Goat roper country pt. 2
Let me set the tone
The year is 1985, we live in a little cabin on a ranch my room has a door that leads to a porch; the door has a crack under it big enough to let spiders, potato bugs and frogs in. My room, which had I guess at one point been the kitchen had a big sink in it, where the potatobugs would get trapped. The room is painted one half in pink and one half in purple, with a large pink and purple tye dyed sheet covering the water cistern beneath the sink. Posters of Billy Idol, Prince, Robert Downey Jr., Rob Lowe, and the rest of the brat pack on my walls. Heavy Metal, Teen girlie mags and Cosmo flung all around.
My ghetto blaster spouts the Go-Go’s, Prince, The Scorpions and Billy Idol (sometimes I even listened to Kenny Rogers – but please don’t tell anyone).
15 was not an easy age, probably not for anyone, though the cheerleaders with names like Candi, Melissa and Renee always made everything look easy – full of pep, laughter, popularity – while I; ever the outsider, dressed in my bleached jeans, blue lips and safety pins in the ears, survived on the periphery – trying to fool all with my tough attitude. I bleached those jeans myself by hanging them up on a clothesline and throwing bleach at them, fancying myself a true rebel.
to be continued…
Goat roper country pt. 1
I have been thinking about my years in goat roper, shit-kicker, inbred hillbilly country. The place people refer to when talking about somewhere so far out in nowhere that the only way to describe it would be the “boonies”. A bizarre place with both hippydippy artsy fartsy bohemians and inbred locals set in some of the most powerful nature the United States has to offer, the Redwood forest. Weather that starts chilly with frost in the morning and warms up to shorts weather by lunch time. To put it bluntly – bizarroland.
We moved there when I was eleven straight from Rome, where I with my godfather like Roman accent went straight from private Italian school to sixth grade where I became one of the space cadets.. but that is another story.
to be continued…
