10 Cent Lives
Friday, April 17th, 2009
We were all ugly. We were average intelligence, at best, but mostly stupid. We were never under any pressure to succeed. The boys might grow up to be decent laborers or good with tools. The girls might work in offices assisting important people. Some of us would be dead before high school or in jail permanently before 19. But we knew who those kids were, and they were the friendliest ones.
Low expectations are expectations, though. Since most of us were going to survive, we did our best to keep our lives going. Other kids would still crack. Every so often in elementary school, a kid would lose it at his desk and be dragged away from class clawing at the teachers and crying. We’d never see him again. That only seemed to happen to boys.
Everything about where we lived was hard. The Cottonwood beside my house was an 80-foot tall tree-dumper that shed leaves on our rooftop year round. In the fall, the backyard was matted with wet leaves. The leaves would tangle together to make a rotting blanket across the dead grass. In the summer, cotton pieces that worked loose from pods would float over home plate during our baseball games. We’d all stop and look at it in wonderment.
“Look,” someone would say. Someone would chase it down, pull it from the air and smash in their palm so it couldn’t go on being pretty. No one else would say anything. Then the ballgames would go on.
Our house started out green. It was green when my parents bought it. When it got too much of a pain to paint, my parents paid to have it covered in beige aluminum siding. The siding was a pain, too. It came loose around the windows and warped on the front of the house, which was in the direct sun.
Our house was ranch-style, but there wasn’t any ranch. The front yard was average-sized for a typical city home and was mixed with dandelions and thin grass. The back was a green space about 40 yards wide and little longer. There wasn’t room for any horses or cattle. My parents didn’t even like pets. And pretty soon, my mom even split with my dad, so there was one less animal around.
The house was split, too, into two parts. The garage, living room and dining room were on one half. The other half was a hallway with two bathrooms and three bedrooms. My brother and I never took our shoes off in the house. We’d worn paths in the carpet from where it began at the kitchen all the way to the back rooms. After my dad was gone, when things broke, they stayed that way. My dad wasn’t handy with tools. But he could afford to pay people to come fix thigns. I think of that carpet as divorce carpet because it couldn’t be fixed thanks to a marriage that went bad.
I had the smallest room in the house. It was a perfect square, but wasn’t perfect any other way. By the time I was 11 or 12, I could stretch out on the floor and touch the walls with my feet and toes. Before I was born, my mother had painted the walls yellow and installed fire-colored carpet and it stayed decorated that way until I was in high school. For a birthday present, I chose to paint it gray to compensate for those years of sleeping in a lake of fire.
My bed was single-sized, a little wider than an Army cot but just as flimsy. My brother and I had bunk beds for awhile. But the beds were eventually split apart. I kept mine until it dipped in the middle and my posture bent with it.
I drive by the old house sometimes. I never get out, just drive by. Someone new lives in our house now. My mom sold it about 10 years ago to a guy who was going to flip it. His plan was to fix it up and sell it in a year, maybe two. It took him eight years to get it to a place where it was sellable. The Cottonwood tree’s roots had grown under the house and caused issues some serious issues with the plumbing.
These are ugly memories. All of us from the neighborhood have them. These are mine. And I have to remember them sometimes when I am in the middle of this race to succeed. I never had it in me to pull the cotton from the air and then pick it apart. That’s success enough for one lifetime.
