Even in elementary, I did poorly in school. My mother, being frustrated with me put me in the special class. The special class in the seventies was typically just a couple of kids who were unable to communicate much, if at all. After a day or so, the teacher told my mother that I did not belong there. My mother heard about a place in town that could test IQ, so she took me there. I took a bunch of tests and they told her, “Good news, he is not stupid, so he is probably just lazy”. My mother then decided if I was not going to put in the effort, then she would not either. At least that is the way I remember it. However I am betting my mother kept trying to the best of her ability and I was a great source of frustration for her.
It would have been a shock to her, but I was trying a lot harder than it looked. I did care a fair amount. I wanted to do well. Before each new semester I would devise a plan of how to succeed. I would organize my folders and books. I would sharpen my pencils. I would commit to doing my homework immediately after school and in order to ensure I did so, I would put self imposed rules in place to punish or reward myself. I would commit to getting to class early so I could establish a seat up front. The bell would ring, the class would begin and I was laser focused. Then the next thing I would hear was the bell ringing to end the class and I had literally heard nothing the teacher had said. I would shake it off, promise to do better in the next class and the cycle would continue until I was frustrated, behind on work and slowly resolve to barely getting by.
In middle school I was mostly getting by with all D’s. This carried on into high school.
Most of my childhood, my mother worked the front desk at a dental office. When I was in middle school she had decided to go back to college to get a degree in education. She began teaching at the high school I attended. She taught a few honors classes, while her son continued to get mostly D’s. My sister was a couple of grades ahead of me and she was a model student. She was responsible and had her sights on college.
To make it even worse, my mother was good friends with the principal and vice-principle of our high school. They were often at our house or we were at theirs. It was a very weird melding of worlds for me.
I was a long-haired metal head kid in the military town of Lawton/Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I was lucky, there was a heavy metal club in town just off the strip of the military base, nestled in between strip clubs. I started going to this club at age fourteen when a band I was into, Rough Cutt was playing there. After that, I went every night I could.
The metal club was a mix of long-haired guys, girls with teased up hair and spandex pants and soldiers looking to get laid or looking for a fight and usually finding the later.
The military guys consisted of Army and Marines. I once went to the bathroom and pee’d in the urinal while two guys tried to prove which was tougher, Army or Marines by standing at each end of the bathroom and charging each other, butting heads until one would not get up. Surprisingly it took a few head butts before they knocked each other out and I just stepped around them.
This placed served beer in used gallon milk jugs for ten bucks. I am not kidding when I say these were just milk jugs the owners brought from home after drinking the milk and just reused these over and over every night.
One Friday night when I was sixteen or seventeen, the weather was supposed to turn cold and snowy. As most kids that age, I went out on a Friday night.
As I was getting ready, my mother offered me a deal. She said, “stay home tonight and I will make you any meal you want”. I wanted to think of something fancy and expensive so she would not agree to it. I said, make me lobster and I will stay home. It should be noted that up until this point my mother had shown no real ability to cook anything. She agreed, went up to Sam’s and bought one of those frozen bags of shitty, freezer burned lobster tails. She boiled them and served them with butter and boil-in-bag white rice. I thought this was a fancy meal. I kept my end of the deal, stayed home and went to my room to probably play Nobody’s Fool by Cinderella on my Flying V guitar ad nauseam.
My vice principal came over to stay the night, so she would not be stuck alone if the weather turned bad. Devonna was a very intimidating figure at school. Everyone was afraid of her. Her scowl was legendary. She was stern and no nonsense. If I found myself in her office, she never broke character and never gave me special treatment.
However, at my house she was pretty fun. We hung out often, going on hikes, fishing, camping, sailing her boat. Above is her on her sailboat. Below is me at her sailboat dock in my Rough Cutt t-shirt.
The weather forecast was accurate that night and heavy snow began falling. This was very rare in southern Oklahoma. I would look out of my window to see the progress. It was really coming down and the snow was piling up. I wanted to get out in it.
From my room, around midnight or a little after, I heard my mom and Devonna laughing. I went out to the kitchen to find them both very drunk. My first thought was, how can I use this to my advantage? I said, “hey, you know what would be fun? We should grab the sled and walk up to the Kmart parking lot and go sledding!”. The Kmart in our town had a giant parking lot on a hill and I always thought it would be fun to sled. This was my chance. They both quickly agreed and I grabbed the sled from the shed, they packed a few beers for the road and off we went walking into the heavy snow on a cold, still night.
Kmart was not a short walk. It was two and a half miles from the house. I could tell about halfway into the walk they were starting to regret their decisions, but I kept my enthusiasm high to keep them from backing out. We got to Kmart and sledded for about an hour. It was a blast. We laughed uncontrollably the entire time we were there. One person would sled down and run the sled back up so the next person could go. We got back home sometime between 3 and 4am. Later in the day, Devonna was sober and told me that I could not tell anyone at school we had done that. I agreed to it, because I was not going to tell anyone anyway. I did not care to tell anybody anything back then as I preferred to keep to myself.
The next week, I passed Devonna in the hall and she scowled at me and all was back to normal.
In a bizarre turn of events, shortly after all of this, I became Devonna’s sisters boss at a flooring factory. I will tell that story some other time.
P.S. If you want a video glimpse of the heavy metal club, check out link below.
What a great story. :-)