This was no Stand by Me, as coming of age stories go. There were no train tracks. There was no dead body. There was, however, the rumor of a bootleg 2 Live Crew album. It was summer, but my neighbor AA heard from a friend of a friend that W_ had a dubbed copy of As Nasty As They Wanna Be - the first album in history to be deemed legally obscene (!). And he got it from an older brother who’d copied it from... and so on. For some convoluted reason I had to call a kid who was on my Spring basebal...

I’m not sure if the guy ever went into space, but he was purportedly an astronaut. When we moved into a new house when I was about 13 or 14, I inherited the room of that guy, one of the sons of the previous occupants. The old owners had left behind some weird and/or tacky furniture, some of which I think my dad actually bought from them, like the living room and dining room sets. They had no need of furniture where they were going - on the road on their fancy long-distance motorcycle houses. Th...

This is the short and the long of it. Mistress Quickly: The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.2 ...

The radio in the station wagon I had as a teenager didn’t really work as the antenna had long ago broken off. God forbid I try fixing it - any real fixes to the wagon tended to make things worse. While I tend to have no qualms about jury rigging most things, I didn’t want to be one of those people with a clothes hanger stuck in the antenna hole, so I made do without. I made do with the tape player. I had bought myself three cassettes as presents when I got my car: Fiona Apple - Tidal Squirrel ...

I was going to be a tiger. And no hurricane was going to stop my trick or treating. My aunt liked painting, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask her to paint me up to be a tiger. I don’t remember that I had any tiger attire, but I knew that all I really needed was the face. All else, actions, emotions, would come from this painted mask of confidence. I’d gone as a Smurf the previous Halloween. Plastic mask, plastic sheet over my regular clothes to look like Smurf overalls. Would I have w...

I was a kid when The Hitchhiker came out on HBO in 1983. The theme song scared the shit out of me. I knew it was time for the show when the ridiculously creepy intro came on. I hid under the coffee table with a pillow over my head, went to my room, or, if at all possible, went next door to my grandma's apartment (she and my dad lived on either side of a duplex during these years). Two things: 1) My dad wired my grandma with our cable through the wall. She never watched The Hitchhiker. 2) I wa...

Castle Grayskull was a wooden bench swing just on the edge of the Evergreen Forest behind my grandparents’ trailer in Wewa, Florida. My grandma was Skeletor and sat on the swing. I was He-Man and my dog was Battle Cat. I had a sword, but to the untrained eye it just looked like a red plastic Star Wars light saber. I had the power of Grayskull, I didn’t need the Force, whatever that was. Grandma was happy to play with me from her swing. I fed her Skeletor’s lines and we acted out the eternal ...

I honestly don’t know how fast I was going when I hit the deer. My speedometer didn’t work. The deer jumped out at me about a half-hour before dusk as I was driving down Hwy-98 between Hattiesburg, MS and Mobile, AL in my 1981 Pontiac Bonneville Safari station wagon. The car was brown-ish. I am pretty certain the deer must have been, too, but I never went to check on it. I knew it was dead. Nothing could've survived the blow, my car was a tank. Plus, some guy who apparently saw the whole thing ...

My dad used to broadcast a sermon every week on an AM radio station in Mobile, AL. He recorded the weekly 30-minute message in a little setup he'd put together at our house. He took the cassette up to the station and would sit there while it played. After it was over, he gave the guy who ran the station a small check. I went with him a few times, but it was a little boring to just hang out in the on-air room, silent for a half-hour. I would look around at the buttons and knobs and dials. And I ...

How like a dream is this! I see, and hear: Love, lend me patience to forbear a while. Valentine: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 5.4 ...

Chomp, chomp, chomp, pa-chewy chomp.Chomp, chomp, chomp, pa-domp-a-domp,Chomp, chomp, chomp, pa-chewy chomp.Chompa dompa dompa, chomp chomp chomp. ...