Fake

  My brother is almost 8 years older than me.  When I was in elementary school, he went to college at Furman University.  By the time I got to junior high, he was about to graduate.  I got hold of one of his college id's and made a fake id for me.  I cut out a picture of me and taped it over his picture.  Why did I need a fake id?  Because I liked movies.

 I wasn't old enough to get into R rated movies, much less foreign films at the Art Cinema.  Those foreign films showed nudity, which was attractive for a guy going through puberty like me.  Swedish films were the best, although French and German ones were good too.  The R rated films appealed to me mostly for the violence.  Many of them also had sex.  

 Most of the time, I would just flash the id to the box office girl.  She would see "Furman" and would let me in.  Once, I thought I was busted.  I was going to see an "art" film, and the box office girl saw my name (brother's name) and said she knew my mother.  She taught the girl in Sunday School.  The girl let me in, but I never heard anything from my mother.  I guess she didn't tell her.

 There were two times that the id didn't work.  Both were when older men were selling the tickets.  The first was at a theater, where I wanted to see a Frank Sinatra detective movie rated R.  He wouldn't let me in.  I saw the film on TV a few years later.  It was rated R for language.  The other time was at a theater downtown showing the film "Fanny Hill" which was a Swedish "Art" film.  No one under 18 could see it.  I showed the guy at the box office my fake id.  He wanted to see my draft card.  Of course, I didn't have a draft card, because I wasn't 18.  I told him that I left it at home.  He then said that it was the law to keep it on my person at all times, so he didn't let me in.  On a side note, the soundtrack music for "Fanny Hill" sounded remarkably like the music for "Star Wars" which came out later.  I can't say that John Williams copied the music, but it is uncanny how similar the themes are.

 I continued to use my fake id into college, so I could drink liquor at clubs.  When I turned 21, I no longer needed a fake id.  It was kind of anticlimactic to go into a liquor store and not have to use a fake id anymore.  Those were more innocent times.  I don't think my brother ever knew I was using his id.  If he did, he didn't tell on me.  

Feet

  When you're a kid, you do some things that one would think twice before doing as an adult.  Case in point--going barefoot without knowing what was underneath your feet.  Even though I didn't get stung, I have been very close in the ocean to jellyfish.  I have stepped on bees before and gotten stung.  I am very allergic to bee stings.  My Uncle Jim was so allergic that two stings would have killed him.  I did get stung on my hand once which swelled up like a catcher's mitt.  I had to put my swollen hand in ice while watching TV.  That wasn't fun.

 But, back to the feet.  My first encounter was with broken glass in the nearby creek.  I was wading through the knee-deep water one Saturday and felt some pain.  I jumped up and landed on more broken glass.  Apparently, someone had thrown a bottle from a car which hit a rock and broke.  I got the joy of stepping on it.  It cut my right foot in several places.  Blood was all in the water.  It is a good thing there were no sharks in this creek.  I stumbled out of the water and back onto dry land to get tennis shoes.  I struggled to put them on and hobbled back home.  My mother told me of the dangers of it getting infected, so I got stung again with the iodine.  I have a few scars on the bottom of my foot from the glass.  Word to the wise--don't throw glass into a creek.  Some kid might get cut up.

 A year later, I was invited over to my friend Beth's house.  She had a Slip and Slide set up in her backyard, and several of the neighborhood kids went over there.  We were going to have fun.  I watched the other kids slide, some on their backs and some on their fronts.  It looked like the ones on their fronts would slide farther than the ones on their backs.  I opted for the front.  Just off to the side of the wet plastic was a rock in the ground.  I hit the rock with the top of my foot but didn't think much about it.  I went again and hit the same rock.  This time, it tore a gash on the top side of my right foot.  I scream in pain.  Beth called her mother to come out and tend to me.  Iodine seemed to be the choice once again.  She took me home.  My mother impressed on me the need to wear shoes.  I still have a scar on the top of my foot.  Every time I look at it, I think of Beth who has passed away.  A reminder of friendship.

 

Carolling

  Our youth group at Kilbourne Park Baptist Church had so much fun.  From the skiing to the camps to the lake to the painting to the car wash and so much more, it was just fun every day we were together.  One of the main things we did was Youth Choir.  We had a wide range of singers from soloists to those who couldn't carry a tune.  All were accepted in our choir.  We were accused by some of being in a clique, but I just had fun.

 One Christmas, our choir director thought it would be good if we would go one night to sing carols in neighborhoods around the area.  We knew most of the songs already, and we learned a few more.  There were a lot of choirs in the community doing the same thing as us, so it felt like we were all blanketing the city with Christmas spirit.

 We went to one neighborhood off of Forest Drive and went walking along the street, stopping at houses to bring cheer to those living there.  We went into a yard and began singing.  A man yelled at us to get off of his grass.  Definitely a Scrooge.  Some of us either didn't hear him, or ignored him, and kept on singing our happy songs.  The man then brought out a shotgun and said that we had to get off of his lawn, or he would shoot us.  We politely ran out of his yard.  

 It was time to get some hot chocolate back at the church.  That was our excuse.  I'm sure some of my friends had to change their pants.  

Swamp

  As mentioned previously, our neighborhood kids were a little mischievous.  It was time to move on to something bigger.  Our parents had bought us walkie-talkies to play with.  We used them to play war in the backyard.  They worked off of a frequency, and the range was about 500 yards.  We didn't need it that far, but they gave us options.  

 One thing we noticed early on was that we could pick up pilots in planes talking to one another and to airports.  It was interesting to hear these people talk about where they were going.  Of course, we devised a plan.  We put together a scenario that our small plane had crashed in the Wateree Swamp between Columbia and Sumter, and we needed help.  It was the first "play" that I wrote.  

 The story went that our plane had crashed into the swamp.  Everybody had died except for us kids.  My friend Bruce played a kid on the walkie-talkie using it as the plane's radio.  His sister Patty was the screamer yelling "help".  I was the director.  As Patty was in the background screaming, Bruce was yelling "Mayday".  Most of the play was improvised.  Bruce said that our plane had gone down in a swamp between Columbia and Sumter, but he didn't know where exactly.  Patty was "bleeding" and needed help.  I chimed in that there were snakes and alligators around.  

 One plane responded and said that he was sending help.  That night on the news, there was a report that a plane had crashed in the swamp with deaths on board.  The Civil Air Patrol had been out searching for the plane but found nothing. They decided it was a hoax. This was before GPS, so they never found out it was us.  We got scared after that, and we broke the walkie-talkies.  That was 55 years ago, more or less.  I am sorry for any problems we caused, but boy was it fun.  

Boiling

  My neighborhood friends, growing up, were great to be around.  We loved playing army in the backyard.  The neighbors behind us had a treehouse.  That was fun just to hangout, until it rotted and fell down.  We would get into trouble, just like kids would do, but we had fun doing it.  I liked to go to the house behind us, because both parents worked.  We could get into trouble, and their parents wouldn't find out.  If they did, they would get yelled at by their father who was in the military.  I could hear him yelling at them with their windows shut.  I was usually an instigator, and others would carry out my ideas.  It worked well.

 One morning, we didn't have school and were bored.  I was over at their house, and we decided to play phone pranks.  We were in elementary school.  We started out with the familiar stuff like calling random numbers and asking if their refrigerator was running.  That was fun, until we called a military base by accident.  They threatened to call the police, so we moved onto other things.

 We had a plan.  We would call a random number and pretend we were the phone company.  We needed to test their phone line.  I was doing the calling, because my voice was a little deeper than the other kids.  A woman answered the phone.  (I'll call her Mrs. Smith)  The conversation went something like this:

 Me:  Mrs. Smith?  This is the telephone company.  We have had reports of a problem with your phone.  

 Mrs. Smith:  You have?  I think everything is okay with it.

 Me:  Do you mind helping us over the phone to check it?

 Mrs. Smith:  All right.  What would you like me to do?

 Me:  Can you unscrew the receiver and tap on the metal plate inside it?  (I could hear some unscrewing of plastic and a tapping sound)  That's fine, Mrs. Smith, but it does sound like there is some dirt in your phone.  Are you in the kitchen?

 Mrs. Smith:  Yes, I am.  I am making some tea.

 Me:  Is the water boiling?

 Mrs. Smith:  Yes, it is.

 Me:  Okay, Mrs. Smith.  I'm going to need for you to drop the receiver in the boiling water to clean out your phone.

 (Mrs. Smith sounded hesitant):  Well, okay, if you think it will help.

 Me:  It will.

We heard a crackling noise, and then her phone went dead.  I hope she got a new phone.  We never called back.

Russians

  My apartment building had 8 apartments in it.  There were four on the top floor and four on the bottom floor.  The building had four on the front of the building and four on the back.  This information is important to the story.  My apartment was on the front on the top floor.  I lived at Ravenwood Apartments were almost 14 years.  During that time, we had several fires in our building.  Many more than other buildings in the complex.  Almost all of them involved cooking.  

 One strange thing about those fires was that I seemed to be home, when they occurred.  Some of the residents accused me of setting them, as it was suspicious that I was the one to call 911.  Now, I know that I have written about setting a fire in the woods, when I was much younger, but I had nothing to do with setting these apartment fires.  In fact, I think it was a blessing that I was home to call 911.  One of my greatest fears in life is an apartment fire.  After all, I have had a lot of expensive pop culture memorabilia in my apartment, and the worse thing in the world would have had it burn up.  I had it insured, but a lot of it couldn't be replaced. 

 There were several neighbors to come and go from my apartment building.  One was a woman who liked to cook cabbage on Sundays, and that awful smell would come into my apartment.  Another was a woman who liked to entertain male guests during the day.  She was very loud.  I really liked to keep to myself in my apartment building.  I never really knew the names of my neighbors, and I liked it that way.  One of the constant stream of neighbors lived across the hall.  I saw them come and go, and they seemed to not speak English.  I figured out that they were speaking Russian.  I had known some Russians who worked at Macy's, but they lived in Chapin.  I knew a few Russian words and would speak phrases to them in Russian.  It was a way to cheer them up, as they lived in a strange land.  

 I never spoke to my Russian neighbors until one night.  I was watching TV when a frantic knock was on my door.  I opened it to find the young blond Russian woman screaming.  She was pointing to smoke coming up through her carpet.  If you don't know the language, gestures are the next best thing.  I learned that in Europe.  She only knew the English for "911".  I called 911 and ran outside.  I ran to the top of the hill to direct the firemen down the hill to our apartment building.  When they rolled up to me, I was waving my arms.  They went down the hill to the apartment on fire.  I followed them down, and I heard one fireman tell our apartment manager that they knew where they were going, but some guy was trying to stop them.  

 Anyway, the apartment was a total loss.  The tenants had left something on the stove and gone to the movies.  The other apartments, including mine, suffered some smoke damage to our clothes and furnishings.  Everything had to be aired out.  As luck would have it (I don't believe in luck), the firemen said that they had just finished up a call not far from Ravenwood.  They were quick to respond.  Had the fire gotten into the attic, the whole building would have burned down.  There were no firewalls.  We were just minutes away from that happening.  My neighbors couldn't accuse me of setting the fire.  The Russians moved out.  Their apartment got new carpet.  From the kids snickering under my window watching me change to the fires, there was never a dull moment at Ravenwood.  I moved out a year later.

Blinds

  In June of 1994, I moved to Ravenwood Apartments in Forest Acres.  My parents had moved to Laurens, SC and were in a nursing home.  I had closed up their house, and we put it up for sale.  I got a two-bedroom apartment that was upstairs on the second floor.  I needed two bedrooms, because of all of my records and videotapes.  So, one bedroom was for sleeping in, and the other was for storage.  

 My sleeping bedroom overlooked the sidewalk below.  When I got home from work, I would sit in my recliner and watch the news and then head into my bedroom to put on my pajamas.  Most of the time, that would be around 8pm every night.  I was a creature of habit.  During the transformation, I would hear laughter outside, but I didn't think anything of it.  After all, there were a lot of children living in that complex, and they often played outside after dark.  

 There was a girl who lived there and worked at Rich's.  One day, she came up to me and informed me that one could see through my closed blinds and see me naked in my apartment.  I didn't know that one could see inside if the blinds were closed but pointing up.  The laughter outside came from the kids watching me change clothes.  After that realization, I joked with the girl that the show started at 8.  She informed me that if I closed the blinds pointing down, that the kids couldn't see me naked.  I started doing that, and I guess they went away.  I had been offered a nude scene in the movie "Chattahoochee" back in 1988, but I turned it down due to folks at work snickering.  I was even offered $1000 to do it.  I did have some scruples.  As it turned out, that scene was cut from the movie anyway but who knew?  I wasn't going to give a show to others for free, though.

 I had exposed myself before to groups, but that was in the Theatre changing costumes.  One doesn't think about others doing that, when one has to change costumes in a hurry.  Change you costume and off you go.  I also streaked once in college, but it was a very short run between two buildings.  I don't think anyone saw me.  But, the saving grace with the show at 8pm was that there were no cellphones back then, and I wouldn't have gotten on the internet.  Thankful.