of this music, from the late 70’s through the late 80’s.  I missed out on a lot of the 80’s scene because of my religious upbringing.  I mean, it was going to stain my soul as it was, after all, the devil’s music, right?  All that satanic backwards-masking and everything.  So I tried to keep my soul pure by restricting myself to Christian tunes, but it was always a battle.  The definitive moment of this battle was an over-zealous moment my first semester in college when I took my Boston and Chicago and Steely Dan and Dan Fogelberg and all my rock albums and put them in the trash, and just to prevent some other poor soul from being entrapped I poured some sort of sticky liquid all over them.  I don’t remember what it was.  I felt clean!

My association with Christian Music (the contemporary kind, not the hymns) began in Big Lake with the folk singers doing the “Hand in the Hand” thing, but our church countered by having a full-blown Southern Gospel singing family into town.  They pulled into town and set up and wow, it was big time.  Even their nine-year-old daughter Cindy was writing and singing music.  She was, and I think still is possibly, the youngest member of ASCAP.  And of course I developed a crush on her.  I may have even kissed her.  And if I didn’t, I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of trying.  I’m sure she left a wake of broken hearts all over Texas.

November 11

There was one other life-changing event that involved the Valiant, and that was when I lost my virginity.  It began as a bit of flirtatious note-passing during church service and then evolved into a serious discussion.  I guess it was about this time that I began showing symptoms of my black-or-white, with-me-or-against-me upbringing.  I would occasionally be very studious and moral and good, truly acting on my intentions to be good for God.  But this was always interrupted by periods of giving in to my ‘lower’ nature and doing what all the other kids were doing.  The net effect was that, from an outsider’s point of view, I was either groping girlfriends on a bus trip or I was singing Kum-By-Yah around a campfire in utter sincerity.  I’m sure I came across at times as both hypocritical and condescending.  The only time I ever had to confront this dichotomy was when we were about to leave on a band trip and I was asked to say a prayer.  This almost always bothered me.  For one, it was a reminder that I was a preacher’s kid and was different.  But it also forced me to say a public prayer when I was anticipating kissing and groping some girl for awhile.  Most any other kid could have switched gears like that effortlessly, since church was just this formality they did because of their parents, or was some sort of abstract thing, a tradition.  But I had bought it hook, line and sinker and was always plagued by the deeper thoughts.  One summer at camp a bible study teacher discussed I John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  It was very helpful to me to overcome some of the anguish I would feel.  It was very much like the effect of the confessional in the Catholic church, except I was just speaking to God and he was promising to not only forgive me but cleanse me.  But while I may have felt cleansed and forgiven on the inside, this was never apparent on the outside.  To others I was just either hypocritical or uncaring.

But the night of the note-passing I took — we’ll call her Amy — back to her house with one stopover.  We parked on a hill behind the K-Mart and got in the back seat.  All I remember was that it was very orderly.  There was no groping or loving going on.  We weren’t dating, she wasn’t exactly my type for that in any way.  She was a bit overweight but cute as a bug, but we were both willing and consenting so we disrobed just enough and……well, it didn’t take long.  And then it was over and I drove her home.

Don’t get me wrong, I was perfectly gentlemanly and even nice, and I was very appreciative.  I still to this day think of her with great fondness.  We even recently spoke of it via email, and while it was awkward I was able to confirm that she wasn’t particularly hurt or upset about it.  And we had sex again two more times within a fairly short timeframe.  And that was it.  Unfortunately we exchanged a few handwritten notes along the way, and while I don’t remember exactly what we wrote the important point is that I kept at least one of these notes somewhere in my room.  And my dad searched my room and then found it.  I’m not sure why he was even searching to begin with.  But he did, and it broke his heart.  His firstborn dedicated to the ministry and here he was defiling himself and becoming impure and losing his virginity, something which he could never recover.

In retrospect, it is amazing to me that a primitive concept such as virginity should hold such sway over our modern cultures several thousand years removed.  At least we’ve stopped shunning or stoning women for not being able to prove their virginity on the night of their wedding, but we still hold it up as a sacred standard.  But in reality all it means is that women enter into marriage anticipating a strange, mysterious probably painful event wherein she is supposed to please her man on the first try and also fulfill all of his porn-fueled sexual fantasies.

But to my dad it was horrible.  I think I was past the age of spankings here, but I was probably grounded.  And for reasons I’ll never understand he took this as an occasion to talk to Amy’s mother!  I have no idea what was said but there were ‘words’ and she still holds a grudge to this day.  I think they started attending another church, or stopped attending altogether.  I rarely saw or spoke to her after that.

I’ve always considered myself fairly handy and fast on the uptake when it comes to electrical and mechanical tinkering.  John and I would occasionally kill a boring Saturday by doing some maintenance on the Valiant.  We replaced the oil pan and valve cover gaskets a couple of times and cleaned a lot of sludge out where we found it.  I would also occasionally replace the plugs and check the gaps.  But we got it used and probably free from some old friends from Big Lake so it had a lot of miles on it.  And I never did any deep engine or transmission work on it, and I doubt my parents had it maintained other than to fix major problems so it was not destined to become a classic lovingly waxed in someone’s garage.  One fateful day it finally gave up the ghost in the form of a plume of blue smoke which probably meant a blown head gasket and water mixing with oil.  I don’t know where it ended up, but hopefully a nice family and not a salvage yard.

My next car was one that we, I think, actually purchased with me in mind.  It was an old used but fairly clean station wagon.  I drove it a few times and allowed my friends to all be impressed with it.  OK, so maybe that wasn’t their reaction, but it was wheels.  I envisioned a lot of fun with this car.  It would seat several people.  I also was very proud of the fact that I fixed the wiring to the rear window so I could lower it from the driver’s seat like it was designed to do.  The wire to the motor had a short, which I spliced and taped up.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to enjoy it for long.

I had a couple of other jobs during this time period.  My second-ever job was at a small chain drug store.  I stocked shelves and cleaned up and put cardboard boxes in the incinerator.  But what I remember most was grabbing a peach soda and a fruit pie and chilling out in the store room.  This was usually accompanied by a radio.  I always think of this job, and that storeroom, when I hear Van Halen’s “Running With the Devil.”  The song just grabbed me in so many ways.  The the thundering bass intro, the crunchy guitar and powerful, crashing drums that joined in, David Lee Roth’s ear-piercing screams punching in and out.  And it was the song of the outlaw.  It was everything I wasn’t, yet it spoke to me on many levels.  It spoke to my dark side, it was my alter-ego that took women’s virginity, that got away with theft and challenged athletes, that drove around with friends who had loaded guns.  But I wasn’t supposed to like songs like that.  It was evil, and it spoke of hanging out with the last entity in the universe one should want to associate with.  I would air guitar and air drum and lip synch and avoid work as much as possible.  I don’t think I had even seen an album cover or a picture yet, but I knew I loved that band.  And I still do to this day.  You will probably not be surprised to learn that I was eventually fired from that job.

My next job, if I have my chronology right, was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  At one point I did some temporary work for them, helping to load up trucks for delivery.  This was an occasional job, just Saturday nights.  They needed extra help for the Sunday editions.  And one time I helped Jason deliver papers.  His mom was a teacher at our school but they lived in a different school district so I only knew him through her.  We left his house, drove to the pick-up area, split a joint in a glass pipe and passed out.  It was my first marijuana, and I was less than impressed.  But now I could brag if I wanted.  I helped him roll and throw the papers for his route that morning.  Later I got my own route in the River Oaks and Sansom Park areas.  I threw the route out of the Olds ‘98 and occasionally got my brother and a friend of his to help.  They would jog behind the car grabbing Sunday papers out of the trunk and tossing them into yards as I pointed.  I was usually blaring rock music on the radio and I’ve often wondered what the subscribers thought, or if they ever saw us.

I put the station wagon in service for the paper route but after only a week or so I pulled out in front of a pickup truck and got slammed on the driver’s side, front end.  Fortunately no one was hurt but the car was a mess and, again, we couldn’t afford to fix it.  I think my newspaper delivery career ended there too, although I couldn’t swear to it.  I was very disappointed after the work I had done on that car.

At some point around this time, although I think it was before I lost my virginity, I was over at John’s house.  His dad ran a construction business out of the house next door and we sometimes hung out over there.  On this day I think his dad was out of town.  I’m sure we were bored and looking for something to do, so the talk naturally turned to girls.  Somehow or another the talk turned into action, and the next thing you know we’re in the bathroom in some sort of strange masturbatathon.  As best I recall it was just a sort of competition to see who could come first.  I can’t imagine doing anything like this now, but there we were, whacking off right in front of each other.  And then it happened.  John, for reasons I’ll never know, decided that he would help me out by taking my cock into his mouth.  As strange as it may sound, I remember being rather detached about it, as in “Hmmm, that’s nice I guess.”  But it didn’t do anything for me, and it didn’t last long, and we finished the normal way and never spoke of it again.  Believe it or not, I never thought it was that strange, except perhaps a bit quirky.  But then John was quirky, so it fit.  It was only many, MANY years later that it dawned on me.  “Holy shit!  John is gay!”

One of my other friends, the one I spent the most time with during my last two years of high school, was Gary.  Gary’s family was just weird.  His dad was an engineer/manager type at the General Dynamics plant and did crash inspections or some such.  He was also a deacon at our church.  But his mom was flitty, a bit hare-brained, and wore thick glasses.  His sister inherited most of these traits but also had big breasts.  She got her fair share of attention but has probably never had sex.  It seems like there was some incident somewhere in there but the adults hid it and I was too naive to think to just ask.  But even those breasts couldn’t overcome her personality which often came across as mild retardation, so she will likely die a spinster.  Gary also inherited the thick glasses as well as some sort of speech problem magnified by braces and bad acne to boot.  But he and I liked rock and he didn’t live far from me so

November 10

Not counting band, some other music memories I have from junior high involve the cafeteria.  At various points there was a radio in there.  The two tunes that always take me back to that cafeteria are Boston’s “More than a Feeling” and one song by B.J. Thomas which I can’t remember right now.

Summer almost always meant two things.  Vacation and youth camp.  Our county Baptist association was large enough that they had their own property overlooking a river, and I spent one week there every summer for five or six years in a row.  It was a combination of bible studies, bible reading and memorization, prayer, and introspection galore.  Religious navel-gazing.  It was also swimming and sports.  And, of course, falling in love.  And I did my share of most of those things every year.  Generally speaking all of my memories of youth camp are positive.

The other constant summer event was vacation, and most often this was to see family.  Family was always a two-day journey away.  My earliest memories of visiting Iowa are a real hodge-podge of images.  We almost always stayed with Grandma and Grandpa.  I was a typical kid, looking for toys and other diversions.  But my two favorites were the pool table in the basement and Grandpa’s porn stash.  I remember when I found a PlayBoy in the magazine rack next to the couch.  I eventually managed to abscond with it to the bathroom so I could peruse it at my leisure.  His magazines provided me many a pleasant moment in Iowa.

The pool table was also great fun, because I had never had access to one on a regular basis.  Grandpa was an old pool hall regular and I can still remember him sitting with one hip on the table, the pool cue raised almost straight up and down, his cigarette dangling from his lips in the half-light from the fluorescent fixture hanging overhead as he executed a trick shot to spin the cue ball around another ball to hit the target.  I only wish I could have gone with him to see him play in public.  He taught me a lot, and so did my uncle and my cousins.  One night my mom woke up after hearing a noise and then heard me crying.  I had evidently gone sleep-walking and had made it part of the way down the basement stairs and fallen the rest of the way.  That’s how much I loved playing pool.

Other diversions and entertainments from Iowa included lawn bowling (a modern version of Bocci ball) and Jarts, a.k.a. Lawn Darts.  Launching large steel-tipped projectiles into the air doesn’t sound particularly safe but it was fun and I don’t think anyone was ever skewered.  My cousin Kathy was my favorite to hang out with and was a year or two older.  We shared an affinity for Grandma’s cookie jar and pastries and she taught me some cool tricks with a frisbee, which I have impressed people with ever since.  Another favorite cousin (albeit briefly) was my Aunt Normas’ daughter Kim.  She was exactly my age, had red hair and was as cute as a bug.  I spent a lot of time with her listening to 45rpm records in her bedroom.  She was also the first and only cousin that I got a crush on and also kissed, so it’s probably a good thing that we only made it up to Iowa every few years.  All of my cousins there were at least my age or older.  My dad was not the youngest but was the last to get married and start having kids, not counting Don and Linda who have remained childless.

I’ve always had a fondness for Uncle Don.  He seems a gentle soul, but unfortunately this made him a target for a controlling personality, and that is exactly what he got in Linda.  Controlling and neurotic and manipulative and nosy.  She has always been the least favorite of all of my relatives in Iowa, in spite of the fact that she gave me several 45 records one year.  She is obsessive/compulsive about the arrangement of every single piece of furniture and knick-knack in her house.  It is no wonder that Don long ago set aside his own ‘guy room’ for watching TV and getting her out of his hair.  They somehow managed to share their home for all these years without either being admitted to a mental institution (as far as I know) so perhaps there is something there I don’t know about, but I wouldn’t be shocked to get a call informing me that Don bought a new wood chipper and Linda had  disappeared.

North Carolina is another world, quite literally.  My Mom grew up sharecropping and her siblings and parents all worked in textile mills at one point or another.  My mom is the only one out of the whole bunch who graduated from college, and this includes her step-siblings and all of my cousins.  They live in very plain house or trailers.  My earliest memory is from being at my grandfather’s house and setting off fireworks with Roger and Ronnie in the back yard.  They were around my age, one older, one younger, and they were my half-uncles.  We were lighting firecrackers on a stump and one of them went off while I was still rather close and gave my ear a good ringing.  At this point Grandpa stepped in for some discipline.  He escorted the three of us into an outbuilding which was, as I recall, like a small apartment.  The punishment?  He walked us down the hall and made us stop and contemplate each and every light fixture, pointing to them with his cane.  It was at this point that I realized that Grandpa wasn’t all there.  He had, in fact, been an alcoholic for most of his life.

On a later trip I remember riding in the car with Ronnie and his girlfriend as they lit up a joint.  They seemed to somehow know that I wouldn’t tell, and I didn’t.  I wanted to be cool.  This was probably during the visit of the summer of 1976.  I had been driving on my beginner’s permit since very shortly after my fifteenth birthday and I was allowed to take a few shifts on the long stretch of I-20 from Texas.  I particularly enjoyed setting the cruise control at around 76mph and picking my own radio station.  My mom was a bit nervous but dad napped in the back seat.  He was evidently over his jitters about me driving, especially after ‘the incident.’  That was during one of our first beginner’s permit outings.  We were all three in the front seat and I was taking a right turn.  Dad was obviously not used to someone else driving because he thought I was misjudging the speed.  We’ll never know if I was or not because he yelled at me to slow down, I applied the brakes a bit and then he decided to help me.  Unfortunately he missed the brake pedal and stomped on the foot that was on the gas pedal.  I responded by slamming on the brake and we ended up stopping crossways just short of a stop sign with the back tires burning rubber and everyone yelling.  After a few seconds we finally got Dad to understand that the tires would stop smoking when he took his foot off the gas pedal.  He finally did, and I proceeded to drive just fine, thank you very much.

I spent most of my beginner’s permit year driving the big car, the 1973 Oldsmobile ‘98.  It was a land yacht, but it had a 455 Rocket V8 in it and in spite of its size it could actually move pretty damn fast.  I surprised a few people by leaving them behind, and I picked up at least one speeding ticket as I recall.  I also managed to crunch in the front end by not paying close enough attention at a stop light.  The car in front of me let off the brakes and then died.  I let off the brakes and accelerated.  Their large steel bumper was unscratched while my fiberglass body didn’t fare so well.  But when I got my driver’s license I did most of my driving in our used hand-me-down red Plymouth Valiant.  It was an unusual car.  It had wings that were more subdued than the typical 50’s auto, and a slant-six engine, but the most unusual feature was the push-button gear shifter on the left-hand side of the dash!  I logged a lot of miles in that car.  I could burn rubber by revving the engine in neutral then pushing the drive button in.  The dash was metal and sported a dent above the glove box from my brother’s head.  I think that’s when he started wearing seat belts.

I spent a lot of time in that car on the roads the skimmed the edge of Lake Worth, specifically from Jacksboro Highway to Roberts Cut-off.  There were probably a lot of people in that area who were on the lookout for that car too.  Most of my memories involve getting in trouble.  Perhaps the first time was when we gave the ‘finger’ to some people in another car, which proceeded to follow us.  I don’t remember if I was with John or another cohort of mine, Gary, but we took off on the Lake Road.  It didn’t look like we were going to be able to lose whomever was in this car, so I did a bit of off-road driving.  I drove up the dirt road to ‘look-out point’ or whatever it was called.  I then took a dirt road which was really unfit for anything less than a high-clearance 4×4 vehicle and went down the side of the hill back to the Lake Road.  But it worked, we lost them.  Fortunately they were above risking the suspension and body of their vehicle.

Another incident on that same road involved ice.  It was really more slush than ice but John and I thought it was a great excuse for a joy ride.  At one point we started sliding and I over-corrected and ended up nose-first in a ditch, but still sliding down the road sideways.  We hit a mailbox right about where John was sitting and then came to a stop.  John jumped out, drug the mailbox out from under the car and jumped back in yelling “Go, go, go!”  And I did.

But the most memorable incident involved me, John and Bruce.  Bruce’s dad was a doctor and he had all the cool toys.  In this particular case he brought a handgun, a revolver if I remember correctly.  Now I have no idea what in the world we thought we were going to do with it, but it definitely imbued us with a sense of invincibility.  We drove by a group of people playing football.  John decided it would be good to flip them the bird, so he did.  Then we drove by again, and did it again.  It was great fun and we all got a big laugh out of it.  Unfortunately we didn’t know when to quit.  The third trip by this same group we came around the corner and there they were, standing in the road.  One big one rushed the car and threw a football at the windshield.  He reached for me through the window (which I had stupidly left open) and that’s when I floored it.  We had separated ourselves by nearly one hundred feet when I heard a rock bounce off the back of the car.  I was angry and hit the brakes, and Bruce decided that was a good time to grab his gun and he jumped out and leveled it at the idiots who just kept running.  Bruce claims he fired off a shot, but I don’t remember hearing it.  I do remember that when we saw the football players weren’t stopping we yelled for him to get back in the car and we were already rolling by the time he did.

The next Monday John was mortified to discover that some of these guys were in his home room class.  They were on his school football team.  Fortunately they never recognized him, possibly because he hid behind his schoolbooks.

Shortly after I got my driver’s license I started working.  I never hesitated because we were poor.  This was driven home to me one morning as I was getting ready for school and complained to mom about not having any good pants to wear.  The only jeans I had were ripped, and had holes, and not in the stylish way.  Mom had to explain that we just didn’t have any money for clothes right now, and I could hear the sadness in her voice.  As the realization spread in my mind I was shocked.  Wow.  We’re poor!  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  So I gladly took the job of cook and dishwasher and sweeper, etc. at the snack bar at the local junior college.  I was there for at least one semester and I eventually ran the whole thing on some nights, including shutting down and locking up.  I always think of that place when I hear the Steve Miller Band as that was what I played on the tape player when one was available.  It helped me pass the time while cleaning up.

November 9

My new best friend after Randy passed away would turn out to be John, from church.  His dad was a deacon and his grandfather was a preacher, so we were the perfect dysfunctional pair.  That we ended up friends is a bit of a mystery since one of my first encounters with him involved his informing me that I had stolen Kelli from him.  Evidently she was ‘going steady’ with him when he went on summer vacation.  His mom played the piano so he had a bit of music understanding and he wrote a love song to Kelli in French.  I think he liked the idea that he kinda sorta got her back from me, but even that didn’t last.  John’s dad and brother were hunters and he grew up knowing how to hunt and skin animals.  One time he gave me a first-hand demonstration of this by taking a rabbit out of a cage in their back yard, whacking it a couple of times over the head with a pipe to break its neck, and then gutting it.  I watched but didn’t particularly help.  His mom cooked it into a meal.  It did *not* taste like chicken.

John and I spent a lot of time together over the years.  We got our amateur radio licenses at the same time after attending a lot of practice sessions.  We had at least one good fight/wrestling match over something that I’m sure neither of us remembers.  He decided that I was talking smack about drugs at some point so he told me he had some (LSD or something, I don’t remember).  He showed me the pills, and I took one.  I was disappointed when I didn’t feel anything, and he acted a bit surprised and miffed that I had actually taken it.  As it turns out, it was something completely benign, just a test.

To round out my middle school experience I often hung out with Wilson, mainly at school.  Our primary form of interaction seemed to be sneaking up on the other person and giving them a good, glancing knuckle to the spine, right between the shoulder blades.  This was great fun when done right, although I’m sure we were risking total paralysis.  The last I saw Wilson is a detective with the Fort Worth Police Department.  I wonder if he would laugh if I pulled the same stunt again for old times sake, or would he just Tase me?

November 8

Lake Worth had a somewhat unusual class schedule at that time, at least for the Junior High, which was trimesters.  It was a bit odd because the second trimester wrapped around the Christmas holidays.  But they also had classes I would never have been able to access in Big Lake.  One of my first trimesters in seventh grade our math teacher taught a class on German.  Another trimester I took Japanese from Mr. Sechrist, the English teacher.  I especially enjoyed this class because Mr. Sechrist had actually been to Japan and as part of the class he would give out props.  We learned to use chopsticks, for instance, and for years I still had these little ceramic boats to rest my chopsticks on.  To this day I remember basic greetings and can count to at least twelve in both languages.

Mr. Sechrist was also, in retrospect, very likely gay but I never heard it brought up.  He was later the high school librarian and to this day volunteers as both museum and tour guide in the historic part of Fort Worth.  I’m sure he thought I was the perfect little fascist in training after I wrote a class paper defending Richard Nixon since, after all, he was the one who pulled our troops out of Vietnam!

The main church activity that I was involved in that I actually cared anything about was the youth group.  Randy’s older siblings Steve and Chris, his sister, were regulars, as well as Cynthia, daughter of one of the deacons, and her boyfriend Loval, and Eddie.  Most of them exist only in sparse memories.  I remember Eddie because he had a Mustang with a custom shifter knob.  Steve sticks out in my mind because he did janitorial work for the church and I enjoyed pestering him.  The typical scenario involved me crawling into the sanctuary while he was buffing the floor and unplugging his cord.  It usually ended with me on the floor screaming as he tried to get a clean shot at the top of my head with his senior ring.  He definitely hurt me a few times, but then I was bugging the crap out of him.  The main thing I remember about Chris was the rumor of her getting caught doing drugs in the church bathroom.  Cynthia and Loval I remember a lot more because we were involved with a music group for awhile, along with Eddie.  I have even seen them at two different events during the past year, so we’re still in touch now and then.  But the first year or two my main memory of Cynthia came from when we would go to her parents’ house to swim.  Not long after she would appear in her bikini I would disappear to the bathroom off of the garage to revel in adolescent fantasies fueled by her size D top.  Memories of Loval center around his car, a jacked up, souped up Barracuda with the stereotypical foot-shaped gas pedal.  I will never forget zooming down the newly completed Loop 820, looking over Cynthia’s shoulder and watching the speedometer approach 120 miles per hour.

The summer between seventh and eighth grades the band director Mr. Phelps asked me to take home a saxophone and practice.  Evidently we were short on woodwinds and heavy on percussion.  So I spent a good part of the summer driving people crazy while learning the school fight song on tenor sax.  I had a very good sense of pitch (although probably not ‘perfect’ pitch) and rhythm came naturally.  I also started taking piano lessons from Cynthia’s grandmother, Oma.  She gave me a very good foundation and always tried to strike a balance between the basics and classics on one hand and contemporary songs on the other.  I think she recognized that I was much more apt to practice an Elton John song than Franz Lizst.  More often than not I walked to her house, which was easily a mile and a half.  Unfortunately this left me vulnerable to one of the few bullies in Lake Worth.  Rodney was the younger brother of three who were all constantly in fights and in jail.  Why he felt compelled to target me I’ll never know, but as I was walking to piano practice he was walking the other way and as he passed me he stopped and sucker punched me in the jaw, and then stood there as if I was going to suddenly launch a vicious counter-attack.  Instead I ran to a nearby yard of someone who I think was a church member.  He finally walked off.  He is one of several on my list of “If I ever see them again…”

I eventually had the complete works of both Elton John and Chicago.  Unfortunately I was most fond of the music of artists whom I had the least chance of emulating.  The sheet music was incredibly complex, the result (no doubt) of advanced classical training.  So I took a shortcut and played using the guitar chords and then improvising the rhythm and key notes.  And of course I sang along.  Again, why I was so drawn to those with above-average vocal ranges?  I could never hit the high notes that Elton and Peter Cetera could.  But I switched to falsetto or sang an octave lower and did what I could.  Enough girls were impressed that I was encouraged to continue.

While I was still ‘going steady’ with Kelli something happened that, in hindsight, may have set some things in motion in my psyche, or at least confirmed them.  Up to this point I had genuinely been a law-abiding kid, but just like the incident in Paisano I was again falsely accused.  We were browsing a five-and-dime store, we being Kelli, Randy and me and I think their dad.  I found a bracelet that I wanted to buy for Kelli.  I had it in my hand and walked around the corner and saw Kelli.  Without even thinking I stuck it into my coat pocket so she wouldn’t see it.  The next thing I new I was being drug backward by an arm around my neck by the store manager.  Yes, he was accusing me of shoplifting.  I think Kelli’s dad finally talked him down off of what he obviously thought was the bust of the year.  I was again humiliated and embarrased, and this time in front of my girlfriend.  The police were never called, but I could tell the manager was sure I was guilty.  Within a year I deliberately revisited that store three or four times and purposefully stole miscellaneous trinkets and worthless crap, just to prove to that stupid idiot that if I was a thief he would never know.  I’ve proven it again many times since, at different places.  Soft drinks from a gas station, cigarettes and fruit pies from grocery stores, motorcycle and automobile gas from gas stations.  I once stole a demo fake cell phone from a display in an auto dealership.  And don’t get me started about hot checks and firearms.  But I have to wonder if this urge didn’t start with these false accusations.  Perhaps I should run this by a therapist some time…

I enjoyed being around the older band members.  I always associate Chicago’s “Wishing You Were Here” with that period because this girl was playing the Chicago VII LP in the band hall.  I believe I was in the eighth grade then.  This was about the time that Randy was diagnosed with cancer.

It was a mole on his lip.  He’d always had it, but evidently it started changing colors and they had him tested.  Malignant Mellanoma.  I saw him afterwards and he showed me the tic-tac-toe criss-cross pattern of cuts on his arm where evidently they let the chemicals soak in.  He seemed to be taking it all in stride.  Not too long after that he went back for more treatments and I saw less of him.  I remember visiting him in the hospital and getting to see him in his room.  But later when we went to his house his room was off-limits.  Either his parents or mine were trying to protect me, and I was too naive to realize that I should have insisted on it.  He was my friend.  The next thing I remember was crying at his funeral.

The one thing I have done so far in my life that might be considered a claim to fame is a very brief stint as the boyfriend of a TV sitcom star.  If you watched TV in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s you saw my ex-girlfriend, first on Disney’s New Mouseketeers and then on 209 episodes of The Facts of Life.  Yes, that’s her…..Blair Warner!  (A.k.a. Lisa Whelchel)   I always got a kick out of watching that show because the character she was playing was pretty much the exact opposite of the way she was in real life, back when we were in love.

Lisa’s family attended First Baptist Church in Lake Worth where my dad was pastor.  Her dad drove the church bus most Sunday mornings during this time and I was often coerced into riding along, an effort to boost the numbers a bit, I suspect.  When Lisa rode along she often helped lead the main body of passengers (neighborhood children) in singing, or she would entertain them with a bit of ventriloquism.  She honed her skills on the bus and I later saw her put on a very nice ventriloquism performance in a school talent show.  Other than that I rarely saw her at school as I was a couple of years ahead of her.  A CCM Magazine interview with her mentions the following which I originally assumed was a reference to myself:

“While the other kids were having food fights in the cafeteria, she and her only friend, the preacher’s son, were off in a corner studying.”

As it turns out she was referring to someone else, but for years I thought that it was me and that I had just forgotten it.  I gave her memory the benefit of the doubt, however, since I also don’t recall a brief ‘love affair’ with Ruthie Martin in the 7th Grade, but Ruthie remembered it enough to bring it up in front of the entire group of attendees at my high school’s 20th reunion!  Trust me, when a woman stands up in front of a group of people and asks you if you remember being in love twenty-five years ago there is only one correct answer, and it doesn’t involve shrugging your shoulders and looking like an amnesia victim!

What I *do* recall is the brief period of time when Lisa and I were ‘going steady.’  I believe it lasted all of two weeks, and the timeframe is a bit difficult to narrow down.  I sporadically kept a diary from February, 1973 to October, 1975.  Most of the entries appear to mark either the beginning or ending of a romantic relationship and I can hardly read them now without laughing out loud!  On December 7, 1974 I wrote the following:

“I have since left Karen and have gone on to other girls.  For instance, Regina and Sharon.  But now I’m having a problem making up my mind.  Lisa Whelchel or Kelli?  I think Kelli likes another boy, but I don’t know if Lisa has a boyfriend or not.  I hope not!”

On the 11th I noted, “Lisa doesn’t seem to notice me.”  And on March 3, 1975 I made the following mature observation:

“I seem to be doing pretty good with Lisa Whelchel.  Yesterday, in Training Union, she and another girl came in from another class.  I made the usual funny jokes.  But today in school she told me “Hi!”!  That’s a switch.  I hope to really get something going with her!”

I hope you are get as much laughter out of this as I do.

I somehow failed to record the ‘climax’ of this torrid affair which occurred on the night my family went to her house, for dinner I believe.  The grown-ups talked and drank coffee in the kitchen and Cody did what all little brothers are supposed to do and pestered us.  As crazy as it sounds I only remember two things about that evening.  One thing is how embarrassed she became when Cody found a pair of her panty hose lying around somewhere and thought it would be great fun to show them to me.  The other thing is the odd way we walked around the house together….instead of holding hands we somehow ended up with her holding on to my thumb.  It felt awkward but I was so excited that she was touching me at all I couldn’t figure out how to adjust!

The next diary entry that mentions her was on September 6, 1975:

“Things have been going okay lately.  In my love life, I guess I will have to say I’m still hung up on Lisa.  I have started clipping newspaper articles of her and keeping them.”

The rest of that entry goes on to describe all of the other girls that had been grabbing my attention.  (Hey, I was fourteen, what do you expect?)  The newspaper articles in question were related to some of her early beauty pageants and acting roles at the local theater Casa Manaña.  She was out of town a lot on weekends after that, and before you know it she was living in California with her mom and running around wearing mouse ears as a member of the “New Mouseketeers.”  That was the break that eventually led to “The Facts of Life.”

The last time I saw her was several years later when I was attending college at Dallas Baptist University.  This would have been somewhere between late 1979 and late 1980.  (I believe that the first season of Facts of Life had already aired.)  I was running around helping get things set up for a concert, I think it was one of the last for a Christian group named Dogwood.  It was either that or when 16-year old Amy Grant did a concert there.  Lisa and a friend from her church came in and I was pleasantly surprised that she remembered me.  We chatted ever-so-briefly but I had to get back to work and I didn’t see her afterwards.  In retrospect I should have hunted her down and had a great evening catching up on her life, but I didn’t, and so that’s where this story ends as my 15 minutes of fame was up.

November 7

My first summer in Lake Worth was one of astounding growth and wonder at the world around me.  We lived in a subdivision off of a semi-major road overlooking the rest of the town and the local drive-in theater.  Lake Worth wasn’t a large school system (I would have 76 students in my graduating class) but we were a suburb of Fort Worth which was in the beginnings of a major growth spurt that continues to this day.  I spent the last half of my twelfth year, the last year before I was officially a teenager, in a large metropolitan area after having spent the previous eight years in the wilderness.  It was a drastic change and I quickly forgot about Big Lake.  I didn’t have time to remember.

I spent most of the rest of the summer of 1973 hanging out with kids I met at church, mainly Randall Tate and his sister Kelli.  Randy was the ultimate ‘cool kid’ to me.  He had longer hair, he was fairly free to roam about, and he smoked cigarettes.  I picked up the cigarette habit fairly easily.  I was soon smoking in secret at our house by hiding them in a crawlspace underneath which was accessed by a small wooden door on the side.  Mom claims to have known what was going on but I don’t recall her confronting me on the issue.  I would often walk the mile down Azle Avenue to the 7-11 where Randy and I would meet, then we would take the shortcut to his house, often stopping and climbing in some trees and smoking and drinking soft drinks and talking.  His house wasn’t large and he shared a room with Steve, his older brother.  His older brother had albums and a record player.  My favorite was Cheech and Chong’s Big Bambu, which came complete with rolling paper.  It was my initiation into drug culture and comedy and the Mexican accent.  (Thanks Cheech and Tommy!)

By the time the school year started I already had a few acquaintances so the transition to full classloads and the new facility was not too traumatic.  I was ‘going steady’ with Randy’s sister, Kelli, by this time and I was a grade behind Randy so I didn’t see him except for breaks or ‘recess’ time and maybe lunch.  Many times we would walk to the far side of the elementary school playground and smoke cigarettes.  Randy was an old hand, blowing smoke rings now and then.  One day he announced that we were going to the fast food burger place up the street so we went.  It was just me and him, but I enjoyed the off-campus trip.  Unfortunately my joy was short-lived.  The school principal was Mr. Kittrell, a long-time resident and former star football player and coach.  I was a bit surprised to see him walk up to the door, but I was even more surprised to see him stick his head in and invite Randy and I to a little visit to his office immediately after lunch.  I asked Randy what this was all about, and he seemed to think that I had lost my mind.  Evidently I had been under the impression that we had an open campus policy for lunch, when in fact we were strictly forbidden from leaving campus during school hours.  Randy thought I knew this, but I most certainly did not.

After lunch we joined the other boys Mr. Kittrell had caught during his lunchtime round-up.  He went down the line, one at a time, asking each boy if he knew that lunch off-campus was against the rules.  One by one each boy dutifully repeated “Yes, sir.”  And then he got to me.  “No, sir.”  He evidently couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and asked me again, and I attempted to explain that I thought it was OK to leave.  This seemed to anger him.  The audacity of this kid to not only break the rules, but to then LIE about his innocence!  I thought I could feel a little extra zip in his swing when it was my turn to get paddled.  Welcome to the big city!

When the sign-up list for the track and field team went around I was interested, but for some strange reason I declined, thinking that my parents wouldn’t allow it or wouldn’t want me to, something they denied when it came up at a later date.  I’m not sure why I made that decision, but I’ve often wondered how things might have turned out differently if I had signed up.  Instead I signed up for band class and continued my percussion track.  Interestingly enough, due to the size of our school junior high music students often played with the older band members in parades and concerts.  I don’t remember if we played at football games, but I think not.  I do remember starting off with the cymbals which, unfortunately, were not traditional drum and bugle corps cymbals but much larger, heavier symphony band cymbals.  I occasionally attempted to do fancy spins but one wrong move and they would either break a wrist or take your head off.  I was always sore after each event from muffling the crash by driving the cymbals into the space between my chest and arm.

November 6

Big Lake had the usual assortment of churches, Baptist, Methodist, etc.  The two other churches that we had the most interaction with were the Assembly of God and Bethel Baptist.  I remember Bethel Baptist mostly due to a ‘concert’ they had with some sort of Jesus Movement music group.  To illustrate how out of sync we were with the rest of the world, I was totally enthralled by this female duo singing an acoustic version of “Put your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.”  It was pretty much standard issue California folk music but it was pretty radical for West Texas.  Those girls must have been from the big city, like Odessa, Midland or San Angelo.

Our interaction with the Assembly of God was more due to the fact that mom and dad befriended the Clamons.  Ben was the pastor, and they had a boy about my age, Chip.  I remember doing at least one sleep-over over there, and it was kinda strange.  I’m pretty sure he had bunk beds, but we were both in the same bunk.  And I don’t remember what we talked about (although in my mind it was girls) but I do remember him attempting to hump me from behind.  It was only MUCH later that the thought occurred to me to look him up and find out if he was gay or not.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he is, but then again it may have just been raging hormones.

One other way that our church interacted with others was our traditional Friday night hamburger cookout/fellowship after high school home games.  All town residents were invited, and I believe hamburgers were free to the football team members.  The men took over the kitchen and grilled hamburgers by the dozens.  It’s a pleasant memory.  But then it isn’t much of a stretch to associate churches with food.  It’s the number one leverage for attendance!

My last year in Big Lake I was in sixth grade.  I somehow ended up on the track team, which was really just a farm team for the older grades.  I especially enjoyed staying at the back of the lead pack and trying to time my move and pass up as many as I could on the final stretch.  I never did excel at high jump or hurdles, not being particularly tall.  I don’t recall much success at pole vaulting or long jumping either.  But I could run decently.  Unfortunately it turned out to be my last year in organized sports.

One thing that I DID particularly excel at was band.  Again, I don’t recall the details but I’m sure it involved some sort of tryout, and I ended up in the percussion section.  It was the beginning of a lifelong pursuit and enjoyment of music, not just as a listener.  I put in a lot of time practicing my snare drum techniques.  I would use those skills for years.

As a kid, as far as I knew we were all happy with being in Big Lake.  Evidently my mom wasn’t quite as happy as the rest of us.  I think it had to do with the hot, dry dusty climate more than anything else.  And I’m sure the pervasive odor of sulfur that was a byproduct of drilling for oil didn’t help any.  So when her friend from high school, Pearl Levar, contacted us about possibly preaching at their church in Lake Worth in view of a call, the Lord mysteriously led us in that direction.  In short order we were approved and called and packed.  Our eight-year stay in Big Lake was at an end.  It was the summer of 1973, and I was twelve years old.  I remember being sad, seeing Big Lake fade away out the rear window of the car, but I was looking forward to this mysterious Lake Worth place.  The school was underground!

We visited the Levars during our initial visit, and I spent a good part of the time outside sitting on the grass, my back up to a cement barrier at the edge of the apartment complex parking lot, listening to my portable AM/FM transistor radio I had received the previous Christmas.  My mouth hung open, my eyes were wide.  All up and down the dial, no matter where I tuned it, there was music!  Station after station.  I was in heaven!  I knew I was going to like the big city.

On my first visit to the junior high school that summer, I was picturing some sort of military bomb shelter type of place where there was a long ramp leading down to the doors.  In fact, when you get to the school you saw the elementary school and the high school in what were very traditional type school buildings.  Each was on either side of the street.  The elementary school was farther back off the road, and there was a good reason for that, because the junior high was in-between.  All you could see of it was four small square brick buildings, each was the top of a stairwell.  In fact the road passed directly over the top of the cafeteria!  This may seem strange when you first see it, but the practicality is obvious the first time you are shaken to the core as a massive B-52 rumbles overhead barely 1000 feet in the air, it’s eight jet engines drowning out every other sound.  Between those behemoths and the frequent F-16 fighter jets from Carswell Air Force Base directly across Lake Worth the average teacher lost seven minutes per class just waiting to be able to speak.  The junior high suffered no such problems.

November 5

I’m pretty sure that Tommy Woods was the one who also talked me into attempting to break my arm.  Normally that wouldn’t appeal to me, but the carrot at the end of the stick was the idea that if you broke something you wouldn’t have to go to school for awhile.  That was enough for me, so the next thing you know we are both on top of my fence jumping off onto a large piece of cardboard, trying to land elbow-first.  The cardboard was, I guess, so we wouldn’t get too dirty, or maybe to reduce the pain.  I’m sure there was a really good reason for it but it escapes me at this time.  After several attempts we were a little sore but that’s about it.  Apparently the body’s natural reactions kept kicking in and made it rather impossible to land wrong on purpose.

We didn’t often do amazing, exciting things as a family, partially due to our location and partially due to our finances.  But occasionally we had some fun just like big city people.  Once dad took my brother and I outside of town to shoot off some fireworks.  It was great fun until we realized that the bottle rockets had started a fire in someone’s pasture.  Dad retrieved a blanket from the car and we somehow managed to stomp it out before it turned into a serious grass fire.  I also enjoyed visiting Mr. Solomon at the train depot.  I specifically remember his massive brass telegraph key.  I was rather fascinated by that.

One of our regular trips was the local steak house, especially after church.  We also had a drive-in theater.  I always remember seeing the Ten Commandments there, but mom says we actually saw that on a trip to Odessa.  Eighty miles for a movie.  That movie was visual reference material for a whole lot of the Old Testament for much of my life.

Occasionally relatives would visit from Iowa or North Carolina.  My mom’s brother Bobby stayed for awhile one time and so did her mom.  My dad’s brother Don and his wife Linda also visited at least once, and we went down to Mexico at Del Rio.  All I really remember from that trip was a ring we picked up from a street vendor, which lasted less than a week before breaking.

I only retain two specific memories from my grandmother’s visit, both involving a traumatic event.  One of them was a dream I had, where I was standing in the dining room and my grandmother was standing in the kitchen cooking something on the stove.  My dog, Patches, was clamped down on one of my feet in spite of the fact that he was missing his lower jaw.  I was standing on one foot, hopping around and trying not to fall over, and too panicked to speak, attempting to get my grandmother’s attention but failing.  The other event was most definitely not a dream, although I wish it was.

For some reason I can’t remember which friends I was playing with in my back yard, although I think it was one boy and one girl.  We were playing truth or dare and it was soon obvious that dares were just an excuse to do something you really didn’t mind doing any way (else why would you ever do it at all?)  So I was dared to take off my clothes and run into the neighbors yard, climb the clothesline pole, and run back.  Much more creative than just stripping!  So I did.  I remember dropping my pants.  I remember climbing the pole.  But I really remember when I was coming back to my yard.  I had left the neighbor’s yard and was climbing between a juniper tree and the fence to approach the wooden gate that led to my yard.  I was standing on a trimmed branch where my head was above the fence and there she was, my grandmother standing next to my clothes!  She looked a bit mad.  She had to order me to get back in the yard and get dressed, which I finally did.

The first TV we owned was probably used, but it was unusual.  It was a Japanese portable, where the handle doubled as a stand.  The black and white screen was no larger than eight inches diagonal.  It also had an AM/FM radio built in.  I remember seeing the first human landing on the moon on that TV.  I also remember watching Star Trek, although I recall that being in color.  Perhaps my memories are skewed by reruns.  But one particular episode involved this planet that was seemingly abandoned, until this small creature dislodged itself from the ceiling and floated down to Spock’s back and began sucking the ever-lovin’ Vulcan life right out of him!  Thankfully they all survived, but I almost didn’t.  That night after I turned out the lights I saw one of those evil things on my ceiling.  My mind tried to talk me out of it, that it was just an illusion, a reflection or some such.  But it took me several minutes to work up the nerve to jump out of bed and lunge for the light switch.  I scrunched my shoulders up and my head back and grimaced, expecting to feel my life being drained, but nothing happened.  I later determined that a street light was coming through a crack in the blinds and reflecting off of the ceiling light fixture.  I was temporarily banned from watching Star Trek because of that.

Sometimes my ability to entertain myself was a good thing.  When I was in little league I spent countless hours throwing a ball into a net which was on a metal frame.  The netting would bounce the ball back up in the air like a pop fly.  It was good pitching, throwing and catching practice.  But I also entertained myself in ways that were expensive.  Normally one would not think that string, a handkerchief and a plastic toy soldier would be expensive, but I was making a parachute and the toy soldier proved to be insufficient weight to properly open the chute.  So I took another handkerchief and tied it around a large steel ball, probably an inch across or slightly more.  This was almost too heavy since it fell a lot faster, so I used the principle of centrifugal force and gave it a few good spins before launching it into outer space.  As I was looking up and noticing that the parachute wasn’t traveling very far I heard a strange noise, like crunching glass.  I brought my head back down and my gaze rested on the neighbor’s car in their driveway with a small hole in the corner of the driver’s side window.  The rest of the window was full of cracks.  Safety glass.  Dad paid the bill.

The only time I escaped a spanking for which I was due was one time when I was playing at a neighbor’s house at the far end of the block we lived on (probably three doors down).  Their house was off of the main street, mostly accessed from the side street.  I was playing with their kids which I absolutely do not remember.  But when dad came around the corner looking for me (evidently I wasn’t supposed to be out) I was swinging in a rope swing in a tree that was between their driveway and the alley.  Separating the tree from the driveway was a low rock wall made of rough-cut limestone.  When I heard dad coming I attempted to bail out of the swing and managed to land wrong and clipped the back of my head on a rock.  It wasn’t a large wound, but it bled profusely and dad had a hard time being the firm disciplinarian while I was possibly bleeding to death.  I ended up at the doctor’s office and the spot where I got stitches is still visible to this day.

For reasons that I’m sure are best left to psycho-analysts I’ve always felt closer to my father than my mother.  Maybe it’s just male bonding, or maybe it is somehow related to the infamous milk incident.  My mother grew up in a very transitory and dysfunctional family situation.  They were sharecroppers.  So they made do with what they had and that included churning their own butter and cooling milk off in the stream.  It is not surprising that she retained a fondness for buttermilk, but I grew up the child of civilized city-dwellers and it was nothing but Grade A whole milk for me!  But for some reason mom thought I should like buttermilk.  The fact that I had sniffed it and tried a very small sip at some point, resulting in gagging noises and grimaces, did not deter her in her quest.  She was evidently sure that if I really tried it I would like it.  So one night near bedtime she handed me a juice glass of milk, which I of course began to drink.  But the first mouthful didn’t even make it to my esophagus before my throat clenched tight and my eyes popped open in surprise.  She had given me buttermilk!  She tried to get me to swallow it but before she could stop me I had spun around, opened the pantry door and spewed the entire mouthful into the trash can.  Maybe that would teach her a lesson.  I know it taught me one!

While it didn’t happen at the very end of our time in Big Lake, perhaps the most unusual event during our time there happened when I was around ten years old, or maybe eleven.  One of the churches in our local association was the Baptist church in Rankin, and mom and dad were friends with the pastor there.  For some reason we had their music/youth director come to our church, perhaps just to fill in, or perhaps for a revival, I’m not sure.  Benny went to dinner with us afterwards at the one and only steak house in town and at some point offered to take me to his house for the weekend.  He often had kids around and did events with them, etc.  So off I went.  I don’t remember if it was that weekend or the next, but it was pretty soon after the initial offer.

So I went to Rankin with Benny.  I don’t remember the entire weekend’s details, or even how long I was there, but I do remember that he took me outside of town, took a dirt road over the railroad tracks, and he stopped the car.  We switched places and he let me drive!  I did pretty good but started overcorrecting when we would get to a creek crossing and there were barriers on each side of the road.  We drove down the road a ways, and then I think I let him drive back.  And that is how my first time ever driving a car was in a Chevrolet Corvair!

Back at Benny’s house, things got a bit strange.  I remember two or three other boys lying around watching TV in nothing but their whitie tighties.  I was encouraged to do the same, and did so but it was definitely strange.  At one point I caught Benny in the kitchen with a needle.  He was giving himself an insulin injection (or so he said) due to being a diabetic.  And that was it, that’s all I remember.

Well, OK, there is this one more thing I remember from that weekend.  I’m pretty sure I only stayed over one night, and I was the only boy who did so.  And that’s when he touched me, and began masturbating me.  It burned a little from the friction, but it felt good too.  And he put my hand on his cock which was (to me) large and hard and wet.  I don’t think I did much for him directly, but as best I can remember I had my first orgasm that night.  As far as experiences with pedophiles go it was pretty mild.  I mean, he didn’t rape me anally, and he didn’t kill me.  And he let me drive his car.  As far as I can tell the main effect of this incident was that I now knew what an orgasm was and thus began my long and glorious relationship with masturbation.  And while I did have two more encounters with other boys it didn’t do anything for me, and all my masturbatory fantasies involved women.  One of my most frequent early fantasies involved my bed being surrounded by women, a couple of which would either do things to me or tell me what to do while the rest watched.  Considering the fact that I had absolutely NO access to or exposure to porn or erotic writing I find this fantasy interesting.  But it is obvious that I am straight, in spite of my homosexual introduction to sex.

I never made a repeat trip to Rankin, and Benny was eventually run out of town by angry parents.  Frankly, he’s lucky he didn’t just disappear and end up at the bottom of some rancher’s stock pond.  I’ve often wondered where he ended up.  Prison?  Sex offender status?  The priesthood?  Who knows.

November 4

One constant companion in west Texas was travel. Any sort of sporting event through school involved a lot of travel. We would often travel to other towns for meetings of the regional Southern Baptist association or state associations. One frequent stop was a visit to the Fortune’s in Sheffield, Texas, a town even more remote than Big Lake, if that was possible. Their oldest daughter, Ruthie, was close enough to my age that we spent a lot of time together when we were there. I remember playing with a tennis ball and racket, just me and a wall. I also remember one time when Ruthie and I were riding in the back of a pickup truck, standing in the truck bed, leaning up on the cab, the wind in our faces. We were singing “If I Had a Hammer” and “A Hundred Miles.” To this day those songs bring back that day, wind in our hair, sun on our faces, as we sang across the wide-open spaces of the edge of the Trans-Pecos desert where you really could hear the whistle blowing a hundred miles.

Sheffield was only about forty miles from Big Lake as the crow flies, but what roads there were had to go around mesas and through passes and so a forty mile distance could easily turn into an hour and a half drive. For the hundreds and possibly thousands of miles I spent in the back seat of a car driving all over West Texas there were three things which were always within view. One was oil wells, pumping up and down, their diesel engines chugging away. Any time there was no other noise to compete with you could hear this constant sound. Even in town when you had the windows open at night you could hear them pumping away, the sound drifting in and out with the breeze. Our high school, now partially infamous due to the movie The Rookie, really does have an oil well pumping away right across the street from the front entrance. The mineral rights and taxes on the oil have kept this entire part of the state from becoming nothing but ghost towns.

Another constant were the utility lines, the old style wooden poles with wooden cross beams topped by colored glass insulators. No matter where you were you could find a line of these stretching out of site to both horizons. And then there is the mesquite tree. It is the only tree growing on the majority of land because it doesn’t need rain with tap-roots going down as far as a hundred feet. The ranchers are always trying to clear it in a never-ending war. But for most of the traveling I did that’s all you could see, and it was just tall enough to block the view from my vantage point. Utility lines, mesquite trees and oil wells. They are the background of my west Texas memories.

We often traveled to the ranch run by the Tuckers. At least half of the trip was on dirt roads and we alleviated the boredom by looking for snakes or tarantulas crossing the roads. Several times my brother and I were allowed to get out and chase a tarantula, many times stoning it to death. Looking back, this seems a bit cruel, but then we probably weren’t wearing seat belts either. I remember one time that my dad ran over a snake in the road. I guess I thought he would swerve because it upset me. But what makes it stick in my mind is the fact that he slowed to a stop, put the car in reverse and made sure it was dead! I was so upset that I cried. In spite of his excuse of protecting innocent people I evidently had no problem allowing a snake to crawl through the brush of a ranch, eating mice and rats. It was one of the few times that my dad did something I considered improper.

West Texas was settled primarily by ranchers, then later by those involved in the oil industry. I grew up around these people, even though they were not a part of my daily life. But I have many firmly entrenched images of them in my mind. Certain faces pop up when I think of a cowboy. Leathery faces and hands, tanned below the brim of their hat, boots with sharp-pointed toes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that one of our annual summer trips was to a camp site in a remote location first frequented by cowboys on cattle drives. Paisano Encampment is near Marfa and Alpine, but that just tells you it is on the way to the Big Bend National Park, possibly one of the most remote, barren landscapes in North America. The buildings are scattered in between rock formations. Children are evidently still allowed to crawl all over the rocks, many of which come complete with fifty-foot cliffs. I’m surprised no one has ever been seriously injured out there. I remember lying on a bed in one of the cabins one summer, and I think it must have been our last summer in Big Lake, and listening to the radio. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Get Down” was playing:

Once upon a time I drank a little wine
Was as happy as could be, happy as could be
Now I´m just like a cat on a hot tin roof
Baby what do you think you´re doin´ to me

Told you once before
And I won´t tell you no more
So get down, get down, get down
You´re a bad dog baby
But I still want you ´round – around
I still want you around

Texas is hot enough, but the heat in this part of the state was oppressive. The main building was referred to as the ‘tabernacle’ and was some sort of strange partially geodesic dome shape. The rafters inside crisscrossed in every direction. Even as a child I was a veteran of church services, and there wasn’t much I hadn’t already heard, so I was quite skilled at occupying myself until they were over. This was made easier in Paisano because I could sit right there in the tabernacle, behaving myself, and to be entertained all I had to do was look up. There were bats! They just hung there, occasionally moving around when it was light. But at night they flew in and out. I’m sure it was quite distracting for the preacher to see so many people looking up and around every few minutes.

One final thought on Paisano. One summer I had a wallet. I think it may have been one that I had made myself as part of cub scouts. I lost it. So my dad went with me to the office to see if it had been turned in. We described it to Mr. Basham, who happened to be one of the members of our church. He was also an old ranch hand leathery-skinned cowboy. He pulled my wallet out from behind the counter and announced “Yes, we found it…” and then he looked right at me, his face flushing a bit, “…in the women’s bathroom!” With this pronouncement of judgment he slapped it onto the counter. He was obviously getting quite some righteous satisfaction out of calling me out for my obvious flagrant improper behavior. I’m sure he could picture me spying on women’s panties around their ankles and who knows what else. As we left I explained to my dad that I had indeed used the women’s restroom, I just didn’t know I was in the women’s side! No women came in while I was there. As I recall my dad believed me, but the righteous anger on that cowboy church member’s face stuck in my mind. I resented and avoided him the rest of my time in Big Lake.

One of my friends that I remember the most from Big Lake was Tommy Woods. I remember him best because every time I was around him I was either getting hurt or in trouble. I think his dad was raising him alone so he spent a lot of time by himself. One time we were playing ‘Marco Polo’ in his back yard. He didn’t have a pool, so we were just walking around. I was covering my eyes with one hand and walking down the fence line. I ran right into a yellow jacket nest and I received several stings to the right side of my head before I knew what happened. My mom, as usual, provided the first aid, after I had walked several blocks back to my house. Another incident in his back yard was when he was showing me how to golf. His dad worked at the golf course so he knew the basics. Unfortunately I did not, including where NOT to stand when someone is swinging a golf club. He raised a wood on the backswing and it whacked me, either in the head or near my mouth, I don’t recall. Once again, Tommy Wood = pain. Another back yard incident, this time in MY back yard, was when Tommy thought it would be good fun to throw darts at me. I hid behind a tree yelling at him to stop, but he just kept throwing them. I stuck my head out to yell again not knowing he had already launched one. It struck me right under my right eye, bounced off my cheek bone and just hung there, lodged in the skin. I’m not sure who was more shocked, me or him! It came out easily enough, but I was an inch away from wearing a patch the rest of my life. And yet for some reason my mom didn’t forbid me from ever hanging out with him again. It would have saved a lot of heartache…..

The piece de resistance occurred one day when I was hanging out with Tommy and some other friend. They talked me into joining them while we all played with matches. For some reason the location we picked just happened to be a small pen off of the alley behind the mayor’s house. There were, I think, a goose or perhaps a duck here, and a small area with hay in it. We had climbed up on the hay, maybe two feet tall, and were dropping lit matches down between the hay and the wooden fence, a space of only a few inches. This fence was probably six feet tall made of tall skinny poles woven together, similar to an old frontier fort look. The tops were sharpened points. Not being skilled with matches I ended up losing most of mine by opening my matchbox upside down. After all of mine had been lit, dropped and extinguished one of the other boys, probably Tommy, managed to – surprise! – start a fire. Since we were on top of the hay everyone began scrambling to climb over the fence and run for it. For some reason I couldn’t get over the fence. I think I was barefoot, and maybe not tall enough. I was trapped. The smoke rose, the fire department was called. The hay was burning pretty hot by the time the fire engine came to a stop in the alley, the siren winding down. Magically a fireman appeared through a gate right next to the hay pile. Why hadn’t WE used that? I have no idea. He popped into view with his dirty yellow flame-retardant coat, picked me up, and deposited me into the mayor’s back yard. I looked up and saw the mayor and his wife and their kids all standing in a row, staring at me. I’ve always wondered why he couldn’t have just grabbed me and taken me to the alley.

One time I was walking down the sidewalk toward the church and the mayor’s wife was out front watering her yard. She turned the stream in my direction until I walked across the street. She didn’t want me anywhere near her house, and I guess I can understand why. Evidently the preacher’s kid was getting a reputation. They probably thought Tommy Woods was a saint.

November 3

So here I was, a rather naive, somewhat innocent preacher’s kid, living that peculiarly insulated life but I was surrounded by the children of ranchers and oilfield roustabouts. In spite of that I only remember attracting the attention of one particular bully, Jimmy. For reasons that I don’t remember (and I doubt he does either) he and his thug buddies decided that we needed to fight after school on this one particular day. I attempted to sneak by them, they spied me, and so I ran. I ran down streets, through alleys, over and under fences, through yards. They never caught me. And is it any surprise that in 6th grade I began running with the track team? I somehow ended up with a paperback karate instructional book and for awhile I practiced thrusting my fingers in a bucket of gravel and stances and kicks. I doubt it would have been much use other than amusement, but it made me feel better and at least I began thinking of fighting back instead of running. I’ve often thought that I feel sorry for the next person who tries to start a fight with me, because the frustration of all the bullies I ran into over the years is going to come out in one episode of psychotic rage.

For awhile I joined the cub scouts. I was always looking through the book for badges I could earn, but I honestly can’t remember a single one of them. I do, however, remember the camping trip we went on. Evidently camping is a lot more fun when you have a group of new kids to play with. So of course we did the inevitable snipe hunt, but I didn’t fall for it and walked back to camp when I saw the hunt leaders peeling off and turning around. I was no fun. And later when they did their secret initiation rite they took us one by one from a tent to where a few men were standing around a fire. One of them was slowly sifting through the fire with a branding iron. They recited some pledgy mumbo jumbo and then blindfolded me. Unfortunately for them I had already spied the spatula handle sticking out of a nearby ice chest so I had figured out what was going on. When they stuck the ice-cold spatula on my bared midriff all they got out of me was a slight inhale. They took the blindfold off and the look of disappointment was palpable. So they asked if I could at least scream to give it some realism. I did, and this made them happy. I guess I should have figured out by this time that adults loved to trick kids but it didn’t take.

In case it isn’t obvious by this point, I was a lover not a fighter. My first true bona fide girlfriend was Karen Rice. She lived across the street from me. For a brief time (was it weeks or months? I don’t recall) we were an item. She would come over to my house and we would climb up into one of the trees in the front yard. This required the assist of a metal folding chair. The problem was that this also meant that my younger brother could follow us up, so I found a piece of rope and tied it to the chair so we could pull it up after us. Then we could sit in the branches of the tree and kiss. We kissed a lot. I will always remember one afternoon we found a hidden spot in the alley way behind her house, behind a neighbor’s fence if I recall, and sat there for what seems like hours. She reclined with her back across my lap. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I got an inkling that there might be something to this whole girl kissing thing. It was not sexual, but I truly enjoyed it. The only other girlfriend I had of note was a brief strange relationship with Belinda Rios. Belinda was a big girl, a bit rough around the edges as I recall, and I felt more like her possession than her boyfriend. But she had boobs so I hung around as long as I could. I’d truly be afraid to see what she looks like today. I imagine she’s a heavily tattooed lesbian.

I have never been that good at keeping friends, always being a bit of a loner. My childhood was no exception. My brother has a group of friends that he attended school with from Kindergarten through graduation. They are all still in touch to this day, regularly getting together for meals, poker or fantasy football. I have no such group. I enjoyed my friend Keith, mainly because he had cool toys. He seemed rich and spoiled compared to my meager existence but I’m sure his parents felt otherwise. I also hung out with Bruce. I think he was a year older than me. My one specific memory is of us sitting on the floor of his bedroom playing a cassette tape, with both of us attempting to sing along with and count out just how many times Bill Withers would repeat “I know” near the end of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Looking back, it is both funny and strange. I’m pretty sure that I had never seen a single dark-skinned person in my entire life up to that point, and yet here I was in 1971, the year that song came out, listening to it and singing along.
It was in Big Lake that I first began to enjoy music. Of course I had grown up on it in church, but most of the hymns were already a minimum of one-hundred years old. There is no way they could compete with pop radio. I suppose it is a bit surprising that I did not end up a big fan of country and western music. I am sure it was the prevalent music of the area but instead I gravitated to rock. In retrospect it is surprising that Big Lake even had a radio station as the population of the town generally stayed in the 4,000 range. But the nearest town large enough to justify radio was over seventy miles away, so we lucked out that Gracie Hickman was in town. As best I recall she was a widow whose wealth came as a result of a lot of money from oil wells. And at some point someone talked her into funding a radio station and thus was born KWGH, with her own initials in it. It broadcast at 1290AM and it was an all-purpose station. The local pastors took turns getting to sermonize on the air on Sunday mornings and the rest of the time it played mostly country music. But the only time I listened was from 5-6 pm, shortly before signing off for the day. I am sure that this hour, the rock hour, was the result of one lone individual driving up to the station each day with their collection of vinyl LP’s but if I ever meet them I will thank them profusely. The music might not have been what was currently on the charts, but it was close enough for me. It was a lifeline to another world.

But for some strange reason I can only remember one song from that time period, from that station. Perhaps it was because it was so different from anything else being played. I can only imagine if I had been in my teens, driving around town and blasting that song out of my car stereo. Or in my bedroom. Think “That 70’s Show” here. But all I could do was listen and feel some sort of tingle up and down my spine. The song was “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. Fortunately we didn’t have anything like MTV back then because if my dad had seen the spaced out video of Ozzy Osborn radios would have been banned from the house! I somehow ended up with a cassette tape of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” For some reason I did a bit of editing so that the words “This is Major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door” were followed by me screaming as if falling off a cliff, then the song picked up where it left off. It always made me laugh when I played it back.

However, at night I had access to stations in strange places far away. Thanks to the ionosphere I could hear KOMA from Oklahoma City, about four hundred miles away. They advertised scary movies at the local drive-in theater. Sometimes I picked up some station out of New Orleans which seemed to play “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” every night. I was probably hearing the 1971 version by Robert John. I fell asleep many, many nights with my hand on the radio dial, slowly tuning back and forth to adjust for a drifting tuner in search of signals from outer space. Two other songs come to mind from that time period. One was Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” which I only remember because some girl, probably from church, an older, wiser girl, told me that the phrase ‘clouds in my coffee’ was probably referring to LSD. The other was a song that always causes me to think of the first time I heard it. Every time I do, I remember sitting in the car while mom was running an errand or shopping or some such in the ‘big city’ of San Angelo, seventy miles east of Big Lake. It is possible we were at Albertson’s, except that I usually went *in* Albertson’s because there was some sort of Dole Banana promotion where they would put stickers of NFL teams on them. Yes, it was seventy miles to the nearest Albertson’s grocery store. Any way, the song was Three Dog Night’s “Shambala” and this preacher’s kid sang along and soaked up every minute of it in complete oblivion to it’s buddhist theme.

November 2

My reading level was such that many of the church youth took it up as a challenge to try to trip me up. Evidently some of them were convinced my dad had coached me into memorizing things so they would bring a current issue of a newspaper or magazine and thrust it in front of me. Phonetics prevailed, of course. Actually, I think memorization would have been equally impressive! But I’m not sure I actually comprehended at first, although that grew with time.

My parents were and still are very good people. They took the Biblical admonition of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ seriously, but I was able to keep the actual spankings to a minimum. That is probably why I remember them so well. It wasn’t a daily or weekly occurrence, which I am sure that they would attribute to following Biblical principles. One morning my dad reminded me to be sure and cross the street at the intersection as I walked to first grade. I didn’t do this, although I don’t recall disobeying him on purpose (more likely just being scatterbrained). Unfortunately for me he was watching me from the back yard and yelled for me to return home. He gave me a thorough belt-spanking in the garage and sent me on my way. He wasn’t mean or angry about it, and I don’t recall being particularly traumatized, but I’m sure the lesson sunk in to my psyche. As I think back, I’ve generally been a law-abiding citizen and model street-crosser ever since…..well, at least until my trip to New York in 2002. More on that later.

When we first moved to Big Lake we lived in the house owned by the church, commonly referred to as a parsonage. Churches, especially smaller ones, have long used this as a way to help offset their smaller budgets. The church owns the property and it is generally considered an investment, the pastor doesn’t have to deal with a house payment. Unfortunately the idea of “we already gave him free rent” comes up a lot in budget meetings. This is one reason I grew up rather poor, although I never thought of myself that way. It was several years later before my place in the social status became painfully clear. In the meantime I was oblivious to my plight.
The home was much larger than the Seminary apartments we had previously lived in and my parents filled it up using the tried and true technique of the charge card. Our dining room and living room furniture were brand new, straight from J. C. Penney. Forty-two years later they are still struggling with their budget and debt, having maintained a rather steady debt level over the years. The back yard was fenced in with cinder block, the top block being rounded. This made for fairly easy climbing, after which you could walk down the top of the fence like a tightrope artist. It required a bit of a jump, but I think in reality it was about four feet high.
Of course, what back yard is complete without a dog? Our first canine came in a box on Christmas day. It was generally understood that the dog was for me, but Patches was generally everyone’s pet. He nipped my ear and drew blood as we were playing on the carpet but it was an easily forgivable infraction. Patches was the source of much enjoyment over the years. He had the run of the yard, and we fed him well, and we gave him a pretty good amount of attention. But two memories stand out. One was when I had his chain tied off in the front yard and somehow lost track of him. We found him later, dangling off of his leash, suspended off the ground. He had jumped over the fence and the chain wasn’t long enough for him to get back to the ground so he wore his paws bloody trying to get back up on top. Thankfully the leash didn’t choke him to death. He spent a couple of weeks lying in his bed recuperating. I felt so bad, imagining his pain. But soon he was back to normal.

The other memory, the main one I have of him, is when he was taken from me. I came home from school one day and he hopped over the fence to greet me in the front yard. I sent him back over the fence and went inside. By the time I fed and watered him out back he was there. A few minutes later the neighbor showed up at our door, red in the face, mad. She yelled at me about keeping our dog in our yard. I didn’t understand at the time, but evidently Patches had jumped over the fence and attacked the neighbor’s chihuahua, taking a strip of fur off its back. My parents talked to her and in the end it was understood that in order to avoid legal action or, possibly worse in my parents’ eyes, a loss of reputation, we had to get rid of the dog. My dad at least gave me time to say goodbye. I remember sitting on the back porch, crying my eyes out, apologizing over and over while Patches was rather oblivious and just wanted to play. It would be the last time that I owned a pet for almost thirty years.

Being a small town in the late sixties children were still allowed to roam rather freely without fear of abduction. I would often walk to the pool by myself on weekends and especially during summer break. Walking several blocks barefoot was not unusual, in spite of the one-hundred degree or more temperature. I would try to walk in between shady spots on the sidewalk until my feet could not take it any more and I had to hop, skip and jump to the next piece of shade. The cicadas would accompany me with their never-ending rising and falling buzzing noises.

One time in third grade the teacher passed a piece of mica around, explaining that although it was technically a rock, it was very soft and that we should be very careful with it. Being your typical curious kid (or perhaps not so typical) I tested just exactly how soft it was by bending it slightly. Of course a small piece of it broke off in my hand! I passed it on while surreptitiously hiding the broken piece in my pocket. But somehow when the mica made its way back to the front of the class the teacher, Mrs. Mills, knew that a part was missing. She announced this to the whole class and demanded to know who the guilty party was. I’m not sure if she knew it was me, but I was sure that she did so I confessed. I attempted to apologize but she made me get up in front of the whole class and apologize, to them! As if they cared! I was mortified and humiliated. Her insistence in this puzzled me for a long time, but in retrospect I’m sure it had something to do with my father’s profession. Perhaps she was making a point, or maybe she was just trying to help the poor pastor with the wayward son. It was just one of many times I would run into the expectation of perfection and innocence that I would never live up to.

Big Lake was where I came of age in many ways. My first kiss (that I remember) was with, I think, Sheri James while walking her home from school. We did so on a dare, but then dares were just good excuses to do what you already wanted to. She was my first ‘girlfriend’ for a very brief time. It was in either fourth or fifth grade that I caught my first glimpse of the female anatomy, a fellow classmates nipple that was revealed through the arm of sleeveless blouse. She was probably just about due for her first bra, but for some reason I still remember it. I’m guessing it was accompanied by the first hints of testosterone in my system. Later I smoked my first cigarette when offered by one of our upstanding church member’s daughters. Thanks, Candy!

While Big Lake had its share of farmers and ranchers one of the mainstays of employment was the oil fields. The first oil well in the entire region had been drilled just a few miles west of town, the Santa Rita. A boom town named Texxon grew up around it and its population actually dwarfed Big Lake for a time. By the time we lived there Texxon was a fading memory, mostly a ghost town that barely justified the post office, and most of the remaining oil company employees moved to Big Lake and drove all over the area from there.

November 1 – It begins

The term “Preacher’s Kid” seems to have a special place in America’s lexicon. When someone discovers that my father is a pastor there is a standard response. The eyebrow’s arch, the eyes twinkle, a long drawn-out “aaaaAAAaaahhh” escapes the lips, the head begins to nod. “So you’re a preacher’s kid! That explains a lot.” This is typically accompanied by a wink. Even if this person and I just met, there is still an acknowledgement that I am somehow different.

And I am.

It should go without saying that I didn’t ask to be a preacher’s kid. But I was one from the minute I was born. As a matter of fact, before I was born my parents dedicated me, their firstborn, to the Lord for his service, specifically to be a preacher. They took as their inspiration the Biblical story of Samuel. Thus it was determined at the outset that my life would be painted on a canvas of parchment filled with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek letters. In addition, my father was in school at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, so my life’s canvas was bound and framed by the peculiarly southern American fundamentalist brand of religion.

I would be well into my adult life before I would begin to comprehend the effect this would have on me. Fundamentalism was all around me in my formative years, indeed all of my years. Within one week of returning home from the hospital (I was delivered Cesarean) I was at a church meeting (albeit in the nursery). I probably attended an average of three meetings a week from then until I was almost forty. This was, in effect, a long, slow brainwashing. I wasn’t confined to a compound, and we didn’t have secret rituals, but there is an insidious imprint when some of your earliest memories involve praying to be spared an eternity in the never-ending flames of hell. Jesus’ admonitions of “He who is not with me is against me” and “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth” leads to a very black-and-white mindset. There is no room for compromise, and if you stray, just remember; Jesus would rather that you excel at being bad rather than just half-heartedly attempt it.

Thus was set in motion a pattern which would govern my life for nearly four decades. All or nothing. Black or white. No compromise. No moderation. Up or down. In or out. In this I share much in common with the typical suicide bomber and plane-flying jihadist.

Same god, different prophet.

My childhood in Fort Worth was generally unremarkable. I was taken to both Iowa and North Carolina to be shown off to my Dad’s and Mom’s families. I learned how to read and pronounce words using phonetics lessons in the local newspaper. My dad served as a part-time pastor to a small rural congregation in a town almost two hours to the south. It was managing to survive on an agricultural basis but like most small country churches there was no growth. The children who went to college rarely came back. I was evidently a big hit and many pictures survive of me celebrating birthdays there in the homes of several church members. I was allowed to steer a tractor once and promptly drove over a chain link fence. I got to taste milk straight from the cow (after only a little bit of chilling and stirring). I was fascinated with the automated milking machinery. The people were friendly, the meals were home-made and generous. What’s not to like?

When my father graduated from seminary he began preaching at different churches ‘in lieu of a call’ – meaning that he would preach a sermon at a pastorless church and then they would take a vote as to whether or not they felt led to call him to be their pastor. It was all couched in religious terms, as if God was orchestrating the whole matter, but in reality God always seemed to ‘lead’ people to pick the person they initially liked, and pastors always seemed to be ‘led’ to accept the call (of God) from churches who provided the best benefits. Keeping an air of somber sobriety about it all helped to give the appearance of supernatural involvement, but it wasn’t much different than headhunting for a CEO. They even sent out teams of deacons and elders as a ‘search committee’ to go listen to recommended preachers, again in lieu of a call.

Somewhere, somehow, my dad was invited to preach in lieu of a call at a church out rather literally in the middle of nowhere. Interstate Highway 10 proceeds east out of Los Angeles and traverses the desert SouthWest of the United States, joining Phoenix and Tuscon, Arizona, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. In the heart of the Trans-Pecos desert the highway forks, with I-10 proceeding southeast toward San Antonio and I-20 branching off northeast toward Midland and Odessa. But if you could keep going straight ahead for another ninety miles or so you would find a small town in the middle of the Permian Basin oil fields named Big Lake. It is ninety miles south of I-20 and maybe forty miles north of I-10. Mexico is less than three hours away. In 1965 the First Baptist Church made an offer, my dad accepted, and he started his first full-time pastorate.

When we first moved there the town actually did have a lake. It was fed by springs and rain runoff, but as the surrounding area’s oil was pumped out the water table dropped and the lake eventually became a dry bed. I attended kindergarten in a repurposed home and then first grade in a building which was separate from the rest of the school facilities by several blocks. My main memories of kindergarten are graham crackers and milk. I remember more of first grade. We napped (or tried) on mats, we read, we learned to write, we sang. For some reason I’ve never forgotten singing this one particular children’s song with Minnie Cortez. I had a bit of a crush on her. It went something like this:

“Oh PLAYMATE, come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three.
Climb up my apple tree,
Look down my rain barrel
Slide down my cellar door
And we’ll be jolly friends forever more.”

A pivotal event occurred when I was seven years old. I was right at the age when most Protestant denominations believed that one had reached the so-called ‘age of accountability.’ It is a rather strange concept, the product of several hundred years of debate and no small amount of angst and confusion. It emanates from the problem of what happens to the soul of a child if they die. Those who die at birth or shortly thereafter are generally given the benefit of the doubt. It is very comforting to think of angels ushering them directly into the fluffy clouds of heaven behind those gates decorated with pearls. They were innocent. This viewpoint sees sin as a choice. However, a literal interpretation of Scripture has led many to the conclusion that we are all born in a sinful state and will head straight for hell no matter when we die, even before we have the comprehension level necessary for salvation. (This presumes that any one can understand it) Catholics solved this by christening babies, presumably offsetting any sin and giving one a reprieve until later. But over the years even Protestants have mellowed and the general consensus is that when one can understand the whole sin/salvation, heaven/hell concept then one has reached the age where a decision must be made.

The solution is simple enough – bow your head, bend your knees, clasp your hands and repeat after me:

“Heavenly Father, I know that I am a sinner and that I deserve to go to hell. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins. I do now receive Him as my personal Lord and Savior. I promise to serve you the best I can. Please come into my heard and save me. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

I prayed much that same prayer at the tender age of seven. My father, sensing that I was ‘of age’ and not wanting my soul to burn forever in hell, sat me down and explained that he and mom were going to heaven when we died. He didn’t particularly use any strongarm or scare tactics, but the message was clear. Get saved or risk being separated from your parents forever. I predictably prayed the sinner’s prayer, with very sincere tears of repentance falling from my eyes. In short order I was baptised during a Sunday morning church service. I’m sure my dad was proud and thankful and full of joy to baptise me that day.

Recently I have run across several people who, at the very age I was willingly and gladly immersing myself in my parents’ religion, were themselves coming to the realization that religion was illogical and irrational. They stood up to their parents and refused to go to church, or were forced to go and spent their youth in silent rebellion. I am always amazed to hear their stories. It makes me feel like a bit of a lemming, doing what I was told, believing and trusting my elders, taking them at their word for everything. It never occurred to me that any one would think otherwise.

When I was six my brother was born. I’ve seen a lot of pictures of us together when he was very young, but I don’t have a lot of memories of this time. Perhaps having him get all of the attention for awhile affected me. I’m not sure. Perhaps the age difference just meant that it was more difficult for us to enjoy the same games or events. But even though I developed a rather normal group of childhood friends over the years I was very much comfortable playing by myself or reading.

One of my favorite solo games was football. No, not outside but in my room. I had somehow managed to collect a set of small plastic football helmets, one for each NFL team. I split the helmets up into two teams, developed some rules, and used dice to determine player movement. I very carefully moved the helmets only one length for each number on the dice in one of four directions as if they were chess pieces. I was always fair and never cheated and truly enjoyed just seeing which team would win. I suspect I enjoyed the process more than the outcome. I also developed a voracious appetite for reading. The local library was my portal to adventure. In the summer it was not unusual for me to walk several blocks to the library, check out my limit of books, walk back home and read them, walk back to the library, turn the first set of books in and check out another group, walk back home and commence reading. I read Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne and other science fiction classic authors. I read Hardy Boys mysteries. I especially remember knocking off Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island” which was several hundred pages, a weighty tome indeed for a ten-year-old.