Going Home (part 1)

Who said you can’t go home again? I don’t know, but, they were right. It’s not that you can’t go home, but, you are never in the same place in your head as you were when you left, and you never can be again. I'm pretty damn sure that's what they meant by it too, in case you're really slow and need me to explain it. I went to my grandma’s little plumbingless house and was welcome. I think I just climbed up to the attic and slept for a week. My whole brain was kind of tired out. The Arizona adventure was over and it impacted my life, but, I wasn’t sure what I’d learned. After a week, in which grandma asked me very little except what I wanted for dinner (she seemed to have a way of knowing when I had enough from life) I got my ass up and started living again. I was half good kid who tried to be a help to my gran and half defiant juvenile delinquent who ran the streets at all hours. I hooked up with my second cousins, who were all wild and lived across town in the skankiest house you have ever seen. That place was so damn nasty you had to be in there for thirty minutes to be able to breathe normally. But, their parents were the salt of the earth and welcomed me into the melee. I still have fond memories of her mom who was a hoot and had a glass eye she’d take out to scare us. She also talked to the dead by table tapping and she was no fake. I loved that woman. They were all holy rollers and no one drank. They wouldn’t waste money on booze or bars, but, they still never had a dime. The second oldest girl was Ann and she was smart and very nice. She was a good girl who went through a lot because of how they lived. She was also a cute, thin girl, but, she thought she was ugly because of her kinky hair and freckles. She wasn’t though and once I talked her into not greasing her reddish mane back and wearing it in a hippie style afro like I’d seen at Hippie Hill. She looked hot as hell, but, she didn’t like it, it embarrassed her and she went back to slicking it down. Her sisters were mean and crazy acting, but, Ann and I were the same age and got along good. We went to the skating rink on weekends and sometimes to the movies. Someone had set up a morton building in town and was using it as a theatre, it was a new addition to Hicksville. One more place for teens to go..that made, uhh, two. We weren’t bad girls, we were just poor kids. We walked the streets because that’s what you did if you didn’t have a car and you were bored. Boys would cruise by and honk and if you thought they were cute and not dangerous, you’d get in and go cruising around. If you rode with the same boy more than three times, he could be considered, your “boyfriend” But, only if you didn’t have sex with him..then you were just a slut and he was under no obligation to be called your boyfriend. No worries there, we weren’t about to have sex with anybody. We had lots of boyfriends but no sex. Not even close. Ann’s older sister, Ivernelly had had sex and now she was nineteen and had three kids. They were cute, but, dirty snot nosed screamers who lived in her parents stinky living room. Sometimes on welfare day, we’d watch them for her so she could go out and make another one. It was depressing and there’s no way we wanted to end up like that. At least not at our age. I will say I liked the names Ivernelly gave them though. She wasn’t very book smart, spoke hillbilly only, but, she was funny as all get out. She named them after her favorite TV show and they were Billy-Joe, Bobby-Joe and little Betty-Joe. And their grandparents loved them to pieces. Now that their grown up, I’ve heard people call them Billy-Ho, Bobby-Ho and Betty-Ho which is pretty funny….to a redneck idiot. People should think of those things when they name a kid though. And I have no idea if they are “ho’s, people call every poor kid that. I got called that all the time and I never had sex. It’s not even a good insult.
*
Time is slick and swift, soon I was an aimless sixteen year old who still didn’t have a real job other than babysitting. I had this dream. What a dream it was. I thought I could learn to type and get a job as a secretary. I’d have my own apartment like Mary Richard’s and I’d live a great life. I’d only do it for a few years, until I got married, but, it would be incredible. I’d have a place of my own, I’d decorate it tastefully with the style of the times and be careful with my money and make a nest egg. I’d own a used car, a nice one. I’d buy a cute umbrella and go shopping in a real mall in the rain and be thought of as a normal person. Maybe even admired. I’d give little dinner parties and use a table cloth and the right fork. That’s as big as my expectations got at that time and I still got laughed at. Girls did not live alone back then, the female work force was just starting to be recognized and not one person ever told me that girls can be anything other than wives and mothers. And if someone had, I’d have been shocked. But, I thought I could study hard and become a secretary. Maybe.
*
I enrolled in school and took typing. That lasted a week until some idiot kid who had parents and a normal life and didn’t appreciate it wrote “Mrs. Jebers is a fat hore” on the chalkboard and she blamed me, the new girl from the bad side of town, for it. Again, no adult would listen to me and I was mad that they thought I couldn’t even spell “whore.“ Of course that message wasn’t mine! The principal locked me in a small supply closet after school for detention. It was hot and I freaked out and tore the place up. It wasn’t the small space that scared me, it was being enclosed in the heat. I was terrified and mad. I threw the desk and broke it and cracked the door. When he let me out, I started screaming and cussing at him and stormed out. I still don’t believe that scene was my fault. Who the hell did he think he was locking me in a damn hot closet?? But, I was labeled a bad girl, a troubled teen, and not allowed back. They suggested I join the Army when I turned eighteen.
*
The freekin’ army? I was a war protester! And if girls couldn’t work, why would they want to be in the army? I thought they were all fucking crazy. I thought most adults were just fucking crazy. I’d been proven right too many times. My attitude got real bad after that. I took up drinking, which consisted of stealing some rot gut peach wine from Myrtle’s store and drinking a tumbler full at once, then throwing my guts up and never trying wine again. Ever. I still can’t even stand the smell of the stuff. I also felt guilty and confessed to Myrt and paid her back. That traitor told my grandma I was a god dammed thief and I felt about two inches tall. I wish I’d never paid her. Grandma never beat me, she just looked at me, all disappointed like and got out her bible. It was awful. I wasn’t good at drinking, thieving or typing. I was fucked. I’d better think of something soon or find someone to marry. I didn’t seem to have much of a future and I was afraid my grandma might get fed up with me. She had a right to. I’d had my own apartment once, at fourteen, in one of my adventurous times, but, I couldn’t make enough money to keep it. I decided I’d try again and work really hard. If I could find a job. I tried going into every shop in town and asking for work, but, they’d look me up and down and say “Aren’t you from Guntown? Who’s your daddy?” And they always said no, sorry, we don’t need anyone right now. Even when they had a fucking “help wanted“ sign in the window. Liars. I even went into the movie theatre and told them I could take tickets, sweep up, anything they needed. They told me they didn’t need any “trouble makers”. That’s what I was, trouble. Add a capitol T to that. This town was too small. I hopped a bus to a larger town where no one knew my family and rented a furnished dump for $14.00 a week. Utilities included. I applied at the one place I knew they’d hire anybody. The local nursery. Shitty, hot back breaking work loading and unloading trees and weeding huge fields.
*
You have no idea how bad those big nurseries treat their help. They pay minimum wage and they use people up. People get old before their time in places like that. Back then minimum wage was like a buck an hour . It’s still ridiculous, people work themselves to death and still can’t afford a decent house. It was mostly Mexicans and a few dirt poor white people. They’d make us go out into the fields in the hot sun and never even give us a break or a place to go to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes for lunch, which you had to bring and sit on the dirt in the hot sun and gobble it. Planes would routinely fly over and dust the same field you were working in. Clouds of noxious chemicals would engulf you while the supervisors sat in their cars and laughed at the stupid spics and white trash. After two weeks of this backbreaking hell, you’d go line up at the office where they’d hand you a tiny check and make jokes, like “Don’t spend it all in one place” or “Don’t spend it all on them tacos and chi wa wa’s“ Har de har. And there was the old standby, “Shake it don’t break it, Senorita!” and “Hey hey, Punta!“ for the Mexican women. Punta? They were talking to someone’s mother who worked her ass off everyday so her kids could eat hot dogs and live in a shack. Or some virgin religious girl who was helping her parents pay the rent on the trailer the entire family lived in. But, because they were Mexicans, they were whores. None of the Mexican chicks I’d known in Arizona were whores, they were the most religious good girls anywhere. There were less Mexicans in Iowa, what there were congregated at places like this so they could work. But, they looked the same to me as my friends back near the border and yet they got called punta by these disgusting white men. And if poor white trash like me worked amongst them, then I was a punta too. I wished so many times that Mary PaloAlto’s brothers could hear these men. They would have killed them. They were truly vile and that made the workplace vile. You treat someone like an animal for years and some of them start acting like animals. Like most of the young girls I learned to hold my water all day long because there was no place to pee. If you went behind a building , you were taking your life in your own hands. There were a lot of transients there and criminals. It was hell on earth. I hope working conditions are better now, but, I kind of doubt it and every time I buy a tree I think of those mistreated underpaid people.