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.