My dad built our house in the middle of nowhere. Well, at least in 1978 it was the middle of nowhere. Which was perhaps for the best, given my family golfed M-80s off the cliff overlooking the Puget Sound, and we owned fifteen to twenty guns at any given time.
No, that’s not an exaggeration. We once counted them. Because that’s what you do in the country – count your guns. And shoot them at random objects, not that we did, of course. Well, maybe we did. But let’s skip over that.
Many of my relatives were, uh, hmmm, well…unique. “A real character“, as my mom dubbed them.
Such as – my aunt, who lived in a single wide trailer that had a big hole in the floor just in front of the toilet. You could see the gravel road beneath while doing your business. And you had to straddle the hole very carefully or risk falling in, all while sitting on an icy toilet seat in the winter.
Or – my cousin kept stealing grandma’s VCR to sell for drug money. Then one day, my grandma was fed up with that nonsense. So, she burst into his house, ‘madder than a hornet’, and beat him up with a 2×4.
Yes. A 2×4. Once again, I’m not exaggerating. There was a very solid reason all the cousins called her ‘Grandma Dragon.’
As I grew up, many termed our family by the usual slanders – white trash, rednecks, and whatever else was popular.
Now, let’s fast forward to years later, and the un-built raw plots of land by my parent’s home were being purchased. Trees were cleared, and fancier (than ours) new homes were being built along our road. At that point, the state finally noticed us in the middle of nowhere, and decided it was time for rules – such as a stop sign on our road where there hadn’t been one before.
My dad was absolutely incensed about it. He would grumble and moan and complain endlessly.
One evening when I was near sixteen, he picked me up from work. My parents loved that my new gig was at a local restaurant. They came early to get me from my shift, and waited in the bar. Then, more often than not, I was the one that drove them home instead of the other way around. But, we’ll quietly skip past that, too.
That night, Dad stopped at the shiny, new stop sign, grumbling and growling about it. To my surprise, he put his restored ’34 Ford truck into park, and got out. It was dark, and the head lights bathed him in yellow as he proceeded to kick the new stop sign down. He’d also likely had a bit too much rum and coke, which assuredly didn’t help his decision making skills.
I gasped in shock and said, “Dad, you shouldn’t do that.”
He said, “I ain’t ever stopped here before and I ain’t gonna stop here now.”
He threw the stop sign into the back of the truck. At home he dropped it in the corner of his large garage.
The county responded quickly to my father’s drunken vandalism by installing a new stop sign.
And my dad grumbled, and kicked that one down too, and filled in the hole, saying, “That’ll stop ‘em.”
I said, “You’re going to get into trouble with the police.”
He ignored me. Again.
The state put a new one up just a bit to the right of that filled hole.
And my dad kicked it down too.
I would sit there, tired from my night of bussing tables at work, arms crossed, and watching as my dad worked in the headlights to kick yet another stop sign down. Okay, to be honest – Mostly I cringed low in the seat, hoping nobody I knew from high school drove by and saw my drunk father vandalizing county property.
So, my dad kept kicking the stop signs down, and a new one would appear, and so on and so forth – you get the idea. It was the new cold war, waged between my dad and the local township.
Many months later, just before Halloween, my mom ventured into dad’s garage for some unknown reason, because she never, ever, went in there. And she went apoplectic when she saw there were 12 stop signs piled up on the floor.
She lost it – lecturing Dad, and yelling at him and wailing about how it was illegal, and “What was he thinking!” She berated him repeatedly.
Though, never mind that a lot of time had passed with this going on, and me mentioning it to her, and she’d never paid attention. But, we’ll quietly skip past that, too.
Then Mom turns to me and my brother, and says, “You two need to get rid of those stop signs.”
Because, Good Parenting 101 definitely teaches one to make the parent’s bad choices a problem for the children to solve. It’s the natural order.
I sighed heavily. “Mom. Do we have to?”
“Yes!”
At this point, it should be noted that this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.
Such as not long before that, my mom came home from the grocery store with a brand new carton of a dozen and half eggs. She handed the carton to me and my brother, and said, “I want you to go egg the neighbor’s car.”
She didn’t mean a nice car parked in their driveway. She meant the old, beat up car our neighbor had left by the gravel road, ‘near’ish’ to their driveway where it broke down. The weeds were taking it over at that point. Mom groused about it every time we drove by.
My brother and I had sighed heavily then as well. “Do we have to?”
“Yes!”
“But why?”
And then she pulled out the parent trump card. “Because I said so.”
Children had no recourse then. So we capitulated, and walked down the gravel road to the neighbor’s car to do our assigned chore. We egged the car very lackadaisically, as if putting dishes away, and walked home with the empty carton under one arm, the required deed done.
And here we were again – two teenagers trying to get our parents to behave better, and not only would they not listen to us, but we were expected to dispose the evidence of their crimes.
Now there was a huge pile of stop signs my dad had accrued, and mom wanted me and my brother to solve his, her, problem. Never mind if we got caught by the authorities with all those signs. It wasn’t like my dad would have stepped forward and said, “Oh, that was actually my fault.” No way.
My brother and I chatted, and we finally decided we’d deal with the stop signs on Halloween, because, well, when else was one to participate in mindless and senseless mayhem if not on Halloween?
On the night of All Hallows’ Eve, we piled the stop signs into Dad’s ’34 Ford truck, and I drove off with my brother riding shotgun. Looking back, it wasn’t exactly the ideal getaway car, considering it was probably the only one like it in the entire state. Then again, Dad had dropped a souped up drag racing motor under the hood. So, on second thought, it was a good getaway car after all.
We drove it to the house of a girl in town who my brother said was ‘mean‘ to him. I didn’t even know her. But, she’d picked on my bro, so as far as I was concerned, she was public enemy #1. Cause that’s what you do in the country – you protect your kin.
We parked down the road from her home late that night, and then we tip-toed with the stop signs to her front-yard, one-by-one. We placed each sign very quietly on the grass, covering it in them. Then we threw some toilet paper over their tree for good measure. Finally, it was time for the coup de grâce. We blew their pumpkin up with an M-80.
Because, yes, of course my dad would buy mini-dynamite for his kids to play with. Doesn’t every respectable house give young, impressionable, children mini-dynamite?
My dad secretly hoped and dreamed that we’d grow up to be one of the Blues Brothers, or a CIA assassin, or something equally cool that used a lot of guns and explosives and made things go ‘boom’. And my brother was kind of okay with that scenario. He still is to this day. My dad even gave us tennis-ball bombs one year. But, we’ll quietly skip past that, too.
My brother lit the M-80 off, tossed it into the pumpkin, and we ran.
Pumpkin guts splattered all over their front-door.
The next time my brother rode the bus with this girl, he said she moaned on and on about the ‘hooligans‘ who’d accosted their home on Halloween with stop signs and toilet paper and explosives. There, apparently, was much debate and discourse on the school bus about how someone got 12 stop signs, which was a rather large number.
And my brother just sat there, smiling a wide wicked grin only rivaled by Bart Simpson. “Really? Wow. How horrible. I wonder who did it.”
Now, don’t judge us; look at our role models. My parents literarily required we do it. Well. Maybe not the toilet paper and M-80. But, we’ll quietly skip past that, too.
So, then, what is the moral or point to this memoir, besides M-80s are excellent weapons for pumpkin destruction?
It’s simple: When your sixteen year old and fourteen old children are both seriously questioning your (the parent) life decisions and choices and behaviors, you really ought to listen to them.