1997.. First part of first draft

I turned 11 in the summer of 1977, between 6th and 7th grade. Jimmy Carter was President. Star Wars had just come out. And Elvis only had a few weeks left to live. That same summer, Mom married her 4th husband Buddy, and we all moved to a house. Before that, Buddy had been staying with his Mom, and my Mom, my brother and I were in a government subsidized townhome where we had lived for 3 years. The new house was in a different school district, but Mom said it would be easy for me since I was going from elementary to junior high anyway and there would be tons of people who didn’t know each other. My brother Chris would have to be the new kid in third grade at his school, but again, Mom said it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, because who really knows very many people when you’re 8 years old. In the new neighborhood we were on the last street, as far back in the subdivision as you could go, which meant there were woods and a big empty field behind our house. And if you hiked through the woods a little ways you would find a creek, where you could catch “crawdads” and then further along, a train track. Walk along the train track a little bit and you would end up in the parking lot of a little convenience store, next to a 2 lane highway. Over the years, I’d hike there many times, either alone or with friends, and get candy bars, Dr. Pepper and stuff like that. This was a whole new world for me. The place we moved from was called Hocker Heights and it was what some would call “the projects,” with a bunch of asphalt lots between apartments and townhomes, where we’d play kickball, or hide and seek, or have wheelie contests on our bikes. Right up the hill from our townhome was a big crumbling asphalt tennis / basketball court surrounded by a mostly broken chain link fence. There were poles where fabric tennis nets were supposed to go, but the fancy nets had been stolen or destroyed or something, because when I was there, they were also made of chain link, just like the fence around the court. There were basketball goals, but again, no nets. No one EVER played tennis OR basketball. I remember there being broken glass up there also, so it wasn’t even a good place to ride your bike. There were definitely no nearby trails through woods or a creek, or even a railroad track. There was a community pool within walking distance, but that cost money, so we didn’t go there often. We spent a lot of time after school and in the summer riding bikes or skateboards, and basically getting up to no good, like throwing rocks at buses when they passed and then running to hide behind bushes and buildings, or knocking on the doors of the houses at the end of the complex and again, running to hide behind bushes and buildings. The most DARING knock and dash was if you went into one of the apartment buildings and rang a doorbell on the 3rd floor. Because a person could open their door before you made it all the way down 3 flights and they’d look over the balcony and yell at you. In the new neighborhood, no one knocked and dashed, or threw rocks or anything. There were no buses going by anyway. I met Troy, Joel, the 2 Steves - Steve Holler and Steve Birdsong and some other kids whose names I can’t remember. With Troy and Steve Holler, I began what would be a tradition for several years - playing the board game RISK at Troy’s dining room table, listening to music and eating junk while Troy’s mom was at work. When we started, it was ACDC High Voltage on the cassette player, but I remember we also ended up listening to Rush All the World’s A Stage and REO Speedwagon, A Decade of Rock and Roll, and some KISS records. Troy’s little sister, Tracy, would stand around and watch us play while she ate Doritos and kept saying ACDC was disgusting and her Mom wouldn’t want us to listen to them. She would put their Mom’s records on the console turntable in the living room and Troy would turn up the volume on the cassette player to drown out the music from the living room, but in between songs from High Voltage, we’d catch quick flashes of Bob Seger, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne or Eagles. (Side note: The band name is Eagles, not THE Eagles. Glenn Frey told the story of telling someone the name he came up with and he would say “Eagles,” and they’d say “the Eagles,” and he’d say, “No, man, just EAGLES. You don’t need the the.”) I knew all this other music, from my OWN Mom’s record collection, and from riding around in Buddy’s van, where he would play Eagles greatest hits on the 8 track player and it would loop and keep playing over and over, like the never ending soundtrack to every day of my life. Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing any other 8 track tapes in Buddy’s van. Ever. For those who don’t know, the 8 track tape cartridge was a kind of media located between vinyl albums and cassette tapes in the media delivery timeline that would continue thru to Compact Discs and then hard disks such as Apple Ipods and Microsoft Zunes, and eventually huge server discs in the “cloud” that you access through your phone or computer or whatever. The 8 track was this huge plastic, mostly hollow box, actually in the shape of a piece of toast, with a big, brown tape scrolling through the inside and you’d shove it tape-side first into a big slot (that looked like a toaster), in your car dashboard or your home stereo console. One of the many weird things about the 8 track was that as it played, it would have to skip to the next track at some point, and it really didn’t matter to the manufacturers if that point came right in the middle of a song, and you’d hear this click, and oh yeah, it was a loud click. Now, you know how when you listen to a song over and over, every day, for a whole summer, you easily hear it playing in your head in the years to come. And you sing along, and it sounds just like it did way back then. So, to this day, when I’m singing along to certain songs from Eagles greatest hits, I will hear the CLICK in my head and be surprised that the music played smoothly right past where the click was supposed to be. But, I digress. So, now, remember we were playing RISK and listening to AC/DC on cassette and Troy’s sister Tracy was playing record albums in the living room. The tape would end side A or B and sometimes we wouldn’t be in a hurry to flip it over, and we’d listen to a whole song from the living room. If it was Bob Seger, we might listen to a few more. Rock and Roll Never Forgets. Beautiful Loser. Night Moves. Troy’s mom really liked Bob Seger. She had a lyric displayed on the living room wall above the stereo console. It was carved, or burned, I guess, into a small slice of a tree trunk, with the bark still attached around the edges. “Turn the Page,” it read. One time, the High Voltage cassette came to an end and we heard RUSH's Double Album, “All the World’s A Stage.” 2112 was so weird and so good. That album replaced ACDC as our RISK playing background music for a while. It was one of the first albums I purchased from the Columbia House Record and Tape club with my allowance or lawn mowing money. You know about the Columbia House Record club, right? Where you’d send in a penny and get 10 records, and then you’d be enrolled in a subscription. Every month they’d send you a postcard showing that month’s featured album. If you didn’t send the postcard back, they’d send the album and then you had to pay for it. It was cool. All summer, Steve Holler and I would meet up at Troy’s around 11am and the three of us would set up the RISK board and play until his Mom came home and kicked us out. One time, she came home and caught us sucking whipped topping from a can and got mad because she thought we were trying to inhale the gas to get high, but we didn’t even know about that, we were just shooting whipped cream in our mouths and washing it down with swigs of Pepsi from a shared bottle.