My Bike Meant the World to Me.

So as I was lying there in bed last night I was thinking of Pedricktown stories. The “why” of why I need to go back and revisit the years of my youth escapes me.  However every single time I read a post on the Pedricktown Facebook page memories come flooding back.

Most of the stories that were coming to mind that night were tied to Ruby’s packing house and/or the Baptist church.  I will leave the packing house stories for later.  Those tales are earthier and deal with teens trying to sort out their place in the world. They are beer, sex and pot infused stories involving a bunch of teenage boys, southern crackers and very  big black men mostly all overseen by grizzled old men with names like Whitey.

Because I spent so much time at the Baptist church there are a number of tales tied to that place that have a humorous bent.  Hell I have a number of stories involving the mental gymnastics I went through each time a visiting pastor would make an altar call.  By the way I am a Lutheran with Buddhist leanings now.  We don’t do altar calls. Period.

The following tale does not tie to VBS or BYF or any of the other Baptist acronyms I remember all so well.  It is more a me versus the monolith that the Baptist Church was in Pedricktown’s consciousness kind of tale.  It is a tale of the church building as part of the places of my youth as opposed to the church community as part of my social story.

When I was about six or seven I had learned to ride a two wheeler bike.  For me this was a major accomplishment.  As any of you who knew me as a kid will remember coordination was not my strong suit.  I think I was the last kid my age in P-City to not need training wheels. My lack of coordination was so sever that on n a sunny day my shadow was a trip and fall hazard.  I digress.

Well any how I had learned to ride a bike and my father had consented to the purchase for me of a sting ray bike from W.T. Grants in Pennsville. It was purple metal flake in color, had high handle bars and a banana seat.  I rode it everywhere.

Well as fate would have it on one particularly sunny afternoon in summer there in Oldmans Township one of my ne’er do well cousins was in town.  My Aunt had dropped both he and a bike off at my grandmother’s house.  During those years my grandmother did a great deal of child care for all of us cousins when our parents had obligations to attend to. This was old America, the one where extended families reached into every aspect of your life. I don’t think there was a town in Salem County where I didn’t have kin who would call my father and tell him they had seen me if they suspected I wasn’t supposed to be out and about.

With two bikes and time to kill we went riding together about town. In P-City there are only so many places you can go. You could ride down to the bridge and look into the murky water for fish or corpses.  I think I remember two jumpers from the Delaware Memorial Bridge being snagged by fisherman off that old bridge over the 18 years of my youth.  You could ride up  Railroad Avenue north to the train tracks, boring.  You could ride south down Railroad Avenuepast the school and to the edge of the fields, even more boring. Eventually the ultimate magnet of our childhood called us.  Off we went to the Baptist cemetery down at the far end of West Mill Road.  For some reason that place held an inexorable pull on us.  The attraction was so strong you could almost see the waves of magnetism in the air.

There was a ritual to the visits there.  First we would walk over to our Grandfather Asher’s headstone.  He had died before either of us had been born.  He had been a veteran of San Juan Hill in the Spanish American war so there was always a flag and a metal star that held it in place on his grave.  Our Grandmother’s name was also carved on that headstone but she wasn’t dead yet.  It just said 1893-      .  We pondered the why of that. Behind that headstone was our uncle’s grave. From the best we could tell our uncle had died in what I believe was a motorcycle accident. I never got the whole story.  People kind of mumbled when it came to talking about his passing. 

After that grave visit we would wander around looking for open graves.  An open grave was a double dog dare kind of thing.  Invariably we would threaten to push each other in.  The terrifying push actually happened once or twice but that was when we were there with a group of cousins. I can remember screaming and crying until one of those sick bastards actually gave me a hand and pulled me out. Of course we were looking for the ghoulish and the macabre.  We were always thinking we might see something like a casket in the ground next to the bottom of the open hole.  Yeah I know it sounds sick and ghoulish but we are talking about being a kid here and more specifically being a boy.  Really we are talking about that age when you are pulling the wings of flies, frying ants with magnifying glasses and the whole Stephen King Stand by Me kind of behavior that boys do.

On one particular sunny afternoon the whole double dog dare thing came into effect and led to a bad result well at least for me.  Could this story be going anywhere else, I mean really did you think it was going to be warm and fuzzy? Nayh.  Boys, graveyards and time to kill, I mean what could go wrong?

On that warm summer vacation day my cousin had the bright idea that it would be a good idea to challenge me to ride out bikes as fast as we could through the grave yard.  Cool beans, there could be blood involved.  Round and round we went dodging granite markers trying not to split our heads open. 

Now as to the sacrilegious and disrespectful quality of this race among the monuments to finality, those hard cold markers of mortality I guess I have always believed the dead were dead and they really didn’t mind. (A number of people have confessed to me since I have left town that they had sex in the Methodist Cemetery.  It was more isolated.)  I mean given the number of people who have occupied this earth before us is there anywhere where you on this planet where aren’t walking over a spot where one of predecessors is now in repose?

It is at this point I must note that to my cousin the thrill of maintaining bodily integrity was not enough.  He upped the ante. As boys clearly we had to do something to make the thrill greater. It is here where the clothes start to come off. As the next phase of the grand prix among the dead we continued the ride shirtless.  We did this for a couple of laps but this was still not enough to satisfy the thrill factor.  The following phase of this championship double dog dare ride was doing a number of laps in just jockey shorts and sneakers.  Given how scrawny we were I cannot image this being an aesthetically pleasurable sight to be observed.

Still a tighty whitey ride was not enough of an adrenaline rush for my nefarious cousin and I being the sheep that I was agreed to what happened next.  Did I mention that I believe the graveyard sat at was still a five point intersection?  It was a main intersection of the town. Traffic was going by but we didn’t notice and/or care.  When you are seven or eight you are the entire world.  Nobody else exists.

Finally there we were riding around the graveyard buck naked on our stingray bicycles.  Well almost I still had on my black horn rim glasses and my sneakers.  We had only done a couple of laps when the church secretary came running out screaming at us.  For the life of me I don’t remember her name.  I do remember her stone white hair and I think she and the hairy thunderer image of God I held at that time had been in second grade together. She seemed really old and I am sure my cousin and my behavior added a few years to her aging process.  Normally she was slow and steady.  She was a rock upon which the church functioned. However on that day she was really pissed off and came out running screaming at us with a fury I could not have imaged.

I believe there were words used like “you filthy dirty boys” and “I have already called your parents”.  “God will punish you heathen little demons” might have been said but hey I have heard that so many times when I was hanging around with my cousins growing up it is hard to distinguish one incident of damnable behavior from another.

Quickly we grabbed our clothes and beat feet way from the church.  We pedaled our little but now clothed bodies away from that church and east down West Mill Street as fast as we could.  We flew.  My cousin turned in at my Grandmother’s house which was about halfway down the street between the church any my house. He wasn’t sweating.  He knew his mother would a. either not care or b. would never find out about it.  Me, I was in full flop sweat, heart racing, and boy parts in my chest mode.

I had good reason to be.  By the time I got to about where the Titus’s lived I could see my mother standing on the porch of our house and did she look pissed.  For all of those who ran afoul of her in first grade, image that look x10.  My memory is of being dragged off my bike and being read the riot act.  One phrase I remember to this day is “What were you thinking, would you take a bath in public?”  Out of context such wording sounds insane doesn’t it?  But at 7 years old it shook me to my core. 

As I was dragged to my room by my collar I heard the words that no child in his right mind ever wanted to hear. “ You will stay in your room and when your father gets home he will deal will this.”  “You will be getting the belt”. Yeah you can pretty much suss out how this ended.  I couldn’t sit for a day or two.  No it wasn’t child abuse it was just mid-1960s parenting.

Did I learn anything from this?  Yeah the church secretary watches the graveyard.  Also lots of cars go by the intersection of Straughn Mill Road and  West Mill Road in mid-afternoon.  I probably should have learned that being naked in a public place does not end well.  As you all know that lesson did not stick.