The Cold Days of Summer - Episode 7
A new family arrives on East 11th Street; television in west Texas (KMOM, KMID and KOSA or before the miracle of cable)
Did you miss last week’s episode? Or, was it so damn good you feel the need to reread it? Well, either way, here’s a link: Episode 6 - This isn't Mayberry; A murderer walks among us.
The Blessings
Remember how there was no one my age on the block? That all changed in October of 1968 when the Blessings moved into 1508 E. 11th, two houses down from our house. Dennis and Mary Blessing had three children and one cat. Jack was one year older than me, making him eleven and in the sixth grade since I was 10 and in the fifth grade. Kate was my age and Janey was two years younger than me. Blackie, the cat quickly established its territory and soon all the other cats in the neighborhood lived in fear. Blackie fought with nearly anything that moved. Even a few of the dogs in the neighborhood learned to be afraid of Blackie.
The neighborhood kids' experience with Jack Blessing wasn't much difference than that of the cats and dogs. Jack was a good head taller than me and weighed fifteen pounds more. That made him just as big as some of the older kids (who were now twelve and thirteen years old) but he wasn't afraid of any of them. Best as I could tell he wasn't afraid of anything. Before the Blessings were in their house for two weeks Jack had challenged every kid in the neighborhood, fought quite a few of them and set himself up as king. He was somewhat tolerant of kids smaller than him, unless they did something to piss him off. The only problem was is it didn't take much to piss Jack off. Sometimes all you had to do was walk on the wrong side of the street.
The bigger, older kids were Jack's real targets. He zeroed in on them, bullied and pushed them around until they either fought him or ran away. He won every fight because he was ruthless in his approach. He didn't fight dirty, he didn't bite or scratch, but he fought hard and fast and he knew how to punch and kick. He also knew where to punch and kick so that the damage was done, but didn't leave much to see. He was a master of the solar plexus punch, the kick to the groin and the stomp on the foot. At first, watching him fight the older boys was entertaining, but the fights didn't last long. A quick stomp, punch and kick and his opponent was usually on the ground groaning. Then depending on Jack's mood he either left well enough alone or followed with some strategic kicks to finish the job. In that first two weeks I never saw him hit someone in the face or anywhere where the punch might leave a mark. He was a professional.
Once he established his kingdom, Jack extracted retribution from all of us. Sometimes it was money, sometimes it was favors like doing his chores for him, sometimes it would be dares. That's how I stole my first comic book, all because of a dare. According to Jack, I had a choice, steal the comic book or he would pound the shit out of me. It was an easy choice. I really wasn't much of a fighter and I didn't see the harm in stealing so we walked down to the 7-11 a few blocks away. While he distracted the cashier I stole an issue of Superman, stuffing it inside my jacket. We didn't enjoy the fruits of my crime until we ran all the way back to my house where he first read the comic book and then I read it. My crime seemed to buy me some respect from Jack.
“I like the way you hid the comic book inside your jacket. That was smooth.”
“Well, I knew I needed to hide it. I just couldn't just walk out of the store with it in my hand.
“Yeah, that was smooth.”
I was emboldened. “You know, stealing one comic is hardly worth the trouble. We should steal more than one at a time.”
“You mean you should steal more than one at a time.”
“Yeah, that's what I meant. Anyway, you get caught stealing, you get caught stealing, no matter if it's one or five comic books. And, if I steal more than one, then I don't have to wait until you finish reading it before I get to read.”
I thought for a moment and said “Something else we should do. We should buy stuff. Maybe some candy or a soda, anything. The cashier will never suspect that someone buying stuff is stealing from him.”
Jack looked at me for a long moment. I was getting a little nervous.
“Well, you little sonuvabitch! You're a natural criminal. I think you and I are going to have some good times ahead.”
All right, I was in like Flynn, or so I thought.
The problem was, how shall I say it, Jack was fickle. One day he would be your friend. The next day he was your enemy and you would spend the day hiding or trying to talk him out of beating the shit out of you. Some days I was lucky, I stayed hidden or managed to talk him out of his anger or found someone else for him to vent his fury on. Some days I wasn't so lucky. He made sure the bruises didn't show. What really sucked was that on the good days he was a good friend. Problem was the bad days were badder than the good days were good. Something had to change. I couldn't see living like this for very long.
Then one Sunday afternoon in February I learned Jack's secret. I was walking in the alley after spending some time scrounging through the trash behind Dunlap's, a moderate upscale department store on 8th street when I heard a girl crying. The crying was coming from the Blessings' back yard. I walked quietly up the edge of their wooden fence, found a slit I could look through and watched and listened.
Kate, Jack and Mr. Blessing were in the backyard. Kate was crying and it looked like Mr. Blessing was angry at her. Jack just stood off to the side, ramrod straight.
“God damn it, Kate. You know how angry your mother gets when one of her plates get broken.”
Kate took in a big gulp of air and seemed to choke on it.
“You've got to be punished. God damn it, now quit crying or it's going to be even worse.” As Mr. Blessing said this he begin to unbuckle his belt and pull it off. He stood there, in front of Katy, who now was crying even harder. She was starting to shake as he held the belt in one hand and started popping it across the palm of his other hand.
He raised his arm holding the belt up to the sky then began to swing it down to hit Katy when Jack stepped in quickly, grabbing Mr. Blessing's arm and standing in between the two of them.
“God damn it, boy. Don't get in my way unless you want some of this shit too.”
Jack didn't let go of Mr. Blessing's arm. He said “Kate didn't break the plate. I did. You want to punish someone, punish me.”
Kate wailed now. “No, no, no, Jack, don't say that it. It's not true, it's not true. Daddy, Jack's lying. I broke the plate. I broke the plate.”
Mr. Blessing looked from one to the other.
“Maybe I should just beat the shit out of both of you.”
Jack spoke again. “I broke the plate, Kate is just trying to cover for me. Right, Kate?” He looked at Kate and though I couldn't see his full face, what I did see told me enough. His expression told Kate to go along with him or she would regret it later.
Kate wasn't as quick on the uptake as I was. “No, no, no, Jack.” Then she got the message. She looked long at Jack, gulped and said “Daddy, Jack's right, I was lying to protect him. Daddy, I'm sorry.”
“God damn it, you know I don't like liars.” He paused for a moment and some of the steam seemed to come out of him. “But, if you have to lie, there's no better reason to lie than to protect your family. Get back on inside the house, Kate. Go to your room. Maybe a couple of hours in there with the lights off you'll think better about lying to me again.”
Kate didn't immediately start walking towards the house.
“God damn it, I said get in the house and I mean now.”
That got her running. When she got to the door she looked back. Mr. Blessing was facing away from her and looking at Jack. Jack saw her at the door as she mouthed “I'm sorry.” He nodded his head to acknowledge her. She walked in the house and closed the door, leaving Jack and Mr. Blessing in the yard alone, with me still watching through the slit.
“God damn it, boy, when will you learn? How many times do I have to teach you the rules of this house? Hell, this belt is too easy. I'm going to treat you like a man today.”
He dropped the belt to the ground then viciously punched Jack in the stomach. Jack tensed his stomach for the blow and didn't get the wind knocked out of him.
“You think you're tough, you little piece of shit. I'll show you what tough is.” Mr. Blessing struck him again, this time with a hard punch to the shoulder.
I don't how long it went on. After a while it just got sickening. Jack would get knocked down and he would get back up. He didn't fight, he didn't defend himself, he just took it. I watched a 30 year old man beat up his sixth grade son. As time passed, Jack would take longer to get back up from a blow, but he always got back up, that is, until the final series of punches, to the stomach, ribs, and under the chin. That last punch seemed to lift Jack off his feet and to the ground. He didn't get up this time. He pulled himself up on his elbows but Mr. Blessing leaned down over him and said quietly, so I could barely hear.
“You better stay down, boy. You can't take anymore of this. You better stay down.”
Jack tried to pull himself up, but Mr. Blessing placed his boot against Jack's shoulder and pushed hard so Jack rolled in the dust.
“I've had enough of you, boy. Don't come in for awhile, you're not welcome inside.”
With that, Mr. Blessing walked away from his son and into the house.
Shit, I thought I had it bad.
I avoided Jack and Kate for the next week. I left five minutes earlier for school so I was a couple of blocks ahead by the time they left for school. Once at school avoiding them wasn’t that hard. Jack was in the sixth grade and his home class was in the sixth grade wing off by itself on the east side of Dowling Elementary. Kate and I were both in the fifth grade, but had different teachers. I had Mrs. Tattersly and she had Mrs. Morrison and luckily they were on different PE schedules so I didn’t see her at PE. At the end of the day I ran out of class so I could again be a block ahead of them.
But Jack wasn’t an idiot. He knew something was up. One afternoon after school before anyone else was home I took out the garbage. Dad and Mom were at work, Elizabeth was at a Brownies meeting. I had walked out into the alley, tossed our garbage into the Dempsey Dumpster, turned around and was face to face with Jack.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“Jack! Hey, good to see you. Um, what do you mean?”
“For the last week you’ve been avoiding me and Kate. Why?”
“No, no, I’m not avoiding you. Nothing’s going on.”
Jack was pissed, he clenched both of his fists as he spoke.
“Fine, fine, nothing’s going on. Just keep it up. Since nothing’s going on maybe I should beat the shit out of you just for nothing, just to do it. What do you think?”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea?”
“So, now I’m stupid! I don’t know enough to know what I should be doing?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant, no, not at all.”
“Shut, up, just shut the fuck up. I’m going to beat the shit out of you, so you might as well shut up.”
Jack’s not stupid, neither am I and I could tell there wasn’t enough dancing or words I could come up with to get out of this situation. I began to resign myself to my fate. I wasn’t a fighter, Jack was. I was going to lose, I was going to lose badly.
I didn't know it then, but I was in the midst of an important lesson. In everyone's life, sooner or later there comes a time, a situation that you would rather avoid dealing with. You would prefer to close your eyes and act like it's a dream, or run away, or do anything but deal with it. The problem is the longer you avoid the situation (or situations like it) the harder it will be. It's like a small cut that you don't clean up or disinfect. Soon it gets infected and starts festering. Eventually you have to deal with it, and do what you should have done from the beginning. Only thing is the longer you wait the harder it is to deal with it, the more you have to do and undo just to get things back to where things were.
That's how things were with Jack. He demanded action, resolution and I had avoided dealing with him time and time again, hoping things would work out or he would go away or the world would change in some way that Jack would no longer matter. But Jack is like a natural force that you can't ignore and sooner or later has to be dealt with. What I hadn't realized was the longer I chose not to deal with Jack, the harder dealing with Jack was going to be.
That day in the alley was one of those big turning point kind of days. I had come to a fork in the road and I had to choose which way to go. There was what seemed like the familiar, and as a result the seemingly easy, route, just keep dealing with Jack like I had been doing. Or I could take a new way, a path that I didn't know where it would eventually lead. All I knew was the old way sure didn't seem to work well anymore as I was about to get the shit beaten out of me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hell, I was about to get the shit beaten out of me simply because I took out the garbage before my Mom asked me three times and because Mr. Blessing beat the shit out of his son. It wasn't right, but it was what was about to happen.
Then, for some reason, I thought back to Jack facing Mr. Blessing, taking on the blame from Kate and I don’t know why, but words came to me.
“Fine, go ahead and beat me up. But understand this, you might win, but I will hurt you.” As I said this I looked Jack hard in the eye.
“What, what did you say?”
“You might win, but I will hurt you.”
Jack looked at me for a long moment, then a big smile went across his face.
“Shit. Shit, I was just messing with you, man. Just messing with you.” He slapped me hard on my shoulder and said “You’re all right, Drew. A little fucked up, but you’re all right. I’ll see you tomorrow, right? No more of this sneaking out a few minutes ahead of Kate, Janey and me, right?”
“Right, Jack, right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
With that, he turned around and walked back to his house.
Sounds like everything worked out well, doesn't it? And the big moral? Don't put something off if you can take care of it today. Yeah, sounds great, but one thing I keep learning is that things are never that simple. No, not that simple.
Jack is like an infection that the strongest antibiotics weaken, but never quite eliminate or eradicate. The infection hangs around and in a moment of weakness it comes back hard and strong, threatening to break down everything that's healed. Jack has his good days and his bad days. On the bad days I've learned the only way to deal with him is to stand up to him. Trying to placate him never works, just seems to piss him off more. Once Jack is convinced you won't back down, no matter how hard he pushes he either hits you and you better hit him back or you get a slap on the back and a big old smile. You never know what you will get, but I learned to deal with it.
Two and a half channels in glorious, fuzzy black and white
Television in West Texas in the 1960's and early 70's left a little to be desired. We had two and a half channels. KMID channel 2, located at the airport, was the local NBC affiliate. KOSA channel 7, located in Odessa, was the local CBS affiliate. Then there was KMOM channel 9, located in Monahans, about thirty miles down highway 80 from Odessa. The call letters MOM stood for, I guess, Monahans, Odessa, Midland. KMOM was the local ABC affiliate and what that meant was we didn't watch a lot of ABC shows. At best KMOM was on the air about half the time, and it always managed to be off the air when I wanted to watch something on ABC, like Johnny Quest, Batman or the Flintstones.
So we had two and half channels of television and if there was something my Dad wanted to watch at the same time that Elizabeth and/or I wanted to watch something, well, I'll let you guess as to who won that contest. Needless to say, I learned to like the programs my Dad liked to watch. Luckily, due to work, he was rarely home before 7:00 pm during the week and on many Saturdays so the only time he watched television was at night or on Sundays.
My dad apparently didn't believe in the magic of color television because he resisted making that upgrade for a very long time. The only real hint I had that there were programs broadcast in color was when I stayed over at a friend's house or if we all went over for dinner at my Uncle Bill's house. I would come home jaded to the power of color television, and the fuzzy shades of gray at our house only confirmed what I had suspected, I lived at the edge of the universe, the wrong edge.
For the me the best time to watch television was on sick days, those days I was just sick enough to stay home from school, but not so sick that I couldn't camp out in the living room while Mom and Dad were at work and Elizabeth was at school. One Wednesday in November of 1969 was one of those days and I was at home, eating a couple of sandwiches when High Noon, the KOSA local talk show came on at, as you probably guessed, noon. The host of High Noon was George Duesler, and his co-host was Kay Gaddy. On this particular day, Paul Archinal was acting as the host as both George and Kay were not available. Paul had his own show on KOSA in the afternoon, “Admiral Foghorn,” a children's show. As Admiral Foghorn he wore an admiral's hat and jacket but this day on High Noon he wore slacks, a short sleeve dress shirt and tie. Admiral Foghorn might be worth a few words in its own right, but for right now, this story is about High Noon.
Local television talk shows have always interested me. They lead to questions such as “Who made you the host?” and “My God, is this town as desperately out of touch with the rest of the world as I think it is?” Important questions for which there are no definite answers.
Paul started off the show with some quick Odessa news and a weather update, then he welcomed his guests. Two straggly long-haired young men walked out onto the stage, clearly thinking this was the biggest goof of the day. It was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Yes, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Yes, in Odessa. Turns out the Rolling Stones were on a nation-wide tour. The night before they had played in Phoenix, Arizona, and the next night they were playing in Dallas. All I could guess is they were riding in a tour bus and the bus had left Phoenix after the last show, then drove hard all night east to El Paso then up to Odessa on its way to Dallas. Why did they stop in Odessa? Who knows? Maybe the Stones had heard of Odessa and its Shakespeare Theater and wanted a little feeling of merry old England. I'm guessing they were feeling a little disappointed because other than the Shakespeare Theater there's nothing in Odessa to remind you of England.
Paul did his best to interview Mick and Keith, but it was plain that he was no fan of rock and roll, long haired men, England or the Rolling Stones. In fact, it took him several minutes to get the names right. He kept calling Mick Mike and Keith Richard. It didn't take too long before the interview was over and Paul said “Everyone, let's give Mike Jagger and Richard Keith a warm goodbye.” I heard maybe three claps.
With that High Noon was over and KOSA started showing the CBS afternoon lineup of soap operas. That was not my thing so I turned quickly to channel 9. The picture came in a little grainy but watchable and I settled down for thirty minutes of Maverick. This was a good episode – James Garner and Jack Kelly played dual roles, their usual roles of Brett and Bart Maverick plus the roles of Pappy Maverick and Uncle Bentley Maverick. I always admired the Mavericks and their way of talking their way out of fights.
Riverboat ring your bell. Fare-the-well Annabelle! Luck is the lady that he loves the best! Natchez to New Orleans, livin' on jacks and queens, Maverick is the legend of the West. Maverick is the legend of the West.
As the Maverick theme song faded away I drifted off to sleep. Around 2:30 I woke up. I thought back to what I had seen that day and I began to wonder if I was sicker than I realized. The Rolling Stones in Odessa! No way. Must have been the fever. Later that afternoon the Admiral Foghorn Show came on and Paul Archinal, in his Admiral Foghorn jacket and hat, didn't mention anything about the Rolling Stones. Maybe they were there, maybe they weren't. I don't know.
A longer than usual episode - thanks to Jack Blessing.
Coming in Episode 8 Drew spends a Saturday in the oil fields with his Dad, and Drew adapts to his clumsiness.