You can't trust kids

Looking back from a perspective of four or five decades, it always seems to me that until about the tenth grade I had a very sheltered and idyllic childhood. Then I start to really think about it. It wasn't very sheltered at all. It's just that I was a child and didn't think in terms of good, bad, right or wrong. Things just were the way they were. It was an experiential process not a judgemental one.

I remember when I was very young, there was a little gang of us boys who roamed the neighborhood. There was a little girl that always wanted to come along with us. We always told her no. She would beg, whine and cry. Finally she would take off her clothes, throw herself down spread eagle on the ground and writhe around for a little while. Jesus, I wonder what her father was doing to her at home. We usually let her tag along.

About that time, I had a friend named Ronnie, whose father had a junkyard on a commercial street a couple of blocks away. Ronnie didn't have any other friends and now that I think of it, he was about as close to a drag queen as a six year old can be. I used to like to go to his house at the junkyard. Ronnie's father would buy or take in pawn, just about anything. The house was filled with other people's treasures. You would meet the most amazing people there. There was a sailor that came in from Lemore, every weekend, to visit his electric guitar and amp. He sat on their living room couch for hours, smoking, playing country, rock and roll, and blues. He never got the axe out of hock. He was always welcome. He played good.

My kindergarten teacher was a pretty young girl. She would play the piano for us. We would lounge about on the floor around her. Sometimes she would have us sing. Sometimes just listen. I used to like to lie on my back and wriggle underneath the piano bench, until I could look up her skirt. Some girls giggled so loudly one time, she caught me and I spent the rest of the day standing in the corner. She didn't seem to carry a grudge though.

I always remember starting to drink at fifteen and smoke at seventeen. That's not true though. Those were the ages at which I started to smoke and drink all the time. When I was six or seven, two kids lived across the street from me named Denise and her little brother Terry. Their stepfather drove beer truck. Whenever he was home he and usually several friends were always drinking beer, he stole it off the truck. The empties always went into a washtub sink in the garage, to be rinsed out later. We would drink the dregs. You could get a little buzz. In the third grade, there was a kid in my class named Corky Morrow. His parents always had him mix drinks for them in the evenings. It was considered a hip thing to do. Corky started to bring a thermos of drinks to school in his lunch box. His parents liked Bourbon, so we got Old Fashioneds, Manhattans and Rusty Nails, icy cold, every day with lunch, for most of that year. Afternoons were very relaxed, in the third grade. I remember sharing cigarettes with Kent Bascomb in the fourth grade. He always had a pack. He said they never bothered you, if you bought them from the machines at gas stations. He was right. Now that I think about it, I smoked quite a bit, right along, from a very early age, maybe even at Ronnie's junkyard.

I always considered myself honest but I used to steal as a child. I never considered it stealing unless it was from an actual person. I would never steal a candy bar from Chappy's liquor, because Chappy owned the store and I knew him. It was alright to steal one from the Thriftimart though, because that was a big company and I did, all the time. I used to steal liquor from Sav-on Drugs, before I was old enough to pretend I was old enough to buy it. It's never a good idea to try and get adults to buy liquor for you. A friend of mine's father once promised to buy me a bottle each of MacGregor Scotch and Smirnoff Vodka. He took the money and all he brought back for us, was a gallon jug of cheap Red Mountain wine. He bought liquor for himself with the money. He said we were too young to drink hard liquor. What an asshole. You can't trust adults.