There’s two things I still ain’t used to about my father’s small Toyota truck—the smell of cigarette smoke and the condensation on the tan vinyl. It’s humid in Houston, something else I ain’t used to, and everything seems moist. Never mind the cockroaches. And this morning it’s foggy. My father’s dropping me off at school on his way to work at the family roofing company. It’s my first day of seventh grade. I’m twelve.
Located on the southwest side, Jane Long Middle School has a horrible reputation. It’s the school the delinquents from the local juvenile detention center get bussed to. BBH, they call it. Bad Boys Home. There are fights every day, on campus and in the local neighborhood streets, most of them race-related. This also means there are many older kids at the school, fifteen and up. Hell, there are kids in eighth grade who are eighteen. But I know none of this on the first day.
As we approach the barbed-wire concrete-block compound of the school, I start looking for the horses. This is Texas, after all, and a newly transplanted blonde-haired white boy from California, raised on a solid diet of cartoons and Hollywood, certainly knows cowboys are from Texas. And cowboys ride horses, ma’am, pardon me.
As for myself, I’m all gussied up in a gray felt cowboy hat with a feathered band, a leather belt with my nickname stenciled on the rear, and pointed cowboy boots. I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing, the fact I’m not wearing a big ol’ buckle or that I’m getting dropped off in a little Japanese truck instead of riding up like Thor spinning a lasso on a Clydesdale.
As we approach the front of the school, the jitters get to my knees. I haven’t seen a single horse or a corral or even a stall on the school grounds. As my father comes to a stop, something slaps me across the face, and this time it ain’t my raging Evangelical mother. It’s the realization I haven’t even seen a cowboy.
Maybe they’re in the back, I think. I bet there’s a barn back there. My adopted dad back in California raised me to be a positive thinker.
“All right, son, go on,” my father says in his drawl.
Hearing the word “son” cross his lips still doesn’t sound natural to me. We met only a few weeks ago, so I’m still getting used to hearing another man call me that.
A herd of kids hangs around the front entrance of the school, waiting for the doors to be unlocked. As soon as I step out of the truck and shut the door, I hear their laughter. I spin back around only to see my father’s truck has sped off. There I stand, Howdy Doody in a cloud of dust, a thousand eyes and fingers pointing at my back, kids falling over each other in hysterics at the sight of my getup.
I run back to my father’s small blue house on Carvel, the one with white trim and a well-manicured yard. My cowboy boots clomp on the sidewalk rubbing blisters on my heels. He forgot to give me a key, so I wait in the backyard all day till he comes home from work.
He laughs when I tell him about it. It was my idea, anyway. I moved to Texas and I was going to be a cowboy, wasn’t I? Never mind the fact that at thirty-one, my father should’ve had the wherewithal to guide me in a more realistic direction. But he’s just as disconnected from reality as I am. Though I had been told he was “a schizophrenic,” I don’t understand what “mental illness” means. Not yet.
Fortunately, he does understand I need some new clothes and pronto. I almost convince him to send me to another school, but he instead lets me stay home for a few days. Meanwhile, my grandmother Honey takes me to JC Penny and I get some Levi’s 501s, a couple polo shirts, and a pair of red Chuck Taylors.
I call my dad in Fresno and ask him to ship me some clothes I left behind. Before moving to Texas to become a cowboy, I gave away my plaid Bermuda shorts, my white-frame Vuarnet sunglasses, my Sideout volleyball shirts, and the rest of that 80’s surfer stuff I was no longer gonna wear. Dad retrieves my duds and ships me a box within days. He also sends me a brand-new G&S Neil Blender skateboard, one of the coolest decks in 1986.
My father takes me to a barber to get my blonde locks buzzed off by a thin old man with yellow teeth and bad breath. The hand he works the clippers with is more of a claw, as three fingers had been blown off by a short-fused grenade he threw in a trench in World War II. He tells me this story with a lit cigarette perched between his soup coolers.
If you’re confused about who I’m referring to as Dad and Father, good. I was certainly confused about all this for the first twelve years of my life.
I’m adopted. But I didn’t understand what that meant until I was twelve. A social worker attempted to explain it to me when I was six. He sat in a little red plastic chair in my bedroom and broke it and I cracked up laughing, so whatever business he came to handle was promptly forgotten. From then on my adoption was a topic that never came up, and only vaguely hinted at during my childhood. But when my parents split in the summer of ‘86, my mother told me in no uncertain terms that I was adopted.
Two weeks later I was on a PanAm flight to Houston to meet my biological father.
Two weeks after that I’m living with him, waiting for my mother and uncle to arrive with the U-Haul from California. Gone are my dreams of going to Tenaya Junior High with my friends in Fresno, playing soccer and volleyball with hopes of surfing southern California waves as soon as we were old enough to drive. Instead, I show up to my first day at Juvenile Hall Junior High dressed like Conway Twitty about to perform at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
My clothes finally arrive and I skate back to school. All is well for about two weeks until I get knocked out by a big black chick with fists the size of honey-baked hams. We’re in the hallway, standing at our lockers. I pop my combo lock off the steel door and swing it open, smacking her on the temple. I didn’t even know she was there.
She stands over me till I’m eclipsed in her shadow and I watch her fat hand reach up near the ceiling lights and then, like playing Whac-a-Mole, she brings that mallet of a fist down on top of my head. My teeth clack, my eyes roll back, knees buckle, and I slide to the floor in a crumpled heap.
The poor gal picks up my limp body and holds me in a bear hug, bouncing me up and down with my legs jangling beneath me till I snap out of it. As my eyelids flutter, I hear her apologizing over the cacophony of laughter and the sea of mouths and fingers.
Two weeks later Dildo and Beebo induct me into a group of skate punks called The Thrashers to prevent any further knockouts and I trade my G&S for a Zorlac.
Solid read Brother. I think I remember you telling me about getting knocked out by the girl, a life time ago, over beers in the barracks.
In my defense, she was a BIG gal. Twice my size in all dimensions. I think her name was Joe.
Thanks for reading, my brother!