Monthly Archives: February 2010

Standing on a folding chair, about fourteen rows back, the Eagles were performing “Hotel California” and I was in “unbalanced” heaven. I was a nerd and didn’t take a toke in my high school years, but the second-hand smoke at this concert was doing the trick. This was 1980, back in the days when you could smoke indoors, even in hospitals, thousands were smoking, but they weren’t smoking Camels.

My senior year of high school was a time of great music and my preferred wardrobe was faded jeans and concert t-shirts. If you went to a concert, it was mandatory that you bought a t-shirt. That way, the next day, everyone in the crowded halls could identify the lucky kids that had gone to the previous night’s show. One of my all-time favorites was the Pat Benatar shirt, she first had a hit when I was a sophomore and was very big at the time. I wore the black shirt with matching black sneakers, of course. As you might guess, I didn’t go for the “Benatar” look that was popular at the time…the stretch black pants, over-sized shirt with cloth belt….spikey hair, too much make-up and head-band. I laugh every time I watch the movie Sixteen Candles…at the part about the school having three “Benatars”….we had at least six!

During that period, I saw too many concerts to list in this blog. I loved music and did not discriminate…whether rock, blues, or pop…if they came through Dallas/Fort Worth, chances are, I was a face in the crowd. Jackson Browne, Heart, Rolling Stones, Foreigner, Van Halen, Bee Gees, Bryan Adams, Earth Wind & Fire, Diana Ross, Doobie Brothers, and Linda Ronstadt…all played…and I listened. I always got a t-shirt and you can bet I already had the newest 8-track each band had put out on the market.

I was mocked by my friends for my love of the Bee Gees. I had loved them pre-Fever days and that movie put me over the top! My friends were jamming to Led Zeppelin and Santana…they didn’t relate when I went into my falsesetto and proceeded to belt out Jive Talkin!! At the height of their popularity they scheduled a concert at the Fort Worth Convention center in June of 1978. No one I knew would go with me to the concert….no one would take the risk of being caught dead at a disco show. My older sister, who rarely went to concerts, was going with her husband…but they could only get two tickets. I was on my own…it was a sold out show.

Face value ticket prices were $17.00 for the Bee Gees…that is the equivalent of about a $100.00 today…it wasn’t cheap. I was on the Chargers that year, we were a really good all-star softball team. We traveled out of town for tournaments quite often and for extra money we painted address numbers on curbs. I walked door to door with my stencil and black spray paint, basically soliciting for work…we charged $4.00. If we walked for the team, the money had to go toward traveling. But some days I ventured out by myself for extra cash…..well, you can tell by the way I use my walk….the Bee Gees knew how to work it and so did I.

I found a ticket from a friend of a friend, paying a whopping $24.00…more than I ever had paid up until that time. My friends were howling with laughter at my terrible taste in music and my careless waste of good money…but I didn’t care. I loved rock, but there was something about the disco beat…it was my guilty pleasure before I knew the term.

I had worked hard to get my hands on that ticket…I had about 2 days to be happy. My softball coach called and told me that he had signed us up for an all day tournament on the day of the concert. Good grief! The only thing I loved as much as music, was softball…what could I do…what would I do?

We figured out if we won the first two games on Saturday, we would then go to the championship round on the next day. The second game wouldn’t be over until about 8pm and the concert was slated to start about the same time. My mother, who watched every single game of my career, was in the stands that day. She drove me to the field and said as soon as the last out was made I should sprint to the bathroom and change….then head to her car and she would drop me off at the concert hall.

I did just that…I took off my sweaty uniform, threw on my jeans and Talking Heads t-shirt and raced to my mother, my taxi for the night. I don’t imagine I smelled too good having played two softball games in a row under the June, Texas heat, but I made it to my seat at about 8:15pm…well before the brothers hit the stage. My long anticipated wait for the big show was over….and I was sweating like I truly had a case of Saturday Night Fever.

The lights went down, the crowd stood up…the back beat started…and for an hour and a half I was in disco heaven! The rest of the crowd was about 10 years older than me, all dancing in their best polyester outfits. I didn’t care….How Deep Was Your Love? ..mine ran pretty deep. I still have the ticket stub in my photo album…and always smile remembering the mad rush to sit in sticky clothes and watch my disco idols.

The Eagles, Long Run Tour was one I didn’t want to miss either and that was how I found myself standing on the folding chair and listening to Don Henley that night. The California rock band moved into their next song, I Can’t Tell You Why, as the lights all went out and the Bic lighters went up….10 thousand of them. It didn’t matter if you smoked or not, inside every kid’s jean pocket was a Bic lighter, a necessary tool in your concert enjoying experience. It made for a pretty sight, if you happened to be high, it just about blew your mind! It was awesome!!

It did blow the kid on the isle seat’s mind and he started to fall through his collapsible metal chair….grabbing his best dude friend beside him…and that dude grabbed the guy on the other side of him…you get the picture…it became a major chain reaction! I teetered for a second and then fell backwards. I got some help from the kids behind me that prevented my head from hitting the concrete floor. The entire row had toppled, but no one was hurt that badly and nothing really mattered. We were young, some of us were loaded, and the Eagles were playing live, just fourteen rows in front of us!

The concert t-shirt was the usual black..with just the words, THE LONG RUN, printed in white across the front. I half-way strutted, and half-way hobbled down the hall the next day…I had bruises on my legs that matched the shirt, but it was all good. I never got the nerve to wear the Bee Gees t-shirt to school. It was pale yellow and had the brothers dressed in white polyester suits, standing together on an illuminated disco dance floor. I was a nerd, queer girl, and I liked to sing disco songs…I didn’t feel the need to push it.
I did use it as a sleep shirt though…it was always folded nicely in my top drawer…right beside the one with the silk-screened picture of the Disco Duck.

Mrs. Runyun was 4’8″ tall and walked with a limp. She had one leg shorter than the other by a good 3 inches and compensated with an elevated shoe. She liked to walk in-between the rows of desks, using a yard-stick as her cane. Mrs. Runyun taught third grade cursive writing at Harrison Lane Elementary. The first day of class she said to me, “Billhymer? Are you like the rest of them?” Six kids had come before me, not all had been in her class, but she knew the name. No, was my reply…I am different. “Good, you might do well.” I made one “B” in the six years of elementary school…she said my writing was very sloppy and she didn’t like the way I wrote my “Fs.” Do you know what you can do with that “F” Mrs. Runyun? Take that yardstick and…

I knew even in grade school that I could write. My first public notice came that same year when I was asked to write a story in English about family. My piece involved 2 Marks-a-Lots marrying…having a small box of Crayons to call all their own. A multi-colored, diverse family living happily together…in a Partridge Family lunch box. My teacher liked it so much she took it to the front office for Mr. Arnold to read it. He couldn’t believe I was the same girl who had puked herself through first grade. I remember that he taped a copy on the glass window by the front desk for all to read.

My mother told me I got my writing skills from her older brother, Uncle Herschel. Herschel, she said, got all the looks and all the talent in her family. He was an accomplished athlete having played baseball with the Fort Worth Cats in their heyday in the 1940s. He was a real Renaissance man who also enjoyed painting and working with wood. Herschel had a friend named George Dolan who for many years was a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Dolan would publish pieces written by Uncle Herschel occasionally. I remember this well, because Herschel liked to write about his younger sister and her brood of seven children.

Uncle Herschel really was different than his six siblings. He had an olive type complexion, tall and lean, there was an unspoken ease about him. It was kind of like that kid on the TV show King of the Hill, the boy everyone in the neighborhood knows is the product of his mother’s affair. My mother always suspected this about Uncle Herschel, but never had a conversation with him, it remained the elephant in the room. Herschel died in 1975 from brain cancer.

George Dolan posthumously published an article that Uncle Herschel had written. It was about my family having lots of trouble with a squirrel that was in our attic. It seems my mother had done everything to get the darn squirrel out of our house, to no avail. One night he wrote, my parents awoke to the sound of the piano being played in our den. My father remarked to my mother…I can’t believe Julie is playing at 3am, but listen, she is really getting good! My uncle went on to say that my mother sprang to her feet to go get me back to bed…only to find the squirrel galloping up and down the keyboard of the piano, mocking her in song!

My grandmother died in 1984 at the age of 93. My mother asked her shortly before her death to tell her the truth about Herschel. Ma Ada confirmed what the entire family already suspected, there had been an illicit affair in 1917…with a handsome American-Indian. Indeed, my mother had a crayon of a different color in her family.

I was so proud of my crayon story that I took it to cursive writing class for Mrs. Runyun to read. She grabbed it from my hands and went limping towards the front of the class grumbling. I blushed as she demanded silence from the class and began to read aloud. Mrs. Ida Runyun was actually smiling when she finished the last part of the story, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I went up to her at the end of the class to retrieve the paper and to receive the anticipated praise I had so longed to hear from her…”Maybe you can learn to type.”

It was a Saturday in August of 1976 and I was spending a lot of time in my room. The Texas heat tends to make you a slave to the air conditioner. Softball season was over, the Wildcats had placed second…I was bored.

I had picked up a book at a garage sale, Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, about the Charles Manson murders. My mother told me it would give me nightmares if I read it. So, of course, I was prone on the orange shag carpet turning the pages and listening to vinyl.

I had an early interest in crime stories, real life crime to me was the absolute scariest…things that could actually happen. The original Star Wars would be released the following May and I would actually walk out in the middle of it. No made up aliens or robots for me, give me real drama!

I played the album Chicago X over and over that summer and into early fall. As I read about the slaughter of Sharon Tate, the song Make Me Smile wafted about my room, in sharp contradiction to the words on the paper. I associate that album so much with the frightening novel, that to this day I cannot hear one of the songs without thinking about Death to the Piggies and the Manson followers.

There was a plain tan dresser in my room, probably purchased at a second-hand store. It was ugly and I needed to fancy it up a bit. I had a box of psychedelic paints and my idea was to paint mod flowers all over the dilapidated piece of furniture.

What’s that? Stickers would be easier? Remember I was fourteen and I had the urge to express myself, carelessness was my modus operandi! My mother left to go grocery shopping and I started creating my work of art…in my bedroom…on the orange shag carpet, with no drop cloths.

The blue paint splashed down on the shag and actually looked like a Jackson Pollock original. I admired it for a second, then imagined my mother chasing me around the house with the fly swatter. Lately she wasn’t catching me like the younger years. She was now 54 and losing a step or two on me. I liked my odds, but I thought maybe I could clean it up before her return.

I did, what any teenager would do…I smeared it around and ground it down to the base of the shag carpet fibers. Hmm…..maybe just scoot the dresser on top of it? No…pretty much in the middle of my room..this was going to be bad.

My mother made a bee-line to my room to gripe as to why I didn’t come help her unload the groceries. The profanities that spewed from her mouth when she saw my work shocked me…and as the seventh kid I thought I had heard just about all of it!

Mother got a bucket of cleanser and water and dropped to her hands and knees. She scrubbed back and forth for the better part of an hour until there was no trace left of the paint. I got to dust the house and fold clothes, two things I loathed to do…and I was grounded the rest of the weekend. I felt bad….and now I had a pitiful tan dresser with parts of two blue flowers on the side of it, and carpet that smelled awful. Stickers. Stickers would be good, I thought.

My mother woke up the next morning with a nagging pain in her right breast. She thought she had worked a muscle she hadn’t used in a while, as she was on her hands and knees scrubbing. The pain persisted for a couple of days and she decided to go to the doctor.
A mammogram was done and a cyst was found. The surgery that followed and biopsy revealed that it was a benign cyst. The entire family was relieved…we had escaped a breast cancer scare.

My mother had been negligent in going to the doctor for annual check-ups. Having seven kids and a job, she was like a lot of women…putting her needs behind everyone else’s…on the back-burner. Recent controversy over when you are supposed to start annual mammograms has led to some confusion. The answer is do what works for you after you have consulted your physician. Some high risk women need to start annual check ups when they reach 40 or earlier…again, call your doctor…I am a lawyer, what the hell do I know?

About two weeks after she was released from the hospital, my mother took me to M.E. Moses’ Five & Dime Store up the street from our house…we got paint and mod flower stickers. My father and I hauled the dresser to the back porch where mother supervised the “right” way to do a project….meaning “Jewel’s” way. Her way was usually pretty darn close to the right way…the dresser was an exact match to the cool vision in my head.

My father died on the 26th of September of a massive heart attack. We had survived a cancer scare with my mother, only to lose my dad at 63…he died in his sleep. After the funeral, when my older siblings had cleared out of the house to go to their own homes..my mother and I layed on the couch together. We cried and she told me that God works in mysterious ways….we couldn’t know the reason I had lost a parent at fourteen. I didn’t know what to think about religion at that age…I just knew that life seemed incredibly unfair.

I had never seen my mother cry like she was at that moment. I was so scared and wanted to say anything to make her stop. I told her I wanted her to take good care of herself, I wanted a mother for many years to come. “Please tell me you will go back every year for a mammogram!” I will, I will she said…sounding tired beyond belief…I hoped that I could trust her.

I am proud that spilling that paint was the catalyst for my mother taking better care of her health needs…that and the fact that she was now a single-parent…an older single parent. I kept that dresser for years to come and it served as a standing monument to the end of 1976, a year of loss. It served as a reminder of a kid’s carelessness….and thankfully to the end of a mother’s carelessness regarding her health.