A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [11]
Being “cool,” I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. I was maybe eleven or twelve and I hadn’t even puffed a cigarette yet. When the joint was offered to me I simply passed it on to the next person. By the end of the ballad, it was so small that someone had put a tiny clamp on the thing. I started to think that the whole getting stoned thing was looking pretty desperate.
Dad never found out that I went over there to watch the concert, but he did give me a disappointed shake of the head a few months later when I got a T-shirt with a KISS picture ironed on it. We were out at Skipper’s for our Friday night fish dinner and he said, “Do you know what that means? It means Kids in Satan’s Service.”
Fried fish is the only food that I liked with ketchup. I squirted the thick red goo into the little paper cups and thought about the bloody face as we waited for our dinner.
Dog Days
“Have you been having bad dreams about dogs?” Mark asked me. “Because Mom and Dad said they might have to send you to a shrink or something. So you better knock it off.” This was partially Mark’s fault anyway, since it was his roommate’s dog that bit me at their house. Three different places: leg, elbow, forearm. I shielded myself with the screen door until they got home and found me there with blood dripping on the welcome mat.
At the hospital I was given three shots. Before I left, the nurse showed me a cardboard box with little plastic toys in it. I didn’t take any.
A few months later, Mom and Dad let me pick out a puppy for myself. I chose a German shepherd with floppy ears that was just a couple months old. I took Polaroids of him for the first year and a half, documenting his quick growth in our tiny apartment. His name was Scooter. He slept in my bed and I talked to him as I fell asleep each night.
Themes
In my sixth grade Social Studies class, we often read silently out of the textbook for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. My teacher, a music fan, would let us bring tapes in and play them on the cassette player while we read. It couldn’t be too distracting, though, and most of the time it ended up being instrumental.
I had recently bought my first cassette recorder, a boom box the size of a toaster, and started recording songs off the radio. I didn’t want to get any of the DJs’ voices on my tapes so there were always clunky segues between songs. The DJs would just jabber and say dumb things before the vocals kicked in. I’d be missing the whole intro to “My Sharona” or “Heart of Glass.” Then if they started talking again at the end, I’d have to cut the song there too. But my ears got used to it because that was the only way to listen to my favorite songs over and over.
My teacher played only one of my tapes for a few songs before changing it.
I turned to another passion. Theme music. First, I mail ordered an album of music from the National Football League. Found in the back of a football magazine, the ad said it featured orchestral pieces that were used by people like Howard Cosell during the football highlights they showed at halftime on Monday Night Football. There were a couple of songs in particular that really got me excited—“Heavy Action (Monday Night Football Theme)” by Johnny Pearson and a crazy sixties-type bebop song called “The Lineman” by Sam Spence.
I also perfected the art of recording my favorite theme songs from TV shows. I held the boom box up to the TV speaker and pleaded to the family to be quiet when the show was starting. I was partial to the cool, stylish themes like the ones from Barney Miller, Taxi, and Welcome Back, Kotter. Upbeat tunes like the ones from Happy Days and The Jeffersons were also favorites. Still, the teacher wouldn’t play the tape in class because it was from TV, which represented the opposite of reading.
Pot
Chad Crouch was my first stoner friend. He lived in a ranch house with faded green paint three blocks