The house that I grew up in was in the middle of the woods, and impossible to see from the road. This made it a perfect location for things such as my parents’ wild biker parties, or my brother having a kegger with a live band. The privacy was amazing. As a teenager whose only parental figure was a drug addict brother in his mid-twenties, the property slowly descended into a place of total anarchy. I honestly loved the chaos.

When my brother wasn’t working as a machinist, he was usually home, smoking a bunch of weed, learning to play songs on his guitar by ear, or watching horror movies with me. He was pretty clean until he started going out with his first wife, who needed a house for her many children. That’s when the aforementioned relapse happened. Once she moved in, it was cocaine fueled tattoo parties and a drunk sister-in-law hitting on me while cocked out of her mind on a Tuesday at 8:30.

Before all of this, in the era of pot smoke and movies, is when anarchy flourished. My brother’s wife wasn’t there along with her sister, brother, mother, and children, and even my brother himself was at home, checked out and chillin’ or gone.

He worked a lot, and he tried to hook up with girls via WebTV chat rooms, so sometimes he would disappear into the darkness. Good for him, he worships our Mom, and he needed the companionship as he was shattered by her death. He would also get arrested a couple of times, leaving me alone for days on end as a 16-year-old, and it was fucking awesome.

So many of my memories are fuzzy, but some moments from this time have stuck with me and still make me smile. Moments like when that my best friend and I took an infamous joyride, or blew shit up. He was always there, he kept me sane, and I love the dude. I also ghosted him, and I don’t get why I am like this.

Whatever, something to work on, I suppose.

Aside from a cat and a dog, I was alone even when people were in my house. Often, I would just lie in bed all day with them floating in and out of consciousness. These were the times when I would randomly open my eyes at noon to see my homie creepily standing over me. This was usually when I knew that I was in for some stupid shit. When he wanted to do stupid shit, he came to the isolated property in the woods, as did many of my friends.

By this point, my childhood home was completely transformed into a White trash wonderland. My brother sold some of the trees behind us to a lumberjack that he knew, and he let my distant cousin, who was a mechanic, store at least 15 cars on the property. We also had hundreds of pallets stacked in a giant, ugly pile, as well as my brother’s personal Camaro collection. There was even a truck with no radiator or alternator, and my brother would charge a battery, throw it in, and drive it through the property for the 10 minutes that it ran. He took out our clothesline with that thing.

I shit you not, one of the Camaros had a logo for the band Boston that took up the entire back window.

This was the setting that drew people to my house like flies. Lawlessness. We played with fireworks, drove unregistered vehicles, and ran the place. My cousin would come over to use our space to get drunk with a bunch of friends, and then they would crash everywhere. A lot of people used the house to get fucked up, but I was super strait-laced during this time, so I just kind of sat there.

I had another friend who introduced me to my best friend around this time, and he would often come by to try out some new hair-brained scheme that he had come up with. One of his favorite things to do was buy cheap stuffed animals and fill them with various explosives. There was one specific incident where pieces of a burning seal flew from my fire pit, across my yard, and onto the roof.

There was another time when my best friend and I hung a stuffed animal up on the pool railing, and it exploded as my brother was driving down the driveway. By the time he could see, only a dangling appendage remained, lightly burning. I believe he said, “I don’t even want to know.”

Have you ever heard of the band Nelson? Well we used to rip on my brother for liking 80s “butt rock” and as a consequence we wrote the words ‘Nelson tears’ in mustard on the roof. It baked in for a while, and it was to that point in my life, my proudest achievement,

 Have enough dumb shit to write for hours on the hillbilly Neverland that we got up to no good in, but this will do for now.

Until next time, stay crescent fresh,

Tommy