Bubba's Tale - How It All Turned Out

My vacation was a months-long extravaganza. I went up the road past the hardware store thinking that maybe, just maybe, I didn't need the drink first to get to heaven and walked and walked and walked and walked. I hadn't walked this far since camp, but I did well enough since I didn't get any blisters and I was careful to remove the ticks and leeches every time I stopped for the night just like my teacher told me to at camp. I sometimes spotted the ticks at lunchtime and had to remember where they were until nighttime, but I didn't forget, not once.

I was so proud of myself. I was being an independent self-supporting adult for the first time in my life. The road ran for nearly two thousand miles and by the time I reach the end I was sure that Steve was wrong and this was not the right direction to heaven. For one thing it didn't go up much except for the little section in West Virginia. So I started back to tell him that he was wrong.

On the way home an odd thing happened, I met someone that had many of the experiences I had endured and it was a she. I mean, she was a girl. I was very excited about this and asked her to be my girlfriend. She asked me if I had any crabs and I said "Yes!" thinking that having them was somehow a lucky thing. Having walked the last thousand miles or so alone, it's clear now that I should have said no.

And that is where things stand now that I'm back in Pennsylvania.

--The End--
While this story ends here, it was only after many years of struggling with feeling that the ringing in my ears and my hearing loss somehow made me a defective person; that is, a mutant, a hideous way of thinking that led to me spending many years in a deep hole of depression. Depression does odd things to your way of thinking - in the story I called thinking about suicide 'wanting to go to heaven' - somehow thinking about it this way made it more acceptable or more palatable.

I finally found a flashlight (complete with weak batteries) and a ladder and climbed my way out of the hole. To do this required taking a 'vacation' - that is to say I couldn't deal with the real world and got some help. The biggest help was being involved in group therapy and just hearing what others had to say - one woman in particular, who gets mentioned in the last part of the story, had many of the same issues I did - but had overcome far greater handicaps. Simply hearing what she had to say helped me get a much better perspective of things.

However, the ugly and mean-spirited dark voices of negativity remain and they are never far away although I've learned to cope with them in a way - and do things that help me avoid triggering their onset and the accompanying awful slide back into the darkness - sometimes even with success.

I've learned to greatly limit alcohol. A glass of wine isn't going to hurt me, and when it’s a special occasion - it's a treat. Drinking to excess, however, is to be avoided at all costs.

I almost always look for something to laugh at - and failing that, change the subject. Unfortunately, sometimes I think I'm seen as 'just a clown' and not taken seriously, when I am being serious.

I try to always encourage others - a kind word might help someone avoid a nightmare or two. No one 'deserves' a trip to the pits of depression and an unkind, careless, or thoughtless word in the wrong place at the wrong time can cause far more hurt and harm than you might ever expect.

I avoid being places where there are happy couples hanging around - seeing others holding hands, kissing, hugging, or just walking, talking and laughing together can burn a deep bitter train of negativity into my thoughts. This avoidance is probably the hardest thing to do... they are everywhere.

My sleeping on the sofa is, hopefully, the last of the 'problem'. I started sleeping on the sofa because I thought that I wasn't 'good' enough to sleep on a bed since I didn't have anyone to sleep with. Sleeping on the sofa was a New Year's resolution - I vowed to sleep on the sofa until I found someone to share the bed with - and the resolution was meant as a positive spur, to get me dating again, having long since given up any hope of finding someone. After three or six months I should have stopped sleeping on the sofa – as it is, it's been well over six years now.

I do not want nor expect pity - the story was written into a journal and never analyzed or evaluated. Having broken it into sections for you to read or not read - I wanted to explain where some of it 'came from' and what, if anything, it might mean.

Deciding to publish this was a very difficult decision for me - it's my hope to eventually cure my 'illness' once and for all. Thank you for taking the time to read this story.

Bubba's Tale - The Current Crisis

Once I was back and had thought about life and its meaning for a while, I was unsure about what I was to do next. I knew I would still like to find one of those whores the guys raved about and getting one of those career things sounds like something I ought to do before too much longer. So I decided seeing the old lady that sent me to college was the best way to go about doing these things. I found her at the school in the playground and when I walked up to her, she keeled over in front of me and died. My grief was boundless, I had lost the only girlfriend I had ever had. I attended the funeral and watched her being lowered into the ground. I pondered this lowering into the ground business since everyone that came to the funeral service said she was going to heaven, which is up there they pointed, when I asked where heaven was. Why set her back six feet? - does she need a running start? Slowly the idea come to me that heaven must be the place where I was when I was in the waiting room before that dreadful day at the hospital.

I had this incredible urge to go to heaven so asked Steve how I could get there and he smiled and said he thought I'd never ask and that sure he'd tell me how. He directed me to get a container of weed killer at the hardware store and to drink it and after I had satisfied my thirst I should start walking the direction away from home and before I knew it I would be there, in heaven, that is.

So off I went to the hardware store to buy some weed killer. I asked the guy at the store for some and he asked me which kind I preferred. I told him I wanted the kind that would get me to heaven quickest and all he did was give me a funny look and say I was a wise ass. At this point I agreed with him, figuring two people couldn't be making the same mistake about what I was. The guy was getting impatient and asked me again which brand I wanted so I asked him which tasted the best. He was very upset after that and threatened to call the cops. I thought calling the cops would be like calling the roll, so I told him that calling the cops was no big deal. I knew instantly I should have just asked for one of the orange colored cans instead, because the guy went gonzo and shouted for me to get out of his store.

My trip to heaven was a fiasco. I never got past the hardware store. I was so bummed out that all I wanted to was kill myself. I returned and asked Steve how I might kill myself. Steve looked puzzled and replied that he had already told me how to kill myself by going to the hardware and getting some weed killer to drink. I knew then that killing myself wasn't going to be any easier than going to heaven. So I gave up trying to do that and went back to my "homeroom" to think some more. I was back to where I started from in every sense of the word and my frustration was mounting daily. I had to find a different way to get heaven or to kill myself or to have a career or a new girlfriend. It was kind of a limited situation and growing weary of the thinking about it, I took a vacation.

Bubba's Tale - A Past Crisis

My joy of having gone through college was short lived as I was assigned a tour of duty in the desert in some place called Eye-Rack. I couldn't understand how I was to study anything marine-like while stuck out in the desert. Worst of all, I was to stand in front of a shack labeled "Latrine" all day doing what my teacher called guard duty. I could smell what was in the shack and I figured it didn't need guarding, so I wandered around looking for the place the guys were always raving about so that I could see what a whore was. I was strolling around asking where the whore was when the teacher that told me to guard the shack appeared and asked me to tell him what I thought I was doing. I told him that the stuff in the shack didn't need any guarding and that I was looking for a whore. If I thought the teacher that meet the bus at camp had an explosive temper, this guy made him look calm. I was taken to a place called the brig and after they did a courts-martial I was told I had failed and I was to return home.

Failed! I didn't know what I was going to tell my folks, folks that only weeks before looked the happiest they had ever looked when the old lady that turned out to be my girlfriend told them I was going to the front and would probably be a casualty. I figured my folks never expect me to sit in the first row and do well, so that the stuff my girlfriend said really brightened them up. Now I was going to return to them a failure, they would really be disappointed in me for not being a casualty, whatever one of those is.

I waited in the brig room for weeks and finally got a ride home. While I was waiting I concocted a story to explain why I didn't do well and be a casualty so I didn't get into trouble. I got off the bus and walked into the house, seeing the inside of it for the very first time, when my brother returned from a room called "work" and nearly passed away when he saw me standing forlornly in the living room. He said that mom and dad would somehow manage to pass bricks through their digestive tracts when they got home.

I was very excited, for the brick passing trick seemed impossible to me, and I was thinking they would somehow use mirrors when at that moment they entered the house and stood stock still before me with their mouths wide open. Thinking this a new social custom that had sprung up while I was away at college, I looked back at them with my mouth open equally wide. After an interval, my dad asked what I was doing home and why wasn't I at the front where I ought to be. I told him my carefully prepared story about how I had found a whore and after getting lucky, had caught some crabs. The college immediately graduated anyone lucky to catch crabs and so there I was. This story didn't seem to have the intended effect as my dad turned very pale and my mother fainted dead away after murmuring something about how could anyone screw something like that. I guess she meant my girlfriend and was wondering why anyone would want to up and leave me. After my homecoming and reunion with the family, I moved back into my room out back by the pigpen and sat around for a while trying to think what all had happened to me. I was very happy to be back in my homeroom.

Bubba's Tale - College

The first thing I noticed about college was that there were no scales to be seen and that the bus that brought me to the college didn't have flashing red lights and was painted a hideous shade of green-grey. I was given quite a rude shock when the bald head of the teacher that greeted the bus appeared at the door and its owner said he welcomed us to Camp Quantico and that boot camp would start in 2 minutes, line our asses up outside the bus and move it, move it, move it. I was thinking I got on the wrong bus, since I was going to college and not to camp, and if this was camp I couldn't figure out why the pell-mell rushing about the guys on the bus were doing when the teacher's bald head disappeared back out the door. I watched them for a minute to see what it was that I was to move, and when I couldn't figure it out, I figured I'd at least line my ass up outside the bus. When I got out of the bus to do this, it occurred to me that my ass was pretty much the shape it was, so lining it up didn't make a whole lot of sense so I walked over to the teacher and told him so.

I have never witnessed such an explosive show of anger. The teacher hollered at me shouting that I was, although I think he meant, I had, a wise ass. I then asked him to excuse me but was I wondered if I was in the right place and was this the U.S.M.C., which the old lady at the school told me stood for United States Marine College. It seems that the old lady screwed you over, the teacher screamed into my ear, followed by the not to be refused request that I get my ass into the line that had long formed at the side of the bus. Later that day, after getting my head shaved, possibly to make it easier for the teacher to get things into it, and being given the first set of new clothes I have ever owned, I was assigned my very own cot complete with a pillow. I thought that with the exception of the rough start, college wasn't so bad after all, but being still confused, I asked the guy laying on the bunk next to mine what getting screwed over meant.

His reply left me all the more confused as he said that's what happened when your girlfriend ups and leaves you after you plunk down the dough to get her a ring. I was partly thrilled because up until then I didn't know that the old lady at the school had been my girlfriend and I really wanted one since I was told that everybody has one but I didn't remember the part about plunking down any dough for a ring. I do forget a lot of things because things are often hard to figure out so I guess I simply forgot that part. I told the guy I needed time to think things out and went to sleep.

It was still as black as can be outside when a teacher rushed through the room making this awful din by hitting a trash can lid with a stick and hollering that there would be roll call in 5 minutes gentlemen, move it, move it, move it. I was bleary eyed as could be but in a way happy, because I figured out the move it, move it, move it part must mean something like the word "over" when they use it movies about airplanes. Camp was over after a few, all too short weeks and I was once again graduated. I was going to kick Steve for telling me I would have a hard time of it, because I didn't.

Bubba's Tale - The Path To College

I eventually found out that school was a place that little children grow to be bigger children and to complain about how awful the sandwiches moms pack in lunch boxes turn when left in a hot locker for 3 or 4 hours before it comes time to eat them. I was once offered the delightful treat of a whole tuna salad sandwich by a boy that told his compatriots that some substance called mayonnaise had magically turned into rat-piss slime jelly. The interval between exiting the bus with the flashing red lights and eating lunch was filled with short stays in several different rooms, the first of them named, rather oddly, "Homeroom".

I often sat while in "Homeroom", wondering why this place that was definitely not my room at home was called what it was. The only thing of note that took place while I stayed here was the bored recitation of announcements of no apparent interest to anyone, the standing ritual called pledging allegiance to a flag for which it stands, and the calling of the roll. Calling of the roll was in itself an arcane activity, for in order to call the roll, the teacher stood and read a list of names and when a child heard one he liked, he would shout out the word "here". In the 12 years I attended grade school the calling of the roll never did actually generate either an appearance or any other response from a roll, even though I would sometimes prod the roll I brought from home with a stick to see if it would react somehow.

It was during roll calling that I became know officially as Bubba although my parents would stoutly declare that they never named me, and the children that went from room to room with me never called me anything but derivations of either the word "mutant" or words of scatological origin. My brother Steve was in my first "Homeroom", which for some reason in the years after the first one, would every year be a different room. I was sitting quietly through my first calling of the roll when the teacher who was finishing the calling got a marked reddening of the face and turned to me and ask me what my name was, if I had one, since it wasn't on the list. I must have looked as lost as I was, because Steve chimed in immediately saying that I was "Bah-ba". The teacher must of thought that Steve was trying to say Bubba because that is what I saw the man write down at the bottom of the list of names he had while mumbling to himself that he had to tell the registrar he had an unfortunate addition. I liked having a name, for it made me an equal with the other children, who it seems, were all given names. I also like being given something, even if I couldn't eat it or sleep on it.

The rooms that followed the "Homeroom" were called things like Art, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Jim. Jim was the most interesting of all these since it was a really big drafty, wooden floored room, and just before we entered it, we went into another room and changed our clothes with the ones that stayed seemingly permanently in small metal closets. My change of clothes were a pair of shorts so stiff that I couldn't bend them and I knew they were mine even the day the lights didn't work due to a failure by somebody named Power, because I could smell them from at least forty feet. The part I remember best about the Jim room is that we would have another calling of the roll but this time instead of just shouting the word "here" when we liked the name that was called, we dropped our shorts to show the teacher our "Jock Straps and Cups". It took me many years to figure out that "jock straps" was not the thing that grows from time to time amongst the hair, and that the cup was the plastic thing that always clanked when the teacher had me stand in front of the children and hit it with a ruler saying to us that a cup protected us from injury. I guess it did, but it hurt sometimes when he got worked up into such a frenzy that he was spitting half way across the room apparently mad that one of the children forgot to wear his that day saying that an example had to be made. If he ever made one, I never saw it so I guess the example must of been made on the other side of the teacher.

I was told by a old lady after attending school for several years, that I didn't need career counseling since no employer in his right mind would ever want to hire something as distasteful as me and that I should go to college. I didn't want to argue with the old lady but I bit off a finger and found that I wasn't all that distasteful, and in fact, tasted far better than a tuna salad sandwich with rat-piss slime jelly and I told her so. She turned a very interesting shade of white-gray and proceeded to vomit all over the table and the application papers she said she filled out for me. When she regained her composure, which she said she lost, she told me I would go to college and the sooner the better. I asked Steve what college was and Steve told me that it was like schall but harder, I was only more puzzled but determined to find out what was harder than the flakes that come off of a dead fish.

The old lady said she would do what she could do get me into a good college and that I was to continue going from room to room like I had been for years. One day, she called me into her room and told me she had great news for me and that she had got me into a college and I was to start in July and that I was to start to think about what I wanted out of life so that I could make the best of my wonderful opportunity.

Little did I know the worst years of my life were soon to come and that I would some day look back on the experiences I had while going to school with a sense of loss and sadness. But before July came, I experienced the pomp and circumstance of graduation, and drinking some stuff called vodka at a party in which the guys invited me to so that they could imitate the teacher that called the roll in the room called "Jim". I never felt so loved in my entire life, and when the party was over, I felt so let down that I had this terrible headache and the thing that grow from time to time in the hair in my shorts hurt like nothing I've ever felt before except maybe the time when a classmate said he wanted to heat some meat with a Bunsen burner and I wasn't to move until he did it. My pain and headache were only just fading when July came around and off I went to college.

Bubba's Tale - Encounter with Steve

The next time the swing flew into view it was empty and I heard my mother say that the stun gun was only for their protection and that Steve wasn't to get to close to the mutant. I was waiting for something that would explain these words when the gate to my yard swung open on some very rusty and very unused hinges and into my world entered my mother and a little boy, both wearing what appeared to be environment suits and my mother carrying what appeared to be a sawed-off shotgun. I quickly deduced this to be the aforementioned stun gun and started to shake from fear, the mutant must of somehow gotten past the safety fence and into my yard. My fear turned to puzzlement when I heard my mother say to Steve that mutants often shake when approached by strangers and that he had nothing to worry about. As I was the only thing in sight that was shaking, it suddenly dawned on me just what was going on.

You might be able to imagine my surprise at this nasty bit of enlightenment but the ongoing mind-expansion was not to end with this revelation, for the next thing I heard my mother say to Steve was that this was the mutant and that it was her boo boo, all the while she was pointing a finger directly at me. Steve was my older brother, it turned out, and he had a speech impairment that was acceptable to the folks that made up society. In fact, it was even considered cute by many, since he could not say the sound of a long "u", so he consequently called me "Ba-Ba" and could never count past one. After this fateful meeting, Steve was allowed to visit me, deeming it his duty to drop in on his pet mutant at least once a day, always taking painstaking care to don his environment suit and making sure that his fingers were never even remotely near my mouth. I grew to enjoy his afternoon chats, for he often would have a story of how his day had gone and even I found his speech impediment kind of cute.

And so Steve grew to the age of attending school when the daily visits came to an end and my folks grew perplexed since they were informed by the authorities that I would have to be allowed to attend school as it was my law-given right. I heard them argue outside the closed gate about enduring shame and ridicule and hadn't God already dealt them this thing called a bad hand. But the day came when the gate swung open on its rusty hinges and I was directed to quickly step into a yellow bus that had flashing red lights on it. I was on the way to school, a place that I was legally required to go 180 days a year for a purpose I had yet to determine. The yellow bus was not the school itself since the driver said that he would be glad when he got to the school so that he could unload something that belonged to a superfund effort. I was puzzling out what a superfund effort was when the door of the bus opened and all my fellow passengers exited, running for their lives and desirous of barf bags if I correctly made out the words they screamed into the air. I didn't need a barf bag as far as I could tell and felt quite safe so I exited the bus with what I hope appeared to be dignity.

Bubba's Tale - Going Home

After what seemed like hours in the hot smelly confines of the paper bag into which I had so ignobly been stuffed, we at long last arrived at where ever it was my folks called home. It seemed that the dumpster at the local Pathmark supermarket had been overflowing, whatever that meant, and that the SPCA didn't have this thing called trade-ins, both events causing my already upset parents increased distress. We must have entered the house through the back door because after only a few steps into the house, I was thrown through the air and onto what later proved to be the kitchen table. I heard the refrigerator door swing open and a couple can tabs being pulled followed by an awfully loud gurgle and an even more terrifying belch, when at length, my father spoke and said that the dog was to move from the doghouse out back by the pigpen and into the nursery, and I that could have his blankets which were to stay in the doghouse.

And so it was, I was home with blankets of my very own in a one room building that had a door that wouldn't close and said "Fido the Faithful" over it and had this really strange odor wafting through it at night. The odor, I soon grew accustom to, but the fleas and ticks that roamed around the hard little collars that I found in a corner on the floor were unpleasant and the grunting noise of the hogs making bacon was not what I had in mind when I said I wanted stereo music. I grew rapidly on the table scraps that were hurled over the fence that dad said kept the curious and the dangerous away, although I couldn't quite figure out why the barbed wire was on my side of the cement wall and all the glass edges that were embedded on the top of the wall had been sprayed with cyanide and the signs that warned folks of some dreadful thing called a mutant were facing the other way.

I was eating on the remains of what appeared to be a chicken with some corn kernels on the side when one day I saw a boy swinging on the old inner tube that hung beneath one of the lower branches of a tall oak tree near my yard. Every time the boy swung, he would appear, gaining the height to bring him into view above my 'safety wall'. And every time he appeared, he made a horrid little grimacing face at me and even in the wind I could hear his stomach protesting at the sight. Finally, being the bright boy that he was, he hollered to my mom who was hanging wash on the line and said he wanted to know what I was. I knew my mother was hanging wash even though I could not see her because every now and then, some piece of clothing that showed excess wear or that would not wash clean, came sailing over the wall to land with a wet plop in front of me. I took the rags with gratitude, for after they dried, they replaced the dogs blankets and I was rid of the pesky fleas, at least for a short while.

Bubba's Tale - The First Day

The first of 8 parts - Iggy hopes to return as soon as he can.

Far up the dusty street, high on the hill that overlooked the stream that long served the inhabitants of the area as an open sewer and named after an Indian tribe stood a very ordinary brick building. The Indians claim to fame has long been forgotten if it they ever had one - beyond having a name that is unpronounceable now as is was then. The brick building showed no real signs of age and bore the words "Montgomery Hospital, Norristown PA" over its two stainless steel and smudged-glass entrance doors. It was here, many years ago that my number was called by God and I left the celestial waiting room on the south side of heaven and entered the world via a dark, damp, tiny, little tunnel.

The bright lights and the garlicky breath of the doctor who was delivering me made me quickly forget the fact that I had somehow gotten covered with a disgusting slimy coating of blood and afterbirth mucus. Gasping for breath at this bewildering turn of events I heard the doctor hollering at the stunned nurse with the prune-like face to slap it! Slap it! whereupon the stern-faced nurse recovered some of her composure and began to slap the living daylights out of my mother. Before I was whisked away to be run through a machine not unlike a car wash, I overheard nurse let out a tortured moan and the words that haunt me to this day, "How could you do this to the world ma'am? that baby is revolting".

A few hours later, my head still spinning from the proceedings, I was attempting to get out of the confines of the straitjacket they put me in as the booties, as I believe they were called, were about as itchy as any fabric ever made. The stale, reused pacifier they stuck into my wailing face tasted like the inside of an empty beer bottle left on a beach for a couple turns of the tide. It was well past the time to split the scene, I was just being to figure, when two ugly wart covered hands reached into the plastic containment cart that held me captive and pulled me into the air and shoved me into a paper bag. In the stuffy darkness, I heard a nurse say something about signing a release paper for insurance purposes and hoping that the owners of the warty hands would be able to find an abandoned dumpster. After a short journey during which I could see nothing and could smell only the remains of a couple overripe bananas, I heard a car door slam and a man's disgusted voice say that we were going home and that something had to be done to correct an awful mistake. I waited in dread, not knowing what the awful mistake was or who had made it.

Bubba's Tale - Preface

As of September 17, 2008 at 7:00 AM
Steps: 189,284
Miles: 80.47



Since I do not know how long I'll be off-line or be unable to type without difficulty after I (hopefully) get my right wing fixed up tomorrow morning, I have serialized something I wrote about twenty years ago into eight sort of semi-digestible parts and will set Blogger on auto-pilot and have it publish one part a day for the next eight days.

At the time this story was originally written, I was having some considerable personal difficulty and was told to write my thoughts into a journal when time permitted. Partly a result of this advise was something I pounded out in an hour and a half over a long lunch break and called "Bubba's Tale." It was a rather grim, unhappy bit of prose, expressing near total dissatisfaction with life in general, and the state of mine in particular.

Looking back on it, I do not recall whether the writing helped me in anyway - I do think there was some relief in just expressing what I wrote. Not all of it is sensible, and very little of it is anything I would write today, although I do find some of what I suppose is "forced humor" to be hilarious.

I hope you will enjoy these entries in the spirit in which they are offered, soul-searching, self-mocking, and mostly juvenile. I've censored it by removing only one sentence from the original and did the lightest touch possible of editing and updating it.

- Feel free to read, heckle, deride or ignore these entries, just don't try to hard to read much into it, or between the lines - you might get scared.



I hope to be back on my keyboard soon. I hope all of you get/stay well and enjoy the onset of autumn/spring as the case may be.