Growin' Up In The 70's

I received an email with the picture above recently and it got me thinking about the 1970’s.  That was my time...aged 4-14.  It was a great era to grow up in and this picture perfectly captures that time.  We had long hair, parted in the middle, and carefully feathered back with large blue or black 'Goody' combs.  We wore cut-off tee-shirts, short jean-shorts, and yes we jumped everything.  We did a lot of stupid crazy stuff, but jumping stuff was huge because Evel Knievel was doing his thing back then jumping over fountains, cars, buses, and of course his rocket-cycle attempt over the Snake River Canyon in 1974.

I still remember where I was on that weird day...in my friend Greg Felson’s living-room watching on TV with his disgusted dad when Evel’s jump failed miserably.  But whenever Evel would do one of his jumps on ABC’s 'Wide World Of Sports' it was all we could talk about at school.  We also had Fonzi from 'Happy Days' who cashed in on the Evel craze in that 2-part episode in 1975 when he jumped over 14 trashcans on his motorcycle.  All of us kids were glued to the TV for those Happy Day’s episodes.  I don't know if the whole jumping thing was a nation-wide craze or not but it was huge where I lived.  Well, KISS, jumping bikes...and Wacky-Packages.  Remember those?  Huge.

My younger friend Jimmy used to jump his Big-Wheel like in the picture above, but all of us bigger kids jumped our pedal dirt-bikes.  We would put jumps anywhere and everywhere.  Just grab a shovel and make a dirt jump in the field, or a log and a piece of scrap wood and we were in business jumping on the road.  Or we would put the jump in the ditch and get a good fast start on the road before gliding down into the ditch jump.

And of course we were jumping over things...boxes, rocks, logs, garbage cans or anything we could get our hands on.  One time my mom came down from the house to the road to check on my little brother Nate only to find him obediently laying in the ditch with us taking turns jumping our bikes over him.  She made us stop that.  We would jump in the winter too.  We had a corn field across the street from my long, steep driveway so we would put a ramp on the road, tear down the driveway as fast as we could on our bikes, hit the jump and fly 25-30 feet in the air landing in the deep snow.  We didn't care if we stuck the landing because it was just as much fun to land and flip over the handlebars into the soft snow.

We were into doing some stupid sh*t, and yes we would get hurt.  I remember one trick we would do was to see how many people we could get onto one bike...like a guy on the handlebars, a guy standing up peddling, another two guys on the seat and maybe a guy standing on the back wheel peg.  Then we would go as fast as we could down a large hill by my house.  Lots of scraped and bloody knees over the years.  Jimmy's older brother Scott got a dislocated shoulder from a jump, and I still have a scar on my right knee from skeeching.

This cool trick we called 'skeeching' would take place in the winter when there was freshly fallen snow on the road.  We would get off the school bus one stop early, run around to the back of the bus and then hold on to the bumper.  The bus would then pull you down the road while you held on for dear life, gliding on your boots with snow spraying up into your face.  It was exhilarating and you felt cool with the kids on the back of the bus cheering you on, but one time I hit an unseen pot-hole and went head over heels rolling down the road at 30 mph.  My jeans were ripped to shreds and my knee was a bloody mess.  I had to tell my mom that I slipped and fell on some ice.

That was painful, but nothing other than our shattered nerves got hurt the time we were at the top of a large grain tower.  We used to climb up the ladder on the outside of this tall concrete container and sit on the sheet-metal dome on top and check out the view.  We could see for miles around and it was a good place to hang out and feel cool.  One afternoon me and Aaron Vermillion were sitting up there and the metal top collapsed from our weight!  That was not cool.  It did not collapse all the way, but the top turned from a dome into a bowl and the sudden 6-foot drop scared the living crap out of us.

A neat game we would play was 'Rock-Tag'.  Before my dad had it paved, our driveway was made up of golf-ball sized rocks.  Towards the end of summer when the corn was grown over our heads my friends and I would break up into two teams.  One team would stand at the end of my driveway and the other team would disperse into the corn field across the street.  The team in the driveway armed with rocks would yell "Marco!" and each player in the corn field would have to yell "Polo!" while tossing an ear of corn into the air.  That would signal your position so that the 'Driveway' team could then throw rocks into your general vicinity hoping to hit you.  The trick of course if you were in the field was to toss up your corn and then break into a sprint to avoid the rocks.  Your adrenaline would just skyrocket when the rocks were raining down around you.  Fortunately only a few of us ever got hit, but we quit playing after Scott took a shot to the head and was bleeding.

So many fun, stupid things.  One afternoon me, Gary Paulson, Aaron and a couple others were hanging out in the loft of an old abandoned barn down the street.  There was a long thick rope hanging down from the ceiling that we used to swing on into the hay below.  Suddenly Aaron reached out with his lighter and lit the bottom of the rope on fire, to be funny I guess.  Of course the flame started climbing up the rope.  "Holy sh*t!!"  Aaron grabbed a two-by-four and wacked the fiery end of the rope hoping to knock out the flames.  He stopped the rope-fire but in the process sent sparks flying everywhere starting at least a half dozen smaller fires in the hay.  We were all running around like crazy stomping out the fires.  A couple of them got fairly big and I remember thinking that the whole place was going to go up and it was going be one huge fire and oh-my-god we were going to get into so much trouble...but eventually we managed to get all the fires out and then we got the hell out of there.

I guess the stupid stuff we did as kids in the 70’s paved the way for the even stupider stuff we did as teenagers in the 80’s (as outlined a few weeks ago in my blog entry ‘Down By The River’).  The 70's were a fun time to grow up in though.  Bike helmets had not been invented yet, we collected baseball cards religiously and never put them in the spokes of our tires, we listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 every week, other than PBS we only had 3 channels on TV, and we did not have video games until ‘Pong’ came along in the late 70’s...but we sure had a lot of fun.  Thanks Mom for letting us be stupid kids.

STD

It was the summer of 1986.  I was home from my 2^nd year of college working a summer job in Waukesha, WI at a butcher shop.  It was a horrible, smelly job cutting and preparing meat.  For the entire summer the faint aroma of blood and meat was always with me, no matter how many showers I took.  I could not for the life of me scrub the blood smell off (out damn spot!).  Consequently, every morning as soon as the sun would come up and shine through the windows at my parent's house two things would happen:  the room I was sleeping in would get very hot...and the houseflies would descend upon me, landing on my face while I was trying to sleep.  There was no air conditioning so I then had to decide between hiding under the covers away from the flies while roasting, or going without covers but feeling the tickle of flies crawling all over my face and arms.  It totally sucked and neither option allowed me to get much sleep that summer anytime after 5:00 a.m.

And while we are mentioning sucky memories about that job, remember Damien the 5-foot Ball Python from my last blog entry?  One Friday afternoon that summer I was taking him to the vet and he got loose in my car.  I did not know if he had escaped the car completely or was under the dashboard or inside the seats or what.  I looked for him all weekend but could not find him.  When I went to work that Monday morning it was hot so I cracked the windows a bit in case Damien was still in there.  When I came outside on break a few hours later I looked in the car…there he was curled up on the front seat, but not moving.  I had cooked him.  I ran him into the meat cooler and tried to cool him down but it was too late…he was dead and I had to bury him the back yard at my girlfriend Lona’s house.  Sorry old friend.  I rebounded though and bought a new python, Damien II.  He lasted a couple of years but then he went on an 8-month fast.  He would not eat and I got scared that he was going to die so I sold him back to the pet store.  Then I bought Damien III, The Final Chapter.  He was with me for several years until I moved to Minneapolis in 1997 and sold him to a friend.  Then a few years later I bought my current Ball Python and her name is Annakiya which means ‘Sweet Face’ in the language from the area of Africa which she hails from.

Anyways, let’s get back to the story.  For several days at work I had been noticing I was getting itchy down below.  Not the normal guy itch were you occasionally have to adjust and itch…but really itchy and getting worse.  I found myself sneaking off into the meat locker to be by myself just so I could itch the hell out of it.  Oh no…what is this?  We had no Internet back then to look this stuff up.  What is wrong with me?  That question was answered for me on day 3 of my mad itching in the form of Lona showing up at the butcher shop crying.  She had just came from her annual ob/gyn appointment and was told that she had chlamydia.  She was 18, I was 20, and I was the only guy she had ever been with, so obviously I gave it to her.  Uh oh.

She told me that a guy can have it for up to a year before the symptoms show up, so we reasoned that I must have got it the summer before when I was with another girl.  So the crying stopped and she told me that I needed to go in and get tested.  Okay, fine…anything to stop this itching I thought.  I had no real idea of what ‘getting tested’ meant.  I just assumed I would go in and the doctor would look at my weiner and say:  “Yep, you’ve got chlamydia, here’s a pill, now get out of here you little scamp.”  Or maybe at worst they would have to take a blood test.

But no, that is not how they do it.  As per usual at a doctor’s office I waited and waited in the big room until they finally called my name.  I was led back to my own private room and told to take my pants off.  Okay, cool, no blood sample…they just want to look at my little friend.  A tad bit embarrassing, but no big deal.  I waited some more until suddenly Beulah Balbricker walked in with a nasty look on her face.  Do you remember Beulah Balbricker from the movie Porky’s?  That is exactly what this woman looked like.  Short, wide, and with a very sour disposition like she would rather be anywhere than here with you.  Well when I saw what she had in her hand my heart skipped a beat, I started to sweat and I shared her feelings of wanting to be anywhere but here.

She was carrying 2 thin sticks about 10 inches long each.  One was silvery metal and one was wood and they each had a cotton tip.  Wait a minute…those aren’t for…she can’t possibly…there is no way…not in my...no...please...no.  “What are you going to do with those?”, I stammered.  She was about 4 ½ feet tall and she looked up at me and growled:  “We need to take two samples.”  Dear god in heaven no.  Not my tallywacker.

I tried to reason with her.  I explained that my girlfriend has chlamydia...I am the only guy she has ever been with...therefore I obviously have it too so there is no need to test me for it.  Just give me the f*cking pill.  She shook her head and told me that without a positive test they cannot prescribe me the pill.  There did not seem to be any way out of this and she ordered me to drop my boxers.  Then she reached for my weiner but I was as un-turned on as I have ever been in my entire life.  Like a scared turtle my johnson was hiding from Beulah and he did not want any part of her or her sadistic sticks of death.

Noticing my incredibly flaccid state, she then began tugging on him...trying to "firm him up a bit" is how she put it.  She was the perfect height for the job and she took it seriously.  She was tugging on my wiener with one hand and trying to jab the metal stick up me with the other hand.  It hurt and I was starting to freak out.  She got maybe a half inch in and I gasped:  "How far do you have to go?!"  She paused, held up her finger to show me for reference and said grimly:  “Two knuckles deep.”  Then she went back to work.

That was it.  I lost it.  My vision started to get spotty and grey and I began to faint.  I had been standing in front of her but when my legs gave out I fell back into an examining table.  As I began to slide down to the floor Beulah reached over and bear-hugged me to hold me up.  As my vision slowly came back I realized that my descent into hell was complete.  I was standing in a doctor's office naked from the waist down locked in an embrace with a short, fat, ornery woman who was determined to do great personal harm to my penis.

She had me sit on the table and when she decided that I was not going to fall over she let me go.  I told her that this was not going to happen...there was no way she was going to stick anything up in me anymore...and that I would rather live the rest of my life with the itch than go through any more of that.  She looked at me long and hard and must have decided it wasn't worth it to try anymore, so she said:  “Fine.” and walked out.  I don't know if she fudged the charts or what, but after getting dressed and walking back to the main room the lady at the front desk handed me a prescription.  I believe it was for just one pill.  I took it and the chlamydia was gone.  Easy come, easy go.

The reason I remembered this story is because the other morning I was driving to work listening to the "Half-Assed Morning Show" on 93X with Weasel, Josh & Nick.  They were asking for people to call in with painful stories of gonorrhea or syphilis.  I didn't have either of those, but I thought my chlamydia story might be a good one so I called in.  Sure enough, I was told to hang on and about 5 minutes later I was on the air!  The whole chlamydia thing was not a good experience, but it was fun being on the radio.  We talked for 5 or 6 minutes and had some laughs.  Nick commented that I had been sexually abused by Beulah with all that weiner-tugging, but that it was kind of cool and it maybe would have turned him on.  He could not have been more wrong.

The funny thing was that my wife Nadia and I work together and usually drive together, but she was going to have to stay late that day so we took separate cars.  She was in her car listening to 93X, but I guess my voice sounded different on the radio because she did not even realize it was me.  She said she was listening to the story and feeling sorry for whoever ended up with that guy, and then when she got to work I asked her if she had heard me on the radio.  She stopped, stared at me for a second, and then the light bulb went on.  She rolled her eyes, sighed and said:  “Oh man…of course that was you.”