The kiln door opens and the art teacher screams with fright at the shrunken heads with toothy grins staring at her through twinkling glass eyes. She holds her pounding heart as she realizes it was just my brother Mark' twisted clay heads.
Our dad was a funeral director and embalmer when my older brothers were growing up in West Virginia. He could've been a doctor but he said, "Dead people don't bitch". My brothers would hang out at the funeral home sometimes and being kids, things like prosthetic limbs, false teeth and glass eyes were interesting. My brothers had a whole drawer full of teeth and glass eyes when we moved to Florida where they finished junior and senior high school.
Kind of puts a perspective to the old warning, "Careful! You'll put your eye out!" I had a friend in high school whose older brother got his eye put out in a fight. He wore glasses. Hence the old question, "You wouldn't punch a guy with glasses on, would you?" I shouldn't tease about vision because I can't see shit any more.
The sun is too bright but I can't see in the shadows, the lenses of my eyes are scratched and I have astigmatism. Circles don't appear round is the basic result. Macular degeneration from living with type 2 diabetes for too long. The diabetes went away when I stopped drinking after CHF back in 2020. That's a whole nother story...
My brother put his clay heads on display in the local mall for the high schools art show. He didn't win any ribbons but they were featured in the local newspaper. Dad displayed them in the living room to fuck with my mom who thought they were "demonic". Mark made the paper again with his psychedelic paint job on his truck in 1969 Tite-ass-ville High but again that's a whole nother thing...
I was in elementary school and my oldest brother Sam taught me a lot of funny things to do with the false teeth and glass eyes. It was fun and games around the church and neighborhood, scaring the old people and the girls. It was a completely different thing at school.
After digging through my brother' collection I found a glass eye that was as blue as my own, pert near identical. I took it to the bus stop and freaked out the uninitiated as well as the bus driver. She usually had a good buzz going by the time she drove the elementary kids to school in the morning with a little Johnny Walker in her coffee so she found it humorous.
The best trick involved placing the glass eye in my mouth. They aren't marbles. They are concave. I would feign an injury to one of my eyes, holding my hand over the eye. This particular instance my victim was a third grade teacher.
I ran up holding my eye and "looked" at her with the glass eye in my mouth. She gasped for air, her eyes got REAL big. I moved the eye around with my tongue and she fainted. "Holy Shit! What did I do?" I panic. The other kids freaked out and one of the girls ran screaming from the 3rd grade complex to the principals office.
By the time the principal and the school nurse arrived Miss Red Head had come to and the complexes other teachers had the other children calmed back down. That would be the first of many paddlings I would receive at school and then get the belt at home later. I always could take an ass whoopin'. I earned most of them.
"Why would you do that?" the people in charge would always ask. "It's not funny!"
"It was to me", I said as I wasn't the only one laughing.
Unfortunately for me, my mother worked there as a 5th grade teacher. She didn't think it was "one bit funny".
After mom was done beating me in front of half the school, the principal had me demonstrate for him and the physical ed teacher exactly what I did. They were impressed by how REAL it looked. Moving it around was the clincher.
My brother taught me that. He also showed me what I would later learn is called the major and minor pentatonic scale for playing lead guitar. To us it was the blues scale and the country scale but that's a...whole nother story!
☮️ ❤️ 😁 👣 🎶 🖖
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