TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY

It seemed like the closer it got to Christmas, the more Johnny Paul kept showing up at our door. He’d want me to come out and play football up the street with him and Bubba and Jeremiah or was wondering if I could come down to his house and work on drawing maps for geography, and once he wanted to know if we had some rope that he and his buddies could use to rig up a trolley from the top of a pine tree across the street in the woods. Everything he came peddling sounded like something worth buying, so I’d grab my carcoat and take off with him nearly every time.

It occurred to me that I’d get a glad feeling that he wanted me to go, and that caught me by surprise, since I had argued so with Mother about him not being my boyfriend and all that day she was working on the clowns. It also occurred to me that he had quit me last year right after Christmas for no good reason except what Mother interpreted as the loss of some sort of “mystery.”

This “mystery” was in a realm I clearly knew nothing about. It all seemed pretty ignorant to me. The whole point in every Nancy Drew book I had ever read and every Alfred Hitchcock movie I had ever seen was to get the mystery solved, not to hope it would go on and on making everybody wonder. But according to Mother, Johnny Paul liked mysteries better when he couldn’t solve them. So now I was in a hard spot: I was liking being pursued by a boy who would only keep liking me as long as he couldn’t catch up with me. Mother said the trick was to play “hard to get.” When you’re used to not having to think about what other people are thinking about you from one minute to the next, like when we were playing football or climbing trees and building trolleys, it’s hard to remember to think about pretending to like somebody less than you really do. It didn’t seem natural, and I thought I would probably make the mistake again of turning loose of any mystery I might have had because to tell you the truth, I didn’t really have any secrets I was keeping from Johnny Paul or anybody else. The biggest mystery to me about this whole thing was what on earth Johnny Paul thought was such a mystery about me anyway. It wasn’t like I was in the CIA or something. Of course I couldn’t tell him that or he wouldn’t have even been interested in popping firecrackers with me at Christmas anymore. This whole thing just gave me the thumps.

But he must have thought I had gotten ahold of some new secrets since last January because sure enough, just like last year, when Christmas Eve came around, there he was on my front porch again looking like Steve McQueen with his blue eyes and black eyelashes and a sack of Black Cats. When the sack was nearly empty, we had a contest to see who could hold onto a firecracker the longest before throwing it. One went off in my hand, so I guess I won. Johnny Paul led me crying into the house where Mother slathered butter all over it.

I knew Johnny Paul had a present for me in the bottom of the Black Cat sack because I had seen it, so even though my hand still throbbed and I would have liked to just go get under the covers, rock my hand, and bawl, I went on back outside and sat on the porch in the dark with Johnny Paul. There, with Johnny Paul’s comforting arm around me keeping me warm and the Christmas tree lights blinking joy through the window behind me, I lost the will to play the game my mother advised me to keep playing, and let myself be caught and kissed. I hoped that kiss wouldn’t cause all the mystery to leak out because I had bought Johnny Paul a silver identification bracelet for Christmas with my name on the back which I figured would become obsolete way too fast for the $7.95 Mother paid for it if things went south like they did last Christmas.

Lately at night after I’d finished my ritual of reading several pages in the dictionary, I would think about Mother’s mystery theory and work on coming up with ways to latch onto some kind of emergency mystery just in case Johnny Paul started acting like he had about figured me out again. I thought one good idea would be to gaze at him with serious eyes and solemnly pronounce “Yo escribo con lapiz.”

Daddy and I had begun a project of learning Spanish, and “I write with a pencil” was as far as either of us had gotten. I thought if worse came to worse this would suffice as a good mystery for him to chew on for a few days and might buy me a little time. But tonight there was no need; it was the magical season of Christmas, and I felt Johnny Paul securely resting in the palm of my hand.

I could tell by the size of the box in the Black Cat sack that he hadn’t bought me another comb and brush set this year, and I was right: in the tiny black velvet box wrapped in shiny green foil paper was a silver necklace with a disk engraved with my name on one side and his on the other. It was just the thing I needed to convince me once and for all that I could quit worrying about my mother’s ridiculous notions about mysteries.

Among other things under our tree the next morning, like sweaters and gloves and records and pajamas, was one of the things I had wanted most for two whole years: a b-b gun complete with a whole arsenal of b-b’s. And out in the back yard was the other: a blue 24” ten-speed English racer bicycle. On that happy Christmas morning with Johnny Paul’s disk hanging around my neck and my brand new bike and b-b gun waiting for me to take for a spin, Travis Wayne Harvey could have sat down at our dinner table and called me “Sunshine”— or for that matter, “Possum Breath”—for three hours straight without ever stopping to take a breath, and I would have just smiled and offered him more turnip greens. I thought there might be something to what Mr. Pete kept talking about; it looked like Jesus had finally found His way to Herald Street.

PICNIC WITH A VIEW

Azalea Heights is the county seat of Shelby County which means we have the courthouse right in the middle of our square. It was built in 1885 and looked like an Irish castle, but we weren’t all that impressed. People didn’t talk a lot about this or stand around it pointing and taking pictures. It was pretty commonplace to us. Folks went there to get their marriage licenses and birth certificates, and if you ran afowl of the law and the Sheriff got involved, they would put you on trial upstairs in the big courtroom. Old men who were hard of hearing would sit around outside on benches and smoke, chew, spit, and pitch washers. You half expected Atticus Finch to come walking out at quitting time and find Scout and Jem waiting for him outside in their overalls.

But Ruth Ann Patterson knew a lot of things about the courthouse that most people, even grown people, didn’t know — probably because her mother worked at the county clerk’s office which was a smaller building right there in the shadow of the courthouse. I think when Dixie Ruth would go there after school to wait for her mother to get off work, she’d be sent off to entertain herself in the same way that my parents dropped me off at the Rio two or three nights a week, even if the same picture show was showing all three nights.

This was handy for them but not as easy as you might think because I couldn’t understand about two quarters or even a dollar bill or any denomination of money that would cause me to have to wait for change. I don’t remember being stubborn about most things (except not wanting to get my hair brushed), but about this I was absolutely adamant. If they were going to get me to go to the show and give them two or three nights off, they had to give me the following: three nickels in one hand to give to Dotty, the ticket lady, and five nickels in the other hand for popcorn, a coke, and a pickle. (I could on a good day be persuaded to take two dimes and a nickel in that hand.) I’d be among the wealthy today if I had just let them give me my show money in the form they wanted to, but about this procedure, I was religiously dedicated, and there was room for neither variance nor negotiation.
In all of Ruth Ann’s courthouse meanderings, she had made some discoveries, so one day after school she took me upstairs to the courtroom behind where the judge sits and reached down and pulled open a little door right there in the floor. Underneath that door was a narrow stairway that led down to a door in the hallway that nobody would ever guess was a real door. There is no other explanation as to why it was located right there where it was except for the judge to use to make his escape after he had given his sentencing. I had this motion picture running in my head about the judge pronouncing to somebody that looked like Boo Radley, “That will be seventy-six years in Huntsville with no parole!” and then snatching that door open, jumping down through it, slamming it shut, and boogeying on down those stairs to freedom just as Boo wrangled free from the bailiff and ran at the judge with a bowie knife he had concealed up his pants leg.

Then Ruth Ann took me to the back of the courtroom and opened another door that hid another stairway that went up to the a little room that sat right on top of the courthouse. It was just like something out of Nancy Drew. It turns out that this room was something called the Civil Air Patrol tower. This is one of the features that made our courthouse look like an old-timey castle from outside. This little room had windows on all sides, and somebody told me that people used to sit up there and look for airplanes. I never understood why since we had a perfectly good airport out on the Logansport Highway with runways a bunch better for an airplane to land on than the streets downtown.

Now you need to know that there were three drugstores on our square in Azalea Heights, and every one of them had a soda fountain where you could sit on round stools that spun around, even though every time a kid tried this, their parents hollered at them to quit, so since the spinning feature never got fully taken advantage of, the drugstores might as well have saved their money and bought the still kind. If you wanted a tuna fish sandwich or an ice cream cone, you’d go to Green’s. Once or twice a year the folks over at Azalea Drug had a special promotion where you could throw a dart at a balloon over the fountain area, and you could get a banana split for the price that fell out of the balloon. This was a good deal, and you never wanted to miss these times, not only because you could get a twenty cent banana split for a nickel or a penny, but also because it was the only time you were ever allowed to throw sharp objects in an Azalea Heights business establishment.

But if you wanted the best hambuger in Shelby County, everybody knew you’d go to the Avery T. Roberts’ Rexall Drugstore. There you would find Billie cooking up burgers that so good that Judy Rutger’s daddy said once it would make you slap your momma. All the kids from the elementary school would race in there at lunchtime and start hollering their orders to Billie as soon as they’d hit the door. Billie was as good at remembering as she was at cooking hamburgers, and pretty soon she got to where she could keep up with what all the regulars liked all the way from third through eighth grade. When I’d come in, she’d shout, “Hey, Little Crocker (Julie was “Big Crocker” even though she was only four- and-a- half feet tall) you want your regular?” This meant mustard everything, which is what I always wanted. Somehow she would manage to get all those orders right, each one charged to the right daddy, and have us out of there and back to school in forty-five minutes. Billie knew how to make you feel like a queen — always remembering just how it was you liked your hamburger, even though you were only ten years old. The funny thing was that even though she was the only one doing any work, and lots of it — bustling around throwing meat on the grill, cheese on the meat at just the right time, slapping on mustard, then piling lettuce and onions on with one hand and pickles with the other, while all the rest of us were just sitting there doing nothing — somehow, maybe because she always looked the same in her white uniform with her hair always the same length and the same style year after year, she managed to make herself seem kinda invisible. I don’t think we ever saw her as a real person with a specific gender who blew her nose and swallowed and wore a nightgown and had people at home that she loved and talked to about things that didn’t involve ground meat or even cooking. Maybe she had a kid or a husband, and brushed her teeth and yawned and stretched when she first woke up, but you’d have thought her whole life consisted of the person she was when she tied on her apron every morning at the Rexall drugstore.

One day in November, Ruth Ann and I made a plan to get Billie to fix our hamburgers to go. We kept quiet about this because we were on an adventure that was not going to be able to accommodate more than two, and we were pretty sure it wasn’t even legal for that many. We got our lunches and snuck across the street to the courthouse where we were careful to run from one bush to another so her mother wouldn’t spot us from the county clerk’s office. We made our way up the stairs to the civil air patrol tower and were just getting our hamburgers unwrapped when we heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. There is not much you can do in a situation like this but just brace yourself and your friend for trouble because you are definitely trapped with only one door in the floor with a sliding bolt lock located on the other side.

Well, the person that was coming up those stairs and who pushed open that trap door and forced his way in with me and Ruth Ann was none other than the dreaded Jesse Pugh, Mrs. Gravitts’ most mature male pupil, who was about twenty and had no business being in fifth grade. What we did next was as smooth as butter. Both of us grabbed our lunches, jumped down through that hole in the floor, pulled the door behind us, and slid that bolt into the locked position. All that took about nine seconds. We could hear Jesse hollering and banging on the floor all the way down those stairs, and we never could figure out why nobody else heard him and let him out, but they didn’t. Now if he had been some deranged chainsaw-lugging, blowtorch-wielding somebody, we would have probably been heroes, but since he was just a fifth grader, albeit an over aged fifth grader, we figured we better not go to any authorities and try to collect a bounty on Jesse’s hide.

Mrs. Gravitts didn’t seem to think much about the fact the Jesse didn’t come back after lunch since just coming to school half a day was a red-letter day for him, and neither did his brother Arnie. The way these boys acted made you wonder what their parents were thinking or if maybe they didn’t even have any parents at all and slept in the cotton gin at night with the drunks.

I don’t know what would have happened to Jesse if we had kept quiet. Maybe he would have starved to death, and someone would have finally smelled him up there when he got all rotten, or maybe he would have gotten desperate and busted out a window and tried to grab hold of a sycamore branch to climb down but instead have fallen to his death like Kim Novak in Vertigo. But we never found out, because we got scared of one of these things happening and wrote Arnie a note saying he had better go up to the courthouse after school and rescue his brother.

We kept expecting Jesse to come after us and knock us off our bikes and steal them or slit the tires on our parents’ cars, but when he finally showed up back at school again, shoot- he acted like nothing ever even happened. This just goes to show you that what we knew about being hoodlums was small potatoes compared to what Jesse knew; or maybe it was just that he got to thinking about it and decided spending the afternoon locked up and smothering in a 3x5 box was better than breathing all the free air he wanted in Mrs. Gravitts’ room.

Sometimes I’d get to wondering what Jesus was doing. I thought about how every week Mr. Pete would tell our Sunday school class about how Jesus saves, but He sure didn’t seem to be doing much to save me or my sister or our mother and daddy or Jesse and Arnie Pugh.

Bathtubs Full of Blood

Halloween came, and I was going as a hobo. I had learned from channel six that you could make your very own beard, even if you were a girl, by putting some of your mother’s cold cream on your face and then rubbing some coffee grounds on top of that. I put on one of Daddy’s old shirts and some overalls, grabbed a stick and tied a dishtowel around the end of it, and, with the help of channel six’s beard idea, I was a hobo. In Azalea Heights you could just take off on Halloween and be safe because everybody in town knew you and your parents and were watching out for you. There were even some widow-ladies that would invite you in and give you popcorn balls or candy apples to eat in front of their fireplaces.

But somebody wasn’t watching the post office on Halloween night when I was in fifth grade. They should have been, too, because Carla Nations and I had been planning for a month the idea that we would pull up all the signs on the post office lawn. I don’t know why, but this seemed like a spectacular idea to us both, so we set out in the darkness to do it. The only trouble was that it was just so easy, and then we were finished. The thrill of it that we had anticipated for so many weeks hadn’t materialized, and the whole affair seemed pretty anticlimactic, so we picked up all the signs and climbed on top of the postal delivery trucks and stuck the signs up there. I sure am glad there was a heavy dew that night because if the signs had not fallen off before the men came in to drive the trucks the next morning, somebody could really have gotten hurt… and it would have all been just because me and Carla Nations, of Azalea Heights Elementary School, got bored.

It makes you wonder how many times terrible things have happened to people just out of somebody else’s misguided prescription for boredom. It also makes you wonder why our consciences didn’t kick in before we left the post office and even worse, what was making them malfunction for that whole year. I’ll bet God had to do a lot of intervening that He hadn’t planned on that year — like causing dew to fall heavily at the Azalea Heights post office on Halloween night.

Since before we made it to the post office, we had gone to the exhibit hall at the fairgrounds to bob for apples and do the cakewalk, it was getting pretty late by the time we finished our sign caper, so Carla and I had to part ways and hurry home. I was further away than I allowed for and realized I needed to run or be late, which would not have been a good thing for my future possibilities of playing football in the dark with Jeremiah, Bubba, and Johnny Paul, so I took a shortcut through a block full of neighbor’s backyard. I was running full speed in the blackness right behind Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hughes’s house when suddenly a guide wire caught me by the mouth and turned me a complete back flip. I landed hard on my back, and for a minute, I thought I was a toothless, dead hobo until I felt the warm flow of blood running all down into my coffee-ground, cold cream beard. Bawling like a kindergartner, I limped the rest of the way home to find my parents with a den full of friends playing "42" and apparently not even thinking about whether I was going to come flying through the door at the last minute before my coach turned into a pumpkin.

Mother and Daddy washed off my beard, found the source of the cascading blood, and as always when I would get a gash somewhere that needed stitches, sent me to lie down in the bathtub until the bleeding stopped. They had learned quite a few years earlier, after I had jumped off the house onto my trampoline and busted it and my head on Christmas morning and later turned a back flip off the diving board while not standing close enough to the end of the board, that taking me for stitches was going to be entirely too expensive and that the we way we would handle these things from now on was just to let me bleed it out in the bathtub.

I thought that night on Halloween that maybe I had finally gotten banged up bad enough to deserve a trip to get stitches, but I was wrong.

FUMING GEYSERS AND GUARDIAN ANGELS

My little big sister, Judy (right) Thanksgiving 2010

That night, Mother and Daddy did have a loud fuss. (Julie and I never called them ”fights” because most of the time, except for that one plate and the kitchen chair, they didn’t throw anything at each other except words.) But these words were horrible, sharp-pointed weapons that boiled up and spewed out of their mouths like the fuming geysers at Yellowstone Park that I had seen on the newsreels at the Rio. Sometimes in the middle of the night if Julie and I went in to try to help negotiate in some infantile way or maybe just showed up by surprise and shame them by letting them know we had heard them, I would look at their mouths and be surprised that their lips and tongues weren’t singed or blistered by the white-hot eruptions that had issued forth from them. Surprisingly, they were always still all in one piece with never any blood or even blisters. Later I learned that there really was all kinds of damage — hemorrhaging, blistering, and scarring — but that it was all inside, mainly inside my mother.

It didn’t look like religion was doing much for them either, at least not late at night when Julie and I needed to sleep and they needed to explode. In the daytime, to look at them both, you would have sworn that everything Reverend Holder was saying behind the pulpit at First Methodist was soaking in. My mother was a pretty and upstanding person who spent her days either fashioning impressively detailed dresses for her two daughters with her Singer sewing machine or working in her high-heeled shoes at “Pep’s Finance Company,” and Daddy dealt with an adoring public, treated his staff and their families with kindness and generosity, and went regularly to Lion’s Club on Thursdays at the BK Café. They had plenty of friends and were patriotic, all of which seemed like God and Jesus, His Son, would have been proud of, but it didn’t seem like Jesus was much a part of anything that went on in their bedroom late most nights.

So that night when I woke up to the geysers spouting off, I just got up and went to Julie’s room, even though I had the privilege of having a room of my very own. She let me crawl into her bed under the afghans and snuggle up under her wing where the pointy words couldn’t penetrate, at least until we had to come out to get some air. It kinda seemed like, freshman or not, that she was glad I was back, and most nights from there on out, I would sleep with her and not the clowns in my room. It’s a good thing, too, because she went back to reading the Bible to me every night and saying my prayers with me.

From fifth-grade on, I began to get a little of what was going on in the Bible stories she would read to me, and some nights I would stay awake for the whole story. People like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Abraham and Isaac, and Peter began to seem like real folks with real problems that could have sat and visited together on one of the twirling stools at the soda fountain of Green’s Drugstore or come walking out of the dime store with a sack of roasted peanuts as I passed by on the sidewalk. When she would read to me right there lying under the covers, two feet away in her fourteen-year-old voice, all of those “thee’s” and “thou’s” and holy words seemed to carry more meaning than when Reverend Holder would say them forty feet away down front wearing his long black robe and standing behind the pulpit in front of the choir on Sunday mornings.

Yessir, even though she was just a kid, I think in the long run you’d have to give Julie most of the credit for keeping me out of the Shelby County jailhouse.

BRINGING IN THE CLOWNS

By early October, knowing I had to get up and spend five days a week with Mrs. Gravitts had worn my childlike joyfulness thin, and at ten, I was already acting like a grouchy grown-up. Everybody in my family, even Julie, thought it was funny to call me "Sunshine." Rather than the desired effect of making me see the error of my ways, hearing "Sunshine" just made the dark cloud that brewed over my head grow angrier and blacker. It seems like for a while there I was pretty much a constant brewing storm and threatening tempest.

It was bad enough that my own family members called me names, but one night at the supper table the funnel cloud touched ground and nearly made goulash out of Mother's nicely laid-out rump roast, jacket potatoes, turnip greens, and fried green tomatoes. Julie had invited her boyfriend, Travis Wayne Harvey, over for supper. As he approached the table where I was already sitting, he opened his mouth and said, "Hey, there, Sunshine!"

Well, that was it. The combination of somebody who was not even a member of my family calling me "Sunshine" and Mrs. Gravitts' clanking teeth and murderous paddle frenzies was enough to push me over the edge.

"Don't you Sunshine me, you bigmouthed bully! Did you hear him, Mother? He is not even a member of this family!"

I let loose with a torrent of high-pitched scowls, and then, with a flourish of drama, turned over my chair and ran to my room. I was hungry; I loved fried green tomatoes, and we didn't have them everyday. I fully expected to be rescued and coaxed back to the supper table, but all that happened next was laughter. I could hear them in there laughing at me!


It's a terrible thing when growing up takes you to the place for the very first time where you aren't experienced enough to know what to do next: if you have a semi-civilized family like I did, you aren't street-smart enough to know how to cuss eloquently or get in the last shocking word, and you know that if you go off half-cocked and try to pay them back in some outlandishly violent way like busting out your sister's boyfriend's windshield with your pogo stick or busting out the kitchen window with your fist and scattering glass all over the table, when your daddy gets home, he will forget the civilized part of his nature and let him barbaric nature handle it with his belt. So I just sat there hungry and listened to Brenda Lee singing, "I'm Sorry," (which I wasn't) and Johnny Horton singing, "North to Alaska"( which is where I wished Travis Wayne Harvey would go).

If it hadn't been for me, he might never have made it to first base with my sister. He had been able to pull the wool over Mother's and Daddy's eyes about being an okay boyfriend to their firstborn daughter totally at my expense. It was last fall at one of the football games. Somebody had thrown a cigarette down from the bleachers, and since I was walking by and noticed that it was a perfectly good, unfinished cigarette, I just picked it up and took a couple of puffs. I should have taken time to look around a little bit first, though, because Travis Wayne happened to be leaving the concession stand and saw me. Before I got home, he had found a way to tell my parents the whole story. This made me so mad I couldn't see straight, but of course Julie was so cross-eyed in love with this jerk that she took up for him.

She came to me pleading his case: "Jen, Travis Wayne was just doing what was best for you. You should feel good that he wanted to take care of you! He was really only doing what your own big brother would have had one." This was a down time for Daddy, so she didn't think of him as a brother right then.

Just the thought of Travis Wayne Harvey as my brother made me want to throw up. Since he and Julie had just started going out, I guess he figured he could make a little headway with Mother and Daddy by blabbing, like some self-righteous big brother figure. I should have beat him to the punch right then in the name-calling department before he called me "Sunshine." I had a few good ones for him, "Eddie Haskell" being among the first.

No siree, he had blown it with me, and trying to join in now like he was family was enough to make me want to take a ballpoint pen and go out and let all the air out of his tires.

Our mother was an artistic genius. At the same rate Daddy took up new hobbies and cranked out pranks, Mother cranked out handiwork. Once she made Daddy this beautiful Mexican-style shirt with lace down the front beside the buttons, and after wearing it only one day to work, he came home with a list as long as your arm of women who wanted her to make one for their husbands. Girl Scout leaders were always inciting her to come teach the girls how to embroider or make pillows or candles. On this particular night after the "Sunshine" fiasco with Travis Wayne, Mother started making some mosaic tile pictures. They were a set of clowns, one with a happy face and the the other one with a sad face.

She said, "Jen, I am making these for your room. We'll put one over each of your beds, and every night when you go to bed, you can choose which clown's face reflects the way you are feeling since you seem to be having some bad days this year."

"Okay, I guess that's a good idea," I said. "But don't let that Travis Wayne call me names. He doesn't even belong here. Why does he have to come over here and spoil our meals? Let him find his own food. Doesn't he have a home and a supper table? Why does Julie have to like him? Why does she have to have a boyfriend at all?"

"Well, you should understand, Jen. After all, you have a boyfriend," she answered calmly without looking up from her Elmer's Glue and colored rocks.

"What do you mean, I have a boyfriend?" I asked innocently and I thought quite convincingly too.

"Now you know good and well that you like Johnny Paul Hightower, and he likes you too."

"Me and Johnny Paul and Bubba just play football, together every afternoon. I don't like Johnny Paul for a boyfriend anymore," I assured her. Johnny Paul, who was also in Mrs. Fletcherton's room in fourth grade and lived down the street, had come over and popped Black Cats with me on our front porch several nights in a row before Christmas and, after we ran out of firecrackers, had kissed me on the lips just like Frankie Avalon kissed Annette Funicello at the Rio Theater. We also went to the Methodist hayride and held hands, and so our mothers both went out and bought us Christmas presents to exchange: I got him a red sweater vest, and he got me a comb and brush set with a mother of pearl mirror. Right after Christmas we had broken up because it turns out that he was the kind of boy that only likes a girl when she doesn't like him back. This attitude was the most ignorant thing I had ever heard of, and it made me pretty mad, since I had given up a way of life to become his girlfriend. And besides that, I hated having my hair brushed with his or anybody else's brush, much less combed, which hurts even worse, which means I didn't have any reason to want to look in that dumb mirror he gave me either. So now, I had bounced right back into my tomboyism and didn't know where my mother had gotten such a crazy idea about me having him or anybody else for a boyfriend.

I didn't want to talk about it anymore, so I said, "Can I sleep with Julie tonight?" I had the feeling that Mother and Daddy were going to fight because she kept calling people trying to find him and couldn't. I didn't want to be in the room next to theirs and hear all that, even though I knew that my parents were trying to give my sister some grown-up freedom from her little sister sharing her room now that she was a freshman in high school and how they were going to do that was to tell me I was finally "getting to have" my very own room.

"Now, Jen, why would you want to do that after we've given you your very own room with two beds that will, as soon as I can finish them, have these really cute clowns over them?" Julie isn't getting any new pictures in her room. You just finished telling me you liked these clowns, and we made that plan about you climbing into the appropriate bed every night, remember?"

That was the thing about most adults. You give them an inch, and they take a mile. I mean, what could I do? When she asked me about those clowns, I couldn't just tell her that I was too big for something that she had just spent a bunch of money on trying to use as a psychological plot to make me fell important. So I had very non-noncommittally, mind you, agreed that this was an okay idea. And now, you'd have thought that I put my hand on a Bible and promised to love, honor, and obey these clowns all the days of my life.

But then again, maybe if I was afraid to sleep in my own room, I was not too big for circus clowns.

MY BIG BROTHER, DADDY

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)