HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH

This week’s HTYH is a continuation of Dennis’ story: A man 4′ foot 6″ tall with a short-guy attitude; will not let a tall drunk drink in peace. The short guy would drink, I’d take a drink, but sooner or later, my lazy eye would accidentally look at him and he’d say, “What are you looking at?” I had no idea what my lazy eye was looking at, but it started fights and I got barred from one saloon after another.

  I had a happy childhood, my father was a Baptist preacher and my mother was a kind loving woman with a bunch of daughters and we were kind of like the black Walton’s. “Goodnight John boy, Goodnight Mary Ellen” and at Sunday School I learned how to act; to say exactly what they wanted to hear. My father had long arms, big hands, fat fingers and he could thump you into a coma in a second. It was sort of like coming out of a black out. I was confused and not certain what happened but I was determined not to let it happen again. I learned to manipulate people and memorize things, and those were some of my worst liabilities when I was drinking alcohol. I memorized Bible lessons until I could recite them forward and backward and people would say to my father, “You have a fine son.” I wished they’d go on and say more; I loved that kind of talk. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t say, “Seldom have we seen a person fail who has memorized our book.” No, it says, “followed our path.” And that’s what I didn’t want to do, follow their path, I just wanted to hang around A.A. and see what they did, but not follow their path. I came to A.A., got a cup of coffee, sat in the front row and nobody messed with me. When we grew up on that cotton farm we were so poor that we never thought much about the civil rights movement. We were still picking cotton when the nightly news came on so we missed it. By the eighth grade things began to change in North Carolina, and segregated schools came to an end. I never thought much about segregation because I was just going to school with my friends. But, school was terribly intimidating because I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t even feel comfortable around black people. At the end of my eighth grade we had a farewell party because it was our last year for segregated schools. And, I found out that I couldn’t dance like other black people. I didn’t need to because we didn’t dance in the farm fields and that’s the only place I’d ever been. I sat there and watched the whole party and saw other kids dancing and I felt even more uncomfortable because I didn’t have a cool walk like the other black guys. Black guys get to be thirteen, or fourteen years old, and something happens to their kneecaps, it makes them dip a little when they walk. I’d been pulling a cotton sack around for thirteen years and it took the dip out of my hips; it took the glide out of my stride. I love Country Music and I’d lay in the bath tub on Saturday night listening to Merle Haggard, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, Conway Twitty and the Twitty Birds; nobody told me black people were supposed to like soul music. I made it all the way to thirteen years old, and I was not cool, I was a “soul brother” who didn’t have soul. Suddenly I found something that did the trick; I took my first drink of alcohol. Cato was my best friend because he was a slow listener and I’m a slow talker. He brought over a bottle of his grandfather’s liquor and we laid up in the corn crib and drank it all up. About ten or fifteen minutes later, I felt real soul and a great wisdom passed over me. It ran my I.Q. up to about 200. When I look back at that day in the corn crib, it must have been my first spiritual awakening. To be continued…