Almost Home (7 page)

I responded with the phrase every southerner uses on a regular basis—“Hell yeah.”

He pulled over and exchanged places with me, then instructed me on how to drive the last couple of miles to his house. He was extremely laid back (out in the middle of nowhere there’s not much to crash into), and told me repeatedly, “You can go faster.” I used to look up to him, but haven’t seen him in many years now.

By this time all of Jacks’ kids had long since moved off on their own, but this particular stepbrother, along with his wife and infant daughter, were forced to move into the tin roof shack with us after their house and all they owned burned to the ground. While there he taught me many practical skills, such as how to shoot and take care of your gun and replace the engine in your car, all while maintaining a beer buzz. I never did develop a taste for the stuff, and have never been able to drink an entire bottle. He’d hand me his girlie magazines while belching, “Don’t tell dad I showed you these.” All in all he was a pretty fun guy to be around, even though his tact was sometimes questionable (once, years later, when witnessing a neighborhood girl flirting with me, he called out a cheerful,

“You better get on that, boy!”).

My first year of junior high I befriended a mildly retarded and majorly weird kid names Kevin. I was most likely the only friend this kid ever had, and you couldn’t make him shut up. It was as if he’d been saving up conversations his 32

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whole life. He could talk about literally anything for hours at a time—a cartoon he’d watched the previous afternoon, a magazine he’d looked at in the grocery store, or a new stuffed animal he’d acquired. This kid was a freak when it came to stuffed animals, and he had a huge collection—it’s where every cent of his money went. I never had to say much of anything; he’d carry the entire conversation. He couldn’t even make himself stop talking during class. Everyone else did their best to avoid him, so we had our own table everyday at lunch.

I believe the reason I didn’t extend myself or try to make other friends is because I couldn’t compete. We were dirt poor, so I didn’t have the latest sneakers, I had no idea what videos were playing on MTV, I hadn’t seen the latest movies, and didn’t own a single article of trendy clothing. I didn’t have to compete with Kevin. I could be wearing a sackcloth and have bare feet for all he cared, as long as I listened to him talk about his stuffed animal collection and nodded my head every now and then. Other than that, there were no expectations. I think pretty much everyone else in the world abused and made fun of him, but as long as I let him hang around, he didn’t care. In hindsight, I also believe some part of me had given up. At the age of twelve or thirteen, I had already decided life was hopeless.

I had to repeat my first year of junior high, because I failed. I don’t remember completing a single assignment during the entire year, and it showed when report cards were handed out—I had an “F” in every single subject. I didn’t pass anything, and I didn’t care. As the school year began to come to a close, I was looking at another long, brutal, lonely summer in what my family still refers to as “the white house.” This year I carried an extra piece of darkness home with me. Right before we were released for vacation, another thirteen year old tried to commit suicide by hanging himself.

Joseph was a kid I had three or four classes with. He even sat right in front of me for one, and was never without a large duffel bag full of books, paper, colored pencils, protractors, and anything else you could possibly need to navigate your way through the seventh grade world. He was no friend of mine, but I knew who he was. A couple of weeks before the end of the year he stopped showing up at school. Soon the entire student body knew he’d hanged himself. He survived, but spent the next few months in a mental institution. The image haunted me all summer long with a power that nothing before had. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

Late at night I’d lie in bed with my ear pressed to my little radio so that no one else could hear it. If Jack would have heard the slightest hint of music he would have thrown a fit and claimed that I had kept him awake all night. I wondered if
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perhaps Joseph had been listening to music when he decided life was no longer worth the effort. Did he wait until nightfall, or did he do it in the daylight? What did he tie the rope to? Did he jump off a chair? Why didn’t he succeed? If I had said anything to him, would it have made a difference? It drove me to tears more than once. Lying in bed covered in sweat and staring at the darkness, I didn’t even feel the mosquitoes biting me as I replayed the scenes I’d imagined over and over. I thought that if anyone knew how lonely and miserable I was, it was that kid. The anguish and the ghosts that haunted me evaporated like mist under the light of the morning sun, but would be waiting for me again when darkness fell. I couldn’t seem to shake it off. That’s how I spent my summer vacation.

The beginning of my second year of seventh grade didn’t start out a great deal differently than the first. I wore my second hand clothes and collected my free lunch. Kevin wasn’t even around this year, as it was decided over the summer that he was better suited to attend a special school for kids with learning disabilities. I was on my own.

One day a week during study hall we were allowed to spend thirty minutes in the school library. It was on one of these excursions that my life was drastically changed when I came across a superior literary publication dubbed “Thrasher.”

For those who don’t know, this was
the
skateboarding magazine. This was the first time I had been exposed to the world of skateboarding. It wasn’t just an activity, it was a culture. At this point I don’t remember seeing any skaters in our school, so I don’t know how the magazine found its way into those humble archives. That magazine became my Bible. All I could think of was skating, and after months of begging, I received my first skateboard for Christmas. It was a cheap, heavy thing, with no nose and very little tail. It was piss yellow, with a Chinese dragon graphic on the bottom. Definitely not the best of equipment, but it gave me my start.

Day and night I did nothing but practice tricks and read “Thrasher.” I stared at the ads for the new decks like a sex fiend in the porn section. I also became acquainted with a different world of music I’d never heard of before, and discovered The Cure, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and many other classics.

My grandmother moved into a trailer park with the dubious title of “Lakeshore Estates,” and when I went to go see her, a couple of the neighbors gave me five dollars to mow their lawns. I saved the money to order clothes from skateboard companies, and began to replace the cheap parts on my board with better quality stuff, one piece at a time. Skateboarding became my life, and I did just
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enough work to get by in school that year. Soon enough, summer vacation was on me once again.

That summer was as hot, miserable, and lonely as the others, but it seemed to pass a little more quickly just because I now had a little life in me. I skated up the old deserted highway between the cotton fields, all the way to the courthouse and public library. Once there I made use of every curb in the parking lot until I was drenched in sweat and on the verge of heatstroke. If not for the old librarian allowing me to guzzle from her water fountain like a horse at a trough, I would have likely suffered terminal dehydration. I never walked anywhere—the skateboard became an extension of my body. I knew the name of every pro-skater, I knew who they were sponsored by, and I knew what tricks each of them had invented. I could have quoted any of these statistics to you without even having to think about it.

Skating had an unexpected side effect, too. It started when I noticed that people who saw me skating would stop and watch. I never thought about it before, but this made me realize I was actually good at something. It occurred to me for the first time that this was something not everyone else could do, and they were impressed with my ability. It gave me self-confidence and raised my self-esteem. I walked with my head higher and any inferior feelings withered away. It was as if I had become a completely new person. A new era had begun for me.

XIII

Going back to school the next year was vastly different because I was vastly different. I was no longer invisible. It seemed that a few others had learned the pleasures of skating, and we drew together to form our own little group. We had our own style of dressing, our own obscure references, and our own rules of conduct.

The way we looked made it easy for us to identify other skaters in the crowd of students, and made it easier for them to identify us. Things have changed in the years since, but back then skaters drew quite a bit of attention, and often enough it was not of the positive sort.

Perhaps I stood out a little more than the others. One side of my head was shaved to the scalp while the other side had been allowed to grow long. I wore combat boots while everyone else had the latest Nikes. I had earrings in both ears and in one nipple. No one else even looks twice at that sort of thing these days, when even housewives have tattoos and every kid on the street has some part of their face pierced. A nose ring now is about as shocking as a glass of milk. Things were different in the South fifteen years ago.

My behavior wasn’t exactly low-key, either. I was thrown out of class at least once a week for disturbing the peace in general. Part of the problem was that I was just so happy to be away from my hell of home. I mocked teachers, screamed out bizarre and nonsensical answers when they asked questions, and made a nui-sance of myself in a plethora of ways designed to drive authority figures mad with rage. One teacher even threatened to “slap that bird nest off of your head” in reference to my haircut. I was delighted.

When I met Jason Baldwin, he was quite the opposite. I don’t recall hearing him ever even speaking during his first year of junior high. I was the proverbial pervert who liked to amuse myself by looking up vulgar words in the dictionary during study hall. I certainly wasn’t going to waste my time on such pointless exercises as homework. One day after exhausting my sexual vocabulary for the millionth time I slammed the dictionary shut and looked up with the intention of finding someone to bother.

Looking back at me was a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet. He was wearing a Motley Crue T-shirt, and judging by the paper on his desk 36

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he’d been drawing and doodling to kill time. There was a backpack propped next to his feet which turned out not to contain a singe book. Instead it held a large collection of cassette tapes—Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and any other hair band a young hoodlum could desire. He often brought a small walkman with him, unclipped the speakers from the head piece and passed me one during study hall, or months later on the bus, so that we could both listen. I’d see him eating lunch every day in the cafeteria and nodded my head as a greeting when I was walking out. I never did ask how he got the black eye.

Jason usually had the latest “Metal Edge” or “Heavy Metal” magazine, and I looked at those while he examined my “Thrasher” collection. All of our interac-tions took place during school, because I still lived in the shack far outside city limits. The only class we had together was study hall, so there was little or no talking. Most of our communication was through gestures—finger pointing, eyebrow raising, head shaking, etc. This didn’t change until one day when my grandmother nearly died.

My grandmother had already suffered one heart attack, so she knew the symptoms well. Luckily she had time to call 911, and then call my mom when the second one hit her. It was late in the evening when my mother began to shout that we had to go. We moved as quickly as we could, but the ambulance still got there before we did. We arrived in Lakeshore to see the paramedics bringing my grandmother out on a stretcher.

It seemed surreal because it was late enough that the sun was down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. The sky was a beautiful mix of dark blue and purple that made my heart ache. There was a special, magickal feel in the air that I’ve only felt a few times in my life. It touches something in you and it’s so damn beautiful that you think you’ll die because it’s too much to take. A time like that isn’t part of any season. It’s not spring, summer, winter, or fall. It’s a day that stands alone, like a world unto itself.

I’ve only experienced it five or six times in my entire life, but I pray to be blessed with more. It’s like a drug. If everyday were like that, no one would grow old or die and war would not exist. There are no words that can convey the magick in those evenings. They’re dark in essence, but look over you benevolently.

There was something about the way the red ambulance lights flashed through the entire world without making a sound that hurt my mind. No loud siren, just that red light flashing. I knew my grandmother would be okay. Everyone is okay on an evening like that.

My mother jumped from the truck and explained who she was. They let her into the ambulance to ride with my grandmother, who was barely conscious. We
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followed behind. At the hospital she was quickly rushed to surgery, where her heart doctor was already waiting.

We sat in the waiting room flipping through magazines without seeing what was on the pages, pacing the halls, and staring blankly at the television screen that perched high in the corner. When the doctor finally came out, after what seemed an eternity, he pulled my mother to the side and explained that he did what he could, but that my grandmother wasn’t expected to live through the night. We slept in the waiting room, expecting to hear the worst every time a doctor passed through. The news didn’t come that night, or the next day either.

That afternoon the doctor came to talk to my mother again. He said my grandmother was still alive, though in critical condition. The new problem was that she had developed blood clots in her leg, and it was going to have to be amputated. He had doubts about her making it through the surgery, but she would surely die without it.