PawPaw

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

– Ephesians 6:1-3 NIV

I’m not sure what it means to honor your mother and father.

It’s the only one of ten commandments without an example given/

All of the other ones have an example. If you cheat on a spouse or lust after someone while you’re married, that’s adultery. If you steal, that’s stealing. Murder and killing are debated by people who justify war in the name of God, but it’s pretty clear to me that you shouldn’t do either if you can help it. But there’s not a single example of what it means to honor your mother and father.

And a kid in the foster system doesn’t how to define mother and father, much less honor them. To me, my father is Mr. James “Ed” White, my PawPaw, the one Judge JJ mentioned in Partin vs. Partin as having grown to view me as his own. What I write is in his honor as much as it is in my mother’s.

My first clear, unambiguous memory of PawPaw is a Saturday morning in the spring of 1976.

I opened my eyes to the smell of PawPaw on Saturdays: Old Spice after shave, unfiltered Camel cigarettes, slightly burnt chicory coffee, and goo from the can by his jar of Old Spice that he used to slick back his salt peppered black hair. He was kneeling by my couch in the living room.

PawPaw was a small and wiry man, only 5’4″ or so, and when he kneeled by my side he was almost my height; conveniently, I was about as tall as the couch was high, so when he woke me up we were eye-to-eye. From my perspective, his smiling face was tilted sideways.

“Hey, d’ere, Lil’ Buddy,” he said with a sideways grin. “”Bout time you woke up.”

I sat up and the world rightened itself. PawPaw’s smiling face was right next to mine. His good eye sparkled. It wasn’t bloodshot yet and it looked just like his glass eye, a dark brown pupil framed with a white.

I hopped off the couch and plopped my duck feet onto the faded peeling vinyl floor.

My feet were disproportionately large. They still are. MawMaw said I’d grow into them and be as big as my daddy, but she was mistaken. I would graduate high school at 5’6″ and 145 pounds and wearing a size 12 wrestling shoe stretched tightly; limp out of the army at 5’11” and 194 pounds (the runt of all Partin men) and wearing a sized 14W combat boot; and today I’m a bit shorter from wear and tear and wear a size 15 running shoe due to further flattening of my scuba fin feet. As a kid, I knew my big feet were good for climbing, because PawPaw told me so.

“D’ose big feet of yours will help you climb,” PawPaw had said. “Just keep trying.”

He should know, because PawPaw was the most respected tree surgeon in all of southern Louisiana.

On Saturdays PawPaw would don his climbing tool belt as heavily laden with saws and goo to prevent termites as a paratroopers ammunition belt and vest, and he’d scurry up as fast as a squirrel and use his wiry arms to whip out a saw and cut a branch with three deft cuts to make a clean face then patch the end with goo and be back down faster than it took to read that.

I never saw PawPaw on weekday mornings. That’s when he worked his side-gig as the custodian and groundskeeper at Glenoaks High School. On weekdays he left before dawn and didn’t come home until after dark. He was to Glenoaks like the Airborne Pathfinders were to the 82nd Airborne: first in, last out. By the time he came home his salt and pepper stubble stood out, and though he still smelled like unfiltered Camels his Old Spice was replaced by an astringent pine oil stench from scrubbing toilets. On weekdays, he came home smelling like a harsher version of the disinfectant I associated with hospitals, probably because Glenoaks couldn’t afford the fancy stuff.

PawPaw was born in the pine forests of Mississippi on the outskirts of Woodville around the same time as Big Daddy, though I never learned if they met. He joined the navy and worked in the bowels of a big ship during World War II performing maintenance. His battle buddies said he was the most cheerful and mischievous person they ever met; decades after service, the most repeated stories about him were how he’d break into officer’s supply rooms and steal their cold beer and share it with other squids. One day while working below deck, a piece of machinery sprung out and took out his eye. PawPaw was honorably discharged and moved to Baton Rouge to find work.

He loved trees and became a tree surgeon, removing and repairing damaged branches after hurricane season every fall, and proactively treating trees in the spring by cutting out old wood and patching damage with black tar to keep out termites. But even the most respected tree surgeon in all of southern Louisiana doesn’t earn much money, so PawPaw accepted a job as the custodian and landscaper of Glenoaks High School, which had the finest old stately oaks of any public school thanks to PawPaw.

Like Big Daddy, PawPaw was a union organizer, though probably no one other than custodians of his era remember him. When Big Daddy was showcased in Life walking around picket lines of the Louisiana teacher’s strike and threatening a Teamster strike in support if teachers didn’t get their demands for more pay and better benefits, PawPaw was organizing custodians to join the fight. The teachers won, and state supporters said they could finally afford a steak dinner; PawPaw famously said that the custodians still couldn’t afford even a hamburger, and he pursued their purpose until custodians fell under the same umbrella as teachers and coaches when it came to evaluating what was crucial for student success; custodians were finally paid enough to afford a hamburger now and then.

PawPaw’s accent was not unlike my dad’s, Big Daddy’s, Grandma Foster’s, and Doug’s, but less refined than Big Daddy’s and slightly reminiscent of the Cajuns he worked with on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. They are of French decent and replace the ineloquent dipthong ‘th’ with the more smooth-flowing d’, like fans of the New Orleans Saints chant in the Superdome: “Who d’at! Who d’at! Who d’at! Who d’at talkin’ ’bout ‘beatin’ d’em Saints? Who d’at!”

“Go on now,” PawPaw said as he pulled away from me. “Get in d’ere before MawMaw’s up.”

He nudged me out of his hug and pointed to the short hallway only a step away.

I followed PawPaw’s finger and flip flopped across the vinyl floor and past the big hallway mirror and into our house’s bathroom. I peed and then stood on the step stool PawPaw had made me from a few 2X4’s so I could wash my own hands. I shoved aside the piles of hairspray and other smelly things MawMaw and Linda used, and gently nudged over PawPaw’s Old Spice and hair oil. I brushed my teeth and spit out the foam and hopped off the stool and landed with a satisfying splat on vinyl floor. If my big feet would help me climb, I was going to practice every chance I got.

My Saturday-in-the-Park clothes were draped over the bathtub. MawMaw had laid them out the night before, after I had fallen asleep. I slipped them on and squeezed my feet into my walking-shoes. They were the only shoes I owned, but PawPaw had many and called them his tree-climbing shoes (they had giddy-up spurs like the Lone Ranger’s boots and had chainsaw oil stains), his work shoes (they had steel toes and had so many stains they looked like camouflage), his around the house shoes (they looked a lot like the work shoes, but without steel toes), and his walking shoes for going to the store. I called my shoes walkin’ shoes; they were the standard tennis shoes most kids wore, but bigger.

I ran out of the bathroom and into MawMaw fluffing her hair in front of the hallway mirror. She was wearing her fuzzy light blue slippers and shaggy grey-white bathrobe the exact color of her disheveled hair. She turned and knelt down and locked her gaze on my eyes and smiled mischievously and said: “Gimme some shugga!”

I giggled and brought my arms up to my chest and ready to defend my face.

She shuffled along the vinyl floor in her fuzzy slippers and got about a foot from my face and said again: “Gimme some shugga!”

I giggled and bring my fists closer to just below my cheeks; it was my modified crawfish defense, like how a crawfish holds up both pinchers and keeps them pointed at you so you can’t grab their whiskers, but closer to my cheeks because I knew MawMaw was aiming there. She was a sniper with her shugga, and I was always outgunned but I still kept trying to defend myself from her attacks.

MawMaw’s held up her own pinchers and scooched closer and closer and snapped her thumb and fingers together like a crawfish about to get me.

“I’m gonna steal me some shugga,” she said.

She thrust out her pinchers out but ducked them down and tickled my exposed ribs. I erupted in giggles and my defense dropped down and she shot some shugga on my cheeks like a shugga sniper with rapid fire reflexes. I squealed and raised my pinchers back to my cheeks; MawMaw tickled me again and I squirmed and she snuck in a few more shots of shugga.

I laughed loudly and she said: “Shhh… You’ll wake the baby.”

I shush so I don’t wake the baby but I made the mistake of lowering my hands: MawMaw is a shugga’ sniper who saw the opening and swooped in for some more shugga.

I squealed again and she shushed me again. As soon as I calmed down, she swooped in again and smacked me on the cheek and I squealed and she shushed me again.

“Get in there and help PawPaw make breakfast,” she said.

She rotated me toward the kitchen and gently nudged me away and stepped into the bathroom for her long ritual of getting made up for the day. I took a plop towards the kitchen but stopped in front of the mirror and turned and scooted toes up to the scuff mark from PawPaw’s tree-climbing shoes. I looked at my reflection and the bright red smudge of MawMaw’s lipstick that grazed the top of my reflected head. Nothing had changed; my head still only kissed the smudge instead of bursting above it.

MawMaw was more than a lipstick smudge on the hallway mirror; she was Delores Shakleton, like the famous explorer who lead his team from a ship trapped in Arctic ice, but that was her name from her first marriage. I never learned what happened to her first husband, but before she married him she was Delores Lamar of the Baton Rouge Lamars. Their highway billboards sported Billy Cannon’s smiling face and his dental business up I-110 all the way to the Saint Francisville exit, and back down to the I-10 split above downtown Baton Rouge. The same billboards that sported Billy along I-110 would later show my cousin Jason Partin’s smiling face for his physical therapy business. Lamar Advertising went public, and their website says they own 80% Billboards across America, many with the small green rectangle at the bottom center that says: “Lamar.” If you see one of those billboards, it’s a sign of how you and I are connected to this story through MawMaw. Because she was from the Baton Rouge Lamars, who had more money than anyone I knew other than my dad and Big Daddy, she spoke with less of an accent than PawPaw. Or anyone else I knew. And because I spent most days with her, I sounded most like MawMaw and had a somewhat neutral accent, at least by southern Louisiana standards.

I stood up more straight and put more weight on my tippie-toes, and because of my big feet I gained an inch and saw the top of my head poke above the smudge; I held my stance as if practicing being taller will make it happen faster.

“You not goin’ to grow by lookin’ at yourself,” PawPaw said. “Come in here and eat some pancakes with your PawPaw.”

I trotted over and stepped up on the wooden stool by the stove.

I asked PawPaw if we were going to climb trees after we watched cartoons.

“Nope,” PawPaw said. “Today is your day wit’ Wendy and Denise.”

Now it made sense why MawMaw had laid out my Saturday-in-the-Park clothes. I lifted up one foot and told PawPaw I’d play on the merry-go-round with my merry-go-round shoes.

He chuckled and told me I had fine looking merry-go-round shoes, then he got quiet. His smile broadened and his good eye twinkled mischievously. He pulled the last unfiltered Camel from the crushed pack in his pocket and crumbled the pack and dropped it in a trash can by the kitchen’s carport door. He slipped out a silver Zippo from the little pocket in his blue jeans, and with his other hand moved the white Camel cigarette to a foot from his lips; the little black printed camel was away from his lips and in plain site to me.

Wait PawPaw! I said.

You’re about to light the wrong end, I pointed out.

It’s backwards again, I said. The little black camel goes in your mouth and you light the other end.

PawPaw chuckled and said: “You right, Lil’ Buddy. You smarter than your PawPaw.”

He flipped the cigarette around and lit it and I smelled the Zippo fuel that’s not unlike the JP-4 jet fuel that blasts paratroopers in the face as they board a C-141 from the rear hatch, but milder. He snapped the Zippo shut and put it back in the little pocket of his blue jeans, then smoked while flipping pancakes.

PawPaw smoked cigarettes like PopEye smoked a pipe: he could hum and sing and talk with it out of the corner of his mouth. PawPaw smoked and hummed something I couldn’t understand and cooked pancakes while I stared out the window and through the dusty spiderwebs on the outside towards the fishing pond.

There was a tall rusted metal gate leaning against the fence made from the same round pipes on my merry-go-round. It was from when a previous owner tried to raise cows. But we had no animals other than bullfrogs we’d sometimes gig for dinner, so there was no need to fix the gate. Those bullfrogs were happy living in the pond and weren’t going anywhere, PawPaw had said.

PawPaw turned to the kitchen table and shoved the pile of his old tools and my Lone Ranger pistol and bullet belt aside. He put a jug of Aunt Jemima syrup on the table and a roll of paper towels to use as napkins. He poured both of us a glass of Blue Bell and we drown our pancakes in Aunt Jemima and took big bites and washed them down with swigs from the glasses. We ate quickly and when we finished and I stepped up to the sink and helped PawPaw wash dishes.

“MawMaw’s out of milk,” PawPaw said. “How ’bout we walk to d’ store and buy some milk and cookie dough?”

My eyebrows shot up and I asked if we could climb the tree; there was only one tree I called the tree, and it was the really big sprawling stately oak tree across from the convenience store on the corner of Hooper and Plank that didn’t have Slushies but had those elf in the tree cookies.

Just then MawMaw walked into the kitchen. She had done her hair in a towering beehive held aloft with copious amounts of hair spray and it towered over PawPaw and me. She tore a paper towel from the roll on the table and pressed it to her lips and showed me the red kiss mark; she handed me the napkin and said it was my breakfast shugga.

I giggled and set the breakfast shugga by my Lone Ranger pistol. She gave PawPaw some shugga on his cheek and he told her we were going to the store. She told me to hurry and brush my teeth because Wendy was coming and I didn’t want to be late.

I return and PawPaw’s reached for the door but paused by the deep-freezer next to the trash can and grabbed a Russet potato from the bag resting on top of the freezer. He opened the carport door and we stepped outside to the sound of a thousand chirping crickets. He shut the door and opened the top flap of our cricket cage and took out his Old Henry two-blade folding knife and cut the potato into chunks dropped them inside inside. He shut the cage and held my hand and we squeezed between his old and beat up brown Ford F150 truck and stacks of Yellow Pages phone books piled up against the carport wall to our house.

PawPaw had a few side gigs. Twice a year we had stacks of books in the carport to keep them out of the rain. In spring, around stinging caterpillar season, we’d get that year’s Yellow Pages of advertisements of all of Baton Rouge’s businesses and PawPaw and Kelly’s Girls would deliver them door to door. In fall, just before hurricane season was in full swing, we’d get Christmas catalogs and a different set of Kelly’s Girls would help PawPaw deliver them. This year, Denise and Wendy were Kelly’s Girls, a national company that catered seasonal work and typing jobs towards young ladies, many of whom were single mothers unable to work traditional office hours. Somehow, PawPaw had finagled the contract for Baton Rouge.

As for the crickets, they were for the back yard pond or Sunday trips to False River in PawPaw’s pirogue.

We crab-walked our way past the books and stepped onto the crunchy gravel towards the blacktop Hooper Road. The driveway was around a quarter football field long, and by the time we reached Hooper we couldn’t hear the crickets. We turned left on the blacktop towards Plank Road and I held PawPaw’s hand and walked in the weeds almost as tall as I was while PawPaw walked between me and the road.

I saw the stately oak tree at the empty corner of Hooper and Plank Road. Its sprawling undulating branches make it seem like a giant octopus with sprawling tentacles draped in grey Spanish moss and one of those tentacles hoovers a few feet above the ground about 40 feet from the trunk and forms a perfect saddle that beckons me to climb into it. I let go of PawPaw’s hand and rush to the tree and reach up and grab the to of the saddle and my fingers slip into grooves in the old bark that are as deep and sprawly as the wrinkles on the back of PawPaw’s weathered neck when I hug him goodnight.

I grasped that gnarled bark with both hands and heaved with all my might but could not pull myself up. I stood on my tippie toes like in front of the hallway mirror and pulled again and again but could not pull myself higher. But then I felt PawPaw’s hands under my arms and I got stronger and pulled myself onto the branch and swung my big left foot over the curved branch and raised a hand in the air as if waving goodbye.

Hi Ho Silver! I said.

The branch swayed gently up and down and I was riding in my saddle like the Lone Ranger on Silver.

I was quick to celebrate and faster to forget. I eyed the branch above me and began to reach. I stretched and grunted but could not touch the bark. Today was not my day. Instead, I grabbed some of the gray Spanish moss dangling by my hands and yanked off a tuff and held it on my chin and looked straight into PawPaw’s good eye.

I’m Craig! I said.

PawPaw chuckled like Puck and reached up and grabbed his own beard and put it on. We laughed with each other like two old men who were best friends and had already knew all the good jokes and didn’t need words to laugh.

He put his beard back on the tree and reminded me we have to get cookie dough and get back home before Wendy and Denise showed up. I kept my beard and reached out my arms. PawPaw swung me over the saddle and onto the ground. We held hands and turned to the store and paused at the Plank Road red light until it turned green. Across the street, PawPaw pushed the big glass door open and I put on my moss as a disguise just like The Lone Ranger would wear a fake beard so he could take off his mask and look like just another old man in town. The Christmas bell tied to a string above the door rang; the man behind the counter looked up to see who came in.

“Well hello there, Mr. Ed,” he said. “Who got with you today?”

It’s me! I exclaimed as I lowered my disguise.

“Wow!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Jason.”

I put the beard back on and he gasped and told me it was a good disguise. I revealed myself again myself again told him that The Lone Ranger was a master of disguise and that I was too.

The man and I chatted while PawPaw shopped. He walked up to the counter with a tube of cookie dough with elves in a tree on the wrapper, a half gallon carton of Blue Bell milk, and a six pack of Miller pony bottles. Without being asked the man reached up and brought down a pack of Camels and put it on the counter by the beer. He gave us two plastic bags to carry things home, one for PawPaw and one for me.

“Bye, Mr. Ed.” the man said. He then looked down at me and said, “You make sure your PawPaw gets home safely, okay Mr. Jason?”

I told him I would.

PawPaw carried the milk and ponies and I carried the cookie dough made by elves that looked like the paintings Craig made at home but without moss and without Puck peering from behind a branch and no Lone Ranger saddle like my tree had.

As I promised the man, we made it home safely.

We put away the milk and cookie dough and pony beers, and as soon as the refrigerator door shut I heard gravel crunching from a car pulling up behind PawPaw’s truck. I reached up and twisted the carport doorknob open and lept out the door and through the narrow corridor between PawPaw’s truck and the piles of Yellow Pages and towards the passenger side of Wendy’s old yellow Datsun hatchback that was the color of last year’s Yellow Pages left out in the sun too long.

Denise stepped out and knelt down. Not that she needed to. Denise was only 5’1″, when she squatted down she was shorter than I was. But she was spherical, so without squatting down and holding her hands out I couldn’t hug her. I stepped into her open arms and she leaned her head forward so that her cheek pressed up against mine.

I squirted back out and showed her how I had learned to pull off my nose like she showed me last time; I reached up to my face with my right hand and yanked it off and held it up for her to see.

My nose was poking between my first and second fingers. It looked a lot like my thumb.

Denise gasped and said I amazed her.

She was Denise Leboux from Thibadeux, and her voice was as sweet as a Cajun French beignet in Cafe DuMonde. The Lebouxs moved to Baton Rouge from Thibadeax when Denise was around my age, but she kept her childhood accent. She had attended Glenoaks High School with Wendy, my dad, Linda, Craig, and practically every person I knew back then. She was the only one who pronounced my name Pa’tan, like the plumber named Patin on Saturday morning TV commercials who jumped into the scene when a woman who looked like MawMaw stood in her bathroom with water shooting out of the toliet and ankle deep water on the floor; that man named Patin smiled broadly said: “Shoulda called Pa’tan! But she used her dipthongs like MawMaw did; I never learned where she picked that up.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Wendy?” Denise asked.

I looked up and Wendy’s standing by PawPaw on the driver’s side. I quickly crunch-crunch-crunched around the Datsun. Wendy squatted down and was taller than Denise but not as tall as PawPaw when they hug me.

Wendy was Wendy Anne Pa’tan. She had strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes that crinkled in the corners like crows feet when she smiled. Wendy was fit with athletic arms but a bosom bigger than Denise’s. In a few years, she would dress as Dolly Parton for Halloween by wearing country singer clothes and a shirt tied into a knot that exposed her belly and exaggerated her bosom, but only needing to do so slightly for the illusion to work. Most people pronounced our last name like Dolly Parton’s.

Our hug broke but Wendy stayed squatted and kept her hands on my shoulders and crinkled her eyes and told me how much I had grown.

I told her I had climbed into the saddle on my tree by myself that morning.

She said we’d go to the park and climb on the merry-go-round after we delivered the Yellow Pages.

I asked if we could get a Slushie.

Her eyes crinkled loudly and she said of course.

PawPaw crunched over and said we had better get busy, those Yellow Pages won’t load themselves.

We began loading the Datsun. Denise made sure I know the back right seat was mine – the one behind her seat – and suggested I arrange books on the floorboard while they loaded the hatchback. I focused on my job and they did theres. When we finished the Datsun sagged like an old mare carrying too many sacks of a farmer’s potatoes. It was a routine. The car always changed and sometimes so did the girls, but the constant was PawPaw and his contract with Kelly’s Girls. The national program got contracts for temporary jobs with flexible hours and catered to single mother’s working around going back to school and taking kids to daycare. In spring PawPaw’s sub-contract led to delivering Yellow Pages; in fall it was Christmas catalogs. Because Judge JJ documented it in my custody records, I know Wendy earned $512 a month working for Kelly’s Girls, yet not even Judge JJ realized that was because of PawPaw. I never heard him brag about all of his accomplishments or the work he did for others.

Wendy and Denise stood back to admire their work and smoke their red-filtered cigarettes. PawPaw smoked an unfiltered Camel that he had put the right side in his mouth that time. He learned quickly.

I played with weeds growing in the mushy ground along the gravel driveway. They finished their cigarettes and we squeeze into the car. PawPaw helped me get in the back seat; we had loaded so many that there was hardly any room for me and I sat on atop a pile of around ten books. I was so tall that my head poked above Denise’s headrest like the weeds poking their heads above MawMaw’s tire.

Denise got in the front and turned her head to see me looking down at her. She was surprised I had grown so quickly, so I explained that I was sitting on a stack of Yellow Pagers. Wendy got in the driver’s seat and the Datsun grumbled awake.

PawPaw told us goodbye. MawMaw didn’t come out (she never came out to see us leave). Wendy cranked the shift into first and we all lurched forward and the Datsun’s tires sent gravel sprinkling against the Ford truck with the rat-a-tat sound of a small caliber machine gun. PawPaw dodged the wave of gravel and chuckled and waved. I turtled my neck down so I could see him through the curved hatchback window and waved back.

We reached the end of the driveway and the Datsun slammed to a halt and my face slammed into Denise’s headrest. Wendy cursed something I didn’t understand and Denise told her it was fine and that driving a stick takes practice. The Datsun grumbled to life again and we whipped onto the blacktop and flew towards Plank Road with gravel from the tires plinking down Hooper behind us.

We stopped at the red light and I pointed to the saddle in my tree and Wendy says maybe we could stop there on the way back and I could show her. The light turned green and we lurched forward and turned right and a minute later passed the airport and went up the I-110 onramp towards Baton Rouge. I-110 is elevated over some swampy land and neighborhoods built before it that had become run down and littered with old refrigerators and more car parts than what was piled behind PawPaw’s barn, but out in the open.

I looked down at the faces looking up and imagine I’m flying in one of the airplanes we always see overhead. The windows were open and my hair blows and I stick out my hand palm-down and flat and rotate my wrist so my hand flys up and down like Superman.

A squeaky mouse must have lived under the Datsun’s dashboard. It wouldn’t stop squeaking, and Wendy felt around the dashboard with her right hand saying she couldn’t get it to stop. She turned off the radio and opened and shut the ashtray, but the mouse kept squeaking. She told Denise it was annoying and she slapped the dashboard with the palm of her hand. It squeaked again and she cursed and made a fist and slammed it onto the dashboard three times while she kept cursing.

“Whoa, Wendy, whoa…” Denise said.

She rested her chubby hand on Wendy’s slim forearm. Both of Wendy’s hands were clenching the stickshift and her knuckles were white.

“Calm down,” Denise said. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a little squeak.”

The mouse squeaked in agreement.

“Here,” Denise said. “I’ll roll us a joint.”

Denise rolled up her window and whipped out her Frisbee and flipped it dish-side up. She pulled out her little blue hand-sewn bag with tiny yellow flowers embroidered on it, unzipped it and withdrew a plastic sandwich bag rolled around a bit of herb.

She asked Wendy to roll up her window and she did, as if relieved to have something to do rather than clench the steering wheel.

Denise dumped the herb into the Frisbee and uses the rigid cardboard edge of rolling papers to push the herb up and allow seeds to roll down. Like one of the TV cowboys rolling a cigarette, Denise deftly rolled a thin joint and puts it between her fleshy lips. In the blink of an eye and with the dexterity of a magician vanishing a handkerchief she had refilled the baggie and tucked her blue bag away and put the Frisbee into her floorboard. She produced a Bic lighter and lit the joint and took a drag.

“Here,” she said through pursed lips and with a lung full of smoke.

Wendy took her right hand off the steering wheel and accepted the joint and took a deep drag. Denise rolled the window handle down a half turn and looked up and exhaled a stream of smoke towards the thin opening.

Wendy cracked her window and exhaled but kept her eyes on the road. She relaxed and handed the joint back to Denise.

“See?” Denise said. “Everything’s fine.”

Denise took another drag and they passed back and forth a few times and laughed about nothing in particular. The mouse squeaked and no one seemed to notice.

I was feeling pretty fine myself when Denise turned the radio back on. Instantly, she gasped and tapped Wendy’s arm and Wendy laughed and they turned up the radio.

Janis Joplin’s raspy voice sang:

Busted flat in Baton Rouge

Waitin’ for a train

When I’s feeling near as faded as my jeans…

It was her 1971 posthumous hit, Me and Bobby McGee, that every radio station in Baton Rouge seemed to play all day every day. If Baton Rouge had an anthem in the 1970’s, it was Me and Bobby McGee. And it was the fashion for girls Wendy and Denise’s age: they all looked like Janis Joplin to me, especially when they sang along with her songs on the radio or her vinyl album when I was with them and their friends.

Wendy and Denise sang:

Windshield wipers slappin’ time,

I was holdin’ Bobby’s hand in mine

We sang every song that driver knew

They got to the part about her dirty red bandana and Denise pulled out a clean red bandana and handed it to me and held my hand in hers while she sang the blues. I was feeling fine and sang along the best I could. I didn’t know what to do with the bandana so I just kept it in my hand and laughed for no reason at all.

Soon after the joint was finished we pulled off Drusilla lane near the fancy seafood restaurant Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob took us to now and then. We turned towards their home in Sherwood Forest subdivision near the Sherwood Forest Country Club, but we didn’t go to their house. Instead, we parked by Westminster Elementary School, where Wendy had gone to kindergarten and I would, too, two months later. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew we had work to do.

Wendy kept the car running and Denise and I hopped out and began walking copies of the Yellow Pages to each doorstep. Denise began with the books on my seat and then the ones in my floorboard. Debbie would carry two and I would carry one, and every three houses Wendy would lurch forward and meet us at the curb and we’d take out three more books. About an hour or two later we’re finished and Wendy said it was time to celebrate with Slushies. She told Denise it’ll be her treat to thank Debbie for helping. Denise told me I helped, too, and I’d also get a Slushie.

We stopped at the 7-11 by the fancy seafood restaurant and I got a blue Slushie. 7-11 said it was blue rasberry; I don’t know about that – it didn’t taste like any rasberry I had ever eaten – but it was sweet and turned your tongue blue and was my favorite color Slushie. Wendy got a poop brown Coke Slushie, and Debbie got bright red cherry the color of MawMaw’s lipstick. We zoomed back onto I-10 and were soon flying above downtown towards I-110. Debbie and I kept sticking our tongues out at each other and laughing at the bright colors; she pulled a makeup mirror from her purse and let me see my blue tongue. Wendy focused on driving and sipping her boring brown Slushie. No one seemed to mind the mouse in the dashboard now that we were high and had Slushies.

We took our Slushies and only had time for a sip or two before we reached the small neighborhood park tucked off Hooper Road that no one ever seemed to visit except us. Wendy came to a hault under the shade of a cluster of green pine trees towering over azelea bushes blooming with red flowers. She was driving better after a day of practice, though that may have just been the weed slowing her down. We rolled the windows all the way down to allow a breeze. The smell of springtime azeleas smell the flowers and sit in the shade and sip our Slushies peacefully.

Wendy hopped out of the car and plucked a red azelea and placed it in her strawberry blonde hair and smiled generously and posed like a happy ballerina in mid pirouette.

Wendy got back in and told Denise that azaleas like to grow in acidic soil under pine trees. She had learned that from PawPaw. Anyone who spent any time around PawPaw picked up things about plants and trees.

Denise wasn’t interested. She turned to me and made a serious face. She contorted her plum body so her shoulders were somewhat squared towards me, and with her right hand she held up her red bandana at shoulder level.

“Watch this, Jason,” she said.

I glued my gaze to the bandana.

She picked up the tail with her left fingers and spread her hands apart to make the bandana taut. She wiggled her wrists and the bandana flipped over itself a few times and became a thin line. She brought her hands together and faster and more deftly than she rolled a joint she tucked a bit of bandana here and pulled a bit from there and dropped the tail and spun the head around and tied a knot that made two big ears.

Denise’s bandana was now the mouse that had been hiding in the dashboard.

If you think that was impressive, you should have seen what happened next: the mouse jumped out of Debbie’s hands and ran up her arm with her hands wiggling and trying to catch it all the way up to her chubby cheek.

I couldn’t believe it!

Before I could ask how she did it, Denise caught the mouse and held him up by his ears and tail and yanked her hands apart. The dashboard mouse vanished and Denise was holding her hands apart with a twirled up red bandana again. She shook it and it became a crinkled version of the red bandana she began with that morning.

I asked how to do it.

Denise chuckled and said, “Well, Jason. That one’s hard. I’ll show you when we have more time.”

I must have looked disheartened.

“But,” she said to perk me up. “I’ll show you something just as good. When you learn this, it’ll make learning the mouse easier.”

She held up her right hand again.

I locked my gaze on her hand. I wouldn’t miss anything this time.

The back of her hand faced me; her fingers were spread wide apart; I could see the Datsun’s windshield through the gaps, but I stayed focused on her hand and the window was just a blur. She took a deep breath and stared at her first finger of her right hand; so did I. She covered that finger with her left hand, but with the tip poking through the first two fingers of her clenched fist.

Suddenly, she made a Pop! sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth and yanked her fist away away and took the finger with it!

I gasped!

My head bounced back and forth between the nub remaining where her finger used to be and the severed tip clenched in her fist.

She brought her hands back together and Pop! the finger was back on.

The mouse was forgotten. Decades later, I’d read that marijuana impairs short term memory; I don’t recall where I read that, but I can attest that in 1976 the miracle of the mouse was dropped from my mind and nothing but popping off your finger mattered to me at that moment.

I said: How’d you do that? You just pulled your finger off and put it back on! How’d you do that? I repeated, just like the Saint’s chant Who D’at! Who D’at!

I wanted to know how she did that, I said.

Denise

Denise taught me how to pop off my finger while Wendy hummed along to something on the radio. Conveniently, Denise was left-handed and I’m right-handed. Watching her demonstrate was like looking in a mirror and easier to learn, because my mind didn’t have to make sense of a reversed image. In no time at all I was removing my finger and holding it a foot away.

Denise said the pop! sound was important. She taught me how to do that, too. The trick is building up pressure with your tongue before making the popping sound. She turned to roll another joint while I practiced.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

I was beoming a master at popping off my finger. Denise and Wendy laughed and I sat there pop! pop! popping and laughing with them until a song came and Wendy gasped like I had and turned up the radio.

She told me it was our song. She said it was because it was Saturday and we were going to the park.

The song was Chicago’s 1971 Saturday in the Park. It’s lyrics go:

Saturday in the park

I think it was the Fourth of July

Saturday in the park

I think it was the Fourth of July

People dancing, people laughing

A man selling ice cream

Singing Italian songs…

I’m certain those were the two songs we sang that day. It was probable. A lot of my childhood memories of Wendy and Denise revolved around driving somewhere and listening to the radio in that Datsun, and local DJ’s knew what people wanted to hear. Saturdays in Baton Rouge meant they played Me and Bobby McGee and Saturday in the Park. I knew the lyrics to both before I learned the pledge of allegiance.

A song that would make Wendy’s cheerful hazel eyes leak tears and lead Denise to turn off the radio and roll another joint was Led Zepplin’s 1971 Going to California. I never learned the lyrics – probably because Denise always turned it off – but they go like this:

Spent my days with a woman unkind

Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine

Made up my mind to make a new start

Going to California with an achin’ in my heart

Someone told me there’s a girl out there

With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair

We didn’t play in the park that Saturday. Usually Wendy and Denise would spin me around in the the rusted creaky merry-go-round (most outdoor metals rust in muggy Baton Rouge after the paint flakes off) or swing from seats held to the tall metal poles by squeaky chains that sounded like they had lost of mice in them. But we ran out of time and Denise ran out of herb. I was so busy pop! pop! pop! ing that I wasn’t concerned. Besides, we were going to see Brian the one armed drug dealer, and I always had fun with him.

Wendy kept the flower in her hair and cranked on the Datsun and we eased onto Hooper Road towards Brian the one armed drug dealer’s house.

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