Although my sister Julie was pretty perfect, she wasn't really all that bad. She was four years older than me and had just entered into Azalea Heights High School. You might think the reason she was so motherly toward me was that she was so old now-- a freshman in high school-- but that wasn't it. She had claimed me as her baby from the day I came into this world three weeks late. I don't remember all this, of course, but everybody says she was just like another little mommy and that as I grew older and my badness couldn't keep being blamed on being a baby, she would look up at my real mother and ask with a sigh, "What are we going to do with Jen?" as though some of the responsibility for raising me and keeping me out of jail belonged to her. That's probably because she knew that everybody needs two parents, and technically, I only had one, our mother, Judy Crocker. Our daddy was more like a mischievous big brother than a daddy, so Mother was really trying to rear three kids all by herself. I guess Julie, being the firstborn and making it into the world on time instead of three weeks late, caught on fast, felt sorry for our mother, and decided to be her own second parent and help Mother raise us other two.
Our daddy, named Leon Perry Crocker, was nicknamed "Pep" when he was just a little boy, and that name had stuck throughout his life so far; even his car dealership and cafe were named "Pep's Pontiacs" and "Pep's Smokehouse," though you would think that a grown man would have better sense than to put a chopped-off name that wasn't even a real name up on a big neon sign and hope to attract mature customers looking for a trustworthy businessman to feed them a safe meal or sell them a reliable car.
He liked to brag about some of the things he did as a kid in Tenaha: steal his own aunt's chickens to sell for money to go to the picture show, and use a bicycle tire pump to pump up his friend, Wiley Earl Skaggs, through his rear end because he couldn't swim, and he wanted to see if this would make him shoot across the pond like a motorboat. I'll bet if he'd dropped the "Pep" and started going by "Leon" when he got to be an adult, he would have turned over some kind of a new leaf that would have made him get this kind of behavior out of his system, but he didn't , and if you ask me, this is why he kept getting into things he shouldn't. Not like jail or anything like that. He was what was called a "white-collar worker" because he did things like be a bank vice-president once and own his own insurance and finance companies and later hospitals and nursing homes. So getting in jail was out of the question. He just acted like a kid once he got off work in the afternoons and took off his white shirt. Even though he never did get really drunk and stagger around, he'd drink beer and whiskey almost every night with his friends like it was something he was getting away with. He'd get on these jags just like a kid-- like suddenly taking up the guitar or the motor scooter or landing his airplane on Highway 287, or buying a fighting rooster he named "The Hawaiian Slasher," which if you didn't know, is against the law, even in Shelby County.
Not that the law ever made much difference to him. I don't remember him ever getting his car inspected, and once when his brakes went out in his old gray Packard, he just started using the emergency brake. He'd take me to school in the Packard, and when we were about to stop, he'd yell, "Hang onto your false teeth!" and then yank up the emergency brake. If I didn't have my feet firmly braced in front of me, I would have knocked all my teeth out on the dashboard. Finally, after a few months of this, the emergency brake went out, and he would slow way down about a block from the school, and I'd just open my door at a low speed and jump out.
Another thing he got a hankering to do that might have been a little bit illegal was to build a still in our utility room. He had this idea that he could make his own beer, so he brought home some I.V. tubes and bottles from the hospital and rigged up a still right there beside the deep freeze. This was an embarrassing thing to try to explain when friends came over after school and we'd go in there to get a Coke. It was even embarrassing when Faylene Holder, daughter of Reverend Leonard Holder, came over, and she was one of the wildest kids anybody knew of, besides Becky O'Hearn and a whole nest of seasoned hoodlums from five generations back named the Beckhams.
It wasn't that Faylene was a hoodlum so much as that she was sneaky and even more of a tomboy than I was. People thought that she was all good because her daddy was the preacher and her two older sisters were beautiful and smart and were named exotic, feminine names-- Sharlyne and Cheryl (both with "y's" where there should have been "e's") -- and never had acted like they were anything but thirty-five their whole lives. They probably would have thought Julie and her friends should have been sent to reform school for turning over Mrs. Gravitts' wastebasket.
But Faylene wasn't so perfect, if you want to know the truth. One day in fourth grade she came over and suggested that we use the doll bottles we were playing with to give ourselves enemas. Also she had a calf that lived in her own back yard there at the church parsonage right downtown. A dog wasn't good enough for Faylene; she wanted this calf, and when she got him, she named him "Junior Lee Holder" and fed him with a bottle with a great big nipple (much too big to be used to give yourself an enema.)
So with Daddy always being on one adolescent binge after another, you can see why Julie felt like Mother could use a little help. As it turned out, Julie was the one who ended up coming to my rescue and saving me from the terrors of sleeping in a room next to my parents' room all by myself.
(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke, © Jan Doke, 2009)
