Houston – Summer, 1977
After living in an apartment off Stella Link and
the West Loop for just four months, it was time to move again. This time Dad rented a house in
Sharpstown. A house gave him the ability
to work on his car or truck and to store his house painting equipment and
supplies. But this move left me at the
age of 13 with no friends, again, all summer.
In 1977 there was no Internet and no cable
TV. Part of the summer I “worked” as Dad’s
painting helper and part of the summer I spent at home. I was a big reader of science fiction books
back then as well as comic books and spent time doing that. I think I watched “The Price Is Right” every
day.
I also passed time by teaching myself to do
wheelies in a wheelchair.
We ended up with the wheelchair when Uncle Junior
got hit by a car trying to cross the West Loop on foot one drunken night.
To recap, I was living with Mom in Memphis and
came to live with Dad when she died in February 1977. Then in late March 1977,
Dad’s father died at the age of 78. So
it was back to Memphis for the funeral. Walter
Clyde Green, Jr. was Dad’s oldest brother by almost 12 years. As these things go in the South, Junior’s
wife called him Gene, whereas Dad’s middle name was Eugene, but as a kid, all
the way through high school, Dad was known as Sonny. I only ever heard him called Sonny once by
family; everybody seemed to call him Douglas and I was, of course, Dougie.
I knew my uncle as Junior. When we lived in Memphis from 1968 to 1970, I
can remember visiting Junior and his wife and my cousins in Arkansas at a cabin
out in the mountains, the Ozarks maybe.
I remember driving up part of a mountain road to get to the cabin that
seemed like it was vertical. I thought
surely the old station wagon was going to roll back down the hill and we would
crash and die.
When I moved to Memphis the second time, in 1976,
Junior was divorced and living with his mother (Pauline) and father (Clyde). By then, Junior was an alcoholic in a very
bad way. He wouldn’t always come home and frequently had that old drunk
smell. He was the kind of drunk who
would drink rubbing alcohol or Sterno cooking fuel if he couldn’t get anything
else. I remember Pauline yelling at him
when he would stumble home drunk.
Pauline yelled a lot at him and Clyde Sr. both. I remember one time that Pauline had gotten a
hold of some sort of drug that she added to Junior’s food that would make him
sick if he drank any alcohol. It didn’t work.
He would get sick, puke everything up and go right back to drinking. Junior smoked hand-rolled unfiltered
cigarettes.
Where Dad was a functioning alcoholic, Junior was
on-a-path-to-his-doom alcoholic. Dad
told me once that when it came to
drinking, Junior couldn’t pace himself at all and couldn’t stop once he started.
Dad told me that Junior was a medic in WWII. He
said that when Junior came back he was a changed man and not for the
better. There was a darkness and sadness
to him after the war. Today, I’m sure,
he would have been diagnosed PTSD.
That March of 1977, after Clyde Sr. died, Dad
agreed to take Junior to Texas with us so that Junior could get a new start. Junior had helped dad get started in the
paper-hanging and house painting business in 1969 and so I guess Dad was trying
to give a helpful payback. Junior
started working with Dad as a painter. We
were living in that apartment off of Stella Link and the West Loop. I think it was only a week and Junior’s first
payday when he went out and got drunk. He
was on foot and tried to cross the 610 Interstate Loop in the middle of the
night.
He got hit by a car and remarkably did not
die. As I recall, he had a broken leg
and ribs and more. He ended up in the VA
hospital for some period of time. As
soon as he got out of the hospital, Dad put him on a plane back to
Memphis. The VA gave him a wheelchair to
get around and it ended up in our spare bedroom.
Junior died of cancer, throat cancer I think, in
1983 at the age of 57.
So that boring summer in 1977 I started riding the
wheelchair around the house. The
flooring was hardwood and I started doing wheelies. I got pretty good at it. I could ride through the entire house, around
furniture, and turn through doorways -- all while on two wheels. I even took it outside a few times going up
and down the sidewalk in front of the house.
The wheelchair highlights a difference between Dad
and I. If I ended up with wheelchair
like that from the VA today, I would make sure that it got back to them – some poor
soul would need it. Dad wouldn’t waste a
second of his time to get the chair back to the VA. The wheelchair stayed with us for a few more
years. Around 1981, I ended up loaning it
to a coworker at Kmart who had a relative or neighbor who needed a wheelchair
for a short period of time; the wheelchair never made it back to me.
The fun video linked to below, “Learn to Wheelie”
reminded me of the wheelchair. This
video is a hoot and I was laughing and cheering on the rider as he got better
and better at his wheelies.
https://youtu.be/lTYJMke4kd8
