Chapter One

Early Childhood

My mother read The Exorcist when she was pregnant with me. Despite her preference for tamer literature, the recent success of the movie and her best friend Pam’s recommendation piqued her interest in the book. As the old saying goes, “Curiosity killed the cat.” My parents had two pregnant cats, making a trio of mommas in the house. After both cats gave birth, they had a rotating shift; while one cat was out roaming around the neighborhood, the other stayed home and nursed all the kittens. Meanwhile, Mom struggled with her pregnancy. She was a small woman carrying a big baby. Her belly prevented her from reaching the pedals in her car, so she couldn’t drive to work. She had time to sit at home thinking, and the book did nothing to improve her bleak outlook. One day, she picked up one of the kittens, only to see a pair of horrendous eyes staring back at her from the animal’s belly. She was terrified, and recalling The Exorcist, assumed the kitten was possessed. She called Pam for help.

“Hello?” said Pam.

“Pam, come over here right now. I need help performing an exorcism on this kitten. It’s possessed with two eyes staring out of it. I’ve never done an exorcism and am not sure where to start. Hurry up!” said Mom.

Pam laughed. “Relax, Kay, your cat is not possessed. It probably has a wolf worm, a common parasite.” She came over and helped remove the worm, but the kitten sadly died days later.

Some may think of this as a bad omen for my life, but I prefer to view it as a foretelling of my penchant for horror novels.

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Despite the incident with the kitten, my birth turned out fine. I was their first child, born in the mid-seventies, and the three of us stayed at a house in the small town of Loretto, TN. Much of Dad’s family lived in Loretto, so we visited them often. In the early-eighties, my parents built a larger house, one they still own and I often visit.

Most of Mom’s family lived in the nearby town of St. Joseph, TN. My maternal grandparents’ nicknames were “Momma Jackson” and “Daddy John.” I have fond memories of visiting their house in St. Joe. A long, paved driveway led up to their house from the highway. I enjoyed riding my Big Wheels trike up and down that driveway. At the end of the driveway was a gravel roundabout with bushes and other plants in the middle. The back yard had a swing set I played on and a fenced-in doghouse for their dog Acorn. There was a garden in the backyard you could walk through to get to my Aunt Priscilla and Uncle Dwain’s house. Dwain played bluegrass guitar and would sometimes walk to his neighbor’s house for jam sessions with his friends. My aunt and uncle have both passed away, along with some of his musician friends, and it’s sad to think there isn’t a recording of them playing. This was the era of cassette tapes and I could’ve easily done it with my cassette recorder. Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

My grandparents’ next-door neighbor Shawn was not much older than me and would walk over to play with me. On the side of the house opposite to their neighbor was a line of trees separating their yard from the town’s only gas station. The house had a garage where Daddy John’s black ‘66 Chevy truck stayed. There was a drawer outside the house with a spare house key inside, in case someone needed to get in. When you came in that door, the stairs to the basement were to the left, and the kitchen was to the right. In the basement was a ping pong table, and license plates from many different years lined one of the walls. This was before they started using stickers to update license plates, and some plates were shaped like the state of Tennessee. The basement’s back door led to steps going up to the back porch. Near that porch was a huge television antenna which reached way over the roof of their house. I always dreamed of climbing that antenna to the top. Momma Jackson always had a plate of oatmeal cookies sitting out on the bar in the kitchen, her special recipe. The kitchen had a round table where they would often play bridge with the older members of their family. It was a typical living room with a couch, television, and bookshelf. Then it went into another room with a piano. One wall in the piano room was covered with a mural. I took piano lessons as a child and played that piano a lot, although at some point it went out of tune. The bathroom was in the hallway and had ants they couldn’t get rid of. When I spent the night, I slept in the guest bedroom across from the bathroom. The bedroom window next to the bed allowed me to hear cars driving by on the highway. I got to spend the night when my parents went to Super Bowl XVI. We watched the game on TV and they had a phone call with my paternal grandparents. This was one of the few times I remember both sets of grandparents interacting.

On my first day of kindergarten, Daddy John brought me to school in his Chevy truck. I remember thinking the first graders were cooler than us because they were older and bigger. The late Mrs. Richards was my teacher. She was the mother of Pam from the exorcism story. My mom taught Special Ed. at the school. One day, some kids and I climbed on the radiator heater in the restroom. They got in trouble for it, but I didn’t. I didn’t know why. I remember thinking it was because Mom was a teacher and felt guilty for getting special treatment. The kindergarten class was at St. Joe Elementary School, which is no longer a school, but a deteriorating abandoned building.

The next year I started going to Loretto Elementary School for first grade. Like St. Joe School, Loretto Elementary is no longer around. It is now a factory for cheerleading uniforms. Our first-grade teacher was Mrs. Dial. The only thing I remember from that class was when my future best friend Greg peed his pants in class. He was sitting towards the front of the class and the urine started going on the floor to the back of the class, so it looked like a river. He was crying and all the other kids were laughing at him. Poor Greg.

Our second-grade classroom was in a little trailer. One thing I remember about second grade was learning to write in cursive. We already knew printed letters, and there were pictures on the wall of the printed letters and their cursive counterparts. I was a book-smart kid, so I’m sure I did well with that.

Around this time was when my sister, Jennifer, was born. The first three Star Wars movies came out around that time, and I was into them and the toys associated with them. My paternal grandmother would spoil me with gifts, and on the day of Jennifer’s birth, she bought me an action figure of a stormtrooper. I already had a scout trooper, which I used as a storm trooper replacement, but it was nice to have the real thing. Still, to act out the movie scenes the right way, I would’ve needed at least ten storm troopers. It’s possible I could’ve sweet-talked Grandma into buying me ten if I’d played my cards right. That day I was more excited about my new action figure than my new sibling.

Because of my generous grandmother, I had a lot of Star Wars toys. I also had Transformers, but my Transformers collection wasn’t as large as the Star Wars one. David Frazier was a neighbor kid I’d visit. David had the Transformer combiner pack where all of the robots would come together and form one big robot. Despite my grandmother spoiling me with toys, I thought he had better toys than me and was jealous. But David was the only person I knew with more toys than me. I had the Ewok Village and the Millenium Falcon, which were too large to bring to school. But I brought my Darth Vader carrying case with all the action figures inside it. I also had a larger action figure of C-3PO, but it was disproportionate to the others. This meant you couldn’t act out scenes with him, unless he was a giant, but I never thought of that idea. I also brought some midsized toys like Jabba the Hutt and his throne/dungeon. I always brought them out during recess and let the other kids play with them. I fancied myself the leader of the “Star Wars Club” of second grade.

We all played with these toys around the area where there were monkey bars, merry-go­rounds, swings, and seesaws. These seesaws gave us all some of our earliest lessons in physics. Mark Hartsfield was a fat kid, and he was proud of that. One day, we had an experiment to see how many kids it would take to outweigh Mark. First, two kids got on one side of the seesaw and Mark got on the other side. Mark’s side immediately went up in the air while the other two kids stayed on the ground.

Mark said, “I’m up in the air, so I weigh more than both of y’all.”

Another kid got on the side opposite to Mark, then another, then another. Mark was still in the air.

“I weigh more than all five of y’all, haha!” said Mark.

My reader, I hope you can see the fallacy in Mark’s reasoning. I did, and I tried arguing with them, but to no avail. This was when I should’ve learned that it’s useless to try to argue with people, but it’d be a long time before I’d learn that lesson. However, I did start to fancy myself as smart at this point. But it was book smarts instead of street smarts or social intelligence. I learned how to read before I was in kindergarten, and I always made good grades in Elementary school. I didn’t understand how to implement my intelligence in a useful way. Take the seesaw example. Understanding seesaw physics was of no use to me. I probably would’ve been better off not knowing it; it would’ve made me more popular. Nerdy stuff was my passion though. My parents had a set of Compton’s and Britannica Encyclopedias that I loved to read. I mostly stayed with the Compton’s because they were easier to navigate, but the Britannica seemed challenging, and that excited me. I don’t remember getting too deep into the Britannica though. This is probably when I became interested in astronomy, especially the planets. I was so into the planets then that we named the family’s black cat “Venus.” I’m sure that was my idea. I made a point to tell people she was named after the planet, not the Roman goddess, even though the planet was named after the goddess. People always ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, and I took pride in saying I wanted to be an “astronomer” instead of an “astronaut.” Astronaut seemed like the typical answer, but I thought astronomer was more practical. In hindsight, an astronaut is actually doing something and an astronomer might just be learning useless information. Typical of me. Another thing I studied in the encyclopedia was Egyptian hieroglyphics and their translation into English. Again, I could’ve been studying a language that people still use like Spanish, but I didn’t care anything about that.

Some of the other kids played sports like baseball or softball during recess. One day, I decided to go play with them instead of doing Star Wars. I appointed Greg as temporary leader of the club during my absence. He was the “vice-president” of the club, and I knew VPs fill in for the president in his absence. I’ve never been very good at sports, especially baseball, because I was afraid of getting hit by the ball. That made me too insecure to want to play, and that was the only day I played during recess. I would play minor league for a short time later on. Even then, I rarely, if ever, hit the ball when at-bat, and rarely caught the ball when I was in the outfield. I was no good at throwing either. My Dad always told me not to “push the ball,” but I never figured out how to throw it properly. My Dad and I would practice throwing out in the front yard, but to no avail. I was terrified of getting hit by the ball too, so that didn’t help the situation any. Minor League was for younger kids, and I was still in Minor League while some of my peers had started Little League, which was played on a larger field. Both of these fields were in Loretto Park.

Come to think of it, my inadequacy at sports was probably part of the reason I got bullied. I was the furthest thing from a jock, and I didn’t fit in with jocks. Around this time, Roger Killen started picking on me. I tried making all of it into a joke. I would draw a line on the ground and say “Don’t you dare cross it!” and he’d cross it. We’d repeat that several times. Deep down I felt like something was wrong and I was being humiliated. The funny thing about it was that I was taller than him, so I should’ve been the one bullying him, instead of vice-versa. Roger was in front of me in the lunch line at school. We were in alphabetical order, so it was Roger Killen, then Michael Kress, then Greg Masterson, alphabetically. This means I was around both of those guys a lot. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I became so close with Greg. I didn’t hit it off with Roger as well though. When Jesse Jackson ran for President, he gave a speech that inspired me. When I mentioned Jackson to Roger one day in the lunch line, he responded by saying, “If he gets elected, he will make all the white people slaves.” Even at this young age, I realized the absurdity of a president being able to just snap his fingers and make all the white people slaves. But I’m pretty sure Roger thought he could do just that. This was another situation like the one with Mark where I should’ve known better than trying to argue.

Chapter Two

Video Games

All my friends were into video games. But William Henkel, Tim’s little brother, was the best video game player I knew. I had an Odyssey while Tim and William had an Atari. K.C.’s Krazy Chase! And Pick Axe Pete! were two of the Odyssey games. Dad enjoyed playing Pick Axe Pete! before he lost interest in video games. Tim’s Atari had an auto racing game called Pole Position that I liked. Shawn also had a video game that we played baseball on. These games were a huge part of what made childhood so fun. My parents would sometimes take me to play games at Showbiz Pizza (now Chuck E. Cheese). A Chinese restaurant was right next to Showbiz, but nobody was ever there. There would be fifty cars in the Showbiz parking lot and one car in the Chinese parking lot. I felt sorry for the owners. There were all kinds of games and an animatronic stage show you could watch while eating pizza. The characters did a cover of “School’s Out.” I heard the Showbiz version before I ever heard the Alice Cooper version. There was also an arcade next to a buffet restaurant in Florence Mall that we’d go to with Grandma and Grandpa. The arcades were better than home video games in some ways. The racing games at the arcades were like real cars with a steering wheel and pedals, as opposed to just having the home game controller. They even had special effects like a vibrating seat and what-not. Most arcades had Skee-Ball and pinball too. Momma Jackson and Daddy John would go with us and all my cousins to Curtis’ Restaurant in Greenhill where they had one or two arcade games. Galaga was one of them, and maybe Ms. Pacman. Ms. Pacman was in a lot of places. Even though it was a spin-off of regular Pacman, I don’t remember the regular one being anywhere.

This was all before the advent of Nintendo. Nintendo was a big deal. The only person who came close to being as generous as Grandma was Santa Claus, and one year he really came through. The magical thing about Christmas was that I really believed in Santa. Even though my cousin Karen told me he wasn’t real, I didn’t believe her. I’d wake up early on Christmas morning to see what he brought me. I was never disappointed. The year I got a Nintendo may have been the best one ever. Mario Bros./Duck Hunt was the game cartridge that came with the unit. I immediately started playing it. Nobody gave a damn about Duck Hunt. You could take the gun right up to the TV screen and shoot the ducks easily. Some Nintendo accessories like that gun were kind of silly. There were fancy controllers you could get that weren’t much better than the stock controller. But perhaps the most overhyped accessory was the Power Glove. I saw that thing advertised, and it looked so fancy; I just had to have it. I can’t remember if it was Grandma or Santa who got it for me. I was the only one of my friends who had one, but it was complete garbage.

Mario was where it was at. Tim and William also had a Nintendo, and of course William dominated on it. This was a time before the internet, so you couldn’t just Google things to find them out. I had to ask the Henkels or other friends about tricks and secret pathways to beat the game. There was a certain mystery to it that wouldn’t be available today. The hardest part of Mario for me was the Hammer Brothers. I got so frustrated with those guys; I’d scream and throw my controller across the room when I couldn’t get past them. Another game I had was R.C. Pro-Am. It was a racing game, and I liked it more than Pole Position because, unlike Pole Position, you could keep up with what place all the racers were in. R.C. Pro Am must have been one of the first racing games like this; it was a predecessor to Mario Kart, which I also enjoyed even after I lost a lot of my video game obsession. Mario Kart had extra features like shooting

turtle shells at other racers, and I enjoyed that, but it didn’t matter much. Improvements in gaming technology couldn’t keep the magic of the old days alive.

The Henkels had Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and The Legend of Zelda. They let me borrow those games. I eventually beat Mario, Tyson, and Zelda. Although there was a code you could use that took you straight to Tyson, I didn’t have that at first, so I had to go through all the fighters. Even after I got the code, it felt like cheating to use it, but I still used it some when I wanted to save time. Tyson was very hard to beat, much harder than any of the other fighters in the game. I did beat Tyson though, but only one time. I was proud because Tim had never beat him, despite him owning the game and me only borrowing it. I’m not sure if William had even beat him at that point. I liked Tyson a lot more than I ever liked any other fighting games. Mortal Kombat came along later and I couldn’t get into it. It just seemed like you had to push the buttons as fast as possible, whereas Tyson was more strategic.

Starting out with Zelda, I didn’t know what I was doing and was just lost in the woods. Then, as things moved on, I learned more with hints from the game and also my friends. Later, I attained a paper map that helped a lot. Zelda was my favorite video game ever, because it was an adventure and satisfied my curiosity. Other games like Mario were adventurous too, but Mario had a more linear progress. With Zelda, you could go any direction you liked, North, South, East, or West, choosing your own adventure. Zelda was like the video game equivalent to exploring the woods behind the house. We loved discovering things in the woods, things people left behind years ago. We saw where people had carved their names into trees, and one day we found a run down, abandoned building. It looked like it had once been a bar. There were lots of empty liquor bottles inside. Sometimes we’d lose track of where we were in the woods and come upon an unknown house. Other times, we’d be lost only to come out at a familiar spot on the road. These kinds of discoveries were like finding a new level on Zelda. This was before the expanded freedom of owning a car, so we had to be more creative in our condensed area. If we wanted to go to town, we’d have to get on Lexington Hwy, which had a lot of traffic. It would’ve been dangerous to ride a bike on that road, and if you walked, you’d have to stay in the ditch. We didn’t let that stop us though. Sometimes I feel like traveling abroad is my adult equivalent to playing Zelda, exploring the woods, and driving to Lawrenceburg or Florence. I can go wherever my curiosity guides me, just to see what’s there. Even though my adventures are on a larger scale now, they don’t seem to excite me more than they did back then. I guess I just require more nowadays for amusement.

In addition to the games we owned, you could go to Video’s Plus to rent games. This was an exciting place for a kid. You could browse around, looking at the games and VHS tapes you wanted to rent, there were arcade games and pool tables in the back, and the owner’s daughter even cut hair there. For us, video games were not a solitary endeavor. There was a sense of community in these games that, like the mysteriousness of the games, may have somewhat diminished in the internet age. Super Mario Bros. 2 & 3 came out later, and I played them too, but not as much. By the time Super Nintendo and its successors came out I had fallen off and my video game glory days were over. There were some attempts at reviving that magic, but to little avail. I got a Sega Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog, but never had the passion for that or any of its other games that I did for the Nintendo. My friends had a Super Nintendo that I would play casually, but it wasn’t the same. i

Chapter Three

Awkward School Experiences

Third grade was the year of the 1984 Presidential election. It was Reagan vs. Mondale. My parents were Mondale supporters, so I followed their lead and supported Mondale too. I had some ideas of my own, but I remember thinking most kids just supported whichever candidate their parents supported. And I was probably the only Mondale supporter in the whole class. We watched the election results come in during class. Reagan won every state except one. Mondale only won his home state of MN. I was at the age when kids idolize their parents, before they hit puberty and do a 180°. I was interested in politics, but I don’t know how much I could’ve actually known about it. I remember standing in my parents’ front yard one day, and my dad was talking to John Evers about politics. I wanted to contribute to the debate, but became frustrated because I couldn’t think of anything relevant to say. I probably had a good knowledge of the names of politicians, but only had a basic understanding of policy like “Democrats want to help poor people and Republicans want to go to war.”ii

Politics was just one of the ways that my family and I were different from others in Loretto. This is somewhat political too, but my family didn’t have a gun (with the exception of a BB gun, which doesn’t count), and the teacher asked us about that one time; I was the only one in the class whose family didn’t have one. Someone said you might not want to tell anybody you didn’t have a gun, which made sense to me at the time, but now seems kind of silly. I wouldn’t want to talk about it because some people would ridicule me, but it’s not like they’re going to come rob or kill me if they find out. One time, the teacher asked the class to vote on whether to go to McDonald’s or Burger King. I was the only one who voted for BK. My, how times have changed. I don’t care anything about BK now, because in later years, I overindulged in all types of fast food. But back then, we didn’t have the freedom to eat fast food every day, and this scarcity created a magic. That magic is gone now. It’s funny though, because there’s a BK next to where I work, and my coworkers are always eating it. I’m still different, but at least I’m able to not-fit-in in a manageable way.

There was a tornado warning one day at Loretto Elementary. We all had to go sit in the hallway where it was supposed to be safest. We even had to stay after the normal time for leaving school. Some of the girls were screaming and crying, thinking we were all going to die. Of course, we all turned out fine.

Fourth grade was the year all the local elementary schools came together to form one, called South Lawrence Elementary. All the students voted on what two colors would be the school colors, which ended up being crimson and gold; many voted for crimson because of “Roll Tide,” the color of the University of Alabama’s football team. Fourth and fifth grades kind of blur together for me, because I had the same homeroom teacher for both years, the late Mrs. Davis. Certain things stick out to me, like when I saw Shane Heupel eat a booger when he thought nobody was looking. I started making fun of him about it, telling everybody else, until one night at the boy scout meeting when he confronted me about it. I was a big wuss, so I quit after that.

It was around this time that I started to hit pre-puberty and became more interested in girls. There were lots of girls I liked, but one in particular that I had the courage to ask to go with me. (We were too young to be going on dates, so people would just “go together.”) Her name was Gina Lee. She rejected me, but since I had revealed to everyone that I “liked” her, I felt the freedom to be open about it from then on. The funny thing was that there were girls I thought were a lot prettier than she was; I didn’t even think she was that pretty at all. The general consensus was that Emily Davis was the prettiest girl in the class, and I agreed with that, but I was too shy to admit that about her and had already done the hard part with Gina. The way I remember it, I made a big deal to everybody about how much I liked Gina. I would tell my cousin Karen these long, drawn-out stories about our pseudo-romance. It must have been so awkward for Gina.

Other boys weren’t embarrassed to talk to girls, whether the girls liked it or not. One day in class, Emily was sitting in her desk. She had long jeans on, but had short socks and the jeans just barely exposed her ankle.

Greg Simbeck was seated next to her and told her, “That’s a pretty leg you got there.”

She made a look of disgust and said, “Ewww, gross!”

Looking back, I guess Greg S. was right, even though he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with her. He belonged to a different clique than her. She belonged to the what I’ll call the “Loretto” clique, and he was in the “Iron City” clique. Although Greg S. was technically from Loretto, he seemed to fit in more with people from Iron City. Iron City was a redneck town, even by Tennessee’s standards. Our world was so small back then. The Loretto clique was more well­groomed; I guess that’s why they called them “preps.” People from Iron City were poorer and more outlaw-ish. A boy who belonged to her clique would’ve been more likely to pull something like that off, but even then, what he said and the way he said it sounded creepy and perverted. But you can’t be afraid of rejection; they’ll respect you more if you say what’s on your mind. At least he found out how she would react. I never found out how she would react to me because I never said anything. I was afraid to talk; I couldn’t ever just be cool, I always had to be weird.

One teacher I had, not for homeroom, but for one of my classes, was Mr. Blair. My Mom was a teacher at the school, so I had to stay there with her until she got off work instead of riding the bus like most of the other students. During that after-school time, I would often go into Mr. Blair’s room and play chess with him. I was never able to beat him, and he has now passed away, so I never will. Although we were chess buddies, I would misbehave in his class. I was socially awkward, and out of desperation, thought that rebellion would help me fit in with the other kids. Looking back, I don’t think it helped much. It seems like my mindset on the situation with Mr. Blair was much like that with Gina. Once I had gotten in trouble with him the first time, I wasn’t scared to do it again. I had “broken the ice.” I always behaved with Mrs. Davis, because I never got through that first hurdle. Teachers would ask me why I was mean to one and nice to the other, and I couldn’t explain it; I’m just now starting to understand. Mr. Blair was to Mrs. Davis what Gina was to Emily.

Jana McMackin was behind Greg (Masterson) alphabetically in the lunch line, which meant we were separated by one person. One day I saw Chris Stults pinch her butt in the lunch line. She teased him about it, and it seemed like it was cool between them. My takeaway from this was that she was cool with guys pinching her butt. So, one day I went up to her and pinched her butt. She didn’t get mad about it, but her and everyone else’s reaction to my pinch was totally different from his pinch. Her friends asked if I “liked” her. It is obvious that I liked her or I wouldn’t’ve pinched her butt in the first place, but for some reason I didn’t like that narrative. And they weren’t even being mean about it; they were just laughing. I was the one who made a big deal about it in my head. I never heard them ask the other guy if he “liked” her. It frustrated me that they reacted so differently to the two butt pinches. If they had asked if he “liked” her, he probably would’ve just admitted (or denied) it, instead of getting upset about the question. It’s kind of off-putting when someone who won’t interact with you verbally tries to interact with you physically. Basic social norms show that verbal has to come first. But at that young age, I had

not internalized that. On a deeper level, I had an inner despair or loneliness that I felt couldn’t be expressed verbally. The only person I tried to express this to was my mom, and there was no way her or anybody else could understand, so it just led to more frustration. I told myself this was why I wasn’t more social than I was. I wanted people to understand me on a deep level and even thought I could express myself telepathically without talking. Sometimes, when lying in bed at night, I would try telepathically express my depression across the hallway into my parents’ bedroom so that they would come comfort me. It never worked. Chris was willing to express himself verbally even if he risked being misunderstood. Another advantage Chris had that I (and Greg S.) didn’t have was that they were both part of the same clique because they were both from Iron City. Everybody knows everybody else in a small town, and Iron City is even smaller than Loretto, so there’s a camaraderie. For me, the situation with Jana was different from the situation with Gina in that I didn’t continue to pursue Jana after the first incident. Perhaps I remembered how embarrassing it was with Gina and didn’t want to go through that again. It was being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was so worried about what people thought about me. People say not to worry about that kind of thing, but there’s always been good reasons to tweak one’s behavior to people’s reactions. I was terrible at it back then, but I’m better at it now.

Chapter Four

Learning Music

Although I was starting to be rebellious and interested in girls at this time, there still remained the loyalty and admiration for my parents that often goes away in one’s teenage years, as it did with me when I reached those years. My Dad was into auto racing, so I was as well. I even wrote a song about NASCAR driver Bill Elliott on my keyboard. As I recall, there was a Darrell Waltrip fan at one of the races we watched on television holding a cardboard sign that said “Bill Who?” This implied Bill Elliott was a nobody, which was nonsense, or he wouldn’t’ve bothered to make the sign in the first place, and I wouldn’t’ve bothered to write the song either. It was done in a fun spirit, and everyone embraced the song’s irony. But that is something people do nowadays that annoys me. They’ll say “Who’s that? Never heard of ‘em,” or better yet, “her,” as if their own ignorance implies said person’s irrelevance. But if you point that out, they’ll react as if you were defending said person, instead of criticizing their own logic. Although the cardboard implied ignorance, I wrote the song to imply “Who” as Bill’s last name, instead of “Elliot.” Only one line in the song implies ignorance of his last name. Pretty clever for a little kid, huh? Looking back, this song reminds me of a lot of music videos shared on social media nowadays. The appeal is that the music is cheesy and terrible. It is hilarious, but the audience is laughing at the “musicians,” not with them. Another thing “Bill Who” had in common with those videos was unhip rapping and a chorus that lacked hook and melody. But the YouTube videos usually have older adults doing the music, which is funnier than a kid doing it. With a kid, people are just impressed that they’re able to do anything, even if it is silly. I wrote the melody with only two keys on the keyboard, the middle-C and the F above it. I used one of the built-in drum patterns on the keyboard for rhythm. I wrote a chart to go with the lyrics. Here it is:

Other songs I had were “You Should Know About the World,” my way of telling people what they were missing out on since they weren’t deep-diving into Compton’s and Britannica encyclopedias like I was; “Water, Not Wine,” my ode to a healthy lifestyle; I was too young to drink alcohol, but had apparently adopted the straight-edge lifestyle early on; I’d flip the script on that soon enough; and “You Act Too Civilized,” my ode to being goofy and not uptight. “Bill Who” is probably the one people remember the most. These songs were a source of embarrassment in my teenage years. In fact, when I played with Melvin’s Head Trip at the Middle Tennessee District Fair, Emily Davis came to the front of the stage and asked me to play “Bill Who.” Back then I would’ve liked to pretend that those childhood days didn’t exist. But who among us is already cool coming straight out of the womb? It turns out, I wasn’t as cool as I thought I was as a teenager either. I’m still not. But at least today I don’t have any pretenses of coolness, and I can acknowledge my past, which kind of makes me cool. It’s the “cool” paradox. I’d perform my childish songs at school and sometimes get others involved in dancing, backup vocals, and whatnot. I would bring my harmonica to school because it was so portable; I carried it around all day in my front pocket. I performed “Bad to the Bone” in front of the class with my harmonica. I also performed it on Boy Scout camping trips. Another song we performed at Boy Scouts was “Fat” by “Weird Al” Yankovich. Music class also gave me an opportunity to do that kind of stuff. It was almost as if I took over as music teacher in the class sometimes. But in addition to my performances, we did other things that took the spotlight away from me and became more about the whole class. One was a performance of “We Will Rock You” by Queen where one kid played bass drum, another played snare, and all the other kids were given a recorder each to play the chorus melody in unison. And every year that I remember in elementary school, we’d have a performance in the gym where the whole class would sing Christmas carols. In addition to the traditionals, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” was sung every year.

I took piano lessons from Nell Perry, my dad’s first cousin. I learned Christmas songs, as well as other songs that were popular at the time. We used the Bastien Piano Basics books for my lessons. I loved the glossy covers of those books. I also loved the color codes the books had for different skill levels. If you mastered one book, you could move on to a different colored one; it was like a special treat for your hard work. I can still play some of these songs; it’s funny how muscle memory still works after all these years. I could play “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Deck the Halls,” among others. My muscle memory might not be as great with reading sheet music though. I still understand the concept; I just might not be as good in practice. I lost some of that when I switched from piano to guitar, because guitar relies more on tablature, even though I still look at the notes for timing. My dream at the time was to own a baby grand piano. Mom told me if I reached a certain skill level, she would get me one. But, as with most things, I never followed through.

During the holidays, Mom took me around to different people’s houses where I would perform Christmas carols for them on the Casio. Jennifer, and cousins Laura and Karen came along to sing with my keyboard. I thought I was pretty good, but, as said before, people give a kid the benefit of the doubt. But I learned of my inadequacies on Momma Jackson and Daddy John’s 50th wedding anniversary. They had it in Decatur, AL there because a lot of Mamma Jackson’s family lived there. Mamma Jackson’s family also had their annual Christmas party in Decatur. It was at these events that Mamma Jackson and her two sisters would pose for photos as “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” They also had an annual family reunion at St. Joseph Civic Center. They had a piano set up for me to perform, and all the chairs were turned toward it as if it were a concert. This time I’d be performing secular, non-holiday tunes out of the Bastien books. I was excited about my big concert; my time in the limelight. But people started turning the chairs away from the piano so they could socialize. Then, to my dismay, some girl sat down at the piano and started shredding! She blew me out of the water. I was devastated. That’s when I realized I wasn’t the greatest musician in the world and had plenty of room for improvement. Maybe if I’d gotten as good as she was, I would’ve earned the baby grand.

Another person who gave me music lessons was high school teacher Phyllis Rushing. Grandma gave me a cheapo acoustic guitar as a gift, and Mrs. Rushing tried to give me lessons on it. The action wasn’t great on it and that makes learning much harder for a beginner. I had a Mel Bay book with chord charts and traditional folk songs. Learning basic chords was a challenge. The F-chord was the hardest for me because I couldn’t get my index finger to bar the B and E strings. Em was the easiest because you only had to fret two strings. G, C, and D were in the middle. After learning the chords, the challenge was switching from one chord to another seamlessly. I was eager to learn, but this didn’t stir up as much excitement as when I later discovered electric distortion in rock music, where all I had to do was make barre chords. So, it was a false start for me on the guitar.

Chapter Five

Cars

Dad and I often went to the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway. Sometimes we got a pit pass so we could walk around and look at the cars. We met Sterling Marlin and Darrell Waltrip there. It was exciting to meet people I’d only seen on TV before. I’d had a strange inner doubt that they weren’t really real. When we were up in the stands watching the race, the adults would drink beer. Jon Pettus, my dad’s first cousin, once let me have a sip of his beer while watching the race. That might’ve been my first drink of alcohol. I didn’t immediately become and alcoholic after drinking it. I only became one after I finally gained access to larger quantities. In 1988, we went to the Talladega 500 with John Evers and the late Ronnie Pennington, two of Dad’s childhood friends. It was televised, and we taped it on VHS. When we replayed the race, we found a crowd shot with me in it. You had to pause it to see me, but I was there. I thought being on national television made me famous and that we needed to make copies of that tape. Jon Pettus brought his VCR to our house. We stacked our VCR on top of his so that we could play the original tape on our VCR while he recorded a copy on his VCR. It was the 80’s. Our favorite driver was Darrell Waltrip, and to our delight, he led most of the laps of the race, but to our dismay, his engine blew up very near the end. Many fans just got up and left after that happened. There was one long-haired kid a few years older than me there with his dad. He had headphones on, listening to heavy metal, uninterested in the race. I couldn’t believe he didn’t care anything about the race that his dad cared so much about. Little did I know that I’d be a lot more like him in a few years.

Leo Tolstoy writes about how multiple factors affect the course of world history. I believe this is true in an individual’s history too. If things had been slightly different, I might’ve

become a great athlete. Who knows? As the see-saw example shows, I was interested in and knowledgeable of physics and other sciences; I was a smart kid. But as the inadequacy at sports shows, I couldn’t always apply my knowledge. It seems apparent that knowledge of physics could help in some physical activities. My fear of injury stopped me from excelling in baseball and skateboarding. But there were safer sports I could’ve excelled in. Maybe I just lacked the discipline and patience it takes to get good at something like that; I got bored too easily.

I never applied my knack to working on cars either. Whenever Dad worked on cars, I was his gofer. But I wasn’t even good at that. Half the time when he asked me to go get something, I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d go get something, hoping it was the right thing, so he wouldn’t know that I didn’t know. I watched him work on cars a lot, but didn’t get any hands-on experience. Maybe he thought I could learn by watching. On the rare occasions that he watched me work and instructed me verbally, if I didn’t understand what he was saying and needed to watch him do one step in the process, instead of showing me the step and then letting me take back over, he’d just go ahead and finished all the other steps of the job himself. He actually was a school teacher for a while, before he quit and went back to working at Kress Auto Parts. Maybe that shows that teaching wasn’t his strong suit. But I never took any initiative either. I could’ve just forced myself in there and asked him to let me have a shot at what he was doing. That’s what I do now when I help him. But that wasn’t going to happen back then. If I had met the right person to show me things, had gotten some momentum going, and the process became fun, who knows what would’ve happened? It was a similar situation with music, even though it doesn’t seem that way. I could’ve been a lot better than I was. I didn’t have the patience to sit there and practice things over and over. I wanted instant gratification. But if your dad owns an auto parts store, you’re supposed to know about cars, and boys are expected to be good at sports. Nobody expects you to be good at music. Embarrassment of my ignorance stopped me from asking questions and getting involved in mechanic projects. I wasn’t embarrassed about any ignorance I may have had about music, so I didn’t have reservations in that area; the only thing holding me back there was my lack of discipline. I wanted a #1 hit single without putting in the work.

In addition to mechanic work, Dad would “help” me with some of my school projects. Dad and I were active in Boy Scouts, which had the pinewood derby, but school had it too. I was sloppy in my woodwork, and if I’d had to make a race car on my own, it would’ve turned out terrible. But with Dad’s help it was slick and aerodynamic. The car didn’t win the derby but it was pretty fast. But the next year I didn’t have any help. Corey Tays was one of my best friends, and one of the few kids who was nerdier than me, so much that his dream was to become a school bus driver. Who says dreams don’t come true? To my knowledge, he is now a bus driver and a school teacher. As a tribute to him, and as a joke, I decided to make my racecar a school bus. School buses aren’t very aerodynamic or fast, but I didn’t care about that. It was slow and lost the first race and got disqualified, but it also looked terrible. It would’ve been pretty cool if I made an awesome, realistic looking replica of a school bus, even if it was slow, but I didn’t. What I made was a jacked-up slab of wood covered in blotchy yellow paint.

Whenever Dad and I watched NASCAR, I realized that when going around a curve, it was easier to pass a vehicle on the inside than on the outside. This is because the inside gives you a shorter distance to travel than the outside. I invented a board game based on this concept. There were six racers, numbered one through six. There were three columns on the track. The track had ten spaces for the inside column. The middle column had twenty spaces, two spaces for each inside space. The outside column had thirty spaces. The pieces were set up the same way as the start of a NASCAR race. For the first race, #1 had the pole position on the inside column, with #2 beside it in the middle column, and #3 behind it on the inside column, going back to #6 in the last position. I rolled a six-sided die to see how many spaces the pieces could move. The novelty of the game was the challenge of passing other pieces. The positions where the pieces started on the second race was determined by where they placed in the first race, and so on. I kept a points system similar to the one that determined a Winston Cup Champion. The differences between points received by high-ranking pieces were greater than the differences between low-ranking pieces. I understood that this was because of the novelty of winning a race. So, someone who won a race but placed poorly in the others has a slight advantage over someone who consistently ranks high but has never won. A player with a first-place and a third-place will receive more points than a player with two second-places. I drew the track on a piece of paper and cut out square pieces of paper, writing the numbers on them, for the pieces. It would’ve been cool to do it with matchbox cars, but my setup was not that sophisticated. I invented this game when I was in my bedroom playing professional wrestling with my Star Wars action figures. My top Star Wars wrestlers were Luke Skywalker (in black) and the Gamorrean guard. Despite the Gamorrean guard’s size, Luke had a slight edge on him.

Another great source of fun for me was a go-kart my dad built. He painted it Chevrolet Orange, PlastiKote part number 200. I burnt myself with the go-kart’s muffler one time and it left a nasty mark on my leg. I enjoyed riding it but what I really wanted to do was race it. Tim Henkel was my next-door neighbor and one of my best friends, but didn’t have a go-kart so I couldn’t race against him. Instead, I’d take it out behind his house and we’d time each other with a stop watch to see who could drive around the field in the shortest time. I tried making a wooden trophy for the winner but it ended up looking raggedy, just as bad as my school bus. He

might’ve made one that looked better; I’m sure he was better at that kind of stuff, but I can’t remember. He might’ve thought it was a silly idea.

Chapter Six

Rebellion

Sixth grade was where we moved to a different section of the school that had all the older kids. It doesn’t seem like much now, but to my pre-pubescent brain it seemed like quite a transition; a rite of passage. I would now be around older, more subversive Iron City kids like Mikey Keeton, Stacy Short, and Jason Bechtold. All three of these people are now deceased. Stacy Short tried to bully me one time in class and I grabbed his arm and swung him around in a circle. Phillip Purser told me that impressed him and it was quite a spectacle. Rayburn Wisdom wrote a song about Mikey Keeton based on the tune of “Mighty Mouse.” His version was called “Mikey Mouse.” I think I changed the song some to my liking also. Here are the lyrics:

Mikey Mouse

Here he comes to ruin the day

Mikey Mouse is on his way

Fighting good and breaking laws

In his dirty overalls

He will never pass the grade

He is dumber than a spade

Mikey Mouse is here to stay (in the sixth grade)

Mr. Hardwick was my home-room teacher. I don’t remember a lot about him, other than his weird sense of humor. He would jokingly say “ancient Chinese proverb,” before he’d tell is something that was supposed to be a moral lesson. Our class had a chess tournament, and because of my passion for the game, I was highly competitive. It came down to the championship game between me and the late Jay Andrews. He made a silly mistake and I beat him, earning the title of Sixth Grade Chess Champion. All that practice I got playing with Mr. Blair finally paid off. Being a book-smart nerd with less-than-average social skills, chess was something that naturally appealed to me. Politics was another nerdy thing that interested me and I’d try to discuss the Dukakis vs. Bush election with teachers and students, surely to their annoyance, however oblivious I was at the time. Hopefully I can read people better now in my maturity.

Mr. McCulough was one of my other teachers for sixth grade. We used to call Mr. Hardwick and him “Hard Dick” and “McCondom.” We thought that was hilarious; it shows how mature we were. Like most young boys, we had dirty minds, but there was also a mental conflict between that and religious morality. The first time I heard Mark Hartsfield say “goddamn,” I was shocked, because I thought he was breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Mark was usually the first one in our friend group to do subversive things, with me and Greg following closely behind. What I remember about Mr. McCulough was him criticizing students. I’ve always liked to prepare for things early, and one time I started packing up my books fifteen minutes before class was out. He called me out in front of the whole class for that. Another time he was asking everyone in class what they wanted to be when they grew up, and Emily Davis said she wanted to be a model. Looking back, that seems reasonable to me; she had a better shot at it than anyone else in the class, but Mr. McCulough chastised her for her statement. That was a bad decision on his part, because Emily’s dad came by the next day and cursed him out.

Seventh grade was when my taste in music started to change. Up until then, I mostly listened to pop, maybe a little country. My cassette collection included Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Huey Lewis and the News, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Billy Idol, Beastie Boys, and others. Bon Jovi was one of the first cassettes I had that may have started my transition into “metal.” Since I was a nerd who made good grades, I perhaps associated more with preps, even though I didn’t really fit in with them. But in 7th grade I started talking more to misfits who smoked cigarettes (among other things) and listened to rebellious music. It may have been Brian McLaughlin who let me hear a cassette of Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses. This was the first time I’d heard any music with cursing on it, and I was shocked. Glam rock was getting more popular, and GN’R was sort of a part of that. I started to get more into those bands and rejecting the pop of my previous years. I added Faster Pussycat, Kix, Motley Crue, The Cult, Winger, White Lion, Great White, Cinderella, and others to my tape collection. I was with my parents when I bought Wake Me When It’s Over by Faster Pussycat. Mom asked me if I was only buying it because of the name. I told her the truth; that I was not. I was buying it because I liked the song “House of Pain,” which was in rotation on MTV. On the other hand, the bare legs on the cover of …Twice Shy by Great White may have influenced my decision to buy that tape. The first Winger album had a cover of “Purple Haze.” I heard their version before I ever heard the original. I had a carrying case for my cassettes. I took all my pop tapes out and added the metal ones. I also added some rap. The “metal” section of my case took up about ¾ of it while the “rap” section took up the remainder, with N.W.A., 2 Live Crew, and the like. Since the Beastie Boys were rap, they might have been the only music that crossed over from my pop era to my metal/rap era, because my musical taste was limited to those two genres at this time. Although they were rap, the Beastie Boys had a harder edge to them, with metal guitars on many of their songs. I remember listening to them and telling Tim Henkel that I was convinced that rap was the only thing that was actually “heavier” than heavy metal. Later in my musical journey, I would find that statement to be false.

Eighth grade had me going more and more into the direction of glam metal. Having taken piano and acoustic guitar lessons, I already was inclined to play music, and when I went to Brian McLaughlin’s house and heard him playing “Paradise City” by Guns N’ Roses, I was amazed. I had to get an electric guitar and an amp for myself. I talked my dad into getting them for me. The amp had distortion from a busted speaker, and I loved it. There were sounds you could make that you couldn’t do on acoustic. This is when I learned you could play the basics of popular songs with little effort. Like Brian, I could play the main riff for “Paradise City.” Solos and intricacies were more difficult though. I had a future ahead of me that consisted of reading guitar magazines and tablature books, learning the songs of my favorite metal bands. Just like when my parents took me to stores that sold cassettes and CDs, when they took me to stores that sold musical instruments, I was like a kid in a candy store. The first rock book I got was an easy guitar book of Guns N’ Roses songs. I was also getting into solo guitarists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. I had tablature books for both of them, which were way over my head. My Dad took my friend Greg and me to see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. That was my first concert. Shortly after that, he took us to see Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood tour, with Lita Ford opening. That was in 1990. The Crue show was quite a culture shock, not what my dad was expecting. They cursed a lot, and Tommy Lee mooned the crowd. I still have the T-shirt I got at that concert.

Throughout our elementary school days, Greg and I always sat together at lunch. It was usually just the two of us, but Mark Richter sometimes sat with us. Greg and I had a two-man band that we called “Wishbone.” Yes, we got the idea from a bottle of salad dressing. I still remembered some things from my piano lessons and still had that Casio keyboard with programmed drums on it and bass patterns. I also had a square electronic drum pad machine that you could play with drumsticks. That gave us a few instruments for two band members. We had to work with what little we had. When Mark sat with us, we got the idea of adding him to our band. I don’t remember what instrument he was supposed to play. Maybe one of us was just going to do vocals. With an extra member, we had to change the name of the band. Now it was “MGM” (Michael, Greg, Mark). Being unpopular made it hard to get a band going. It still does, because networking is a big part of the music scene. It was hard enough the find someone who wanted to play, harder to find someone who could play, and even harder to find someone with their own equipment. Other than my guitar, the instruments we had were like kid’s toys. A guitar was the easiest rock instrument to attain, but I had the dream of getting a bass guitar and drums for the band. Luckily, Victor Wooten’s virtuosity at the Flecktones concert inspired Greg to get a bass and start playing. We were getting closer to our dream, but drums would be harder because of their inconvenience. Nobody I knew had a set. Older kids like Anthony Weathers who played in marching band may have had a set at the time. Shane Olmstead was our age but he probably had not started yet, so it was a rough going.

Although I was the furthest thing from being cool, I was slightly more talented at music than I was in the world of bikes and skateboards. The bike I had was a goofy looking yellow bicycle that, in my mind, wasn’t as cool as the bikes other kids had. While they had sporty, BMX style bikes, mine was more like the one in Peewee’s Big Adventure. It was decked out though. It had a contraption on one handlebar that you could rev up to make it sound like a motorcycle. It also had a speedometer. I didn’t know any other kids that had speedometers on their bikes. I once got it up to 55 mph going down a hill on Littrell Road. But it seemed like all the other neighborhood kids could do better tricks with their bikes than I could. We all had skateboards too. It was the same with the skateboards as it was with the bikes. I was afraid of getting hurt. I mostly hung out with Tim Henkel, because he lived closer to me than anybody else. Another neighbor I had was Rayburn Wisdom, but he lived a little further down than Tim. Whenever I rode Rayburn’s skateboard, I noticed it rolled a lot faster and smoother than mine. I told my dad about that, and he got some bearings from Kress Auto Parts to put on my skateboard. That didn’t fix the problem though. I should’ve just gotten a skateboard like Rayburn’s. Still, a better board wouldn’t’ve done me any good because I was too scared to ride. Tim and I had a little ramp set up that we could jump with a bike or skateboard. It was just a wooden board placed on top of a large brick, like the ramp in Napoleon Dynamite.

Rayburn was by far the best skateboarder on our block, and he had all the accessories, including the cassette tapes that went along with it. Skateboarding turned a lot of people on to punk early on, as it was part of the culture, and Rayburn had D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies tapes when everyone else still listened to Poison and Warrant. He had a quarter-pipe in his parents’ garage, and was always riding the half-pipe at the Skating Rink in Leoma. Dad built me a quarter-pipe. I’d just ride up and down it halfheartedly. I was afraid to drop in on it. I might’ve dropped in one time, but even after that, I was still scared. I’d mostly stand on top of it, petrified, trying to work up the courage. One day Rayburn jumped my quarter-pipe. That really put me to shame. I always wondered how Rayburn managed to be as cool and popular as he was. I guess part of it was not being afraid of getting hurt. He caused permanent damage to his hand at a young age by slamming it through a glass window or doing something crazy like that. That natural fearlessness from physical harm made him a good skateboarder, and physical fearlessness must’ve crossed over into social fearlessness. Sure, there were preps who were as popular as he was, but he was able to dress and act like a freak while staying popular in all the different social circles. I couldn’t do that. If I acted like a freak, then only the freaks accepted me, and even they were reluctant. While many of the other kids became too cool for Boy Scouts, he remained a Scout and had a sash full of merit badges. I was afraid of kids seeing me in my Boy Scout uniform because they would make fun of me, but Rayburn didn’t care because they never made fun of him for the exact same thing. In fact, I used to console myself from the shame by telling myself that at least someone as cool as Rayburn was still a Boy Scout. People used to call him “Burny,” and he got everyone to stop calling him that. He told everybody he would kick their ass if they kept calling him that, so I guess his willingness to fight also helped him pull stuff off.

It seemed like that block where Rayburn, David, Tim, William, and I lived was our whole world. Since we didn’t have cars, we couldn’t safely venture out on the highway, so we had to be creative in our explorations. As the earlier Zelda example showed, I wanted to see how far out in the world I could go, more than any of my friends. The furthest I ever rode my bike was to Ricky and Suzanne Cain’s house. I rode out there by myself, because I couldn’t convince my friends to go out that far for no reason. They just used their bikes to go to each other’s houses and to do tricks. It was the same with the woods. Tim would run through the woods and didn’t mind getting scratched up by the briars, so it was a macho thing for him, but I hated those briars and tried to avoid them, so I trailed behind. But Tim wouldn’t want to go deep in the woods just out of curiosity.

Every time I visited Tim’s house, he’d be bullying William. I felt sorry for William but never said anything about it. Perhaps part of the reason I was such a wimp was because I didn’t have a big brother to beat me up. In spite of the bullying, it was obvious William looked up to Tim. Tim started his cassette tape collection early on and when William caught on to what he was doing, he started collecting the same ones. Some of Tim’s first cassettes were rap tapes like Radio by L.L. Cool J and Crushin’ by The Fat Boys. Crushin’ had a song called “Protect Yourself/My Nuts” on it. “Protect Yourself” was about condoms, and I understood that because the AIDS epidemic was at its peak and the topic was mainstream in the media. They even talked about it in health class at school. But “My Nuts” confused me, because I didn’t know that “nuts” were testicles. It didn’t make sense that the song would be about the food, and I suspected some type of innuendo, but that’s as far as I got with it. Tim later moved on to even more explicit things. He gave me a 2-Live Crew tape as a gift one time, and let me borrow an N.W.A. tape that got me in trouble once. Mom was gone somewhere, and it was only me and Jennifer in the house. I was playing N.W.A. really loud, exposing Jennifer to its explicit lyrics, when Mom arrived. I wasn’t smart about concealing my crimes. Despite my fear of punishment, I lacked the foresight to realize my parents could arrive at any minute. I probably got grounded a long time for that. I probably felt remorse for getting caught, but I often felt indignant that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Later, Tim started collecting more rock tapes like Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, and Primus. That’s when William started copying him. You could look at both of their tape collections and see that they were almost identical.

Chapter Seven

High School

Motley Crue played a big part of my freshman year in high school. I had the Dr. Feelgood shirt I got from the concert, and I wore it all the time. If you look at an old yearbook, you’ll see that everybody had mullets and Motley Crue shirts, so that helped me fit in, I guess. I still had the stigma of being a nerd though, and people made fun of me because I went to that concert with my dad. Times were changing, and MTV was playing different things than before; it was time for another one of my musical transitions. The first time I saw the video for Antisocial by Anthrax I thought it was the heaviest thing I’d ever heard. I ran out and got the cassette State of Euphoria. Since I was already contemplating and discussing degrees of heaviness within hair metal and rap, this moment now seems anticipated and inevitable. Greg and I wore that tape out, so much that it was one of the few tapes I had with all the print worn off it. We loved every song except Make Me Laugh, which I thought was sacrilegious. Looking back, I don’t think it was. It’s only making fun of TV preachers. I started getting into heavier music, and then grunge came along, turning me on to punk as well.

The first actual band that I was that wasn’t rigged up some kind of way with a drum machine and keyboard, but actually had drums, bass, guitar, and amps, was Melvins Head Trip. Looking back, that seems cool for a first band. My band members were Rayburn Wisdom on bass, Stacy Fleeman on guitar and vocals, and Billy Redd on drums. This band was my first introduction to the Lawrenceburg punk/alternative scene. We played a show at Crockett Theater in Lawrenceburg with other bands. Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Huntley were in one of the bands. Teen Idols, Septic Tank, and Witcher may have been some of the other bands if I remember correctly. This concert dug me into some of the deeper, darker aspects of the underground scene. There were Melvins 7”’s there and I met Ben Becker for the first time there; he was telling me about bands Melvins and other bands of that ilk. My parents were there and made me quit the band after that because of some of the things Stacy said onstage about LSD. I didn’t even know what LSD or “acid” was at the time. My parents did the best they could to shelter me, and I was still drug-free at the time, but my curiosity had already been piqued. Billy’s parents made him quit too. After we left, they got Shane Olmstead on drums and became a three­piece, playing like that until they eventually dissolved. Rayburn is now a super-Republican redneck. He did a total 180° from the skater-punk that he was before. He made that transition pretty early on; I thought it was bizarre at the time and still do. He just quit playing bass and skateboarding one day and became a full-time redneck. The rednecks welcomed him with open arms, and the alternative people called him a poseur. Stacy formed other bands and stayed in the scene until his untimely death. Billy, unlike me, must’ve taken his parents advice that this was a bad deal because he quit the music scene and gave his life to Christ.

One place that my friends Greg, Tim Henkel, and Mark Hartsfield went to frequently was the Skating Rink in Leoma. It was a place younger kids went to but was thought of as uncool for older kids to go to. Leoma was right in between Loretto and Lawrenceburg, so the skating rink was sort of a mediary between the two towns. There was a half-pipe in the back of the rink that Rayburn skateboarded on before he became too cool for the skating rink. Since he was cooler than me and my friends, he stopped going to the skating rink before we stopped. Young kids skated around the rink, but older kids just went there for dating purposes. Calvin Moore, the politician, owned the place, and his daughter Casey, who everybody had a crush on, would sometimes work there, but she didn’t hang out there because she was too old and cool for that too. She dated Rayburn for a while, and he introduced her to some of the Lawrenceburg alternative people, so she would hang out in that scene instead of at the rink. One night at the skating rink, I met Misty Kimbrell and the late Amanda McGee. They were younger than us and hadn’t become too cool for the skating rink yet, but Misty was already part of the alternative scene despite that. Although Misty and Casey were part of the same scene, Casey hated Misty, and I didn’t know why; I originally thought it was because Misty was younger and Casey thought she was immature. I was pretty dense back then; it only occurred to me recently that it was because Rayburn had cheated on Casey with Misty.

When I met Misty, she asked me if I was into alternative music and if I played an instrument. She told me she knew some guys in Lawrenceburg who had a band and that she could hook me up with them. Misty introduced me to the band members and I agreed to meet them for an audition. The name of the band was Fantastic Suicide Machine. I met the bass player, Rafiale Borden, at a gas station on the south end of town. We rode to the drummer’s house in Raf’s car. Dirt by Alice in Chains was playing on his stereo. I met the rest of the band members. Eric Dick on vocals, Brad Layfield on drums, and me on guitar. Also, Jason Ballentine was always hanging around and would sit in on guitar when I wasn’t there. I found this strange because he knew the songs as well as I did and it seemed more convenient for him to do it, but I was grateful for the opportunity. It was a punk band in the style of the Misfits with almost all the songs written by Eric. This was my real introduction to Lawrenceburg’s alternative scene.

After Fantastic Suicide Machine dissolved, I joined another Lawrenceburg band with Eric Dick, Ben Becker, and Darrell Dickey called Dick. Dick was not as good as they could’ve been because of the silly direction I tried to take the band. They wanted me to sing but I considered myself a musician who did other things besides just singing. I really wanted to play guitar, but the consensus was that we didn’t need two guitarists. I ended up playing atypical rock instruments like the recorder and the banjo because I wanted to be original. Primus was a popular band in our scene, and they’d just released Pork Soda, which had banjo on it, so I thought people might find the instrument cool because of that. They didn’t. Dick recorded an EP at Jeff Quillen’s studio in Loretto. We played a horrible show at The Farm in Summertown, opening for the new, 3-piece lineup of Melvins Head Trip, with the late Shane Olmstead on drums. After that show, Ben quit the band, causing it to dissolve. Things rocked along like that for a while.

A lot of alternative people hung out at Ron Overton’s house, and Raf lived there for a while. One night, when I was hanging out there, Raf convinced me to try weed for the first time. I’d been around people using it and turning it down for a while. My peers talked about how it wasn’t as bad as other drugs and wasn’t addictive, but my parents and teachers had a different story. I worried that the weed might be laced with some harder drug. My peers responded by saying that nobody would waste a drug that cost them money by secretly lacing it in a joint. This happened to be true, at least at the time. Raf’s argument was that all the great musicians used drugs and it stimulated their creativity. I argued against that for a while, saying that the image of drug use in said musicians helped popularize them, and that’s why it seemed so prevalent. Even back then, my worldview had the seeds of sophistication, though it wouldn’t grow until much later. Today I believe that drugs can benefit your creativity, but so can any other life experience. I eventually caved into Raf’s argument and smoked. I was seventeen at the time. I didn’t get high the first time but when I realized that it didn’t kill me, I decided smoking it a second time couldn’t hurt anything. The second time it blew my mind. Raf had a fretless Hohner bass, which he ran through a distortion pedal into his amp. He’d take the water bong and place it over the bass pickups while he took a hit out of it. Distorted bass bong hits, loud as hell! We’d sit in Ron’s basement recording guitar and bass for hours on my 4-track. When I was stoned, I really thought pot made me a better musician. But when I sobered up and listened to the recordings, it didn’t sound as good. We hung out at Ron’s and got messed up all the time. We joked about me calling Ron’s cat “kitaaay” when I was stoned and “cat-ass motherfucker” when I was drunk. I used to get so high that I’d go into school after smoking the day before and tell people that I thought it’d been laced because I was still high. Once I started weed, I was off and running. All my friends smoked weed except for Tim Henkel. All the misfits I tried to hang out with smoked it, so I thought it’d help me fit in; one of the first things I did was run and tell Rayburn I’d tried it. I was almost done with high school when I started smoking, and when I graduated high school and turned 18, that freed me up to do a lot more partying.

Chapter Eight

After High School

I was smoking a lot, and since smoking sometimes made me paranoid, I was drinking more and more to counteract that. But I was not 21 yet, so I had to find places that wouldn’t card me. My go-to place was a drive-thru in Dunn, between Loretto and Lawrenceburg. This would be my new mediary between the two towns.

I remember my first-time buying alcohol legally, on my 21st birthday. I probably went to work at Kress Auto Parts during the day, and then, after work was done, I went with my parents to Ricatoni’s in Florence for a birthday dinner. I can’t remember if my sister went with us. When we got back, I went to a beer store in St. Joseph and bought a six pack of Bud Ice Light bottles. The guy carded me and told me “Happy birthday.” I hung out with David Gieske that night. I don’t remember what we did. David Gieske and Chad Benefield were my neighbors (I was still living with my parents.), so I did a lot of drinking and partying with them.

I went to more concerts during the years 1996 and 1997 than I ever have in my life. Sometimes I would go with Greg, Phillip Purser (nicknamed Pusser), and the Loretto crowd, and sometimes I’d go with the Lawrenceburg crowd. Greg’s parents were letting him live by himself in his childhood home, a place where I’d visited many times as a kid, and we started partying there regularly. Greg and I had a band called Insanity with Michael Hartsfield on drums. We didn’t have good equipment when we started out. We had amps, but since we didn’t have a PA, we had to run the vocal microphone through Greg’s home stereo system. Even with that lousy setup, it was still loud enough to bother the neighbors, so for a little while we started practicing at Kress Auto Parts. One guy who worked at the garage across the street from Kress Auto Parts came over to hear us play; he said he had a PA with speakers he’d sell us, but then he decided he only wanted to sell the PA, which meant we’d have to find the speakers elsewhere. Greg got mad at him for changing his mind and told me I shouldn’t buy the PA because of that, but Greg was already mad about him saying you couldn’t play chords on bass. I ended up buying the PA, but had to find the speakers elsewhere. First, I went to a pawn shop in Killen, AL and bought some of what the pawnbroker called “Saturday Night Special” speakers. Anybody who knows about sound equipment will tell you there’s no such thing as that brand. But I didn’t know anything and was easily persuaded. This would be one of the many times I was a sucker and people took advantage of me. These speakers blew up the first time I hooked them up to the PA and tried them out. We later got some Peavey Black Widow speakers that could handle the PA’s power. That PA/speaker setup was quite powerful. I’d somehow managed to blow the speakers in my Fender Princeton Chorus guitar amp. In addition to my being a pushover, I was also quite irresponsible with my possessions. I ran my multicolored GTX guitar through my digital effects processor and into the PA, until one day, the processor stopped working. I took it to Galaxy Music in Florence, AL to get it fixed. They told me they’d sent it off to get it fixed, but every time I checked in, they said they hadn’t got it back yet. I was afraid of confrontation, so I didn’t do anything until Matt Davis went with me to ask for a replacement. They gave me a brand-new processor. It was that easy.

Michael eventually quit the band because he wanted to spend more time playing video games, so we got Pusser to take his place on drums. We decided to change the band’s name because of the new member. Greg wanted to call the band “Hatred,” but I didn’t like that. Even with the dark place I was in my life, I thought that limited the lyrical scope of the band. I said the name was too simple, so Greg took that and suggested “Simple Hatred.” That wasn’t any better. At one point, Greg let me move into that house. The house stayed messy and filthy all the time. I was going back and forth between the Lawrenceburg and Loretto crowds, sometimes bringing LSD down to Loretto from Lawrenceburg. At one point, the Loretto crowd discovered you could trip on Robitussin and a lot of us started doing that. The “Robo trips” were pretty intense and started to get out of hand. The only rule Greg had for his house was no Robo tripping when he wasn’t there. Well, I ended up breaking his only rule and got kicked out. I stayed at Pusser’s apartment for a while but eventually ended up moving back in with my parents. I still jammed with Simple Hatred after the move out though.

Around that time, I started jamming with Raf and Doug Corey in Bodenham. We named our band Psycho Stone. One night, Raf and Doug came over to Greg’s house and we had a jam with two drummers, two bass players, and me on guitar. I was starting to hang out more frequently with Raf, and he had had a falling out with some of the members of the Lawrenceburg scene, so that in effect caused me to alienate from that scene as well.

In 1998, Raf started working at Avex Electronics in Pulaski and said he could get me and Greg a job there through Randstad and I could live with him in his Bodenham trailer. We had to take a pee test for the job, so we took a lot of ginseng pills the night before the test and drank a lot of water the day of, hoping that would work. It did, so I quit my job at Kress Auto Parts and started doing working at Avex. We worked a lot of overtime. I remember working 72 hours one week. At that time, it was the most hours I’d worked in a week and the biggest paycheck I’d ever got. One weekend, Raf and I drove down to Counts Brothers Music in Muscle Shoals. I bought a cream-colored Mexican Strat that I still own. Raf bought a large bass cabinet to play his Hohner fretless bass through. Since Raf couldn’t get along with anybody, we had a hard time finding a drummer. There was one drummer who worked at Avex who came and jammed with us one night. He was a punk rocker, as were a few people who worked there.

Sarah Burrows was a punk rocker girl working at Avex who probably considered dating me before she realized how creepy I was. She had a lip piercing, which was less common back then than it is today. She was a NOFX fan, and was the first person I’d ever heard mention the band, despite my punk rocker friends in Lawrenceburg. She brought her CD case to work one day, and I noticed Rage Against the Machine was the only mainstream band in her collection I didn’t consider “punk.” When she rejected me, I thought I could communicate my feelings to her telepathically by staring at her. I kept hoping they would move me to where I would be working next to her but, looking back, they probably intentionally kept us apart because of my behavior. Another girl working there who considered dating me but then thought better of it was named Judy. She even gave me a ride home one day. She was cute, but I didn’t get as attached to her and think of her as a “soul mate” because she wasn’t a punk rocker like Sarah. Raf and I rocked along like that for a while, but I was getting tired of being around him all the time. I’d even leave the house and drive around Pulaski aimlessly just so I could be away from him. I eventually moved back in with my parents. A while after that, I had a nervous breakdown and quit Avex.

The economy was great in the late 90s, and I never had any trouble finding a job, but I couldn’t hold one for long, never longer than a year. My next job was at Arvin, a factory in the same industrial park as Avex. Pusser’s sister, Brenda, worked there also, and we were both on second shift. I hung out with her quite a lot, we both loved smoking weed, but I drank a lot more than she did. I had a secret crush on her but never told her how I felt. One night after work we went back to her apartment to hang out. This was one of the rare times I remember her drinking, perhaps the only time. She got very drunk, and I had to hold her hair while she vomited in the toilet. After that, she came on to me and we cuddled on the couch. I basically thought she was my girlfriend after that, but the next time I saw her, she acted like nothing had happened. I

thought at the time that she regretted it, but now I think she probably didn’t remember it because she was blackout drunk.

I’d wrecked my 1988 LeBaron several times and finally totaled it out, so I had to borrow my Grampa’s Explorer to drive to work, and sometimes Brenda would give me a ride. There was a musician named Jon Paul working there who I hung out with a few times. He had recorded a CD under the stage name of “Jonpaw.” One Friday the 13th, I went to Lawrenceburg Kroger to cash my paycheck from Arvin. The woman accidentally gave me $100 more than the check’s value. When she called me to report the mistake, I lied and said I didn’t know what she was talking about. My superstition made me think the 13th gave me evil good luck. I went to Parker’s Place in Alabama that night and bought a gram of cocaine from a dealer there with said $100. Then I went to Ron’s house to do the coke with Raf and Ron and listen to the Jon Paw CD with them. I introduced John Paul to Raf, and we hung out at Phillip Nash’s house one night. John Paul was a Christian who wasn’t into drugs, so he, like Greg, didn’t seem to fit in with that scene. Raf had some coke that night and we snorted it in front of John; Raf offered him some but he declined. John said that was the first time he’d ever seen anyone do coke. John drank a couple of beers so I guess that helped him fit in some. Brenda hated Jon Paw’s CD. She said, “Jon Paw sucks!”

It was either during Arvin days that Raf and I started jamming with Moose. Every time we changed drummers, we had to change the name of the band. This time we called it “Unknown.” Moose stayed with his wife at a house out in the sticks of Pulaski, a perfect place for jamming, with no neighbors to complain about it. One night when I carpooled with Brenda, she gave me a ride from Arvin to Moose’s house after work. I’d told her it wasn’t far out of the way, but halfway there, she started complaining about it being too far; turns out it was more in the sticks than I thought.

I eventually quit my job at Arvin and started working in different factories in Lawrenceburg. Some of those were Tridon, Jones Apparel, North American Container, and Graphics Packaging. Raf had a falling out with Moose and we started jamming with Pusser. The name of the band with Pusser was 7 Hrs. So, we rocked along like that for a while.

Chapter Nine

Marijuana Maintenance

At some point in 1999, I decided I had a drinking problem. I’d made a fool of myself a few times, couldn’t hold a job, I’d wrecked all my cars, and was still living with my parents, so I went on the marijuana maintenance program. I just smoked weed and did every other drug besides alcohol.

When Y2K was approaching, I’d wrecked all my cars, so I begged my dad to lend me the car he was letting me use to drive to whatever job I had at the time to go to Philip Nash’s New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t drinking, but we smoked a lot of pot. Raf was putting what was supposed to be peyote cactus in his ounce sized joints. I didn’t trip but I got really high. 7 Hrs. played at that party, and there were a lot of both Lawrenceburg alternative people and Loretto people there. So, the 90s were over and the new millennium had begun.

My grandfather, Daddy John, died on Mar. 24, 2000, two days before my birthday, and the funeral was on my birthday. I was working at Graphics Packaging when I got the news of his death. I told my cousin, Jon Pettus, about it, and he at first thought I was talking about my other grandfather, who was related to him. Raf was living at these horrible, cheap apartments in Lawrenceburg with a shared toilet. I left him a note saying that I couldn’t hang out, jam, or whatever, because of the death. Raf and Greg both came to the funeral. I was a pallbearer at the funeral. I cried my eyes out.

7 Hrs. recorded a CD at Jeff Quillen’s recording studio in 2000. Pusser was having mental problems at this time. He acted like he had voices in his head, so everybody believed he was insane. He overplayed on drums, got way out of time, and never would end a song properly. We would take breaks from the recording session to go smoke weed, coming back reeking. We

never got any really good takes because of Pusser. The songs we put on the CD were “Nowhere to Run,” “Wouldja,” “Drag You Down,” and “Cactus Juice.” 7 Hrs. finally dissolved when Pusser and Raf had a falling out.

Around 2001, Raf started dating Angela Durham. She fixed me up with Shannon Brown, and we dated for about two months. I was working at KFC when I first started dating her, but soon lost that job. Shannon lived with her mom, Betty Brown, and I just kind of bummed around at their house all the time. Betty had a black boyfriend who hung out there too. One night, Shannon and I went to one of Phillip Nash’s parties. I was still not drinking, and she was not supposed to because she was diabetic. She did though and ended up having to go to the hospital. I went to visit her in the hospital a few times, but not as frequently as what her family and friends thought a good boyfriend should do. It didn’t help that I had Phillip Purser with me during most of my visits. Phillip Nash used the drinking incident at his house as an excuse to go to her and apologize for getting her drunk, and he used that as a way to get in good with her. I met her one time after she left the hospital. After that, she started going to Philip Nash’s house all the time. I was heartbroken, but Angela fixed me up with Amanda Jenkins on the rebound. Alas, Amanda couldn’t fix my broken heart, not because I was “in love,” but because her face wasn’t as pretty as Shannon’s. Looking back, I’m sure a prettier face would’ve fixed that heart up right away, no matter what her personality was like.

The next band I was in, around 2002 or 2003, was Roy’s Machine. I was hanging out with David Gieske and he took me to Roy Smith’s house. There was a trailer out back where a bunch of black guys were jamming. Roy didn’t play an instrument, but he was like the band manager. He died shortly after I joined the band, so they named it “Roy’s Machine” in his honor. David and I went to his funeral at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The members of Roy’s Machine were into the Isley Brothers, Al Green, and The Temptations. The band mostly did covers of old R&B music, including “Let’s Stay Together” by Green and “Who’s That Lady” by the Isleys. Most of the band members drank except for me and the band’s drummer, named Flee. He liked to take a lot of pills and smoke crack, so I hung out with him more than any of the others. He wasn’t an alcoholic trying to substitute it with other substances like I was; he just never developed a taste for it. I hung out at his apartment in Lawrenceburg getting wasted and watching the NBA all the time. Lee Dooley, the band’s rhythm guitarist and the only other white guy in the band, lived in the apartment across from Flee. Lee drank but also did a lot of pills, so I’d hang out there too. He had a nice Les Paul guitar, which was ironic because everybody thought I was a better guitarist than him, but I just had my $300 Mexican Strat. We worked up a short set and played our first and only gig at a black VFW bar in Lawrenceburg. Our set was around an hour long, which would’ve been fine if we were doing a show with other bands, but this was a bar and we were supposed to play all night, so we ended up playing the same songs over and over. Betty was there with her boyfriend, and I hoped her seeing me with a band would redeem myself in some way, she’d tell Shannon about my performance, reviving her affection for me. But that didn’t happen. My thinking was flawed, to say the least.

Chapter Ten

Off The Wagon

My parents had had enough of my nonsense and would not let me stay at their house anymore, so I moved into Raf’s duplex on Smith Circle in Loretto. I didn’t have a real job, but Chris hired me to help him do work on his house and other odd jobs. Chris was a tweaker who always had lots of speed, and when I turned in my hand-written time card, my payment would be part cash, and part drugs. We took Lortabs, Didrex, and other types of speed. These cocktails made me productive and also made me lose weight. That way I could squeeze into those hard-to-reach places under Chris’s house. All this time, I still wasn’t drinking, until one day, I found out Emily Staggs, a girl I had a crush on, like Raf instead of me. I got depressed and started thinking about the best ways to self-medicate. The only major drug I’d never done was heroin, and I talked about trying that. Then it occurred to me I could just start back drinking, so that’s what I did instead. The great thing about drinking was that since it was legal, I could usually get as much as I wanted and get as blitzed as possible. I decided I was going to get shitfaced all the time, but this time I wasn’t going to drive drunk. I set myself a two-drink limit while driving. That night, I got drunk with Raf at his house. Raf was against drunk driving, but as everyone knows, drinking can affect your judgment. We decided he could drive us to Chris’s house. He hit a small tree in a neighbor’s yard on the way there, so obviously he shouldn’t’ve been driving.

Raf found out that his wife was cheating on him with Moose and other people. In fact, Moose told me and I told Raf. He was enraged. He even suspected that he wasn’t the biological father of their two daughters. He expected loyalty from me as a friend, which meant I shouldn’t be hanging out with Moose. But I was still writing, recording, and smoking weed with Moose. I had a palmtop recorder I got at the Sound Shoppe with built-in drum and bass patterns. The recorder was so small that we could record vocal and guitar parts while riding around and hotboxing in my truck. One night I had Moose in the car with me in Lawrenceburg, and Raf pulled up next to us at the red light, so I was exposed. Raf hated me, but I still lived with him.

I soon moved out of Raf’s and into a duplex across the street from Loretto High School. I was working at North American Container in Lawrenceburg at the time. Gieske came and asked if he could move in. I was a pushover, so I let him. He never helped with the rent or anything much at all. Matt Davis brought his bass over one night and we were jamming really loud, so the neighbors called the cops. They came over and told us to turn it down. I suggested we just turn it down a little bit, but Matt made the smart move and said we should just turn it completely off. A few nights later, David told me that I was banging on the walls of the duplex and cursing the neighbors. I didn’t remember any of that, so I must’ve been blackout drunk.

David’s story freaked me out so much that I decided I had to move out. I left there and moved in with Jimbo James. His house was right down the road from Pusser, who walked over all the time, and across the street from Greg, who I didn’t see much because he was sober. We were always partying over there, and at some point, Chasity Smith started coming over there and partying with us. I’d known her for several years at this point, originally from hanging out with the Lawrenceburg crowd. She and Misty would ride around with me a lot and get stoned. I was excited about being reunited because I had always had a crush on her. Jimbo let her and her two twin boys move in with us. I was happy about this, but Jimbo got fed up with her and finally kicked her out. I didn’t like this at all, but then Jimbo moved out and was going to let me continue living at the house. I thought this was great because then I could get Chasity to move back in. The problem was that she wouldn’t just wait around for me to get off work so we could hang out; she was always partying with other people. One day, when she was staying with Raf, I went over there to see her while he was at work. She offered me a beer and I took it. At first, I was going to drink that beer and go on in to work, but as we kept talking, she suggested we go to the creek. I knew if I didn’t go that I wouldn’t get to see her for a long time, so I caved. I didn’t call in and I didn’t go back to work after that. After that, I wouldn’t be able to make rent, and I had to be out before the new tenants moved in. During the time before I had to move out, I let the house go to hell. There was a huge turd in the toilet that I couldn’t get to go down, there was a bag of sugar spilt on the floor that attracted huge numbers of ants, and flies were everywhere. The fly traps we had up were covered and didn’t work anymore. The utilities were cut off, so I had to sleep in the heat with flies buzzing around my head. After I moved out, Chasity told me she wanted to go back and get a blender she left in the house. I didn’t want to go face the new tenants, but she told me the blender belonged to her and she was entitled to it. When we went in the house to get it, they gave me the biggest “go to hell” look I’d ever received.

I crashed at different people’s houses and slept in my truck for about a month. I’d bought Ozzy tickets when I still had a job and a house, and the date of the concert had arrived, Phillip Purser and I rode up to Starwood Amphitheater to see it. My truck was using a quart of oil every day, but this was a longer trip than what I usually drove in a day. I put a quart in when we got to Columbia, about halfway, but when we finally got to Nashville it was bone dry, and I had to put in several quarts. We just kept pouring the oil in for the whole trip. We were lucky to make it back.

Chapter Eleven

Sobriety

On July 27, 2004, I was sleeping in my truck in my parents’ driveway, when my uncle Chris pulled up and asked me if I wanted to go to rehab. He’d just gone there and gotten sober a few months earlier. I said yes. I wasn’t completely sold on rehab; I couldn’t fathom the idea of never smoking weed again. But I was getting tired of sleeping in my car and liked the idea of “three hots and a cot,” as they say. I also thought there might be women there, but to my dismay, it was a men’s retreat. There was a woman who worked in the office and we all got to go in the van to outside AA meeting where there were women from other treatment centers, but I never talked to any of them. One of the things people say in treatment is to not get into a relationship during the first year of sobriety. I didn’t have a problem with that because nobody wanted to be in a relationship with me anyway. I stayed in treatment for a month.

When I got out, I moved back in with my parents. After I’d been out for a while, I started job hunting. One day, I drove the brown Oldsmobile Cutlass my dad found for me down to Kelly Services, a temp place in Florence, to apply for a job. Greg came along with me. They had a job for me at Sara Lee. This was going to be a new chapter of my life. I’d spent a lot of my partying days in Lawrenceburg, not knowing many people in Florence, and I was going to spend much of my sobriety in Florence, alienating from the Lawrenceburg crowd.

It seemed like a lot of people at Sara Lee liked to bully me. One of the worst people to do this was Marty McLaughlin. I still lived at home in Loretto, and he lived at home in Greenhill, which was between Loretto and Florence, so one day he asked if I wanted to carpool. I reluctantly said yes. I just couldn’t stand Marty though, and didn’t like riding with him, so I asked my “spiritual advisor,” Howard Jeffries, what I should do. He said to stop riding with him.

After I was sober for eleven months, I decided to stop smoking. At that point I’d been smoking for about fifteen years, so it was difficult. I started out using nicotine lozenges, but since you couldn’t have gum or candy inside Sara Lee, I switched to the patch. I went exactly by the directions on the box, never cheating. The patch kind of wires you up, like having a buzz; you will have bizarre dreams if you wear it while sleeping. It was a successful tool; I haven’t had a cigarette since then.

I was a temp at Sara Lee for over two years before I finally went full time. That was probably because I just never applied for any positions up until then. When I got hired, I got to move to another department, away from Marty, but to my dismay, there were unpleasant people there too. My new job title was “backup bag-line operator.” There was an old lady who was the main operator, and I took her place when she went to break and on days she wasn’t there. The bag machine dumped sausage patties into bags and then sealed up the bags. I had to run the machine but there were other people on the line who put the bags in boxes and then stacked them on pallets. Sometimes the machine would stop sealing the bags and would dump the patties all in the floor. I either had to try to fix the machine while it was running and salvage as much sausage as possible or stop the machine, halting production, and call maintenance. The maintenance guys were often rude and this is where a developed an anxiety around maintenance men, even if they were nice. I didn’t handle stress well back then.

It was this stress that made me decide to go back to the University of North Alabama, where I went for a short time in ’96 and ’97. I thought either going to college full time or the further options a degree provided would help me avoid these situations. The first class I took after my long absence was pre-calculus. I seemed to be the only one there who was interested in the subject. I would stay after and ask the teacher questions. I made an A in that class.

After finishing my pre-calculus class at UNA, I switched to the local community college, NWSCC, because it was cheaper and easier. I was on first shift, so I took night classes and decided to major in accounting. I didn’t have home internet at the time, so I’d go into the NWSCC computer lab and do Myspace in there. I wasn’t playing in a band at the time; I was recording instrumental guitar music with a drum machine. I would upload that music to Myspace and then add as many friends as possible to share it with. Guitar Player magazine found one of my songs and featured it in a column. I had a subscription to the magazine at the time, and discovered my feature while thumbing through one of the issues. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was one of the most exciting moments in my life.

On my thirtieth birthday, I went out to eat with my family to a Chinese restaurant in Florence. My parents, grandpa, Uncle Chris, his girlfriend Rhonda, and her daughters Chelsea and Lakesha all went.

Chapter Twelve

HON

Sara Lee was the first job I’d ever had, other than Kress Auto Parts, where I’d lasted longer than a year. But I eventually got too stressed out and had to quit Sara Lee. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think it was something like me missing a day and being afraid to go back and explain why I missed. I had some money saved, so after I quit, I laid low for a while, just staying at the house in a depression. I finally got a bit out of that funk and started looking for another job. I went to a temp agency and they found me a construction job helping build a baseball field close to McFarland Park. I’d never done that kind of work before, and according to the guys I worked for, I didn’t know what I was doing, so they let me go before the end of the first day. Next, another temp agency sent me to Young Welding Supply. They were paying me around $8 per hour, but after a few days of working there I got an offer to work at HON for $8.25 so I decided to go work there instead. I told the guy I got a job paying 25¢ more and he said “but it’s only 25¢.” I asked if he wanted me to finish out the rest of the day and he said “no.” The people at the temp agency were mad when I told them I quit too.

I would stay at HON, making office furniture, for over five years, until the plant shut down. My first job there was in a “practice cell,” assembling parts and taking them apart over and over. It took me a whole day to realize we weren’t actually doing anything. After I proved myself in the practice cell, they moved me to the “Park Avenue” department, which would be my home for several years. I worked in assembly for a couple days until my supervisor came to ask me about my machine operator experience at Sara Lee, then he sent me to train on the edge bander with Stacy Vickery.

Stacy told me he’d been working at HON since Reagan was president, so I asked “Did they have cars back then or did you ride to work on horseback?”

This was a joke I stole from Sam Kinison, but Stacy didn’t laugh.

He just replied “Yeah, we had cars.”

Stacy was a nice guy, really into Alabama football, which I didn’t care anything about, so that made things kind of awkward sometimes. He’d have a game playing on the radio and would walk away to do something. When he came back, he’d ask “Who’s winning?” Since I wasn’t paying any attention, I was embarrassed to tell him I didn’t know.

After Stacy was done training me, I ran the edge bander by myself for a few weeks or months, then, the operator of Weeke #2, one of the CNC machines, started missing a lot of days. She was a skinny woman with masculine features. Everyone assumed she was a lesbian. On the many days that she didn’t show up to work, I’d take her spot on the machine. Those days grew in number, and she eventually quit, so I became her permanent replacement. There were two Weekes, and my Weeke #2 was right across from Weeke #1. Since I was to become the permanent Weeke #2 operator, I needed to do some training with one of the more experienced operators. I was on 2nd shift, but I moved to 1st shift for two weeks to train with their Weeke #1 operator, Jimmy Poole. One of the main things you had to avoid as an operator was cutting pods, and I cut them a lot, unfortunately. Jimmy never cut them, and a couple times when he walked away and left me to run the machine, I’d accidentally cut one of his pods. It was frustrating.

When I returned to second shift, I was on my own. The first shift Weeke #2 operator’s name was Regis, and I would converse with him in between shifts. He ran the machine faster than me and didn’t cut many pods. He also did most of the routine maintenance on the machine. The computer would have notifications pop up telling me it was time to do certain maintenance

tasks, but I never learned how to do them, so I would just hit “remind me later.” Then Regis would see the notification on his shift and do the maintenance himself. After some time passed, I was scared to ask for help because I should’ve asked at the beginning, so Regis got stuck with that job.

Most factories have quite a bit of turnover, and even though there were some decades long veterans there, that wasn’t the case for most of the employees, so I saw a few different second shift Weeke #1 operators during my time on second shift Weeke #2. The first guy’s name was Chase. He was kind of a blowhard. He was casually dating one of our coworkers, a black woman named Tina. He had rebel flags and could still date a mildly attractive black woman. Go figure. He was always talking about drinking and partying. Since I didn’t do that anymore, I didn’t really participate in those conversations. He’d give me a hard time about not partying, telling me if I died tomorrow, I’d regret not having a good time the night before. When “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton came on the radio, he’d get all excited and scream out the hook. I never said anything about being alcoholic because I didn’t like to talk about it for fear of what people would think. He would do triceps press downs on the worktable when he wasn’t busy. I was working out at the time (which I’ll get to later) but didn’t think it was effective to do exercises at random times. I always limited my exercises to a scheduled workout. We had a short layoff, and when we came back, Chase didn’t cooperate fully with the request to return, so he was fired.

Although some people might discourage taking a layoff, I enjoyed mine. My rent was only $300 a month, and the $275 of unemployment I received every week was enough to pay my bills for a while. My days consisted of going to my college classes, studying in the library, working out, messing around on the internet, reading, and watching TV. One thing I remember

watching on TV at this time was Obama’s inauguration. I remember this because I used it as an argument when people said Obama caused a recession.

I’d say “I was laid off on the day Obama took office, so he inherited Bush’s recession.”

When we came back from layoff, they had to get another guy to take Chase’s place on Weeke #1. His replacement had an Alabama Roll Tide shirt that had been washed to make it look pink instead of red. We used to cut up a lot, maybe a little too much. Michael Jackson had just died and was in the news all the time. He loved to make fun of him and his pet chimp, Bubbles, and I joked with him about that throughout the day. My boss, Jason Atwood, came to me one day and told me I wasn’t running enough parts because I was talking to that guy too much. I guess he was right. He eventually got too many attendance points and got fired. I was always careful about attendance points, never wanting them to get too low, because you never know what might happen.

The next Weeke #1 operator was a black guy named Gabriel. Like a lot of the people at HON, he liked to drink, among other things, maybe a little too much. I became friends with him, sometimes giving him a ride to or from work, going to lunch with him, and occasionally seeing him outside of work. Ray, the edge bander operator with an associate’s degree in liberal arts, was our mutual friend. The three of us would sometimes take backroads to Jack’s on lunch break. They would also go to the store and get beers that they would shotgun before going back to work. Like Gabe, Ray drank a lot, so much that his face was always red, and he had a beer gut. Since Gabe and I joked around so much, I was always trying to think of more things to joke about, just to make the workday go by faster, so one day I started talking about Ray’s beer-gut.

We were always under pressure to work fast and to keep up with each other, so I’d yell out to Ray, “Hurry up, fatass!”

I did that as a joke, not thinking that it would hurt his feelings, until one day he came over and told me I was being inconsiderate, and that I didn’t look that great myself. This upset me in two ways. First, I thought it was all in good fun. I didn’t think it was mean because I thought it wasn’t considered a big liability for men to be fat. And second, I thought I was supposed to be in shape. I knew that I’d gained weight, but I thought that it was muscle from working out instead of fat. Ray obviously didn’t think so. This leads me to my next point.

I’d been getting into bodybuilding. I’d bounce around from one gym to the next in the Florence area, but one of my mainstays was Gold’s Gym in downtown Florence. I was trying to get big and strong, with my main focus on improving my bench press. I’d always lift my butt way off the bench, which is technically cheating. I’d ask people at the gym to spot me. I never wanted them to touch the bar because then I wouldn’t know for sure if I was lifting it all on my own, but sometimes they’d put their hands under the bar and say “It’s all you!” I never knew if they were lying or not.

I’d been skinny all my life, and that never helped me pick up chicks, so I wasn’t concerned about fat loss. There was a lot of bro-science going around back then, and I heard a lot of different opinions about my progress. People in the gym told me I was small, that I wasn’t making progress, and that I needed to gain weight to get strong. I saw people in the gym putting up insane amounts of weight, and I wanted to be on that level. I wish I knew then what I know now about that stuff. I could’ve been in excellent shape like I am now. I spent a lot of money on supplements that probably weren’t helping and ate a lot of food for “dirty bulk,” which probably added more fat than muscle, which should’ve been obvious from the example with Ray. I think “dirty bulk” is a myth. You can add muscle as long as you get enough protein. My real problem was that I only went to the gym three times a week; one day for chest, one for legs, and one for

back. I never did arms or shoulders. I should’ve been training more frequently, and I shouldn’t have worried as much about getting sore and getting a pump. My training was ineffective, and it’d be a long time before I’d see any results.

Jennifer had her first child, Colin, after she’d been married to Chip Hudson for a few years. I didn’t get to be there for the birth because I was working at the time. But somehow, I got a picture of the baby on my flip phone. Someone might’ve texted it to me; it was the only photo I had on my phone at the time. I don’t remember taking any photos with the flip phone, so I think it may not have had that capability. It’s funny how I can forget how old technology used to work once it becomes obsolete. One day, my family and I went up to Jennifer and Chip’s house in Spring Hill, TN, to see the baby. It was me, Mom, Dad, and Grandpa in the car for the ride, and Chip’s mom was there when we arrived. We all took turns holding the baby for photos. It was a pleasant and fun trip spending quality time with family.

Chip and Jennifer had a nice, big, house that I was in awe of. The size of that house motivated me to work harder in college so I could get a career and have a house like that one day. Well, that didn’t pan out, but that’s ok; I don’t care that much about houses anymore. I craved success back then because I thought it’d help me with women. Now, I realize personality can go a long way regardless of income.

Chip had an acoustic guitar and a weight rack full of dumbbells, but what really caught my eye was his Nintendo with Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. Chip pointed out the low resolution of the game and how primitive the technology was when it came out. That didn’t faze me though; I still wanted to play it. I used to be obsessed with that game, but this time around I got bored quickly and gave it up. I guess that’s the same kind of thing that happened to Dad when he gave up video games after Pick Axe Pete. (See page 8.)

Toward the end of first decade of the new millennium, I met a girl on Plenty of Fish named Jennifer. We seemed to hit it off well at first. She was into music and liked to go see bands play. I was still only a few years sober and wasn’t part of any music scene because of the presence of drugs and alcohol, but I still went to bars if the woman I was with wanted to go. Once we went to a bar where Barry Billings was playing. It was just him playing solo, doing covers with guitar and vocals. He had a looping station on his guitar that made the set more interesting. He did “Under the Bridge” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, which she enjoyed, because that was her favorite band. I wasn’t as big a Chili Peppers fan as she was, but I grew up on them and was familiar with their body of work, so we made a connection there. She liked me even more when she found out I could play guitar and sing. One thing that I’ve found with fangirls of certain bands: If you can play and sing songs by those bands, they become attracted to you. She was so much of a Chili Peppers fan that she even had John Frusciante’s solo CD. She hated rap though, which I found ironic because of the influence rap had on the Chilis. I learned “Under the Bridge.” And tried to teach it to her on guitar, but that didn’t work out. I don’t know how much she really cared about learning, and we kind of just used that as an ice-breaker.

She liked to go to bars with her girlfriend(s) and I would accompany them. We would go out to eat, go to the movies, and go bowling. Sometimes I would be the designated driver of her car, but even then, she’s take back over driving because my driving was so awkward. Looking back on it, it seems like that kind of socializing was a waste of time. One time we went bowling with her girlfriend and her gay friend. I’ve never been homophobic, so I was cool with that. She explained to me that though she was Christian and went to church, she didn’t have a problem with homosexuality. I got that but thought it strange how that progressive view conflicted with her seemingly racist tendencies; she hated black culture and loved to use the “n” word.

On New Year’s, I brought in the 2010’s at a bar with her and her girlfriend. She thought we had a good time, but I didn’t really have a good time. Since I didn’t drink, I didn’t fit in with the crowd. We met up with a lot of her other friends, guys and girls, and sat around a round table playing a card game as a social ice-breaker. Part of my awkwardness had to do with people thinking I’m judging them for doing something I don’t do, and I also never had a good reason when they asked me why I wasn’t drinking, but I also wasn’t good at hyper-social situations unless there was some kind of agenda. I’m better at that now that I’m on medication. My coworker, Ray, was also at that bar that night, which was good for two reasons: First, he saw me with two girls which made me look cool and would help with my reputation at work, since he’d tell people about it. And second, since Ray and I were friends, it showed social proof and helped relieve some of the awkwardness of the night for me.

I never called her my girlfriend, and although we agreed on no-strings-attached at first, I think she was wanting me to do that.

She kept on saying “What are we?” and I’d reply by saying “We’re just hanging out.”

It was obvious things were going nowhere, and it took a while before she finally broke it off with me. I never would’ve broken it off with her because it was so hard for me to get a girlfriend in the first place, but I didn’t argue with her, and was actually relieved.

My late grandfather started Kress Auto Parts in 1950, and in 2010, they had a 60th Anniversary car show. This was a big deal for my family, and I was expected to go. I had a good time. That was only fourteen years ago, and I can think of three people there who are no longer with us: Howard Jeffries, Chasity Smith, my late grandfather, Louis Kress, and my aunt and uncle Evelyn and Bill Kress. The latter three died of old age, but the former two deaths were likely drug or alcohol related.

Having not seen Chasity since I’d gotten sober, I was surprised when she showed up there. I hardly recognized her. She used to be so pretty, but drugs had taken their toll on her, she had lost too much weight, and her face no longer had that glow. She told me she was here with her “old man.” Do you know how when you’re around somebody a lot that they can sometimes seem to take you for granted? But when you spend time apart and then reunite, they are so much more affectionate? “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I guess. That’s kind of how it was with her. I was in love with her, and I would sometimes try to hug her. She’d hug me back, but she never initiated it, and she acted like she thought it was weird. But when I saw her at the car show, she immediately approached me and hugged me. Then, when she and her old man were getting ready to leave, she gave me a goodbye hug. That was the last time I saw here alive. During our brief reunion, I told her about my studying to be an accountant. I was trying to portray to her that I was doing something with my life and wasn’t a loser anymore like when I was hanging out with her. Alas, we wouldn’t be hanging out together anymore since I was sober, and her life revolved around alcohol and drugs. She died a few years later. I never would’ve found out about her death if I hadn’t briefly started back communicating with Raf. He was the one who told me about it and where the funeral was. He also told me about Fred, the bassist for Roy’s Machine, dying, but I didn’t care as much about that. I visited the funeral home in Lawrenceburg where Chasity was. She was cremated, and her dad was there. I thought her dad didn’t like me because of my association with Flee who he thought was a narc, but he was friendly to me when I visited.

My friend Greg was a born-again Christian and was therefore sober, so I would be hanging out with him more than most of my other old friends. Although I’m not religious, something I have in common with many religious types is a drug-free lifestyle. This lifestyle, in combination with growing up on the same bands, gave us much common ground indeed. My attention at the time was focused on things like college and fitness, shifting away from music and concerts, but Greg talked me into going to see some of these legacy bands we grew up on, even though I was reluctant to go.

In August of 2010, we went to see Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax in Knoxville, TN. We checked into our hotel, took a bus to the concert venue, and got our seats. Everyone had long hair, denim, leather, band shirts, tattoos, piercings, and the like. Greg pointed out that this was the only kind of place you can go where people look like that. Anthrax was going to be the first band. Greg said of Anthrax that it was “20 years in the making,” because we both first started listening to them in the early-90’s. Even though I wasn’t excited about the concert, when Anthrax came on, my feelings suddenly changed. I remembered why I loved concerts so much. These mythical creatures, who I’d only heard on cassette or seen on video, were solidified as real, and I was part of that reality, no longer a distant viewer. It was a similar sensation to when I met those race car drivers. (See page 21.) Although Greg and I had seen Anthrax with John Bush during their heyday with that singer, Joey Belladonna was now back with them, and he was the singer on State of Euphoria, the album that originally got us into them and thrash metal in general.

This type of music was not generally associated with Christianity, and that didn’t bother me, but it made it awkward for me to go to something like this with Greg. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to some of this stuff in his presence. One guy in the mosh pit had a t-shirt that said “Jesus Is a Cunt.” I was hoping that Greg didn’t see it, but I’m pretty sure he did. I didn’t want to have to talk about how horrible it was; the only reason it was bothersome was because he was there. Another awkward thing was Slayer’s satanic imagery; it’s pretty much

their whole schtick. During part of the light show there was an image of a cross that slowly changed into an inverted cross; I made sure not to make eye contact with Greg during that part.

In December of 2011, we went to see another one of our childhood bands, Guns N’ Roses, in Nashville, TN. Before we went to the concert, I visited Greg’s apartment where he stayed with his then wife, Bethany. He wanted to work on recording some of the songs he’d written. We started getting into the songs and I wasn’t happy with the way they sounded. Greg fancied himself a singer, but his vocals weren’t very melodic. I started making suggestions to improve the songs, and Greg got angry.

He said, “Fuck you, they’re my songs.”

Of course, he had asked me to participate in this endeavor, and I felt I had a vested interest. I feel anxiety about putting out bad art, because you never get another chance to make a good first impression. Another thing he started doing was coming up with criticisms for me as a reaction to my sincere constructive criticism. I notice that people will sometimes do that, as it shows the illusion of hypocrisy. Greg even did this kind of thing when we played together in a Christian band called Mandated Purpose. He had a Crate guitar amp that Bethany had given him. Crate is a cheaper brand of equipment, and the amp ended up becoming defective and making loud buzzing sounds when we were jamming. But he couldn’t do anything about it because it was a gift from her. We never even said anything about it, but it was obvious everyone, including Greg, was irritated. Then Greg started pointing out and mocking the soft humming sound my Peavey amp made when it was on the distortion channel, even though that was just the natural sound of the amp. But I digress, because just writing this is making me angry.

We went on to the Guns N’ Roses concert and it was amazing. We didn’t know who the opening act was until we got to the venue and saw Black Label Society t-shirts. This is an exciting part of the concert experience because you often don’t know who will be opening until you arrive. After Black Label Society was done playing, it took a long time for Guns N’ Roses to start playing, which is something they’re notorious for, and is quite annoying, but it was worth the wait. Guns N’ Roses played for three hours, and I enjoyed every minute of it for two reasons: First, because I was wired up on Starbucks. And second, because I knew and loved every song. The only downside was that they didn’t play much, if anything, off of Lies. There were some cute girls sitting next to Greg, and I asked him to switch seats with me because he was married and I was single, and I wanted to pretend like I was going to hit on them. Alas, I was too scared to do anything, and the only thing it led to was awkwardness for me during Guns N’ Roses’s sexually charged lyrics. I made sure not to make eye contact with them during those parts.

Chapter Thirteen

UNA

When I graduated from Northwest Shoals Community College, I didn’t attend the ceremony, but I was ready to start Junior level classes at the University of North Alabama and knew that the business and accounting classes would be more challenging than what I was used to.

My supervisor at HON, Jason Williams, or Redbeard, as I liked to call him, was a graduate of UNA with a major in accounting, and he was one of the people who warned me of this difficulty. He had done accounting for a while after he graduated but said that he quit and came to HON because he hated that kind of desk work, and preferred something more physical like factory work. It was only after he’d been a laborer at HON for a while that me moved up to the supervisor position, which I’m sure his business degree helped him obtain. I loved to make fun of his beard, and Gabe made fun of his bad breath. He was probably too scruffy for the accounting lifestyle.

I was anxious but eager to get started at UNA. I wanted this degree badly. I was familiar with basic accounting concepts because of the classes I took at NWSCC, but that was a few semesters ago, so I thought I should refamiliarize myself with those ideas to prep for intermediate accounting. I spent hours in the basement on UNA’s library refamiliarizing myself before the Intermediate Accounting I class started. I was hardcore. Accounting was only one of the difficult business classes I would need to take to obtain my degree. I had a full-time job during my college career, so I never took more than two classes per semester, but those two classes usually occupied a lot of my time.

I had to study a lot, and didn’t like doing it at home, so I would spend most of my time in the library. I love UNA Library. There were two girls in my business classes who I became friends with and studied with a lot. They were Samantha Schmidt and Ly Le. There were a lot of girls in college and studying gave us an excuse to hang out together, usually at the library. Our relationships rarely went further than studying, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself just doing that. This brings me to the point I made on page 58 about needing an agenda for social situations. My work ethic in college was the only agenda I had that worked consistently to have any kind of constant female companions, and then it was never for dating.

Not long into Intermediate Accounting, I realized I was going to need a lot of time to study for the exams. For some reason, I guess because I just didn’t pay attention to a lot of things back then, I was ignorant of the vacation days I had at work, until Tina pointed it out to me and suggested I take them to study. So that’s what I did. I would take the day before my exam off and study the entire day, for 12+ hours, but I took a lot of breaks during that time. For me, the library made what would otherwise be boring, studying, something fun and interesting. You never knew who you would see coming in there, coworkers, people you knew around town, classmates, people from Tennessee, professors, recovery group members, musicians, and anybody else who just decided to walk in. Also, I liked the ambiance of the library and still do.

I made a B on my first Intermediate Accounting exam. It was one of the higher grades in the class, and Samantha was curious of how I ended up scoring that high. (It was because I spent a million hours studying.) That’s when we started studying together. Samantha was married, which was ironic, because the only reason I wanted to study with her was because I was attracted to her. I would never have wanted to consistently study with another guy. She surely knew this; how could she not? But she probably wasn’t attracted to me. The only thing I had going for me was my height. I didn’t know how to dress and was awkward. Still, that couldn’t’ve been good for her marriage. We’d meet in the library at 8 or 9 and go to class at 11. After that, I had to be at work at 2:30. Sometimes we’d sit at the computers on the first floor and work on the online parts of our classes. Other times, we’d go up to the second floor and sit on the comfortable couches, doing our bookwork. There were several books on the second-floor shelves that I’d checked out and read, including Last Words by George Carlin and I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne. I loved books and enjoyed being surrounded by them.

It may have been in Intermediate I that I met Ly. She was an exchange student from Vietnam and worked at Einstein Bagels in the UNA cafeteria. She didn’t have a car, so I’d pick her up and drive her around places. Unlike Samantha, Ly was single. Ly asked me one day if I had a girlfriend.

She said “because if you did, we wouldn’t be studying together.”

I took this as a hint that she might be interested in me romantically, but still I never made a move. After she realized I was too scared to do anything, she lost attraction and that’s when she friend zoned me. Much later I saw on Facebook that she’d married some guy I knew and who she was way too pretty for. I was in a study group with that guy. We were in the same online class and got put in a group together for a project. The group did a lot of work together online, but also met up in the library. He was the most studious one in the group, which was probably something Ly respected. Still, I would’ve been better for her, if only I’d been more forward. It wouldn’t have taken much. If he could do it, then I could’ve!

I studied with both Samantha and Ly separately for a while, and on one of my 12-hour study days, I studied with Samantha in the morning and Ly in the afternoon. I felt nervous and excited about this for no good reason, like I was cheating on both of them. I even humble­bragged about this to Greg like I was some kind of stud with a guilty conscience. I finally told them about each other, and the three of us studied together a few times. Once, the three of us were studying on the second floor of the library. I sat on the couch, and the two of them sat in chairs, even though Samantha usually sat on the couch with me. But Samantha thought Ly and I were supposed to be a couple, so she offered to let Ly sit on the couch with me, which was what I was wanting, but Ly declined. Yet another awkward moment in my life.

I don’t think they ever became close though.

Once Samantha referred to Ly as “Chinese and Ly corrected her by saying “I’m Vietnamese.”

Ly seemed irritated by Samantha’s mistake.

Intermediate II obviously followed Intermediate I. This is considered by many to be the hardest business class you’ll ever take on any level. Other hard classes were Tax and Auditing. I participated in every extracurricular activity I could, including Accounting Scholars and Save First Tax Preparation. Samantha and Ly were both in Accounting Scholars. I was really into reading, and Accounting Scholars assigned us a reading project of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I was into genre fiction at the time, so I didn’t appreciate it as much as I would now. We talked about the book in one of our meetings. Since I was so enthusiastic about school, reading, and all things intellectual, I was eager to talk about the book and did, showcasing my knowledge. I probably embarrassed some of the students who claimed they didn’t get a chance to read it. Tax prep was fun too. People would come there to get their taxes done for free, and the students were supposed to do it for them, but we weren’t very competent, at least I wasn’t. I was hoping that at least once, I’d be able to finish somebody’s taxes all on my own, but that never happened. Every single time, I had to get one of the experts to come help me. There were two Chinese exchange students in there who were friendly. One of them was named Fan Feng. I can’t remember the other’s name. Most exchange students didn’t have cars, so they were always needing a ride, and I’d take them wherever they needed to go.

I made B’s in Intermediate I and II, and was ready for Tax and Auditing. Around this time, I got moved from second to third shift at HON, which fit my college schedule well. We had a small crew on thirds, and I worked at Weeke #2 in the Park Avenue department all by myself most of the night. Only occasionally would a boss or coworker pull up on a golf-cart or forklift to check up on me, just to make sure I wasn’t dead. I enjoyed it because there wasn’t any social pressure like there was with all the people on second shift. Also, the work I did was easier. All the parts I ran were the same, so I didn’t have to move the pods around, and there was little chance of cutting them. However, I made some bad decisions regarding my health. I got out of class at 12:45 PM, and had to be at work at 10 PM, so after class, I’d run to Jack’s and get a combo meal with a milkshake for a drink. I thought being full would help me overcome the insomnia I often had on that shift. I went to sleep well enough, but when I woke up and arrived at work, I felt like death. I think it was because of the effect the milkshake was having on my body.

I’d get off work at 6 AM and usually go to some gas station to get a couple biscuits, a coffee, and a V8. Sometimes, I’d go to a 7AM recovery meeting. A cool thing about these third shift morning excursions was that while most people were just waking up, I’d been up all night. I enjoyed the contrast. The recovery meetings were walking distance from the college, so I could park at the college and walk back and forth to and from the meetings. On days I went to meetings, I’d usually leave early and go on to school. On days I didn’t go to meetings, I’d arrive at UNA a little after 6, after I’d had my biscuit. UNA usually has crowded parking, but at that time of the morning I was the only one there. I always parked in the same spot, my ’96 Corolla being the lone car in the parking lot. The Guillot University Center was the first place to open, and they had some nice couches in there, so I’d go in there to study before the library opened up. Around the time of my 3rd shift experience, HON announced that the Florence plant was shutting down. Some people were upset about this, but I was happy because it meant I’d get severance pay, unemployment benefits, and some time for being lazy. In the months before my final day at HON, I took a leave of absence and went to China with a group from UNA. Shortly after my final day at HON, while I was unemployed, I took a trip to New Orleans with another UNA group. The China trip is covered in the next section and the New Orleans trip is covered in “States I’ve Visited.

Chapter Fourteen

China

My friend and study partner, Samantha, had gone to China with UNA the year before, and she was already well-traveled before that. She would sometimes ask me about what I did for fun and said once that I led a “sheltered life.” That irritated me, but perhaps it also motivated me to get out and travel more. I don’t know though. I already had a big desire to do that. I went and talked to Bruce Gordon, a professor who was organizing the trip. The group that was going to China met a few times before the trip, but I still didn’t know any of them very well. I had to ask Matt Myers, my supervisor at HON, about taking a three-week leave of absence. I’d been working there for five years, so they were pretty lenient about that kind of stuff, as they should’ve been.

It was late at night when I was expected to arrive at Dr. Gordon’s house to leave with him for the airport. I did some meditation and listened to a Sun Ra record before I left. I arrived at Dr. Gordon’s house early, as I usually do, so I sat in the car for a while before I nervously went to his door and knocked. His wife and two sons were in the house because they were also going with us. We went and picked up Ying Wang to go with us. She was a Chinese woman who worked for UNA’s business department. We flew to Chicago and then got on the main flight. It was a huge plane. Five seats in the middle and three on each side, I think. I should’ve been one of the largest planes because it was traveling about as far as you can go. We flew for about twelve hours and finally landed in Beijing.

This was the first time I’d been out of the U.S. in several years, and the only time I’d been abroad away from my parents. I shared a room with this guy. I can’t even remember his name, even though I basically lived with him for three weeks! We did a lot of things with the group, and broke up into smaller groups, but I loved it when I got to go out on my own. We saw most of the major historical landmarks with the large group, but when I went out on my own, I’d go to coffee shops and read the Kindle. A lot of them would go out to bars at night, and when they asked me if I wanted to go, I always declined. There was a woman closer to my age that I hung out with a lot. There were also two sisters who were really religious, and disliked by most of the others, that hung out with us, in our little group of four.

I’d printed off directions to the AA meetings in Beijing and Shanghai. Out on my own in Beijing, I called a cab and showed him the directions to the meeting. We couldn’t speak each other’s’ languages, so he just shook his head “no” and handed the paper back to me. One of the strangest things I heard was a cover of “The KKK took my Baby Away” by the Ramones, on the speakers in a hotel lobby. It may have been Shonen Knife’s version. When we got to Shanghai, I was finally able to find a meeting. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life. When the cab driver dropped me off, I still had a couple of hours before the meeting started, so I sat around at a Starbucks. The meeting room was in a tall building with over one hundred floors, and it was on one of the highest floors, overlooking the city. I was standing outside the door where it was supposed to be when somebody walked up and asked, in my own language, if I was there for the meeting. We went in and had a regular, English-speaking meeting. All this time, I’d seen nothing but Chinese people outside of my college group. Now, I was surrounded by Americans and Europeans. I went to a couple of those meetings and went out to eat with some of those guys a few times. When I got back to the room, my roommate asked me what I did. I didn’t want to tell him about AA, so I said I went and saw a friend. I thought that might be believable, because the older woman on the trip had a friend out there, who rode on the bus with us. I don’t think he believed me though. There were some massage girls/hookers that were working at our hotel. I bet he thought I was lying to cover up going to them. I worried that he didn’t respect me after that. That’s too bad, too, because it seemed like he was the best possible roommate for me of all the guys in our group. We didn’t have a choice in who our roommate was. It was chosen randomly.

One of the coolest moments with a small group that I had was at a karaoke place in Shanghai. I went with Dr. Gordon’s family and the older woman. I sang a U2 song and “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. They were all surprised at how well I could sing. One of them said the U2 song sounded exactly like the original. I felt like this was one of the only real connections I made during the trip. They went back and told everybody else how good I could sing. Then, on the bus ride to the returning flight, they talked me into singing acapella on the bus microphone. Dr. Gordon, perhaps jokingly, told me my grade depended on it. I didn’t know if he was joking or not. Otherwise, I wouldn’t’ve done it. I sang “She Talks to Angels.” It only made everything more awkward. Another reason I didn’t get along well was because I didn’t know how to dress. I was oversized t-shirts and too-long jorts.

We flew from Shanghai to Los Angeles, then to Dallas, then to Birmingham. I rode back to Dr. Gordon’s house with him and his family. We had dinner at his house and then I drove home to my apartment. After not being able to sleep on the planes or any of the layovers, I finally went to sleep in my own bed for a long, long time.

Chapter Fifteen

Bikini Atol

One day, when I was at Waffle House in Florence, I saw who I thought was Sam Roy. We’d been estranged for years. Sometimes I freak out in situations like that, so I just left before he saw me. However, one day, at Gold’s Gym on Cox Creek Parkway in Florence, I saw him again. He asked me if I wanted to jam some time. I thought it’d be cool to play some of my instrumentals with a band, so I said yes. We started jamming at his apartment in downtown Florence. with just drums, guitar, and vocals. Without bass, it was impossible to do the instrumentals, so we tried doing some classic rock covers I knew, like Floyd, Sabbath, and Hendrix, but the lack of bass made those hard to pull off as well. Then, we tried playing some Ramones songs, which sounded a lot better, because with them, the bass and guitar usually play the same thing. We tried some other punk tunes, which also sounded good. It was at that point that we decided to be a punk band. I have the kind of personality that likes to be educated about certain things. I think of this kind of stuff as a project. I decided, if I was going to be in a punk band, I’d better learn as much as I could about punk rock. I pretty much quit listening to anything but punk. These were the days before Spotify where you had to rip off music from places like Napster, LimeWire, Pirate Bay, etc. I became obsessed, accumulation a huge collection of pirated punk CDs. I didn’t just steal music though. I also started collecting vinyl records. Thanks to those days, I now have a lot of punk on vinyl.

In addition to our punk covers, we started working on some of Sam’s originals. Since we were able to mold them how we liked, they worked out okay without bass too. When we finally had a decent set, Sam booked us our first gig at The End Theater in Florence. It was with two other bands, Local Orbit and Dirty Swagger. This was the first time I really became a part of the Florence rock scene. I talked to one of the guys from Local Orbit, who was into punk. Somehow, I brought up the Big-4 concert I went to with Greg. He liked Slayer, but didn’t care too much for Anthrax. Sam and I talked to Dirty Swagger’s drummer and his wife, who was a teacher. What I remember about those two bands was that the singer for Local Orbit had a clown outfit on, and that Dirty Swagger’s guitarist had a full-stack so loud, you couldn’t even hear the drums. You know it’s loud when you can’t hear the drums, because drums are loud!

There was a bar/restaurant called LaFonda’s that Sam and I played at, not as Bikini Atol, but with Barry Billings. I played bass and sang some that night with Barry on guitar. We did some covers. There were only a few people there and my friend Ray from work came in a heard us play. We made a lot of mistakes because we hadn’t practiced and everything was off the cuff. That’s the only time I’ve ever played with Barry.

Another one of our first shows was in Decatur, AL, at a record shop that was about to close down. One of the bands that played with us was Strange Waves, but they called themselves Red Wings at the time. The other band that played acted stuck up. They and all their friends sat in their cars outside the whole time we were playing. I bought a record player and a Blue Oyster Cult record, as well as some cassette tapes.

After that, we started playing a lot more at The End, as well as watching others play. We met several local bands, including Sunday @ Six, Random Conflict, Voodoo Sound System, Cheap Thrill Deville, and Your Boys. The largest crowd we ever played for was at a battle of the bands, put on by Voodoo Sound System’s Matt Lang, at The End. There were 10 bands, and Dirty Swagger won the battle, with Sunday @ Six coming in second, and Flux coming in third. We didn’t place. This was the first show we did with a bassist. Sam asked Cheap Thrill Deville’s Luke Hunter to play for us. We practiced with him a couple of times before the show, and I found it frustrating. He was messing around with a lot of effects pedals, including distortion. I don’t necessarily have a problem with bass distortion, but he had even more distortion than my guitar. I wished he would just plug straight into the amp and play clean. He also didn’t learn the songs very well. It seemed like he was just playing random notes. The weird thing was that he seemed oblivious. He kept saying “I dig it,” but I didn’t dig it. All the bands at the battle were supposed to play two originals and a cover. The cover we chose was “Bullet” by the Misfits. That song is so offensive. I wouldn’t choose to play that song today. We also used to play the “Last Caress,” (not at the battle of the bands, but at other shows), which is even more offensive. Speaking of the Misfits, Sam and I went to a Misfits show at Exit/In, on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, around this time. It was a wild coincidence, considering the fact that “Bullet,” one of their most popular songs, is about the JFK assassination. We were wondering if they would play the song, because I’d heard that they’d quit playing it, but they made an exception that time and played it.

If I recall correctly, we only played one show at Pegasus Records, and it was with Isaac The Band’s CD release of Stereo Something. (Great album, by the way.) We were the opening band, and Luke Wright let me use his Big Muff distortion pedal. I think there were quite a few people there when we played, but it didn’t seem like it, because it was such a large area and they were spread out. But when Isaac came on, it did look like a lot. We never seemed to have much luck getting big crowds, except for the battle of the bands, but because of Isaac’s large crowd, the show made pretty good money, and we got a decent cut.

We recorded some during our time as a two-piece, and it was a struggle at first. We went down and recorded at David Brawner’s studio for free. “Lookin’ for that High” was one of the songs we recorded there. It was the first time I heard Sam do his death metal growl for that song. I don’t know if he had that planned, but it seemed spontaneous. The funny thing was that it wasn’t a death metal or even metal. It was kind of a happy song, but the growl sort of worked. When we finally got to hear the tracks we recorded, they sounded saturated. I played them for some guys at work and they thought the songs were good, but the sound wasn’t good, so we didn’t put that stuff out.

Another place we went to record was at a church that Sam’s friend, Logan, went to. That was weird, because Sam’s not religious at all, and some Christians may have considered our music offensive. We also had band practice at there, because Sam’s neighbor called the cops on us for playing too loud. As I said earlier, drums are loud! Some of the songs we recorded there ended up on our first CD. Logan had a small Marshall amp and a 5-string bass that I used. I thought Logan was a pretty good producer because he had advice for me. For the song “Dave,” he told me I sounded like I was afraid when I was singing. After that, I made a point to sing more passionately. To this day, I think about that comment when I’m singing. He also gave me ideas for spicing up the bass line for that song. It’s always good when a producer/engineer has opinions, as long as they’re good ones. It means they care about the music, and they’re not just there to rip us off and get our money. On the other hand, if a producer has a lot of bad ideas, then that’s a problem too, even if they’re sincere. But I’ve learned that I’m not always the best at knowing the difference, even though I used to think I was. As far as practicing at the church, that was a blast. The equipment and acoustics there were great, and I loved the tone that that Marshall amp got.

About half the songs on our first CD were recorded by Logan, and the others were recorded at Sam’s house. This was the house Sam moved to after he left that apartment. This was my first time recording drums on a 16-track that I’d had for a while, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Probably the worst thing about those recordings was the fact that we used cheap microphones to record the drums and the vocals. I suppose the bass and guitar sounded ok because they were plugged straight into the board. We printed those CDs and then sold them for $10, which was way too much. What I disliked about this was that Sam would give the CDs away to some people. We should’ve lowered the price and not given any away. It’s not fair to the few people who are actual fans and are willing to pay. The people he gave the CDs too probably never listened to them and just used them for coasters or frisbees. The people who actually want a CD and would listen are sometimes too broke to buy one, especially at a high price. They are the ones who should be given one. The solution could be to sell them for 25 cents. That way, only the people who wanted one would get one, and everybody could afford one. Making a profit doesn’t really matter. We’ve always had to pay for our art.

Commies and Queers was mine and Sam’s Ramones tribute band with Bill Conflict and the late Brooke Perry. To prepare for our only show, the three of them had a practice, without me, at the house Sam was staying at. We played at The End, and I sang unpracticed on about half of the songs. Bikini Atol also played at that show, so I got to play twice. Bill sang some of the songs, but he’s not a really melodic singer. Sam would have rather had me sing them all. Brooke did harmonies with me, on the spot, with no practice. I’ve rarely gotten to do vocal harmonies with people, so that was a special treat.

Chapter Sixteen

4-Piece Bikini Atol

When we didn’t have anywhere to practice, Sam and I rented a room at Pegasus Records. At first, we were sharing the room with Cheap Thrill Deville, but later, they moved out, and Strange Waves moved in. One day, Andrew Hayes and Steven Herring came in to jam with us. They learned our songs pretty quickly and we started playing shows as a four-piece. I’m pretty sure our first show was at The End with Your Boys, who were still a two-piece. Steven made a “Bikini Atol” sign with neon lights that added a more KISS-like vibe to the show. Although there was a certain novelty to having a two-piece band, this was exciting, because adding two instruments made us sound twice as big. We played a lot more venues as a four-piece than we did as a two-piece. In addition to The End, we played at 116 E Mobile, Underground Art & Sound, and Nu Way Vinyl in Florence, Maggie Meyers Irish Pub and Copper Top Dive N’ Dine in Huntsville, Springwater Supper Club & Lounge in Nashville, The Boro in Murfreesboro, Egan’s Bar in Tuscaloosa, Zydeco in Birmingham, Champy’s Chicken in Sheffield, two house parties in the Shoals area, and The Comic Shop in Decatur. I’ll give a brief description of the events at these venues.

We played at 116 many times. One time was for Strange Waves’s CD release show. This was fun because the PA there was a little better than what they had at The End. We were still developing our sound and image. We all wore black t-shirts, which looked kind of cool, even though some other bands do the same thing. One of the best shows we played at 116 was with James Leg from Port Arthur, TX, and Monsoon from Athens, GA. James Leg was fairly well known, plus Monsoon had a song in a commercial, and a girl singer, Sienna Chandler, who brought more girls to the show. The first time we played with Monsoon was at The End, during the W.C. Handy Festival. That time, Sienna had two different guys playing with her, so clearly, she was the star of the band.

Underground Art & Sound was a cool underground record store that Kirk Russell worked at. When I lived at the Lion’s Den, it was only a short distance from my apartment. I could just walk there, then go down the steps to the hidden store to see what was going on. We did two shows there, one with Random Conflict and the other with Cheap Thrill Deville. The one with RC was right after Trump had been elected, and right after Halloween. I had a mullet wig I’d bought for Halloween that looked cool at a show we’d done earlier at Copper Top, but for some reason it looked stupid at UAAS. Maybe it was because the first time had been spontaneous, and the second was planned. My bandmates said I looked like Mink Deville the first time. Edwin Coombs said “I’m so glad that’s not your real hair,” at the UAAS show. At the Cheap Thrill show, they sounded bad, because they didn’t have a bass player. It just didn’t sound full at all, which was a good reminder of how important bass is in a band. UAAS ended up closing when Kirk Russell had a falling out with Carter Cothren, the guy who was running the place. Carter wouldn’t let Kirk take off to go to a funeral, so Kirk left and started working at Nu Way Vinyl when they opened. One day at UAAS, Kirk was telling me about how the business would fail without his help, and he was right.

Besides Kirk, there were other guys I knew who worked at Nu Way. Corey Keenum, who played guitar/vocals for Chieftain, worked there. They were a fun band. They had a black guitarist who was wild. He would flop around on the floor while playing and act crazy. During one show at The End, they passed the instruments around to the audience. They ended up breaking a guitar at that show, but it was a cheapo. I know some people are against instrument destruction, but that was a cool moment. You just had to be there. The other guy who worked at Nu Way was Jamie Rowsey. He played drums for Voodoo Sound System and Bad Ethyl. VSS had some decent songs. They wore makeup, and as my bandmates pointed out, it looked sloppy, not well-done like KISS. Bad Ethyl had a Van Halen vibe. The guys in that band had pretty good chops. The guitarist, J.J. Bartlett, had a Dean brand guitar and opened for Michael Angelo Batio when I saw him in Sheffield. The bassist was a big Billy Sheenan fan and played the same kind of bass that Sheenan plays. He played in that cool, lead-bass kind of style.

We played shows with Big Gaping Holes and Camacho at Maggie Meyers. That was cool, but seeing legendary punk bands The Queers and Richie Ramone was cooler. Since it was a small venue, they were more intimate than shows in large arenas. I met and got photos taken with both Joe Queer and Richie Ramone. It’s cool to be able to say I played in the same venue as those guys. Copper Top was the same type of dive bar as Maggie Meyers. Steven would bring his mistress to some of the shows his wife didn’t go to. She came to a show at Copper Top, and the one at Egan’s. She also came to some of our practices and took the group photo on our “Gold” album cover. A solo guy open for us one night at Copper Top. He played guitar, kicked a bass drum, and sang. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but his lyrics were funny. Steven called him “Randy Chode.” The Copper Top crowd didn’t seem to like our originals, even though some girls danced to a few songs. But when we started playing “Where Eagles Dare” by the Misfits, a bunch of guys came up and sang along, making that song the highlight of the night. It took us a long time, but we finally booked a Springwater in Nashville. I was excited to be able to say I played in “Music City,” but it turned out to be an unamazing show. There were hardly any people there, and almost all of them were men. Playing darts with John Orman was the most fun thing I did that night. My band members and I had a “prayer” we did to Ronnie James Dio where we would stand in a circle, make Dio’s devil-horn sign with our hands, put our hands together like that, and sing a line out of “Holy Diver.” It was our ritual before we went on to play. We did it that night, as we did at most of our shows.

We played at The Boro with Southern Shame. I’d call them outlaw country. Perhaps not a perfect match for us, but it was a fun show. Most of the audience would sit in the back, so we couldn’t see them that well, but we heard their applause. A couple of guys would sometimes come up to the stage and dance. I was working for Buffalo Rock at the time and had to work the next morning. It took over two hours to drive to Murfreesboro from Florence and two hours back, so I would only get a couple of hours sleep before I had to get up to go to work. That happened a few times with long-distance shows, but I usually felt it was worth it. In fact, I felt great the next day if the show was a success. The other place we played in Murfreesboro seemed a little more upscale than that country bar. It was more restaurant style and they had some nice food. Steven’s family came and they ate there. I’d talked to The Acorn People’s drummer at one of our 116 shows, and he was able to book us because he worked there. I remember being pleased with the P.A. and the mix because I could hear my vocals so well. I was able to back up off the mic, which is rare. I usually struggle to hear the vocals, asking the guitarists to turn their amps down and the drummer to play lighter. I have to eat the mic and sing loudly, blowing my voice out by the end of the show.

The show we did at Egan’s Bar was another long drive. It was close to the University of Alabama, so there were a lot of college kids partying around town, but most of them didn’t seem interested in that bar or our band. Andrew and I handed out fliers outside the bar with little success. We saw Jared McCoy from Cheap Thrill Deville there. (small world) This was at a time when I was getting my bandmates to write stage-banter for me. One of the things they’d written was “let your freak flag fly,” but they said I slipped up and said “let your freak fag fly” instead. What a tongue twister.

The Zydeco show, another long drive, was at a venue where some bigger name acts had played, and I thought that meant something, but there was hardly anybody there to watch us. I wore my Subhumans shirt, while Steven wore GN’R and Andrew wore KISS. I thought it was a weird, not necessarily cool, contrast between my punk shirt and their mainstream rock shirts. I had a hang-up about punk that I no longer have. Don’t get me wrong, I still like it, just not in that weird (dogmatic?) way. A Christian rap group played before us and a rock group played after us. I’ll call them butt-rock, which sounds like a diss, but it’s really not. They were good, but I don’t know what else to call them. They did a Velvet Revolver cover. The audience picked the winner by applause. The butt-rock band won, only because so many of their friends were there.

We did our show at Champy’s Chicken when I was working in Lewisburg for Michael Sullivan’s CPA firm. This was a hard time for me. I was feeling a lot of stress at my job. I’d just gotten my bachelor’s degree in accounting and started this job, my first and only of this type. I had no idea how to do the work. There was no kind of on-the-job training. I was just flying blind. Michael’s assistant was mean. The drive to Champy’s was long and I had to work the next day. We were opening for Tommy Womack and weren’t supposed to curse because of the venue. My parents and Pam Richards came to the show. Steven’s family came too. We started off with some songs that we used capos for, but I forgot to put my capo on, so it was way out of key. Sometimes, when you mess up, you can just keep playing and pretend like nothing happened, but this was so disastrous that we had to stop and start all over again. Womack was an acoustic act so we agreed to play more stripped down, with me on clean electric and Steven on acoustic. Steven’s wife said she liked us better that way. I can see how some people would like a more laid-back version of us.

We played one house party in Tuscumbia around Halloween. There was a deathcore band called Abrasive there too. I think most of the people there were more into heavier music, which is common around the Shoals music scene. We all dressed up. I went as Freddy Kreuger, Sam went as a guy dressing up as Paul Stanley, and Andrew went as a bodybuilder with fake muscles. Another party was at Stephanie Lucas’s house in Florence. Sam didn’t want to play, but begrudgingly did. We played almost all our songs and messed up a lot. Lemmy had just passed and we decided to try to play “Ace of Spades,” not having practiced it with Sam. That song was a train-wreck, and the night was a disaster.

We played that way as a 4-piece for a while, until Sam got a job in Las Vegas. Then, we decided to keep playing as Bikini Atol without Sam. We got Conner Puckett to play drums with us and rehearsed at Strange Waves’s practice house. Conner was playing with Strange Waves too, so it was convenient. We played Scott Long’s birthday party at 116. Scott sang a Joy Division song with us. We played at UAAS on a night when Sam was back from Vegas for the weekend. He watched us play with Conner and sat in with us on a few songs. We did Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” that night. The last show we did with Conner was at The Comic Shop. We opened for a band with some members of Cancerslug in it. There weren’t many people for us (as usual), but when they went on to play, it was packed.

Chapter Seventeen

After College

That night at Champy’s was the night before I quit my job at Michael Sullivan CPA. I was so stressed out from the work that I couldn’t stand it. My parents had just come to see my band play, and when we got done and I was ready to drive back home, I called my mom and told her I was going to quit. She tried to talk me out of it, and I started yelling at her. I would have had to work there for two years to have enough experience to go out on my own. I can’t imagine what that would’ve been like. I’d already laid out one day and not called in because I was to stressed. He called me and I didn’t answer. He came to my house and started banging on the door. When I didn’t answer the door, he went to my neighbor’s house, got a key from her, and let himself in, then asked me if I was ok. He came back that afternoon to check on me again. I went into work the next day. On the day I finally quit, I made sure I called him to let him know so he wouldn’t do the same thing again. Otherwise, I would’ve ghosted him like I always do. I decided to move back to Florence because I despised Lewisburg. There was a lot of traffic there and nothing but fast-food restaurants. I had a really bad mindset at the time because of my job failure and anger issues. Michael Sullivan was racist and his assistant was homophobic. The woman they hired along with me came and told me one day that she couldn’t stand them. I told her I couldn’t stand them either. At least she had the nerve to hang in there longer than I did. God bless her. I planned on hiring someone to help me move, because I didn’t want to rely on my parents. I was mad at them for no good reason, but I finally broke down and accepted their help.

Back in Florence, I moved into Lion’s Den apartments. I wanted to live downtown, and it was the first place I found that would let me in. It didn’t even have a kitchen. I tried using a hot plate at first, but ended up just microwaving stuff all the time. I got a third-shift job at a saw mill. I was using milkshakes to go to sleep again, so (deja vu) I felt lousy most of the time. There were only a few guys on third shift, some real go-getters. The maintenance guy was really religious. One night, he was looking at some pictures of artifacts on his phone that were supposedly over 10,000 years old.

He said “Ya know that’s wrong, ’cause the Earth ain’t that old.”

Like a lot of people who work in places like this, he had a couple of nubs for fingers. One day, he was telling me about the safety rules.

He said “You ain’t gotta go by ’em all the time.”

I was thinking if he’d gone by them all the time, he might still have his fingers. Oh well. A lot of my time there, I would help this guy run a huge saw. It was exactly the same kind of saw they had at HON, where I saw a guy get his finger chopped off. There was a safety line on the saw. You were never supposed to stick your hand past that line. There was a stick you could use to grab the wood so you wouldn’t have to put your hand there. When that guy got his finger chopped off, he wasn’t using the stick. He was using his hand instead, for no reason. This guy was doing the exact same thing (Deja vu), on the same exact saw. Trump was running in the Republican primaries at this time, when nobody really thought he’d win. The saw operator and his brother, who was the boss, were both Trump supporters. The boss brother said he liked Trump because he would just do whatever he wanted and not ask for permission. That sounded like fascism to me, unlike what America is supposed to be, a system of checks and balances. On the day of the primaries, I had to drive all the way to Lewisburg to vote for Bernie Sanders. I went as soon as I got off work that morning. That night, they were talking about the election. The religious guy supported Ben Carson. There was one guy there who thought Trump was an idiot, so I was glad about that. While I was working there, I daydreamed of moving to England if Trump won the election, which was a silly idea. I wouldn’t have been able to save enough money to do that, and I didn’t have any work skill that would make them want to let me in. Every morning, I’d get off work at six and go to Hardee’s to get breakfast, before going home and going to sleep. I had to be at work at ten every night, and one night, when I got up, I felt so terrible (probably from the milkshake) that I called in and told them I quit. The fact that I had some money left over from a 401k cash-in made me less reluctant about that decision, I suppose. I had a little bit of time before I had to find another job. Pokémon Go came out around that time, and a lot of my Facebook friends played, so I spent some down-time doing that. I never got good at it, but I didn’t have much else to do.

Finally, when my money started to dwindle to a couple thousand dollars, I applied for a job at Buffalo Rock. I liked this job, because I didn’t feel much pressure. I got to drive the Pepsi mobile all around Alabama, and didn’t have anybody to answer to most of the time. I was working there when Trump got elected. I always vote Democrat, and Alabama gives you the option of voting straight down the party line, so that’s what I did. Bikini Atol had a show with Random Conflict coming up, so Bill Conflict came over that night to get some fliers for that show. He had on one of those “I voted.” stickers they give you. We sat and talked for a couple of hours before the election results started coming in. Sam, like many others, was sure Hillary was going to win. I thought she would win but wasn’t 100% sure. I stayed up late watching the results come in until it looked like Trump had it in the bag. I was devastated. I was in a terrible mood at work the next day. I remember that day well. My boss could probably see how upset I was by the look on my face. I don’t know who he supported or whether he cared about politics at all, but was amazed at how nonchalant he looked, just going about his business. I had to do Muscle Shoals Wal-Mart and K-mart that day. It was interesting doing those two stores because of the huge contrast between them. Walmart had set itself up for domination and K-mart was about to go out of business. I would spend the majority of the day in Walmart, stocking and restocking. They would sell a lot of 2-liter Mountain Dews, especially on holiday weekends. Sometimes I would stock the shelf full of them, and fifteen minutes later, they’d be gone. K-mart was the opposite. I would just go in there at the end of the day and walk through the store. I really didn’t even have to do that, because the shelves didn’t need much stocking. A lot of the time, I’d just remove out­of-date 2-liters.

After I’d been working there for a while, replacing other people on their routes, I finally got my own route. I’d been getting paid by the hour, but now I was going to get a salary. I thought this was going to be a good thing, until I got my first paycheck. I just had a lot more responsibilities and not much more pay. It was still better than a lot of factories I’d worked in. I had to work with this other guy more though, and he was kind of bitchy some of the time. I can’t say that I blame him, considering the job he has, but he made me nervous and bitter. He would complain about how hard he worked, everything that was expected of him, and how much harder his job was than mine. It seems like that kind of stuff happens a lot in the workplace. They don’t understand, or don’t want to admit, that most working-class people are in the same boat. Most of us are having a hard time too. A lot of times, I would ride with other people, and sometimes I’d have somebody ride with me. There was one guy who played music, and I told him I played music also. I didn’t plan on telling him about my band, because sometimes that can hurt PR, but he kept on asking me questions. It’s hard to tell people that you jam with other people, because when you do that, you almost always have a band name. It’s actually pretty weird to not have a band name. So, I reluctantly told him the name was Bikini Atol. Then, to my dismay, he looked us up online. We had a fairly strong online presence, so he could find out a lot about us, including live videos of me playing, dancing, and acting, some might say, like a fool. So, of course, he told everybody at work and a bunch of grocery store workers about us. Luckily, when all this happened, I’d just put in my two-week notice to start working for Optinet in Las Vegas. I kept on keeping on, knowing it would all be over soon. Otherwise, I probably would have quit. I used to feel relaxed around my co-workers and would cut up with them, but when word got out about my band, I started feeling nervous. It seemed like they treated me differently too. I don’t know if that was real or imagined. But the times I worked alone were nice. It was cool to go to country restaurants and grocery stores, soaking it all in one last time and thinking I wasn’t going to be a part of this simple life for a while. I wrote some about my Optinet experience in “States I’ve Visited,” so I’m going to skip over that and go into the England trip I took when Optinet laid me off.

Chapter Eighteen

England

When I knew that I was going to be laid off from Optinet, I had a lot of money saved and booked a vacation in London for a week. My Dad helped me arrange everything, including a bus ride to my hotel, a tour of Stonehenge, and a tour of several castles, churches and royal institutions. When I arrived, I wasn’t able to figure out how to use my pass to get on the bus. It also took me a while to figure out how to exchange my U.S. dollars for Euros. I finally gave up on the bus and took a taxi to my hotel that cost me about a hundred dollars’ worth of Euros. The first thing I noticed was the driver’s British accent. He noticed my American accent too, but not just that. He said I sounded like I was from the “Deep South.” Obviously, I was pretty tired by the time I got to my hotel, but I had to go out and do something, considering I was abroad on my own for the first time in my life. I went to a fancy Indian restaurant, then went back to the hotel to go to sleep. I was supposed to go to Stonehenge the next day, but when the alarm went off, I was still sleepy, so I decided not to go. It’s a damn shame. Back then, I blamed it on jetlag, but it had more to do with my unhealthy lifestyle. I got up later and figured out what I was going to do. I got a subway ticket, which helped me get around, but it was still hard to navigate to all the places I wanted to visit. Sometimes I’d end up in the wrong spot, and I’d have to roam around aimlessly for a while before I figured out what to do. Estate Office Coffee was close to my hotel, and I went there several times during the week to get a coffee, a sparkling water, and some type of pastry. I’d sit outside with my drink and read Plato’s Republic. When I went on the bus tour, I was socially awkward, and that stopped me from making any real connections. I was a little better than I was with my China trip and some of my California trips, and my clothes were a little better, but I was still somewhat worried about my clothes and my accent. The Rolling Stones played while I was there, and I talked to some people who went to see them. Our tour guide was really nice and funny. I talked to him for a bit. The highlight of my trip was Westminster Abbey, where all the kings and queens are buried. I saw where Darwin and Newton were buried (no photos allowed). Stephen Hawking had just died, and he was going to be buried between those two men.

Chapter Nineteen

Life After Optinet

After I returned from England, I didn’t know what to do. I drove to the west coast and stayed in hotels for a while before I came back east. After I got that out of my system, I decided to move back to Florence. I got a job at North American Lighting, and when I did that, I was able to get an apartment in Seven Points. Seven Points is a nice place, and I got the apartment because of its proximity to UNA. At NAL, I saw a few people I used to work with at different places. There was a guy named Chris who was a friend of Marty McLaughlin. Chris worked with me at Sara Lee and we didn’t get along well. There was also a woman named Karen who I worked with at HON. I always got along with her just fine. This probably sounds like déjà vu, but I got too stressed out by some insufferable people (not the ones I just mentioned) at NAL, walked out one day, and never came back. I’m not sure how long I lasted at NAL, maybe a month or two. I still had plenty of Optinet money, so I just chilled for a while after that. It was time to get some reading done. I chose some books that I felt were appropriate for my situation or mindset, like existentialist philosophy. I read The Stranger and Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. I reread The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker to try to recapture the comfort I got from that book after I quit my job at Sara Lee. I also got an abridged version of Critique of Pure Reason, by Kant, in the mail. I became lazy, ordering pizza often and never doing any real cooking, but I tried to stay halfway in shape by walking. Since I was able to walk to UNA, at night I would walk there and then walk laps around the campus while listening to audiobooks. I would sometimes walk to Rivertown coffee and get an espresso. The campus brought back memories of my time in college that I longed for. I thought of all the books inside its walls and everything that had been taught and learned over the years. There was also a record store that Bikini Atol played an acoustic show at once that was even closer to my apartment than UNA. I had lost a little bit of my interest in music, but this store had books also, which made it a kind of heaven. I bought two Platos, a Kerouac, and a Heidegger there. I walked for hours at a time, and this proves that walking alone won’t keep you in excellent shape or full of energy. I would stay up all night, then go to Jack’s and Starbucks in the morning before going to sleep. I decided to take a Spanish class at UNA and was trying to learn coding online, so I spent a lot of time in the UNA library on their computers, working on those projects, which were silly and useless. I didn’t learn Spanish or coding. Part of me was trying to recapture the moments spent there in the past, which was futile. Everybody there looked so much younger than they did before.

After a while, I started looking for jobs in Tennessee. My Mom found an ad in the newspaper for a job fair at Graphics Packaging, where I’d previously worked in the 90s as a temp. I remembered doing twelve-hour shifts where I’d take crazy-long breaks. We’d alternate between working an hour and taking an hour-long break for the entirety of the shift. I used to go on every break and get stoned. I thought if I could make it as long as I did back then, it’d be a breeze, now that I was sober. They were hiring people for full-time positions at the job fair. The interviewer didn’t like my gaps in employment, so I didn’t get the job. However, there was a temp place there that asked me to come by. They assigned me to a night-shift job at GPC, a factory in Mt. Pleasant, TN. Even though I still had my apartment in Florence, I slept at my parents’ house, because the drive from Florence would’ve taken too long. It still took a long time from Mom and Dad’s, which was a problem because of the long hours required. I worked there for a while and made quite a bit of money, but was miserable and felt tired all the time, never getting enough sleep. One day, they said we were going to start working seven tens. There was a guy there who complained, saying it was against his religion to work on Sunday, so they changed it to six twelves, which was even worse for me, because I’d get even less sleep during the week. I didn’t go to work the next night. The temp place called me, and I told them I wouldn’t be able to go back.

After that, I found a job fair ad for Faurecia in Spring Hill, TN, a factory that contracted with GM, making the door panels for their cars. I got that job and moved to Spring Hill. I had to pay extra for breaking my lease in Florence, but ended on good terms. My parents had to help me move out from Florence, then I stayed with them for a while until I got my new apartment. The Faurecia factory was just starting up. During the time between my job offer and my first day, I couldn’t even find the factory because it was blocked off. They were still doing construction on it. Finally, my first day arrived. We had to take classes for a week. I met some of the people I’d be working with for the next year. When we finally went to the factory, we had to carpool from the classrooms to the factory, because there wasn’t enough parking yet. We had to use porta­potties because the restrooms weren’t built yet. Starting out was so easy. We mostly just swept the floor and mopped all day. I wish it’d stayed that way. Eventually, we started training on the machines, slowly at first. Then we progressed to building our speed up, preparing for full production. I applied for a job as a GAP leader, thinking I was ready to handle the stress of that role and move my way up in the company. But alas, I eventually decided it wasn’t worth it and stepped down.

While I was working there, I started thinking about how I often lacked energy and wasn’t able to handle stress. I looked back on my life, wondering what I was doing wrong. I knew that at times when I’d tried to eat healthy, I felt better. I knew that when I worked at Buffalo Rock and was working hard pulling pallets all day, I’d been able to keep the weight off, even though I ate like a pig. One day, when I was loafing around at Mom’s in my intermission between jobs, she asked me to do ten pushups. I felt better and more energetic all day, just from doing that. I made a mental connection between health and positivity. So, because I was feeling stress at Faurecia, I decided to implement some exercise to try to alleviate it. First, I did pushups, then I remembered how we did burpees in CrossFit. That gets your heartrate up really well. I started doing those, but was still going by Sonic or McDonald’s every night after work. Then, as I was watching YouTube videos, I saw something about how important the combination of nutrition and exercise is. It couldn’t be just one, if you want optimal results. I started, slowly at first, to clean up my diet. I started eating Cliff bars at work, which was kind of silly, because they aren’t that much better than regular candy bars. I wasn’t paying much attention to labels. I’d get tuna and crackers, but then my friend Rosa would give me food that she cooked on top of what I already had. I started running on a treadmill, but, partly because I was working so many hours, I only ran once a week.

One day at work, my coworker, Shayla, asked me if I knew about the union meetings she’d been going to at the UAW hall. I told her I hadn’t, but was willing to go. I started going and got really involved in it. Word got around, and lots of people started attending the meetings. They gave us UAW shirts to wear to work. We were all supposed to wear them on the same day, to show solidarity. A lot of people wore them and it was looking good. The UAW Hall had a nice gym, for only fifteen dollars a month, with no contract. I joined and started working out there. The UAW involves itself in a lot of the affairs of the auto industry in the Spring Hill area. It was around the time of my own union involvement that GM went on strike. Since Faurecia contracts with them, they shut down too. I was happy about this, because it meant I’d have time off to do whatever I wanted. I got an unemployment check, but it wasn’t much, certainly not enough to sustain my lifestyle indefinitely. Finally, it looked like GM and UAW were coming to an agreement. Faurecia called all the GAP leaders back first, a group I was a part of, unfortunately. I would’ve preferred to have continued drawing unemployment for a little longer. When we all had been back from the strike for a while, and it looked like our own union was going up for a vote, they brought the union-busters in. We had to go to these meetings to listen to their anti-union propaganda. I lost my temper in one of the meetings and went off on one of the union-busters. My coworkers were surprised. I thought maybe they were impressed. But finally, on the day of the vote, the majority voted “no.”

The 2020 Democratic primaries were going on at this time, and Bernie Sanders was doing well. I was trying to get involved in Bernie’s campaign, and I did some things online, then met a group of other supporters at a Starbucks in town. My assignment from the meeting was to find ten people to download the “Bernie” app on their phone. This was hard for me, considering I don’t talk to that many people. The task caused me to break an estrangement with Sam. I went down to his house in Summertown to talk with him. We talked for a long time. I couldn’t shut up about the books I was reading. He showed me his music setup, which I wasn’t that interested in at the time. He and his girlfriend, Stacy, got a few people to download the app. I also got my parents to get some people to download the app. I Instagram messaged Jeremy from Strange Waves and Scott Long, asking them to download it. They said they might. They were Bernie supporters, but didn’t seem interested in the app. I don’t blame them. It wasn’t a very good app, so I’m not sure if I helped Bernie too much. Maybe that’s a good thing though. He might not have beaten Trump. While I was at Sam’s, we talked some about Coronavirus. It wasn’t in full swing yet, but I made the prophetic statement of “It’s coming.” And boy, did it.

I was on third shift at Faurecia because I’d tried to work a side-job at Jackson Hewitt on day shift to get some tax experience. I was ambitious, but that didn’t work out. I ended up quitting the tax job because I couldn’t get any sleep, but stayed on thirds at Faurecia. It was more laid back on thirds than seconds, the shift I worked previously. There was less drama, and I liked the people. I’d get off work at 6AM and go straight to the UAW gym. They had an indoor track that I’d run laps around. They also had all the weight training equipment you could ask for. In March 2020, when Coronavirus was just starting out, people weren’t wearing the masks as much, but we were advised to stay apart from each other. Everybody would wipe down the equipment and wash our hands like crazy. Then came the time that GM shut down for the virus, under pressure from the UAW. On our last day, the boss asked me if I wanted to go home early or stick around and clean. I was ready to go, so I said “go.” I was about to get in the best shape of my life.

Chapter Twenty

Coronavirus Shutdown

At the time I was laid-off, everybody was freaking out and buying a lot of toilet paper. My Mom called me and told me there might be a forced quarantine, and I should stock up on food. I went to Target and bought the most groceries I’d ever bought in a single trip, all healthy food. I washed and sanitized the hell out of my hands for that trip, but didn’t wear a mask. There were a few people in the store wearing masks that day. That was the first I’d seen that.

During the shutdown, there was a temptation for a lot of people to just sit around all day, eating junk food and watching television. I wasn’t about to do that. I had goals, and plenty of time to achieve them. I was going to get a six-pack. I had doubts about whether somebody my age could achieve that goal, but I saw a YouTube video by the “Kilted Coaches” about getting a six pack after forty, which made me think it was possible, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it’s be. I started counting calories, which was something I’d never done before. I’d tried eating healthy before, but they were huge portions, and now I know I could never get to a weight where my abs were visible that way. Not in a million years. A caloric surplus is my default state. That video suggested a lot of things. One suggestion was 45 minutes of cardio, four times a week, so I started running three hours a week. Since I’d been on third shift, getting up at three or four in the morning was actually sleeping in, so I’d get up around that time and go run. There was hardly anybody up at that time, so it was peaceful. I got the Strava app and started recording my runs. I was ready to do some weight training also. After experimenting with different home workouts, I realized I needed more tools in my arsenal, so I got soap, hand sanitizer, and a mask so I could go to Wal-Mart. I freaked out when I saw maskless shoppers there. I ran to the workout section and bought a cheap adjustable dumbbell set and a resistance band, then checked out and left as fast as I could. There was a playground at the park outside of my apartment, so I’d go out there and do pullups on the monkey bars. I stuck the resistance band under my feet to make them easier. Finally, I ran out of all that food I and needed to get some more. My parents would put in orders at Wal-Mart and have the workers bring the groceries out to their car. I would put in an order for them to pick up, then drive down to their house to get it. I’d visit with them for a while, never going inside the house, only staying outside on the back porch. Pam Richards gave me a pullup bar one Christmas, and I decided now would be a great time to set it up at my apartment. My Dad helped me assemble it at their house, then I had to figure out how to install it on the wall at my apartment on my own. It wasn’t too hard. I worked my way up, and started doing fifty, sometimes a hundred, chin-ups or pullups a day. One of the keys to improving pullup performance is losing weight. I kept getting better and better. I’d always found chin-ups to be easier, but soon I became able to do wide-grip pullups for several reps. Things were looking up. Sometimes I’d run in the sweltering heat. I got down to 162 pounds, and finally had my six-pack. Then came the dreaded call-back to Faurecia.

Chapter Twenty-One

Work During Coronavirus

Before the shutdown, I’d signed up to join a different department than the one I was in at Faurecia, which was going to be on first shift instead of third. Human Resources called and told me to come back on first shift, while the other third shifters got to stay off and keep drawing unemployment, because they were only calling back first and second. When I got there, they told me I could just work on the line in my old department for a while because the new department wasn’t ready to start up yet. It was a nightmare, with the line running so fast. They moved me around to a lot of different places. Then one day, they put me on one of the hardest machines. The parts were stacking up behind me, and I was stressed. I decided that since I had plenty of attendance points, I’d use one of those and go home. My boss told me that was “abandoning the line,” but I left anyway. They fired me, and I didn’t get paid any of my paid-vacation hours either.

I was angry, but it didn’t bother me too much, because I already had another job lined up at Apcom. I was already thinking about leaving Faurecia to go there, thinking it might be better, but it turned out not to be. At first, they had me doing an easy job pulling parts off a line. If I’d stayed there, it would’ve been great, but the guy I was working with took a leave of absence because he apparently got Coronavirus, so they started moving me around to less pleasant jobs. After that, I just left. Then, I decided I needed to be really picky about the next job I chose. I went to one temp place, and they offered me a job, but wouldn’t tell me what it was unless I accepted, so I said no. I looked around and a lot of people were hiring, but I decided to hold out for something I thought would be tolerable. I looked at the job reviews for Atco, and people were talking about how easy it was, so I tried that. It was pretty easy, and the people seemed really nice. The only downside was that, since it was a company that contracted with GM and was located inside GM, the traffic leaving work was terrible. I was afraid of having a wreck every time I left the place. Then one day, the stress hit me at Atco. In factories, there’s a thing called “hot parts.” That means they have to be produced asap. Just before the pressure at work started to build up, I got a resentment in my head. I started thinking of something somebody said that made me mad, and what I could’ve said back to them. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I was supposed to be concentrating on this urgent job. When break time came, I was a mess, so I just walked out.

I was devastated by my own failure and didn’t know what to do. I fell off my diet and exercise routine, eating junk food and sitting around the house. On the upside, I read a lot of good books. This is when I started getting into indie-horror. My Mom suggested I go to a therapist, so I started talking to one, not in person because of coronavirus restrictions, but on the phone. I enjoyed talking to her, but I’m not sure how much that helped. It just seemed like a normal conversation. She suggested I get a job as a stocker at Kroger. She thought maybe I could be by myself and not have to deal with as many personalities at that job. I started the job, and it was the same kind of nightmare as other fast-paced jobs, with the work piling up on me so I could never keep up. At the end of the first (and last) week, the timekeeping lady had a “talk” with me. She went off on me and was condescending because I did my timecard wrong. I wasn’t going to work somewhere that stressful where I was constantly being disrespected, so I didn’t go back.

When I talked to the therapist again, I had to tell her I quit the job she suggested. I kept on talking to her about every two weeks and she prescribed Lexapro to me. It has helped me so far. After I was on the medication for a while, I started looking for another job, being particular about finding one that would suit me. I finally got a job at Flash Technologies. I’ve now been working there for three months, and enjoy it. It’s easy and stress-free. I’m back on my diet/exercise routine and things are going well. I’ve had the first Covid shot and am going to get the second one tomorrow. Reader, wish me luck!

Appendix

States I’ve Visited

Alabama: I was born in a hospital in AL but was raised right across the state line in TN. Since

my family lived right there, we would frequently be going back and forth between states, especially to visit the city of Florence where we would go shopping and do other fun things like eat at Showbiz pizza. In my younger years, I thought of it as an exciting town. I remember anticipating getting a driver’s license; my newfound freedom would include visiting Florence on my own or with my friends. When I was around thirty, I moved to Sheffield, one of the Quad­Cities of Florence, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia, also known as the Shoals area. I lived in that general vicinity for about a decade, working in various factories and attending college. I graduated from the University of North Alabama in 2015. The most appealing thing about the Shoals is its musical heritage and current music scene. The music stores attracted me when I was younger, collecting cassette tapes and CDs, and when I got older and started collecting vinyl, I would frequent those places to talk with musicians and fans. There were also venues where you could see local bands and occasionally big-name acts. Florence is a very walkable city. When I lived downtown, I could walk to record stores, UNA’s campus, and concert venues. I was in a band that played around town regularly. We also played shows in Huntsville, Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa. Despite my affinity and nostalgic feelings towards AL, there is a stigma attached to it. In addition to its segregationist history, Roy Moore recently received the Republican nomination for Senator. (On a positive note, I was able to help Doug Jones defeat him by sending in an absentee ballot from NV.) They also passed a deplorable abortion bill; I haven’t been back to AL since that bill was passed.

Arizona: I worked as a network systems integrator for a company called Optinet, who did contract work with Cox Communications, and two of the cities we worked in were Phoenix and Tucson, AZ. Our company provided most of the internet and cable for those two cities, among others. It was an exciting time because of the opportunity to travel, but work and abrasive personalities caused stress. A defining quality of this part of the country is the dry heat. Fortunately, a lot of the work we did was in the a/c, but with temps pushing 120 degrees, the time we spent outside meant we had to stay hydrated. During my first stint in AZ, I lived in a house in Glendale with two other men. There were huge cacti in our front yard, as well as the yards of most of our neighbors. I travelled back and forth between Phoenix and Las Vegas a lot. There wasn’t much to see, other than nature, on the road-trip between those cities. During my second stint, I stayed at the Candlewood. After our contract with Cox ran out, I had some money saved up, so I spent some time road-tripping in this state. I visited the Grand Canyon and the meteor crater. I was fascinated by the crater because of its impact being so many thousands of years ago with humans possibly living there at the time, as well as the speed it was traveling and the impact it had on the environment. I love learning about that kind of stuff.

Arkansas: It’s been necessary for me to drive through this state in my journeys out West. I don’t care much for exploring it because I’ve lived in the South all my life and don’t think it has much to offer that AL and TN don’t have. The trials of the West Memphis 3 also add to the stigma for me. In fact, I once detoured into Louisiana just to avoid this state altogether. The only positive thing I have to say is that the Mississippi River looks beautiful crossing into it.

California: I’ve visited CA many times in my life and have almost always enjoyed being there. I visited twice with my family when I was a child. We stayed in San Diego and went to Disneyland, Tijuana, Universal Studios, Wild Animal Park, and other tourist attractions. The next time, I was in my thirties and went there with my friend R——, who was from there but living in AL. This was when I became painfully aware of my southern accent. It was so strong that people couldn’t even understand me! When we were living in Vegas, my friend S– and I took the four-hour drive to L.A. one weekend. We visited Santa Monica Pier and the Sunset Strip during the day. Highlights were Amoeba Records and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. My desire is to go back at night and experience the cool venues; to see if they live up to the hype. One of my favorite CA experiences was when we went to Santa Cruz for a short weekend to see the giant Redwoods and play a gig at Poet & Patriot Irish Pub. They were really into us; it was fun watching all the faces light up when we played. I think one reason we went over so well was the novelty of having a southern act play there in CA, which may not happen that often. One downside of the show was since I couldn’t bring my guitar on the plane, I had to borrow another performer’s guitar, which was a cheap one. It was fine for his rhythm playing, but when I started bending strings during solos, it went out of tune. The audience didn’t seem any less into it though, so perhaps I was the only one who noticed. After my Optinet stint, I was looking for a job out west so I could move there. It was kind of an aimless search, but one of my focus areas being El Centro, simply because my friend R—— lived there. My experience has been that the U.S. areas with the lowest cost-of-living are the South and Midwest, with CA having perhaps the highest cost, including the rural areas. I was determined to make a change though and thought since El Centro was such a miserably hot area, I could find a deal. I applied at some places, but couldn’t get a response anywhere, including temp agencies. Since El Centro, San Diego, and Yuma are border towns, being able to speak Spanish could’ve helped me find employment. I’ve wanted to learn Spanish, but I haven’t always often had people to talk to in that language, which

is an important tool. Living in this area would help with the language problem, but the job/language dilemma is a vicious circle.

Update 12/7/19: I’m sitting here in Escondido Public Library writing this. I’m hoping to meet a lady for dinner later, but I think it’s still up in the air, because she didn’t know I wasn’t from the area, so I will probably find out shortly. If she cancels plans, then I will probably drive up to L.A. and walk on Hollywood Boulevard. There are a few things I want to do there and I’m sure there will be some good photo ops if I decide to go. The last two days have been interesting. I got off work Wednesday night at 10:30 and woke up at 3:25AM to get ready for my flight, which left at 7:25AM. The flight was long and uncomfortable, with a layover, and I was glad when I finally arrived in San Diego. I still had to get my rental car. I took one shuttle bus to the airport rental car station, then I had to take another shuttle bus because my rental car dealer was off-site. When I finally got my car, I realized I didn’t have a car-mount for my phone’s GPS, so I had to drive around for a while, looking for a place that sold one. Then I mounted my GPS and drove to Mission Beach. The ocean was beautiful. I was tired by this time and thought it would be convenient to book at Hyatt hotel, but the price was obscene, so I went ahead and booked an Airbnb. E—–, my friend from work, emphatically recommended Airbnb over hotels, and it was good advice. My first host was friendly and helped me with my situation, and the house was a short walk from the beach. By the time I got settled in I was so tired that the only thing I wanted to do was eat and go to sleep. I walked to a Taco Bell to get a cheat meal. When I returned to the house, I did my daily routine of 100 pushups and a 10-minute meditation with a reading of Tao Te Ching, then I crashed hard. I woke up refreshed on Friday morning and did the same daily routine. I went to the beach and walked around a little bit, then I texted my friend R——. (continued 12/9/19 in San Diego Airport) He told me when he would be home, so I drove to his house at that time. We rode around in my rental car and ran some errands in a shopping center. He got some food for the house at a dollar store. Then we went to a great Mexican restaurant. Some of the most authentic Mexican food in the U.S. can be found in San Diego, but the quality is still hit-or-miss for me. It can also be hard to find healthy options. I found a healthy option at this one (except for the small portion of chips), and the food was a hit. I just texted him. He said the name of the restaurant was Sombreros.

I had this idea of writing for my geographical location, and that’s what I’m trying to do now, so this section is not linear. Now I will tell what happened on 12/7. The lady, R—-, didn’t cancel when she found out I was not from CA, so I went with her instead of driving to L.A. I picked her up at her work and she wanted to go to a casino. She treated me to the buffet, so that was a major cheat meal. Then we went to play the machines, and I blew $20. I’m not much of a gambler, but it was exciting to explore a more rural part of CA with a friend. She helped me find a hotel that night for a good deal. Another lady, L—, sent me a message on Hinge early the next morning. We agreed to meet in Carlsbad for coffee and a walk on the beach. Again, I had to tell her I was from TN and she was ok with it. She showed up in a Titans shirt, and although I’m not a football fan, it was a nice gesture. I found her very attractive. I bought her a coffee and I got my usual espresso and sparkling water. We sat next to a huge map of the world and talked about travel. She’s been to Israel, England, and Hawaii. Our walk had a great view, looking down on the beach. Despite the cold weather, there were many people surfing. We parted around 10AM because she was meeting her 17-year-old son that morning. I drove back to San Diego and gave R—— the groceries he left in my car. There was another lady I was going to meet in La Jolla, but she cancelled after she found out I wasn’t a local. One thing I’ll do on my next trip is book

all my stays ahead of time. It’s too much stress trying to find an immediate place to stay and driving there. People in SD are nice and friendly, but they’re asshole drivers.

Colorado: At one point during my job at Optinet, we were doing a lot of driving back and forth between Las Vegas and Wichita. The shortest, most convenient route was through AZ and NM, so that’s the one we usually took. But on one of our trips back to Vegas, we were feeling adventurous, so we decided to take the northern route through CO and UT instead. CO has some of the tallest mountains I’ve seen.

Florida: Alabamians and Tennesseans regularly visit the FL panhandle on vacation, and I’m no exception. I’ve visited the beaches of Pensacola, Destin, and Panama City many times. I feel like I used to turn into “Florida Man” whenever I went down there! Perhaps my most interesting FL story was the time I had very little money but decided to drive to Pensacola from Loretto with two of my broke friends anyway, just for the adventure. I had a quarter bag of weed so we smoked pin-joints periodically to stretch it out. We slept in my car on the beach and barely had enough gas to make it home. Another time, my friend G— and I went down there for vacation in my car. He had stopped drinking and using illegal drugs (I hadn’t), so he drove while I was drinking. I got drunk on Fosters 32 oz. cans, walked the beach for hours with no suntan lotion, and got probably the worst sunburn I’ve ever had. I had wrecked my car a few times and was using a rope to hold the hood down because it wouldn’t latch due to the impact. G— was driving us back to TN on the interstate at 60 mph when the rope loosened, causing the hood to fly up onto the windshield. He was able to pull to the side of the road with no problems, but that was a scary moment!

Georgia: Atlanta is a concert destination for many Alabamians if they are willing to make the trek. My friend and I had planned to go see the Descendents, and he flaked, so I ended up going by myself. I foolishly booked a cheap hotel, not fully realizing the dangers of booking in that high-crime area. I only stayed one night and moved to a safer area outside of Atlanta the next night. The Descendents rocked! Previous to this concert experience, my friend P—— and I visited GA on a “for the hell of it” trip. We went to a truck stop on the state line and I bought a Robin Williams cassette for the ride back.

Hawaii: I’m sitting in Crema Coffee in Honolulu as I write this. The coffee shop has a cool vibe with a room in the back full of comfortable couches and away from the busy section. I’m writing this on my phone because my laptop has been in the process of restarting for about an hour. How frustrating! The most notable thing I’ve done so far was bench press 225 easily and with no spotter at Anytime Fitness. I visited Pearl Harbor too. The trip from Tennessee to Hawaii was long because I had a se

Illinois: I’ve been to O’Hare International Airport on a college trip to China. We had a weather delay and had (or got) to spend more time there than expected. My friend C—- from work had been bragging about Chicago hot dogs, so I got a legit Chicago airport dog and sent him a picture. He was impressed! On one of our Optinet trips from KS to TN, while riding with my boss J—– and coworker S–, we drove through the southernmost tip of IL. I was able to look out the window of the moving truck and see where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers met.

Indiana: One weekend when I was living in Florence, I was bored and felt like road-tripping, so I drove up to Evansville, IN. I had a horrible diet at the time that I believe caused me to feel tired

all the time and have depression, so that’s what probably made the experience unpleasant overall. The Ohio River was the coolest part of the trip.

Kansas: I more or less lived at Candlewood Suites in Wichita when I was there working for Optinet. No matter what city you’re in, the rooms look the same, so it feels like déjà vu. It has a marketplace which allows you to charge food to the room, which influenced my own self­destructive behavior. I would lay in bed eating ice cream and watching Big Bang Theory. I gained a lot of weight working for this company. I did a long-distance carpool with S– for most of these trips, so I didn’t have my own ride while I was there. I used Uber and walked to a lot of places, my favorite being Barnes & Noble. Like Candlewood, B&N always looks the same, which is neat and comfortable in a way. You can always get a strong Starbucks espresso and count on certain books being there. Wichita B&N is where I really started to branch out from the limitations of genre-fiction to a broader array of topics like philosophy.

Kentucky: I’ve always wanted to visit as many states as possible, so one day I convinced my friend G— to ride from Loretto to Kentucky with me. We took Highway 31 (I think) and stayed high the whole trip. Unfortunately, my memory is failing me on this and some of the other “for the hell of it” trips. I get the KY trip mixed up with the time we went to MS for no reason. I remember that on our KY trip, G— told me he couldn’t get any weed, but when we started to head out, he surprised me with 3 fat joints. It seems like we went to a movie on one trip and went to a guitar shop on another.

Louisiana: When I was in college, we did an alternative spring break to help with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I don’t think we were very useful, but it was fun staying in the same house with all those students, sort of like being on MTV’s The Real World. We did yardwork during the day but were also able to do cool things every night, like go to Bourbon Street and the French Quarter. Everybody knows this, but they have great food!

Massachusetts: While staying in RI for the Necromonicon conference, I met a nice girl on Bumble. She lived in New Bedford, MA. Since I was staying in Warwick, we agreed to meet halfway in Seekonk for sushi at Mizu Asian Bistro. The first thing she noticed was my southern accent, which I thought she would be used to because she lived in Nashville for six months. The date was awkward at first but got more comfortable as we continued to talk. We stayed in the restaurant until they closed and stood outside in the cold for a while as I waited for my Uber. The wait was going to be a while, so we went into an ice cream shop in the same strip mall to warm up. Then we had to hurry up and eat the ice cream because the Uber was arriving. We went our separate ways and I hope we maintain a long-distance friendship.

Minnesota: When my friend S—and I flew from KS to CA to play a gig, we had a layover at MSP. I rented a car and we drove out to a hipster coffee shop in Minneapolis. That’s all we had time to do. The shop had a BLM sign, which I thought was cool. We enjoyed the espresso and sparkling water.

Mississippi: Iuka, MS is only 31 miles away from where I used to live in Sheffield, AL. I used to meet women online and drive to Iuka, Booneville, and Corinth for dates. We would do typical stuff like go to the movies, bowling, parks, restaurants, or sometimes just stay at her house. Dates are the only reason I recall going to MS other than driving out west and “for the hell of it.”

Missouri: One of the times I got to drive my own car from Loretto to Wichita for work, I decided to stop at a hotel in St. Louis. That night I strolled along the river and went to eat at a nice Italian restaurant. I was surprised at how uncrowded the area was, creating a solitary, peaceful experience. I was walking distance from the Gateway Arch, so the next day I took the tram ride to the top.

Nevada: The first time I ever got to drive out west was when I took my job at Optinet; my destination being Henderson, NV. It took me 2 ½ days to arrive at the house I’d be living in, on and off, for the next year. I pulled in the driveway, called my friend S–, and he rushed to meet me there. Sometimes they did work from inside the house, so he showed me what they’d been doing. Later, we worked on writing songs with my acoustic guitar. It was exiting to be expressing myself artistically so far from where I’d lived my whole life; something I’d always wanted to do. In the months that followed, we rented a practice space and met a bass player on Craigslist. We’d emailed him our songs, and to our delight, he could play them on the first day we practiced with him at the practice room we’d been renting, so we were immediately able to start booking gigs. We played at Double Down Saloon and Evel Pie, which is located on Fremont Street. I learned there that the dryness of the desert will make your guitar go out of tune. Some gigs went well, others not-so-well, but made great memories. We also filmed a music video on Fremont. One of the most surreal moments was when I saw Jello Biafra browsing at 11th Street Records during Punk Rock Bowling and had a short conversation with him. I was starstruck for sure.

New Jersey: I don’t have much to say about NJ. On my trip to New York in Dec. 2019, I flew into EWR and took the train into NYC. It was one of the few subway experiences I’ve had so far and was a pleasant one; very convenient and timely.

New Mexico: NM is another state I drive through on my way out west. Route 66 is the most convenient way to Vegas as well as El Centro. I’ve driven through this state by myself and with my boss J—–, a Trump supporter who likes to spout pro-Trump rhetoric, making my time with him less-than-pleasant. Unfortunately, I haven’t done much in NM other than sleep in hotels.

New York: NY was the first time I flew out for a long-distance trip, all on my own. I booked a flight to NYC during Christmas break of 2017. My hotel was a short distance from several of the most famous landmarks. I could walk to Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the clothing store that used to be CBGB’s. I did a bus tour of the city and saw the Statue of Liberty from a distance. One of the songs that was playing on the bus was “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. I’ve loved that song ever since then. But it was so cold that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have. I hope to go back again when it’s warmer.

Update 12/28/19: I’m sitting in a Gregorys Coffee in NYC writing this. I haven’t even been in NYC for a whole day yet and I have so much to write. My New York experience was amazing and cool from the very start, because as soon as I arrived on the train here, my friend W­messaged me and told me she was ready to meet up. I hadn’t even dropped my bags off at the hotel yet. I met her at a coffee shop, then we found my hotel so I could. She asked me where I wanted to go eat, and I said I liked Thai food. She told me she was from Thailand, which I didn’t know, and she jokingly said she could just cook it for me. We went to zoob zib thai noodle bar. It was some of the best, if not the best, Thai food I’ve ever had. Most of the Thai food I’ve eaten was in Vegas, but I’ve also eaten it in AL and TN. The AL and TN restaurants couldn’t hold a candle to this. Plus, I was eating with a Thai food expert, and she knew to ask them for the spices you otherwise wouldn’t get. Then we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When she first suggested going to a museum, I was like, whatever. I remembered going to museums in China that I wasn’t thrilled by. But this one was amazing. The first section we visited was the European section. There were all these paintings, mostly Biblical paintings depicting Christ in different ways, from the 15th, 16th, and other centuries. They were in great condition to be that old. Then we visited the Egyptian section, which was much older, with relics dating back to 3500 B.C. There were mummies dating back to a few hundred years B.C. We spent a few hours there, then she said she was tired and ready to go home; she had been up a long time. I had too, since 3:15AM, and even though it was only around 6PM, it would take us both a while to get back. We probably only saw 1/3 of that museum, and I regret not seeing the Greek and Roman section. I’ve read some of the ancient Greek philosophers, so it has a special place in my heart. The time I spent with L- was a highlight of my 2019 NYC trip. She is an amazing and beautiful woman.

North Carolina: This one is hard to write about because I don’t really remember going there. My parents claim I visited NC with them when we went to the Smoky Mountains in my youth. The Smoky Mountains are on the TN/NC border, so I’ll tell about one of those trips, even if I didn’t cross the border on that particular one. When my friend G— and I graduated high school, we traveled up there. All I remember is we rode go-karts and listened to KISS Destroyer on cassette in his car.

Oklahoma: Like a few of these states, OK is one I just passed through and didn’t do much in, but it’s still special to me because it was the first place I arrived at in my journey out West that seemed different from where I was from. This was because of all the casinos. Once I passed the AK/OK state-line, casinos were everywhere, and they were a constant for the rest of my drive to Vegas.

Pennsylvania: I had recently quit my accounting job in Lewisburg, TN and moved back to the Shoals area to be closer to my band. I was working a 3rd shift temp job that paid next-to-nothing but had some money from when I cashed-out my 401k. Since it was a crap-job, I didn’t mind laying out Friday and Monday to do a 4-day trip to Philadelphia to see Iggy Pop with my rhythm guitarist, S—–. Post Pop Depression had just come out, and I bought the record at Pegasus, a music store that was walking distance from where I lived at the time, but, unfortunately, is now closed. I played this LP repeatedly in preparation for the concert. I have to say, Philly is one of my favorite cities and the show was one of the best I’ve ever seen. The city is a big one (the kind I like), and the old, Georgian architecture is beautiful. David Bowie had just died, and Iggy played songs from 2 of his Bowie-produced albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life, along with the new album. We were walking distance from everything, so we didn’t have to Uber or taxi anywhere. We saw the Liberty Bell and other sites associated with the Founding Fathers.

Rhode Island: I sit in Café Tempo of Warwick, RI as I write this. There’s some anxiety because my debit card was declined for Uber, causing me to switch to Lyft. If Lyft declines my future payments, I’ll have trouble getting to the airport, but I’m going to risk it because there are more places I’d like to visit, like the beach. I came to RI because H.P. Lovecraft’s Necromonicon conference was happening this weekend. I was going to do a walking tour of Lovecraft’s places of interest in Providence, but the one I arrived for was cancelled. I was told at the Bitmore hotel that I could do my own walking tour with a map they provided, and what I ended up doing was walking from there to Lovecraft’s grave in Swan Point Cemetery. The place was quite large; one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve seen, and I was concerned my phone might die before I found the grave, making it impossible to contact a ride back to my hotel, but I found the gravestone on time and arrived at my hotel safely. EDIT: I’m finishing writing this section in Loretto, TN. After I left Café Tempo, I went to Warwick City Park, where people were playing baseball (or softball; I don’t know). I walked the walking trail and found some water, though not a beach. Then I walked 3-4 miles to the airport with everything I brought on my back, arriving extra early for my flight back to TN. I don’t know how much that backpack weighed, but it was tiring after a while. I got some exercise that weekend and saved money by walking instead of Uber-ing. Overall, it was a cheap, quick, spontaneous trip. However, next time I go to New England, I plan on renting a car.

Tennessee: I’m a Tennessean. I was raised in Loretto, TN and went to elementary and high school there. The partying I did in my 20’s was mostly done in Loretto, Lawrenceburg, and surrounding areas. Lawrenceburg is only 15 miles away from Loretto, but it seemed like a whole other country when I was young. Many of my Loretto friends were rednecks, while my Lawrenceburg friends were more punk or alternative. My failed bands from those two towns rarely played anywhere other than house parties. I’ve been to many concerts in TN. I saw Ozzy Osbourne 5 times in Nashville and once in Memphis. I saw the original KISS (with makeup) twice in Nashville and once in Memphis. The shows I saw in Memphis were at the Pyramid, which is now a Bass Pro Shop. Some of the now deceased performers I saw were B.B. King, Dimebag Darrell, Layne Staley, Peter Steele, and Chris Cornell. The most memorable concert venue for me and many others was Starwood Amphitheatre. Along with seeing my favorite big­name acts, I would meet many of my friends from both Loretto and Lawrenceburg while roaming the grounds. In ’96 and ’97, it was important for me to go to as many concerts as possible, and I went to a lot. I’m more familiar with TN and AL than any other states, but the big difference between the two is that I was drunk and high in TN but sober in AL. Many of my TN acquaintances remember my drunken past, while the ones from AL have never seen me that way (thank God). I worked in Pulaski and lived in Bodenham for a couple of months. I could work a 12-hour shift, get off and go get drunk, then come back to work on a couple hours of sleep, still reeking of alcohol, and work another 12. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t still be able to do that at age 43.

Texas: It’s a big state with much to explore, but I’m not a fan of the places I’ve visited there. I didn’t love my drives through the panhandle. I know some people from Amarillo and feel sorry for them because that city reeks with the smell of cow patties. Here’s an example of an unpleasant experience in TX: I stopped at a motel to stay for the night. There was a white man, wearing camouflage, yelling at a man of Indian ethnicity, I presume, about the service he received during his stay. He shouted (I paraphrase) “You think all us Americans are stupid!” The fallacy in this statement is that the white man isn’t necessarily any more American than the Indian, but this, along with reading Toni Morrison, reinforces my suspicion that many people only associate Americanism with whiteness.

Utah: I rode through UT with my friend S— on our way from Wichita to Vegas. We didn’t really get to experience that state because we were driving the whole time. We listened to a lot of music on these trips. I would pick an album to listen to, then he would pick one, alternating for the whole trip. The only place we stopped at in UT was a Mexican restaurant.

Virginia: When I was a sophomore in high school, I went on a trip with the marching band to Washington D.C. I don’t see how we could have possibly driven from Loretto to D.C. without going through Virginia, so I’m assuming we did, though I don’t remember anything about that state. I was quite the juvenile delinquent at the time and didn’t enjoy the trip. I was disciplined by my educators and also bullied by other students, mostly because of my own behavior.

Washington: This is probably the shortest amount of time I’ve spent in a state. I was flying from Nashville to San Diego, with a one-hour layover in Seattle. Naturally, most of the time during the layover was spent finding my terminal and getting a bite to eat. I took a few pictures out the window of the plane of the trees, the ocean, and the city.

Conclusion: One never knows what ideas and memories the act of writing will bring about. The process of writing this essay has caused memories to come rushing back to me and made me grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in this amazing life. I’ve also visited the countries of Mexico, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, China, and England, so I realize the U.S. is just a tiny section of the globe. I currently have a valid passport, so I’m ready to branch out even further to have experiences and explore cultures the U.S. can’t fully offer.

i It’s now occurring to me what made those childhood days so magical: Although sometimes reflection on the past can be deceiving, where you forget the bad times and only remember the good, there are some concrete things we can point out. First is an obvious one; interest in girls and the awkwardness that pertains to it. You have none of that in the early years. Although you don’t have objective freedom in childhood, you don’t desire that type of freedom until puberty, when you dream of having a car to go wherever you want, whenever you want. There is a freedom from responsibility in childhood, not just from paying bills, but from what people think. I’ve been told that I worry too much about what people think of me, more than the average person, and I believe this is true. (But people with natural charisma don’t understand how people who lack that are sometimes treated.) This social anxiety may have started with attraction to girls, where I wanted to act a certain way to make them like me. Before that, I could act and talk however I liked, because I was just a kid; I was “innocent.” I was a well-behaved kid with reasonable parents, so I didn’t have much fear of disciplinary action. (My behavior would change later.) But the greatest freedom was from embarrassment. Along with the desire to impress girls came the desire to fit in with the “cool kids.” This brings me to my point about the “magic” of the video games. Right around this time when everything was changing, I discovered drugs, which helped with the anxiety at first. People would get high and play video games. But as a kid, doing it sober was better. The freedom was gone now. I enjoyed the video games more when high, but this also detracted from my enjoyment of them when sober. I remember one night at Doug Corey’si trailer, he and Raf were playing video games. They just kept on playing two-player, without asking if I wanted to play, and I was too scared to ask to play, even though I wanted to, so I just sat there and watched them. We were sober. I know this because if I had been high, I either would’ve asked to play or been content with just watching. Later, years after his and Doug’s falling out, Raf would make me play Turok, a 3D war game. I hated it but didn’t mind if I was stoned. I never much got the hang of shoot ‘em up games and even less of 3D games. The camaraderie of video games was long gone for me at this point. I probably would’ve outgrown video games, but my point is the magic was gone from all of my activities, including music. There is irony in that, considering the common association of drugs with music. I remember as a child listening to a cassette on my Walkman one day and thinking I could be happy forever as long as I had this music to listen to. It might’ve been the Miami Vice Soundtrack that I was listening to. Back then, the way I heard music was different. I just heard the song, without distinguishing between the different instruments and performances. I just felt the music without thinking about it. But I had that little Casio keyboard I played Christmas carols on that gave me one of my first experiences with analyzing music. I had a cassette tape of In Square Circle by Stevie Wonder. I pondered recreating a song off that album with only the keyboard and my voice, because those were the only instruments I had. The idea to create the illusion of multitracking with a minimalist approach. With the keyboard’s preset drums and rhythm, a virtuoso would’ve been able to come up with something decent. I, however, could not. Another music experience I had was listening to the Pulse album by Pink Floyd. Chris had gotten me stoned and we were riding around in his car listening to the CD. It all of a sudden occurred to me that there were several different frequencies, but they were all together in harmony. That’s some deep stuff, huh? It may seem obvious on paper, but like I said, I usually reverted to just hearing it as one thing. So drugs did open up my mind to things and maybe gave me ideas I wouldn’t’ve otherwise thought of. But I lacked the discipline or foresight to carry any of these ideas out, and drugs prevented me from attaining said discipline.

• ii It’s fascinating to think about how I operated back then with such little knowledge, compared to the knowledge I have now. Were there many things I knew back then that I’ve forgotten? Surely there are many specific irrelevant things about my situation that I have forgotten. Peers can help each other remember those kinds of things, or simply tell the other person about something they’ve forgotten entirely. But what about deeper, conceptual truths? I feel like I have a good memory; I wonder how much knowledge is buried in my subconscious, waiting to rise to the surface periodically. Some knowledge may be gone forever or buried too deep to ever be seen again. However, my hope is that writing and other tactics will succeed in unearthing some of that lost knowledge.