Me and my brother B-rad, as recounted in past tales, were
nothing but little badasses coming up in our old neighborhood. This
neighborhood was not the worst, but it wasn’t the best either. Working poor,
and racially diverse for the most part. There were some rental houses
throughout the hood, and we long-timers always liked to poke around whenever a
new family moved into a nearby lease property.
Now I must offer a brief aside to explain myself. As is the
case with many of my hoodoo, I end up looking a little badass by the time the
yarn is unspun. I had never thought of this particular incident which I am
about to relate as an embarrassing one…until I recounted it to the horrified
and confused countenances of my co-workers. “You are horrible,” “You really ARE
evil!,””You should be ashamed, taking advantage of a little kid!” That was the
general consensus from my co-workers, who I’ve since realized are really a
bunch of humorless prudes any way. But, alas, their reaction impressed upon me
that I should have been embarrassed, so after receiving that reception, I did
what any good RBR’er would do: I ran to type my newly mined shameful hoodoo
fare. So without any ado, I offer you this recounting.
One summer, we watched as what appeared to be a band of
hippies ferried their furniture into one such rental house. This “furniture”
consisted primarily of old wooden telephone cable spools (tables), a few
folding chairs, mattress and box springs, assorted milk crates full of record
albums and I assume, since they were hippies, patchouli and wicker and bongs
and Credence and such. But I digress, for this is not a dissertation into the
minimalist nature of hippie feng shui. No, no, this is a tale of the brutality
of middle-city youth and the horrors wrecked on their surrounding communities
by the specter of summer boredom. And meanness…have to throw meanness in there
somewhere.
Back to our new neighbors…we quickly noticed the Hippie
Family Robinson had in tow a young hippie. Like hungry wolves watching lambs
led through a narrow mountain pass, B-rad and I savored the opportunities that
awaited us. The hippie kid looked to be younger than us by a few years. Perfect
for manipulation. Though I have forgotten the exact age due to the advancing
march of years, I would put myself around age 12, B-rad falling somewhere
around 8 or 9. We saw the hippie kid playing in the yard a few days after his
move-in, and decided to see if he wanted to come play football with us in the
street. (Yes, in the street.)
“Well I don’t know if my mom will let me, and I don’t know
how, I’ve never played football before.” Astutely, thanks to the young hippie’s
accent, his apron-clinging and his open admission of football ignorance, we
perceived that he was most likely from the North. We were surprised to find
out, upon further interrogation, that the young man was from Louisiana. We
pronounced it “Loo-zana,” and he kept correcting us. “Lew-eez-eee-anna” he’d
say after each time we massacred the state name. Come to find out later, to
lend credence to our original supposition, his parents were from Ohio. Enough
said. We also learned that his name was Cody, which was a name fit for a
hippie, by my estimation. Hippie or a cowboy, I reckon.
Cody began to come to our house to play ball and ride bikes,
you know, the kind of stuff kids today eschew for things digital. And since he
was some bit younger than us, we began to plot against him. Not in a harsh
mean-spirited way, but rather in a more mellow mean-spirited way. We’d tell him
we wanted to play hide and seek, and let him hide first. Somewhere between the
hiding and the seeking, we’d disappear. He was persistent though, stayed hid
once for better than two hours until Mrs. Hippie blew her ram’s horn, or whatever
the hell their ilk do to signal yunguns that the dinner of tofu, bean sprouts
and kombucha awaits.
Cody ended up being a lot of fun, simply because he was so
good-natured and unassuming. Even though we’d hang him out to dry, he’d always
come back for more, never uttering a mean word, accepting the fate the “hateful
heathens that live in the curve” (that was us!) would cast down upon him. There
was the time we convinced him to jump off of our roof. Liability be damned, it
sounded like a good enough idea at the time. Plus, me and B-rad jumped off the
room all the time, no big deal. When he hit the ground, he curled into a little
pellet of crying fetal material, rolled up like a dying roly-poly after a
rainstorm. We’d just tell him, “No, no Cody, it’s alright. All Southern kids
have to do that, it’s your test. You passed! Yay!” Various “tests” provided
hours of humor through the course of my young life. And I thought kids hated
tests. Go figure.
B-rad and I had been tinkering with an idea of our own, even
before the young hippie had the misfortune of meandering into our lives. We
dreamed of the day that we would be able to one day build a human catapult. Now
granted, we were both big ole boys. Takes a good bit of grocery heft to get yunguns
like me and B-rad airborne. We constructed our device from a discarded 2x6
harvested from the wood pile behind my neighbors shop. We tried several
fulcrums: tin coffee can, unsplit
firewood, an old lawnmower motor. Finally, we settled on a hunk of rounded off
concrete, I believe it had previously been employed in holding a fence post
rigid in the ground.
Try as we did, nothing could get our big asses in the air.
We knew the catapult design was sound, but something in the physics, namely our
corn-fed, genetically-altered asses, were not built for flight of any kind. So
when we met Cody, we decided that he would be the Neil Armstrong of Larkwood
Drive, the first space traveler launched from our human catapult. Or as it
became known, the Cody-pult.
Now, young Cody was a hippie, but he was not a dumb one. He
knew that most of our enthusiastically sold bright ideas ended in some sort of
pain for him. This one was no different.
“I-I-I…I don’t know you guys,” he said. “I don’t think my
mom would like this one.”
“Ah, com’on man, don’t be a vaj,” said B-rad, ever the
diplomat. “Do it, you’ll get to be an astronaut!” You want to be an astronaut
don’tcha?”
Cody lit up. I think he saw it as a chance at greatness, or
at the very least, a chance for acceptance. Always willing to leverage the low
self-esteem of a playmate for our enjoyment, we persistently encouraged him. He
finally consented, to our delight.
Now we had our astronaut. I want to take a moment to explain
the physics of this operation in more detail. So the 2x6 was placed astride of
the concrete chunk, teeter-totter style. Like a seesaw, in other words. The
hypothesis behind our initial experiments involved B-rad standing on the launch
end, and me, since I was bigger, jumping with varying degrees of force on the
up end of the seesaw. But B-rad and I were too close in size, and he’d get a
little lift, but nothing that would launch him clear of the platform. I’d try
jumping from a chair, and once we set it up so I could jump from the roof onto
the launcher. But alas, my aim wasn’t great, so I couldn’t hit the sweet spot
from that height.
Cody was the perfect solution. He was tiny, he was all
wickets, and his participation allowed both B-rad and I to jump on the launch
end, thus doubling our thrust while reducing the weight of the payload.
Our burgeoning space program was about to leap to the next
level. If only we’d known how high that leap would be…
T-minus 10 second sto lift-off. Things were set. Cody was in
place, trembling and attempting to back out. We, in his best interest of
course, would not allow such lily-liveredness. After all, a man only gets so
many opportunities at greatness…one must seize the day!
B-rad and I took our positions, and the countdown began.
10…9…8… Cody cried out, “Guys, I-I-I…”
“3…2…1…,ignition!” We jumped down on the up end of the
seesaw, and the thrust was incredible.
At first I had looked down to mind my
foot placement on the launcher, but as Cody sailed over my head, I looked up. It
seemed to happen in slow motion, “…YOU GUYYYYSSSS!?!...” The look on his face
was one of sheer terror, as if he’d seen his hippie mama’s ghost spraying
Round-up on her beloved ruby begonias.
Let’s just say B-rad and I had not accurately forecast the
physics of our little experiment, as Cody achieved a height that, while short
of orbit, was terrifyingly close in my young eyes. Still in slow-motion, I was
already thinking of ways to explain this as an accident. One has a tendency to
exaggerate space and time when viewing it with a young mind, but I swear he was
20 feet in the air, and his trajectory created a parabola of epic proportions.
I’m no mathematician, but I didn’t have to be a NASA flight tech to see that the
splashdown of this extended and unexpected flight path would put the young
hippie into the hedge of Chinese holly bordering our back porch.
That was the first correct assessment of the situation I had
made all day. I mean, the kid’s hang time was in the 4.5’s, easily. He covered
some ground, possibly even heated up on re-entry. The wail he let out when he
crashed into the holly’s hedge of pricks (which coincidentally, is the name of
the Texas A&M booster association), was epic. Banshee-like, reverberating,
Mama Hippie-summoning. The last thing you want to do is deal with a mad mama
hippie, as they tend to be protective of their young. (Free tip, could save
your life one day. You don’t have to thank me.)
It was awesome, had it not been so horrifying. The kid had
as many pricks in him as Christina Aguilera on prom night. For the uninitiated,
aside from Pyracantha, Chinese holly is the most awful cultivar of plant ever
devised by the sick and twisted minds of horticulture (looking at you, Barn.)
Each leaf has eight spines…EIGHT SPINES! Kid looked like he got put in a figure
four leg lock by a roll of barbed wire. Cut to shreds. Battered, bruised,
broken. Nothing worse than a broken hippie, they make these weird sucking, sobbing
noises. Very off-putting.
Ultimately, we never got in any trouble for that incident. I
promised the battered astronaut that I’d include him in the weekly paper I
wrote out and distributed to neighbors. His claim to fame, The Terra-Dome’s
First Astronaut!
The moral of the story: you can’t trust the White Devil. And
hippies are not aerodynamically sound.
RTR
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