Dream Come True

A little over 25 years ago I was living in a one bedroom apartment with this crazy chick from Ohio. She was a junior at the University of South Alabama and was thus entitled to rent a dumpy house in a dilapidated area from the school. When my lease at the apartment expired we decided to move into university housing. The price was right.

One morning after we’d been in the house for a couple of weeks we were up and doing what we did every morning we didn’t have to be anywhere — smoking pot and drinking coffee with Kahlua. For some reason I happened to remember a strange dream I’d had the night before and I told her about it. I don’t remember any of the particulars of the dream, or her reaction to it. That was 25 years and many scorched neurons ago. The gist was that we’d had our power cut off (in the dream).

A few minutes later, while we were still sitting around doing nothing, someone knocked on the door. To our shock, and indeed awe, it was a guy from Alabama Power. He was there to yank our meter, the net effect of which would have put us in the dark. We hadn’t even gotten our first bill yet, much less neglected to pay it. My girlfriend and the power guy got on the phone with the office and tried to sort the situation out. It proved to be a clerical mistake having to do with transferring the account, and its deposit, from my name to my girlfriend’s name when we’d moved a couple of weeks back. It was a fluke thing and one of which I was totally unaware, at least consciously, until the power dude knocked on our door.

I vaguely recall another strange dream come true sort of deja vu experience from my childhood, but that was so long ago it’s very sketchy. At any rate, strange shit happens.

Big, Bigger, Biggest

Way back in the day, circa ‘81, me and my best running buddy hung out in a biker bar called the Sahara. I don’t know why the bikers put up with us. Maybe because we bought ludes and acid from them. They even protected us upon occasion. As diminutive and stupid as we both were, those occasions weren’t all that rare. Mostly, though, we just chased girls and drank too much. We were harmless to everyone but ourselves.

At some point I began to notice my buddy dancing with large women. Stupid attractive women have always really liked him, so I didn’t understand his behavior. He explained that he liked dancing with fat girls because it made them feel good. Sounded good to me. I forgot about it.

Then one morning he called and informed me that he’d woke up with “a cow” in his bed. The good news, he told me, was that when he’d taken her home (home to her house) he’d met her two good-looking roommates. He assured me I’d soon appreciate his taking one for the team.

A few days later my bud and I were waiting in the parking lot of some apartments while another dude went in to buy some weed. Suddenly my buddy slid way down in the seat, kind of like a jack-in-the-box in reverse. “The cow!” he whispered. Just then two big girls, well into the two hundred pound range, came lumbering by.

I was horrified. “Oh man, you didn’t” I said.

“No, no man. Those are the good-looking roommates”. He peeked over the dash and pointed. “There’s the cow.”

Naked Tornado Drill

Once upon a time in the early ’90s I caught a “love” piece on a morning talk show. Two young women who’d penned a book were describing signs that a relationship was in trouble. They advised men that when their girlfriends no longer come to bed in the nude, things aren’t looking good. I almost certainly scoffed at the information. For some reason, though, I still remember the tidbit.

In the late ’90s I was living in Germantown, Tennessee. That’s where rich and wannabe-rich Memphians tend to live. (I was neither but that’s another series of posts.) It’s also where lots of tornadoes of the deadly variety seem to touch down. I lived there between ‘93 and ‘99 and in that time tornadoes killed people in Germantown on at least two occasions.

One night in the Spring of ‘98 the tornado sirens woke me from a sound sleep. Germantown’s tornado history and the fact that my room had several large windows inspired me to climb from bed and seek shelter in the hall. I remember feeling a flash of concern for my girlfriend and our tiny basset hound puppy.

I found the puppy in my girlfriend’s lap. She was seated on the floor in the hall, riding the storm out, such as it was. I remember being mildly amused that she’d chosen to save the puppy, but hadn’t bothered to wake me. A smarter man might have suspected, then and there, that something was wrong with “us”. She was even wearing a cotton nightie. I didn’t get it though, until some months later when she summarily ejected me and the by then hefty hound from her life. Live and learn.

Hank Williams and Uncle Homer

The summer of 1976 found me preparing to enter high school and the ninth grade. Actually, I wasn’t preparing for it. It was just inevitable. I was probably nervous but I really don’t remember.

About the time my Babe Ruth baseball season ended my paternal grandmother’s Aunt Marion died. I didn’t know Aunt Marion. I lived in Mobile and she, like most of my father’s people, lived in Butler County, Alabama. My father came down from Memphis to take my grandmother to the funeral and I ended up going along.

There’s only one way to describe Butler County, and that’s rural. I’d been through there a few times over my 14 years, but never enough to forge anything remotely resembling a relationship. I wouldn’t have recognized any of my relatives from up there had I passed them on the street. Still wouldn’t. Such is the world I live in.

Only a couple of things stand out from that visit over 30 years ago. After the funeral, we went to visit “Uncle Homer”. He was one of my recently-departed grandfather’s older brothers and the physical resemblance to Granddaddy was striking. His wife let us in and chatted with Dad and Grandmama for a time. The old man never so much as acknowledged our presence. “Uncle Homer” was engrossed in a professional wrestling match he was watching on a portable black and white television. He spit tobacco juice in a coffee can. Part of me thinks he was playing a fiddle, but I’m not certain about that. From time-to-time he would roar with laughter at the antics of the fake wrestlers. He never looked at me. It was surreal. It may also have been alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, or dementia, but I hadn’t been introduced to those yet.

Later we went over to visit one of Dad’s cousins. He had a modern house and a bunch of hotrods all over the yard. While Dad and Grandmama visited with the adults, I adjourned to the bedroom of one of the kids who was about my age. We were both interested in music and swapped a few licks on his acoustic guitar. Peter Frampton was all the rage that summer, but my cousin had never heard of him! He’d never heard of any of the bands I was into. It’s entirely possible he’d never heard of rock-n-roll. For him, Hank Williams was still the one and only, even though he’d been dead since 1953!

You’d have had to have been there I guess.