Night Fishing

“Night fishing” is a euphemism from the south.

I don’t know what the heck it means; my father used to laugh about it with his cousin Gerry, who was Chubs’s dad. Gerry’d come over, kind of on a regular basis, and he’d sit out in the yard with my dad and mom and laugh, joke, and drink beer. My mother, of course, wouldn’t be outdone. She’d keep pace beer for beer with ol’ Gerry, and pretty soon she’d be hammered and slurring. Swaying and sloshing her way inside, she’d finally pass out on the bed or something. I don’t remember directly, but I guess this usually took place on weekends, because my father would stay up with Gerry after my mother lost consciousness and they’d laugh some more. Eventually, somehow, Gerry drove home.

Sometimes, Chubs would come with him. He’d hang out with my brother and me, and we’d try to find things to do to keep ourselves occupied. It was harder when it got too dark to stay outside. We had to find something we could do in the dark or in the house, and it was never any fun to be in the house with my slushy drunk of a mother. You never knew what she’d do when a few beers were in her.

One time Chubs and Gerry came early in the afternoon. His nasally little whining sister Missy didn’t come with them, usually. Ryan, Chubs and I spent our day getting around Bell Avenue’s surrounding neighborhood, heading south and across Greene Lake Road, just before it became Oak Avenue, and into an empty lot on the far side.

It was a hot day -- all of them in the south are. The Cicadas buzzing in the thick, lush trees rimming the area only made it feel hotter. My brother Ryan and I, not knowing what they were actually called, just called them “heat bugs.” It seemed like the more they screamed, the hotter it got. The lot bordering Greene Lake Road was overgrown with tall grass, bramble bushes and dense, malicious undergrowth that tore at your pants and feet as you tried to plod through. It left burrs, seeds and insects deposited all over your denim, and I could only feel sorry for anyone dumb enough to wear shorts. They might've been cut to the bone.

Twigs snapped beneath our feet as we pushed through, me leading the way with Chubs close behind and Ryan on his heels. It felt like I was exploring the African savanna, and the thick, wet air, dense with humidity falling from the Cadet-gray sky and dripping over everything like molasses, refused to let the sweat evaporate that pooled out of our skin. The sun, never clearly visible to my eye in the southern sky, hid behind his vaporous veil and taunted us as we tried to reach the point of our journey: a tiny, green pond in the middle of that empty lot.

It was tucked carefully behind brush and scrubby little trees, but I’d spotted it from the car one day on the way home from somewhere. So that day, after Chubs, Ryan and I couldn’t figure out what else to do with our times, we decided to go check out the pond.

At least it was a way for me to get away from home.

As we approached the pond, swatting at buzzing invisible insects and debris from the dusty lot, we heard a distinct sound. It was one that made all of us stop and stare at that murky green water.

A splash.

We watched the ripples roll away from the center of that little body of water where a single white patch of froth was dying, and we knew.

“A fish!” Chubs called out, grinning. “There’s a dad-dang ol’ fish in that pond!”

“Let’s catch it!” Ryan said merrily.

I nodded. “It’s too hot right now though. He’ll stay deep. We have to wait until later.”

“Yeah,” Chubs said, “let’s go night fishin’!” His thick Georgian accent made it sound like “naht fishin’.”

“Yeah!” Ryan bellowed, and just as he did, the water broke again and a new set of ringlets gradually moved apart on the water.

“Okay, let’s get our gear together. We have to wait until the moon’s high,” I said authoritatively.

I have no idea who made me an authority on night fishing. At that point in my life I’d probably caught a grand total of three fish, and none of them had been large enough to keep. And I’d absolutely never been night fishing before.

But, both of the others nodded in firm agreement.

A final pop of the water and a silent ring testified to the idea, and we were bound for home.

Ryan was about seven at that time. Have you ever tried to make a 7-year-old wait for something? It’s a nightmare. He whined, he complained, he made me want to smack him. The sun wouldn’t set fast enough for him. My mom and Chubs’s dad, meanwhile, were getting happily stupid as the hours rolled away. My mother was always easier to be around while drunk if someone else was there; just make sure you stay out of her way so you don’t piss her off. And God only knew what was going to piss her off, because my brother and I sure didn’t. So we stayed as far away from her as we could, but no matter where we went we could hear her cackling, loud-mouth laugh and we watched the sun sink on the horizon.

Eventually, we needed to eat. Still the sun hovered, seeming to grip the sky like a man hanging from a cliff, refusing to fall over the horizon. We played outside some more. We tried to watch TV, but in the days before cable, there wasn’t jack on during the summer and early evening. We tried to read comic books, but I only had a couple, and they were boring to me. I’d read them a thousand times. We played with our dolls -- I mean “action figures”. We drew pictures. Nothing worked, though. The earth had stopped spinning and it felt like the damned sun wouldn’t ever set.

We were chatting in our room about something when Ryan suddenly blurted, “Hey, it’s dark out!!”

We all bolted to Ryan’s bed, positioned just under the window facing north out of our bedroom. There was one facing west, too, but that one was buried beneath the smothering tendrils of a monster bush intent on world conquest.

Outside, the tiny bulb in the lonely streetlight cast a yellowish ring of warmth on the asphalt beneath it a few houses down the road. Houses had glowing amber patches set against the frames of pitch dark to mark their presence along the street, and the Cicadas had given way the to feverish chirping of crickets.

Night had fallen when we weren’t looking, and it was time to go fishing. After hours of tortured agony enduring endless strands of time waiting for this moment, we had enough time to prepare and then make our way through the thicket of the lot to that shiny, stagnant mega-puddle.

We raced out of the room and charged the kitchen. I quickly checked, as cabinet doors and the refrigerator banged open and closed, whether anyone was in the house.

My mother had passed out, nude from the waist up, face-first on her bed. She was loudly and wetly snoring so I opened the bathroom door wide, which meant I was closing the door to her room. Shaking my head, I watched as Chubs and Ryan were slapping bologna sandwiches together at a fever pitch.

“How many you want, JD?” Ryan asked as Chubs passed him another slice of bread. He slathered a load of mayonnaise on it and then set it beside him.

“I guess two,” I said, and joined the assembly line by slapping a slice of bologna on each set of sandwiches. I closed them all one by one as I did, and soon we had food for the three of us to go long into the night.

“Okay, that’s good, get some drinks,” I told Ryan. He was only too happy to obey instructions when it meant something for him, so he hurried back to the fridge and grabbed a few more cans of soda pop, one for each of us.

Chubs was putting everything into a grocery bag, which at that time were all paper. The loud rustling of the heavy brown bag was noisy and I put my finger to my lips to silence him.

“Quiet!” I said softly. “C’mon, let’s get our stuff and get going.”

My brother and I each had a pole, and we found a clunky old spare for Chubs among the others stored in the “spare room,” which was really a storage locker full of boxes and sundries that hadn’t been unpacked, weren’t able to find a place for, or simply weren’t needed in the rest of the tiny green asbestos-armored house. Without really thinking about it, I grabbed the tackle box, too -- a collection of fishing equipment and supplies my father had from when I was a little boy.

With Chubs carrying the bag of food, Ryan carrying the bag of drinks, me carrying the tackle box, and all of us armed with our fishing rods, we set off toward that mysterious pond on the far side of Greene Lake Road. As we crossed the yard, the glow from the fire at the end of the cigarettes our fathers were smoking turned our way.

“Where y’all goin’?” I heard Gerry ask.

“Night fishin’,” Chubs said. “Up the road here a piece.”

That brought a round of wheezing, uproarious laughter from both men. “Oh, night fishin’, huh? Well, good luck then.” I could tell by the way my father spoke he was being facetious and condescending. I decided not to retort.

“We’ll be back before morning,” I called over my shoulder.

“I’m sure you will,” he said, and more laughter chased us up the street as we set off for the pond.

We headed up the hill south and crossed Greene Lake Road for the second time that day, and as we watched the full moon crest over the trees in the distance, we started across that empty lot.

We’d had to work hard for it in the light. At night it was downright hazardous.

Ryan kept shouting “Ah! Ah!” every time his foot fell farther that he expected into holes or divots. Chubs and I kept shushing him, but he’d just whine that he couldn’t help it. Big clods of dirt reached out of the black and tripped us, making us stumble. The tangles of dense, malevolent undergrowth that had slashed at us during the day slithered around our ankles and bound us at night. We fought for every inch, scanning every so many steps for the reflection of the moon in the pond, listening for the splash of the fish in its cooling muck-filled waters.

I saw a clearing ahead, and I whispered that it was probably the pond. The water would be the only place where the thicket would be clear. Chubs craned his neck and Ryan stood on tip-toes, trying to follow my pointing finger into the blackness.

Finally they said they could see it, and they moved off ahead of me toward the clearing.

Distances are deceptive in the dark, though.

Ryan was ahead of Chubs and had taken about 10 steps when he screamed and flailed. I heard a slick, slopping sound and his grunts of disgust before he started screaming for help, he was falling, help, catch him, helphelphelp!

Chubs burst out laughing his hyena’s lilting laugh, but Ryan caught his wrist as he toppled, and the next sound I heard was a series of splashing into ever-deepening water. There was a wailing screech as Ryan sputtered and spat slimy pond water out of his mouth, and a split-second later I heard the water’s surface break again followed by more sloppy, mucking footfalls and rushing water as it pours off a wet body, then the wails of Ryan mixed with Chubs’s laugh.

“What happened?” I said.

“The dad-danged pond’s right here,” Chubs told me, trying to stop laughing. “We were past it before, I reckon, so me ‘n Ryan walked right into it.”

“I need to go home,” Ryan whined, fighting back tears, “I got mud in my socks and I’m all wet. I need to change clothes and get dry underwear.”

Chubs couldn’t stop laughing. “I cain’t change!” he giggled. “This is all I brought with me!”

The slip-slop, slip-slop, slip-slop of their footsteps all the way back home marked our passage back to tiny green house. When we got to the yard, the two men started laughing.

“Hey, you’re back,” Gerry spoke through his wheezing laughter. “An’ jus’ in time; c’mon, Chubs, we got to go.”

“Catch anything?” my father said, wheezing his laugh right along with Gerry. I guess the way you laugh in Georgia is just like Muttley in the cartoons.

I didn’t say anything as I put the tackle box and my rod away. Ryan made a B-line for the bathroom and closed the door behind him to get out of his sopping clothes.

I sat down on my bed and just laughed. I laughed and laughed for hours, until I finally drifted off to sleep.

I’ve never been night fishing again. And I still don’t get the joke.

-JDT-

Technorati Tags: fiction, life, kids

Bill vs. the Carp

Lake Berryessa is a big lake formed by the Monticello dam just east of California's Napa Valley. When I was a kid, my parents used to spend time with Bill's parents boating and fishing on Lake Berryessa, in an area known at the time as Spanish Flats. It had a dock, a bait shop and general store with a pier for boat fueling, a gravel road that led to those things, and I'll be damned if I can remember anything else about it.

When I was a kid, summers usually meant at least one extended trip to Lake Berryessa. It probably wasn't more than a few days, a week tops, but it always felt like a really long time. And the ride up there seemed long and boring too. We took long, winding roads up through the Napa Valley, passing under tree-canopy covered roads lined with ancient oaks and other deciduous trees. It was up and down hills all the time, my father towing our red Caravelle ski boat behind us with the big V-8 engine of the Bel Air station wagon laboring over the meandering blacktops.

I don't remember the sweltering heat, but I know it was there. The lake can get warm in summer -- like, 75 degrees, so you know the sun just bakes the water. That was a drought time for California, complete with water conservation mandates and penalties. We were even asked to recycle bath water, if you can believe that, and to avoid showering whenever possible in favor of baths. The legislature also wanted us to bathe less frequently, but most folks just flat ignored those stupid things.

I wasn't more than 8 or 9 at the time. I didn't know how to swim yet, so the summers were spent in either a Mae West style, bright-orange choker of a life vest, or, if I could convince my parents to allow it, in one of Bill's ski vests. The foamy interior was covered with a thick, paint-like covering to keep it water tight, and the pressing of the non-breathable surface on my skin made me sweat and itch. My swim trunks were usually not well-fitting either, so every time I stood up or sat down there was a ceremony of adjustment that had to take place.

During that time, there were still rumors and discussions about the specter of the Zodiac killer, who murdered a young couple on the lake a few years earlier. He'd never been caught, and many of the trips to the lake were tainted for me by the fear that my overly-paranoid mother exuded. She was particularly afraid of the prospect of sleeping on the boat, but the lake offered no other alternative. It wasn't like there were 5-star hotels rimming the area or anything. So many a night I drifted off to sleep with every sound shooting a startled burst of adrenaline through my veins. The pitch black and deathly quiet finally would overtake me and I'd sleep. In the morning, I'd awake, still alive and with both parents whole and intact.

Most of the time on the lake was pretty enjoyable, though. My mother's alcoholism hadn't really started to be a problem for me yet. At least, I can't remember it being one. Maybe she was less of a raging lush when she was there, or something. All I know is, Bill and I would do things and hang out there and have a good time.

Fishing was a major thing for my dad. He would go off by himself, either to the end of the dock where the boats were moored, or by the shore somewhere in a relatively secluded area. The Spanish Flats area was in a lagoon off the main lake, so you could wander past the dock and get to a little bay where the road didn't run. Sometimes he went there to fish. My mother was more of a skier, though, so he didn't get tons of time to fish. He had to drag her around behind the ass of the boat and watch to make sure the idiot didn't drown or lose a leg on a log.

One day, Bill and I spent our afternoon fishing too. We went to the bait shop, got some worms or nightcrawlers, and headed off to a quiet place to cast our Zebco-equipped rods out into the stillness of the no-wake area of the resort. Of course, neither of us knew a lot about fishing. Bill was mostly a city kid, from the urban sprawl that is supposed to be San Francisco's southwest suburb area. I was a goofy, unathletic dork who couldn't manage to hook a fish even when I did get a bite. So needless to say, we didn't catch much but the blistering rays of that blazing sun. We ended up coming back to the dock with a styrofoam container full of dead worms and a better tan, Bill with his well-muscled bare chest and me pulling and adjusting the sweaty life jacket and tugging endlessly on my shorts.

Bill was complaining about it to my father, parroting things he'd heard from his father -- the water level was too low in the cove, the pollution was up from all the boats, the fish population was down due to whatever ... stuff like that. The dusty, dry wood of the dock kind of echoed his sentiments under his bare foot while he tapped his toes impatiently, sort of ticked that we got nothing.

My father just chuckled at him. "You want to catch a fish, Sweet William?"

My father called Bill "Sweet William" as long as I could remember. I have no idea why, and I don't think Bill did either. Most everyone else called him "Billy", but my dad always had to be different. They teased each other and Bill would play practical jokes on them -- that's probably where the nickname came from now that I think about it. Bill was always doing something shifty and mischievous.

"Well, yeah, that's why I fish," he said, being ever the smart-aleck.

"Well, I can get you a fish, then," my dad said. Bill looked at him suspiciously.

"How? I told you nothing bit. Nothing."

"Need the right bait," my dad said wryly.

"Worms aren't the right bait?" Bill said, even more suspicious. "Don't all fish eat worms?"

"Not all of 'em," my dad said. He was sitting on one of those aluminum framed chairs with the nylon webbing that you saw at picnics and beaches, the ones that folded down into a small footprint to fit into the car, and pinched the hell out of your fingers on their way. Beside him was the cooler full of our food for the trip. Just a short car ride away was a general store, so for extended visits you could go get more supplies, but we usually lived out of the coolers when we were there. He was rummaging around in there for something, and when his hands emerged, wet from the melting ice inside, he held a piece of white bread and a can of 7-Up.

"What's that for?" Bill said, his attitude becoming curious and inquisitive. My dad had his attention now. Mine too.

"This is your bait, boy," he said patiently. As he spoke, he took the bread and mashed it violently into a tiny ball of dough that was so compressed and mushy it held its spherical shape in his palm. Bill leaned over to watch as my dad took his rod, found the hook, and poked it through the doughy glob. Holding the hook over the water, he pulled the tab of the can of pop off the 7-Up and poured the fizzy, clear syrup over the ball of bread. When the bubbles died he did it again, and finally a third time. The little doughy ball was wet and sticky with the soda.

"There ya go, Sweet William," he said. "Take this and cast it off the dock just about anywhere, and I guaran-damn-tee ya you'll catch somethin'."

Bill looked at him sideways. "You sure? With this?"

My dad nodded slowly. "With that."

Bill shook his head incredulously. "Okay ... if you say so."

My dad settled his bulk into the tiny chair more fully and it complained about it while Bill strode down the dock a few paces to an empty berth. He looked at me, and I shrugged. He shrugged back, then he pressed the line release button on the Zebco and the little ball of dough dropped into the water and vanished into the murky, aquamarine water. Just a few feet below the surface it vanished from view.

Bill sighed and sat down at the edge of the berth, plopping his chin in his palm with an I-feel-like-a-complete-idiot-for-fishing-with-a-dough-ball look on his face. "This is so dumb. How can you catch a fish with a --"

He never finished his sentence because his line snapped violently taut and the Zebco screamed as line was torn viciously out of its spool.

Quick as a wink, Bill jumped up and took the rod in both hands to steady his grip. "HOLY SHIT!" he burst out, "I've got a BITE!" I stood with him, eyes wide through my thick, horn-rimmed glasses, adjusting my ski vest over my skinny torso and fixing my swim trunks again.

He tugged on the line, firmly but not too hard, trying to set the hook. The instant he did, whatever was on the other end fought violently back, bending the tiny rod into a parabolic U-shape that dipped sharply toward the still surface of the water.

"Damn!" he cried, "it's heavy! Doyle, help! Help, Dad!" he was calling for the men to assist him. I knew then that, whatever he'd caught, it must surely have been the size of a Buick. If Bill couldn't handle it alone, it was Monstro the Whale.

His father poked his head up from the deck of their boat, and watched. "Whatcha got there, Will?" he said, smiling.

My father sauntered over with his hands in his pockets, laughing. "Got a bite, Sweet William?"

"Holy crap, what IS this thing?" Bill said, "I can't even reel it in!!"

My dad reached for the fishing pole. "Here, give it here," he said. Bill obediently passed him the rod, and he watched as the line swirled and zig-zagged over the surface while whatever was hooked frantically swirled about to escape.

Slowly, patiently, my dad began to draw the line up. He would allow the pole to dip toward the surface, then draw the pole back up and simultaneously wind the reel and retract some line. He'd repeat the process, and tell Bill and I to let the fish get some slack, then tighten it so he can't go back toward the bottom, then do it again. Some kind of redneck crap like that. We weren't really listening. We just wanted to know what the hell it was.

Finally, with a dramatic and heart-stopping splash, the mysterious captive breeched the surface of the water and showered us all with spray. Bill was shouting excitedly as my father handed him the pole again.

"You bring 'im in, Willie," he said, smiling. "He's a big 'un."

Bill was all grins as he struggled with the beast, its flashing scales and spiny fins breaking the water's surface as it fought to dive to the safety of the deep again. Bill pulled heavily, grunting with the effort as the big fish rolled over on its side as it tried to sound, its brass-coloring gleaming in the midday light. He called to his dad who was bringing a net, saying to hurry, his arms straining against the struggling giant that would not surrender.

His dad got on one knee, laughing and shaking his head, and my father was rolling in hilarity next to him. Bill's dad scooped down with the fishing net, and when he tried to gather the monster in, he stopped laughing.

It wouldn't fit in the net.

It was too big. Bill was panicking, his body leaning back as he struggled to hold the pole, still bent over and occasionally touching the water's surface.

"Dad, Doyle, what do I do? What do I do?" he said urgently. "I can't hold it up much longer!"

I put my hands next to his on the pole and offered whatever pathetic measure of strength I had in his effort to keep the fish from ripping the pole out of his hands. I could see the sweat dripping from his hairline in exertion, and he smiled briefly at me, grateful for the help.

My father and Bill's dad reached down together, and with one of them holding the end of the rod and the other clutching the line tightly, they grunted and heaved.

And Monstro finally cleared the surface of the water.

As they lifted it free, Bill wound the line in, making it possible for them to set the huge fish on the dock's shaded surface. It arched its body frantically, its empty, staring doll's eyes staring blankly as it bent into a C-shape and then suddenly contracted into a U-shape, slapping the slimy, spiny fins and tail on the dry wood.

A monster carp, lurking just below the dock the whole while. Not an eating fish, but certainly fun for sport.

Bill was ecstatic! He shouted victoriously as he stared at the leviathan. It was three feet long if it was an inch, and was so thick the body breadth came nearly halfway up Bill's shin. The scales were the size of thumb nails, and the sharp fin splines could puncture skin. The raw-meat red gills fanned out then collapsed as the fish gasped for oxygen and from exertion. My dad bent down and somehow managed to remove the hook from the fish's lip. Its tiny mouth worked opened and closed as if in relief from the pain.

"There ya go, Sweet William," my dad said, patting him on the shoulder.

"Thanks, man!" Bill said, "I'll never doubt ya again! You really know your fish!"

My father laughed. Bill's dad rumpled his hair affectionately. "Good work, son. Let me get the camera and we'll take a picture of you with it."

It was only a moment before he was back with an old camera (even at that time) in his hands. He fussed with it for a moment, the fish continuing to pound against the dock angrily with its arching, straining body.

"Okay, Will, hold the fish up so we can have a look at it," his dad said.

"I can't," Bill said disappointed. "It's too heavy."

"All right, then put your foot on it instead. That'll help give it some scale."

"Okay," Bill said happily, and he dropped the pole on the dock next to him. I moved aside so the shot could be just Bill. I was always camera shy anyway.

Bill balanced on one leg, lifting his right foot off the ground gingerly over the fish. He slowly and gently lowered the sole of his bare foot onto the slimy skin of the hefty fish.

The fish didn't like the victory celebration.

It slapped faster than ever before, faster than lightning, and when it did, the spiny, sharp tail poked Bill's foot hard. He yelped as blood oozed from the tiny wound, and the fish lashed out again. He wailed in fear and jumped aside.

The fish twisted its huge body in mid-air, in an amazing display of strength and athleticism, and with an effort that cannot be defined in earthly terms, it literally danced on the dock, flipping back and forth from one side of its body onto the other ...

... and managed to get off the dock and back into the water before any of us could react.

There was a huge splash, a whipping of the water into a frothy foam, and then silence. Bill watched, his face fixed in horror and shock, mouth agape.

We stood there watching for a long time before my dad came back over.

"There are other fish, Sweet William," he said.

Bill just nodded, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.

-JDT-

Technorati Tags: fiction, writing, kids

Riffling through My Mind ... Again

I haven't really been keeping up with journaling; sorry about that.

I did some deciphering of my history today, and I have to say, I'm a little surprised at what I found. I was doing some chronological checking to make sure I wasn't off my nut doing my Georgia Kids Life blog stories, and I discovered that I've got an interesting time line of events running right through my life. Funny how I didn't notice any of them.

For example, the Vietnam war ended while I was in the 3rd grade. I don't recall any of it, really. I know it was the first broadcast war in history, and was on every night, and all that crap. I guess I was just shielded from it somehow. I never had really politically involved parents, and my father had already served his time nearly 10 years before the end of the conflict. I had an uncle in the military at that time, but he really didn't have a lot to say about it. He was on the USS Kittyhawk, so I don't think he saw much of the Vietnam that we've come to associate with that time. He wasn't in the jungles and surviving harrowing village scouting trips ... nothing exciting like that.

I do remember the oil crisis, but can't remember what year(s) that covered. It was in the Carter administration, so it had to be around '76, right? Or was it the Ford administration, which would have been between '72 and '76? My wife is much better at these things than I. I remember the bicentennial celebration of '76, and the tall ships sailing off New York (or was that DC?) on TV. I can remember things like Mark Spitz at the Olympics, and some of the Super Bowl games that were played (Steelers vs. Cowboys, Vikings vs. Raiders, Cowboys vs. Broncos, Redskins vs. Dolphins, crap like that in no particular order). I can remember movies ... Jaws, The Exorcist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Rocky, The Legend of Boggy Creek, The Hills Have Eyes, The Black Hole, Alien, Star Trek: The Movie (or Motion Picture, or whatever the hell the title was), The Godfather I and II. And I can remember some great TV shows too. Things that are part of our culture now, but were only a dim memory for me until I was older: The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Happy Days, Gilligan's Island, M*A*S*H, Night Gallery, The Night Stalker, The Love Boat, Love: American Style, The Greatest American Hero, Spider-Man, Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, Ultraman, Johnny and his Giant Robot, The Banana Splits, Laugh-In, Hee-Haw, The Lawrence Welk Show, Saturday Night Live, and the whole plethora of Saturday morning cartoon shows that were composed entirely of 7-1/2 minute shorts. Not a single half-hour show among them.

I can remember snippets of things from my childhood -- some of them good, some not so good. Most not so good, actually. I can remember wetting my pants in 3rd grade because I was afraid of the teacher. Her response to children asking to go to the bathroom, and insisting they do that at recess, always seemed unreasonable to me. And her name: Mrs. Smith. She seemed like a nice lady, but I guess that was a peeve of hers. I actually did it twice before confessing it to my mother. She then had a meeting with the teacher, who changed the way she responded to me from that day until the end of the year. I'll never forget her, because after that, she didn't seem so scary, even though she was a tall, imposing woman that towered over my mother ... and probably my father, too.

I can remember being spanked once in first grade by the teacher for being out of control and fooling around, making people laugh. Can you imagine such a thing now? Hoo-hoo, the lawsuits! But it was fine then. And I remember my parents gladly signing the permission slip to provide corporal punishment as needed when that became a requirement not long after that. I never got spanked again, but I did that once. I can't remember the first grade teacher's name anymore, but I remember her face. If you're still alive and reading this, thank you. It made me a better behaved child in school. If you're not ... well, there it is.

I can remember Mrs. Mac(Farland) in 2nd grade; she was a large, lump of a woman that was matronly and kind despite her troll-like appearance. Nothing outstanding there to recall, I guess. I can also remember Mrs. Malloy, whom I had for both 4th and 5th grades. She was a "pressure-phobe." She didn't want to teach fractions, or have us participate in Science Fairs or Spelling Bees, because her daughter was forced to be in a Spelling Bee once and nearly (or did) suffered a nervous breakdown. She was kindly, and sweet, but my education sort of started to suffer at that point. Other students in the school were better spellers and farther along in mathematics, and when I visited a private school in 5th grade -- which I attended the following year -- I was completely lost in the concepts they were studying. When I brought this up -- because I was made a spectacle of and asked about my "visiting day" when I returned to my public school -- her answer was "Yes, we should be studying fractions, but really, how often do you need that? How often, really?" I don't know, Mrs. Malloy -- daily, maybe? Go figure.

Because of that, I never really grasped math. I think there was too big a leap for me somewhere along the way and I never fully caught up. I don't, of course, blame Mrs. Malloy for that, but if the foundations had been properly laid, perhaps things could have been different. On the other hand, my brother got the same opportunities I did, and the benefit of more years of private schooling than I did, and he's a dumbass, so maybe that had nothing to do with it. Anyway, I was very fond of Mrs. Malloy, and after that it was off to private school with me.

The concept of changing classrooms for different subjects, and having structured "periods", was odd to me. It took a lot of getting used to. After a time,of course, I didn't have to think about it anymore, because it was all dictated for you. Go to the room you're supposed to be in for your next class when this one is over, and that's it. High school was a new adventure in that, though. Despite the tiny size of the school, both structurally and in student body numbers, it took me time to figure out where I had to go and I always dreaded having to learn a new route to my classes. I guess, despite what I may have thought about myself, I've always hated and resisted change. I like my routines, evidently, and I don't like going new places, meeting new people and doing new things. Even today, I hate driving in a strange town or state, God forbid country, without at least someone to pass the time with or assist with road signs and map reading and such.

In 6th grade I made new "friends", which I supposedly had through high school, since a lot of us went to the same school as a logical jump to the next stage. Once a parochial school boy, always a parochial school boy. I found them to be nice, but things changed quickly for me after a short time. I was an outcast, and not widely accepted by most of the other kids. It wasn't as bad as it was in high school, where I was anonymous and sort of a loner in a school of only about 500 students, but it was always that way for me. I was just ... never able to fit it.

So many things ... so many. And yet, I struggle to find something to write in my blog. I think most of the problem is that I don't believe a lot of it's worth reading (maybe an audience would disagree, but I'm pretty boring overall). The rest of it is that I don't remember a lot of it clearly. I don't know if that's due to the chemicals I've ingested over my lifetime (I was a sickly kid and took no less than one experimental medication for it) or because I just don't want to remember a lot of it.

Hopefully, this post will spark something interesting. Tomorrow's the 4th of July, and so being off, maybe I can reflect tonight and let my fingers probe the darker recesses of my brain and see what I can find there that would be worth sharing -- and that I don't mind sharing.

See you all then, hopefully.

Common Trauma

It happens to us all at some point in our childhoods. That just doesn't make it any less traumatic.

In case you haven't gotten the picture yet, my mother's a real piece of work. My father moved us all to Georgia, and she let him know about how unhappy she was every chance she got. When she got a little lubed with liquor, which was pretty often, she'd let loose even more. He'd hang his head and suffer through it for some reason, and go on his merry way being spinelessly ignorant of his options. To get even for being forced to live in Georgia, she'd make him send us back to "visit" her family in California as often as they could scrape the money together. That wasn't often, but I don't think he saw his family more than a handful of times in my memory. If we made it back to California two or three times during our time in Georgia, that was a lot more than he got back to see his family, before we got there or after we returned.

One of those trips at least was during the summer. My brother and I weren't in school and the oppressive, thick heat of Georgia was dripping over everything like hot syrup. You'd sweat and never dry off. Our lean-to little shanty of a house didn't have any way to cool down except box fans, and those did a lousy job of it. When we got back, I don't think we were even unpacked completely that night. It was just too hot to do anything except spend time with our dad and go to bed.

Bell Avenue is dark at night. Really dark. There was only one street lamp that I can recall, and it was far enough away from the house not to do anything helpful. Even if it could, there was a terror of a bush standing higher than the roof of the little crackerbox house that sprawled like a Kraken threatening to drag down a ship, and it was positioned between that pathetic, weak light and the front of our house. We lived in its shadow in the day, and at night it shrouded the house in a blanket of pitch that was impenetrable. Add to that the pea-soup humidity that moistened everything, and the light had no hope of making a dent in the blackness.

Waking up in the night, then, got pretty interesting. The room my brother and I shared had two windows in it: one that faced into the belly of that beast of a bush -- and we couldn't see any light through it in strong sunshine -- and was shielded by it; the other was on the wall adjacent and looked down the gradual slope of Bell Avenue to the north, toward the Tennessee border of State Line Road. There were lower, less dense bushes around that one, but if you looked out the window, you could see the dim candle of a lamp standing in the street a few houses down. It did nothing to light up the inside of the room, but you could see it.

Waking up at night is something I've always done. I have no idea why to this day. I wake up probably two or three times a night on a regular basis, and I always have. At 12 years old, waking up in the night meant one of three things. Either I had to go to the bathroom, I was having an asthma attack, or I was hungry.

Having to get out of bed for two of those three things became something of a chore living in that tiny asbestos block. The first thing you have to do is let your eyes adjust to the darkness. Even though your eyes have been closed, I guarantee whatever backlighting your brain uses to show you your dreams was brighter than the light that managed to pick its way through the murk of the Georgia night. It was like living in a black hole. Whatever light there was got sucked into a void and couldn't escape.

That first night back from California, with its brightly illuminated San Franciscan suburbs and busy streets, took some getting used to. It was quieter on Bell Avenue than anywhere I think I've ever slept before. When you grow up with the background noise of a more urban area, the quiet's unnerving a bit. Waking up to the soot blackness and the morgue quiet made you sit up straight in bed, afraid you've died.

When I woke up that night, I had to figure out what woke me up. Instantly, I knew it wasn't asthma. I was breathing fine, and was getting stronger every year in my resistance to it. I listened quietly in the stillness for that familiar rumbling that would let me know if my stomach, seemingly always empty regardless of how much I threw down my gullet as my teen metabolism began to fire up and burn calories faster than an American V8 burns Arabian oil, was the culprit.

Nope. Not the gut. But I could've used something to eat, I noted.

That only left one cause for my bout of consciousness: my bladder. I waited for the signal ... and there it was. Gotta pee.

So now, adjusting to the darkness and the stillness of the cemetery-creepy night, I drew a heavy sigh and resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to plod over the leaning house and into the single bathroom between my parents' room and the dining room.

I waited quietly, hoping to go back to sleep and that my urinary tract would forget what it wanted. No suck luck.

I had to pee and it wasn't going to wait until morning.

For some reason, I had the covers on. Normally, I wore the standard kid uniform of sweatpants and a T-shirt to bed. But at 12 years old, I also still slept under my covers. I can't recall now whether those constituted a blanket or not, but it seems goofy to me now. It was so hot, I really didn't need anything. I had to kick them off me, though, and then I lay still for another couple of minutes to muster the energy to make the walk to the bathroom.

It was a real problem. When I got there, I'd have to turn on the light to see the damned toilet so I didn't whiz all over the floor or whatever else was around the commode. That meant burning my retinas, and turning the light off would leave me next to blind for a few minutes. Throw in the fact that rhinos have better eyesight than I do, and getting back to the room to bed usually meant a bunch of stubbed toes, wall-bumping and walking around like Frankenstein's monster, arms outstretched and lumbering to avoid breaking a foot or nose crashing into stuff.

I heaved myself out of bed, dreading the walk. I could finally make out the dim shapes and shadows that constituted my world at night without my glasses, and started to make my way toward the bathroom.

That tiny house was too small to house all of us and all our crap. I don't remember if the room my parents had never had a door, or if my genius old man took it off. Either way, the decision was made that they'd open the bathroom door all the way and it would block their room, acting as a door of sorts. That's how small the house was -- one door, two rooms. The tiny bit of light that spilled from the bathroom window behind the chipped, ancient tub and shower gave me something to aim for as I shuffled through the abysmal dark to relieve myself. My room was adjoined to the living room, and those windows faced away from the light, so the biggest hazard was getting through there without breaking a bone or falling. Once you made it to the kitchen, abutting the living room through a narrow doorway, it was relatively smooth sailing.

When I got through the living room without getting hurt, and got onto the cool linoleum floor of the kitchen, I figured I was home free -- at least until the way back.

I was dead wrong.

I felt my way through the opening that led to the hallway with the bathroom straight ahead of me. I took hold of the door to my left ... and I heard an unfamiliar sound.

I thought my parents were awake. But it was the middle of the night, and I was sure my father had to work the following day. What would they be doing awake?

I poked my head around the door.

I bit my tongue to keep from screaming, my eyes bulging so wide they nearly fell out of my skull. I wish they had.

My mother's legs were wrapped around my father's torso and the bed clothes were strewn all over the place. What I thought were words being spoken were guttural, carnal grunts and moans.

I couldn't move fast enough. I slammed the door shut behind me and never turned the light on. I ripped my pants down furiously and the urine stream began to flow, far too slowly, so I pushed it with all my might, trying to force it out of my body like I was giving birth. I made as much noise as I could to alert everyone to my presence -- I turned on the faucet behind me and rinsed one hand while I pulled my pants up with the other, and then flushed. While the toilet was still sucking water loudly down its throat, antique pipes slurping and clanging with the effort, I crashed through the door like a charging bull, and banged it back into place, bolting like a chased gazelle through the kitchen and living room, recklessly ignoring any potential for injury, running with my feet pounding hard against the floor boards as I sprinted for my room. I dove, crashing the bed springs and bouncing, clutching the bedding for dear life. When I landed I pulled the covers over my head, eyes squeezed shut as tight as I could, weather and humidity forgotten. I waited for someone to come up and check on me, to make sure I was all right. I jumped at every creak and groan the old house made as gravity tried to pull it to pieces. Thankfully, no one ever followed up.

No matter how I tried, though, that image was seared into my brain like a brand on a cattle's hindquarters. I couldn't clear it from my memory no matter how I tried to distract myself with thoughts of sports, girls, food ... nothing worked.

It still doesn't, frankly.

-JDT-

Technorati Tags: Fiction Writing Kids

Oh, the Pain ... The Pain of it All!

As any of you that read my gibberish know by now, I like to fancy myself a bit of a creative soul.

I can draw ... some. And I can write ... a little. I'm not a giant in any field, naturally, but I feel that I have some creativity to offer the world and I think I tell a good story. When I can actually get someone to read what I've written, I get nothing but rave reviews.

Now, it's entirely possible that those are just polite indulgences. Most people aren't going to rudely tell you what they actually think of your stuff unless they're close to you. (I don't know, sometimes they're the ones that blow sunshine the worst.) But, even when I ask relative strangers to read and give me their thoughts, they end up telling me the things they read that I've written or drawings I've made are "good."

I don't know exactly what "good" means. Not evil, I suppose. Not bad? I don't know.

Anyway, that brings me to my point. There are certain websites where EVERYone thinks their stuff is good. Whether it is or not, they believe it is. I've written things that don't get very much public exposure. Very few people read it. But I've never written anything, and published it for public viewing, unless I was satisfied with the product. I proofread it, I ask for another set of eyes to read it (my wife's -- very good eyes indeed), and I make sure that when I finally put it out there for the world to see, it's ready for that scrutiny.

Now, to be fair, I'm a bit anal. Most people, especially on sites like the ones of which I'm speaking, are just having fun and don't necessarily obsess for perfection like I do. But, when you publish something to a massive site with millions of submissions, I've got to believe you want someone to read it. And if that's true, why wouldn't you take the time to make sure it's legible? That it flows? That there's a story to read, and the language to read it? It seems that proper punctuation and spelling are beyond most people. Typos? Of course, we all make them. I have plenty of them in my posts, I'm sure. But between the two sets of eyes, we usually find them (even if not immediately) and fix them, and that's only AFTER the piece has undergone a spelling and grammar check through my friendly neighborhood word processing program. Take your pick, they ALL have them -- even Microsoft Works. And yes, it is sufficient to catch most of them.

Instead, the sites are flooded with badly written, poorly structured and horribly misspelled "literature" (if you can call it that). In addition, the topics don't seem to change very much. It's like most of the stuff out there is written by angst-ridden teens or kids that define themselves as "emo" (I didn't even know that word existed, never mind what it meant, until I looked it up on the 'Net after seeing the Mac commercial where the PC has to go download it), is all written from that whole razors-and-mascara perspective, and just generally isn't any good.

Then, they can't figure out why no one will read their writings. It's pathetic.

Enter dorky me. I have no clue what goes on on these sites, so I happily enter and start hanging my drawings up for folks to see. I don't draw anime, and I don't animate my art. I'm only average at best, and never claimed to be anything other than that. So, I didn't get too offended when I didn't get many page views on my art. The few people that did stop by were intelligent, thoughtful and easy to talk to, and they offered me some great insight.

But then I started writing. I rather fancy myself a writer of sorts. I'm a better writer than I am an artist, and that's likely because I work at it a bit more. I decided, some time ago, that I wanted to change my style of writing a bit and start posting stories from my childhood. I had a stable of some pretty amusing stories to share, and I wanted to get them out there and see if I could emulate the style of writing of Chris Kimball. He's the editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine, and the host of the PBS show America's Test Kitchen. He's a brilliant writer though, and his writing captures a feel and a tone from a time forgotten -- a time when kids wore denim and Keds and plaid short-sleeved shirts with crew cuts, or pig tails and eyelet dresses, and they played games like stickball and kick the can, and had clubs and rode their bikes to buy trading cards.

Get it?

So, I tried to inject some of that into my writing. I felt I was pretty successful at it, too, and so I posted some of those stories on an artists site so that others who write (supposedly -- NOT suppose-of-ly) could see it and maybe offer me some direction to make the work stronger.

Nothing.

When I stop and think about how deeply buried in CRAP the good stuff gets (anyone's, not just mine -- there are other good writers out there), it's no wonder no one reads the literature on the site.

I got to thinking, then, that maybe sex sells. I notice that if you publish naked photos, or draw sleazy, sexy comic women, your page got loads of page hits. So I thought I'd try and experiment to see if would work for me, too.

I started an anonymous account with a pseudonym, and I wrote some erotica. What do you think happened?

Absolutely nothing, that's what.

So, no matter what I try, if I'm not writing homosexual stories of existing anime or manga characters, or "furries" (whatever the fuck THAT is), no one's interested. I mean, the erotica got more initial interest, but the same thing happens. It gets buried under a lot of garbage cranked out by horny teens who think that characters with fur, tails and unpronounceable Japanese names are "literature". And after it does, no one reads it anymore, because it would require effort to find it and cipher through the tripe to get to the gems out there.

It's really disappointing.

I don't mean to be disparaging of someone else's work; I know we all feel our creativity deserves a view by the world, and even emo teens feel they have something to say. All I ask is that you make it worth reading for the REST of us.

Anyway ... I'm finished ranting. If you like good writing, you can read my fiction on this site and others around the 'Net. If you don't like my writing, that's fine, but don't tell me it's because I'm not any good at it or that the story isn't well-structured or constructed. It's because you don't like the material or the subject or the style, but not because it isn't well written. Sounds arrogant, doesn't it? <Chuckle!>

What about any of you Internet readers? Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions? Opinions?

Shout out and be heard -- even if only by one madman.

-JDT-