King of the Hill
Mr. Gilliam lived directly across the street from us in a white clapboard house, and from his rocking chair on his front porch he surveyed his property. With a street full of boys, he needed to, but in our own neighborhood, we were mostly innocent. Mr. Gilliam was my grandfather’s age and he might have shared similar experiences, though he lived in Ohio and Roy O’Connell, six hundred miles away, in Nevada Missouri.
They both, at an age that spoke more about their past than the present, bought outlandish cars, Mr. Gilliam a pink, 1957 Oldsmobile 98, five years before Roy, his white Cadillac. A year before I earned my driver’s license, I drove that white Cadillac; I could only dream about driving the pink Olds.
But what I remember most about Mr. Gilliam was his language.
When we played king of the hill on the edge of his sloping lawn, heÃd holler, “No, no bank, papa spank.” Climb his trees and you’d hear. “No, no, trees, papa please.” I climbed everyone’s trees, but his, and I was in his neighbor’s tree when Charles reached over to touch the high tension wire running between the limbs.
It was a humid summer day in Cincinnati and we were perched Like blackbirds in that tree. Glenn and I, dressed in our white shorts and tight black muscle t-shirts stood below the wires looking up, while Paul, Charles’s younger bother, clung to the highest limb, above the telephone pole. Steven Brown, hands clasped behind his head, rested on a branch shaped like the homemade slingshot which hung from his pocket. We were honored to have Charles in our tree. He was, after all, a big brother, someone to whom you might say hi – if you were feeling really talkative.
“Do you dare me to touch it?” Charles asked with a broad grin.
We didn’t dare to dare Charles to touch the wire.
Dare him to maybe die? Nope, not us and we were mostly fearless. But we were intrigued. What would happen if he touched the black wire? Charles flapped his hand at the wire as if he were playing with a burner on a hot stove. Touch it quickly and feel no pain. His game made us giddy, but still we remained silent. We wanted him to , and we didn’t want him to. How to explain that?
“What if I touch the wire but with a leaf to protect my hand?” Charles asked.
Sure, that made sense to me. Leaves that hung like laundry might add enough protection. From what, I wasn’t even sure. Paul broke our silence with, îDonÃt do it,î but too late to stop his brother whose hand was already in motion. Thwap! His hand hit the leaf, the leaf hit the wire and they both bounced back. All of us jumped but Charles.
ìAre you okay?î
ìDidnÃt feel a thing.î
We werenÃt so sure because Charles climbed down from the tree, waved to Mr. Gilliam on his porch, and walked straight into his house.
Posts up and most of the floor has been deck-screwed to the joists. The happy couple pose as Jan dreams of a full width set of stairs, and Mark wonders why we didn’t accomplish more.
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Ya had me on the edge of my seat there. I used to have to dispose of burnt, dead ‘possums who’d gotten onto the high tension wire through our yard somehow but then encountered the metal support pole……………
Comment by groundskeeper — August 27, 2004 @ 9:41 am
Well everything looks all squared up now; the deck’s parallel to the window lines, anyway. Somewhat better than the Grok Hill deck.
“We werenÃt so sure because Charles climbed down from the tree, waved to Mr. Gilliam on his porch, and walked straight into his house.”
So what happened next? Did Charles fall dead on his living room floor? I didn’t see any “To be continued”. Is this the first installment in a Millers Boys Saga? Or just a cliff-hanger ending?
Comment by rakkity — August 27, 2004 @ 9:42 am
I can deduce where the stair goes, I just can’t figure why…………
Comment by critic — August 27, 2004 @ 9:45 am
I might ask how you two read this two seconds after I posted it.
Diane tells me I can add fiction to these memories, but for some reason I canÃt will myself to do so. Charles lived to climb another tree. But somewhere in all these tales, is a moral that goes something like: we did a lot of scary stuff and no one died. Except for a couple suicides, a death or two by car accidents, everyone that I grew up with lived well into their thirties. Seems to me thatÃs not the case anymore. Or is it just my worry-wart parental perception?
Groundskeeper. DonÃt you think this would be a perfect time to tell your high tension story with its not-so-happy ending?
Critic. You know Q is a man of romance, not practicality.
Comment by michael — August 27, 2004 @ 10:00 am
One more thing, groundskeeper. Did you ever question why your parents were asking YOU, and not Doug, to separate those possums from the high voltage lines?
Comment by michael — August 27, 2004 @ 10:04 am
“we did a lot of scary stuff and no one died”
It’s not the deaths, its the half-dead living that goes on and on afterwards There were two kids in my grammar school, Tim and Bill, who nearly killed themselves in 6th grade. Separate incidents within the same year. Tim dived off a wharf into shallow water, broke his neck, and had to re-learn how to walk, A year later he returned to school, a staggering, stumbling wreck. Bill rode his bike down “deadman’s hill” into a car, smashed his head, and was in the hospital for a year. He survived to go on to high school, even became a prodigious weight lifter, but never regained his former personality.
From Tim and Bill I learned at an early age to fear diving into shallow water and riding 60 mph down hills in the city. But that didn’t keep me from doing other scary things and enjoying some near-death experiences later in life.
Comment by rakkity — August 27, 2004 @ 11:17 am
But that didn’t keep me from enjoying some near-death experiences later in life.
Maybe thatÃs the difference. I didnÃt know any ìhalf-dead living individuals.î Jimmy, CharlesÃs youngest brother, coasted down our rather steep street, looked back, and smashed into a parked car. I remember a neighbor carrying Jimmy in his arms back to his house. But no brain damage. Not to long after that, he was hit by car, but all he ended up with was a neato scar that looked like a question mark, starting on his forehead and ending, appropriately, at his nose. Still, no duller than before the accident.
ìBut that didn’t keep me from enjoying some near-death experiences later in life.î Says the rock climbing man.
Comment by michael — August 27, 2004 @ 1:33 pm
When does the first book of short short stories get published, Mike?
I have a title: King of the Hill.
Another book idea: “Just a blog” — excerpts from your blog, with a little narrative to thread them together (a la , Just A Geek reviewed on Greg’s blog, which I just read and could not put down).
Comment by smiling — August 28, 2004 @ 6:58 am
That to which Michael refers was an incident in late gradeschool, early high school, when we were out hanging out at our usual country club break-in, and the friend of an older friend, visiting from high school our unfamiliar land of Venezuela, climbed the floodlight tower of the driving range and touched in the dark untransformed 13,800 volts while standing on the metal rung of the metal tower. It blew out the entire instep of his tennis shoe arcing through his foot and sent him tumbling out into the night in a 60-foot freefall. We heard the “ZZZZZT”, and scary seconds later the sack-of-potatoes thud and rushed over. He was conscious, and aware enough to ask us not to move him. A panicked flight to the nearest household summoned up a sleepy maid in a see-through nightie (which I mention only for the absurd counterpoint of teenage lust and abject fear warring for prominence in our attentions), and with a phone call or two, help was on its way. In the form of two company guards who picked the injured boy up by feet and hands and slung him hammock-like into the back of their pickup. If he wasn’t paralyzed already, he was then. Highest cervical possible without dying, no use of arms or legs or anything else for the rest of his life.
I remember how it changed the night, but how it changed the rest of our lives is harder to say. I look at the caution I contribute to our camping trips more in light of my family’s sake, but I know that first-hand awareness of consequence plays a strong, if unconscious part. Some there are who worry “what if”, others take up dancing seconds after losing a finger…………..
And all hail the happy medium, embodied by rakkity — fully engaged, while responsibly competent.
Comment by bystander — August 28, 2004 @ 8:15 am
Responsibly competent? Well… You obviously haven’t heard my (pre-blog) story about the time I broke a wash basin into shards with my jaw–when I fell in a slippery, dark sauna from the 2nd level.
Comment by rakkity — August 30, 2004 @ 9:43 am