Bryce Adventures Pt 1: Mischief at the fairgrounds

A fifteen minute walk. A less than five minute bike ride. That's what separated Bryce's house from mine. That's nothing. It's not even considered across town in Bonham whose population at the time was about seven thousand strong. This was where Schlumberger, the VA and General Cable were the big employers. Before Bonham got a big Super Walmart and not one but two prisons. Hell, before Bonham even had a McDonalds. Those places would help swell the population to the over ten thousand folks that reside there today. Bryce and I were practically neighbors.

We both loved Ninja Turtles, Legos, basketball, rap music and most importantly, Nintendo. Yeah. Our friendship was solid. He was an only child raised by a single mom. Connie was like an awesome aunt to me. And I loved Bryce like a brother. His grandmother lived with him a few years. She basically served as his adult supervision when his mom was at work in an assisted living facility as a nurse. His grandmother liked me. I always made the honor roll. She felt I would make a good example for him, that I would tutor Bryce. Ha! I hated homework! No way in hell was I helping him with work if I didn't do my own work outside of school.

Neither of us was great at basketball. We were above average though. He was probably a little better than me. I was tall and pretty much a center or power forward. I cleared the boards. Bryce was short and handled the rock. We'd play horse, I guess we were equal shooters. We'd come up with plays to run. These were junk because it was just the two of use. We'd pretend we were on the Charlotte Hornets or the Orlando Magic. We loved NBA Jam. When we played we'd be Shaq & Penny or Larry “Grandmama” Johnson & Alonzo Mourning and pretend to be them on the court. I loved the Dallas Mavericks but they were awful. Nobody ever pretended to be Jim Jackson & Terry Davis.

Bryce's mom made more money than my parents, and she just had one kid. I had two siblings. Him and his mom were by no means rich but he had more things than me. I had often thought of him as spoiled but he didn't have an obscene amount of things. He was down to earth. We never had a lot of classes together for some reason. I really only remember us being in band together in the sixth grade. He gave trumpet a shot but it didn't stick. We both had Mrs. Crossland in the 8^th grade and freshman year we had Mrs. Youree in theater class. We hung out after school a few times a week for several years though. Friday and Saturday would feature one of us staying the night at the other's house. We would have Lego contests usually at his house because he had more Legos. We would stay up super late playing video games. We would usually rent games from Hayes House of Video on the square or we'd go to TNT Video, also on the square. This was a unique place that also sold furniture. This was one of those mom and pop places that had a separate room for adult videos. Sneaking a peak in there was a rite of passage. It was just so cool because they had posters hanging up that no young boy should see. Yeah, boobs.

Bryce got a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo before I ever got one. We rented so many games. Super Ghouls N' Ghosts was crazy hard. We rented Mega Man games all the time. I sucked at those games but Bryce was a beast. We played Turtles in Time a lot and Final Fight.  Super Contra was also a huge draw for us. Those games were amazing. They don't make them like that anymore. We mastered a game called WWF Royal Rumble. You and the other player pick a wrestler. Every few moments another wrestler would come to the ring. The object is to throw another guy over the ropes to the floor. My favorite wrestler was Bret the Hitman Hart. Bryce's was Razor Ramon. Our technique was brilliant. I would grab a wrestler as he entered and whipped him to the other side of the ring where Bryce waited and hip tossed him over the top. We did this over and over until the entire roster was exhausted and there were only two left. Free for all baby. Bryce went from being my partner to my sworn enemy.

Without question the top two games for us were Mortal Kombat and the aforementioned NBA Jam. He was so much better than me at MK. Subzero and Scorpion were without a doubt the best fighters. We would beat Shang Tsung and Goro over and over and over. Years later we watched the Mortal Kombat movie. While the music was cool it was a shitty movie.

 Goro went down like a bitch.

NBA Jam and all its versions and sequels were a fixture for us for years. We typically played on the same team. Of course we loved the Magic and Hornets best, but the Super Sonics were also good, they had Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp (though Detlef Schrempf was always a favorite of mine, him being German and all). We didn't really watch very much basketball on TV but we sure loved our NBA Jam, and collecting basketball cards.

Bryce and I had a system for acquiring basketball cards. We bought packs, sure, but getting your favorite players was often a daunting task. I didn't just collect basketball cards, I also collected baseball cards, particularly those of my all time favorite player Barry Bonds. At one point before selling 99% of my cards, I had over 2,000 Barry Bonds cards. Anyway, our system was simple. It worked with Pogs as well.

I'm not saying I'm proud of it, but hell, it happened and I'm not gonna say I lost sleep over it. My house was near the fair grounds. Every weekend after the first Monday of the month the fairgrounds hosted a flea market affectionately know as Trade Days. For a town like Bonham, this was a big event. Tons of vendors. Food trucks. Lots of junk available for procurement. The process of obtaining the object of our desire was rather simple. The seller typically sat or stood behind a table. The cards were displayed on the table. One of us would pick up a handful of cards and look through them. Oops. We dropped the cards. No problem. Pick up the cards. Put the card you want in one hand, put the rest in the other and return the rest to the table. No harm no foul. It was simple. It was stupid. But we were never caught and confronted about it.

One time at Walmart, before Bonham was blessed with a super center, we took part in a free throw shooting contest. This was back in the day with Walmarts had food trucks in the front that sold corn dogs and popcorn. Next to that they had a basketball goal set up. I was first. They asked my age and raised the goal to ten feet. I did well enough to get third place at the time. Third place won a free basketball or something. I never got a call back, so some asshole knocked me out of contention.

Bryce was next. He is actually younger than me by about nine months, and yet he lied and said he was even younger. Being short has its perks I guess. They lowered the goal for him to eight feet. That sucker got first place and a free basketball goal. He ended up getting his neighbor to let him put it up in his driveway because he didn't have a great place for a goal at his house. Now we had something else we could do without having to ride all the way to the parks by LH Rather to shoot hoops.

Around the corner of the church down the street from Bryce's house was a creek directly North of a government housing complex. It was a decent sized creek that ran under the road. We called this our sewer. It was a drainage outlet or something. We would crawl in there like the Ninja Turtles and we could go through tunnels under the road across the street. Probably not safe. Definitely disgusting. To this day I'm rarely sick. I credit hanging out in the sewers with strengthening my immune system. One time, I swear, there was a dead catfish in mint condition in one of the pipes. It was so weird. At the time though it was like, “Cool, so what?” We didn't really do that much in there, it was just something to do. So much of my life at this time was filled with the quest to fill my time.

Beavis and Butthead was a cultural phenomenon.

Boys aged 8 to 25 loved that shit. Bryce would be Butthead and I was Beavis. Not that I was his sidekick, it was our haircolor mainly that dictated our roles when we were messing around. He had dark hair and I was blonde. On at least one occasion we actually played frog baseball. Frogs weren't abundant, but not exactly hard to find in a damp field by his house. He found a frog and I was the batter. He threw a strike and I missed. Again and I missed. It was his turn to try and I tossed that poor bastard underhanded and boom. Bryce whacked that son-of-a-bitch so hard. It was like a ball of flesh flying in slow motion with a single twitching leg, destination anywhere but here (lyrics stolen from a Rise Against song). Yeah, this was cruel and probably more than a little evil. We were influenced by a controversial juvenile show and were unsupervised. This made for a horrible combination. We truly were Beavis and Butthead.

There was one summer where we literally slept at one another's house like five nights a week. Loneliness and boredom were afflictions we were constantly vigilant of. We avoided these symptoms like the plague. During one of our long stretches of inseparability we didn't exactly practice healthy consumption habits. It felt like two weeks but probably was just four or five days. For this period of time all we drank was mountain dew. Which is funny because today Mountain Dew disgusts me.

We drank this liquid cocaine and stayed up until 1 or 2 AM. We played games or watched TV and whatever was on USA Up All Night if it was Friday or Saturday. We'd try to go all night but always crashed before 3 AM. And then we'd sleep until noon. What we ate wasn't any better than the Dew. We had gotten a huge pack of Rolos. Rolos are individually wrapped chocolate covered caramel ecstasy. We popped those things as snacks all day. They made perfect compliments to our primary source of sustenance—microwave burritos. That's right. Bryce and I nourished our bodies nearly a week with nothing but Mountain Dew, chocolate candy and meat and beans wrapped in a flour tortilla zapped on high for 90 seconds. Strictly a carb diet for us. Back before anybody knew what the hell a carb was. We had plenty of energy to run across town and make trouble. This trouble usually manifested at the fair grounds.

Bryce and I had at least two and a half near run ins with police at the fairgrounds. On the south end of the fairgrounds where Billy cut his foot there is a creek that runs under highway 56. We went under the highway and ended up in what felt like a cavernous ten foot ditch. In there there were fresh water clams. I had never seen these before. We kept grabbing them and just throwing them hard at stuff. Trees, rocks, the ground, whatever. We were destructive rascals. This creek was heavily wooded and felt so secluded. Then a youngish man called on us. He claimed to be a cop. We didn't believe him and he offered to show his badge. I said, “Nah, that's OK,” but Bryce was bold and called his bluff. The guy was so high up and flashed his badge so fast we didn't really see it. I doubt he was a cop but we played it safe and climbed out and headed to my house.

One night it was really late and we snuck out of my bedroom window. We walked to the fairgrounds because why the hell not? There are recreated cabins, a replica life sized fort, a tiny-assed lame amphitheater. When we got bored we decided to head back home. We took a different route that went by the Sam Rayburn Library which is right next to the fairgrounds. We saw a cop car round the corner and panicked. Oh shit! It's past city curfew! We dove and hid behind some tall cedar trees on the side of the road. The police car drove by and it was really nothing but it was so fun and scary. What a rush. We were fugitives! Only nobody was chasing us.

There is a pavilion on the fairgrounds. We were there one time and as usual nobody else was there. This place was cool, why was it always abandoned? We grabbed some rocks and busted out some light bulbs in the pavilion. It was surprisingly easy to do. Again we were bored and made our way to the pay phone. We joked around and called 911 thinking nothing would happen. After all, we didn't put any quarters in it. Only something did happen. Dispatch answered and we hung up the phone and decided to get the hell out of Dodge. We didn't run or anything, just made our way out gingerly. Until a cop approached us.

The officer asked if we called 911. We lied and said “no.” He said, “Well somebody did,” again we lied. He asked if we knew anything about the busted bulbs. Shit. “No officer” He asked if we were sure and we feigned ignorance. He knew we were lying but what was he gonna do?

We were a couple of kids up to no good. We weren't bad kids. We never did anything really bad. We were just consumed with the quest of always having something to do. After Bryce moved to the other side of town, our devilish misconduct would continue...

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My brother Johnathan and me. 1992

If I had to pick a single song to be the soundtrack of this post it would be...