My Pathetic Life chapter 2(part2)

*Hi gang, had a few set backs this week, so I am posting part 2 of chapter 2 (yes there will be a small part 3)**
                                 **ENJOY**

Being four foot eleven was a pain in the ass but really worked out at school dances because most of the girls were taller than me. It made slow dancing an awesome mammary experience, which still puts a smile on my face today. While in the gym dancing with a girl that I was dating named Jen; she already had a set C’s; I had my face buried in her bosom and I felt a tap on my back. When I turned around it was one of the female teachers, who informed me that school policy dictated no less than six inches apart during a dance function. Imagine that I was cock blocked by the education system, just my luck. So we duck out of the dance to the parking lot, and I remembered that I lived only two blocks from the school. There was still two hours left of the dance before Jen’s parents were going to pick her up, so I convinced her to follow me to the now infamous tree fort and it was there that I lost my virginity. All I remember is that my legs were so shaky that getting down from the tree house was going to be tricky. I damn near fell out of the tree attempting it, but made it to the ground safely. We made it to the parking lot just in time for her parents to pick her up and not suspect a thing. I whistled all the way home that night.

In December of that year, I was staying over at my friend Dave’s house and the neighbor’s across the street from his house had just got a projection TV and were showing the movie ‘Halloween’; by John Carpenter. That movie scared the hell out of me, but what was more terrifying was the walk home that night. There was a field I had to cut through to get to my house that ran by the old Midway Dance Hall, that had been abandoned since the early ‘60’s and the wind was blowing hard that night. As I was passing the old dance hall to get to the field, the wind blowing through the old structure was making the creepiest sounds and my imagination took over. I thought for sure that Michael Myers was prowling around the edges of the building, and I took off running as fast as I could through the freshly plowed field. Half way across the field a ring necked pheasant flew up in front of me, its wings slapping me in my face, and I literally pissed myself and screamed like a school girl at the prom. I don’t know who was more frightened, me or the pheasant; all I know is that I was frantically trying to restart my heart and sprint the rest of the way home. Once inside the house, I looked down to see that my pants were definitely wet with piss and my mother was staring at me.

                ‘What the hell happened to you?’ she asked, and after explaining the movie and the walk/run home all she could say was ‘Serves you right for watching those silly movies’. Thanks for the fucking support mom. It took me almost three hours to fall asleep that night, because of the windy shadows dancing from behind my curtains.  Thank you Mr. Carpenter for the first set of chronological nightmares of my life for the next two years, damn that was a great movie.

On February 20, 1980 we heard the news that AC/DC’s lead singer Bon Scott had been found dead, and we were all devastated. I had just started to listen to their music the year before and was planning to see them in concert that summer. I had even got permission from the parental units’ head of time, but now he was gone. I remember all the girls in the school quad crying their eyes out and all the guys staring blankly into space, slowly shaking their heads. It was the first time that I really had to sit down and look at this thing we call death. In my mind it just seemed sad that after all the crap we go through in life the final reward is death. This wasn’t my first run in with death, and hasn’t been my last.

Sunday, May 18, it was 08:39 in the morning. Suddenly and without warning Mount St. Helens, a volcanic peak in the pacific cascade range exploded, and days later we were seeing the ash fall on our town here in northern California. What I remember most about that time of the year was that due to the eruption we had some of the most spectacular sunset’s that I have ever seen.

As the school year ended, I stopped watching the news because it was all too depressing. We all watched the networks’ failed attempts to create new shows while others seemed to be sliding out of sight. Pretty soon the only thing that was repeated was “Who shot J.R. Ewing?”

During that summer we had one of many contests to see how stoned we could get in that infamous tree fort and still be able to climb down. I am pleased to report no casualties, but at least two people fell out of the tree, good times indeed. As the summer drew to a close, we all began to think about the new school year and our roles as ninth graders. I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t act like the ninth graders that had terrorized me in my seventh grade year, and I stuck with it.

As the school year began, rumors were flying around about a teachers strike and we were all for it; just seemed like an extension to summer really. So one week after school started the teacher’s went on strike, and what also started was the three months of partying at friends’ houses. Most parents supported the teacher’s strike; my parents’ were no exception. Every day I would leave the house not to go to school but to go to the next teacher’s strike party at whoever’s house that day, for rounds of drinking and getting stoned. My whole first semester of my ninth grade year was spent in a haze and by the time school resumed I had pretty much forgotten what school was actually for.

December 8^th of that year Mark Chapman shot John Lennon right in front of his New York apartment, and all I could think of was how crazy the world had become; little did I know that the craziness would only be the start of this insane cesspool of a world we are in now.  

Chapter 2 (part 1)

***Sorry about the delay, I have been sick for the last couple of days and was not very motivated. I will post more of the chapter later. Hope you enjoy. AW***

CHAPTER 2

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Junior High Days.

During the summer going into my junior high experience, a movie came out that would rock the foundation of movies forever…..Star Wars. I spent most of my summer sitting in the movie theatre from the time that they opened until they closed, watching this movie. For that summer I escaped my pathetic existence and reviled in the vastness of the stars for 90 minutes at a time. Total number of times I saw Star Wars that summer? I stopped counting at 150, and yet I will still sit down with my kids and watch it today.

When I started the seventh grade, I was introduced to a new set of humiliations called ninth graders. Apparently their whole purpose in life was to make life a living hell for seventh graders. Being a small lad, I was constantly put into wall lockers, only to miss class until the janitor opened up the locker after hearing my screaming and pounding. Most of these guys thought that they were hot shit, and it made my stomach churn every time I saw them. The necessary evils you have to face while going to junior high are sometimes your best source of comedy. One time a ninth grader told me, “Your momma is so fat, when she wears high heels she strikes oil.” To which I responded, “At least I have a mother and father and not a mother and twenty nine suspects.” The ass beating that ensued was worth the dumbfounded look on his and his buddies’ faces, priceless.

It was then that I had my first cigarette, after school with one of my friends that had stolen a pack of Lucky Strikes from his old man. The head rush that happened when I took my first drag, made everything look like a flash back in a bad B-movie. I remember thinking to myself that I looked grown up; here twenty five years later I still wish that I could quit that disgusting habit.

By the second semester of school, I was invited to my first junior high party and had my first joint and beer. I was over at a friend’s house to play a new game called ‘Dungeons & Dragons’; yes I was a geek to the core. One of the guys that showed up had a twelve pack of Budweiser and a handful of rolled joints and without saying a word handed me a beer and a joint saying ‘Light it up’. I cracked open the beer, gulping it down half way then preceded to light the joint. I took a big hit and began to cough my little fool head off. The rush that washed over me was like nothing I had experienced before, and as I sat down on the couch all I could think about was how much I liked the feeling. Now I had seen and smelt pot, because my mom would smoke it in her bedroom, and I had snuck the occasional sip of beer from my old man but somehow this was different. This brought me more out of what seemed to be my shell, and soon I was the drunken life of the party. I was spending the night at my friends’ house and my parents didn’t know that his parents were gone for the weekend, so I was pretty much free to get as fucked up as I wanted. Well that plan didn’t go as well as I imagined.

I woke up the next morning with what seemed to be someone banging on a drum behind the back of my eyeballs and a taste in my mouth that can be only described as licking the floor of a bar. I laid smack dab in the middle of my friend’s living room, face down and wondering where the hell everyone was. Something was stuck on my forehead, with a blurry effort I grabbed it and peeled it off. As my hung over eyes tried to focus on the words Butter Finger, I could not remember if I ate it or wore it. I looked inside the wrapper and there was something written inside of it. It was a note that read:

                ‘Dude you got fucked up last night, and passed out. If you wake up before I do see if you can fix the towel rack in the bathroom that you broke last night, my parents are going to be pissed!’

Apparently I used the towel rack in the bathroom to hold myself up while I was peeing, and from what my friend said, it broke under the stress that I was putting on it and I fell head first into the wall behind the toilet. Good news is that I didn’t miss the toilet, or got any on myself. I eventually got up and made an attempt to fix the towel bar, when my friend came in and asked me how I felt. I think the look I gave him was response enough and I asked him what the hell happened last night, fearing the worst. What he told me was not as bad as I feared. I had played about two hours of the game before I had disappeared to the bathroom and had passed out in there. They dragged me as far as the middle of the living room before giving up.

Relieved that I hadn’t totally made an ass of myself, I finished up fixing the towel bar and left his house, walking through the fields that separated our houses. Those fields are not there anymore, they have long since been plowed under by housing tracks and strip malls. When I got home my mom was sitting at the kitchen table and looked up from her coffee and said that I looked like shit. Yeah mom and I feel like shit too. Funny the conversation didn’t go any farther than that. I spent the rest of the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to dog bark next door; picturing a mafia execution of the mutt.

Eventually be the end of the year, a friend would turn me on to a thing called ‘cross-tops’; for those of you that don’t know what that is, it is pills with X’s on them that were made of speed; and I began to sell them to kids at school. That lasted about a month before I was caught selling at school and was suspended. That went over like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest at home, where my dad made sure that the ass beating that I received would be remembered. I would hear it every day for the next week of my suspension on how much of an idiot I was, and that worse than the ass beating. I learned my lesson, ‘Never sell drugs on school campus, sell them before and after school off campus and that would never happen again’. Yeah right.

During the summer in between seventh and eighth grade, several friends and I started work on an abandoned tree fort, which was in a very old, very tall cottonwood tree. The bottom level of the fort started at 25 feet off the ground and rose up from there three stories. We made a pact that summer to use it to get girls, almost by holding them hostage once they got up there because getting them up there and getting them stoned they usually didn’t want to try to climb down. The whole inside of the tree fort was upholstered with padding and carpet remnants that we had collected from a near housing track work site, it looked like the inside of one of those 1970’s van’s without the complementary water bed. It was a teenage nirvana, smelling like teen spirit way before Nirvana came out with their song.

As the eighth grade year rolled around, I began to see less and less of my dad because he was constantly working out of town. My mother had started her own upholstery shop in what used to be our garage, and growing pot in our backyard; in our old kennel that my dad built two years before. The dogs now ran around the backyard that my father had fenced in, and it was my job to feed/water the dogs and water my mom’s plants. Soon began my education in growing pot, skills that would be helpful later in life.

to be continued....

The force feeding of the Media Sheep

Hi gang! I will be posting Chapter 2 of my book hopefully by this Friday. Right now I want to talk about the way I was raped while I watch the Superbowl on FOX yesterday.I sat here, like most of us, wanting to watch a good football game, yet time and time again FOX wanted to shove that piece of shit show GLEE down my throat. it is the worst comedy on network TV, never holding a light to The Big Bang Theory and surely could never touch the likes of Californiaction! Singing kids and a bitter lesbian gym teacher was already done before, am i the only one that remembers Square Pegs?( and yes they had a couple of music numbers) Yet the media sheep just graze upon the mediocrity of a network so out of touch with the world that they couldn't come up with a good comedy if you put a gun to their heads.Fox's last really good comedy in my opinion was Married with Children. Now don't get me wrong , not all of FOX's programs are trash, just most of it. So I sat there and watched FOX literally suck the life out of me with their pitiful line up of bullshit shows, wishing that some one would just shoot me and get it over with. Then out of morbid curiosity I watched the GLEE presentation of THRILLER and thought for sure that I heard Micheal Jackson screaming NOOOooooooooooooooo!! from the grave. I mean they totally ruined an already shitty song, which in my opinion was something I never thought possible. Watching it was like watching roadkill on the street get ran over time after time. Why does FOX think that we are a nation of sheep, sheep that they feed dead grass to. Stop FOX's force feeding of the USA as Media Sheep. Okay I think I am done.....comments?

My Pathetic life

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING…

June 13, 1966 5:55 am... Santa Rosa, California.

After 18 long hours of labor, my mother gave birth to me; probably a mistake the world will regret for a very long time; but none the less it happened against the rules of the universe. The weather report was for a sunny day, not that my mother would know it; she slept for 9 hours, unaware of the beautiful northern California day. Looking back at this day makes me wonder if my first thoughts were about what my infant eyes saw, or did I make fun of the child in the next plastic hospital crib next to mine. Maybe I was mentally commenting on his ethnic heritage or the size of his nose. Either way I knew that there was a hard road ahead. I find that the more I think about it, the more I realize that my life has really never been easy, the more comedy in my life was essential.

So there I was, this small version of my now self, swaddled in diapers and sucking on a ‘binky’; just trying to figure out this wacky thing called living. As most children, I was carefree and explorative in a setting that in those days, was probably not a safe as it should have been. Like the time I climbed up on the kitchen counter, ate a bottle of kids Tylenol chewable’s, slipping off and cracking my head open. (Yes there might be the first symptom of my madness.)

Note to one self: taking Tylenol before your accident will not prevent pain, just saying.

When you have to think back to your early days, you seem to only remember pockets of it. So, I will have to navigate you around some of mine.

Kindergarten

My first vivid memory of my childhood was my first day of school. My mother made us bath in the morning of that day; it was colder than a well digger’s ass; and the only heat in the house was our gas wall heater. While I was standing there butt naked, drying myself off, I manage to fall backwards and landed against the heater, burning my ass checks in the process. The heater’s grate like design had been burnt into my young bum, making it look like the stripes on the American flag. Well I guess that’s one way to be patriotic. So there I was, butt padded with bandages and waddling into the kindergarten playground. It was an interesting way to start off your education, having to have the teacher change your dressings twice a day for the next week. It seemed like I was the only source of entertainment for my class for that week, to the tune of names like ‘flag butt’, ‘broken ass’ and a few others. Sitting was a new experience in pain all together. I finally convinced the teacher to allow me to lie down on my stomach after two days of complaining. Learning your ABC’s while in constant pain will soon get on your nerves, and I just wanted every school day to end quickly.

Soon I was healed, and the names gave way to a new set of insults. I remember the first time someone called me ‘Art the fart’, her name was Michelle. (Side note: to all my childhood friends, since I really don’t want to pay you to use your name in my book, I will be changing them.) She walked up to me, blonde ponytails, blue dress, white stockings and glossy black shoes and asked me what my name was, my heart skipped a beat as I answered ‘Art’. Her face was blank for a moment, then she exclaimed ‘Art the Fart!’ needless to say I was devastated. From that day on I would only allow people to call me Arthur, in the hopes of avoiding this assault on my name. Unfortunately it did not, and they soon came up with the song that they would sing in unison:

                “Gene, Gene made a machine. Joe, Joe made it go. Art, Art cut a fart and blew it all apart!”

Apparently my name was now a childhood number one song, like ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round’. After the daily ritual of this, I wanted to punch them all in their mocking little throats. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t get into some fight or another over this. In my opinion, school fucking sucked and I was soon coming up with whatever illness to avoid going. I once drank ketchup, stuck my finger down my throat and threw up all over the kitchen floor. Well I got out of school that day, only after having to clean it up and a little trip to the hospital. As the doctor scratched his head, trying to figure out my symptoms, my mother began to scrutinize me and it was then that I knew that the jig was up.

She asked me why I smelt like ketchup, and I stammered that I didn’t know what she was talking about. Well the lie was soon found out, and I had my first taste of parental justice. I got a spanking and was on restriction from watching television; my only friend at that time was taken away from me for a week and at that age a week seemed like forever. That’s when I was introduced to my new friend, resentment and little did I know he would be there in my life for a very long time. Later in life I would find out that resentment really like alcohol and drugs, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Fourth grade

The next little pocket of my childhood was when I was in fourth grade, and another head injury. We were playing baseball at recess, and I was next up at bat waiting for my turn. Little did I know, with my back to the batter’s box, that I was too close and the biggest fourth grader you’ve ever seen swung at the ball; missing the ball and connecting to the side of my head. Instant lights out and I awoke in the hospital ER, dazed and confused. I heard the nurse tell my mom that I had a really bad concussion and would need to stay in the hospital overnight for observation. The only thing in my mind was that the ringing would not shut the hell up, and my stomach would not cooperate. I instantly threw up anything that they fed me, so I eventually just gave up trying for the rest of the night. It seemed like my stomach was mocking me to eat but then would pull a dirty trick right afterwards. As I drifted in and out of a restless sleep, my only comfort was when the pretty nurse would put her cool hands on my forehead and ask me how I felt. How I felt? Really?  Was this a joke or a set up? I remember thinking, ‘Lady if you only knew’.

My parents picked me up the next morning, and informed me that I was out of school for the next week. Like this kind of news was going to break my heart, I would have to say that it was one of the best weeks of my little life so far. I was allowed to lay on the couch in the living room and watch television, hello old friend. Watching ‘The Price is Right’, ‘Dialing for Dollars’ movies and afternoon cartoons like Scooby-Doo, in my opinion was some of the best shit on the planet. I escaped in to the world of television, like a beaten wife to a woman’s shelter.

Just a year before this incident, my sister was born and I now was the big brother. It was a responsibility that was thrusted upon me, like a really crappy Christmas present. Some days I would wonder if her life would be better than mine, or was she going to have to put up with the same shit as I was. Well first she was lucky that my parents named her Gerri, it also didn’t help that everyone thought of her as a princess. Up until her birth, being an only child was not a bad gig, but it soon gave way to her being in the spotlight at every family function and I was now yesterday’s news. Hello resentment, have a seat on the couch. Want a cookie?

Fifth and Sixth grades

By the time that my fifth grade year rolled around, my emotional skin had grown a callus like the hands of a migrant worker and the evil songs and words now meant nothing to me. That year for Halloween I cut a hole in the bottom of a pumpkin, hollowed it out, put it on my head and went to school as the Headless Horseman. The teacher’s thought that it was brilliant; I didn’t have the heart to tell them that my family was too poor to afford a real costume and that I had stolen the pumpkin from the next door neighbors’ garden the night before. Halloween was pure heaven to me, how could it not be? A day when you could act and be someone else and no one would chastise you for it. What’s not to like? I reveled in the acts of scaring the little girls on the playground with my home-made disguise and watching them run away screaming. What did I care, they were the same ones who sang those evil little songs and all I could do that day was endlessly  grin behind my vegetable mask, fuck them. That’s when I realized that revenge was sweet given out in small doses, and resentment had a delightfully evil twin brother. The more they cried the more I enjoyed it, I usually don’t condone this kind of behavior but in this case the act was so gratifying, I think I went home that day almost feeling high. Needless to say, I went home with the first prize in the best costume contest, thus flipping the middle finger in my mind at the others in my school. Yeah I won that battle.

When the school year ended, going into the great summer vacation, is when I was introduced to a little game called ‘Truth or Dare’ and the first time I got a girl to lift her skirt and show me her goods. Little did I know that this was just a preview of what was to become my so called sex life later. When she did show me the goods, I would have to say I was a little disappointed. I mean here I had this thing in my pants, this creature if you will, that constantly did things to embarrass me and she had this blank slate with a crack in it. I mean that’s it? That’s what all the fuss is about?  When you’re ten years old I guess you just expect an action figure to jump out or something. Nothing.

This little girl became my first girlfriend; for the summer; and at the time I really didn’t understand what that meant. To me it just meant someone to hang out with, and an extra set of hands to help build tree forts. It is also the time when I realized that I could make people laugh with a joke or a funny face, I had found my niche. Whenever I met confrontation, I would joke my way out of it. To me it was just sheer brilliance, and I soon tried to find the funny in everything around me.

As sixth grade started that year, I found myself being sent home from school the first day, for acting like a dog and pretend peeing on the teachers’ leg while his back was turned to the class. Anything for a laugh, right?  That didn’t go well when I got home, another helping of parental justice with two scoops of ass whooping to go please. Looking back, my teacher didn’t really deserve what I did and he turned out to be one of the best teachers I have had in my life. Thank you Mr. Martin. He would read books to us, like The Hobbit, and do all the voices of all the characters. Sixth grade was bearable with him and his bearded surfer attitude, and again at Halloween I surprised everyone by playing Frankenstein in our Halloween play. All of my costume was home-made, including the paper Mache’ false forehead to make me look like the creature. My mother had made the suggestion, and actually helped me fashion it. Though she was thoroughly drunk while we did it, but what the hell …quality time. Just before Christmas she would surprise the hell out me, flipping my dad over her shoulder and to the ground on the side of the road on Highway 101.

Ok, let me explain. Both my parents drank until I was 11 years old, my mom quit yet my dad continued. At the time my mom was going to school to become a correctional officer and had just completed her self-defense training classes, much to the dismay of my father. Whenever they got drunk like that there would always be some kind of fight, either verbal or physical, but this time it was deferent. My dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and jerked her out of the car, and as I watched out the back window of our ’71 Nova, took a swing at her. She intercepted his arm and in one fluid motion, whipped him over her shoulder, planting his drunken ass on the gravel. I think he was just as stunned as I was, and it took the fight right out of him. My mom then proceeded to drive him to the police station and turned him in. I remember my mom calling my dad’s best friend, Bill, and telling him that he might want to go bail him out and have him stay with him for a while. I think that lasted for about three days, and he was back with flowers and an apology. Shortly after that my mom quit drinking and picked up smoking pot, and life would soon be a lot more interesting. If not greener, pardon the pun.

I would end up playing Santa Claus in the school play, ‘Twas the night before Christmas, to the amusement of drunken parents and sugar induced kids. Not being the most graceful kid on the planet, I fell off the stage, missing my mark. The results were an uproar of laughter, mixed in with a little of concern and I recovered immediately, taking a bow. I even made my dad laugh, which was rare to say the least. I remember going home after the play, thinking to myself that maybe there was something to this comedy thing after all. One could only hope.