The Best Spider is a Flat One, Part 1

I’m a big dude, and I mean big. I’m six-foot four inches of former college football player with size fifteen feet weighing in at a stealthy 375 pounds, give or take a mediocre steak dinner with all the fixin’s…or two. I’m the guy who has successfully eaten the biggest steak on the menu in a real Texas steakhouse (in Texas I mean) with the looming promise of it being free if eaten in a predetermined time frame set by the establishment offering the deal to the eating public. I personally guaranteed
my success by walking into the steak house with out a dime to my name, so it was either eat and win or face whatever consequences might attach itself to failure. Consequences like going to jail or washing dishes till my debt was satisfied. It was the best sixty-five ounces of formerly corn-fed Texas steer I have ever enjoyed in my life up to that point. It wasn't the "Big Texan", the 72 ouncer served at "The Big Texan Steakhouse" in Amarillo, but they were first cousins. Sometime when I'm in Amarillo, I'm gonna check that one off the old bucket list. Not attempt, mind you, I mean check it off, period. Some folks want to jump out of perfectly good airplanes with a giant silk bed-sheet attached by ropes strapped to their backs, packed by someone they don't even know...or do other stupid stuff involving excess gravity. Me? I'm for the more "ground bound" challenges, at least ones that when accomplished, allows the "checker-offer" the chance move on to the next item on his or her list. Oh, and doesn't involve lawyers, finger pointing, and assignment of blame if said Bucket-Lister's attempt goes south and he or she croaks. All bucket list stuff ought to come with a waiver and a witness.

But that's just me.

I’ve also done most of the macho things a dude might do if needing to prove his manhood to other men. The kind of stuff most women think silly or stupid but most men appreciate. I rode a giant-assed, pissed off bull on a dare and got thrown off that beast, twice, right after I got called "city boy" by a bunch of Pro Rodeo wanna-bees. Too much liquid bravery enhancer caused that screw up. Truth was, I'd hung on longer than they expected, and I guess I was embarrassing them at their own game. I’ve lined up across from a few future NFL linemen in my college football career and bested them. I’ve bench pressed 400 plus pounds a time or two in my life, squatted the equivalent of a small car or a kindergarten class, all at once. I’ve worked at a steel mill as a summer job in 800 degrees of dry heat by the melt shop cleaning up steel slag, so hot it would make the majority of the population melt from heat and fatigue. I’ve worked moving 200 pound rolls of sod grass all day for minimum wage in the humid Georgia heat, ten hours a day for an entire summer between my college years. I considered it “educational incentive” of sorts, promising myself I’d get through college with a diploma intact with my full name emblazoned across it, and I did. I stepped onto an airplane after selling my prized 65 GTO to spend a summer in Lake Tahoe working. I left the Atlanta tarmac with out a set plan, just rented a car in Reno, drove to Tahoe after I landed and sorted it all out when I got there. I even got hit head-on by a two ton Jeep when I turned thirty years old and it didn’t kill me. It came dang close, but it didn’t extinguish the fire lit up on March 2, 1960 on that snowy night in Atlanta, Georgia. Why do I feel the need to tell you how tough I am, based on how dudes determine how tough another dude is on any given day? Here’s the reason in a nut shell:

I hate Spiders.

I. Hate. Spiders. Big, small, medium it doesn’t matter. I am an equal opportunity confessed serial killer of all things Arachnid, no matter breed or size. I jump up on furniture when I see one. I holler in girly range tones. I forget my religion and cuss like Ragan in The Exorcist movie, ready to hurl green upchuck and talk in hellish shrill voices at a moments notice. It’s like I become an instant black belt in every conceivable martial art discipline if I run into a spider web. If you saw me the seconds after I walked into one, you’d think I had mixed judo, jujitsu, drunken boxing and Choi-Quang-Do, with some other as of yet undiscovered ninja moves, with parts of the “Twist” and the “Mashed Potato” dances thrown in for good measure. Any spider is the proverbial mouse to my elephant. You get the picture. Let's move on, shall we?

I have a specific reason I hate spiders and I am going to share it with you right now. I’ve kept it to myself for forty-four years and it’s about time it got out. I think just about anyone would sympathize with me once he or she finished reading this story. If you don’t, well, you are just plain mean and your mom dressed you funny as a kid and you are a communist. The story you are about to read is true and no names have been changed to protect the innocent here. It starts with a trip to the Atlanta City Zoo, my then best friend Dickey McGrew, and a certain skinny, bouffant (pronounced boo-font) hair-dooed and cat-eye glass wearing volunteer, sister to the Devil himself, assigned to Mrs. Reynolds third grade class of which I was a member in fair to medium standing. I’d say good standing, but as Mark Twain said in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”…”If I’da said it I’d be lying it.” I was a good kid as far as I could tell, I just couldn’t get my teacher to believe it on a daily basis. If she would have known my Dad better she would have known how committed I was to being a good kid and how important it was to my long-term survival. I guess making that particular connection is one every kid my age struggled with at one time or the other. I know I did.

My Dad was a man from exceptionally modest means, raised in the mountains of North Carolina in the community if Unaka, just two miles outside of the metropolis of Hanging Dog. At the time of this story he was an up and coming executive in the United States Postal Service. He was a future master of all things mail, M.I.T. (yes the one on Massachusetts) and Duke School of Business Graduate, with numerous other educational and executive based accolades rounding out a great career. In 1968, the year of this story, he was a postal supervisor, dealing with folks who gave original meaning to the term “going postal”. He had a kind and gentle nature about him, but he was “the” disciplinarian around our homestead. His Marine Corps background meant one undeniable truth: what he said was the gospel. If you crossed the line in his careful but simply built matrix of rules, you paid the price. He made those rules crystal clear so that me, my brother and sister wouldn’t trip up and cross the “line”, as it were. He used to tell us “I’ll show you where the line is, and each of you should stay back ten feet behind it in case you stumble and fall, you won’t cross over.” Wise words for me and every man, still to this day.

My dad was a great dad and I mean that with all my heart and soul. He was funny and loving, always including me in his outside activities. He liked old cars and he always included me in his hobbies regardless of how simple or complex. I was a kid who loved his dad and wanted nothing more than to please him. As I stated earlier, he was a Marine, and that truth meant that every thing he owned, from tools to clothing to automobiles, remained in immaculate and “as new” condition during it’s tenor in my dad’s possession. He was a very disciplined man in all aspects of his life and he considered his children his greatest responsibility. That meant numerous lectures about life for me over helping him changing oil in the family car and maintaining the yard, including how young men ought to act when at school. He told me at a young age that I carried his name and his father’s name to school with me and it was important to be a good kid. The rules I mentioned earlier were the foundation upon which he molded his young people into respectable future older people. I had great respect for his authority at a very young age, I just didn't seem to have the ability to maintain that respect 100% of the time I was breathing. He told me once. "all you have to do is 'want to' badly, and it will become habit". Thing was, my "want to" and his didn't seem to line up when it really counted the most.

My dad was also an inventor of sorts. He single-handedly, in my estimation, invented the two-sided belt. I discovered this fact when I got in big trouble at school. I don’t remember what the occasion was, but I’m sure it involved me begging my teacher not to tell my dad of whatever infraction(s) I had committed leading her to send the dreaded “teachers note” home to be signed by my parents two. His belt was thin, the style back then, formal black with a polished silver buckle on one side, used to complement his immaculately polished wing tip black shoes on work days. The other side, I discovered, was a bullwhip, the likes of which Indiana Jones might covet, and use to whip his way out of trouble when it popped up. When I broke the rules, my dad used it to "keep me in the rows" when I brought such notes home, breaking his most basic of rules. My dad was not abusive in any way. He was not a "dog kicker" after a bad day at the rock pile. Every single whippin I got was the sole responsibility of the same person writing this story, and no other. Heck, I even thought for a short while I was the reason whippins were invented.

I’m telling you this part, the dad part, so you’ll know what I was up against way back in the year 19 and 68.

More of this true tale on Wednesday!