My Life In South Carolina

Two days this week I’ve had to stay home with my son because he had all sorts of fluid running out of him from both ends. I used to be able to handle things like that, I was a paramedic for eight years for Pete’s sake. I don’t know if it’s that I’m getting old or have a weak stomach but, I checked on him during one of his “episodes” and flew into a full on gag-retch situation. Oh, it was the whole body locking metamorphosis. I’m not sure but I think I noticed a little gas being passed during the process.

His stomach is weaker than mine so he just puked harder when he witnessed my display.

I’ve been working at home which is a challenge, way to many distractions. Ya know?

I’ve had VH1’s rockfest playing in the background and I haven’t heard some of these songs in years. It took me back to when I was in high school and really didn’t have a lot of responsibility. Ahhh! The good ol’ days.

When I was in school my friends and I saved our lunch money all week so we could pool together on Friday nights for beer. We always had enough to buy a couple of cases of Milwaukee’s Best. So every Friday we’d get hammered on “The Beast” at my friend Toms’ house. That’s what we’ll call him for the purpose of this post.

Tom lived with his mother and brother who had the upstairs and he lived in the basement. The basement was equipped with two bedrooms a bathroom and a small kitchen, so it was pretty much like his own place which was cool.

His mother worked at night so we had the place to ourselves, which helped our weekend drinking binges a great deal.

Tom’s dad lived in Charlotte NC which is about 60 miles from here. I had never met the man, but all kinds of rumors filled our conversations about him. Tom told us he was a bookie and dealt in other organized crime in the area. So, you can imagine what we thought about him. That’s right, he had to be the coolest dad ever! One thing was agreed, everyone that knew him said he was a bad ass and shouldn’t be f@*ked with.

We found this out one night when Tom’s mother came home from work way to early.

We had been knocking out “the beast” pretty good one night when she arrived home and found about five cars in the driveway. She came downstairs and waded through the empty beer cans to the side room that held the pool table and all the delinquents that happened to be there at the time. Her and Tom had words about us drinking and being underage.

He talked to her like a dog and she screamed something about his dad being on the way over. Tom said “screw you he’s not coming he never shows up here.” She stormed out of the room cursing all of us and screaming “You”ll SEE!” I broke a little nervous after this, because for one thing I’ve never talked to one of my parents the way he did. It was just uncomfortable hearing all of the cursing. The other thing was, if his dad was on his way I didn’t want to get shot in the face for something Tom did. I asked if we should leave and he said “don’t worry about it, my dads not coming. That was just a threat.”

About thirty minutes later a car screeched to a halt outside. My heart fell. I just knew we were gonna die. We all ran to exit out of the basement. Apparently his dad knew that route would be our escape and was standing there waiting with a baseball bat. I almost shit. He started swinging wildly missing everyone. Tom ran upstairs seeking shelter from his mom which I’m sure was a useless attempt. We all dove in our cars with his dad still cursing at us.  I hauled ass home praying Tom wouldn’t rat us out. I could only think of the Scarface bathroom scene. Shit!

Tom was at school on Monday. He told us his father gave him a pretty good beat down and maybe we should lay off the Friday night “beast” parties for awhile, and as for talking to his mother the way he did, his father let him know that maybe he should rethink that also.

I met his father a couple of weeks after that and he was as nice as anyone could be. I thought he would remember me and give me a quick “tune up,” but I was lucky. He either didn’t remember me or didn’t care that just a few week earlier he had chased me with a bat. I guess he thought he had scared me enough.

Oh, he had a aire of bad assery about him, and you could tell that he didn’t put up with a lot of shit. As for Tom, I don’t know what ever happened to him. He came to school drunk one day and got busted. I remember him being expelled and going to live with his father after that. There’s been all kinds of stories over the years. You know, the usual ones like, like he was dead, he was in prison, he was a crack head and doing sexual favors for crack money, but I guess I’ll never know. Tom if your’re reading this drop me a line.