Where The Hell Is That Damn Box? The Beginning

Where The Hell Is
That Damn Box

Anyway?
The Beginning
by
A Memoir
Copyright 2009 by V
First Edition
General Editor/Ghostwriter: Iyan Igma
Published by CreateSpace in Scotts Valley, CA
ISBN: 1442173521
EAN-13: 9781442173521
All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole

or in part, by mechanical, electronic, or any other means, without
permission.
For information, contact V at v@thatdamnbox.com or

Iyan Igma at: iyanigma@gmail.com
Additional Copies May Be Purchased On Amazon or From

www.thatdamnbox.com and www.iyanigma.com
Cover design and back cover photo by Iyan Igma.
The front cover background illustration is “The Scream” by

Edvard Munch, which is public domain per US Copyright laws,
as it was created before 1922.
All graphics used in the interior of the book, besides those listed
on page 198 in further detail, were in the public domain.
This is a work of non-fiction. The names of people and places

have been omitted and changed in several cases.
Large portions of this book was dictated, and great care has been
taken to preserve the style of the vernacular, grammar be damned.
In Memory of My Father
I probably learned more from him than

anyone else. He was the one that taught
me to think for myself. He was the one
that taught me to depend on myself
instead of looking to somebody else to
take care of me.
The Beginning
Introduction
Apparently the memories of everything I've done

just hang around. I can remember the things folks say
and their faces. It would be simpler for me to direct a
movie than write a book. I have a photographic memory
of everything I've done in my life, and when I was
younger I used to think my head would explode. But it
didn't.
Now, about the title. All my life I've heard people
talking about how they had to get out of the box. Well,
hell, I've always been so far out of the box I can't find it.
I guess that's because I don't remember ever limiting
myself by saying I'll never do something. I was pretty
much game for most anything.
Life Motto #2
Wherever you are, whatever you do, always remember
to “hit a lick.”
5
Where The Hell Is That Damn Box Anyway?
Special Note:
Lamentably, On 2 January 2010, V passed on, and I am

certain that by now he has made it safely to Valhalla. V
was one of the most remarkable people I ever met. It
was my honor and great entertainment to help him with
this project.
This book was finished when he died, however he had

not finalized certain details. Having burnt all the
midnight oil I could helping him catalog many of his
memories, I hope that this book stands as an accurate
representation of what he wanted and who he was—
which is a far cry from how his obituary depicted him.
Iyan Igma, Ghost Writer and Editor
6
The Beginning
Table of Contents
Lightning.......................................................................10
The Bullwhip................................................................14
Reincarnation................................................................19
Playing In Church.........................................................22
The First Television......................................................24
Egg Custard...................................................................28
Egg Custard Recipe.......................................................30
"Cute"............................................................................31
Bullies...........................................................................34
Speeches........................................................................38
Hatchets.........................................................................43
Swamp...........................................................................45
First Invention...............................................................48
The Duck Hunter...........................................................49
The Nest........................................................................51
Log Jam.........................................................................52
Swamp Folks.................................................................53
Grandparents.................................................................55
Fertilizer Delivery.........................................................56
The Frontier Dentist......................................................59
BB Gun Versus Rock....................................................63
Basketball......................................................................66
Pinball...........................................................................68
Bored Stiff.....................................................................75
First Cigarette................................................................78
Casino...........................................................................81
7
The Demon And Drowning...........................................83

Broken Back..................................................................87
After School Recess......................................................89
Wheel Bases..................................................................94
Bootlegging Begins.......................................................95
FFA Camp...................................................................100
The Dog......................................................................107
Chocolate....................................................................109
Boy Scouts..................................................................111
Cause He was Family..................................................116
Jailhouse......................................................................118
Bootleg Cherry Bombs...............................................123
First Nookie................................................................126
Shooting Off Hat.........................................................128
Go To Hell Hat............................................................130
Violent Knight.............................................................131
Off Camber Hill..........................................................137
First Motorcycle..........................................................140
A Lifeguard's Holy Terror...........................................144
Thumper Camp...........................................................146
Cow Sitting.................................................................148
Algebra in High School..............................................150
Library Fight...............................................................153
Principal's Desk...........................................................155
Douglas.......................................................................157
The Night of the Wedding...........................................159
Driver's License..........................................................161
Race Cars....................................................................163
The Bet........................................................................166
8
The Beginning
The Intersections.........................................................167
My Fear Factor Moment.............................................169
Three Bridges Road....................................................170
Theater Terror.............................................................174
The Night of the Prom................................................177
Skunk Story.................................................................182
The Fair.......................................................................194
Jealousy.......................................................................196
Smoking......................................................................197
Senior Trip..................................................................199
Getting Sam There On Time.......................................206
Spence Field................................................................208
The Dead Man.............................................................209
Illustration Credits......................................................215
About V.......................................................................216
About V.......................................................................216
9
Lightning
I was at my Grandparent's house one night.

Mother was working in town; Dad was doing
something, although he couldn't have been working in
the fields because it was raining. I was probably four
years old, maybe five. My Granddaddy was out on the
porch, and my Grandmother was in the kitchen fixing
the evening meal.
I was in the bedroom playing with my toys. Now,
my toys consisted of a big box of wooden thread spools,
which my grandmother kept saving for me. I wouldn't
have traded my thread spools for any video game I've
ever seen. I could do anything with them. I could build
things with them. I could make vehicles with them.
My Grandfather came into the house. Then, he
walked through the kitchen into the bedroom where I
was. He called to me.
10
The Beginning
He said, “Vaughn, come out here. I want to show

you something.”
And I remember looking up at him and asking,
“What?”
And he said, “I can't tell you. I've got to show
you. Come on out here.”
And so, he reached out to me and took me by the
hand. We walked through the kitchen, and I remember
my Grandmother fixing the evening meal.
He led me out onto the porch and pointed out into
the rain, and he said, “I want you to look right over
there.”
And where he pointed there was a tree about
twelve feet tall about about maybe ten feet from the
porch where we were standing.
And I said, “What do you want me to look at?”
Again he pointed at the tree and said, “Just keep
looking at it. Just keep looking at it.”
And I stood there looking at the tree. I'd seen it
before, and I couldn't figure out why he wanted me to
look at it now. And just about a minute after he led me
out onto the porch, a big bolt of lightning came and hit
the tree. It just split it in two. I was just ten feet away
from it, and I thought the thunderclap was going to
knock me over.
I really didn't think about it until it was too late.
But ever since I did think about it, I always wondered
how he knew lightning was going to strike that tree,
because from the time that he got up out of his chair to
11
the time the lightning struck the tree was about five
minutes. I don't know of any procedures today for how
to tell where lightning was going to strike something
five minutes ahead of time.
Now, since that time, I've been extremely close to
lightning many times. Lightning has struck the car I was
riding in four times. I remember one night at home,
lightning struck the circuits in the house. I think it got
there through a ground strike. But I was standing in the
kitchen getting something. And I heard lightning strike
just outside the house.
And while I was standing there, this bright blue
light just started going all over the kitchen. It went to
everything electrical in the kitchen. It would come out
of one and go into the other. It would go from the fridge
to the stove to the water heater to the fuse panel. And
I'm just standing here in the middle turning and
watching each appliance have this blue aura on it. I just
thought it was interesting having this blue light running
around and around the kitchen, though it did burn up
everything. But I've never been afraid of lightning. I
guess when you've been that close to it, you don't have
any more fear of it.
I can tell you from experience that when lightning
strikes the car you're driving, the noise is just absolutely
stunning. But the whole world just goes white. Now, I've
seen this same blue light jumping around on the outside
of a car. But that's kind of interspersed with the whole
world going white.
12
The Beginning
They mix together somehow. I never have been

able to see anything but that blue light. I never could see
anything outside the windows because everything was
just way. That's one reason I don't drive a car with a
computer chip, since I know that a lightning fries a
computer chip. (Another reason is because I don't know
what all exactly the computer chip does do, so I'd rather
not have it around me.)
13
The Bullwhip
The same Grandfather from this lightning story,

and I was about the same age, probably four. I'm sure I
wasn't in school. I was down at their house again,
though this time in the daytime. I don't know what
brought this on, but for some reason something that I
had done got my Grandfather kind of upset at me.
He was holding his bullwhip in his hands, and he
said something about spanking me. And I remember
taking it as a joke.
And I said something to the effect of, “Well,
before you spank me, you'll have to catch me.”
And I took off running. And I felt that bullwhip
snap just right between my shoulder blades. And it drew
blood. It was a hard lick. And I remember just as soon as
I felt that bullwhip hit me, something different came
over me. And I stopped dead in my tracks, and turned
14
The Beginning
around, and with a measured pace, I walked back to my

grandfather.
My head came up just a little above his waist. He
was standing there with the whip uncoiled and laying
out on the ground. He didn't move anything, and my
Grandmother was standing next to him. She didn't
move. It was just like they were frozen in time.
I walked over until I was just about a foot away
from him, and I looked up at him and I said, “If I do
something wrong, you can spank me. But if you ever hit
me with that damn thing again, I will kill you.”
I walked over to the porch and went inside, and
they just stood there kind of frozen. My Grandfather for
the rest of the time, never ever had any thought about
hitting me with anything.
Now, just a few years after that, my Dad bought
me a bullwhip. I worked with it, and I worked with it. I
kept the back of my neck and shoulders bloodied from
learning how to use it. It was a ten foot Roulette whip,
the best kind they ever made. I worked with it all the
time, just every spare minute I would work with that
whip. I thought that I was going to beat myself to death
before I learned how to control it, but I didn't.
I got to where I could pop it so a cow would feel
the wind from the tip, but it wouldn't ever touch the cow.
So, it wouldn't hurt them that bad. I got real good with
my whip.
A couple of years later, Dad saw that I was getting
good with it and could control it. He got me a whip
15
made. It was a twenty-two foot bullwhip with an eight

foot cracker on the end. He gave it to me for Christmas.
That year for Christmas, from the same place that Dad
had my whip made, Mother, without conferring with
anybody, ordered and gave me a feedbag for a horse. I
didn't have a horse.
I said, “Where's the rest of it?”
She said, “What do you mean, where's the rest of
it?”
I said, “Where's the horse?”
Dad finally decided that he could cut out a piece
of one side of it and keep clothespins in it. If she had
just told Dad what she was going to do, he could have
told her that we didn't have a horse. There wasn't
anything we could do with the damn thing.
I got good enough that I could actually pick a shot
arrow out of the air with those whips. I did all kinds of
tricks with the neighbor kids and with anybody that I
could talk into doing it. I started off cutting newspapers
out of people's hands with either one of the whips I had.
I got down to a cigarette in the hand, and then I got to
taking cigarettes out of people's mouths. Then, I got so
that I could flip a quarter from between their fingers
without touching their fingers.
And all that got boring pretty quick. And one of
my cousins, I think he may have been a little jealous.
I'm not sure. He suggested that he shoot these practice
arrows next to me and at me with his bow. So, we
started off with him shooting the arrows next to me. And
16
The Beginning
I could just flick them out of the air at will. And then we
worked up to him shooting the arrows at me, and I could
just flick them out of the air before they got to me. Boys
really don't have to be stupid to be stupid.
At one point later on in my life, I won some
money on a bar bet. Somehow the conversation got
around to whips and what people could do with them.
And I told them that I was good with a whip, and
nobody much wanted to believe that.
And so, we wound up making a bet that I wouldn't
be able to crack that whip in that bar without hitting
anything. The bar had real low ceilings, about seven foot
high, and standard height cocktail tables that went to
about three feet high. So, that meant I had about four
feet left, and this was a thirty foot whip, which meant I
was going to have to stretch out my whip almost the
length of the bar in just a four foot space.
So, I made out my bets, and the next night I
brought my whip. They all looked at it, and there were
some more people that said that it couldn't be done.
There wasn't enough room to get a thirty foot whip to
crack in just four feet. So, I got more money bet against
me.
We were standing on a stage making up bets and
putting up money. When I turned around, the waitresses
had set all of the chairs in the bar up on top of the tables
because the bar had been closing. So, the chair legs were
now sticking up on top of these tables. And that actually
left me about two feet, more or less, for the whip to go
17
through between the ceiling and the chair legs.

So, all these guys that had been betting against me
told me that it would be okay if I wanted to wait for
another night or move the chair legs. I told them I'd
rather them double all the bets, and I'd like to do it like it
is. They were all too happy to.
I backed up on the stage and uncoiled my whip,
and it just stretched out like a rattlesnake striking, went
straight through the air through the chair legs, and
stretched out to the other end of the bar and cracked just
like a rifle shot. And I collected my money. I didn't even
have any trouble getting the money.
They said, “Anybody that can do that deserves to
be paid for it.”
18
The Beginning
Reincarnation
I firmly and positively believe in reincarnation. I

had...they weren't dreams. They were memories of
things, that I remembered when I was little that I didn't
even know what they were until later on in life.
I wrote in old English. I spelled everything with
the old English spelling. The teachers didn't know I was
doing that until I got into high school, and then I found
out that one of the reasons that I couldn't spell was
because I was honestly spelling everything in old
English. Hell, when I was in grade school, the teachers
didn't even know what old English looked like,
apparently.
Well, one of the things that I remember was being
in a battle. The people that I saw that I was battling with
were dressed in what appeared to be animal skins of
some kind. The thing that struck me most was the
surface that we were fighting on.
It was something that I had never heard of or
19
seen. I don't remember if I asked my parents about it,

but I'm sure I did at some time, but they didn't know
what I was talking about.
I found out later on in life it was the Devil's
Causeway in Northern Ireland. But the Causeway that I
was fighting on was just barely awash with water. It
seemed to have just about an inch of water across the
hexagonal blocks that made it up. Nobody that I knew
even knew what it was until I was in high school, and in
all of the pictures that I saw of it was dry.
I remember being an Oriental warrior in both
Japan and what I took to be China. In several memories
that I had I would be hidden inside of an enemy
campground, either in logs or boulders, and the enemy
warriors would be all around me and setting on the logs
that I was around and hiding behind.
I remembered a lot of that. I have looked through
books of various places and pictures of various places
and just suddenly knew that I had been there, like a pile
of rocks, or a castle, or a street in a town. And with this
background, I never doubted that I had been there.
The lot of the warrior is that when somebody
needs us we're the most wonderful thing around but as
soon as we've done our wonderful things, they want us
killed so they don't have to deal with us.
Another one of my dreams that I had when I was
real little was living under water. Just going along like a
fish. I mean, I wasn't a fish but moved like one through
the water.
20
The Beginning
I remember being in a smoky cave with a bunch

of men dressed in animal skins.
21
Playing In Church
Mom and Dad took myself and a slightly older

cousin to church one night. I think it was in some kind
of revival. We'd gotten out of the pew and decided that it
would be a fun place to play tag. So we did. We ran
down to the front of the church and we'd tag each other
and the other one would run away.
I noticed that neither Mom nor Dad was chasing
us. And it got me and my cousin a little worried, so we
decided that we had better go outside for a while, we
went out and looked in the church and they were
continuing to have church and it got over and we got in
the car and they took my cousin home.
22
The Beginning
And then, we went to the house. I think mother

started off. Mother started whipping me with a belt. And
when she got tired, Dad took over for a while. Then,
mother started back.
And by this time I'm thinking, "They must be
tired of having a child. Hell these people are just going
to kill me for doing that."
They didn't, But I learned that playing in church
was not the smartest move that I had ever made. That
was probably the beginning of the end for religion.
23
The First Television
Mother worked at Friedlander's. She was a floor

manager and a buyer for the women's department at
Friedlander's and a world renowned cosmetician. She
sold what was at that time the most expensive and best
cosmetics in the world. Friedlander's was by far the
smallest and least exclusive store that they sold Charles
of the Ritz in the world.
The only places other than that that you could find
Charles of the Ritz were in stores such as Sachs 5th
Avenue and Nieman Marcus, except for Friedlander's
down here in podunk, Georgia. They sent mother to
school in New York four times to learn different parts of
the cosmetology. And at one time they offered her the
managership of the cosmetic department of any store in
New York, if she'd just move up there and take it,
because Charles of the Ritz was such a power in the
cosmetic industry that they could dictate who ran the
cosmetics in Neiman's or Sachs or any place that they
24
The Beginning
were in.
She was so well thought of by them that when she
left Friedlander's and opened a little gift shop on the
ground floor of the Colquitt Hotel that Charles of the
Ritz went with her instead of staying at Friedlander's.
She had a position that Friedlander's was trying to keep
and trying to keep her happy, because they realized that
she could go anywhere in the country and do well.
One of the things that they did, and this was
about 1945 or 1946, Friedlander's used their influence in
the retail world and connections in the retail world to get
3 twenty-one inch black and white (naturally)
Magnavox televisions. If I remember right the Vereen's
got one, and I believe that the Pidcock's might have got
another, and we got the third.
There were only two channels available. The only
two television channels anywhere around here were
Channel Four in Jacksonville and Channel Two in
Atlanta. We didn't need a movable antenna to point
anything at because there was nothing else to point an
antenna towards.
They came in good. They said that at that time
that the antenna company had designed an antenna that
was cut and designed just for channel four's frequency
and we got an antenna that was cut and designed for
channel's two's frequency. I mean it was black and
white, it was snowy, but we hardly had any trouble out
of it, whenever we wanted to watch television, we
watched television.
25
They weren't on but for about six hours a day, and

then they went off and the thing went blank, and they
kept gradually getting a little longer and longer. There
were several families in the community that through
newspapers and such would find out about TV shows
and come over to our house to watch TV for one show.
And then, another family would come over and
watch their show and then leave. And there were a lot of
times that our family would be in town, maybe grocery
shopping, or we'd go to pick up mother or get some
supplies on the way back and we'd come back to the
house and find two or three families in the living room
watching their shows. There were six or eight white
families and two or three black families that came over
and watched their shows. No one locked their doors at
that time.
If I met a family coming home they'd say come on
in and make yourself at home, as they left and there'd be
someone else watching their program.
And then, one of the neighbors that had watched
our television called us and told us that he had a new
system of watching television at his house. He told us
that we could come over to his house and watch his new
“color” television. None of us had ever heard of one
before, and so we loaded up and went to see what this
looked like.
And he had bought a brand new black and white
TV with a plastic strip that you just stuck on the front of
your television and it was translucent it had a blue streak
26
The Beginning
across the top third of it and a pink streak in the middle

third and a green streak across the bottom third, and that
transformed your TV into a brand new color television.
And people just bought them like it was silver
falling from the sky. They bought millions. It took me
less than three minutes to just hate those things. And
they're sitting there bragging about how they're in color
and they have skin tones and the grass is green. And I'm
just sitting there thinking what in the hell are these
people talking about? This is crap.
And I don't remember anybody ever thinking
about the house being full of people when you came
back, it was just normal. The only comment that I heard
from Mom and Dad was when we'd pull into the yard,
oh yeah, this is their night. This is their program. It was
just an ordinary normal thing. But, God almighty if I
found somebody in my house today I'd kill 'em and eat
them before I realized that I couldn't do that in polite
society.
I was in college when I saw a real color TV for
the first time. But I do remember WAGA-color. WAGA-
color was a system whereby station WAGA in Atlanta
broadcast color pictures with a black and white camera
going to a black and white television set. Color is a
frequency, and they'd use a different frequency of
flashing for different lines on a screen. But I think it was
way too involved to do on a regular basis. They just did
it every once in a while to show off.
27
Egg Custard
About the same time, I was six years old, and we

had one of my little cousins come stay with us for a
while, maybe a week, I think, and mother was working
in town and Dad was working in the fields so we were at
the house and I was to entertain my little cousin.
And somehow we decided that we were hungry in
the middle of the afternoon. And between the two of us
we decided that we would like some egg custard
pudding. Now I had seen mother make egg custard on
several occasions so I decided that I would make us
some egg custard. I found out that we didn't have any
eggs.
Went and got the tractor and got it cranked up. So,
I tried to get my little cousin to stand up by the tractor
seat. Now I was small enough at that time that I had to
28
The Beginning
stand on the clutch with both feet in order to put the

thing in gear, but I had driven the tractor around on the
farm before. She was afraid to stand on the tractor
anyway or anywhere so I had to back the tractor up and
hook it up to a trailer that we had which was really a
terrible job for a six-year old kid.
But I got the thing hooked up and got her up in
the trailer and drove to the store about two miles from
the house. I think I had found some money somewhere
or I had a little money, I don't remember where the
money come from, I didn't have enough money for a
dozen eggs, so I bought two eggs, that's all I needed for
the custard. So, I gave my cousin the two eggs, and she
could just hold one egg in each hand. I think she was
about 4.
I drove back to the house with her in the trailer in
her little frilly dress holding these two eggs in both her
hands. And when we got back, I cooked us some egg
custard. It turned out great. I think that was the first
thing I cooked just altogether by myself, but sometime
soon after that I decided that I was never going to give
any woman the opportunity of starving me to death, I
was going to know how to cook.
Life Motto #1
Where the hell is that damn box anyway?
29
Egg Custard Recipe
Ingredients
2 eggs (from a chicken. Brown ain't half bad)

1 tablespoon sugar
1-½ cups milk, warm
¼ tablespoon vanilla extract
ground nutmeg
Directions:
1. Warm your milk, but don't let the damn milk boil,
or it will go and curdle the eggs.
2. Beat the eggs with a fork, after you've cracked
them, of course.
3. Add the sugar and warmed milk.
4. Pour into a greased pie dish.
5. Sprinkle some nutmeg on it.
6. Bake at 300°F for 40 minutes, or until you can't
half stand it any longer.
30
The Beginning
"Cute"
One of the first fights that I ever got into in school

was because of the damn outfit I had on. It was “cute.”
Mothers are the ones that find "cute." “Cute” has gotten
more innocent boys beat up than anything else on the
earth.
My little “cute” first grade outfit was a white
shirt, I think it had ruffles on it, I'm not sure. It had a
little brown jacket like a sports jacket, and short pants
and a little matching cap, with a real small cap brim that
did no good at all.
I don't think they were seniors, but they were
probably eighth grade or ninth grade students on the
bus. They got my hat off my head and started throwing
it back and forth between themselves. And, naturally, I
31
ran from one to the other from one to the other chasing
the cap.
Until, I realized that that wasn't doing any good,
that I couldn't ever outrun them. So, the only thing that I
could ever think of to do was to, when the ring leader
got the cap, I just dove at the ring leader. He had already
thrown the cap, but I hit him and knocked him down in
between the bus seats.
He got just luckily just kind of wedged in these
bus seats. So, I started hitting him. He couldn't get up,
and I was hitting him, and it took the other two a minute
to figure out what was going on, it surprised them so
much. And I know I wasn't doing any kind of damage
except morally, but I was beating on him.
And they ran up and started trying to pull me off
of him. Well, when they pulled me, I grabbed whatever I
could get, a nostril or an eyelid or an ear, and when they
pulled on me they'd pull on whatever I had of his, and
he'd scream for them to leave me alone, and when they'd
let go I'd start beating him again. They'd hit me in the
back and then try to pull me off of him. But I just kept
beating on him.
I know I didn't do any damage, hell, I was six
years old, but I was a strong little kid, but I didn't know
where to hit anybody, but I did what I could. I realized
years later that if I had seen myself in that I would have
beat my own ass. You can't go into civilized society
anywhere without using a little common sense about
"cute." I remember mother saying that over and over
32
The Beginning
about that, "How cute that is; how precious that is," and
there's no power on earth that could have got me
through a day in school without getting beat up in that
outfit.
Life Motto #2
Hit A Lick!
33
Bullies
I don't quite know how it happened, but at about

five or six years old, I was the one elected to fight the
local bullies, whoever they were. Somehow, since I had
been born without a reverse gear and didn't know how to
back up from anything. I did that. It got to be a habit that
pretty much followed me all throughout my life. I
realized later on.
One of the first times, I think I was in the first or
second grade. I wasn't very old, and nobody knew
anything much about fighting. We had a fellow that had
failed first grade a couple of times and he was going
through second grade for the second time. He was from
some place up north, I think he said New York or New
Jersey. In kid speak that meant he was a lot tougher than
anybody else. He was a lot bigger and older and he
would take kid's lunch money away from them.
That went on for a good portion of the year. I had
a friend at that time that was a little, real skinny guy. He
34
The Beginning
and I were walking along back of the school one day

and this bully came swaggering up to us.
“Well," he said, talking to my buddy, "It's your
turn to give me your lunch money today."
My buddy was just scared. And I remember
saying,
"He's not going to give you anything."
If memory serves, my buddy already had his hand
in his pocket. The guy turned and looked at me, and
said,
"I guess, then, I'll take both of your lunch money."
I said, "No, I don't think that you'll do that."
Nobody knew how to fight, but this guy was so
much bigger and stronger than everyone else in the
class. His way of fighting was to put his head down, get
at least a ten or fifteen feet head start and run into a kid,
knock the wind out of them, follow them down to the
ground, and knock the wind out of them again when
they hit the ground. Then, he'd beat them up however he
wanted.
When he lowered his head and came after me, I
remember the thought running through my mind and
thinking what to do, what to do. I came up with the idea
to just hit him on the top of the head since that was all
that was open to me.
So that's what I did, and he fell down like he was
dead. At that point I don't think it mattered much to me
if he was dead or not, but the teachers ran over and tried
to wake him up but couldn't. I think it took three of them
35
to pick him up, he was like a rag doll. They carried him
in to the nurses office.
I had to go to the Principal's Office which was a
daily occurrence in grammar school. I'm still his friend.
Saw him not long ago. We saw each other so much... He
didn't do anything to me, because two or three others
had told him what had happened.
I think it took them about thirty or forty minutes
to get this kid awake. But years after that, he thanked me
for it, because he told me that when he got older, when
he got to be an adult, he put some thought into what had
happened then. He was sure that it had changed his
whole life. I knew that he quit being the bully that day.
I've had that happen a lot. People come back and
tell me that just that one ass-beating changed their life
for the better. So why in god's name do all the women
try to stop anyone from even thinking about a fight? If
kids are allowed to fight at an early age, nobody gets
hurt very bad, the kids learn that they have to accept
responsibility for their actions, they learn that other
people have rights, they learn that for every action there
is an opposite and maybe not so equal reaction and that
they have to depend on themselves and pay their own
debts instead of depending on someone else to do it for
them.
It's a major part of the learning experience that
has been deleted from our young people for some kind
of weird emotional reason. Bad choice. Now they're
teaching the kids that actions have no consequences.
36
The Beginning
Good god. That nobody has to pay for their mistakes.

That's a horrible, insane thing to be teaching children,
unless you want the kind of society that we've got now
with people being shot in the streets and prisons running
over and no one being able to do anything for
themselves.
Ever since then I've always been the one to whom
that everyone has always gone to deal with the bullies of
the world. And I did. To date I have been able to do this.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
37
Speeches
And I think it was some time close around there,

maybe the second grade, we had a meeting of the whole
school for some kind of motivational speaker. Although
I didn't hear most of what he talked about. I'm pretty
sure he didn't know much about what he was talking
about. He was making a speech, and we all had to go to
the auditorium, and the whole school had to be there. I
may have been in the first grade because we were on the
front row.
I remember one of the things he said and
emphasized was, and he said it in a loud voice,
"Anybody can do anything that they want to do."
I turned over to my buddy and said, "That's just a
lie."
My buddy laughed and I laughed, and the big
38
The Beginning
motivational speaker said, "Son, do you want to share

that with the rest of us."
I said, "No sir, I don't." Cause I didn't.
He said, "Well you seem to doubt my statement
that anybody can do anything they want to do." Then, he
said, kinda haughtily, "Why don't you tell me one thing
that you don't think I can do."
I said, "Well I don't think you can strike a match
on a wet cake of soap."
He got red-faced, his face turned bright red, and
he shook his head, and you could tell that he was just
furious. And he looked at me, and now I'm a 6-year old
kid, and he has decided that his best plan is to have a
war of wits with a 6-year old kid, and he said in a huff,
"And if you want to be facetious about it, you
can't roll a wheelbarrow full of smoke around this
building." And he kind of rocked back on his heels and
looked over the audience kind of smugly and self-
aggrandizingly
And I said, "Yes sir, I can.” And he just got
madder.
I wouldn't have thought that anyone could have
gotten madder, but he did. He was just moving the
podium up and down.
"You think you can roll a wheel barrow full of
smoke around the building?"
I said, "Yes, sir. If you'll fill it up for me, I'll roll it
around this building."
He just went nuts. I immediately felt a couple of
39
teachers grab my arms, and I don't know what happened

to the big motivational speaker, but I was carried bodily
down the aisle and out of the auditorium to the
Principal's Office, where I had to wait until he got there.
I think that's why I don't like public speaking much. I
had a bad start.
To the best of my knowledge, I am the only
person on the face of the earth that has ever passed a
public speaking course in college without ever making a
speech. The whole quarter I kept using every wile and
game and con that I could come up with to keep being
missed on these speeches that the class had to give, and
I used all the tricks that I could think of. At the end of
the quarter, the professor called me into his office, and
he said,
"I don't know how you did it, but I just realized
that you have gone the whole quarter without ever
making a speech." Then he said, "This is a public
speaking course. I cannot, I will not pass you if you do
not make a speech."
He told me that the final exam was going to be a
speech in front of an assemblage of the college. And it
was going to be an impromptu speech. The format
would be a 5-minute speech, you'd be on stage, walk up
to the podium, turn over a card on the podium with the
subject on it, and you'd have to speak five minutes on it.
The big day came. I sat through this whole dog
and pony show until about half the class had made their
speeches. He told me that if I managed to figure out
40
The Beginning
some way to get out of the speech, he'd fail me. I sat
through the whole thing; it was getting closer to being
my time to speak. The professor was just glaring at me
across the stage.
I got up, and walked up to the podium, and turned
over my card, and on it was written the word, "dates,”
D-A-T-E-S.
"Well," I said, "My speech is going to be on dates.
There are a couple of kinds of dates. One you eat, and
one you go out with."
And little titters went out through the audience.
And then, I said, "And sometimes there is no
difference between them."
The audience broke down. There were people
falling down and rolling out of chairs and falling down
in the spaces between the seats, people fell out of their
seats in to the isle and couldn't get up, I saw people
trying to get up the isle to leave that were laughing to
hard to make it up the isle. The entire audience broke
down people were roaring and crying and falling over
each other all over the auditorium.
I stood at the podium watching all this for about
five minutes, and turned around and went back to my
seat, and when I got to the professor's chair, he said,
“I don't know how you did it, but I'm going to
have to pass you, because it wasn't your fault that you
couldn't make the speech.”
It took about forty-five minutes to clear the
auditorium, folks was laughing so hard they couldn't get
41
up and get to the door. That was the end of the finals
that quarter. The other half of the class didn't get to give
their final speeches either.
Life Motto #1
42
The Beginning
Hatchets
One thing that I thought about an awful lot, I

looked out the window in I think it was first grade, and I
saw this kid in the first grade class, (and I call him a kid,
and I probably called him a kid then,) chasing a bunch
of the class around the schoolyard with a little hatchet. I
was in the classroom writing spelling words, I didn't get
a recess in grade school, because I was always writing
these damned spelling words during recess. The teacher
was in the room, and I called her over.
I said, "Listen this guy is going to hurt those
kids."
She ran to the window and looked out and kinda
laughed and came back to me, and said, "It's okay. I'm
sure that's a rubber hatchet."
I was only six years old, but I remember thinking,
why on god's green earth would anybody ever make a
rubber hatchet, and why would anyone ever want to buy
43
a rubber hatchet. It just astounded me that there would

be a rubber hatchet on the earth. I had been cutting
wood for fires at home for several years.
That first winter in first grade I stood behind the
school, and I saw one of the teachers cutting wood for
the school fire behind the building.
I told him, "You don't know how to cut wood."
And he kind of sneered and said, “If you think
you know more about chopping wood than I do, show
me."
Then, he handed me the axe, and from that time
onward I cut the wood for the fire at school, until they
changed their heating system, because he realized that I
was a lot better at it than he was.
44
The Beginning
Swamp
In very early elementary school Dad had a friend

that owned another farm about a mile away and the
three of us on occasion would go fishing in the
Okefenokee Swamp. And when I got just five or six
years old they decided that I was old enough to go with
them.
And they were both used to river fishing. We'd
just go and find a good spot and walk down to the river.
Then, we'd walk the river banks fishing.
And I remember the first trip I went with them.
I'm sitting on the riverbank just fishing away and just
having a good time watching the bees and the bugs and
the fish go by. And I looked around, and I didn't see
anybody.
45
They had forgot that I was with them and just

moved on down the creek. So, I started hollering. I
didn't hear anybody. So, I sat down and I said,
“Well they had to go this way.”
So, I walked down the creek, and I finally found
them down the creek. And Dad started telling me a few
things about tracking animals and people, and I thought
that was interesting. So, I spent quite a while figuring
out my own ideas out about tracking animals and people
and whatever I could track.
And I got to be very good at it, which helped me
and kept me in good stead all of my life. I think
everybody needs to know how to track. I probably
ended up the best tracker that I have ever run into or
known. I used to tell people that I could track a spider
across a paved parking lot, and that wasn't far wrong.
I got to be very good at it, so I didn't worry about
them leaving me on a creek bank. Because I knew that
they couldn't get away from me, because I could track
them wherever they went.
I kept getting into situations like this with my Dad
when he just assumed that I'd come up with a solution.
And I did.
But I know that there in the swamp alone that was
just an unholy terror. They had been talking about things
that happened in the swamp the whole trip. And here I
am now all alone. And I had to figure out something to
do, and did.
And that followed me all the way though my life.
46
The Beginning
I got so good at it. And it was such a natural thing for

me that I'd have in later life somebody come up with
some kind of impossible situation or problem that they
had. And they'd ask me, and I'd answer them directly
back. And I could see the light come on in their head,
and they'd say,
“Damn! That will work.”
It might have been things they'd been worrying
about and worrying everyone they knew about for years
and had not come close to a solution. And I'd just give
them a solution immediately back. And all of it stemmed
from being left in situations and fights where I just had
to find a solution THEN or it was just... gone. Or I was
gone.
Bad things would happen otherwise. This did
cause one problem: It was always so easy to me, that I
hardly ever managed to make any money for solving
problems for these people. It usually backfired on me.
Life Motto #1
47
First Invention
At one point we had to cross a log across the

Suwanee River or one of its tributaries and down under
the log was this bunch of alligators and I got across the
log somehow.
I was real concerned about them alligators and
slipping. But we got back across the log on the way
back. That night, I got me some tacks and some bottle
caps and nailed those bottle caps on the soles of an old
pair of shoes.
I wouldn't be worried about slipping off. I might
fall off, but I wouldn't slip off.
48
The Beginning
The Duck Hunter
They told me about a man that they knew that had

gone fishing in the swamp from Moultrie. He was just
terrified of any kind of snake. Just the sight of a snake
would throw him into a panic.
Now, I didn't know how he managed to wind up
in the swamp duck hunting. He had gone down there
when it was just a swamp, before it was a park or game
preserve of any kind. Then, anybody could go anywhere
they had guts enough to get into to hunt or fish.
He took an old wooden boat (but all the boats
were wood then.) He had some fishing tackle and a
shotgun in the boat, and he was going up to Billy's Lake
to shoot some ducks. He went up there and hunted all
day, and it got getting close to the middle of the
afternoon.
He decided that it was time for him to get out. He
started back to the landing, and on the way back about
49
halfway back a water moccasin fell off of a limb in the

boat. Because I found out at an early age, in the swamp
there's usually more snakes in the trees than on the
ground.
He jumped up straight in the air and when he
came down he shot the snake five times and sunk his
boat and now he's out here wading around in the swamp
with the snakes and has got quite a way to get back to
the landing. He didn't need no stinking oar, he had a gun
with him.
50
The Beginning
The Nest
I fell in a damn alligator nest one time. I guess it

was an alligator nest. I was walking along changing
fishing spots, and I walked up over this kind of a little
mound. And the thing fell in with me and I fell in up to
my hips.
If anybody had just had an Olympic measuring
device there, I'm pretty sure I would be in the record
books. Because I instantaneously jumped right straight
up out of that hole. And I cleared the ground by a big
distance.
51
Log Jam
We went over there one time and had a boat with

us and went over to Billy's Lake and at that time, when
we got to Billy's Lake and the water widened out a little
bit, it looked like a log jam in front of us, and we kept
on rowing and got up in the lake and realized that the
place was almost solid with alligators.
We kept rowing and the alligators would lay on
the surface of the water and when the boat got about
three feet from them, they'd just sink down staying
exactly level, and when the boat went over them and got
about four feet away from them they'd bob back up.
We did that all the way across the lake. There
were just hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands, of
alligators out there, just laying on top of the water.
52
The Beginning
Swamp Folks
Later on, I was going hunting with one cousin in

the Swamp. And we decided that we'd stop by and see
another cousin of mine, a distant cousin that I had found
out that he had a business in Fargo, I believe, so we
stopped. He had a little restaurant there and we got some
food to eat.
He sat down and talked to us for a while and told
us about places to go and invited me to come over
shining deer any time I wanted to, he said that we'd use
his guns, because every time he'd run into a good
cheap .22 rifle he'd buy it for shining deer so he could
throw it away without losing anything much.
I had a pleasant time. And when we left, the
cousin that was hunting with me said,
“I'm sure glad to get out of that place.”
And I said, “Well, why?”
He said, “Man, I didn't like that guy at all.”
And again, I said, “Well, why?"
And he said, “Did you, did you look at him?”
53
I said, “Yeah, I looked at him. Hell, I've been

talking to him for three hours. Of course I looked at
him.”
He looked over at me kinda wide-eyed and said,
“Well, that man would just as soon kill somebody as say
hello to him.”
I said, “Well, sure, that's one of the things I liked
about him. You don't have to bother figuring out people
like that; they're right up front with everything.”
I remember seeing the old-fashioned no
trespassing signs in the Swamp. They weren't signs, per
say. They were a human skull on a post, which, even if
you weren't able to read and write, anybody should be
able to figure that out. Then, later on they changed to
animal skulls, but they meant the same thing.
Just like all swamp folks, if they like you they'll
do just about anything in the world for you. And if they
don't like you, you better not be around them. And the
world would be better off if everybody was like that.
54
The Beginning
Grandparents
I don't know how old I was, but I was staying

with my sick grandparents at the hospital. The nurses
and doctors pitched a bitch about me staying there
because they said that I was so young that I was not
supposed to be in the hospital without my parents. and
they told me that if I stayed I'd have to stay in the room
and I couldn't get out of the room at night.
But I finally got Mom and Dad to realize that I
was the best one to stay up at night with my sickly
grandparents. So, I'd sit there through their sickness and
dying. I guess that I always figured that that was another
thing that made me grow up in a hurry, because I didn't
do things kids did. I just had these things put on me and
did them. It didn't matter if I could or not, I just did
them.
55
Fertilizer Delivery
On our farm we had a field on the back side of the

farm that was probably about forty or fifty acres. The
layout of the field was so that the rows were very long.
We had a road around the field, because when you got to
the end with the tractor you had to have some space to
turn the tractor around, so we just made that into a road
circling the field. When we planted anything, the tractor
would make one through, and half way back the planter
would be out of fertilizer, because it took four bags to do
a round, and the planter would not hold but three bags.
When you use a mule, a through is going down
one plow1, or rather one side of a row. One row or two
1 Plow: means that when you do what you're going to do through the field
one time.
56
The Beginning
rows or twelve rows, when you go from one end of the

field to the other, that's a through. And when you go
down and come back, that's a round. We bought
fertilizer then in 200 pound bags. I watched Dad carry
the bag of fertilizer out to the middle of the field for
every round out.
And I finally was able to help Dad. I wasn't big
enough to do this, but I did it anyway. I realized that if I
could rassle a bag of fertilizer out to the back of the
truck, then work it off the truck onto my back, that I
could walk down the row out to the middle of the field
with the fertilizer.
And I think I was probably eight when I started
that. And I'd get in the truck and drive it up the road to
the second to next row, and get another sack pulled back
to the gate, and carry that sack out in the field. And that
led to him letting me drive the truck with the cotton to
the gin, because I was driving around in the field. So, he
figured why not?
When my Dad was thirteen fourteen years old, he
was driving. Let's see he was born in 1909 and this was
in the Depression when times really got bad, really,
really bad, he was probably fifteen years old he was
driving truck loads of produce to Miami and Cleveland
Ohio and Boston Massachusetts selling produce to keep
the family going.
His Dad figured he was too young to go off by
himself, and he was too young to drive the truck, so they
got an older man that didn't know how to drive to go
57
with him. And Dad would drive and the older man
would sit over there so that if the cops stopped them the
older man could get under the wheel and tell them that
he was driving, but he didn't even know how to crank it
up.
Dad figured that if you can do the job, then do the
job. What somebody else says or what rule somebody
else makes up should be a general starting point, which
is something I've been saying for most of my life. A
book written in generalities should not control the
specifics of any situation.
Anyway, doing things like that and catching hogs
when we had to castrate hogs. It was my job to catch
these about 100 to 150 pound hogs. And usually when I
first started doing it the hog weighed just about as much
as I did, and I had a pretty good job holding the hogs,
but I held them. And Dad would cut one and doctor it
and let him go. And I'd catch another one, and I got to
be phenomenally strong, just unreasonably strong,
because I had to. It never did matter if I could do a job
or not, I just did it. Just somehow found a way to do it.
Life Motto #1
58
The Beginning
The Frontier Dentist
I was about eight years old. I fell or got hit some

way and split one of my permanent teeth on the bottom
right in the front. I dealt with it about as long as I could
and Mom and Dad decided that they had better take me
to the dentist.
Now, there was an old dentist in town that I
always envisioned that he had been a frontier dentist
back in the olden days. But he stayed late to see us, and
we went in his office and he was talking to me as best he
could.
He was old, he had grey hair, he was probably
seventy. He was talking to me and he said that he wasn't
going to hurt me because I was about eight, and he said,
“I tell you what, if I hurt you, I've got a billy goat
outback, and we'll go out and let that billy goat butt me
if I hurt you filling the tooth.”
That didn't quite sound right to me, but I agreed.
He told me he was going to give me some Novocaine to
59
dull the pain so I wouldn't feel anything. When he stuck

the needle in he stuck it in too hard and it went all the
way through my gum and into the base of my tongue.
So he gave me the shot of Novocaine in my
tongue, and I'm eight years old and I don't know that's
not how it's supposed to work, and he's talking to Mom
and Dad.
And he says, “Is your tooth numb?”
And I said, “No, sir.”
And he said, “Well, I'll give you another shot.”
And he did the same thing, and gave me a second
shot of Novocaine into my tongue. And we sat a little
while, and he asked,
“Is your tooth dead?”
And I said, “No. You're not doing anything to my
tooth. You're sticking it through my gum into my
tongue.”
And Mom said something to the effect of, “You
know he's not doing that!”
Now by this point, everything from the shoulders
up is dead and numb and I can't hardly see or talk
because these two shots of Novocaine in my tongue had
deadened everything BUT MY TOOTH.
And he said, “I'll give you another shot then.”
And he got another needle out and gave me a shot
and didn't quite stick it all the way into the tongue this
time. But he did stick it through the gum. When he hit
the plunger, Novocaine spewed everywhere and out of
my mouth.
60
The Beginning
And I said, “You see! I told you you weren't doing

anything to the tooth!”
And he said, “Aw, hell, it's got to be dead by
now.”
And he got his drill. And of course, the minute he
touched this damn tooth, it just almost killed me, and I
started trying to get out of this damn chair. And he got
up on top of me. I'm in the chair, and the dentist, I'm
sure he weighed over two hundred pounds, he got up in
the chair and he's sitting down on top of me.
We ended up with him sitting on my stomach, my
Dad holding my right arm, and mother and the nurse
holding my left arm. And every time he touched that
tooth with that drill I was coming up with all of them,
and I was trying to get to my knife.
And I tried to holler one time, “Let me get to my
knife! Let me get to my knife! I'll cut this bastard off of
me!”
But he had both hands in my mouth.
I endured just about thirty minutes of that, and all
the people that had me just barely could hold me. I gave
a good account of myself. I was just before getting
loose.
And I was thinking, “Just let me get an arm free!
Let me get one shot at this son of a bitch! Or just let me
get my knife!”
I'd have cut him if he were the Pope. Hell, God
Almighty that hurt, 'cause he had everything dead
except that tooth! And he was grinding away at the
61
nerve of the tooth. He finally got through with it, and it

worked him down because I was trying to get him off of
me and get one arm loose. And he finally got off of me
and said he was through.
And I said, “Where's that damn goat?”
God, he almost killed me! I found out he didn't
have a damn goat. I went to the back looking for the
damn thing. The son of a bitch had done all that and
lied, too. It was a miracle I didn't cut him when I got up.
The Geneva conventions wouldn't have allowed
that to have happened to anybody, and I was eight years
old. But it did take absolutely everything that four
grown people could do to hold me in that chair while he
was doing that.
I have not been a friend of dentists since then. I
always figured that since a lot of frontier dentists kept a
hammer behind their chair that when someone came in
and needed work he'd knock them on the head, since
frontier dentists didn't have ether or Novocaine. I
figured that's how he learned to work.
I tried to eat the next day, but I kept chewing on
my tongue. God, it must have taken a couple of days for
that to wear off! My whole head was numb; my neck
was numb. Everything but that damn tooth! I'd just try
to eat and bite my tongue, because I just couldn't feel
anything. But now, the filling never fell out, I'll give him
that much.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
62
The Beginning
BB Gun Versus Rock
I had gone down to stay a week or so with my

uncle in Thomasville and we were out in the yard doing
something and this neighbor kid came by and he was a
little snooty bastard and kind of arrogant, so, and he did
something, I forget what it was, but I think he told me to
do something.
And I told him that I wasn't gonna do it, and he
came over and either kicked me or slapped me or
slapped at me. So, I got on him and just right quick had
him down on the ground just rubbing dirt in his face just
doing anything I could do to humiliate him.
And my uncle ran over and made me let him up.
And he ran out of the back yard crying. And my aunt got
all bent out of shape and was ready to kill me. She
wanted to know why I had hurt the neighbor boy, and I
said,
“Now this fool jumped on Me and I didn't have
anything to do with that.”
63
And I think my uncle had to go somewhere and

she was in the house, and I thought, 'By god I'm not
going inside with that crazy woman while she's still
mad.' And I sat down on the back steps.
And I heard something hit the house next to me
and I looked around and I didn't see anything and about
that time I heard something hit the house on the other
side, and I heard it hit again and I saw the thing that
time and it was a BB and someone was shooting at me
with a BB gun. And they were just barely hitting on the
same side of the world.
But they were shooting at me, and I reached down
and picked up a handful of rocks. And I couldn't see him
he was in the bushes and I picked up three good places
where he could be and I threw a rock through the first
place and then the second and when I hit the third place
I heard a yelp, and then a few seconds later a scream,
and then the noise of someone running through the
woods.
And in just about ten minutes my aunt came out
and she was just fuming. I had hurt the neighbor kid,
why did I hit the neighbor kid.
I said, “Wait a minute, now. That idiot was
shooting at me.”
She said that he had just come into their house
and his mother had seen him, and he came in the house
with a gash over his eye just a bleeding and just about
this time my uncle came home and he ran around
because he heard her screaming and I told him that the
64
The Beginning
guy had been shooting at me with a damn BB gun and

showed him the places on the house where the BBs hit
the house.
This kind of put my uncle in a jam because he
really didn't have much going for him he had just gotten
a new job, and had just moved to Thomasville. And the
guy that I had split the eye for came from one of the
richest families in Thomasville and lived behind him on
one of these big antebellum plantations.
He got on the phone and said he had seen the gun
where her boy was shooting at me with a BB gun and
seen the places on the house and that I had picked up a
rock and hit him in the eye and he thought that I should
have hit him I the eye. And that was pretty much the end
of that story.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick!
65
Basketball
When I was in the second grade, I guess, I got hit

in the face with a basketball and my nose bled, and they
thought I was going to bleed to death, hell I did too, hell
it was just bleeding like a fool. We finally got the thing
stopped. Afterwards, for a while I didn't have a minute's
trouble with it.
Till the next year, I don't know the exact date, but
it was the same month and same time of year and close
to the same day, and I was just sitting in school and my
nose started bleeding again. And for about six years that
happened on close to the same day every year. I didn't
know of any reason for it. I just knew it was about time
when it got close to that month and day,
I'd just walk around waiting on a nose bleed, and
it was a good one, too. After I had this nose bleed, it was
through the left nostril and the whole nostril would clot
up and scab up and stay that way for a couple of weeks.
And I didn't want to move the scab, because I thought
66
The Beginning
that it would come back and start bleeding again.

I know that at one time I had a cold and my head
was about to explode and I couldn't blow my nose
because this scab was clotting up one side and I went in
the bathroom and pulled off some tissue and rolled it up
and made a little hole in the scab and with my paper I
kept rolling it up and started pulling out mucous until I
had rolled out enough about the size of a baseball out of
one side of my nose and I kept thinking, good god,
where is this stuff coming from, and I kept rolling and
rolling. I felt a lot better. This was honestly probably a
cup of snot.
67
Pinball
Before “Pinball Wizard” I was a pinball wizard. I

discovered a little country store that is now a house, that
has been a house for a good many years that had a
pinball machine there when it was a store. They called it
the Twin Pines Grocery. It was just about two miles
away from the house.
So, I'd run up there and play the pinball machine
and got pretty damn good at it, and I'd get me a few rolls
of nickels just about anytime I went up there, cause they
paid off in nickels, a nickel a game. Or you'd get some
free games. You could use it to play another game, and
68
The Beginning
at the end you'd get a nickel for every free game you had
left. I'd make money, a couple of rolls of nickels, which
is a lot of money for a fourth grader.
They told me one day they were going to close the
store and make a house out of it, so I asked them if they
knew anybody else that had a pinball machine. And one
of the places was at the Doerun truck stop. Now the
Doerun truck stop is still there, but it hasn't operated as a
truck stop for forty years, and it didn't operate as one
then. It was a whorehouse. Most truck stops try to cover
it a little better than they did. There was just barely
enough room to park a car, and definitely not enough to
park a truck. Sometimes I'd drive the tractor over.
But a lot of the time I'd just run over there in the
afternoon when I got out of school if I didn't have
anything else to do and the girls just went nuts over me.
Course I still hadn't yet quite figured out the
wonderment that girls embodied. They just went crazy
over me, always making over me the whole time, when
one'd leave another two take her place and come up and
hug me and talk to me and hang on me and I was
shooting pinball making money. But the guy that ran the
place was actually trying to figure out ways to keep me
out of there because I was winning a lot of money on the
pinball machines.
A lot of times I'd run home with my pockets full
of nickels and quarters and smelled like a whore because
for three hours I'd had whores rubbing over me. They
finally shut the place down, I think a bunch of do-
69
gooder women shut down my afternoon delight. I didn't

even know how to benefit from it, what a good place I
was in. Do-gooders got no life, so the only thing they
can do is make sure nobody else has a life either. So
they put their whole time and effort and being into
trying to keep everybody else from having a life.
Falling from grace in my Mom's eyes was a
gradual thing. Mother and I were just like, well, her
world has always been diametrically opposed to every
molecule of my world. The world was a Sunday school
class to her. It was just millions of Pollyanna's.
Later on when I started driving, though I still
wasn't old enough to drive, I'd get in the car to go
somewhere. And Dad and I could just go anywhere, and
we'd go anywhere and come back and have a great trip
and enjoy the trip and enjoy each other. But when me
and Dad and Mother'd get in the car to go somewhere, in
less than a mile, Mother and I'd be fighting. I drove
them down to Florida one time. I stood it as long as I
could. I just kept gritting my teeth trying to make it back
home.
I got back to Lake City, Florida, and I pulled over
to the side of the road.
And I said, “God dammit I can't stand this
anymore, y'all can drive the car home, I'm going to ride
the bus or hitchhike home.”
So I got out in the street and started hunting a
damn bus station. She had already made me get rid of
my Violent Knight for God's sake, what did the woman
70
The Beginning
want? Just because I was thirteen didn't mean I shouldn't

own a car!
I rode back on the bus.
Dad told me, “You shouldn't talk to Mother that
way.”
And I said, “Dad, you need to think about what
was going on in that car.”
And he thought a minute and said, “Even if she's
wrong, you don't need to talk to her that way.”
And I said, “I stood it 150 miles, and I couldn't
take it anymore.”
And he said, “Yes, but you left me to be in there
with her!”
And I said, “Well, why in the hell didn't you just
ride the bus back with me? She can drive.”
The problem I finally figured out, one of the
biggest major problems that there is in a family, is that
most females honestly don't believe that there's any
difference between females and males. They honestly
just believe that a male is just simply a female with a
penis. Women will get in a fight with you because what
one of their girl friends did to them three years back,
and they can tell you exactly what you did and whatever
you did that if you didn't do it exactly like a woman
would have done it, you are wrong. They honestly and
truly expect men to be women that have penises.
In all nature, there is an innate reflex called the
fight or flight reflex. This is now become the flight or
hope someone else takes care of me reflex. In men at
71
some time you either have to fight or capitulate and

become some kind of effeminate being.
This has been done to appease a handful of weird
females. It has become unpolitically correct for women
to listen to and obey what their husbands say, but to try
to listen and obey many hundreds of others that neither
know them or care about them, ruining the basic family
unit on a whim.
Being a man takes far more than just not having a
vagina. Men have the tools needed to guide a girl into
becoming a woman. But women have no concept of the
tools that it takes to guide a boy into being a man, not a
woman with a penis. At some point, you have to find a
way to fight something and win, when, by all logic, you
should lose. That is one mark of a man. And that's my
philosophy, and I'm sticking to it.
I took a survey, I still do it when I have a few
minutes. I go to some kind of a busy store like
Wallyworld or a busy grocery store and most of them
have an area marked off in front of the entrance for
people that are trying to give them money to go across
the street. And the cars are supposed to use all caution in
that area because the people that are trying to give the
store money are trying to get into the store. And I sit and
I watch that, and I've been doing that on occasion for
probably thirty five years.
I have found in that time that eighty to ninety
percent of the women that I see come out of the store or
step down off the curb eyes locked straight ahead with
72
The Beginning
never a glance from one side to the other. Men look to

see if a car's coming. In particular I figure if most people
get a chance they're going to try to run over me. I don't
care what the marks on the pavement say.
When two women come out of a store they never
break stride or miss a word, because the cars are going
to stop. If they're supposed to stop they're going to stop.
If a man's coming out of a store and he's talking to a
woman, when they get to the part where the traffic's at,
the man stops to look for the car that's going to hit him
and the woman just walks right out.
Except in the past few years I have found that
young men, and I have to assume that for some reason
or another that were raised without a male influence,
will walk out in the street like women do, without
looking at anything.
I was stopped making my survey a couple of
years ago at one of the drug stores in town and I saw
these two girls walking from the parking lot and they
were talking to each other and they walked directly
across the traffic lanes looking at absolutely nothing but
each other's eyes, walked up the ramp, and stepped up to
the drug store.
Now these were just girl both just out of high
school—just beautiful girls. They walked up to the door
and just stood there and they're just talking to each
other. And then it hit me, they're waiting for someone to
open the door for them. It wasn't an automatic door, and
no one was standing there to open the door for them.
73
And I guess they didn't know what to do.

And neither one of them was going to open the
door for the other because that would admit the other
was prettier and these girls stood there for three minutes
just standing at the door and finally this guy walks up
and reaches around and steps around them and opens the
door. and I don't think either of them thanked him as
they walked right through.
Of course, I've had women bitch me out for
opening the door several times. You're supposed to
know automatically what they want you to do. Well,
God dammit bitch if you don't want me to open the door,
put a sign on your back or your ass.
74
The Beginning
Bored Stiff
In the third grade, I was figuring out how long it

would take to drive to different stars at different speeds.
I was doing my homework, I'd devised some way to do
it in roman numerals. I don't remember how, but it
worked. My reading material was the Iliad and the
odyssey and the classics. But after 3rd grade I was just
bored stiff.
The only good thing I can think of was I kept
writing reports on the Iliad and the Odyssey all through
college. Every time someone hit me up for a report it
was one of those, whichever one struck me. I guess
that's really one of the ways that I was able to do so
much. I'd just float through the year, and then the last
two weeks of the year I'd read all my books.
I didn't want to do very well on the tests. I kept
dumping answers so I wouldn't do very well because I
75
didn't associate very well with the folks that were in the
Beta Club. and I didn't want to be around them and I
knew that if they tried to hang around me, the the folks
that I hung around with would take off their clothes and
paint them blue and hang them from a flag pole. But
when a real test came up, I could kind of let it go then.
In the fifth grade, I believe, we took some kind of
state test, I don't know what they called it, but it was to
find out if your knowledge had caught up to your
position in school grade wise. And, with the exception
of spelling, I graded that I should have been from the
first year of graduate school to a point where I had
completed my doctorate.
Everybody went nuts. The principal, whom I
knew well, had been telling me for a long time, that
nobody could figure out what to do with me. So, I just
bored along with everyone else in the school from the
third grade up. Had a good third grade.
The teacher told me, "Figure out some kind of
work and bring some kind of books from home because
we don't have anything in the library that will work for
you, and I'm not sure that anybody can teach you."
So they had the third grade divided into four
groups: the average group, the above average group, the
superior learners, and me. But, I couldn't spell, and it
was the rule in school, that you had to write each word
god knows how many times, from a 100 to 200 times. I
just rebelled against anything that had to do with
spelling and writing these words.
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The Beginning
I know in the third grade I did two things: I sweet

talked all of the girls in the class my first recess to write
the words for me. But we got caught. I didn't think about
there being different hand writing. So we got caught,
and all the girls got punished, which wasn't what I had
in mind.
Immediately after that, I made a machine out of
various things, I devised a machine out of rubber bands
and pencils. I used two pencils as a rail. I think I had one
rubber band and a string. I tied those together with a
string on one end and a rubber band on another, and then
I lined up sharpened pencils between the rails, and I
could write sixteen words at a time. And that worked for
quite some time until the teacher came in unexpectedly
and found me working the thing on my desk. Then I
went to the Principal's Office. Again.
Life Motto #1
77
First Cigarette
I don't know how or where I found them or how I

got them. My first cigarette was a Picayune Cigarette,
which Picayune Cigarettes will melt the hair off of your
head. I don't know what they have in them. I always
heard that the tobacco was mixed in with donkey shit
and things of that nature, and it may have been. They
were many times stronger than any other cigarette that
I've ever been around, except Home Runs. Home Runs
were pretty close to being the same as Picayune.
I got my pack of Picayunes and I went down in
the woods with my dog and my gun, and smoked my
cigarette, coughed up half of a lung trying to smoke the
thing. I finally got it smoked, and I decided that it was
time to go back to the house, stood up, and just dove
head first into a clump of bushes, and then started
getting sick. Between drunk and sick it took about three
78
The Beginning
hours to get started back to the house. That was the

second worst exposure to tobacco that I remember ever
having.
The first and worst was when a cousin and
myself, he was a couple of years older than me, and I
don't think I had started to school, I'm sure I hadn't. I
stole a whole plug of Brown's Mule chewing tobacco
from my Dad's desk. And my cousin and I went up to
the barn and we got this plug of Brown Mule split in
half. We kept chewing and breaking and mashing and
until we got the thing into our mouths and we were
chewing on it, or trying to chew on it.
And my cousin said, "Well, you know what we
need to do now, don't you?"
And being a big grown up four, I said, "Sure I
do!"
And he says, "Now we're supposed to swallow it."
And both of us did it. He honestly thought that
was what you were supposed to do. He wasn't trying to
pull anything over on me. And both of us went to
straining and pulling off pieces and swallowed it.
My god I was sick. He was sick, and we were
throwing up and everything tasted like tobacco, and we
were sick for two or three days. I couldn't go to school
for a week, and just bad sick, wrong sick, it was forty
years before I ever made any effort to try to chew
tobacco again. I smoked, but chewing was something
that was foreign to me for about 40 years, every time I
saw a plug of chewing tobacco or a bag of chewing
79
tobacco or snuff,, uh!, I couldn't have anything to do

with it.
I was sure I was gonna die, and was hoping I'd
just hurry up and die. Then, about half-way through this
thing, I decided that they wasn't any way that I was
gonna die, because I'd have to get better to die, and there
wasn't any way that I was getting better.
Oh, sure, my parents found out.
"Why are you so sick?"
I had to tell them. I didn't know of anything that
would make anybody that sick. I didn't know people got
that sick. They just raised hell about everything.
"Good God Almighty! I just threw up my
stomach, and you're in here raising hell about tobacco!"
80
The Beginning
Casino
We had a casino built up in the roof of one of my

buddy's Mother's garage. And we'd get up there and we
had two tables going. We'd play cards just about all
night. And we did that for a while.
I would wait until the folks went to bed, then I'd
sneak out of the house and run over to Doerun. It was
seven miles. I'd spend the night playing poker, and
usually won some. I won more playing pool than I did
poker, but the pool gave me a good stake for playing
poker.
And then, three or four in the morning I'd run
back home and get a couple of hours sleep and then get
up and go to school. I never made any kind of effort to
time how fast it took me. I had to get there and the best
way I had was to run, and so I ran.
Everybody smoked or chewed tobacco or used it
in some manner. We found out that we had to have
something to do with all this tobacco since people
spitting and getting rid of their plugs of tobacco and
snuff. And people would have to pee.
And we didn't want to have to keep crawling
81
down out of the casino to do it. So we got a gallon jug

and used that. People would put their tobacco juice and
plugs in it, and pee in it. And this went on for a month or
so, and the jug got full.
So my buddy said that he was going to find
another jug or clean that out, and he told me, I think the
next day or the day after that, that he'd started thinking
about it, and he got an old rag and strained he liquid
through it into another jug. And he sold it to this old
black guy walking along the street that worked at the
gin.
We figured it would kill him. But it didn't. He was
back a week later wanting more of that stuff. We told
him he'd have to give us two or three weeks. And we
had a steady customer. We'd fill it up once a month and
he'd come and get it. I think he went missing after about
three months, but I'm not sure.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
82
The Beginning
The Demon And Drowning
I went from the best teacher that I ever had

directly to the worst teacher that I ever had. She was a
demon that just happened to be teaching in this school.
With her, I went to the Principal's Office usually
multiple times a day, because everything I did and
everything that anybody else in the class did I had to go
to the Principal's Office.
I was sitting in class one day in my desk, and this
teacher was at her desk, probably ten to twelve feet
away from me checking in the books for the library.
There was one of my buddies a couple of rows over that
apparently said something or did something or made a
fart noise. This teacher jumped up from checking in her
books and started screaming at me.
I think I had been asleep, so I wake up to this
woman screaming at me, and I'm sitting there trying to
figure out what in the hell she's talking about and why
she's screaming, and she hauls off and throws a book at
me, and I remember watching the book come at me, and
right before it hit me, I ducked my head down.
83
And it went right over my head and hit the girl in

back of me's head and knocked the girl and the desk
over. And the teacher's just jumping up and down on the
books that she raked off her desk, telling me to go to the
Principal's Office. I got out of the door, and that's when I
decided that I wouldn't go.
For a couple of years, I found out that if I smiled
cutely enough and talked sugary enough, I could hustle
the lunch room ladies into giving me extra peach
cobbler when we had peach cobbler, and I loved it.
And I said, "Well, I know what I'll do. I'll just go
to the lunch room."
I told the ladies that I wanted some more of that
good peach cobbler. So they fixed me a big bowl of
peach cobbler, and I sat down at a table and started
eating it. I don't know why they thought I was in the
lunch room at 1:30 PM, but they didn't seem to think
anything of it, so I ate my cobbler and crawled under the
table and went to sleep.
When I woke up, they were in the back of the
lunchroom. So, I got up and walked around to the front
of the school. There was a big crowd gathered by the
pond to the south of the campus. I decided to find out
what had happened. I just stood there trying to figure out
what had happened. There was a pond close to the
school grounds, and there were a couple of boats out
there. And these people were just watching the boats,
and then one of the teachers turned around, saw me, and
grabbed me.
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The Beginning
"Where have you been?"

"Well, I've been right here. What have they been
doing in the pond out here?"
She said, "They're using grappling hooks to look
for you."
And I said, "Well, I'm not in the pond, I'm here."
But I found out that when I didn't show up in the
Principal's Office, they looked all over the school,
except in the lunchroom. They got everyone out and
started looking for me all over campus.
And when they couldn't find me, they called the
sheriff and told him that they thought I'd drowned in the
pond, then he got out some boats with grappling hooks
trying to bring up my body. That was fourth grade, when
the demon taught.
If memory serves, that was the day that I had
decided that that had gone as far as it could go, that I
was going to make an effort to drive her insane, and
when we left for Christmas break, they put her in a
rubber room.
I drove her as batty as anybody has ever been.
They said she didn't know who she was or anything, and
I intended to do it. The bitch was out to get me. I
thought it was my duty to fight back, however I had to,
so I drove her crazy. Literally.
Her husband always liked me after that. I always
thought that that was odd. I knew him all my life,
though not all that well before. But after I drove her
crazy, he was just as friendly as hell. I guess I managed
85
to do something he'd been trying to do for years.

The demon teacher later had to buy the books she
was stomping up and down on. That was just one more
little victory for me.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
86
The Beginning
Broken Back
In the second half of the fourth grade after I drove

the teacher insane and they locked her up, I broke my
back. The class went to St. Augustine, Florida, on a little
class trip of some kind. I think we all sold some kind of
magazines or seeds or something or some kind of thing
to get up enough money to go on the class trip and on
this trip, we went to a little park thing down in Florida.
Anyways there was this playground down there.
Had a lot of good things on it. I was going to go down
the slide. And I couldn't just go down the slide, I had to
do it better and faster than anybody.
So, on this particular slide, they had the braces
and frame made out of 1-inch galvanized pipe screwed
together, heavy pipe, not like the little tin they make
them out of today, and I slid down it one time and
everyone else was coming down back of me, and I got
87
up and got out of the way and got to the ladder to go

down again.
I said, "I need to change this, this is boring."
At the entrance to the slide itself, they had a brace
over the hole where you got on the slide, and I
formulated an idea coming up the ladder, when I got up
there, I put both hands on this cross-brace and jumped
up as high in the air as I could and like a gymnast I
tucked my feet under me and came down to pick up as
much speed as I could before I hit the slide and hit the
bottom brace with my tail bone and it knocked me out.
I came down the slide like some kind of rag doll
and I woke up just about the time I oozed off into a
puddle at the bottom of the slide. I felt like my bones
had turned to Jello. Everybody got upset and terrified
and running over and patting me asking me if I was all
right.
I said, "Yeah, I'm all right I'm all right. Just leave
me alone,"
And I found out later (about ten years ago) one
that I had cracked several places in the bottom of my
spine when I did that and all the way up until, well, a lot
of times in grammar school and high school and all the
way up, my left leg would just go numb where I couldn't
move it, I'd just drag it along with me, but I learned to
hide it well enough that no one knew that I was doing
that because I had already learned at an early age that
the sharks go for the wounded first. But it all had knitted
back.
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The Beginning
After School Recess
The only recess I had was after school. By the

time I was in the seventh grade, I was learning to shoot
pool in town. You had to be twenty-one to go into the
pool room, but I was a pretty big guy and I found out
that if I could get in one time and just move around and
keep them from noticing me too much, then by the
second or third day they would just assume that I was
old enough to be there. And I wouldn't have anymore
trouble.
So, that's how I learned how to shoot pool. It cost
me a little, but I had some good teachers. I remember I
had just got started off shooting pool when I had a
hustler come through that took from me what little
money I had, but it was some of the best money that I
ever spent in my younger days. He told me something
that I never forgot,
89
He said, "Son, don't ever shoot pool for money

with a snooker player."
He shot snooker, and from that point on I shot
snooker, and I got exponentially better shooting snooker.
In eighth grade I was going to junior high in
Moultrie, and I would ordinarily ride the school bus. It
came to my grandparent's house, and either stay there or
walk about two miles home. So it hit me, I can stay in
town, my Dad would think I was staying at my
grandparent's house. My grandparents would just
assume that I had just walked home. And as long as I
could physically got home before my Mother got off
work and got out to the house, I'd be okay.
So, that's what I did. I would stay in town, hustle
pool, make a little money. I always liked to play
hustlers. I got good enough that I enjoyed playing the
hustlers when they came through, because they had
more money than the people I knew, and I could usually
beat them.
I would cut school on occasion. The railroad
tracks ran just back of the school here in town, and there
were trains coming through usually in the morning
before schools started. We'd be standing around a bunch
of us, and I'd make up my mind then whether or not I
needed to stay at school or shoot pool. And if I wanted
to shoot pool, I'd found out that the trains going in one
direction went to Thomasville, and the trains going
another went to Albany.
I didn't go to Albany too much, because I had to
90
The Beginning
catch a freight train back or hitch a ride. From Moultrie

to the house, it was about thirteen miles. I'd stay at the
pool room and then run home. I had people that were on
the school track team run with me and they'd last for
four or five miles, and then just give up. And I'd tell
them that if you're going with me you've got to come on,
if not go on back to town, but I've got to get home
before my Mother comes home, and did. I don't think I
ever got caught or didn't make it before she came home.
Then, I pretty much quit shooting pool for a
while. But I have found out, looking back at my life,
that about every ten years—I don't hold a cue stick or
anything—but about every ten years I wind up running
into someone or winding up in a pool room, but to this
day every ten years I make a little money shooting pool.
I got pretty good at it one time.
I went to see some people in Louisville,
Kentucky, and when I got there I found out that they
were going to a funeral or something for a relative or
someone they knew, and I told them that they just
needed to let me off somewhere, and I'd wait. They just
happened to let me off by a pool room, and I started
shooting on an empty table. After a bit, a two-bit half-
ass hustler came over. We shot a game and he asked if
we ought to bet.
The first game was kinda funny, we both were
trying to let each other win. I finally won to just end it. I
lost the second game. Then, when he wanted to set the
hook and bet real money, he didn't get a shot. I shot his
91
eyes out. When my friends came back to pick me up, I

had about 80 new dollars. I was always real proud of
being a pool hustler. Never know, might have to fall
back on that. Times are hard.
I didn't drive to any of the bigger towns around
until I was fourteen, I think. So this was some time
before then, I was probably twelve or thirteen,
somewhere along there. But I had been going in this
pool room for two or three years in town, and hadn't
ever had any problem down there, except you were
supposed to be twenty-one to go in the pool room.
I ran into a couple of guys that I knew had just
gotten paid for the week. They had decided that they
could shoot pool, and they had some money in their
pockets and I decided I'd go with them. I told them my
car was broken, cause no one knew I was twelve. We
drove around back, and I got the stick I liked, and they
followed me, and I racked the balls.
The owner of the place, Shorty, got madder than
hell, and came running over.
He said to the first one, "Where's your ID?"
The owner checked it. He was twenty. The owner
got mad.
"You're trying to get me closed up! By God, get
out of here!"
He turned to the other guy and said, "Where's
your ID?"
The owner checked it. He was nineteen.
The owner said, "By God, get your ass out of
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The Beginning
here!"
And he stopped then, and turned around and
looked at me. And he knew he'd been seeing me in there
for two or three years. And I just took my stick and
threw it on top of the table.
And I said, "Well, goddammit, if my buddies can't
play in here, I'm not going to play in here either."
And I stormed out. I'm twelve and I'm fine, and
my buddies are nineteen and twenty and they got kicked
out. I remember clearly going back in there the next day
and playing pool and making a little money.
Life Motto #1
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Wheel Bases
I found out that because of, or by way of, that

wheel base of all the automobiles and the wheel base of
all the standard gauge trains were both exactly the same
wheel base as the roman chariot.
And along with that, I realized that I could get a
girl or two in my car and get it on the railroad tracks,
and I didn't have to drive. I could drive the girls instead
of the car. There were many times that I went from
Doerun to Moultrie ten miles down the railroad tracks.
I didn't much care about the train schedule. The
car had reverse in it, and I figured that I could get back
to some kind of a road. But there were a lot of times
when I wouldn't have known if a train was around until
it knocked us off into the woods somewhere. Still, all
you had to do was give it gas.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
94
The Beginning
Bootlegging Begins
When I was about eleven, I just drove over to

Doerun, and there were a bunch of people and cars
sitting around. I was in a car, and they were just parked
in a service station and talking and doing whatever. And
I just walked up and stood there and listened to the
conversation a little bit. And later on I got into it some.
The bootleggers didn't immediately accept me. I
was kind of hanging around on the outside of
everything. One night I was walking down between two
lines of guys. They were kind of leaning up against a
car, and somebody just pushed me into this big guy, just
95
a monstrous fellow. And he hit me.

And I said to myself, “Well, by God, this just
won't do!”
And I jumped over at him and hit him. And we
just started fighting. It was a hot night. I know it was a
hot night because he had cut me up over one or both
eyes and I had sweat running off of me and into my
eyes.
And I got to where I couldn't see anything. And I
figured out that I just had to cover up as best I could and
wait for him to hit me so I'd know where he was. I
couldn't see him, but I did that and I hit him several
times pretty damn good.
And I finally decided that I just couldn't fight like
that and I had opened my mouth to tell him that if he
wanted to fight, let's just do it some other time cause I
just couldn't see him,
And he said just about the time I was going to say
that, “Listen, fellow, I don't know who the hell you are,
but I've got to quit. I'm hurt. I've got to quit.”
After that they pretty much accepted me. And
driving, as young as I was, I could out drive just about
all of them. I could handle a car better than just about all
of them. We got into a few little races and I could hold
my own anytime we got to a place where the driving had
more to do with the race than just the engine in the car. I
could hold my own with any of them. So, I was just one
of the bunch then, just one of the group. I don't think
any of them ever knew or figured out how old I was.
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The Beginning
We ran lots of liquor. At two or three o'clock in

the morning, we'd go to the truck stop and eat. We went
a lot of places. If we went to a bigger town, I always
told them that my car was out of gas or something was
wrong with it, the clutch was slipping or the brakes
weren't working or I had a flat tire or something. I didn't
want to be driving around in a big town, because I
figured that somebody would notice that I wasn't
supposed to be driving.
We went to every place around here. I call Albany
a big town, and Thomasville and Moultrie, because they
were bigger than Doerun. When we ran liquor, we took
it from stills to some kind of little dumpy jukes
somewhere. They wouldn't necessarily be in town; I
tried to steer away from the ones in town for places
more out in the country or out on someone else's farm.
And later on after the law had been after me a bit
and I had just out-drove them or outrun them, I started
driving wherever I wanted to. If someone wanted to
catch me they'd have a chance to, but they just never
were able to do that.
Somebody there was always somebody pushing
around on somebody or bowing up on somebody. I was
at the service station one time (and in high school I
didn't drink. I smoked, but I didn't drink,) and I had this
guy come up to me and say he had some shine.
And he stuck his jug out and said, “Have a drink,
buddy.”
I told him I didn't want any.
97
And he said, “I'm offering you a drink; you need

to take a drink.”
And I said, “Fellow, I told you, I don't want any.”
And he said it again.
And I told him again, a little stronger that time, “I
am not going to drink any of that.”
Even if I had wanted it, I had already found out
that there was good shine and there was bad shine. A lot
of people would run shine through automobile radiators.
Some people would add a shovel full of fertilizer to
make it work quicker. And some would pour rubbing
alcohol in it, or put wood chips in it to make it bulk up
the mash. All kinds of crazy things. And I didn't know
what kind he had.
So, he opened up one of what they used to call a
watermelon knife. Damn knife had a pearl handle and
open it was probably twenty inches long with a little
thin, narrow blade about ten inches long. It was pretty
much just made for cutting watermelons, and wasn't
good for much else. And he said, that if I didn't take a
drink that he was going to cut me with that melon knife.
And, that started another fight. I wound up
knocking him out and throwing him in his car and just
leaving him, and somewhere I still got the knife he had.
I think one of his buddies drove him home, but he was
in the back knocked out.
I still see some of them once in a while. One of
them just died last year. He got killed, he was driving an
old truck about 40 miles an hour and a preacher's wife
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The Beginning
that was talking on a telephone ran a red light and ran

into him and killed him.
I told his family that I remembered us talking
about that a long time ago. We both figured that we
would be killed in a car, but we thought it would be
when we were driving 150 MPH, but not now.
We didn't expect to wait till now and have some
preacher's wife kill us driving 40 MPH. I thought about
that. I figured that, of all things, a bootlegger to get
killed by a thumper! You could understand a bootlegger
killing a thumper, but the other way around wasn't
supposed to happen.
99
FFA Camp
In probably the eight grade, I went to an FFA

camp with the school. Riding up in the school bus,
everybody on the bus smoked. Most of us had cigarettes.
Hardly anybody had anything to light the cigarettes
with. We were in the eight grade.
So what I got everybody to do, cause I had some
matches and I was the only one there that had anything
to light something with, I got everybody to be sure to
keep one cigarette gong the whole trip. If you were
about to put out a cigarette, you'd call out. And
somebody else would light theirs off of your cigarette so
we wouldn't use all the damn matches.
And there was one guy that didn't have any
matches or cigarettes either. And he was making a career
out of bumming cigarettes from everybody, and he kept
bumming cigarettes from everybody. He was trying to
bum one from me, and I kept telling him no.
And then I decided to do something about it. I
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The Beginning
found another guy that had one of these old pocket

combs, they used to make them out of rubber. I broke
three teeth out of that pocket comb and stuffed them in
the end of that cigarette. And when the guy wanted to
bum a cigarette, I gave him that one, and he smoked it.
Apparently, he didn't have any trouble with it.
So, I fixed up another one. I think I had seven
comb teeth in it, I had to pull most of the tobacco out of
the thing to have enough room to get the comb teeth in
there, and he smoked it and didn't have any trouble.
And so the last one, I worked on it and I don't
know how many comb teeth I put in there, but it was
almost solid comb teeth with just a little bit of tobacco
in it, and I gave it to him and he didn't seem to have any
trouble, and the ashes would just string down to the
floor.
I finally gave up and he asked me for another
cigarette and I gave him a good one and I thought the
good one was going to kill him, the burning rubber
didn't bother him but the good cigarette made him gag
near to death.
I started selling my matches for fifty cents a piece,
and then another guy in the camp and I remembered that
there was a little store a couple of miles away from the
camp. And I don't know what they would do, shave our
heads and send us to camp I guess, but it was against the
rules to leave the camping area. Of course, that didn't
mean a hell of a lot to me or the other fellow.
He was a lot better off than me, so he went up and
101
bought candy and cigarettes and stuff. And I bought

matches and started selling them for fifty cents a piece.
Cause matches were scarce. Well, hell, if you had all the
cigarettes in the world and couldn't light one, you were
backing up.
I did have some extra special tutoring with one of
the counselors and a couple of the girls that came up
there to the camp.
And oh, one night I snored. Bad. There was one
night in our cabin that they told me, because I didn't
know I was snoring. It wasn't bothering me, they told
me that that night I started snoring just horrendously.
And now this was the story I got, they said I
started snoring bad and they were laying there suffering,
by that time I had woken up everybody in the cabin and
they were just laying there dealing with it because I
think they were kind of scared to do anything to me
because most of them knew me.
And then it looked like I went into overdrive. I
started rattling the floor and the windows and they
throwed some pillows at me, and they said I snorted real
loud. And then I got quiet and was quiet the rest of the
night.
The next day in a cabin down from us where I had
found a couple of friendly girls living. And when I ran
into one of them the next day, she looked like she was
real tired. Their cabin was probably a little over a
hundred yards away from ours.
And I asked her what had happened, and she said
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The Beginning
they had spent the whole night in the middle of the floor
of the cabin in a huddle with the counselor because there
was a bear outside growling. And it was just going from
window to window. And then it must have crawled
under the floorboards, because it got really loud. And
then later it gave a loud snort and went away.
And I said, “Well, hell! That wasn't a bear. That
was me snoring!”
Even down o the snort at the end, because I
remembered when they said they threw the pillows at
me I snorted loud and then quit. And all the guys in my
cabin were just sitting around open mouth and pointing
and saying,
“You see, dammit? We told you you snored bad!”
Sometime at the end of this thing we had a day
that it rained all day and we were locked up in the cabin
and it was just raining like hell and they said that it was
time for lunch that we had to got to the dining hall and
everybody got out and went to the dining hall and got
wet.
And I walked over to the door and looked over
and said, “Well, now I don't want to get wet. I don't
think I'm going to do this.”
But I was kind of hungry, and that's when I
remembered that mother had made me a tuna fish salad
sandwich for the trip up there. So, I went over to my
suitcase and found it. I took it out and ate it, and it had
been locked up in the suitcase in the summertime for
four days. Nothing bad happened to me.
103
At some point during the camp they were going to

have these field days and have one cabin competing
against another, and one of the things they were going to
do was play tug-of-war and there was this one cabin that
had people in there that looked like they were nearly
fully grown and they were going around ridiculing
everybody and they just knew they'd win the tug of war
and it was practice day and they were just pulling
everybody across the yard and intimidating everybody.
And somehow, I think I was off with one of the
friendly girls and they pulled against my cabin and just
pulled them all over the yard, and I came up at the end
of that and these guys were just ridiculing everybody
and just making fun of everyone and I didn't like that.
And I said, “Hell, I'll beat you by myself!”
And they started laughing and had the best time
over that.
And I said, “Hell! Give me the rope!”
And we decided that we were going to pull until
the first side went over a side walk. and I got back at the
end of the rope so that I could figure out what to do
maybe, because there were about twelve of them on one
end and just me on the bitter end of the rope.
And I knew that I had to figure out something to
overcome what they had. But as I said before, I was hell
strong, and they could pull me across the grass and
across the sand. But I found out that when I got to a pine
tree if I could run around and get my feet braced on a
pine tree, they couldn't pull me. They'd have to keep
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The Beginning
jerking and jerking until they got me unbalanced enough

to get me off the pine tree.
So, finally after about six or eight episodes with
these pine trees, they got me pulled up to the side walk.
And they said, “Oh, look a there! We beat you!”
And I said, “Oh, no you didn't! The game was till
the first one to get pulled across the side walk!”
And I had the rope behind my hips and I planted
my feet on the sidewalk, and they couldn't budge me.
And I had my heels hooked on the sidewalk, and the
rope was coming around my hips. And I had the rope in
both hands going around my back. And I'd bend my legs
some, and then straighten my legs out. And then, I'd
bend them again.
And when I'd bend them again, I could pull the
rope an inch or two around me, like a winch would
work. And I was winching them up towards the damn
sidewalk, just dragging them. And they were screaming
and hollering,
“Pull, god dammit! Have you quit pulling? He's
pulled us up to the damn sidewalk! Did you quit, or
what?”
And I'd feel my chance, get my least little bit of
slack and they'd slide up towards the edge. And their
feet were slipping, and they started falling. Then, they
threw the rope down and started cussing and walking
off. But I intended to just wench them across the
sidewalk Things like that taught me that it don't matter
how big or bad or how many, you've got to beat
105
yourself.
You ain't beat until you quit. 'Cause there wasn't
any way in hell that I was supposed to beat a dozen guys
all of them bigger than me in a tug of war. There was no
way for that to happen. I've had things like that happen
all my life just simply because, by god, it didn't matter if
I was supposed to, if I could do it, or if it was possible. I
just got my back up and made it happen, just made it
work some way.
I decided to bleach my hair. It was the style then
that everybody was bleaching their hair, so I decided
that I'd try it. A guy up there had some Marchane, which
was the kind of bleach that everybody used. And I talked
him out of some of that, and he told me how to do it.
And I put it on my hair, and I sat out in the sun all
morning, and nothing happened.
He had put some on his hair out of the same bottle
and his hair turned almost white. Mine didn't do
anything. So he had some left, and I put some more on
my hair. Still didn't do anything. I found a jug of Clorox
and I poured out a handful of it and put it on my head
with the Marchane and sat out in the sun all afternoon
and my hair didn't do a thing. Didn't do absolutely
nothing! So I gave up; didn't know what else to do. It
never did do anything.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
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The Beginning
The Dog
I'm in high school and hunting and walking down

a dirt road near my home. I hear noises off to my right
and I know that it's a hunter and his bird dog. I can just
barely see the dog, but I know he's running along at a
fairly good pace with his head held high proudly, his
chest thrown out, the king of all he surveys. He prances
up to a three foot tall fence with his head thrown back
and proud, he sails up into the air like a doggie version
of Baryshnikov he floats up towards the firmament to
jump the fence, and does.
As soon as he goes over the fence, he looks down
and sees that there's about a ten foot drop below him
onto the road where I'm walking, and I get to see his
face go through a small gamut of expressions from
surprised to terror, this dog's eyes got as big as saucers
when he looked down and saw the road bed about ten
107
feet under him.

I can imagine that being a bird dog he's seen this
all of his life, so the only thing that he can come up with
on the spur of the moment is to use the same actions like
he has seen birds do. He spreads all four limbs out as far
as he can and just plummets to the earth with all four
limbs spread wide like a bird. It didn't seem to help at
all. He just fell like a spread out rock!
I knew the hunter, and he later told me that all of
this dog's life he had had problems with the dog running
ahead of him and jumping fences and he would have to
follow the dog rather than the dog following him, but
after that episode, the dog never jumped another fence,
no matter how small, now matter how well he could see
the other side. He always had to be lifted and carried
across any fence.
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The Beginning
Chocolate
We got a lot of mileage out of ex-lax when I was

growing up. I remember that one fellow iced a birthday
cake with it.
In grade school I went to a boy scout camporee in
Thomasville. There was a cousin of mine down there
with me. He and I both loved chocolate, and they
opened a concession stand thing, and we bought all the
chocolate that we could figure we'd eat, and loved it.
Hershey's bars.
I ate fourteen and got the world's worst galloping
shits. And no place in that whole damn place had toilet
paper. We'd run from outhouse to outhouse, and he'd
open the door and scream,
"No paper here!"
109
And we'd run around picking up newspapers and

scraps of paper and wide leaves, and just before we
exploded I decided,
"I don't care if it has paper or not, I've got to shit
in here or shit on myself."
So we got in the outhouses with some scraps and
did the best we could. We didn't have all that much
because everybody was always cleaning the damn place
up so there wasn't much around to use.
We cleaned up the best we could but I knew I
needed to do a little more and I didn't have anything left
but a Hershey's bar in my pocket, and I kept thinking
about it, and finally decided aw hell. So I sat there on
that crapper and ate the Hershey's bar to get the paper to
wipe my ass from getting sick from eating Hersey's bars.
And I don't remember having a chocolate craving since
then.
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The Beginning
Boy Scouts
I think at the same camp I was in as before there

was a guy, a scout, I don't think he was a scout, I think
he was s scoutmaster from some troop around here. He
didn't want to be sleeping on the hard ground. So, he
gathered up a big bunch of leaves and made hisself a
bed. There was pine straw everywhere, but he didn't use
it, he gathered up limbs and leaves off bushes and he
woke up the next morning one giant bug bite. He had
chiggers red bugs ticks just hundreds of them all. They
had to bring an ambulance to come out and take him to
the hospital. Hell, I thought everybody knew better than
doing that, but I guess not.
We had a fellow who is now not only a preacher
but a missionary, a big time missionary with whom we
had a contest to see who could light a fire first. They
gave us three matches, and the one that lighted the fire
quickest with the least matches would win the contest. I
don't know what kind of prize they had, probably a
damn Hershey's bar.
Everybody knew that I was better at just about
111
everything than just about everybody there. Hell I'd

spent all my life in the woods. The day of the big contest
I had beaten everyone else there, and he and this now
big time missionary were up against each other to see
who could build a fire the fastest.
They blew the whistle, and I grabbed up my
tender. I got it set up how I wanted, and I looked over at
him. And he had blaze going just billowing up black
smoke from this blazing fire he had and they declared
him the winner
I said, “Wait a minute. That's a kerosene fire. He's
poured kerosene and lit the damn thing!”
But they let him win the damn contest. His daddy
was one of the big wigs in town.
But Karma, I've found, is a wonderful thing. Later
on that night we had all eaten supper and we were sitting
around the campfire talking and this same guy that had
just cheated me out of winning the fire starting contest.
Had found a golf ball and he had his knife whittling on
the golf ball by the fire.
Now the scoutmaster and one of the other judges
was right next to him. They were in a tight circle around
the fire, and he was whittling on this golf ball.
And I said, “Have you ever cut into one of those
damn things before?”
And he said, ”No, but I want to find out what it's
like.”
And I said, “Well, maybe you need to go slower
and take your time.”
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The Beginning
And he said, “No, no. I'm fine”

And I had never seen somebody cut into a golf
ball before, but I decided to get a little farther away and
lean up against a tree and they're all talking and sharing
stories and he's cutting what appears to be rubber bands
inside this golf ball.
All of a sudden everything in that circle turned
white. There were two or three of the scouts and the
scoutmaster that wore glasses and I remembered that all
of their glasses just instantly turned white and I'm
standing by the tree just looking at all this.
It was just this instant thing. At one blink they
were just sitting there talking normally to each other.
And the very next blink they were all white. Hair,
glasses, eyebrows, mouth, everything just turned white
instantly.
That's when I found out what happens when you
cut into a golf ball. They sat there like white statues for
thirty seconds no one could figure out what had
happened or what to do. And, and then the ones with
glasses took off their glasses and they had these pink
areas behind them. I think it was the scoutmaster that
talked first.
“Good God! Does anybody know what that stuff
was? It's all over all of us! What the hell is it? Is it a
poison? What?”
So I always figured that it was karma getting him
for that kerosene fire that he started earlier.
Mother had a friend that she was determined to
113
force me, he was in scouts, and she was determined to

force me to be friends with him and he was queer as a
three-eyed duck.
I went along with it long enough to keep her
pacified and he was two or three years older than me
and at the camp my Dad had a fairly monstrous
collection of arrowheads that he'd picked up on our
farm.
He used to plow with a mule. I have plowed with
a mule, too. You plow one side of one row with a mule,
and then you come back on the other side of the same
row. And it just took forever. And the mule was always
farting on you, and sometimes you just got mules that
were determined not to do what you wanted them to do.
At one time we had a situation where the mules
were getting out of their corral almost daily. We never
could figure out just exactly how they were getting out.
We thought that somebody might have been letting them
out, because the gates were latched, but they weren't
locked. We had sliding latches on the gates.
I decided to stake the place out and find out how
the mules were getting out of the pen. After watching for
a few hours, I saw a mule come out and walk around the
fence to the gate, reach across the fence to the other side
of the gate with his nose, and open the gate.
The astounding part to me was that this was a
blind mule. He always had to feel his way around the
barn and pens and fields that he was in. But, he figured
out what kind of latch we had on the gate and how he
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The Beginning
could work it so he could get out. And naturally, the

other mules just followed him through the opening. It's
hard to call it a him because it was a hermaphrodite.
Mules are like hyenas, since most of them are
hermaphrodites. And they fart all the time. Apparently,
they don't eat right.
But when you plowed with a mule, you were
walking all the time, and slow, and you stepped on every
inch of the field you were working turning the dirt over.
And our property had several springs on it ad several
monstrous oak trees and we finally figured out that was
some kind of meeting ground and camp place for, God
know how many years, so there's all kinds of stuff out
there.
I had told them about it, so they wanted me to
bring it down to show it to the scouts down at the camp,
and Dad wanted me to and I wanted to, so I did. And
this guy got after me to let him help me carry it. So, I let
him carry about half of it.
He tripped and dropped them in a damn river that
we had to cross and he went in the river just after that
with bloody nose and bloody mouth because I knocked
his ass in the river.
I told him that he wouldn't get out of the river
until he got the things back. I guess he made a half-
hearted effort, but he said he couldn't feel anything. And
I said to hell with it. And I think later on that afternoon I
knocked his ass down for running around trying to
apologize to me.
115
Cause He was Family
Now this is the same cousin as the camporee, and

this could go under bullies. This cousin was a mean little
devil. I say he was little, but he was a couple of years
older than me. He used to beat me up every time that he
saw me until one day he found out that he wasn't going
to be able to beat me up anymore. And that brought all
that to a screeching halt.
One of my other cousins asked me a few months
ago when was the last time that I got my ass beat.
I said, "It was this cousin that did it."
When I was about eight years old he was the last
one to beat my ass, because I decided it wasn't a whole
lot of fun, and I knew the winner felt a lot better than the
loser did, so I figured I'd get really good at it. So, my
cousin holds the distinction of being the last person to
beat my ass.
This is just after he found out that he couldn't beat
my ass any more. We were at a boyscout meeting, and
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The Beginning
he did something to get a guy upset that was an eagle

scout. And I think he was a senior in high school and
loved to fight, he was always getting in fights with
people at school. And everyone had heard about him
getting in fights at school, how good he was, and how
tough he was, and everyone knew about it.
We were in the scout meeting, and I heard him
talking to my cousin. He was talking real loud with him,
he said he was going to beat my cousin's ass. So I just
turned around and ran across the room and dove at his
head, and my whole body crashed into his chest and we
both went over backwards and I knocked the air out of
him and I'm sitting on him with my first drawn back
about to hit him in the eye. I figured that was a soft
place to gouge him at.
And as soon as he got his breath back, he said,
"Wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm not going to hurt him,
I'm not going to hurt him, I was just joking."
So there wasn't a fight. I didn't think anything but
ran over there and jumped on him and already started
the fight 'cause the cousin was family.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
117
Jailhouse
In Doerun about the only thing that we could

think of to do was either steal watermelons or throw
firecrackers around in the middle of the night and harass
the local law. I was the only one in the bunch that could
actually pick up the back end of a car, so, lots of times,
especially when we got a new cop, we'd run out and I'd
grab the back bumper and pick the car up and one of my
buddies would set a half of a watermelon under one
wheel.
Then, we'd run around and just do a burn out or
do a doughnut on the highway or something to raise
some kind of ruckus, and the cop would run out and get
in his car and just floor it. The speedometer would be
pegged out at 120 and nothing else was moving around
him, because if you get a watermelon under your wheel.
I don't care what you do, nothing is going to move until
118
The Beginning
yo jack the car up and take the watermelon from under

the wheel.
We used to set up the two traffic signals. We used
them to start our drag races. We broke into the box and
figured out a way to make the light change at will. So,
we'd have good ones on Sunday afternoons. The cops
were going to shut it down one time, and they sent three
sheriff's deputies over to the little town and they were
going to give a show of strength. So they parked their
cars at one of the service stations on the main street right
next to the traffic signal. So, when they'd go in to get a
drink, we'd get about thirty friends to come in and park
their cars around the cops. And the cops would come out
and see their patrol cars out in the middle of a sea of
cars. All locked. Nobody around anywhere.
And we'd hold our drag races then, and the cops
would be just literally jumping up and down screaming
trying to get somebody to move a car so they could get
out.
We had one cop, now he was an old man. He was
about 85, and they decided that he was too old to be a
cop. So, instead of putting his name in the books as
being a cop, they used the name of a buddy of mine that
was still in high school. So, officially, my buddy was the
cop, but his grandfather was the one who walked around
town.
And he said that if any of us came by and he saw
any of us throwing cherry bombs around he was going
to shoot the people in the car. He was an extreme old
119
man, or he thought was until he ran into us.

So, naturally that night, as soon as we heard about
it, we got in my car, a bunch of us, and went right
through the middle of town, probably running about
100. And just as we passed the old man, there were half
a dozen cherry bombs came out of the car at, under, and
around the old man.
And he did pull out his gun and start shooting. He
shot out two plate glass windows in the pharmacy across
the street and one in the barbershop right behind him,
about a foot back of him. He never even shot in the
direction of where the car was. Nobody ever figured out
where the other bullets went.
A bunch of us one night couldn't find anything to
do. It wasn't watermelon season, and the pool rooms had
closed, and we were either tired of the casino or we
hadn't made it yet. No, hell, we had to have made it. I
guess we got tired of it.
So, I told a bunch of them, probably half a dozen
guys with me, "Come on down here and let's break into
the jail."
I was a backwards kid. Anyway, we went down to
the jail and found an old window in the back that I
jimmied and got to raise up. Now in the jail, to save
money, they had bought some big metal-mesh cages
that sat in a room in the jail. They had six of these cages
sitting in there. And the cages lacked about three feet
going up to the ceiling, but they had the same criss-cross
bars on top as they did across the sides.
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The Beginning
So, I had an idea. I figured that the cop would be

sleeping. And before I went in, I tried to get the rest of
them to go in and raise hell, and run out past the cop and
scare him half to death. They didn't want to do that.
So then, I had an idea about something else. I
grabbed me a handful of little rocks off the ground and
climbed up the side of the cage real quiet and went to
just sneaking up across the thing, and there was 6-8
black guys in the first four cages, and the last two cages
were empty.
So, I'd take one of these little tiny rocks where it
would either hit the cage bar or hit one of them in the
head, and they would look around, and I was laying
about a foot over them, but they never looked up, and
they never knew I was there. When I hit one in the head
or the back, I'd go, "OOOOOHHHH" real softly. And I'd
wait a few minutes and toss my little rock and start
moaning "OOOOOHHHHH." And they started
screaming about haints and screaming for the cop.
"Lord, boss man, they's haints in this place. You
gotsta let me outta dis place. They's haints in this place.
I can't be in this place."
I'd hit another one on the head and go "OOHHH,"
and then another one on the walls where it would clank
"OOHHHH" and they were just jumping up and down
like monkeys trying to get out of this place. He finally
came back there to see what was going on.
All of them told him at the same time, "Oh, Lord,
boss man, boss man, you gotsta let us out. They's haints
121
in here."
"Oh, you got to go to sleep, you gotta stop making
a ruckus," he ordered them.
I kept doing that until the third time, when he told
them they had better quit or he was going to start
shooting people. I eased on back off the cage and out of
the window, and the people I'd left outside were just in
one pile.
All I saw was just arms and legs and heads, and
they were trying to keep themselves from laughing and
each other from laughing loud. I mean, they were all
laughing, but they were hitting each other and pinching
each other to keep the cop from coming back there.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
122
The Beginning
Bootleg Cherry Bombs
It was just after the state of Georgia had outlawed

most firecrackers and especially all cherry bombs. I had
found an old backwoods store about two or three miles
from home that had cherry bombs. So, in the afternoon
when I got home, if I didn't go to shoot pool somewhere,
I'd run up to this old store and buy all the cherry bombs
that I could afford to buy. The next day I would take
them to school and sell them to the other kids at a profit.
I did that for quite a while, and then I had a big
order for something that was coming up, and I had
several big orders. So, I bought a bunch of my cherry
bombs. I came to school and got with some of my
buddies and was selling them just outside of the
classroom. We were going to lunch and were going back
in the same classroom, so I opened the store on the
walkway outside the classroom.
And just as I sold and took the money for the very
123
last one, the teacher popped his head out the door and
caught us. So he came over to the group and he made
everybody give him their cherry bombs and told me to
wait there that he was going to go get the principal to
talk to me about selling cherry bombs in school.
The teacher took all the cherry bombs. He really
had a bunch of cherry bombs. He put them in a sack,
and then he put them in his desk. Then he came out of
the room and started towards the office and told me to
be sure not to go anywhere because he'd be right back
with the principal.
So as soon as he left, I went in the room jimmied
the desk open, got the cherry bombs, and started
reselling them to the same people. They said that I
should have just given them the cherry bombs.
I told them, "You could have gone and got them
out of the desk. But you didn't want to. I did. So you
see, these are brand new cherry bombs."
I proceeded to sell them all. I told the people,
"Well, you folks had better scatter."
They all left and I stayed there like I was
supposed to do. The teacher came up there with the
principal and motioned me over. I came in. The teacher
bent down and looked in the desk, looked at me, looked
at the principal, and looked back at the desk. The
principal looked at the empty desk drawer, at the
teacher, and they both looked at me.
They both just kind of smiled. And said, "What
happened to the cherry bombs?"
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The Beginning
I said, "I don't know what you're' talking about."

They actually smiled a little more.
They said, "Well, we know you got them, but we
can't do anything to you because we don't have any
evidence."
And they're still smiling.
And they said "Well, don't let use catch you with
any more cherry bombs."
I said, "Okay, I won't let you catch me with any
more cherry bombs."
Life Motto #1
Where the Hell is that dam box anyway?
125
First Nookie
The first time, it was one of the older neighbor

girls. She came onto me. Most of the time that's what
happened. I really rarely asked a girl to go out with me.
But somehow it worked out. There really were very few
times that I asked a girl to go out with me or go
anywhere with me.
I have had, I wasn't trying to keep a record, but I
have had many virgins within just a couple of hours of
126
The Beginning
the first time they laid eyes on me. That was a life
changing experience. I found the joys of the female sex.
I found both what they could do to me and what I could
do to them and what I could encourage them to do to
me, and it was all great fun.
I decided them to do as much of it as was
humanly possible. I believe I got my first piece of ass
before I got my first kiss, everything went pretty fast
there for a few minutes.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
127
Shooting Off Hat
I'm down in the woods hunting with my trusty .22

single shot rifle. And I'm taking a few pot shots at
things, leaves, twigs, just to improve my aim some. And
I see a bug caught in a cat face of a pine tree.
Now the cat face is where they scrape the bark off
so that the gum or resin from the pine tree can run down
the tree into a cup and they can gather the cup and get
the turpentine out of the cup. This was an old cat face
that had a bug stuck in the resin.
And so, I leaned over and took careful aim at the
bug and shot and saw the bullet hit the bug and I heard a
buzzing humming sound coming at me and I realized it
was coming right over my head. It hit my hat and
knocked my hat off my head, and I'm standing there
trying to figure out what in the hell had just happened.
And I finally realized that this resin on this cat
face in the pine tree had sat there for a long time. When
I shot it, I hit the bug, and resin deflected the bullet back
128
The Beginning
almost exactly the way it came. And I shot my own hat

off. I realized that if that damn bug had been about two
inches lower on the cat face I would have probably shot
myself right in the eye. And I never shot at another cat
face.
129
Go To Hell Hat
Along about that time I had my Go to Hell hat. It

was a black canvas hat, I think they called it a pork pie
hat. It was flat on top, had a little turned up brim around
it, and had a wide shocking pink band around the hat.
And sometimes if I felt like it I'd stick a feather in the
side of the hat.
And I always said that it was my go to hell hat.
And I had dyed some shirts to match the hat band, a
shocking pink, and I had dyed some socks to match the
shirt and hat band. And that was my garb for a while.
And I called it my go to hell hat because if anybody
didn't like it, they could go directly to hell.
And the easiest way I knew for somebody to get
their ass whupped was to grab my hat and do anything
with it, because that was an immediate fight. But people
learned that.
I had it blow under trucks, and down a mountain,
into a pond, and I had to get the thing out of a pond, it
just went through tortuous times, it had a bullet hole in it
because it was the hat I shot off of my head.
130
The Beginning
Violent Knight
I wore the go to hell hat a lot, and when I was

twelve I bought my first car on the sly. I bought it from
a high school kid. It was a 1931 Model B five window
coupe. It had leather seats and a leather rumble seat.
And it had a spark advance on the steering wheel where
you could advance the spark while you were driving the
car and you could retard the spark enough so the thing
would run on kerosene.
It would run on just almost anything that would
burn that you could pour in it. It used oil, a lot of oil,
and it leaked water. I'd drive it almost to Albany. I had
found a place up there that sold used oil from the marine
base. You had to bring your own jug, so I'd go up there
and I'd get five gallons of oil and I kept a five gallon can
of water in it because the radiator leaked until I fixed it
131
with red pepper. That's the best radiator stop leak I have
ever used, and I still use it.
And I found a stencil somewhere, and in black
paint on the door, I christened it and stenciled it the
“Violent Knight.” Now, the rest of the car was, I never
could find any other way to describe it, besides a
buzzard vomit green. It was probably the most hideous
green colour that I have ever seen in my life. I bought it
for twenty five dollars, and I did win some races in it.
I got the money for it hustling pool and playing
cards. Now, for about two years of not keeping it at
home, but keeping it at other people's houses, when I
wanted to drive my car I'd run over to their house and
drive it wherever I wanted to go. And after a couple of
years mother got wind of my car and she pitched a bitch
and told me I had to sell it back to the guy that I bought
it from.
So I went back and told him the sad story and told
him I needed to sell it back to him for twenty-five
dollars and he refused. Now, when I run into him,
especially when I run into him around a group of his
friends, I ask them to tell me who they think was the
biggest idiot, me trying to sell a good '31 five window
coupe for twenty-five dollars, or him refusing to buy it
for twenty-five dollars. If either one of us had it now it
would be worth fifteen thousand.
It didn't have good brakes. I kept a concrete block
with a rope in it under my feet so I if I got in some kind
of jam I could throw it out and hopefully get stopped,
132
The Beginning
but most of the time I'd have to open the door and put
out of a foot or get out and stop it. The speedometer
didn't work but I found out that at sixty-five miles an
hour the fenders would start flapping. So that was my
speedometer.
I used to do things like I used to get a bunch of
people in it and go through Doerun with the train. The
train would just be going through town like it normally
would and I would cross in front of the train and run
down go up a block and cross back again and I knew the
engineer was just having a duck because he kept seeing
this bilious green car just darting out in front of him
every time he came to a crossing.
I finally sold the car to another guy. I tried to
move it to several other places and mother kept finding
out about it because she was looking for it. She was
asking people about it then.
I was the one that started chain drags. I knew my
old car wouldn't run fast enough to race anybody. Now, I
kept the family car tuned well enough that I could race
people in it. But in the Knight I had to do what I had
devised as a chain drag.
You put a real light, three foot piece of chain
between the bumpers of the car, like a necklace chain,
and get on a real twisty dirt road and go one way with
one car in front and then after that go the other way with
the other car in front. The front bumper of the back car
was chained to the rear bumper of the front car. The
front car won if the chain broke, and the back car one if
133
the chain didn't break.

And I won a lot of races that way because I could
drive, and that was strictly a driver's race, because the
speed of a car didn't have much to do with that
especially on a dirt road with lots of curves, so I'd take
away their advantage of speed and use my advantage of
actually being able to drive a damn car.
Because neither the violent Knight or the farm
truck had windshield wipers, that taught me to get along
without them. And up to this day I worry people to death
because I just wait and wait and wait before I turn on the
wipers. Of course, the truck was supposed to have
wipers, but they didn't work.
And with the Knight you had to reach up and pull
a lever. They were manual. And so I got used to driving
through the rain channels on the windshield. And now
I'll wait ten, twelve, to fifteen minutes until I think about
turning them on because I'm fine; I can see.
I had one guy, a bunch of us was riding around in
Doerun, boys and girls, and this guy from out of town
was talking about how hot his car was, and I told him
that I'd race him in the Violent knight and he had a
pretty hot car he had two deuces, and he wouldn't race
me, he said that the last time that he raced a car that
looked like that they just ate him alive, and he said that
he wouldn't ever race another car like that. Of course, I
was just going to challenge him to a chain drag, which
I'm sure he didn't know nothing about.
Along about the same time, the local bootleggers
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The Beginning
used to meet at the Moultrie truck stop in the middle of

the night, which was out on the old Doerun road, or old
Albany road. And a bunch of us was out there one night,
I was supposed to be in bed, I'm pretty sure that my
parents thought that I was in bed, but I was at the truck
stop with the bootleggers.
So a bunch of us saw these two drunks in there. I
mean they were knee-walking toilet-hugging drunk.
They got mad about something, I think with us. And
then, they decided that they couldn't fight cause they
couldn't walk. And then they decided they'd better go
home.
So they drug themselves out to the old car they
had. It was a 1950 Buick, I mean one would walk a bit
dragging the other until the one fell down. And the other
would somehow get up, and he'd drag a spell.
I said, “Hell, let's follow these fools.”
Well, these guys got to the old car, left the truck
stop, and the first thing they did was they turned on to
Buttermilk Alley, which was later renamed Woodman
Road. Swift Meat Packing Company had built most of
that part of town for there to be cheap housing for their
workers to live in. The Moultrie Swift used to be the 2nd
biggest meat packing plant east of the Mississippi. They
always paid everybody in two dollar bills so that
everybody'd know where Swift's money went
They had this old Buick running as fast as they
could, and there was a railroad crossing that was real
rough. The railroad must have been three feet higher
135
than the road. They went over that thing and sailed up in
the air, and when they hit the ground they, busted all
four shocks on the car.
I thought that they had busted all four tires. But
we kept looking and the tires were all right, and we
realized they had busted all of their shocks. Now the old
car is just bounding up and down by itself, they don't
have to hit a bump for the car to go up and down and
still driving just as fast as the old car would go all the
way down to what is now the Tifton Highway.
And just about down there where the power
station is, somehow they whipped in a drive way and
drove into the living room of their house. When we
came by, the whole car from the windshield forward was
inside the living room of the house. And these drunks
were in the front seat.
And I guess just fell over and went to sleep. They
weren't moving anywhere. So we went back to the truck
stop. Just drove through the wall, knocked the house off
the blocks it was sitting on. And the car was inside the
house, in the living room, and they were just asleep in
the car.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
136
The Beginning
Off Camber Hill
In the early years, there were a couple of times

driving that... I learned to drive on slick dirt roads. Even
as young as I was (this was seven or eight years old) I
read a book by Sterling Moss on Formula One Racing,
sterling moss described a Formula One race as a 500-
mile long wreck, because if you weren't pushing
yourself beyond the place where you would wreck, that
you weren't pushing yourself hard enough.
After I read his book, I decided that I needed to be
a formula one driver, which would have been an
excellent thing because today the starting pay for a
Formula One driver is $20 Million a year, which ain't
bad. And I did everything that I could do to hone my
reflexes and my driving skills and abilities. I found that
the limit of adhesion, the point where a car looses grip
and starts trying to go out of control is exactly the same
as it is for a car on a slick-dirt road at low speed as it is
for a formula one car at high speeds.
137
So, I practiced this over and over and over and got
very good at reading the adhesion of surfaces and how a
car would react and really, really, worked at it. And got
my reflexes and my driving ability and road and
conditions reading ability and my ability to drive ahead
of the car enough to run at formula one speeds, then, I
found out that Formula One drivers weighed about 130
pounds and were around five feet tall. So, without a lot
of amputation, it didn't make much difference how good
I was. That profession was just off-limits to me.
So my driver training was always on slick dirt
roads. At first, after a rain it would take me three or four
hours to make that two miles to the dairy and back. But
that's the biggest place that I learned to drive. At one
point, it was in a driving rainstorm, just a blinding
rainstorm, the windshield wipers had quit on the car, so I
couldn't see very well and I was driving slow.
I got on a curve, which I knew all about, because I
had been on it a thousand times, it was an off camber
curve at the top of the hill. I wasn't going fast enough at
the base of the hill and got slowed down right on the off
camber side of the curve.
Naturally as the car was spinning, it was trying to
move towards the ditch downhill. I had to stop, and
then, every time I tried to start off, it would start sliding
closer to the ditch. I didn't think I could back up,
because I had just barely gotten through the road back of
me the first time, and now it was worse.
So, I sat and thought for a minute. The only thing
138
The Beginning
I could come up with was, I got out of the car, left the
window down, got a stick, cause the old car had an
automatic transmission, put the car in drive braced my
back against the car, my feet against the ditch bank,
mashed the accelerator with the stick, and walked the
car up the hill. It worked. I don't know how old I was
then, probably somewhere in the early time.
Life Motto #1
Where the Hell is that damn box anyway?
139
First Motorcycle
I found a motorcycle that I could afford, so I

bought it. It was a Honda dream. I don't know why they
called it a dream. The only motorcycle place anywhere
around here that wasn't Harley, that I knew of, was in
Thomasville. I went down to Thomasville to get some
kind of part for my bike, I think the day I bought it or
the day after.
I rode it down and was coming back, and I was
riding just as far over to the right as I could get cause I'd
just gotten on the thing just the day before. But I had
bought it the afternoon before, cranked it up, let out the
clutch here in town, and promptly rode through
everybody's hedge and flowerbed on that block. I didn't
know how to make it go where I wanted it to, or make it
go as fast as I wanted it to and had no idea how to stop
it. So I rode through bushes and flowerbeds for 20
minutes, and then got calmed down enough to figure it
out.
140
The Beginning
The next day I rode down to the bike shop in

Thomasville. I knew where the bike shop was because
when I had been riding the train to Thomasville to hustle
pool I walked past the motorcycle shop. I rode down to
get the parts I needed and I'm coming home just as far to
the right as I could ride. I am looking in the rear view
mirror, and I knew someone would run over me before I
got through. It still had pieces of rose bushes and things
on it.
This Cadillac's coming up behind me, and I'm
watching him. I see he's not getting over, and I'm over to
the right as far as I could go without going in the
shoulder. The shoulder was soft, so I thought it would
put me in the ditch.
That Cadillac came by me at 75 to 80 miles an
hour and missed my left handlebar by just about two
inches. I let out a bellow and tried to take off after him.
That's when I found out a Honda dream will run 50
miles an hour, and off a cliff 60. So I'm running this
thing as fast as I could and watching him go smaller and
smaller.
Before that happened, I had planned that I would
kick his door in or something and let him know I was
there, and if he stopped I'd kick his ass. But he didn't
even ever see me. He was in sight less than a minute.
But on that trip I swore that I would never own another
slow motorcycle.
The next time that I went to Thomasville to get
some parts for my Honda dream, just as I pulled in, now
141
by this time I had actually learned how to ride a

motorcycle. It wasn't the next time, I'd been down to the
shop there talking and looking for a motorcycle that I
could afford that would outrun the Honda dream that I
had. Hadn't been able to find one.
But I needed some parts. Went down there to the
shop. Happened to notice this guy pushing a motorcycle.
He was probably 40 or 50 yards from the shop and he
pushed it up to the shop.
And I said, “Man, it looks like you've got troubles
there.”
He said, “Well no, I don't have any trouble. This
bike don't have no trouble.”
I looked at it, and it was a Yamaha 250cc TT
Special. It was made especially for road racing by
Yamaha. Now he told me that he had just bought that
motorcycle and he rode it out the door of the shop and
rode it three blocks down the street and got off of it and
pushed it back because he figured that it was going to
kill him. Four blocks before I got it, it was brand new.
And I said, "Well, you mind if I ride it up the
block a little bit?"
And he said, "No."
By that time the dealer had come out and I rode it
up the block one way to get the feel of the motorcycle
and then I RODE it up the block the other way three or
four times down around the place. I rode up to the shop
And said, "Man this is the kind of bike I need to
have."
142
The Beginning
Well, they both said, "Well, this is the kind of bike

you need to have."
And they worked out a deal I could afford to by
the bike and trade in my Honda Dream on that
motorcycle. And I rode around the next few months
looking for that damn Cadillac I was pretty sure he
couldn't get away from me on that TT Special.
I raced it anywhere, everywhere, any money. If I
didn't have any money I'd just race for the fun of it. I got
in organized road racing, I dragged people, just
anything, any time. It didn't make any difference.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
143
A Lifeguard's Holy Terror
It was in high school, I had learned to swim like a

fish and could hold my breath for about five minutes, I
kept doing things like in an Olympic size pool I could
swim eight lengths of the pool underwater. And I was in
Thomasville at the Thomasville Country Club pool one
time. It happened that there were a lot of girls going up
and diving off the diving board
So I decided that the best place for me to go up
and watch them and watch for any wardrobe
malfunctions was underwater. So, I was prone to go
down to the deep end of the pool and I'd go down under
the water and hold onto a ladder to hold myself down
and just sit down there and watch for around five
minutes and come up to the top for air and go back to
the ladder and I'd go back down,
And I'm watching these girls jump down and
having a ball. And I feel someone grab hold of my head
and tug me up by my hair. And it's the damn life guard,
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The Beginning
And he said, "What's wrong?"

And "I said nothing, I'm just sitting here watching
the girls."
He said, "We'll you've been down there a long
time,"
And I said, "Well, so?"
I was really a terror of life guards cause I could
disappear longer than a human should be able to
disappear.
145
Thumper Camp
I went to this Baptist camp of some kind. That's

when I found out that apparently, according to the
Baptists, you go to Hell if you're ever in a swimming
pool with a girl. I also found out why Baptists are so
against pre-marital sex. They're afraid it might lead to
dancing.
They had this monstrous outdoor pool, and the
way they operated, they had a buddy system. And all the
boys got in the pool, and you were supposed to pick out
your buddy and stay with your buddy all the time. And
every once in a while one of the doofuses would jump
up and holler,
“Buddy, buddy!”
And you were supposed to jump up and hold
hands and show you were right with your buddy. Well,
my buddy got thrown pretty quick, I thought that it was
up to him to keep up with me. And when they hollered
“Buddy! Buddy!” I just sank down to the bottom and
stayed there.
I guess that went on for about an hour. And then,
they called out that all the boys had to get out of the
pool so the girls could get in and swim. So, I went to the
deep end again. They shuttled all the boys out of the
pool and shuttled all the girls into the pool. And I felt
like I had pretty much died and gone to Heaven.
I'd swim around into and among groups of girls.
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The Beginning
I'd find me a group of girls underwater and then swim

through their legs into the middle of them. And I'd come
up, and we'd talk and just play around. And then some
Doofus would holler “Buddy!” and I'd get down in the
middle of them. And they'd hide me.
So, I made it almost an hour with them. Then,
some damn old battle axe saw me during one of the
buddy calls. She went ballistic. I thought she was going
to have a stroke.
The bitch was jumping up and down, screaming
and hollering. You would have thought someone had let
a mad bear loose in the place. The girls told them later
on that these damn women were telling them that they
could get pregnant from swimming with a boy and all
sorts of crap like that.
I told them I'd show them how to you pregnant.
And I did.
147
Cow Sitting
Now, this good friend of mine, the same one that

later became a state patrolman, he would on occasion
come out to the house and we'd go camping or hunting
somewhere. This particular time we had gone over on, I
think we both had motorcycles then. we took a tent
down to the pond and just pitched the tent by the pond
in the pasture. We had gone to town on the motorcycles,
rode around a little on the dirt roads, came back, got in
the tents and went to sleep.
The next morning I woke up to these funny
sounds going on. I opened my eyes and all I could see
on either side of me was just tent. We had a two man
tent, and I heard these real low weak sounding grunts
coming from all around me. I couldn't figure out what
was going on with the tent at first.
I said, "Well, hell! I've got to get out and see what
happened. Something has gone crazy."
I got out and a damn cow had just sat down on
148
The Beginning
James. It had kinda sat on the tent and the tent had kind
of folded over on him so he's on there trying to get
enough air to grunt to wake me up. He don't know if I'm
still alive, but he figures I'm the only chance he's got.
But as soon as I get out of the tent, I see this cow
just sitting on his half of the tent. So I run the cow off.
He got up and said the cow had been on him for quite a
while, because he couldn't get enough air in him to get
loud enough to make me wake up.
So he got up and got out of the tent and walked
over a little ways from the tent to a fence row and peed.
We had just put in a new electric fence. He had never
seen an electric fence and I had just forgotten to tell him
that we had them up.
And he started peeing. And then he started
screaming and jumping and yelling, "Oh, god damn, oh
god damn!"
And just about that time the stream got off the
fence.
And he said, "What in the hell kind of thing is
this?"
He said it felt like something had set him on fire.
To go from being under the cow to feeling like
something had unjointed every bone in his body would
be, for me, a shock.
149
Algebra in High School
I had a teacher that everybody thought she taught

Adam. God, I don't know how old the woman was. She
must have been eighty and acted like 100, a bitter 100. I
never did figure out what happened. I took algebra that
year, and went into the class and it really didn't excite
me.
I had actually invented similar stuff when I was in
the third grade to play with as my math class. Back in
the third grade, I devised a way to do all of my math
homework in Roman numerals, until they told me I had
to quit. The principal told me that he had talked to
everyone he knew and they could see that my answers
were right, but they didn't know how I got there. So, I
had to stop. So, I stopped.
So this bitter old hag that was teaching algebra, it
was the first week, could have been the first day, she
asked us to look through the book and pick out a
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The Beginning
problem that we wanted her to work out on the

chalkboard the next day. I looked through the book and
thought I had a pretty good idea of what was going on,
so I just closed my eyes, put my finger in the book, and
said, that would be my problem.
She worked problems for everyone, and got to
me, and I told her the problem I had picked out, and she
got into a huff and went into a fit and told me
"If you want me to work that problem out, then
you need to bring a comic book to class every day for
the rest of the year!"
I said, "Okay."
I didn't bring comic books, I brought Chaucer and
Paine and that was my reading class. I didn't take a test.
She just passed me up. At the end of the year, they had a
state-wide test in math to see how well people had
gotten math that year.
She told me, "Well, there's not any reason for you
to take the test, because you haven't done anything."
"Well, I think I'll take it any way."
She kept trying to talk me out of it.
I kept saying, "Well, I think I'll take it anyway,
because everyone else was."
She came back in the day after the test results
came back and stopped in the door screaming at me
asking
"Are you trying to get me fired?"
I listened to her.
And she said, "I can't pass you because you have
151
a zero average because you didn't even take a test!"

And I said, "Well, lady, you told me not to take
the test."
She said, "But you made the highest grade in the
state."
So, I just kinda shrugged my shoulders. I didn't
know what else to do. She said that the school board had
already asked her about retiring because she was
apparently flunking the state's best mathematician. I
thought it was good enough for her.
I had to come back for summer school, I went in
and sat in class, and looked through the window and
here this bitch is walking to the classroom. I just got up,
walked to the door, and passed her at the door. I wasn't
spending anymore time with that demon. If I failed the
grade, I failed the grade, but I wasn't going to be trapped
with that demon anymore. She looked kinda surprised,
but hell I don't think she wanted me to be in there
anymore than I wanted to be in there.
I think I made the second highest grade in the
state on the SAT's. But I was just absolutely bored out of
my mind with school.
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The Beginning
Library Fight
At the high school, the old high school on 2nd

Street SW, there was this new guy from south Florida
who had just moved into school. He was a monstrous
fellow, must have weighed 350 to 400 pounds. I was in
the library studying, and he came in and somehow, some
way just kind of bumped into me. When he bumped into
me he pushed me out of the way and I stumbled through
a couple of chairs,
And I said, "Well, now, this can't be."
So, I came back at him and I hit him in the
stomach, and I knocked him probably fifteen feet
through tables, chairs, and students. And he came back
at me and was knocking me fifteen to twenty feet and I
was knocking him fifteen, and we fought all over the
library. Everybody left the library, the librarians the
teachers the students. Everybody went outside the
library.
153
We had books everywhere, we really did just tear

the library apart and finally I just decided to up the ante
a little bit and got a real good running start and hit him
and I think I broke something. I heard something pop
like it broke when I hit him, and he decided that he
really didn't want to fight anymore. Then, he wanted to
be friends, and we got along after that.
We got to be buddies after that. We walked out of
the library together just talking and everybody was just
gathered out in the yard in a group outside the library.
They were shook up so much nobody even thought
about going to get the principal or a teacher or anything.
They were just standing there waiting I guess for us to
get through.
So, we came out talking and walked off. And the
bunch just stood there and watched us come out and
walk down the corridor. And I never did hear anything
else about it. I never could imagine just nothing being
said about something like that.
Life Motto #2
Hit a Lick
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The Beginning
Principal's Desk
Along about the same time the Principal's Office

got broken into one night and got messed up, they took a
bunch of ink that they found and threw it all over
everything and poured it into filing cabinets and got
some stuff out and set a little fire on top of his desk and
burned up some things in his office.
And the principal and most of the teachers
decided that it must have been me, because I was in
pretty much everything else that went on at school. So
they called in everybody, including the sheriff and the
GBI. My friend from the cow sitting episode was the
son of the leader of the GBI office. As I said, they called
him in to investigate this thing. And he looked around
and looked at what was done, and the principal told him
that they suspected that it was me that did it because I
was usually into everything that went on.
And he looked at him and said, "Well, folks, he
didn't do this."
155
The principal didn't believe him.

He looked at the principal and said, "Well if he'd
gotten mad at you, he would walk up here and kick your
door in and reach across the desk and whip your ass.
He's not going to do some bullshit like this. He will
come up to you and whip your ass. But he didn't do
this."
He knew me. I wouldn't have done that. I might
have beat the Principal's ass if the time had come, but I
wouldn't have done bullshit like they did. I don't
remember anyone ever saying who did it or anyone else
ever asking me if I did it.
156
The Beginning
Douglas
I had a cousin that went to South Georgia College

in Douglas. I went over to spend a few days with him at
his invitation and took a friend of mine with me from
here. We got over to Douglas and I don't know or
remember a lot about what my cousin or buddy did, but
it was pretty much my way, and I tried to screw all the
girls in Douglas.
And I think I made a pretty good dent in the
population, but I finally decided that I couldn't get
through all of them that trip. Maybe next time. Takes
two trips for Douglas.
We started back home in the middle of the night,
must have been midnight or later. I had trouble getting
away from the last two or three girls. I think we had to
be back at school the next morning. And I had been up
for four or five days just running from one girl to
another pretty much constantly over there. I hadn't had
157
any time to get any sleep, so I knew I'd been up the

whole time.
I stopped at a gas station outside of Douglas and
got a Coke and a pack of crackers and got back on the
road. And my buddy went to sleep in the seat by me.
And I really didn't feel sleepy, but the highway started
raising up in the air. And I remember at one time it went
up at such an angle that I had to get my head laying
down on the steering wheel so I could look straight up
through the windshield so I could see the road because if
I looked out like I normally did, it looked like I was
looking out straight on top of the road, but if I looked
straight up I could see where I was going.
The very next conscious thought that I had I was
two miles from home. Now, I drove from Douglas,
Georgia to two miles from the house asleep. I mean, just
as dead asleep as anybody has ever been. I went through
several towns. And my buddy was still asleep.
I pulled over in a farm road driveway two miles
from my house and went to sleep. That was the only
time I ever went to sleep that close to my home.
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The Beginning
The Night of the Wedding
One of the things that I used to kid my best friend

about and tell people, before it was popular, was that he
spent his wedding night with me. We didn't have no
bachelor's party. He just spent the night with me. His
girl's parents didn't really care for him. So, they ran off
and got married. They sneaked off and got married and
didn't tell anybody about it, not even me.
They cut school, and got together and went off I
think to baker country in 1960. So they're going on 50
years being married I guess they suited each other. But
they had to sneak off and do it because her folks just
didn't like him a whole lot. I never did understand why.
Hell I don't think they understood why.
He got married that afternoon, then he took her
back to her house, and he happened somehow to stay out
at my house in a little bedroom about as big as 10x12
room out in the yard, so we just partied a little and spent
159
the night in the bedroom thing. I think I was probably

the first one he told.
But when he told me, I said, "What day was that?"
And he kept going and told me again.
And I said, "Do you realize that you spent the
night with me on your wedding night, you idiot? I told
him if you'd told me you and Sandra could have come
out and slept in the shed, or I'd have worked out
something."
And I told him I wouldn't let him forget it, and
when I ran into the other state patrolmen that he worked
with or under him, I told them, "Next time you see him,
ask him who he spent his wedding night with."
160
The Beginning
Driver's License
When I went to get my driver's license, I forgot,

and just drove up to the courthouse, and just as I got
inside, I realized that nobody drove me up here.
So I quickly decided on a story that I had a buddy
drive me up here and he was going to meet me at the
drug store. So I did the written test, and made a 100 on
it. Then the trooper went out to give me the road test.
And when we got to the car, I realized they had
been trying to catch this car for quite some time. I hoped
he wouldn't recognize it. I drove him around town, and
made a 100 on that test, too.
When we returned, two of the troopers started
talking over to the side. And one came over to me.
He said, "Fellow, how long you been driving?"
I told him, "Fellow, if I told you how long I've
been driving, you'd put me in jail."
He said, "Oh, no, no, no."
But I never told him how long I'd been driving. I
161
think he recognized the car, and was having trouble

matching this fifteen year old that had out-driven
everyone in the state to me, and I'm just getting my
learner's license.
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The Beginning
Race Cars
I started hanging out with and driving and racing

with the local group of bootleggers when I was eleven
years old. I would sneak out of the house, and
sometimes sneak a car out of the yard. And sometimes I
had talked my parents into letting me drive the cars
about two miles over to a dairy where we bought raw
milk.
You are supposed to die the day after you drink
raw milk. It didn't kill me. The milk would have had to
stand in line for that. Sometimes it would take me three
hours to drive that two miles, but I don't think Mother
caught on. I think it was kind of okay with Dad.
When I was about twelve, I started driving the
truck to the cotton gin. I had earlier hauled cotton to the
gin on the tractor. And the truck would be so loaded
down that when it hit a bump, the front tires would
163
come off the ground, which taught me that I had to drive

far ahead of myself, because sometimes there would be
thirty or forty yards that I couldn't steer the truck
because it was standing on its rear wheels. I would have
to wait until my front tires were on the ground to adjust
my steering again, but for thirty or forty yards in front of
the truck since I wouldn't have any steering until that
point.
I figure roughly that the police tried to catch me
somewhere over three thousand times, and never did it
once. (for speeding, racing, running liquor.) But they
didn't know who I was and that they were chasing a
twelve-year old kid.
The local GBI agent, who was a fishing buddy of
mine told me that he happened to overhear an
assemblage of police officers called by the chief of
police of my home town.
The chief ordered his policemen to "Stop chasing
the man in the black Ford," which was me.
He said, “All he was doing was racing and driving
fast and you police officers were going to kill
somebody.”
They just didn't know how to drive like I did.
After this, I just guess became some kind of hero
to my high school buddies. I just astounded them by
driving through the middle of town past the courthouse
at sixty, seventy, eighty miles an hour and having the
cops just wave at me. And I'd wave back at them. And
that was all that was ever done. Here my buddies were
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The Beginning
worrying about keeping their licenses and getting tickets

for speeding and reckless driving. And they're sitting
there watching the cops give me a friendly wave while
going through town.
I also had people connected with the state patrol
tell me that in Atlanta they had started a driving school
for state patrol officers specifically to train people and
build cars to catch me. And they never were able to do
that.
There is a bed and breakfast on Sylvester
Highway in Moultrie, and it was the first state patrol
post in Georgia. And the commander of the first state
patrol his family still has a farm where he lived between
Moultrie and Doerun with his family on a farm.
It's awful odd to put all this in an obscure corner
of Georgia. All state patrol cars in Georgia up until the
mid 60s were dispatched from Albany. If somebody
needed a state patrol officer in Rome, the call had to be
sent out from Albany and the car was radioed from
Albany.
165
The Bet
I had one of my buddies... I used to, on many

occasions, I would run 120, 130, 150 along a paved road
and drive directly off onto a dirt road. And the people in
back of me, usually the state patrol or some kind of
police wouldn't make it. They'd go out in the field or in
the ditch. The smart ones would stop and let me go. I
also heard, about that time, that I was the reason that the
state patrol was ordered to never chase anybody on a
dirt road for any reason. That was after they had lost
about 40 or 50 cars trying to catch me.
A friend of mine, who's family had just gotten a
brand new, 1957, retractable, hard-top Ford accepted a
bet from a mutual friend. I heard the bet was for $2. He
was betting that he could do what I had been doing. But
he was going to do it at 80 MPH instead of at 120 to
130. And he promptly drove this brand new, retractable
hard-top into a pine thicket. He didn't stay on that dirt
road long until he got off into the woods and destroyed
the car for what I understood was a $2 bet. (We all were
doing things like that.)
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The Beginning
The Intersections
I had come into Moultrie one night. I hardly ever

went anywhere that some from of police didn't get after
me at least once that night. I think my record for one
night was that six different police departments tried to
catch me. They just knew me as the guy in the black
Ford because I wouldn't let them get my tag number or
get a good look at me.
As I came into town, something really weird
happened. I wasn't paying attention to the first part of
this, so I don't know exactly how it happened, but this
particular car chase was through the middle of town, and
the cops that were chasing me were one block east of the
road I was on.
They were running parallel to my route. we
watched each other at the intersections. We came
through town at 120 to 125.
When we passed the courthouse, I could tell by
the way they were driving the exact moment they
realized the road they were on dead ended at the
outskirts of town. We went all the way through town. I
167
started watching them real close, and kept getting in

some kinda position that when I crossed the
intersections that if I had any indications that they were
trying to turn or stop like they were going to, I was
going to let them go by the last intersection before their
street ended. Which I did.
Then, I pulled a bootleg turn in the intersection
corresponding to the one they had just been in. I did a
little zig-zagging, and was gone. Wish I could have been
in their car to see their faces.
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The Beginning
My Fear Factor Moment
I thought about all of this when I watched that

show, because I always enjoyed tripe and pig ears and
pigtails and chitterlings and sometimes on fear factor
one of the supposed tortures was to eat chitterlings.
Some time in junior high school, I guess they call
that middle school now, about eighth grade, I think
somebody probably asked me if I could jump between
two pickup trucks running 60 miles per hour.
I said, "I'm sure I could."
That brought on some kind of a bet. But it taught
me that if I ever had to do that in the future, the problem
was two-fold: if you jump hard enough to overcome the
wind at 60 MPH, the biggest problem you have is not
running out the other side of the truck.
I tried it twice to make sure my theory was
correct, which it was. I was twelve or something. But
then I decided that if I ever needed to do it again, I'd just
dive and land flat in the bed, and that way it wouldn't be
any problem.
169
Three Bridges Road
In early high school, a little bit before the skunks,

some time around that time, a guy wanted to race me.
The bet was something like fifty dollars, or twenty
dollars. Could have been less; this was a long time back.
It was in 1958. The family had a new 1959 Galaxy 500
with a police option engine in it, that I tuned. And this
guy had a 56 Chevrolet Power Pack that was pretty fast.
He and I used the traffic signal in Doerun to start
our race. When it turned green we left going down a
small, narrow paved road. It was 270 headed towards
GA 33. At that time the road was so narrow that when
you met a car, anybody that couldn't drive pretty well
would run off the road meeting them. And even if you
could drive real well, if you met a truck, both of you
would have to go off the road or you'd have trouble.
On that road there were two or three bad curves
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The Beginning
and three concrete bridges and the bridges were

narrower than the road. When the light turned green, the
race was on, and we stayed wheel to wheel sideways
around curves, we were running somewhere between
140 to 150 MPH around curves, wheel to wheel and
across bridges. The first bridge was real bad.
But it wasn't nearly as bad as the 2nd bridge. By
the 3rd one I sure was hoping that somebody would
have a flat tire before we got to the bridge. I had a
couple of guys in the car with me, and they just peed all
over my car and the one in the back seat had got down
on the floorboard and he was screaming the lord's prayer
and doing everything religious that he could think of to
do and just begging me to stop.
And I said, "Hell, I'm not losing this thing."
Now, he went on to be a commander of an air
force fighter wing, and I always wondered if that ride
made him realize that he really didn't have anything else
to worry about, he's already been through worse than
they could do to him.
But those three bridges... The guy I was racing
and i, took our cars back over there the next day and
parked them on the bridges. If we put the bumpers one
foot apart between the car and the concrete on either
side there was six inches left. And we put those cars
through three bridges at 150 mph at night under those
circumstances. And the '59 Ford had a big flat front end,
and the air pressure would build up on that front end and
the front end would walk a foot from side to side. I
171
could watch it walking side to side, and I had to time it

on the end swings to keep from hitting the bridge.
Now the end of the road was a bad curve, and
then a straight away and then we hit GA 33. We went
around the bad curve still wheel to wheel in a
powerslide. I was watching the road and him, and I
could see he was just watching the road, I was watching
him to see if he was going to run into me. We got around
the curve and hit the straightaway, it's about a mile long
straightaway before we got to GA 33.
I could tell from the lights that there weren't any
cars on GA 33. And he started stopping for 33. The race
was to Highway 33, that's the way I understood the race.
So, he stopped for 33, and I crossed 33 at 150 mph
because I knew that a little bit off to the right of where
270 ran into 33 there was a dirt road, so I went up the
dirt road in the middle of the night, and the car must
have jumped 100 feet when I hit a little off center of the
dirt road.
I started trying to get it straightened up. I knew I
couldn't slow down fast, and if I'd hit the brake I
wouldn't be here telling this today, so I kept the speed up
cause I had to have the tires rolling to steer the car with
front and back tires. It took about a mile to get it
straightened up, and I had to cross a wooden bridge, and
I had to time the fishtailing to get across the bridge
straight and I was able to do that and made it up the next
hill before I got it stopped going from side to side. And
that's when the bootlegger peed all over my front seat.
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The Beginning
The guy I was racing told me later, "Hell, I

thought we were just racing to the road."
I said, "Hell, we were racing to the damn road,
and I beat you to it."
He said that he just sat there watching me go up
the hill headlights going from side to side running like
hell, going up the hill and down, through the bridge, the
lights moving in the trees showed I was still moving.
Said he just sat there and watched the whole thing. The
show was worth the admission.
I won the bet.
173
Theater Terror
One summer in high school I got a job as a

projectionist in a theater. They had cameras that were
called Carbon Arc cameras. They produced a light to
show the film by arcing an electrical current between
two carbon rods, like an electric welder would work.
I used to joke that the projectors were used by
Grant in the Civil War. They were pretty good
projectors, I guess, but they were just temperamental
and hot and about worn out and hot. You had to pretty
much watch them all the time. And did I mention that
they were hot? It's hard to imagine how hot electricity
arcing between two carbon rods can actually get.
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The Beginning
Well, I had to keep the movies in a closed metal

box that had, I believe, a dozen compartments, for one
reel of film in each compartment. Because if the film
was compressed and ignited some way, I was told that
each reel of film had the explosive properties of about
one stick of dynamite. I never tested that. Shame.
The projectionist's room, of course, was up on the
top floor. I used to always try to park my car under the
window right in front of the theater. That way if
anything really went haywire in the projection room, I
could jump out the window onto the roof of my car. I
always wanted to make sure that there would be a car
there to jump out on top of.
If the balcony got too rowdy, when I changed the
carbons in the projector, I'd take my tongs and take one
of these red hot carbon rods and just chunk it out
through the projector window. That usually had a way of
quieting things down pretty well. The place was built
like a fort. It had a big steel door with double slide locks
on the inside.
It wasn't a bad job. But it was kind of boring,
because I had to sit and watch parts of the movie so I
could watch for the changeover spots.
On the movie usually in the upper right hand
quadrant, they would always have these little
changeover spots that would just come on the screen.
And the number and timing of the spots, and I know
everybody's seen them, but most people don't have the
faintest idea what they're supposed to represent.
175
The changeover spots allowed you to change from

one camera to another nearly seamlessly. You had a spot
for starting the cameras. These old projectors you had to
kind of baby them into running. You couldn't just throw
the switch and make them start running. You had to
gradually get them up to speed.
If you had your film set up right, you could
change from one reel of film to the next reel of film
pretty much seamlessly, keeping with the action that was
going on the screen on the other reel. Most movies
would have a half a dozen reels that you would have to
change back and forth between cameras during the
movie.
Gidget Goes Hawaiian was the movie that ended
my film career. It was held over another week, and I
knew that if I had to sit through Gidget one more time,
that that would be the end of me. Thus, my early
entertainment career came to an end. I just pretty much
said if they were going to hold over Gidget Goes
Hawaiian, they were going to have to do it with
someone else watching it.
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The Beginning
The Night of the Prom
There was a girl in town, one of the hottest

looking girls in town, and I asked her to go to prom and
she said that she'd be thrilled, and I had a lot of the
Sunday school girls by that time would we'd set up
something and they would go out of town somewhere
and rent a room and I'd come up and meet them and the
word around school was always that they weren't doing
anything with anybody they were the nice girls.
I even started a business with that a little earlier. I
told people that I knew that if they were interested in
going to bed with a girl, if they would pay me for a
dinner, plus a little extra, then I would get a date with
the girl and tell them what to say and do to get her in the
rack and screw her. The rest of it was up to them, but I'd
tell them moves to make, after I found out if they
worked.
Well, I waited until the last minute, cause I was
screwing half the women I knew so it wasn't a big thing
177
to me, but I finally got around to asking her, and she

said she would be thrilled to go with me, and I guess she
must have been just waiting on me cause I knew she'd
had a zillion people ask her because hell this was about
two weeks before the Junior prom.
Just before the prom, about a week before the
prom, I had gone over to her house and we were sitting
on the porch in the swing. It was daylight sometime in
the afternoon and we were talking about what to do that
night and this car drove up in the yard. There were four
Air Force cadets from Spence Field that got out of the
car. And they walked up almost to the porch, and the one
in the front just told me to get out.
And I said, “No, I don't think I'm going to do
that.”
And he said again, “Well, I came over to pick up
this girl. We're going out tonight.”
And I said, “No. I don't think you are going to go
out tonight.”
So the other three just kind of grouped around
him and they just got red faced and telling me that I was
going to get the hell out of there or they was going to
whip my ass, and he's gonna go out with her tonight.
And I said, “Fellow, if you're gonna whip my ass,
you're going to actually have to fight me.”
And we started fighting in the front yard. And I
had all four of them knocked out of the ground just out
cold. And I opened the doors to the car, drug them in,
got in, drove it a quarter of a mile down the road, drove
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The Beginning
it into a swamp, and walked back to her house.

She and I got in my car and left, and when we
came back somebody had gotten the car out, and I didn't
give a shit if they drowned or what, but I never did see
them again, ever, if I saw them on the street, they didn't
say anything to me. She thought it was great. Women
love to see men fight.
Just before the prom, Mother decided that I was
going to go to the prom with the daughter of a friend of
hers.
And I said, “I am not.”
And she said I was. And it went from bad to
worse. Eventually, I took two girls to the junior prom.
They didn't know about it. I picked them up separately.
I almost ran myself to death doing this now. I sat
one way off in one corner, and the other diagonally
across the room in the other corner. And I tried to pick
tables where they were kind of hidden or would be
hidden a lot from each other.
And I ran back and forth between the tables and
when one of the girls decided that she needed to go to
the bathroom I ran over across the gym, and some of my
buddies knew that I was doing this and had gotten good
seats, and they were just enjoying the show and when
one went to the bathroom I grabbed the other girl, and
drug her up on stage and marched through the archway,
and spent some time with her.
And then I told her something I think that she had
a piece of spinach in her teeth, and she went to the
179
bathroom. And while she was in the bathroom, I ran and

grabbed the other one and came through the arch and
got my picture taken with her. And the whole night went
like that.
And then I decided who would be the best one
and at the end of the night when the prom was over I
took what I deemed the least likely one home and made
her get out of the car, and made her stay and she didn't
want to, and went back and got the other girl and went
to the beach for a few days. A couple of years later I
would have taken them both.
Now the talk around school for the prom did not
have anything to do with the theme of the prom. The
talk was whether or not I would wear my motorcycle
boots to the prom. People were betting about that all
over school, and for the prom I showed up in a tuxedo
and motorcycle boots. And I made a lot of people happy
and a lot of people made money. The losers were mad.
I got into a little bit of a jam. I had a buddy of
mine invite me over to dinner one time and I knew that
he had turned into a preacher because I had already
joked with him and asked him how in the hell that
happened because I knew him. He had run around with
me for a long time.
I went over to his house and his wife opened the
door and she was the girl that he had paid me to tell him
how to screw her. And it was a little bit of an odd
feeling. But I just carried it off just like normal. Well, I
had been to people's houses before where I had screwed
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The Beginning
the woman of the house and carried it off. I did my

damnedest to lay all the girls in the world, and I'm still
plodding on, still giving it my all.
I've been telling people for years that women hold
no more surprises for me, I don't understand them but if
I understood them it would probably scare me half to
death, but they hold no more surprises for me. I've just
absolutely seen and done too much and know too much
about the inner workings of women to be surprised.
Sugar and spice they ain't. It's a lie! It's a lie!
181
Skunk Story
At the time I had an old '51 Ford custom

automobile which was an ex-bootlegger's car. When I
bought the car, the guy told me that he'd sell me the car.
But I was going to have to wait for him to take his tank
out the of the trunk. So I did.
So I got the tankless car. I always described it as
being four colors. It was black, dark blue, rust, and bare
metal. But it ran like a dream. Some buddies and I
somehow decided to go skinny-dipping in a lime sink
just outside of town with probably the three best-looking
and hottest sisters in town at that time. One of these
sisters looked exactly like Bridgette Bardot with black
hair. We played around all afternoon.
When time came to stop, we all got dressed and
back in the car. There were six boys and three girls in
my fifty-one Ford. On the way out of the lime sink, we
saw a family of five little tiny tiny—between two and
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The Beginning
three inches long—skunks, crossing the road in front of

the car. So, the girls went to screaming and giggling
about the skunks being so cute. They wanted to get the
skunks and keep them as pets.
Well, I tried to talk them out of it, but the girl
looked like Bridgette Bardot. The skunks had just barely
learned to walk. I finally talked myself into believing
that surely they wouldn't be old enough to spray juice
around. That was wrong, wrong, wrong.
So, I acquiesced and let them get the skunks.
After running around back and forth and in ditches after
these skunks, we finally got the skunks caught. And the
girls got the skunks in their hands and just petted them.
And the skunks just seemed like they were satisfied and
happy. The girls wanted to take the skunks home with
them, and I told them that they couldn't put the skunks
inside the car, that they would have to put the skunks in
the trunk, which was another mistake.
I opened the trunk, and the girls brought the cute
little tiny skunks back and set them down in the trunk,
and we started off again on our journey back to the
civilized world. Just as we got out on the highway back
to town, the old car ran out of gas.
I had already rocked the car from side to side to
get any little gas over to the gas pickup tube when it
stopped in the lane on the road. Oh, this gets better. At
that time, most anybody, if you were stopped in the
middle of the road for any reason it was understood that
any car coming up back of you would just ease up to
183
you and just push your and you could either go off to the
side or go on down the road as far as they would push
you. I mean, everybody did that.
So, we were about half a mile from the first
service station coming into town, that was owned by one
of the guys in the car's family. Now, he weighed
probably 350 pounds. There was another guy, the
brother of these three sisters, weighed about 280
pounds. And I weighed about 250. One of my other
buddies probably weighed 200 pounds, and his brother
weighed maybe 150 pounds. The girls were just lovely.
They weighed exactly the right weight.
So, we sat in the road out of gas for a minute. And
a car came up behind us and asked if we wanted a push,
and I said we did. And he started to push us down the
road. The instant his bumper touched our bumper, the
skunks let fly all at once.
The air turned kind of thick green, and (I should
warn you, I've had people hurt themselves when I tell
this story, and it gets better, this isn't the high point.)
And we all started coughing and gagging and crying and
my car had two windows that would let down—the two
front windows. The others wouldn't.
So, everybody in the car was trying to get their
heads stuck out the two front windows, and everybody
managed to do that except for the two fat guys in the
back seat. One of them was just fat. The other one was
muscles, and one of the local tough guys. He later
became an enforcer for one of the unions and weighed
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The Beginning
about 280 pounds I guess.

They're gagging and crying, I looked back at the
muscular fellow, and he was just sitting in the corner of
the back seat with his hands in his lap, tears just
streaming down his face, getting his shirt wet
He was saying, “Somebody's got to let me get to a
window. I am gagging to death in this car!”
And he was just saying that over and over.
Nobody moved.
The guy that was pushing us, pushed us for less a
hundred feet, sniffed the air, stopped his car, pulled over
to the other lane, and left. So we're still sitting in the
middle of the road with no way to move. That happened
over and over until it took over an hour and nine
separate cars to push us less than half a mile. I could see
them start sniffing in the rear view mirror. And as soon
as the smell would hit them, they'd back off and leave at
a high rate of speed.
We finally got to the gas station and to the pumps
—it was full service. The guy walked out to the car,
none of us had any money. I told him I wanted a dollar's
worth of gas. He ran out, grabbed the hose, stuck it in
the tank, sniffed the air, locked the handle down, and ran
back in the gas station. When he ran in, the guy whose
parents owned the gas station got out of the car. He was
the one that weighed 350 pounds or so.
He got out of the car and went in the gas station.
The next thing we saw was his father pushing him back
through the door of the station and screaming at us that
185
we couldn't come in.

So we got in a corner of the lot in a group and
waited for the gas. We had to have a break from being in
the car. We had to get out of that car for a minute. I
know we was just getting a dollar's worth of gas, but we
had to get away from the car for a minute or just die
When we came back, we decided that we would
have to brave it and get back in the car and go
somewhere. The owner of the station was screaming for
us to leave. When we got back to the car, we saw the
guy had filled up the tank with gasoline because nobody
wanted to go stop the hose when it got to a dollar
And I told him, “I just ordered a dollar's worth of
gas because a dollar was all we have.”
It was about thirty cents per gallon then. The bill
wouldn't have been over five dollars. But we didn't have
five dollars. But we did have a full tank of gas.
I told the man that we just had a dollar, we didn't
have anymore money.
The owner said, “I don't give a damn about any
more money. I don't even want your dollar. I just want
you to get that damn car away from my gas station.”
While we were standing over at the corner of the
parking lot trying to get a breath of fresh air, we had
seen a good number of cars, come up, drive up to the
pump, sniff, and drive off in a hurry. So the station
owner just wanted us gone. He didn't want us to take
time to pay anything. He just wanted us gone.
So with the exception of the biggest, fattest guy
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The Beginning
(he stayed at the station, but his Dad wouldn't let him
stay close to the pumps or go in the station. He had to
stay in the parking lot.) We left him and continued our
journey with the skunks who were still apparently
spraying like fire hoses in the trunk.
As soon as we left the station, my best friend's
brother wanted to stop and get out. He still had about
four miles left till he got home, but he said that he
couldn't stay in that car any longer, he had to get out and
find some kind of fresh air somewhere.
We went from there to the girl's house and let the
girls off. We tried to leave the skunks there, but the girls
had decided that they no longer wanted the skunks as
pets. We kept riding the fire hose skunks with us. We
couldn't figure out what to do with them.
The girls got out and went in the front door of
their house together. And the very next thing that we
saw was their father bellowing at the top of his lungs.
“What in the hell is wrong with you folks? Get the
hell out of my house! Stay out in the damn yard!”
And he was pushing all three of these girls out of
the front door of their house, and yelling at them that he
didn't think that they would ever be allowed back in his
house. So, we left, rather than get more involved in this
family squabble—and before he pulled out his guns and
started shooting.
Then, I had the idea that might be able to salvage
some of the day, since everything had already been
ruined, if we could take these skunks to a zoo of some
187
kind and sell them to the zoo or pet shop or something.

After going about five miles, we realized that it wasn't
humanly possible for us to get to a zoo or a pet shop or
anything. We just simply had to get the skunks out of the
car however we had to get them out.
We pulled off to the side of the road, got out,
opened the trunk, and found that the skunks had wedged
themselves in the springs of the back seat. So, nobody
could stand being around this trunk very long, and the
skunks were still just fire-hosing as best as they could. I
don't know where a 2-inch skunk got that much stink in
them, but they were well prepared.
The big guy, the brother to the girls, who we
wouldn't let get out with his sisters, cause if we had to
stay in the skunk car, he'd have to stay in the skunk car
too, or he'd have to figure out a way to whip my ass. So,
he stayed. I was the first one into the trunk, and with all
the gagging and crying coughing that I had done in the
front of the car, the trunk was far far worse than I had
ever encountered. We had to treat it like some kind of
deadly, toxic spill.
We had to just take turns crawling up into the
trunk trying to get these skunks, and the other two
would get far enough aways from the car and the skunks
that they could breathe a little bit to get a little bit of a
break.
And then when the one in the trunk just couldn't
stand it any longer, he'd leave. And another one would
come up and try to get a hold of a skunk, or any part of a
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The Beginning
skunk, and throw them out across the ditch and into the
woods. We'd already given up all hopes of trying to be
nice to the skunks by this time. Actually, the smart thing
to have done would have been to set the car on fire, burn
our clothes in it, and just walk back through town naked.
The big guy, the brother of the girls, when it got
to be his time, he went over and started to crawl in the
trunk. Just as he got his head down, one of the skunks
dead eyed him right in the middle of his forehead. And
he turned around to look at me, and I saw just some kind
of green slime right between his eyes just dripping down
his nose. And he had had so much by that time that he
didn't even try to wipe it off.
And he said, “That god damn skunk has squirted
me right in the face!”
He got up and walked over to the ditch bank. And
he just sat on the ditch bank like in a daze for the rest of
the time. Every once in a while he would just say,
“This is all I can do. I can't do any more.”
That was the first time I remember seeing what
call the thousand yard stare. So it was up to the other
two of us to get the skunks out, which we finally did. It
only took us an hour to round them up and throw them
into the woods.
Then, we loaded everybody back in the car, and,
once again, I had to force the big guy to get in the car.
He said,
“By god, I am not going to get back in that car,
dammit.”
189
But I made him. We went back and let him off at

his house. His dad was by this time sitting out on the
front porch to make damn sure that he didn't try to get in
the house. And he had made the girls go out in the far
back of the yard and hang sheets up on the clothes line
and get in there naked with a water hose trying to wash.
He made their brother go out and do the same thing in
the other corner of the back yard. And he had told them
that until they had got that scent off of them that they
would never come back in that house.
So, my friend and I drove over to his house and
drove way back in the back of their yard and stopped.
His mother wouldn't let us go anywhere around their
house because she smelled us before we got to the house
and the other family had already called her and warned
her. So she just handed us some sheets and pointed at
the water hose. And we made kind of a blind on her
clothesline and got in there and took off all of our
clothes, along with his little brother who'd gotten home
by this time.
And his mother called everybody that she had
ever known to ask them what would get rid of a skunks
smell. We tried tomato juice, we tried lemon juice, flour,
meal, and what the hell all else, I think somebody tried a
can of beans. Anything and everything we could get. we
mashed up tomatoes on us and rubbed around on us. We
bathed in Clorox.
Anything that we thought had any chance of
cutting down on that smell we washed in it. And his
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The Beginning
mother kept bringing stuff out to us. Like, she'd bring us

a dozen eggs and we'd just crack eggs on us and wash in
that. Nothing seemed to help. We were down close to
the car, and anything that we tried on us we'd go down
and throw in the car and see if it would help that.
There was a little subdivision across the pond
from where she lived. And the whole time that we were
in this cabana thing that we had made, we kept hearing
sirens in that part of town just over and over. And we
found out later on that it was the people in the
subdivision., every time the wind would change, they'd
call the fire department and make them come out. They
said it was the most terrible stench. They smelled it and
thought it had to be dangerous. They didn't know what
was going on, but something bad was happening in their
neighborhood.
We finally burned our clothes that we had on and
got the smell down to a roar and got some of it out of
the car.
At one time during all of this, my friend's mother
called out to me and made kind of a Freudian slip. She
asked me if I would mind driving my car off into the
pond, because the people she knew had finally decided
that the green fog was coming from her yard and she
told them about my car and they wanted me to move it
somewhere where it wouldn't blow on them and the fire
department was still running around looking for this
terrible happening, whatever it was.
It was way into the night when we finally got the
191
scent down to some kind of a roar and I got back to

where I could get back into the car. I drove it home. I
had gotten used to it some. When I got home, Mom and
Dad made me park my car down in the field. They
wouldn't let me leave it at the house. I finally threw
enough stuff in it to cover up most of the scent,
Then, I discovered something else interesting. As
a last gasp at me, I found out that from that day forth,
every time it rained, that smell would come back. I
finally had to just take the car to a junk yard and give it
to them. First, I decided to try to sell the car, and I was
trying to get a little more of the stink out.
I had run out of something—soap or air freshener
or something, and I jumped in Mom and Dad's car and
drove to town and got what I needed and came back.
When I got back I saw that Mother had decided that she
was going to help me out by taking the stuff out of the
car and putting it in a cardboard box.
When I walked up I looked into the cardboard box
and I realized that she was cleaning out from under the
front seats. At a later count, I found that she had pulled
out seventeen pairs of panties and nine brassieres out
from under the front seat.
She said, “What are these?”
And I said, “I don't know. I don't wear things like
that.”
That's when I realized that the desperation that
women have for marking their territory. I found out later
on in my life that thread ran throughout my life, that
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The Beginning
women always want to find some way to mark their

territory. They always do.
I have known men to get into the most trouble by
taking a woman to their home to have their tryst. And
their wife coming in that night and finding a strange pair
of panties with a strange odor stuffed up under the bed
or under the mattress...just marking their territory.
I tried to sell the car. And as soon as anyone sat
down in it, they decided they didn't want to buy my car,
so it went to a junk yard. Couldn't sell it. Couldn't drive
it. Every time it rained, the smell got a little worse.
The stench had become a living thing. It was a
living entity. It was no longer just a smell. Every one of
those 2-inch skunks must have squirted out a gallon of
skunk fumes. The girls and their brother had to sleep out
on their front porch a couple of nights, the two brothers
slept in a screened in porch, and I slept in a shed for a
few nights.
I don't think anybody in that car even wanted to
see a picture of a skunk again. After the skunks there
was a period when nobody would get around us, we had
to stick as a group. We couldn't get around anybody else.
After that I could smell a skunk ten miles away.
193
The Fair
I took the three sisters to the fair one night. I've

always been super strong and super athletic and agile
and just virile and way out of reason with athleticism
and muscle memory and things, so fairs just hate me. In
my lifetime I have closed down a lot of midways. Just
shut the places down. They'd just have to close them up,
and this was one of the best times that I did that.
I took these girls to the fair and they all wanted a
teddy bear.
I said, "Okay, I'll win you a teddy bear, a big one."
I started on down the midway and every booth
that I stopped at. I pretty much cleaned them out of big
teddy bears until they just shut,
They'd say, "We're closing up for the night"
And I'd go to the next booth and beat them. They
couldn't eve rig the things enough so I couldn't beat
them. I could tell this one guy was trying to rig it.
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The Beginning
The girls were just throwing teddy bears on the

ground cause they couldn't carry them, and I had people
stuffing money at me and I'd throw the ball and the
man'd hand me a big teddy bear and I'd shove it back
behind me and I didn't care who got it.
And the girls when we were walking between
booths were just handing teddy bears to everybody they
knew to keep from carrying them. And all these places
would shut down and I'd look around and see a place
behind us that reopened and I'd turn around and start
walking back and the guy would see me coming and
immediately shut the curtain down.
I probably won seventy to eighty bears that night.
If they had big bears I'd just start winning them and win
all they had and go to the next place and win all they
had. The girls probably kept six to eight apiece. They
had all that they could possibly carry, and they had them
mashed between them, and they had people they knew
carrying teddy bears.
They'd told them, "I'll give you this one if you
carry these two for me."
I was a terror at fairs because I could out hustle
anybody that they could find.
195
Jealousy
A little while after the skunk story, a future

girlfriend of mine, a cousin of the girls involved in the
skunk adventure told me a story. I had started dating her
and there were times that she would just get mad at me
for no reason.
And I kept asking her, “Why, why?”
She finally told me that she had gone over to these
girls' house and her being the cousin, she just walked in
the front room and she saw their brother in the living
room asleep on the sofa, and she walked on through
going to the kitchen going through his bedroom to get
there. And when she opened the door she said that she
saw me lying in the bed naked with all three sisters
naked in the bed with me. She said she just turned
around and went back out of the house and got mad.
The Bardot look alike was out of this world. Hell
I would have probably eaten those skunks, if I thought it
would have impressed her.
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The Beginning
Smoking
As a Senior in high school, I smoked. I smoked at

home and I smoked just everywhere that I wanted to.
One day at school, a bunch of us decided to go across
the street to one of our friend's houses and smoke a bit.
So, we did.
And when we came out of his house, the principal
came out of the door to the school and saw us. He told
us all to go wait in the hall by his office, which we did.
He proceeded to have his secretary call each of us in one
at a time to his office. As each guy went in, you could
hear the sound of loud blows coming from the office.
The guy would come out with red, teary eyes,
trying to keep from crying, and just walk straight off
down the hall. He finally called me in. I was the last
one. He made what I was sure was the same speech that
he made to everybody. He said that we weren't supposed
to be smoking, and we weren't supposed to be leaving
campus.
Then, he told me to go over and lean my hands on
the desk. I told him that I just simply wasn't going to do
that. I smoked at home, and I didn't feel like it was right
for him to spank me for something that my parents
accepted.
He said that if he had to, he would call some of
the men teachers in and they would hold me for my
spanking. I told him, that he had better call all of them
197
in, and he'd better be ready for a lot of them to be hurt.

He looked at me for a few seconds, and he told
me, “Don't let me catch you leaving campus anymore.”
I walked out, and I think I may have lost friends
that day. They all sort of treated me a little differently
from that day. But they had the same option that I did. If
they had had the balls to do that, then probably the same
thing wouldn't have happened.
Life Motto #1
Where the Hell is that damn box anyway?
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The Beginning
Senior Trip
We went to Washington and New York City. I

learned quite a bit on that senior trip. I learned that I
couldn't come up with any sane reason for anybody to
ever want to go back to New York City if they didn't
have to live there. I didn't stay with the group a lot. I did
my own thing. And did find a couple of pretty good girls
wandering around up there.
I remember at one time I was in front of the Radio
City Music Hall, I kept sneaking off away from the rest
of the class, they were always trying to find me, and I
asked this guy where the hotel was. I believe it was the
Taft hotel, or the Roosevelt. I think it was the Taft.
And he pointed down the street we were on, and
he said, “It's right down this way. It's a pretty good
ways. But if you walk down there, you'll come right
down to it."
So I thanked him and I walked and I walked and I
walked, and I got to noticing that everyone around me
199
was Oriental, and I knew that I hadn't seen anything like

that around the hotel. And I was hungry, so I kept
walking and I went down this alley and found this
restaurant door, and I was hungry and decided to go up
and eat.
And there was this flight of stairs going up this
dark hall and went in this restaurant that I don't think
had any kind of light at all, and was feeling my way
along, and found a seat and ordered something, and it
was decent food, it was about the only decent food I had
in New York City. I thought I would starve to death in
New York City.
I got through eating and got back on the street I'd
been walking on and decided I'd back track to where I'd
been. I was walking along down the street, and there
were four guys back of me. They were talking about
what they would do that day.
And one of them said, "Well, we can go down
somewhere and roll some folks and get some money."
And one of the other said, "Naw, let's don't do
that. We might pick somebody like him."
And I looked around enough to see they were
pointing at me, but I kept walking and kept trudging
back, I had at least eaten by then, I got back to the radio
city music hall, and I decided to keep going across the
street to see what was down that way.
When I got to the corner before I crossed the
street, I looked through the traffic and I turned my head
and I saw to my left the marquis for the Taft Hotel half a
200
The Beginning
block from me, and I had walked god knows how far
down into Chinatown by myself, and I had asked this
guy directions one half block from the entrance to the
hotel. I did see the Rockettes. They didn't impress me
that much. I'm sure they could have impressed me more
if I'd been a little closer to them.
One of the times that I went off on my own, I
went to the Waldorf Astoria hotel, and I'd heard about
this thing all my life, the Waldorf Astoria and wandered
around in it until I found one of the restaurants. I'm sure
they had more than one restaurant, but the one I went
into everything in the restaurant was black. They had
just a few lights, and mirrors all everywhere, but
everything in there was black.
I thought it was just fabulous looking, so I sat
down and I think I ordered half of a roast chicken, and
two or three sides and my chicken came. I started to eat
and when I ate one of the sides, I got a whiff of
something bad and I started investigating a little bit and
I finally realized that the damn chicken was rotten. So, I
pulled at it some, I had a lighter, by the light of my
lighter I could see that down next to the bone the
chicken was green.
I called the waiter over there, and I said, "Fellow,
you folks have given me a rotten chicken."
And of course he looked like I had spit on him or
something, and he said, "Sir, I'll have you know we do
not serve rotten chickens at the Waldorf's,"
And I said, "Well, you served me one."
201
Well he stuffed his nose up in the air and walked

off and got the manager and the manager came back.
He said, "Sir, what seems to be the problem?"
And I said, "You folks have served me a rotten
chicken."
And he gave me the same spiel. He said, "Sir, you
have to be mistaken. We don't serve anything but the
finest at the Waldorf."
And I said, "Fellow, lean over here a little bit."
And I flicked my lighter and I said, "This chicken
is green next to the bone."
And when he looked he saw the chicken was
green and just about that time he got a whiff
And he said, "Yes sir, we'll take care of this," and
handed the plate to the waiter and the waiter carried it
off and the manager said, "Pick out whatever you want
on the menu complements of the Waldorf"
So I looked around and looked around and
nothing seemed all that appetizing, until I finally asked
for country ham with some sides because I didn't think
they could mess up a country ham, they finally brought
me the ham with something on it
And I called the waiter over and I said, "What is
this stuff on my ham?"
It was raisin sauce. And it was god awful tasting
raisin sauce. I scraped as much off of the ham as I could
still couldn't eat it. This raisin sauce was bad, bad. So I
finally just ate the sides and got up and left. I don't know
what the hell they did with the chicken, but they ruined
202
The Beginning
my ham trying to fancy it up.

I did see one kind of amazing thing. I ate in an
Automat. Automats were before your time [speaking to
the typist,] and I don't think they had them anywhere but
in New York City. In the Automat I found some pretty
decent food. And it was cheap. I mean you could eat
pretty cheap in the Automat. But the most amazing thing
about the damn Automat. I did this several times just to
see it. They had these half a dozen girls sitting in this
glass cage thing with glass all around them. It was set up
like a ticket box at a movie theater. It had a desk-like
thing on both sides.
You could hand them a dollar, and these girls had
buckets of change, buckets of loose change in front of
them and they would take the dollar scoop up a handful
of loose nickels and just throw some nickels across the
counter, and there would always be twenty. They'd just
scoop up a handful of change and throw you twenty
nickels.
If you gave them a five dollar bill, they would
scoop until you got five dollars worth in nickels, dimes,
or quarters. I wound up with about five pounds of
change in my pocket just to watch them do that. And
they never made any mistakes. They could do it with
nickels or dimes or quarters, whatever you wanted, they
could just pick up a handful of coins and throw you the
exact change for what you gave them. That was almost
worth dealing with the rest of that crap from New York
City and the trip, just watching that.
203
I ran up the steps to the Washington monument.

Went on the circle line. I started driving real young as I
have already said, one of the things that I noticed about
New York City, one of the reasons that I decided that I
didn't like New York City, as we had been up there four
days riding and walking all over the city, never one time
did I ever see one single car that hadn't had a wreck.
That was one thing that made me decide that I couldn't
understand why anyone would want to keep going back
to a damn place like that, that and almost starving to
death from the crap food I found.
We went to Washington and saw the Smithsonian
and we had just got to the Smithsonian and I think the
bus parked in the wrong place, we were on a school bus,
ad we rode from Washington to New York City on a
train. We didn't go in the front of the building, we
somehow got on the side of the building, and they had a
bunch of bronze cannons out laying in the grass.
And they were, these things were pretty big, they
were about eight feet long maybe, they were longer than
me, and I was six feet long, I didn't try to measure them.
They were just bare cannons, they weren't on wheels or
carriages or anything, and we all just stopped and started
looking at these canons.
And some guy came by, and he had on some kind
of Smithsonian uniform. And he came walking by, and
he called to all of us in general and said,
“If you can pick one of those up, you can have it.”
So, that started the wheels to turning.
204
The Beginning
And I told my buddies, “I'm fixing to get me a

cannon.”
So, the cannon had a nob on the end of it about as
big as a baseball, and I reached down and got my hands
on that knob. They were slick. They had just been
cleaned and waxed, I guess, I asked another guy if he
had a handkerchief and I got my hands on it, and stood
up, and I hear someone over to the side, hollering to put
the cannon down and I looked around and it was this
same guy.
And I said, “Fellow, you said if I could pick this
cannon up, you'd give it to me.”
By this point he's running across the grass.
“I meant if you could put it on the bus.”
So, I stood up taller with it. I had it resting on my
knees.
And he said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “Hell, I'm going to put it on o that bus over
there and take it home.”
By this point he goes ballistic and starts
screaming, “You can't have the canon! Put it down!”
And everyone is just rolling with laughter.
So the best I can figure, the Smithsonian still
owes me a damn cannon.
205
Getting Sam There On Time
I drove a prominent attorney here in Moultrie,

(Sam Gardner) I was his assistant when he was county
attorney at one time. He and I went to Atlanta one night
in his wife's car. He had a meeting with the governor. It
was a new Ford station wagon. As background,
everybody that knew anything at all about Sam knew
that he was Universally late. Nobody even expected
Sam to be on time for anything. I kept trying to get him
to hurry.
"Let's go! let's go!"
Finally, it was 5 PM when I got him in the car. We
left. Pretty soon after we got out of the city limits, Sam
leaned over and went to sleep. So, I decided that I'm
driving a state senator to a meeting with the governor in
the Capitol building. I had a get-out-of-jail free card.
So, I went to Atlanta on a narrow, two lane road.
There wasn't an interstate system or four-lanes until you
206
The Beginning
got to Atlanta. When I woke Sam up in the Capitol

building parking lot in Atlanta, he first asked me where
we were, and I told him we were at the meeting.
And he looked at his watch, and said, "We can't
be at the meeting."
I said, "Sam, look out this window."
He looked over and looked out the window and
saw the Georgia Capitol there.
Sam said, “I still don't believe it. But if it is true,
this will be the first time anybody's ever seen me on
time.”
It was 10 till 7 PM, and the meeting was at 7. I
drove from Moultrie to the Capitol in one hour and fifty
minutes with a Senator sleeping all the way. There were
no seat belts. God, how did we stay alive without seat
belts?!
207
Spence Field
While working with Senator Gardner, I wrote up

the bills that had to go on the ballot for giving Spence
Field to the City of Moultrie.
And I got a commendation from the committee
that sanitizes bills that go before the legislature that said
that my bills were the only ones that year that they did
not have to change anything. They just shuttled them
straight through to the legislature.
208
The Beginning
The Dead Man
This happened the summer between high school

and the first of college. I got a job at a local gin from a
fellow that I had known most of my life. He was a
business manager for the guy that actually owned the
gin and several other businesses in town.
He gave me a job weighing bales of cotton,
figuring and writing up the checks for the cotton seed,
and loading the bale of cotton on a truck to be moved to
the warehouse.
I was hired for the night shift. The gin ran twenty-
four hours a day, or until they gave out of cotton. I rode
to work late that afternoon on my motorcycle. Now, I
had been having some trouble with the kick starter. The
teeth of the kick starter lever had worn off.
I found out that the kick starter shaft wasn't very
expensive, and there was a little clip that held the shaft
in the motorcycle that I think probably cost about a
quarter. But the little clip was directly on the opposite
209
side of the transmission from the kick starter, which

meant that I would have to take every moving part out
of the transmission so I could get to this twenty-five
cent clip so I could change the shaft to the kick starter.
So I had gone through all manner of different rigs
trying to get out of doing that. I had drilled a hole
through everything so I could bolt the kick starter itself
onto the shaft. And that worked a little while, but it wore
out, like everything else I tried. So, I had started just
putting the bike in gear and running beside it. I never
had to run very far, and then jumping on the bike,
popping the clutch, and it would crank, and I would
drive off. I had been doing that for quite a while.
So, this particular night it was early in the season.
They had just started the gin. And they ran out of cotton
about four o'clock in the morning, and we had done
everything that we were supposed to do. And it was time
for us just to go home.
Now, earlier that night we had an old black man
that worked in the gin that I found out later, he got
drunk a lot, and came into work drunk a lot. He was a
pressman. That night I had had occasion to grab him and
pull him back from falling into the press that pressed
and tied the bale of cotton, cause the station where I
worked was directly behind the press. A bale of cotton
would come out of the press and roll back beside my
station where it was weighed and then I would write a
check for the cottonseed.
Now, this guy liked very young girls. He liked
210
The Beginning
girls, but very young girls. He told me later on that he

was about to quit because the people that ran the gin
were going to put him on the day shift. And he said that
he just couldn't go on the day shift, he had to be on the
night shift. And I quote, “All them other niggers work in
the day time.”
Now, this guy had a regular route for every day of
the week that he would go around to houses where the
man was at work, and the woman was waiting for him to
make his appearance. And, working in the day time
would have pretty much done away with his schedule
there.
Along about four o'clock we got off. I went and
got my motorcycle and pushed it down the yard, down
the drive way. A lot of things happened at once. Just as I
was about to jump on the motorcycle, my foot slipped,
my hand slipped on the clutch, releasing the clutch, the
bike cranked, throwing my body off the back end of the
bike, my upper stomach was on the seat, and I was in a
sand bed. The bike was fishtailing through this sand bed
wide open, 'cause when it threw me off the back of the
seat that pulled the throttle wide open.
I'm trying to get this thing straightened up and get
back on it, while it's running full throttle through the
sand bed. Just as I've almost got it under control, it hits
the paved road in front of the gin. And then, everything
pretty much went to hell from that point.
I'll have to rely on hearsay for a little bit of this
now, 'cause I was too close to see the forest for the trees.
211
The people that worked at the gin heard this high-

revving motorcycle, and they all turned to watch what
was happening. And they all said that they saw me and
the motorcycle go roughly twenty feet in the air.
And I know that we both went almost fifty feet
absolutely straight down the center line of the road,
because the next thing that I knew, I was sitting on the
centerline of the street in town. My motorcycle was
laying on its side, just maybe five feet away from me.
And I could look almost straight down on the of my left
shoulder. It was right about over my heart.
So, the only thing that I could think of to do, there
sitting in the middle of the street, I made a fist, and put
my fist in my armpit. I lifted up my left leg, and got the
inside of my left knee against my left elbow. And, using
my arm as a lever and my fist as a pivot point, I worked
my shoulder back around where it was supposed to be.
Then, I got up to see if my bike was all right.
While I'm working my shoulder back into place, I hear
this big black guy that worked the press telling another
black guy to go out there in the road and see about me.
And the second black guy said, “Now, I can't go
out there. I ain't going out there. You go out there and
see if he's all right.”
And the pressman, who was a monstrous man
said, “Now, you know I can't go around no dead folks.
But if you don't go out there and find out if he's all right,
I'm going to beat you to death.”
A while later, we were on a little bit of a break,
212
The Beginning
because some of the gin had broke down. And all the
guys in the gin were sitting around talking. And this big
black pressman was sitting back there, and he was
telling them about some of his exploits with women and
being caught with husbands and boyfriends. And he said
that he had whipped about everybody in Colquitt
County at the time.
Now, I was out of sight at the time. I had gone to
get something and I was on another side of the wall. So,
I could hear them, but they couldn't see me. They asked
this giant black guy if he had ever seen anybody that he
was afraid to fight.
And he said the only person in his life that he had
ever seen that he knew that he couldn't beat was me. He
said, “Just nobody's going to be able to beat him.”
Now, one of the reasons he said that is the night
that I had the accident that they thought I was dead, I
went to the hospital finally. I wasn't going to go to the
hospital, but it got to hurting me so bad I finally went.
And saw the doctor at the hospital said he was sure glad
that I had sat down in the middle of the road and put my
shoulder in place, because with the muscles I had if I
had ever let them stiffen up enough he wasn't sure if the
people in the hospital would have been able to pull my
muscles enough to get my shoulder back in place. So,
that may have saved my arm.
The next night, I showed up for work with my left
arm and my shoulder taped to my chest, completely
immobilized and hurting like a bitch. That did hurt! I
213
came in, and the people looked up at me like I was a

ghost.
And they said, “What they hell are you doing
here?”
And I said, “I came to go to work. Isn't it time to
work?”
And they said, “We already hired somebody else.”
And I said, “I didn't quit, and I need the job.”
And the guy asked me if I could do the job. And I
told him that I would find some way to do the job. And I
found out that if I could get the bale of cotton in just the
right spot, I could lift that bale of cotton on the back of
the truck.
Now, when the big pressman said that about me,
one of the big gin managers said, “What do you mean
he's the only guy you think you can't beat? He doesn't
have but one arm!”
And the big guy said, “I don't care if he ain't got
no arms. Nobody ain't gonna be able to beat him.”
Before I showed up for work, I ran down one of
my girlfriends and we went over to her place and had
what I thought was an extraordinary session in the
bedroom. And she said that that was the most amazing
thing that she had ever seen, that she didn't think that
anybody could be screwing with one arm and the other
arm taped to their damn chest.
But she said, “It worked just fine with me.”
214
The Beginning
Illustration Credits
Trojan Horse by Jon Eben Field
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jefield/38101069/sizes/m/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Royal Fush by gregyounguk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64515226@N00/3504105153/sizes/o/
Slide by Fotoblog Rare
http://flickr.com/photos/59837616@N00/5386033
Stills by Eupator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Samogon.JPG
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_Lice
nse
Outhouse by Tomasz Kuran
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Squat_outhouse_cm01.jjpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GNU_Free_Document
ation_License
Apple Pie by Jonathunder
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MinnesotaCountyFairAppleP
ie2006.JPG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
Desk by Paul Robinson
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuvola_desk_2.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
hotrod by dave_7
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveseven/2908062199/sizes/o/
Projector by André Koehne
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Projetor_antigo_cinema_2.jp
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
Slippers by dbking
http://flickr.com/photos/65193799@N00
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dorothy
%27s_Ruby_Slippers,_Wizard_of_Oz_1938.jpg
215
About V
Not your ordinary anything, this book is an honest

representation of the life journey that I have owned, or
has owned me.
I have been a skunk-tamer, bootlegger, pool
hustler, race car driver, Sensei, head-toter, PI, hellion,
and outlaw, in no particular order. As I'm sure you've
learned by now, I wrote the book on debauchery. Hope
you enjoyed it.
Viking Prayer
“My sword and shield I leave to whoever can take them.
My scars and marks I carry with me to bear witness.”
216

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Where The Hell Is That Damn Box? The Beginning

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Where The Hell Is

That Damn Box

General Editor/Ghostwriter: Iyan Igma

Published by CreateSpace in Scotts Valley, CA

All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole

For information, contact V at v@thatdamnbox.com or

Additional Copies May Be Purchased On Amazon or From

Cover design and back cover photo by Iyan Igma.

The front cover background illustration is “The Scream” by

This is a work of non-fiction. The names of people and places

I probably learned more from him than

Apparently the memories of everything I've done

Lamentably, On 2 January 2010, V passed on, and I am

This book was finished when he died, however he had

Iyan Igma, Ghost Writer and Editor

The Demon And Drowning...........................................83

I was at my Grandparent's house one night.

He said, “Vaughn, come out here. I want to show

They mix together somehow. I never have been

The same Grandfather from this lightning story,

around, and with a measured pace, I walked back to my

made. It was a twenty-two foot bullwhip with an eight

through between the ceiling and the chair legs.

I firmly and positively believe in reincarnation. I

seen. I don't remember if I asked my parents about it,

I remember being in a smoky cave with a bunch

Mom and Dad took myself and a slightly older

And then, we went to the house. I think mother

The First Television

Mother worked at Friedlander's. She was a floor

They weren't on but for about six hours a day, and

across the top third of it and a pink streak in the middle

About the same time, I was six years old, and we

stand on the clutch with both feet in order to put the

Egg Custard Recipe

2 eggs (from a chicken. Brown ain't half bad)

One of the first fights that I ever got into in school

I don't quite know how it happened, but at about

and I were walking along back of the school one day

Good god. That nobody has to pay for their mistakes.

And I think it was some time close around there,

motivational speaker said, "Son, do you want to share

teachers grab my arms, and I don't know what happened

One thing that I thought about an awful lot, I

a rubber hatchet. It just astounded me that there would

In very early elementary school Dad had a friend

They had forgot that I was with them and just

I got so good at it. And it was such a natural thing for

At one point we had to cross a log across the

The Duck Hunter

They told me about a man that they knew that had

halfway back a water moccasin fell off of a limb in the

I fell in a damn alligator nest one time. I guess it

We went over there one time and had a boat with

Later on, I was going hunting with one cousin in

I said, “Yeah, I looked at him. Hell, I've been

I don't know how old I was, but I was staying

On our farm we had a field on the back side of the

rows or twelve rows, when you go from one end of the

The Frontier Dentist

I was about eight years old. I fell or got hit some

dull the pain so I wouldn't feel anything. When he stuck

And I said, “You see! I told you you weren't doing