13.

Inspired by Jon, on another Blog.

I grew up in a small, but pretentious river town in Illinois on the Mississippi River.  It was pretentious, because its residents were fond of saying that our town was founded before St. Louis(1817), old only by American standards, and it was a quirk of fate that we weren't St. Louis.  Also, about 80% of the 40,000 were proud that they weren't farmers, but considered themselves city folk.  After all, they shopped at the Stix, Baer, and Fuller in St. Louis, (my mother had a Stix box with the signature pastel butterfly logo, full of pillbox-era hats ) ate at Italian restaurants on the Hill, saw sophisticated St. Louis movies almost every weekend, like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Paint Your Wagon.  They smoked and had cocktail parties: highball glasses  on boomerang tables. Had Tiki bars in the basement,  bowled on Monday night (at least Dad and Grandpa did), while the kids played pinball in the neon, starlit lobby.

Being 13 there, however, was magic , as long as you were away from the house, your parents, school, and church.  Usually this was accomplished by running off to the woods or a field of some sort where you'd meet up with other escapees from house, school, church.  We were full of schemes. One of our schemes was to get into the Guinness Book of World Records  for the longest game of hotbox, right on the street in front of my house.  We set up the bases, collected extra gloves, even a lefty for me, back-up baseballs in case one landed in the sewer as they often did, so we wouldn't have to waste precious record time retrieving it, made an elaborate, five day schedule,  brought out a cooler so we wouldn't have to go in anyone's house--

"Hollis, you can pee in the woods, man! If you go inside your mom's gonna...."

 Then someone got bored with the idea,  (for the record, not me--I was the last man standing, calling the others a bunch of candy ass quitters who needed their moms to make them some pudding).  Once we were going to make our own tree house village out of scrap lumber--a Utopian village with our own laws!  We could live there all summer!  We did get one tree house, built--I visited it for the last time during my senior year of college, during Thanksgiving vacation, listening to "Alice's Restaurant" for company.  And me, I was always organizing plays to be put on in various basements and garages--usually around Halloween, so my sister got eyeball grape peeling duty.  One was called "Hannah-pot."  What??  What a weirdo I was.

Hollis, "Hollis-oil", "Woo-Dagoo", James Bond aficionado and later Eagle Scout, was the second boy  I kissed when I was 13, on the roof of his house, for some unremembered reason. He was better than the first.  I coulda married him:  he taught me how to play chess, and used to come out of his house and play "The Stripper" on his trombone at me as I walked home from the bus stop.  It really aggravated me on the surface, but underneath I think I was just glad someone noticed I was a girl.  He and his family moved not long after this.

The first  was Mike "the Perv", who convinced me earlier that year to go "out-of- bounds" during a game of Ditch for a half an hour while the little kids looked for us hopelessly--we could hear them calling us whinily in the distance, saying, "Mommmmm sezzzz..."  I remember iconically swinging on a lamppost ala Singing in the Rain Gene Kelly afterwards, then  admonishing myself..it's Pervavich..you don't even like him!  Yet for a month or so I was obsessed with him and the idea that he kissed me. His teeth were slightly recessed, like David Bowie's, (before he got them fixed).  Prominent eyeteeth, like a vampire.  That was the main thing I found charming about him.  I do remember this: we were so young and stupid we didn't know how to French kiss.  He must have had some vague notion of it, though--without understanding the general mechanics, because he kept saying to me.."Try opening your mouth."  But then there we were, both of us stupidly with our mouths open, not knowing the next step.  Makes me wonder who he'd been talking to.  Or maybe it was just some sensual instinct for him.   However, he was from near Chicago and actually liked the Cubs.   He left secret codes in the handle-bars of my banana seat bike, and why in the world did I even think to look in them?  He must have said something.  I think I thought I had crossed over to new worlds.


The scheming life of kids away from parents always has fascinated me: it's how the world evolves, to my mind.  Maybe we got it from the historical vibrations of the ground we were covering.  Maybe it was the ominous influence of the Piasa Bird, mythological bird with deer antlers and lion's claws,  painted originally by the Illini, on the limestone bluff face overlooking the River.  Maybe it was in the infinite recesses of murky Blue Pool, where the truly crazy dived from the cliff above (not me)--it was rumoured to have a train car rusting away in its bottom that no one had touched. The Illinois Central tracks ran by, not 100 yards away.

My town is a tangled nerve of contradictions dating back pre-Civil War. It was home to an ardent abolitionist lost in the mists of time, Elijah Lovejoy, who pressed his antislavery  paper on our side of the Mississippi, to the chagrin of the local business owners, and was eventually murdered by slavery supporters. The town embarrassedly erected a statue to him in a backwater cemetery, and nobody visits it.  We do not have an "Elijah Lovejoy Day", that I'm aware of .  He is viewed as even  crazier than his partner in crime, Mr. John Brown, whose body "lies a'moulderin' in the grave".

I was surprised to find, and I imagine the politics of this worked similarly in other"free" states like Illinois, that, although slavery was illegal in the state then , it was lawful to keep another man in indentured servitude (no wages) for up to 99 years.  Slavery essentially, although the owner perhaps had no rights to the progeny of the servant.  Bet they figured a way around that too.  Another prestigious citizen of our town was  James Earl Ray of Martin- Luther -King- assassination infamy.  For us kids, he haunted our imaginations like one of the excrement-smearing Snopes in Faulkner: we imagined him living in the roof-wrecked house at the bottom of the gully on Belle St., where the colored lived, haunting the nearby woods, looking for a way to get a shot off across the street.  My brother and I once got in a car-wreck (he was letting me try out his MG) right at the crossroads of that very spot, and I illogically blamed James Earl.  You know, it just occurred to me--that's the place the real crossroads of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Stone Roses fame,  HWY 61 X 49 downriver, ought to look like.

Our town was also a stop on the underground railroad, however, conveniently located up river from Cairo, (pronounced "Kay-ro" , like the syrup, for you great unwashed: this is not Egypt!).  It turns out some actual Christians (not the kind who go to Church a'Sunday to point out how fat so-and-so had gotten), some actual Christians at one point held some wealth and power in town, and, rather than rock the boat politically on the slave question, decided to secretly take matters into their hands.  They collectively began purchasing land back in the woods, decent farmland if cleared, but off the town's beaten path so that rumours of Indian sightings still worked the town's imagination.  They brought in runaway slaves from all over the South via the River, and gave them the land.  They even staged an Indian attack way back on Rocky Fork Road, the ingress to this other world, to scare white people away.  Who knew Christians could be so hilarious?

A black boy named William used to catch the school bus with us off of Rocky Fork Road, at the entrance to the boy scout camp.  He talked differently than the other African-Americans in town, and was much more friendly.  We used to wonder where he came from. There were no African Americans in our neighborhood, and he always came out of the woods. My sister loved him because he would loudly and unself-consciously sing the Pepsi jingle of the times:

"Nickle, nickle, a doobie a dat-dat..Pepsi-Cola, value pack, brings a nickle serving back/ Every serving that you pour/ Costs a nickle, not a penny more!" 

The stupid things roaming around one's brain.  I can still hear him. My sister and I would sit in the very last seat of the bus, near William. And my sister would say, "Sing 'Nickle, Nickle', William!!"  That is, until Ann Slaughter and Tina Crupi tried to beat us up and stole the back seat from us...they were bigger and meaner.  Anyway, at some point it occurred to me that William must have been the descendant of one of those free men who had farms way back in Rocky Fork.

Rocky Fork Road.  I know, it sounds like I made that name up, and if you knew I was a Faulkner fan, you would have good reason to be suspicious.  However, I can assure you it's the real name of a real road...you can look it up if you are so inclined...but, it was one of the parameters of my childhood playground.   I told you we were playing on sacred ground.

Our woods were full of ghosts, and most of us hadn't read Twain.  It was just town lore.  Jean Lafitte the pirate was seen swinging his lantern through the woods in Hop Hollow, looking for the treasure he'd buried off the banks of the Mississippi. There wasn't a straight road in the whole town, except the River Road, ( I am using the term "straight" loosely here; it, naturally, followed the curves of the Mississippi, which, due to an unlikely curve at Alton, made the Muddy one actually SOUTH of us rather than WEST like you would think, forever contributing to my wonderful sense of direction...) But, it had straight stretches, and it, eventually, if you went far enough South, would lead you to the crossroads of Robert Johnson fame.  The terrain all through town was strange, up and down, hills and valleys in stark contrast to the Midwest plain states surrounding us..as if it defied gravity.   It added to the spookiness, particularly at night, as you could rarely see around corners or up and down hills.  The scientific answer to this phenomenon was no less poetic: earthquakes.  We were on the San Madras fault line, and the land showed the trauma: some wit named our "city" "Little San-Francisco".

Hop Hollow is also where you could get easy crossover status as a badass in Alton, if you dared: the rite of passage involved your Daddy's car.  Or any car; most of us had our daddies'.   You entered Hop Hollow from the top of one hill, which immediately dropped straight down, then rose rapidly uphill, to exit at the top of the opposing, equally high hill.  It was a rush to teeter your car on the brink of one hill, in neutral, and let the car drop...you were not allowed to touch the brakes....until you got to the top of the opposite hill.  Of course this had to be done at night, ideally a moonless night.  Some brainless friend of the devil once added this to the mix, and it became part of the ritual.  Regardless of the time of year, cold or no, you had to open all the windows, so you could take in  all the night sounds of owls, crickets, batwings, lonely riverboat foghorns,...turn off the radio, which , in my world was probably blasting Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or maybe Jeff Beck..from KADI or KSHE.  Then.....put out the lights.  Take in the sounds of night , for suspense.

Throw the gear into neutral.  Detach your foot from the brake, and keep your hand well away from the handbrake...

At 13 I had performed this ritual too many times in the backseat of someone else's car.  But I knew it didn't truly count for points in heaven until I was the driver.  I think I had a reputation for being a bit of a Prince Hal...hung around a certain element for the vicarious thrills, but only observed their dirty deeds, cheaply done.  All my friends smoked, but I did not.  ( I didn't acquire that habit until I was 27, and immediately became a pack a day girl--which I have since quit.)  So one star-filled night, I took my Dad's yellow Volkswagon, my friend Barb, and the Twins, Doug and Dennis, to Hop Hollow.  Now in my mind's ear a revered punk song was playing on the radio,9353's "Famous Last Words"---

"It's okay/ It's not loaded/ I'm a good driver/ don't worry, honey...",

But in reality that song didn't exist yet.
What about Iggy Pop?
"Well, I am your crazee driver--I'm sure to steer you wrong.."

  Nope, don't think we had that one yet either, although it existed,  but  not on KSHE.  A little magical realism.  Anyway, we woulda had to turn it off, according to the ritual.  I believe some alcohol was probably coursing through my veins as well.

 What if there's someone on the other hill, getting ready to do the same thing?  Aww, what's the chances of that?   Put out the lights..and then, put out the lights....

Naw.  We survived that night, although my heart was pounding like a big bass drum.  What a dope.  I now know I have a weird heart condition, an arrhythmia, and when my heart gets going too fast, it shuts down and I faint.  When I was 13 it happened to me in study hall, where I was clandestinely reading The Exorcist, got to the crucifux scene, and fainted.  What if I had fainted that night, with three other people's lives in my hand?  Ah,  Catholic guilt, it stays with you long after the last time you light a candle.  Unfortunately, some kids in my brother's class, four years later, weren't so lucky--was it the 13th?  Exactly everyone's greatest fear, two cars at once with the same destructive idea, but they didn't hit the way we imagined, at the bottom of the hill.  One car turned over into a ditch in the woods, and crushed the occupants.

That winter, Doug was driving all of us; I was back in the backseat.  It had been snowing, we had been imbibing.  Soundtrack?  The Feelies: "Loveless Love."  It had already snowed so there was icepack on the road, but a new layer had been building foot high drifts.  Doug says slurrily, in his Monty Python voice," Let's drive like we're in England!!" I started to get a queasy feeling, in the backseat..hey, I'm not in control: how do I stop this?  He switches lanes on the two lane road, accelerates, and within five seconds we were in a skid.  In 45 seconds we were in a snow drift ditch, the stationwagon was stuck good.  I wasn't 13 anymore.

And I haven't even had a chance to tell you about Lover's Leap, or The Twilight Zone.