my cousin and i didn't come from money. we didn't live in what you could call a city, or even really a town. we lived in trailers and houses where the roofs rotted into your porch. "critters" lived in our basements/attics/crawl spaces. villages. of alcohol, drugs and simple times. culture? nope. we did have some bible bangers, though.
we lived about 45 minutes apart, but i remember all my fondest recollections of childhood were shared with staci. about 10 months apart in age, (me her senior, i shall never let her forget), we had many adventures together, even though no matter how much i begged or attempted to bribe her - she would never deem me her "favorite" cousin. nope, that honor belonged to charity (who now shares a double wide with a homosexual husband named earl and five children. condoms = abortion. it's god's way). well, i think i'm beating charity now. . .
we loved sour patch straws. jolly rancher candies. greasy, crunchy, juicy broasted chicken from the norseman supper club, four blocks down the street from my childhood home. chucky movies were the best. we had a ball, with the limited resources we had. if we didn't have an arcade, we made up our own live role playing video games. we didn't have the coolest movies, so we made our own with my uncle's video camera (or at least plotted them out with props, scripts, actors and planned how it would be filmed if he ever agreed to let us borrow his equipment). my favorite film of ours that was never created involved an oversized bouncy ball, a ginormous teddy bear and some sort of haunting premise.
we also wrote plays. some live with humans, but mostly with barbies and my vast troll doll collection. our other cousin lacy usually turned our barbie plays into some sexual twisted display, which always left staci and i scratching our heads, wondering what "pussy" meant and why lacy kept slamming the barbies plastic pelvic areas into ken's plastic underpants. our moms would shake their heads, bored (and stoned) out of their minds at our weak displays of directorship and thespianhood.
we played bar instead of house, especially at lacy's trailer. one of us would get to be the bartender, and the others would pretend we were wasted, based off our parents' examples. if there were only 2 of us, we'd get our stuffed animals to sit in the other chairs so the bar would look full. shots of pickle juice, orange juice mixed with milk and mustard, flat coca cola, we drank it all. never booze, though. not sure why.
lacy taught me how to shave my legs for the first time. 13 months older than i, she knew the rules of beauty and was in the same boat as i in our mothers not permitting us with our own bics and shaving gels. being in the sixth grade and tormented every phys. ed class in shorts was not a fun experience. "hey gorilla legs!" it was already bad enough coming from a poor home and having the humiliating rounds of free lunch tickets announced by my homeroom teacher every morning. throw in a bad mullet haircut, "cokebottle - double paned soundproof" government issued glasses and hairy legs and it was just too much. so when lacy dug out two rusty disposable razors out of her mother's bathroom garbage, how was i to know that this could be a bad idea? finally! an out of gorillahood and an in to womanhood and potential popularity (or at least, lessened teasing). lacy proceeded to scrape her legs, sans water or soap, with her razor. "this is how my mom does it, you try."
i did. no water, no soap. rusty edged razorblade orange handled bic. i still have a pretty visible two inch long scar on my lower left leg from where the blade scraped my flesh in a thin, straight, long strip from my leg. that shit bled. forever. i couldn't hide the bloody toilet paper balls, shoved in the bathroom trash from my mom and she knew it wasn't from my menstrual cycle. (that joy came two years later). she was pretty horrified at my disobedience and quickly provided me with my first accurate shaving lesson, complete with name brand aloe razors and shaving gel. "jesus, jodi." and several bandaids and neosporin applications later, the scar eventually subsided to what it is today, a slick, shiny indention that is only visible in certain angles of light.
another favorite game staci and i would play together in my hometown was called "monsters." all this pretty much consisted of was running around like maniacs along the street until we'd spot cars approaching in the distance. as soon as the cars were within visible distance, we'd make some sort of whooping sounds with our mouths and shout "waaaaam waaaaaahm waaaahm, MONSTERS!!!" and run for our dear lives to avoid being viewed by said beasts (the monster's (car's) headlights), and dive down the slopes into the nearby park or throw our bodies flat onto the ground. if we were "spotted" by a monster, we would be frozen in place in fear, similar to freeze tag, and remain standing with our legs spread apart so our co-players could come to our rescue when no additional monsters were in sight, and crawl through our legs, thus freeing us from the paralysis brought upon by the monsters.
we were hick kids, that's for sure.
nowdays, i find myself living in one of the largest city's in the country. a city where real monsters roam the streets and murders, rapes, and various other criminal activities never dreamt possible in our hobunk villages occur on a daily basis. would our freeze tag and diving into the ground tactics work here now? probably not. then again, sometimes i wonder if we aren't the real monsters ourselves. drinking into oblivion, following the paths of our mothers, this time playing bar in the real deal vs the doublewide. turning our backs onto our forgotten youths and cluelessly wandering forward, unsure of what lays ahead.
i could really go for some jolly ranchers about now.
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