D N A "The Mountain Story" Part 1 of 2

D ‘n ‘a “the mountain”
Okay. Beckie’s friends, Rhona and her boyfriend, Chuck, arrive at this house in a small town Georgia village. She’s riding with them. She’s visiting her friends Louemmie and Gina.


They’re talking about piercings as our story opens, moving from a truck parked outside to the window and into the middle bedroom where Louemmie has just talked her sister into going first.
“Closer to God” is playing while Chuck readies Gina’s upper ear; they’re talking about facial paralysis from bad piercings. Beckie teases Gina, “little Momma,” about being the buttoned-down one, getting this done! She figures, although she has just met Rhona’s new boyfriend, everything will be cool. Beckie notices the ouija board sitting out while Louemmie comes in with something for them to drink from the kitchen. She tells them to make themselves at home now and get anything else they want themselves. Becky brings up their previous sessions on the board, which Louemmie characterizes as haunted by an idiotic spirit named Walrus, the mention of which gives Becky chills, since it has spelled out a message recently that it wants to take Becky! She then mentions that she shouldn’t even let Becky on the board, since she is not saved.
(that’s about two pages of drawings, btw, as are each of these segments)
“Don’t believe in that stuff.” Beckie scoffs.
“There!” says Chuck. “This alcohol astringent seems to be working okay, since we don’t have alcohol. The hole looks okay.”
“Yeah,” says Beckie, “except for the blood.”
“Shut U-up!” says Rhona, who steps over to Chuck’s shoulder. “Did you tell them what time we’re gonna be there, baby?”
“Yeah,” he replies, “I got time to do your friend here.”
“Well, her mom’s in the living room,” retorts Beckie, “are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Oh, she won’t mind,” Louemmie says, “whatever money we girls can work up on side is good for the whole family’s cookie jar! Ah-hah-haha!”
“Louemmie’s terrible,” Beckie says, laughing.
“So what got you into the ouija board?” Chuck asks Louemmie as they start her ear piercing.
“Oh, weird shit’s been around me as long as i can remember,” Louemmie says. He steadies her head for the piercing. “Our fans kept turning on and off mysteriously over at our house on 227---our Dad was preaching at the time, and he eventually got mad at us for turning the fans off and the house being really hot when we’d get home on Sundays...this happened more than once, and not just on Sundays, but that was what really ticked Poppa off! Heheh! Are you gonna do this, man?”
“I’m ready if you are,” Chuck replies.
“I don’t think she’s going to call him, really,” Beckie says to Rhona. “I wouldn’t! Not after embarrassing ME all over school over HIS stupidity!”
“She just didn’t know him that well,” Rhona replies.
“Yeah,” says Louemmie, “we just left that board out, I guess Gina did it. Didn’t know she’d bring friends, but that’s cool, I like knowing everyone. Well, not everyone, but –he-heh! Cough! You get me.”
“I don’t know how you’re not screaming out in pain,” says Rhona.
“I’ve got a really high threshold for pain,” says Gina.
“Not me!” says Louemmie. “Y’all gonna have to deal with it if I scream, I know I ain’t gettin’ killed but I’m a complete pussy when it comes to pain, ask Gina!”
The others laugh. Louemmie’s howls are the center of attention.
“Yeah,” replies Chuck. “Oh, I’m finished.”
“You two need to come out with us to this spot out near Coosa,” Rhona says. “It’s so pretty.”
“A picnic! Cool! “ exclaims Beckie. “At least Daddy keeps me in a car that runs, you should ride with me.”
“You know, our Dad might be able to look at your car for you,” says Gina.
“Could he really?” replies Rhona. “Seriously? My brother looked at it but he couldn’t figure it out. I mean, it needs a break job, definitely, but I don’t know why it’s cutting out. Old, I guess.”
“Oww! Huhhuhheh...Poppa Bear loves looking at stuff, especially if he gets to rescue somebody as a bonus! I can call him in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Papa! Come get this thing! I just wanna come home! Heheheh!”
“That’s pretty cool,” says Rhona.
“Why don’t you come by early tomorrow afternoon?” says Louemmie. “ I think he’ll be up...sometimes his alarm will go off for like an hour, you have to go pound on the door and yell, “Papa! Get up!’ Hahaha! I get like that, too, working dumbass late shifts for Milton. But if I ask him he’ll at least take a look at your truck.”
(A tiny devil sits next to Chuck’s ear and whispers, “man, this is your chance! You need to take this opportunity to get control of things.” There is a halo with a Vacancy sign hung inside.)
“Yeah,” says Chuck, “you should bring the board. It will completely rock. Are you a virgin? (to Gina) You seem like one. (in other direction, towards what could be any of the other three girls) No way are you a virgin...”
“You talkin’ to me, or her?” asks Beckie.
The next day, outside, the three way for the sisters in Beckie’s car (model?).
As Gina comes out the front door, her mother calls to her in the living room, and asks her to fix her “a Co-ooke.”
From the backyard, Louemmie can be heard loudly telling her father goodbye while he works in the garage, with the door open. “Be safe!” he says. “I will, Daddy,” she replies, as she walks over to car, climbs into the back seat, while Rhona and Chuck sit in the front seat.
“I got that board, too, Chuck,” Louemmie says with enthusiasm. “Your car’ll be fine where it is, Dad said he’d look at it in about an hour, while there’s still plenty of light.”
“Thanks!”
“What convinced you to buy one and figure it out?” says Chuck.
“Actually, nobody’s asked me! HAhaha!” Louemmie replies, tossing back her hair. “I think it was an incident with a swinging door, at that same house I told you about, 227? Okay, it was like, we’d ask questions, and the door would swing, like two for yes and one for no, I think. Something like that. Now this only happened the one time, and it must have been about fifteen or twenty minutes. I don’t think we ever tried it again, but I can tell u it scared the fuck out of us! Hahaha!”
“So what’s that got to do with the ouija board, then?” asks Rhona.
“We went out and bought it the next day! It may have been even THAT day, but we didn’t need the door again, we wanted more than limits of yes and no.”
“Sorry!” Gina says, running across the yard. She stops to make sure the gate locks, as Beckie cranks up the car without a hitch.
“Hits off smooth,” Chuck remarks.
“Yeah,” replies Beckie, as Gina climbs in back with her sister.
They take a right out onto highway 101, as “Operator” by Jim Croce plays on the radio, with the sisters singing along.
The next shot is on another back road, and they are engaged in conversation, which means Louemmie is saying something...
There’s another shot from Gina’s perspective Oh! We’re almost there? I didn’t even know what road we were on. I’m terrible with directions.
“I’m glad we all got together like this,” says Rhona. “It’s not easy to make good friends sometimes. You guys all went to school together, right?”
“Yeah.” (“no rain” by blind melon is playing on the radio.) Gina sings along as a joke:
“And I like watchin’ the pu-ddles gather...boogers!” (everyone’s laughing as we see car turning right.)
BECKIE: Is this Huffaker Road? This is the way to the mountain where we’re going, right?
RHONA: Is this the way to the Seven Bridges Road? I heard it’s somewhere out here in the country.
BECKIE: I hear there’s a satanic church hidden out there!
CHUCK: If you keep going down Big Texas Valley Road, you get over in Armuchee. That’s where you find
CCC Road, tucked away behind 27 North.
LOUEMMIE: Really? I didn’t know the directions, but our brother did that one. He said what they say about it is true: if you drive the six bridges on the way out there, there will be seven then on the way back. He’s smart, so somethin that didn’t make sense that he saw with his own eyes creeped him out! They went back and tried again, and it happened again!
GINA: Bubba knows some people who say they are into Satanism and other things. I think some of his friends in Rome are some pretty crazy people, but that’s just from hints, I’ve never been up to his new place. I figured, after that last time at home, he’s ready for space!
LOUEMMIE: If this is Huffaker Road, we’re actually pretty close! Yeah, I think it’s in town, that way.
GINA (leans out the window): I’m waving to him: hey, Bubba! Hahaha!
LOUEMMIE: Hope you’re having fun, miles away!
RHONA: Is he your older brother?
BECKIE: Yeah, Timothy graduated from Rockmart, too, the year before Louemmie.
RHONA: So you guys are all like a year apart?
GINA: We’re stair steps.
CHUCK: I thought y’all were twins when I met you.
LOUEMMIE: Hahah! Lot of people think so! We ARE the same age for eleven days.
GINA: Maybe I was your twin for eleven days, too! Somebody was.
LOUEMMIE: Yeah, they thought Mom was gonna have me and a boy at first. He was the first brother to move out, I guess! Hahaha! Is that awful?
BECKIE: Her parents tried every form of birth control and those kids just Kept coming. Me, I’m adopted, I wouldn’t know! Maybe someday!
RHONA: Your Mom musta liked babies! I hope she did.
GINA: Oh, that’s where I get MY love of babies! Momma used to have visions about babies---this was all family---she would have a dream about someone getting pregnant, and then she’d tell them about it, sometimes before they even knew! She would dream the sex of the baby before it was born, too---once she said it was a girl when the doctors said it was going to be a boy, and she was right! Hahaha!
RHONA: Your Mom can leave me out of her dreams for now! I’m not ready!

Got any Outlaw Theme Music? "TJ & 14"

TJ & 14

The night I’ll remember, when I look back on all the times my friend T.J. stayed over at my house, is the night he didn’t come over at all. Despite that, it was a night that was everything our entire time together was, like this evening, as I write.

His mother thought he was there. T.J. spending the night? Sure. Routine. His 14th birthday was coming up that weekend. She couldn’t do a lot to mark the occasion, but that would be something he liked, in the one place he would probably get in the least trouble. My parents didn’t drink, didn’t even smoke. As for drugs, they drug me to Church, three services a week, where partying was considered “of the devil,” probably even more cartoony in the mind of a bemused scoffer and confirmed non-church goer. It’s right there in St. Paul’s writing: “the world” will not understand.
Make no mistake, they kept me on a tight leash. These were the days when we didn’t carry cell phones, so in lieu of checking up on me, they simply forbade me go very far. Without special permission, I could only walk about a mile away from the house. “Yard dog,” as they used to say when teasing Neal down in Auburn. Even hanging out over at T.J.’s trailer in the park across the old highway over the wooded hillside deserved an informative phone call, at least. At least from there, I had more places to walk and explore, neighborhoods and countryside all along highway 53.
We lived in a trailer, too, on a piece of land my grandpa White sold my parents for a penny, just across the driveway from him, Grandma, and Aunt Linda. That was where we used to plant and pick fresh vegetables, in a garden on the other side of their old driveway, in clean country air of the foothills of Appalachia. Tomatoes, okra, corn, green beans---you name it. Everybody worked at the family hardware store, which you reached by walking across an old 2x4 plank laid over a drainage ditch through a patch of hickory bushes. You could get “switched” with one of those if you didn’t behave. Hickory Tea.

Mom & Dad could finally afford a double wide that year, so the bedroom where I spent that night without T.J. spending the night was different than the one where we spent most of our times hanging out late, continuing the same never-ending conversation we used to carry as far as the ol’ yard dog could walk and still cover myself with my peeps.


We were close because he popped up in my weekly kaliediscope classes, where you had a chance to enjoy a more creative, adult-minded version of school for a sweet while with Amy Langham and wonder Ms. Fountain. So we were two oddballs who made each other laugh.

Oh, and for any true Shannon dwellers from those days, this isn't a story about Fourteen who used to come into Shannon Supply Hardware Store, but he's pretty okay by me, too. I remember him when I was a kid, seven, eight. I used to ask Paw Paw if Fourteen would come in, or had.

Originally, his Mom, step dad, and two sisters rented a house just behind the old Model Elementary school, itself the remaining campus of the 1912 founding of Model School, across from step=dad’s mother’s house.

I envied their freedom “to be worldly.” In other words, there was porn to be sneaked and rock music to be heard. I watched “Porky’s” once when I spent the night there; I think we had to be a little sneaky to manage that one. I loved talking to his mother, without pretense, freely, like an adult, without editing or constricting my precocious and liberalized opinion, and never without laughter.

That was the place where T.J. “taped off” a copy of Born in the U.S.A., my one and only contraband album of rock music. It could’ve just as easily have been Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Aside from some songs pirated from their abbreviated form on the television show America’s Top Ten with Casey Kasem, I didn’t have my own choice of music until the wonderous clock radio came into my life, so the Boss had a wide open imagination in that savored bedtime audience. He’s inspiring the back of my mind with his hopeful new Workin’ On a Dream as I share this story with you. “Surprise, Surprise, come open your eyes” indeed. I really enjoyed my gift, specially requested of my reprobate buddy, the kid caught with cigarettes his first week on campus, about the time of his eleventh birthday.

He was a bit more able to take care of himself physically, because he was bigger, a bit tougher, and able to project enough cocky confidence, but mostly he was a lot angrier than me.

Funny, the kids who believed in Tough hung out with him anyway when I wasn’t around. I had depth perception problems in the same eye where I also sported a wondrous pea-sized cyst on my eyelid, of the type favored by sorcerers of old. Wonderful for sitting and seeing into daydream worlds, but to catch anything, or hit anything, I needed to be exposed to the Zen approach. Besides, I didn’t have anyone in the family close to me and associating with me who’d stayed in school and done athletics. Fortunately, I didn’t end up totally by myself.

The Holt was the only other guy who expressed interest in spending time with me; he and Kevin had an innocent little gang of smart alecks in Mrs. Atkins class across the hall. I’d stop at their table at lunch when I threw away my stuff from my plate, even though you were forced to sit according to class. The Holt made comic books a fad for a minute in fifth grade, though we were almost eleven and would soon be considered too old to collect Transformers by the next year.

T.J. discovered music in a big way when some of us first joined band in sixth grade. His talent at alto saxophone was becoming apparent by the end of that year. He really amazed people and by eighth grade was making All State and being asked to play with the adults at Sam Baltzer’s North Georgia Wind Ensemble, nights on Shorter College campus. Mr. Shook, our nearly retired band director, could plainly see practicing was what was holding the boy together.

One day T.J. would finally tell me, if I’d never been there, with my strict parents, stuck around the house, hoping for something so exciting as smart, rebellious T.J.’s visits, he doesn’t know how he’d have survived. It was like getting a look at Paula Hill’s ass: something to sustain the emotionally disturbed phenomena of being stuck in a school day with something pleasant to think about. But more serious.

He said, joyously, recently, I’d never have realized the things he saw, the sadness he knew, living in his Mom’s trailer. He says that saxophone talent was nothing less than an escape valve. The world of Duke Ellington & Count Basie that seemed too fine for my palette composed mostly of white Southern Gospel and stolen Top 40 pop, welcomed him in jaunty bar by bar, because that is where he went to escape emotional anguish. Maybe I thought too much of the comparison to allow myself to get much better on the saxophone. But maybe my home was also a place with so many comforts and distractions, one could be lulled into a complacency not to need more, or truly develop one’s self, depending instead on the wild distinction that made school a breeze so long as you paid attention. T.J. told me later he never doubted my parents loved me, no matter how many times I wished someone more to my taste loved me.

I went along for his vandalism sprees with his crew, the same boys who worked with him to build a hazardously toxic still, their eleven year old attempt at moonshining. I never had any taste for hurting anyone or destroying anything; it always made me feel guilty to take anger out on anyone. We did all the wrong we could without actually injuring people, although that stunt we pulled putting cinder blocks up on the train rails to see how far the train would knock them was exactly the kind of thing you hope your local cop or someone picks kids up for doing. For our own sakes, it’s probably best T.J. and I got caught early on in those experiments, even if I couldn’t go to Disney World with the band, candy sales or no. It might be the start of why I still want to tour to this day, in the long view.

We were picked up shoplifting while going to K-Mart with Mom on my 14th birthday. Between Kenny G and David Sanborn, he had a lot of jazz stuffed down his britches. My copy of the Beach Boys didn’t have the foot-long plastic anti-theft casing, but we were stars on store security, anyway. While he was debating on whether to call the police to come get us, the guard gruffly said, to my saddened face, “well, happy birthday!”
Thank God the Holt was just stuck talking on the phone with me. We would get in enough mischief in years to come, the Stupid and Disruptive Risks At Whim Years. He did get to run with us sometimes though!

But you know what? T.J.’s 14th birthday really took the cake. Must have, because there wasn't one. That "birthday celebration that wasn't" was the last time I’d ever aid my buddy in circumventing the rules, unless there’s one about propriety broken by this telling. The Wade Brothers, his enterprising neighbors and hell-raisers, worked with step-brother Shawn in spiriting T.J. to the Greyhound Bus Station. The most believable alibi was that he was spending the weekend with me, even if that would mean Sunday School. So, after all the confessions about girls, and monologues about building one’s emotional state, and harangues against the well-intentioned powers that be, and dirty jokes and well-behaved interactions with the parents, I was left to myself to think it all over, to look back.

I listened to “Desperado” by the Eagles that night, more than once, to capture some sense of life for which there was no song I knew. Tonight, I hear Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete”, who was found by an enemy who never sought to be his friend. Hearing from your old life is a common theme now among the great song writers in grey haired times.

I wondered how long it’d be before his mother realized he was missing, how long I’d have to hold out; I felt terrible that there was no other way. I can never judge. His grandparents in Coweta County, Oklahoma, had a farm where he was welcome. So he covered himself long enough to make the trip; I don’t think he let her know til she called them. I totally understood the desire to escape, to try to go somewhere and re-invent one’s self, but the reasons for his escape remain a secret for his family. It is a conflict I could never truly know, and here is not the place to try explaining. I wanted to share the exhilaration one finds best at the beginning of a new journey, that ineffable continuous contact with the unknown. That night, while hopeful for my good friend, for a moment I cried to myself, appreciating differently the level of sharing and honesty now ended. The end of sharing, well, at least he'd soon write, and as for the end of honesty, great, because T.J. loved a good compulsive lie as well as anyone. Certified electrician, indeed!

Someday, we’d find each other again. I’d think about writing it all, today, with fourteen years to celebrate, of a different life of two, with a new close friend found seven further years down the way. It’s the second month’s seventh day, the fourteenth anniversary since two others surrendered to one another, to discover as they say, that in the spiritual life, you are always at the beginning—so the happiest celebration of fourteen of all is found at this story’s end.
February 7, 2009

Cecil Disharoon, Spring 2009 Good to Have You Back, B'Joy