I dreamed about my teen years last night. Don't worry, I'm not going to recount them here. Not the actual dreams, anyway. This is just to say. . . my teen years were not the best. They were, really, not good at all. My parents got divorced after twenty years of marriage. My friends were bad. Really bad. So were their parents. Much of my teen years, I realized last night, were spent in my car. How many miles must I have put on that old Bel-Aire? I didn't even think about it. I guess I had no idea that cars wore out. That one never seemed to. In my senior year of high school, my mother, father, and I put in equal amounts of money, and I got a much newer car, a Chevy Nova with that classic 307 engine. Oh, man. . . I thought I was really moving up in the world then. But it was in the old Bel-Aire that I lived for awhile. I slept in the back seat in the trailer park where my friend Tommy lived with his mother, step-father, sister, and brother in a two bedroom 10' x 60' trailer.
Thinking less of me?
Donny and Deena lived there, too, in a trailer with their parents. Like my friend, Tommy, both had dropped out of high school. I don't know how people made it. Only the men worked, and only sometimes in bottling plants and factories. I remembered last night that I was always driving Tommy's step-father somewhere because he didn't have money for gas or his old car was not working. On Sundays, I would drive him to the next county over where they sold beer on Sundays.
I never think of those days, but last night they appeared to me in great detail. One night, there was a new guy in the park. He was big. Everyone was drinking in Tommy's trailer that Saturday because his mother and stepfather were out at the marina bar on the river. Things got weird--I think drugs were involved--and Donny, who was not a big guy, jumped the new guy from behind. It was stunning. The big guy just threw Donny off his back hard to the ground then gave him a boot. Donny didn't get up. He just lay there and moaned. Deena was crying and worrying and asked me to take Donny to the hospital. He had a cracked rib and a broken toe. Nobody blamed the new guy, and later that night, if I remember correctly, everyone was friends.
Deena was a peach. She was the Beauty Queen of the Lakeshore Trailer Court. She acted like it, too. Her parents never allowed anyone into their trailer home. It was like a shrine, it seemed, sacrosanct. One had to wonder what went on in there. The entire family believed they were better than the others who lived there. They seemed to say, through their actions, never actually voicing the words, that they were doing everyone a favor by living there. The father, Donny Sr., had retired from the military. He thought he looked like Frank Sinatra. He believed he sounded like him, too. But like everyone else who lived there, he was a drunk, as was his wife. Still, you know. . . he had served honorably.
Deena had a boyfriend who lived in Alabama. He was older, twenty-one, I think, and she said that they were engaged. He would come down once every few months to see her. She would be preening for a week before he arrived like some visiting royalty from a far off land. On his last trip, for reasons befuddling me now, her parents let her spend the weekend with him somewhere. A few months later, it was known that she was pregnant. The boyfriend was not coming back, and Deena took up with another dropout who had a "decent" job. They moved into a trailer in another trailer park on the other side of the county.
Tommy had been seeing the girl who lived in the trailer across from him. She lived with her mother and father. She had two brothers, but they were older and not living there any longer. They each owned trailers in a park a bit further down the highway. The father and the two brothers all worked in canning plants. The oldest of the three siblings had been an athlete in high school and still held himself as something of a trailer park homecoming king. The other brother was a goofball but a nice guy. Debbie was in love with Tommy, and the three of us often went places in my car. We went to see "Romeo and Juliet" three times at the drive-in theater. I think that is where she got pregnant.
I graduated high school and that summer got a job working at Disney in the General Laborer's Union. It was a big deal to get in. You had to be sponsored. Donny's father had gotten a foreman's job on the Contemporary Hotel construction site, and he sponsored Donny, Tommy, and me. We all became unions members and went to work there the next day.
Tommy's parents moved to another part of the county. They took their trailer to a new trailer park that was just beginning. Tommy and his siblings moved with them. I lived far from work, two counties away, but Tommy didn't have a car, so I would go out of my way to pick him up. I would have to make my paper bag lunch of three sandwiches, a bag of chips, and an apple the night before, then get up at four a.m. in order to pick Tommy up and get to work on time.
Meanwhile, back at the old trailer park, Debbie was getting bigger. Was Tommy going to get married? It was a question that was making him sick. Many days I would go to pick him up but he would say he was going to work that day. Of course, he was eventually fired.
It got around that one of our truly worst person in the wold "friends," a really bad guy, had taken Deena's mother to a really lousy hotel where she made him shower before they had sex. I remember hearing him tell that with a mixture of revulsion and envy. Not envy, really, but maybe jealousy or maybe some kind of sick glee, for she had always held herself so prim and proper and high above us all. . . .
The world I lived in was a fallen one.
This is not a fraction of the story, but I can stop. Tommy did end up marrying Debbie. I worked all summer, ten hours a day, seven days a week, because the overtime pay was more than equal to the hourly wage which was already substantial. Those rednecks were getting cracker rich and buying boats and cars and. . . brand new trailers.
I had an accident that if I had not been such a dumb hillbilly should have made me much richer, but being a dumb hillbilly, I was glad that they let me sit in a trailer and drive other injured workers to doctors appointments. At the end of the summer, out of nowhere, really on an impulse, I enrolled in college. I wanted to get far away from that life.
Whoa! All of that was in my "dreams" last night, and much, much more. I'm not even going to try to figure out why. The "dreams" were not impressionistic at all but were clear and precise. I could see all the faces clearly, could smell the odors and feel the grit.
As I lay there when I woke, I thought what a lazy fool I was not to take the required hours to write the stories in a meaningful, well constructed way and not just wing it in my morning blog.
I am, though. Lazy, I mean. Or maybe it is something else, some doubt that was implanted in me in during that teenage nightmare, something I may have never truly overcome.
Don't judge me.
The photo at top was one I took with my Fuji medium format camera and the mounted Canon lens adapter. I have learned that most of the functioning of the lenses and camera are not available from the adapter with my Fuji model. I would have to spend thousands to upgrade to the next, higher resolution generations.
I'm not going to do it. I swear. . . I won't.
I'm pretty sure, anyway.
A William Eggleston print just sold at auction for 1.44 million dollars.
This one.
Eggelston's teen years were spent in decadence, too, but he was rich. He has never had a job in his entire life. He invested his life in music and photography. That's $1,4400,000.00. I need to go back and find out if it was part of an edition or what.
It is another in a string of perfect days. I will get out early. The light is too good to waste. I need to make a good photograph. Apparently they are going for more than I have been charging.
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