Book #1

Setting up a meeting with my representative this week to look at publishing options. To be honest, I just wanna put it on Amazon and be done with it. Now that it's written, I can move on to other projects. Will keep everyone updated on what I find out. The attorney representative told me not to sign away movie rights. If that becomes a reality, I would love for Sandra Bullock to play me. But realistically, it will probably be Melissa McCarthy at least for the college years.

White Trash Rising, an excerpt.

(Tubby is my older brother, he has a real name but most people don't know what it is, so to protect the innocent (me) I never use his real name).

Old black-and-white movies frequently provided Tubby with new ideas for his adventures. After watching a war movie that featured catapults, Tubby announced he had an “idea” and promised, “It’s gonna be fun!” Excited for the attention, I skipped alongside him to the woods, unaware of what was coming. He took a birch sapling, bent the top to the ground, and instructed me to sit on it. “It’s gonna be fun,” he repeated. Of course, he let go, and I went airborne. Although I wasn't in the air for long, lacking necessary aerodynamics, I still recall time slowing down as I glided through the air, landing face-first in the swamp.

Time and again, I voluntarily followed Tubby into these wild experiments, perhaps motivated more by the fact that someone was paying attention to me. Maybe I was not a particularly intelligent child. I was the first to ride down the big hill on a truck hood used as a sled. After hitting a few bushes and finally a tree, Tubby determined that some steering mechanism was necessary.  It would have to be installed before further tests with actual humans, not sisters, could be attempted.

When Tubby woke me in the dark of night to play army, I’d carry the cellar stick while he carried the BB gun, and we would march through muddy fields. I can still remember his sigh of exasperation as he had to return for his “troop” when I got my boots stuck in the mud. He safely set me on dry ground, picked up his weapon, and continued our maneuvers.

He told me that putting the water hose on the electric fence would show me something fun. Why didn’t I ever learn that “it’s gonna fun” was Tubby’s code for “kill, maim or torture baby sister”? Occasionally, Tubby himself would get injured in one of his inventions, but only if he thought it was safe enough to test himself and not send me, his baby sister, out as the test pilot.

On the hill to the north of our house was the pig pasture. A huge hill ended at the bottom with a mud-filled hog wallow, thickened with pig shit. Tubby took our family bicycle (rescued from the dump) and brought it into the pig pasture. Marking out a racetrack in the soft dirt at the top of the hill, he created a replica of some racing event he had watched on television. Does television cause violence? No, but it certainly gave my brother some ideas that ended violently.

The bicycle was a massive old Schwinn wannabe with no chain guard or brakes. It was infamous for the chain jumping up and biting your pant legs and a bit of your skin when pedaling at full speed.  Disembarking involved throwing your leg over the middle bar and jumping clear of the crashing bicycle. Tubby’s big idea was to ride the obstacle course on “Ol’ Leg Killer,” and as ballast, I was going to ride on the handlebars. I didn’t know his actual plan; he never explained what he wanted to achieve. He said, “It’s gonna be fun.” I got on the handlebars.

Pedaling down the hill as fast as he could, we swayed and curved through the first couple of stick markers. At some point, gravity took over, increasing our speed, and the chain jumped off to wrap around Tubby’s legs. “I can’t stop!” he screamed frantically.

I held on to the handlebars with both hands, preventing Tubby’s attempts to steer. We crashed into the three-foot-deep black hog wallow at an incredible speed, somehow continuing to slide a few feet after the bicycle stopped and sank.

I lifted my face from the muck.  I was already regretting my open mouth as I screamed during the landing. Tubby, lying next to me face down on the slop, lifted his head. His right hand made a sucking sound as he pulled it out of the mud and wiped a smear of pig shit and mud off his glasses so he could look at me. “Don’t tell Mom,” Were the first words out of his mouth. We didn’t tell them anything; my lips were sealed. But the smell of pig shit gave us away.

The tin bathtub was set up outside the house, and I was promptly dunked in it. I cried and told Mom, “I don’t think this is gonna wash off; this will have to wear off.” 

I had the luxury of adding a teakettle of hot water into the garden hose water bath.  Tubby had to go around the corner of the house and use the water hose to clean himself and his clothes.  I was right; the smell of pig shit on our bodies seemed to linger for weeks.  At least we didn’t get a lecture from Mom; we had already received enough natural consequences for our stupidity.  In incidents like this, I think my parents weighed their actions.  I was just a child blindly following along. Tubby, eight years older, was spending time with his little sister.  There were no villains or victims.

Tubby just wanted us to have what the “other people” had. Things we saw on television, in other people’s homes, and had heard about in school. He would try to create something if we didn't have the money to buy it. He often tried, but he also just as often failed.

We learned by watching commercials that trampolines were popular among wealthy kids in the late sixties and early seventies. For us, however, it seemed like an impossible dream. But then we had Tubby, who could make anything. With my sister Donna off to college and Mom and Dad off to town for groceries and tobacco, they once again foolishly left me in Tubby’s care. I was assigned to stand on the cellar door and watch out the window that faced the driveway, ready to yell as soon as they turned onto the tar road. I knew that being on the lookout meant something “fun” was about to happen, filling me with excitement.

Tubby announced that he was going to build a trampoline. In the upstairs “junk room,” we had stored every piece of broken furniture we had ever owned.  The inventory included a pair of old box springs and a spare mattress. Somehow, Tubby and I managed to wrestle the box springs downstairs and place them on top of the kitchen table. With Donna gone, Mom had removed the center extension piece to bring the two ends of the table closer together, making it smaller for our family dinners. The box springs fit on the table, though they hung over the edges quite a bit.

The mattress proved to be a more challenging task, bending and sagging, but we got it on top of the box springs. At this point, we had created a towering stack of bedding on the dining table, what Tubby proudly called “our trampoline.” Feeling adventurous, I climbed onto a chair to access the mattress near the ceiling. “No, I’m going first,” Tubby declared confidently. At that moment, I believed our project was a guaranteed success since Tubby was willing to be the crash test dummy for his own invention.

Jealously, I watched as he climbed up the precarious stack. “Watch this!” he yelled before jumping a few feet into the air. I watched as he came down, perfectly centered over the middle of the table where the two halves were joined. As his weight hit the table’s most unstable point, the table crashed inward, its legs flinging outward like the limbs of a smashed insect.

I was angry that I never got the chance to try the trampoline. Instead, I had to help drag the two box springs and the mattress back up the narrow stairs to return them to the junk room. We somehow managed to get the table upright again. Frantic adrenaline propelled us as we pushed, bent, and twisted the table until it leaned precariously but appeared intact. It was holding together like a house of cards.  If no one looked at the table, they would never know anything was wrong.

When Mom and Dad returned, we casually lounged on the couch, peacefully watching TV, just two innocent kids. As soon as Mom heaved the first bag of groceries onto the table, it fell apart like a deflated balloon, crashing to the floor at her feet. “Goddammit, what the hell did you kids do now?” she yelled