An autobiograhy of James Arthur Casey (Part 5)
originally written on September 18, 1995
Slightly revised on August 21, 2021
(When I last left off it was about 1977-1977 and my mom and dad were trying to rekindle their romance by weekly visits to the BJ Corall then I got a little side-tracked. Now we return to the original manuscript...)
Charles and i were left alone on these Saturday nights. That didn't bother us, however and we actually began to look forward to having the run of the house at such young ages (I was 16, I think, and my brother one year behind). They would buy us Fox DeLuxe and Tony's pizzas to fix for our dinner(perhaps this is why I have such well-documented love for pizza even today)...cooked 'em straight from the freezer and into the stove, no mamby pamby microwave for us country boys who hated country music. We also got a six-pack EACH of Coca Cola so we learned quickly how to process caffeine and use it in the service of staying up as late as we possibly could. There was nothing stopping us from staying up until mom and dad came home but I don't remember them coming back and in retrospect they probably left us to fall asleep on our own until the bars closed down at 2:00. I may have been young but I knew even then that this place was no more than a glorified bar out just side of the county line. The law concerning alcohol was known as B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bottle) but the news kept talking about a new law that essential would supplant pseudo-dry counties: Liquor By The Drink. I don't remember the essentials of that mandate, it just meant that the Oklahoma was catching up with the Coasts and Las Vegas concerning alcohol consumption. Pretty sure it had a lot to do with taxing the hooch much like we now tax "medical" marijuana in Oklahoma and let the more "pious" of us call it a "sin tax". Tobacco has always been a huge player in collecting Oklahoma's sin tax and it looks like ganja could well surpass it in sheer dollars and cents within a short period of time...hell, I haven't looked at the numbers, our marijuana taxes may already have surpassed tobacco. I wouldn't be surprised what with dispensaries popping up in every crevice of every small town and blossoming like the wild west in the bigger cities. Oklahoma City and Tulsa, for instance, have countless dispensaries already in full operation.
What will be the future of marijuana in Oklahoma? In the long run we'll just have to find out.
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Back to the autobiography...
So...here's me and my brother all alone in the house, I suppose some would say these days that we were being "neglected" but that would be plain silly. It's not as if we lived in Chicago. Remember, the town I grew up in was small. Somehow it's been classified as a "city" as of not many years ago but make no mistake, it's a small town, always was and always will be. Small town gossips, small town churches (except for the beautiful Catholic Church which hosts the supposedly infamous Shrine of the Infant Jesus), small town schools, small town shutting the doors down at 10 PM and except on special occassions everyone was expected to be at home with his/her family. And we were, most of us. There were some names that were infamous for being outlaws...Fawcett, MacAnally, Griffith...I grew up with a sense of fear for this lot...except for Justin Fawcett, who, along with his sidekick Russell Drury became my first "partner in crime".
Justin and I had a wooden box with a lock on it. I suppose I should say it was Justin's, he had the key to the lock, but he let me see what was in it...just more of the "adult books" that I'd been developing a taste for. We would take magic markers and write coded messages all over that box so there was no mistaking who it belonged to. Like a club. I also remember a small metal box where someone had cut out individual pictures of nude women from Playboy and Penthouse and me receiving these on the cusp of my pubescence makes the memory of that box strong even though I was the one who threw it away. Why did I throw it away? I suppose I didn't want my mom and dad to catch me with it, I don't think I ever even showed it to Charles, this was my own secret box.
Time marches on. I was not damaged by my appreciation, as a pre-teen, of what the prudes called "porn". It wasn't until several years later that I saw what I would consider actual "porn" and it was a different ball game indeed.
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Back to those Saturday nights, slightly less outlandish. We'd stay up as late as we wanted to watch Mazeppa's Uncanny Film Festival (featuring Gaylord Sartain as Mazeppa and his many skit characters, and a young, less frazzled healthy Gary Busey whose main role was as a Tulsa Oklahoma version of a greaser named Teddy Jack Eddy. This stuff should still be on YouTube, I think you'd be amused to point your Google Antenna towards those keywords and see what you find in those waters).
This was also the era of the first few seasons of NBC's Saturday Night...as any true fan of the original show knows it wasn't called Saturday Night Live during at least the first one. No lazy initials of SNL and Chevy Chase were only on that first run before I assume he became too obnoxious and coke-addled to be relied upon (or even liked). It didn't matter because Charles and I only started watching it when the second season began, the one where Bill Murray joined the cast and the music guests began to get more eclectic (DEVO, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello & the Attractions to name a scant few of dozens of awesome, original music guests. Nothing like it is today, although I don't doubt that plenty of people who aren't really deep into music might think there's something there that just wasn't there before, I am here to tell you there was. Kanye West, face it, is his own biggest fan. Much of what passes for music on SNL these days is a pale imitation of honest working man's music or punk rock or progressive rock or anything that was happening in the 70s and most of the 80s (I'll give you a few from the 90s as well but Kurt Cobain killed alternative music when he shot his stupid ass self in the head having succumbed to every musicians' nightmare, the Siren of all artistic integrity and the killer, HEROIN.
I have never done heroin in my lifetime and it is with a great degree of confidence that I will tell you that I'll never do it for the rest of my life. I can't say that I won't one day fall off the weed wagon (though I don't see it happening anytime in the future). But I swear with my hand on the Bible and the Rosetta Stone that I'll NEVER smoke crystal meth or crank or speed and even though I'd been open to it for a long time I don't want to trip on LSD or even mushrooms. Life on this planet is too bizarre on it's own terms for me to want to mess around with reality.
Hugs not drugs. Sounds lame. Trust me, it's not. There comes a time when it catches up with you. You start to think you have the answer. You start to think of yourself as Buddha himself dispensing wisdom hither and yon. You start thinking that everything you see on the TV and in the movies is either real or intended to mess with your mind. Have you ever seen The Truman Show? I got to see it in the theater with a few of my friends from my stoner days. I was so brazen at the time that I took a wood pipe and a quarter sack in an Altoids box everywhere I went and once I even took a hit in the empty men's room of this particular theater. I don't think it was The Truman Show when I did this, but no matter, I was on Cloud 9 with my ganja gang and something about Truman's predicament as the unwitting star of a whole television show he knew nothing about made me feel paranoid. Looking back I'm surprised that it didn't push me into a psychotic episode, now that I understand better what a psychotic episode is like...and I have marijuana to thank for that.
My story...I'll never be able to see it in a linear fashion. It will always be memories that trigger something within me that I recognize as my SELF. Is it starting to get weird? Trust me, it gets weirder and I'm not barely half through with the original manuscript I began transcribing a few days ago. This is not an invitation to pry into my private life. It is only a sharing, secure in the knowledge that NONE of you, not a single one of you is better or worse than I am and hence I am no better or worse than any of you. The great equalizer. So it is. Down to choices.
I really need to listen to some music today! What will it be? Choices!
Choices! What should I listen to? I think I'm going to get out the old HP Computer that I put on the shelf when Microsoft killed Windows 7 (idiots...Windows 10 sucks big time next to Windows 7 Home Premium and that old computer will prove it. Now I'm happy to use a Lenovo with a slow Dell back up). There are a ton of videos I made of myself during various stages of learning to play guitar and singing, none of which would probably make the grade on a silly Tik Tok video, but they were recorded so long ago that I'd forgotten them. I think I'll spend most of my Saturday with headphones on my head a computer on my lap, laying on my back so it doesn't start hurting again...there's something I should figure out and chech with my doctor about, my back just kills me. He'll just say exercise more and he'd be right. He just doesn't know how much I can't stand the sun sometimes.
Choices!
(Damn, I have a fine wife. A good wife. Thank you Jesus for sending her to me...I don't think I'd still be tethered to the mortal coil without her)
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