The weekend after I saw Miss Nicks dance, Debbie and Wendy picked me up at Paw Paw’s and took me for a drive. The new phone books had come out and were piled so deeply in Debbie’s car that I had to sit on Wendy’s lap until we had delivered enough for me to have room in the back seat. It was always fun with them, they laughed and joked and never asked me what I did on my other weekends, so I never had to think hard around them.
Read moreI said goodbye to PawPaw and crawled into my dad’s truck. I was anxious to show him my award from school for having drawn the best art in Baton Rouge for my age. It had been all over the news, but he didn’t have a TV. Even if he did, it’s unlikely he would have been awake at 7AM for the Buckskin Bill Black show that I watched with Paw Paw before school. But I wanted him to know that I had been on television and was famous, just like Big Daddy had been so much lately.
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A construction site boss was interviewing men for a job, when along came Boudreaux. The boss thought to himself, “I’m not hiring that ole lazy cajun…”
He decided to set a test for Boudreaux, hoping he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions, and he’d be able to refuse him the job without any problems.
Read more“I missed wrestling in the junior olympics because I overslept,” is what I told most friends later that summer. It was true, in a way. I never told Coach what happened, because he didn’t ask; he never asked about anything that happened in the past, only what I was doing today for tomorrow. But when Mrs. Abrams asked if I were okay – she didn’t ask what had happened to my face – I told her all of what had happened that day. I was transparent, like she had taught me to be.
Read moreWhen Mrs. Abrams answered the door, she was obviously shocked by the ringworm covering my right cheek, and of course she asked if I were okay. I assured her I was, and told her what happened, and that I was tired and out of money and had no where to go.
Read moreI woke up and felt the back of my head. The ringworm was still there, so I got up and walked to the mop closet and rubbed fungicide on the raised bump without taking time to look at it. I was feeling impatient and was too hungry to think clearly, so I dodged traffic and crossed Government Boulevard and entered a conveneince store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, cheap booze, and sugary snacks.
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I awoke on the wrestling mat that morning, and yawned and stretched and tried to come to life. Dolly Parton’s voice was singing “9 to 5” in my head.”
Read moreI’ve always found it difficult to write a memoir of my Partin family. Most of what I’ve written is publicly available, but few people outside of the FBI have put together pieces of the puzzle about my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin. You may already know about him, even if you don’t recall his name.
Read moreI arrived at my grandfather’s funeral early, but no one recognized me, so the police didn’t allow me in. I stood on my tip-toes and tried to look over the shoulders of reporters as they took photos of the mayor and LSU football players who had just arrived, but I didn’t see anyone who could let me inside.
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Nature is my church, and I felt like I was in heaven within a half hour of walking uphill from the trailhead in Besi Sahar. I had left the smog and car horns of 2 million people in Kathmandu, and had arrived in a secluded, rural area with neither a person in sight nor an automobile within hearing distance.
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