A very special barn of the week

This barn is the barn on the farm in Lee County, Virginia where I lived from 1974 to 1980. We put up a lot of hay, cured a lot of tobacco, smoked a lot of marijuana and cigarettes, and drank a lot of cheap beer and Boone's Farm wine in and around that old barn in back in those days.

Bittersweet

As most of you regular readers know I'm hooked on Facebook as well as blogging. And for every old friend from college or high school that I've reconnected with there's been people from that part of my past that I'd rather just stay away from either because they've become intolerant Christians who look forward to going to the Creationist Museum or because I didn't like them back then and I still don't like them now. My friendship with some of my blog friends has deepened as a result of being on Facebook with them as well as reading their blogs.

Unfortunately, I've also ran into some sad and troubling news on Facebook as well. I recently friended a gal I went to high school with. I knew she would not remember me because I was a few years behind her. But I not only remembered her, I went to a very small high school, I was friends with her young brother Scott.

Scott was friends with my sister Sandy first. He and Sandy and another gal named Sheila were thick as thieves for a few years but when Sandy and Sheila graduated and went on to other things Scott was still in school with me, he was a year ahead of me. Since we both partied in high school we would often hang out together and get stoned and or drunk. Scott was a fun, funny, stand up guy. And he was gay.

In a small rural community like Lee County, VA if you were gay you had to keep it under wraps or you faced the wrath of people who hated gays and the wrath of the sanctimonious holier than thou Christians, and often they were one and the same. But for some reason this didn't apply to Scott. And I think it was because Scott was so beloved by everyone. We stoners liked him because he was one of us, the jocks liked him because he was not a threat to them, and the hicks liked him because he made them laugh. If you asked him he'd tell you he was gay but he didn't go around screaming about his sexual orientation. He wasn't a flamer, but you knew he was gay if you spent any length of time around him at all.

I liked Scott immensely because he was such a fun guy. He always was quick with a joke and to poke fun at the people and things that needed it. He reminded me of me in that regard. I also liked him because he was who he was and he didn't change for anybody. I always thought he was pretty brave to not change who he was in order to try and fit in. In a way he was a hero of mine because if a gay guy like him could be himself in that small town then I, a smart geeky bookish kid with a smart mouth, could be who he was and not worry about it. Sometimes I had to reign in who I was but Scott never did and for that I always admired him.

The day after I graduated high school I left moved out of Lee County and for the most part I never looked back. I had heard that Scott had died of HIV/AIDS but I never was sure about it, until his sister and I began emailing each other on Facebook that is. I shared with his sister that my brother Charlie, who she remembered very well by the way, had died from an HIV/AIDS related illness and so she told me that Scott had as well. But oddly enough he didn't get it from unprotected sex, he got it from a blood tranfusion. She told me that Scott was managing a restaurant in North Carolina and one night after he closed up the place he got carjacked. The carjacker slit his throat so he could not scream but the slit did not kill Scott. The carjacker tied him up and put him in the backseat of his car and then he took off. Despite having a slit throat Scott was able to undo the bonds that held him and he managed to run off when the carjacker stopped for a rest break. It was during his hospitalization that Scott was given AIDS tainted blood.

It's a sad turn of events that cost my friend Scott his life but I know that he lived that life braver than most anyone else I know. I wish I had kept in touch with him after I left high school and I wish I could have seen him before he passed so I could have told him he was one of my personal heroes. I missed the chance to do those things, so this will have to do, so long Scott, you were one hell of a guy and this world was better for you having been in it.

I was a teenage sex symbol

It's been awhile since I regaled all of you with a story from my sordid past so I thought I'd share two tales of my awesome teenage sex appeal with you.

I lived in the world's worst area to be a teenager, Lee County, VA. Lee County was, and probably still is, extremely boring. Sure, it's fine if you're a farmer, a prison guard (they recently built a federal prison there), or if you just love being stuck in a county where the big entertainment is jeering at homosexuals and going to yet another revival at yet another Christian cult church. I lived in Lee County from 1974 to 1980 and if it hadn't been for smoking pot, sneaking beers and cheap wine when we did, and reading Rolling Stone and Time magazine to find out what was going on in the outside world then I would have gone bat shit insane.

I lived on Aunt Rageholic and Uncle Adultery's farm which was located about a half hour outside of town. And when I say town I mean Jonesville. And the thing you need to know about Jonesville is that it's literally a one horse town. It's tiny. It has one stoplight and it's not even a regular traffic light, it's a flashing red light in the middle of town. There's not much to do in Jonesville if you're a rambunctious curious teenager with a zest for living. Most of my free time back then was spent on the farm, I was stuck there because I did not drive, some day I'll share that saga with you, and because Aunt Rageholic ruled things with an iron fist and most of the time I was forced to stay at home during expeditions into town. Even though we always had a station wagon or a big ol' Chevy Surburban there was no room for me in either vehicle when there was house work to be done and there was always housework to be done, he said while rolling his eyes.

On the rare occasions when I was allowed to go into town one of the places I always went was the pool hall. It was an old timey pool hall with a bunch of pool tables and pinball machines, this was pre arcade style video game era. The pool hall was managed by a mildly retarded man everyone called Bear.Bear was in his mid 40's/early 50's during this time period. He not only was mildly retarded, he had a speech impediment which stemmed from an early childhood accident. When I say Bear managed the place, what he really did was just open the doors in the morning, make change all day long, swept up the place, turned on the lights when it got dark, picked up trash, and closed the doors and locked the doors at night. He lived in a tiny room in the back of the place.

The other thing about Bear was he was gay. And for some reason I caught his fancy. Crazy, I know. He loved to smile and wink at me, well more like leer and lick his lips at me when ever I happened to catch him checking me out. In fairness to him I was pretty hot. Here's my senior year picture:Back off ladies, I'm taken.

Anyhoo, I'd be playing pinball or shooting pool and Bear would waddle, he was a shade over weight, over to me and whistle and leer at me. I used to use a lot of body English while playing those old school pinball games and he would stand behind me and say things like, "I like the way you shake your ass boy," although due to his speech impediment it would sound like he was saying, "I lak de way oo shake oor ahh bo." He'd also tell me all the time that he'd even pay me for a piece. He'd say, "I'll give you five dollars for a piece of ass boy," which actually sounded like, "Five da pi ahh bo."

It all creeped me out. I had to push him away from me several times when he invaded my personal space. He'd laugh and make kissey faces at me and I'd gag at the thought of him touching me and at the urine smell he exuded. Eventually I quit going in there because of him and his constant unwanted attention.

But it turns out that Bear wasn't the only guy in town who wanted me. There was a guy in my small high school who always wanted to be my buddy but I just didn't like him. It was one of those things where he and I didn't have much in common and we were into different things, so no matter how much he wanted it, I wasn't going to hang out with him or be his BFF.

I got a vibe off him that he wanted to be more than just my friend and on graduation night he made a clumsy move on me, which in retrospect I'm not sure why he did because even though I didn't have a girlfriend, it was screamingly obvious I was into girls. Anyway, on the night of our graduation there were four or five parties going on in town and I was determined to hang out all night and go to all of them if I could. The guy in question was at a party at someone's house, I forget who's it was now, but as the night progressed he got drunker and he became agressive towards me. Him and a few of his friends surrounded me in a dark room and he grabbed me and he began pusing his dick on me, we were all fully clothed but really really stoned and drunk. He was passing what he was doing off as being funny, but as I was telling him to stop he got rougher and at one point he had his buddies hold my arms while he gyrated on me. He was laughing and I could feel him trying to undo my pants and I finally yelled atthe top of my lungs, "Get your hands and your dick off me Mark. This isn't funny! I don't fucking like it!" He hissed in my ear, "Shut up!" I had to yell again and finally he got off me and his buddies let my arms go. As soon as they did I pushed him against the wall and I left for another party with some friends.

When I got to the other party Mark and his posse showed up about an hour later and he began telling people that I took his joke the wrong way and that I was a sissy for yelling and for not laughing and playing along. I was still pissed about what had went down and when I heard him say that shit I wanted to kick his ass but he was much bigger than I was and he would have wiped the floor with me and he would have gotten off while doing it. So when I saw him sit down near the fire, this party was outside in a field, I walked over and I "tripped" on a non existent rock which caused me to dump the two beers I was holding all over him. He jumped up and cussed at me but since there were so many people around he didn't dare hit me. He did say he was going to kick my sissy ass the next time he saw me but as luck would have it we moved out of Jonesville the next day and I never saw him or Bear again.

Opening day

Yay! Major league baseball is back!

Opening day conjures up a lot of mixed feelings in me, relief mostly because it signals that spring is here and the NBA season is about a quarter of the way over. Other feelings opening day evokes in me are happiness, because my team the Boston Red Sox are in first place on opening day and they haven't blown a lead or a series to the hated Yankess yet, and sadness, because the one thing I first wanted to be when I was a kid was to be a professional baseball player, but that dream died young.

From the time I first was able to understand and follow the game I loved baseball. And growing up for the first ten years of my life in Detroit before the expansion of cable TV spoiled me because I got to see so many Detroit Tiger games broadcast on free TV. During baseball season I'd get to see at least three or four games a week and I got to hear the great George Kell and Ernie Harwell call all of them. I'd beg my mom to let me stay up late in the summer when my siblings got packed off to Aunt Rageholic and Uncle Adultery's farm so I could watch the games. And she usually gave in to my whining as long as I promised never to tell my brothers and sisters that I got to stay up past 9 0'clock.

I not only loved watching those games, I loved playing the game as well. We lived in the projects, Smith Homes Housing Project to be exact, and there were always kids, both black and white, who were ready to get a game going on a moment's notice. Sometimes we'd play in Stoppel Park, which was a few blocks from us, and sometimes we'd play across the street in the parking lot of St. Monica's Catholic Church, the priests didn't mind us playing baseball in the parking lot but they abhorred us playing football in lawn beside their rectory. Those were some great times just playing baseball as long as we had light.

After my mother died and we all got packed off to Aunt Rageholic and Uncle Adultery's farm for good my baseball watching and playing days were curtailed sharply. Watching baseball, or any sport for that matter, on TV was deemed a waste of time so I had to sneak around and get my fix in. Since we lived so far out of town there were no other kids who I could get into a game with because my cousins did not like to play baseball and neither did my siblings. I got to play some during gym class and I lived for those times. I was of the age to play little league during this time but it was unthinkable that I'd be allowed to do such a thing because the house had to be cleaned every day and my aunt always found other chores for us, and by us I mean mostly me and my siblings because she saw to it that the kids she gave birth to got to do pretty much whatever they wanted while my brothers and sister and I had to clean up after everybody.

When we moved south in 1974 I had pretty much given up on playing and watching baseball but thankfully I made some friends who loved baseball as much as I did, the Martin brothers, Darrell and Ernie. We became fast friends for awhile due to our love of baseball. We'd play for hours when I could get away from the housecleaning and other chores. We'd collect baseball cards and trade them, cut out pictures of baseball players and argue about who was best, and sometimes we'd just sit and watch games at their little house up in Martin Holler.

In 1977 my high school decided to let a college student who was doing her student teaching field work at Jonesville High form a jay vee baseball team and because Cousin Psycho wanted to try out, I got to do so as well. I convinced Darrell and Ernie to try out as well but both of them quit after the first day, they had been the butt of so many jokes because their family was one of the poorest in the county they developed an inferiority complex. I stuck it out however and by some miracle I made the team. I was on cloud nine when I saw I had made the team. I'll never forget the feeling of pride I had when they gave me my jersey and I saw my last name on the back of it. I felt like I was a hall of famer.

But it turns out I never got to play an inning. The county we lived in was so small there were no other jay vee teams so we had to look outside the county to find teams to play. We found one in near Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee and so we all jumped in a couple of vans and drove off to play our first game. As luck would have it a freak storm blew through Lee County as we drove to LMU and we were forced to turn back and go home. They managed to get a make up date for that game but it was in early June after school had let out and I was not allowed to go into town because the house needed cleaning or something.

I tried out for the varsity team the next two years in a row but it was painfully obvious that my love for the game well out paced my ability to play it. In other words, I stunk. I got beaned several times during warm up tosses and I could not hit for shit, so they wisely did not allow me to play. So my dreams of playing pro baseball died on the baseball field at Jonesville High School.

********

But my ball playing days did not die that day. In the late 1980's I moved to Roanoke, VA and I joined a local church, not because I believed in any of that Jesus and the holy spirit mumbo jumbo but because I wanted to meet people and make some friends. When I found out they fielded a team in the church softball league, I was definitely in. They welcomed me with open arms on the team and I was allowed to be a relief pitcher, they'd usually put me in after we were ahead the game was well out of reach. But one night I got shelled like a howitzer and I gave up like ten runs. Somehow we climbed back in it and we tied it when I came to bat. There was a man on third and we already had two outs, inside I was shaking like a leaf from the pressure, after all I had let the other team back in it with my sorry ass ptiching, but I tried not to show it. I was not what you would call a power hitter and the other team knew it. They had their third baseman play way in on me and they decided to throw me strikes. I took two pitches, one of which was a beautiful strike, and then I watched the ball leave the pitchers hand on the third pitch. I had already made my mind to swing at it no matter where it went.


It turns out it came at me belt high so I swung as hard as I could. The ball sailed over the third basemsn's head and it landed about 15 feet in front of the left fielder who was playing too far back. As soon as I saw our guy score I jumped up and down like Carlton Fisk in game 6 of the 1975 World Series. I ran to first and was heading to second when they told me to stop because my hit had won the game for us and put us in the playoffs. I was the happiest guy in the world right then and I felt like all my years of loving baseball had finally paid off.


These days I usually fall asleep watching games, except during the playoffs and the World Series, so I usually just watch Baseball Toinght on ESPN but boy oh boy, I still love baseball.

Snow Days

We're actually having a winter this year here in my corner of Tennessee. For the first time in years it's cold for several days at once and we've had a few snow events which were bad enough to have most of the local school systems cancel classes for a few days in a row. Even Sparky's employer has called off classes and closed their offices due to the inclement weather a couple of times this winter.

For the past four or five years we've had no winter to speak of. It's been warmish from December right through to February. Yes, we had a cold day once in awhile but no string of them and we had hardly any snow. But it wasn't always like that around here.

It started snowing on Christmas day in 1976 when I was living at Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery's farm in Lee County VA and it snowed on and off for the next four weeks. About four inches of snow fell that Christmas day and we were all so excited because we had the next week off to play in it. As the snow fell so did the temperatures, it did not get above freezing for weeks at a time.

Most cities and counties north of the Mason Dixon line know how to do adequate snow removal but in the rural mountainous counties of southwest Virgina/northeast TN the county road crews were not prepared for what hit us that year. The snows fell fast and furious the last week of December and for most of January. And because the road crews could not plow and salt all the roads to a degree that allowed school buses to travel safely on them, when it came time to go back to school after the holidays, school was cancelled.

We lived out in the middle of nowhere there in Lee County on a road that got plowed and salted maybe once a week if we were lucky. I was too young to have my drivers license so I was stuck at home and at the mercy of others when it came to going places. About all I could do was watch the snow fall, watch TV, read, or do chores.

Those were the dark ages back then late 1976/early 1977 entertainment wise. Cable TV was something fancy la dee daa people in big cities had, we had four over the air channels on our TV, NBC out of Bristol, ABC out of Knoxville, CBS out of Johnson City, and PBS out of a phone booth in Sneedville TN. And our TV had no remote, you had to get up and change the channel and if the reception was bad you had to go outside and turn a huge antenna, which we had to have because we lived so far out in the middle of nowhere, until the picture came in decently. VCR's were not big back in 1977 either, they weighed something like 900 pounds and they cost about a million dollars, okay I exaggerate but I'm not too far off. If you wanted to see movies you went to a movie theatre, which meant driving over the mountain to Kingsport, TN, the nearest 'big' town near us at that time. So basically for fun and entertainment we watched shitty 1970's TV, read books, I remember I re-read The Hobbit and the first book and a half of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, read comic books that we had read a million times already, and listen to albums by Yes, Rick Wakeman, Alan Parsons, and other bloated bombastic schlock and roll groups.

At first being off from school was kind of fun. We'd go out and make snowmen, sled down the mountain, go cave exploring, build bonfires, have snowball fights, and hike around the farm. But as the days wore on boredom over took us. I hadn't started smoking cigarettes yet, let alone pot, and I hadn't begun my life long love affair with beer at that point so I couldn't self medicate my way out of the boredom. So we began to pick at one another. You know what I mean, all of us teens would start fights over petty things and soon they would escalate in to shouting matches and then Aunt Rageaholic would step in punish me or my sister, even if her kids were at fault. By the end of the second week of January I felt like I was stuck in a hellish stage play by Jean Paul Sartre.

Outside the snow kept piling up, the cold kept coming, and they kept cancelling school. Then just as things were really bleak, unsettling, and at their worst, something happened that almost drove us all over the edge, Aunt Rageaholic's menopausal rages began. Imagine being trapped in a cage with a mountain lion that is pissed off and hasn't eaten for weeks. Being trapped in that cage would have been a picnic compared with life with my menopausal aunt. She'd fly into a rage if you breathed too loudly, laughed at something she did not find funny, or wore clashing plaids. Anything and everything we did pissed her off more than usual. It was then and there that I learned the meaning of the phrase 'walking on eggshells.'

We got a three day reprieve from her madness when she had to drive my cousin back to college in Berea KY. The snow was falling faster than stock values are falling in today's shitty economy when they set out for Berea College that day. She brushed aside suggestions that she wait a day before driving up there, she was master of the elements she insisted and a little snow didn't scare her, so she made all of us kids, all 6 of us, pack the car for her trip. I was secretly praying that she would not cancel and when she pulled out of the driveway and onto the main road we stood at the window and cheered like the people of Paris cheered when the Allies took it back from the Nazi's. About three hours later she called and said they got as far as Jonesville, which was about 15 miles from the farm, and they were going to have to stay in a motel over night before setting out again the next day.

We had a three day party without her. We stayed up late, played board games, stayed on the phone for hours, ate pounds of bacon, scores of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank gallons of orange Kool Aid, and we scarfed down our body weights in cold cereal. Somehow she knew we had too much fun while she was gone so when she got back she made our lives a living hell once more, but nothing she could do could take back the fun we had while she was away.

Towards the end of the third week of being off from school the temperature suddenly shot up one night and a warm wind kicked up. It was almost eerie walking outside and being almost knee deep in snow while a 60 degree wind flew down the valley at us. When we woke up the next day there were hundreds of snow wheels on the ground. They looked like this except for the fact that they were laying flat. They were all over our farm and in town as well. People freaked out and some said it was a sign that the end of times was at hand, which made me laugh.

The snow wheels did turn out to be a sign though, they were a sign that the snow and cold had been broken and a week later we were all back in school and I was never so happy to be free from my crazy menopausal aunt and her psycho kids. Our high school tried like hell to cram in all the stuff we missed over January but it was to no avail because at the end of February/early March the rains started to fall, the creeks and rivers began to rise, and we were out of school for another two weeks due to flooding.