Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Doreen is uneasy about allowing her daughter to go to the mall without adult supervision. Can she be trusted at twelve years old to know the diff between a policeman and a pervert? Maybe there is no difference.

Alicia tells me that her friend is off grounding today. She was grounded for sneaking out of her house with her boyfriend. The thought of this took me back to when I was growing up in Abilene, Tx. When I was twelve I would sneak out of my house in the middle of the night and roam the streets. In the summertime i would steal fruit from the neighbor's trees and for the rest of the year it was just general vandalism accomplished in the dead of morning, a toilet paper roll woven into a pecan tree or a piece of graffiti here and there.

We were at the edge of suburbia when I was twelve. Malls hadn't been invented yet. There were "shopping centers." Behind my house was a wheat field, thirty or forty acres before the next thoroughfare. In the evenings after school, I would go with my dog into the wheat field and lie between the stalks and dip snuff. Snuff was easy to steal. Much easier than cigarettes.

12 and 13 were my most mischevious years, tho in retrospect, my mischeviousness continued on as a lifelong friend.....offering possibilities out of the commonplace.

back in the fifties, actually 1959-60-61, there was a lot of open space between the small towns inbetween Dallas and Ft. Worth, Texass......expecially around Euless. We'd bike ride for an hour just to reach a destination. There was an old B-36 bomber parked at Amon Carter Airport, surrounded by a short chainlink fence, that I had eyed for some time and off we went biking down hwy 183 hid the bikes in the tall grass and jumped the fence where we found a ten foot long wide flat board just waiting for us with the rear cabin, the rear gunner's hatch ajar.....we shinnied up the board into the rear gunner's place where we found a long tunnel with rails and a flat truck that we used to pull thru to the front of the plane where the radios, navigator, pilots, and bombardier hung out....i remember looking thru the bombardier site, was then up in the cockpit having the time of my life when i glanced out the pilot window back across the giant wing and saw my two mates bouncing up and down frolicking as the police came into our little playground.....

we also found, in our bike explorations, a dry gulley at the backside of the new 6 flags over Texass, where the fence simply crossed wide and high, which we sneaked through and spent several times enjoying the park.....couldn't do the rides, tho cuz we didn't have the flourescent stamps on our hot little hands!, but lots of girlie gawking and unsupervised too!

we also had our night adventures....we'd camp out in tents in friends backyards, and lit out at night.....the tented fruit stands were easy pickins, especially the piles of sodas that we'd drink at our leisure then later cash in the bottles.....we also snuck into the municipal swimming pool, scaling the tall chainlink fence and jumping off the high board in the middle of the night was glorious, but then the dogs barked, the sirens whined, and we scrambled away to safety, dodging headlights as we made our way back to the hideout....we also committed missdemeanors, i confess, i left my mark, charcoal plucked from a backyard grill, slazhed giant zorro "Z"s across suburban garage doors, we hoisted the school zone policeman statue up to the roof at the school where it watched over us every morning peering down our silent partner in crime as we went inside.....stayed there a good while too, the two story building where nodody looked up except us, it remained there in broad daylight for the entire school year....and the demonic, when we'd pour a gasoline trail across the road, hiding then light it as cars approached a line of flaming luciferian enlightenment from our dark souls, but the scariest was when we tossed water balloons at cars but were chased by an angry motorist at full blast down the hill, right through my own back yard, the madman in close pursuit, a full screaming scared sprint, we finally lost him at the bottom of the hill where we ran off the road into the woods and up a secret embankment.....we finally got nabbed, tho, coming back to the tents one night to find the cops waiting....and were called in for skinney dipping in the local pond, spied upon by viscious girlies.....and when we crushed stinkbombs in a not-so-convenient store.....

glorious times, by any standards.....who'd have known that within just a very few years we'd be confronted by the vietnam war and adulthood in a conformist society, why i continued my ramblings with a vengeance from age 24 to 34, and later with another 8 month hiatus at age 40.......once you got it, you can recall it whenever ya want.

when i was down and out in new york, staying at the flophouse on the bowery, taking drawing at the art students league, scared, numbed, tired, i'd often say to meself, "these are glorious times," and, in retrospect, they were.