Navigating three years of junior high school had been tempestuous and I felt as if I’d haphazardly muddled my way through a fairly frenetic middle school experience. Trying to fit in at school while trying to not stand out at home had become my de rigeur method of procedure. With my dad still treating me like a second-class citizen ever since I’d let it be known I wasn’t down with being a Klansman like him and his racist buddies, I felt as if I was flying blind most days. Not to mention I eventually began to realize my mom’s drug and alcohol dependencies began in earnest about this same time. Her substance abuse and ensuing addictions would eventually become a life-altering dilemma for Judy-O.
In spite of my intuition about my mom’s choice of habits, I was still curious as to why my parents and their friends seemed to enjoy those vices so much. However, it would be another year before I would take my first drink of some booze I’d swiped from my ol’ man's liquor cabinet. I’ve since learned that the regular consumption of alcohol slowly kills brain cells. But back then it didn’t bother me since I was never in much of a hurry. While I do know I’ve gotten drunk and made a mess of more than a few things in my lifetime, in alcohol’s defense, I’ve done some equally dumb stuff while completely sober. These days, I really don’t drink much any more and can easily go weeks or months without imbibing. Then I might enjoy a cold beer with a cheeseburger or a glass of wine to complement a delicious dinner.
Having said that, I’ve had some close friends say they couldn’t go a day without a boozy beverage. I realize what they’re effectively saying is they’re functioning alcoholics, that they have a physical addiction to some chemical. I’ve seen first hand how deviant someone can become when they’re at the mercy of their drug-fueled demons. But back in ‘76, as the nation’s bicentennial celebration was winding down, my folks had become notorious partiers who invited their like-minded friends to stop by on Saturday evenings in their party room in our basement. By then the size of those hoedowns had dwindled to a select few of the usual suspects, and they were almost always the same faces. I realized the music wasn’t as loud and laughter wasn’t as long ever since the crowds had become smaller. I still noticed the same marijuana smoke wafting up the stairwell that separated the Lover's Hideaway from the rest of my world and I knew they kept a well-stocked bar. I could only imagine what was actually happening when the lights dimmed, although I wasn’t really wondering quite like I used to. I might’ve been so young as to be severely lacking in regard to experience, wisdom and discernment, but I had a good idea what was happening down there under the glow of those black lights. Regretfully, I’d seen picture proof, which was something I would never be able to forget.
In spite of how anxious my home life caused me to feel, I’d made enough friends to keep afloat and avoid being a social exile but it wasn’t without its pitfalls. Thanks to my reasonably good grades I had been in a lot of classes with the more popular kids with whom I’d developed an increasing preoccupation. Something about my life back then made me long to be liked by those socialites whose well-to-do lives fascinated me so much. While I no longer felt ridiculed or belittled by them, there were those moments when I could detect some degree of insolence regarding me being in their presence. It stung a bit but it wasn’t like I was crying myself to sleep.
By the time I became a freshman at Greer High School, home of the Yellow Jackets, I’d pretty much disregarded the Gene Lawrence story, dismissing those fascinating details as a lucid dream fabricated by my mom’s befuddled brain. It would be another couple of decades before my biological father’s name would resurface and cause me to wonder why things were the way they were.
On a positive note, I’d rapidly become a skateboarding aficionado and rode pretty much every day. Not only did I vibe with skateboarding’s counter-culture ethos, I also wanted to continue to get better so I could mimic those surf-inspired moves I saw in every edition of SkateBoarder magazine I could get my hands on. We still had the ping pong table ramp that had become my usual afternoon hang, provided the weather was pleasant. Thanks to the money I’d made cutting my grandparent’s grass on those summer weekends, I had upgraded my skateboard’s wheels and trucks again. That helped me to progress to the point where I could do a variety of freestyle tricks and was generally considered one of the better skateboarders in the local area, although there weren’t that many of us to begin with.
Due to my previous classroom performance, I was enrolled in advanced subjects as a high school freshman and didn’t struggle to make better-than-average grades. I made straight A’s in Science and Pre-algebra my freshman year. I had another handful of classes that required me to do a modest amount of homework, usually at the last minute. I did well in those classes too. The only class I dreaded was English. For some reason, grammar was always difficult for me to grasp, conceptually. It was also the only class which routinely required students to speak, usually to read some passage from a known work by a famous author, or maybe to read aloud a sentence we’d constructed as a part of a class exercise. Those occasions always triggered my glossophobia, which is something I eventually overcame much later in life as a result of generous amounts of something I like to call exposure therapy.
In an era before cable and the internet, there were only three TV stations broadcasting to our black & white television set in ‘76. To fill the void, many of us teenagers listened to our local AM radio stations. I feel a modicum of sympathy for those too young to have grown up with tiny transistor radios glued to your ears, listening to your favorite disc jockeys playing the latest ‘top 40’ tunes over a crappy speaker the size of a copper penny. I recall going to bed and hiding my pocket-sized radio underneath the covers in an attempt to not be caught listening when I should’ve been asleep. One of the fun things our local radio station did was conduct occasional call-in contests. From time to time they would play some advertisement for a sponsor between songs and then they’d “Take the fourteenth caller” to win a related prize. Me and many of my friends, who were all at home hiding underneath the covers of their beds listening to the same radio program, would call in when these contests occurred. The prizes ranged from tickets to upcoming concerts to free desserts at local restaurants. I remember calling from the phone in my room and it was almost always busy. Occasionally it would ring and be answered, but only to be told by the deejay something like “Sorry, you’re the ninth caller. Try again.” However, one night at the beginning of my freshman year the deejay did an ad for Mello Yello, the soft drink company. They followed that up by conducting another call-in contest for a Mello Yello t-shirt, so I grabbed my telephone and started dialing the number I’d long since memorized. It was busy the first few times I tried to get through. Then on my fourth try it started ringing and I got my hopes up since I’d never won anything in my life. It rang for so long I began to wonder. Finally, the deejay answered and told me I was the lucky fourteenth caller. He then proceeded to take my name and other information and told me I could come by during the station's business hours to pick up my prize. Then, as was their custom, the deejay would eventually announce on-the-air who won the call-in contest by stating their name and location.
The next day at school many of my friends congratulated me on winning the t-shirt because they’d heard my name on the same radio station. I felt famous. Some of my classmates, many of whom never spoke to me, were lauding my good fortunes. It was kind of amazing to realize something as innocuous as a local radio station call-in contest could catapult my social standing into another gear.
However, I still had to go get my t-shirt, which meant getting my mom to make the thirty-minute drive to the radio station. That may not seem like a big deal, but an hour round-trip drive was asking a lot of my mom and her unreliable Chevy wagon. The ol’ Vega might have been good on gas, but it wasn’t the most dependable means of conveyance and had been giving my mom some problems. So I pleaded with my mother to drive me to the other side of Greenville County. Finally, she relented and we planned to drive out there the next afternoon.
The following day I got home from school as quickly as I could. While I was genuinely excited about getting this t-shirt, my mom was not. She thought it was a long way to drive for a free shirt when I already had plenty. The two of us still climbed into her Vega and took off in search of the four towers which would let us know we were close to WQOK’s headquarters.
For some reason, I’d presumed the radio station was a massive complex of buildings that housed state-of-the-art high fidelity technologies. I figured those vacuum-tubed electronic apparatuses had the ostensive purpose of delivering the day's top tunes to those tiny radio receivers scattered all over upstate South Carolina. I imagined there would be tons of people running around, maybe in white lab coats. There might even be an armed guard to keep groupies away since radio deejays were famous as far as I was concerned. When I saw the radio towers hovering above the tree line in the distance, I started to get a bit nervous in anticipation. Then, as we turned off of White Horse Road to drive up to the station, I could see the four antennas all in a row, jutting up behind a small white building not much bigger than our house in Greer. There were only a few places to park in front of the tiny radio station and my mom pulled into the last available spot and went inside. I was somewhat dumbfounded that this was the radio station's headquarters. I thought it was going to be something out of the pages of a magazine, yet it was this lowbrow, nondescript building with a bunch of antennas. My mom wasn’t in there very long and came back out in an obvious hurry, with my shirt in hand. She got in her car and tossed my prize at me. As Judy-O backed out to head home, I held it up and admired it. It was perfect - pale yellow with a WQOK logo emblazoned across the top with the Mello Yello logo underneath.
Of course I wore my new shirt to school the next day and got asked about it by people who normally didn’t give me the time of day. A year later I would give that t-shirt to my girlfriend, Georgeanne. She’s still a good friend of mine and a few years ago I got to speak with her about that memory. Georgeanne said she held onto my old t-shirt until her own daughter began wearing it when she herself was a teenager. It made me happy to know Georgeanne even remembered that t-shirt and held onto it for as long as she did. That it got passed down to her daughter made it that much sweeter.
It’s truly fascinating how good friends from my past - confidants like Georgeanne - have become the personification of a shared experience. I only have a handful of people I’ve ever felt genuinely close to in spirit, but I can tell you one or more really good memory about each and every one of them. I always feel profoundly blessed whenever my mind’s eye reflects on those moments-in-time that were spent with someone I truly cared about. All those memories are reminders that there’s always something for which to feel very, very grateful.
© 2023 Joseph Phillip Lister Sr.
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