When we lived on 8th Street
I was just down the road a couple blocks south of Andy's house(yes, that Andy). Andy was about my height. He had blonde hair. He
was overweight like myself. Many times people confused me for him.
It was annoying.
I'd come over to Andy's to play often,
and sometimes he'd come to my place to play. Andy had a trampoline,
he had lots of Nintendo games, he had microwavable fried chicken from
Sam's Club for snacks, and he had Buster the three-legged dog. None
of that matters for this story.
Found it odd how he spoke to his
parents. He didn't call them mom and dad. It was Denise and Clark.
Briefly influenced by this, I tried calling my dad Joe and mom Angie.
They weren't having it and threatened to whoop my butt. That's what
I think most kids would expect. As I've stated in previous posts
though, every family is different and I should not judge, whatever
works for yourself is what you should go with.
 |
| Dad playing pool. Around 1976. |
Andy also had a pool table. Neither
of us were any good. What 3rd grader is really good at
pool? But we were competitive. One time Andy called me out for
hitting his striped ball before getting my solid in the hole. “It's
not allowed” “yes it is!” He told me it's not, he read the
rules. Then my big whopper, “Well, my dad wrote the rule book so I
should know.” My dad was good at pool, winning the occasional
tournament. But he sure as hell didn't write a book. And Andy sure
as hell didn't buy into my lie. It was the dumbest lie I had told
until in the 7th grade I told people that Super Dave
Osborn was my uncle. They didn't buy into that either.
Once at my place we went into the back storage shed . We found hidden inside my dad's
old army stuff a deck of playing cards. These weren't ordinary
playing cards though. They had nudies on them. They were dirty
cards. We sat on my dad's weight bench and played strip poker. Just
the two of us playing 3-card draw deuces wild. We felt like rebels.
We were so bad.
That summer Andy invited me to join
him at church for vacation Bible school. I don't recall any
particular evangelizing or learning anything. I only remember
oriental trading post prizes for behaving. I also remember Andy
whispering at me about the cards. I had given him a couple. See, it
wasn't about poker. It never was. It was about seeing naked women.
I was so embarrassed. I didn't really know much about God, but I
knew naked women were bad. I shushed Andy but he'd keep bugging me
about it. I relented and promised to give him more.
I don't know if my befriending Billy and later Bryce faded our friendship,or if he
got tired of me, or maybe his folks discovered the cards and he
squealed on me, but we rapidly separated as compadres. We would just
become schoolmates after that, outside our mutual “membership” in
the itty-bitty-titty committee a few years later. I can't really
recall much about that other than the fact it was a thing for a few
days or a week.
Eventually all the cards disappeared
and the weather was too cold to pay in that storage shed. Like
“Girls Gone Wild” looking at naked women actually can get old
and tired. School would take up my time and things like the Little
Dribblers basketball league would take up my free time not involving
Bryce. Andy and I had separate groups of friends and interests. I
still loved Nintendo and frozen chicken but wasn't too heavily
invested in our friendship to be all that interested in figuring out
what happened and how to repair it. Or maybe I was just increasingly
annoyed with strangers calling me Andy.
### |
| I'm guessing this pic of me showing off my fashion prowess (ahead of it's time) was from about 1990. Probably a year before these events. |
If I were to pick a single song to represent this post it would be....
Comments
Post a Comment