Plate

  I never had a vanity license plate for my car.  Personalizing it just wasn't what I wanted.  Maybe it was a little paranoia, but I just didn't want to stand out in traffic.  I wanted anonymity.  I just took whatever plate the DMV would send me.

 One day, I got the plate in the mail, and to my surprise, the plate read "DMW 777".  It had my initials spelled backwards plus three "7s", which was my lucky number.  When I had plates before, I had to remember them by making up words that were close to the letters and numbers.  Now, it was a no brainer.  Was it a stroke of luck that I had this special plate?  Was it random?  I didn't really have a clue, but I knew I could easily remember it.

 I worked at Columbia Mall, which had some crime areas near there.  It wasn't in the best of neighborhoods.  As I was getting off work from Macy's, a friend wanted me to see her new car.  When I walked back to my car, I saw that my license plate was gone.  It couldn't have fallen off, because I had securely fastened it.  There had been a rash of stolen license plates from cars in the parking lot.  Panic set in.  What if the person used my plate on a car involved in a crime, and I would be blamed for it.

 There was a Richland County Sheriff's substation inside the mall.  I went in there to report my stolen license plate.  They told me I wasn't the first one that this had happened to, which I already knew.  They gave me a slip of paper to take to the DMV to get a new plate and to present to any officer, if I got stopped before getting to the DMV.  Thankfully, there was a DMV close to the mall, so I didn't have to go far.  I could take a lot of backroads getting to the mall from my apartment so as to avoid as many officers as possible.

 I got a new plate with random letters and numbers.  I really liked "DMW 777".  I hope whoever used it after me liked it, too.  All the way to jail.

Forging

 From early on in my academic years, I had been told by teachers and my parents how smart I was.  Testing revealed that I had an above-average IQ bordering on genius.  There were two problems with me being so smart.  The first was that I didn't study for tests. I just didn't see the need to study.  The second problem was that I just didn't care about my grades, even though my teachers and my parents did.  It was very hard for me to make an A or a B, unless it was in a class I liked.  Unfortunately, there weren't many of those classes being offered. When I got to college, I found that I was very good in Speech and Drama.  I loved those courses and made A's in those.  I had a 4.0 in my major which made up for those F's.

 In 8th grade, I was not doing well at all.  I got beat up every day by bullies. I hated coming to school.  My grades were suffering.  So, I decided to do something that would avoid the embarrassment of bringing home a bad report card.  A parent had to sign the report card, before the student brought it back to school.  I learned how to forge my father's signature.  

 He signed things in a very distinctive way.  It took practice to sign "John K. Durst" correctly.  The last name was easy, because he used the line off of the "D" to go above the rest of the letters and cross the "t" at the end.  I worked for about a week to get his signature down to a copy of his.  I would turn in the report card with the forgery, and my teachers never knew the difference.  Some kids would be creative and change "F's" to "A's" by just adding one line.  Some of the teachers got wise to that and changed from printing grades to using cursive writing.  It was harder to make that change for the students.

 One day, my father asked me why he hadn't seen my report card in almost a year.  I tried to make up an excuse, but nothing was very believable.  He called the school and asked them if they were still issuing report cards.  They said yes, every six weeks.  My deception had been discovered.  My father was mad at me along with my teachers.  I felt the sting of the paddle that my father gave me for my forging his name. From then on, my father knew when a report card would be released, and he demanded to see it.  Those days weren't happy after that.  

 I still didn't study, and I still didn't care about my grades, but at least I graduated by the skin of my teeth.  High School.  College.  Graduate school.  No more forging.

Amazing

  One of the places I loved to go to, when I lived in Fort Worth, was Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington.  It was halfway between Fort Worth and Dallas.  I also loved roller coasters, and I found that I could ride one coaster and sing the first verse of "Amazing Grace" before the first drop.  For some reason, I found that very calming.

 Before moving to Texas, I went to Six Flags there while in college.  They had two things there that I really liked.  One was a tower that you could go up in and see the entire park.  The other was a gondola ride that went across the park.  Since I was a little mischievous back then, I used both things for pranks.

 I was riding the gondola ride and had some pennies in my pocket.  I was about 20 feet above the ground, so I dropped pennies from the gondola on unsuspecting people.  I tried not to hit them on their heads but aimed for right in front of them.  Sometimes I missed and actually hit some people.  I didn't think they knew it was me, but I learned later that some people had reported the Pennies from Heaven.

 I moved onto the tower.  It was much higher than the gondola, and it was a hot day.  How do you cool off the people walking below the tower?  By spitting off of the tower and aiming at people.  It seemed perfectly logical.  I got a few good spits off of the tower, when a security guard came up to me.  He asked me if I had been spitting off of the tower.  I denied it, but they had witnesses.  He then asked if I was the one who was throwing pennies at people off of the gondola.  Of course not, I said.  They had witnesses.  I was asked to leave the park.  I was with some friends, but they didn't care.  

 Fortunately, it was about the time I was to meet up with my friends to leave anyway.  I bet the people I threw pennies near kept the money, and the ones that got spit on got cooled off some.  They never got the chance to thank me.  I was the "Lone Stranger". 

Hut

  When I was a member of Kilbourne Park Baptist Church, we had a great youth group.  Because we were so tight, the church decided to give us a house on the property for us to hang out in.  It had been used for Sunday School classes, but the church didn't need it anymore.  We were very excited to get this one-story house.  It had two large rooms on either side of the house which were separated by a long and wide hallway.  It had wooden floors and sheet rock for the walls.  We needed to do some work to get it the way we wanted it.

 The church provided us with the necessary materials like paint.  They also gave us some adult help on how to paint the walls mostly with rollers.  We had fun painting the walls, as well as ourselves.  We learned the trick of using masking tape for the edges.  There was some disagreement on what colors to paint the walls, but the majority ruled--purple, white, green and pink.  Some of the kids wanted to paint the walls in psychedelic colors, but the church said no.

 As we were preparing the house, we had an idea to knock down the hallway walls and make one big room combining both side rooms and the hall.  We asked for sledgehammers to get this done.  One of the church's members was a contractor.  He had the blueprints for the house.  He came by one day and asked us what we wanted the hammers for.  We told him about our plans, and his mouth dropped open.  He told us that if we were to go through with our plans, the roof would cave in.  Those two walls supported the roof.  We decided that we would just use the rooms as they were and not to knock down any walls.  It was probably a good decision.  

 The church called it "The Youth Hut".  It was our home away from home, until the church took it back and used it for other things.  Eventually, it was torn down and turned into a parking lot.  We had a lot of fun in that house.

Tub

  I prefer baths to showers.  I always have.  It reminds me of my childhood.  A word of advice:  never lose your inner child.  I take baths and listen to music. It is the nicest part of my day to be in a hot bath and listening to my stereo.  Today, it was Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Showers are okay, if I don't have a choice.  It is just relaxing to be in a bath.

 This brings me to an experience, when I lived in a condo in Greenville.  The buildings were close to one another, and they formed alleys between each building.  My bedroom was on the second floor and overlooked the alley and the back of the next building.  The guy, who lived in the opposite condo, was a bit overweight.  I'm being nice.  He probably weighed 300 pounds.  Every morning, unless it was storming, he would come outside on his porch; strip down to nakedness; and stand in a metal tub to take a bath.  Even in the rain and the cold, he would have this ritual.  Unfortunately for me, I would see him from my bedroom.  I wanted to look away, but it was like watching a car wreck.  Maybe, he was too large to fit into his tub inside, although those tubs were pretty big.  Maybe, he was a nudist.  I never met him to find out.  He was the real-life "ugly naked guy" character from "Friends".

 I would hope that we would have thunderstorms in the mornings, because it wouldn't have been safe for him to stand in a metal tub with water.  Although, I secretly wanted for him to test the laws of electricity.  Some of the condo's residents complained about his show every morning, but the owners said he was within his rights to do that on his property.  If he had been a supermodel, and she was bathing herself outside, it would have been vastly different.  If anyone sees me taking a bath outside on my porch, call the folks with the rubber rooms.  

Grooves

  I've worked thirty years in retail stores.  During my tenure in retail, I learned a lot about how to be successful.  I learned how to display merchandise that would make the customer want to buy it.  For example, when I worked in Books at Belk, there was a new book by Billy Graham.  I built a cross with those books on a table.  We sold out of the books.  Creativity was the key to displaying items for sale.  I also learned what people wanted to buy.  When I was a buyer for Belk, I brought in a Tummy Toner knock-off as seen on TV.  We sold 10,000 units within a six-week period.  When I worked at Rich's/Macy's, I had the number one Lamp department in the Rich's company in sales and the number five Luggage department in all of Macy's stores.  Why?  I knew how to sell.

 My unfulfilled dream has been to have a store of my own selling books, records, posters, autographs, memorabilia, magazines, videos, and other stuff.  For a long time, I have been selling much of this stuff on eBay and Amazon, but I wanted to have a store of my own.  I have had some of my stuff in a couple of other stores, but I had no real control over the sales.  

 When I thought I could do a store, I put in a lot of study into what other stores did that were similar to what I wanted to do.  In my business model, I picked a few things from record or memorabilia stores, but I found that no one in the Southeast was doing what I wanted to do.  So then, the preparation began.  

 I had a very large collection of VHS tapes with music on them.  I took those tapes and recorded them on 8-hour tapes.  I created tapes with a lot of genres from rock to pop to soul to country to classical to jazz and more that would appeal to customers. In order to break up the music, I also added movie or comedy clips to add to the videos.  I made sure that everything would be suitable for any customer that came into the store. The idea was to play these tapes in the store on a big-screen TV and maybe have a sofa so that customers could sit and watch them. I had over 130 video tapes to show in store.   When DVD's came out, I transferred much of the material to discs.  I had over 180 discs, since I couldn't get any more than six hours to a disc.

 The store was going to be called Grooves and Such. My advertising would use the tagline "Grooves and Such, it's a Gas, Gas, Gas" using the first initials in the store's name and borrowing a line from "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by The Rolling Stones.  I thought it was catchy. I needed cork boards to display the autographs and posters; three glass cases to show the small stuff; a few tables with boxes to use for the records and videos; and other fixtures for the books and magazines.  The store itself would be no more than 1200 square feet.  I figured that $175,000 would be needed to get the store going and allow it to be profitable within a year.  The location would have to be in an area with free parking and easy to get to, like a traffic light nearby.  I scouted several locations and found a few that could work.

 My dream never materialized.  The closest I got was in 2015, when I was working with a friend who would supply the financial needs.  Unfortunately, he was killed.  One blessing was that the store probably would have failed during Covid.  Maybe one day.  

 

Hurt

  The Cobbwebs was a band that I was a part of.  I wrote the lyrics to several of the songs.  We billed ourselves as "original 60's rock and roll".  Del and Chris did all of the music.  We were based out of the Irmo, SC area, where they lived.  

 There was a local company that produced a various artists tape called "The Burning of Columbia" in the mid-1990's, and we were picked to be on that tape.  We went into a recording studio to cut our song.  The tape was released, and we got some radio airplay.  

 Things were looking up for us.  A local band was getting some major airplay during this same time.  They were called "Hootie and the Blowfish".  We knew some of the people with that band, or we knew people who knew people with that band.  At any rate, we knew we were good and tried to shop our music around to artists and labels.  We would send them a tape of our music along with the sheet music for the enclosed songs.  The companies would return the tapes but keep the sheet music. We listened to the radio to see if a band would steal our copyrighted songs, and then we would sue them and make millions.  

 Due to a lawsuit many years before regarding George Harrison and "My Sweet Lord", it was determined that a song would have to have eight bars in a row the same in order for the music to be copied.  We heard one rather famous band use our music, but it was only six bars, so there was nothing we could do.

 We were getting a lot of buzz around town for our music, especially on local late-night FM radio.   We were going to be the next Hootie that was going to come out of Columbia.  One Saturday, the three of us went to Augusta, GA for a record convention.  We liked to go there to look for rarities to add to our collection.  As we were going from table to table, I overheard Chris and Del talking to a dealer.  They were telling him about their upcoming move to Nashville, TN to make it big up there.  This was the first I had heard about a move.  They were going to leave Columbia and me.  We had a three-way partnership with The Cobbwebs.  All decisions had to be put to a vote.  I wasn't consulted about their moving to Nashville.  I was shocked and deeply hurt.  Of course, it was a good move for them and the music.  They just never told me they were moving.  I couldn't go with them because of my job.

 The last time we were together, before their move, was at The Rolling Stones concert in Columbia in 1995.  It was a great show.  I had to resign myself in knowing that the music would be better in Nashville.  It was, and we got noticed.  We never achieved "Hootie" status.  We were in the top ten for indie releases in several European countries in 2002.  That was something.